Wild Awake (11 page)

All of a sudden, I feel incredibly bored.

This party is stupid.

There’s nothing
happening
.

Everyone’s just flirting and posing and trying to look cool. There’s no greater meaning here. No beauty. Sukey was stabbed to death, and I’m supposed to stand here watching fools play Guitar Hero?

A hum of anxiety is building in my chest like a swarm of wasps. I should do something. I should make some signal to let Sukey know I’m with her. I can’t just stand here.

I make another useless circle of the living room and go outside to the deck, where there’s a hot tub, tiki torches, and a barbecue the size of a tank. The lid of the hot tub is off, and the water is steaming quietly into the night. It looks so warm and peaceful, I walk right over and dunk my arm in.

Kelsey’s dad is manning the grill.

“Go ahead,” he says when he sees me. “You can be the first one in.”

The suggestion is too tantalizing to resist.

I can see my reflection wobbling on the surface of the water like the film of edible ink on a Your-Photo-on-a-Cake. I slip my feet out of my sandals, swing my first leg over the edge, and the water swallows up my leg all the way to the hem of my shorts. I swing my other leg in and stand there like a stork in the middle of the warm, bubbling water. Inside the house, a group of guys has just shown up: I can see a flock of wide-brimmed caps moving toward the chip bowls on the kitchen counter. A pair of celery girls squeak open the sliding glass door and come onto the deck to gawk at me.

“Omigod, Kiri, are you really getting in?”

“I
am
in.”

And oh how brightly doth the first stars shine in the waning nectarine of the sky. This is real. This is like one of Sukey’s paintings. Now if only Lukas would come out here and dance with me and the celery girls would go back inside with their tanned legs and big teeth. I scrape the surface of the water with my fingers. The celery girls squeal.

“But your clothes are going to get wet. Where’s your bathing suit?”

I ignore them and turn around in a slow circle, feeling the hot jets of water whooshing against my legs. Little white petals are falling from a Japanese cherry tree and landing on the water. Little bubbles are crowning the hairs on my legs. I am the Lady of the Lake. Suck it, bitches.

“Are you just going to spin around in circles and not say anything?”

I reach up, plug my nostrils, and submerge, submarine-style, until their voices are nothing but warbling squeaks above the surface of the water.

When I come up again, the celery girls are still standing there, now joined on the deck by a half-dozen more gawking girls and a handful of lumbering Ball-Cap Orangutans that start hooting and taking pictures on their cell phones when I emerge soaking wet.

I take a quick bow, step out of the hot tub, push through my crowd of admirers, and go inside, trailing wet footprints across the kitchen floor. My random act of beauty accomplished, I make a unilateral decision to grab Lukas and bust out of here.

Lukas is still talking to Kelsey, whom I suddenly can’t stand with a level of not-standingness so powerful I can hardly restrain it from leaping out of my throat like one of those snakes-in-a-can. She’s telling Lukas about how much she loves waterskiing, her voice high and whiny-sounding. I wedge myself between them. “Lukas? D’you want to go?”

“Oh, hey, Kiri.”

Lukas is holding a can of soda with beads of condensation on the outside. I can smell the chemical tang of the fake lemon when he takes a sip. I not so much ignore Kelsey as fail to see any point in acknowledging her existence for the second time in a single evening. Kelsey looks down at my dripping clothes.

“Ooh, looks like someone found the hot tub. I can lend you a swimsuit, babe.”

I sort of nod at Kelsey, but my eyes are locked on Lukas. “Hey, Lukas? Lukas. Are you ready to go?”

The wired feeling that started when I left my house has grown into a thrumming, crackling, electrical field. I want to kiss Lukas. I want to dance down the street. There’s a reason people get drunk after funerals, and I suddenly know what it is: the flip side of sadness is a dark, devouring joy, a life that demands to be fed.

“Lukas—”

Do Lukas and Kelsey exchange a look? Was that a look? Bitch, don’t exchange a look with my future boyfriend!

Lukas rocks on his heels. “Actually, I was just about to get a burger.”

Kelsey licks her lips in what I cannot help but interpret as a lecherous fashion. “Mmm,” she says, looking me square in the eye. “Think I will too.”

I cast Lukas an urgent look, but it bounces right off him. He gives me a strained smile and turns around to go outside to the barbecue. Kelsey follows him, waving over her shoulder at me.

“Bye, Kiri. Sorry you had to leave so early!”

On the walk home from Kelsey’s, a car full of college boys slows down and follows me for an entire block, whistling at me and shouting, “Where’s the wet T-shirt contest?” I give them the finger, but they just laugh, and when I duck into the corner store to escape them, the cashier shoos me back out again for dripping water on the floor. As I hurry down the street, my wet clothes cling to my skin, clammy and uncomfortable. When I get home, I flick on all the lights, but the artificial brightness only emphasizes how big and empty the house is.

I make a beeline for my bedroom and paw through the heap of clothing on my floor, looking for something clean to wear. I haven’t done laundry in the two weeks since Mom and Dad left, and all my shirts are sour and wrinkled. I pull on an old tank top and go downstairs to make something to eat, but the carrots and broccoli have gone limp and rubbery and the bread is blooming with mold. I stand over the compost bin tossing everything out, my heart fluttering with something like panic.

I wish I’d stayed at the party. This time, I’d cooperate. I’d watch people play Guitar Hero. I’d pretend Kelsey Bartlett had even slightly tolerable taste in music. I wouldn’t make a scene in the hot tub.

Bad thoughts snake through my brain. Stupid thoughts. I wonder if those boys in the car figured out where I live, if they know I’m home alone, if they’re planning to come by later and break into my house. I wonder if Sukey’s murderer is still on the loose. I wonder if he knows where I live. I wonder if Sukey did something bad or got in trouble with some gang or stole something her murderer is still looking for.

Once I start thinking about the murder, I can’t stop, and horrifying scenes reel through my mind, all these scenarios, all these reasons. I go to the computer and type the words
Sukey Byrd murder
into the search box. The back of my neck heats up, and I minimize the window, as if I’m afraid someone will walk in and catch me snooping. It feels like I’m doing something forbidden—pawing through my parents’ dresser or reading Denny’s email.
It’s public information
, I remind myself.
I’m allowed to know
.

But part of me knows that I’m not allowed. That I’m breaking a rule. When I reach for the mouse again, my hand is shaking. I can feel the computer screen’s glare on my face.
Be brave
, I tell myself. I click the window open again.

The first few hits are for some other Sukey Byrd, a criminal lawyer in Cambridge, England, with a specialty in murder trials, but the last one’s an article from the
Sun
.

I click.

The page takes a moment to load. When it does, a pop-up ad blocks most of the screen. I close it and scan the page for her name.

It’s not even a real article, just a news brief: name, age, address.
Ms. Byrd, 21, was estranged from her family. There have been two other murders reported since the hotel changed ownership in 2001
.

Estranged from her family. It sounds cruel and primitive, like a tribe booting one of its members out into the desert to die.

“She wasn’t estranged from
me
,” I whisper at the screen.

I comb through the search results to see if there’s anything else, but there’s nothing. I don’t get it. Where’s the murder trial, the conviction, the lifetime in prison? Does this mean they never found out who did it?

Just chill
, I tell myself.
Newspapers don’t turn every single murder into a big story
.
It doesn’t mean anything
.

I click the window shut and clear the search history, like I’ve been looking at porn or instructions for how to build a bomb. My skin is hot and I’m sitting up too straight. I feel conspicuous in the same way as when I came home from Lukas’s house after we kissed on his birthday—like the truth of what I’ve just done is written all over me, obvious as a clown wig, and everyone can see.

You’re allowed to know
, I tell myself again, but already a fine mist of guilt is settling over me. I think of my parents and shake it off.
You don’t owe them anything
.

I try smoking weed again, but instead of mellowing things out it gives my worries tiny fangs and bright yellow eyes and hairy feet and sets them marching like trolls. I sit on my bed with the lights on and my cell phone at the ready, my thoughts sliding back and forth between paranoia and self-recrimination.
If you weren’t so self-absorbed, you would have noticed that things weren’t okay with Sukey. You would have helped her. But no, all you cared about was whether she would take you for milkshakes when she came to visit. You selfish little brat. You
knew
she didn’t die in a car crash, didn’t you?

I didn’t, I swear I didn’t.

But you cared more about keeping Mom and Dad happy with your stupid piano playing than about knowing the truth
.

I curl up into a toxic ball of grief and self-loathing, the ceiling light hot and accusatory on my back. In the morning, I promise myself, I’ll get Doug to tell me the details, even the horrible ones, even the ones that will break me in ways I will never be able to fix. It’s what I deserve for being such a coward. And it’s the only way I can start to forgive myself for hiding from the truth for so long.

“He was a kid, eh. Young
guy. Stupid. Hooked on junk.”

Doug and I are sitting in a sticky, distinctly sneezed-on booth at the Sunshine Diner, one of those all-day-breakfast places in Chinatown. He agreed to put down his early-morning beer, pull a shirt on over his speckled torso, and talk to me when I showed him the wooden bear. We’re the only ones here except for a table of twentysomething hipsters wearing plastic sunglasses and those really tight cardigans that make skinny people look anorexic and everyone else look morbidly obese. They’re reading the menus and laughing about the spelling mistakes, debating loudly whether to order the chocorat milk or the rapefruit juice. They project this aura of gleeful self-awareness that makes me feel awkward sitting with Doug while he pores over the menu like a sacred text, hungrily and with complete lack of irony.

I clamp my hand around my glass of syrupy orange juice. “What was his name?” I say.

“Billy.”

Billy
. I handle the word warily, like an animal that might bite. My head has been swarming with questions all morning, but now that Doug is here in front of me, I’m too nervous to speak. I wish he would just talk, just tell me things. I tear at the edge of my napkin and twist the little white shreds into spirals, my mind shouting,
Ask! Ask! Ask!
but my lips refusing to move.

The waitress comes to take our order, staying just long enough to leave a disinfectant breeze that lingers over our table. I take a sip of my orange juice, as thick in my throat as cough syrup.

“So this Billy,” I force out, my fingers working the napkin. “Um. How—um.”

Doug lets out a long, hoarse sigh.

“She helped him out a couple times. Sukey-girl could never say no to anyone who needed help, even a junkie. She said he was just a kid. Said he just needed to get on his feet.”

My stomach turns.

“She
knew
him?”

I’d been imagining a stranger or distant acquaintance—some random brute, senseless as a dump truck. I hadn’t even considered the possibility that it was a friend. Someone who knew her. Someone she’d helped. Someone who had seen how small she looked in her denim jacket and realized how easy it would be to break her body with a fist, a knife, a pair of scissors. I feel the orange juice burning in the back of my throat and force myself to swallow.

The waitress comes again with our food but I don’t see her, I just hear the clink of plates on the table in front of me and smell the suddenly unwelcome aroma of scrambled eggs. Doug reaches for the grubby ketchup bottle next to the napkin dispenser. He turns it upside down and whacks it. Dark red blobs of ketchup plop out, and I have to look away before it calls up images I’d rather not have in my head.

“I told her to stay away from that kid,” he says. “He was dangerous. Shifty-eyed. Rob his own mother for a fix. Sukey used to let him stay at her place when he had nowhere to go. She’d tell me, ‘Doug, he’s just a baby. He’s just a baby, Doug. He’ll be all right once he gets clean.’”

I pick up my knife and fork as if to eat, but I’m remembering the way Sukey always gave change to the crusty punks sitting outside the McDonald’s with their enormous dogs, all spikes and grunge and attitude. Some of them were nice, but there were scary ones, too, and Sukey never seemed to notice the difference. I remember one guy in particular, with long, dirty dreadlocks and a barbed-wire tattoo around his neck. When Sukey gave him our change, he asked her for a cigarette, and while she was digging one out of her purse, he walked his eyes all over her body as I half-hid behind her, unnerved.

It was him. I know it was him. I remember the faded black spikes around his neck and the way his dog growled.

“What did he look like?” I whisper.

“Crooked nose,” says Doug. “Blond hair. One of those hockey players, eh.”

Something like relief sweeps over me.
It wasn’t the guy outside the McDonald's
.
It wasn’t anybody I’ve seen
.

Doug’s still talking. I struggle to catch up.

“—said he took a puck in the face during a game. His nose pointed straight to the left, like he wiped it on his sleeve and it stuck there, just like that. Made him look tricky. Sukey told him he should go play hockey for some college, after he got clean. She was always trying to tell him to go play hockey. Said he looked just like Bobby Orr.”