“Nope,” Cal told me. “He didn’t miss it. First he screamed for his mommy; then he tried to talk me into ditching you; then he started shouting your name for everyone to hear. I had to punch him in the face to shut him up.”
Come to think of it, Garrett’s nose
did
look a little swollen.
If it hurt, he didn’t seem to care. In fact, he leaned forward, grabbing my head between his hands so that he could kiss me on the mouth.
I pulled away from his still-fishy lips. “
Ew! Stop!
”
“
Can
you fly?” he asked again. “Because I might have to propose marriage.”
“No!” I tried to salvage this. “And I don’t know what you
think
you saw—”
“Oh please, Skylar,” Garrett said. “I saw it all. You’re a superhero.” He looked from me to Cal and back. “And, oh, my God, your friend Dana is, too, isn’t she? You and Dana and Jilly…” He laughed. “Odds are
one
of you can fly.”
I looked at Calvin, and Calvin looked at me.
I’d messed up, big-time. Rule number one of being a Greater-Than was:
Don’t let anyone know.
“How about telepathy?” Garrett was saying. “Can you read my mind? Do you know what I’m thinking? Do you?”
“That little girl,” I whispered. “I couldn’t not…”
Cal reached over and squeezed my hand. “I know,” he said. “Dana’ll fix it.”
“She’ll want to kill him,” I said, and Garrett laughed. He thought I was kidding.
But I didn’t need Dana to fix my mess. I’d gotten myself into this, and I’d get myself out. I held up my finger in warning as I turned back around to face Garrett. “Sit back,” I told him. “Seat belt fastened. Now.”
“Oh, yes, ma’am,” he said and actually obeyed.
“Besides being stupid,” Cal murmured to me, “you were also kinda badass.”
I shook my head as Garrett watched me expectantly. I was grateful that my telepathy was restricted to Milo only. I honestly did not want to know what Garrett was thinking. Not now, not ever.
“You can’t tell anyone what you just saw,” I told Garrett. “And you can’t breathe a word about what you think you saw with Jilly, or what you imagine about Dana. I will neither confirm nor deny any theories you might have, but I will tell you this. As long as you don’t tell anyone what you saw—not a
soul
—then I
will
help you find Jilly.”
“
We
will,” Cal confirmed, glancing into his rearview mirror at Garrett.
Garrett was looking from me to the mirror and back, nodding slightly.
“Do we have a deal?” I asked. “Because you need to say it. You need to promise. You need to
swear
.”
Garrett’s nods turned to a head shake. “No, sorry, no deal.”
“What?” Cal voiced my own stunned surprise.
“It’s not a fair deal,” Garrett told us. “I mean, would you take this deal if you were me?” He mocked my voice. “
I will neither confirm nor deny any theories…
That’s bullshit.”
I glanced at Cal. “I’m gonna let Dana kill him.”
“Dana’s not going to kill me,” Garrett said. “She won’t have to. I won’t tell anyone. I’ll take that part of the deal. But only if you tell me what the hell. I want info. I want explanations. Details.” He smiled because he knew he had us over a barrel. “I want to know what your other superpowers are.”
He didn’t say it, and I didn’t need Greater-Than telepathy to know what he was thinking.
Garrett McDouche Hathaway wanted to know which one of us could fly.
“You do that, as well as help me find Jilly, and I’ll keep my mouth shut.” He made an annoying little zipping motion across his lips and even did the whole pretend-to-throw-away-the-key thing before holding out his hand. “Do we have a deal?”
Cal made a very sad little noise as I reached out and shook Garrett’s nasty hand.
I choked the word out. “Deal.”
Chapter
Five
Holy shit
had become Garrett’s catchphrase, and as we approached the old Coconut Grove Mall, he used it again and again. First, as we pulled onto the overgrown and crumbling road that led to the abandoned mega-mall, and next, as we drove around the back toward the formerly gleaming twenty-plex theater, and finally, as Calvin parked his car near a hole in the huge chain-link fence that surrounded the entire deserted mall complex.
“Aren’t there, like, security guards?” Garrett asked, clearly uneasy about trespassing. Still, he followed Calvin and me, ducking to get through that upside-down-V-shaped hole in the fence. I held aside a particularly sharp and clawlike cluster of metal so it wouldn’t catch on his precious letter jacket.
“They never come down here—they don’t have time.” Cal repeated info that Dana had told us back when he and I first came here, all those months ago. “Budget cuts limit them to about a five-second drive-by, way out on the main road.”
“We’ve never seen a guard,” I added, “all the times we’ve been out here. It’s safe.”
Relatively.
After leaving Harrisburg, we’d stopped at a gas station to refill the six water guns I’d managed to salvage, and Calvin now carried them with us, on his lap. I caught Garrett glancing down at them as he followed us across the disintegrating asphalt, and didn’t miss the fact that he stepped up his pace to stay close to me.
The morning sun was bright, and it sparkled and reflected off patches of broken glass that dotted the long-deserted parking lot. When Cal and I had first come here to meet Dana and Milo, it had been late at night and very dark.
The lush tropical plants that decorated the outskirts of this formerly upscale mall had grown like mad without the squads of landscapers constantly cutting them back. Weird fingers of untamed branches and vines reached crazily for the sky. It was spooky even in the sunlight. In the hazy moonlight, it had been flat-out terrifying.
“I went to a
Firefly
marathon here when I was maybe, I dunno, twelve?” Garrett guessed as we approached the silently hulking mall. The twenty-plex entrance held the now-empty frame for a huge screen that had displayed showtimes and even previews of the films. “They showed all five of the movies in a row.”
Cal nodded. “I remember that. I was still in rehab, so I couldn’t go.”
“Rehab?” Garrett said the word with such incredulity, I knew he was stupidly thinking of the thirty-day programs that people entered for drug or alcohol abuse.
“Physical therapy, after the accident,” I corrected him, keeping the
You ignorant idiot
silent.
“Oh, right.” Garrett eyed the Dumpster that sat outside the twenty-plex’s heavily chained doors. He looked wary, as if someone might be hiding behind it. “I thought that happened back when he was, like, nine.”
It was a too-common phenomenon that came with the chair—people talked about Cal in the third person when he was sitting right there.
He
instead of
you
. I wasn’t going to do that, so I let Cal respond as I opened the doors. They were unlocked—the chains were just for show.
“He
was
nine when the gas line exploded,” Cal told Garrett. “But he had a series of surgeries to attempt to repair the damage to his back until he was thirteen.”
“Bummer that it didn’t work, dude,” Garrett said as I held open the door so Calvin could go in first.
“Who said it didn’t work?” Cal glanced up at me before motoring forward, and I nodded my reassurance. Normally, we’d enter with supreme caution, but Dana had made a fresh mark on the side of that Dumpster, indicating that she and Milo were already inside. That scrape in the rust told me they’d already checked for stray squatters and had come up clean. At least in this part of the immense mall.
“Well, duh,” Garrett said with all of the sensitivity of rotting roadkill as he followed Cal into the musty dimness of the lobby. His voice echoed off the graffiti-covered walls and ceiling. “If it’d worked, you’d be walking.”
“If it
hadn’t
worked,” Cal told him, “I’d be hooked up to an oxygen tank, wearing a diaper, lying in some bed in some hospital—assuming I was even still alive. The surgery gave me back the ability to breathe on my own, and a whole bunch of other handy-dandy tricks like being able to use my hands, arms, and upper body—and to control my bodily functions.”
“Can you have sex?”
It was amazing. Within just a few short hours of becoming our “friend,” Garrett put voice to the one question I’d never quite managed to ask Calvin.
“You don’t have to answer that,” I quickly interjected despite the fact that I was burning to know.
But even as Cal shook his head in disgust, he flatly responded with, “Yes, Garrett. I will be able to have sex—when the right time comes, with someone—for me, preferably a woman—that I love, cherish, and respect.”
Garrett opened his mouth, but Cal cut him off.
“Don’t say it,” Cal warned, but we all knew what Garrett was thinking.
Wouldn’t it be awesome, especially considering Calvin’s limitations, if she could fly?
I laughed despite myself, and Garrett added one of his
heh-heh-heh
’s as even Cal smiled and shook his head, too.
“Could you
be
any noisier?” Dana’s irritation cut through, and we all instantly sobered. We were also instantly blinded.
She was standing at the entrance to theater six and she was shining an old-school flashlight directly into our eyes.
“Sorry,” I said, adding, “Do you mind?”
Dana lowered the beam to the floor in front of us, and Cal silently led the way past her and inside.
“Hi.” Garrett held out his hand to Dana. “I’m—”
“I know who you are.” She cut him off. “Shut up and get inside. Milo?”
“Got it. Hey, Sky.” Milo appeared out of the gloom of the theater. He reached to close the door with one hand even as he briefly touched me—his hand against the side of my head, tucking my hair behind my ear. It was enough for our telepathic connection to snap on.
You’re okay
. His relief was powerful, but he double-checked with a question.
Are you okay?
I am
, I told him and zapped him with a fast-forward version of the events at the Sav’A’Buck. It was meant to reassure him, like,
See how well I handled things?
But his reaction to seeing that deadly assault weapon was a rather loud
Dear God!
“I’m okay,” I told him out loud.
“She’s obviously okay.” Dana echoed me, her impatience evident in her tone. “Do you mind saving the big Hollywood kiss for later?”
Milo let go of me, and I sent him a rueful smile with an eye roll, but the smile he gave me back was forced, with only a flash of dimples, before he closed the theater door, leaving the boys inside and Dana and me alone in the lobby.
She stomped away from the door, gesturing impatiently for me to follow, and I silently went with her into the vandalized ladies’ room. For a weird moment, it felt just like we were normal girls on an outing with our friends. Especially since Dana was wearing what I thought of as
normie clothes
—jeans, flip-flops, and a yellow Coconut Key long-sleeved T-shirt. Most of her tats were covered, and the only leather she had on was a motorcycle saddle bag that she wore over her shoulder like a purse.
Even her short blond hair, usually worn in intentionally disheveled spikes, was product free and soft around her face, making her look younger and sweeter. Her makeup, too, was intentionally muted. She wore almost none around her ice-blue eyes.
But as I watched, she set the flashlight on the edge of one of the few remaining sinks and glared at herself in the broken mirror above it. “What,” she said, aiming a pointed look at me. “The hell.”
“I’m sorry—” I started.
“
You
were supposed to help
me
today.” Dana cut me off as she reached into her bag for a tube of hair gel. “That meeting in Harrisburg wasn’t for my health, Bubble Gum. I needed you to come looking like your usual”—she gestured toward me—“Susie Goody-Two-Shoes or whatever, so that I could get this Shania girl to talk to me. Instead, she blows me off, and
then
I get a distress call from Calvin—”
“If Shania blew you off, if she didn’t come to the meeting,” I pointed out, “then my being there didn’t matter.”
“Maybe she was nearby,” Dana countered, leaning in toward the mirror. With her hair back to its spiky normalcy, she began to apply her usual thick, black makeup around her eyes. The effect was striking. “Maybe she would’ve emerged if it hadn’t been just me.”
“You really think she knew something about Lacey?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Dana admitted. “She was a user, but she was the closest thing to a lead I’ve had in weeks.”
“Wait wait wait,” I said. “Shania was a
Destiny
user? And you don’t think she would have told you anything, any old BS, to get you to give her money? And forget about the fact that she could’ve jokered and killed you! Or, God, told her dealer about you!”
Destiny users are one of the biggest dangers to girls who are Greater-Thans. If we get too close, they can recognize that we’re G-Ts, kind of in the same way we can tell they’re users.
Dana didn’t respond, which was her surly way of agreeing with me.
“You act so tough, and you’re so judgmental,” I continued hotly, “but you’re just like me. You’ll be in danger, too, if someone finds out about you!”
She stashed her makeup back in her bag and pulled off her T-shirt. She wore her standard white tank underneath it, a black bra beneath that. And when she turned to face me, all traces of Dana-the-Normie were gone. She was back to full-on kick-ass Greater-Than.
“My sister might be out there,” she said flatly. “Somewhere. Still alive. And I don’t have your homing skills, so I can’t find her the way you found Sasha.”
Dana was incredibly pessimistic, not just about our chances of finding Lacey, but of finding her still alive.
My sister might be out there
was the most optimistic language I’d ever heard her use. And that was not lost on me.