The Butterfly Clues (9 page)

Music drifts up to us from a bar on the strip below: slow, steady beat, languid violin, molasses guitar. Flynt gets up and flaps his arms like wings. He grabs my hand, pulling me with him and twirling me once.

“You’re a pretty good dancer,” he says. “Bet you didn’t know that, did you? Just like you don’t know that you’re a good bowler, or a good wind-chimer, or that you’re beautiful?”

Beautiful
. That word makes all the other words dry up in my mind. “I—I’m not—”

He cuts me off. “So what’s ‘Lo’ short for?” He spins me away and back again.

“Penelope.”

“Penelllllllopeeee.” He sings it. “I like that. It’s kinda cool, old-fashioned or something.”

“It was my mother’s grandmother’s name,” I explain as he twirls me back in, then puts his hand on my lower back and begins a waltz. It makes me shiver, but I don’t pull away. I blabber on, “My parents said that when I was born, my hair was thick and dark, like hers. They were going to name me something else but when they saw me, they were sure I was her, reincarnated.” I pause; he dips me. Electric heat races up my back. “My parents are kinda weird,” I continue, feeling Flynt’s big hand around mine, guiding me in circles. I count each revolution in my head:
four, five, six.
“Or, I mean, they
were
weird. Now they’re not anything.” I bite my lip, wishing the words back. “So, what’s the story with
your
name? I’ve never met anyone else named Flynt.”

He drops my hand and does a goofy ballerina twirl, arms raised above his head. “Just a nickname. After Larry,” he says as he twirls farther away.

“Larry?” I repeat.

“Larry Flynt.”

Now that Flynt isn’t leading, I don’t feel comfortable dancing. I hug my arms across my chest, squeezing my fingertips hard into my shoulders; each finger, three times,
push push push.
Thirty; thirty pushes. The number relaxes me; my neck releases, I shake my head.

Flynt raises his eyebrows. “Mr. Flynt happened to be quite the porn-o-graphy mogul back in the day. He was a pretty famous smut publisher and owned a chain of strip clubs and all those sorts of things.”

I squint at him. “So, what? You’re secretly a porn mogul?”

“Not exactly.” He laughs. “You actually never heard of Larry Flynt?”

I shake my head again and Flynt reaches out, chucks my chin like I’m six and not sixteen. “You really are from Lakewood, aren’t you?”

“Just not too much of a porn buff,” I say stiffly, jerking away.

“Hey, hey.” Flynt’s voice is soft. “I think it’s cute. I think it’s great, in fact.”

Cute. Great.
Like
beautiful
: words that have never applied to me, words I always thought were meant for different kinds of girls.

“People started calling me Flynt because when I first moved to Cleveland from Baltimore, I earned most of my money in strip clubs.” Flynt hurries to explain when I raise my eyebrows. “I sketched strippers for their clients. You know, they don’t allow cameras in the clubs. I was a one-man service industry for the service industry.” I can tell he used to use this line a lot. He raises his eyebrows up and down, cartoon-like. Teasing me.

But his reference to strippers has distracted me.

“So, then maybe you remember Sapphire?” My voice sounds weak and high. “You know. The stripper—the friend of mine—who was murdered last week? Maybe you’ve sketched her?” My mouth and throat are dry, itchy, waiting for his response.
He’s got to know her. How could he not?
The breeze picks up. The city below looks like it’s on fire.

Flynt shrugs. “I don’t know. I mean, there’s like half a dozen clubs in Neverland alone, and strippers in and out of them constantly, too many to keep track of. I only know a few of them, really.” He is watching me sideways.

And what comes to me, a certainty like a rock in my stomach, is:
he’s hiding something.

“She worked at Tens,” I say, “Do you know Tens?”

A few seconds pass; he seems to be thinking. “Yeah, I know Tens,” he says finally. “I haven’t been in a while, though. Maybe Sapphire started there after I’d already stopped coming by to draw.”

Another rock drops in my stomach.
He’s lying.
I don’t know how I know. I just do. My heart is a great thumping whale within my chest. I count rooftops in the distance. Eight red. Four deep blue. Five light blue. All bad. Bad bad bad. The nervous feeling is creeping in, wrapping itself around me, serpentine.
But
—I reason with myself—
if I group the blues together, four light and five dark makes nine.
Nine is very good.

“I’m thinking of stopping by there soon, actually,” I say, wrapping my fingers around the butterfly in my pocket, relaxing my face, voice, attempting to sound casual. “I feel guilty about being out of touch for so long. I’m thinking it might help if I could talk to some people who knew her.”

It’s not difficult for me to make these sorts of lies sound genuine. The guilt is real enough. The guilt is always real. I dig my heel into my shoe, feel the mashed up piece of paper slide against my sock so I always know, so I never forget that anywhere I go, anything I do, there is at least one thing I’ll never be able to undo.

Flynt looks at me hard, a look that makes me draw back. “I wouldn’t get your hopes up about the girls at Tens.” His cute dimples have disappeared, and his face is serious now. “The thing with strippers is this: unless you’re a client or carrying a cocktail, they’re not interested in talking. You’d be wasting your time.” He stands up, all business suddenly. “We should get you to the bus. I’ve got some stuff to work on over at Malatesta’s, and it’s getting dark.”

Just like that, he turns and walks back toward the stairwell. I follow him, feeling like the air has just been knocked out of me.

Tap tap tap, banana
; I don’t care if he notices or not. We exit the building in silence. Flynt doesn’t make more jokes about staircase monsters or giant holes in the stairs. He doesn’t look back to check on me. Outside, the darkness feels huge.

“So, do you need me to walk you to your bus?” Flynt asks flatly, like he hopes I’ll say no.

There’s a chance I’ll get lost, but I don’t want him around if he doesn’t want to be.

“No,” I answer. “I’ll be fine. I’m fine.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yeah. Totally sure.” I pull my cell phone from my pocket and pretend to check a text message that doesn’t exist. I bet this annoys Flynt. I hope it does. “My friend … um, Jeremy … texted me to say that he’s around here. So, I’ll be fine. I’ll meet up with him.”

“Oh. Okay. Well, do you think you’re gonna come by again anytime soon?”

“I don’t know.”

Flynt rubs his forehead, under his bear hat, and sighs.

“Lo, look, I’m sorry to break the news to you about Tens. It’s just the truth.”

“Yeah. Thanks.” I don’t look at him. I don’t want to give in. Instead, I stare at the sleeves of my coat. They’re dirty, covered in red paint, Flynt’s hand-splatters. I was happy about it earlier, and now I’m not. Now I’m annoyed, off center. “I’m going to go, okay? Jeremy’s waiting for me.”

“Yeah, me, too. Got a lot to do.” He chucks my shoulder with the back of his hand like nothing’s happened. “Don’t be a stranger, Lo. Come back soon. Really. You know I’ll be here.”

Flynt salutes me and walks in the opposite direction, toward Malatesta’s. I finger the dried paint on my coat as I walk to the bus, studying the street signs carefully. I’d be worried about Mom getting mad, except I know she’ll never notice.

Thirteen and a half blocks to the bus stop. Left on Eastern Avenue. Right on 117th.

Maybe Flynt was right. Maybe he was genuinely trying to help. But when I mentioned Sapphire, it felt as though I flipped an invisible switch inside of him. Suddenly he became a different person—evasive and nervous. And mean, too.

He told me I was pretty.

He’s a liar.

I run my fingers across the dried paint again on my coat. Six streaks. I see his hands in my mind. His long fingers.

I wish I could erase him. But he’s stuck on me, now.

Six streaks. For good.

CHAPTER 7

The next day, school’s as long as ever, but I’m distracted by too many things to notice its slow crawl.
Why would Flynt lie about knowing Sapphire?

I space out for most of Brit Lit while Sidney Lourie and Brigid Crank, the girls in class with straight, silky blonde hair and beefy boyfriends, gush about
Pride and Prejudice
for nearly thirty minutes.

Why did he turn so suddenly, and then try and act as though nothing had happened?

I answer a vocab question out loud in SAT prep: the wound exhibited signs of (
copious
) drainage requiring medical intervention. I never do this. The answer comes to me and so I blurt it, automatically, “B: maximal.”

During study hall, in the bathroom, I’m tapping out the six syllables of my name as I say it quietly aloud; three times to make it eighteen, which is an especially perfect number right after study hall. I start:
Pen-el-o-pe-Ma-rin Pen-el-o-pe-Ma-rin Pen-el-o-pe-Ma-rin; Pen-el-o-pe-Ma-rin Pen-el-o-pe-Ma-rin—
and then Keri Ram walks in and sidles up next to me at the mirrors, putting on oozy lip gloss that smells like watermelon. I have four left to go, and I can’t stop, even with her right beside me, even though my whole body is burning, shameful. I mumble it, tap so softly, hoping she won’t notice.
Pen-el-o-pe-Ma-rin Pen-elo-pe-Ma-rin Pen-el-o-pe-Ma-rin Pen-el-o-pe-Ma-rin.

“What did you say?” she asks me through the mirror.

There’s a strange expression on her face. Mine is a deep, beet red. I reach for the butterfly in the pocket of my jeans, squeeze it three times so I can speak, so I can say anything at all, so I’m not a total mute freak in front of Keri Ram.

“What?” I choke out. I want to run. I want to die.

She raises her eyebrows. “Did you just say something to me?”

“Oh.” I tell her, hands fixed on my thighs to make them stop shaking. “I was just … trying to remember, um, something from English class. That T. S. Eliot poem that we read.” I stare at my awful clumpy bangs in the mirror. I pretend to fix my hair, though it’s kind of beyond fixing at the moment—just a tangled mass with a rubber band wrapped around the end of it that I’m trying to pass off as a braid.

“I’m
so
bad at memorizing poems.” She caps her lip gloss, pauses, assesses my reflection. “Where’d you get that necklace? I really like it.” She puckers her lips and admires them in the mirror.

“Which one?” I ask, weirdly nervous, though I know Sapphire’s pendant is pressed beneath my shirt, out of sight.

“The moon.”

I raise my fingers to the necklace, a crescent moon cut out of metal, a small, pale blue crystal dripping from its center; the silver horse burns, warm against my chest. “My father brought it back for me from Thailand a couple of years ago,” I answer, shyly.

“Thailand.” She sighs. “Cool. Have you ever been?” She reaches into her big leather purse and pulls out a thin black and silver tube of mascara.

I fuss some more with my braid, pulling out the rubber band and struggling to pull my fingers through the tangled nest of my hair. “My dad goes away a lot. But he never takes us. I mean, he used to take my mom sometimes. But, never Oren and me. And now”—I shut my mouth quickly. I never say Oren’s name out loud. I glance at Keri in the mirror—she’s rummaging through her bag again. Maybe she didn’t hear me; she doesn’t seem to be listening. “But I want to go. To Thailand. When I’m older I’ll go.” I force my mouth shut—when I talk, I have a tendency to babble—and go back to fussing with my bangs.

“Yeah, totally.” Keri responds vaguely. I don’t think she knows what else to say. “So, Lo,” she begins, clearly trying to change the subject, twirling a loose strand of hair behind her ear. “Do you have a crush on anyone at school?” Her eyes pierce into mine through the mirror.

I’m so surprised by the random turn of the conversation I can only force out a “No.”

“Really? Not anyone?” She’s still staring at me through the mirror, like she’s waiting for me to crack and expose the awful, secret truth.

I shake my head. “No. No. Definitely not.”

“Not even … Jeremy Theroux?” She turns away from the mirrors to face me.

I make it look like I’m thinking hard—bite my lip, stare up and to the left, put my pointer finger over my lips—“Jeremy Theroux?” I repeat, like I’ve never heard the name before. “I don’t think I even know who that is.”

“That’s weird. Because he stares at you in class. You really haven’t noticed? And he’s always trying to sit next to you. Like, obsessively. He’s obviously got a crush on you. He’s on the track team, too. He wins, like, every meet.”

My face has gone tomato-red. “Oh,” I say, acting like some light’s gone off in my head, “
that
Jeremy.” I sweep my bangs across my forehead three times in a row. To the right and to the left. Six times. “I wasn’t sure who you were talking about first.” I cough. “Sorry.”

“So you don’t like him?” Keri presses.

My face is violently red. “No.” I shake my head for emphasis. “No.” And again to make it three. “No.” She’s making me nervous—she probably thinks she’s seeing right through me, that I’m blushing and saying no over and over again because I’m lying. She’s probably going to leave the bathroom and tell all of her friends that I
do
like Jeremy but that I’m afraid to admit it, and then he’ll find out, and ask me out for study dates a million more times, and it will never end.

She cocks her head, narrowing her eyes at me. “Yeah, okay. I got it the first time around.” She looks almost disappointed in me. She swings her bag over her shoulder and heads for the exit, and with the door half open, says to me over her shoulder, “He’s actually pretty cute, you know? If you really take the time to look at him?”