Strike (42 page)

After some more tears and hugs, she looks exhausted, like the crying cost her. I urge her upstairs to rest. She'll get chemo soon, but I've got to keep her functional until then.

I scan the restaurants around the hotel and text Wyatt.

Patsy:
Sushi buffet. 7?

Wyatt:
Sounds good.

Patsy:
Tell all the kids.

Wyatt:
Cool.

Then, as I step into the elevator, my phone buzzes again.

Wyatt:
We're going to get her back, Patsy. I promise.

Patsy:
Don't promise me things. Except sushi.

Our hotel room is soft and brightly lit, the puffy white comforters defiled by our purchases. Gabriela is in the bathroom, the sound of her clippers buzzing through the closed door. I'm next, and I'm not excited. I don't really trust a junior dog groomer to give me a good haircut, but how bad can it be? I cut my own hair, after all, and my grown-out bangs and ragged, asymmetrical bob aren't going to be hard to improve on. She told me to wait with the bleach until after she was done, and I'm not looking forward to that, either.

Bea is in the uncomfortably square chair by the window, reading a paperback romance with a half-naked cowboy on the cover and
drinking a green smoothie with a dancing head of lettuce on the front. She's not smiling, and I wonder if she's getting anything out of the crappy-looking book, but I'm not about to ask. Our conversation earlier was unsettling. I long for my knitting, but I know my stitches would be tight as hell right now. Maybe I'll find something good to spray-paint on my way to the mall later. It's the only way I have to scratch this itch.

The bathroom door opens, and Gabriela steps out, shouting, “Ta-da!”

Her hair is cropped close to her head, revealing beautiful, fierce lines and making her cheekbones pop.

“You look fantastic,” I say.

“Thanks. It'll do. Catch!” She throws something at me, and I dodge and fall off the edge of the bed. When I pick it up, it's a big ball of her purple Afro, fluffy and light as a puff of cotton candy.

“Your turn.” She holds out a hand to the open bathroom door, and I step inside.

“What do you want?” she asks.

I start to shrug, then lift my chin. “Short. Whatever you think best. Just make me look like someone else.”

She has me take off my hoodie before she wraps a crunchy hotel towel around my shoulders. I've never had my hair professionally cut, so it's not like I know what I'm missing. When she turns on the clippers and does the first swipe, I want to cry. She must notice.

“Turn around,” she says, confident and tough, two things I don't currently feel.

I turn my back to the mirror and close my eyes as strip after strip of thick black hair falls to the ground. The buzz of the clippers grates on my nerves and tickles my neck, and it seems to go on forever before she turns it off, snips me with scissors for an eternity, takes my shoulders, and turns me around.

When I open my eyes, I have a rough pixie cut. And I feel twenty pounds lighter. Before I can really enjoy it, though, she's pulling packets out of the box of bleach I bought and mixing up a white paste that burns my nose. Soon I'm spackled in grit, my scalp burning.

“How long?” I ask.

The set of her mouth is grim. “As long as it takes.”

While we wait, she calls Bea in.

“What do you want?” Gabriela asks.

“I don't care. Hair is just another disguise,” Bea says placidly.

Gabriela reaches for the girl's long, white-blond hair, her hand hovering in the air. “May I?” she asks carefully.

She doesn't actually touch it until Bea says, “Yes.”

“Did you buy any hair dye?” Bea nods, leaves the room, and comes back with the most boring brown I've ever seen. “This and a long bob, and no one will ever notice you.”

Bea smiles, a real smile. Almost. “Good.”

A few hours later, and we emerge. Bea is mousy and invisible. I have red hair in a pixie cut, and bubblegum-pink lips. I can't stop smiling. Not because I feel pretty or hope Wyatt will like it. Because I look nothing like myself, which means I might get to shoot Leon Crane before he even notices me. But I don't tell anyone that. It's my own little secret.

And then we wait. We take turns showering, steaming up the bathroom and trying not to get our freshly dyed hair on the towels. Gabriela and I do our makeup, aiming to look as normal and boring as possible. Bea reads her book, looking even less like a human and more like a robot. I'm pretty sure she bought her striped leggings and flowered shirt in the little girls' section. For a sixteen-year-old, she's tiny. But what do you expect if you only eat green foods? She's by far the strangest person I've ever met.

Time drags slowly. I sweep everything off one of the beds and lie down, but you can only stare at a white ceiling for so long before you start to go insane. Gabriela's charging her iPod, and my phone is plugged in, and when it buzzes, I just about leap across the room.
We have to conserve our phone use, since we don't know how much data or time is on them.

It's Wyatt's number.
Meet me ten minutes early?

I answer,
On my way.

I stop for one last mirror check, and it doesn't even register as me. I'm in leggings and a flowy gray tunic, mostly as an ironic nod to all the YA dystopias I used to read, in which everyone wore gray tunics all the time for no good reason. Maybe I should kiss Chance and start a love triangle, too. I think the bleach is messing with my mind. On the way out, I grab my new flowered denim backpack.

“Lobby in ten,” I remind my cellmates.

And then I'm hurrying to the elevators and toward Wyatt. His back is to me when I step off in the lobby—he's reading the breakfast menu, not that we'll be here to try it. When he turns around, we just stare at each other, mouths agape.

“Holy shit,” he says. “You make a cute redhead.”

“You look like a lumberjack,” I say. He's got that hipster haircut, with the sides shaved and the top long and messy. With his stubble growing out and the plaid shirt he's wearing, I worry that he's going to be too eye-catching for what we've got to do tonight. Because I would notice him, wherever he was.

The gawking gets so awkward that I just go in for a hug so we can stop standing here, staring like two idiots in a rom com.

I pull away and rock back on my heels. “So . . . what's up?”

He looks sheepish, like the old Wyatt. “Uh, I just needed to see you. The wait's been killing me. We all went and got haircuts, and then it was like the clock stopped moving. Chance is asleep, and Rex is watching some movie with a ton of explosions, and if tonight goes crazytown, I wanted some time alone with you first. Even if you're still a little mad at me.”

He holds out his hand, and I lace my fingers through his. We walk out the front door and follow the sidewalk around as I struggle for the right words. “I'm not mad at you. I'm just mad. Like, at everything. In general.”

“Me too.”

“Now that we have a plan, I'm a little better. At least we're doing something.”

“We're going to get her back, Patsy.”

“I know. But keep telling me that.”

He sits on a bench and pulls me into his lap, wrapping his arms around me.

“Your hair smells weird,” he murmurs into my ear.

“There isn't a normal anymore,” I say. “Will you just hold me?”

“For as long as I can.”

We kiss wildly, madly, passionately, desperately, as if trying to devour each other. And then we just sit like that, plastered together, not talking, looking like strangers, forgetting the world, until our friends come down for dinner.

It feels a lot like the Last Supper, but with Styrofoam cups of soda instead of wine. The six of us sit around the sticky wood table at the sushi buffet, alternately stuffing our faces and staring down at the planks of fish and rolls of bright orange eggs as if realizing that eating is pretty dumb if you're just going to explode in a couple of hours. Because isn't that the crux of it? Whether we fail or succeed, if we're not out of that building on time, we'll be burnt crispier than a salmon-skin roll.

We don't talk much, because what's the point? We can talk tomorrow—whoever is left to talk. There's another table of kids nearby, and they're all seniors talking about the colleges they've applied to for next year and early acceptance and frats and which bars serve warm beer without checking IDs, and I want to jab all their eyes out with my chopsticks. College just means more debt, which means Valor wins. Again. Do they seriously not know what's going on?

“You guys want to-go cups?” Chance asks, and everyone shrugs noncommittally. “Coke Zero?” he asks Gabriela, and she just shrugs again, her eyes far away.

When Chance goes to the hostess to charm her into more drinks, Gabriela stares at his back like she's trying to change his mind telepathically. He shaved his head, and he doesn't even look like the same guy. He looks haunted, like a war refugee. Maybe she's right about his death wish.

The waitress brings our check and another round of sodas, and I slide my Happy Birthday gift card over, because who cares which of us pays with stolen Valor money? Everyone but me and Chance heads for the bathroom, and as soon as Gabriela's out of view, he pops the top off her to-go cup.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“I'm putting roofies in her drink,” he says, like it's the most normal thing ever.

“You know I'm not okay with that. I'm going to tell her.”

He shakes his head, and I can see the cracks in his cool-guy facade as he stirs her drink with his chopstick. “Look, I don't want her to go into the mall today. I might be dumb and invincible, and I might deserve to die for all the bad shit I've done, but she's too good for this kind of thing. She couldn't pull the trigger, even if she had a gun. So she's going to be asleep in the hotel while it goes down.” He puts the top back on and meets my eyes, fierce and angry. “And you're not going to tell her because you know I'm right.”

“Do you have any more?” I ask.

“A whole Baggie full.”

I lean over and check the route to the restroom.

“Put some in Rex's drink too.”

“What about Wyatt and Bea?”

“Wyatt needs to do this, or he'll feel guilty forever.” It's selfish as hell, but I don't care. I need him there.

“And Bea?” He holds a tiny pill over her drink, waiting.

“Bea can handle the risk.”

And the world might be better off without her
, I think but don't say.

The pills go into Rex's drink, and Chance recaps it, right as the bathroom door opens.

“I would be really pissed at you for selling roofies,” I mutter, “but right now we need roofies.”

“I don't sell them,” he whispers back. “I found them on the kitchen table of one of my marks and figured they'd be safer with me than with whoever broke into his house after I left. But you're welcome.”

A guy who thinks like that doesn't deserve to die, but I don't know how to tell him that.

Gabriela picks up her drink and takes a deep sip, and I smile at her.

Chance is right. It's better this way.