“How was your day?” he questioned as we drove. “I heard one of the new boys almost ran you over this morning? Are you okay?”
I tightened my fists on the steering wheel. “People know it was me?”
He patted my knee, trying to be comforting. “Don’t worry, Seph—they described you and I connected the dots.”
“Described me?”
“Yeah, someone thought you were Cabe’s sister.” He laughed. “They were getting all excited, thinking we’d have a new cheerleader for the team.”
I snorted, and he laughed harder. It always astounded Tariq how I managed to fly under the radar, but I wasn’t so surprised. It was the way I liked it. I worked hard for it. I parked a few houses down and we both walked home, slipping through the door with our guards raised.
“About time!” our father thundered from the kitchen.
Tariq paused, and I collided with his back. Slipping in front of my brother, I faced off with Gerald.
“Where were you?” he growled at me. “I’ve been waiting all afternoon.”
Yeah right.
“We were at school.” My voice was cold, firm, as it always was with him. I knew perfectly well that he hadn’t been waiting for us, because his shirt was still crumpled from sleep and his eyes were groggy.
“I’m hungry,” he spat. We all are. He narrowed his green eyes at me, bloodshot and swollen—once beautiful, like Tariq’s, but now covered in a film of strain and sin. “Where is all the food?”
“You took the money again, Gerald.”
He spat out a curse and rounded the counter, his hand whipping out with worrying speed, capturing my neck in a claw-like grip. “Shouldn’t you be at work then?”
A growl rose in my throat, but Tariq put a palm between my shoulder blades, tempering me.
One… two… three…“Yes,” I bit out. “I’m going.”
Gerald shoved me back and began to round on Tariq, but I stepped aside to draw his attention back to me. Taking the cue, Tariq rushed up the stairs, and I heard the click of his bedroom door locking.
Gerald must have heard it too. “Get moving, you ungrateful shit!” He shoved me again, and my hip bit into the counter. I shot toward the front door and disappeared before he could do anything else. Tariq was safely in his room. There was nothing left for me there.
With each step that I took away from the house, I shed the things inside that threatened to condemn me. I was not a victim. I was just another girl, black-haired and wearing sneakers. I walked as every other girl did, along a perfectly average, house-lined street toward an unremarkable—albeit slightly rusted—car. For all anyone knew, my father might have saved up to buy the car for me, and I might have been on my way to the mall right now to hang out with more girls just like me. I built upon my imaginary life as I drove to the club, thinking about the boy who might ask for my number, and the new action movie that my group of friends would invite me to watch. We would buy popcorn and kick our shoes off to notch our feet against the seats in front of us.
I released the fantasy as I arrived at the club, content to sit and stare at the scraggly trees that bordered the small car park at the back of the brick building. I could sit there all afternoon or all night if I wanted to, since I wasn’t actually rostered to work that night at all, but after a few minutes I left the car and started toward the front of the building. There was a simple sign over the door stating that the club opened at 10pm and closed at 4am, with a few general regulations. Sender’s Nightclub dominated the top of the brick building in bold black lettering. There were no sparkles, lights or other advertising gimmicks. It was a serious club, for people with serious problems.
I had been forced to start work there a year ago, only a few months after my sixteenth birthday, when my father couldn’t pay off his drinking tab. Now he was banned from the club, but I was still working, because my father didn’t have a job. Whatever he had been once upon a time, he was like the club now: stripped of sparkle and full of poison.
I climbed the stairs and found Sally in her office.
“Hey, sweetie.” She glanced up when she saw me, a small frown twisting her mouth. “I didn’t have you rostered for tonight.”
“Could you use any extra help?” I asked meekly, my eyes focussed on her desk. It seemed that with each of my shifts, her paperwork pile grew even larger, and I wondered if she were in some kind of trouble.
She studied me for a minute, the frown lines between her brows deepening, and then she finally nodded. “Sure, why don’t you fill up the shot trays out the back?”
This was why I still worked here. Sally never turned me away.
“Thanks.” I tried to smile, and not for the first time that day, I failed.
Her frown dipped lower, but she made no comment. I suspected that there were already too many things on her mind for her to venture into enquiring after my problems, but I didn’t mind. I wouldn’t tell her anyway. I weaved through the tables on the club floor and pushed out to the kitchen area. I found the twelve black circular trays, still sticky from the night before, and began to wash them up. I dried them out and set them side-by-side along the industrial-sized counter. As I placed out the shot cups and filled them, my mind began to wander, and the time passed quickly as I went about the motions of preparing the club for opening. By nine, Sally had me sitting in her office, eating takeaway pizza. She claimed that she ordered too much, as she always did. I knew better. It made me feel guilty, because Tariq was probably starving at home. For half an hour, I curled up in a chair and tried to get through my homework, and then Sally was hustling me to the front door. I stood there, taking money from people as they entered and stamping their palms.
I hated every minute of the club when it was open. I hated that my fingers occasionally brushed against the fingers of strangers as I stamped the backs of their hands, I hated that I had to smile at them while they gave me money for shots. I hated that they thought I was there just for them. I wasn’t. I was there so that my father wouldn’t fly into a blind rage and kill me or my brother. I was there so that Tariq wouldn’t starve.
I usually stood at the door, a few paces behind the security guard, until around midnight, and then I’d have to start handing out shots. I glanced at my watch, checking the time, and started for Mark—tonight’s guard—before one last person walked through the door. I paused, recognising the silhouette. The stranger wore a hood pulled up to cast shadows over his face, feeding the mystery that surrounded him. The first time he showed me his identification, his thumb had been conveniently covering the name, and nobody else in the club seemed to know what it was either. He was almost always here, he always bought exactly one drink, and he never spoke to anyone. He was gentle in his interactions with me, but the other employees and patrons avoided him with a vigour that I couldn’t help but find suspicious. They seemed terrified of him. He nodded to the guard, who didn’t check his licence, and walked up to me, handing over his money without saying anything. I tucked it into the safe box through the window behind me and he reached for my hand. I had met him on my first night a year ago; I had been too frightened to touch anyone back then, and I had almost mistaken him for Quillan—they looked very similar at first glance. That changed when you got a closer look.
This man had a cold scowl firmly set into his expression, and wildness lurked behind each of the prominent scars that tagged his face: one dragging down the corner of his top lip, another creeping through his left eyebrow, and yet another disappearing into his hairline, thicker and more jagged than the rest. Danger boiled just beneath his skin, forming a screen over his black eyes, making them seem even darker than Quillan’s, and much more unstable. He was handsome, if you managed to see past the terror caused by his very apparition. His skin tone hinted at Mediterranean descent and he held himself tall, his shoulders squared with a grace rarely seen, his chin often lowered to imbue an intensity in his stare. I smiled my obvious fondness for the silent stranger as he caught my hand and stamped himself. H
e touched a thumb to my cheek before he walked away.
It was exactly what he had done on that first night a year ago.
I stared after his broad back, noting the usual black jeans and black boots. I wondered again if he was related to my art teacher in some way. I handed the stamp over to Mark and skipped back upstairs, checking in once with Roger, who was working the bar.
“Can you help me out here a bit, sweets?” he asked. “We’re busy tonight and Crystal called in sick.”
“Sure.” I moved to his side. “What do you need me to do?”
Roger was a science major, and I’m pretty sure that he was interested in both guys and girls. I’d seem him flirting over the bar with both genders. He had slicked-back hair, a nose piercing, and flat blue eyes.
“Take one of those trays and start collecting glasses, thanks.”
I retrieved the tray and headed out to the tables, piling empty bottles and glasses onto it. Someone slipped a hand around my middle and I pushed away from them, setting my teeth together in a show that wouldn’t have passed for a smile even on one of my good days. Random people tipped me, even though I wasn’t doing anything for them, and I collected the tips in one of the empty cups. I threw out the bottles and loaded the cups into the washer, and then did two more rounds before I started with the shots.
“Hey there babe.” Some guy with ruddy cheeks and a crooked smile sidled up to me, and I straightened my spine. “How much?” He glanced at the tray, and then promptly set his eyes on my chest.
“Two dollars,” I said, holding out one of the little shot cups for him.
He grabbed it, tossed it back, and then grabbed another, dropping a few coins onto the tray and moving to pat my ass. I jumped out of the way, spilling some of the alcohol on my tray, and he laughed obnoxiously. I moved toward the outskirts of the room with grim resignation. I had learned early on to always have a wall at my back, but somehow in my preoccupied state, I had forgotten the golden rule. When I reached the corner that my silent stranger usually sat in, I slipped into the seat next to him and heaved a relieved breath. Unlike the other customers, he never grabbed me or leered at me, or even spoke to me. He glanced over as I sat, tipping a glass of vodka to his lips.
“I’m having a bad day,” I told him.
Under normal circumstances, I was well aware that spilling your guts to scary-looking strangers in seedy clubs wasn’t the smartest thing to do, but it was another given in my life—just like my father’s rapid-fire abuse and our constant state of poverty. The stranger in the bar. I wasn’t entirely sure how it had started, or when it had started, but somewhere along the way he had become the only person that I could really say things to. I knew that it was probably due to his lack of a reaction to the things that spilled out of my mouth, but it didn’t matter. He was like a priest behind a curtain—though, admittedly, one that you wouldn’t want to come across alone at night.
“Hm.” He made a non-committal sound and indulged himself in another sip of vodka.
I examined him in the shadow of our little corner, wondering why he even came to this place. Maybe he was a dealer.
“I know,” I said, toying with one of the shot cups. “I have a lot of those. But today was especially bad… or especially weird. I feel like I’ve been living my whole life high above the crowds of normally-functioning humans, walking along a wobbly cord that doesn’t lead anywhere, and today… today I think something knocked me off. Someone snipped the cord, or maybe the world rushed up to meet me. I don’t know. Everything feels suddenly… changed. My favourite teacher, the new boys at school, even my painting—it all changed. It feels different now, and I don’t think I like it.”
He opened his mouth as if to say something, and then seemed to think better of it, turning his eyes to the bar. Well that was a first. I blinked at him, and then held up one of the little cups.
“Want one?”
His eyes found mine again, a brow arching. Yeah, right. He wasn’t a shot person… possibly a cocaine person, but not a shot person. I sighed, put the shot back on the tray and stood, ready to palm off the rest of them.
He reached up and tugged my elbow, pulling me back into the seat next to him, much closer than I had been sitting before. He tucked a note into my hand and then stood and grabbed the tray. I watched as he found a bin close to the door, leading into the smoking area, tossing the lot of them in. I looked down at the note curled into my fist. It was a hundred dollars.
What the hell?
He returned, sat, and placed the tray on the table. “Better?”
I gulped. “I have eleven more trays.”
He reached for his wallet and my eyes went wide. I panicked and reached out to grab his hand. “No!”
His eyes flashed, smouldering with the same fire that lit in Quillan’s eyes whenever he was angry with someone, or proud of one of my paintings. I lost my breath, and the fire touched every part of my face with the same itching feeling that had been accosting me all day. I slowly pulled my hand back, my arm shaking. He shifted forward, his voice low. “Finish your trays, Seraph.”
I jumped up so quickly that my tray clattered to the ground. I picked it up and ran back to the kitchen, wondering how he had found out my name. I had probably told him at some point… hadn’t I told him everything else? My thoughts were so tangled that the rest of the night passed in a whirl of faces and sticky coins. My feet were aching and a headache was brewing by the time we closed up, and I left as soon as Sally slapped some bills into my hand. It was too late to do any shopping, so I stopped into a fast food place on my way back and snuck into Tariq’s room when I returned home, waking him up to eat. He grumbled until he smelled food, and then he quietened and began stuffing his burger into his mouth.
I put myself through a shower and stumbled into my bedroom, flicking on the lights. There was an envelope on my bed, my name written across the front. Confused, I opened it, letting the contents spill onto the bed. Several printed photographs fanned out beneath my fingers, one of me being cornered in the cafeteria by Cabe and Noah. The photo was taken from behind me—presumably through the window at my back—so I couldn’t see my own face. The next was of me walking in-between the two boys. It was taken from behind again, the boys hovering over me as I cowered in the middle. My teeth started to chatter as I sorted through the images. The last was the most disturbing, because I didn’t clearly remember it. It was Cabe pulling me up from the ground, Noah behind him. My face was torn with sorrow, like I had been waiting for the car to hit me, and Cabe had ruined everything. I dropped the last picture onto the bed, feeling a cold blanket of fear settle over my shoulders, shivering up the back of my neck. I fell to my knees, picking up the typed note that had been included with the pictures.
Ladybug, ladybug fly away home.
Your house is on fire,
Your children will burn…
I stood there as the clock ticked by on the wall, the belligerent sound battering against my frazzled nerves as loud as a drum. The rhyme was familiar, and after I recovered from my shock, I rushed to the four cardboard boxes stacked in the corner of the room, trying to pass for a bookshelf. One of the books had been pushed to the very back, beneath a pile of second-hand paperbacks that Tariq had bought me last year for my birthday. I pulled out the book of nursery rhymes and opened it to the first page, running my fingers over the inscription.
My darling Seraph,
Never let the bad guys win.
Love,
Mum.
My intake of breath was tremulous and watery as the words blurred before my face—I had forgotten all about my mother’s whispered words as she finished reading me a story each night and turned out the light. Pushing the memory away, I turned the pages in search of the rhyme that had been quoted in the note, but my fingers kept catching on other pages instead, as the edges had been folded down. Opening to one of them, I found myself reading Three Blind Mice, my eyes drawn to a line that had been circled in red.
They all ran
after the farmers wife.
My initial trepidation upon seeing the photographs returned tenfold, and I skipped to the next folded page: Goosey Goosey Gander. This time two lines were circled.
I took him by the leg,
And threw him down the stairs.
The next marked page was Jack and Jill, and before even reading the lines, I instinctively knew which ones would be circled.
Jack fell down,
And broke his crown,
And Jill came tumbling after.
It was clear that the note had something to do with Noah and Cabe, as they were included in every single picture, but what did the messenger want exactly? Did they expect me to stop talking to the two boys, or were they trying to warn me about something? Or… perhaps more importantly… why did they care? I shoved everything into the envelope and grabbed a blanket, moving back to Tariq’s room. He had finished eating, and was snoring softly. I shut his door, locked it, and slid onto the end of his bed. He grumbled something, kicked at me and then shot up into a sitting position, his sleep-tousled hair matted to one side of his face.
“Seph?”
I didn’t answer, and he hovered there for a moment. The tears were rolling silently down my cheeks, and he touched a palm to the side of my face. I screwed my eyes shut, and he watched me for a moment more before falling back. He threw his own blanket over me, fit a pillow beneath my head, and went back to sleep.
Tariq was an amazingly simple person.
In the morning he didn’t wake me up until the last possible minute, and when he did, he shoved a handful of clothes at me and pushed me toward the bathroom. I brushed my teeth, combed my hair and slid on the cotton shirt and pleated black skirt. It was a little nicer than what I usually wore, but I didn’t have time to change again. We both crept through the door and I left a twenty on the counter for Gerald. Hopefully he would buy food with it.
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