Authors: Amy Sparling
Tags: #Contemporary Romance, #Young Adult, #Mary Jane
Finding Mary Jane (4 page)
Someone’s tapping their foot against the floor. It’s dark in here except for the glow of a television across the room. I’m not opening my eyes though. I’m in ridiculous amounts of pain. Everywhere hurts.
It feels like I shouldn’t remember everything that happened. Like I should be waking up right now with amnesia accompanying my pulsing migraine, because not knowing anything would better than knowing what I do know.
Bluntz isn’t my friend.
Ben is gone.
Marla is fucking psycho.
My eyes don’t need to be open to know I’m on a hard floor with something soft shoved under my head. It smells like men’s cologne. The tapping sound stops. I breathe slowly and evenly, hoping that whoever is in the room doesn’t know I’m awake yet.
Footsteps fade across the floor, getting farther away until I hear them go upstairs. A door opens and closes. I hold my breath. The clunk of a deadbolt slides into place. I’m stuck.
After an extremely long time that could be just minutes or hours in my dazed condition, I haven’t heard anything else and I’m ready to sit up.
I open one eye, and then the other. I’m in a storage room that’s filled with boxes on one side and a small living area on the other. It has a tweed couch, a small television and a mini refrigerator. Why am I laying on the floor when there’s a couch?
My wrist hurts as I push myself into a sitting position. Blood rushes to my head and my vision gets little purple splotches all in it for a moment. I assess my injuries: major migraine, knot on my forehead, sprained wrist and bruised knees.
Bluntz’ hoody is crumpled into a makeshift pillow for me. When I see the hoody, I picture him—not as the gorgeous guy who bowled with me—but as Marla’s cowardly minion who ruthlessly shoved me down here. He can die for all I care.
Anger surges through me, radiating through my nerves. I need to get out of here. I need to go home and find Ben and—and, well I have no idea what I’ll do. Can I call the police without getting Ben in trouble?
I pull myself onto my knees, wait for the blood rushing in my head to subside, then I grab the concrete wall and try to stand. My shaky knees threaten to buckle, so I use the wall for support. My whole body is trembling, but I’m not cold. With my back on the wall, I look around this small room. The couch and TV, boxes of junk, the stairs I feel down that lead to the locked door—my only means of escape.
It hits me now. And it’s the most terrifying realization in the world, and probably the worst thing that’s ever happened to me, but at the same time it’s funny. It’s hilarious that it took me so long to realize this. I am totally fucked.
The door swings open and slams against the wall. I’m sitting with my back pressed to the wall and my knees pulled to my chest and apparently I had fallen asleep like this because my head jerks up at the sudden noise. The purple splotches fill my vision again. Two shadows walk down the stairs. They reach the bottom stair just as my vision comes back. It’s Marla and some guy.
Marla’s beautiful face is twisted into a pissed off sort of scowl. The guy was probably hot at some point in his life, but now his head is shaved, his arms are all tatted up with angel and devil type references and he has entirely too many gigantic muscles. He’s so freaking huge, I think the sleeves are cut off his shirt because his arms just wouldn’t fit into them.
I sit a little straighter and clench my knees. Marla crosses her arms in front of her chest. “Tell Max what you told me.”
Max bends down on his knee as he awaits my reply. Even down here he’s still way taller than me. “Um,” I say, scrambling to remember what I had told Marla. “I don’t know what’s going on.”
Max smiles. “Babe, I need you to tell me exactly what you said when you came to the Greene Shoppe today.” He glances back at Marla and she flinches. “If your story doesn’t match Marla’s, then she has a lot of explaining to do.”
He reaches down and brushes hair out of my eyes, wincing when he sees the big knot of my forehead. “And if your story does match hers, well, someone has to pay for this mistake.”
Something in his eyes makes me see past the muscles and tattoos. He’s not so bad. He just wants to know what’s going on. And maybe he’ll let me out of here. “I just came here to ask Marla if she knew where my brother was,” I say.
“And your brother is?”
“Ben.”
Max gives me a sympathetic nod. “Why were you trying to find Ben?”
Marla’s nervousness is almost tangible. I swallow. “Because he hasn’t been home in a week. And he won’t answer my calls.”
Max stands up, his gigantic body casting a shadow over me. “Well I say we get Ben to come home, eh?” He holds out his hand and Marla places her cell phone in it. For the last few seconds, my head almost feels normal again. I let go of my knee and reach up to touch my forehead. When I press on the knot, not only has it gotten bigger since I last felt it, it sends an additional surge of pain through my head.
I hold back tears as Max looks through Marla’s phone, finally stopping on a number. He puts the phone to his ear. “What’s your name?” he asks me.
I manage to croak a soft, “Lexie.”
A few moments of silence pass. In the quiet, I can hear the robot voice on Ben’s voicemail instructing Max to leave a message at the tone. The voice makes my stomach flip over; I’ve heard it a thousand times in the last few days.
“Ben Stark.” Max kneels down again. “This is Max. Lexie, say hi.” He holds out the phone.
“Hi,” I say. My voice is thin and weak.
“Tell him where you are,” Max says.
I look around. “I don’t know, some kind of basement.”
Max pats the top of my head and stands back up. “It’s over, Ben. Dig your ass out of whatever hole you’ve hidden in and bring me my money. You have two days, eh—maybe less. I’m impatient, you know.”
My brain gets fuzzy and I realize I’ve been breathing so fast, I’ve made myself lightheaded. I think Marla is smiling, but I’m not looking at her. I’m staring straight at Max’s slight gap tooth as he says, “If you don’t show up, your precious baby sister will die.”
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Amy Sparling is the author of The Summer Unplugged Series, The Devin and Tobey Series, Deadbeat & other awesome books for younger teens. She also writes books for older teens under the pen name Cheyanne Young. She lives in Houston, Texas with her family and a super spoiled rotten puppy.
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