Deadgirl

my hand out of my pocket like I’d discovered a snake in my coat.

Before I could ponder my symptoms any longer, a hand seized my wrist and tugged me out of my musings.

“Wuh—?”

My eyes snapped first to the wrist of my assailant, and then to his face. Before the flight or fight instinct could even begin to take hold, the fires of defiance died. Smothered, in fact, by a shiny nickel badge pinned to a dark blue shirt.

“Excuse me, miss,” the cop said. “Can I see your ID?”

He released my wrist almost instantly—I think he counted on his badge to do the rest of the work.

“S-sure,” I said.

I dug through the pockets of my coat, and my mind did cartwheels when I felt the bullet casing. I didn’t think it was illegal to carry an empty shell around, but my hammering heart wasn’t sure.

I fished my California ID, another insistence of my over-protective father, out of my black-and-rhinestone wallet and handed it to the cop. He took it in one hand. His eyes were unreadable under black glass, and his face was stone.

“Lucy Day?”

I nodded.

“Would you mind coming with me?”

“N-no,” I said. The heat inside me blossomed, like I’d just chugged a pot of scalding coffee and jumped into a lobster pot. I bit my lip and tried to imagine what a tub full of ice cubes would feel like.

I followed him through the Set, failing miserably to ignore the stares of a hundred looky-loos. A cop in the mall wasn’t a fascinating concept. A cop dragging an errant, bedraggled-looking teenager to a cop car was always good for a rubberneck.

His car hugged the front curb, and he gestured for me to lean against it.

I did. He looked me up and down, consulted something in his leather-bound notepad, and then handed me a slip of paper.

It was a printout, on normal computer paper. A picture of me and Zack and Morgan all striking ridiculous poses. Morgan’s fingers mimicked snail antenna behind her head, Zack had a growly look on his face, and I was cross-eyed. Benny had taken that picture on his cell phone the night before. Of course. Of course that’s the picture they gave to the police. I looked like an idiot.

“This is you?” he asked me.

I glanced up at him to see if he was joking. I was wearing the exact same clothes in the picture, and my hair hadn’t changed a bit. I nodded.

“Yes,” I said, with a reluctant sigh.

“Your parents and friends have been searching for you since dawn—they were worried about finding your body in a gutter.”

I nodded, numb. I hadn’t thought about that. The thought of Zack and the others—what they must have thought when I disappeared. They’d all gone into some stupid sign shop, and I’d gone to the bathroom across the way. When I’d run into the Idiots-Five, I’d been alone. None of my friends had any idea what had happened to me.

And Mom and Dad. I felt my face go white.

“You look afraid,” the cop said. I looked up at his badge—Sykes. Of course. Such a cop name.

“I am,” I said.

“Good,” Sykes said. His granite face hadn’t changed, but the tone in his voice was disgust.

“I didn’t run off,” I said. Despite the worry for my friends and family, I felt a bright red point of anger in my chest. “I wasn’t off with some boy or something. I was attacked. Thank you for your concern.”

Sykes straightened immediately—the casual, teacher-like posture of his body sprang into a soldier’s pose. Still, his movements were measured, without haste, as he opened up his leather notepad again and snapped a pen from his shirt.

“Your name?”

“What?”

“Name?”

I sighed, “Lucy Abigail Day.”

“Age?”

“Don’t you know this?”

“Age?”

“Fifteen.”

It went on until he’d acquired all of my apparently relevant data. Then he picked up his radio, something I thought he should have done a while ago, and spat a series of codes, the fact that he’d found me, and his current location. I sat against the cop car while he sent a request to terminate the amber alert. I recognized that, at least. It meant a kid had gone missing or been abducted. I sighed. My parents were thinking the worst.

But what had happened? Hadn’t the worst happened?

Had I just…recovered?

“Who attacked you?” he asked.

“Aren’t you calling my parents?”

“It’s already been done. I told them I’m on my way with you.”

“What about my friends?”

“I imagine your parents will call them,” Sykes said. “Who attacked you?”

I sighed and painted a loose, watercolor version of the truth. Five guys—I gave him good descriptions of only the guy who caught up with me first, the bald guy, and Fatty. None of the rest of them had stood out, beyond being total creepers. I explained I’d been a little too freaked out to whip out my camera phone, which didn’t exactly quell Sykes’ pissed-off tone. I told him about the gun, and from there I veered into true pants-on-fire territory.

“I don’t think he wanted to shoot me,” I said. “We struggled, and then. He hit me. On the head.”

“Where?”

Panic. I took a deep breath.

“The back of my head.”

Sykes gestured for me to turn around.

“Could you hold your hair out of the way, ma’am?”

I felt for the raw patch, rubbed red by the asphalt, and prayed to Oprah that it would fool him. I split the hair around the back of my skull to give him a better look.

“Hmm.”

“What?”

“And then what happened?”

I shrugged, “I woke up in the parking lot.”

“What parking lot?”

I told him the name of the office building. His pencil scribbled long graceful A-plus penmanship lines into his pad.

“Were you sexually assaulted?”

My breath caught in my throat.

“Wuh…”

The officer’s face softened. He tugged off his glasses and slipped them into the pocket of his shirt.

“Sorry,” he said, pale blue eyes staring into mine. “Were your clothes in disarray, any pain or discomfort?”

“No, no,” I said, and that was true. Not from lack of trying—those bastards probably thought I was too dead to party with. They were like real knights in that way. “I think…I think they freaked out. Thought I was dead, I don’t know. They didn’t seem like experts. Or human. Or subhuman—”

“Anything stolen?”

“No,” I said.

“How does your head feel?”