Shade Me

  And I could see why girls would line up to be with him. His expensive sport coat and khakis were so perfectly fitted, they wrapped around his tan skin like butter. Styled to look careless, he practically reeked of influence and adventure, as if he was ready to climb a mountain or negotiate a business deal or lay down a royal flush any second of the day. I had noticed him at school—everyone noticed him at school—but had never been this close to him before. He was flawless, perfection. I had to remind myself to breathe and do my best to ignore the violet thoughts that wanted to push into my brain. I liked to think of myself as immune to obvious guys like Dru Hollis, but nobody could truly ignore who he was.

  After a beat of surprise, he let go of Peyton’s hand and stood, the khakis sliding along the lines of his muscles.

  “Sorry,” he said, wiping tears from beneath his eyes with his fingers. He gazed at Peyton. “It’s just . . . she looks so bad.”

  I didn’t say anything. I was too struck by him to open my mouth. I’d never been alone in the same room with Dru Hollis before, and I was suddenly thirteen again. It was seriously starting to piss me off.

  He held his hand out. “Dru,” he said. “I’m Peyton’s brother. They just called me. Thank God I was close by.”

  I took his hand, feeling a jolt run through me as I met his eyes. Despite looking tired and red-rimmed, they were searching, as if he was accustomed to always being allowed entrance into souls, just because of who he was. Something about the way he gazed into me made me feel naked. The violet I was ignoring pulsed brighter. I let go of his grip, tried to compose myself by staring at his hand. His knuckles looked red and swollen around the tan line of a ring, a scuff of raw skin skidding across the back of his hand. That was probably what most girls loved about Dru Hollis—he was rich but rugged. Privileged without being pampered.

  “I’m Nikki,” I said. “They called me here, too.”

  I saw a flicker of something strange pass over Dru’s face. Confusion, maybe? Irritation? He went back to her bedside and sat, grabbed the same hand he’d been holding before, and pressed it to his cheek. “Who would’ve done something like this?” he asked. “Why? Why would someone hurt Peyton? If she dies . . .”

  He trailed off, but I could have just about finished the sentence for him. I knew what he was thinking. If she dies, I’ll die, too. If she dies, someone will pay. If she dies, will I ever be fixable? There were a boatload of ways to finish If she dies, and I knew every last one of them, because my mom did die, and I lived through that same loop of horrible thoughts. I spent more sleepless nights with why than I could count. I felt another squeeze in my chest, but this one was different from the one before. It was pity for Dru. I knew how his heart was breaking, because mine had broken just like it ten years ago. And as far as I could tell, I was anything but fixable.

  “She won’t,” I said, moving a step toward him. “She’s strong.” I said this like I knew her, and then I realized that, in a way, I did know at least that much about her. I’d seen how she’d worked the school, students and teachers alike. I’d seen the way she’d organized everything from parties to protests. Let nobody get in her way. Peyton Hollis was strong as hell. A force to be reckoned with. “She’s a fighter. She’ll fight.”

  But somebody out there was stronger, a bigger force. Somebody out there had beaten the fight right out of her. She didn’t look like a fighter right now. Pale and lifeless, with all those tubes and wires wrapping her up, she reminded me more of a fly in a spider’s web.

  Who was your spider, Peyton?

  “Yeah,” Dru said. “She definitely knows how to survive. She’s a Hollis, after all.” He was quiet for a moment, and then seemed to shake off a thought. “I haven’t ever seen you around. You two hang out much?”

  I shook my head. “No. You?”

  He gave a breathy chuckle. “She’s my sister.”

  “Oh, right,” I said. “I wasn’t thinking. Sorry.”

  The curtain rustled open again, and the nurse who’d nearly knocked me down before came in. Dru backed up to make room for her. “Okay, guys, we’re going to move her upstairs,” the nurse said. “I can get some blankets and pillows for you.”

  “No,” I said. The thought of spending a whole night bathed in Peyton’s crimson lights and Dru’s dark, electric stare terrified and nauseated me. I needed air. I needed space. I needed time to think, to process. “I’ll just grab my phone and go.”

  I bent to retrieve my phone, and that was when I saw the rumors were true—Peyton actually had gotten a neck tattoo. It was small and had the sharp lines of new ink, all in black and gray, which seemed an odd choice for what it was—a rainbow, surrounded by clouds. The words Live in Color were scripted beneath the curve of the bottom stripe. To me, it was beautiful, the words jumping out in vibrant gem tones, especially against the gray of the rainbow. I wanted to reach out and touch it, as I so often did when words took on a particularly stunning hue. But Dru stepped toward me, and I resisted.

  I tore my eyes away from the tattoo and bent all the way down to the floor, lowering myself to my hands and knees so I could find my phone.

  When I stood up again, Dru had gone back to Peyton’s bedside. It seemed like the perfect time to leave. “I’m really sorry about your sister.”

  I didn’t wait for him to respond but ducked back through the curtain and practically raced out of the emergency ward and through the double doors into the waiting room. Only then did I slow down a little to collect myself.

  But just as the sliding doors swished open in front of me, I heard a voice calling from behind.

  “Nikki!” I turned. Dru was rushing through the doors after me. I waited. “Hey,” he said when he reached me. “Did you drive here?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “Let me walk you to your car.” He gestured toward where we’d just come from. “This has got me a little on guard, you know?”

  He wasn’t the only one. In general, I wasn’t easily shaken, but I would admit that seeing Peyton’s injuries had me eyeing the parking lot a little closer than I normally would. I felt like eight-year-old Nikki again—afraid that the bad guys who’d killed my mom might jump out at me and take me out, too. Not that I had any reason to trust Dru Hollis, but another warm body was better than nothing.

  “Consider it a thank-you,” he said. “For coming.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Of course.”

  We walked to my car, awkward silence stretching between us. Away from the heavy hospital smell, I was able to catch his scent. The night air commingled with his cologne and drifted through me, practically carried me. He smelled rich, rugged, sexy, and like he didn’t know it, which only made him even sexier. I was conscious of everything—the way I walked, the wrinkles in my shirt, the catches in my hair from being windblown on the window ledge earlier. I wondered if I smelled like smoke.

  Once we got to my car, I finally spoke. “This . . . didn’t happen at your house, did it?”

  Hollis Mansion was huge, and the setting of a museum of epic parties. If someone came to school laughing about having lost anything from shoes to car keys to their virginity, chances were high that it happened during a party at Peyton’s. The mansion was like Pleasure Island—the place where fun happens and nobody has to answer to anything. It was weird to think of the boy standing beside me being part of that scene. Even despite the rumors about him. It was even weirder to think an intruder might have gotten in there and tried to kill one of them.

  “No,” he said. “The nurse told me someone found her in a parking lot, called it in, and split.” He wrung his hands together. “I don’t know who it was. I’m just glad she got some help.”

  We fell into silence again, and I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to get into my car now, or if he had more to say.

  “What happened?” I asked, to break the tension. I pointed at his hand.

  He glanced at it, splaying his fingers out, and then covered it with his other hand and let them both drop in front of him. ??
?Basketball game,” he said. “Got a little rough. Also took an elbow.” He rubbed his cheek, right below his eye, and I noticed for the first time that it was bruised and swollen as well.

  “Damn, tough game.”

  He stared back toward the hospital. “Better than being on one of my father’s job interviews, which was where I was supposed to be,” he said.

  “Job interview?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “My parents think I need some direction.” He said the last with a heavy tinge of sarcasm.

  “So you burn off energy by beating up basketballs?”

  He turned to me, and I got the patented Dru Hollis guarded stare full-on for the first time.

  My cheeks burned. “Sorry. It’s been a weird night.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “It has. I don’t understand it. Why would someone want to hurt Peyton?”

  “I have no idea,” I said. “And they said I was the only contact in her phone. Why? Why not you? Or your parents?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, looking surprised. “My dad’s going to be shattered. They’re really close. I couldn’t get ahold of him. He has no clue. None of this makes any sense.”

  “Maybe it was an accident?” I said hopefully.

  “Maybe,” he echoed, but he sounded doubtful. “Listen, I really appreciate you coming.” He reached around me for the door handle. Instinctively, I tensed, fixing my eyes on the point on his throat that I would punch if he did something fishy. But then he smiled at me and I relaxed a little. That smile. It was so disarming. Alarmingly disarming.

  “No problem.”

  He pulled open my door and stepped back so I could get in. He licked his lips—God, they looked so soft!—and we locked eyes again, a gaze that swept through me, made me breathless.

  “No, I mean thank you for everything. For being there with Peyton. For reminding me what she’s made of. You made me feel a lot better. I can maybe have a little hope.”

  “I’ve sort of been there,” I said. “I get it.”

  His eyes narrowed, as if he were studying me. “You really do, don’t you?”

  I couldn’t answer. I could see the letters on his key fob, a leather souvenir from the Dominican Republic, which hung out of his front pocket, begin to glow lavender, then purple, and then violet so bright I could feel it in my throat.

  I wasn’t the only one feeling that current between us.

  Or was I? That violet could have been all me.

  I swallowed again, tearing my eyes away from the fob, trying to put Cool and Controlled Nikki back in place. “I should go. My dad doesn’t know I’m gone.”

  “It is pretty late,” he said.

  I squeezed past him and got into my car. “See you.”

  “Yeah. It was nice meeting you, Nikki,” he said. “And thanks for”—he shot me a look that was part grateful, part wary—“everything.” He pushed my door shut with a thud.

  I started the car, put it into gear, and took off, glad to be free of the unnerving Hollis pull.

  4

  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 pe
rpetrator, 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.”