The Deadly Sister by Eliot Schrefer Page A

locker combo.
    The locker was virtually empty; obviously, Mr. Duarte wasn’t aware of precisely how rarely Maya had been coming into Xavier High this year. There was an actual dust bunny inside, along with a Manic Panic carton, three sporks, and some loose-leaf paper. And, wedged into the backside of the vent, a note folded into a football.
    I unfolded it with trembling fingers.
    Three lines only:
M ONDAY , M AY 13th
    5:00
    30 L ANGDELL , #40
    That address again.

13.
    I mapped the address on my phone as I drove. I would be heading to a downtown apartment complex just around the corner from Medusa’s Den. I realized as I approached that it actually was Medusa’s Den: the building had entrances on two streets. I bypassed the humming halogen storefront and walked up to a bent tin door, countless layers of paint over countless layers of graffiti. When I rapped my knuckles against it, the door eased open.
    A guy was shooting up in the stairwell. He was older, sinewy, someone you’d expect to see in an apron smoking at the back door of a restaurant. I wasn’t shocked as much as embarrassed that I’d intruded on a private moment. I said, “Oh, I’m so sorry,” and backed out the door, then wondered at myself as I stood paralyzed on the stoop. I’d apologized for invading a junkie’s personal space. How unequipped was I for the directions my life was heading?
    “Hey, are you okay?” a woman’s voice said. I turned and saw the most handsome woman I’d ever seen. Not handsome, like they call the women men overlook in Jane Austen novels, but a really cute guy wrapped into a woman. Tank top, triceps popping from the strain of carrying a canvasgrocery bag, biceps tattooed with barbed wire. Long blonde hair yanked into a ponytail.
    “Yeah, I’m fine,” I mumbled.
    She nodded and pushed open the door, then saw the junkie. There was a stream of curses and protests in Spanish as she hurled the guy out on the street. I had to press myself against the railing to avoid him.
    The woman stood next to me on the stoop and watched the guy hobble away. “Never again,” she yelled after him. “ Never again, do you hear? You’re shut off!” She turned to me. “I’m sorry, did he bump you on the way out?” Something about how she’d phrased her own question pleased her, and she smiled.
    I shook my head. She looked at me quizzically. “I’m going to go out on a limb and say that someone probably sent you to me.”
    I shook my head again. My heart raced—she was about to ask what I was doing there, and I hadn’t prepared a reason.
    She looked into me, frank and disbelieving. “Okay, yeah,” I lied. “Maya sent me.”
    She nodded sharply and started upstairs. “Come on up, then.”
    I stepped over the used needle in the stairwell and followed her up to the fourth floor. As she opened the door and ushered me in, I hesitated. It seemed like a really dumb thing to do, to enter some drug den as cheerfully asGoldilocks. Especially when I hadn’t really settled on my lie for being there. But if I didn’t go in, I couldn’t get to the bottom of this woman’s connection to Maya.
    The whole place looked familiar. Walls white and shiny. Furniture obscured by clothes and magazines. Crowded, just so extremely inhabited, almost pleasant in its chaos. The total opposite of my home. “Do you want a drink or something?” the woman asked.
    “No, thanks,” I said, placing myself on the edge of the couch as she unloaded groceries. We were in Keith’s apartment; we’d entered on the opposite side.
    “How’s Keith?” I asked.
    She paused, a jar of grape jelly in her hand. “I didn’t know you’d met Keith.”
    I shrugged, just the way I thought Maya would have. “Well, you know.”
    “So, why did Maya send you?” she asked. “She got the note I had a runner stick in her locker, I guess?”
    “You know, it’s not the easiest time for her.” I was worried—how much longer could I stay evasive? But I wasn’t sure exactly