Wild Awake - By Hilary T. Smith Page 0,22

Imperial but doesn’t lift his fingers off the edge of the window. When he speaks again, his voice has gone down to a normal volume.

“Hey, do you think you could help me out with five bucks?”

I stick my hand in my pocket, fish out a bill, and push it at him. He grunts and peels his fingers off the window. I look at Skunk. “Let’s go.”

Skunk signals and pulls out into traffic, leaving Doug standing there on the sidewalk with his crutches. I watch his crooked shape recede in the rearview mirror.

We drive down Columbia Street, and soon we’ve put one block, two blocks, three blocks between ourselves and the Imperial Hotel. The farther away we get, the less real the Imperial seems, until what happened in Doug’s room starts to feel fake, implausible, like something that couldn’t have happened after all.

Except that it did.

Skunk reaches into the cup holder. “Coffee?”

I realize that’s what I’ve been smelling for the past two minutes. He lifts a hot paper cup and hands it to me.

“Thanks.”

“It’s black.”

“That’s fine.”

I smile at him, doing my best to keep a lid on things, secure the emotional perimeter, choke off the flood inside me like a thumb clamped over a garden hose. It’s my own fault for going in there. I should have gone home and practiced piano like I wanted to.

I feel a stray sob straining at the back of my throat and take a sip of coffee to suppress it. But somehow, when I swallow my coffee I forget to not think about what Doug told me, and before I know it there’s coffee all over my lap and tears washing over my cheeks and my chest hurts so bad I actually look down to see if I’ve been shot. I wipe my nose on my sleeve and try to jam the mostly empty coffee cup back into the cup holder before I spill it all.

Skunk is steering with one hand and feeling around under the seat for a napkin with the other. Neither of us knows where we’re going. I try to stop crying and apologize, but all I can manage is a series of soft shrieks.

“I’m sorry,” I gasp.

“Shh, no, it’s okay.”

He finds a stack of napkins in an old Taco Bell bag and hands them to me. I put them on my lap, and within a matter of seconds they’re all soaked. Between sobs, I somehow blurt it out: “I just found out my sister was murdered in that hotel.”

When I say it out loud, I immediately regret it. It’s just like the time I told Petra I was stressed out over auditions for the Showcase: He’s going to think I can’t handle it. Now each time he sees me—assuming we ever see each other again—he’s going to think of this tearstained freakazoid who got him to haul her murder-bag home in his van.

“I thought it was an accident,” I babble through my tears. “My parents said—they never told me she was—”

Murdered.

When I get to that word, my throat constricts. I don’t know who killed her or why he did it or if they caught him or what Sukey did or didn’t do to bring it on. Doug didn’t get that far before I bolted for the stairs.

All I heard was the word stabbed.

Followed shortly by the word death.

Skunk glances over at me and gently touches his hand to my elbow.

“Hey.”

I turn my face away so Skunk won’t have to witness how pitiful I am with my messy tears and blotchy face. Outside the van, the world is surreal, going about its business with incomprehensible calm. A FedEx truck idles next to a mailbox. A man with two little kids comes out of a noodle shop holding a stack of Styrofoam take-out boxes.

“Where are your parents?” Skunk says softly, as if I’m a lost kitten he’s trying not to scare away. “How do we get you home?”

He fishes in his pocket for his cell phone.

“Here.”

I wave it away, sniffing back my tears.

“It’s okay, I’m fine.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to call your mom or dad?”

“I can’t, it’s long distance, they’re away on this cruise.”

“Is there someone else?”

“No, I’m really fine.”

Skunk keeps a firm grip on the wheel. “You wanna just drive for a while? Want me to take you back to your house?”

A new wave of grief breaks over me, and I can’t answer him. All I can think about is Sukey, my Sukey, with her zebra-print jacket covered in blood.

We