Holly padded down the hall in her bare feet and knocked gently on Kaylee’s door. When there was no response, she figured Kaylee was listening in on a conference call with her underlings at the casino. Holly eased the door open.
Bathed in the gentle light of the lamp on her nightstand, Kaylee was sprawled on top of her bedcovers, fully clothed in her clubbing pants and gold lamé top, her platinum-blond hair likewise sprawled on the pillow. She was asleep, not assassinated by rivals at Caesars Palace, which was Holly’s first thought. To make sure, Holly watched Kaylee’s petite chest expand with one, two, three slow breaths. The news squawked quietly on the TV mounted on the wall, and sections of the newspaper spooned next to her like a lover. One arm was flung over her head, and her limp hand rested dangerously close to the grip of her ubiquitous pistol glinting underneath the pillow.
Holly took a step into the clutter of a normal twenty-two-year-old woman’s room: girl rock-band posters; an open closet with a pair of dirty tennis shoes next to a pair of deep-discount designer heels; a huge teddy bear sent by Kaylee’s mom, whom Kaylee did not like to talk about (she was supposed to hug the teddy bear when she wanted to hug her mom); Chinese paper lanterns hanging from the ceiling. With perfect features and a porcelain complexion, the unconscious Kaylee looked too delicate to be part of this saucy materialism, like some slender-necked white waterfowl blown from typhoon to Santa Ana to desert wind and dropped into an apartment complex in Vegas. Holly wondered what had tired Kaylee to the point that she actually succumbed to sleep.
Out of the corner of her eye, Holly caught a movement.
Not in the apartment—she sucked in a long, quiet breath and let it out slowly as she realized this. In the parking lot. She stepped to the window for a better view.
Her heart beat faster as the movement fluttered toward Kaylee’s black BMW. Two figures, a young man and woman dressed in black, squeezed on either side of the car in its parking space in the full lot. They looked through the back windows, then the front. The woman said something, and both figures looked up at the apartment building. Their eyes slid over it from Holly’s right to left, skipping over the window from which Holly gazed. They stopped. Came back to her window. Stared straight at her. Pointed.
This was not happening to Holly. This was a flare-up of MAD brought on by the distress of seeing Elijah pass out earlier, and the threat of running out of medicine. After all, she’d been dead sure when she was fourteen that she could float up to the level of her parents’ chandelier. But she could have sworn these two strangers knew who she was, and where she lived, and had a particular interest in her. From Kaylee’s car they crossed the parking lot without even looking both ways—it was three in the morning with no traffic, but if Holly had been them she would have looked up and down the parking lot before crossing anyway—and they stepped up onto the crushed rock around the apartment building.
As they drew closer, she could see their black clothes weren’t for prowling and skulking around strangers’ apartments in the wee hours. They were Goths. The man—more of a boy, really, not much older than her—wore a black trench coat, ridiculously hot in the Vegas night, and black jeans. The woman—a girl, also around her age—had dyed her hair a vibrant unnatural red, but otherwise wore a black dress, black leggings, and clunky black shoes. She should have worn heels, which would have made her legs look longer.
The boy’s shoulders shook with laughter as Holly thought this.
They kept walking toward Holly’s window. She could have written it off as curious when they looked in Kaylee’s car, it could have been a coincidence as they eyeballed her apartment, but now they walked up to the window and looked at her on the second story. They could see her in the lamplight. They stared right at her.
Holly was near panic. She wasn’t sure what she expected them to do—throw gravel at her window? uproot a cactus and heave that toward her too?—but their very presence was so threatening, their stare, their knowledge that she was there and she was linked with Kaylee’s car. They did know who she was.
She opened her mouth to wake Kaylee. She wanted Kaylee to see this too, Kaylee who was head of security, Kaylee who was sane. She took a breath to call to Kaylee and—
Suddenly that did not seem like a good idea.
The Goths still stared at her. They still made her decidedly uneasy. But she didn’t need to call to Kaylee. That was not a good idea. She simply stared back at them, watching them watch her. Her heart descended from panic mode and maintained a rapid beat of only mild alarm.
The man said something.
The woman held up one finger where he could see it: wait.
They stared at Holly, and Holly stood still, for another two minutes. Finally the man spoke again. The woman blew Holly a kiss. The two of them turned their backs on her, crossed the gravel, and disappeared around the corner of the building.
Holly’s alarm remained but didn’t grow. It hadn’t been a good idea to tell Kaylee about the Goths. So it wasn’t as big a deal as she’d first thought. She retreated from Kaylee’s room and went to her own. As she lay down, her h*ps hurt where Rob’s fingers had been. She curled into the fetal position and stared at the wall.
Elijah woke the next morning in his own bed, fully clothed, cognizant of everything that had happened the night before, but terribly groggy with his one-beer hangover. His habit since graduation had been to take his breakfast onto his front porch, where he could watch the traffic zoom by as people hurried to work. This morning was no different, or so he thought at first. He was so groggy that he hardly noticed how groggy he was. He wasn’t sure how long he’d sat at the patio table with his cereal turning soggy in milk when Shane poked his head outside. “Good morning.”
“Good morning,” Elijah replied. Barely aware that he should be embarrassed at staring into space like an imbecile, he finally ate a mushy spoonful.
“And good morning to you,” Shane said to the doormat.
Elijah half rose and peered over the table to see what Shane was really looking at. Rob lay on the threshold, unconscious, face bloody and swollen.
“Oh!” Elijah exclaimed with his mouth full.
“Did you even notice this?” Shane asked Elijah. He knelt to put a hand on Rob’s wrist, checking his pulse.
Elijah swallowed. “I—” He thought back. Hard. “I guess I did trip on my way out the door. Is he okay?”
“Hand me your bowl.”
Elijah didn’t understand this command, but he reached for his bowl and placed it in Shane’s outstretched hand.
Shane dumped the milk and cereal on Rob’s bloody head.
Rob sat up, spluttering. “What the hell!”
Elijah rushed over. “My God, Rob, are you okay?” he asked the skull-like head oozing red blood and white milk. “Who beat you up? Do you want us to call the police?”
“I am the police!” Rob pulled himself up to standing, bracing himself on Shane. Then he poked his finger in Elijah’s face. “You get the idea to put a hand on Holly Starr again,” he spat through the milk, “you remember I found her first.”
“You found her first?” Elijah asked indignantly. “Like she’s a . . .” He meant to make Rob hear how disrespectful he sounded. But Elijah was so groggy, he couldn’t think of the other end of this simile, an object that people commonly found. Then he remembered, “But you didn’t find her first. I asked her out in ninth grade.”
Rob folded his bloody arms. “Did you do her?”
“No, I— What kind of question is that?”
Rob shoved Elijah.
“Hey,” said Shane.
“Ew,” said Elijah, because Rob had left a milky handprint on his shirt.
“She’s mine,” Rob barked. “She belongs to me. You remember that. Stay the f**k away from her.” He stormed inside and slammed the door. The sharp crack echoed against the quiet houses across the street.
Which was silly—the symbolic finality of that door slam, shutting them out—because Elijah and Shane lived there too, and Elijah had to go inside to get another cereal bowl and a mop. Shane sat at the table and watched Elijah clean up the mess.
Finally Elijah slid into the chair next to Shane. “Some night, huh?” He reached for a second helping of cereal and milk. “Hey, I meant to ask you. Last night at Glitterati, before the shit went down, why didn’t you hit on Kaylee? You’d been talking about her at the table, and I thought you were going to ask her out.”
Shane shook his head slowly. “I wanted to, but then I changed my mind. I wonder why she keeps doing that to me. It’s insulting.”
“Doing what to you? You’re the one who changed your mind.”
“I’m not so sure about that.”
Elijah didn’t get a chance to ask Shane what he was talking about before Rob burst out of the house again. He lugged two suitcases down the sidewalk between the decorative cacti, toward his sheriff’s car parked at the curb.
“Rob!” Elijah called. “What are you doing? Are you moving out?”
Rob shouted without turning around, “No, I’m spending a week at band camp.”
“Should we help him pack?” Shane asked. His eyes were inscrutable behind his vintage Wayfarers, but Elijah could tell from his dry tone that Shane loved this scene.
After everything Rob had said and thought about Holly in the past few days, Elijah felt the same way. “No, let’s not.”
Even without help, it didn’t take Rob long. His bedroom furniture belonged to the house, and in a week he hadn’t accumulated much else. He glared at Elijah and Shane one last time, roared off in his sheriff’s car with the siren disturbing the peace just for spite, and was gone.
“Fucker,” Shane declared, walking inside.
The excitement over, Elijah settled back into his breakfast and his own blankness. A few minutes later, or perhaps a few hours, Shane reemerged from the house, carrying his guitar case. “I’m going to class and then work. Will you be okay here by yourself?”
“Sure.” Elijah took a sip of coffee, wishing the caffeine would work. Boy, the Mentafixol label wasn’t kidding when it said DO NOT MIX WITH ALCOHOL.
Shane stood directly in front of him and bent down to look into his eyes. “Will you call me if you’re not?”
“Sure.”
“Are you hearing me, Elijah?” Shane rapped with his knuckles on Elijah’s forehead. Elijah’s hair padded the knocking, but it still almost hurt. “Call me if anybody you don’t know comes to the house,” Shane said. “Don’t go anywhere with a stranger.”
“Okay.” This was easy to agree to. Strangers didn’t approach Elijah out of the blue and try to get friendly.
Except Shane, a year ago.
And Rob, a week ago.
Shane must have left then. Elijah got lost in his own thoughts, or lack of them, and didn’t notice Shane’s 1963 Pontiac Catalina leave the driveway. But he watched it pull into the driveway and park again. Shane opened the door in a pool of light from the streetlamp. It was night.
Carrying his guitar case, Shane walked up to Elijah on the porch. “You’re sitting in exactly the same spot and exactly the same position as when I left this morning. Did you go to work?”
“I must have.” Elijah sipped his coffee. “My mom would have called to check on me if I didn’t go in.” At some level he knew he should be concerned about losing a day of memory, but it was like a shield protected his brain, preventing alarm from punching through and taking hold.
“Your mom’s out of town on vacation,” Shane pointed out. “She won’t be back until Monday.”
“Oh, yeah,” Elijah said, remembering. He snapped his fingers as more came back to him. That afternoon Holly had come up to him in the employee break room in a sparkling red bikini with panels of pink transparent fabric floating around her long legs. She’d looked like a genie. She’d pressed a folded note into his palm as she swept past the lockers and disappeared into the hall.
In the note she asked whether he was okay after their adventure last night. She told him she’d passed out after a few sips of beer in high school, so she understood what had happened. She apologized for Rob trying to kill him. She’d gone out with Rob only that once, and it was over. She hoped Elijah wouldn’t have any more trouble out of him because of her. And Elijah should burn this note.
Actually, now that he thought about it, the note had been very sweet, almost as if Holly liked him. He should ask her out. Except he might get his mom fired. He’d definitely get himself fired. Or perhaps the threat from Holly’s dad and Mr. Diamond no longer applied seven years later?
“Elijah!” Shane tapped on the table. “Did it ever occur to you to try weaning yourself off that pill?”
The tapping created ripples in Elijah’s coffee cup. He watched them, mesmerized, then realized Shane had asked him something. “What?”
“I mean, you may not feel it day to day, but that’s a serious elephant tranquilizer of a drug, if you’re not supposed to drive while you’re taking it, and it makes you pass out cold after one beer and walk around like the living dead the next day.”
Elijah had a hard time following what Shane said. “What?”
“In the past few days, when you were off that drug, you seemed jumpy and anxious because you wanted to get back on the drug and you couldn’t find any. But you did not seem crazy.”
Elijah opened his mouth to protest, then closed it again. For years he’d kept his delusion that he could read minds a secret. He wasn’t about to spill it now.