Shade Me

  DEDICATION

  FOR SCOTT

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Acknowledgments

  Back Ad

  About the Author

  Books by Jennifer Brown

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PROLOGUE

  WHEN SHE WAS being honest with herself, she knew she had chosen the drop site based mainly on how she’d seen it done in movies. Laughably typical, she thought—every part of her life had always been so very Hollywood. Dazzle and dysfunction, spritzed with expensive perfume. Every secret, every scandal, every stitch of clothing and fancy car had a glam front to it. Emphasis on front. Her life was nothing if not faked. That was, after all, the main problem.

  Of course, needing a drop site in the first place was almost as millionaire’s-daughter cliché as choosing the loading dock of an abandoned Italian grocery in the middle of the night. Lord knew she’d spent enough of her life in the tabloids—Daughter of the Acclaimed Producer—but if she kept playing into the moneygrubbing rich-girl stereotype like this, she could end up being paparazzi fodder for the rest of her life. God, for the tiniest moment, she wished to be one of those boring girls in small towns where nobody even knew a film director or makeup artist to the stars.

  She’d asked for five million. She could have asked for more. Maybe she should have asked for more. Maybe five million would be gone before her twenty-first birthday, and she would wish she’d asked for ten. Or twenty. God knew, twenty was doable.

  She hadn’t heard the purr of a car engine since she shut hers off. The loading dock wasn’t just isolated—it was completely abandoned. Flattened cans and discarded fast-food bags drifted in the corners of the dock, rocking and shivering in the breeze. It was a clear night, but it felt foggy somehow, as if danger were physically pressing down on her.

  Paranoid. She was being paranoid. She had chosen carefully who would make the exchange. He wouldn’t let her down. He was the only one she could somewhat trust.

  But it was the somewhat that had her worried, wasn’t it? He was good for booze and bitch sessions and the occasional cover-up, but he was hardly an upstanding citizen. She knew enough of his dirt to know she couldn’t totally trust him.

  Maybe she should leave.

  Definitely she should leave.

  But just as she started to step out of the shadows, she heard the familiar crunch of tires on gravel. It was his car. Her heart sped up as the car slowed to a stop, the headlights dying before the engine. In their absence, her eyes seemed filled with black ink; she rubbed them with the heels of her palms, fighting panic.

  Why had she trusted him? She knew how he could get. You trusted him because this affects him, too, she reminded herself. Even if he won’t accept it yet. But still, out here where nobody would hear her scream, his not accepting the truth seemed to make all the difference in the world.

  Mistake. This was a huge, huge mistake.

  She would call. She had to call. It was too soon, but she’d told herself she would, if she started to think things might go south. If she didn’t call now, she might never get the chance.

  She fumbled her phone out of her pocket and hesitated.

  He got out of his car and began walking toward the dock, but stopped as another pair of headlights clawed open the darkness. She got a momentary glimpse of him—cocky, expensive, athletic. A briefcase swung casually from one hand—way too casually, she thought, given what she knew was in it—the Figaro bracelet she’d given him for Christmas two years ago glinting in the headlights.

  He’d promised not to bring anyone else with him. He’d betrayed her.

  “Where is she?” a voice said from the direction of the new car. She heard a door softly shut.

  “I just got here,” he answered. “She’s here, though. Her car’s here.”

  “We’ll find her,” the other voice answered. Now two sets of feet were scuffing through the gravel toward her.

  She pushed herself deeper into the corner, no longer caring if there were rats or used condoms or dirty hypodermics underneath the trash and leaves. She woke the phone, slid to the only number in her contacts list, and hit call. It rang what seemed like an impossible number of times, during which she clearly heard the words “Right there” come from the direction of the cars, though from which one of the men, she couldn’t be sure.

  “Hello?” a voice said on the other end.

  Suddenly, she didn’t know what to say. The men were moving quicker now, the one who’d just arrived walking with a cane. She thought she recognized his silhouette, and that was bad news. Her mouth went dry and her mind went blank as she tried to figure out where—how—to start.

  “Hello?” the voice repeated.

  “Hey,” she said, panicked. “Listen, I . . .”

  “Put the phone down,” the man with the cane said. He didn’t bother to yell it, which scared her even more.

  “What?” the voice on the other end of the phone said. “Hello?”

  Her throat seemed swollen shut. She could have sworn her every breath whistled as it tried to force its way into her lungs. All the things she needed to say—the instructions she needed to give—swirled nonsensically in her mind. “Nikki,” she said, but the men were climbing up the dock steps now, so close she could make them out clearly.

  “Put the phone down,” the man with the cane repeated.

  She hung up and stuffed the phone back into her pocket, tried to look tough, even though she was trembling and pouring sweat. “You’re late,” she said. “I was about to leave.”

  The man with the cane grinned. One of his side teeth wore a silver cap, which matched the silver ball cane handle he was gripping.

  “We show up when we want to show up,” the boy said. But there was something funny about his voice. She thought maybe the briefcase trembled.

  She crossed her arms over her chest so the two wouldn’t see her hands shake. “You seem to have forgotten that I’m the one who can destroy your life,” she said to the boy.

  Worry flickered in his eyes. “Who did you just call?” he asked.

  She tossed her hair back. “Don’t worry, golden boy, I didn’t out you yet. You play nice, and I’ll play nice. That’s how it works. Just give me the money and I’ll be out of your life forever.” Or at least until I need more money, she finished in her head.

  The boy swallowed; then the man elbowed him. “Go ahead,” he said. “Who cares who she called? Do it.”

  The boy held the briefcase toward her. She made no move to take it.

  “It’s all here? Five million?” she asked, staring into his eyes, refusing to look away.

  “You don’t trust us?” the boy said.

  She laughed out loud. “Not for a second.”

  “It’s all there,” he said.

  “I want to see it.”

  After a brief hesitation, he turned the briefcase so it was
flat against his forearm. With his free hand, he popped open the clasps, and then slowly eased it open. The man with the cane let out a low whistle. Finally, she tore her eyes away from the boy’s and gazed at the neat stacks of new bills within. Tears pricked the corners of her eyes. Her ticket out of Brentwood. Her freedom to finally live a real life. Maybe she would go to the Midwest. Get as far away from this life as humanly possible.

  She nodded, and he reclosed the case, the snap of the clasps especially loud in the abandoned lot. Wordlessly, he extended the case toward her and she took it, her hand brushing up against his.

  “Pleasure doing business with you,” she said, though it had been anything but. The only pleasure now would be getting the hell out of there.

  Somehow she found the strength to move her shaky legs. She could feel more sweat roll down between her shoulder blades. She felt almost weak with relief. She’d done it. She’d gotten the money and gotten away. Away from them all. Forever.

  She stopped just before passing her so-called protector. She was shorter than he by at least six inches, but she knew that for him, it was all about attitude. She gazed at him through the darkness, his dark-brown eyes nearly black. His betrayal hurt. So very disappointing.

  “You can pass on this message. Do not. Fuck. With me,” she said through gritted teeth. Satisfied, she sauntered slowly toward the stairs, her heart thrumming as if she’d been sprinting for miles.

  Just as she reached the top step, she heard the rustle of swift movement, followed by a sharp cry of “Wait!” She turned at the top of the stairs, just in time to see the cane singing through the air toward her.

  Her eyes shut involuntarily, and she brought her hand up to shield her face. There was time only to suck in a great gust of air, but never to let out the scream.

  1

  IF I WERE a conscientious student, I would be studying for my chem quiz instead of sitting on a window ledge, chain-smoking. But it was beautiful outside—clear, starry, kind of chilly. I loved the way the air in Brentwood smelled on nights like this. It was crisp and still and promising, and if you closed your eyes and inhaled deeply enough, you could even fool yourself into thinking you were catching a little whiff of the beach five miles away. So much better than the aroma of the high school, which smelled like old food, new money, and competition. And phoniness. So many fake people. Sometimes I wondered if a real feeling actually existed in this city, if you could trust the words of anyone here. I sure as hell didn’t. When you lived in a town where it seemed like everyone claimed to have a sister in a music video or an uncle who was so-and-so’s agent, it was hard to know who was real and who was a wannabe.

  But I didn’t give a crap about being a conscientious student, so instead of studying, I was sitting and smoking, my legs hung over the ledge, the backs of my shoes thunking, soft and rubbery, against the side of the house in time to the music pulsing through my computer speakers. I’d already dropped three butts to the rock landscaping below. Dad would have a shit fit later; would blame the gardener. But at the moment I didn’t care. I was enjoying myself. I would finish my smoke, and then, I promised myself, I would go back inside and cram. Enjoyment over.

  Who was I kidding—the air could have been choked with pollution, unbreathable, and I still would’ve rather been sitting on the ledge than hunched over a textbook, scratching notes onto index cards and memorizing formulas. I only had a semester and a half left until graduation, thank God, but that also meant I only had a semester and a half left to try to salvage my pathetic GPA. At the moment, my graduation status was iffy. The school called it academic probation. I called it hopeless.

  Not that academic probation was a surprising new development for me. School had never exactly been my forte. I pretty much avoided being there every moment I could. Hence, the grade issues.

  When I was a kid, I always wondered why nobody else talked about words and numbers looking magenta or brown or blue or yellow or silver. I never understood why emotions didn’t have colors to other people, or how someone could be depressed without seeing a field of sickly greenish yellow everywhere, or why nobody else seemed to understand that happiness was pink.

  Turned out I was the weird one. When I got to kindergarten, I couldn’t concentrate on the alphabet, because I was too dazzled by all the colors. Math was torture, because threes were purple, but so was the letter E, and I was always getting them confused. And I hated it when teachers would say things like, “Roses are red,” because while the right color for the word red was definitely red, the color for roses was more orangey pink.

  And then there were the colors of feelings. My mom always called me “sensitive,” but I learned later that she really meant “intuitive.” Most people missed the little hints that we all give off when we’re feeling sad or angry or happy or uncertain. But those feelings also had colors for me, so I couldn’t miss them, even when I desperately wanted to. Where other people knew a room felt awkward, I knew the same room was blushing dusty pink.

  But as a kid, I didn’t know all this yet. Like all my friends, I didn’t consciously realize that my second-grade teacher had red-rimmed, puffy eyes and a voice that turned down at the edges and hands that shook. I only knew that the putrid brown that her white chalk left behind made me cry. I didn’t necessarily notice that the PE teacher’s fists were balled up and his face tense with anger when he yelled at us, only that the numbers on his jerseys were always electric pulsing ragemonster red and they scared me.

  And the worst, Mrs. Hinton, the art teacher who wrote her name so neatly in cursive. Later I would piece it together that, of course, there had been hints that she was sick. But at the time all I knew was that her room felt dull olive to me, and that halfway through the year, she was absent for a few days and never came back. I asked and asked if any of my friends had seen the ugly color in her room, but they hadn’t. Only me. I felt responsible, like I had made her sick. She was probably dead, and I might have made her that way, too. Because of my colors.

  After Mom died, and I became too afraid of letters and numbers to go to school, Dad bounced me around from doctor to doctor, trying to figure out what was wrong with me. I was only eight, and I was nervous and upset, so I couldn’t describe what was going on any better than that the room felt brown or green or that the word color was like a flashing dance of primary hues. Most of the docs seemed to think it was an eye problem. One sent me off for brain scans. Two suggested therapy. And another insisted I was making it up; that I was trying to get attention. I learned quickly to put doctors on my People Not to Be Trusted list. When people in charge couldn’t seem to figure out what was wrong with someone, they assumed that person was messed up in the head. God forbid we didn’t have all the answers.

  Dad was about to give up when we finally found a doctor who’d seen cases like mine before. He told us that some people’s senses combine. They might hear a scent or see a feeling or smell a shape. Or, like me, see a color in a number or letter or emotion, or all of the above. It was rare, and pretty much impossible to treat, but at least we had a name for what was going on with me: synesthesia. He said it wasn’t uncommon for someone to have more than one kind, like I did. He also said synesthetes could be highly intuitive, which explained why I could “see” Mrs. Hinton’s sickness and the PE teacher’s rage in my colors, even though nobody had ever exactly told me that Mrs. Hinton had hepatitis or the PE teacher had a short fuse. According to the doctor, this was like a gift. According to him, I was special. And in case I didn’t like feeling special, I would eventually just get used to it. I would get to a point where I barely even noticed it.

  That was third grade. A grade I got to be in twice, thanks to my special little gift. I was now just months from graduation and still avoiding my homework, so I guess that doctor was wrong. Instead of getting used to it, I learned to hide it well. The only person besides me and Dad who knew about it was the high school counselor, who Dad forced me to “open up to” after I started failing enough to make graduation loo
k iffy.

  “You never know, Nikki,” Dad had said. “He might be able to help you through a lot of old emotions, and then maybe this will go away.” Because sometimes even Dad didn’t get that my synesthesia wasn’t just an emotional problem to be solved.

  But ten seconds in the same room with Mr. Ear Dandruff or whoever the counselor was, I was wishing that he would just go away. It was clear that (a) he didn’t believe a word I was saying, and (b) even if he did, he didn’t exactly care.

  “So you’re saying you’re too distracted thinking about colors to concentrate on your work,” he’d said.

  “Not really,” I said, hating that I was having to talk about this once again, and that I hadn’t gotten any better at explaining it at eighteen than I had been at eight.

  “Not really,” he repeated, his voice vaguely sarcastic. He wrote something on a piece of paper. I glared at him.

  “It’s not that I’m too busy thinking about colors to think about what we’re doing in class,” I said. “I’m trying to concentrate, but the colors just . . . push in.”

  He nodded as if he’d just cracked the code to the universe or something. “Push in.” He was great at repeating stuff.

  “Yeah, so I’ll have to think, ‘Is this a three or an e,’ and by the time I’ve figured it out, I’ve completely lost my train of thought.”

  He wrote something else down, nodding. I shifted, starting to get irritated. “So you’re working, and then you start thinking about what colors things should be, and you get distracted,” he said.

  “Yeah. Well, no. Not like you’re saying.”

  He arched an eyebrow at me, pooching his lips together in thought. “Have you ever been tested for ADHD, Nikki?” he asked.

  I sighed. “Yes. And I don’t have ADHD. It’s synesthesia.”

  He nodded, flipping back a few pages in my file. “Yes, yes, I see that.” He glanced up at me and pasted on a patronizing smile. “I think we would be wise to look at ADHD again, since it’s affecting your schoolwork. Testing has come a long way in the past ten years. They could have missed something when you were tested before. You might find a new, treatable diagnosis to be more satisfying to your grade card.”