Lead Me Not (23 page)

Renee told me about Devon’s anger and jealousy, the way he
had lost it in the bar when she talked to a guy from her Econ class, punching him in the face and dragging Renee outside by her arm.

Devon had taken her around the side of the building, where it was dark, and screamed at her, accusing her of cheating. He had smacked her in the face and then punched her in the chest. He told her she was ugly and stupid, that she was lucky he even looked at her, that no one would ever want her but him. And then, ignoring her staunch denials, he had threatened to do worse if she ever looked at that guy again. He had laughed when she begged him to stop. He had become furious at her tears.

“I can’t see him ever again, Aubrey. Ever!” she cried, covering her battered face with her hands.

I held her as she began crying again, my mind distracted from my own rage by memories of my sister.

“He loves me, Bre. He doesn’t want me to even look at another guy. He says he’ll die without me,”
Jayme said, desperate for me to understand.

I had walked in earlier to find my sister and her boyfriend, Blake Fields, in her room fighting. He had her against the wall, his hands pinning her as he yelled in her face. Jayme had been crying, and Blake had only yelled louder. The idiot was lucky it was me and not my dad who
walked in while he had his hands on Jayme like that.

I had interrupted and told Blake to leave. When he looked at me, I knew instantly he was on something. His eyes were glazed and bloodshot. I barely noticed that my sister’s eyes were also glassy and unfocused. How had I been so blind?

He hadn’t put up a fight. He hadn’t bothered to say another word to Jayme before he left.

My sister had been furious, her behavior erratic. She had told
me emphatically to mind my own business. And I had already started to dismiss the earlier scene as teenage drama,
something that I had thankfully opted out of as I grew up.

I waved my hand in dismissal, rolling my eyes at her dramatics. “That’s ridiculous, Jay. What kind of nut job says something like that?” I asked, condescension dripping in my voice. What did Jayme know about love?
She had just turned fifteen. She was a freshman in high school. She didn’t know the first thing about real relationships.

This guy she was dating, Blake, was a junior and had just transferred from another school. I hadn’t taken a whole lot of notice of him.
He was nondescript in that trying-too-hard-to-be-unique-but-I’m-actually-
just-like-everyone-else way. He subscribed to the emo thing a little too religiously. With the black, side-swept hair that fell over his eyes and the skinny jeans and guy-liner, he looked like he had stepped out of the pages of
Teen Angst Magazine
.

I had seen the people this Blake dude had chosen to hang out with, and it was common knowledge they were the druggie crowd. But they seemed more interested in playing the part of hardcore fringies than actually walking the walk. I didn’t take them seriously.

Nobody did.

Jayme crossed her arms over her barely there chest and glowered at me. She was only just now starting to develop boobs.
She had been complaining for years about how flat she was and her ass being like a piece of cardboard. My sister was a late bloomer, and she was fixated on it. Her lack of curves seemed to hit her self-confidence hard. She would say she was ugly, that no boy would ever look at her. So when Blake showe
d interest, she had been sucked in by his compliments and attention.

She didn’t see him for what he really was—a pathetic bully who preyed on girls like Jayme. And she didn’t see herself as Mom, Dad,
and I
did—as a beautiful young girl with her life ahead of her.

She only saw what Blake wanted her to see. She became the girl he wanted. She followed in his dark footsteps eagerly.

“I love him, Aubrey. We’re going to be together forever,
” she said with the passion of inexperience. I rolled my eyes again, not believing her in the slightest.

“What’s the rush, Jay? Why can’t you just date around and see who you like? Why does it have to be all blood and guts?” I asked, wishing she’
d shut up already so I could get back to my reading. I had a mountain of homework to get through, and the longer she stood there talking about her stupid boyfriend, the less time I had to get it finished.

“He’s the only one who gets me. You just don’t understand,” she wailed, stomping out of my room and slamming the door.
I honestly didn’t understand her constant need to rush things, why she had to jump in with both feet before she had even learned to swim. But Jayme had always been in a hurry to live. In a hurry to love.

In a hurry to die.

I hadn’t seen the way Jayme had slowly started to change every tiny thing about herself. Eventually she stopped talking to me altogether. We became strangers living in the same house as she pulled further and further away from her family and into the world of Blake Fields and his friends.

And I hadn’t noticed she had gone anywhere until it was too late.

Until the night Jayme Marie Duncan never came home.

Until she was found asphyxiated on her own vomit in an alleyway outside a notorious druggie hangout, overdosed on drugs I pretended she didn’t take.

I noticed then.
When it didn’t matter anymore.

“Just take it one day at a time,” I whispered to Renee as she started to drift off to sleep, exhausted from crying her soul out.

Renee nodded, her eyes drooping shut. “Thanks, Aubrey,” she muttered before falling asleep.

I lay there a long time afterward, staring at the ceiling and thinking about all the ways my life had gone wrong, and how now, when I thought I was finally getting it right, I was poised to screw up all over again.

I wondered what Maxx was doing. Was he out up to something nefarious and shady? Was he stoned out of his mind, overdosing in a gutter?

I thought about him selling drugs to those people in the club, and how smug and entitled he had seemed. I hated that man.

But then my mind switched gears, and I thought about Maxx telling me about his brother and worrying that he’d fail him. I couldn’t ignore the pull of him and the way he made me want to help him. How easy it would be to fall down the hole with him.

I rolled onto my side and stared at the bruised face of my friend. She and Jayme were all mixed up in my head. And they were twisted with the memory of Maxx when I confronted him about Compulsion. The way he had split himself open when he realized I had seen him. He had been devastated.

He had broken.

And goddamn it, I wanted to gather up all those pieces and put them in my pocket. I wanted to make sure he could put himself back together again.

I would never be able to turn away from Renee.

And I couldn’t turn my back on Maxx.

chapter

seventeen

aubrey

i
had been up most of the night with Renee while she alternated between crying and screaming into her pillow. Her phone had started ringing around midnight. At first, we ignored Devon’s persistent calling. But around the fifth time, I turned it off, and Renee didn’t argue. Her red, swollen face had been set with grim acceptance.

When I got up the next morning for my lecture, I checked on Renee and was glad to see she was still asleep. I had convinced her to skip classes today and rest. She was worried about running into Devon and embarrassed for people to see her face.

I assured her the bruises could be covered up and the swelling in her lip would be gone by morning. Renee had seemed mollified by that and had finally stopped fretting about it.

After her initial admission about Devon’s abusive behavior, she had stopped talking about him altogether. She stated she wasn’t ready to hash out everything, and I begrudgingly backed off.

Stepping out into the crisp air, I took a deep breath, letting it fill my lungs. I wrapped my coat a little tighter around myself and started walking down the street. I noticed a bunch of painters heading around the back of my apartment building.

I overheard several of them grumbling about “fucking kids and their stupid graffiti.” Curious, I followed them and came to a quick stop. I tilted my head back and took in the gigantic painting along
the back wall of my building.

“What the hell?” I mumbled to myself. It was amazing. Absolutely stunning. But it was also extremely disturbing.

Because someone had painted a beautiful sky raining . . .
blood
? There were two people, a man and a woman, each with bright blond hair, holding hands, walking along what looked like a macabre version of the yellow brick road into a stormy sea while the gorgeous clouds above their heads unleashed a torrent of blood around them.

The ground was a mass of interconnected
X
s, giving away the artist’s identity. I should have known. The style was one of a kind.

But why had the mysterious street artist painted
this
on the back of my building? Because again, this clearly had nothing to do with Compulsion. This was a painting meant to say something else entirely.

The painters were putting up their ladders and opening up tins of white paint. They were getting ready to cover it up. And the thought of them destroying it made me feel panicky inside.

“Wait!” I called out just as a middle-aged man with a potbelly and a bald spot swiped his paintbrush over the blissfully happy couple in the picture. He looked over his shoulder at me in irritation.

“Do you have to paint over it?” I asked, realizing how ridiculous I sounded.

“Look, lady, the landlord hired us to fix this shit. Not our call. So why don’t you let us get to work,” another guy said, dipping his brush in the pot and bringing it up to the wall, smearing white over the vivid colors.

I didn’t say another word. I backed up and watched as the painters slowly eradicated the beauty X had clearly spent a lot of time creating. I felt as though I were witnessing a murder. It seemed a crime to undo something so beautiful as though it had
never been there at all.

Feeling strangely sad, I forced myself to walk away, unable to stand there another moment while the men so callously covered up the picture.

Normally, I would meet Brooks for a coffee before my first class on Friday morning. But he hadn’t responded to my multiple texts. So I made my way to the coffee shop just off campus by myself.

I hated feeling lonely, and this morning I felt it acutely. I hated feeling that there was something going on with Brooks and that he was purposefully keeping his distance. I was going to have to confront it head-on eventually, but with everything that was happening right now, I selfishly didn’t feel like expending the energy the situation required.

I got my caramel latte and a muffin and sat down at my usual table by the window. I pulled out my notes in case there was a pop quiz and took a small sip of my hot beverage. I spent some time people-watching.

It was then that I saw a familiar set of broad shoulders and a head covered in a gray beanie coming into the coffee shop.

I thought hard about slinking down in my seat to avoid being seen, but then I thought better of it. Why should I hide? There was nothing wrong with him seeing me, even if just the sight of him caused me to flush to the tip of my toes at the memory of our encounter in the hallway.

As if sensing me there, Maxx’s eyes met mine. I raised my hand in a halfhearted wave, wiggling my fingers.

He smiled that smile that lit up his face.

He is so coming over here
, I thought to myself as I waited on pins and needles for him to get his coffee and make the trek to my table.

“Is this seat taken?” he asked, his eyes dancing at our inside
joke. But unlike the time he had asked that question in the library, I offered the chair—not without hesitation, but with a lot less of it. I couldn’t help that I still had misgivings about being seen with him. My lips tingled and my heart smacked against my rib cage, but I felt an undeniable wariness.