Shade Me (24 page)

I know everything. I need to see you.

There was no response. A few minutes later, she'd sent another to the same number.

Call me for time and place.

Still no response. Ten minutes later, she'd sent a third.

I wouldn't chance it if I were you. Call me or I will take you all down.

Wait a minute.
You all?
I tapped the phone number at the top, and three other phone numbers dropped down. It was a group text. The numbers all shimmered in their individual colors, settling into disjointed patterns. All except one.

The one I recognized.

Dru Hollis's phone number.

I
JOLTED OUT
of my chair, dropping Peyton's phone on my desk, staring at it as it bounced and fell to the floor, all the while Dru's number sending a beacon of lies at me. Turquoise, gray.
Cheater, liar.

She was threatening, in those texts, to take them all down. Including Dru. Had asked them to call to set up a place and time to meet.

Put the phone down.

A man's voice. Was it Dru's? I covered my ears, paced the length of my room and back, hearing the voice over and over in my head, trying to place it, to match it to his. I didn't know. It could have been Bill Hollis's voice. For that matter,
it could have been anyone else's. Gibson's. Arrigo Basile's. Or one of Luna's friends.

I left the phone on my floor.

I'D SAT THERE
so long, researching the Hollises, combing Peyton's phone, it was evening before I left the house. By the time I reached the hospital, it was full-on dark. I hurried through the parking lot, looking over my shoulder the whole time for Luna, or Vanessa, or both. I was hungry, but afraid to eat anything in my house, afraid to stop anywhere, to walk through a parking lot. Nothing seemed safe to me anymore. Nobody.

I had plans to see Dru that night, to meet him at his apartment. It was supposed to be an intimate meeting. A good time.

But how could I have a good time with him now?

Yet, I wanted to see him, to hear his explanation of why he'd never told me about the text, even after I told him about Luna. I needed to see how much he knew about the family business, about Hollywood Dreams, the Molly,
Double Rainbow
. But I needed to see him for other things, too. I needed to be reassured by his touch, by the colors that would swamp the room when we touched, that he wasn't involved in this. That he hadn't gotten the text. That he'd talked her out of whatever she was planning. That . . . something. Anything.
Otherwise it would mean I'd placed my trust—what little of it I had—in the wrong person. Again. It would mean Detective Martinez had been right, and that I'd been stupidly playing with fire all along. It would mean I'd chosen violet lust over myself, over Peyton.

Surely this made me one of those dumb, mooning girls. Surely this made me the very kind of girl I hated. The kind whose headlines would make me shake my head and goggle at their stupidity.

I headed straight for Peyton's room, not even pausing to listen for the footsteps that seemed to follow me everywhere. The closer I got, the more the urge to see her pressed in on me, and I found myself jogging down the hallway by the time I got to her floor. Nurses stopped and stared at me. I rounded the corner into Peyton's room and skidded to a stop.

Vee was sitting next to her bedside, tears streaking down her face in long lines of jet-black mascara. Behind her stood the guy I recognized as the drummer from Viral Fanfare but didn't actually know. On the far end of the room, sitting on the heat register, his arms folded, sat Gibson Talley.

“Oh,” I said, my hand covering my heart without my even realizing it.

Gibson Talley stood up, uncrossed his arms. He glared at me.

“I didn't expect . . . ,” I said. My throat had gone dry. “Why are you here?”

“I would ask the same of you,” Vee said. Her top lip was swollen and red from tears. “But we know that you're all up in Peyton's business. Never hung out with her once, never came to a single show, yet here you are again. Can't even let the poor girl die in peace.”

“Die?” I said, taking three hurried steps into the room.

“Don't get your hopes up. She's not dead yet. You still have time to pin this on any number of people in Brentwood,” the drummer said. He chewed on the inside of his lip piercing, making the skin surrounding it wiggle up and down in a deepening dimple.

“Listen, I know it wasn't you,” I said, turning to Gibson.

“No shit,” he said, his face hard. There were stitches on the side of his head, though the cut that they'd sewn together looked mostly healed. I felt a small pang of guilt.

“I'm really sorry, but you came after me.”

“I came to talk to you,” Gibson said.

“You put me in a choke hold. I had no other choice.” I turned to Vee. “And someone said you'd been asking about a will. Surely you can see how you guys looked guilty.”

“I just wanted to know what to do with the songs,” she said. “Especially the ones that Gib cowrote. Just in case something terrible happened. The band has a right to them.” She looked down at Peyton, and her eyes filled with tears
again. “It was bad timing. If I'd known there was a real possibility that she could die, I would never have asked. We can write new songs. All that stuff was stupid. I wish we hadn't ever fought. I think we all wish it.” She leaned miserably into the drummer. He wrapped an arm around her shoulder as she sniffled.

It was the softest and most genuine I'd ever seen Vee. I hadn't known she could do that.

I sat in the chair on the other side of Peyton's bed and leaned forward to get right in Vee's line of vision. “She was in trouble,” I said, a whisper. “She maybe still is. And now I am, too. I can't figure out why she was reaching out to me before her attack, but I know now for sure that she was.”

“How do you know?” Vee asked. “Maybe she wasn't and you're just butting in.”

“She left me some clues. And if she left them for me, it must have been because she wanted me to know something. I can't figure out what the missing link is, and it's driving me crazy. If I don't get it soon, the police will take over and that will be it. I'll never know what Peyton wanted me to know. Please. I'm sorry that I hurt you.” I looked over at Gibson. “But I'm desperate. What do you know?”

Vee sniffled some more, and I could see her fighting with herself over how much to let me in. Chameleonlike, her shirt slowly shifted to the green of lime sherbet. She clearly didn't trust me—clearly didn't like me—but she wanted to
do the right thing by Peyton. Deep down, despite the arguments and the threats, she loved her friend.

She shrugged helplessly and looked at her two bandmates, who seemed to acknowledge something without moving a muscle. The three of them were that close. “All I know is that she started acting really strange. Started talking about not being able to trust people.”

Immediately, I heard Jones in my head, standing outside my classroom door, telling me about a party he'd been to at Peyton's house.
She kept saying all this weird shit . . . some shit about not being able to trust anyone . . .

He'd seen Dru and Luna carry her away, joking about Peyton being groomed to be a soap opera star. He'd later seen them fighting with another blond woman. Dru. Luna. And Vanessa, I was sure of it now.

I will take you all down.

What had they done to blow her trust in them?

Vee continued, “She moved into Fountain View, and even though it meant we couldn't practice at the mansion anymore, we were all like, okay, this is going to be good, because now she'll be living close to Gib.” She reached over and touched Peyton's tattoo, running her finger along it like she was tracing the lines. “She and Gib even got new tattoos together. We thought this was a step in the right direction, because her family . . . Something was going on. She was bothered by it.”

“What was it?” I asked. “Did she ever say anything about the name Rainbow?”

Vee shook her head. “Not really. She loved rainbows—that was why she got the tattoo. She loved colors in general.”

She loved colors. Shocked me. I didn't realize until Vee said those words how much I'd come to hate colors over the years. I'd always equated them with bad things—sadness, death, worries, stress, bad grades, feeling like an outcast. It never occurred to me to embrace them, to see them as a gift. Look at what I was able to do—I was able to communicate with a comatose girl because of my colors. That was pretty amazing. Why was Peyton able to love her colors and I wasn't able to love mine?

Vee sniffed again, long and hard.

“Tell her about the rest,” the drummer said softly. He seemed to be the quiet one of the group, but I didn't dare mistake that for weakness. He was still hard as rocks.

“I already told her,” Gibson chimed in, his voice stone.

Vee glanced at him, then back at me.

“She walked out on you,” I said. “And took all her songs with her.”

Vee nodded. “And refused to cut a deal with her dad's friend. She had gotten so weird. Cutting her hair, moving out. She got a new phone so none of us could get ahold of her. She never called anyone on it.”
Not true,
I thought.
She called me.
“She was all of a sudden so paranoid,” Vee
continued. “It was like she knew this was going to happen to her.”

“She did,” I said.

Vee looked startled. “She knew?”

“I think she did. That's why I'm here. She knew, and she tried to call me right before it happened.”

“It doesn't make any sense,” Vee said. “Who would want to hurt Peyton?”

My mind swam. How many times had Dru said those very words? Only now I had no idea if he really meant them, or if they were a cover.

It's not like Peyton's attacker is going to be hanging out at the hospital,
Dru had once said, sarcastically. Though every moment it was looking likelier and likelier that her attacker had been doing just that. The question was, which one of them was it?

I felt Gibson's eyes bore into the top of my head. I reached over and grabbed Peyton's hand in mine. “Turns out, a lot of people wanted to hurt her,” I said. “Too many to keep track of.”

Viral Fanfare stuck around for a few more minutes. Mostly we sat in silence, only occasionally interrupted by loud sobs from Vee. The girl was taking this very hard.

“We were like sisters,” Vee said, as she stood to go, propped up by the drummer. “She always said I was her third sister.”

“Third sibling,” I corrected.

She shook her head. “No, third sister. Peyton had two sisters. The blond chick who looks just like her, and another one. I never met her or anything, so I assume she's older.”

I froze, my hand gripping Peyton's. Probably if she'd been awake, she would have winced under the pressure.

There was another sister? One that Peyton, Dru, and Luna hadn't mentioned? A secret sister? Was it possible?

They headed for the door, a bundle of leather-clad sadness. I swiveled in my chair.

“Did she say the other sister's name?” I asked.

Vee turned, looking confused. She shook her head. “She only really talked about her a few times.” Her chin crumpled and her lip quivered. “She said something about how they used to watch movies together all the time. They had a favorite. What was it called?”

The drummer shrugged, but Gibson Talley spoke up. “Some Harrison Ford movie.”

Vee pointed. “Yeah, that's it. She said they'd watched it a million times and that they liked to sit in her sister's window and smoke. Said her sister always chucked the butts into the bushes, and if anyone ever looked inside those bushes, they would be shocked.”

They turned the corner, and I was left alone with Peyton, wondering how everything fit together. A sister nobody had said anything about? A Harrison Ford movie? I felt like
these were important details, but I couldn't quite put them together.

I got out my phone and pulled up IMDB. I plugged in “Harrison Ford” and began scrolling through his acting credits. He'd been in so many movies, and I'd seen most of them. Everyone had. But none of them sounded important. None of them rang any bells or set off any alarms. Maybe Bill Hollis had produced one of them and I would have to go through, one by one, to discover which movie it was.

“If this is another one of your clues,” I said to Peyton, “I'm missing it.”

Almost as soon as the words were out of my mouth, I saw it.

My mouth hung open, and I felt like I was spiraling down a long tunnel. I could only sit there next to Peyton's bed, my whole body numb, my mind racing, my ears ringing. The urge to sneeze pressed in on me, distant, familiar. The urge I always got when I saw the dusty word
beneath
.

What Lies Beneath.

Harrison Ford had starred in a movie called
What Lies Beneath.

I'd stared at that photo for more time than I wanted to think about. I'd looked so hard for clues, for anything to make sense of it. I'd assumed it was a mistake, a throwaway. But I should have known. In the clues that Peyton had laid down for me, there were no throwaways.

They liked to sit in her sister's window and smoke. . . .

Dusty, sneezy
beneath
.

I could see the image clearly in my head now, and it all made sense. The stucco wall, the pinprick of orange light, the bushes.

That photo was a photo of me. Me, sitting in my window—my favorite place—and chain-smoking when I should have been studying for chem or history or God-knew-what.

I felt like I was floating across the room toward Peyton, the crimson pushing, pushing, pushing in on me, tinged with whorls of confusion and spikes of anger and curling snakes of shock.

It made sense. Of course it did. Synesthesia tended to be genetic, my doctor had told us. Had I had any siblings, the chance was good they would see colors, too. But I didn't have any siblings.

Or at least I didn't think I did. Until now.

Peyton saw colors. Peyton talked about a third sibling. Peyton took a photo of me in my window and then told Vee that her sister sat there, referencing a movie she'd titled that very photo. Peyton tried to call me moments before her attack.

I know everything,
her text had said. I could see the colors behind those words, the colors behind all her words.
What Lies Beneath. I know everything.
And in her Facebook
post,
Must get to the bottom of things. Nik
. And when her friends had pressed her, she'd answered in a single word. A brilliantly colorful one:
Family
.