A Hundred Hours of Night Read online

  I discover that there’s one advantage to dragging a drunk guy up three flights of stairs: It’s a great way to warm up. It’s been a long time since another body was so close to mine. My dad hasn’t been allowed to touch me for years. My mom’s never liked the feeling of anyone else’s skin against her own.

  And then, halfway up the second flight of stairs, I suddenly have an idea. What if this crazy drunken boy has a guest room?

  It’s insane and I know it. Normally, I wouldn’t even dream of sleeping at a strange guy’s place. Well, at Seth’s, yeah, but that was different. Seth’s even more awkward and shy than me, plus he’s got an eleven-year-old sister. Staying with a big brother is fine.

  But the person who’s hanging around my neck right now doesn’t seem at all shy. He looks like a rich guy who’s fallen on hard times, and he curses like the heroes in American movies. From the point of view of a potential houseguest, he actually has just one thing going for him: He’s only semiconscious.

  It’s not much, I admit. But the streets of New York are bitter tonight. And how badly can you be assaulted by someone who’s keeling over?

  After three steep flights of stairs we’re standing in front of a mint-green door.

  “Not my choice of color,” he says as I turn the key in the lock. “I took over the room from a friend of mine.”

  He heads inside, but I stand in the doorway. I didn’t know jaws really could drop in surprise.

  In the middle of the room is a double mattress piled up with blankets. And that’s the full extent of the furnishings. Literally. No chairs. No table. No closets. Just brown linoleum, bare walls, and a lumpy ceiling with water spots and a lightbulb hanging from a wire.

  “He gave me the mattress too.” He kicks off his shoes. “Had no time to get anything else yet. And, of course, no money.”

  He throws his jacket on the floor, pulls the bloodstained T-shirt over his head, and drops his pants. I stare at the ceiling, but can’t help noticing the smiling Cookie Monster on his boxer shorts.

  “Where’s my phone?” he mumbles. He picks up his pants. “I need to set the alarm. Those fuckers at the hospital say I might have a concussion. Because I crashed to the floor when I saw all that blood.” He sighs. “They said my mom has to wake me up every two hours tonight.”

  I raise my eyebrows. “So where’s your mom?”

  “At home, in Detroit.”

  “Did you tell that to your doctor?”

  “None of his business. Why should I tell some asshole where my mom lives?”

  He lies down on the thin mattress, places the bandaged hand on his chest, and pulls a blanket over himself. I stand in the doorway, looking at him. His eyes are almost closed.

  “And what if you’re unconscious two hours from now?” I ask. “Then you won’t even hear your phone.”

  “Oh yes,” he says drowsily. “Then I’m screwed. Oh well, nothing I can do about that.”

  The bare lightbulb throws a pale light on his face. In one corner of the room is a cardboard box full of clothes. In the other is a stack of fifth-hand books.

  I’m so tired that I’m almost falling over, but I need to think.

  That mattress was probably already there when dinosaurs were roaming New York. God knows how filthy it is. God knows what could fall onto your face while you’re sleeping here. And God alone knows how many cockroaches there are …

  I want to turn around and race back down all those stairs. But if I can’t sleep for a few hours, soon I won’t be capable of doing anything at all. And there’s another thing. This stranger is on painkillers and beer, and he just fainted not so long ago. He could end up in a coma tonight.

  I’m still hesitating. I weigh the cold against the bacteria. The sidewalk against a double mattress with a half-naked boy on it.

  And then I think about my parents. I picture their faces. My dad with the wrinkles across his forehead like lines on a graph. My mom with her gray-green eyes that look straight through everyone and everything.

  How about that? Those pathetic swamp dwellers think I’ve run away to Frankfurt, but I’m really in New York. This is most definitely a good thing.

  But it could be even better.

  They think that right now I’m safe inside Klara’s spotless little apartment. But one day I’ll tell them I spent my first night in New York lying next to a half-drunk, almost completely naked, blood-spattered boy on an ancient mattress in a moldy room in the middle of the city.

  I’m looking forward to it already.

  When an unfamiliar ringtone wakes me up at three fifteen in the morning, I lie there, frozen.

  I really did it. I stayed and I slept beside him. And no one in the world knows where I am. He could murder me and dissolve my body in hydrochloric acid without anyone noticing.

  There are no curtains, so I can vaguely see him. The cell phone beside him is still ringing, but he’s just lying there, motionless.

  I have to reach over him to grab the phone.

  “Are you awake?” I whisper. He smells of beer. And coconut.

  He mumbles something.

  “Do you know what city we’re in?”

  “New York,” he says hoarsely.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Jim.”

  And suddenly he sits upright. “What the … ?” He stares at me.

  “Sorry,” I whisper. “I stayed the night. I was going to tell you, but you were already asleep by then.”

  “So you just lay down beside me in bed?” He shakes his head. “I could sue you for indecent assault.”

  “I’ve still got all my clothes on!”

  “But I don’t.” He lies back down. “Just make sure you stay on your own side. I don’t like girls in my bed.” And then he’s asleep again.

  • • •

  I’m boiling hot when I hear the alarm again two hours later. As soon as I turn it off, I hear him groaning.

  “Jesus, this hurts.”

  “Your four-fingered hand?”

  “Like it’s exploding. And then imploding. And then bursting apart all over again. Seriously, I … ” He makes a noise that sounds a lot like a whimper.

  “Didn’t the hospital give you any painkillers?” I ask quietly.

  “God yes, and antibiotics! Cost a fucking fortune. But they said I couldn’t do without them.”

  I feel dizzy when I stand up. I turn on the light, squint through my half-shut eyelids, and search the pockets of his leather jacket. I find two boxes of pills and read the instructions on the front.

  “There’s some Coke on the floor in the corner,” he says gruffly.

  I hand him the half-full bottle and an orange pill and try not to notice how good-looking he is. At school, the boys who look like that are the worst of all. And every single one of them is friends with Juno. Last week their posts online actually made me vomit.

  • • •

  “Jim!” I whisper two hours later. “How old are you?”

  “Seventeen,” he mumbles without opening his eyes. “And it doesn’t matter what you say. If I want to move to New York, then I will. I don’t have to go to school. I hate it there.”

  “I know what you mean,” I say.

  He opens his eyes. “Jesus!” His blond hair is sticking to his forehead. “I thought you were my mom.”

  It’s starting to get light outside. I can tell it’s already midday in the Netherlands, because I’m finding it harder to sleep. I was just dreaming about Jim. So it’s pretty weird to wake up and to still be lying in bed beside him.

  He turns onto his back. “All those adults have made such a fucking mess of things. And now I’m supposed to go to school forever and ever so I can learn how to keep their fiasco going? Yeah, right!”

  I don’t answer. I know all about fiascoes, but that doesn’t matter right now. I listen to his breathing, which slowly becomes deeper again.

  When I was little, and Mom was away, I was allowed to sleep in the big bed with my dad. He didn’t like fairy t
ales, so before we went to sleep, he told me about things that were true. About the rings of Saturn. About air balloons, steam engines, and barometers. And about Benjamin Franklin, who flew a kite in a storm to catch the lightning.

  • • •

  Another hour later, I’m too hungry to keep sleeping. I get up and go looking for the bathroom. A shower’s not an option, not with how hairy and filthy it is, but the bandage on my hand really needs to be changed. It can’t wait any longer. With trembling hands, I clean the wound with disinfectant and two types of iodine.

  In a way, I have to admit, the cut isn’t that bad. It’s not light-years deep. And it doesn’t really look inflamed either.

  • • •

  “Jim?”

  He groans.

  “I’m going to get breakfast. I’m taking your keys, okay?”

  He doesn’t answer. I take that to mean, Great. How very kind and thoughtful!

  Slowly, I walk down the stairs. Just the act of lifting my legs, thinking, looking around—there’s something unreal about it all. My body is dirtier than it’s ever been. My last shower was thirty-three hours ago, and I spent the night in a human-size rats’ nest. But the situation is not entirely hopeless. Because I got through the darkness without the police. I haven’t been dissolved in hydrochloric acid. And for the first time in my life I slept next to a boy.

  The boy in question was an almost unconscious, nine-fingered high-school dropout who could sue me today for sexual assault. But if I can forget about that for a moment, it’s going to make a great story for my friends.

  That is, if I still have any friends. They didn’t send me any threats over the past few days, not like the others. But they didn’t do anything to help either.

  • • •

  As soon as I open the front door of Jim’s building, a cold wind blasts my face. Dark and pale gray clouds ripple across the morning sky. I button up my coat and look around. Where can I find food as quickly as possible?

  Then I spot the girl.

  She’s sitting on the steps in front of Seth’s door, exactly where I was sitting last night with my teeth chattering. There’s a chain around her neck, fastened to the stair railing with a shiny lock, and a piece of cardboard on the ground in front of her pink rain boots. I cross the street.

  I look silently at her. So this is Seth’s sister. Her eyes are the color of melted chocolate and she’s almost as skinny as her brother.

  “Hey, I was just thinking,” she says, as if she’s known me for years. “Justin Bieber and James Bond and SpongeBob and God are all men.” She stops. “No, maybe SpongeBob isn’t quite a man … But he’s certainly a boy sponge. That’s not very fair, is it?”

  Even though she’s chained up, she’s moving constantly. She twists the end of her dark braid around her finger, scuffs her pink boots across the ground, and I notice that her face can smile and look serious all at the same time.

  “Would you like to be a man?” she asks.

  “No,” I say immediately.

  “Why not?”

  “Men are dirty.”

  She nods. “I get it. You’re gay. That’s okay. Same-sex marriage is allowed here in New York. Everything’s possible here.”

  “No, I’m not a lesbian,” I say. “I just like things to be clean.”

  She frowns. “So what are you going to do? You can’t get married to someone you think is dirty, can you? They’ll say to your husband, ‘You may now kiss the bride,’ and you’ll just go, ‘Eeeww!’ ”

  “You’re right. That could be a problem.”

  Before Abby’s had time to come up with a solution, the front door opens.

  I know he lives here, of course, but it still feels weird to see Seth in the doorway again, the boy I spent so long waiting for last night.

  He looks even more serious today than yesterday, but perhaps that’s because now I’m comparing him to Jim.

  “Hey, Seth,” I say. I want him to think that it’s completely normal for me to be standing here on his steps whenever he opens the front door.

  But he ignores me. He looks at the chain around Abby’s neck and, with one leap, he’s down the steps. His eyes fly across the sign at her feet. Without saying a word, he picks up the cardboard from the sidewalk and rips it into pieces.

  “Hey, watch it!” yells Abby. “Remember the Constitution! The First Amendment says we can say and write whatever we want. We did it last week at school.”

  But Seth is clearly not thinking about the Constitution. He grabs her arm and shakes it. “ ‘My brother’s keeping me prisoner’? Do you really want people to call the police? Then I’ll have to explain that Mom had to go to San Francisco and we’re alone all weekend. And then they’ll take you away.”

  “Ouch, don’t tug at me!” she says angrily. “I’m all chained up. Can’t you see?”

  “Then undo the lock!” He lets go of her arm and takes a step back. “Where’s the key?”

  “I don’t have it,” says Abby. “I was going to swallow it, but I couldn’t get it to go down. So I threw it away.”

  “You threw it away?” asks Seth. “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, you know. I just threw it away,” she says. “Over there somewhere.” She waves her hand vaguely in the direction of the other side of the street.

  I do my best not to laugh. As far as I’m concerned, eleven is actually a perfect age.

  “I’ll help you look,” I say in a serious voice.

  Seth and I cross the narrow street and silently begin our search operation.

  “So how do you two know each other?” Abby calls from the stoop. She’s following our efforts with great interest.

  As my eyes roam over the sidewalk and the road, I tell her about the room that didn’t exist.

  “Seriously?” she asks. “And Seth just told you there are plenty of hotels around here?” She gives her brother a look of disgust. “Children aren’t allowed to rent hotel rooms—you know that, don’t you? I tried it when I ran away last year. And it didn’t work.”

  He mumbles something.

  “So where did you sleep last night?” Abby calls over to me.

  I point at the off-white building. “Over there, at Jim’s. I met him on the street in the middle of the night. He’d been injured and I made sure he didn’t end up in a coma. But now I have to find somewhere else as soon as possible, because Jim has a bathroom full of bugs and a mattress stuffed with woolly mammoth hair.”

  Seth looks at me for the first time today. “You slept in a strange guy’s bed last night?”

  “Yeah. After you abandoned me on the street, it seemed like a pretty safe option.”

  “But that’s perfect,” cries Abby. She’s dancing up and down on the sidewalk. The chain lies forgotten at her feet. “You can stay with us. Mom’s not here and her room is superclean.”

  “You’re not chained up at all!” Seth stares at her.

  She nods. “I only had one padlock. So I could fasten the chain to the stairs, but not around my neck.”

  I can see Seth doesn’t want me around, and that’s a pain.

  “There’s no need, really,” I say. “I can sleep at Jim’s again.”

  “Of course you can’t,” he snaps. “You’re staying with us. Didn’t you have a ridiculously huge suitcase with you yesterday?”

  I don’t answer. He should try packing his entire life into a box. And last night I managed to drag that “ridiculously huge suitcase” up three steep flights of stairs all on my own. If you can carry a suitcase by yourself, it can’t be that big.

  “I’ll be back in a minute,” I say.

  I open Jim’s front door and head inside. But halfway up the first flight of stairs I stop. I turn around.

  “Seriously?” I say. “You’re both coming up there with me?”

  “I may be only eleven,” says Abby, “but it so happens that I like meeting new boys. Especially wounded ones.”

  “What about you?” I ask Seth.

  “Safety precaution,�
� he says.

  As he stands there, with his skinny arms and serious eyes, part of me wants to laugh at him—and part of me doesn’t.

  On the stairs, the paint is flaking off the walls and it smells like seaweed. I can hear people yelling on the second floor and there’s music thumping away on the floor above.

  “He’s probably still asleep,” I whisper when we’re standing in front of the mint-green door. “It must have been a pretty serious injury. I don’t know what happened, but he’s only got nine fingers left.”

  “Oh, that’s so supersad!” But Abby looks like she’s just heard it’s her birthday tomorrow. “How old is this Jim, by the way?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “Seth’s sixteen,” says Abby enthusiastically. She looks at her brother. “Mom’s always saying you don’t have enough friends, isn’t she? Maybe you can be friends with Jim!”

  Seth glares at her but doesn’t say anything.

  Cautiously, I open the door. A warm fug of sleepiness hits me in the face.

  Jim is awake. He’s sitting up in bed with my suitcase next to him.

  The suitcase is open.

  All around Jim, on the filthy mattress and the poop-brown linoleum, my clothes lie scattered. My pale pink bra is on top of a clump of blond hair. My wonderful sleeping bag is covered in dust bunnies. Three pairs of underpants are strung beside a few moldy crusts in a pizza box and my favorite sweater is half across Jim’s hairy leg and half across a lump in the Cookie Monster.

  I feel as if my head’s about to short-circuit.

  “Ah,” says Jim. “So you’re back? I woke up and didn’t know what the hell was going on. You’d taken off with my keys, and just left that shitty suitcase behind.”

  It’s like looking through a microscope. With absolute clarity, I can see my clothes lying on the floor. And everything else is black.

  “How about we put everything back into the suitcase?” I hear Abby ask. “I’ll help.”

  And that’s when I start screaming. I’m out of breath and completely hysterical. I can hear what I sound like, but there’s nothing I can do about it.