Don't Breathe a Word Page 4

  I handed my number over to the woman at the counter: 235, good for a set of tea cozies.

  “Here you are,” the zoo lady said, handing me a paper bag with my consolation prize nestled inside. Mom would love them. Or, more likely, she’d re-gift them to the cleaning lady. Oh, well. At least someone would love the flowery design.

  I hugged the bag to my chest and spun around. And there was Asher, holding a paper bag in each hand. My items.

  “Well, I hope you enjoy them,” I said, a slight slur in my voice, as I moved to stalk past him.

  “Wait. Joy.” The way he said my name—gravely, but with the same touch of gentleness I’d seen when he fed the giraffes—stopped me. Like we were the only two people in the universe, and everyone else was just fading in the space around us.

  “What?” I sputtered. It came out more like a whisper. Damn. My voice would betray everything.

  “These are for you,” he whispered back. I could imagine what those lips would feel like, after the thrill of hearing them say my name. He held out the two bags. “And something extra,” he took a step toward me, “though I saved part of it for myself . . .” Our hands brushed as I took the handles. “. . . Because I didn’t think it would fit you.” His right hand slipped between my arm and ribs and slid all the way down to my hip.

  I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. He held up the vintage Nirvana T-shirt. “Oh, well, whatever. Never—”

  And then his lips met mine so softly that my words still hung between us. I could taste the smokiness of his mouth and chocolate honey on his tongue. Shivers spread over my body, to the tips of my fingers and toes and back.

  “See you around,” he said. I had to wait a minute to catch my breath. Inside the bags were everything—the Cranium set, the saints bracelet, a party at Bouncing Castles. The signed Nevermind album, the picture of Kurt and Courtney, and an envelope for a night out at The Cloud Room with a phone number written in crisp handwriting: “Call me.”

  Apparently, I had a date.

  Chapter 7

  Thinking about that kiss now left a bad taste in my mouth, made worse by the lingering effects of coffee on an empty stomach. I finished the last dregs of the latte and tossed the cup into a trash bin.

  All right, Capitol Hill. Time to wake up.

  Right about now, J3 would make a path through his Legos and Brio trains and trudge down the white stairs, looking for cereal. My mom would be lining up lunches, meds, and keys before going to work—anything to give the illusion of control. Dad wouldn’t be far behind. On the way out, he might notice somebody forgot to set the alarm. The cleaning lady would come at noon, when she’d see the dirt on the carpet and the open window. Maybe she wouldn’t think anything of it. Mom and Dad would get home around seven and assume I was with Asher. At ten, they might start to worry. Eventually Dad might call the cleaning lady and find out about the dirt, all the evidence sucked up by a vacuum cleaner . . .

  That’s when all hell would break loose.

  The rest I didn’t want to imagine. There would be fallout. My parents would be frantic and Jonah would be frightened. I knew I was leaving a nightmare in my wake . . . the thought of it made my lungs hurt. I focused on the things I knew: I needed a place to sleep. I needed to find the one I was looking for. I needed to never look back.

  Churches and shelters were off limits. Then there were places I had been with Asher, or with my friends. Any of those could give me away. Instead, I would cross from one world into another, where the weak became strong.

  I would need to be strong if I was going to make it out here. Superpowers would come in handy, but I would settle for street powers. My street power would be invisibility. I would hide in plain sight.

  Though I doubted anyone would recognize me, with twenty inches of never-dyed hair gone. I pulled the envelope addressed to Locks of Love out of my backpack. A page of stamps had to be enough to send a pound of dark hair from an anonymous Seattle mailbox. I felt strange without it—light. Unencumbered.

  My reflection in the bathroom shocked even me—hair a cottony white, bleached as white as two lightening kits could get it. Eyes rimmed black, smudged by my nap on the bus.

  Even the one person I wanted to recognize me wouldn’t know me now. I thought of his voice, following me even after I had ducked away from his gaze into Hot Topic—penetrating and intimate. Not like Asher, who made me feel stripped and vulnerable every time he looked at me. This boy, whoever he was, made me feel vulnerable in an entirely different way. If he had a street power, it was music. It spoke to my soul.

  I knew it was crazy to think he could help me, this boy with the guitar whose name I didn’t even know—only the eyes that met mine, promising his help.

  When I called Asher after the zoo party, I didn’t know I would be trading one prison for another. I only knew I was suffocating.

  Not in the literal sense—my family made sure of that. Ever since I almost died from pneumonia when I was five, they watched over me with the kind of attention you’d give to an abandoned baby bird.

  I’d been in and out of hospitals countless times with pneumonia and asthma attacks and another near-death experience at age nine.

  We all knew the drill. One stray molecule of mold or dust would send me into a fatal spiral, so when my mom wasn’t working, she spent the rest of her waking hours making sure every speck of air in the house was vaporized and nebulized and sanitized. The cleaning lady came so often that one time Jonah called her Mama.

  No one said anything, because everyone knew the sacrifices we had to make.

  Jesse did, all too well. Before he left for Western, his job was to keep me from dying—first by watching out for me on the playground and later by driving me to and from appointments, drugstores, and classes. I couldn’t really blame him for wanting to escape. Sometimes I felt so trapped, I wished I’d just stop breathing.

  That is, until I met Asher. I didn’t know how someone so measured, so deliberate, could make me feel on edge and out of control. I longed for things to be out of control for once in my life.

  I called the number he’d given me. He seemed distracted, like he couldn’t quite remember who I was.

  “We met at the zoo party,” I said, slightly incredulous. Did he meet and kiss and buy bags of Nirvana stuff for so many girls that he couldn’t remember who I was? “Joy,” I said. “Joy Delamere.”

  “Joy,” he repeated, this time with an intimacy that shocked me. He could do that—go from cold and distant to inside my skin in an instant. I regretted my angry tone.

  “Sorry, I was working on something,” he said, the heat back in his voice, like the grey smolder of his gaze at the zoo. “So you were calling to ask me to The Cloud Room.”

  I laughed. I hadn’t ever met anyone so confident, so quick to unhinge me with his boldness. “Well, yeah. I guess so.”

  “You didn’t come across as a girl who guesses,” he said. “You seemed pretty sure of what you wanted at the zoo party. And . . . here I am. So, ask me.”

  I didn’t see myself that way—I was the girl caught between two brothers, at the mercy of one wrong breath. The fact that he saw me as sure of myself sent a ripple of pleasure through my skin.

  “So,” I said. “I have this gift certificate someone gave me for The Cloud Room. It’s for four, so I was thinking—”

  “Ah,” he warned, and I remembered the flash of fire. Hot. Very hot. A girl could be consumed in that kind of fire.

  “I was thinking,” I began again, “maybe the two of us could go . . . ”

  “Mmmm,” he murmured. Approval.

  “ . . . and then, maybe we could go again another time . . . ” I waited for his voice to cut through the static. It was hard to guess at what he was thinking when I couldn’t see his face.

  “Hmmm,” he said, as if considering my proposal. “Interesting idea. Why don’t we try once, and see how it goes.”

  A week later, we were on the roof of the Camlin, me with my fake ID and Asher inspecting i
t for flaws. He told me more about his work with crows, like the vending-machine project. The crows came to it for treats, then learned they could put coins in the slot for more. Eventually, the crows learned to scavenge for change in order to keep the treats coming. The project practically paid for itself.

  “People are no different. It’s extraordinary what they will do for rewards—over time, you can give them less and less. You can even introduce punishment, but they’ll keep coming back.”

  The comparison of crows to people made me uncomfortable. “Are you going to study zoology?” I asked.

  “Of course not. I’m preparing for politics and psychology.”

  “But I thought . . .”

  He kissed me gently, and I had to catch my breath at the spark that passed between our lips. “Let me explain. If you can learn to manipulate the social hierarchies of animals, the natural next step is people. They aren’t all that hard to control.”

  I blinked, feeling for a moment the power he already had over me. It rushed through me like lightning.

  This was the beginning of my dance with fire—the heat, the burning, the pleasure of him going deep into me, trying me, testing me, pulling and pushing and molding and shaping me into the other half of him, distant and cold in some moments and shocking me with his force at others. And just when I was finished, tired of being pushed away and then reeled back into the sheer consumption of it, he would do something so amazingly tender that I would forget what made me want to leave him. Because there, at his apartment, in his car, in his arms, we were two, only two, and I was the most important thing in his universe—not the girl crushed by her parents’ constant worry but the center of someone’s passion.

  My parents knew Asher’s parents. They knew of Asher’s work and reputation. He would finish out his last year at View

  Ridge Prep while I was a junior at Eastside, then he’d take a year to do crow research before heading to an Ivy. He was a good boyfriend for me, the perfect guardian now that Jesse was gone. They knew nothing of the fire that drew me to him, dangerous and alluring.

  Everything changed when my dad lost his job. Even more, my relationship with Asher changed.

  Dad came home one day and told us all it was over. “People just aren’t investing in nonprofits these days—not like they used to. It’s a tough economy.” They were “reducing expenditures,” and my dad was the first one to go.

  When I told Asher, he nodded, like he’d known all along. “Yeah. I’ve heard there was some insider stuff going on.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Asher gave me a smile, patted me on the knee. “Don’t worry about it.”

  But I did worry about it as things got tighter at home. Days stretched into weeks and months, living on Mom’s part-time salary while Dad job searched.

  Then Mom’s hours were cut back. We were about to lose the house, school, medical insurance. All of this while Asher’s family empire seemed to be expanding and even profiting from the growing recession.

  Dad sank into a depression of his own.

  Mom started looking at apartments.

  I was the one who could save us—by asking Asher for help.

  “What do you want me to do?” Asher had demanded, and I asked him. Could he get my dad a job?

  A week later, Dad had an interview and Asher took me back to his apartment.

  It was my first time, with him or anyone else. He kissed the places where my clothes had been, and I was afraid but grateful. I owed him this much.

  He agreed.

  Chapter 8

  Capitol Hill was almost unrecognizable by day. The axis of Broadway and Pine meant boarded-up clubs, a college, restaurants, and a spider’s network of dilapidated businesses. I had only one thought on my mind: finding a place to crash. An empty house? A dryer vent? Just someplace safe for tonight.

  There were always plenty of grubby people scattered along Broadway, playing guitars or singing or acting out strange, senseless monologues, asking for spare change. Spainging, my brother Jesse called it. He knew the homeless scene well, after all of his volunteering. I bet he never guessed his sister would be one of them.

  When I came up here with Asher, we followed the unspoken rule: Never make eye contact. That was as good as telling them you had money to give.

  Now they had the power, and I had none. Nowhere to sleep. Nothing to eat except for the emergency rations in my backpack. I hugged it closer and scurried past the lineup of kids sharing a light and the men whose odor and hunger were almost tangible. Other people walked past as if they were invisible. We were invisible.

  “You’re new here.” A gaunt, bald man—all leathery skin and whiskers and smelling like he slept in a sewer—blocked my path. I tried to walk around him.

  “Hey.” His voice slammed hard as a brick. “I’m talking to you.”

  Only yesterday, I would have been as hidden to him as he was to me, protected by an unseen armor. Suddenly, I was more vulnerable than I was standing naked in front of Asher.

  “Hey, are you deaf, little girl?” The man reached for me, and I darted out of his path. His filthy hand landed on my shoulder and brushed my backpack. The others watched, waiting to see what would happen. One of them, a big boy in chains with his hair shaved into a black mohawk, took a drag on his cigarette. He watched me with a mixture of fascination and hate. The girl next to him wouldn’t meet my eyes.

  “Leave me alone,” I mumbled, and backtracked. Up ahead was the hospital, the Garage, Atlas Clothing: areas I knew, when I was Joy. Behind me: Safeway, Urban Outfitters, the Rite Aid that kicked me out this morning. Starbucks, where the guy named Bach might still be working. This scary guy wouldn’t mess with Starbucks. They’d call the police, but would someone call the police for me?

  Something tripped me—the mohawk boy with the mean eyes—and I stumbled forward. “Better go home,” he said under his breath.

  I started walking fast toward Urban Outfitters. The old guy followed at a slow, menacing pace, his stench blowing toward me and filling my nostrils with fear. The light turned red, but I didn’t stop. A long horn sounded only a few feet behind me. Two students stood at the corner, looking over and then turning away as I approached. Invisible—exactly as I wished.

  I looked over my shoulder and he was still there, waiting at the light while a police car cruised past. I hid my face. They could be looking for me by now. If I hadn’t done a good enough job with the dirt . . . if Jonah had snuck into my bedroom for a wake-up hug . . . if my mom checked my bed to see what I was doing today . . . Pictures of me could already be transmitted to every police BlackBerry. Every cop in the city could be looking for me, yet they wouldn’t see the chase right under their noses.

  I reached the Urban Outfitters on the corner of Harrison and Broadway. There were the couches and shabby-chic housewares in the front, then racks of fall dresses and fluttery shirts and cardigans. I slipped inside, hoping to lose scary Stench man here in the retail maze.

  I could call Asher now, I thought, tucking myself between two racks of jeans. He could come get me and take me home, and I could explain everything as just a big misunderstanding. He would be angry, and he’d know I wasn’t telling the truth, but I’d stick to my story as if my life depended on it. All I had to do was turn on my phone.

  My stomach growled, as much from hunger as from adrenaline. The bells on the door jingled wildly. Was that Stench? Would he actually follow me into a store?

  I ducked further down past the jeans. I could make it out the back door into the shopping center, but I had an even better chance if I could get to men’s clothes.

  In the center of the store a metal staircase swept up to the second floor—I would have to cross a wide expanse to get there. I bent down to look for his feet, which would be filthy and ragged. My face was so close to the ground, I could feel the hum of passing traffic. Jeans and dresses obscured my view. Then two tiny, vintage boots appeared, attached to a short girl with a ratted-out brown updo. She looked too nic
e to be angry, and yet her eyebrows were knitted in a combination of rage and fear. Of me? Or was Stench right behind her?

  “What are you doing down there?” she demanded. I tried to stay down, to indicate the urgency of silence. Every word she spoke endangered my life.

  She let out an annoyed huff. “What’s going on?” She started to reach for the walkie-talkie at her hip.

  “No, wait,” I said, as an acrid smell hit my nose. She made a face and turned around.

  “Hey!” she said with a surprising amount of authority. “You’re not supposed to be in here,” she said to Stench and brought the walkie-talkie to her mouth. “Security!” she called in a bored tone.

  Now was my chance. I could dart behind the stairs to the atrium. The drugstore in the basement had to have a back door, or at least a bathroom where I could figure out what to do next.

  I made a move and Stench followed, but by then a couple of security dudes were pounding down the stairs and taking him by the shoulder.

  “I was just looking for somebody,” he groused.

  “Riiiight, buddy. Why don’t you go back outside, or you’ll be spending the night in jail.” One of the guards held his walkie-talkie to his mouth, ready to say the word.

  “I’m not the one you should be looking for. She’ll steal you blind!” I heard him shout, but I had already slipped out the door, clutching my backpack and veering toward the other end of the mall. The smell of samosas hit my nose from the Indian food cart, reminding me how hungry I was, but I couldn’t afford to stop. I wound my way through the atrium to the opposite street corner and ran past another lineup of panhandlers. None of them was the boy with the guitar, the only one I’d trust to help me.

  Where was he? He would be hard to miss in this crowd. Was I crazy to think I could find him?

  I dodged down a side street further up Broadway and landed at the Daughters of the American Revolution property—a house from 1900-something, restored and repurposed into a historic reception hall. A row of camellia bushes bordered the west side, big and shadowy enough to hide one small, white-haired girl. I folded myself into the space underneath, taking two deep breaths with my emergency inhaler and willing my heart and lungs to calm down. Voices drifted from the first-floor window, a gentle murmur. If Stench tracked me here, at least they would hear my scream.