We had an elaborate note system in St. Joke’s. Scraps of paper slipped under doors, tucked in the pages of Bibles, crumpled in hands that passed dirty dishes from the table to the sink. We were like a spy network constantly gauging the Pastor’s mood and the Wife’s indifference. For months I knew Carissa’s and Rosa’s handwriting better than their voices.

At school the habit was hard to break, but we were a lot less careful about it.

In the third or fourth week of Beth’s stay at St. Joke’s, my English class was canceled and we got shoved into a computer lab with the students that were there working. When I saw Beth was in the class, her hair pulled back in a big gingery knot, my heart beat so hard I felt it behind my eyes, in the palms of my hands. The base of my dick.

One wild, solid thunk of happiness.

Sweat slicked my hands, making some of the cuts that refused to heal sting, but I barely felt it. That was the power of Beth.

I tried not to grin as I walked down the last aisle to where she was sitting, and like God wanted me there, the computer beside her was empty.

And I was about to ask, is it cool if I sit here, when she looked up at me with a smile. I swear, that smile was like nothing I’d ever seen. Like nothing that had ever been flashed my way.

I had a few memories of my mother, a harried whisper, the strong tug of her hand on mine. Picnic lunches on a red blanket and the rumble of her voice as she read me a story. I remembered enough to know she was real young and we lived lean and there’d been scary times. She’d left me alone a lot. Died of an overdose in someone else’s apartment and no one came looking for me in ours. I’d been alone for days, until hunger drove me out into the streets.

And she’d been pretty, or maybe every kid feels that way about their mom. I don’t know. We didn’t talk about moms a lot at St. Joke’s. We thought about them constantly but rarely said a word about them.

But I knew I got my blond hair and blue eyes from her and her smile had made me feel safe.

But that smile was never like this.

Never for me.

I can’t tell you what it was like having someone after having no one. And that person was so happy I was there, she couldn’t contain it, didn’t even bother to try. Didn’t even care who saw it.

You, that smile said, make me happy.

I didn’t ask to sit down. I just sat in the spot like it had been left for me.

“What are you doing here?” she whispered and I started to explain but the teacher shushed me fast.

And just as fast Beth opened her notebook and took out her pencil. I grabbed my pencil out of my butt pocket, the eraser long ago chewed off.

Class canceled, I wrote. Teacher got sick.

Our teacher is high, she wrote. Literally.

I glanced up at the front of the class, and the teacher was organizing the pencil drawer at the top of the desk.

What do you know from high? I asked her, because if there was a straight in this world, it was her.

What don’t I know? she wrote.

I laughed before I got a look at her face, her mouth all twisted like she’d eaten something bitter.

You’re not joking?

Not joking.

I wanted to ask her a bunch of questions about her mom and where she came from and how she got to St. Joke’s, but one thing she’d made clear in the last few weeks—she didn’t talk about that shit. Ever.

You sleeping okay? I wrote, and she jerked back, looked at me sideways.

I’m sorry, I wrote. I heard you last night.

My mom used to give me these pills to help me sleep, she wrote. I haven’t had them in a while. I can get bad dreams.

The page was full and I reached forward to turn it but she jerked it out of the way and it fell to the floor, the notebook splitting open on a page with a drawing on it. We both bent to grab it and bonked heads at the same time.

We groaned and laughed, holding our heads where we’d hit each other, and the notebook lay open between us.

“Did you draw that?” I asked her in a whisper. The whole page from end to end was an underwater scene with all these fish hidden in seaweed, and when I looked carefully, there was a squid, and when I looked again, it was gone.

“Yeah,” she whispered and grabbed it off the floor, closing it so I couldn’t see the picture anymore. “I was just fooling around.”

I put my hand over the notebook, my fingers touching the fleshy part of her palm.

She turned my hand over, revealing the ripple of the cuts from her first night at St. Joke’s. The cut near my thumb that kept opening no matter how hard I tried to help it heal.

“Do they still hurt?” she whispered.

I shook my head, unable to speak, my throat like a straw I could not suck any air through.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, and I felt my body get so hot so fast I thought I was going to combust right there.

She touched one of the scars, her finger tracing it from one side of my palm to the other. I closed my eyes in the ecstatic fucking pain of it. I could die, I thought. Right now.

I shifted to keep my books in my lap so she couldn’t see my hard-on.

Embarrassed, I wanted to jerk back, but I didn’t. I left my hand there. My skin touching hers.

And she left her hand there, her skin touching mine.

The address in Santa Barbara was on a road along a high ridge above the town. Through the trees I could see the city, all lit up in its grid pattern, and the dark ocean beyond it, broken up only by the oil rigs off the coast.

The houses were built into the ridge, thick trees behind each house to provide privacy from the road. But the houses that I could see, they were mansions. Big fucking mansions.

And the numbering made no sense.

“Where is 1137,” I breathed, peering over the steering wheel as I slowed down to a crawl. “Where the hell?”

I turned a slight curve, and the house in front of me was lit up. Every window was illuminated, and cars were parked on the road and filling the big driveway. I could hear the music from the house inside my car.

Pest sat up and looked out the window.

Pest loved a party, and with me around she didn’t get to go to many. All those people to pet her, all that food dropped on the floor. Dog’s paradise.

“Sorry, girl,” I told her. “You can’t come with me.”

She gave me her best suck it, my human look.

I parked in front of the driveway, boxing in about three other BMWs.

“Here we go,” I murmured. I tied my tie, looking at myself in the rearview mirror to confirm I’d made a total hash of it, and I slipped my new ID in my pocket.

When I opened the car door, the music coming from the house was so loud, the bass turned up so high I could feel it in my chest, battling with the pound of my heartbeat. I could hear the roar of voices, too.

This wasn’t just any kind of party. That much was clear.

The front door was surrounded by potted trees, and there were two security cameras trained on me. I ignored both of them and knocked.

I had no idea what I was doing, but I figured acting like I knew what I was doing would at least get me in the door. I hoped. I’d make it up as I went.

The door opened, and a giant man with a severely broken nose and no neck stood staring at me.

Bodyguard. Clearly.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“Driver,” I said.

“Can I see some ID?”

I gave him the card Carissa had made for me.

“Who called you?” he asked and I blanked. “Did her mother call you?” he asked.

“No,” I said, operating purely on gut instinct. “She did.” I had no clue who she was. I wanted to ask if she was Beth. But I’d give myself away.

The bodyguard’s eyebrows lifted. “No shit?”

“No shit.”

“Well good fucking luck to you,” he said with a dry, bitter laugh. “I’d have her assistant go find her, but Beth got shit canned earlier. And I’m not leaving this door. You’re gonna have to find her yourself.”

“Beth?” I said, too sharp ’cause the guy narrowed his eyes at me. “She’s the one who ordered the car.”

“That makes more sense. She might be getting her stuff. I don’t know.” He jerked his thumb back into the party. “Go ahead and take a look around.”

Oh fuck. Was it possible it was going to be this easy? Pick up Beth and take her to Arizona?

He stood aside and let me pass, and I waded into the wall of people that made up the party. There was a lot of skin. A lot of pretty. The smell of sex and dope thick in the air. There was a song thumping through the house, and I kind of knew it. Mostly didn’t.

I kept hearing the name Jada, and I felt like I should know who that was. But I didn’t.

As I got out of earshot of the bodyguard at the door, I turned to the closest soberest person I could find. Not an easy feat as just about everyone was heavy-lidded and wasted. All these people out of control like this made me nervous.

All this skin made me nervous.

The sex.

And I hated that it made me nervous.

“Hey, man,” I asked a boy who didn’t look old enough to be holding that drink in his hand. “You know where Beth is?”

“Who’s Beth?”

“Jada’s assistant?” That was a stab in the dark.

The kid shrugged and went back to his conversation. The living room opened up to a huge kitchen filled with more people. Beyond the wall of sliding glass doors was a pool and a deck. Also full of people.

There was so much skin. Girls in bikinis and skirts. Short shorts that looked like bikini bottoms. None of the guys were wearing shirts. Like…none of them.

I tried not to stare, but it just seemed to be everywhere I looked.

So much skin touching other skin. There were couples making out on couches and against walls. One woman was grinding up on another woman against the sliding glass door. In the pool two men were doing something under the water. I didn’t know what, but their faces told a pretty raunchy story.

My heart rate went up; my blood thumped in my veins. I didn’t know where to look or how to move through this crowd. There was sweat crawling down my back.

I felt like a sixteen-year-old walking into an orgy.

“What’s wrong with you, man?” a guy asked when he caught me staring at the girl he was with. She’d taken off her shirt, and her tan lines, the paleness of her breasts against the darkness of her shoulders and arms…

“Sorry,” I muttered.

I glanced at my watch. The half hour I’d carved out for this side trip by speeding my way down Highway 1 was mostly gone. I needed to find Beth, figure out what I was supposed to pick up and get the fuck out of here so I could hit my window.

“Excuse me,” I asked another person, a woman this time, mixing drinks in a blender. She wore a bright green bikini and a pair of sunglasses despite the lack of sun outside.

“Do you know where Beth is?”

“That buzzkill is gone! And good riddance!” She laughed and turned on the blender. The lid wasn’t on, and she got splattered with margarita. She and her friends dissolved into laughter.

I kept asking, making my way back farther into the house where the crowd got sparser. The hallway leading to the bedrooms was not nearly as crowded.

“I’m looking for Beth,” I said to just about everyone I passed. “Have you seen her?”

A rather harried-looking bald man finally had an answer for me. “Yeah, she was back in the guest room packing up her stuff not too long ago. She said she wasn’t leaving until she had a chance to talk to Jada.”

Guest bedroom. Excellent.

I shouldered my way down the hall, opening closed doors as I went and shutting them quickly when I found them empty or full of people fooling around.

The third door I opened was empty, but the light by the bed was on and the door on the far side of the bed was open. There was a suitcase on the bed, a heap of clothes sitting in it.

“Beth?” I said. “You here?” I walked around the bed and looked into the en suite. Nothing. Empty.

Shit.

In the hall there was only one more door I hadn’t opened. When I tried it, it was locked.

I knocked, rapping my fist against the wood pretty hard so I could be heard above the sounds of the party. The door opened, and a pretty black woman, with swollen eyes from crying, stood there.

“Who are you?” she demanded.

“The driver,” I said. “Who are you?”

The girl shook her head, fresh tears in her eyes. “I used to be her assistant—”

“You’re Beth?”

“Yeah,” she breathed. “She fired me, but I’m not leaving as long as these jerks are here!”

“We heard that!” someone yelled from inside the room.

I pushed open the door, confused as I’d ever been. Because while this pretty woman might be Beth, she was not my Beth.

You don’t have a Beth, asshole.

“Did her mom send you?” Beth asked.

“No,” I answered. In my world moms weren’t really a thing.

We were standing in the small foyer of a giant master bedroom and I could hear voices beyond the corner so I just kept walking, determined to figure out what the fuck I was supposed to be doing.

The scene on the king-size bed took a second to process. A woman, who appeared already passed out, long dark hair falling over her face, her skirt pushed up above her waist, revealing a pair of black lace panties, was getting an injection in her thigh from a man in a suit. Two other people, a man and a woman, lay sprawled across the bed, watching.

“I told you not to do that!” Beth cried as she rushed past me toward the man in the suit. “She’s had enough.” As a junkyard dog she was pretty sad. I mean, Pest would have done a better job of barking that man away than she did.

“It’s done,” the man said, dropping a spent vial and a syringe into a bag on the bedside table. He stood up and peeled off a pair of latex gloves. “And you…” he said, looking at Beth with supreme disdain, “have been fired.”

“‘Yeah, Beth,” the man on the bed slurred while slowing easing across the bed to lie spooned with the unconscious woman. “You’ve been fired.”

The guy on the bed ran his hand over the unconscious woman’s ass.

“Don’t touch her,” I snapped, my voice crackling through the room, drawing everyone’s attention to me. I didn’t like watching passed-out women getting pawed. It was vile. This whole fucking scene was vile.

And as a junkyard dog, I was completely effective.

“Who are you?” the man who’d had the syringe asked. Fuck, if he was a doctor, he should have that license yanked and fast.

“I’m the driver,” I said like I was God. “Who are you?”

“I’m Jada’s personal physician, and we didn’t order a car,” he said and glanced over at the stoned couple. “Did we?”

“Her mother probably,” the woman on the bed sneered, giving Beth an evil eye.

“Well, that’s a problem,” the doctor said.

“Her mother is better than you,” Beth said. “And someone needs to know what you’re doing to her before she ends up like Michael Jackson.”

“Jesus, you are overdramatic,” the woman on the bed sighed, rolling her eyes so hard it was a wonder they didn’t get lost.

“Jada!’” the doctor said, bending down to the passed-out woman. He gave her a hard shove. “Jada!” he yelled in her ear.

“Hey!” I snapped, stepping toward the doctor. Frankly, if he was a legit doctor, I’d eat my fake driver badge. “Don’t manhandle her like that.”

“Jada!” he yelled again, smacking her.

I shoved the doctor back, getting between him and the woman on the bed. This wasn’t my current mission, but there was no way I could just stand back and let this shit happen.

“Touch her again and I’ll break your hand.”

The doctor held up his hands. “No need to get excited.”

“Beth?” I said. “Do the cops need to be called?”

The room was silent. Still. Like this was a line that had never been crossed. Or mentioned. But they all knew it was there.

In my opinion the cops needed to be called yesterday.

“Beth!” I snapped.

“Y-yes,” Beth said. “The cops need to be called.”

“Do that, then.” I didn’t take my eyes off the “doctor.”

“You don’t know what you’re doing,” he said in a quiet voice, running a hand over his tie, and I knew a nervous tell when I saw it.

“Is that supposed to scare me?” I asked. “Like I’m the criminal here?”

“Jada,” the doctor said, like he was smarter than me and he was doing me a favor by explaining himself, “is in a highly fragile state. She’s suffering from depression and exhaustion. She’s an insomniac who is experiencing manic episodes. I was called in because her friends are scared she’ll take her life.”

“Those friends?” I asked, jerking my thumb back at the couple on the bed. They were preoccupied with the powder in lines on the bedside table.

“You know something, I’m calling the cops,” the doctor said, backing up another step. “You broke in here.”

“I was let in.” This guy was not going to be calling any fucking cops. “But go ahead. I’m sure those two won’t mind. Just let them finish that coke they’re hoovering.”

“You’re threatening me. You’re threatening Jada—”

“Who are you kidding, John?” a slow, rough voice said from the bed. “It’s bad for all of us if you call the cops.”

“Jada!"

I turned to see the dark-haired woman on the bed sitting up. Her clothes were dishevelled, twisted on her body. Her breast was nearly revealed through the neck hole; her skirt was still hiked up around her waist. She fumbled with the clothes, but then stopped like it was just too hard.

Her hair was not all black, it had green, blue, purple and pink highlights. It was beautiful, like an oil spill. Well, like a beautiful oil spill. She pushed her long hair off her face, and I nearly died. Right there. Cardiac arrest.

It was Beth sitting there.

My Beth.