The Butterfly Clues (6 page)

“What are you doing here?” he demands as I shake myself out of his grip.

“I’m—I’m not doing anything. What are
you
doing?” I spit back. “You’re the one who—why would you—” My words tumble out, tangled fragments. “Why would you come up behind someone and—you could have been—”
You could have been the killer,
I almost say, but I can’t get it out, can’t tell this boy in a dumb bear-eared hat who I thought he was, what I thought he was about to do.

He stares at me hard, seeming to assess me. Then, suddenly, his whole posture shifts, and his face softens into a grin. “Whoooa, man. Don’t shoot!” He puts his hands in the air like we’re playing cop and robber and I’m pointing a toy gun at his heart. He has blue eyes and scraggly dreadlocked hair. Oddly nice teeth. “Just a simple question. Don’t you remember me—Le Market du Flea—from yesterday?” He steps back with his left foot and bows, pretending to lift an invisible hat from his head in apology—but he leaves the actual hat with the bear ears on his head.

Freak,
I think, but don’t say it. “I remember you,” I say, still angry. “You crashed into me. Why the hell were you running so fast?”

“Oh, you know. Just stretching the legs. Sorry about that. Where better for a quick jog than a crowded outdoor market?” Even though his words come easily, he’s still shuffling his feet, hopping a bit from left to right. He’s either got to pee pretty badly or he’s nervous about something. “I saw you from the alleyway, thought I’d come over and say hi.”

His long dreadlocks are dyed blond in some places, though the rest of his hair is dark brown, and I can see now that his eyes are somehow blue and green and gold at the same time, like the old marbles Dad gave me and Oren to play games with as kids. He’s wearing scruffy black pants and big sturdy-looking brown boots without laces, tongues hanging loose.

I narrow my eyes at him and he rushes on, “I’ve just been over there”—he motions to the other side of the house—“doing a little treasure-hunting Dumpster-diving, and I thought to myself”—he puts a finger to his temple—“if that pretty girl goes to the flea market, and likes creepy old things, I just bet she’d appreciate a good scare and then, the rare and impossible chance to check out my newly salvaged wares. So, we’ve got the scaring part over with, and now, part deux.”

Pretty girl
. He just called me a pretty girl. The words give me an electric rush.

Or maybe I misheard him. Maybe I heard a word that just
sounded
like pretty.

He grabs my uninjured hand and leads me toward the Dumpsters, and I don’t protest. This guy radiates something— something bright and big and open, something I’m not used to at all—and I’m drawn to him despite myself.

No. He did. He called me a
pretty girl
.

Pretty means the girls at school, with their blow-dried hair and matching silver heart necklaces.

Pretty means normal.

He stops next to the Dumpster, stooping to lift something. He turns back to me, holding a flat tire delicately between his thumbs and pointer fingers.

“You, um, found a flat tire,” I say. I don’t know how this boy expects me to react to a bit of rubber, which he has obviously pulled from the inside of a dirty, smelly Dumpster, in the very alleyway where I was almost
shot
three days ago. Not that he could know about the last part.

“Oh, I certainly did,” he says, without irony. “Here, just come a little closer. It doesn’t look like much now,
but
”—he removes one hand from the tire and, as a magician might do, waves it back and forth in the air—“wait till you see how it got flat in the first place.”

I don’t know why I decide to move even closer to this near-complete stranger, but I do. He lifts the tire closer to me and flips it around. Its entire backside is embedded with shards of mirrored glass, protruding from the ink-black tire like stars.

“Wow. That’s—that’s really beautiful.” And I mean it, and move my fingers toward the glass. I’ve got to touch these stars pulled earthward, before they disappear.

“Hey—don’t do that!” He yanks my fingers away. His hand is cool and big. I shove my hands into the pockets of my pullover, embarrassed.

“See?” He shows me the palm of his own left hand, covered in tiny red gashes. “I got all cut up earlier. Bleeding from the hand isn’t as fun as you might think, believe it or not. But an artist’s life is full of hardship! And I guess they’re kind of like my battle wounds.”

My wounded palm throbs inside my sweatshirt. My whole arm suddenly feels cut up—sharp and raw. He doesn’t realize that I’m suffering from my own battle wounds—the kind of battle wounds you get when you stumble onto the frontline by accident. The thought of the bullet, the explosion—glass flying everywhere— once again makes me shiver. I blurt out, “Battle wounds, huh? So what are you battling?”

He hesitates for a second. Then his eyes light up. “My noble and single-handed fight for garbage rights!” He extends his uninjured hand to me. “I’m Flynt, by the way.

” “Lo.” I don’t shake his hand. Shaking hands reminds me of something adults do, and therapists when they’re meeting you for the first time and trying to prove
they respect you as a person.
I should know: I’ve been to a half dozen therapists in the past three years, including Dr. Janice “Call me Janice” Weiss; Dr. Aaron “This is a
safe space
, Penelope” Machner; and, most recently, Dr. Ellen Peech. Dr. Peech was straightforward, overworked, and obviously exhausted. By session number two, she’d already penned me a prescription for Zoloft and sent me on my way to Zombieland, where Mom lives. After two weeks of feeling dead numb, I decided the sewage system needed the pills more than I did, so I flushed them all down the toilet.

Mom and Dad don’t notice, of course. They never notice. Anything.

Flynt doesn’t say anything about the handshake snub—just puts the hand back into his coat pocket and bows again, still grinning.

“So, Flynt,” I say, “you never answered me. What are you doing here? Besides fighting for trash-related justice?”

He looks up at the sky for a few long seconds before responding: “I’m an artist. Don’t have the money to buy shit to make art, though.” He shrugs. “So, I find materials wherever I can from this, our eternally wasteful nation-home of Neverland.”

When Flynt says
Neverland
, he might as well be saying
heaven
. “Check it out. Great haul this morning.” He turns around and plunks a canvas sack at my feet. He’s always moving, never still.

“Open it up. Look around. Store’s open till three.” He rocks back and forth on his heels.

I pull out a ceramic lamp cracked down the center, a bag full of broken blue glass, a wooden board studded with a graveyard-like schema of rusty nails, a giant dented metal picture frame–like thing.

“So, what do you think?” He’s grinning again, tugging at one of his blondish dreadlocks and then at the frayed bits and holes in his pants. I like the little imperfections in his clothes, the way they’re kind of rumpled and don’t really match and how his coat has colorful patches sewn onto its elbows. It all looks so right on him, on his lanky body. Really right. And soft. Not like the boys at school—overly pressed jeans and gelled hair and matching everything. All cold, clean, sharp lines.

“They’re cool,” I say, and mean it. I unconsciously go to finger the rusty nails and have to stop myself. Flynt is watching me closely and I blush, embarrassed. “What will you use them for?”

“Dunno yet. Something wildly, earth-shatteringly original. Or, you know, probably something ugly and terrible that will never let see the light of day.”

We begin putting his things back in the sack, kneeling together on the dirty concrete. “You live around here, Lo?”

I stare at the ground, weirdly self-conscious that I don’t. “No. Just outside of it.”

“Where’s just outside?” he asks.

“Lakewood. I can take a bus right here, though. It’s easy.” I can feel heat still burning through my cheeks.

“Never been there. I don’t really leave Neverland much. At all, really,” he says. “It’s sort of my unbreakable rule.” I look up at him and notice that he’s blushing, too.

“You never leave at all?” I repeat. “Doesn’t it get kind of … boring?” At the last second, I stop myself from saying
depressing
. I stare across the broken landscape of Neverland: all randomness and grit.

“Not really.” He shrugs. “This is home, for right now at least. And Neverland is great.”

I must be making a face because Flynt adds, “Trust me, it’s true. There’s lots of cool stuff around here. You just haven’t had the right tour guide.” The grin never leaves his face, but his eyes are sharp and alert, like an animal’s. “So, Lakewood Lo, you never actually answered me either: what are
you
doing, ambling around these parts, fiddling with broken door handles? You”—he hesitates for a second—“ever been here before?”

I can’t tell him the truth; I feel that, like a pulse through my body. I stand, wiping dirt from my knees; Flynt stands, too, watching the clouds of dirt rise between us. “Um, well, I have this old friend—or I
had
this old friend. She was murdered a few days ago. I saw her picture in the paper and a photo of where she lived.” I point to the puke-yellow house directly beside us. “And I felt like I should come here and, you know, pay my respects or something.”

Adrenaline is pushing words from my lips I hadn’t, stupidly enough, been prepared to say. I rush on, clutching the horse pendent around my neck, spitting out invented details as they come to me, “We were really, really close as kids and then she moved away and my parents would never let me come out here to visit … and now she’s, well, she’s gone.” Avoid eye contact. Deep breath.

Flynt gets quiet. He’s tugging at an errant dreadlock again; he’s no longer grinning. “Hey. I’m really sorry about your friend. I heard about that. Well, I read about it, too.” He looks back toward the Dumpsters. “It’s rough. People are crazy, especially around here. Trust me. I know most of them.”

“Yeah, thanks,” I say. And then, all at once, in a burst: “The worst is that the police don’t really give a shit. They’ve just written the whole thing off. They’re not even investigating. Not really.”

Flynt says nothing. I’m embarrassed by my outburst, and I bite my lip, turning away from him.

Silence: seconds like bricks, falling from the sky, forming a wall between us. I wrap my navy blue coat around me tighter.

“I should probably get home,” I tell Flynt, who nods.

“Let me walk you to your bus,” Flynt offers, linking his arm with mine, like we’re old friends. I pull away. I’m not used to being touched, not by a boy, anyway. The few times it has happened have been by accident—like when J. R. Miller grabbed me around the waist at the sixth grade dance, confusing me for Grace Hull, or in eighth grade, when Micah Eisenberg put both hands on my lower back and pushed me out of the way so he could make the winning spike in our gym-class volleyball tournament. And that hardly counts.

Flynt doesn’t try to touch me again but doesn’t seem offended, either. We walk through Neverland’s landscape of uncapped potholes and trash-strewn streets.

“You should come around sometime. I might just know a really cool guy with fabulous taste in head gear who can show you how great this shit-hole town can be,” Flynt says when we’re almost at the bus stop. He tugs on his bear-ear cap.

My heart leaps. Someone wants to hang out with me. A boy wants to hang out with me. I examine his face, his eyes, trying to decide if he’s messing with me. But his expression remains the same: dimpled grin, wide, playful green-blue-gold eyes.

The moment I cast my eyes away from Flynt and to the sky, I see six blackbirds swoon past in a line—like they were put there, right at that moment, to reassure me. It’s almost enough to distract me from my mission, from the images of Sapphire’s murdered body still cycling through my head—an endless revolution, a bloody carousel.

I decide to play along. “That sounds like it could be all right,” I say cautiously, and Flynt’s smile gets even bigger. “So … how do I find this really cool guy? Does he have a cell phone? A bat symbol? A birdcall?”

“I wish!” he says. “He wasn’t blessed with the whistling gene, unfortunately. See.” He purses his lips and tries to whistle, releasing a stream of air, a flag of spit, nothing more; we both start laughing. “Doesn’t have any of that other fancy robot stuff, either. I’m pretty sure I’m—I mean,
he’s
—trying to stay off the grid as much as he can, you know? Just, meet me—I mean, him— in the same spot. I suppose you should give him your number, just in case he ever happens upon a phone booth. And don’t be afraid to just ask around. Someone will know where to find him.” He pauses and corrects himself, for real this time, gazing at me. “Where to find me.”

The 96 is waiting at the stop when we arrive. I scribble my cell phone number quickly, nervously, in a soft-covered notebook Flynt has been keeping in his pocket. Then I
tap tap tap, banana
as softly as I can, face burning as I do, hoping he won’t hear me, hoping he won’t notice, board the bus, pay the fare. Through the reflective bus windows, I watch Flynt slip through a different alleyway to who-knows-where, tire slung around his neck, soft-side-down, like a fallen halo.

CHAPTER 5

Spring starts inching its way into Cleveland, devouring old snow, asserting itself in the parks and tree branches, and consuming the high school world with a kind of madness. Each and every wall of Carver is glutted with flyers when we return from the weekend: PROM! PROM! PROM! ONE MONTH UNTIL PROM!
VOTE ON YOUR FAVORITE THEME! MAD JUNGLE DISCO? HIP-HOP-ALICEIN-WONDERLAND-RABBIT-HOLE? OUTER SPACE
?, then small print:
TICKETS $25. FOR A LIMITED TIME ONLY, SUCKAAAAS. AND: WHO RULES? YOU DECIDE. VOTE FOR YOUR PROM COURT TODAY
! The entire science wing—papered with flyers featuring Annica Steele’s face, a Photoshopped diamond crown atop her perfect hair, one word at the bottom of each flyer:
BALLER
.