Shade Me (3 page)

The man in the background spoke again, and this time it was clear. “Put the phone down.” And then the connection cut off.

I looked at the screen. The numbers were all their standard “correct” colors—two was green, nine was yellow, three was purple—but it wasn't a color order I recognized, and I was really good at recognizing and remembering color patterns. It wasn't Jones's number. I had no idea whose it was.

I held the phone in my free hand, waiting for it to ring again, but it never did. I lit a cigarette, the weirdness of the phone call dulling any real enjoyment I would have gotten
out of it. I eventually flung it to the ground with the other butts, the night air now feeling cold and as if I didn't belong in it.

“Weird new tactic, Jones,” I said softly. Even I didn't believe myself, though. He had a younger sister, one who might have been talked into giving the old ex a call, but subtlety wasn't exactly Jones's strength. He would've called back. He would have capitalized on such a chilling mystery by offering to come over and hold me until I calmed down or some other soppy bullshit like that. Jones was pathetic, but he wasn't this pathetic.

Who had it been, then? She'd said my name. It was hard to pretend it had just been a wrong number when the person said your name.

I pulled myself back into my room and tried to concentrate on chem, ignoring the rainbow of letters and numbers as they swirled around the page, wishing for a memory miracle. The doctor once told me he read about a patient who could remember every meal he'd eaten for the past nine years. I could totally believe it. I remembered strange, random things that normal people wouldn't, the colors associated with a date or an address or God-knew-what sticking tight to my brain, and I was great at memorizing things like phone numbers. Yet I couldn't seem to remember the other name for
antimony
to save my life, or whether magnesium or gallium was liquid at room temperature. Synesthesia was
funny that way—always either a distraction or a tool, and only it could decide which it wanted to be at any given time, it seemed.

I accidentally pushed too hard with my pencil and broke the lead. Growling, I tossed it onto the desk. God, I hated homework.

I went downstairs and found Dad in the living room, cleaning out his camera bag. He glanced up.

“Done with homework already?”

I flopped onto the couch and propped my feet on the coffee table. “Sure, why not?” I said. “Pointless anyway.”

“Ah, must be working on chem,” he said, vigorously wiping off a lens with a cloth.

“What else?” I said. “Just distracted, I guess.” I sat up. “Hey, the house phone hasn't rung or anything, has it?”

His brow furrowed. “No. Why?”

“No reason,” I said. “I thought I heard it is all.” I definitely hadn't heard it, but figured it was worth a shot. “I got a weird call on my cell.”

He put down the lens and picked up another. “Weird? How so?”

“Someone said my name. I'm sure it was just a prank,” I said.

“They still make prank calls these days?”

Come to think of it, not really. In fact, I had never gotten one before in my life. Caller ID made prank calling too
difficult. Or maybe people just didn't get that bored anymore. But that only served to make the phone call even weirder. “I guess so,” I said.

“Well, no wonder you're distracted,” Dad said. “Want to help?”

“Sure.” I scooted down onto the floor next to him and began pulling camera supplies out of his bag, sorting and cleaning them, the whole time Dad grilling me about my grades and how I was going to make sure I would graduate. A topic that he never stopped talking about, and one that always wore me out.

When we finished, I checked the clock. It had been an hour. If ever there was a time for a smoke break, it was now. I headed back upstairs, shut my computer, and started for my cigarettes, but was interrupted by the buzz of my phone again.

I grabbed the phone and fumbled it, catching it at the last minute between my arm and stomach. It was the same number as before—I still didn't recognize it, but whoever it was, they were way desperate, a realization that made orange start creeping over the numbers, blotting out their correct colors. I recovered the phone, gripped it tightly, and hit the answer button, half expecting to feel the heat of that orange against my cheek.

“Hello?”

“Uh, yes, is this Nikki?” a woman's voice on the other
end said, and then went on before I could even answer. “I'm trying to reach Nikki. It's an emergency.” Definitely not the same childlike voice that had called earlier.

“This is Nikki,” I said. “Can I help y—”

“You must come quickly,” the voice said. “She's in terrible shape, barely hanging on.”

“What? Come where? Who is this?”

The woman on the other end took a frustrated breath. “This is Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center calling,” she said. “You need to come right away. She might not make it through the night.”

“Who?” I asked. There was no “she” in my life. The only real “she” who had ever been in my life was my mother, and she had died long ago. “She who?”

“We were hoping you could tell us,” the voice said. “We've brought a girl in. An anonymous caller found her, but he was gone before the ambulance got there. You're the only contact number in her phone. She has no ID, no nothing.”

I paused, pulled the phone away from my ear, and studied the numbers again. “I don't . . .”
I don't have any friends,
I wanted to finish, but that sounded too pathetic to divulge, even to a stranger. I didn't have any. Not real friends. Not in this fucked-up town full of plastic dolls and expensive wannabe whores. I had my stock of social media “friends,” and my sparring “friends” at the
dojang
, and maybe even some of
Jones's idiot bro-gang “friends,” but anyone I'd actually hang out with? Anyone who would have me, and only me, in their phone contacts list? Never. “I think this is a mistake.”

“Would you be willing to at least come and see if you can identify the girl? We really need to get ahold of the family.”

“It's that bad? She's, like, not conscious?”

“Yes,” the nurse answered. “And I can't stress enough that you need to hurry. Please, Miss . . .”

“Kill,” I supplied for her. “I'm Nikki Kill.”

She cleared her throat, the way so many people do when they hear my last name. “Please, Miss Kill. She may not have much time.”

“And this isn't a prank.”

“Absolutely not. This is the hospital calling. I've—”

“Because if it is, and you're just messing with me, you are some kind of sick jerk,” I interrupted.

There was a pause, and then the nurse's voice came back, sounding very serious. “I can assure you, what has happened to this young lady is no joking matter. You'll see when you get here. If you're going to come, you should do so soon.”

I stared out the window, considering my options. “Okay, I'll be there,” I said reluctantly.

This was too weird. It couldn't be a mistake—the nurse knew my name—but it sure as shit could be a joke. I mostly flew under the radar at school, but maybe Jones had finally
gotten angry about the breakup and had turned some of his bro-gang and bro-gang sympathizers against me. Was Jones capable of that? I didn't think so. Jones was much more the follow-you-around-begging type.

Out of habit, I pulled out another cigarette, but just as I held the lighter up to it, I froze. I couldn't ignore what I knew. The orange. Something in the caller's voice had made me feel orange. My cynical side told me this was a setup. But the orange in my head told me this was a true emergency.

And I was just curious enough to find out what kind of emergency we were talking about.

I
T WAS AFTER
midnight, but the TV was still droning downstairs, so I knew Dad hadn't gone to bed yet. I would have to sneak out. Not that I was too worried about it. I'd been an expert at sneaking out of my house since middle school. It wasn't too hard to sneak out on a guy who pretty much didn't notice what I did on a daily basis anyway.

I crept down the stairs as softly as I could, prepared to make up something if he should catch me and grill me about where I was going on a school night.

I have to borrow chem notes from a friend,
I practiced in my head.
I left something in my car. No big deal. I'll be right back.
Or how about this one:
Dude, I'm eighteen, I can leave whenever I want.

No, that would probably just open up some sort of “conversation” that I definitely didn't want to get dragged into. When Dad wanted to “have a one-on-one conversation,” things got pretty agonizing pretty fast. Also, I didn't like to hide things from him. Dad was mostly a cool guy who'd been dealt a really raw deal in this life. And we had a pretty easy system going. He didn't mess around in my business, and I didn't give him reason to want to.

I reached the bottom of the stairs and peered around the corner into the living room. Dad's leather recliner was empty. I could see light spilling from his study onto the wood hallway floor, could hear his fingers tapping on the computer inside the study. I grabbed my jacket and slipped through the front door, turning the doorknob so it wouldn't click behind me. He'd have no idea I'd ever left.

I got into my car, put it in neutral, and coasted down the hill before starting it, then took off toward the hospital.

Driving had always been a challenge for me. If there was ever a time I was surrounded by letters and numbers, it was while driving. I'd learned to ignore most of it but still got distracted by the occasional house number or name on a mailbox. But tonight I had no time for distraction. And even if I did, I was already preoccupied enough by thoughts of what I would find at the hospital. Would the mystery girl already be dead?

I sped through the night, talking to myself. “Okay, Nikki,
this is weird. But you've done weird before, right? Your life's default setting is weird, so you've got this.” What was I talking about—this was weirder than weird. The woman on the phone hadn't even told me what had happened to this so-called dying patient. Was it a car crash? An accident at home? Was she mangled, missing body parts, burned, bloody?
She might not live through the night
—that definitely sounded bloody. Dear God, could I even do bloody? I remembered bloody. Bloody was terrifying. Bloody was life-altering.

My phone buzzed, and thinking it might be the hospital again, I quickly hit the Bluetooth button on my steering wheel.

“Yeah?”

“Hey, Nik.” Jones. Cripes.

“Listen, Jones, now's not a great time.”

“I just want to talk,” he said.

I let out a deep, calming breath. It didn't work. I was still irritated. “We've talked. And talked and talked. There really isn't anything else to say.”

“You in the car?” He sounded like he'd been drinking. A little aggressive, a little slurred. “Shit, Nikki, are you on a date? The body's not even cold yet and you're already with somebody else? What the fuck?”

A shiver went down my spine.
The body's not even cold yet.
I hoped that wasn't a harbinger of what I would find at the hospital.

I bit down on my annoyance. Part of me wanted to tell him,
Yes, we're on a date. We plan to park in your driveway and screw our brains out to that stupid
Say Anything
song you were always making me listen to, and then we're going to fall in love and get married and have tons of babies and maybe we'll name one Jones just so you can be even more pathetic than you already are. Will that make you stop calling me?

“Relax, I'm not on a date,” I said instead.

“You're in the car. I can hear it.”

I sighed, flipped on my turn signal. I could see the hospital in the distance. “Yes, I'm in the car, but I'm alone. Can't we do this later? At school tomorrow?”
When I can see you coming and run away from you?

There was a noise, almost like choking, which turned into a drunken sob, and I nearly groaned out loud. “I thought you loved me, Nik. What happened?”

“I don't have time to talk about this right now, Jones. Go home and sober up. And I never told you I loved you.”

“But I love you.”

“I know. You've told me. And I've got to go.”

Before he could respond, I hit the end call button on my steering wheel. If the phone rang again—and it probably would, if Jones was being true to form—I would just ignore it, no matter who might be on the other end.

Soon I was turning into UCLA Medical, scanning for a parking space in front of the emergency room.

The lobby was mostly empty, except for a couple sitting in a corner, the woman holding her head in her hands, the man rubbing a wet washcloth on the back of her neck. ERs always made me think of neon green—pain. I held my breath while I walked by just in case it was contagious pain.

“May I help you?” a nurse at the front desk asked.

I let out the breath I'd been holding. “I'm looking for someone,” I said. “I'm not sure who. They called me. I'm Nikki Kill.”

“Nikki Kill,” the nurse repeated, typing into her computer. Her eyes went wide. “Oh, yes. You're here for the one who came in on the ambulance. She's in Bay Nineteen. Go through those doors and take a left.”

Suddenly nervous, I wiped my palms on my jeans and followed where she was pointing to a set of double doors. I pushed a button on the wall, and they swung open slowly. I went through and turned left and walked past bays filled with moaning patients and beeping equipment until I found Bay 19. The curtain was pulled closed around the bed, and I could hear the hum and tweet of machines, but no voices within.

I quickly scanned the area for a nurse or doctor who could maybe give me some answers, but none were around. I turned back to the curtain.

“Hello?” I called out softly. “Is anyone in there?”

There was no response. I pulled back the curtain and stepped into the bay.

Immediately, my breathing went ragged, and the room began to swoop and swim.

The girl's face was swollen, puffy, distorted, nearly unrecognizable. Her hair was caked with blood and lying stiffly across the pillow underneath her. Bandages, soaked through, were wrapped around her head, her neck, her upper arm. And the machines. There were so many machines—wires and tubes snaking out of her, the color of the numbers on their readouts so strong it was practically blinding me. The blood pressure monitor, the oxygen reader, the pulse monitor. Forget their correct colors—all of them were shaded a deep crimson. I felt surrounded by it. I checked my own shaking hands and saw that they, too, were crimson, reflecting the lighted numbers from the machines. I knew this color.

Instantly, I was eight. I was coming home from my friend Wendy's house. I'd had dinner with her family, and it was late evening when her dad dropped me off in my driveway. I was carrying a sack filled with Tootsie Rolls and singing the song that had just been on the car radio, totally relaxed, totally happy.

So relaxed and happy, in fact, I didn't even notice that the front door was wide-open, the house completely dark and silent. Didn't notice, until I felt my shoe slide on the tile and looked down to see my mother's outstretched arm, lying in the same pool of blood I was standing in. The numbers on her watch were covered, too, making them deep crimson.
Mom's hand twitched, the crimson pulsing at me. My hands relaxed, the Tootsie Rolls splashing in the blood. I looked at her face. Her eyes rolled to meet mine.

“Nikki . . . go . . . ,” she wheezed.

But I couldn't go. I could only stand there, feet frozen in her blood, and stare at her watch as its pulsing crimson numbers followed my mom's heartbeat. They skipped fast while she turned her head to look directly at the ceiling, then slowed as her eyes closed. I watched in horror as time stretched between the beating of the numbers. The pulses got more uneven, and then shone a steady, thick crimson. I knew then that she was going to die.

Crimson meant death.

If the color in my head was right, if my intuition was spot-on, the girl in Bay 19 was going to die. And seeing her there like that—seeing all that crimson—practically knocked me down. Her face bent and swirled into my mother's face, her blood my mom's blood, the lifeless hand lying across her stomach my mom's hand reaching for help on the tile floor. I blinked, trying to steady myself, trying to clear my mom out of my eyes. I wanted to vomit, to pass out, to run—all the things I didn't, and couldn't, do when I found my mother.

“Oh, God,” I rasped, as my breathing got faster. It felt like my heart was going to squeeze my chest dry. I pressed my fingers against my eyes and tried to push away the woozy feeling. But it wasn't working, so I backed out of the bay,
accidentally knocking into the wall that separated Bay 19 from Bay 20. My cell phone fell out of my jacket pocket and slid across the tile floor, coming to a stop under her bed. I didn't go after it. I just needed to get out of all that crimson for a minute.

I took two steps back, three, four, half doubled over. I felt myself bump into something from behind again. Scattered, I whirled to find myself face-to-face with a cop.

“Jesus!” I breathed.

“Whoa,” he said, holding his hands out toward me. “Got to watch where you're walking in here.” His forehead creased into concern. “You okay?” He took my elbow and led me toward a wheeled office chair at a computer station. “Here, sit down. You look faint.”

I followed his guiding hand and eased into the chair. I took three deep breaths and willed my heart to slow, willed the images of my mother's lifeless body out of my mind.

“Stay here, I'll be right back.” The cop stepped away, during which time I closed my eyes and focused my breathing, trying to get back in command of the situation. I hated being out of control. I hated going back to that place with my mother. Back to the worst day of my life.

Why was I even here? I wasn't meant to be here. Not for
this
girl. Despite her bloodied and puffy face, and despite the little side trip down memory lane, I'd still recognized the girl in the bed, and it only deepened the mystery of why in
the hell they'd summoned me.

She was Peyton Hollis, lovely, doe-eyed daughter of noted film producer Bill Hollis. As if his power and money didn't make him sexy enough, Bill Hollis was known for having trotted out Peyton and her brother for the tabloids and entertainment shows, holding their tiny hands in his big, important ones, dolloping ketchup on their fries at the Malibu Country Mart, petting bunnies with them at Studio City Farmers Market. Most people, including me, couldn't pick Peyton's mom out of a crowd of two, but anyone who'd ever read a magazine in a dentist's office would recognize the salt-and-pepper-haired movie executive and the beautiful children he doted on.

Admittedly, I hadn't seen Peyton in the press for a long time. And she definitely wasn't a child anymore. In recent months, she'd gone from sweet little rich girl to punk rocker with a trust fund. She wasn't Hallmark-card cute anymore, but she also wasn't rehab-scandalous. Translation: too boring for the gossip pages. She was still queen of our high school, though—popular, head of Drama Club and Choral Group, but she was also popular for other things now, too, like hosting epic parties at her house—a place all of us knew as Hollis Mansion. Most notably, she was lead singer for Viral Fanfare, an underground garage band that played at pretty much every A-list party in Brentwood. Not that I was an A-list partyer by any stretch. But when Peyton Hollis was
involved, everyone in the free world had to know all about it. Including no-listers like me.

I knew who she was, but I didn't
know
Peyton. We weren't friends. We weren't even in the same stratosphere—the weirdo flunk-out and the ruler of all that is high school. Yet my number was the only number in her cell phone? It didn't make sense.

I didn't need this shit. Not right now. Not with Jones hassling me and with trying not to fail my senior year. Not when I'd finally gotten to a place where I didn't think about my mother's murder every day.

I should've told the nurse who called me that this wasn't my problem, that my phone number being in that phone was a mistake. I should have stayed on my window ledge, where I was happy with my crisp air and cigarettes. Peyton Hollis had so many friends. So many other people to be there for her. People who would fall all over themselves to keep vigil in that pulsing crimson room. What was I supposed to do here, anyway? I couldn't stop someone from dying. It's not like Peyton would help me if I were dying. She was royalty and I was no one.

I opened my eyes and started to get up.
Fuck it, I'm out,
I said to myself.
Let the Hollis family deal with their own problems.

But before I could make a move, the cop reappeared,
holding a Styrofoam cup in my face. “Here,” he said. “I brought you some water.”

“I'm fine. Just leaving, actually. I'm not the one who should be here.” But he didn't budge, and I couldn't get up with him blocking me. “Excuse me?” I said pointedly.

“Just have a drink first,” he coaxed. “You looked like you were about to pass out over there. I don't feel good about you getting behind the wheel of a car just yet.”

Impatiently, I grabbed the cup and sipped from it as I studied his police badge. Detective Chris Martinez. Kind of cute. Definitely young, maybe early twenties. Close-cropped black hair, muscles, stubble. Something behind his eyes looked wounded, or maybe just jaded, not that I could fault him for it. I was the most wounded and jaded person I knew. Hell, I was so wounded and jaded I was about to bail on a battered girl. But there was something about the erect way he stood—important and eager—that made me think of sparkling gold. His badge numbers came across as bright yellow. If my instincts were right, he believed in the whole serve-and-protect thing, heavy on the
protect
. Too bad I didn't need his help, because this was not my problem. Peyton needed his help. I needed a cigarette and some distance. Let Detective Martinez handle the Peyton situation.