Night Sky

by Suzanne Brockmann

  Calvin made a noise. “Man, no one’s going to let me into a club, with or without a fake ID! Look at me!” He waved one hand in front of his legs as his other gripped the steering wheel. “Who wants to let someone in a wheelchair through the gate? Bouncers won’t let you in if you’re not sexy enough, and last time I checked, my chair has a sexy rating of negative ten.”

  “Dana’s going to help you with that,” Milo replied.

  “Help with what? Making me sexy?” Calvin laughed.

  Milo shook his head. “Wait until Friday. She’ll show you.”

  Calvin looked at him with disgust. “She’ll show me. That’s the best you’re going to give me?”

  “I think you’re going to need to see it to believe it.”

  “Okay, oh mysterious one,” Cal said with a laugh. “Be that way.”

  As we exited off the interstate, I could see the lights of the Sav’A’Buck in the distance. Other than that, everything was dark.

  “Turn here,” Milo said urgently, and Calvin pulled a sharp right, his tires screeching slightly down the narrow street.

  I looked around. The area was mainly residential, but the houses were dilapidated and sallow. On either side of the road, the few remaining streetlamps cast a flickering and feeble light onto the pavement. The front lawns were either overrun by crabgrass and weeds, or comprised completely of ground-up shells.

  “We’re going to number 3111,” Milo said. “Fourth house on the right-hand side.”

  Calvin pulled up to the place. It was a rundown single-story building, the paint on the shutters peeling off like old snakeskin. The front porch sagged slightly, and a hanging wind chime whistled and clanged with an ominous sound as the breeze blew through it.

  “And how well do you know this…friend of yours?” Cal asked skeptically.

  “He’s a friend of a friend of a friend,” Milo specified.

  “Oh, good.”

  Milo placed a reassuring hand on Calvin’s shoulder. “It’s okay. I’m certain that you’re safe here.”

  Calvin was clearly not convinced. “Let’s just get this over with.”

  I leaned over to open my door, but this time Milo beat me to it. I thanked him quietly as he shut it behind me.

  “I’m not gonna be able to go inside,” Calvin noted. The steps up to the front porch were steep, and rickety to boot. “You guys better get this done fast,” he added grumpily.

  But just as I was about to offer to wait outside with Calvin, a huge dude with tats and a trucker hat opened the front door to the house and marched down the steps to meet us.

  He was a burly guy with a thick, ratty beard, and I’d assumed at first glance that he was at least thirty-five, if not older, but as he got closer I realized that the facial hair had thrown me way off. He was actually only a few years older than Milo—just seriously weather-worn. He was, himself, pretty much a walking fake ID.

  “Y’all can’t come in, ’cause Becka’s feeding the baby and her tits are out.”

  Lovely. Apparently Milo had some really classy friends of friends of friends.

  “You must be Nicholas,” Milo said. “Renfro sent me.”

  “Renfro, huh?” The trucker dude crossed his arms belligerently, as he hacked a loogie to the side. “If he sent you, he told you how much it was going to cost.”

  Milo ignored the drool missile and nodded, unperturbed. “Nine hundred. Each.”

  “Dollars?” I asked, my voice squeaking a bit as the word popped out of me almost involuntarily.

  Nicholas glanced at me. “Cash,” he told Milo. “Paid up front. Non-negotiable and nonrefundable. If the IDs don’t work ’cause your girlfriend’s twelve, I don’t want to hear about it.”

  “I’m not twelve,” I said indignantly. “I’ll be seventeen on Friday.”

  “Well, yee-hah,” Nicholas said with absolutely no inflection. “Thus endeth the jailbait phase.”

  “She’s not my girlfriend,” Milo said a little too quickly—as if the idea were horrifying to him—as he took what looked like a bank envelope from his back pocket and held it out.

  Nicholas took the envelope with a hand that was almost completely tatted, and opened it to reveal a thick, healthy-looking stack of bills.

  Calvin’s eyes got huge as Nicholas counted the money.

  I touched Milo’s arm, needing to ask, Where did you get that?

  “Eighteen,” Nicholas said, looking from me to Calvin to Milo, even as Milo took my hand and squeezed it. His own hand was dry and cool and really nice, which made me realize that mine was sweaty. Yuck.

  It’s okay, Milo told me, and I realized I’d broadcast that entire thought.

  “I’m assuming,” Nicholas said, “this is for the Mouseketeers and that you’re good.”

  Dana’s really good at finding…things of value and selling them on the black market. “I’m good,” Milo told Nicholas pleasantly. “But I’d be even better if you showed just a little more respect for my friends.”

  Finding, I asked him a tad anxiously. You mean, stealing?

  “By all means,” Nicholas said, heavy on the sarcasm. “Please. Step right this way, sir and ma’am.” He led the way toward a separate structure that was half garage, half Quonset hut, turning on the light inside and opening the metal door so that Calvin could roll right in.

  Milo held onto my still-sweaty hand as we followed. No, I mean finding. And it was weird, because instead of him telling me with words, I saw a very clear, very sharp picture in my head of Dana and me—and Calvin too—at the Sav’A’Buck. And I saw Dana take the gun that the jokering woman had brandished, and tuck it deftly into the back of her pants.

  And I knew, from seeing that, that the money Milo had used to pay for our fake IDs had come from Dana selling that gun. I also knew… Catching Sasha’s killer really matters to her.

  It does, Milo agreed.

  A camera flashed, and I flinched, looking around and realizing that this hut was part computer lab, part photography studio, and it was my turn to step in front of a green screen and get my picture taken.

  For my fake ID.

  I let go of Milo’s hand and moved into position.

  “On three,” Nicholas told me, but the camera flashed right after he said one.

  “Hey,” I said. “That’s gonna suck.”

  Nicholas was in a rolling chair, and he zoomed across the room to the computer station. “The pictures have to suck,” he said. “If they’re too good, they’ll get looked at, and you don’t want that.”

  And sure enough, up on his computer screen was a picture of me, mid-blink. I was smiling, but my eyes were almost entirely closed.

  “Wow,” Calvin said. “You look stoned.”

  “And yours is so much better,” I countered as Calvin’s face appeared next to mine on the screen.

  Milo took one look at it and cracked up. It was the first time I’d heard him laugh out loud with genuine amusement. I smiled. I liked the sound. It was deep and warm—a lot like the way it felt when I was inside of his head.

  “What?” Cal said.

  Milo caught his breath. “You look…”

  “Constipated,” I finished for him.

  “That’s my sexy face,” Calvin protested.

  “It looks like you’re due for a stool softener,” Nicholas said bluntly. “It’ll definitely do.”

  Milo and I lost it. Cal scowled, but then he laughed too.

  “This is gonna take a while,” Nicholas said. “Three hours at least. You wanna come back to pick ’em up?”

  “No,” Milo said. “I’m gonna stick around while you work. Just let me get my friends on their way home.”

  He was already herding us toward the door, but I took his hand again. I don’t want to leave you here alone!

  “I’ll be fine,” he said aloud as he closed the hut
’s door behind Calvin. That friend of a friend told me that Nicholas is brilliant but kinda irresponsible. It’s best to wait while he does the work. Eighteen hundred dollars is a lot to gamble. “You need to get home.”

  “We can wait with you,” I said, but I was thinking, God, three hours from now it’ll be after midnight, and if something goes wrong and my mother finds out, I’ll be grounded for life.

  I felt Milo smile. We definitely don’t want that. Gently, he disengaged himself from my hand so that he could open the car door for me.

  Calvin was already getting in the driver’s side, and I knew that he was more than ready to leave.

  “How will you get home?” I asked Milo.

  “Actually,” he said as I got into the car and opened the window. He bent down to talk to me. “Dana and I are camping not too far from here.”

  And I was glad, then, that he’d let go of my hand. Dana. I’d completely stopped thinking about Dana—his girlfriend. I felt simultaneously jealous and terrible. What was Dana going to think about my ability to read Milo’s mind? If Milo were my boyfriend and some other girl could see and feel his thoughts? I would not be happy.

  “Still,” I managed to say. “You don’t really know this guy.”

  “Yeah, but like you said, we don’t want you grounded,” he pointed out.

  “But she didn’t say that,” Calvin started, but then looked from me to Milo and back again. “I still think you guys are pulling the Ouija board trick.”

  “Cal,” I said calmly. “You know me pretty well. Do I seem like the type to play a practical joke on you?”

  Calvin squinted his eyes suspiciously. Then he relaxed. “Yeah. You’re right. But I’m still having a tough time buying it. In fact, all this shit is hard to swallow. Up until the past couple of weeks, I was a firm believer in basic laws of physics. Like, gravity? Call me crazy, but it was a principle that I’d sort of accepted.”

  There was sympathy in Milo’s eyes. “I had a tough time wrapping my brain around all of it at first too,” he admitted quietly.

  “Oh yeah? And how long did it take you to finally feel like your life wasn’t some long, drawn-out, very strange dream?”

  Milo paused to think. But then he grinned. “Calvin, I don’t think I’ve woken up yet.” He glanced at me. “It gets stranger every day.” He straightened up then, backing away from the car. But then he bent down again to add, “Go straight back to Coconut Key. Don’t stop for anything. Get home safe.”

  I nodded as Calvin pulled away.

  Milo stood in the dim light outside Nicholas’s crummy house and garage, and I watched him until he faded and blended in with the darkness of the night.

  And all I could think was, was this it? Was it happening? Was I turning into more of a compassionless sociopath with every breath I took?

  I know Dana said it was a myth—that being a Greater-Than didn’t mean I would automatically lose my empathy and my humanity and my ability to be a good person.

  But a good person wouldn’t have spent the past ten minutes clinging to her friend’s boyfriend’s hand.

  Or fantasizing about him kissing her like that.

  Or—worst of all—wishing, at least a little, that she was prescient, which would mean that kiss she’d imagined in such glorious Technicolor was yet to come.

  Friendship with Dana be damned.

  Chapter Nineteen

  I was back on the highway again. This time, the rain had let up, but the fog hadn’t, so it was really difficult to see even a few feet in front of me.

  I had a pretty massive holy crap moment when I realized that I was dreaming again. And that thought was immediately followed by the idea that if only I could get my hand on my phone, I’d be able to take notes for Dana. But since my phone with those notes would inevitably be left in my dream world, there was really no reason to try to record anything. Once I woke up, none of this would be tangible.

  Kudos to me for trying, though.

  I tried to concentrate and at least make mental notes about what I was seeing. The trees on either side of the interstate were blowing in a fairly strong breeze. Oh, yeah, and I was back in that mystery car, wearing that mystery dress. I looked down at my lap and studied the pattern of the fabric. It wasn’t exactly high fashion. In fact, the cheap-looking blue-and-white diamonds looked a lot like the design on a hospital gown. I reached around and felt the back. Sure enough, the material was tied in the back twice—once between my shoulder blades, and another right above my butt.

  Okay, so it didn’t just look like a hospital gown. It was a hospital gown. But why?

  And then, talk about holy crap moments. Milo, of all people, tapped on my windshield. I screamed a little, or I think I did. It definitely startled me. But Milo’s smile calmed me as I unlocked the door.

  He didn’t make a move to get into the car, though. I motioned for him to walk around and jump into the passenger side, but he motioned just as adamantly, insisting that I get out.

  I paused. In the very first dream that I’d had, I’d gotten out of my dream car to try to chase Sasha down the highway—and, in the blink of an eye, had found myself alone in the middle of a field with the creepy she-thing.

  Milo was insistent, so I reached to open the door.

  But then I hesitated, double-checking, just to be absolutely certain that it was Milo out there.

  And, yeah, nobody else in the world had dimples like that. Even in that crazy fog, I could tell that much.

  I stepped out of the car.

  And I instantly realized my mistake. My butt had to be hanging out of the hospital gown!

  But when I reached around to close the opening, my hands grazed denim. Jean shorts. I hadn’t been wearing them in the car, had I?

  Milo shrugged like he didn’t know.

  So I guess in dreams you don’t have to touch me to get inside my head, I said without opening my mouth.

  Guess not, Milo answered, his lips pursed as he watched me intently.

  And then something really crazy happened.

  Milo took a step toward me, put his hands on my hips…

  And he kissed me.

  I’m not talking peck on the cheek, either.

  I’m talking full-on, passionate, head tilted to the side, hair blowing in the wind, tongue-touching, heart-pounding, I-want-your-body kiss. And I did something really crazy.

  I kissed him back.

  Pinch me, because I think I’m dreaming, I told him as I melted against him, as his arms tightened around me.

  Very funny, he said, and when he pulled back slightly to look down at me, his eyes smiled. But it was a smile that was laced with heat, which totally took my breath away, because I knew he was going to kiss me again.

  Except, the heart-rate monitor sound was back, and even through the fog, I could see her over Milo’s shoulder.

  Sasha.

  She was running toward us down the long, straight road, waving her arms over her head as if trying to get our attention.

  At first I thought she was wearing a mask, because her face was the color of a fire engine, the whites of her eyes startlingly bright against the shiny contours of her forehead. But, as she got closer to us, I realized that the girl was horribly, gruesomely covered, head to toe, in blood.

  Milo grabbed my shoulders and tried to bury my face in his chest, as if instinctively attempting to shield me from the awful image. But it was engraved forever in my mind, and even though I knew I was asleep, I also knew that when I woke up, this terrible, bloody picture of Sasha would still be there. Because it was the same image I’d seen in my vision when I was with Dana down on the beach.

  But when I looked again at the girl’s face, she wasn’t Sasha anymore. Suddenly, she had turned into Nicole, my best friend from Connecticut, but then, just as suddenly, both Nicole and Sasha were lying on the highway, bloody and despe
rate and needing my help.

  Sasha! Nicole! I called out, but when I tried to speak, no sound came out.

  Milo heard me, though. Without opening his mouth, he pressed his hands against my face, and I felt him respond. They can’t hear us, Sky. They’re not really here. They’re somewhere else.

  Frantically, I screamed and screamed, calling their names, even while knowing that there was nothing I could do to help them. I pulled myself away from Milo’s protective embrace, and my world faded to black.

  —

  When I woke up, my mother was humming an old Celine Dion song and rustling with clothes on my floor as she sifted through them, trying to find the dirty laundry.

  Somehow, despite the fact that I’d simultaneously had the best dream and the worst nightmare of my entire life, I managed to sit up slowly in bed, while not shouting, Oh my God, what are you doing in here?

  Mom turned to look at me. “Good morning, sweetheart,” she said pleasantly. Today she was wearing gray linen pants and a sleeveless turtleneck sweater. Her hair was poufy and side-parted, with a thick headband. It reminded me of pictures I’d seen of 1950s housewives.

  “Morning,” I croaked as I attempted to wipe a glob of sweat from my hairline. I was completely soaked with fear-induced perspiration. I hoped my mom couldn’t tell.

  “Sorry I got in so late last night,” Mom replied. “The parent-teacher prom committee ran over, and a few of us ended up stopping at CoffeeBoy afterward.” With two fingers, she picked up a wrinkled sweater that probably hadn’t seen sunlight in months and added it to the dirty laundry basket.

  Somehow this whole conversation was almost as surreal as my recent dream. It seemed almost…disrespectful to chat about prom committees, of all things, after what I’d just witnessed.

  Still, Mom hadn’t been in my head. I played along. “It’s okay. I went to bed pretty early.” All of the relentless lying to my mother was starting to leave a bad taste in my mouth, despite the fact that it was necessary. And to be fair, it wasn’t as if she were being completely honest, either. Prom committee, my ass. Unless, of course, Jenkins happened to be working on the school dance, which was kind of scary to consider.