“What?”
“Oh Lord, another one of these,” she mumbled to herself. She began collating a stack of forms and placing them onto a clipboard, this time repeating the phrase as if I were mentally deficient. “Are you in any grave or imminent DANGER?”
“No,” I said.
“Are you currently under the influence of drugs or alcohol?”
“No, wait. You don’t understand. I’m not here for me—”
“Do not be nervous. You have found safe harbor.” She had clearly read from this same invisible script every single day for years. “Gentlemen are not permitted past our doors, with the exception of Mr. Wyatt, our founder, security staff, and approved maintenance. No police presence is permitted without warrant or legal representation. If you are currently under the influence of drugs or—”
“No, maybe you didn’t hear me. I’m here to find my friend.”
She stared at me. “Are you sure about that?”
I caught her eyes darting over to the left side of my face. Oh, God. I draped my hand over my cheek, but it was too late. I hadn’t reapplied my concealer. I’d been so wrapped up in our mission, I hadn’t even thought about the scar. And now Delores Danello had sized me up as a textbook victim of domestic violence, one of those girls too ashamed to admit it, trying to hide injuries behind a hair curtain. The pity in her eyes—no, it wasn’t just pity. It was condescension.
As far as Delores Danello was concerned, I was a tiny, battered flea, clinging to the itchy ass of the world. This was probably how every single girl who’d ever walked through the door felt. Maybe even Sarah. And it pissed me off.
“Delores,” I said through clenched teeth, “I am just here to find a friend.”
She sniffed and rolled back in her chair. “And who’s your friend, sweetheart?”
“Her name is Sarah.”
Something flashed across Delores’s face. Like she’d swallowed a bug or choked on her own saliva. “Last name?” she asked.
“Last name?”
“Yes. Does this friend of yours have a last name?”
Andy, why didn’t you get it? Why? No. Last. Name. Something came over me, a shaky, electric, fuck-you energy. I knew Sarah was here. I’d reached the finish line, and I didn’t want any more questions; I just wanted to see her face. I was about to launch into a hysterical rant, but someone spoke up.
“Mac, is he gone yet?”
I recognized the voice. I turned and spotted Helena, peeking her head into the lobby. She was wearing her dowdy floral dress again, but her platinum hair was choppy—she hadn’t flattened it into the good-girl ponytail. And she’d re-pierced: little silver hoops glistened along the side of her ear. “Mac” was Burly Man. I hadn’t even noticed, but he had taken a seat at a small table on the opposite wall, apparently his security station.
“I took care of him,” Mac grunted.
Victor had a point; he did sound a little like Tony Soprano.
“You’re the best, Mac,” Helena said with a toothy smile.
“Helena!” I backed away from Delores and ran to her.
Her eyes narrowed. She seemed to be searching her memory banks. “Hey, I know you . . . Theo, right?”
“Right.” I wished I hadn’t given her my real name.
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m still trying to find—”
“She’s looking for a girl named Sarah,” Delores interrupted, her head poking through the office window. “No last name.”
Helena stared back at Delores for a second too long, and then turned back to me. She sized me up, just as she’d done the first time we met. “What happened to you at the party? You ran out of there like the place was on fire.”
“Yeah, I’m sorry about that. I’d had a little too much to drink. I got sick.”
“Been there,” she said.
Helena, Mac, and Delores were all staring at me now. Delores cleared her throat loudly. “Ms. Reyes,” she said, “if you’re done with your little chat, I’m going to have to ask your friend to leave. I can’t allow visitors without authorization. Frankly, I’m not even convinced she knows—”
“No, please,” I interrupted. I turned to Delores, then back to Helena. “Please, I just need to see Sarah.”
“I’m sorry,” Delores said, “I can’t allow—”
“Nah, it’s cool, Delores.” Helena locked eyes with mine. “Theo’s visiting with me today.”
“You know this girl?” Delores asked dubiously.
“Hell, yeah,” Helena said, searching my eyes. “She’s a friend of Ms. Renaux’s.” Helena dialed up the attitude. “She’s a guest at the wedding. You want to tell Ms. Renaux that you threw her out?”
With that, Delores’s head disappeared back into her office. “Ten minutes,” she called.
I almost hugged Helena in gratitude. “Thank you,” I mouthed.
“Come on,” Helena said, flashing a grateful smile at Mac, who buried his head back in his New York Post. “I’ll show you my room.”
It was all exactly as Andy had described: long, dorm-like hallways lined with metal doors. Maybe less like a dorm than a prison. The rooms were numbered, with a tiny pane of glass at the center of each door, just large enough to see inside, probably so Mac could check on the girls, make sure they were safe, make sure they’d made curfew.
I could feel Sarah behind one of those tiny windows. I could almost see her, even if the features were still a blur. How far away was she now? How many doors down? We passed Room Twenty-One, Room Twenty . . .
“You got to forgive Delores,” Helena whispered. “A lot of these girls are running from something or someone, so they’re real strict about who they let inside.”
“Yeah, I saw what happened with Victor—” I clamped my mouth shut. Ugh. There goes your clinical lack of discretion again.
“Ay, Victor. You know, sometimes you just make really, really bad decisions, and then you got to keep paying and paying and paying.”
“I know it,” I said, though I really didn’t. Past Room Sixteen, Fifteen . . .
“Well, there’s no way Victor’s getting his scrawny ass through that door again,” Helena said with a sad little laugh. “Only way he gets another crack at me is if I’m dumb enough to go out there alone. See, the twisted dudes—the really twisted ones are always trying to lure us outside. And some girls fall for it. Some girls make whack-ass decisions like that and they end up . . . you know. Love just makes people really, really stupid.”
I felt a sharp twinge in my stomach as Andy’s words darted through my mind. If you find her, then you’ve got to bring her out here to me. You’ve got to convince her to talk to me. It would be a pretty brilliant move. If he couldn’t get in, then he could convince a clueless girl like me to do it instead. I could get past Mac without a problem, vouch for Andy’s sweetness and undying love to Sarah, and convince her to come outside.
But I’d learned my lesson at the Magic Garden. I knew who Andy was. He wasn’t one of the twisted ones. He wasn’t Victor. I dumped the thought and moved on.
“So you’re telling me there are never any boys in here, ever?”
“Oh, I didn’t say that.” Helena flashed a sly smile. “Nah, believe me, not every girl in here is ‘keeping our promise.’” She pulled me into Room Ten and shut the door, lowering her voice to a cautious whisper. “Mr. Wyatt’s got an office on the second floor. It’s got a window in the back, near the fire escape, with one of those window gates on it. But he never locks the gate in the summer because he likes to keep the window open. So if a girl really wants to sneak a dude in, all she’s got to do is tell him to meet her around back at the window. And if you tell anybody that, I’ll break your face.”
A second-story window around back.
Andy’s half-assed memory had gotten it half right. Sarah did tell him to meet her at a
back window, but it wasn’t a brownstone on Bergen Street; it was an old, run-down shelter on Parker Street. Now it made so much more sense. She wasn’t hiding him from her parents; she was hiding him from a three-hundred-pound security guard.
“Helena, are you sure you never met Sarah here?” I asked. “I know she was here last weekend. I know it.”
Helena peeked back through her door, then stepped to the mirror by her bed. It was her entire room: a full-length mirror nailed to a bare white wall, a twin bed with a standard-issue brown blanket, and a wooden dresser.
“All right, look,” she said, staring into the mirror, carefully removing each of the seven sparkling hoops from her ear. “I wasn’t sure I could trust you when I first met you. I didn’t know if you were one of us or one of them. If you weren’t the sixth girl, then I thought maybe you were one of Ms. Renaux’s cousins or something. That’s why I didn’t tell you about Sarah.”
“Wait. You do know her?”
“No, I never actually met her. I just knew a chick named Sarah had been here for a night, and I knew she ran away, so I wasn’t about to snitch.”
“She ran away? She’s gone already?” My chest felt brittle, like my lungs were turning to stone. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
She glared at me over her shoulder. “Well, I didn’t know how much you cared until I saw you in the lobby just now.”
I dropped my head in my hands and massaged my throbbing temples.
“Look, Theo, you got to understand something.” Her tone softened as she turned back to the mirror. “What you saw with Victor out there . . . I mean, yeah, that happens sometimes, but that’s not the usual around here. We don’t get a lot of visitors. Most of us either got families that want to forget we ever existed, or else we want to be forgotten. We only want people to see us when we want.”
I nodded. “I understand.”
She finished taking out her earrings and started brushing her hair. “I don’t know if you do. We K.O.P. girls, we’re kind of like ghosts. We want to stay invisible. A lot of the girls don’t even give their real names when they come in here. Mr. Wyatt has to give them temp names like stray dogs at the pound, because you can only have so many Jane Does walking around one spot. Sometimes a girl will come in here so messed up, she doesn’t even remember her name. But I don’t always buy that one. I think it’s just another way to stay lost. It’s like Ms. Renaux always says . . .”
She left the sentence hanging. I know she was expecting me to confirm what Ms. Renaux always said. I met her gaze in the mirror. “Some want to stay lost,” I echoed.
“A lot of us want stay that way. So I wasn’t about to say shit to you about Sarah. If a girl doesn’t want to get found, then she does not want to get found. Period. Besides, the whole Sarah thing freaked me out, so I wasn’t going to say anything about it in front of Ms. Renaux.”
“What do you mean, ‘the whole Sarah thing’?”
She gathered her ponytail in a black elastic, glanced through the door again, and sat down close to me on the bed. She drew in a deep breath, and it was a little shaky as she blew it out. “Okay,” she murmured. “I only told my girl Felicia about this. And I’m only going to tell you because you’re Sarah’s friend, but you got to swear you won’t go making a scene about it to Ms. Renaux or anybody else. The girls feel safe here. We know how to ignore the creepy stuff, and I ain’t about to mess that up.”
“I swear,” I said. Still, I forced the next logical question through my lips. “What creepy stuff?”
“I’m going to tell you.” All her brash confidence had melted away. She sat on the edge of her spare mattress, suddenly looking much younger. “Ms. Renaux has this thing about keeping girls out of Room Nine.”
I felt another twinge in my stomach, more painful than the last. For the briefest instant, I saw myself huddled in the corner of my bedroom, blasting the Beatles’ “Revolution 9” on endless repeat. I could hear the voice on the track, repeating the words. The voice I’d always thought was John Lennon’s. “Number nine . . . number nine . . .”
“Shit, I’m already freaking you out,” Helena said.
“No, I’m fine,” I said. I hadn’t even noticed I was clutching her coarse blanket. I let it go. Keep breathing. It’s not what you think. It can’t possibly be what you think.
“Okay.” Helena wrung her hands. “Okay, so the girls were all whispering at breakfast on Sunday about how Ms. Renaux put this Sarah chick in Room Nine. No one even wants to walk past Nine. It’s got this energy. It’s, like, too empty. I try not to look through the window when I walk by. I always come in from the other side just so I don’t have to pass it. I didn’t know Ms. Renaux put a girl in there, so when I heard those sounds coming from next door, I just about lost my shit.”
There was that rush in my ears again. “What sounds?”
Helena bit her lip. “I don’t really know. All I could picture was, like, a big rat clawing at the wall. Lots of little drags. So I got out of bed and peeked through my door, and I saw Ms. Renaux standing right in front of the room, looking in. She must have been staying late at the office. Maybe she heard the scratching from upstairs. She was staring through the door, and she had this look on her face. It was like . . . in those commercials for scary movies, when they show you the audience watching the movie? They get that look when something real sick jumps out, you know? That’s what Ms. Renaux looked like. And she swung open the door and ran into the room, and I heard her yell, ‘Stop it. Stop it!’”
“Someone was in there?” I choked out.
“I didn’t even know it. I figured it was a new girl, freaking out on shrooms or H, scratching at the walls or whatever, ’cause we get those sometimes—girls who ain’t even come down yet. That’s what I told myself, and I slammed my door shut and hid my ass back under the covers.”
“And then what?”
“Then I don’t know. I didn’t really see anything else. I heard Ms. Renaux come running back out to the hall, all agitated and freaked out, whispering to someone. It could have been Mac—it could have been anybody. All I know is, by lunch on Sunday, everyone was talking about how that Sarah chick ran away, and I thought, Good for her. If anyone tried to check me into Room Nine, I would have run for my life, too, and never come back here ever.”
“So that was it? She never came back?”
“Well, that was the thing.” Helena examined the folds in her frumpy dress, avoiding my eyes. “Even after Sarah was gone, I still heard the sounds sometimes. Only late at night, like, waking me up halfway. I think maybe it is the rats. There’s got to be rats under these rickety old floors. That’s probably why they’re fixing it up, right?”
I tried to get her to look at me. “You really think it’s rats?”
“Like I told you. The girls feel safe here. We know how to ignore the creepy stuff.” Helena glanced at the digital alarm clock next to her bed. “Damn, we’re going to be late for the rehearsal dinner.” She jumped up and gave herself one last look in the mirror, redoing her ponytail, checking her ass, and frowning. “Shit, we’re supposed to be making K.O.P. look good. You got to leave. Delores only gave you ten minutes.” She finally looked at me. “Hey, how come you’re not dressed yet? Aren’t you going to the steakhouse?”
“What steakhouse?”
“Delmonico’s Steakhouse . . . ? The rehearsal dinner? Aren’t you going?”
I jumped up from the bed, trying to shake the dread that had consumed me, that had made me forget almost everything, even the wedding. “Yeah, I just need to run back to the hotel and change,” I lied. “I might be a little late.”
Out in the hall, Helena’s door closed behind me, and I could feel the air change. It went sterile and cold. My legs began to quake, just as my whole body had when Andy first showed me Emma’s picture. I forced myself to step next door. The number nine hovered right above that tiny window, daring me to peek through it.
I heard the rush of my beating heart again, but now there was something else, a faint ringing in my ears, high-pitched and constant.
If I didn’t know better, I’d swear the room was trying to sound a warning, trying to push me away. But I had to look. Would I recognize the furniture? The walls? Was it like one of those memories Andy described? Locked up in some story box in my head, with nothing but a song to remind me? I knew I’d blocked out The Night in Question, but what about last Saturday night? How well did I remember that? I’d spent it in the corner of my room, listening to that Beatles song over and over . . . hadn’t I?
I inched closer to the scuffed plexiglass and leaned forward, squinting into the darkness. I could just make out the black-and-gray outlines of a bed and a small desk, barely lit by the sunset through a barred window by the ceiling—
The shadow of a man bolted past the window. I buried my mouth in my hands to stifle a scream. Three more times, he flew past; he was pacing furiously, like a madman. I was afraid to look at his face, but on the fourth pass, I caught the profile of his perfect, ski-slope nose.
Andy . . . ?
Of course. He already knew the way in through that upstairs window. He must have snuck in while I was talking to Helena. I glanced down the hallway to make sure it was still deserted; I could hear Mac and Delores laughing about something. Drawing a shaky breath, I yanked the handle and slid through the door.
“What are you doing in here?” I whispered.
He didn’t answer.
Bad idea to step inside. I’d attributed my tremors to fear, to some kind of post-traumatic stress after The Night in Question. But now I felt a weight. Like the ceiling was crushing me flat, and my bones were rattling from the resistance.
“Andy, I don’t want to be in here,” I said. It had been cold just outside the door, but inside it was sweltering and stale, like the hot air had been sealed inside ages ago, drained of all its oxygen.
The Girl with the Wrong Name Page 13
