Free Shade Me by Jennifer Brown Page A

taken.
    There was a date printed on the bottom of the photo. October 15. There were only five photos after that, all taken in black and white. A new artistic phase, I guessed.
    In the first, Peyton stood in the pool with her life preserver.
    The next showcased Peyton and her sister ( half sister, my mind corrected, in Dru’s voice), Luna, standing in front of a plate-glass window. Definitely not in Brentwood—maybe New York? A neon sign in the window promised violet SEXSEXSEXSEXSEX . Luna’s head was tilted back, mugging, her hand buried in her hair, while Peyton jutted her chest out toward the camera seductively, a giant gold-glittering dollar sign on the front of her T-shirt. She had titled the photo Double Rainbow . For some reason the words immediately brought to mind the tattoo on her neck. Only the word rainbow didn’t come out at me in its usual colors. Ihad a hard time describing the color it made me think of in this photo. Glitzy cherrybomb, maybe? I sighed, rubbed my eyes. I hated when I got so tired even my synesthesia got confused.
    Regardless, I pressed on. The next was a family photo, standing on a pier, the ocean rolling behind them. I zeroed in on Dru, who looked at home in the sun, his shirt unbuttoned and revealing a chiseled chest and a dark shadow of hair under his belly button. I blushed, cursed at myself, and quickly flipped to the next photo.
    In this one, Peyton sat at a bus stop, her face turned away from the camera, her free hand caressing the back of her new haircut. She stared pensively at a cigarette butt on the sidewalk, her profile blocking out most of an apartment rental ad and some graffiti behind her head. A square of gauze covered her new tattoo. The overexposed black-and-white pixelation made her skin look grainy and pocked. She might have been mistaken for someone homeless in this photo, an effect I found to be brilliant and shocking. One of the richest girls in the city, mistaken for a homeless girl? Would she have died to know that was what someone would see in this photo, or was it what she’d been going for?
    She’d given the photo a title: Fear Is Golden . Which made me chuckle, because the first thought in my mind was, No, it’s not. Fear is bumpy gray and black, like asphalt .But then I remembered I was the only person who knew that.
    The final photo looked like a mistake. This was the only one in color, but it might as well have been black and white. It was a close-up of a stucco wall, the bottom of which was gobbled up by foliage. At the very top left-hand corner was a pinprick dot of reddish orange—a tiny light of some kind. I squinted at it, tried to zoom in, but nothing would work. It was as if she’d accidentally snapped a photo while she was walking by a building. But she’d given this one a title, too.
    What Lies Beneath
    I felt a familiar tickle, a sneeze coming on. The word beneath , the color of dust, always did that to me. But the tickle was soon forgotten as I saw the rest of the title.
    It was a date.
    October 20.
    The date of her attack.

6
    I WAS JARRED awake by the buzz of my cell phone against my cheek. I jerked upright, confused, blinking. I was still sitting at my desk, Peyton’s YouTube channel pulled up. After a few seconds, I remembered. I’d fallen asleep poring over Viral Fanfare videos, watching every move Peyton made. Every time I saw even the tiniest flicker of something stand out, I backed up the video and watched it again, never sure if I was just imagining things.
    I looked at my phone. It was 6:03 a.m. It was also the familiar color sequence of Jones’s number on the ID. I sighed. Might as well get it over with.
    â€œHi, Jones.”
    â€œHey, beautiful.” He sounded sleepy, and I took amoment to remember what Sleepy Jones’s skin felt like—warm, smooth, muscles somehow rock hard without him even flexing, as if they were ready to spring into action at any moment. I loved waking up in