“You said you don’t want to go outside, right?”
“Yes.” Tears shone in her half-closed eyes. The line behind me was quiet.
“Do you have friends here?” I asked. “I’ll take you to them.”
She swept a pale hand toward the main room. “In there.”
As I gently led her away, the guy managed to focus on me. His hand was still on her other arm.
“Let go,” I said to him. My voice stayed even, but my heart hammered inside my chest. The smell of old beer, the music, the shadowy hallway . . . bile crept up in my throat and heat spread across my back as the memory box inside me creaked open another notch. Not now. I needed to stay focused. This girl needed help.
“What’s your problem?” the guy asked me. “She’s fine.”
I took a step toward him, but Veena caught my forearm and spoke to him. “Listen, you should really do what Nic says.”
“I’ll get help,” a girl from the line said before hurrying off.
After a long moment of drunkenly sizing me up, the guy released his hand. A few of the girls watching clapped.
I tried hard to calm my breathing as the box inside clamped shut again. That was too close.
Veena and I led the girl back to the main room. After a minute, she found her friends at a table. They didn’t look much better off.
“Are you girls driving?” I didn’t recognize them from VMA.
“No, we Ubered from our hotel,” one said.
“Good. Might be time to call it a night.”
Finally realizing their friend was crying, the girls pulled on jackets and gathered purses. Ali and Gage came over after they left.
“What happened?” Gage asked.
Veena gushed. “Nic rescued that girl from a drunk jerkwad who was trying to get her outside!”
Ali lightly punched my shoulder. “You rock so hard, Nic.”
We all went back to our table. As we walked, Veena glanced at her phone and froze. Her hand shook as she thrust it at me.
It was a grainy video of Veena on the dance floor a few minutes before. The text said:
You won’t be dancing much longer.
Eleven
We left Ali and Gage with a few rushed apologies and found a bundled Kovitch stamping his feet in an alley right around the corner from the bar. I showed him the video.
His hazel eyes hardened. “I’ll call the chief and let him know.”
He beckoned the black BMW sedan idling down the street. I checked to be sure Bart was behind the wheel before helping Veena into the back seat. Then I slid in after her, and Kovitch slammed the door shut. He and his team would follow us.
Bart drove the speed limit back to school, glancing in the rearview mirror often. No one spoke.
In our room, Veena placed her shoes by the door instead of kicking them off like usual. She turned on every light, even in the bathroom, and sat in front of her shrine, staring at Lakshmi.
After my routine check of the bathroom, balcony, and closets, I perched on my bed, wondering what to say. What were we dealing with here? Were the threats coming from a student, like Darya? Or from someone a lot more sinister? By being in the bar with Veena, the extortionists had dangerously upped the ante.
Darya hadn’t been at the bar. I scanned my memory for every VMA kid who was there, but no one stood out from my watch list. A lot of non VMA kids were there, too, and a few adults like Connor and the other ski patrollers.
I studied the video, the angle from which it was taken, willing it to give me more information. We had the phone number it was sent from, but Bart had explained before that the numbers they previously extracted from Veena’s phone had come from burner phones—cheap, disposable devices used once and thrown away. There were even apps that created temporary burner numbers.
Veena spoke, her voice soft and watery. “I want to go to the hill.”
I texted Kovitch and Brown and followed her in pulling ski pants and boots over my clothes. The night air hovered right below freezing, and staying in her room was safest, but I didn’t try to talk her out of going. She was sniffing back tears, and it took her two tries to zip up her jacket. She would say she needed her happy place.
I kept my hands free and eyes open, my stick still snug against my back, as we trudged up the hushed hill to the pipe and settled on the deck where I’d found her before. At least I could see a threat coming from a long way. Kovitch and his team were nearby, too, unseen but vigilant.
“I’m sorry, Veena. I know that was scary.” An understatement.
She nodded, staring at the opposite wall of the pipe. “I was having such a good time dancing. I almost forgot all this was happening. How did they know what I was doing?” She glanced around, her eyes wild. “Are they watching me now?”
I didn’t have an answer.
“Nic, my parents will freak. They’ll want me to come home. They’ve been incredibly cool letting me stay here and train, but this might be it. They’ll say it’s too dangerous, that they have their own security team at home. I’d be safer for sure.”
I knew she didn’t mean that as a judgment on me—she had every right to be frightened—but it stung anyway.
“I don’t want to go.” Tears dripped like melting icicles onto her waterproof pants.
Those tears were too much. I knew I shouldn’t, but I scooted closer and put an arm around her.
She went on. “I know this will sound dramatic, but I don’t want to live without being able to ride. I’ve snowboarded more than half my life. It’s not what I do; it’s who I am. Since I won my first competition, I’ve worked every day toward my dream of being the first Desi to medal in the winter Olympics.
