Then, almost immediately, Javier frowns and steps back.
“You should try and kick my knee before I get to you. That’s your best block.”
“… My best block?” Awkward. I thought we were going to make out.
“We need to practice for tomorrow,” he says sternly. “If you’re going in, then you’re going in as prepared as we can get you between now and then. Let’s see what kind of weapons they packed for you, then we’ll go over some defensive moves.”
“I don’t think I got any.”
He turns my backpack on its side and digs through to the zip-up panel in the very bottom, fishing out a small black canvas bag. Inside is a brand-new bowie knife with a four-inch blade.
“Nice,” Javier muses. “But we’ll practice with this.”
He holds out my pink hairbrush.
“We don’t have to do this—”
“Yes, we do,” he insists. “I can’t fight if I’m worrying about you.”
I swallow my protests and take the hairbrush.
Twenty minutes later, after a great deal of jabbing, feinting, and blocking his approach by (gently) kicking his knee, I seem to be getting worse. Even with Javier coming at me slowly from well across the room in plain sight, my instincts are to flinch and run, not jab and swipe.
“There’s no point!” I snap after managing to knock myself on the forehead with my own hairbrush. “I’d be better off dropping my knife and running for it.”
Javier considers this. “You are pretty fast,” he concedes. “But how far are you going to get in a fenced compound? I just need you to be able to hold off an attacker until I can help—”
There’s no point, I want to scream. This is possibly my last night on earth. I don’t want to spend it practicing knife-fighting!
“Again. Come on.” Javier returns to his starting point, across the room, in front of the truly hideous drapes. “I’m going to keep coming at you until you fend me off, okay?”
I get in the stance he’s shown me: chin slightly tucked, pink hairbrush firmly in hand, weight balanced, ready to go into a crouch. Punch for the throat. Jab at the eyes. Okay!
He crosses the room at half speed. I kick at his knee, jab toward his eye. He feints, his arms going around my waist. I put an arm around his neck, and then his mouth is on mine and we’re on the scratchy duvet cover, pressed against each other.
Now this is how I want to spend my last night on earth.
I dig my fingers through his short hair and feel his muscled neck, his carved, stubbly jaw. His lips move to my throat, melting my brain. And then his hand slides up under my shirt, along my bare back, and his fingers wind around my neck, and all the heat in me drains away.
Why is he holding the back of my neck like that?
I twist my neck to get him to loosen his grip, but he doesn’t seem to get the message, and the ridges on the back of his fingers swim before my mind’s eye with terrible clarity, and I remember his words: “I killed a guy with my bare hands.”
I push away from him, gasping, one arm straight out, elbow locked, like we’re practicing self-defense again.
“What is it?” His voice is pained.
“I need to know about your one.”
Javier rolls on his back, and the electricity fizzles out of the air. He crosses his long arm over his eyes. There’s a long beat, filled only by the rattling swamp cooler in the corner.
“So all that stuff you said, about not wanting to know about rap sheets? About getting to know everybody as themselves? I guess that was B.S.?”
“Sometimes you say what you have to. Like when you called me a useless bitch.”
“Jeez, Signal!” He sounds so stung. “Everything I said then was to keep you out of the compound! What happened to our clean slate?”
“Maybe clean slates are B.S. too,” I say bluntly. “Maybe you can’t clean a slate if you don’t know what was on it in the first place. I don’t even know what we’re agreeing to not talk about!”
“Because I don’t want you to know,” he says softly. “I’ve done some seriously bad things, Signal.”
“So tell me about it,” I plead, though my pulse is racing at just these words. “What else do we have to do tonight? I think we can agree I have well and truly killed the mood.”
He stares up at the ceiling, the face of a boy carrying the weariness of a man.
“I just wanted a new beginning,” he says softly. “If only for a couple of days.”
I’m acutely aware how these moments are slipping away. It’s my fault, and I wish desperately I could go back to before I asked him about his victim, to the heat and magic of a few moments ago. But I can’t.
I can only lie there, letting my unspoken refusal to accept so little from him hang in the air and condense into a silent anger.
“Okay. Well. It’s late,” I say dully. “I’m going to get ready for bed.”
When I get out of the bathroom, Javier is in his pajamas, sitting primly on the side of my bed. I sit down next to him and give him a “Well?” look.
“Let me see your arm?” he asks quietly.
I let him take my hand, and he picks up the complimentary pen from beside the motel phone, turns my arm over and retraces the dandelion in black ink, then looks at me, something like an apology in his eyes.
“Can I hold you?” he asks.
I get under the duvet and he lies on top of it, curled up around me, his knees behind my knees, my back against his chest. Spooning, that’s what this is called. What a stupid word for such an intimate gesture.
Finally he lifts his arm and pulls down his sleeve, tapping the figure of the boy on the inside of his forearm, which he holds out in front of me.
“You know that kid tattooed on my arm? That’s my baby brother, Mateo. Loved machines, building stuff, taking it apart. He was smart the way Dennis is smart, but so emotional. I remember he cried when he was three and someone told him Spiderman didn’t exist.”
His quick, agonized chuckle makes me instinctually grip his arm.
“I had a friend named Ricky,” he says at last, and the name comes out heavy, charged. “One of my best friends, till we got to high school. Then he got caught up with the Death Heads. So we kind of stopped hanging out—not like, I wasn’t angry about it, it was kind of … his brother Ray had always been high up in the Death Heads, so he was always going to be part of that crowd. But it meant we were on two different tracks.”
I nod in the darkness.
“But it’s summer, so Ricky drops by one day and says, oh let’s go to the corner store like old times, and Mateo wants to tag along. Except Ricky’s wearing this black bandanna around his forehead. He’s flagging for Death Heads—you know what flagging means?”
“Like … advertising he’s one of them?”
“Right. Well, I didn’t know, back then. I was such an idiot. It was just a black bandanna to me.” He pauses, then forces himself on. “So we’re walking along the street with Ricky, Mateo’s asking me if I’ll get him sour punch straws. And I was teasing like I wouldn’t, but I always did …” His voice breaks off for a moment and I grip his hand. “But then this car slows, this red Mustang. I remember thinking, these guys must know Ricky, and that’s when it happens, this huge bang. It was so loud. It’s not like on TV, it’s so much louder …”
No no no.
“They missed Ricky,” he says simply. “Mateo was twelve.”
I turn on my side to face him. “I’m sorry.” How wholly inadequate. His hands slide up and cover his face for a moment and he just shakes. At last he comes up, with a sound like someone coming out of water for air.
“My dad? He’s real tall, like I am? Built, just like, the strongest guy. But at the funeral? I had to … I had to lead him by the hand down the stairs. Like he was an old man.” Javier’s voice breaks, and I wait for him to go on.
“Two, three weeks go by, and nothing,” Javier says, his voice low. “No arrests, no suspects, no witnesses. Everybody knew who did it, but nobody would give evidence. The shooters, you understand, they’re with the Centro Street Gang, so nobody wants to get involved. Not even Ricky.”
He’s holding my hands now, so tight it hurts. I squeeze back.
“The day before the homecoming game, I get dragged to this house party, and there’s the same red Mustang, parked right out front! I’m like, how many times did I describe this car to the police? And it’s just parked right out front, in plain sight!” The frustration is still raw, his voice high and strained with disbelief.
“I walk in and there he is. There’s the shooter. I recognize him immediately. It’s the same guy who’s been in my nightmares for weeks, when I see him it’s like someone’s punched me. This guy … he’s drunk, fat, chatting up some girl, not a care in the world. Mateo is buried next to my grandmother, and this guy is just … walking around? It wasn’t right. It wasn’t right! My friends tried to stop me, but I go up to him and I say, you’re the one. You’re the one who killed Mateo Olivar.”
He swallows.
“And this kid’s like, ‘Who?’”
Javier lets out a thin, joyless laugh.
“It’s a blur after that. Something … just snapped. I was in football, I was a center my junior year, I was the strongest I’d ever been. After that first punch, I don’t really remember anything. Not until the cops pulled me off him.”
So this is why he doesn’t regret it. He doesn’t remember it. He lives my worst fear: he killed without even realizing it.
Javier lets out a long sigh. “The Death Heads claimed they ordered it, to make themselves look tough. Like: you shoot at us, you get your skull pushed in!”
I shudder at the image.
“So that’s how I was charged, like it was a gang killing. Didn’t matter that I was varsity football, honor roll, had stopped hanging out with Ricky the last three years … oh no, I was a gang banger. It wasn’t till I got in prison—because they put me in adult prison, oh yes—it wasn’t till I got in that I joined. To stay safe, I let the Death Heads put the tear by my eye. But I kept Mateo where I could always see him. So I can remember to try and be who he thought I was.”
I lift his hand to my lips and kiss each one of his scarred knuckles.
“They scare you?” he says after a long moment. “The scars?”
“Not when I know where they come from,” I tell him honestly. “Do you feel any better?”
“No, not really,” he says bluntly. “Talking about this kind of thing … it doesn’t … this pain is always going to be there. Whether I talk about it or not. Some things will never be right. No matter what you say about them.”
I lay there, holding his hand, rubbing the back of it with my thumb.
“Tell me about Mateo?” I ask gently.
I carefully extract them: better and better memories, until I hear the smile come back to his voice. Once the smile is back the exhaustion creeps in, and our words start to trail off.
We wake up curled into each other like a figure eight, fingers entwined, him over the duvet and me under. He’s already awake, staring at me.
“Morning,” he says, voice gravelly from sleep.
I kiss him gently on the lips. (Carefully, because what if I have morning breath?)
“Thank you for telling me last night,” I tell him honestly. “I’m sorry it hurt so much.”
“Don’t feel bad, gorgeous.” He smiles, and it’s a relief to see that smile again. “You know, I haven’t slept that deeply in a long time. Maybe telling you is part of that.” He tucks a strand of my hair behind my ear. “Or maybe it’s just sleeping beside you.” He leans to kiss me, just as the shrill bedside alarm goes off. We groan and force ourselves up and out to the car.
Stomach aching, hands clammy, mouth dry, I stare out at Ojai Valley as we crest the final hill before town and check my phone for the thousandth time.
Nothing from Dennis. No asterisks.
We pull into the Oak View Motel. Our room, for once, is inviting and smells delightful. I check my phone. It’s half past one. No asterisks.
Javier’s phone chimes. “Ray’s on his way now. I might take a shower real quick before I meet him, unless you want in the bathroom?—”
“Javier?”
“Yeah?”
I walk over to him and throw my arms around his shoulders and he pulls me in even closer, his hands holding tight to strands of my hair, like I’m a balloon that might fly away. “It’ll be okay, Signal. We’re going to get you out of there safe tonight. I promise.”
I lean back and scan his face: his large, gentle dark eyes; his sensitive, serious mouth.
“I’m not worried about tonight.” It’s the next ten minutes that really scare me. “I’m going to drive down the street to the store, okay?”
“Okay …” He can tell something is wrong. But so many things are wrong, that’s perfectly normal, I guess. I float over to the door, looking over my shoulder one last time. He’s about to disappear into the bathroom when something squeezes it out of me:
“Javier?!”
“Yeah?” He ducks his head past the door.
“Being your girlfriend is the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” I tell him. And without giving him time to respond, I shut the door and hurry to the car.
I left my phone in my backpack, along with my credit card. I just have the keys and my knife sheathed in the small of my back. Our route perimeter is limited to a mile around the motel, and a mile around the road to the Owl’s Nest compound.
So if I drive over a mile down the road away from Ojai, I’ll know if Dennis succeeded or not. Which presumably he has, since there’s no asterisk. Of course, he could’ve not sent an asterisk because his mission went wrong. Or his phone isn’t charged. Or he just plain forgot.
Or they figured out he was trying to hack into the kill switches and set his off first.
Stop being such a weakling. Do you want to free all your friends and get justice for Rose, or go into a cult compound tonight and watch Javier murder someone so you don’t have to?
I pull out of the parking lot, gaining speed as I merge onto the rural, oak-lined street. I stay in the outside lane, so if I have to, I can veer off the road with my last conscious twitch and not endanger other drivers.
Stop it. Be brave.
When the balloon breaks, the helium escapes, and joins the air.
I cross the half-mile point and wonder what my mother is doing. Is she at her job, gray-faced and smiling, trying not to picture me in the cell where she thinks I am, forever?
I think of kissing Javier last night, the sweetness of it.
I picture Nobody in the desert with Dennis, dozing in the driver’s seat of their parked van, head tilted to catch the sun on her perfect face. I picture Dennis in the back, watching a beeping point of light that represents my kill switch flying off course. Three quarters of a mile.
Kurt is off somewhere in sports gear, his heart still broken. And Jada and Erik in Portland. Just thinking his name hurts. Why didn’t I say goodbye to Erik? Why didn’t I do whatever it took? And this regret is what pierces through, a high note of pain above the low roar of despair, and knocks the tears out of me at last.
A sign looms up ahead, “Welcome to Meiners Oaks,” and the last good feelings dissolve. All I have is the sound of my breath and the steering wheel in my hands. Did you do it, Dennis? Did it work? I step on the accelerator and my chest floods with fear.
Rose, if this is it, please come get me.
The sign shoots by, my heart throbs, and I am 1.1 miles off my route. I shout at the top of my lungs and punch the car’s ceiling, and then shout again as I fly down the back road, crying and laughing like a maniac, pounding my steering wheel and yelling at the top of my lungs as I pull off onto the shoulder of the road.
“YEAH! HELL YEAH!!”
I get out of the car, shaking wildly as adrenaline cascades through my nervous system. I jump up and down, bang my fists on the hood and actually turn a cartwheel, enjoying the sharp pain as the gravel at the side of the road digs into my palms. Pain is a gift, just as much as my racing breath and the warmth of the sunlight; I am here for all of it. I catch the stunned expression on a driver of a passing pickup truck—he probably thinks I’m crazy. What’s really crazy is that we aren’t all dancing with joy every minute we’re alive.
Oxnard is full of low bungalows and tall palm trees leaning in the breeze that rolls off the ocean. I find Jaw’s duplex on a street of candy-colored houses, bleached pastel by relentless sun.
I knock three times on the door. Hard.
A seagull cries overhead as I wait, watching the palms sway like they’re underwater. No answer. Two little girls cruise past on bikes, ringing their bells before turning the block’s corner.
Go time.
I walk to the side of the duplex, slipping between two scraggly cypress trees and following a rough wood fence. Up on the second story of the duplex, past a white iron balcony rail, is a sliding door. Time to see if it’s unlocked.
I grab the top of the wood fence, tuck the toe of my sneaker into a knothole and bounce upward, pulling myself to standing five feet off the ground, then throw myself toward the lip of the overhanging balcony. Thanks to the obstacle course, my practiced fingers hook and dig. I gain the railing, pull myself up and swing my leg over the rail like a cowboy mounting his horse.
The balcony door opens noiselessly under my hand and I step into the air-conditioning. There’s a gentle clatter of vertical blinds as I step through, closing the door behind me, my senses on high alert as I listen for voices.
This must be Jaw’s mom’s room: there’s a vanity covered with cosmetics and lingering perfume mixes with notes of new paint. As I move out into the hall I bump the bedroom door.
SKREEEEEEEE …
The hinges let loose a high-pitched, comically prolonged shriek that rings through the house. I freeze in place and listen.
Complete silence. Well then. The house is definitely empty.
With a sigh of relief, I spot a padlock on a door down the hallway. That’s got to be Jaw’s room. Thanks to a few hairpins from his mom’s hairdresser, I get it open fairly quickly.
The smell hits me first, intimate and grimy like the bottom of a laundry pile. Though the hallway is bright and airy, Jaw’s room is completely dark. Snapping on the lights reveals industrial-strength blackout curtains nailed around the windows. The walls are covered floor to ceiling with posters of black metal bands, turning the room into a dour patchwork of black, red, and purple.
I move quickly past Jaw’s unmade bed to the rickety desk in the corner. It’s dominated by an enormous gaming console next to a charging e-vape. I’ve tried three different passwords when the e-vape blinks on. I look down and freeze when I see the swirling image on its LED screen: a blinking purple pentagram.
The vertical blinds clatter across the hall, and my skin crawls. I must have left the sliding door open. It’s probably just the wind. But I could have sworn I closed it?
SKREEEE …
Someone else is in the house.