“Aren’t you hot?” She says it without looking at me. I nod, even though she can’t see it. The sun is beating down on us and I can feel a small drip of sweat run down the side of my cheek.
I shrug off my hoodie and pull down my jean shorts, feeling embarrassed to be wearing so little and for being glow-in-the-dark white. I almost make a crack about how white I am because I haven’t been in the sun yet this summer. But I immediately clam up. That would be really weird and awkward to say to a black girl. Especially a girl I just met who may not even want me around.
“He likes you.” Again, she says it without looking at me, keeping her eyes trained on the guys in the water.
I’m not sure how to answer. “I like him, too.” I say it quietly. But I can tell she hears me because she gives a slight nod.
“Don’t break his heart. Don’t fuck him over. His last girlfriend was bad news. He’s had enough heartache in his life. He doesn’t need any more.” Now she lowers her sunglasses and looks right at me.
I swallow hard and nod slowly. Danielle was bad news? I try to hide my reaction and look down, smoothing some suntan lotion on my legs. When I look back up, Jazz gives me a big smile.
“Besides, I like you.” She flops onto her stomach. “At least so far,” she adds.
End of conversation.
I can’t help it. A small smile creeps across my face. She likes me. But then I remember what else she said — He’s had enough heartache in his life.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Raven is lying beside me on the towel, his upper body warm and sending tingling through me at every spot our bodies touch.
Flip and Jazz are off at the nearby playground swinging and laughing.
That’s one thing I really like about them. Every time I’ve seen them, they are so happy. And Jazz likes me. Why didn’t she like Danielle?
Raven sits up and pushes his sunglasses back.
“Wanna go grab something to eat?”
I pull on my shorts and stand, eager to be alone with Raven. We tell Flip and Jazz we’ll meet them later and take off.
As soon as we round a corner of the walking path, Raven takes my hand. For the first few minutes we are silent, walking and holding hands, which seems like the best thing ever to me. What could be better than walking down this tree-lined sidewalk on a sunny day holding hands with a beautiful boy?
But I remember. I’m with him because my friend is dead. I also remember what Jazz said.
“Can I ask you something?”
I can feel him tense a little through our fingers.
“Why are you ... on your own?” I’m not sure how to phrase it.
“You mean why am I an oogle?”
He lets go of my hand, heads to a bench, and sits down. He puts his head between his hands.
“I had to get away from home. See, things were great when I was little but then my grandpa died and my dad sort of freaked out and got religion. In a big way.”
I bite my lip. My mom and dad and I used to go to church every Sunday. That ended with the divorce. I vaguely wonder if my dad goes to church in New York.
“We’d always gone to church and all that. We drove into Davenport from Coal Valley,” Raven says squinting into the distance.
He’s from Iowa. Not that far away.
“But then when I got older my dad decided that wasn’t good enough and that everything we did was wrong. He started telling me that the music I was listening to — Troll and Throes of Dawn — was devil music and that the books I read — even Harry Potter — were inviting demons into our house.”
Troll is creepy, but I don’t say it. He’s lost in his memories. He doesn’t meet my eyes as he speaks.
“At first my mom argued with him but then one day I came home from school and all my things were gone. My mom had taken all my posters down, taken away all my CDs and stripped my bookshelf in my empty room. It wasn’t long after that she went away. Had some stuff going on. Some depression stuff.”
“When they took her away, I freaked out. I was fourteen. I left the house and didn’t come home until the next day. When I did, my dad beat the crap out of me. Kept saying he’d beat the devil out of me.”
He absentmindedly fingers his lip and I notice a small scar above his lip.
“I ended up in the hospital. He’d broken my arm, my ribs and I had stitches here and here,” he points to his eyebrow and his lip.
“Oh my God.” I want to hug him, but his eyes are far away looking somewhere up in the leaves of the tree as he tells his story.
“Of course, they wouldn’t let me go home after that. They put me in a foster home and arrested my dad. I lasted about a week in the foster home. There was this older guy and he got in my bed one night.” He looks away as he says this. “I think I broke his jaw. I didn’t want to go to juvie. I was scared. So I left. I met this guy down at the river. He rode the rails. He introduced me to everyone else. I stayed there for a week with them and then when they left, I hopped a train with them. I spent the next year traveling with them across the country, seeing things I never dreamed about. They took me in. Made me family.
“I’m an oogle now,” he says it defiantly as if I’m going to argue with him. “That’s what we call ourselves. Nobody else can call us that, though. Or they’ll end up dead. God, I shouldn’t even be telling you this. I have no idea why I am.”
“What?” I gasp at the word dead. Like Danielle dead? Did she call him an oogle? He suddenly seems like a stranger. I pull back.
His brow furrows. “Well, some people have had a tougher time. Some of the oogles are really protective. They have to be. We have to look out for our own. Nobody else will.”
“You said dead. As in murder?”
“You don’t understand. I’m not going to talk to you about this anymore. I never should have brought it up.”
“Isn’t your dad looking for you? Or your mom?”
He relaxes slightly.
“Not now that I’m emancipated. An oogle who used to be a judge did it all with his contacts. It’s all legal.”
“What about your mom?”
He sighs. “I miss her. But she’s been in and out of mental health places since then. She can barely take care of herself. Everyone told me to forget about it. That she’d be better off without me in her life. I believe it.”
“She must be worried sick.”
“Oogles have this sort of code of honor. They’re super loyal to each other. We’re not supposed to contact our families. We have new families now. A bigger family than I ever dreamed. These people would die for me.”
I couldn’t help but wonder — would they also kill for him?
“Check it out,” he says pulling his phone out of his pocket. “We have a Tumblr and Facebook page and website and everything.”
“How do you even have a phone?”
“I got a bank account. Automatically pays my phone bill every month. Every year in September, I work the Sugar Beet Harvest up by Fargo. I make more than two grand working it. That money usually lasts a year if I’m really careful.”
My forehead scrunches up.
“Lots of oogles do it. Here, you’ll see in some of these pictures.”
I take his phone and scroll through the pictures.
Then I nearly drop the phone. A picture of him and Danielle. In the photo, Danielle is smiling up at Raven. His hair is in his face and I can’t see his expression as he looks down on her, but their fingers are clasped together.
Danielle has that look again — the look that tells me she was a goner for him.
With her short hair and more punkish clothes, she looks so different from the girl I knew. Her blond hair has a turquoise streak in it and she has a small nose piercing I’d never seen. I study the picture. She’s wearing a black leather mini skirt and ripped top that says “City of Angels” on it. She has on thick black stockings that stop right above her knee and her boots have three-inch heels. She looks nothing like the friend I once knew.
&
nbsp; “She didn’t drown.” I say, not taking my eyes off the photo.
“I know,” he says.
When I look up, Raven is watching me. There is something in his eyes I’ve never seen before. “You should know something. We hung out and I really liked her, but it wasn’t very serious. At least on my end.”
Boarding the bus later after we ate at McDonald’s, I think about his words. “We hung out ... it wasn’t very serious.” Raven and I “hung out” today. But that doesn’t make it serious, does it? At least not on his end.
As the bus pulls away and I watch Raven’s back turn the corner, I remember the look on Danielle’s face in that picture. He wasn’t serious, but she obviously felt differently than him. Maybe she thought she could make him like her more. Maybe I think the same thing.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
There is a small knock and the door to my bedroom opens. My mom just left for Sam’s house. Did she forget something?
It’s Curtis.
In a knee-length forest green cape with a hood. The hood is on.
“Your mom let me in as she was leaving.”
“Cool,” I say, sitting up straighter on my bed and putting down the paperback I was reading. “You look like you’re headed to the renaissance festival. Or a Hobbit convention.”
He pulls back the hood. His eyes have dark shadows under them.
I give a weak smile trying to hide my disappointment that it’s not Raven. Not that my mother would have let Raven in the house, nonetheless sent him up to my bedroom.
I straighten my hair a little with one palm.
“So ... why are you here?” It sounds ruder than I intended.
He stands in the doorway shifting from foot to foot. His Adam’s apple bobs and he looks out the window. Then clears his throat.
We both speak at the same time.
“Emily, there’s something—”
“I don’t understand how Danielle drowned.”
He answers first. “I heard some things.”
I jump out of bed and stand in front of him. “What things?”
“Danielle’s friends — your friends — they are the hook up for smack in Uptown.”
“So.” I turn away and fiddle with the books on my nightstand.
“So, I heard Danielle liked it.”
“Bullshit,” I say. She would never break our pact.
He fidgets, looking down at his studded motorcycle boots. I wonder absentmindedly if he’s seen Raven around and if I should ask him this.
“Listen, I need to talk to you about some stuff—”
“Hey,” I interrupt. “Have you been in Uptown lately?”
He doesn’t answer, just presses his lips together and shakes his head.
Disappointment fills me. I try to hide it from him.
“This was a bad idea,” Curtis says and turns. “I gotta go.”
“Wait.” I say it but am not sure why.
Curtis turns halfway back to me but doesn’t say a word, only gives me a strange look and then turns to leave.
CHAPTER THIRTY
As soon as the door downstairs slams, I pull out my laptop and look up information about heroin deaths and overdoses on my laptop. As I read, I realize that if Curtis is right and Danielle was doing heroin that might explain how she was so out of it that she fell in the lake and drowned.
I still have a hard time believing she could change so much from the girl who made the pact with me about doing drugs. But the phone call she made to me makes me wonder. Was she turning to me for help? To give her willpower to stay away from the drugs?
Clicking through articles, the first ones I read talk about teenage girls from the suburbs dying of heroin overdoses and how this is a big trend in affluent communities. I’d always thought heroin was a drug for homeless street punks, not people destined for Ivy League colleges. I was wrong.
A state senator is featured in one article trying to get some laws passed so cops carry something that will help counteract the effects of an overdose. Her daughter died of a heroin overdose a few years before. I had no idea.
I keep digging around and find an article that talks about how people die from heroin overdoses.
What I read doesn’t seem real so I read it again:
“Most people who die from a heroin overdose do so because their bodies forget to breathe.”
How can someone forget to breathe?
The article says that only one in ten heroin overdoses end with the person dead. And it is rare for a first-time user to die. Addicts are the ones who usually die from an overdose. Even if she experimented once or twice, there is no way Danielle was an addict. The article quotes some doctor saying that a normal dose of heroin makes people sleepy and relaxed and calm, but someone who takes too much is put to sleep.
The doctor says that under normal sleep, our body remembers to breathe, but in a heroin overdose, the body actually forgets to breathe.
I can barely wrap my mind around this.
Searching under heroin deaths from not breathing, I stumble on a forum that talks about people “nodding off” and not waking up again. One person on the forum, a DrHouse, advises another person to have a friend nearby who either keeps the user awake or is there to jolt them back into consciousness — or worst case scenario — perform CPR to get them breathing again.
A guy on the forum, HighJinx, said he just took a lot of heroin and is worried because his pulse is racing, heart pounding.
“Whatever you do, don’t nod off. Don’t fall asleep,” DrHouse says, explaining that too much heroin causes “respiratory depression.”
“That’s when your breathing slows down to barely nothing, man, and your brain and heart and all that is deprived of oxygen and sometimes you stop breathing all together. That is the danger,” DrHouse writes.
“What you’re saying is odds of staying alive and well are 100 percent if I pull all-nighter and pretty bad if I fall asleep?” HighJinx writes. “Damn, I’ll pull an all-nighter then. Not taking any chances. My two friends nodded off and then died in their sleep. Not gonna happen to me.”
“If it becomes hard to breathe, call 911,” DrHouse wrote.
That was the end of the thread. Hope the guy made it.
Danielle could have fallen asleep and died. But how did she get in the water then? That’s the question. But why? Then I hit on it. Every crime show on TV that has an overdose, shows the drugs in an autopsy report.
I send Beth a text:
Can u get Danielle’s autopsy?
Beth immediately shoots me back a text.
I’m on it.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
It’s midnight when my phone rings. It’s Beth.
“I got it.”
I don’t answer, taking it all in half asleep.
“Emily?” I barely register that she is actually using my name for the first time ever.
“I’m here.”
“I waited until my dad went to bed and then I went on his computer and printed out a copy.”
“You have it right there?”
“Yes.”
“No kidding?” Beth isn’t the super goodie-two shoes girl I’ve imagined.
“Can you bring it over here? Now?”
WE LOCK THE DOOR OF my room even though my mom is at Sam’s.
We plop on my bed and Beth’s hands are shaking holding the stack of papers. They are a little confusing.
One part says that she had a cut and bruise on her forehead. The summary says that she may have fallen and hit her head and then drowned.
It says that water in her lungs indicates a drowning. It also shows the alcohol in her blood was off the charts. Something like .15 or something. I don’t know much about alcohol, but after my driver’s ed classes I know .08 is the legal limit to drive.
And then, there it is. Heroin in her system.
“She did heroin?”
I flip open my laptop and look at the amounts in her bloodstream compared to levels considered an overdose.
“Now it makes sense,” Beth says. “I heard my Dad telling my mom he was going to make sure something about her death never got out to spare her mom and dad. I thought it was something dumb like she wasn’t a virgin anymore or something, but I bet this is what it was.”
“Can your dad do that? Keep something from going public?”
Beth rolls her eyes. “You have no idea.”
I don’t press her but flip through the autopsy report again.
“Even with them saying she was drunk and high does that mean she just fell into the lake and drowned? I don’t buy it,” I say. “The shore isn’t steep. And she didn’t go swimming with her boots and clothes on and trip and hit her head,”
“No way. None of it makes sense. We have to find out what really happened,” Beth says.
“I’m working on it.”
Beth turns to me and I tell her everything. About my pact with Danielle to not take drugs. About her phone call to me and how she seemed scared and said only I would understand. All about my plan to find out what happened to Danielle by infiltrating the gutterpunks and how I’m friends with Raven. I don’t tell her he’s kissed me.
When I finish, I look down at my shoes. I’m afraid to see her reaction. Will she hate me again? Think I’m a freak?
“Wow.” She says it and exhales loudly.
I peek out of my bangs at her. She is smiling.
“You’re kind of a bad ass, Dawson.”
I can’t help it, I smile back.
BETH AND I ARE SITTING at my kitchen table eating salsa and chips when I remember how Raven said he and Danielle just “hung out.” And I’m filled with jealousy. Why would I think I’m any more special than beautiful, confident, vivacious Danielle? Beth would know more about their relationship. All the things I’m embarrassed to ask Raven.
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