The Butterfly Clues (4 page)

A new page comes up, bordered in the same creepy pastel flowers, but this time it’s quilted in a background of gruesome thumbprint photos. A list of bolded names runs like a twisted spine through the center of the screen. “Sapphire: age 19, murdered at home; Lourraine Street” is right at the top. My heart flips. Still just Sapphire. No last name. A blinking banner beside it reads:
NEW ADDITION
!!! like it’s an advertisement for a vacuum cleaner or dishwashing detergent.

Click.

First: a hand-drawn street map called: Neverland and Environs
.
Below it, more photographs, all obviously taken from the outside, and rendered partially obscure by the stippling of light over the window: her ransacked apartment, things torn up and strewn across the floor, a smattering of blood against the bedroom wall. The pictures are grainy, pixilated, as though snapped with a cell phone.

I picture her sitting in front of a mirror, applying her layers of makeup in that light blue room like she’s icing a wedding cake, sliding her bruised-purple lips back and forth against each other. I imagine a surf of blood rising up to her ankles, to her knees, to her neck—everything in her room bobbing in that blood like buoys on a rising tide.

Trying to relax before bed, I move the copper elephants closer to the soft-bellied jester dolls and the soft-bellied jester dolls closer to the wooden dollhouse rocking chairs. Their placement is giving me a nervous feeling in my stomach right now, and I’ve got to make them right again.

Normally, doing this makes me calm, but for some reason, I can’t focus and don’t feel better. Something’s not right; everything in my room looks wrong, rearranged. Twisted.

Cleft. Naked.

I can’t make it right.

CHAPTER 3

I wake to a window pattern of light streaming through my blinds, roll over in bed and stretch. Saturday has its own special taste: like the blackberries Mom and I would pick every week during the short three months we lived in Kuna, Idaho, when I was ten. I remember how flushed with pride we’d felt as we hugged the brimming baskets of fruit to our chests, eating blackberries by the fistful, all day long.

Saturday is Flea Market Day, holiest of days.

Then I feel the throbbing in my hand. The cut. The glass. The bang. It was real.

I throw on my army pants, rolling down the giant waist, and my green thermal hoodie, which is loose enough, like most of my clothes, to cover my boobs. I’m still not used to them. I may never be. They arrived around the third week of ninth grade without consulting me—first the right one and then the left, which proceeded to grow some more to meet the right and then surpass it. I’m pretty sure they’re engaged in some kind of constant competition.

I check my shoe for the folded piece of paper I keep there— safer than a pocket, where things might fall out. Still there. I step into my shoes, then scrutinize myself in the collection of antique mirrors (nine) above my dresser. My bangs look stupid in each and every one. I push them back from my forehead and let them fall. Three times. “Penelope Marin,” I say out loud to my reflection, in my best scary cop voice, “step
away
from the mirrors. I repeat: get your wallet from the nightstand and step
away
from the mirrors.”

My costume ring with the big yellow daisy on it is calling out to me like the yellow house two days ago, and I know I have to wear it, and it feels good on my finger, and I’m ready.

According to B. Hornet’s map, Neverland and Environs, the Cleveland Flea is technically within the borders of the Neverland neighborhood, but somehow it’s an oasis, a safe haven. It spans blocks: it is its own magical city. There are vendors at the flea six days a week, but Saturday is my day. The right day. The only day of the week with three perfect syllables.

I allow myself to visit only nine stalls per Saturday so that the pleasure of the market’s newness remains never ending. By the time I’ve gone through the hundreds of stalls, after weeks of patient and selective meandering, most of the vendors will have changed, and I can do it all over again. That way, Saturday will always and forever mean waking up hopeful.

As I approach, the sounds of the flea are in beautiful, cacophonous bloom. I
tap tap tap, banana
before I enter the market, three times. Nine taps, three bananas in total. Good. Very good.

People are milling about—hundreds of them, holding hands and touching things and living their lives, and I blend into the crowd. Normal.

I pass a table stacked with antique glasses frames and pocket watches from the twenties: frames jeweled at the corners, tortoise-colored, glossy. Just as I’m about to approach the booth and run my fingers over all the glittering, beautiful, old things—my fingers are practically salivating they’re so excited—Keri Ram darts toward me from the next booth.

My hand flies immediately to my bangs; I wish I knew how dumb on a scale of one-to-ten they looked right now. By the feel of it, I’d say eight. I hate eight.

“Hey, girl!” she says, acting excited to see me, which is weird because I see her every day in calculus, and she’s never, ever been excited to see me there. My chest feels suddenly tight and I realize that I don’t know what to say. I could say
hi
when I’m really supposed to say
hey.
She could report back to her friends at school on Monday about how much of a dork I really am because I still say words like
hi
.

When I finally force myself to speak, all that comes out is an awkward little “Hey,” almost a growl.

Her mouth turns slightly sideways, her eyes creasing like she’s trying to figure out what exactly I just said. I’ve been in at least a dozen classes with Keri since I moved to Cleveland at the end of eighth grade, when I was fourteen, but we’ve never really spoken before. She hasn’t always been in the popular group, but she is now, and I don’t know if I’ve ever seen her anywhere without a train of at least three other people following behind. She’s on student government and in SADD and mock trial and the field hockey team and probably twenty more organizations I’ll only know about when the yearbook comes out and I flip through the glossy spread of everyone else’s faces.

There’d been a rumor going around since ninth grade that she was a lesbian—I think it’s because she’s got kind of broad shoulders and a deep voice—but then last year a different rumor started circulating that she’d lost her virginity to some twentyeight-year-old musician she’d met at a hotel pool in Chicago, on a family vacation, and that rumor kind of swallowed the other. I’m pretty sure kids at school don’t know anything about me, nor do they care; I doubt most of them even know my name. I’m a ghost to them—not even worthy of rumors. If they know about Oren— and I don’t really see how they
couldn’t
know about Oren—they don’t know he was my brother. I doubt they noticed when I was out of school for a whole month last year.

Keri says, “This place is kind of weird, right?” She smiles at me, flashing perfect, blindingly white teeth. “Camille made me come here with her. She’s trying to find a gift for her grandmother or something.” She doesn’t even give me time to respond before moving her big smudgeless leather purse to the crook of her left elbow and continuing: “So, I
completely
spaced out in Keller’s class on Friday, not that that’s so hard to do or anything. I mean, I know I’m usually right on top of everything, but, seriously, does Mr. Keller actually expect us to be able to focus on
derivatives
right before the weekend?” She shakes her head, giving me a knowing glance, like I
must
understand how hard it is to pay attention to school on a Friday—what with all of the parties and drinking and hotel-pool sex I’m planning for the weekend.

“Yeah,” I say. “Right.” I nod my head vigorously. Too vigorously. I force myself still, move my bangs to the left, stare at the toes of my scuffed-up Chucks. The good Saturday feeling is draining away. Keri-freaking-Ram has destroyed it with her shiny hair and scar-less forehead and straight-bridged nose and cheerful little paisley-printed dress.

“I know. I mean, it’s really
easy
, and it’s boring on top of that.
”
Keri adds the
really easy
part to remind me how smart and impressive and strong a leader she’ll be once I help vote her into next year’s senior class presidency in May (
Only two months away! Never too early to start thinking about new leadership!
)—I’m sure of it. I glance back up at her; she flips her hair over her right shoulder, bites her lip. “So, did you manage to write down the homework or anything? As much as I hate math, gotta get that A or my ’rents will slaughter me, you know?” She looks at me expectantly.

“We. Actually—we didn’t have any. I mean, not really nothing, but nothing
really
.”

Keri looks confused. “Wait—so, we don’t have homework, or we do?”

She’s got three small pimples sprouting up on her chin; I can see them under her concealer. I stare at them as I respond. “Well, Mr. Keller said we should just, um, just look over chapter twelve some more if we didn’t feel good about limits, or whatever.”

Keri smiles and her pimples grow farther apart. “Oh. Awesome.” She straightens the hem of her dress, heaves a happy sigh. “I guess Keller’s not all that evil when it comes down to it.”

She looks over her shoulder as she hears Camille, calling to her from a nearby booth. When she turns back to me, she looks relieved, like she’s glad to have an excuse to be rid of me. “Well, looks like Camille found her grandma
something
worth buying here… . Thanks for the good news about the homework, girl.”

“Lo,” I say to her as she’s turning to leave.

She stops, turns around, and looks at me strangely. “What?”

“My name’s Lo,” I say, and I feel a blush heating my cheeks.

She squints at me with a look of pity. “I know what your name is. We’re in, like, four classes together.” She shakes her head and frowns a little before galloping over to Camille through the crowd like they haven’t seen each other in years.

I see Camille squint hard in my direction and point as soon as Keri reaches her. Keri bats Camille’s hand down, whispering something into her ear that makes them both shake their heads as they join the stream of people moving toward the exit.

I keep walking, waiting for the bad feelings to drain away, hoping my tapping and counting goes unnoticed by the hoards of people milling, shopping, smiling.

There’s a booth filled with old instruments just a few feet ahead that calms me instantly: brassy tubas and ornate French horns, dangling from the top of the booth like flanks of glossy raw meat. They’re all too big to take home and too expensive to buy, but their beauty and the idea of their heaviness makes me wish I could have one just to cradle for a while. The weight of them comforts me; they’re solid. They won’t evaporate into thin air.

I’m staring up at the glinting instruments, when a boy in a bear-eared hat—at least I think it’s a boy, since all I get a really good look at are the bear ears—zooms past, tornado-like. Our shoulders meet for a long second before he knocks me backward, directly into the table behind me. I nearly tip the whole table over trying to steady myself. All sorts of random junk—jewelry and old lamps and brooches and statuettes and silverware and pins and buttons and bow ties—tumbles to the ground.

“Sorry,” I say quickly, stooping to lift the fallen things from the ground. I don’t even care who the mysterious bear-guy was that slammed me—I’m too focused on the treasure I’ve fallen into, the opportunity to look, to rearrange and separate and order.

“That’s all right, sweetheart,” the vendor says, scooting around from behind the table to come help me. “Not too organized around here.”

I raise a delicate silver watch from where it landed, diagonally splayed beneath two different colored salad forks. I sway it left to right to watch the glinting sun play against its face.

The vendor sees me holding the watch and looks startled. “Oh,” he barks out. “That one’s not for sale.” He’s got one of those sticker nametags on. It says
Hello, My Name Is Mario
in messy red script.

“But—” I start to say. He leans forward and practically rips the watch out of my hand. Filled suddenly with a hot, rising anger that I can’t resist, I blurt out: “You shouldn’t put things out that you don’t want people to buy, you know. It’s not fair.”

“Sorry, don’t know how that one got in there,” Mario says, grinning at me.

He squats, reaches under the card table, and scoops up the rest of the fallen objects, then dumps them back on the tangle of stuff piled on his table. Mario’s hair is a shock of Manic Panic red, a color I see dripping down the foreheads of most of the punk kids in gym class as they sweat. But he’s way too old for high school— forty, at least, sporting an over-size Jimi Hendrix tie-dyed T-shirt and faded jeans, skin leathery full of lines.

“Everything else is for sale, though,” he says. “Go ahead and pick something out. Pretty girl like you; I’ll give you a discount.”