I KNEW RIGHT where Vee’s locker was. Everyone knew where Vee’s locker was. It was the battle site of a longtime war between Vee and the custodian, the door scrubbed to bare metal where it had been tagged with Vee’s Sharpie about a thousand times over. Angry bumper stickers had been half scraped off, flyers for grunge bands pasted on and ripped down. It was a disaster area, which was just the way Vee liked it.
I sort of knew Vee a little bit. She’d been in my family and consumer sciences class in junior high. It was one of the few classes that I did okay in, because I didn’t have to read to sew a pair of mittens (a stupid-ass project for a bunch of California kids, by the way) or to open a can of biscuits or diaper a fake baby. I could zone out in there. One of the few places.
Vee was who Peyton would be without her rich Hollywood parents and their celebrity-studded parties. Punk, without the posh. Even back then, Vee had a troublemaker side to her. She was forever sabotaging her own cookies just to watch the teacher’s lips pucker in disgust during the taste test. Her mitten boasted an obscene middle finger. Occasionally, she would catch my eye while she was doing something she wasn’t supposed to be doing, and we would laugh together. Which didn’t exactly make us friends, but it was probably as close to friends as Vee or I ever get.
Vee played bass guitar. She had biceps to beat most of the boys in our school. And she had the rattiest, nastiest-looking dreadlocks I’d ever seen, with feathers and shit hanging out of them. She was so crazy she was cool. And when she hooked up with Viral Fanfare, she got even cooler. But untouchable cool, like Peyton. Only Vee was about a million times more unlikable than Peyton. Nobody envied Vee; they feared her.
She loped to her locker about ten seconds before the tardy bell rang, clearly in no hurry to get to the next period, which I knew was PE because I normally had health at the same time.
“Hey,” she said, flicking her eyes to me. I was leaning against the locker next to hers—the only two people left in the hallway.
“Hey,” I answered.
She opened the door—22, 3, 19, black-and-white checkered, purple, mauve—and a bunch of papers fell out. She bent to retrieve them, wadded them up, and crammed them back on the shelf. The inside of her locker smelled like smoke and pork chops. She shoved a book on top of the papers, crammed her messenger bag into the bottom of the locker, then slammed the door shut and crossed her arms, leveling me with her stare. “What? You lost?”
Probably half the kids at our school would have pissed themselves if Vee were standing in front of them looking the way she was looking at me, but I wasn’t half the kids at our school. She didn’t scare me. I could identify girls like her a mile away. She was all talk and no action. One chokehold and I would have her pounding the floor for mercy.
And her attitude irritated me. It had been a long enough day without dealing with her crap.
“Peyton Hollis, that’s what,” I said.
She blinked, recovered quickly. “What about her?”
I narrowed my eyes. “You know exactly what about her. Someone beat the shit out of her, and I think you might know who.”
“I might know who?” She snickered derisively. “Someone’s been watching too many cop shows. Why would I know who’d want to turn Peyton into a high-dollar smear on parking lot pavement?” She started to walk down the hall, but I followed her. “I’ve been done with that bitch for a while now.”
“Not true. I saw the black daisies,” I said. “I know they came from you. What’s going on? Did she do something to Viral Fanfare?”
She whirled around on me, the sleeves of the flannel shirt she had tied around her waist smacking me in the knees. “And this is your business, why?”
I ignored her question and fired back one of my own. “Gibson Talley?”
She threw her hands in the air. “What about him?”
“‘You won’t win this,’” I recited. “Sound familiar? He said that on her Facebook page. What wasn’t she going to win? What did she do to him? Was it about the songs? Or were they something more than bandmates?”
She smirked and shook her head as it dawned on her what I was saying. “You don’t have a clue,” she said, and started walking again. “But you would be wise to stay out of it. Gibson Talley is not somebody you want to piss off.”
“Answer my questions. I saw him at the hospital. Why is he after her?” I touched the back of her arm and she wheeled on me, smacking my hand away angrily. Instinctively, I curled it into a fist, shifting my weight back onto my right leg, fight-ready.
“He is not ‘after her,’ and if that’s what she’s telling people, she’s lying. You need to leave this alone. It has nothing to do with you. And nothing to do with Peyton’s current problem.”
“Problem? It’s not a broken fingernail. She’s not telling anyone anything, because she’s barely hanging on. But I guess you knew that, since you sent black flowers. Classy, by the way.”
She grinned, her entire body tensed. “Why are you bothering me about this, anyway? Haven’t they already arrested someone? I heard it on the radio on my way here. Oh yeah, it’s Dru. I also heard you been hanging around the hospital a lot, so you probably already know all about Dru Hollis’s legal problems. He letting you pretend you’re screwing for love?” When I didn’t answer, her grin widened. “Aw, a happy romantic couple. How cute.” She poked a finger in my face, all of a sudden serious. “You need to find a new hobby. And leave me and Gibson Talley alone.”
This time when she walked away, I simply watched her go, my fists clenched at my sides, my shoulders tensed. Her vile words washed over me. I wanted to chase her down, rip her backward by her hair, and side-kick her to the face. I wanted to show her how wrong she was about me, about Dru, about all of it. But the worst part was I wasn’t sure how much she was actually right about. I knew she was right about one thing, though—Dru was in jail. And I wasn’t sure yet what exactly that meant.
“I don’t screw for love,” I yelled.
She turned. She was still smiling. “Just so you know, Nancy Drew, we have a song called ‘Black Daisy.’ Peyton wrote it two years ago. It was my favorite. I special ordered the flowers. I thought it would be a nice touch. Would make her smile when she wakes up. Mystery solved. Seriously, you should stay in the clubhouse with all the other little kiddies playing Clue.” She walked backward a few more steps, wiggling her fingers at me in a good-bye gesture. “Tell Dru I said hi.”
She turned and was gone. I paced back toward her locker, then screamed and punched it, leaving a dent right in the middle of a piece of a bumper sticker, the only letters still visible—ass. A teacher poked her head out of her classroom.
“What’s going on here?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“You should get to class, then. The bell has rung,” the teacher said.
I turned toward Vee’s locker and started spinning the dial. “I know. I’ve just got to get my book,” I said.
The teacher gave me a disapproving look, and then, after a pause, said, “Do it quickly,” and went back into her room.
I rolled my eyes at the space where she’d just been and started to walk away. But black-and-white checkered, purple, mauve flashed in the back of my head. Checkered, purple, mauve.
I turned back to Vee’s locker. She would absolutely kill me if she knew I was even thinking what I was thinking.
But somebody was hiding something. Maybe it was Dru, maybe it was Gibson, maybe it was Vee. Maybe it was Peyton herself. All I knew was I was too far into it to just give up now.
I turned the dial a few times, and then went to checkered, purple, mauve—22, 3, 19—and pulled open Vee’s locker. Those same few papers dropped to the floor, but I didn’t bother to pick them up. Looking over my shoulder, I quickly opened Vee’s messenger bag. Hesitating for only a second, I lifted her laptop out of her bag, tucked it under my arm, shut her locker door, and walked out of the school.