Chapter 14

Shane

I killed the engine in the empty parking lot, setting my helmet on the handlebars and waving at the dark storefront. I couldn’t see him, but Jake would be watching out for me.

Sure enough, the storefront lit up and a second later my best friend walked up to the door and unlocked it to let me in.

“Did you bring the goods?” he asked in a conspiratorial whisper, even though we were the only ones in the store.

“I brought them,” I replied. “Have you called for pizza yet?”

He laughed. “Have I ever. I’ve ordered enough to feed the whole football team.”

I cocked a brow at him as we headed toward the stairs up to the office. “Why? Expecting company?”

“Nope. You only get to skip prom once though so I figured we should go big.”

“Nerd.”

Jake looked back at me as he began to mount the stairs. “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that.”

The TV and GameCube were set up in one corner of the office. I tossed my bag onto the couch directly opposite, and not even a second later Jake was rummaging through it.

“Jesus, you’re like an addict.”

Jake emerged from my bag with a bag of Red Vines and a two-liter bottle of Coke. He grinned at me. It was a wonder he still had teeth to smile with, considering the amount of candy he consumed.

“As I said, you only get to skip prom once...”

I wondered if Jake was genuinely this excited about our night or if he was just trying to make the best of it. I knew that he would’ve gone to prom happily if there’d been a girl he could go with. He’d been too chicken shit to ask anyone, despite me telling him on more than one occasion how many girls at our school would be delighted to go with him. He was a massive geek, sure, but he was tall and wasn’t ugly, and could make a girl laugh if he ever managed to say anything that wasn’t about the weather.

When Jake poured me a glass of soda and shoved a licorice toward my mouth, I realized that Jake wasn’t just trying to make the best of it for himself.

“I’m fine,” I said, swatting his hand away. “You don’t need to fret over me or try to make me forget that the girl I like massively rejected me by way of an overabundance of pizza. I’m over it.”

I wasn’t over it. I still didn’t understand why Dallas was so upset that day, but I hadn’t had a chance to talk to her since then. She was constantly surrounded by Wes or his goons, and she hadn’t come by her dad’s shop once since the day I asked her to prom. At least, not while I was around.

“Okay, okay.” Jake put up his hands in surrender. “You’ve just been a little glum lately. Can you blame a guy for trying?”

I smacked him on the back and pushed him toward the couch. “I’ll be in a better mood after I kick your ass at Super Smash Bros. How about that?”

He gnawed on a Red Vine and tossed a controller at me. I slumped down next to him as the credits flashed on the screen.

“This might make you feel a little better,” he said. “I hear that Dallas pushed Wes through a glass window at the Gromley party tonight.”

I froze. “Dallas is at the Gromley party?”

Jake nodded. He didn’t notice my distress, too busy selecting options for our melee on the screen. “Yeah. My friend Duncan from Science is over there. Said it’s cuckoo bananas. Not our kind of scene but I would’ve killed to see that asshole get knocked down a peg or two.”

What would possess sweet, shy Dallas to push a guy through a window? I could only imagine the kind of horrors she was experiencing over there right now. Wes was probably furious that she’d humiliated him at his own party. What was she doing there anyway?

“I don’t understand why Dallas would go to that party,” I said. “She’s not that kind of girl.”

“I don’t know why either,” Jake said with a shrug. He grabbed another Red Vine and lowered it into his mouth from above. “Makes sense why she said she wasn’t going to prom though.”

“She can’t be having a nice time.”

“You sure about that? I think I’d be having a great time if I got to push Wes through a window. That would be the most fun I’d had all year.”

I looked over at him, and the gravity in my expression wiped the smile right off his face.

“You don’t know her, Jake. She’s not the kind of girl who’d get drunk and go cuckoo bananas. She shouldn’t even be there in the first place. Her dad would have a shit fit if he knew. Wes and Sasha probably dragged her there.”

Jake read the intent in my eyes a second before I even started to put down the controller.

“Nuh-uh,” he said, throwing an arm over my chest to keep me down. “You are not going to that party. Gromley and his friends will rip you apart if they see you there.”

“Then I’ll make sure they don’t see me.” I tossed his arm away and rose to my feet before he could stop me.

“Shane, please. You’re gonna get yourself killed. Fucking around with Wes is one thing, but his dad is a whole other ball game.”

“What choice do I have? Dallas is over there, and she could be in danger.”

“She made that choice.”

I shook my head, grabbing my wallet from my backpack and shoving it in my back pocket. “We don’t know that. Even if she did choose to go there, she’s in over her head, and she probably knows that by now. And even if, by some miracle, she’s having a good time and I leave there without her, at least I’ll know she’s okay.” I started for the door. “I’m sorry man, but I won’t be able to relax until I know she’s safe.”

“Don’t be a hero!”

I didn’t answer him. The conversation was over, as far as I was concerned. He could be pissed at me all he wanted, and maybe I’d just ruined one of our last nights together, but I would never forgive myself if I turned a blind eye and something happened to Dallas. There wasn’t another option for me, simple as that.

I hopped on my bike and jetted into the darkness, winding through Sitka Valley’s damp streets all the way to the outskirts of town, where the Gromleys lived in a gauche mansion that I’d never seen clean. There was always some grungy party or another taking place inside, and the couple times I’d been over here for football events had disgusted me. Sure, I lived in a trailer, but there weren’t cigarette butts and empty beer cans littered around my place like decorations, and nobody ever opened my bathroom door to find a drunk girl passed out inside from the night before.

I killed my bike at the bottom of the drive and hid it in a bush in case someone recognized it. I would have to play this smart. Pulling my hoodie up over my head, I shoved my hands in my pockets and looked down at the ground in front of me as I sauntered up the drive. I had to look like I belonged here. The only people who would recognize me were people from school, and they were probably already too drunk right now to notice as long as I kept my head down.

The music vibrated through the pavement, heavy bass beats tickling my sneakers. People were screaming and laughing, one even howled to the moon. They spilled out from the front of the house like sand and coated the front steps, the smoke of dozens of cigarettes twisting off into the air. I pushed my way through the stale-smelling crowd. Nobody moved aside for me, but it was because they didn’t seem to notice me at all. I was a ghost drifting through the darkness.

The smell of beer and weed hit me the second I walked through the front door. People loitered in the hallway. Some of them were talking, but others were passed out against the wall. The music was coming from the far end of the hall in the living room, and I glimpsed a crowd of people there pulsing and grinding to the electronic rhythm.

A sickly looking girl with bleached hair and dark roots disengaged herself from the wall and staggered toward me. She couldn’t have been much older than me.

“Hey sexy,” she drawled, lurching forward.

I reached out to hold her up. “You okay?”

She cackled. I didn’t understand what was so funny about what I said, but she found it fucking hilarious.

“You’re too sweet to be in a place like this, sugar.” She stroked a long fingernail down my cheek and stared up at me with bloodshot eyes. “You sure you didn’t take a wrong turn on the way to Chuck E. Cheese?”

“Unfortunately.”

“How about I go show you a different kind of good time?” she said. “You seem like you could use it.”

While I was still forming an answer, a man came up behind my new friend and grabbed her tits from behind.

“Come on, tramp. I’ve got a job for you,” he growled.

I recognized that voice. Vinnie, one of the doormen at Preston’s club. He probably wouldn’t remember me, since we’d only met once, but I started to skirt away from the scene anyway.

“I was going to hang out with that young guy,” the girl complained.

Vinnie pushed her toward the stairs, and she stumbled, landing on her hands and knees. “Did I fucking stutter?”

I desperately wanted to help the girl, but I knew that would only end with me being recognized. Vinnie disgusted me. Everyone associated with the Gromleys disgusted me. I gritted my teeth and kept walking, trying not to look at the doped out faces of the hallway specters.

There were a couple of guys from the football team on the dance floor in the living room, but I kept to the outer edges of the room and tried to keep their backs to me. Dallas wasn’t here. I moved on.

The kitchen was a mess, broken glass and blood smeared on the floor, a massive hole in the wall where a window used to be. At first, I worried it was Dallas’s blood, but I soon picked up that it was the blood of people who’d taken to walking around with bare feet after being in the pool. My stomach roiled but I pushed the feeling down. A group of people surrounded the island at the center of the room, snorting cocaine and laughing madly at some private joke. Or maybe there wasn’t a joke at all. I recognized Nelson in the group and ducked out just as he was standing up after snorting a line.

Where was she? I was going to be discovered any second, and I’d come no closer to finding Dallas. I checked outside next, where people splashed in the pool and others poured beer and bottles of champagne over their faces while they swam. Dallas wasn’t out there either.

I began to worry that she was up in one of the bedrooms. I hadn’t seen Wes yet either, and I suspected that wherever they were, they were there together. My heart sank into my stomach, and I tried to keep calm as I navigated back inside and waded my way back to the stairs. I mounted the stairs with a weighty sense of trepidation, worried about what I would find. Dallas would never sleep with Wes. Not if she was in her right mind. If I found him on top of her in one of the bedrooms, I was going to kill him. I didn’t care if it meant my own destruction.