Shade Me (5 page)

I
TOSSED AND
turned all night, seeing Peyton's face morph into my mom's, and when I woke up all I could think about was what I'd seen in Dru's key chain, which I'd regretted about ten seconds after I pulled away from the parking garage. Everything felt wrong, like I was being played. Like I was involved in something I shouldn't have been. Like I had let myself be sucked in by his charm like some swoony, desperate girl. And I was generally not big on being “involved” in things to begin with.

I had no idea what I was doing on my chem quiz, but I didn't have time to care about that. I still had a D in the class, and if I didn't screw up my finals, I just might pull out enough of a grade to graduate. I had time.

Not that it was possible to concentrate on schoolwork anyway. Word had already gotten out about what had happened to Peyton, and everyone was talking about it.

“I heard she rolled her car, like, ten times,” a girl said in first period. “They say she was running from drug dealers when she did it. You saw that tattoo on her neck, didn't you? Who does that?”

“Nuh-uh, it was cops she was running from. And I heard she got run over by a truck,” someone else said.

“I thought it was that she was dating some college guy and he beat her up because he caught her cheating. With a girl,” yet another person chimed in.

Killed themselves to put you up on a pedestal, just so they could watch you lose your balance and fall, and even pull you down when you weren't falling fast enough.

I wanted to turn on them, tell them all to shut up because they had no idea what they were talking about, and just yesterday they were all wanting to be her and talking about the neck tattoos they were going to get. But then I remembered I actually had no idea what had happened to Peyton, either, and they could have been right for all I knew, not to mention why on earth would I be sticking up for Peyton Hollis anyway?
Stay out of it
,
Nikki,
I told myself about a thousand times.
It's not your business.

Still, I wondered how her night had gone—if she was still comatose, or if she'd stirred and asked for me, or if she
hadn't made it after all. Would anyone have found a way to tell me if she'd died? And should I even care? Before last night, would I have cared? I thought probably not.

By the end of the day, people were talking about going to visit her after school. Some of her friends had collected money during lunch shift for flowers. There was going to be a carpool. A caravan of carpools. So predictable. They'd probably show up with entire greenhouses full of flowers, with cashmere teddy bears, these people who'd spent the day relentlessly passing around rumors about her. Brentwood was dangerously close to Hollywood in so many ways.

The last thing I wanted to do was be in the middle of that bullshit. Especially if Dru was there. Awkward City.

So instead of going to the hospital with everyone else, I went to open gym at LightningKick, the tae kwon do academy where I'd been training since I was twelve. I liked LightningKick. It centered me, made me feel strong and powerful, capable. I couldn't score an A on anything at school to save my life, but I could kick the ass of a grown man without breaking much of a sweat. Knowing I could do that didn't make the bad guys who'd killed my mom go away, but it made me less scared of them. Plus, when I was perfecting an eagle strike or memorizing my patterns, the synesthesia didn't matter, because I wasn't even seeing letters or numbers. I wasn't feeling emotions. I was focused inside my head, inside myself. Maybe the vacation from a
color-coded world was why I was so good at tae kwon do. I didn't do it to be good, though; I did it to be myself. And myself liked to beat the snot out of unwitting sparring partners on a Tuesday afternoon at the
dojang
.

I pulled open the glass doors and inhaled the familiar smell of LightningKick—a mixture of sweat, muscle ointment, and bare feet. A gross combination, but one that I associated with taking control, with self-preservation; so immediately, I felt better. I couldn't pinpoint it, but something about the events of the night before made me feel like I needed to brush up on my self-protection skills. I headed for the changing room, where I unloaded my backpack and cell phone, took off my shoes, and changed into my
dobok
. My muscles twitched with anticipation.

“Everything okay, Nik?” Gunner, my
kyo sah nim
, asked as I walked across the padded floor toward the heavy bag.

“Yes, sir, fine,” I said. I squared myself up next to the bag and roundhoused it so hard it swung back and forth on its hook. The connection rattled my whole body. It felt good, so I did it again. And again. And another dozen times, before switching to my left foot and starting over. Peyton's face flashed in my mind, the crusted blood around her nostrils and crimson monitors trying to edge in on me, shake me up. The memory of how Peyton blurred into my mother stirred into focus. I blitzed the bag with everything I had—royal-blue strength bubbles popping around me—gritting
my teeth to keep them from clacking together with the impact, and the image shattered to pieces and floated away. I tried, instead, to imagine her perpetrator, who had somehow, in my mind, morphed into my mom's nameless, faceless culprit, fantasize about finding him in Bay 19 and kicking him over and over until he coughed blood and teeth. But it was impossible to conjure an image of someone you had no clue about. I'd been trying to take down an anonymous bad guy since the day I slid in my mom's blood on the tile entryway floor. The frustration ramped me up and I kicked harder and harder—blue, blue, blue—my foot stinging and then going numb.

Kyo Sah Nim
Gunner appeared on the other side of the bag and held on to it to stop its swing. I paused, bouncing on my toes, breathing hard. “You sure you're all right?” he asked. “This bag is crying uncle.”

“Sorry,” I said. I felt sweat trickle down my back and disappear under my belt. I didn't want to lose my momentum, so I moved to the sparring dummy and practiced a few elbow strikes. “It's been a long day. Late night last night. Was at the ER with a fr—with someone I know.”

“Ouch. Your friend come out okay?”

She's not my friend,
I wanted to say, but instead I just nodded. “She'll be fine.”

“You want to spar?” he asked. “I can find Justin if you think you're up to it.”

I reared back and hit the dummy with a palm heel, and followed it up with a tornado kick. The dummy tipped so far the weighted base couldn't counterbalance, and it fell. Justin was a skinny kid, not much of a challenge, but he was a live body. One I could pummel guilt free. “Yes, sir,” I said. “I'm up for it.”

For the next hour I punched and kicked until my legs were wobbly and my arms felt like they'd been filled with sand and even the blue faded. I was drenched with sweat, my hair lying in a limp ponytail down my back, my
dobok
wet through at the shoulder blades. I felt good. Like I could take on anyone, even anonymous bad guys. I felt like me again.

After, I went back to the changing room and peeled off my
dobok
. I used a towel to wipe myself off, then sat on the bench, trying to cool down and catch my breath.

I couldn't get Peyton out of my mind. I felt guilty for not going back to the hospital. I didn't know why she'd asked for me, but she had, and it was shitty of me to just leave her lying there in a hospital bed because I was too afraid of running into her friends or her brother or whatever other dumb excuse I'd been giving myself for staying away. I still didn't want to, but I had to go see her. Just suck it up and go.

PEYTON'S ROOM WAS
just as I had expected it to be. There were flowers on every flat surface, as if a celebrity had died. There were stuffed toys and so many balloons they
were like cloud cover along the ceiling. In the middle of the jungle of get-well wishes, looking sallow and broken in a nest of crisp white blankets, lay Peyton. Sitting next to her, just as he had been the night before, was Dru.

He had been leaning his forehead against the mattress but looked up when I walked in. I suddenly felt smelly and gross and wished I had showered after my workout. And then I was pissed for being worried about something as stupid as Dru Hollis thinking I smelled bad. I could wrap him up and take him down before his muscles could twitch a response. Why would I worry about what he thought?

Because he makes you see violet, Nikki. Even more than Jones,
my brain tried to answer, but I shoved the thought away. That was last night. That was me in a weak moment.

“Where is everyone?” I asked.

“Who?”

I gestured at the plants all around. “For starters, these people. And, I don't know, your family. Don't you have another sister?” I knew he did. She was younger than me. A sophomore. She was fragile and wispy, with creamy actress skin and perfect everything. She was Peyton: The Starlet Version, waiting to happen in full force the minute we crossed the graduation stage. I'd seen her a few times, in the halls. She was always giving this sweet little smile and giggling like a tween, but there was something calculated about her. I couldn't stand her.

“
Half
sister,” he said. “Luna. She came earlier.” His mouth turned down when he said this, and I wondered if maybe she'd been a big, dramatic mess, and he wasn't very good at crying scenes or something. I could definitely see a Hollis being unable to handle emotion. Emotion and the press didn't always go together.

“What about your parents?”

“Out of town,” he said. “In Monaco. They're trying to get back right now.”

I tried to imagine what it must be like to have something like this happen while you're on vacation. I couldn't do it. When Mom died, our lives stopped. Dad shut down, seeming to wrestle with so many regrets and memories they practically bowled him over.

Ever since, he'd been an emotional desert. He never talked about Mom. A freelance photographer, he wandered through life clutching his camera like a safety blanket, without even seeming to notice when a model hit on him or an actress threw herself at him. He was just a void. Half the time, he ignored me. The other half, he tried to be my friend. But I knew he would come to my side if something happened to me. Instantly.

Wouldn't he?

He never solved Mom's murder,
I thought, for the thousandth time.
He tried,
I reminded myself.
But every lead was dead.

“Anyway,” Dru said, “a few friends have been in and out. But that cop has been hanging around and making everyone feel uncomfortable, so they haven't been staying.”

“The same one from last night?”

His jaw tightened. “I guess. Crew cut, stubble, major superiority complex.” Again, there was something in his voice I couldn't quite place. Something severe, off-putting.

“Detective Chris Martinez,” I supplied. “Seems pretty harmless. Has he found any suspects yet?”

“Not that I know of. He's all about chasing his own tail. I told him he should be out there, asking around, interviewing people, following leads, or whatever it is cops do. Not in here, watching her . . . die. It's not like Peyton's attacker is going to be hanging out at the hospital.”

I stepped closer to the bed. At the moment, the monitors were all shrouded from my line of sight by balloons and plants. I was trying to keep the colors at bay. But I could feel the crimson edging in on me. My palms started to sweat.

“That would be pretty stupid with you sitting right here. I'm guessing you wouldn't mind it, though, getting a chance for a one-on-one with the person who did this.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Yeah.”

I took another step. The crimson was flooding my peripheral vision, but I ignored it. My mouth was dry as I went all the way to Peyton's bedside and eased into the chair across from Dru. I focused on her tattoo, letting those colors
dazzle the crimson away.
Red is an apple. Blue is the sky. Yellow is the sun. Orange is a tabby cat.
Green is the grass. . . .
“Have there been any changes?”

He shook his head, still not looking at me. “Looks like it was a blunt weapon. A board or a baseball bat or something. Messed up her brain pretty bad. I wish I could have stopped it. In some ways she's the centerpiece of our family. When she moved out, it upset everyone.”

“She's the centerpiece of a lot of things,” I said, thinking about the conversations at school, my voice coming out more bitterly than I'd intended it to. Then it sank in what he'd said after that. “Wait a minute. She moved out? Where?”

Dru paused and squinted at me. “Why are you here, Nikki?”

I ignored his question, my mouth moving faster than my brain. If people knew she'd moved out, they weren't talking about it. Which was odd. “When did she move? Where is she living?”

He shrugged. “A couple of weeks ago. I don't know where. Nobody told me.”

A couple of weeks. Right around the same time she got her hair cut and stopped coming to school. This seemed like more than a coincidence. Something had clearly been going on with Peyton Hollis before this happened. “Can't you ask your parents where?”

“I told you, they're in Monaco. I don't know what was going on. Why are you here, Nikki?” he repeated a little more forcefully.

“They called me,” I said.

“Yeah, last night they did. But why are you here today?”

That, really, was the question of the hour. Why was I there? Why, after the sucker punch of reliving my mom's murder in that bay last night, had I come back?

A distant part of me realized that maybe that sucker punch
was
why. Maybe because I had to prove to myself that it wasn't my mom lying there. Maybe to keep the nightmares from coming back, or even just to assure myself that, even though my mom's killer had never been found, Peyton's attacker would be. Maybe, somehow that I couldn't explain, coming back today made me feel safer.