Shade Me

by Jennifer Brown

  “Who could it be?” I muttered to myself, my words echoing off the walls. “Who hurt you, Peyton? Was it one of your friends?” My head jerked up. I brushed the water off my chin. Her friends. Of course. Peyton Hollis had about a billion Facebook friends. I knew this because pretty much every single person on my paltry friend list was also connected to her, even though not a single one was actually connected to her in real life. I didn’t get on Facebook very often—social media was a little too social for my taste—but it seemed like every time I was on there, one of Peyton’s posts was staring me in the face. Most of the time it felt like I was the only person I knew who wasn’t friended to Peyton, but it didn’t matter because I saw all her stuff anyway, through her adoring fans.

  I rinsed the conditioner out of my hair and soaped myself up quickly, then got out and dried in record time. I slipped into a pair of sweats and a T-shirt and plopped into my desk chair, opening up my laptop at the same time.

  “All right, Peyton,” I said, logging onto Facebook. “Let’s see what you’ve been up to lately.”

  I had zero messages and zero notifications. Typical. The top post in my feed was by Jones, a link to some video of an “epic prank.” Assholes being assholes. Typical. Not surprised at all that Jones liked it. Wouldn’t be surprised if one of Jones’s bro-gang perpetrated said epic prank.

  But Jones was a good enough starting point. I knew for a fact that he was friended to Peyton, so I followed his post to his page, scanned his friends list, and clicked through to her page. Easy.

  Her last post had been on October 7, which, now that I thought about it, had to be right around the time she disappeared from school.

  Must get to the bottom of things.

  The post was, of course, filled with worried questions from 240 of Peyton’s closest friends. The only hint that Peyton would give, though, was in a comment halfway down the thread that provided a single word:

  Family

  So Peyton had been frustrated with her family just before chopping off her hair and disappearing from school. But so what? We all had family drama, right? In some ways it was the most normal post Peyton had ever put on her page.

  I scrolled down. There were links to songs and a shitload of memes about being wasted. There were tongue-out, Solo-cup-wielding party selfies and a photo of her last pedicure. Everything she posted—everything!—was treated like it was the most profound thought all of Brentwood had ever heard.

  And then there was this:

  u will not win dis.

  The post was written by Gibson Tally. I didn’t know him, but I knew of him. He was older, a notorious drug-head dropout, who’d gone out epically, smashing lockers and kicking dents into the sides of Assistant Principal Elliot’s Mercedes on the way. He was everyone’s hookup for weed and once got arrested for supposedly calling in a bomb threat during an antidrug assembly. He was constantly in fights and in jail and reportedly carried a gun with him everywhere he went.

  He was also the lead guitarist of Viral Fanfare.

  Was he more than that to Peyton?

  I clicked on his name and it took me to his profile, but it was too private for me to see anything other than photos of him playing his guitar. He’d acquired a few tattoos and facial piercings since I’d last seen him. He’d also acquired a hard look in his eyes that sent a chill through me. u will not win dis.

  I went back to Peyton’s page and read the comments under his post. Most of them were asking what was going on; a few were making typical Facebook jackass jokes. Only one stood out, from a girl named Liz who I’d seen clinging to Peyton’s orbit.

  I heard about you and the band. Is it true?

  But Peyton hadn’t responded to her, and nobody else seemed interested. I scrolled through the comments again, looking for anything I might have missed, wondering what it was that Liz had heard about Peyton and the band. What Peyton was trying to “win” against Gibson Talley. Was he joking or threatening? I’d assumed he was threatening, because of his bad-news reputation, but with Facebook, you never could really tell who meant what they were saying. Facebook made my head hurt. It was like a jumpy mishmash of colors. This was why I didn’t hang out on it much. It was impossible to follow anyone’s true thoughts there. It was impossible to block out the rainbow.

  I wondered if Detective Martinez had been through Peyton’s Facebook yet, and, if so, what he made of Gibson Talley’s remark. Or did the police only do things like that if someone died?

  I scrolled down farther, past a few more parties and one throwback picture of Peyton in a black leather fringed bikini.

  Wait a minute. I went back to the bikini. It might or might not have been black—it was the photo itself that was black-and-white. Peyton was standing shin-deep in a sparkling swimming pool, her hip cocked out to one side, the rope of a life preserver draped over her shoulders and snaking down her hip. Her hands were on her hips, the life preserver ring draped casually around one wrist, the letters SO a soft glow across the top of the ring—SO, yellow, pink. Peyton’s face was dwarfed by sunglasses, her lips painted a deep color that came across as slick black in the photo.

  She looked amazing.

  As usual.

  I clicked on the picture, and it took me to a photo- and art-sharing website. Aesthetishare.com. Peyton had been posting for three months. I scrolled down to her earliest posts. One of a moppy little dog. A nearly nude bathroom mirror selfie. One of a pair of shoes—a scuffed and worn pair of cherry-red Chucks—with kneesocked legs still in them. The toe of one of the shoes was lifted by a sizable rock. Pretty standard. I’d seen a zillion photos like these on Instagram.

  I scrolled up to the next one. Peyton, with Viral Fanfare. She was grasping a microphone, her mouth wide open in one of her high notes. Her eyes were scrunched shut, her hip jutted out. I scrutinized the other band members, but they all looked totally in their own zones. All except Gibson Talley, whose eyes were on Peyton as he played his guitar. I stared into the photo, trying to glean anything I could from it—love, anger, scorn—but got nothing. If Gibson Talley was battling Peyton over something, which his post suggested, it could have been any number of things. I continued to scroll. The three photos above that one were similar—more Viral Fanfare performances—and in none of them did anything look abnormal.

  But the one above those was different. They weren’t performing. Instead, they were standing inside a recording studio, in a line, their arms wrapped around one another like a bunch of kids at camp. The bassist and the drummer were smiling like it was their birthday. But it was Gibson I couldn’t quit looking at. His face was set in a smug look of victory, his eyes looking away from the camera. His guitar was draped across his body—the word Hendrix, printed on the strap, jumped out at me in tie-dye letters. His left arm was casually resting on the drummer’s shoulder, but his right arm . . . his right arm was crooked around Peyton’s neck, his fist practically under her chin. A pose of conquest.

  Peyton was the only one in the photo not smiling. Her eyes were pointed toward the floor. I could practically feel the tension coming off her. Whatever had been eating Peyton had already been going on when this photo was taken.

  There was a date printed on the bottom of the photo. October 15. There were only five photos after that, all taken in black and white. A new artistic phase, I guessed.

  In the first, Peyton stood in the pool with her life preserver.

  The next showcased Peyton and her sister (half sister, my mind corrected, in Dru’s voice), Luna, standing in front of a plate-glass window. Definitely not in Brentwood—maybe New York? A neon sign in the window promised violet SEXSEXSEXSEXSEX. Luna’s head was tilted back, mugging, her hand buried in her hair, while Peyton jutted her chest out toward the camera seductively, a giant gold-glittering dollar sign on the front of her T-shirt. She had titled the photo Double Rainbow. For some reason the words immediately brought to mind the tattoo on her neck. Only the word rainbow didn’t come out at me in its usual colors. I had a hard time descri
bing the color it made me think of in this photo. Glitzy cherrybomb, maybe? I sighed, rubbed my eyes. I hated when I got so tired even my synesthesia got confused.

  Regardless, I pressed on. The next was a family photo, standing on a pier, the ocean rolling behind them. I zeroed in on Dru, who looked at home in the sun, his shirt unbuttoned and revealing a chiseled chest and a dark shadow of hair under his belly button. I blushed, cursed at myself, and quickly flipped to the next photo.

  In this one, Peyton sat at a bus stop, her face turned away from the camera, her free hand caressing the back of her new haircut. She stared pensively at a cigarette butt on the sidewalk, her profile blocking out most of an apartment rental ad and some graffiti behind her head. A square of gauze covered her new tattoo. The overexposed black-and-white pixelation made her skin look grainy and pocked. She might have been mistaken for someone homeless in this photo, an effect I found to be brilliant and shocking. One of the richest girls in the city, mistaken for a homeless girl? Would she have died to know that was what someone would see in this photo, or was it what she’d been going for?

  She’d given the photo a title: Fear Is Golden. Which made me chuckle, because the first thought in my mind was, No, it’s not. Fear is bumpy gray and black, like asphalt. But then I remembered I was the only person who knew that.

  The final photo looked like a mistake. This was the only one in color, but it might as well have been black and white. It was a close-up of a stucco wall, the bottom of which was gobbled up by foliage. At the very top left-hand corner was a pinprick dot of reddish orange—a tiny light of some kind. I squinted at it, tried to zoom in, but nothing would work. It was as if she’d accidentally snapped a photo while she was walking by a building. But she’d given this one a title, too.

  What Lies Beneath

  I felt a familiar tickle, a sneeze coming on. The word beneath, the color of dust, always did that to me. But the tickle was soon forgotten as I saw the rest of the title.

  It was a date.

  October 20.

  The date of her attack.

  6

  I WAS JARRED awake by the buzz of my cell phone against my cheek. I jerked upright, confused, blinking. I was still sitting at my desk, Peyton’s YouTube channel pulled up. After a few seconds, I remembered. I’d fallen asleep poring over Viral Fanfare videos, watching every move Peyton made. Every time I saw even the tiniest flicker of something stand out, I backed up the video and watched it again, never sure if I was just imagining things.

  I looked at my phone. It was 6:03 a.m. It was also the familiar color sequence of Jones’s number on the ID. I sighed. Might as well get it over with.

  “Hi, Jones.”

  “Hey, beautiful.” He sounded sleepy, and I took a moment to remember what Sleepy Jones’s skin felt like—warm, smooth, muscles somehow rock hard without him even flexing, as if they were ready to spring into action at any moment. I loved waking up in Jones’s arms. For those first few moments after blinking into consciousness, I could even pretend that maybe I wasn’t in hate with love, and that our bodies fit together perfectly for a reason. That feeling only lasted a few seconds.

  “What do you want?” I asked, cutting him off before he launched into kissy noises or some other sappy bullshit.

  “Did I wake you up?”

  “It’s six o’clock in the morning, Jones, what do you think? I wasn’t out running a marathon.”

  “Wow, someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning,” he said. “I’m just checking in. Just because we broke up doesn’t mean I stopped caring about you.”

  I wish you would, I thought. “If only I’d woken up on a bed,” I mumbled instead. I rubbed my cheek. I could feel creases in my skin where the phone had been pressed into it for God-knew-how long. I yawned. “I fell asleep at my desk.”

  “Chem? You need help?”

  “No. I mean, sure, I always need help with chem. But no, I wasn’t doing schoolwork.” You probably should, the voice in my head reminded me. Academic probation, remember? But I ignored that voice. It had been a long time since I could be guilted over not doing schoolwork. “I was watching videos.”

  “Oh,” Jones said, his voice going up into that obnoxious falsetto he got when he was trying to be flirtatious.

  “Not those kind of videos, you freak,” I snapped.

  “Kidding, kidding,” he said. “You gonna be like this all day? Just asking so I can avoid you at school.”

  “Yes,” I said, relieved. At least I could cross dodging Jones off my to-do list for the day. “I’m planning to be a huge bitch all day. Avoidance is a good idea.”

  “You could never be a bitch,” he said. “That’s why I love you.”

  “Try me.”

  He yawned, and again I could imagine him, his bare chest tan and warm, his amazing abs descending to a V right where the sheets pooled deep around his hips. I needed to stop thinking about it. “I’m not too worried. I know you better than you do, sometimes,” he said. He groaned as if he were stretching. “I probably should get ready. I just wanted to say good morning. I’ll see you at school.”

  “Okay, whatever,” I said. Gibson Talley’s paused face stared at me, his hand in a downstroke on the rhythm of “Your Mother Loves It.” I started to hang up, but stopped myself. “Hey, Jones?”

  “Yeah?” Hopeful. Eager. I rolled my eyes, hating that do-anything sound in his voice, and hating even more that I was about to take advantage of it.

  “You know Peyton Hollis, right?”

  “Of course.”

  “Do you know the guy from her band? Gibson Talley?”

  He made a humming sound. “I think I might know who you’re talking about. Dropout, right? With the green Mohawk?”

  “Yeah, that’s the one. What do you know about him?”

  “Not much,” he said. “Only that he lives in those apartments by the storage place. What’s it called? Fountain something. Come to think of it, I saw Peyton Hollis walking over there not that long ago.”

  I sat up straighter, the cobwebs suddenly blasted out of the sleepy corners of my mind. “When?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. It was probably a week or so ago. I only remember it because everybody was talking about how she freaked out. Had some sort of mental breakdown or something. You saw her hair, right?”

  “Yeah, I saw it,” I said. “And you’re positive that it was her you saw walking there?”

  “Totally positive.”

  “You’re not messing with me just to get me back, are you?”

  “Nikki, I can’t believe you think I would do that.”

  “Are you?” I repeated.

  “No.”

  “Because we’re not getting back together, Jones. Not ever.”

  He sighed. “So you’ve told me. Time and time again. Why are you so interested in Peyton Hollis all of a sudden, anyway?”

  Instantly, the image of Peyton lying in her hospital bed flooded my mind. Dru, sitting there next to her, looking at me with a mixture of gratitude and suspicion. “Never mind,” I said. “But thanks for the information.”

  I hung up and headed for a shower, my back stiff and aching from sleeping bent over my desk. I pushed my hands into the small of my back and stretched, mulling over what Jones had told me. It felt like important information, but I couldn’t quite figure out why.

  Halfway through my shower, it hit me.

  When she moved out, it upset everyone, Dru had said.

  When she moved out . . .

  I shut off the shower, dried myself, and slicked my sopping hair into a ponytail. It was now 6:42. School started in an hour, and I still had yet to get dressed and get my shit together. But how was I supposed to think about world history or English literature, or—the worst—chem, when I had just been handed a clue that might lead me to what happened to Peyton Hollis?

  I wrapped myself in a heavy robe that Dad scored for me at Four Seasons Chicago last year and hurried back to my desk.

  Just as I sat do
wn, the doorbell rang. Glancing down at myself in my robe, I decided to let it go. Probably just a delivery. But a few seconds later, it rang again, followed by insistent knocking.

  “Fine, fine,” I muttered as I hurried down the steps, pulling the robe tight around me as I went. “You can just leave it on the porch, you know,” I called.

  There was a pause, and then, “Miss Kill? It’s Detective Martinez. From the hospital. Mind if I talk to you for a moment?”

  Alarmed, again I glanced down at myself, my hands instantly flying up to my dripping hair. I wasn’t one of those perfect-princess types of girls who always had to look like she just stepped off a runway when she left the house, but a robe with nothing underneath was maybe just the tiniest bit too casual for conversation with strangers.

  “Miss Kill?” he called again. “Nikki?”

  Groaning, I accepted the inevitable and opened the door a crack, awkward fern turning into all-out-embarrassed pine in my vision. There was Chris Martinez, smiling and holding up a steaming cup of coffee.

  “Mind if I come in?”

  Now, standing next to him in his pressed khakis and button-down shirt, I felt really naked. “I’m kind of busy,” I said.

  But he was unflappable. “It’ll only take a minute. You like French vanilla?”

  Eyeing the coffee, I sighed and backed up, opening the door wider for him to come in. He stepped through the threshold without a word and pressed the coffee into my hand.

  “Sorry to bother you so early. I thought I might try to catch you before school.” He paused and looked me up and down. “I apologize if I’ve caught you at an inappropriate moment.”

  My face burned—I might as well have been standing in the middle of a pine forest at that point, I was so mortified—and I crossed my arms over my chest, just in case my robe might get any ideas. I sipped the coffee, which was—frustratingly—really good.

  “Is there a place we can sit?” he asked.

  “Not really,” I said. I didn’t love cops to begin with. And Dad absolutely hated them after they botched Mom’s case so badly. If he found out I’d let a cop into our house for a cup of coffee, much less let one sit down, he would probably flip. “Can we make this quick?” I gestured at my hair like I needed to do something with it. As if I ever did anything with my hair.