Sketchy Read Online Free PDF Page A

comes running over, purring—twisting around my legs.
    “Whistler.” I bend down, drop my purse to the floor, and pick up my furry friend. “How have you been?” I scratch under his chin.
    Marcus unlocks a tall antique cabinet. I know the cabinet well, and I know what’s in it. He pushes aside a few leather-bound books, peruses the stash, and takes out a plastic bottle filled with tiny pink pills.
    “Marcus, no. Please, I didn’t come for that. I told you. Please.”
    He doesn’t seem to hear me, removes Whistler from my arms, placing him on his bed, and takes my sweaty hand in his, dropping two pills onto my palm.
    “You’ll feel better, I promise.” He lifts my chin with his hand. “I’m so happy you’re here, Bea.”
    And I am suddenly there. Back. Back in the dark alleys of my life…

    It was last April, right after my seventeenth birthday, and I was running with Marcus in the Arboretum, hand in hand through a field of hip-high alfalfa and rye grass. We werehigh out of our minds, giggling and leaping over downed hickory trees, somersaulting on the grass until we found a hidden gully at the base of a wooden bridge that arched over a trickling spring.
    “Heaven!” Marcus sang out. “This is it… we found heaven!”
    He pulled me down on the grass and rolled over on top of me. “You’re so beautiful, Bea. Your hair, oh your hair.” He studied it, seemed mesmerized by it. “And your body, your skin—so beautiful, like a frothy caramel cappuccino.” He kissed my neck. His tongue flickered in my ear. “So sweet,” he purred, kissing my lips. His hands moved under my cropped madras top, and he caressed my bare belly. He fingered the hand-painted ivy on the thighs of my jeans, and slowly, ever so slowly, started unzipping them.
    “Marcus, we should stop—”
    But he covered my mouth with his hand and quoted Jack Kerouac: “‘A pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world.’”
    I dissolved into the words even though I had no idea what they meant. We were oblivious of time, oblivious of the sudden rainstorm. And, with our sweaty bodies entwined, we fell into a deep, thick-as-molasses sleep.
    “Help. Help me,” I heard. “Help, please…”
    A voice. A weak, tortured voice breaking through theheavy fog in my head. A voice of a girl. “Could it be me?” I asked myself in my stupor. “Am I calling for help? Why would I be calling for help?”
    I rolled over to my side and tried to make out where the voice was coming from.
    “Marcus, I think someone needs help,” I slurred. But I didn’t see him, couldn’t find him. He wasn’t by me anymore. “Marcus? Marcus, where are you?”
    I heard faint, hoarse coughs, a slight moan, I thought, over beyond the bridge, down toward the orchid conservatory, and I tried to crawl, in slow motion, it seemed, to the voice. I managed to drag my heavy-limbed, hallucinating body two feet, then fell back into the damp, sleepy grass, and the voice stopped—dead.
    I awoke at dusk with my phone ringing. Unread text messages buzzed, disturbing the peaceful surroundings. Sirens wailed in the not-so-far distance.
    “Turn that thing off.” Marcus was back, lying next to me.
    My phone buzzed again. “Shit. What’s going on, anyway?”
    I squinted my eyes and read the text from my mom.

    “Marcus. Marcus, wake up.” I shook him. I shook him hard.
    “Easy, easy. What’s going on?” he grumbled.
    “Someone was killed here today—here at the Arb. A girl.”
    And I remembered. Her voice rushed back to me, her pleading words. “I heard her cry for help. I thought I was dreaming. And I couldn’t find you, Marcus.”
    “Shit. Are the cops here?”
    “I could have helped her. She was alive. She was. She can’t be dead. I heard her.”
    “You were hallucinating—tripping on the ’shrooms, Bea.”
    “You think that was it? You heard things, too? Voices?”
    “We gotta get out of