You'll Be the Death of Me(17)

Once we got to high school, he turned into Boney the burnout, and I barely thought about him. I’d almost forgotten about Boney the junior entrepreneur, with his tree-climbing gyms and his overpriced candy. My eyes sting, and I blink harder.

Mateo leans against the side of the building, Ivy cradled against his chest, and glances at me like he’s expecting maybe I had a plan beyond crashing through the back door. I don’t. All the decisiveness I had upstairs deserts me in an instant. The only choice I can make now is whether to hurl or pass out. Both seem like solid options, but my stomach decides for me. It seizes, and I bend over to vomit into a patch of grass.

    “Okay,” Mateo says when I stand and shakily wipe my mouth. “We need to regroup.”

He has that Determined Mateo look I remember from the tail end of our friendship, when his dad hit the road to “find himself” as a roadie for a Grateful Dead cover band. Like Mateo had finally realized he’d been letting a useless person dictate half his life, so he was going to have to step up and…oh. Oh, okay. I’ve become the useless person that Mateo has to compensate for, and I both recognize and accept that in an instant. I’m relieved, actually. All I want is to follow someone else’s lead for a while.

Mateo strides toward the sidewalk, Ivy still in his arms, and looks both ways into the deserted street. An engine roars suddenly, way too close for comfort, and we barely have time to exchange panicked glances before a car careens around the corner. But it’s just some guy on his cell phone, who doesn’t even spare us a glance as he speeds past. As soon as he’s gone, Mateo starts moving again, half jogging across the street before he ducks into an alley between two buildings. I follow nervously, too shell-shocked to ask questions, as he winds through the narrow passageway.

It feels good to keep moving. When I focus on putting one foot in front of the other, I don’t have to think about what happened back there. Not just in the building, but in Lara’s literal studio. Her latest drawing half-finished on the nearest easel, as though she’d just been working on it. Which she should have been on a Tuesday morning. It’s her only day off, her best chance to create, and she’s always said she can’t concentrate at home.

So why wasn’t she there?

    And why was Boney? Because that had to be Boney, right? Even though none of us had the guts to look beyond the sneakers, we saw him go in.

But we never saw him come out.

My stomach starts rolling again, and I force my attention back onto the sidewalk in front of me. I have enough presence of mind to wonder whether eventually, we’ll run into someone who demands to know why Mateo is carrying an unconscious girl. Seems like minimum responsible adult behavior on a city morning, but the only person we pass is a drunk old man slumped against the side of a building.

Mateo turns another corner, then pauses at the edge of a large metal door. “Keys are in my right pocket,” he says. “Can you get them?”

“I…what?”

“Get my keys,” he says, his voice edging into impatience. “My hands are kinda full.”

“I know, but…where are we?”

“Garrett’s,” he says. “Back door. They don’t open till five, so it should be deserted.”

I stop asking questions and extract the keys as quickly as I can. “It’s the big, round one,” Mateo says. I find the right key, and fit it into the lock with shaking hands. It turns easily, and I pull the heavy door open as the sound of sirens starts up again. I startle so badly that I would’ve dropped the keys if they weren’t dangling from the lock. Mateo ducks inside with Ivy and I follow suit, slamming the door closed behind me.

We’re in a dim, musty-smelling room piled high with cardboard boxes and what look like empty kegs. There’s only one other door besides the one we just came in, and it opens into a small stairwell. I follow Mateo upstairs and find myself in a room dominated by a bar on one end and two pool tables at the other. One side of the room is all windows, but they’re covered by shades that let in only a faint, yellowish light. The tables nearest them have bench seating covered with faded red cushions, and that’s where Mateo finally deposits Ivy.

    Once she’s down, he shakes his arms out and rolls his neck and shoulders a few times, then carefully straightens an edge of her skirt that rode up during the transfer. Ivy murmurs something but doesn’t wake.

“Is she…shouldn’t she be conscious by now?” I ask. The last time I saw Ivy pass out from her needle phobia was in seventh grade, when somebody found a discarded syringe on the soccer field at school and started waving it around during gym. My memory from that time is a little hazy, but I could swear she woke up within minutes.

“I don’t know,” Mateo says. “She was pretty freaked out.” He leans over her, pressing his fingertips against one side of her neck. “Pulse seems normal. Breathing’s normal. Maybe she just needs a little more time.”

“You know Ivy,” I say. “She can probably use the rest.” Mateo gives me a tight-lipped smile in recognition of the weak joke. Back when we hung out with Ivy, she never slept more than five hours a night. I’d miss texts from her after I went to bed, and then a bunch more before I woke up the next morning. Now that I think of it, I feel kind of nostalgic for the weird, random facts that used to strike Ivy while everyone else was sleeping.