Don't Breathe a Word Page 6

  “Poor little rich girl didn’t find what she was looking for?” Asher baited. He gave her that half smile he gave me, when he knew he was in control.

  “The big one said, ‘Sorry, I’m not the guy you’re looking for.’” She imitated a deep, scornful voice.

  The short boy with black hair looked over. He might have been cute if he cleaned up a little bit. The girl looked skinny but scrappy. I wouldn’t want to mess with her. I couldn’t make out the tall one’s features, but I knew he was watching.

  “What was that all about?” Neeta demanded. “Were you trying to buy drugs?”

  I shrank a little in embarrassment. Ari rolled her eyes. “I just wanted to see if I could, Neeta.” She slurped her soda. “Apparently he’s not that kind of boy.”

  Asher tilted his head and eyed her appreciatively. “Ah, so now the truth comes out.”

  Ari tilted her chin. “You don’t know anything about my truth, Crow Boy,” she challenged. I couldn’t fathom talking to him that way. “He’s pretty steamy, though,” she said slyly.

  “Maybe he’s another kind of boy. I mean, he could totally be her pimp. Do you know the kind of stuff that goes on around here?”

  Ellerie came back from scoping out the crowd. “What kind of stuff?”

  Ari gave her a knowing look. “We’re talking about homeless teen pimps.”

  Ellerie’s eyes went wide. “Did you see one?”

  “Shhhh,” Neeta hissed. Ellerie craned her neck to get a better view of the alleged pimp.

  Ari giggled flirtatiously and poked Asher. “There are four of us and one of you, Crow Boy. You could be our pimp.”

  The short boy looked over his shoulder again, and skinny Ave girl scowled in our direction. The tall one in the shadows leaned closer to the other two like he was watching over them. A red light flickered on his face, and his eyes locked with mine.

  In that moment I knew without a shadow of doubt that he was no pimp. There was something so close and knowing in that look. Vulnerable. No pimp could be like that.

  “I mean, seriously,” Ari was saying. “Can you imagine someone having that kind of control over your life?”

  The tall boy stepped into the light, his gaze still fixed on us. On me. As if he were listening to my thoughts. A shiver passed through me, like he was taking an inventory and didn’t like what he saw. I held Asher closer.

  “Asher would make a good pimp,” I said, almost to myself.

  Ellerie chuckled, then stopped short. Ari put her hand over her mouth.

  My heart began to pound in my chest. I tried to smile. “I mean, you could handle four women,” I said lightly. “Not that I’d want you to.”

  I thought of how an unlit match could burst into flame from just a thread of smoke. A thread of smoke was all it would take to suffocate me.

  I didn’t want to look at Asher’s face to see his reaction. He would explode, and then it would be over. Everyone felt it.

  “C’mon, you guys,” said Neeta, breaking the tension. “Let’s dance. Look—the band is setting up—”

  “So is Balloon Boy,” Ari snorted. Ellerie giggled.

  Seconds later, a cute East Indian guy with glasses came out onstage, the crowd crushed into the center, and even Balloon Boy calmed down enough to hear him shout out, “This. Is. Freezepop!”

  And two seconds later, a guy on a keytar, another on the sequencer, and a girl with a hot pink streak came out and started rocking. But I wasn’t listening. I was waiting for the moment when Asher would blow.

  The shorter Ave boy pushed his way to the front, and I looked back at the taller one. His dark hair hung around his eyes, but he was still watching my every move.

  “Are you okay?” Neeta asked, and I shrugged. Asher wasn’t touching me, but I could feel his heat prickling my skin.

  “Yeah. Of course!” I shouted, a bit too loudly over the music. Neeta watched me a second longer and then let Ellerie lead her into the throng.

  The melody pumped up the crowd with its electronic happiness, and even Asher’s body started to move to the driving beat. I breathed a sigh of relief. Maybe he wasn’t upset after all.

  A little while later, Asher said in a low voice, “I’m going out for a smoke.” And even though the room spun with music and noise and dancing, his words triggered a response. He meant for me to follow.

  As soon as we were out of the club, Asher lit up a cigarette. He knew it could prompt an asthma attack. But if it did, he’d be right there to take me to the emergency room.

  I followed him around the corner to the alley behind the club. He took a last swig of the beer in his hand and then threw the bottle viciously against the wall. I could barely see the shards of glass, shattered into a thousand pieces, through the tears suddenly springing to my eyes.

  “Asher, I’m sorry,” I breathed.

  In a split second he gained control of himself. “Now you’re sorry,” he said quietly. “You wait until I’m upset to be sorry when you should have thought about that before you said it. What the hell, Joy?”

  “Asher, I didn’t mean to make you angry—”

  But he was done with my excuses. Instead, his voice was heading to that dangerous, low pitch I knew well. “Do you think your family’s going to be happy when I tell them I can’t take care of your pathetic ass anymore? Do you think you’re going to be sorry when your dad gets fired and he can’t get a job in this whole fucking town?”

  Dread coiled around my lungs. I counted to three, slowly, to try to catch my breath. Eyes closed. Calm. One breath, two breaths, three breaths.

  “You’re not looking at me,” Asher seethed. “How can we have a conversation when you’re not looking at me?”

  He came in close and took my jaw in his hands, so close I could taste the sugar and smoke on his breath. I almost wished he would hit me, because then I would have a reason to call for help.

  Instead, he pinched a lock of my hair and let it fall through his fingers. Gently. So gently. “Slowly,” he said, helping me breathe. He held me up until my lungs recovered.

  “Don’t ever do that again,” he whispered, his voice cracking, as if the pain of my betrayal had broken him. He kissed me on the cheek, and I melted into his arms.

  “Sorry,” I murmured. “So sorry.”

  I almost crumpled when he released me and I was left on my own two feet. “I’m going to get the car now,” he said. “Be here when I get back.”

  Of course I would be here. As soon as we got to his place, I would show him how sorry I was and how grateful I was for his forgiveness. I blinked back the tears that came readily now that he was gone and wildly tried to wipe them away.

  A sound startled me, the hum of a melody I didn’t know. When I spun around, the tall boy with the guitar was standing there in the shadow of a doorway. I could tell by the look in his eyes that he had witnessed everything.

  “I saw how he treats you,” the boy said.

  Around the corner I could hear the roar of a DeLorean coming closer. I felt utterly broken, but I couldn’t break from his gaze. Any second the car would be here.

  “If you ever need help, you know where to find me.”

  Chapter 12

  After his victory at the Safeway, Stench paraded around the streets with my backpack and gloated over his prizes. He’d taken most of my money and supplies and could probably make a killing with my drugs, if he didn’t decide to use them himself. I was down to one inhaler, and I had to make it last.

  That meant I had to manage breathing on my own. Outside of Chop Suey with Asher was the first time I’d had to do that in a long time. Normally I had three inhalers with me, and everyone else had extras. An asthma attack out here could be fatal.

  What doesn’t destroy me makes me stronger, Asher would say. I was stronger now than I had ever been. Besides, my backpack was one of the last things connecting me with my former life. Without it, I felt weightless. In a way, Stench had set me free.

  When Stench went AWOL for a few days, it
gave me a little breathing room. I hoped he used my cash to catch a bus out of town or drink himself to death under a bridge—good riddance. But I still had to figure out what to do next. I needed money. I needed meds. I needed a more permanent place to sleep. The garden shed worked for now, but any day I could get caught. My time was quickly running out.

  The homeless boy—I’d seen him twice now. Didn’t that mean something?

  Neeta would think so. If you see someone more than once, you are meant to cross paths. That’s what she said about our friendship. She’d moved to Issaquah with her parents when we were eight years old. We saw each other two times in that stretch of woods between our neighborhoods and had been friends ever since.

  She kept calling me after the Chop Suey incident, and I avoided every call. “Why did you leave without telling me?” she demanded in the earlier messages. And then, when I didn’t answer, the tone shifted. “What’s going on, Joy? Why don’t you call me back?”

  I wanted to tell her, but there was nothing she could do—nothing I could do, short of running away, and that would mean leaving my family to take the fall. He might follow through on the threat against my dad’s job. And what else? I remembered the bottle he hurled at the wall, the thousands of glass slivers.

  They were just words now, and I could handle those. Besides, I thought, it was only some of the time. Telling Neeta would only make things worse.

  When she finally reached me a few weeks after Chop Suey, she didn’t ask any of the questions I knew were crowding each other to be heard. Instead, she said, “Let’s go on a trip. No Asher, no Ellerie, no Ari. Just you and me.”

  I hesitated. We’d barely spoken for the last year, didn’t even know each other anymore. Being trapped in a car for hours could make a person say things they didn’t want to say.

  “Come on,” she urged. “We could go somewhere, anywhere you want. Maybe up to Bellingham to see Jesse.”

  My breath stopped in my throat.

  Neeta couldn’t help, but maybe Jesse could.

  That one desperate thought took me all the way to Western with her, two hours in the car. I’d left without telling Asher, so I knew he would be furious. It didn’t matter, though, because Jesse could help me. And then all of the secrets I’d been keeping for the last year could come out. He was always the responsible one—he’d know what to do about Dad and Valen Ventures. He’d tell me what to do about Asher. Maybe he’d even let me come stay with him for a while.

  But that’s not what happened. When Neeta and I showed up at the old house he shared with a bunch of other students, he almost slammed the door in my face.

  “What are you doing here?”

  It was nearly dark, and Asher would be getting out of the lab right about now. He’d call me soon, calling for his little bird, and I wouldn’t be there. There would be consequences, I knew.

  Just seeing me on his doorstep was enough to set Jesse off. “I have school, I have a job, I have a life!” he shouted, as if Neeta wasn’t even there. “Get a life, Joy. I’m not responsible for you anymore.”

  Neeta and I didn’t say much on the way home, only the bare essentials. Did I want to stop at Dairy Queen or Taco Time? It didn’t matter. I couldn’t eat. But I could pretend to sleep.

  “You’re different, Joy,” Neeta said softly.

  When we were younger, we’d gather a group of girls and lift each other one by one with our fingertips, chanting, light as a feather, free as a bird. Light as a feather, free as a bird.

  We’d actually convinced ourselves that we could fly, until the one time I’d had an asthma attack midflight and everyone dropped me in shock—all except Neeta, who was still holding my hand.

  I was falling now, and she was reaching out. But it was already too late.

  After dark, I headed back to my garden shed. Home, sweet home. As long as I arrived at night and left before dawn, I might be able to get a few more days out of it.

  My Vans scraped along the sidewalk in a quieter part of Capitol Hill, and I tried not to think about what was happening at home. A flap of rubber came loose, reminding me I’d need better shoes soon. I stopped to tug at the rubber, and a rock skittered behind me.

  Suddenly, I was on high alert.

  An oddly bulky figure was following a block or so back, his face dark in the shadows.

  I picked up the pace and considered alternate routes. Broadway was a few blocks away, and my garden shed seemed like it was ten. He matched me step for step.

  I was almost to Twelfth. I could head off to the right and see if I really was being followed, then maybe I could double back. Mohawk would be all too willing to protect me. How could I have been so stupid, to think the guitar boy would?

  The man behind me turned the corner at Twelfth, matching my speed. I couldn’t make him out in the pool of darkness, but a whiff of him sent me back to the struggle outside Safeway. The smell ignited my adrenaline.

  Stench.

  My pounding heart would set off a chain reaction. I had to slow down. One. Two. Three.

  The park was up ahead and off to the right—I could run through the field, past the fountain, and maybe make it back to Broadway. I didn’t actually know where Mohawk went at night, but I did know he’d added another girl to his harem.

  What he extracted for his protection, I could only guess . . . but it had to be as bad or worse than what Stench had in mind. I shuddered at the thought.

  The park was slippery under my Vans, the dampness soaking first into the canvas and then into my feet. A streetlamp lit the grin on Stench’s face. I slipped and fell forward, streaking my hands with grass and mud. I wasn’t fast enough. His boots squished through the green at an easy pace. Even if I ran, he was almost close enough to tackle me. I smelled the sewage embedded in his skin and clothes and breath.

  Then all at once, someone pounced out of the shadows and tackled Stench, punching him first in the gut and then in the face—a wiry form, lean and strong, with dark wavy hair falling around his face. Whoever it was, I didn’t stop to find out. I picked myself up off the grass and ran toward Broadway. I was a block away before I stopped to look back at the brawl. Stench was crumpled in a heap on the grass, and the other one strode toward me, lamplight bouncing off his figure and illuminating his face.

  I knew him.

  The one who made a promise in the alley, whose music made promises of its own.

  He was right here in front of me, and he had just saved my life.

  Chapter 13

  “It’s you.”

  My lungs were still burning from the encounter with Stench, but I couldn’t hold the words back.

  Up close, he was even taller than I remembered, his eyes more cloudy, his hair a little longer. It hung in chocolaty strands around his ocean-blue eyes, which were watching me carefully. He wore the same clothes as when I’d seen him outside Hot Topic—an army surplus jacket, grubby jeans and tee, saggy black combat boots. Everything about him seemed familiar, as if we already knew each other. We did know each other.

  He’d offered his help.

  He wishes he could cure the scars, he’d sung to the deepest layer of my being.

  “Do I know you?”

  There was the voice—not angry or condescending, but . . . puzzled. And out of breath, from saving my life.

  Slowly I felt the clench of my airways relax, and he waited for me to answer. I was still staring at him, willing him to recognize me. Didn’t he recognize me? How could he not remember?

  “I . . . I’m sorry, I didn’t mean . . . I mean, thanks. Thanks for helping me with Stench.” My voice felt strange in my mouth, and I realized I hadn’t used it for days.

  “Stench?”

  I felt myself blushing. “That’s what I call him, anyway.”

  He laughed, though not harshly. “It’s as good a name as any—he smelled like . . . so wait, I’ve seen you, but how do you know . . .” He stopped himself as if he’d hit a wall. His eyes narrowed, looking deeper, and I had the sensation of tota
l exposure. “What’s your name?”

  The word stuck in my throat. Joy was wrong. It didn’t fit. Tristesse, I thought, would be better. Sadness.

  “Triste.”

  It seemed true enough. Already, I had left Joy behind, the second I said good-bye to her in the mirror. I couldn’t be her again.

  He gave me a dark stare, then nodded. Like he knew it was fake, but it would satisfy him for now.

  “What about you?”

  His face clouded over. Did he recognize me from Chop Suey, and from the sidewalk outside Hot Topic? Could he see into me now the same way he could then?

  “We’ve been watching you for days—you’re new around here, aren’t you?”

  The clothes and the hair—they’d be enough to fool everyone from my old life, but not him.

  “Yeah,” I said carefully, “but—”

  “Wait,” he interrupted slowly. “Wait. I know who you are.”

  A bubble of hope rose in my chest. I knew it. “You remember me!” I cried. I was almost laughing as I said it, laughing with happiness and relief, that he could see through my pathetic disguise.

  Until I realized he wasn’t laughing. Far from it. His eyes had gone stormy, his hands clutching the hair away from his face so that the veins and sharpness of his forehead were thrown into high relief.

  “No. Oh no,” he was saying. “Oh no, you can’t be. Damn.”

  I was stunned. I’d thought, once I met him . . . something was there. A spark. He had to feel it, too. So different from Asher, something I couldn’t quite place.

  He continued to stare at me in horror. “Did I meet you at Chop Suey?”

  I nodded, not daring to look at him.

  “Yes, and you were . . . you were outside, crying . . . no, you can’t be here. What are you doing out here?”

  “But you said—”

  “I know what I said.” He was pacing now. “No, I don’t know what I said. I didn’t tell you to run away.” The last part he muttered to himself. “Did I?”