ON MONDAY MORNING, I waited for Luna outside the side doors of the school, which were just across from where most of the sophomores parked, but also just happened to be a secluded place where the smokers could light up a quick one before diving into their stressful school day. I stood with my back pressed against the wall, the threads on my jacket catching against the rough brick. I didn’t like brick—it reminded me of shame, and sometimes anger. I cupped a lit cigarette in my palm by my side, every so often stealing a drag.
There was a deep gouge in the toe of one of my Chucks from rolling around on the gravel with Gibson Talley, and there was a cut under my right eye from where Stefan’s fist had met it. My entire cheek was tender and swollen, and the back of my head ached where the little runt had grabbed my hair. Even the palm of my right hand felt sore from gripping the knife so tightly. And I was terrified that someone at Hollywood Dreams would notice that all four of Peyton’s and Dru’s birth certificates had been removed.
It had been a rough few days.
Sophomores poured from their cars and streamed into the school, most of them chattering in that annoying sophomore way, without even noticing me standing there. I didn’t care. I was there for one person and one person only.
Just when it seemed like Luna wouldn’t show, her mystic-brown Mercedes screeched into the lot and squealed into a parking space. A sixteenth birthday gift from Daddy, no doubt. Or maybe a hush gift. I’ll buy you a Mercedes, darling, and you don’t tell the world about our little family business, okay?
Luna got out of the car, giggling and talking over two of her friends, who had also piled out of the car. They moved slowly, as if they were heading to a social gathering rather than school. I watched as other girls, standing by their ordinary cars or getting off the school bus, stood and watched her. Luna was the next Peyton Hollis. The next reigning royalty of her high school class. All hail Queen Hollis the Second.
Only, unlike Peyton, whose coolness was her popularity, Luna was aggressively unlikable to those she didn’t care for. There was something almost reptilian about the way she moved through her world. Something sideways about the way her eyes worked, as if she was always looking over her shoulder, over your shoulder. As if she was always on the make. Predatory. Something about her made me think of the rough grayish green of crocodiles, the cold scaly gunmetal of snakes.
They reached the alcove, a little hurricane of decibel-shattering snark, one of them pulling open the door without so much as a nod toward me. Luna’s two friends slipped through, and Luna started to follow. I pushed away from the wall.
“Hey, Rainbow,” I said. She didn’t hear me, so I repeated myself, louder. “Hey, Rainbow.”
Luna turned, the smile on her face changing to a look of bemused surprise. She seemed to take me in slowly, as if she knew she’d seen me somewhere before but couldn’t quite place who I was. Then it dawned on her. “Excuse me?” she asked, all well-bred innocence and politeness. “What did you say?”
“That’s who you are, right? Rainbow?” I didn’t return her smile. “Well, the second Rainbow, anyway.”
She seemed torn by the gravitational pull of her friends, who had now turned and were waiting for her a few steps down the hallway.
“I’ll see you in class,” she told the girls, waving them on. She let the door close. She dropped all pretense of giggly sophomore as she faced me full-on. “Who told you?”
“Who said anyone had to?” I said.
She clenched her teeth. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“That’s not what Stefan says,” I said. She narrowed her eyes, and I could almost see her turning over my words in her head, trying to suss out if I really knew what I was talking about or if I was bluffing. “What do you want?” she asked. “Money, is that it? Predictable. I don’t have any on me now, but I can get some.” She had the gall to look weary of the process. “How much do you want?”
“I’m not after your money. Not everyone works like that, Luna. And you know exactly what I want. I want to know who hurt Peyton.”
She touched her fingertips to her chest, her eyes opening wide and innocent. “And you think I know?”
I rolled my eyes. “You’re a terrible actress. Stefan told me a lot of things. I can sink you and your entire family with a single phone call. First, I’ll tell Mommy that you’re the one who’s been stealing drugs from her office and selling them right under her nose. She’ll love that. And then I’ll talk to my friend Detective Chris Martinez at the police department. I’ll let him know all about the family business, and dear old Daddy’s favorite pastime, which appears to be paying barely of-age girls for sex. Wow, won’t that change the way the world looks at him when the media gets ahold of it? I know all about you, Luna. You’ve been doubling as Peyton, selling drugs as her, meeting up with clients as her. I just don’t know why. What were you setting her up for? And I don’t know what it has to do with her lying in a hospital bed clinging to life right now. But I promise you I will figure it out.”
“You don’t have any proof of anything,” she said. “You’re just a jealous, delusional girl, out to extort a rich family, who, by the way, is grieving their daughter’s assault. We will make sure everyone knows that. What do you think the media will do to you, after you stalked and terrorized Peyton’s sister?”
I nodded thoughtfully, flipped my cigarette to the ground, and stepped on it. I let the last drag flow through my nostrils. Luna was a lot of things, but grieving didn’t really strike me as one of them. Neither did terrorized. If Luna wasn’t off-putting enough on her own, her lack of concern for Peyton made her downright ugly. “If you want to risk it . . .” I started to walk toward the parking lot.
She grabbed my sleeve. “Fine. I’ll tell you. But you’re not going to like it.” She had a maniacal look about her—feverish, desperate. “Yes, I’ve been taking the Molly and selling it to my clients. But it’s not like my mother is missing it, and she’s the one who got them hooked in the first place. I was trying to help Peyton. She wanted out. I thought I could get her fired if our mother found out she was stealing.” She bared her teeth. “But it never got to that point, because of what happened to her. As for who beat up Peyton . . . Dru did it.” I must have looked shocked, because she picked up steam, nodding. She held her fingers to her ear as if she were holding a phone. “Hello, tips hotline?” she said in a squeaky voice thickly laced with an East Coast accent, sounding nothing at all like Luna Fairchild. “That girl who got beat up in the school parking lot? I overheard a guy telling someone that she was his sister, and that he beat her up. Yeah, he said he wanted to kill her, but it didn’t work and he was worried he was gonna get caught. Yeah, I don’t know why, but you should check him out.” She pretended to hang up the phone, a smug look on her face.
“You set Dru up?” I asked. “Why?”
“No, I turned him in. There’s a difference,” she said. “He did it. He found out about the escort service, and he was so pissed he wanted her out. He thought she was the one selling Vanessa’s precious Molly, which is actually his good buddy Rigo’s precious Molly. He found out she was sleeping with turds like fat Stefan. So he went after her. Dru is vindictive and dangerous, Nikki, and you need to stay away. I would have warned you right up front, but you got all up in our business and messed up everything.”
“I don’t believe you,” I said. But the truth was, at this point, I had no clue who to believe.
“Why would I lie?” She flipped her hair over one shoulder, haughty, daring. “He’s my brother.”
“Half brother,” I reminded her.
“Aw, it’s cute how well you know the family tree,” she said, giving a sweet smile, her eyes narrowed in a glare. Again, I was reminded of something reptilian.
“What is that even supposed to mean?”
She shrugged. “Nothing. But you may want to be careful about how far up in our family tree you climb. You may not like what branches will hit you right in the face.”
“Is that a threat?” I felt my fists clench and stuffed them into my jacket pockets to keep myself from ripping out all her hair right there in the sophomore parking lot.
She stepped right up to me, so close I could smell wintergreen gum on her breath. “Sister, that’s a promise,” she said. “You’re going to want to leave me alone.” She turned and pulled open the door, then sashayed into the school without so much as a look back.
I had come into this meeting certain that I would have the upper hand. Certain that I would be able to tell her what I knew, and that she would buckle. Instead, she’d fed me a mouthful of bullshit about Dru and turned the tables around to threaten me. Not at all what I’d expected.
Luna Fairchild wasn’t the delicate little innocent she made herself out to be.
Luna Fairchild was scary.
I decided that I wasn’t going to walk through the same hallway that she just had. One, it was full of obnoxious sophomores, but two, I didn’t want Luna to have the impression that I was going to follow her anywhere. I hoped that despite her threats and bravado, she was maybe the tiniest bit intimidated by me. That she was thinking Nikki Kill was scary.
I walked through the grass toward the front of the building, where the buses dropped off and the doorway bottlenecked with kids who didn’t want to go inside. I wished I could stay back at the side doors and sneak another cigarette, but there wasn’t time. I needed to get to class.
The first four hours of school were pretty much torture. My eyes swam with colors every time I entered a room, most of them bringing back to mind something to do with Peyton’s attack. Turquoise: Luna’s pinkie charm. Glitzy cherrybomb: Rainbow. Soft orange: SOS. Crimson, crimson, crimson. I was completely lost from having skipped so much, and I couldn’t concentrate on anything.
Mrs. Lee called me to her desk during study hall, where I was busy rubbing my temples miserably, my eyes squeezed shut against the world.
I approached her desk in a slump.
“Everything okay?” she whispered. A kid in the front row looked up, and then quickly down again, but I could tell from the cast of his eyes that he was just trying to look like he wasn’t listening. I recognized him as someone I’d seen in Peyton’s orbit.
“Yeah. Fine,” I lied.
She tilted her head to the side, scrutinizing me. “You sure? You look like you’re in pain over there. Do you need to see the nurse?”
“No, I’m good.”
She pointed to her computer screen, which was now dark, in sleep mode. “I was noticing that you’re having some attendance issues.”
Nice. She didn’t notice when I wasn’t here, but the minute the freak was back, she suddenly wanted to get all up in my life. “Sorry.”
“You know, Nikki,” she said, lowering her voice, “study hall is a gift to someone on academic probation. I want you to succeed. But there’s only so much I can do. I can’t help you graduate if you don’t show up.”
“I know,” I said, mostly tuning her out.
She leaned over so her temple was in the palm of her hand, her elbow propped up on her desk—the universal teacher I-care pose. I wanted to throw up. “I’ve heard that your friend Peyton was in a pretty bad accident,” she said.
I gaped at her. “My friend?” I asked. “Where did you hear that?”
She looked confused by the question. “I may be a teacher, but I do know some things. Have you been spending a lot of time at the hospital?”
“I have homework to finish,” I said, turning away.
“I think it’s really loyal of you to be by your friend’s side,” she said at my back.
I noticed that several faces were pointed toward me now. And the ones that weren’t were trying to look like they weren’t listening, just like the boy in the front row was doing. I whirled to face her, and then positioned myself so I was talking to the whole class. “Look, I never met Peyton Hollis before the attack, and any of you who hung out with her already knew that. So I don’t know why all of a sudden everyone is talking about me, but I can assure you there is nothing to talk about. Okay?”
“Not what Vee says,” a girl in the back murmured.
“Excuse me?” I asked, craning my neck to look at her. I didn’t know her, but recognized her as one of Viral Fanfare’s many groupies.
She at least had the decency to look embarrassed about being overheard. “Just that I heard you jumped the Viral Fanfare guitarist and beat the crap out of him with a tire iron.”
I laughed incredulously. “A tire iron? Is that what he’s telling people?”
“All right, everyone, we should be working,” Mrs. Lee said.
The class shuffled uncomfortably and bent their faces to their books. I made my way back to my desk, feeling much better now that I knew I clearly no longer had Gibson Talley to worry about. He was definitely afraid of me and embarrassed about what I could do to him. I would have almost felt bad for the guy if he hadn’t jumped me first. A tire iron. Ha.
I slid into my desk, feeling pretty proud of myself, and got comfortable. I shut my eyes and reopened them, thinking maybe I could get into reading a little, with that much, at least, off my mind. But as soon as I opened my eyes again, the cheerleader across the aisle leaned over toward me. Her face was split in a giddy smile.
“So, is it true?” she asked.
“Is what true?”
“Are you really dating Dru Hollis? You know, he dated my older sister for a couple of weeks. He is so hot. I never thought he would go for someone younger than him. According to my sister, he likes real women.” She leaned back and crossed her legs, her posture so filled with self-importance it sickened me. Everyone wanting a piece of Hollis to rub off on them. And Luna so happy to provide it.
Fortunately, the bell rang, and I didn’t have to answer her. I gathered my things and blew out of class before anyone else, cruising through the mostly empty halls before the classroom doors had even been opened.
I had fifth-period lunch shift.
Just enough time to get to the hospital and back.
Jones intercepted me halfway across the parking lot.
“Going out for lunch?” he called as he cut through the line of cars to get to me.
“Yep.”
“Want some company? I could go for some pizza.”
I kept walking, digging my keys out of my jacket pocket at the same time. “I don’t want pizza.”
“I’ll eat a burger,” he said. “Listen, I’m sorry about all those things I said the other day. I was being territorial. Let me make it up to you. Where are you going?”
I sighed. “Jones. Don’t make me tell you where I’m going.”
His face fell, and then hardened. “Right,” he said. “Have fun, then.” He walked briskly away from the car, and for a fraction of a second, I felt bad.
Even though it was fall and the temperature outside was pretty mild, it was toasty inside my car when I slid in. But I welcomed the warmth, not realizing until it began to seep into my skin how chilled my fingers and toes were. Like the freezing-out from the others had somehow wormed its way into me. Well, screw them, I thought. They could judge all they wanted. They could accuse me of whatever they wanted. They could talk. I had work to do.
I fired up my engine and drove straight to the hospital.
DRU WAS SITTING by Peyton’s bedside. I didn’t realize until I was in the room that I’d expected to see him there.
He looked up when I came in. His face was weary but brightened with a smile as soon as he saw me.
“Hey,” he whispered, getting up. He hadn’t shaved, his stubble reminding me a little of Chris Martinez. I felt choked with violet and yellow and gray shards flying at me in a confusing blast. Who was Dru, really, and who was I when I was with him?
“Hey.”
He came around the bed and, with no hesitation, scooped his arm around my waist and pulled me into him. His arm was strong and warm against my back, and while it still felt weird to be doing this at Peyton’s bedside, it felt comfortable now somehow, blasting the shards away. Like I belonged there, in the crook of his arm. He leaned in and kissed me, both of us swaying a bit, my back arched over his forearm.
“Hey,” he said again when he was done, his lips still close enough to tickle mine when they moved. He relaxed his arm so that I lowered myself off my toes. “I wasn’t expecting you yet.” He looked at his watch. “Isn’t school still on?”
“Technically,” I said. “But it’s lunch shift, and I wanted to see Peyton.”
His arm slipped around me again, and he pulled my hips to meet his. “I think you meant you wanted to see me.”
“You, too,” I said. “But I did come to see her. How’s she doing?”
He released me and went back to his chair, shaking his head. “No change. I thought maybe she fluttered her eyelids earlier, but I guess I was wrong. Maybe I was wanting it too much.”
I glanced at the machines behind her bed, hoping that maybe he had seen movement and she had taken a turn for the better. But the crimson still bled from the readouts. My mom’s arm, flung sideways in a pool of her own blood, the numbers on her watch pulsing slower and slower . . . I squeezed my eyes shut and concentrated on Peyton’s face when I opened them again.
“So where have you been?” Dru asked. “I tried to call you last night.”
I had decided that I wouldn’t tell Dru about where I’d been. I had gone back and forth with it in my mind. I didn’t know how much of what Luna said was true. Maybe he knew about the business, about Peyton, and was keeping it a secret from me out of embarrassment. Or maybe she was lying and he knew nothing. I had suspicions, but no proof that his mom’s business was directly related to Peyton’s attack. What right did I have to yank his family skeletons out of their closets?
But then there was the Luna problem. I wondered if Dru knew that she was an escort. A master at imitating people. A drug dealer. I wondered if anyone in the family knew. And I especially wondered if he knew that she had turned him in.
But, again, no proof. Not yet. Just a hunch, some cryptic information from a john, and a threat that Luna would undoubtedly deny until the day she died if I were to out her. Oh, and my synesthesia. I was not about to open that can of worms. Not with Dru.
“Nowhere,” I said. “I was tired. I went to bed.”
Dru cocked his head to one side disbelievingly. “Nikki. You have a black eye and a cut on your cheek. You didn’t get that in bed.”
I touched my cheek tenderly. It still hurt like hell, and just touching it reminded me of that disgusting slug Stefan. I wanted to jack his nose again, watch the blood spurt, just for fun.
“Oh,” I said. “The dojang. Sparring got a little out of hand, I guess. No big deal. I’ve been hit harder.”
He stared at me for a moment longer, and I could see the wheels turning inside his head. Mint-green clouds above us. He was trying to decide if he should believe me. I set my jaw and stared at him until I’d pushed the clouds away. Eventually he turned his eyes back to Peyton.
There was a rustle of movement in the doorway. “Oh, gosh, what a surprise,” a familiar voice said. I turned just in time to see Luna coming into the room, carrying a giant stuffed bear. “The two lovebirds getting their mating dance on at my sister’s deathbed. How very white-trash romance of you.”
Dru’s eyes hardened. “Don’t be gross, Luna.”
She sat the bear in the other visitor’s chair and brushed her hands off, her Cartier bracelets clinking together with the movement. “I’m not the one using Peyton’s hospital room for a motel room. Talk about gross. Ghoul.”
“What do you want?” Dru asked in a tired voice.
Luna slipped me a sideways glance. She wanted to send a message that she was watching, I knew. She wanted to ferret out what I had told him. But of course Dru knew none of this. She pinned a brilliant, very whitened, smile to her face.
“I just want to see how my sister is doing,” she said. She walked over to Peyton and stroked her hair, pushing wisps of it behind Peyton’s ears. She even leaned in and kissed Peyton on the cheek. It might have been tender and sweet had it not been Luna. “She looks god-awful,” she said, and while she said it in a concerned voice, I could hear the cattiness beneath. The playacting. Damn, Luna was one hell of an actress.
“I should go,” I said, pointing toward the door. “I should get back to school.”
“Already?” Dru asked, but at the same time, Luna, who was still looking down at her sister, said, “Yes, you should.”
“What the hell, Luna?” Dru said, but I had turned to leave, and I let it go. Let them have their family squabble. If I got too in the middle of it, I would spill what I knew.
It was a good time for me to leave anyway. Lunch shift was long over, and already I was late to sixth period. Not that I cared much about Shakespeare or whatever the hell we were learning in that stupid class, and at least I was going back, which was better than I usually managed.
I hurried through the hospital, my stomach rumbling from missing lunch, and headed toward the parking lot. I unlocked my car, got inside, started to put my key in the ignition, and stopped cold. There was a Post-it note stuck to the ignition.
I pulled it off.
Don’t ever doubt where and how I can get to you, it said, the bumpy gray-and-black words undulating on the pink scrap of paper.
Luna had been in my car. My locked car. How had she done that?
Clearly, Luna was out to prove to me that her threat was not idle. She could get to me. And she would, if that was what she needed to do to protect herself. Luna did not want to be found out. And she was willing to go to pretty great lengths to keep it that way.
I balled up the paper and tossed it backward out the window so that it came to a landing out in the center of the parking lot aisle.
Luna had her messages to send; I had mine.