I make my mother a sandwich and take it into her room for her. Since I told her about Doyle’s promise and that we’ll have her ID on Friday, she’s been frantically searching the Alpha sites, looking for her family. She barely notices when I come in, and when I wish her a good night she grunts one back.
I think that maybe if I get some sleep, it will clear my head. Today felt like there were more than twenty-four hours in it, and even though my thoughts are on fire, my body is dragging. I turn on the sound machine, find my mouth guard, and swallow four melatonin pills. Before I pull my blackout blinds down, I peek out the window. There’s a man leaning against the streetlight below. I can’t make out his face, but I know he’s wearing a Niner shirt. He waves, sending icy chills through me. Something about him is familiar, but it’s too dark to make out who it is.
“Screw you,” I say as I close the blinds. “I am so out of here.”
My phone’s buzzing wakes me. I pick it up, expecting a text from Bex, but she’s actually calling me. People our age do not call each other unless something horrible has happened.
“Bex?” I ask.
“They hurt him,” she sobs.
“Bex, what’s wrong? Who got hurt?”
“A bunch of guys jumped him . . . Russell, he did it.”
I sit upright in bed. “Shadow.”
“He’s bad,” she sobs. “I called an ambulance. I don’t know if they’re coming.”
“Where are you?”
“Tammy’s.”
“I’m coming!”
I don’t bother getting dressed. I snatch my shoes and sprint for the door. I’m so frantic, I fall over a chair in the kitchen and my mother appears.
“Lyric?”
“Shadow is hurt. He’s at Tammy’s. Call Dad.”
“Let’s wait for him,” she says.
“No,” I say, throwing open the front door.
I’m breaking curfew as I run down the street. If the cops catch me, they’ll stop me, maybe even force me to go home, but I have to get to Bex. If I get spotted, they are going to have to chase my ass.
The front door to Bex’s building fills me with dread. It’s wide open, and when I run up the three flights to her apartment, I see Tammy pacing in the living room, smoking and crying.
“Lyric—”
I raise my hand and she shuts up. “This is your fault.”
She doesn’t say anything, just points to a door. “They’re in there.”
I nearly knock it down trying to get to them. Shadow is on the bed, his face destroyed, unrecognizable. He is still. His chest does not rise and fall. His eyes do not flutter under their lids. His fingers do not twitch with signals from the brain. There is no sign of my friend in the body. He has left it behind. Bex stands over him, using a towel to try to stop the bleeding, not noticing, or refusing to accept that it has stopped on its own.
Bex turns to me. She’s beaten badly, her eye so swollen I fear it will be permanently damaged.
“He fought them,” she says.
“My father is on his way,” I say.
She’s not listening. “Russell let them in. They were Niners. He said they were there to teach me a lesson, and the weirdo here jumped in. Can you believe him? I mean, who is this kid?”
She smiles at me and then turns to him, as if she’s expecting him to roll his eyes and give her a laugh because he just can’t help it—he is so madly in love with her.
Chapter Twenty-One
I wrap myself around Bex and hold her through the night, crying for the both of us because she is still and silent and stiff, like she’s going through her own rigor mortis.
“He loved me,” she whispers in the darkness of my room.
“I know.”
“Russell did this. He joined the Niners.”
“The police will—” I stop myself, hearing how stupid I sound.
“They’re going to kill me,” she says. “They won’t stop. Russell told me so.”
“We’re leaving on Friday,” I say. “We’ll keep you safe until then.”
“Where are we going?”
“Denver.”
“What’s in Denver?”
“Mountains.”
“Denver,” she repeats. “That’s, like, a million miles away.”
I nod.
“Good.”
She pulls herself free of me, then asks for something to drink. I rush to the kitchen, where my mother is looking out the kitchen window.
“How is she?”
“I don’t think she gets that he’s gone. She’s not even crying,” I say as I take a glass out of the cupboard.
“She’s in shock. How is your head?”
“I’ll survive.” A migraine showed up while I watched the ambulance take my friend away.