The Butterfly Clues (17 page)

I look at his face, his bee-stung lips, his green-blue-gold eyes: there’s something in them I don’t understand—a despairing, pleading ache.

I still don’t completely trust him, but for now, I have to let myself believe that what he’s saying is true. I can’t lose him.

He’s the only friend I’ve got.

Flynt lays the sketch back on Sapphire’s desk carefully, running his hand over her penned form, over the outline of the girl that floated through his fingers. I hug my book bag into my chest.

“Okay,” I say, nodding, my voice raw.

“Okay what?” he says.

“Okay, let’s get out of here,” I say.

The cold rises around us and we draw closer together, as if magnetized by body heat. Flynt pulls my hand to his and squeezes, and I have an urge to pull away but another urge to melt right into him, to let him carry me somewhere and make me solid again.

He tugs me gently forward. I let him.

When I get back to Lakewood, I still feel like I’m moving underwater—wavy and slow and deep-sea. I pass beneath the interwoven arms of quaking aspens and river birches and slippery elms. I remember when we’d first moved to Cleveland and Bob Solomon, our kooky, tree-hugging hippy neighbor—as Dad liked to put it—went around putting classification labels on every tree within a six-block radius. Even after they’d all fallen off, Oren could still point to every kind and tell me what they were. He was surprising like that: what he noticed, what he cared about.

The memories flow through the liquid: sitting beneath the giant shellbark hickory on our front lawn; Oren sketching the grain of the wood in microscopic detail, his face a map of blissful concentration; climbing up Mrs. Hawthorne’s silky dogwood three houses down, hooting like a monkey as he pretended to eat leaves. I’m so lost in thoughts of the past that I almost miss the very recognizable hulking man puffing steadily on a cigarette, huddled half hidden in a doorway on the corner of Maplebrook and Oak.

It’s the bouncer from Tens. The one Gordon Jones called Vin. I recognize the smashed tomato nose, the neck robed in gristle. It’s definitely him.

And he’s one block from my house.

I duck into the shadow of two dark blue SUVs parked end to end. Heart thumping rapidly, bally green sweater clinging to my skin beneath my coat, I watch him. He stands there, no more than fifteen feet from me, flicking his tongue like a snake between the gap in the two front teeth, smoking, eyes flitting back and forth. Like he’s waiting for something. My heartbeat goes wild; something tells me he’s waiting for
me.

I watch him puff and release, puff and release, the smoke winding wildly from his lips. I’m 99.9 percent positive that I’ve never seen him around here before—his being here now can’t be a coincidence.

Pffft.
My hand accidentally slides down the side of the Ford Explorer I’m leaning against. The bouncer’s head whips in the direction of the car, his fingers fanning out against his giant thighs. He starts to inch closer to me when the phone in his pocket begins to buzz loudly. He answers.

“Yeah,” he answers in a low voice, nodding vigorously. “Nope. Yeah, I’m sure. Okay.” He gives one last look around from his post before throwing the cigarette he’s smoking to the ground and hurrying, head down, into a black sedan that pulls up to collect him, headlights cutting sharply through the dark.

I stay still. Watching, listening, trying to make myself invisible, crouched low to the ground as the car door slams shut, a hard hollow sound. I feel breathless again. The bouncer: he’s the one who’s been watching me. Could he have killed Sapphire? But why?

I think of those words, violently scrawled:
Now you know what curiosity did. Be careful.
…

The words spin and slur around me, twisting blood-red between the leafless branches of the trees.
Be careful be careful be careful.

I tap my feet against the gravel. Nine times. Again. Eighteen. Again. Twenty-seven.

I pull myself up from between the cars and count the cracks in the sidewalk as I walk the final block home. Every few seconds I whip around, terrified that I’ll see the sedan racing toward me again, the bouncer looming out from the shadows. My head is still whirring as I approach my house, climb up the clean white porch stairs.
Tap tap tap
,
banana
, open the door and walk inside, triple bolt it.

In my room, I thud my book bag to the ground and unzip it quickly. The three frogs I took from Sapphire’s room. The three frogs will make me feel better, safer.
Mom would have liked these, when she still liked things.

I place them in a small triangle, noses touching, at the foot of my ceramic daisy collection—which forces me to move my twenty-four metal skeleton keys beside my soft-bellied jester dolls and my bejeweled combs one foot’s length closer to my Pennsylvania license plates, which, I decide, can stand mild shadowing via the comb tines. By the time I finish rearranging and ordering and restructuring, I only feel a little better. Which distresses me even more—if the order can’t make things right, nothing will, which means I’m stuck like this, paralyzed within my own skull, forever.

I pull the other salvaged things from my bag to my bed: Sapphire’s bustier, the thick stack of her journals. I slide my fingers over the velvet and rhinestones of the bustier. I
must
put it on. It will protect me. I need to be wearing it. Now. Shivering, I pull the bustier gently over my head, wriggling into it. It fits me perfectly: snug around my boobs, pushing them together, cinching my waist and making my nothing, narrow hips appear fuller. It feels right, holding me together, safe. Protected.

I curl onto my bed and pick up the first journal on the stack, heart pounding as I devour every word—searching for any mention of the bouncer. He’s
got
to be somewhere in these pages. Maybe they were friends. Maybe they dated.

But, he’s not mentioned anywhere, and I think back to what one of the girls said at Tens:
She never did extra to a guy for a hundred bucks, never went out with the guys from the club, not even the regulars. Not even the
bouncers
.

I read pages and pages about Bird. She never calls Bird her boyfriend, even in her own private writings, but it’s clear that whoever he is to her, he’s very important. A very close friend, at least, and probably more from the things she describes that they do together:

Bird and I raided the Goodwill today. He said the goal was that we both look like “circus freaks” for our traditional Thursday “fancy dancing night.” We dug through the $1 bins and found all sorts of crazy stuff—I found a floor-length spider-pattern dress and he found a jester hat with bells on it and a
giant
pair of silver pants. We snuck into the basement of this old red brick building on Meyers Street through the window and jumped around like lunatics… .

In another entry (September 8), she talks about midnight picnics on construction scaffolding:
Giant Eagle is the greatest—I swear. Bird has this obsession with Driscoll’s strawberries (which are freakishly
huge
, btw). He hand-feeds me and calls me “Baby Bird.” (Isn’t he
so
romantic?? Ha-ha.) Sometimes the things that he wants to do—and when he wants to do something,
we do
it
all the way—
make me laugh so hard I come dangerously close to peeing in my pants. Wonder if he’d still find me sexy if I did… .

I flip through each book with urgency. Interspersed between entries are funny little to do lists—
wheat bread, peanut butter, eggs, bobby pins, latex, smaller feathers, computer programmer, laundry—
in addition to dirty limericks and doodles (lots of hands and feet and flowers) and telephone numbers and dislocated thoughts and musings. Sapphire’s a good writer, and the girls at Tens were right—she’s funny. I keep reading.

I keep farting really loudly in my sleep and waking myself up because of it,
she writes in one entry (April 29).
Is this normal? Does Bird hear it and just pretend that he doesn’t to spare me the embarrassment, or does he really just sleep like a total rock?

In another entry (October 16):
A regular pulled me aside tonight and told me he’d pay me a grand if I let him worship my feet for an hour. I said no, of course. But now, when he comes into the club, I
swear
I smell feet on him all the time (is it possible he just invests in foot-scented cologne?), and I can’t help but look around at my coworkers and wonder which ones
have
taken him up on his offer. Nasty. I had to tell Bird about Mr. Foot Fetish. He laughed so hard he snarfed Dr Pepper all over me. I’ve been calling him Dr Pepper for two days.

And another, near the end of her journal, one of the last entries (no date):
We’ve decided: for our anniversary, we’re going to tell each other our real names. It’s funny how in this place, it’s the scariest thing you can share with a person—your real name. In normal places, you find that out the first time you meet someone. But, for us, it’s our anniversary present to each other. And the best anniversary present I could want. To know something about him that I didn’t know before… . Hope it’s not something terrible, like … Bob. I hate the name Bob. Every day, I make a new guess, and he just shakes his head and says, “Not telling.” I can’t wait … four more months.

In her later entries—over a year ago, according to the dates— Bird is still the primary subject, but something major has shifted: she writes a lot about him “flying away,” getting sick. In one entry, she writes:
When I tried to come close to him the other day, he snarled at me like an angry dog. Maybe he’s just hungry—I don’t know if I’ve seen him eat anything in a week. I miss our late-night Giant Eagle raids, our picnics on other people’s roofs …

I wonder if the worst he ever did was snarl at her, or if it ever got seriously bad—maybe those are the things she wouldn’t write about. Or
couldn’t
write about. Maybe he found one of her journals and read it, and then he got angry and hurt her. Could Bird be connected to the bouncer somehow?

In another entry, she writes about her mother:
It’s been 437 days since I came to Cleveland. I keep the number in a little book. Every day, I cross the old one out and write the new one in. Today is the 437th day. And so now I’ll always know: the day my mother died is the 437th day since I’ve escaped from Dayton and the 437th day since we’ve spoken a word to each other. And now there will only be more days, but no more days to change it. I thought she wouldn’t care if I disappeared, and, turns out, I was right. She didn’t care. She didn’t even try to find me. So, we’re lost to each other for good now, I guess. I’ll have to start a new book of numbers. Today is Day 1. Day 1 of my mother being dead. Tomorrow, it will be Day 2.

I wonder what day she would have marked into her book today, if she was still alive to do it. Staring at the cluster of scrawl on the page, a jumble of numbers and letters, it hits me how young she really was when she was killed: nineteen. So, she was just seventeen when she wrote these entries—my age—and only fifteen when she ran away from home. Fifteen. She hadn’t seen or spoken with her mother since she was fifteen years old.

It’s difficult for me to imagine her that young—in every picture I’ve seen, she looks so much older. It’s the makeup, of course. But, it’s something else, too. Something about her eyes.

I fall asleep sideways, face squashed onto the page I was in the middle of reading—something about Bird, drifting, drifting away.

Sapphire’s dark eyes peer out at me from between letters, numbers, unfinished scratches in the pit of my dreams. Blackness; a cracking sound, and then: I’m pressed into a muddled crowd of people whose faces are being torn clean from their skulls by crows, swooping down from the sky. Black feathers float through the air like New Year’s confetti.

I lift my hands to protect my face, but my hands have already been taken.

I try to scream, but my mouth is just a gaping hole between bones and bones and bones.

CHAPTER 14

Beepbeepbeepbeepbeep—
my eyes snap open in bed, stare in disbelief at the alarm clock: 7:15.
Shit.

Shit shit shit shit.
I have to be at school in fifteen minutes.
SHIT.
My dreams were so deafening that they managed to drown out my alarm, which has been banshee-blaring for the past half hour.

The bustier is still wrapped tightly around me, pinching uncomfortably in places. I pull the first thing I can find over it (hunter green flannel), slip into a pair of crumpled black jeans from off my floor, lace up my Chucks, shove one of the journals into my book bag,
tap tap tap, banana
, and sprint like mad out of the house and to the bus stop. The bus has already left by the time I get there—but just barely—and I race to it, flagging it down several blocks ahead, panting as I step inside and slide into a window seat.

I watch my breath fog up the window in big, cloudy Os, unable to get a phrase from Sapphire’s journal to stop turning through my mind:
I thought she wouldn’t care if I disappeared, and I was right.