The Butterfly Clues (23 page)

I find the same jean skirt and crocheted shrug I’d worn the first time I went to Tens, and throw them on over the bustier. I don’t have any high heels besides Mom’s, from the eighties, or a non-see-through thong. I don’t have
any
thong. I wonder if all normal girls wear thongs, and if I’d been born normal, I’d have one, too.

Before I leave, I touch each of Sapphire’s three frogs, lightly, on their heads; feel for the butterfly in my coat pocket, the soft piece of paper nestled into the sole of my left shoe; flip the light switch on and off six times.

Downstairs on the kitchen counter, there is a glass of orange juice and a bagel, untoasted, cut in thirds, the way I’ve always liked it. A note next to the coffee machine reads:
Had to get to work early. Big meeting. Have a good day at school. —Dad.

I pour the orange juice down the drain and eat two of the three bagel segments as I walk toward the bus stop. The final third I shred into small pieces and scatter behind me. The air is full of fluttering and dark motion as the birds descend, swooping, crowing triumphantly, on the feast.

In the weak early spring thaw of daylight, Tens is duller and squatter and less frightening than I remember it being in the dark. Still, my breath catches in my throat and my heart starts pounding as I push through the door into the cigarette-smog of the club:
Tap tap tap, banana.

A man is waiting for his jacket in the vestibule, tapping an elegant leather shoe against the ground as he checks the watch on his wrist with mounting frustration. My stomach flips. It’s Gordon Jones.

“You got it back,” I say abruptly, standing in the darkened doorway.

He glances up, looking completely startled. I feel my whole body blush. He probably doesn’t even remember—our time together in the booth, the clumsy girl who tumbled onto his lap.

“What?” he says.

“Your watch,” I blurt out, wishing I could drop through the floor. My body is burning. “You got it back.”

His jaw drops slightly. He squints at me.
He doesn’t remember.
I bite hard into my lip and push past him into the club, ducking behind a pillar to pause and collect myself. I squeeze the butterfly eighteen times in my fist.
I’m so stupid. Why would he have remembered
me?
He sees a million girls all the time. I’m nobody to him.

Still, I can’t get the feeling out of my head—the drunk rush I’d felt as he stared at me like I was beautiful, desirable. Like I was someone he would want to get to know. Disappointment creeps through my chest.
Was none of that real, either?

The club is mostly empty at this hour. Three middle-aged guys sit at three separate points in the room, each wrapped in his own solitary bubble as he watches the girl onstage—the small, curly haired girl I saw being escorted upstairs just before I tripped into Gordon’s booth. She crawls up the pole like a squirrel. Her rib cage is strikingly slender, highlighted by the amber stage lights. She slides weightless, like silk. I can’t take my eyes off her.

One of the men—weak, graying hair cropped around the sides of his head, shiny as a peeled onion on top—leans forward, closer to her as he sways his hand in the air for another drink. A waitress swoops in from the hidden place to the left. I recognize her face as she comes closer—Lacey.

I wait until she walks in my direction to step out from behind the pillar and call her name. I don’t even know what to say next. She whips around, pulling the empty drink tray sharply into her chest and wrinkling her nose. I’ve seen Camille do exactly this at school with her books when an undesirable sophomore approaches her from behind.

She squints at me, shows the slim gaps in her teeth through her red lips. “Oh. Hey. Julie, right?”

I don’t correct her. “Right.”

“You get hired yet?”

“Not sure …,” I say. She shifts her tray to the other hand and smacks her gum. “I’m supposed to audition later.”

“Oh yeah. Amateur night,” she says, gum clicking. “Well, good luck. At least it doesn’t cost anything to audition. The managers are a bunch of horny assholes, but they like to think of themselves as businessmen.” She glances back at the three men in the audience, fiddling with their ties. “Then again … I guess there’s not much difference really.” She blows a bubble with her gum and turns to walk toward the bar, bumping her hips a little to the techno coming through the speakers. I stop her.

“Do you—do you know a guy named Mario?”

She whips back around. “Mario?” She wrinkles her nose, thinking for a second, shaking her head; “I don’t think so… . Should I? He a customer here or something?”

“I don’t know. I mean, maybe. He’s got this … creepy bright red hair, and he’s pretty short, probably in his forties. Kind of sounds like he’s high when he talks …?”

“Nope. Definitely don’t know that guy.”

I tug at my shirt, bite my bottom lip, three times on each side. “Well, do you know if Sapphire ever shopped at the Cleveland Flea, then?”

Another girl walks past then, whacking Lacey on the butt with her tray.

“You’re in trouble, Donna!” Lacey calls after her, turning back to me, tapping her foot, sighing broadly. “About the Cleveland
what
? What’s this about, girl? You have a lesbian crush on Sapphire or something? I hate to tell you this, but you’re a little too late. Besides, she wasn’t a switch-hitter.” Lacey laughs at her own joke. “Anyway, Sapphire never shopped at no flea market. She didn’t
have
to shop. People just gave her things. Flea market …,” she mutters, shaking her head as she walks past me and to the bar, drink tray pressed against her hip.

I stand there as Lacey saunters away, still shaking her head, in the hazy bar light. Seconds later, the waitress who’d swatted Lacey’s butt with a tray, comes over to me.

“You were asking about Sapphire, right?” She flips her drink tray over and slides it under her arm.

“Yeah,” I answer, breathless. “Yes. I was.”

“Sorry for listening,” Donna says flatly, as though she isn’t sorry at all. Then she drops her voice to a whisper and says with sudden viciousness, “You know, she wasn’t the sweetheart everybody thought she was. No way she made that much money above board, you feel me? I mean, some nights she was walking out with six or seven hundred, and the rest of us barely made house.” Donna curls her lips back as my head spins, trying to guess what it even means to “barely make house.” It probably has to do with some kind of fees that the girls have to pay, but I can’t help imagining them playing house like little kids, except in sparkly stilettos and fishnet thongs.

Donna goes on. “You ask me, she was definitely hooked up.
Someone
was paying those bills, and I’d bet my ass she was paying him back, if you know what I mean. Nobody gets that many gifts for doing nothing.”

“Gifts? What kind of gifts?”

Donna snorts. “You know, love notes and shit. And jewelry, handbags, necklaces …”

Love notes—the words perk my ears, my memory: the bird drawing—in her locker, in her bathroom. “She had a boyfriend, didn’t she? Bird?” I press.

“If she did, he was loaded. Some of that shit was
costly
. And some was just … creepy.” She looks back to the audience; Onion Head has his arm raised, another empty drink in his fist. “Shit. That’s my cue,” she says, peeling sleekly away, tray balanced on her right palm.

I start walking toward the exit. Somehow, I have to track down Bird.

As I reach the vestibule where I’d spotted Gordon earlier, collecting his coat, a man in a valet uniform, a knit cap pulled low over his eyes, is standing in the way, blocking it off.

“Excuse me,” I say, trying to push past him.

“No, Mees,” he says in heavily accented Spanish. “Exeet theese way, theese way.” He ushers me back inside the club, and points to a dim, glowing sign at the back of the club, marked
EMERGENCY EXIT
.

“What’s wrong with that exit?” I ask, turning over my shoulder to look at it.

But he doesn’t understand. He just keeps saying the same thing. “Theese way, theese way, Mees.” We reach the back of the club, to the door sandwiched between the VIP booths and one of the prep bars, and he opens it for me, pointing a hairy finger down the long hallway. The hat is shading his eyes almost entirely, but I can see that they’re a flat brown color; heavy purple circles beneath. “Exeet theese way, please.”

“Okay!” I tell him. “I get it.”

Tap tap tap, banana.
The door clicks shut behind me as I walk down the creepy hospital-white hallway, my stomach knotting up. It even
smells
like a hospital in here. I run my hand along the wall, lifting it at every crack, staring, too, at the white linoleum tiles, dodging the cracks between tiles.
Ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourt—

In a flash: one of the plain white doors to my left flies open.

My stomach drops to my toes.

A figure all in black, wearing a distorted, rubbery black mask, lunges for me. Before I can run, I’m pulled into the room behind the door. I have no time to tap. He has broken the rules.
Please please please.
I struggle to move my arms out of his grip—have to— have to tap. No—
oh God oh God oh God—
can’t move—too tight. Pitch black. Hands twist my arms behind my back. They burn. They’re burning. I try to pull one more time, to
tap tap tap, banana
. It’s scratching through me—the
urge
, the need—it’s ripping at my skin, at every single cell. I start to shake, to cry, try to scream, but the man—must be, he’s giant like a man, rough like a man—claps his hand over my mouth, hard. His hands taste like tobacco.

Oh God. Oh no.
I feel sick, stomach roiling, turning, high-diving into the jelly pool of my legs.

His arm wraps around my throat, pulling tighter, breath against my ear. “Whatever little game you think you’re playing,” he growls, as I gasp in all the air I can, “you’d better lay off, or you’ll end up like your friends. And trust me, if you think what we did to that nosy freak Mario was bad …”

I can’t breathe. He’s going to kill me. I’m going to die here, in this little room, where no one will find me. I see my mother’s face when she used to wake me up in the morning with the softest kiss on each of my cheeks. Right one, then left. Afterward I would always ask her to kiss them again: first the right, then left, then right again. Three kisses. Safe. I feel her bend over me, smell her lavender.

He blows his hot cigarette breath into my ear again: “This was your final warning. There won’t be another one.” He shifts his other arm back to my wrists, tightening his grip, tugging, twisting. Someone’s moaning. It must be me. “Now I’m going to give you one chance to run. On the count of three,” he says, like a clown at a children’s birthday party, leading a game of hide-and-seek in a graveyard. “Ready?” He tugs again, like I’m made of rope.

“One.” Swings my arms, madly, ripping them from their sockets.

“Two.” Digs his nails in.

“THREE.”

The door swings open. I run, pain everywhere, ignoring it, pushing through the exit door at the end of the hallway. Running— through the hazy light of the sun, its peaks and dips piercing through the buildings and the arms of dead trees.

CHAPTER 20

My breath cuts through the cold air in tinny, wheezing gasps. My knees ache. But I can’t stop running. I feel eyes on my back, everywhere. Eyes, scraping my skin, wind—squeezing itself around my neck tighter and tighter and tighter.

A car scrapes with a high
whinnnny
around the corner and I leap—skirting behind a bush in another person’s lawn. I try to
tap tap tap, banana
, but my feet are lead and my mouth doesn’t work. I bite my tongue nine times. Nine times, again. Pulse my shaky right hand around Sapphire’s butterfly, six times. Do it all again, and again—it’s weird how you can feel like you’re sinking and floating at the same time, how not even your body in space makes any sense.

This was your final warning. There won’t be another one.
The words ring again and again in my mind. My stomach won’t stop heaving, like I need to puke. But nothing will come out.

I can’t go home. I can never go home again—he’ll find me there too easily. I feel in my pocket for the butterfly and brush past something else: a small rectangular card.
Lieutenant Leif M. Flack: Cleveland PD.
On the back of the card is an address: the police station.

I abruptly change directions, head for the bus that runs downtown. The butterfly grows warm in my fist, and I know it’s Sapphire, telling me she’s here, telling me,
There’s no other way.