The Butterfly Clues (3 page)

“He may be a pothead, but he’s totally reliable. They had major full-on sex. Rachel told me
details
.”

“Seriously? Like what?”

I put my head in my hands and groan. Ordinarily, overhearing Keri Ram and Laura Peters’ whispered gossip might pique my curiosity—a window of insight, cracked open just slightly, to a world of friends and hook-ups that I know nothing about—but, today, it’s painful. Unbearable. The whole school day’s been this way. Every scrape of a metal chair against the linoleum floors reminds me of that gunshot last night. I’m full of jitters—empty, racing nerves.

I steal the pencil we were given to do more pointless practice SAT exercises, just to feel some kind of relief. I grip it in my good hand throughout class, throughout the rest of the day, hoping for calm. It doesn’t help much.

Everything seems even more surreal than it usually does, in every school (besides Carver High) I’ve ever been to (twelve), in any town I’ve ever lived in (eleven). Each class designed to prepare us for tests that indicate nothing but how well you memorize useless, pointless facts. Each day a new chance to remember how small you are, how meaningless, how little you matter to most people. Every school a fresh reminder: no one wants to get to know the new kid, especially if the new kid is a weirdo who spends every second of every day trying not to seem like a total spaz in front of her teachers and classmates. Every suppressed sequence of hand-raising, every muted
tap tap tap, banana
is my painful effort to seem normal. And still, it never works.

After last period, I head to my locker—locker ninety-nine, a locker too perfect to leave, despite the fact that it’s broken and has never actually
locked
—and shove my AP US history and calculus books inside, on top of a pile of nubby sweaters and scraps of paper. Then I notice a pencil—taped to the inside of the locker door and a note beneath it that reads:

So you won’t have to steal one next time —Jeremy.

P.S. Need a study partner?

His cell number’s written at the bottom of the note in black ink.

It must be from Jeremy Theroux, the boy in my SAT prep class. He wears the same faded green Neil Young T-shirt and gray skinny jeans almost every day. I don’t know much about Jeremy Theroux; only that he is on the track team but seems to hangout more with the band geeks than the jocks. His hair is crazy, wildfire red.

I look around the hallway. Everyone is busy loading and unloading their bags, grabbing their homework, making plans. I didn’t realize he had seen me swipe the pencil. I didn’t think anyone really saw
anything
I did, barring incidents of incredible embarrassment, like the time I put my shirt on inside-out after gym and walked around with deodorant streaks on my boobs for the rest of the day.

I keep the pencil taped to the locker but peel the note carefully off from beneath it, folding it six times, until it’s very small, before sticking it in my pocket. I feel for it every few seconds on my way out of school, pushing through the septic green hallways, dodging a small circle of varsity soccer players. Kevin DiGiulio is pulling off his sweatshirt at his locker; while he wrangles it up over his head, I catch a glimpse of his bare torso as I pass. He’s got a dark little patch of hair in the middle of his chest and a thin line of it that snakes below his belly button and into his jeans.

I wonder for a second if Jeremy has chest hair; but then an image of it—a patch, thick and ropey and fire-red, like an external heart—gives me a queasy feeling, and I try to think of a peaceful ocean instead. That’s what Mrs. Freed, the guidance counselor, told me to do when I’m feeling overwhelmed in the middle of class or a test, though it sometimes makes things even worse because I’ll start to picture terrible things bobbing between the waves, like Oren’s body, or just his disembodied head.

Finally, I
tap tap tap, banana
, push through the heavy dark blue exit doors of George Washington Carver High, and gulp in the frozen air. It stings my lungs, but I like it—the thousand tiny, precise needles entering all at once. On my walk home, I feel several more times for the tiny square of Jeremy’s note with my fingers, to make sure it hasn’t fallen out.

Here’s the thing: I don’t choose to take things. I have to. I’ve always had to do certain things, since the day I turned seven and began to insist that I wanted to stay six. I didn’t know why, but seven felt off, somehow, made me feel like the world was tilting too much to one side. It wasn’t so bad at first. Just little things—like the way food looked on my plate, or needing to eat peas before chicken, or needing to put the left shoe on before the right. I started taking little things—a toothbrush or a candy bar from the grocery store, discarded ticket stubs from the movie theater, stickers from the kids at school.

But since Oren disappeared it has gotten worse. A lot worse. Now, when the
urge
comes on, it’s like this superhuman force that grips my body and won’t let go until I have the thing I’ve spotted, the thing I need. And it’s not the taking or the stealing that I crave, it’s the having and the keeping. Forever. With me. Safe.

I figure when you’ve moved around from town to ugly town your whole life it’s only natural to crave beautiful things. When we move, it’s always somewhere cracked at the center, somewhere with enough depression and failure for my dad to fix and profit from. In the city consulting business, he says, it’s the forgotten cities that need him most: Detroit, Baltimore, Cleveland, whereugly-ever, USA.

When we moved to Cleveland, it was only supposed to be for six months, a year tops. But we’ve been here three years now, and I need my treasures more than I ever have before, just to wake up in the morning. I need to know that beauty exists, to possess it, to surround myself with it, to be encircled by its warmth.

I need it just to breathe, sometimes. Definitely to get through a whole dragging, lonely day of high school.

Mom is standing in her bedroom doorway when I get home, barefoot on the beige-carpeted stairs. Her almost-black hair, like mine, hangs limp around her pale face, strands of gray I hadn’t noticed before standing out, silver and wild. The large, framed painting on the wall beside her door—ocean, big red sky, inch of dusty shore—reflects muted colors against the pale of her face; the rest of the hallway stretches on, blank, slightly scuffed, to Oren’s room. She’s wearing blue velour sweatpants, so big on her now-gaunt frame that they fall from her hip bones, and a faded pink tank top with coffee stains skid-marked down its front. Her eyes are half shut, as usual, like she’s just sleepwalking. Delivering her a glass of water a few weeks ago, I saw her nightstand drawer open, full of half-empty bottles of pills: Anafranil, Elavil, Paxil, Zoloft, Lunesta, Ambien. I wonder if she even distinguishes between them anymore, or just dumps them all into her palm at once, eating them like popcorn.

“Mom,” I say, touching my lips to her cold cheek, “you’re up. That’s good.” She smells like coffee and medicine and, underneath that, something else. Something familiar and Mom-like—her old lavender soap-smell, maybe—but faint, stale.

“Did you hear about the girl who was killed?” she asks me abruptly. Her lips twitch slightly. “Last night. House on Lourraine Street. East side of the city. She was shot, Lo.” Mom leans against the wall. Her eyes are overcast, a wintery mix, freezing; before Oren disappeared they were sunny, clear skies, seventy-five degrees. “Someone just came right in, put a gun to the girl’s head.” She clicks her tongue, continues in her razor-edged monotone: “All the reporters are saying the crime rate’s at a twenty-year high. Drugs they think. Bad things. They say it’s getting worse over there.”

Lourraine Street—that’s where I was yesterday. My heart begins to race; I imagine Mom can hear it thumping away beneath my T-shirt. I zip my gray hoodie up to my chin, just in case, and stuff my cut hand into my pocket, tap against my leg. Nine, nine, six.

“You know the area, Lo?” she presses. “They call it Neverland. The city of lost children. Lots of kids hanging out in abandoned buildings like a bunch of burn-outs.” She takes my chin in her hands, eyes blazing. “You don’t go there, do you, Penelope? With your friends from school? Do you?” Her breath smells like cigarettes. She started smoking them again a few months ago, out of the window in her room.

I pull away from her. She looks very, very old.

“Mom,” I say softly, my throat burning, “I don’t go to Neverland, okay? I’ve never even heard of it before.”

“Well, good. That’s all I wanted to know.” And then, just like that, she goes blank again; she retreats into her room and shuts the door.

I have to fight myself from calling out:
By the way, Mom, I’d actually have to
have
friends to be able to go anywhere with them.
She doesn’t know anything about my life—that the loneliness is a constant, that I’ve learned how to deal with it in my own way, that I’ve learned to live without her.

I’ve learned to live without anyone.

It doesn’t take long to find the article about the murdered girl online.

There is a row of pictures spearing the center of the article: Lourraine Street. The weird yellow house with the daisies. The murdered girl’s house.

My breath catches in my throat; my whole body goes cold. The noise I heard—the bangs—the bullet. I was right there. Fifteen feet away. Less maybe. I was there when a girl was shot; the shot that ended her life, the shot that almost ended my life, too.

I swallow hard.

Jesus. I was
steps
away from a killer. I can’t stop replaying the events in my head—the bangs. The piece of metal wedged in the wall in front of me, glinting under the streetlamps. I could have done something. I could have helped. But I didn’t.

The girl’s name was Sapphire. Just Sapphire; that’s all anyone knew. Nineteen years old and a stripper. She danced at a club in Neverland called Tens. In every picture she wears thick gray eye shadow and too much blush. She has angry eyes, and her lips are a bruised blue-purple color—a lipstick that somehow looks completely right on her. She looks way older than nineteen—all that makeup, I guess.

The journalist describes the murder in detail. She was assaulted, raped, and then shot: carpet soaked in blood, skull cleft, naked limbs twisted, rearranged. Another stripper, a friend from Tens, lists things that were taken. Small things. Cheap things. An old wooden clock, a collection of brass bangles, a silver chain with a rusted horse pendant, a butterfly figurine, three small paintings of ravens.

Everyone interviewed is sad but not surprised. So, one more girl dies, one more drug-addled stripper.

That’s just the way it goes.

But it’s not enough—not for me. I want more. I need more.

New search: Neverland; Sapphire; murder. Pages of results, most of them different links to the article I just read in the
Plain Dealer
. And then, something new, bolded and caps-locked, catches my attention:
B. HORNET
’
S NEVERLAND CRIME BLOG
. My throat squeezes shut.

Click.

The page loads and it looks like something Martha Stewart might have designed to advertise a new line of wallpaper: pastel purples and blues; a border of blooming hyacinth, daffodil, bluebell; cartoon hornets with enormous stingers perched in the center of each flower, smiling. A headline in creamy pink reads: “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Homicide, Suicide, and Other Newsworthy Violent Occurrences, But Were Afraid to Ask.” Scanning the screen, I see it in the top left corner: Neverland Murders. There’s a buzzing between my ears, a strong, savage heat.
Click.