“I didn’t know one did. I haven’t even met that person yet.”
“Well, you’re new. Do you want to report this to the police?”
Allie opened her mouth, then closed it again. She knew the next words to come out of her would carry a lot of weight. They would determine her immediate future. And still she didn’t know the right thing to say. Getting her roommate arrested was big. A radical, dangerous act. Maybe better to do nothing at all. Except . . . until she stood up for herself, this would never end. Brick would push her. And push her. And push her. It was a game now. One Allie didn’t want to play, but she was mired up in it all the same. It would go on until Allie owned nothing at all. And she already owned so little. So close to nothing. How much more could she afford to lose?
Allie’s whole body felt strangely awake and alive. It was that feeling only danger can produce. She felt herself poised at the edge of a high cliff, her toes lapping over the edge. And no real option for backing up.
She took a deep breath and jumped.
“Yes. I want to report it to the police.”
Chapter Thirteen
Lights-Out, in More Ways than One
“I can’t believe you did that,” Jasmine said.
They stood at the living room window together, Jasmine holding one side of the curtain back. They watched the two uniformed policemen walk away. Walk back toward their patrol car.
“I know,” Allie said. “It’s weird. It’s big. Or it feels big anyway. But I had to do it. Thank you for telling the police what she told you.”
“Yeah. Whatever. But . . .”
Allie followed Jasmine’s eyes to see why her sentence had stalled. Brick was coming home. Walking down the street toward New Beginnings. She was looking down, tapping on a smartphone she held in one hand.
“Did she always have a phone?” Allie asked.
“Not that I know of. Maybe that’s what she bought with your suitcase money.”
“Damn. I should have sold those suitcases and bought a phone. I didn’t get to bring mine. And I still don’t know why not.”
Allie silently noted, as she heard herself speak, that she sounded outwardly calm. It didn’t even feel like something she was doing on purpose. There was a ball of fear inside, one she had not yet tapped into. It felt as though there was no door into it. No access. Not that she wanted to access it.
“Because there’s nobody on the other end paying the bill anymore. Think she even sees the cops yet?”
“Apparently not.”
But the cops saw her. Allie could tell. They had stopped on the sidewalk by their patrol car and seemed to be waiting to talk to her. After all, they had her description, and it was a good one. None of that “average height, brown hair, brown eyes” muddle. Blonde dreadlocks. How often do you see a teenage girl with blonde dreadlocks?
A mere ten steps from the cops, Brick seemed to notice something in her peripheral vision, above the small screen in her hand. A flash of blue, maybe.
She stopped cold. Looked up at the cops. The cops looked back.
“She sees them now,” Jasmine said.
For one strange, frozen moment, nobody and nothing moved. Not inside the window. Not on the street out front.
Then Lisa Brickell broke in the opposite direction and ran like a thief.
Fitting, Allie thought.
It took the younger of the two cops only ten or twelve running steps to catch her. He dragged her back by one upper arm and loaded her into the rear of the patrol car. Just the way you see on TV, with one hand on top of her head.
Just before the cops closed the door on her, Brick looked up to the house and saw Allie and Jasmine standing at the window watching. Jasmine dropped the curtain, but not nearly fast enough.
“At least she helped your case by running,” Jasmine said.
“I just hope they don’t bring her back here tonight. Or, you know . . . ever. But the way the cops talked about it . . . What did they mean about ‘citing her out’? I was embarrassed to ask because I figured it was one of those things everybody knows but me.”
“It means they write her something like a ticket. And she has to pay a fine. If she can’t pay the fine she might have to do a few days in jail or juvie, but she has time to come up with some money to pay it. So for the next month at least she’ll still live here. And she’s going to kill you.”
Allie laughed. Or tried to, anyway. A sound came out, but not the sound she had intended.
“Not literally, though.” A silence. Too long a silence. “Right?”
Jasmine flipped her head toward the back of the house. Allie followed her out into the yard. The sun felt strong, the air surprisingly clear for downtown. A warm breeze was holding the smog at bay. It felt wrong. It felt as though the world was going on with its business, painfully unaware of the disaster that was Allie’s life. That didn’t seem fair.
They sat in Jasmine’s weed clearing, their knees close.
Allie had to wait for Jasmine to light a cigarette. Wait to hear what her only friend had to say. How bad Allie’s future might truly be.
“Maybe literally,” Jasmine said. “Or maybe not literally kill you kill you, but then you have to think whether killing you is the only thing she can do that would scare you.”
“I outweigh her at least.”
“You don’t outweigh her boyfriend.”
A cold tingle in Allie’s gut. She spoke around it as best she could.
“She has a boyfriend?”
“Oh yeah. He was in jail just a few months ago. Not sure the whole story of why, but it was bigger than stealing somebody’s suitcases. He was inside for years. He drives a motorcycle. Big guy. Last time a girl made trouble for Brick, she had her boyfriend hold the girl for her. She didn’t kill her. But the girl wound up in the hospital with, like, two hundred stitches. The girl didn’t dare rat, so Brick never got in trouble for it. She just walked away.”
A cold, clammy feeling gripped Allie’s stomach. Wet. Liquid fear. A sensation Allie couldn’t imagine living with for long. At the same time she knew it would not be going on its way anytime soon.
She never answered, but Jasmine must have seen the fear in her eyes.
“I tried to tell you, Allie. I tried to warn you. I said this thing was for real. Seriously dangerous. That she was really crazy, not just the way people usually mean it when they say that word.”
“Yeah, I know. You did.”
Allie’s head spun with possible retreat plans. She could go to The Elf. Get herself placed somewhere different. Hell, if she had to she could even do something to get arrested. At least in police custody she would be safe from Brick. She tried not to picture where on her body that poor girl had needed all those stitches.
Not her face. Please don’t let it have been her face.
“I just . . . ,” Allie began. Then her thoughts ran dry.
“I know. Where you come from, nothing was ever so dangerous.”
“Right!”
It was a small comfort, to be understood.