The Girl in the Headlines

by Hannah Jayne

  And being drunk.

  “Let’s just go inside for a few minutes. Then we can come back here and”—I nibbled my lip, trying to seem sexy—“do whatever.” I didn’t really want to be alone with Cal, but the patio had scattered tables, a few other couples, and a chaperone lurking in the semi dark. And maybe by the time we finished taking photos, Cal would be sobered up and back to normal.

  I had taken a step toward the open doors and the safety of Lynelle and the camera crew when Cal grabbed my wrist.

  “Ow!” The pain was sharp and instant. “Cal, let me go,” I hissed, more angry than scared.

  Cal wound me toward him, the pain in my wrist beginning to throb. “I think we should go somewhere else.”

  “Let me go,” I said again, my voice low but stern. “I’m not going anywhere with you.”

  “You’re staying with me tonight, remember?” His eyes were glinting and watery, either from the alcohol or the twinkle lights, but either way, I just wanted out. He smiled, showing me the hotel card key in his palm.

  Once upon a time this afternoon, my stomach had fluttered when I’d thought about the possibility of staying the night with Cal, but now it made my stomach roil and my heart start to thud in the worst way possible. I snapped my hand from his and rubbed my wrist, the bones already aching and feeling bruised.

  “Cal, you’re drunk. And obnoxious. I’m going to hang out with my friends. And I’m not staying with you tonight.”

  “I already paid for the room.”

  I shrugged. “Not my problem. Besides, I told you my mom won’t let me.”

  “Your mom is a bitch. She’s always dressed like a ho.”

  I opened my mouth and closed it again, anger thrumming through me. I had noticed the way Cal stared at my mom, but I had never thought twice about it. Now the idea that he wasn’t staring but leering made me want to vomit and claw his eyes out, then run home and hug my mom, who did not dress like anything but a regular mom.

  “You’re disgusting.”

  “Fine,” Cal spat. “Run back to your little cove of bitches and idiots. I knew you were a trashy little mama’s girl anyway.”

  And then he shoved me.

  It was so fast that it didn’t quite register—were those his hands on my chest? Was he trying to stop me? Did I trip over the strappy sandals I was still learning to walk in? He couldn’t have… He wouldn’t have shoved me. Not Cal, not here, at the prom, in my sparkly dress and under the twinkling lights where there were chaperones and other couples? But I was flat on my butt, and the strap of my gown was broken, and Lynelle was rushing toward me just as Cal was rushing away. He cast one glance over his shoulder, and at first, I didn’t recognize his eyes—they were a thousand times darker than normal, and everything about him looked smoldering and angry and off. Then he seemed to register me, sprawled on the patio, reaching for my broken strap, and for a split second, he was the old Cal again. His brows knitted, and I thought he was going to apologize or lean down and help me, but he just disappeared.

  “Hello? Earth to Andi?”

  But Cal wouldn’t…

  I hope you’re happy now.

  I blinked, Nate in front of me, fingers about to snap again.

  “There is this guy…” I chewed the inside of my cheek, trying to work out how to explain Cal, how to explain that weird, darkened expression and the shove and the crack about my mom and how I dated him. “I don’t know. It’s probably nothing.”

  I could call him… And say what? You were gross and pervy and talked about my mom. Did you try to kill her? Did you kill my dad?

  “This is hopeless, Nate.” I glanced at the clock over his shoulder. “I’ve got to do something. I can go to the police—”

  “The police think you’re armed and dangerous. And they know you’re not with Josh.”

  “What?”

  “You essentially broke into your mom’s hospital room. You didn’t have your little brother with you. You know what the cops are going to think?”

  “That I’m a concerned and loving daughter who’s been wrongfully accused?”

  Nate folded the paper and sighed. “That you were checking on your handiwork with your mom and that you’ve probably already done away with Josh.”

  “No,” I shook my head. “That’s ridiculous. No one thinks that. No one…”

  “The police are going after the most likely suspect. The one who was closest to the victims. The one who went to the hospital and discarded a bag of the victim’s stuff right outside.”

  “The lady who visited my mom!”

  “And who is that exactly?”

  “I don’t know, Nate, I’m not a detective, but—but maybe the hospital’s security cameras work. They can look at those and see that she isn’t me and that she dumped the stuff and then—” I lost my breath. “And then I won’t be a suspect anymore.”

  But my father would still be dead. And my mother just barely hanging on. And Josh…

  “I have to find my brother. I have to sort this whole thing out.”

  “You can’t go out anymore, Andi. Everyone is looking for you. Your face, your dark hair—you don’t exactly blend in.”

  Fifteen

  “What am I supposed to do? I don’t have anything except what’s in my hockey bag, and I doubt my jersey with my last name on it is going to be any less conspicuous.”

  “I’m not talking about your clothes necessarily. You’ve got to change your whole look.”

  I’d worn my brown, wavy hair down to the middle of my back for as long as I could remember. I would freak when Mom took me to the salon, making the poor stylist swear up and down that she would only take the split ends off, trim off an inch, two at the most. I’d worn my hair the same way for school pictures and for prom. My thick, curly mane was kind of like my signature. I’d never thought of it as something that could expose me. Then I thought of the news, my pictures cut and edited to make me look tough and mean splashed all over, and once again, I was thrown into this bizarre world of standing out versus fitting in, of being someone I didn’t know, someone I definitely wasn’t, of being on the prowl. How can I clear my name if I can’t even say my name?

  I sucked in a sharp breath. “Do you have a pair of scissors?”

  Nate nodded. “In my room.”

  * * *

  Nate led me to room 1, and I hesitated as he sunk a key into the lock. “You coming?”

  I sucked in a breath as he opened the door and flicked on the light.

  “You’re not going to kill me?”

  Nate walked into the room, flicked on the television. “Not unless you try and kill me first.”

  I stepped over the threshold feeling weird and guilty. I had never been in a guy’s room—if you didn’t count Josh—and I had definitely never been in a boy’s motel room. My parents were pretty lax about most things, but boys in the bedroom was a firm no, and me going into a boy’s bedroom? Also no.

  “You…live here?” I asked.

  The room was the same layout as mine: two beds with horrible matching bedspreads, nightstand with remote control bolted to it, chintzy “kitchen” table with stuck-on wood grain, and a nonoffensive chair upholstered in oatmeal beige, but it had an unavoidably lived-in feel. A Pearl Jam poster was taped over the sailboat-in-the-harbor “art” on the wall. The half-open closet was stuffed with clothes and a few cardboard boxes, and the towels hanging outside the bathroom were navy blue and looked vaguely plusher than the motel-issued ones. There was a microwave and an instant kettle, two boxes of Cookie Crunch, and a half-opened case of instant noodles. There was a laptop on the table with an open can of orange Crush next to it and a selection of maybe laundry in the corner.

  “My mom and I live here.” Nate cocked his head as if he was listening for something, then shrugged, a hint of a smile on his face. “Well, I live here. My mom took off abo
ut ten months ago.”

  “Ten months ago?” I gaped. “Are you serious? Where’d she go?”

  “Eugene, I’m guessing. With a guy named Wes who owned a Winnebago. Or Randy who owned an RV. Coulda been Vince in the Vanagon. Anyway, said she’d send for me when she got settled. Guess she’s not settled.”

  “That’s not… You can’t just… Did you call the police? Maybe something horrible happened to her.”

  “More horrible than Vince in a Vanagon?”

  I shook my head. “Okay, well, did you call social services or something?”

  Nate looked at me like I’d grown another head before exploding into peals of belly-rupturing laughter. He doubled over, holding his gut, and a hot stripe of embarrassment shot up the back of my neck.

  “What?”

  “‘Call social services’—that’s classic! ’Cuz some sweet white family with a shaggy dog and a Volvo have just been waiting for a seventeen-year-old mixed-race punk to complete their happy little family.”

  A slice of anger gnawed at my gut. “And what you have around here is so much better?”

  “I got a pool and a mini fridge. No shaggy dog, but we’ve got rats the size of racehorses, so really, I’m five by five.” An annoyingly smug half smile cut across his face.

  “And the owner lets you live here?”

  “I give him forty hours a week—more or less. He gives me a paycheck, a break in the rent, and peace and quiet.”

  I looked around. “Wow, so you get to pay for this dump too?”

  Nate’s voice was low. “Not everyone got sent to Swanky Acres, girl.”

  “Please stop calling me girl.”

  He immediately went back to that easy smugness. “Lady, mama…”

  “I have a name.”

  “I know.”

  I shrank in on myself, the urge to run surging hot through my muscles.

  Nate put a firm hand on my shoulder, smiled. “Relax. I’m not going to do anything. Not going to call anyone.” He turned, singing the lonely riff from “Hotel California” as he slid the room key onto a hook on the wall. “You can hide out here.”

  “I didn’t do it.” I said.

  “I didn’t ask. So tell me about this adoption.”

  I stared Nate down. “Why do you care?”

  He shrugged. “Look, you dropped yourself into my world, remember? I’m just trying to be friendly, make conversation, get some information for my tell-all book.”

  I pinched my lips together so I wouldn’t smile. “You realize I am in the middle of a murder investigation, right? That I could go to, like, the gallows at any moment, and you’re cracking jokes.”

  Nate held up a single finger. “They haven’t used gallows in a hundred years, cowgirl. I’m just asking. My family life”—he swished an arm in front of me—“hasn’t always been this stable.”

  My eyes scanned the chaos of his life, and though the detritus of mine was wholly worse, it felt nice to have someone interested in me. “It wasn’t really even an adoption. Or something. My birth mom had gotten clean for, like, fifteen minutes after she had me. Then she left me at a bus station.”

  Nate’s eyes went wide. “She dumped you at a bus station?”

  “Something like that. Anyway, my birth mom had family, and they picked me up—or so the story goes—and got my mom into rehab, and I guess everything was hunky-dory for a little while. I think I lived with my grandma, and my mom would visit whenever they let her, then she got clean, and I went to live with her.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Baby—a year, maybe two?” I scratched my head. “It’s not like I remember. It’s just what I’ve been told. Anyway, Mom started to get squirrelly again and would leave me in her apartment, alone. I guess I wandered out, and social workers got involved.”

  “Why didn’t they just give you back to your grandma?”

  Suddenly, there was a weird lump in the back of my throat. “I—don’t know.”

  I loved the McNultys, but every once in a while, late at night or when my dad had yelled at me for not doing something, I’d think about this grandma. Did she care about me? Did she cuddle me and snuggle me? Was she sad when I went away? Strangely, I hoped that she died after my mom took me back, because the other reality—that she didn’t want me either—was too hard to bear.

  I fake coughed into my hand and rolled my eyes. “Maybe she was a druggie too? Anyway, the McNultys came along and were like foster parents, and then they were guardians.”

  “But they didn’t adopt you?”

  Another shrug. “My birth mom was never sober enough to sign the paperwork to give up her rights, and the judge was never bothered enough to terminate them, I guess. It really never seemed like that big a deal.”

  Nate blinked. “Really?”

  “Do you think about your guardianship? About how your mom is doing a bang-up job leaving you in a crap motel to fend for yourself?” I was angry, and it wasn’t Nate’s fault, but who the hell was he to judge me and the McNultys? Everyone in my life had abandoned me before I was even out of diapers, and he was casting a shady eye on the two people who took me in and made me a part of their family, with basically no questions asked. Rita hadn’t exactly come looking for me, and the few times she showed up, she’d just stare at me with these wide, hollow eyes and scamper away the first chance she got. If the McNultys had kidnapped me off the street, I wouldn’t even care. They were my family. I was their daughter. That was all there was to it.

  “The media acts like you were a wild child or—”

  “The media acts like I’m a criminal.”

  There was a beat of awkward silence, me trying not to cry, Nate studying the wall—anything to avoid looking at me.

  “And what do you think?” My question hung on the air, my heart thumping against my ribs. I don’t know why I asked. I wasn’t sure I even wanted to know. “Do you think I’m a criminal too?”

  Nate opened his mouth and closed it again silently. “I…” He let the word trail off.

  “Why are you even here, helping me?”

  He looked at his palms resting on his thighs. “Because you look like someone who got a raw deal. You look a little helpless and hopeless.”

  I wanted to break in and say something strong and haughty, but I couldn’t.

  “I’ve been there. Shit,” he sighed. “I might still be there.” His smile was weak, doing nothing to hide the pain in his eyes, and I looked around the room—his “house,” the place where he lived—and the uncertainty and despair was all around us. There was one picture of Nate, maybe around ten years old, gap-toothed and hugging a young woman who had his eyes. Even in the frame, I could see the picture pulling up in places, the exposure melting onto the glass. Everything else was impersonal: stacks of paper plates and plastic forks, that one Pearl Jam poster, and those chintzy towels hung up to try and make this place like home. But it was a motel room, and he was a kid dumped here, trying to make a life. We had both been trying to make a life.

  Sixteen

  I gritted my teeth.

  I would show everyone. These were my parents, and I was their daughter, and some horrible person had done something unmentionably horrible to my family, and I was going to find out who and maybe kill him myself. Even as I thought it, my stomach gurgled painfully, and bile itched at the back of my throat.

  This isn’t happening. None of this is really happening.

  It’s going to be okay, I tried to tell myself. They’ll find the person who did this and find Josh, and my mom will recover. But my dad… I tried to steel myself, clench my jaw against the torrent of tears. My dad was dead, and nothing was going to be okay ever again.

  “I’m solving this case myself.”

  Nate raised his eyebrows, his lips quirked into a half smile.

  “Scissors, please.”

 
He handed me a pair, and I locked myself in the bathroom, my stomach dropping when I clicked the weak lock. I was alone in the tiny white-walled room, and everything inside me wanted to curl up, to stab myself with the scissors and die.

  But I wouldn’t.

  I couldn’t.

  I’d never leave Josh. I’d never let whoever hurt my parents walk free. I held the scissors up to my scalp and lopped off my hair.

  My hair was now short, spiky in places, and I didn’t find a new sense of badassness, like when the chick in the movie shaves her head to reveal a cool, edgy new look.

  I just looked awful.

  I stepped out of the bathroom, and Nate pinched his lips together. “It looks good.” His smile was so weird and forced that I wanted to punch him.

  “It’s awful.”

  “Yep.”

  “Can I fix it? What can I do?” I rushed to the mirror framed with an ugly gold frame and tried to move my inch-long hair into some sort of style. “Do you have gel? Mousse or something?”

  Nate cocked an eyebrow, his own disheveled hair drooping over one eye.

  “Stupid question. Okay, do I look different enough?”

  “Come with me.”

  Nate walked me across the Midnight Inn parking lot to a drugstore. Its bright lights only made the motel look that much more decrepit. He stopped in the hair dye aisle, did a quick scan, and handed me a box.

  “It’s teal!” I said.

  “It’s weird.”

  I gave him back the box. “Yeah, moron. Weird attracts attention.”

  Nate didn’t smile. “Not for us it doesn’t.” He turned, heading for the door.

  “What does that even mean? Where are you going? We need to pay for that!”

  He palmed a bag of M&M’s that disappeared immediately. “Do you have money?”

  I dug into my bag and pulled out my wallet. “No cash. I have a card though.”