Night Sky (6 page)

I nodded impatiently. “Fine. Okay. But you didn't take down that
Just
hangin' out
poster?”

“No, that poster is adorable. I know you love it. Why would I do something like that?”

I didn't understand. First my alarm clock and then my poster. Something was happening, but I didn't know what.

“Sky, are you okay?” my mom said, frowning. She shivered in her towel.

“I'm fine,” I said. “Go get dressed. Sorry for the weird questions.”

Mom stood there for a moment, staring at me. She opened her mouth as if to say something, but then shut it again.

“What is it?” I asked.

“It's nothing,” Mom said. “Nothing important.”

—

“I neeeeed coffeeee!” Calvin wailed dramatically as I buckled my seat belt.

“I haaaaave tiiiiiiiime!” I replied, grinning, as Calvin made a U-turn back toward Beach Street, one of the numerous CoffeeBoy locations on Coconut Key. But then he slowed. “Wait. When's your first class?”

“I'm free until second period,” I replied.

“What happened to science with Wilson?” Calvin asked. Even though we didn't share all the same classes, we still knew each other's schedules by heart.

“Mrs. Wilson is out sick today,” I said without thinking about it.

“Liar,” Calvin said, grinning.

I looked at him and gasped, feigning shock. “Well, I nev-aah!” I exclaimed in a pretend British accent. I raised my hand to my chest dramatically. “Accuse me of lying? Despicable!”

Calvin grinned. “Mrs. Wilson was perfectly fine yesterday. I saw her rocking the pleated pants. What'd you do? Call her this morning and check?”

I realized that he was absolutely right. I had no idea why I thought Mrs. Wilson was sick. But I still knew it was true.

“Come on, lie-aah,” Calvin said, pulling off an equally horrible Brit accent. “Let's get some coffee and scones!”

He parked the car in the closest space, which was just as good as the handicapped spot. Even though it was seven thirty in the morning, the place was dead.

I didn't know a whole lot about the state of the economy, but I didn't need to be a rocket scientist to figure out that things were getting worse. If a usually-bustling coffee shop wasn't ringing in morning customers on a weekday, there was a problem.

I hopped out of the car and waited for Calvin's nifty wheelchair ramp to let him out of the driver's side. “Scones?” I asked. “Do they even sell scones outside of England?”

My mother had once told me that back before CoffeeBoy, a chain of coffee shops right here in the States used to sell scones. But then England had gotten on the corporate government's blacklist and far more American donuts—with red, white, and blue jelly—had come into vogue.

“Crumpets too!” Calvin said delightedly as he closed the driver's side door.

This particular CoffeeBoy was looking pretty bleak. Inside the dingy place were three cheap-looking tables and a scattering of battered plastic chairs. Boxy TVs hung in each corner of the shop, tuned to various news channels. The din of reporters filled the almost empty room.

I absentmindedly tapped on the counter, an orange Formica rectangle stained with large
O
's where people had set down their overflowing paper cups. A girl stood behind the register, looking simultaneously bored and despondent. She popped her gum as Calvin and I scanned the menu. There were no scones. At one time, there had been donuts available, but the word had been crossed off the menu with a bedraggled strip of masking tape.

Apparently there was coffee, or coffee.

“Hey…Amber,” Calvin said, reading her name tag. Beneath her name was a little sticker that said “Ask me about my…” Amber had scrawled the word “schnauzer” in messy letters. “How's your schnauzer?”

“Dead,” Amber said, and snapped a bubble.

“Right,” Calvin replied. “Sorry to hear that. I'm going to have a large coffee, extra cream, lots of sugar.”

“We're out of cream,” Amber with the dead dog replied apathetically.

“Out of cream at a
coffee
shop
?” Calvin asked disbelievingly.

Apparently Amber figured a lack of response would suffice for a yes.

“Okay, awesome!” Calvin said, his voice absurdly cheerful. My best friend was a clown.

“I'm gonna pass,” I told him as I sat down in the least disgusting chair. I let Calvin continue to torture Amber and briefly thought about the homework assignments that I should have been working on, last minute. There was no way I'd be able to concentrate, though, with so much on my mind.

So I stared at one of the TVs and zoned out.

“…police continue to investigate the bizarre disappearance of both Coconut Key resident Edmund Rodriguez and his nine-year-old daughter, Sasha.”

In a heartbeat, I was paying attention. I turned to search for the TV where the news anchor had just said Sasha's name, and found it. An image of Edmund Rodriguez appeared on the screen behind the blond news anchor, followed by a recent school picture of Sasha.

“In a breaking story, local law enforcement officials have identified Mr. Rodriguez's truck, which was found near an abandoned warehouse in nearby Harrisburg, just over the county line.”

“Calvin!” I yelped. “Look!” I pointed at the TV.

“Can you turn that up, please?” Calvin asked Amber, who rolled her eyes and aimed a remote control toward the screen we were watching.

The image changed to a police lieutenant speaking into a miniature microphone atop a wooden podium. His expression was grim. I recognized Detective Hughes standing slightly behind him.

“Lab tests confirm that the blood in the bed of Mr. Rodriguez's truck was, indeed, that of his daughter, Sasha.”

Blood?

Images from my dream three nights ago hit me like a punch to the head. I brought my hand up to my mouth and looked at Calvin. But Calvin didn't look away from the TV. The muscle was jumping in his jaw.

“…found another item, also stained with the victim's blood, which confirms our fears that this crime was of a…sexual nature.”

“No,” I said, and I shook my head as the picture changed back to the news anchor.

“We'll have the latest in sports and weather when we return,” she said brightly as the station went to a commercial break.

Now Calvin was looking down at his hands, but then he turned and gazed at me. “You okay?”

“Am I okay?” I asked, laughing humorlessly, as on the TV children sang a song about toilet paper. “No, I'm so
not
okay! I'm furious!”

“I get that,” Calvin replied quietly.

“I'm furious,” I continued, “because I
know
Mr. Rodriguez didn't hurt Sasha!”

Calvin looked surprised at that. “Um, weren't you paying attention?” he asked. “They've got physical evidence. I'm just seriously glad that sick a-hole didn't hurt
you
.”

“He didn't do it,” I said, shaking my head adamantly. “I know he didn't do it.”

“And how exactly do you know that?” Calvin countered. “Sky, I know you're upset, and I'm really sorry.”

I bit a nail to the quick, frustrated. “Cal, you've got to believe me on this one. Remember when we went to Sasha's the night she went missing?”

Calvin nodded.

“And remember how I thought I saw something in her room?”

“The big, bad, vaguely witchy shadow that had her teddy bear?”

I nodded, ignoring Calvin's slightly mocking tone. “Well, when I was in that room… I don't know. It's like I could smell the fear—and something else too. That nasty sewage smell… I don't know how to explain it, but I felt this…I don't know, pressure. Doom or foreboding. And it definitely didn't have anything to do with Edmund.”

Calvin stared at me. “Girl, are you playing with me?”

“Do I look like I'm playing around?” I asked.

He let out a steady exhalation and sat back in his wheelchair, folding his hands behind his neck. “I think you're losing it,” Cal warned.

“Okay, so then answer me this,” I insisted. “Why is it that the dolls in Sasha's room were all messed up? And why is it that things in my room are being messed with too?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Someone's been putting my stuff in weird spots. Like my cat poster.”

Calvin snorted. “That jacked-up picture of the kitten hanging on a tree branch?”

“Yes!” I exclaimed. “When I fell asleep last night, it was hanging on my wall, and when I got up this morning, not only was it not there, but it had been removed from the frame, rolled up, and stashed in my closet!”

Calvin leaned forward and hummed the
Twilight
Zone
theme. He wiggled his fingers in front of my face. “Whoever did it must be really tall to get into your room through the second-story window with no trees or ladders to climb.”

“All right, fine,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest. “Fine. Don't believe me.”

“Aw, I'm sorry,” he said, throwing his arm over my shoulder. “I know you're upset. I won't joke around anymore.”

The news came back on with a completely different story. And we silently left the shop and got back into Calvin's car.

“I don't know, Sky,” Calvin finally said as he pulled out of the CoffeeBoy parking lot. “Sometimes people just really suck. Plain and simple.”

“I totally agree,” I said, “but I don't think that Mr. Rodriguez is one of those people.”

Calvin put his left blinker on, turning when the light changed from red to green. All of the disbelief was gone from his face, and now he just looked sad.

“I know I'm right, Cal.” I'd just glanced down at my bitten fingernails, so I didn't see exactly what it was that made him hit the brakes so hard that the car came to a sudden, lurching stop.

The sound of our tires squealing was overpowered by the roar of a motorcycle engine. Apparently, we had narrowly missed hitting a bike.

“Damn!” Calvin hissed, and we watched as the motorcycle driver pulled away in a flash of red leather and an opaque helmet. “People need to learn how to drive!”

I watched the motorcycle get smaller and smaller as it moved farther from us, while I struggled to slow my pounding heart.

We were okay. The biker was okay. No one was choking on their own blood, gasping as they struggled to breathe…

And Calvin—who had only the vaguest idea why my mother had that stupid rule about my not being allowed to ride in a car with a driver who was less than thirty years old—had no clue that I was about to pass out from fear.

“All right. I think I've had enough almost-heart-attacks for one day,” Calvin quipped with a laugh.

“Don't joke,” I said sharply, unable to keep myself from glancing nervously at Calvin's chest, because I knew he had the heart health of a seventy-year-old man. “That's not funny.”

He stopped laughing.

“Sky?” he finally said, watching the road as he drove—slowly and carefully this time. “Sometimes people suck. Things suck. A lot of it
really
sucks.” He glanced at me, his eyes so serious I had to look down. “And when that happens, after you've exhausted all your resources, the only thing you have
left
is laughter.” He pulled into the school and slugged his car into Park. “And in this life, I plan to laugh my damn ass off.”

And then it was Friday.

It was a normal enough school day, followed by more fruitless searching for Sasha, made worse by the fact that Calvin now believed what the police believed—that the little girl was dead, murdered by her own father.

I'd had a typically strained dinner with Mom, then escaped to Calvin's to watch a movie—after which we'd set off in search of chocolate to make those stupid s'mores. And we'd ended up taking that ill-fated trip across the tracks to Harrisburg.

To the Sav'A'Buck.

Previously, in Skylar's weirdly messed-up life,
she and her bestie ventured into a grocery store in a super-low-rent part of town, where they were threatened at gunpoint by a large-bosomed female contortionist wearing designer shoes. Facing a hideous and somewhat embarrassing death-by-crazy-lady, they were rescued at the last second by a height-challenged super-girl with a blond pixie cut, a red leather motorcycle jacket, and an industrial-strength death glare.

Yeah.

And as if all that wasn't freakishly weird enough, after disarming and karate-chopping the crazy killer-clown-lady into submissive unconsciousness, Motorcycle Girl somehow knew my name.

“Way to protect Tiny Tim here, Sky,” she'd said.

I looked at Calvin and he looked back at me, equally disturbed—so much so that the Tiny Tim insult didn't penetrate. Or maybe he was still too stunned to speak. I'm pretty sure I was in shock too.

“What were you waiting for?” the girl asked me, genuinely annoyed. “A sign from God? News flash! She's a little too busy with the real important shit to put in an appearance in this craphole.”

She marched over to a stack of red plastic shopping baskets and yanked one off the top so she could…?

Grocery shop. Seriously.

There were quite a few things I wanted to do after nearly getting shot to death in the Sav'A'Buck by a murderous trophy wife from hell. Using the nearest bathroom so as not to add the awfulness of pee-pee pants to my swamp butt was high on my list. But food shopping?

Motorcycle Chick inspected a little box of tuna before throwing it into her basket. And then she stepped over the former Little Miss Sunshine before heading to aisle seven, her biker boots click-clacking on the industrial tile floor.

The rest of the store had completely cleared out by then, the shoppers and the store clerks stampeding through the front doors in a flurried panic. I could see people's headlights through the windows of the store as they peeled out of the parking lot in a hurry.

I still couldn't move. I
had
to be in shock.

Cal placed a shaky hand on my arm. “Dude,” he said, staring down at the security guard and the crazy lady as they lay unconscious in front of us. At least the guard was unconscious. I could see him breathing. But Little Miss Sunshine was not moving at all. “Dude.”

Motorcycle Chick reemerged from aisle seven and headed back toward us. Her basket was already filled to the brim. I spotted at least six huge jars of peanut butter as she walked past us on her way to the deserted registers.

“Hey!” I finally got my feet to move again as I followed her. I also managed to find my voice, but it sounded thin and tiny—as if I were Sasha's age. “How do you know my name?”

The girl looked up at me and said, “Oops,” before taking a wad of cash from one of her many pockets. She threw it onto the register. The tinny music from the overhead speakers echoed through the empty store.

“Hey!” I said again.

She didn't pay attention to me as she swung herself over to the other side of the checkout counter. She picked off a couple of plastic bags and started packing her food. Only then did she say, “I'm in your class at school?” But she said it as a question, as if she knew I wouldn't buy it.

Cal spoke up from behind me. “If you went to our school, we definitely would have noticed you.”

“Caught by the bullshit police,” she said without looking up. “And speaking of police, they're gonna be here soon. The real ones. You should go. Girl like you doesn't want to draw too much attention to herself.”

“A girl like
me
?” I repeated. The heavy incredulity in my tone made me sound a little older now. Maybe twelve or even thirteen.

“Don't play games.” She double-bagged the pile of peanut butter jars and then knotted the bag with deliberate, almost aggressive precision. “I saw what you did with that Taser.”

“I didn't do anything with the Taser. I mean, I tried to tase the crazy lady, yeah. But it didn't work, obviously—”

“I'm talking about your abilities.” The girl looked up at me then as she enunciated the word with four crisp syllables. Her eyes were the color of crystal, heavily rimmed with charcoal-colored liner, and I couldn't look away.

But then what she said sunk in. My
a-bil-i-ties
? The word made me uneasy. “I don't know what you're—” I started.

“Your powers.” She nodded toward the woman on the ground behind me. “Tits McGee over there? She could smell it on you. Destiny addicts sense it sometimes, when they joker. Kinda the way one G-T can recognize another.”

One G-T can
wha
…? I looked at Calvin and he looked back at me, equally lost. Clearly Motorcycle Girl wasn't speaking some kind of Floridian street code that I, a nonnative, couldn't decipher.

“Was that even a sentence?” Cal asked her. “When Destiny addicts
joker
? What does that mean? Can you try again, please, in American English?”

“I'm pretty sure that lady couldn't smell anything over the disgusting fish stank,” I added, and now they both looked at me.

“Fish stank?” the girl repeated, as incredulous as if I'd just announced that I pooped rainbows and diamonds.

“And now
you're
freaking me out,” Calvin said as he pointed to me. “First the weird sewage smell in Sasha's room—”

“You smelled sewage in Sasha's room?” Motorcycle Girl demanded, skewering me again with those odd blue eyes.

But I was the one who got up into her face—so much so that Calvin grabbed on to one of the belt loops of my jean shorts to hold me back. “How do
you
know Sasha?”

She looked away first, and when she met my eyes again, her expression was almost apologetic. Almost.

“I'm sorry for your loss,” she said, and for the two seconds that it took her to say those words, I actually believed her.

But then she took a bite of an apple that she'd left out of her tightly tied bags. Like this was the perfect time and place for a snack. I wasn't sure I was ever going to eat again.

“I know about Sasha because she was all over the news for, you know, her fifteen seconds of fame,” she said with her mouth full. “Hundreds of girls go missing every day, Red. I'm one of the few who cares enough to remember their names. That's how I know Sasha. And Betsy and Clarice and Lacey and DeNika and—”

“Did you take her?” I interrupted her, with all of the rage and grief from the past week making my voice quiver. “Do you have her? Give her back!”

“Oh, Bubble Gum,” the girl said, shaking her head. “I wish it were that easy. And I swear to you, if I knew where she was, I'd tell you. But I don't.” She sharply lifted her head then and said, “Police are on their way.”

Only then did I hear it—sirens. But they were way,
way
in the distance.

“I'd love to stay and chat some more,” she continued as she effortlessly lifted her two bags with one hand, apple still in the other, and started for the door, “but I gotta go. And I'll repeat, FYI, that you and Wheels definitely don't want to be here when the police show up. Not with your powers. That won't go well.”

Again with the powers, and again with that uneasy feeling in my stomach. Still, I laughed as we followed her. “I really don't know what you're talking about—”

With lightning speed, she tossed her apple high into the air, then grabbed a heavy box of soup that was in a display right by the door, next to the ancient, broken Redbox machine, and flung it at Cal's head. I reached out instinctively, grabbing the box in midair, right before it hit him in the face. I mean,
right
before. I could feel the tiny hairs on my arms tickling Calvin's forehead. It was weird, because I was pretty sure I hadn't been standing that close to him before she'd grabbed for the soup.

“What the
Hay-ell
—” Cal started.

“Nuff said,” the girl interrupted him matter-of-factly. She caught her apple before it hit the floor and took another large bite. “Don't worry, Scoot. Skylar's learning. You're not gonna die. At least not today.”

“Are you okay?” I asked Cal even as I found myself thinking about the alarm clock and the cat poster, as the girl's crisp voice again echoed in my head.
A-bil-i-ties
…

Cal, meanwhile, had narrowed his eyes at the girl now walking out the Sav'A'Buck door before looking up at me. “I'm fine,” he replied. “Except my cray-cray limit has maxed out.”

I set the soup down on the floor before following the girl into the parking lot. I had to know more. “Hey! Wait!”

Calvin kept pace with me. “Really?” he was muttering. “We really want more of this?”

The girl had stopped next to a huge motorcycle—the only vehicle left in the lot besides Cal's car—but now she turned to face us. She was still munching away on her apple.

“I don't get you,” I said. “So I caught the soup box. I can catch. I've always been able to catch. Big deal.”

“It
is
a big deal,” the girl said as she stuffed the bags into the small back trunk of her motorcycle, then tossed the apple core across the parking lot. She kicked away the stand and climbed onto the bike. It made her look even more petite, but no less of a badass. “It's a really big deal, Bubble Gum. If you're not careful, they'll come for you next.”

And now it was the memory of that shadowy figure I thought I'd seen in Sasha's room that made me shiver.

Meanwhile, those distant sirens were getting louder.

“Gotta go,” she said.

“Wait!” I yelled as the girl started the bike's engine. I could barely hear my voice over the roar. “Please!”

Motorcycle Girl revved the engine before leaning forward and glaring at me with eyes so intense that, again, I couldn't look away. “Listen to me. I'll be in touch. But right now, get into your car, both of you, and drive away. You need to get the hell out of here.
Now
.”

With that, the girl sped off on her motorcycle, leaving a cloud of dust and a whole crapload of unanswered questions behind.

At the same time, a different question was answered.

I looked down at Cal. He looked up at me and nodded. It was definitely Motorcycle Girl that we'd nearly hit and killed yesterday. Coincidence, or had she been following us?

Neither one of us said a word as we got into Cal's car. We “got the hell out of there” before the police arrived, because I'd had that little talk with Detective Hughes, and Motorcycle Girl was right. It
hadn't
gone well.

“I can't believe you couldn't smell that fish,” I said, finally breaking our silence as we headed back home.

Calvin looked at me, his hands tight on the steering wheel. “Yeah.
That's
what you can't believe. A crazy lady with a gun, pulling out her own teeth, and
Destiny
addicts
sense
your
powers
sometimes
when
they
joker
,” he said in a very decent imitation of the motorcycle girl, “whatever the eff
that
means. Blondie knows both
your
name and Sasha's—and
you're
all about my clogged sinuses.”

I reached for my bag, which I'd left on the floor of his car, and dug for my phone with its Internet access. Maybe we could answer some of these questions with a little help from Google. “Destiny addicts.” I nodded as I powered up my phone. “And joker. And what else did she say?
G
and
T
. Let's see if we can find out what the eff at least
some
of this means.”

—

What had Calvin said? That his cray-cray limit had maxed out?

Well, mine was now pinned. Plus that feeling of uneasiness had moved into my belly. Permanently.

We sat in Cal's car, pulled off to the side of the road and safely back in our neighborhood in Coconut Key, as we both used our phones and the intermittent Internet to attempt to understand what the blond-haired motorcycle girl had told us.

A-bil-i-ties
.

“Destiny,” Calvin read, the screen of his phone almost touching his nose, “is the street name for an illegal drug, quote,
a
chemical
compound
called
oxy-clepta-di-estraphen that has not yet been approved for use by the corporate drug administration
. Lobbyists claim it's safe, although expensive. Says here it was developed to treat people with terminal diseases. Cancer patients with a month to live. One article says
clinical
trials
have
proven
that
it
completely
eradicates
all
traces
of
cancer
in
patients
who've used it
.”

He looked over at me and there was something wistful in his eyes. “It makes users stronger, smarter, faster, literally
younger
. One doctor claims he gave the drug to a fully paralyzed patient, someone who needed a respirator to breathe after breaking her neck, and after a single dose, the woman was out of bed, breathing—and walking—on her own steam.”