“For real? Yikes.”
“Yeah.”
“Shit,” Janey said as her cell went off. “Here. Hold this.”
Winny took Janey’s glass and the disk fell off again. She didn’t bother to pick it up.
“It’s from my mom. I have to go and grab Zach from daycare.”
“Of course. It’s no biggie.”
“I’m so sorry, Win.” Janey pouted and threw her arms around her best friend’s shoulders.
Winny, not used to standing for hours in two-inch heels, nearly toppled over. “Seriously, it’s fine.”
“Look, I’ll get him, then circle back here so I can bring you home.”
“You sure you don’t mind?”
“Not if you don’t mind maybe getting whatever rug-rat germs he’s spreading.”
“Sounds . . . risky.”
“You don’t even know. I’m not kidding. The zombie apocalypse is going to be caused by the preschool generation. You watch.” Janey waved as she backed away, leaving Winny standing alone at her debut, feet throbbing, and with a heart as flat as the fizz-less cider in Janey’s impostor glass.
31
WINNY
ONE HOUR AND THIRTY-FIVE MINUTES AFTER CLOSING
Cool air greets me, chilling the sweat that coats my skin, but in a good way. I can breathe in here. Maybe it’s the sea blue walls or the warm glow of the old-school light bulb in the bedside lamp, but it’s a relief regardless.
“You can sit.” Rochelle gestures at her bed, which is covered by a clean white blanket and topped with plain white pillows. It gives the whole space a spa-like vibe. On a tall dresser, a picture frame catches my eye, the exact replica of the one my school gives to every graduating senior, the pics inside snapped at the moment our diplomas were placed into our hands.
“I’ve got that same frame.” I freeze, leaning closer to take in the image, then jerk my gaze to her face. “We went to the same school.” I snap my fingers, but I can’t pull the info from my memory. “You graduated last year, right?”
“So?”
Shelly what? I keep coming up blank, but I know her. We were in choir together for a semester last year, but we didn’t sit near each other—I’m a soprano and she was an alto.
I can’t let myself get comfortable. The space is cozy, but far from safe, and this girl, though familiar, is no friend of mine. I perch on the edge of the bed while Shelly moves to stand before the open window. We’ve unintentionally positioned ourselves so our backs are to each other. Well, for me it was unintentional, but maybe that’s what she wanted, so she won’t have to acknowledge that all of this is real.
That I’m real.
Forced here, among people who don’t know me or care to, I’m no one. I get smaller and smaller until I’m a non-person, just a tool kept around to serve the needs of these strangers. The familiar structure of home and school and the rules that made me who I am are gone now. How simple it would be for these guys to kill a person like that, a no one. For a moment, I feel like I’m floating away in a dark, empty void, cut off from the world. Anything could happen.
“He’s not a bad guy. Not really.”
Shelly’s voice brings me back to this peaceful prison.
She’s turned back to face me. “Darrel, I mean. He’s . . . It’s complicated. He’s got this family—his mom—they put all this pressure on him, so he has to help . . . he has no choice.”
“They killed a woman.”
She flinches like I just punched her. “Darrel?”
I shake my head, and she sighs in relief.
“But he’s in charge. And there are more of us back there. Four others, and he shot one of them.” I shrug. “I’m sorry.” And I am, and not just for Oscar and Sylvie, but for Shelly, this girl who’s almost my age and who maybe bought that cupcake book so she could make birthday treats for her boyfriend.
Shelly collapses into a honey-colored wooden chair that sits in front of a vanity table. And then she sits up straight. “He had no choice, but after tonight, he’s done. With all of them, his family, too. He promised.”
“You love him?”
Her eyes answer for her.
“I love Scott, but he doesn’t know it. I couldn’t say anything because he was going out with my friend. Maybe he still is, but I think they broke up. Now, maybe we’re going to die, and I’ll never get to tell him, even though I could have told him any time. Maybe he and Becky were together, but I still could have said something. And maybe it wouldn’t have mattered, but at least he would have known. I wasted all this time I could have spent doing the things I wanted. Things just for me. My mom thinks I’m afraid of the future, of challenging myself. She doesn’t get that art terrifies me, but I love it so much that I don’t even care. And now it’s too late. For all of it.”
“Darrel won’t let anyone kill you. He couldn’t.”
I shake my head, but I don’t argue with her. “Please, help me. Help us.” I point to an iPhone sitting on her nightstand. “Let me call the cops. They can stop all of this. The two of you can run away now, tonight. Instead of loading the truck with guns, you and Toto—” I catch myself. “—Darrel can pack it with your things. I’ll even help.”
She shakes her head. “They’ll catch up to us, arrest him. Put him in jail. I can’t do that to him.”
“What if that happens anyway? I wish I could wave a magic wand and make it not real, but the devil will eat you whether you greet him or not.”
“I hear that. But at least Darrel will have a chance this way.”
“It’s going to get worse. I heard him say so to Ryan. Why do you think they’re buying guns? They want to get some guys, Aaron and the Chef. Or maybe they’re the same guy, I don’t know.”
“No. Darrel promised me.”
“I heard them make the plan.”
“No.”
“What if Darrel and Ryan don’t win their fight? What if the Chef or Aaron or whoever wins, instead? And you could have stopped it? Darrel may not be a killer yet, but if you don’t help us, that’s exactly who will come home to you tonight. If he makes it.”
Eyes wide and unseeing, she gets to her feet and backs away until she strikes the window. “He isn’t like that. You don’t know him!”
How can this girl be so blind? The evidence is right here in front of her.
If you cover a fire . . .
“Then give me a weapon. Something we can use to protect ourselves. Please, help us.” She can’t say no. I have to make her understand. I take a step closer, but she skirts me and circles around so she’s blocking the door.
“I can’t with my dad here.”
“A knife, anything. You don’t get it. People are dying. There’s blood on the floor, and on my dress and my shoes.” I point my toes, but she doesn’t look at my silver sandals. “There’s going to be more. You can’t just pretend this isn’t happening because you don’t want it to be true.”
She stares at the wall behind me for a minute, gnawing on a bubblegum-pink fingernail. A second later, her head snaps up. “Wait here and don’t make a sound.” Before leaving the room, Shelly grabs her phone from the nightstand.
The house feels huge around me. No voices. No TV or radio. I try the door after I’m sure she must be gone. The knob turns and it opens—It opens!—but only a little. Something catches. A gap, maybe an inch thick, gives me a view of some kind of latch. Shelly locked me in from the outside.
I want to cry, but if I lose it now, I’ll never get it together again, so I breathe instead. Think. Think. The door to the hallway isn’t a great option, anyway. Even if I do get the door open, how will I get through the house without being seen?
Hurrying to the window, I try to calculate how high we are here on the third floor. Below me, the dark rectangle of the driveway stretches into the night. I could jump. The windows are new, and the screen slides up easily enough. A warm breeze promises freedom and safety, but when I lean out through the opening my head starts spinning.
No
way.
What if I break my leg or arm, and they catch me anyway? Then again, what if I make it to the ground and I’m fine? I can’t think, can’t decide.
I hear footsteps in the hall. It’s too late now. I waited too long.
I slam the screen down hard enough that it bangs, and the door opens before I make it back to the bed, but it doesn’t matter. It’s only Shelly.
God, what’s wrong with me? Only Shelly? Like she’s safe just because we went to the same school and she hasn’t threatened to kill me yet?
“Why do you have a lock on your bedroom door?” I ask.
“It’s from when I was little. My dad holds meetings in the house sometimes. He didn’t want me getting in the way. Here.” She holds up a black vest. “This is the best I can do. It’s bulletproof.”
“But won’t they see it?”
“It’s a size small. That’s why my dad has it around. No one he deals with can wear it. Put it on under your dress, and button your sweater all the way up. You’ll be a little hot, but unless they’re really paying attention, they won’t notice it. And since men never really pay attention to stuff like that—”
“—they’ll never know.” I laugh, and though it feels wrong, it feels good, too. It feels like me, the real me. That’s something. “Thanks.”
Shelly turns her back so I can slip off the bodice of my dress. It just about fits over the vest. With my cardigan buttoned to the top, my reflection in the full-length mirror is a little bulkier than usual, but she’s right, it’s not super noticeable.
“You sounded good, you know,” Shelly says from behind me. I watch her smile in the mirror. “In the choir. You had that pretty little solo at Christmas, right?”
“Yeah. That was me.” As I study the new, Kevlar-enhanced Winny, my smile fades, leaving behind a grim face. “That was me,” I whisper again.
32
WINNY
NINE HOURS AND THIRTY-FIVE MINUTES BEFORE CLOSING
Barefoot, Winny descended the stairs as though she were being walked to the gallows. She adjusted her robe, trying to block out the AC-chilled air and the cold soaking through the soles of her feet from the hardwood boards.
“Mom. You’re home. How nice.” She tried to smile, but her lips felt too stiff.
“Did you get my message?” Jeannette Sommervil waited for her daughter at the foot of the staircase, hands on her hips, one black leather pump telegraphing her impatience.
“I heard part of it.” The floor boards creaked out the moan Winny was struggling to suppress. Her mom coming home in the middle of the work day had to be about the exhibit, no doubt about it. “I was showering.”
“Going somewhere?”
There it was.
Winny didn’t answer. Her brain whirred, but she couldn’t come up with a response that wouldn’t implicate her, so she kept her mouth shut and waited. There was no point in resisting the incoming tidal wave of her mom’s wrath.
“I was under the impression you didn’t have any plans today,” her mom went on. “At least, you never mentioned anything.”
“Mom—”
“I just heard from one of your school friends about the art show, Winsome. Why would you deliberately disobey our request?”
Was she for real? “Because you guys gave me no choice. I seem to recall your disapproval of all things art.” Winny stormed past her mother and into the kitchen where she ran the tap to fill a glass of water.
Her mom’s heels clicked behind her. “We’ve talked about this. You said you understood.”
“Yes, I understood the words coming out of your mouth, but that doesn’t mean I agreed with you.” As Winny raised the glass to her lips, her hand trembled. “The only thing you guys approve of is stuff that will look good on a med school application. And, in case you don’t remember, I’m not even in college yet.”
Her mother inhaled one long slow breath through her nose and let it out in a rush. “Art is a wonderful hobby, but not a career path. It can’t possibly give you a future.”
“You don’t know that! Maybe I’m good, really good. You wouldn’t know, because you’ve never seen my paintings.”
“I’m sure you’re good.” Her mother’s expression softened, and she actually smiled. “You’re good at everything you do. You have an incredible life ahead of you. But you need to see that and not limit yourself or your goals.”
“But it’s okay for you to limit my goals?”
“You have the next three years to create the kind of CV that will get you into a top tier medical school program. After that, it’s too late. Now isn’t the time to waste on frivolous pastimes.”
“It’s not frivolous to me!”
“Let’s not forget the facts of the world,” her mother continued on as if Winny hadn’t spoken. “Medicine, engineering, business, psychology—those are all valid career paths with earning potential. You’re not always going to have your dad and me to provide for you. Ou wè sa ou genyen, ou pa konn sa ou rete.”
“Right. I have no idea what I’m in for out there in the big, bad world.” Winny didn’t even need to listen. She’d heard this speech from her mother countless times before. “Why can’t you just trust me to pick for myself? You always said I could be anything I wanted.”
That was why they’d come from Haiti, or at least that’s the line her parents had fed her all those years. Her dad would plop her on his lap and talk about all the opportunities open to her that he never had. Why it was worth it to them to leave the home they loved, their family. He’d launch into his dream of her joining his practice, father and daughter physicians, working together, side by side. Winny used to love that, and she’d wanted nothing more than to follow in his footsteps. But what her parents hadn’t understood was this aspiration was more fantasy than reality. Winny’s five- or eight- or ten-year-old brain hadn’t understood what medical school would be like. Or a law career. It did understand nights eating dinner with only her mom or her dad. Or the nights spent at the Forans’ house next door, or Janey’s, because both her parents got stuck at the office.
“Of course you can be anything you want to be, but I don’t want you to let fear lead you.”
“You think I want to pursue art because I’m afraid of a real career?”
“All I’m saying is that I want you to choose wisely. A career with stability that lets you use your potential.”
“Even if it makes me unhappy?” Even if she didn’t faint at the sight of blood, her parents’ life was not the one she wanted. There was no magic there for her.
Her dad would define magic as a dead heart coming back to life or the destruction of malignant cells in the face of pharmacological advancements. For her mom, it was helping a deserving person get justice. But for Winny, magic took the form of color and light on a dull, blank canvas. Color and light she created with her hands and her brush and her pigments. Depth coming out of flat nothingness. Life breathing through a still image. Beauty born into the world.
“So, are you saying I can’t go today? My ride is coming in like twenty minutes. I should call and tell them not to bother.” Winny glared at the wall behind her mom’s shoulder as she awaited the pronouncement. “And I have to call the gallery curator, Jackie.”
Eyes closed, her mom sighed. “No, that’s not what I’m saying. Your name, our family name, is attached to this event now. You won’t dishonor that by shirking your responsibilities.”
Winny turned to her mom. “What? Really?”
“But,” her mom said, holding up a finger, “we’re discussing this matter further tonight. And remember, Winny, your father and I have worked hard to support your education. We expect to have a say in it.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“We don’t have to continue to pay your way, you know.”
“You’re threatening me? Threatening to cut me off?”
“You have a wonderful future awaiting you.”
“If I do what you say.”
“Winso
me—”
“I can take care of myself, Mom.” But her voice held no confidence.
“I’ll be telling your father about this.” With that, her mother spun on her heels and headed out of the room and down the hall to her home office.
33
WINNY
ONE HOUR AND FORTY MINUTES AFTER CLOSING
The guns come wrapped in blankets, but I don’t know if that’s to keep them from bumping together in the car or to keep them from being noticed by the neighbors or any cops, if they happen to stop us.
The bundle I’m given is way heavier than I expected.
“Don’t you drop that, girl,” Shelly’s father says.
Our bundles make quite the mound in the SUV’s cargo area. Where did these even come from, and who buys them, if not us? Other criminals? White-collar Everymen just trying to protect their families? Gun enthusiasts who want to see what an assault rifle can do at the shooting range? Probably not. Those guys probably buy their guns from fancy stores. Maybe that’s where these originally are from.
They all have to come from somewhere.
“Winny.”
It’s Ryan. I didn’t even know that he knew my name. I wish he didn’t. “What?”
“There’s one more, back in the kitchen.”
I give him a wide berth as I pass by.
Once we’re loaded up, we climb back into the SUV. Shelly doesn’t say goodbye. She’s been in her room ever since Toto knocked on the door to get me.
“Aren’t you gonna wish me luck?” he asked.
“I think we’re done talking.” She shut the door on him, and he hadn’t moved for several moments, making me wonder if he forgot I was there.
Unfortunately, he hadn’t.
“I think it’s time to check in on our friends,” Toto says before we pull onto the street.
“All as it should be over there?” Ryan asks.
I strain, but can’t catch Twitch’s response, only the hiss of the SUV’s air-conditioning and the gentle hum of the engine.
Everything must be fine, though, because Ryan nods. “Talk to you in ten.”
“We good?” Toto asks over his shoulder as he pauses at a stop sign halfway down the block.
Ten After Closing Page 16