DEDICATION
FOR SCOTT, WHO MAKES MY WORLD MAGENTA
CONTENTS
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Acknowledgments
Back Ads
About the Author
Books by Jennifer Brown
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
PROLOGUE
THE FIRST THING she needed was a shower. A hot one. So hot the mirrors would become fogged and the towels would feel dewy and opening the bathroom door would be like stepping into a refrigerator. Her feet would be bare. And she would walk from the steaming water to the sink without wrapping a towel around herself like armor. She’d dreamed of that shower—literally dreamed of it—last night. Like her brain just couldn’t wait to wake up and make it a reality. The shower. Right away. First thing.
She’d been sitting on the edge of her bed for hours now. Motionless. Muscles frozen. She didn’t even twitch when a determined fly landed on the top of her ear and crawled around with its prickly little feet, only to pop up in a dizzy swoop and light on her again, this time on her cheek. Her knees and ankles were clamped together. Her spine was straight. Her hands rested flat, palms down, on the cover of a journal. Leather-bound, each page meticulously kept, in neat, all-caps handwriting.
8:10 A.M. AWAKE
8:22 A.M. SHOWER, DOOR CLOSED
9:10 A.M. BREAKFAST, CEREAL, DRY, COFFEE, CREAM, SUGAR, DIDN’T FINISH
9:30 A.M. STUDYING, OPEN TEXTBOOK, GEOGRAPHY
9:56 A.M. CIGARETTE BREAK 1, COMPLETE TO FILTER, NO BRAND CHANGE, DISCARDED BUTT SAVED, RETRIEVED, AND LOGGED
Pages upon pages of tedium. Six months of it. Boring as hell. Thank God she wasn’t the one in charge of writing it all down.
She allowed herself to blink, but was otherwise absolutely still on the edge of her bed. Still as a statue. Still as a corpse. Heartbeat slow, rhythmic. Ka-thud. Ka-thud. Ka-thud. She could feel her blood swooshing around inside of her like an out-of-control river, carrying her life force through her organs, souring and poisoning all the tissue, the gristle, the fat.
As if she had fat. Please.
She imagined the inside of herself as boneless, muscle-free, an inky-black and never-ending cavern, the bottom filled with tarlike sludge. To her, the popularized portrayal of a red devil was far from the truth. He wasn’t red. No. He was midnight. He was what you couldn’t see until he surprised you from the depths within yourself. He could only be found by those truly looking for him. By those who’d already died inside. Those who were walking rot.
She was walking rot.
Gorgeous, rich, popular walking rot.
The best kind, really. Life was so easy when you were gorgeous, rich, popular walking rot. Before, when she cared about making impressions, when she tried to do it all the right way, her life was anything but easy. She was left to subsist in ordinariness while those others—those imposters—were living her rightful life. She had to fight tooth and nail to get to the pot of gold at the end of that luscious rainbow.
Ha. Rainbow.
She’d stopped caring. She’d gone still and let the rot take hold and make everything easy.
Well. Mostly easy. Until that bitch came along and screwed it up for everybody. Screwed it up for her.
10:24 A.M. EMAIL CHECK, DELETE
10:37 A.M. GEOGRAPHY, BOOK OPEN, MOVED FROM DESK TO BED
10:37 A.M.–11:02 A.M. SOCIAL MEDIA. NO ENGAGEMENT, JUST SCROLLING
“You ready?”
She raised her head, slowly, evenly, as if on a tight hinge.
Dolores. Young. Half-afraid. Pretty. Liked to tell kindergarten knock-knock jokes, as if they were all there because they just didn’t know any better. Dolores didn’t mind when the TV stayed on too long. Didn’t even seem to notice the journal. Dolores was easy. Maybe Dolores was rotting, too. Maybe she knew all about that devil sliding around inside of herself.
Dolores leaned forward, her hands tucked into her guard uniform pockets. “You ready?” she repeated.
Finally, as if shocked into life, the heartbeat sped. Ready? So ready she could taste it. So ready she could feel that shower streaming down her back. So fucking ready she had to grip the journal tightly between her hands to keep from shoving her thumbs right through good old shy Dolores’s eyes. Knock-knock, Dolores, who’s there? Death, that’s who.
Her entire body clenched. Her shoulders pressed up so tightly against her ears, they ached. Her fingers were white around the leather journal cover. Her feet felt numb, like she was floating. Every open door was a birth as she passed through.
He was waiting in the vestibule, all dimples and teeth and yes, ma’am and no, sir. He understood the importance of what he was embarking on. He understood the gravity of the situation. Whatever it took, he was prepared. He would make sure neither of them messed this up.
Have a great life, Dolores, you dingbat, she thought as she walked through that final open door, squinting against the sunlight all the way across the parking lot.
“Have you heard anything?” he asked, opening the car door for her. She slid into the hot vinyl interior, grimacing. He paused, looking down at her, waiting for her to respond, and then shut the door. She waited until he came around the car and got in behind the steering wheel. “Well?” he said, fumbling the key into the ignition slot.
“Of course not. Information comes when it comes. You think I’m just going to be having casual conversations about it over my tapioca? What, are you fucking stupid?”
He laughed, rocking back against his seat. She couldn’t even look at him—his hair so white it practically glowed in that impossible sun.
“Only stupid enough,” he said. “And that?” He gestured at the journal.
Her fingers gripped it tighter. “What about it? Jesus, turn the car on. It’s hot. I don’t want to die in this parking lot.” They connected eyes, considering, with dirty grins, the irony of that statement. She chuckled. “You didn’t bring a cane, did you?”
He sobered. “Still looking for it.”
She rolled her eyes. “That was a joke, moron.”
He twisted the key in the ignition; the air blew into her face full blast. The car had been parked too long and the air, too, was hot, like standing too close to an open oven door. She squinted against it and started to tilt the vents away, but then imagined the heat curdling the internal rot and decided she liked it that way. Rot away, sludge.
“Has it been helpful?” he asked, gesturing toward the book in her lap.
“I need a shower,” she said.
“I asked you a question.”
She leveled her eyes at him, taking him in fully
for the first time. He disgusted her. He was such a chameleon, it was almost impossible to tell who she was dealing with at any given moment. But he would do anything for the love of his life. He’d said so himself. He’d come clean when the shit hit the fan.
And besides, he was all she had right now, so she was just going to have to deal.
He was the only person who could stand between her and what she’d been waiting for, planning, for six months.
Only he could keep her from Nikki Kill.
“Yeah,” she said, hugging the journal to her chest, finally allowing herself to relax into the seat. “Very helpful, actually.”
1
MY HANDS SHOOK as I struggled with them behind my head.
I wasn’t exactly a jewelry kind of girl to begin with, and my chewed-to-the-quick thumbnails weren’t made for tiny metal necklace clasps. Then again, I was hardly a Flower Pink lipstick kind of girl, either, but damned if that wasn’t smeared all over my lips, too. Sweet makeup, hair brushed to a gloss, jewelry, heels. I felt like a parallel universe version of myself: Plastic Doll Nikki, for your special-occasion needs! Special occasions like high school graduations that nobody expected you to actually achieve. Graduate Nikki, now with stunned eyebrows!
I finally got the clasp and let the topaz teardrop dangle, touching it lightly with my fingertips as I stared into the mirror. Sunlight streamed in through my bedroom window—God, what I wouldn’t have given for a quick smoke before heading off to be Barely Achieving Student on Parade—and reflected off the facets of the gem and onto my face. Faint blue starbursts caressed the scar on my cheek, moving when I moved, swirling and blending with brown and peach, the colors that reminded me of heavy hearts and nostalgia. The same colors I always saw when I looked too closely at my scars. Colors that made me think of Dru.
Would Dru have come today to see me graduate? Doubtful. He wasn’t the type to sit in a crowded auditorium with a bouquet of roses in his lap. He was more of the type to meet you in the basket of a hot-air balloon with a bouquet of roses and tickets to a Vegas show. I guessed. The truth was I didn’t know exactly what type of boyfriend Dru was, because he and I had never exactly gotten to that stage.
And now it was too late. A putrid brown-and-peach swirl splatted against my forehead and dripped away into nothingness.
Hell, who was I kidding? Dru and I would have never gotten to that stage, no matter how long we’d had together. Because I didn’t do that stage. Ever. And he probably didn’t, either. Which would have been one of the things that attracted me to him in the first place. How screwed up was that?
“You look just like her,” I heard behind me. I whirled around, the remaining brown-and-pink swirl shooting up into surprised gold fireworks. My hand slapped over my heart.
I let out a heavy breath. “You scared me, Dad.”
“Sorry. I forgot the rule.”
The rule was no sneaking up on me, ever. Not unless you wanted to eat a few knuckles or perhaps get a really close look at the ball of my foot as it slammed into your face. Not to mention unless you wanted to give me a heart attack. Ever since that night at Hollis Mansion seven months ago, I’d been fighting a pervasive jumpiness, as if bad guys were waiting around every corner to attack me.
Last I heard, the bad guys were gone. Bill and Vanessa Hollis were hiding in Dubai, and Luna was locked up for killing Dru. But I’d spent so much time looking over my shoulder, it was pretty much habit now to assume that anyone coming up behind me was one of them, trying to kill me.
I picked up my mortarboard to distract myself from those memories and placed it on my head, reminding myself that they were in Dubai and juvie for good reason, and nobody had heard from them in months. Hell, nobody had heard from anyone in months. It was like nothing had ever happened. The entire world—minus yours truly—had forgotten all about it. I wished I could forget about it.
The mortarboard scrunched down over my hair, flattening it even further. I fumbled with a bobby pin, and Dad stepped up behind me.
“Here, let me.”
I handed him the pin. He slipped it up into the bottom of my cap, scraping it along my scalp, and held out his hand for another. I winced as I passed it to him. Dad doing my hair was nothing unusual—he’d been doing it since my mom died when I was eight. He’d had to be both Mom and Dad, which was too bad, because he wasn’t particularly great at being either one.
“You do, you know,” he said softly. “Look like her. Especially wearing her necklace.”
I tried not to react. Tried not to even hear his words. I’d spent a lifetime working on forgetting my mother—forgetting how it felt to lose her, forgetting the nightmares and the crimson, crimson, crimson of death that had followed me everywhere after she’d been murdered. It took ten years of effort, but I’d finally managed to be able to think about Mom without being overwhelmed by images of wet brown paper sacks and rushing muddy rivers of sadness. I’d even sometimes begun to be reminded of magenta and pink—the colors I associated with love and happiness—when I allowed myself to pull up memories of her.
But not anymore. Not after what happened with Peyton Hollis. Not after the letter she left for me—I’ve known you were my sister for a while now. . . . Your mother, Carrie, was my mother, too. I know this because I’ve followed a very long trail of deceit. Now every time I thought about my mother, my colors went crazy. They all pushed in on one another—anger, betrayal, danger, death, suspicion, fear. Sickly yellows and grays and browns and seething, pulsing midnight—a monster’s galaxy.
“I think it’s good,” I said, tugging on the mortarboard, choosing to ignore the big dead mother elephant in the room. “Thanks.”
He put his hands on my shoulders and gazed at our reflection in the mirror. “She would have been so proud of you today.”
I gave him a thin smile, concentrating on the blue of the mortarboard and hoping it wouldn’t be drowned out by the bad colors. Or by the ocean of turquoise that so closely resembled what I had come to think of as cheater blue—that ocean being an endless sea of guilt that I, no matter how hard I tried, could not find the shore of.
Basically, I was a synesthetic time bomb, held down by a very flimsy lid. And I’d spent the last seven months trying not to let too much steam escape.
“She’s probably pretty surprised right about now,” I said. “I know everyone else is. The earrings? Or is that too much?” It felt like too much, as I held one of the smaller teardrops up against my earlobes.
“Too much,” he said, echoing my thoughts. I dropped it back into my drawer, noticing that its match was missing anyway. I rooted through my jewelry with my finger, but it didn’t turn up. Weird. This was the second time something had gone missing on me this week. A few days ago, I had turned my room upside down looking for a half-empty pack of cigarettes and my favorite lighter—a vintage Zippo that I’d swiped out of the ISS teacher’s desk drawer in seventh grade and carved my initials into. I loved that lighter and couldn’t believe I’d misplaced it.
“And, for the record,” Dad continued, “I’m not surprised. I knew you would graduate.”
I raised my eyebrows at him.
“Okay, I’m a little surprised. But I had faith in you. And when I think about all that you’ve been through . . .” He shook his head, as though he felt sorry for me, and once again I had to concentrate on other things. My fingers itched to hold a cigarette. He took a breath. “Anyway. Your grandparents are going to meet us there. I thought maybe we would have dinner afterward? Someplace nice. You’re dressed for it. Grandma and Grandpa would like that.”
I sighed. My dad’s parents lived in Flagstaff and didn’t come around very often. I wasn’t sure how much they knew about what had happened with the Hollises, but I was guessing not much. Dad was a pretty private person, and I was even more private than he. I still had never told him everything about that night—had shared only enough to satisfy him and make him stop hammering me with questions. Sometimes I felt guilty about it, like if anyone should
know that Mom wasn’t who she pretended to be, it should be him. The only explanation I had for keeping things from him was that I was afraid of hurting him, afraid of hurting us, our family, even if that “family” was only a memory. He’d never gotten over Mom’s death. To find out that he’d spent a decade mourning a woman who’d cheated on him—with Bill Hollis, no less—would be devastation.
Or worse. I would tell him, only to find out that he already knew. That they’d both kept it from me. That they’d kept my sister from me. And then what? I would feel betrayed and I wouldn’t be able to trust him again, and my dad was really the only person I had in this world. I was great at destruction—destroying people, destroying things, destroying hearts. The last thing I needed was to destroy my relationship with my dad.
So I’d told him only the basics. That I’d gotten in too deep with the Hollises. That I’d started dating Dru—even though that was hardly what we were really doing—and that his sister, Luna, had taken offense at me being so close to the family when they were grieving. I’d told him about how Luna had gone crazy, had drugged me, had held a gun on me, had shot Dru by accident instead. It was all a tragic mishap.
But that was where I’d stopped telling the truth. I didn’t want Dad getting all up in my business, asking questions and demanding answers and locking me down, a prisoner in my own bedroom. Not that he wasn’t already trying his hardest to do that. He’d felt so guilty about me getting wrapped up in a huge mess without him even knowing, he was constantly questioning me, and constantly searching for news on Luna’s trial. He’d even written a letter to the juvenile judge, railing about how Luna had attacked me for no reason, and asking to be kept in the loop if anything should happen with her case.
But there never was any news. There was no loop. At least not a loop that I was part of. Which is not to say my classmates weren’t talking about it; I just wasn’t part of the discussion. If I was a nobody before Peyton’s death, I was less than a nobody now. I finished out my senior year with home study, visiting campus only when I absolutely had to. I hardly ever went anywhere. And when I did, I avoided going any place where I might run into one of Peyton’s or Luna’s friends.
Dare You Page 1
