by Lamar Giles
We were in ridiculous danger. There was something leading in the big boy’s question. A plea. He wanted one of us to say yes, and then …
Didn’t want to think about that part. Because, one thing I knew to be 100 percent true …
“I did not kill Paris Secord!” Kya shouted.
I pressed back into the padded van wall. There was so much force behind it, like she’d been storing it in her gut all week, waiting for the right moment to projectile vomit the words. After that, all masks turned to me, and I stuttered, “M-m-me neither. She was my friend.”
Cartoon Shoes continued working her tablet. “Now we know that part’s a lie. She wasn’t friends with either of you over the last several weeks. That much we’ve pieced together from various sources.”
“What sources?” Kya said, staring daggers at me.
Cartoon Shoes ignored her. “How did you both end up in the same room, at the same time, with her dead body if you didn’t have anything to do with her murder, though? Who wants to go first?”
“I was there to apologize,” Kya blurted out. “Okay? I’d been a jerk, and we had some problems, but I was still her best friend. She invited me to the party she was throwing, to fix things between us. I was going to apologize. When I got there, I found Fuse. Never got to give that apology.”
Faint road noise and expectations filled the void left when she finished. The masks turned to me. My heartbeat seemed as loud as my voice when I said, “I was going to yell at her.”
Cartoon Shoes was taken aback. “Really?”
“We were at odds because of all the control she’d handed over to that leech Paula Klein,” I explained. “I got it, we were young and didn’t have a ton of business experience. I probably could’ve found a way to monetize our online reach better. But there’s older and more experienced, then there’s oldest and skilled in the art of sketch. That’s Paula. She drove a wedge between ParSec and me. Honestly, if I’d gotten the chance to have my say, I probably would’ve driven a deeper wedge between us. When I arrived, she was dead. Now I just wish I’d said I loved her.” It hurt to admit that. Then it just hurt.
The masks turned from one to another in some form of silent communication I couldn’t decipher. Like birds perched on a lamppost, conferring on bird matters. Their verdict took an eternity.
Finally Cartoon Shoes said, “Good enough. For now.”
Thank God. They believed us. Though I had to wonder: When Kya told her side of the story, had she been lying too?
What I told the masks wasn’t everything. Not even most of the things.
Did it even matter? The van hadn’t changed direction. We were far away from where we’d started.
Elmyra Fudd said, “We’ll have time to dig into your stories a bit more. For your sake, they better hold up. For the record, most of the Nation believes neither of you could’ve actually pulled off the killing. Your arms are too skinny.”
“Our … arms? What kind of body-shaming crap is that?” Fuse was indignant.
Elmyra Fudd kept going. “This little parlay was always meant to be reconnaissance to feel you two out, see if you were up for the assignment.”
“Assignment?” Fuse and I said at the same time.
“You two are like a set of bookends, aren’t you? Good. You’ll need to be in sync to give us what we want. We’re going to explain some things to you. Some you may already know. Some, you’ll want to dismiss. Don’t. Are you ready?”
All of the aggression between Fuse and me had sloughed away. No matter how we felt about each other, we weren’t the source of our immediate danger. We exchanged frantic looks. Both uncertain. Both scared. We had more to bond over in the last half hour than we’d ever had before. We nodded. Ready.
A dude mask spoke next. “We’re huge DJ ParSec fans. I don’t think there’s been a more innovative music maker to arise this decade. I mean, she’s like Missy Elliott, Timbaland, and the Neptunes built a time machine, scoured the future for genius sound, and brought her back with them. You know?” His tone was high, giddy. “If you doubt me, pay attention to the track she produced on Mic Drop’s Facepalm album, her first ever. People focus on the bass line, but the most inspired part is that pop-sizzle sound in the hook. An actual fuse blowing! How’d she even record—”
Elmyra Fudd cleared her throat. Loud and exaggerated.
Not-So-Calm Dude took a deep breath and re-centered. He reined in his rant—which wasn’t totally accurate. The song on the Facepalm album wasn’t Paris’s first production credit. She’d done indie tracks for all the neighborhood rappers, who mostly sucked but sounded better through her efforts. As for how she recorded that fuse-blowing sound, and most of the other odd accoutrements she dressed her music in? With my help. We learned those tricks together.
“My point,” he continued, “we—the entire world—lost something priceless. There must be justice.”
“Yet,” Elmyra Fudd said, “history tells us, in a case like DJ ParSec’s, justice is unlikely. Have you ever heard the name Adelaide Milton?”
The whomp-whomp-whomp rotation of tires over rough asphalt was the only agonizing sound while I searched my memory for the name, spoken like I should know it. The craziest part was I kind of did. It had the familiarity of a difficult word, one you could use but couldn’t quite explain without a dictionary.
“I’m sorry,” I said, apologizing to my kidnappers. “I don’t know her.”
Fuse said, “I do. She got kidnapped. Are you guys going for justice, or poetic justice? Because these.” She shook her bonds.
Elmyra Fudd said, “Adelaide Milton, age five, was vacationing with her family here at the Ocean Shore boardwalk. Her mother turned her head for a split second, and little Adelaide was gone. She is trending on Twitter and Instagram right now. She’s very pretty. Green eyes, strawberry-blond hair. In the last twenty-four hours, she’s garnered roughly fourteen million more internet impressions than DJ ParSec, despite the best efforts of the Nation. Monday morning, barring any other major, worldwide developments, Adelaide’s story will be featured in the first half hour of all the national news shows. No one plans to run a story on DJ ParSec.”
That stung. Of course national news wouldn’t care about our grief. Already rationalizing, I made the distinction between a dead big girl and a kidnapped little girl. “I don’t understand what Adelaide Milton has to do with this. If she was kidnapped this weekend, with enough coverage, enough noise, maybe that little girl gets found.”
“Adelaide Milton went missing five years ago. This is the anniversary.”
Whomp-whomp-whomp.
“This weekend,” said Elmyra Fudd, “three girls of color—two black girls, one Latina—have gone missing in southeastern Virginia.”
“Five, if we count you two,” said a male mask. The threat became an additional passenger.
“If you want to know what they look like, you can google them. That’s probably the only way you’ll know. The police effort to find them will amount to little more than paperwork. On a similar note, the detectives working DJ ParSec’s case have already stalled. No leads. They’re not even looking at you two. Funny, considering murders are usually committed by people closest to the victim. Check out the case file for yourself. What little there is.”
That rolled tube she’d bopped me with wasn’t a newspaper, but a folder, thin, with very few papers inside. She dropped it between Fuse and me.
Frustrated, I said, “We already told you we didn’t do it!”
“We heard you. But our demand is simple: Find out who did.”
Every mask was still, waiting for our reply.
I said, “That’s just stupid.”
“Fuse!” Kya said.
“What? They’re the ones with kidnap equipment and access to police files. Why isn’t the Dark Nation using their resources to honor their god? Leave us out of it and cut these stupid zip ties. My wrists hurt!”
The masks weren’t angled on us anymore. They were angled on me.
; Maybe not the best time for a tantrum.
Cartoon Shoes tapped her tablet screen. “Our masks won’t work for this. The very nature of our anonymity and tactics would void any chance of on-the-level, legal repercussions for the sleaze who did this. For anything we do to stick, someone in our ranks would, eventually, need to expose themselves. That would certainly lead to other problems, being that in our zeal for DJ ParSec’s music, we haven’t always engaged in … lawful activities.”
Kya said, “You’re worried about lawful activities? You’re kidnapping us right now.”
“You’re not the police. You’re not lawyers, judges, or a jury. You can’t stop us with paperwork and red tape. Also, I’mma keep it one hundred with you. Since the tragedy, you fill a void. You entertain us.” She rotated the tablet so we could see. Located at some complicated URL was a web poll, animated so the wedges pulsed in time with “Calm Down, Turn Up!” flitting through the speakers.
Under the chart was a still shot of us being restrained by police the night we found ParSec, taken by the jerk with the camera phone. Now I had an idea how they might’ve gotten a copy of the police’s case file.
“How—?” I wasn’t sure what I was even going to ask. How did they do this without me knowing? How were we supposed to do what they wanted? I lost my train of thought when Cartoon Shoes signaled to one of her minions, who slipped a sack over my head, blinding me.
“Stop that,” Kya said. “Don’t touch—”
She went quiet too.
“Relax.” Cartoon Shoes’s voice was muffled by the sack. “We’re invested in keeping you safe. For now. That may change if you decide to get talkative about tonight’s little parlay. Feel me? We’re—what’s the word I’m looking for, fellas?”
The Gruff Male said, “Shy.”
Cartoon Shoes snapped her fingers. “Right. Don’t embarrass us by trying to put us in the spotlight. Or else we might decide to invest elsewhere. Any other questions?”
I had nothing else to ask. Only wanted out.
The van slowed, stopped. Ride over.
The only senses I had were hearing and touch. In the sack, I couldn’t smell anything but my SheaMoisture hair products, a yucca-and-plantain fog. Couldn’t taste anything through my freshly retaped lips. And, of course, the only thing to be seen was bag.
The van door slid open, blasted us with night heat that made the sack on my head go from uncomfortable to suffocating. Claustrophobia that I didn’t know I had kicked in. I bucked at my restraints involuntarily. My body insisted I be free.
Two masks lifted me quickly, carried me from the van, and stood me upright, leaned me against something cool and smooth. It didn’t stop me from freaking.
“Stop moving,” one of them said. The ties around my ankles got sliced. Then my hands were freed. “Count to ten before you take that bag off. Understand?”
I didn’t say anything.
“You too.” To Fuse, presumably.
I sensed motion. A sudden return of sanctified personal space. The van door slammed shut, the engine revved, I’d counted to eight as I heard it drive off quick, tires squealing. At ten, I yanked my bag off and found Fuse a few feet away, the hood of a car between us, already unbagged, and squinting after the vehicle, ripping tape from her mouth. “The license plate was covered in mud, I got nothing.”
I peeled the tape off my mouth, or tried to. It took a couple of attempts to pry a corner free and do the painful yank. My hands were still shaking, but I willed them steady to ensure my necklace—thank God—remained where it should, with me. “That just happened.”
Spinning in place, unsure of where we were, I spotted a bank and a coffee shop across the street. A comic book store and a pizza parlor. We were in an empty, poorly lit lot that seemed of no interest to the people in any of those businesses. If the Nation had dumped our corpses here, would they still be enjoying their calzones and lattes and Avengers comics while we rotted? This didn’t feel like Ocean Shore. The smells weren’t right, no salt in the air. “Where are we?”
“Norfolk,” Fuse said, her voice as shaky as my hands. Before I asked how she knew, she produced a key fob from her pocket, thumbed a button. The car we’d been leaning on flashed its lights, the doors unlocked.
“Why’s your car here?”
“I had to meet a guy before the memorial service. It’s a long story that I don’t feel like getting into.” She stared over the roof, barely. She was the size of an action figure. “So I’m going home before another van full of psychos decides they’d appreciate my company.” She opened the driver’s side door.
I had a brief moment of panic that overrode the pride telling me not to ask the question. “Could I come too?”
“I unlocked all the doors, didn’t I?”
Despite the snark, I got in. This car was way newer than what Mama drove. Almost everything was. Inside, it smelled like clean linen. Fuse pressed a button, and the engine came on, but I couldn’t hear it over the blaring music. You know who.
It seemed to startle Fuse. She tapped the radio off. Lowered the windows and took us downtown, toward the highway, with wind roaring through the cabin too loudly for a conversation. Locating the switch, it took me a couple of times to actually roll my window up because my hands were shaking. I managed to complete the mission, cutting the mega-draft by half. “We should talk, don’t you think?”
“I don’t want to.” With the controls in her door handle, she lowered my window again, and the wind slapped me like a hot hand.
Determined, I rolled the window back up. “They were outside my house, Fuse!”
Her head jerked, as if she were a bobblehead whose chin I plucked. “That’s where they got you?”
“Right off the street.”
“I—I’m sorry.”
I almost said thank you, was close to being grateful. But, no. “You should be. Why’d you tell those lies about me on Twitter, you jerk?”
“I didn’t lie. I just presented select facts.”
“Select. Facts.”
“You punched me in my face, Kya! What was that about?”
“I lost it a little, okay? You know what that night was like. But me punching you didn’t draw a bunch of creepy lunatics to us, did it?”
“I—” She rolled her window up so we didn’t have to yell at each other, even if we kind of wanted to. I noticed a tremor in her hand before she reestablished her grip on the wheel. “I didn’t think it would get this bad, Kya. And what the heck did you say about me on that Tumblr?”
“Something that I didn’t think would get this bad.”
“Touché. People throw shade on the internet all the time, you know. It’s not for real.”
“Tonight felt very real.”
She didn’t argue. “I’m sorry, really. Okay?”
“Yeah, me too. Really.”
We were on the highway by then, 264 East, toward Ocean Shore. Silent and scared.
I said, “Do you think they were serious about us, like, solving Paris’s murder?”
“Name some things more serious than snatching humans into dark vans. There are a few. Not many.”
The talking helped. And I meant my apology. Fuse was but a blip on my radar compared to the rough hands tossing me into the back of a van. Letting go of our pettiness felt like an important first step to normal after today’s horrors.
Though there were still miles to go.
We sailed into ParSec’s old neighborhood at the residential-friendly twenty-five miles per hour. These homes—really a single large building, divided vertically, like sliced cake—seemed uncomfortable. Like everyone was being squeezed by everyone else. ParSec’s old room had been stifling small whenever I visited. The one time she came to my house, she mentioned her room could fit in my dad’s man cave “if she folded it right.” I’d just smiled and shrugged because I hadn’t known how to respond. Maybe I was a little embarrassed.
I knew the Cooke High population represented “several different tax brackets.” Somethin
g Dad pointed out whenever I brought home less-than-stellar grades, or I didn’t get excited by the phrase Ivy League. As if the range of classes—social, not academic—at school negatively impacted my performance and rational thinking.
ParSec came from one of those lower tax brackets. As did Kya, thus their close proximity.
How privileged would I be if I said any of this out loud?
“Over there,” Kya said, motioning. We coasted to a stop. This was her street. Her home. The Dark Nation violated it. I didn’t necessarily like Kya, but I felt her on this one. “You okay going in there?” I asked, with no plan if she said she wasn’t.
“Mama’s home. I’ll be fine. As far as kidnappers go anyway.” She popped her lock and opened the door, triggering the interior lights near where my ceiling met the windshield.
I flicked them off, still wanting to talk without feeling exposed. “Shameik Larsen. We’ll want to get him involved.”
“Involved?”
“Full disclosure: I created ParSec Nation. Those loonies back in the van aren’t it. Kidnapping us was their first move, Kya. Do you want to know their second? I don’t. Unless you have some genius plan I haven’t considered, I imagine you’re thinking the same thing I am.”
She knew I wasn’t wrong. “We’re going to play.”
“Until we have a better move, it’s our only move. We put all that catty online beef aside for now. Plus …” This part, I didn’t know how to really say. There was a silly hope to it that might sound dumb vocalized.
Kya, apparently, didn’t have the same hang-up. “Adelaide Milton doesn’t need our help.”
And there it was. Somebody needed to remember what ParSec meant, and do something about it (in a way that wasn’t Dark Nation crazy). “Do you know Shameik?”
“Enough to recognize him in the hall. What’s he got to do with any of this?”
“Remember what Cartoon Shoes said about suspects being those closest to the victims?”
“Yeah.”
“Shameik was ParSec’s boyfriend.”