The Butterfly Clues (25 page)

He turns away and goes to the bally mustard-colored couch, clearing space among the tubes of paint and discarded clothing. Paintings line every wall—nudes—women, some with animal bodies, made of tree branches, leaves, flower petals, gesso, tar.

I rip off my cold, wet sweater and the bustier beneath it, and put the T-shirt over my head. It’s big and soft and smells like him—like pine and grass and snow and cloves. There are three tiny holes on the right sleeve—good. A good sign.

“Lo,” Flynt says, softly. “Talk to me. What happened?”

My feet take me to the couch, and Moby leaps up into my lap and I pet him and start to talk. About Mario. About Tens, and being pulled into the pitch-black room and nearly strangled.

Flynt leans forward on the couch, staring at me, eyes burning. “Wait,” he says, voice tight. “Did you see who it was? Could you describe him, I mean?”

I wrap my arms around my knees, tenting his big, soft T-shirt over them. “No. It was dark.” I gulp, stare at the crease in my arm. “But whoever he is, I think he’s working for someone. Sapphire— she wrote about her ex-boyfriend, Bird. I think—I think maybe he got violent with her.” Flynt opens his mouth, but I rush on. “I can’t find him. I don’t know anything about him. No one knows anything about him. But I
know
he’s involved somehow. I can
feel
it.”

“Jesus,” he says, standing from the couch and making a full circle around it, landing back in front of me, sitting down again. He rubs his hands up and down his thighs. “Jesus, Lo. This is serious.” His eyebrows are knit, his face is gray. “You know that, right? You know how serious this is?”

“I
know
it’s serious,” I tell him, meeting his eye and then retreating, hugging my knees again, so tight. “That’s why I went to the police.”

“You did?” Flynt goes very still. “What did you tell them?”

“All of it. I told them everything, from the beginning.” Anger floods my limbs thinking about it; my nails dig into my knees, I’m shaking with it. My head, my hands. “They thought I was a drug addict. They gave me
pamphlets
. They didn’t care. They’ve never cared.”

“What do you mean
never
?”

I run my fingers across the white circle on Moby’s forehead: nine, nine, six; nine, nine, six; nine, nine, six. My mouth feels like cement.

“You can tell me, Lo.” Flynt sits back down on the couch, reaches out and touches my right knee, then my left. Perfect. Even. “Please tell me.”

I look for a sign, for some kind of change to indicate that it’s right to tell him. But there’s nothing. A great, wide hollowness; a white silence. Everything blank, open, waiting.

“My brother,” I manage to croak out. “Oren.” His name feels like a thousand paper cuts all over my body. Nine, nine, six—circles around Moby’s white spot with my fingers. “He died last year.”

I look up at Flynt quickly, then back down. “His senior year of high school. He—he got into drugs. Heavy stuff. Maybe he was into it before—I don’t know. He started just leaving, for weeks. When Mom and Dad tried to question him, he’d get angry. Start screaming. And … he wouldn’t come back for a long time, and every time he looked skinnier and was just mean. He wasn’t … he wasn’t
him
anymore, you know?”

I take a deep breath. It hurts to talk. But it hurts more not to—the words are pushing on the back of my throat, struggling to get out. “He dropped out, you know? My parents put him in rehab, but it didn’t work—he left as soon as he turned eighteen.” I try to breathe. “Then he would sneak into the house and steal Mom’s jewelry to sell it, but once she figured it out she put it all in the safe and he stopped … he stopped. He stopped coming by at all.” My face is wet and I’m shaking; I’ve started crying without knowing it.

Moby leaps from my lap and onto Flynt’s—I must be pressing his white spot too hard. I wipe my face and nose. “Six months later the police showed up at our door”—breathe breathe breathe— “they’d found him. In an abandoned apartment building. Mill Street. He’d been dead for a week. A week.” My vision is completely blurred now, but I can’t stop, even though I’m speaking in a whisper, barely choking out the words. “A neighbor called to complain about the smell. They had to identify him from—from his dental records.” I pulse my hands into new tight, round fists, a cry peeling from my throat.

For a moment, there’s just the sound of my huffing and sniffing. Flynt is silent. He’s waiting. “And—it’s my fault. It’s my
fault
. I could have done something to help, but I didn’t. I did
nothing
.”

I’m shaking, heaving. Flynt slides closer to me on the couch, bends his head down to speak to me, softly, easing out his words. “Lo—listen to me—there was
nothing
you could have done. You’re not responsible.”

I look up at him, his face a watercolor blur. The hollowness gathers me up and moves me from the couch, like a zombie, to my shoes. With trembling fingers, I pull the crumbling piece of paper that I never leave home without from the left heel and hand it to him. He unfolds it, confused.

It had words on it once, in ink, but they’re indecipherable now. I’ve looked at it too much, held it too much, let it slide beneath my heel for too long, thought about it so hard I’ve burned holes into it with my brain.

“I—I don’t know what this is,” Flynt says.

“It’s from Oren,” I say, gasping in tight fistfuls of air. “He wrote me nineteen days before he died. He needed money. He wanted help. And I ignored it.” Flynt tries to say something, but I shake my head and push on. He needs to know the truth. “I told him not to contact me. Not until he was sober. I could have done something. I could have saved him. But instead I—I let him die. I killed him.”

There it is: my secret—my darkest secret. My body feels like it’s breaking. I start pulling at my hair. Pulling pulling pulling. But the feeling won’t go away, the feeling of imbalance. Everything is dissolving.

Flynt puts his arms around me. His touch feels like fire, but I don’t have the energy to shake him off. “Lo,” he says, “it’s okay. It’s going to be okay.”

“No,” I croak out, and now I’m sobbing. My lungs are full of knives—my ribs, too, and my throat. “It’s not okay. It will
never
be okay.”

Flynt grabs me tightly between his arms, presses me into him, and I’m shivering and crying and shaking and everything is dark, like I’m being pressed between the walls of a collapsing tunnel. I let him gather me into his warm chest. His chin touches the crown of my head, and he’s whispering, “Shh, shh, shh,” and I’m making his shirt wet with my tears, but he doesn’t seem to mind. He leans gently backward, pulling me down onto his chest.

His long warm fingers brush the hair out of my face as I deep breathe into his chest for what feels like hours. At first I am burrowing into the silk-soft of his flannel, his grass and clove and snow and pine smells rising around me as though I am in the middle of a wide, dense field. And then I am in a field—and then I am nowhere—and then I am drifting, drifting somewhere new.

Sapphire’s sitting on my bed with the dead cat on her lap. She keeps petting it, and saying, “Four thirty-seven,” over and over.

She reaches into the air and opens her palm: she’s holding a tube of lipstick. She opens it and rubs some onto my lips. The cat’s getting blood all over my bed, and when the blood drops from its neck and onto the carpet it becomes a butterfly in midair—
the
butterfly—glittering, wings folded back, head bowed; I swoop down to try to catch one before it flutters away, out of reach, but when I look back up, I’m with Oren, and we’re in our basement in Gary, Indiana.

We’re digging through our costume chest next to the big sliding-glass door, looking for the best wizard clothes we can find; we’re about to put on a Thanksgiving play for the whole family. It’s starting to snow outside and we’re off from school tomorrow. Oren smiles—he’s lost two teeth up top and one on the bottom—and pulls out a long purple dress covered in tiny white stars that used to be Mom’s. “I found yours, Lo! The
best
Ruby Rainbow Wizard costume
ever
!” He rushes over to me and he smells like soap and dirt and chocolate—like Oren—and I raise my arms and he slides it over my footie pajamas and hugs me. “I knew it. You look like a
real
wizard now, Lo.” And then he hugs me tighter and the snow falls and it smells like turkey and fireplace and the adults are making clicking sounds with their heels on the floor and I hear Mom laughing really loudly. Everything is warm.

CHAPTER 22

I wake up some time later with an eerie feeling—I’m being watched. I lift my eyelids open a fraction.

Flynt has drawn a chair up next to the couch and is looking at me, intensely, as he moves a thin piece of charcoal back and forth over a piece of paper. Even though I’m embarrassed that he was watching me while I slept, no one else in the world has ever looked at me like he’s looking at me right now—like he could stare at me forever and never get bored, like I’m the most interesting thing he’s ever seen. The top of his flannel is unbuttoned and hangs, like his dreads, loose over his shoulders. I lift my arm to my head, scratching three times at my left ear.

“Lo—don’t move,” he says, seriously, his eyes like honey in the basement light—warm and amber and shining. “I’m still working.”

“I had an itch.”

“Let me know next time, and I’ll scratch it for you. Before the terrible itching incident ruined everything, I was about to start on the dark shadow of your elbow crease. Now I’ll have to re-create that perfect, dark, little cityscape from memory.” He grins. “I’ll be done soon, I promise.”

I sink an inch deeper into Flynt’s lumpy couch and watch him draw. Our eyes meet, and I shiver a little and push my bangs back and forth over my forehead, three times, out of habit.

“Hey!” he says.

“Sorry—sorry—it won’t happen again, really!”

He lifts his charcoal and blows on the piece of paper, black dust flying onto the legs of his patched jeans. His eyes move across my face, my forehead; he keeps drawing. My horrible bangs. I want to comb them out, but I’ve already promised that I won’t. My throat feels raw when I swallow. I remember crying, telling him everything, but it feels faraway, like I dreamed that, too.

“So, how’d you get that scar over your eye?” Flynt asks, resting his charcoaled hands for a second on his knees, eyeing it.

“I fell into a creek, by our old house in Minnesota”—I pause for a second, remembering Oren’s arms, wrapping around me, pulling me up, putting his warm ear to my chest, testing my heartbeat—“but my brother saved me.” Flynt’s eyes move down the left side of my face, his hand moving with them, bent to the side and shading in something furiously. “Can I ask
you
something now?”

“’Course you can, Lope.”

“What’s your real name?”

I watch the breath catch for a second in his chest. Moby wakes and leaps onto the couch in that instant, stretching his paws languidly over my midriff. Flynt reaches his arm out and shoos him away. “He’s such a diva.” Flynt laughs “Thinks he’s handsome enough to be in
every
drawing.”

I meet his eyes, and he lowers them to his sketchpad.

“You can tell me. I won’t tell anyone. Really,” I say. I want to tap, but I can’t so I bite my lip instead, six times.

“Can’t. I’m sorry. Sworn to secrecy.” He winks, trying to make a joke out of it.

“Why not? You can say it once and you’ll never have to say it again. I mean, it can’t be
that
bad—we had a neighbor in Detroit named Richard Krotchtangel.
Dick
Krotchtangel. Really. I’m not making that up.”

He laughs, but it’s halfhearted. “It’s not like that. It’s not a bad name, it’s just that … it’s all tied up in my old life, and I don’t like thinking about my old life anymore. Which is why I’m Flynt now.” His face darkens for a moment. “People can only kick you so many times before you just have to walk away, you know?”

My dream comes screaming back to me—Sapphire—
four thirty-seven.

“What kind of people?” I ask, quietly.

“People,” he says abruptly, his face hard and still. Then he looks down at his sketch and continues drawing. “My stepfather, for example.”

I wait in the silence, afraid even to breathe, for him to say more.

He focuses on the sketch in his lap; then goes on. “I think that’s why I like drawing so much.” He starts moving the charcoal over the page again so quickly, it’s like it’s dancing. “You get to see a side of people … you get to see past the bullshit. You get to see beyond that. Being a kid doesn’t last, right? That innocence doesn’t last. But it never totally goes away, either—we all keep it, stored up. In our eyes, or something. You know?”

He pauses and looks right at me: right into my eyes, like he wants to jump inside of them. He puts his sketchpad down on the floor and his charcoal next to it. He comes to me on the couch. I watch as he reaches his fingers to my face and brushes my bangs away with his hand, as he brushes them away, three times, running his finger over the scar above my eye.

Something catches in my throat as he touches my scar so tenderly, like he’s never touched another person’s skin before—and I look up at him and I’m shivering because I’ve never been touched by a boy like this before and I don’t know what to do, or think, and I can’t remember how to breathe.

And then, slowly, he leans forward and I lean forward and our lips are touching—gently at first, hesitantly—before I press into him and his hands meet my neck, my back, gliding across me, over me, around me and we’re kissing hungrily, greedily. My first kiss.

And, then, I
do
know what to do, and I’ve never wanted anything so badly before—all of it, every single part—Flynt’s warm lips against my lips in the syrupy basement light, Flynt’s skin against my skin and the lumps of the couch, pressing like small fists into my back, Flynt’s big hands staving off the chill pressing through thin walls, the tips of his fingers, grazing over every part of me beneath the gaze of his hundred painted nudes. I feel possessed by my wanting.