The hallway was dark and full of doors. He covered his face with one hand and tried to think. He was dizzy and the stereo was much too loud. The carpet was soaked with beer.
There in the hall, standing across from him, was a chubby girl with butterscotch hair and a bored expression. She was leaning against the wall by the bathroom door, which was closed.
“Are you waiting?” he asked thickly, trying to keep the words from running together. He reached for the wall and fell against it harder than he’d meant to.
The girl looked up at him. “Hey,” she said. “Hey, are you all right?”
He shook his head and rubbed one hand clumsily over his eyes.
“Look, do you want to go in front?”
He nodded and tried to thank her. He could feel himself choking and covered his mouth.
When the door swung open, he didn’t wait, but slipped quickly past the girl coming out. Fumbling behind him for the knob, he locked the door and leaned against it. He was sweating through his shirt, hot and shivering.
In the yellow light he could see his reflection above the sink, gauntly shocked. A used-up-looking boy with a shining face and desperate, starry eyes. In the mirror, he didn’t look like himself anymore. He didn’t look like anyone. The fluorescent tube in the ceiling dimmed. He felt his head hit the floor, but it didn’t hurt at all.
THE PARTY
CHAPTER NINE
T
he address Alexa has given me is on a street to the far, far north and it takes me a while to decipher the timetable for the train. I have to take the Blue Line and then switch to the Red Line, which travels along a high track overlooking all of Chicago. Out the window, the city looms like five or ten Pandemoniums, but without the glossy splendor of home. Everything is caked in grime.
My stop is in a clean, quiet neighborhood with trees, much nicer than Truman’s. The air coming off the lake is murky and cold. It smells like minerals.
On the front steps of Dio Wan’s house, I pause and touch my mouth, testing the shape of my smile. It feels wrong under my fingers—too wide, too hard. Clearly, I’ll need more practice.
The house itself is narrow, with a short flight of concrete steps leading up to the door. No one answers when I knock. Inside, voices rise and overlap and when I knock again and no one comes, I turn the knob and let myself in.
The entryway is full of smoke and people. To get through the crowd, I have to touch them. I can’t help it. Their shoulders and chests and backs press against me, but no one pulls away when I get close. No one seems remotely disturbed by my presence. They could knock me down and still barely notice I’m here.
“Hey,” yells a girl over the steady thrumming of the music. She is wearing outrageously green pants and a wide plastic headband. “Hey, I like your boots! Are those vintage? Those are vintage, right? Where’d you get them?”
“Altamont,” I say, trying to keep things simple.
A girl with a pink blouse and plastic fingernails pushes through the crowd and shoulders her way in next to us. “Morgan,” she yells. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you.” Her hair looks white in the light shining from the end of the hall.
“Hello,” I say, turning to face her. “Do you know a boy named Truman Flynn?”
She just looks at me without saying anything. Her eyes are pale and frosty.
“What?” shouts the girl with the plastic headband.
I ask again, yelling the question this time, and it feels strange to be so loud.
She cups her hand to her mouth, leaning to my ear. “You mean Tru? He’s kind of tall?”
“Yes, I think so. Do you know him?”
“
Every
one knows Tru,” the girl with the white hair says in a tight, cold voice.
“Do you know where I could find him then?” I try my smile, but it feels wrong and it must look wrong because now they both pull back like they want to flatten against the wall.
“Oh wow,” says the white-haired girl. “Where’d you get your teeth capped? Those must have been really expensive.”
I look back at her, trying to decipher the question. “What does capped mean?”
“Ew, are you telling me they’re
permanent
? I’m sorry, but that’s completely disgusting.” She doesn’t sound sorry though. She sounds scandalized and a little bit pleased. She sounds satisfied. “And what do you even want Truman for, anyway? I mean, maybe no one told you, but you’re not really his
type
.”
I put my hand to my mouth to make sure my teeth aren’t showing. “Why? Type of what?”
She twitches her shoulders, looking past me. “He’s just not into the whole Goth scene.”
“Visigoths?”
“How are you so
weird
?”
The girl with the headband steps between us. “Claire, just quit, okay?” Then she turns and addresses me in a tone that suggests she’s taking pity on me. “Hey, I saw him like twenty minutes ago, but he was looking pretty rough. Not good, you know.”
I want to tell her that his appearance might not be worth remarking on. That he didn’t look good the last time I saw him either. “Please, I need to talk to him.”
“Good luck. I’d check the bathroom. He’s really drunk.”
I nod and make my way farther into the crowd. When I glance back at the white-haired girl, she smiles tightly. Her smile doesn’t look any more real than mine. I wonder if she has to practice too.
Truman Flynn is a piece of paper in my coat pocket. He is a memory of water and of loss, his hand sliding free from mine, no way to hold on.
It’s strange to be in the house with him now. To know that he’s here, somewhere in this sprawl of dark rooms and noise. I wish he were a star. Then he might shine through the spaces in the walls, gleaming between boards and under doors. If he were a star, I could follow the light. But there’s nothing. Time, which did not exist before, is rushing past me like a long gust of wind. And Obie is somewhere in the world. Missing.
The house seems to go on forever. Over in one corner of a large, noisy room, a boy with a shaved head and buckles all over his jacket is pressing the dark shape of a girl against the wall, running his mouth all over her throat.
“Excuse me.” I tap him on the shoulder. “Hello, I was wondering if you could help me.”
He turns and there is a moment—I see it clearly—when annoyance turns to simple confusion.
“Can you tell me where the bathroom is?”
He jerks his head toward a doorway on the far side of the room, but says nothing. Then he turns away from me and fills his mouth full of the girl.
This is the world, I tell myself as he begins to feel her breast right there by the television table. This is the real world.
I step into a dim hallway. There are beer cans on the floor, scattered across the carpet, and a closed door and standing beside it, a girl. She looks pleasant and solid, like a nice toy. Her hair is braided into two short plaits, bright yellow, and she’s standing with her arms folded, almost expectant.
I point to the closed door. “Is this the bathroom?”
When she nods, I pound on the wood with the flat of my hand, but there’s no answer. “Do you know who’s in there?”
The girl shakes her head and shrugs. “Some guy. I was waiting, but he looked kind of sick, so I let him go ahead. He’s been in there awhile, five-ten minutes maybe.”
I want to ask why it doesn’t bother her that no one answers. Her mouth is wide and honest. Maybe this isn’t the kind of thing that worries people.
I knock again, harder. “Do you think he’s all right?”
“He’s fine. Just sick, is all. I’m about ready to go down the street to the Marathon if he doesn’t come out, though.”
“Marathon?” I think of Greeks, barefoot or in leather sandals, racing away along an arid coast, a blue sea glittering in the distance.
As though she can see into my dream, the girl smiles. “You know, the Marathon. The gas station. You wanna come with?”
“Thank you, but I’ll wait.”
She shrugs, and I watch her step through the doorway into the living room, disappearing into the crowd.
As soon as she’s gone I try the door, only to find that it’s locked. The knob moves loosely for a second, then stops and won’t go farther.
I examine it, but find no real keyhole, only a small round opening. In the movies, hairpins open doors when you don’t have a key, so I rummage in my bag for a pin. I stick it into the doorknob and turn it back and forth, but nothing happens and I don’t quite know how to proceed.
The knob is metal, though. Metal can melt, and this afternoon, I burned a man standing under a bridge simply because it was what my hands knew how to do.
I close my eyes until everything gets red—red as the light that shimmers and drips above the Pit. There’s sound in my head like the roar of the furnace, air rasping in and out. There is a pin in my hand. Anything can get very hot. A thin coil of smoke rises out of the knob as the tumblers begin to soften. When I turn the handle again, the door swings open slowly.
THE BOY IN THE BATHROOM
CHAPTER TEN
H
e’s thinner than I remember, shoulder blades showing through his worn-out sweater like wings. He’s lying sideways on the bathroom floor.
“Truman Flynn?” When he doesn’t move, I get down on my knees beside him and touch his shoulder. “Truman, wake up.”
Light glows from a buzzing tube above the sink. Everything else stays quiet.
The skin around his eyes looks purple, like all the blood has drained out of the rest of him and settled beneath his eyelids in dark, poisonous bruises. Out in the hall, the party is thumping away like a heartbeat.
I grab him by the front of his sweater and drag him up off the floor. Obie said he was going to take care of Truman, but he looks worse than the last time I saw him. The waxy pallor of his face is scaring me. His mouth looks delicate, but too blue and too raw. It’s strange, but seeing something broken is somehow worse when you can tell that it used to be beautiful.
“Truman, listen to me. You have to wake up.”
His hands are moving on the linoleum, opening and closing in weak spasms. He pulls away from me and tries to sit up, then slides sideways.
I catch him, but only sort of.
The top of his head hits my chin and I yelp without meaning to, letting him go to cup my hand over my mouth, but I’m not bleeding.
“Daphne.” The voice is clear and sudden, shattering into the bathroom from everywhere. Lilith is reflected in the mirror above the sink, staring down at me with brilliant eyes. “You’re wasting time. That boy is completely insensible.”
“He’s just sick,” I tell her. “He isn’t himself right now.”
“Then never mind him. I want you to visit the apartment where your brother was living. You need to go here.” Her reflection fades, replaced by the image of a door with dark, scalloped trim, and after that an oblong yellow sign that simply reads ESTELLA.
I stare up at the mirror, trying to understand what I’m looking at. “I don’t know where that is.”
“Neither do I,” Lilith says, reappearing above me. “That’s why I need you to find it.” She says it with finality, like the world is not entirely full of doors.
“I can’t find a place if I don’t know where to look for it. Truman might be unconscious, but at least he isn’t completely hypothetical. He’s here right now, he knew Obie, and it’s likely that he knows the city. He’s got to be able to tell me something.”
“Well, wake him up then and make him tell you.”
“
How
?” My voice sounds uncharacteristically shrill and my throat feels tight with frustration. Truman is slumped on the floor, partway in my lap, and the throbbing of my chin is already fainter. “How can I help him? He can’t even lift his head.”
In the mirror, Lilith’s smile looks brutal. Her eyes are fixed on my face, so intent that I’m not even sure she sees me. “If you ponder that one long enough, I’m sure you’ll figure it out. But I don’t think you’ll like the answer.”
I turn my back on her and when I look again, she’s gone and I’m breathing too fast. I pull a battered hand towel down from a bar beside the sink and wipe Truman’s face. His eyes are half-open, a strange, pale blue that is almost like no color at all.
“Oh, God,” he whispers as I scrub his face with the towel. His voice is low, catching in his throat, and his chest hitches and jerks.
I touch his cheek, his damp hair, trying to find the way that people touch each other on Earth. Tears are dripping down his face in clear, perfect rivers, landing in the palms of my hands. “You’re crying,” I whisper, and my voice sounds awed. “Why are you crying?”
But he doesn’t answer.
Then, from out in the hall, there is the sound of footsteps growing louder, sharp and purposeful even through the music. The bathroom door swings open and Moloch stands over us, raking a hand through bright, unruly hair.
He tucks his thumbs under his suspenders and sighs. “You have
got
to be kidding me.”
“What are you doing here?” I ask, holding Truman tighter.
Moloch steps inside and closes the door behind him. “I might ask you the same thing. I just had a bit of a holdup in the terminal, because
apparently
someone had already gone through using the name for my job. Now, I’m here to collect.”
“But he’s not dead.”
“In point of fact, he was supposed to be dead twenty minutes ago. What have you done?”
“Nothing, I just told him to wake up. That’s all.”
The look he gives me is scathing. Then he reaches into his coat pocket and takes out a length of wire. “Fortunately, this can be resolved in no time.”
I grab Truman, sprawling over him. “No! What are you doing?”
Moloch loops each end of the wire carefully around a hand. “Someone is about to die of asphyxiation.”
I hold Truman close, clutching at his sweater and staring up at Moloch. “You can’t take him!” My tone is so shrill I’m nearly begging. The feeling isn’t one I’m accustomed to.