Don't Breathe a Word (11 page)

“Yeah. Olympia's nice, but it's not the same. I'll never get over the water here.”

I understood. My suburban home, thirty miles east and nestled in the low, green mountains, couldn't compare. Everything converged in downtown Seattle—the water, the mountains, the sky—and made you feel like you could live outside forever, even if you were under a bridge.

Creed took another bite of his sandwich. “There was this horse I used to know. Callisto—named after a nymph of Artemis.”

“Goddess of the hunt,” I supplied.

“Yes. She was so beautiful—honey colored, with deep black eyes. She used to love to run on the beach, except she'd always pull toward the water. Over and over again, this would happen. I took her out to run on the beach, and she would try to gallop straight into the ocean.”

I realized I wasn't even eating anymore, didn't feel the cold—only the rhythmic gallop of a horse named Callisto. “So what happened?”

“One day I let her.”

“You let her go into the ocean?”

“Yeah. I just held on to the reins and let her go wherever she wanted to go.”

“And?”

“She kept going. Into the ocean, further and further until she was all the way up to her neck, straining against the water. She didn't swim. She just kept trotting, trying to go where she knew she was meant to go.”

Maybe like Creed and his music, straining against the waves. Like me, straining against my asthma and the reins my family and Asher put on me because of it. At some point the horse would have to stop struggling and go back to shore or she would die. But for now, she'd left the reins behind.

“I always think about that, when I think about why I'm here,” Creed said.

The sun was almost completely behind the mountains now, except for a sliver of gold. It was so beautiful, I thought I could cry.

Chapter 21

Santos, Creed, and May had been whispering all day.

“I don't know what you're talking about,” May said when I asked what was up. Creed shrugged, and Santos had a big grin on his face.

“What?” I poked Santos, but he danced out of my reach.

It was the day after they'd gone to the New Horizons shelter for a real shower and a change of clothes.

“I'm not going,” I'd said.

A hot meal, May promised, even though, according to her, I had a long way to go before I got scrawny. A shower, Creed hinted. New shoes and warmer clothes, Santos promised.

“They talk about Jesus and shit, but the New Ho's are all right. Least, they give decent food,” he said. And last week, he'd come home with a jacket, new socks, and underwear.

I thought of my oldest brother, Jesse, the Good Samaritan. He was always the one collecting clothing for the shelters. I'd probably run into my own clothes there, remnants from another life. If they thought I ran away, that would be the first place they'd check. Were there posters up for missing kids? Would they report me to the police?

Even if I didn't, there were other hazards. If I undressed in front of May, she would see the bracelet. And more.

“I can't.”

“Oh, come on,” Santos wheedled as he ran his hand over Faulkner's sleek fur. “I mean, I didn't wanna say anything, but you're getting kinda smelly—”

“I said no!”

May raised her eyebrows. Santos looked hurt. Creed appraised me thoughtfully. “Fine,” Santos said, “you don't have to go . . .”

Creed pushed himself away from the wall. “Leave her alone. If she doesn't want to go, she doesn't have to. We all have things we don't want to talk about.”

A sick feeling crept into my stomach. May had things. Santos had things. If they knew about my things, they would kick me out faster than I could swipe a bar of soap from the drugstore. If they knew about my friends, my house, my parents . . . still they wouldn't know a thing about me.

Only Creed knew about Asher, and he hadn't seen the worst of it.

“It's all right, I'll stay with her,” May volunteered. “I could help you with your bleach—you got an inch of roots growing out and are starting to look like a fucking skunk.”

After the boys left, May said, “I'll go out and get supplies and stuff. You wait here.”

“Don't you want me to come with you? It's getting late.”

She gave me a withering look. “I'm not afraid of the dark, if that's what you're asking.”

“No—that's not what I meant. I—”

“Don't worry about it—I'll get there and back in ten minutes. And seriously, I heard about what happened at the Red Apple Market. I don't want to get kicked out of the closest drugstore.” She giggled as she disappeared down the basement stairs. “But thanks for the toilet paper!”

There wasn't much to do, alone in the house. May and Santos had stacks of library books in their room—
A Brief History of Time
,
Dragon's Keep
,
Speak
,
Crime and Punishment
. May had finished reading
Little Women
and was on to
Mansfield Park
. Santos had
The Oxford Companion to Greek Mythology
, opened halfway and splayed across the blankets. They were remarkably well read, I thought, for being homeless.

I picked up
Dragon's Keep
and took it to our bedroom with the candle—nearly burned out. We would need more soon.

Ten pages later, May still hadn't come back. The words started to blur until I was reading the same sentence over and over and closing my eyes, and then I heard the boys coming up the stairs, laughing about some guy at the shelter trying to hang on to his stuff while he took a shower. Everything came into focus again.

Creed stood in the doorway, so huge in the flickering candlelight, all clean and shaved with hair still wet. In a moment, he would lie down on the mattress next to me, so I could bury my nose into him and smell his skin. I smiled as I rolled over.

“Brought you something.” He tossed a pair of socks in my direction.

“I fell asleep,” I mumbled, reaching for the socks. “Is May back yet?”

Creed's face changed in an instant. “You let her out? What were you
thinking
?”

“Hey, man,” Santos interjected from the other room. “It's not her fault—she doesn't know.”

Creed closed his eyes with the weight of it. “Herding cats,” my mom used to call it when she was trying to get all five of us somewhere at once. Creed looked like he was herding something far more slippery than cats. Ave Rats.

“Whatever it is,” I said, “it's not your responsibility. May's a big girl, she can take care of herself.” Now I was standing up, a little wobbly. May might have been small, but she wasn't anything like those dead-eyed girls I saw with Maul, or the ones strung out on the sidewalk and sleeping under bridges with their boyfriends. I wished I could be as strong as May.

“You don't know what you're talking about.” Creed again.

“I would, if you'd just tell me.”

Creed sighed. “You'll probably find out soon enough.”

May showed up a few hours later acting like my little brother before a birthday party—hyper and happy and with an armload of bleach and hair supplies, ready to do my hair right then and there. Only it was the middle of the night, and Creed and I were already asleep. Santos was out. We went back to bed, but I could hear her rattling around down below, then pounding down the stairs and into the night.

This morning, she was crashed in the pile of blankets, and Creed wouldn't look me in the eye. The secrets, keeping track of who was carrying what, were starting to become exhausting.

Then Santos came back with coffee and May slept until the afternoon, and suddenly the three of them were whispering and talking about tonight's plan as if nothing had happened.

Now, somewhere close to midnight, the four of us scurried along through the darkened city.

“Where are we going? The Ave?” “The Ave” was short for University Way, a street near the University of Washington where tons of homeless teens hung out. It was another one of my brother's haunts, and the last place I wanted to go.

Santos glanced at May. “No. We don't go there.”

I relaxed. We trudged through another neighborhood where I'd been before, north of our usual haunts and much quieter. The houses and yards had more space in between them, and there weren't any brownstones for miles. Every once in a while a car crept by.

“You're gonna love this,” Santos kept saying. “It's better than the shelter.” Even Creed was smiling, though I saw worry every time he glanced at May.

May was like a shadow of what she'd been last night—tired and tiny, tucking a holey sweater around her. When she caught me staring, she smiled an uneasy smile.

“You okay?” I asked. She looked five years younger just then, a little girl in her five-foot skin.

“Yeah. Fine, thanks.” She hurried to join the boys up ahead.

“Right up there,” Santos whispered, nodding toward a huge building behind a city park sign: Maplewood Community Center, situated at the top of twenty feet of concrete stairs. The lights were out except for one parking lot lamp.

“You get inside, and I'll keep watch with the girls,” Creed said to Santos, who vaulted over the fence and disappeared.

“We're going inside?” I whispered.

“You can't see in from street level,” May whispered back. “It's the perfect crime.”

Creed's right arm slipped around me as he held up May with the other. His fingers rested on the lower edge of my hoodie, at an exposed slice of skin. I held my breath, wishing for his fingers to find their way under the cloth.

Santos appeared behind the glass doors and unsnapped the locks. “Come on in, mofos,” he hooted as we slipped in one by one. He was already peeling off his shirt, revealing a backside rippling with tattoos.

“This way.” Santos strolled through double doors and into a vast, echoing room. Only a haze of light came in from the streetlamp, reflecting on an enormous swimming pool. Creed started to take off his clothes as we hit a cloud of chlorine. Santos dove in headfirst while Faulkner padded along the side. May threw the pool light switch, sending a greenish glow up from the water.

I realized I couldn't look at Creed without giving everything away. But I looked anyway.

All the times I'd been wrapped in his body, I'd imagined what he would look like. But I wasn't even close to the real thing. What I'd thought was skinny turned out to be strong and lean. There at the edge of the pool and lit by the liquid glow, it was enough to rouse my every nerve.

“Don't look too hard,” May muttered, and I spun around, red and flustered. Part of me, the deepest part, ached with unbearably crazy desire. The rest burned with shame.

I started to unzip my hoodie and unbutton Asher's flannel—I still wore it even though its hold on me was wearing looser and looser. Once upon a time, Asher had made me ache this way, too, before the ache turned into hurt. I slipped the crow bracelet into a pocket before anyone could see.

May stripped to just her baggy T-shirt. She yanked it down to cover herself, but it did nothing to camouflage the bruises on her arms and legs, skinny as sticks. I peeled off my clothes down to my cami and underwear, but no further. There were things I didn't want them to see, either.

The boys raced from one end of the pool to the other, cutting through the water and leaving wakes of light. May gingerly climbed down the stairs, as if the pool were a cauldron of boiling liquid.

I dove in and swam as far as I could before coming up in a burst of lungs and water. The farther I swam, the more I could wash off the sweat and grime and burning at seeing Creed.

But there he was, in my path, hidden only by the swirling current between us. I swished to a halt before I could crash into him, and my skin would touch his skin and other places I wished would touch . . .

But instead, he kept a moat of personal space between us, treading water in front of me. “You a diver in your former life?”

Damn
. Even the unconscious things could give me away. “No,” I said, which wasn't exactly true. I hadn't been on the swim team for years—not since junior high, when one season had landed me in the hospital for weeks with severe pneumonia. Just being here with Creed was a slap in the face of my former life.

His eyes penetrated mine, reading whatever he could, then flickered away, down my neck and wet cami—closer to sheer in the water. The glow of the pool lit up my skin underneath.

“Here,” he said, lifting his hands up to wipe under my eyes—black circles were probably running down my cheeks like charcoal tears. I couldn't stop looking at his mouth, wondering what it would taste like. Salty, warm, and maybe a tiny bit sweet.

Under the water, my foot brushed against him, and both of us jumped.

Again, a trace of annoyance flashed across his face—so quickly I wasn't sure if I saw anything.

“You dive like a pro.” Then Creed dove under the water himself.

Santos, totally bare, jumped up and down on the diving board. “Watch this! Watch this!” He sprang into a wild sideways dive.

I floated to May, who still waded in the shallow end. Her arms and legs glowed in the aquamarine except for a fresh bruise, circling her arm like a huge hand. Finger marks stood out purple against white.

I gasped. “What happened to your arm?”

She spun around. “Nothing. None of your fucking business,” she spat. Two seconds later, she was stalking out of the pool toward the door, her arm held across her body as droplets streamed down her legs.

“May, watch this,” called Santos, doing a backward dive. But she wasn't watching. She threw the switch, sending the pool into darkness.

“What'd you do that for?” Santos sputtered, coming up to the surface. Creed was moving toward him.

May came back to the pool and sat down on the side. “I got scared,” she said. “Someone's going to see the light.” Her face, illuminated by the streetlamp, begged me not to say anything. If Creed knew, he'd be giving someone hell. Me? May? Whoever gave her that bruise? It must have happened on my watch, so it was as much my fault as the person who put it there.

At least, I was afraid that's how he'd see it.