Feather Bound Page 7

  The camera zoomed in on his back, panning slowly down its length. The feathers were thinner than mine were; long and almost oval with a faint black line stretching up the vein. They came out of his shoulder blades, just like mine had, draping down half his back, but I could see more of them peeking out of the skin itself, all the way down to his underwear. They were matted to his back in one continuous unit.

  The girl chattered throughout the close-up in a frighteningly upbeat, tour guide-esque tone as if this were some sort of educational video appropriate for middle schools and bondage rooms everywhere.

  It was like pulling a carrot out of the ground from the stalk. She yanked the feathers from the main stems and they all came out together. With a hand, she smoothed the cape over her forearm as it dangled there, limp, luscious and pristine. All the while her friend gazed up at her. The light was gone from his eyes.

  “Turn it off,” Ade said in a voice so small I figured it was the last time she’d have the energy to tell me. I did.

  9

  CAPTURE

  “Deanna? You OK?” My dad hesitantly opened my bedroom door Tuesday evening and came in with a bouquet of flowers.

  “This is a first.” I turned over in bed and sat up. “Usually when you feel guilty about something you buy us donuts.”

  Dad hunched his shoulders and scratched his head, clearly avoiding my eyes. “Well, uh.” He cleared his throat. “It’s not from me.”

  “It isn’t?”

  When Dad tossed the bouquet onto my bed, a white envelope slid out from between two posies. It was from Hyde. Dad stood there awkwardly as I let out an ugly sigh. Hyde had been calling nonstop since Anton’s party. So he’s moved on to flowers, huh?

  It wasn’t that I didn’t appreciate the concern, but I just wasn’t in the mood and there was something particularly vile about a guy who refused to take a hint.

  “Thanks Dad,” I said and threw the bouquet in the trash.

  But that was just Tuesday.

  “Hey, Dee, someone’s stalking you.” It was Ade this time, because it was Wednesday morning and Dad was at work. I looked up from the couch and had to throw out my arms quickly when Ade tossed the bouquet of flowers at me.

  “Another one?” I flipped over the card. “Ugh.”

  Ade shrugged. “Well, he’s persistent,” she said before scouring the cabinets for another bag of chips.

  Hyde certainly was: he sent three more bouquets throughout the day and upped the ante with chocolates Thursday morning.

  “Wait!” Ade said as I began clicking on my phone. “Don’t call him!”

  I frowned. “Why? He can’t keep doing this.”

  “Are you mad?” She waved the now empty heart-shaped box of Belgian truffles in my face. “Chocolate! Let’s just… wait and see where this thing goes.”

  We did. The next day brought Adrianna much joy: chocolate boxes, this time carts of them. Giant teddy bears, enough to fill a small storage room. All this capped off with DVDs of all the most popular movies of the past year. Of course, Hyde couldn’t have known what I was into so he was probably just covering all the bases.

  “Nice to see he’s making good use of his dead adoptive father’s money.” I lay back on the couch while Ade debated which comic book movie to put into our brand new DVD player.

  “That kid did always have a soft spot for you, Dee,” Dad said once he came back from work and saw our new treasures.

  Sure, except his soft spot had the tendency towards creepy obsession.

  Friday followed along the same track: cupcakes from that shop on Utica Avenue I used to love as a kid and more flowers – a garden of them. I didn’t think he could top himself after the DVDs. That was before the bell rang that evening. Wearily, I crept up to the door while Ade bounced on her feet behind me.

  The Mariachi band started playing as soon as I opened the door: “Deanna, please forgive me! Whatever I’ve done to offend youuu!”

  “Has he… has he lost his goddamn mind?” After slamming the door, I collapsed against the frame while Ade laughed so hard, she tumbled over the arm of the couch. I could hear the band members shuffling down the front steps, muttering their complaints on the other side. This had gone too far.

  I strode to the kitchen and plucked my phone off the table.

  “What are you doing?” Ade started, but I put up a hand to silence her before dialing Hyde.

  “Deanna! You called! Are you OK?” Incoherent chatting and techno music bleated in the background on the other end of the receiver. And yet I could still hear the elation in his voice.

  “You’re a psychopath.”

  “What? I can’t hear you,” he shouted. “What did you say?”

  “You’re a freaking psychopath!”

  “Bad at math?” OK, now he was just shitting me for the fun of it. The little laugh proved it. “Deanna, you are OK, right?”

  Yes: the “OK” that people usually are after a soul-sucking, traumatizing event. “Yeah,” I lied. “But–”

  “Good… in that case I’m going to have to call you back. Sorry, it’s just that this is a really bad time.”

  “Excuse me? You’ve been calling me for days and now suddenly ‘Oh sorry, totes busy, ttyl?’”

  “I’m at the cover party for Bella Magazine.”

  “Oh, well, lah-dee-friggin-dah.”

  My hand was shaking. I didn’t think it was possible for one human being to piss me off so… so completely. As if the feathers weren’t enough to deal with.

  “Deanna,” Hyde said, his voice suddenly clearer. The music was harder to hear. Probably found a quieter spot. “I know I don’t have the right to say this but… I want you to be careful from now on.”

  I sat on the arm of my couch and scowled, sorry he couldn’t see it. “What the hell do you mean by that?”

  He paused. “Anton. He’s here too, with his stepmother. And he’s being unusually friendly.”

  Anton. The mere memory of the venom in his drunken snarl as he’d tried to grab me raised the hair on my arms.

  “Friendly? After you fired his dad and beat him up and humiliated him at his birthday party?”

  “Exactly. And he asked about you.”

  I swallowed. “So?” I tried for nonchalant and would have gotten there too if it weren’t for the tremors in my voice. “Why wouldn’t he? The way you were all over me at his party, it’s no wonder he’s curious.”

  “I don’t like it. I don’t know what it means, but, please, just take care of yourself.”

  I considered his words, considered the quiet panic lacing them. I thought of him standing there in his crisp suit, hobnobbing with the very people he was apparently out to destroy. “My life has nothing to do with yours,” I said finally, more for myself, as if it were a promise. “Not anymore. Remember that, because this is the last time I’m going to say it.”

  “But Dee–”

  “And the next time I find a Mariachi Band ready to belt out your apology I will castrate them all without hesitation. Then you. Got it?”

  That was pretty much a conversation-ender.

  Live footage of Beatrice Hoffer-Rey and Hyde striding into some Manhattan “it” club told me where Hyde was. This time Beatrice’s white-blonde hair was long, draping down the back of her fur coat. Of course, if one had to ask why a human being would wear a fur coat at the end of June in New York, then one was very clearly an unenlightened plebian who had no right to look upon the transcendent radiance that stained the ground after every step Beatrice Hoffer-Rey made on the undeserving asphalt with her snip-toe pumps. Or something like that. I was only half-listening to the reporter’s yammering. This was Fashion TV after all.

  Said reporter narrated her dramatic entrance while standing a few feet away from the pandemonium. Every time the door opened to let more people in, the music seeped out, shaking the streets. According to the reporter’s excitable prattle, Hyde was looking “dapper.” Nice to see he was staying busy.

  “But one can only gue
ss at the kind of reception the new head of Hedley Publications is currently getting at the cover party, especially from Beatrice, third wife of former executive Edmund Rey, who was fired just this morning.”

  So Hyde was off to a good start firing Anton’s dad and making enemies. But maybe that was a part of his plan. It was his father’s company after all. His legacy. His by right the second his dad had bought him for aid space.

  There was something more to it, though. The way that Hyde had stared at Anton – and at Edmund, too – at the reception: a gleeful sort of malice. There was something I wasn’t getting.

  Shaking my head, I turned off the TV. It was not my problem. If Hyde wanted to play out some revenge kamikaze drama, then that was his prerogative.

  “Hey, Deanna, I’m going to Flex tonight with the girls.” Ade put her hair up in a ponytail while coming down the hall. “It’ll be fun… you in?”

  “No, I’d rather watch people have fun on TV, to be honest.”

  Ade’s shoulders drooped as she sighed. Running her finger down the two foot pile of DVDs on our table, she stopped at one and slipped it out without toppling the rest. “Here, watch this, then. It’s about a seventeen year-old drama queen who opts out of life and consequently spends the rest of her days old, sad and alone.”

  “Is it in 3D?”

  Ade threw the DVD at me and left. It was a children’s movie – and it was in 3D. Or at least it was now. Certainly it wasn’t when Hyde and I had first watched it in that busted old movie theatre over on Coney Island Avenue. Afterwards, he’d taken me to one of the best bakeries in New York where I’d had my pick of everything and anything I wanted. Even sixteen year-old Ericka, who hadn’t come because she wouldn’t be caught dead running around New York with a bunch of kids, had been crazy jealous when I came back home in a sleek, white limo. Hyde had always been a little over the top.

  I lay down on the couch, running my finger down the plastic casing of the DVD. Why had he latched on to me so strongly back then? Because he was lonely? He’d told me he didn’t have any other friends. He didn’t have any parents either, not really. Taken from your home to live with a strange new family you know deep down doesn’t really care about you. Caged in a hollow home. Alone.

  He was still alone, even now.

  But it didn’t matter. There was nothing I could do at this point. This was Hyde’s battle. And my life had nothing to do with his anymore.

  I put in the DVD. Just a few minutes before the penultimate animal sing-along at the end, my phone rang. Ade’s number?

  “Hello? Ade?”

  “Hello, is this… Deanna Davis?”

  It was a voice I didn’t recognize. Male and adult, though young enough to make me think he was college-aged.

  “Who’s asking?”

  “My name’s Paul. I’m the bartender at Stylo.”

  “OK. Why do you have this phone?” Wasn’t Ade at that other club? Plus, it wasn’t like her to leave her phone somewhere. The last time she did, she nearly freaked out and we had to walk all the way back to the movie theatre where she’d left it.

  “There’s a girl here who definitely looks like she needs someone to come get her. Brunette, tall, skinny, pretty.” Paltry descriptions, but each one made my heart thud that much louder. “She’s barely conscious–”

  My hands shook against my lap. I had to make sure. “The phone you’re using – does it have a pink leather strap hanging from it?”

  “Yeah. She’s got your number on speed dial, so I called it.”

  My heart pounded against my ribcage. Ade, what the hell? This wasn’t like her. Ade took pleasure in skirting the law when it came to alcohol, and she usually got away with it. But she was never careless. Passed out in a bar? No. That wasn’t Ade.

  “Look, if you’re her friend or something, you definitely need to come pick her up. She looks sick. I’d call her a cab, but I don’t know where she lives and, to be honest, she’s so wasted right now I doubt she can remember her own name, let alone an address.”

  My fingers tightened around my phone. I could feel the metal digging into the joints. “Aren’t you supposed to keep that from happening? What the hell kind of bartender are you?”

  “I–”

  “Forget it. I’m coming. Just don’t let anyone near her.”

  I couldn’t tell Dad about Ade, though a part of me wanted to. He was blissfully ignorant of Ade’s nightlife, a feat that she worked diligently to achieve. He wasn’t the best father, but if he knew Ade was passing out at clubs, he’d find a way to keep us padlocked indoors for good. I had to keep this to myself. I owed that to her. He was out anyway, at his friend’s for another poker night.

  I checked my watch. Eleven, almost on the dot. Dad usually came home drunk at midnight. That didn’t leave me much time. Hopefully, I’d be back with Ade before he stumbled in.

  On the way, I thought of a million different scenarios that might have explained how she ended up drunk in some random bar at night alone, when she was supposed to be (less) drunk in another random bar at night surrounded by her horde of friends. What the hell had happened? Regardless, I wasn’t about to let Ade get manhandled by some assholes.

  A subway trip and a short taxi drive took me close to Chrystie Street on the Lower East Side. Ade was definitely going to have to pay me back for the fare. I walked the rest of the way to Stylo. It definitely looked shoddy from the outside – certainly not as fancy as the pretentious French name would suggest. There were no windows in the red brick, just the building’s number, 297, in big letters shaded under a shabby red awning. The door was old and decaying, the paint rusting off its surface in sheets of moldy brown. I couldn’t see anything through its tiny window; just the crinkled, gaudy curtain draped over the glass from the inside, off-white and dirty as if it’d been used to clean a rusted bathtub decades ago.

  Sucking in a breath, I went inside. There wasn’t even anyone checking IDs. I’d never actually been inside a bar before. Unlike Ade, I actually feared the long arm of the law when it came to the legal drinking age. I could barely tolerate the taste of beer anyway, which, of course, made me the designated loser in my already lower-rung social circle at school.

  I looked around. The place had a kind of musty smell with a sharp coat of alcohol layering the mix, a shot to the senses. It was almost as dark inside as it was outside, but the dim lights were certainly bright enough to light up the burlesque dancers writhing on stage.

  Wait, what?

  “Ade, what the hell?” I whispered, gaping. Ade in a burlesque house? Was this some new fetish of hers? Except, I’d never seen her express an iota of interest in the corseted arts. But more importantly, I couldn’t find her anywhere.

  “Excuse me?” I said once I’d walked up to the bar.

  The bartender barely spared me half a glance as he dried off glasses. “ID.”

  “What?”

  “ID.”

  Crap. I clutched the cinched tote bag Ericka had gotten me for my last birthday. “Uh… I’m actually… under-age. Kinda.” Long arm of the law.

  “Oh,” he said. “Get out.”

  “Wait, you’re the guy who called me a little while ago, right? About my sister? I’ve only come to pick her up, that’s it! Once I get her, I’m gone, I swear.”

  That got his attention. He stared at me, the cloth in his hand motionless against the wineglass he’d been wiping. Then, with a quick cough to clear his throat, he set it down and picked up another one.

  “Oh?” He slid right back into the whole “talking to me without looking at me” thing, and though it wasn’t any less annoying than before, this time was different. The way his eyes seemed less focused, his hands more jittery... Something was off here.

  “Hey, where is she?” I tried to force his gaze to me. “She didn’t leave with anyone, did she? What the hell! Didn’t I tell you not to let anyone near her?”

  “Relax.” He scratched the modestly-sized silver bead embedded in his left brow. “She’s upstairs in
the back. She kept falling off the stool so I let her sleep in one of the empty VIP rooms on the second floor. No one else is in there.”

  VIP rooms. I could see them from down here, behind the railings. The bartender tossed a silver key onto the table. “Here, take it. It’s the first room on the right hand side, just around the corner.”

  After one more judgmental glare, I silently took the key and headed upstairs. To be so wasted she needed her own private room to detox? It just wasn’t like Ade.

  My fingers twitched – so violently, I nearly dropped the key. I stopped half way up the stairs, peering at the rooms, not sure why I suddenly felt flushed. Something was wrong.

  Almost instinctively, I whipped around, but there was no one behind me. So then why was my heart pounding? What was this? The hairs on my arms rose off the gooseflesh and I half-expected someone to jump out at me. But I was on a staircase – where would they possibly come from? The ceiling?

  Stop being stupid. Go find Ade.

  Shaking it off, I rushed over to the VIP room, first room on the right-hand side, just around the corner, and opened the door.

  The girl lying half-conscious on the velvet couch next to the giant metal cage in the wall was not Adrianna. It wasn’t the blonde hair that gave her away. It was the feathers.

  “What–?”

  An arm wrapped around my waist at the same time the cloth smothered my nose and mouth. I was out in seconds.

  10

  CAGED

  Sounds of laughter. Men were laughing. I struggled to pry apart my eyelids. Soft fiber brushed my fingers, smothered my face. I slid my legs across it, slow and sluggish, and though it burned my skin, I still couldn’t figure out what it was or where I was. My muscles ached.

  “What? You’re not having fun?”

  Were they talking to me?

  Somewhere there was a frail whimper. Female. Young. Scared.

  Open your eyes, I commanded myself, to no avail. My lashes were practically glued shut.