IT WAS AFTER midnight, but the TV was still droning downstairs, so I knew Dad hadn’t gone to bed yet. I would have to sneak out. Not that I was too worried about it. I’d been an expert at sneaking out of my house since middle school. It wasn’t too hard to sneak out on a guy who pretty much didn’t notice what I did on a daily basis anyway.
I crept down the stairs as softly as I could, prepared to make up something if he should catch me and grill me about where I was going on a school night.
I have to borrow chem notes from a friend, I practiced in my head. I left something in my car. No big deal. I’ll be right back. Or how about this one: Dude, I’m eighteen, I can leave whenever I want.
No, that would probably just open up some sort of “conversation” that I definitely didn’t want to get dragged into. When Dad wanted to “have a one-on-one conversation,” things got pretty agonizing pretty fast. Also, I didn’t like to hide things from him. Dad was mostly a cool guy who’d been dealt a really raw deal in this life. And we had a pretty easy system going. He didn’t mess around in my business, and I didn’t give him reason to want to.
I reached the bottom of the stairs and peered around the corner into the living room. Dad’s leather recliner was empty. I could see light spilling from his study onto the wood hallway floor, could hear his fingers tapping on the computer inside the study. I grabbed my jacket and slipped through the front door, turning the doorknob so it wouldn’t click behind me. He’d have no idea I’d ever left.
I got into my car, put it in neutral, and coasted down the hill before starting it, then took off toward the hospital.
Driving had always been a challenge for me. If there was ever a time I was surrounded by letters and numbers, it was while driving. I’d learned to ignore most of it but still got distracted by the occasional house number or name on a mailbox. But tonight I had no time for distraction. And even if I did, I was already preoccupied enough by thoughts of what I would find at the hospital. Would the mystery girl already be dead?
I sped through the night, talking to myself. “Okay, Nikki, this is weird. But you’ve done weird before, right? Your life’s default setting is weird, so you’ve got this.” What was I talking about—this was weirder than weird. The woman on the phone hadn’t even told me what had happened to this so-called dying patient. Was it a car crash? An accident at home? Was she mangled, missing body parts, burned, bloody? She might not live through the night—that definitely sounded bloody. Dear God, could I even do bloody? I remembered bloody. Bloody was terrifying. Bloody was life-altering.
My phone buzzed, and thinking it might be the hospital again, I quickly hit the Bluetooth button on my steering wheel.
“Yeah?”
“Hey, Nik.” Jones. Cripes.
“Listen, Jones, now’s not a great time.”
“I just want to talk,” he said.
I let out a deep, calming breath. It didn’t work. I was still irritated. “We’ve talked. And talked and talked. There really isn’t anything else to say.”
“You in the car?” He sounded like he’d been drinking. A little aggressive, a little slurred. “Shit, Nikki, are you on a date? The body’s not even cold yet and you’re already with somebody else? What the fuck?”
A shiver went down my spine. The body’s not even cold yet. I hoped that wasn’t a harbinger of what I would find at the hospital.
I bit down on my annoyance. Part of me wanted to tell him, Yes, we’re on a date. We plan to park in your driveway and screw our brains out to that stupid Say Anything song you were always making me listen to, and then we’re going to fall in love and get married and have tons of babies and maybe we’ll name one Jones just so you can be even more pathetic than you already are. Will that make you stop calling me?
“Relax, I’m not on a date,” I said instead.
“You’re in the car. I can hear it.”
I sighed, flipped on my turn signal. I could see the hospital in the distance. “Yes, I’m in the car, but I’m alone. Can’t we do this later? At school tomorrow?” When I can see you coming and run away from you?
There was a noise, almost like choking, which turned into a drunken sob, and I nearly groaned out loud. “I thought you loved me, Nik. What happened?”
“I don’t have time to talk about this right now, Jones. Go home and sober up. And I never told you I loved you.”
“But I love you.”
“I know. You’ve told me. And I’ve got to go.”
Before he could respond, I hit the end call button on my steering wheel. If the phone rang again—and it probably would, if Jones was being true to form—I would just ignore it, no matter who might be on the other end.
Soon I was turning into UCLA Medical, scanning for a parking space in front of the emergency room.
The lobby was mostly empty, except for a couple sitting in a corner, the woman holding her head in her hands, the man rubbing a wet washcloth on the back of her neck. ERs always made me think of neon green—pain. I held my breath while I walked by just in case it was contagious pain.
“May I help you?” a nurse at the front desk asked.
I let out the breath I’d been holding. “I’m looking for someone,” I said. “I’m not sure who. They called me. I’m Nikki Kill.”
“Nikki Kill,” the nurse repeated, typing into her computer. Her eyes went wide. “Oh, yes. You’re here for the one who came in on the ambulance. She’s in Bay Nineteen. Go through those doors and take a left.”
Suddenly nervous, I wiped my palms on my jeans and followed where she was pointing to a set of double doors. I pushed a button on the wall, and they swung open slowly. I went through and turned left and walked past bays filled with moaning patients and beeping equipment until I found Bay 19. The curtain was pulled closed around the bed, and I could hear the hum and tweet of machines, but no voices within.
I quickly scanned the area for a nurse or doctor who could maybe give me some answers, but none were around. I turned back to the curtain.
“Hello?” I called out softly. “Is anyone in there?”
There was no response. I pulled back the curtain and stepped into the bay.
Immediately, my breathing went ragged, and the room began to swoop and swim.
The girl’s face was swollen, puffy, distorted, nearly unrecognizable. Her hair was caked with blood and lying stiffly across the pillow underneath her. Bandages, soaked through, were wrapped around her head, her neck, her upper arm. And the machines. There were so many machines—wires and tubes snaking out of her, the color of the numbers on their readouts so strong it was practically blinding me. The blood pressure monitor, the oxygen reader, the pulse monitor. Forget their correct colors—all of them were shaded a deep crimson. I felt surrounded by it. I checked my own shaking hands and saw that they, too, were crimson, reflecting the lighted numbers from the machines. I knew this color.
Instantly, I was eight. I was coming home from my friend Wendy’s house. I’d had dinner with her family, and it was late evening when her dad dropped me off in my driveway. I was carrying a sack filled with Tootsie Rolls and singing the song that had just been on the car radio, totally relaxed, totally happy.
So relaxed and happy, in fact, I didn’t even notice that the front door was wide-open, the house completely dark and silent. Didn’t notice, until I felt my shoe slide on the tile and looked down to see my mother’s outstretched arm, lying in the same pool of blood I was standing in. The numbers on her watch were covered, too, making them deep crimson. Mom’s hand twitched, the crimson pulsing at me. My hands relaxed, the Tootsie Rolls splashing in the blood. I looked at her face. Her eyes rolled to meet mine.
“Nikki . . . go . . . ,” she wheezed.
But I couldn’t go. I could only stand there, feet frozen in her blood, and stare at her watch as its pulsing crimson numbers followed my mom’s heartbeat. They skipped fast while she turned her head to look directly at the ceiling, then slowed as her eyes closed. I watched in horror as time stretched between the beating of the numbers. The pulses got more uneven, and then shone a steady, thick crimson. I knew then that she was going to die.
Crimson meant death.
If the color in my head was right, if my intuition was spot-on, the girl in Bay 19 was going to die. And seeing her there like that—seeing all that crimson—practically knocked me down. Her face bent and swirled into my mother’s face, her blood my mom’s blood, the lifeless hand lying across her stomach my mom’s hand reaching for help on the tile floor. I blinked, trying to steady myself, trying to clear my mom out of my eyes. I wanted to vomit, to pass out, to run—all the things I didn’t, and couldn’t, do when I found my mother.
“Oh, God,” I rasped, as my breathing got faster. It felt like my heart was going to squeeze my chest dry. I pressed my fingers against my eyes and tried to push away the woozy feeling. But it wasn’t working, so I backed out of the bay, accidentally knocking into the wall that separated Bay 19 from Bay 20. My cell phone fell out of my jacket pocket and slid across the tile floor, coming to a stop under her bed. I didn’t go after it. I just needed to get out of all that crimson for a minute.
I took two steps back, three, four, half doubled over. I felt myself bump into something from behind again. Scattered, I whirled to find myself face-to-face with a cop.
“Jesus!” I breathed.
“Whoa,” he said, holding his hands out toward me. “Got to watch where you’re walking in here.” His forehead creased into concern. “You okay?” He took my elbow and led me toward a wheeled office chair at a computer station. “Here, sit down. You look faint.”
I followed his guiding hand and eased into the chair. I took three deep breaths and willed my heart to slow, willed the images of my mother’s lifeless body out of my mind.
“Stay here, I’ll be right back.” The cop stepped away, during which time I closed my eyes and focused my breathing, trying to get back in command of the situation. I hated being out of control. I hated going back to that place with my mother. Back to the worst day of my life.
Why was I even here? I wasn’t meant to be here. Not for this girl. Despite her bloodied and puffy face, and despite the little side trip down memory lane, I’d still recognized the girl in the bed, and it only deepened the mystery of why in the hell they’d summoned me.
She was Peyton Hollis, lovely, doe-eyed daughter of noted film producer Bill Hollis. As if his power and money didn’t make him sexy enough, Bill Hollis was known for having trotted out Peyton and her brother for the tabloids and entertainment shows, holding their tiny hands in his big, important ones, dolloping ketchup on their fries at the Malibu Country Mart, petting bunnies with them at Studio City Farmers Market. Most people, including me, couldn’t pick Peyton’s mom out of a crowd of two, but anyone who’d ever read a magazine in a dentist’s office would recognize the salt-and-pepper-haired movie executive and the beautiful children he doted on.
Admittedly, I hadn’t seen Peyton in the press for a long time. And she definitely wasn’t a child anymore. In recent months, she’d gone from sweet little rich girl to punk rocker with a trust fund. She wasn’t Hallmark-card cute anymore, but she also wasn’t rehab-scandalous. Translation: too boring for the gossip pages. She was still queen of our high school, though—popular, head of Drama Club and Choral Group, but she was also popular for other things now, too, like hosting epic parties at her house—a place all of us knew as Hollis Mansion. Most notably, she was lead singer for Viral Fanfare, an underground garage band that played at pretty much every A-list party in Brentwood. Not that I was an A-list partyer by any stretch. But when Peyton Hollis was involved, everyone in the free world had to know all about it. Including no-listers like me.
I knew who she was, but I didn’t know Peyton. We weren’t friends. We weren’t even in the same stratosphere—the weirdo flunk-out and the ruler of all that is high school. Yet my number was the only number in her cell phone? It didn’t make sense.
I didn’t need this shit. Not right now. Not with Jones hassling me and with trying not to fail my senior year. Not when I’d finally gotten to a place where I didn’t think about my mother’s murder every day.
I should’ve told the nurse who called me that this wasn’t my problem, that my phone number being in that phone was a mistake. I should have stayed on my window ledge, where I was happy with my crisp air and cigarettes. Peyton Hollis had so many friends. So many other people to be there for her. People who would fall all over themselves to keep vigil in that pulsing crimson room. What was I supposed to do here, anyway? I couldn’t stop someone from dying. It’s not like Peyton would help me if I were dying. She was royalty and I was no one.
I opened my eyes and started to get up. Fuck it, I’m out, I said to myself. Let the Hollis family deal with their own problems.
But before I could make a move, the cop reappeared, holding a Styrofoam cup in my face. “Here,” he said. “I brought you some water.”
“I’m fine. Just leaving, actually. I’m not the one who should be here.” But he didn’t budge, and I couldn’t get up with him blocking me. “Excuse me?” I said pointedly.
“Just have a drink first,” he coaxed. “You looked like you were about to pass out over there. I don’t feel good about you getting behind the wheel of a car just yet.”
Impatiently, I grabbed the cup and sipped from it as I studied his police badge. Detective Chris Martinez. Kind of cute. Definitely young, maybe early twenties. Close-cropped black hair, muscles, stubble. Something behind his eyes looked wounded, or maybe just jaded, not that I could fault him for it. I was the most wounded and jaded person I knew. Hell, I was so wounded and jaded I was about to bail on a battered girl. But there was something about the erect way he stood—important and eager—that made me think of sparkling gold. His badge numbers came across as bright yellow. If my instincts were right, he believed in the whole serve-and-protect thing, heavy on the protect. Too bad I didn’t need his help, because this was not my problem. Peyton needed his help. I needed a cigarette and some distance. Let Detective Martinez handle the Peyton situation.
“Your color is looking better,” he said, and at first I was confused, thinking maybe he had synesthesia, too, and what were the odds. But then I realized he was talking about the color of my face. My hairline was ringed with cold sweat, but the burning in my cheeks had stopped.
“Great,” I said. “So I’ll be going now.” I started to get up again, but he still didn’t move.
“Just curious, what had you so rattled in the first place? You looked like you’d seen a ghost.”
I squared my shoulders and tried to look confident, unfazed by how close his assessment was. “I just didn’t expect to see her looking like that, I guess. I didn’t know how bad she was.”
His eyebrows went up. “Her?” He motioned toward Bay 19. “You know her?”
I nodded. “It’s Peyton Hollis. Everyone knows her.”
“Hollis?” he repeated. He seemed to be searching for the name. “As in Bill Hollis?”
I nodded. “The producer. That’s her dad. Like I said, everyone knows her. I have no idea why I’m here.”
He arched one eyebrow. “You’re part of everyone, aren’t you?”
I cocked my head to the side. “Not to Peyton Hollis. I’m no one.”
He gave me a long look, then flagged down a nurse and whispered to her. The nurse nodded, pulled a piece of paper out of her pocket, jotted Peyton’s name on it, and hurried away.
I set the cup on the counter behind me and finally stood, forcing him to shuffle back a step. “What happened to her?” I asked.
“I was hoping you could tell me that,” he said.
I glanced at the curtain again. I had left it open a crack when I’d backed out of it, and I could see crimson glowing out, could see one of Peyton’s closed, swollen eyes. I swallowed. Confidence, Nik. Cold confidence. That’s not your mother in there. It’s not. “I have no idea.”
“You’re not friends at school?”
“No. Not at all. I mean, I knew her. Know her,” I corrected, realizing I had just spoken about her in the past tense. “I actually haven’t seen her at school in a couple of weeks.”
Now that I thought about it, the last time I saw her at school was the day she showed up with her perfect, shiny blond hair chopped into uneven, dry-looking hunks and dyed mousy brown. Everyone was talking about it, and saying she’d also gotten a tattoo on the side of her neck. On someone like me these changes would have looked “gross” and “skanky” and everyone would have assumed I was suddenly on drugs or had joined a gang or something. But on Peyton Hollis they were cool rebellion, and soon everyone would be cutting their hair that way and begging their parents for neck tattoos.
The next day, she was nowhere to be found. Some people said she quit school, but nobody really believed it. Royalty like Peyton Hollis didn’t quit school. Crowds were their lifeblood.
“You never hung out?” Detective Martinez asked.
I shook my head.
“Ever meet her family?”
I shook again.
“Know of any enemies Peyton might have had? Anyone who might want to hurt her?”
I thought it over. Did Peyton Hollis have enemies? Yes, and no. Everyone envied Peyton. She was so popular, everyone wanted to be her friend. Hell, everyone wanted to be her. But her popularity also made everyone hate her in their own way. Wasn’t that how it always worked? People 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. When the whole world idolized you, did that mean the whole world was your enemy, too?
But the phone call I’d gotten before the hospital had called. The one that had said my name and hung up. I didn’t have the first clue why, but I was now sure that call was Peyton. And, if it was, there had been a male voice in the background. Was that person an enemy?
How on earth would I know? And why would I want to? Why help this cop, when cops had never done anything to help me? Hadn’t I asked as many questions about my mom’s death ten years before? Hadn’t I gotten big old shoulder shrugs from everyone? Whoever was in the background of that phone call was presumably still out there. It seemed safer to just stay out of it.
I shrugged. “Not that I know of. Like I said, I wasn’t . . . am not . . . part of her group or anything. Um, shouldn’t someone contact her family?”
“We’re working on that. Having someone identify her definitely helps.”
Detective Martinez stared off toward the curtain, chewing one side of his lip. I wondered if he knew something he wasn’t telling.
“Any idea why you’re the only number in her phone?” he finally asked.
“No,” I answered. “No idea at all.”
“Mind if I leave you my card? In case you come up with information we should know about.”
Yes, in fact, I did mind. I didn’t want to be part of this at all. But I would be lying if I said I wasn’t a little curious about what had happened to her, too. “I doubt I will. Like I said, I don’t know anything about Peyton Hollis’s private life at all.”
“Can’t hurt to think on it some, though, right?” he said. He fished around in his pocket and pulled out a business card, then fished again and cursed. “Forever losing my pen. Here, you mind?” He gestured toward the double doors and I followed him to the front desk, where he borrowed a pen from the nurse he’d spoken to earlier, who was just hanging up the phone when we got there.
“I’ve contacted the family,” she said, and the detective nodded. “Someone’s on the way now.”
He wrote something on the back of his business card, and handed it to me. I turned it over. His cell phone number had been written there, the digits every bit as yellow as the ones on his badge. “You have a number where I can reach you? In case I need to ask some questions?”
I gave him my information, and he wrote it on the back of a different business card, which he tucked into his shirt pocket.
“Thanks for your help, Miss Kill,” he said. He gestured to the card still in my hand. “You think of anything, just give me a call. You never know which details are important details.”
I nodded and watched him stride through the automatic double doors and get into his police car, which was parked in the tow-away zone at the curb.
I stood there for a long while after he left, listening to the cars pull in and out of the parking lot, letting the night air calm me down and clear my mind. Being outside the hospital, away from the crimson, was far less frightening than being by Peyton’s bedside, but something was keeping me from just walking to my car and leaving. There was something so curious about the whole situation, and somehow I felt obligated to stay, even though I knew this was so not my problem and that Peyton wouldn’t stay there for me, and even though I’d heard the nurse say the Hollises were coming to be with her, so I knew she wouldn’t be alone.
An ambulance pulled up to the curb, lights flashing, and I took a few steps back, my mind trying to eel its way back to all that crimson, back to my mom. I was in the way here. I wasn’t needed. More importantly, it wasn’t good for me to dredge up all those horrible memories.
I stuck Detective Martinez’s card, which I hadn’t realized I was still holding, into my jacket pocket, then had a panic moment. My phone was missing. Frantically, I patted all my pockets until I remembered it rattling on the floor and skidding under Peyton’s bed.
Damn it. I was going to have to go back and get it. I wasn’t sure if I could make myself do it. I didn’t want another scene like before. But I needed my phone. Even if I spent most of the time dodging Jones on it.
Slowly, my stomach clenching with the very thought of it, I turned and went back to Bay 19.