Dare You

by Jennifer Brown

  “What do you want?” I cried out. “If this is about Luna, I just want her to leave me alone. I’m not planning to do anything to her.” Perhaps a lie, but I needed to do something to make him stop before he bashed my brains out right here on the kitchen counter.

  “Who is Luna?” he grunted, tightening up against me. My hips creaked against the countertop. I could feel my skin scraping painfully against the edge. “I want to know why you’re following us. What are you after? What do you want?”

  Us? Us who? My mind raced, trying to push away the thick asphalt fear long enough to form a thought. “I don’t know who you’re talking about,” I gasped, accidentally raising my head.

  “You lying bitch!” He slammed my head forward again and, unprepared, my nose took another blow. Pain renewed. My face slid on warm blood, which was pooling on the countertop.

  Pooling blood. Mom’s outstretched arm. Nikki . . . go . . . All that crimson. Crimson waiting to swallow me up.

  Screw that.

  I remembered my last spar with Detective Martinez, how he’d used my own momentum against me. How he’d worked to knock me off balance so he could move in for the kill. Gunner’s voice was inside my head again: Use his hand against him, Nikki.

  Suddenly, the bumpy gray and black cleared long enough for me to think. I reached back and clamped my hand down over his, pushing it into the back of my head. Before he could react, I drove my foot backward in a rear kick, cracking him on the kneecap, hard.

  Instantly, he let go of me, crying out, dropping back. I slithered out from under his arm, lunged for the other side of the kitchen, and grabbed a knife out of the knife block. The handle was slippery in my palms. I hadn’t held a knife like this since that night at Hollis Mansion. The thought made me shake, and I tried to slow my breathing to keep myself from panicking. You did this once, Nikki, I reminded myself. You can do it again if you have to.

  But I didn’t want to have to.

  I just wanted this to be over.

  “You bitch!” the man was screaming, bent over and rubbing his knee, which I’d at the very least hyperextended. I still didn’t know who he was. He was in all black, including a black ski mask—a look that was so Nighttime Intruder it was terrifying. He was here to kill me. I wouldn’t get out of this without beating him to the punch. “You’ve been following us for days!” he bellowed. “Coming to the store. Coming to the auction.”

  Oh, God. The store. The auction. Us were the Basiles.

  “Watching from your car,” a voice said from the other side of the room. A deep voice. A growl, almost.

  Shit, there were two of them?!

  Two Basiles. Basiles, who had been to prison. Who had run gambling rings and been in the drug business and who killed Peyton. Standing here. In my house.

  “I don’t know what you’re after,” said the man I had kicked. “But you’re going to stop right now. You’re done coming to the store, you’re done following us around, and you are never going to so much as think about our family again. And the guy you’re always with. Same goes for him. You tell whoever’s sending you after us they’re sending you on a death mission. You got that? Because if I see you around my family again, I will kill you myself.” He straightened and came toward me. I held the knife out in front of me in both hands, to try to stop the shaking.

  “I’m not— Nobody is—” I stammered.

  “I’m not playing with you, bitch. Back off.”

  Panicked, I swiped the knife toward him. The man was quicker than I expected him to be, even with the hurt leg. He reached out and grabbed the knife handle, pushing it against my thumb until it popped free. I struggled, and he swept the knife up, slicing into my collarbone on the way. Now he held it, although, behind the mask, his eyes looked surprised to see that he’d cut me. The other man, dressed exactly as he was, rushed toward us.

  “Fuck,” he said. “Let her go, Antony. You scared her. That’s enough.” There was something familiar beneath the growl in the other guy’s voice. I’d heard it before. But the adrenaline was rushing so hard through my ears I couldn’t make sense of where. Had I heard Rigo talk? When?

  But “Antony” didn’t move, didn’t take the knife away from my chest. “She knows something. She’s after something. I can tell she’s lying.”

  The other guy moved toward him. “She isn’t worth it. Let’s just go.”

  “Antony” stared me down for a few long seconds, during which I tried to remain as calm and steady as humanly possible, even though on the inside I was a trembling storm of colors and everything in me cried out in pain and fear.

  At last, he dropped the knife onto the floor, then kicked it away with his boot. “If we see you again, we will come back, and I can promise you will regret it,” he said, pointing into my face.

  “Come on, man,” the other guy said urgently. He was already halfway out of the kitchen.

  I waited until I heard the front door slam before I moved from my spot. My whole body was shaking so hard I thought I might fall down. Instead, I hurried to the broken window and peered out. I could see their two silhouettes running through our backyard. In no time, they disappeared between the two houses behind us.

  “Shit,” I said, studying the broken window. Dad was going to have a field day with this. So was Martinez. My feet crunched over the glass pieces as I moved to the cabinet where we kept all our extra plates and cookbooks and stuff. Mom had fallen in love with the cabinet at a flea market and had insisted Dad buy it for her. It was huge, heavy, and way too big for our kitchen, but Dad had bought it anyway, and had declared, after spending more than half a day trying to move it in, that it was going to stay in that spot forever, even if we moved away. And it had. Until now.

  I went to the side farthest away from the window and pushed. The cabinet barely budged. I leveraged my feet against the doorjamb behind me and pushed again.

  It took half an hour to get the cabinet in front of the broken window. But at least I could breathe again.

  I slid down the side of the cabinet and curled up in the corner, once again gripping the knife.

  I fell asleep there.

  27

  I WAS AWAKENED in the morning by the rattle of my phone against the floor. I hadn’t realized in the scuffle that I’d dropped it. Or maybe it had fallen out of my pocket when the guy rushed me from behind. I didn’t know. All I knew was that I felt like I’d been hit by a truck. My face and collarbone throbbed. My hand hurt from being curled around a knife handle all night, and my neck hurt from sleeping sitting up.

  Not that I slept soundly, of course. Every few minutes I would jerk awake, certain that I’d heard footsteps above my head or a car outside my door. Certain that it was Luna or Rigo or now Rigo’s guys, or whoever else might decide that today was the perfect day for me to die.

  I pulled myself off the floor, grimacing as the slice through my collarbone pinched. I put my hand over it; it came away covered with flakes of crusted blood. At least it had stopped bleeding. It couldn’t have been too deep if it stopped bleeding on its own, right?

  My legs were asleep from being bent all night, and I staggered over the broken glass, my shoes landing heavily on the tiny pieces. I would need to sweep that before Dad came home. I would need to come up with an explanation for what had happened, or Dad would never let me be alone again. Worse, I wasn’t sure anymore if I wanted to be.

  Either way, I hoped that it wasn’t him on the other end of the phone, telling me that—good news!—they’d gotten an early start and he was nearly home right now. I needed time to figure out how I was going to explain everything.

  I wanted everyone to leave me alone.

  I wanted to sink into myself and be washed away by colorful dreams.

  I just wanted everything to stop for one day and let me pretend that my life was normal.

  It wasn’t Dad; it was Detective Martinez. I’d completely forgotten about getting together with him today. I grimaced, holding my side where it had made contact with the coun
ter, and sent the call to voice mail. Then I pulled up my messaging and texted him. Every part of me knew I should tell him what happened. Every cell in my body screamed that he would freak out if he discovered it on his own—and oh, he would discover it on his own. He would set up camp in my backyard. He would put a tail on me 24/7. He would sit over me like a worried nanny and treat me like a precious, fragile piece of glass.

  Which was exactly why I couldn’t tell him.

  Sick. Going back to bed.

  And that was exactly what I did.

  I WOKE TWO hours later, my stomach rumbling and my sweaty hair sticking to my neck. I was getting super tired of feeling so shitty every time I woke up.

  I decided a bath was needed. I soaked so long, all the bubbles died and the water began to turn cold, so I got out and dried off, and sat for a long time wondering what to do with myself. I was feeling a little better, but I needed a day off. Just one day off from the crazy. I settled on getting into a clean pair of pajamas, grabbing a frozen pizza, and watching TV.

  I had just the television entertainment in mind.

  While the pizza baked, I shuffled into Dad’s office. He’d said we would watch Mom’s videos together soon, but it hadn’t happened. And if I hadn’t even known about them for eighteen years, I didn’t have any reason to believe he was in a big hurry to show them to me now. I hadn’t thought anything of it before. But now that I knew Dad was hiding things from me, I wondered if the videos were hiding things, too.

  I felt a prickle of nerves, reminding me of chalkboards and slippery rocks, then tried to shake myself out of it. This was stupid. It was my dad’s office. It had been here since before I was born. There was nothing scary here. Some curious things that had me wondering, but nothing terribly out of the ordinary. To prove it to myself, I sat at his desk and pulled open the bottom drawer. I would thumb through the photos again and see if maybe I’d seen things wrong. If maybe I saw something different this time. Maybe the words had been something else and my synesthesia was confused and saw glittery lilac where it shouldn’t have been. The Hollises were on my mind every day, so it was totally possible.

  But when I opened the drawer, I found it empty. Completely cleaned out. I reached all the way until my fingers bumped the wooden drawer back, and still came up with nothing. The photos. All of them were gone.

  Who had taken them?

  Dad, of course. He had to have done it. Other than the two guys last night, he and I were the only two who could have possibly been in here. What use would they have for them? He’d taken them away. The only question now was why? Had he hidden them in the locked box under the desk? How could I possibly know, when I had no idea what could be in there at all?

  I got down on my hands and knees and stared at it, part of me expecting it, too, to be missing. Or to have never been there at all—for this whole thing with Peyton to have officially driven me crazy. But it was still there.

  I army-crawled toward it, pulled it out, and sat with it on my lap. I turned the dial. I tried my birthday. My dad’s birthday. Mom’s birthday. Our house number. Random numbers. Nothing worked.

  The front of the box rippled with color in the back of my brain. Cheater blue to the deep indigo I associated with betrayal. Mint-green suspicion that sent dots of candy up into my mind, then morphed into that ugly, horrible lime green of mistrust.

  Quickly, I stood and opened the top cabinet, my heart in my throat. I almost expected the white box that had contained all of Mom’s videos to be gone too, but fortunately, it was still there. I didn’t realize I’d been holding my breath until I let it out with a whoosh, sending a new round of pain into my side. I hesitated, my hands hovering near the box. Did I really want to do this? What if I found something worse than what I’d found in those pictures?

  Don’t be stupid, Nikki. If there was something worse in this box, he would’ve taken it right along with the pictures. Sadly, I settled on this as the truth and grabbed the box.

  It was heavier than I remembered it being, and my sore muscles didn’t help any. I gave it a heave. Something fell from the top of it and landed on Dad’s desk. I froze, staring at it.

  It was my mom’s teardrop aquamarine earring. The one that had gone missing on graduation day. It had a little piece of paper wrapped around the clasp. I straightened the paper. In tiny block letters, it read: BOO!

  I dropped the earring back on the desk and spun so I was facing the door, my entire body shaking. Who had been in here? Who had stolen Mom’s earring from my room and brought it down here? I had been looking at this very box only days ago—it had to have been after that. The Basiles had been in the house last night—I knew that much—but how would they have had the earring in the first place? And how would they have known to put it here? No. Whoever had been in my house had been someone who knew me. Who knew how to get to me.

  BOO!

  The backyard of Hollis Mansion. The pool gurgling in the moonlight. The trash can I was hiding behind, full of empty bottles. Boo! Found you!

  Luna.

  IT TOOK ME a few minutes to calm myself. I checked every lock on every door and every window. Of course, the broken one wasn’t locked, so I left the cabinet in front of it.

  Jones called while I was at it, sounding tight and tentative. “How are you, gorgeous?”

  Distracted. Terrified. Busy. “Okay.”

  “You sure? You sound kind of funny. You want to hang out? Go do something?”

  “Not today. Sick.”

  “Really?” He sounded skeptical. “Want me to come take care of you?”

  Jesus. No. That would be the last thing I would need right now—Jones in my face, asking how I felt and if I needed a ginger ale every five seconds. “We’ll talk tomorrow, Jones.”

  “Sure, we will.” That skeptical tone again.

  Only after I had checked every closet and bathroom and under every bed did I feel comfortable enough to go back to Dad’s office, back to the box of videos.

  I pulled it down and set it on Dad’s desk. I opened the top. Inside were rows and rows of VHS tapes. Old-school. I ran my fingers down their edges. None of them were labeled.

  I carried the box into Dad’s room. His TV was the only one left with a VCR attached. I used to make fun of him mercilessly about keeping the old thing, but now maybe it made sense. If he got rid of his VCR, he wouldn’t be able to watch Mom’s movies again. Not unless he converted them into disks, and as I touched each tape, I thought I understood why he wouldn’t want to do that. Mom’s hands had touched these. These movies were probably the only thing distinctly Mom left in this house. I pulled one out of the middle and smelled it. It smelled like plastic, but I told myself it smelled like overripe peaches, trying to convince my colors to come along for the ride. But that wasn’t the way my synesthesia worked. It didn’t come and go on command. It was always there, except when it wasn’t, and that was just the way it was.

  I ran back downstairs and grabbed my pizza and a couple of sodas, took them up to Dad’s room, popped in the first movie, and leaned back against his pillows to watch, trying to push everything that had happened out of my mind.

  God, she was beautiful. She could have been a model. Or an actress. Or a high-end escort? I batted the thought away. She popped in and out of the camera’s view, fussing with someone’s costume or instructing their movement or just calling for a break. Every time she realized she was on camera, she smiled, her entire face lighting up, and would wave like an awkward girl rather than an aspiring film director.

  People used to tell me I looked like her. You have her smile, they used to say to me, and I really did. At the time, I did. But something happened on that day I came home from Wendy’s house and dropped the Tootsie Rolls in Mom’s blood. My smile changed. It came out as rarely as the sun on a cloudy day, and even when it did, it was tentative, stopping at my cheeks. Nothing lit up my face. Nothing made me beautiful in the same way Mom was beautiful.

  I paused the frame with her in it and studied her fac
e; looked for myself in it.

  Chalk that up to the many things her murderer stole from me—her smile. My smile. Whatever.

  I watched until my pizza and both sodas were gone. I watched as the sun baked overhead and started to fall again. I watched until my eyes felt sandy and the back of my head felt numb against the pillow. I watched with the intention of watching every movie in that box.

  I felt like I was watching an old friend. Like I was watching my past. A past I didn’t know I had.

  A short film about a man and woman who were in love but separated by a brick wall—experimental, weird, and my favorite so far—ended and the tape went to fuzz. I got up and used the bathroom, then came back and ejected it. I reached back into the box—only a couple left now—and grabbed another tape. I popped it in and sat leaning forward on the edge of Dad’s bed.

  The first person in the frame was Dad. He was waving, acting goofy, a beer in his hand. There was noise—a lot of people talking over one another and dishes clinking, that kind of thing—and suddenly music started. A party. Dad began to dance, and then held out his hand and Mom joined him, her head tipped back and laughing as he bit at her throat.

  God, they were so in love.

  Soon another couple joined in the dancing, their bodies half cut off by the camera, and some more people, and soon there was a lot of hooting and hollering and cheering and raising glasses.

  “The man of the hour! Cheers!” Dad called, holding his beer up high. Several others joined him, including Mom, although her smile had withered a little.

  “To Bill Hollis,” another woman cried, and they all drank.