Dare You by Jennifer Brown
“Wow, that’s really cool. But what about Gib? I wouldn’t blame him for not wanting me there.”
She waved me off again. “Gibson will be just fine. He’s a lot more bark than bite. Especially if I put a muzzle on him.” She laughed. “No, really, he’ll be chill, I promise. It would be good for you to come. I can’t explain why, but having you there would feel a little bit like having Peyton there. Weird, huh?”
Not really. But of course Vee didn’t know that. Nobody outside of the Hollises, except for Detective Martinez and me, would understand why Peyton and I seemed so linked.
“I’ll come to a show,” I said. “It’ll be fun.”
Vee beamed. Something I’d never seen before and thought I would never see. But there was petal-pink happiness bursting from that smile—the kind of pink that looked like babies and smelled like daisies. Nothing fake here that I could sense. Vee truly liked the idea of me coming to one of her shows.
Someone called her name and she took off, kicking her shoes under a chair and running away barefoot, leaving me alone with Peyton’s photo and all the flowers. I didn’t have anything to add to the shrine, which kind of made me feel like an asshole. Hell, even tough-as-nails Vee left the pick. But on the other hand, where were all these people when Peyton needed them most? They weren’t crying by her hospital bed—they were making a guessing game out of what might have happened to her. They were accusing her of all kinds of things. They were saying she had a freak-out. They were reveling in her downfall.
Fake bastards.
“So you would have hated it anyway,” I said quietly to Peyton’s photo. “All blue. Everywhere you look, blue. Can’t tell anyone apart because we’re all blue. Plus whatever color you associate with boredom. If you do that. Do you do that? Or is it just letters for you? Or maybe something else. It is pencil beige in here. That’s my boredom color. It’s so bad, I can actually smell pencil shavings if I close my eyes and concentrate. I hate that. I bet you did too. Or maybe you still do, if Vee’s right.” I sighed. “I wish you could have told me what your boredom color is. It would have been nice to have one person in this world who understood. Just one.” I felt a tear prickle the corner of my eye and angrily blinked it away.
I had willed myself not to cry again since that night at Hollis Mansion. I’d cried myself inside out while curled up on the pool deck next to Detective Martinez, and promised myself that it was over. The crying was over. But I hadn’t thought about things like pencil shavings at graduation. I wondered how many other things I had yet to think of. “So congratulations, Peyton,” I said. I placed my mortarboard on her chair and moved the tassel from right to left. A teardrop landed on top of it, spreading out a darker blue blotch on top of the lighter blue. “Let’s party, huh?”
Dad was probably in a near panic by the curb, thinking I’d been kidnapped and left for dead by now. Somehow I was going to have to get control of him. He’d always been so easy before—barely even noticing when I was home and when I wasn’t. I was almost nineteen, I had graduated, and it was time for me to live my own life. Whatever that life was.
I straightened, unzipping my gown as I did, and that’s when it caught my eye. A movement, quick, so unnoticeable I wondered if I’d really seen it at all. A shadow over by the bleachers, sliding left into the crowd.
Dark buzzed hair over ears that stuck out just slightly, and a tanned neck, carefully groomed. Erect posture and muscular arms stuffed into a polo shirt that was tucked fastidiously into khaki pants.
And a badge stuck to the waistband.
A badge that glowed yellow. Serve-and-protect yellow.
“Was that . . . ?” I said to myself, and then started forward. “Detective?” I picked up my pace, trying not to turn my ankle in my ridiculous shoes, wishing I’d abandoned them like Vee had abandoned hers. “Hey, Martinez!”
But when I burst into the crowd, it gave way, dissolving into a semicircle of graduates and their families, all hastening toward the doors. I looked right and left, even stepping backward and peering behind the bleachers. Nothing.
I darted to the side door and shoved it open, nearly hitting a girl who was coming back inside. Ignoring her indignant sigh, I pushed past her and scanned the parking lot.
Where I saw a familiar car. A very familiar detective behind the wheel. A very familiar detective who hadn’t said so much as boo to me for seven months.
I didn’t wave. Just watched him go.
It was like he’d never actually been there.
But I still felt the yellow sunbeams that told me he had.
3
THERE WAS A tiny part of me that thought Peyton must have been spinning circles in her grave as I walked up the long driveway to whoever’s beach house this was. A beach party? I could imagine her saying, her eyes rolling upward. In this tiny place? Cliché much? How lame.
It was a house I’d never been to before, and I wasn’t exactly invited to the party, but who was invited to these kinds of things? It was an after-grad gathering. Even if I managed to piss off everyone there—which could definitely happen—they would all forget me in a week, anyway.
Tall and skinny, the house had the appearance of being crammed in between two other houses. It seemed to spring up to the sky, as abrupt as the cliffs just a few yards down Santa Monica beach. It was nighttime, but there were enough lights blazing for me to see that it was painted a cheerful yellow, a color that reminded me again of Chris Martinez. Had he really been at my graduation ceremony? After seven months of not talking at all? Why?
There were so many cars, I had to park forever away, but the thumping music and the sounds of people partying led me all the way from my car to the front door. I could hear splashing in a swimming pool, along with the muffled whumps of balls being hit or kicked or who knew what on the beach. People seemed to be everywhere, and not all of them seniors. Not all of them students at our high school at all. There was something comforting about that.
The front door was open, but the mob inside was so dense I couldn’t see much past the door. Suddenly I felt very exposed. I wasn’t ever named in any of the news coverage of the Hollis story (something I can only attribute to Protection, Courtesy Detective Martinez, the Great and Mighty Defender), but everyone knew the third person in the backyard of the mansion that night was me. Everyone saw my bandages and my scars. Everyone talked, even if they didn’t have the first clue what they were saying. But I had promised myself that I was done letting situations like this intimidate me. I held my breath and squeezed through the door.
Inside was a writhing mass of salt and sand and sticky skin. The music was so loud I could feel the bass in my chest, making my heart feel like it was racing to catch up to the beat. The furniture had all been pushed to the outer edges of the rooms and was draped with people. The hardwood floor was covered in grit, and there were Solo cups on every conceivable surface. It was still pretty early in the night—there was no way that this house wasn’t going to be completely trashed by morning.
Not my problem.
I wouldn’t be stupid enough to invite the entire graduating class and half of California to my house for a good time. Or any kind of time.
Besides, I wasn’t here to worry about that kind of thing. I was here to forget, and I intended to forget.
I snaked my way into the kitchen, which looked like a liquor store. I grabbed a bottle at random and dumped its contents into a cup until the cup was half-full. I filled the rest of it with half a can of soda. Not wanting to be wasteful, I grabbed a second cup and mixed another drink. Leaning against the counter, I took three long swallows of the concoction, then coughed and gagged as the alcohol battered the back of my throat.
“Easy there,” a guy wearing only a pair of board shorts said as he filled a cup from a keg in the corner. “We don’t need any pukers. Party just got started.”
I wiped my watering eyes. “I won’t puke,” I said. “Puking’s for freshmen.”
He laughed, held up his cup toast-style. “
I held my cup up in the same cheers gesture and took another drink. I coughed again, but less this time, and my eyes squinted of their own accord but didn’t water.
The guy pointed at me with his cup. “Didn’t you used to date the dude with all the . . .” He mimed flexing his muscles.
I nodded. “Jones. Yeah. For a while.”
“He’s here,” he said. “Just saw him. Out on the front porch. He was looking pretty lonely, if you know what I mean.” He gave a dude chuckle—the kind that always made my skin crawl—and winked at me.
“Thanks for the report.” I drained the rest of my first cup without coughing at all, crushed the plastic, and tossed it into the corner with about a thousand other cups that were overflowing a small stainless-steel trash container. It was a swamp of foul-smelling alcohol.
“Two points,” the guy said. “She shoots, she scores.” He paused to drink and went back to pouring.
I curtsied, then grabbed another random bottle by the neck and carried it in my free hand on the way out.
I decided to head down to the beach, where I could blend in and decide if maybe a grad party wasn’t exactly my thing after all. What was I expecting to find here? Acceptance? Forgiveness? Some sort of proof that I could have been Peyton’s sister in more than just blood? Or maybe just a chance to celebrate like a normal person?
I found a spot, unlaced my shoes, and kicked them off, and sat with my toes dug into the warm sand, my arms around my knees. For the longest time, I listened to the ocean—a sound that always brought shimmery iridescent salmon to mind, the pink of happiness combined with the opalescence of opulence. Ocean was one of the few water words that wasn’t a shade of blue to me. I sipped from the bottle and closed my eyes and floated up and down the color, fading away, blissed out.
Until I was smacked on the cheek with a ball. My eyes flew open as I rocked back into the sand.
“What the—?” I said, pushing myself upright with my elbows. My cheek stung, and the bottle had knocked over, spilling brown booze onto my leg.
There was laughter, and out of the darkness two images came into view. “Oh, sorry,” a set of very white teeth said. “We didn’t mean to.”
But the giggling coming from behind her said they weren’t exactly trying not to, either.
The girls stepped into a beam of light coming from the house then, and I could see who they were—two seniors who’d been in my government class this year. Tanned and endowed God’s-gift-to-the-world types who spent far more time whispering about other people than they ever spent actually studying American government. Not that girls who looked like that needed to be rocket scientists to get ahead in this world, anyway.
“Whatever,” I said, throwing the ball to the one in front. A little too hard, maybe, because she shook her hand after catching it.
They started to leave, whispered again, then turned back. “Hey, so we like, heard about what happened to Dru Hollis,” the one with the gleaming teeth said.
“Only you and the whole rest of the world.” Incessantly. For as long as the media could bleed the story dry. “Your point?” I rubbed my aching cheek. Even through the fog of alcohol, the skin felt warm.
The one in back glared at me, but Teeth simply patted the ball with one manicured hand and continued. “So it sounded really awful. Was it?”
I pulled myself to standing, brushing the sand off the seat of my jeans and where it had stuck to the alcohol on my leg. There was stupid, and there was really stupid . . . and then there was this girl. “What kind of asinine question is that? No, it was the best night of my life.”
She glanced over her shoulder nervously and turned back again. “We just wanted to say we’re like, sorry or whatever. You and Dru were a thing, right?”
Sorry or whatever.
Or whatever.
God, was there not one genuine feeling in all of this ridiculous town?
“No,” I said. “We weren’t a thing. Not that it’s anyone’s business, but we were trying to figure out who hurt Peyton.”
“You mean who killed her,” the girl in back said.
I leveled my nastiest gaze at her. “Or whatever.”
The girls exchanged looks again, and then the one with the ball turned back toward me. “I don’t know why you have such an attitude about it. We were trying to be consoling.”
I bent and picked up the half-empty bottle. “Oh, is that what this is? You’re consoling me? So if I’d told you all the dirty details of what happened, you weren’t going to run right over there and tell your little friends all about it?” I gestured toward the loose crowd of people standing near a cooler, most of them staring at us.
She shook her head. “No, I—”
“Spare me. You want to get the dirt. And I don’t have any to give you. They’re dead. Both of them. Maybe you should let them rest in peace.”
I stormed away, realizing with shock that my chest felt heavy and my throat full, as if I were going to cry. I churned my feet extra hard through the sand, hoping to grind away the emotion before it blew up into color. So, so sick of emotions and colors. I took a giant gulp from the bottle and then chucked the whole thing into the sand behind me.
“You’ve got an attitude problem, Nikki Kill,” I heard one of the girls shout behind me.
I turned, walking backward, and flipped them a double bird. “So I’ve heard! Well, up yours with my attitude problem, how about that?” Without missing a beat, I turned facing forward and continued marching toward the house, keeping my middle fingers extended high over my head. They wanted to talk? Might as well give them something to talk about.
The alcohol had begun to hit me, making me feel fuzzy and warm. I didn’t notice the bodies I bumped into as much as I worked my way back through the house. I felt contained, in my own zone. I knew I was still the gossip everyone passed around, but with the buzz in the back of my brain, I no longer cared. Why would I give a shit what fake ditzes like those girls thought about anything? It sounded really awful. Was it?
As a general rule, I didn’t drink a lot. Gunner, my kyo sah nim at LightningKick, would kill me if he knew I even thought about drinking. Drinking made you slow and lazy and took you off your guard. A drunk can’t defend herself, Nikki, I could almost hear him saying. Gunner was always treating me like a little sister he had to protect, and I can only imagine the Big Brothering he would be doing since the mess I’d got into with the Hollises. Not that I’d let him. The dojang was a part of my life I hadn’t gotten back to yet. I’d cracked one of my metatarsals on the back of Luna’s head, but even after it healed, and my excuse to avoid my workout disappeared, I still couldn’t work up the courage. Pummeling people just wasn’t as enticing to me as it used to be.
But, Gunner’s feelings about alcohol aside, I didn’t like to drink because drinking made my synesthesia lie to me. My colors went haywire. I interpreted things wrong, and that usually ended up with fights.
I was never more aware of the way I relied on my synesthesia to help me take the temperature of a room, of a situation, than I was when I was drinking.
Unless, of course, I drank so much the colors just went away.
The thought made me go back into the kitchen and pull a beer out of an ice bucket. I plowed back through the crowd, daring someone to fuck with me, pausing here and there to guzzle from the can.
It seemed I took the longest way ever, and maybe even got lost once or twice, but finally I found myself stumbling out onto the front porch without really remembering much about how I got there.
I sipped my beer, realizing with confusion that I wasn’t holding my shoes. I stared at my hands for a beat and then let the ragemonster overtake me. Those shoes had stood on Dru’s blood. I couldn’t lose them. I couldn’t.
I swung around, trying to take inventory. Faces, faces, faces, all of them painting over with crimson. With ragemonster. With crimson. Back and forth.
“I lost my shoes,” I said
My legs felt weak, and all of a sudden I was really tired. People were laughing. I was pretty sure they were laughing at me. But I no longer cared. I only wanted to find my shoes and go lie down somewhere. Or go home. Or both.
I sank to the porch floor and let gravity take over, lying back and blinking hard, trying to clear my vision. Or my mind. Or something. I wasn’t quite sure what anymore. I only cared that the porch boards felt cool against my back, and steady, like they were the only things in this world anchored down.
Blink. Ceiling. Warped ceiling that swooped like a sheet in a breeze.
Blink. Brick wall. Curved wall that made me feel like I was in a fishbowl.
Blink. Someone’s feet. Super loud on the wood floor.
Blink. A face.
I squinted, trying to recognize it. Blink. And I did.
Like magic, Jones was there, bending over me, his chest bare, his board shorts low on his hips, highlighting most of the V of his abdomen. I squeezed my eyes shut again, but he was still there when I opened them. I felt so much relief, seeing him there. I actually surprised myself with all that relief. Maybe it was true what they said about absence making the heart grow fonder.
“Come on,” he said, and though he seemed a little wobbly on his feet as well, I took his hands and let him pull me back to standing.
“I lost my shoes,” I said.
“I’ve got them,” he said, holding up one hand, my shoes dangling from two of his fingers.
“You’re the best,” I said, throwing my arms around his neck and lunging into him so hard we both almost fell over.
“Let’s get you some space right now. Here, give me that.” He plucked the beer can from my hand and handed it to a guy standing behind him.
“I was drinking that,” I said, shoving into his shoulder with my fists playfully. He barely moved.
Jones smiled, his chin dimple joined by the two adorable dimples in his cheeks. I’d forgotten how adorable those dimples were. “Yes, you definitely were,” he said. “And I’m trying to keep you from getting sick. Or worse. Come on.”