Darling Girl: A Novel of Peter Pan(15)

As she reaches the door, a tall figure brushes past her, face obscured by a hoodie. The person is in such a hurry he bumps her shoulder as he passes. The doorman scowls at him before offering to take her luggage, but she waves him off, takes her bag to the elevator, and then it’s blessedly quiet. Except, as she steps out onto her floor, it’s not. There’s a low heavy throb in the air, thumping through the walls so hard it reverberates in her chest. It takes her a second or so to realize it’s actually music, another second to realize that the sound is coming from her apartment. She tests the doorknob—locked. Could she somehow have left the speakers on? Or perhaps Manuela came back for something, although Holly for the life of her cannot imagine her grandmotherly housekeeper listening to music with a bass line like this. She unlocks the door, cautiously opens it. And in a glance understands everything.

Two of Jack’s friends are lounging on her couch, dirty sneakers draped across either end. Beer cans litter the coffee table in front, and there is the faint but unmistakable aroma of pot. Jack himself is leaning against the kitchen wall, holding a cloth to his nose. Blood is dripping down his shirt, puddling onto the floor.

Eden’s blood.

One of the boys must have heard or sensed the door opening over the music. He raises his head and sees her. It’s Brett Pike.

“Oh, shit,” he says. “Dude. Your mom.”

But Holly’s already moving past him to Jack, fear propelling her forward. “What happened? Where are you hurt?” she says, taking the cloth from his face. His nose is grotesquely swollen.

“It’s fine. I’m fine,” he says, his voice nasally. He takes the cloth back. “I got punched in the nose, is all. It’s no big deal.”

She looks at him, at the blood on his shirt, and suddenly she’s furious. At the waste. The price she’s paid—the things she’s done—and for this? And then it occurs to her that more is at stake.

“Did you bleed on them? On anyone else?” She doesn’t wait for an answer. She crosses the room before he has a chance to speak, inspects Brett, the other boy. Their eyes are red, their breath smells like beer, but there’s no blood and, more importantly, no visible cuts on their skin. Satisfied, she jerks her head at the door. “Out. Now.”



* * *





Sending two high and drunk teens out onto the streets of New York may not be her finest moment, but Holly doesn’t care. They’re lucky she doesn’t call their parents or, worse, the police. But she has no time for them. She grabs paper towels from the kitchen and uses them to clean off Jack’s face. His nose is swollen, but she’s pretty sure it’s not broken. She gets another paper towel, wraps ice in it, and makes him sit at the kitchen table with the ice on his nose.

She scrubs the kitchen floor, mourning every single drop of blood she cleans up. She has no idea whether it’s still potent. For a second, she considers trying to save it, but the scientist in her points out how unsterile it is, so she puts the paper towels in the sink and burns them, one at a time, so she doesn’t set off the fire alarm. She wets down the remains until they’re formless black sludge, then throws them in the trash. Only then, when she’s expended some of her energy, is she ready to face Jack without killing him.

She takes off her cleaning gloves, snapping them away from her wrists, and tosses them in the garbage. She leans against the counter, arms crossed.

“Now talk.”

“What?” Jack says, his voice muffled through the cloth. If he rolls his eyes at her, she swears to god, she’ll undo all the years she’s spent trying to keep him alive with one blow.

“Oh, I don’t know, let’s see. Let’s start with why aren’t you at school? Who punched you? Or, my personal favorite, where the hell did you get the pot?”

She sees him thinking about a way to deny all of it, can recognize the thoughts as they come and go behind his eyes. But his brain must be too muddled from the beer and the weed to lie. He shrugs his shoulders.

“Some guy. Brett knows him.”

“Really, just some guy, huh? Does he have anything to do with the bloody nose?”

He starts to shrug again, but even in his inebriated state, he can recognize the warning signs. He’s fast approaching her breaking point. “Yeah. He got here and tried to overcharge us, and then he tried to stiff us. So Brett and I took care of it.”

“You had him here? And what do you mean, you took care of it?”

“We pushed him around a little bit, that’s all. There were three of us, and he’s some skinny dude from Brett’s sister’s college. And he . . . he didn’t like it, and he tried to fight back. And he was flailing around and hit me in the nose, that’s all,” Jack says defensively. “He couldn’t have hit me on purpose if he tried. It was a total accident.”

“So what, he just left after that?” She knows Jack, and she thinks she knows Brett, that little piece of pond scum. There’s no way they’d let the dealer just walk away.

“Well, not exactly. Brett hit him a few times first while Vince held him down. But the guy was fine. He totally got off easy.”

Holly closes her eyes. She can imagine it.

“Did you bleed on him at all?”

“What?”

“When you got hit in the nose. Did you bleed on him? Or on anyone?”