Chapter One
“Are you all right, sir?”
I look up at the voice. A bellboy smiles cheerily at me. He has no idea who I am or what I’ve been through, yet he has the nerve to smile. It’s been nineteen days since Isis Blake forgot about me, and he has the nerve to ask if I’m all right.
I light another cigarette.
“Get out of my face.”
His expression falls, and he backs away. “S-Sure. Have a nice night.”
I scoff and lean against a pillar of the grand marble roundabout of the Hilton. I watch ridiculously fancy black cars shuttle in and out, dropping off equally puffed-up old rich people. Bellboys and concierges scurry around, calling taxis and directing valets. Revolving glass doors with gold accents constantly whir and hiss over the mindless chatter. Women shriek with laughter, men guffaw; all of them are oblivious, happy idiots. I can see the truth in their clothes and posture—five of the men are cheating on their wives. Two of them with far younger women, one of them exclusively with prostitutes. He not-so-subtly taps the ass of a passing blonde in a peacoat. She hides her grimace with an actress’s grace. When she sees me, she clips over in her heels with a mildly happier smile.
“Jaden! Oh my God! It’s been forever!”
“Three months, Lily,” I correct. Jaden is the name I use for my escorting work, and I’ve never let the other escorts I’ve met in passing know my real name.
“Three months, forever, same difference.” She laughs. Perfume wafts off her, the expensive, strong kind. The kind you buy when you have to cover up the pervasive smell of sex.
“Finished with work?” I ask, and jerk my head at the man still watching her lecherously, his wife oblivious and clinging to his arm.
Lily sighs. “Yeah, for the night. I’m about to head back to my place. What about you?”
“Mayor’s daughter.” I motion to my tuxedo. “Winter ball.”
“Bet you were the hottest guy there.”
“It was a Catholic girls’ school.”
“And the hottest guy she’ll ever have.”
Lily is just a few years older than me, but she’s been in the Rose Club far longer. Lily isn’t her real name, just like Jaden isn’t mine. I don’t know her in real life, and she doesn’t know me. But sometimes we work in the same hotels, and she’s one of the few girls in the Rose Club who isn’t annoyingly vapid. So we talk.
“Seriously.” Lily elbows me. “I’ve seen her. She looks like an inbred Pomeranian on her best days.”
“Now now.” I blow smoke into the sky. “Let’s not be nasty. She paid good money. And I respect and appreciate money.”
Lily watches my face carefully as she waits for a taxi to cycle past. She knits her thin brows.
“What about your own prom?” she asks.
“What about it?”
“Are you going to that? Do you have a girlfriend? Or a date?”
I took Sophia to my junior prom. Sophia, the hospital-ridden girl I’d known since middle school—my first infatuation and first real friend. But it’s not Sophia who pops into my head right now. An image grows strong of Isis, dressed up in some silk dress. Red? Or blue? Purple, probably, to match her hair. She’d dance and drink and start at least four fights. It would be awful. It would be hilarious. I smirk at the thought, but it quickly fades. She’s in the hospital, too. And thanks to that scumbag called her mother’s boyfriend, she doesn’t remember me anymore. It’s been almost three weeks since she asked who I was, with that blithe smile on, and only now have I really started to believe it.
“No. I’m not going to the senior one. It’s pointless. I’m graduating in five months, anyway. High school barely matters anymore.”
She plucks the cigarette from my lips and grinds it under her heel. “When did you start smoking?”
“When did you decide to start mothering me?” I ask.
“It’s not good for you.”
“Neither is sex work.”
Lily glowers. “Escorting. And we both have our reasons for doing that. You don’t have a reason to smoke. Unless you want to die early and painfully.”
“And if I did, it would be none of your business.”
Lily flinches, as if I’d slapped her. She hails a passing cab, then pauses in its open door to look back at me.
“You’re one of us, Jaden,” she murmurs. “Society looks down on us. Customers objectify us. All we have is each other. So it is my business.” She pulls out her Rose Club card—white with pale gold stripes—and hands it to me. “If you ever need anything, or if you wanna talk, call me.”
She’s gone before I can throw it back at her, gone before the gaping chasm in my chest has the chance to bleed. I shake it off. I’m Jack Hunter. No one makes me bleed.
Except one girl, at a party, nearly five months ago.
I light another cigarette to cover the stench of weakness emanating from me. The women at the hotel’s entrance are eyeing me. If I so much as blink in their direction, they’ll accost me, flirting with tired tactics and worn eagerness. They are just as bad as the men. They covet things that look nice. And when they can’t have what they covet, they squabble, quickly turning on each other in sickening displays of predatory possessiveness.
I consider throwing Lily’s card in a nearby puddle. She has no idea what I’m going through. I have no idea what I’m going through. She can’t help me. Besides, her help is offered solely because she has designs on me. Even an idiot can see that much.
Not everything with a vagina likes you, dipshit!
I whirl around at the sound of the voice. It’s so clear, so perfectly loud and obnoxious, that it has to be her. But no purple streaks bob out of the crowd to greet me. No warm brown eyes crinkle with a smirk.
I fall against the pillar again and laugh, putting my head in my hands as reality slips through my fingers. Get it together, Jack Hunter. You’re going to Harvard in seven months. Your mother is waiting for you to come home now. Sophia is counting on you. Her surgery is imminent. You can’t go crazy. People are depending on you. You have a life to live, and no matter how much you wish on stars, no matter how much you bargain with God or with the doctors, that life does not include Isis Blake any longer. You’re a stranger to her.
The hole she burned in the ice must be filled.
There is no warmth anymore. You barely tasted it, barely felt it on your skin. It brushed against you for a single second. Something so small should not retain this much weight. It is illogical. You are illogical for letting it affect you so much.
There is no warmth, Jack Hunter. Not for the likes of you.
You have blood on your hands. You have duty, and guilt, and you can’t escape that. No one can help you escape.
Not even her.
“Jaden!” A shrill voice makes me look up. Cynthia, the mayor’s daughter, waves me over to the limo. Her dark hair is over-curled and looks ridiculous. Her pink dress is too tight and too bright. Her circle of simpering friends have dropped off their purses and retouched their makeup, and now they’re on their way to an after-party. We’re on our way. I’m being paid to be one of them, after all.
I stub my cigarette out and put on my best smile.
My life has become a series of people asking me if I’m better.
Except I’m sitting in a hospital bed with a massive bandage around my head like a turban. So no, I’m not better.
But people keep asking anyway because it’s how you show concern for someone you care about, I guess, but frankly a giant box of chocolate truffles and reign over a small kingdom would be acceptable stand-ins.
No school. No home. All I do is sit in bed all day and watch crappy soap operas in which people faint dramatically all the time. Like, damn. That shit’s an epidemic. I get so bored I try to mimic their faints, except the nurses catch me and say stuff like “you have a head injury” and “contrary to popular belief, the floor is hard” or some nonsense, so nobody can blame me when I steal the nearest wheelchair and bolt down the hall at top speed.
“Good evening, chaps!” I nod at two interns. They shoot each other looks, but before they can call security, I’m blazing around the corner.
“Bloody good weather we’re having!” I smile at a man sitting in his bed as I pass his open room. He cheerily returns my greeting with a resounding, “Go to hell!”
I round the next corner and come face to face with Naomi, my nurse. Her hair’s back in a strict bun, her face angry and worried and tired all at the same time. I don’t know how she manages to look a million years’ worth of tired and still keep up with me, but she does it well.
“’Ello, love. Fancy a cuppa?”
“You’re not British, Isis,” Naomi says flatly.
“I can be things,” I insist.
“Yes, well, unless those things include a person who is lying in bed recuperating, I don’t want to see them. And I especially don’t want to see them wheeling around the hospital like a madman.”
“The madman is back that way.” I jerk my thumb behind me. As if to prove it, a loud “FUCK!” reverberates. Naomi narrows her eyes and points at my room.
“Back in bed. Now.”
“Why you gotta be like that?” I sigh. “We can work this out. There can be bribes. Of the monetary kind. Or maybe not monetary. Do you like adventures? I’m full of those. I can give you at least nine adventures.”
“You’ve already given me one for the day. If you don’t get back in bed, I won’t let Sophia in after her checkup.”
I gasp. “You wouldn’t!”
“I would!”
I stand up and start to faint dramatically, but she catches me with her meaty arms and plops me in the wheelchair, pushing me back to my room. I grumble the entire way. In the doorway, I crawl out on my hands and knees and fake sob, collapsing into bed.
“Oh, quiet, you drama queen,” Naomi chides and closes the door behind her.
“Drama empress!” I yell. “I prefer the title empress!”
My room’s quiet. Too quiet. I huff and cross my arms and blow bangs out of my face. I need a haircut. And an escape plan. But looking fabulous while escaping is somewhat required, so I’m putting one before the other.
I grab my phone and text Sophia.
DEAD PROTEIN IS TRYING TO EAT MY EYES. BRING THE SHARP POINTY THING.
Her text comes seconds later.
You mean the thing you threatened that male nurse’s balls with?
I sigh contentedly at the reminder of my own past brilliance. I’m so lucky to be me.
Yes. That.
She sends one smiley face: :-)
Sophia and I are the youngest people in this hospital, discounting the kids’ ward, and they don’t let you in there unless you’re a doctor or a parent or you have permission, which is really hard to get. Which is why I use the windows. I hate Jell-O and it’s all they give you at meals, so I hoard it and give it to the kids like a gelatin-laden Santa, and it’s a big hit. Not so much with the nurses. And security officers. Regardless, Sophia and I make sense. Since the day we met at lunch a few weeks ago and I gave her my apple, I’ve felt like I’ve known her forever. Being with her is like a massive, run-on déjà vu. When she first told me her name, I blurted, “Oh! You’re Sophia!” like it was a huge revelation. She asked me what I meant by that, and I searched long and hard in my own sizable brain and couldn’t find a reason. I’d just said it, without thinking, and I didn’t really know why. I still don’t know why. I don’t know a lot of things anymore, and it frustrates me, but it’s not easy to maintain frustration when all people ask of you is to sit in bed and eat all day.
Besides that tiny bump in the road, she and I have been getting along famously. You can tell because A) she hasn’t run away crying yet, and B) she always ends her texts to me with a smiley. Only people who like you do that. Or people who want to secretly murder you. But really, I don’t think someone as delicate and beautiful as Sophia would want to murder someone, unless she wanted to be, like, beautiful and delicate and bloodthirsty, which, I’m not gonna lie, would add to her considerable mystique—
“Isis,” Sophia says from the doorway. “You’re thinking out loud again.”
I whirl to face her. She’s in a floral sundress, with a thick, cozy-looking sweater. Her platinum hair is kept thin and long, like strands of silver. Her milk-white skin practically glows. To offset all her paleness, her eyes are ocean-deep and navy-dark. In one hand she carries a book, and in the other—
“Scissors!” I crow. “Okay, okay, deep breaths everyone. Because I’m about to say something mildly life-changing.”
Sophia inhales and holds it. I point at her.
“You’re going to cut my bangs!”
She exhales and fist-pumps. “I’ll chop them all off.”
“Soph, soapy Soph soapbutt, we have only been together three weeks and I love you dearly, like a sister, like we are deer-sisters frolicking in the woods together, but this is extremely vital to my well-being and I am trusting you with my life.”
“Ah, I see.” Sophia sits on my bed, giving me an understanding nod. “You keep all your vital organs in your bangs.”
“As well as all my future prospects with Tom Hiddleston. So you realize how important this is to me.”
“Obviously.”
“I am quite serious.”
“Deadly.”
“It’s not like you can make me look any less hot, since that is impossible, but generally speaking—don’t fuck up.”
I’m not hot, definitely not compared to someone like Sophia, but it’s the bravado that counts. She runs her fingers through my wild bangs.
“Straight across?”
“Uh, you’re the fashion expert here. I just sort of throw on things that don’t have holes in them and hope for the best. I read a Cosmo once on the toilet. Does that count?”
“Depends on how long you were on the toilet.” Sophia experimentally brushes my bangs with her fingers.
“Years. They talked about face shapes. Like, do I have a square face? A heart-shaped face?”
“Definitely heart-shaped.”
“Really? Because I was thinking more that-one-unfortunately-misshapen-Skittle-in-the-bottom-of-the-box shape.”
Sophia laughs. “Just hold still and close your eyes. I promise I won’t disfigure you for life.”
There are the soft sounds of snipping and the feel of Sophia’s gentle fingers, and then she tells me to open my eyes. I leap out of bed and dash into the bathroom. The age-stained hospital mirror reflects a short-banged girl, her slightly faded purple streaks gracing her forehead. A single bandage wraps around the base of her skull and up to the top of her head, like a headband, and leaves the rest of her head open. She looks tired, old. Her face contains two volcanic eruptions on her chin, one on her nose, and bags under her eyes that would make Coach jealous. And something’s wrong. Something deep inside the girl is wrong.
Ugly.
“What’s the matter? Don’t like it?” Sophia comes up behind me. In the mirror, she practically radiates pale, waifish beauty, and I’m…
“No, I love it. You did great. Fab. Nothing’s wrong! Absolutely zero. Absolute zero. It’s kind of chilly in here, isn’t it?”
I run back to the bed and burrito myself in the blankets. Sophia follows, sighing.
“If you don’t like it, you don’t have to lie.”
“No, I do! Shit, I really do. Sorry. It’s not that, it’s…other stuff. Stuff from before I came here.”
“Ah.” She settles on the foot of my bed. “The hard stuff. The stuff the hospitals can’t heal.”
I nod. Sophia’s gaze isn’t piercing, but something about it has weight, gravity, like she’s decades older than she seems. I haven’t told her about Nameless, mostly because she doesn’t need to know when she already looks so sad all the time. Nameless was my first and last crush back in Florida, and he ruined me in ways that serrated my heart for good.
Sophia hasn’t told me anything about her past, either, and it’s better that way. I can tell she’s had it worse than me. Sniffing out tragedy is sort of my entire deal.
“Was it a boy?” she asks finally. Was it a boy? Or was it a monster? I still don’t have the answer to that, so I say the easy thing.
“Yeah.”
She folds her hands over each other, like a dainty lady, and for the billionth time I’m reminded of how mature she is compared to me. The nurses gossip about her; the way she’s been in the hospital for five years, the way she has no family—her mother and father died in a tragic “accident,” and her grandmother raised her, but she passed a few years ago, leaving Sophia all alone in the world. Mostly they gossip about the boy who comes to visit her, Jack, the same guy who happened to see our house door open and saved Mom and me from Leo. He wasn’t quick enough to stop Leo from flinging me into a wall and cracking my skull open, but he was quick enough to save Mom, and that’s all that matters.
Infuriatingly good-looking, and an infuriatingly Good Samaritan, Jack apparently visits Sophia a lot. But since I got here, apparently he hasn’t visited her at all. He’s sent letters to Sophia (Letters! In this day and age!), but he hasn’t come personally. The nurses love to gossip about that, too. I scream politely from across the room correct them whenever I can; I don’t know him! He barely knows me! I’m indebted to him, sure, but there’s nothing going on and there never will be because duh, all boys who aren’t Hollywood actors with prestigious superhero careers are gross!
“I’m sorry,” I blurt.
“For what?”
“For your boyfriend. He’s…he’s stopped coming around since I got here, and if it’s because of me, I’m sorry, and I know that’s arrogant to think, but the nurses blab and I can’t help but think—”
She pats my hand and smiles. “Shhh. It’s okay. They don’t know anything. He’s just busy. He works a lot, and he has school.”
“I have school,” I grumble.
She plops the book she brought down on my lap. “That’s right! And you have two acts of The Crucible to read if you wanna catch up before you go back next week!”
I contemplate seppuku, but after remembering how big the medical bill for a cracked head is, I refrain. Mom’s having a hard enough time paying without adding spilled organs and general death to the list. Besides, I can’t die yet. I still gotta thank Jack properly. Dying before you pay someone back for saving your mom is just plain rude.
“I don’t wanna go back to school,” I say.
“Yes you do.”
“I totally do. It’s a snoozefest in this place.”
“Then we’d better get reading.” Sophia smiles. I groan and roll over, and she starts reading aloud. She enjoys torturing me. Or she’s just happy to have someone here with her. I can’t decide which. We might get along great, but she’s still a huge mystery to me. Me! The queen empress of deducing what people are all about! I study her face, her hands, her dress as she reads. Everyone in the hospital knows Sophia, but no one knows what she has, exactly, except her doctor. The nurses don’t like to talk about it. I asked Naomi, and she glared and told me it was under doctor-patient confidentiality. Sometimes Sophia stays in her room for “treatments,” and those last for days. She doesn’t limp or cough or vomit, and no bandages or stitches are on her. Except for the fact that she’s so pale and thin and sometimes complains she has migraines, she’s perfectly healthy as far as I can see.
“Soph,” I interrupt. She looks up.
“Yeah?”
“I know this might be super invasive, and historically, invading has been pretty bad overall, but I don’t think I can physically contain my curiosity any longer. Or, I could. But I’d like, implode the star system from the stress.”
She laughs. “It’s okay, Isis. You can ask whatever you want.”
“Why are you in the hospital?”
Sophia slowly closes the book. “You really don’t remember, do you?”
“Remember what?”
Her eyes dampen with sorrow. She stares out the window for a long time before sighing.
“What?” I insist. “What is it?”
Sophia looks back at me. “Oh, nothing. It’s just sad, is all. I’m sad for him. He was so happy, for a while. No—it was more than happiness. It was like he was alive again, with that fire in his eyes.”
I wrinkle my nose, and before I can explode with the demand for answers, Sophia starts talking again.
“I have the same thing you have.” She taps her head with one finger. My mouth makes a little O.
“You…split your head open like a melon, too?”
She laughs, the sound like bells made of crystal. “Something like that. Our heads are equally broken. Maybe not in the same ways, but broken all the same.”
I look over at the bag she brought. A bunch of romance books crowd it, various clones of Fabio flashing their brooding frowns on every cover as a scantily dressed female is in the inevitable process of fainting on a rock somewhere nearby, preferably directly beneath his crotch.
“Why do you even like those? Aren’t there just like, princesses and kissing and misogyny?” I wrinkle my nose.
Sophia shrugs. “I don’t know. I like the princesses.”
“They’ve got great dresses and fabulous hair and loads of money. Kind of hard not to like ’em.”
“I suppose I like the way the stories always end happily. Since…since I know my story won’t end as happily.”
My heart twists around in my chest. She sounds so sure of herself.
“H-Hey! Don’t talk like that. You…you’re the closest thing I’ve ever met to a princess. Like, a real-life one. Minus the tuberculosis and intermarrying. And, uh, beheadings.”
Sophia laughs. “You’re a princess, too, you know. Very brave. And noble.”
“Me? Pft.” I buzz my lips and a delightful spray of saliva mists the air. “I’m more like…more like…I guess if I was in one of those books I’d be like, a dragon.”
“Why?”
“It just makes more sense!” I smooth my hair. “Fabulous glowing scales. Beautiful jewellike eyes.”
“Wings for arms?” Sophia smirks.
“That’s a wyvern! Dragons have wings independent of their limb system! But I forgive your transgressions. I’ve encountered a bit of heartburn today and am not in the mood to eat a maiden like you in the slightest.”
“What would you do as a dragon?”
I shrug. “You know. Fly around. Collect treasure. Burp infernos on some townspeople.”
Sophia is quiet for a moment.
“But I still don’t get it,” she finally says. “Why does a dragon make sense for you?”
“Think about it. I’d just make a badass dragon. I mean…nobody really likes the dragon. You get to be alone, in a cool, quiet place. No one likes you because you’re too loud and full of fire. But if you’re a princess, everybody likes you and you gotta be in the middle of hot sweaty balls all the time.”
Sophia raises an eyebrow.
“Ballroom…balls. Dances. Ugh.”
She laughs that chime-laugh, and I can’t help the laugh that bubbles up, too.
“And I mean,” I add, “you know. Dragons never have to worry about. Um. What I mean is, princes don’t fall in love with dragons—”
Ugly.
“—they fall in love with princesses—”
Did you think that’s what this was? Love? I don’t date fat girls.
“—so it makes more sense, you know?”
Sophia nods, and for a moment we’re both dead silent.
Finally, she smiles. “I think you underestimate princesses.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah! Everyone only pretends to like them because they have to. They don’t have any real friends, because they’re locked away in the castles all the time. Every princess wants to be free. Every princess wants freedom more than anything.”
Her words ring with a deeper truth, like it’s something she’s been thinking about for ages, not minutes. But she smiles, and suddenly the tension is gone. She reaches into her bag, a little leather thing she keeps makeup and stuff in, and pulls out tiny airplane bottles of booze.
“Where did you get these?” I ask. Sophia shrugs innocently.
“Some rich college frat boy got checked into rehab in the next wing over. They made him empty his pockets, and then it was just a simple matter of sneaking them off the confiscation cart.”
“You never told me you moonlight as a master thief.”
“When you’re trapped in a hospital most of your life, you learn how to YouTube everything. Including sleight-of-hand tricks.” Her smile is so warm. “And, as a bonus”—she pulls out a can of spray paint—“the janitor left this in his closet.”
“Oh my God, you’re like a cat burglar. A huge cat burglar. A tiger burglar.”
“I just know this hospital really well,” she insists.
“And what debauchery have you planned for the evening with these supplies, madam?”
“I’m thinking we drink these.” She motions to the bottles. “And tag that awful security guard’s booth with a middle finger or two.”
“Giant genitalia is much harder to clean off.”
She points at me and winks. “Now you’re thinking with evil.”
“I prefer the term ‘chaotic neutral.’” I unscrew a bottle’s lid and down it, the familiar smell of rum searing my nose.
Rum. Rum and the fizz of Coke on my tongue. The warm heat of dancing bodies all around me. Music. Music so loud I can’t hear myself think. A soft, smooth chest behind my shoulders, giving me stability, keeping me standing. A feeling of being safe.
“Are you all right?”
Sophia’s soft voice breaks me out of the memory. I blink four, five, ten times, the hospital coming back into focus. What the hell was that? Who was the person behind me, making me feel that safe? Not even Mom makes me feel like that, not since I was little. She’s been too fragile. But whoever that was gave me an inner peace I can still taste on my tongue.
“I’ll be better when I’m drunk.” I grab another bottle. If I keep drinking, maybe I’ll remember more.
“Hey, slow down! Leave some for me,” Sophia insists. She swallows a bottle eagerly. We trade sips, and when we start giggling at each other for no reason, I know we’re drunk.
“I feel so warm and weird.” Sophia laughs.
“Is this…” I hiccup. “Is this your first time drinking?”
“No!”
“It is!” I pat her shoulder. “I feel so honored to accompany you on your maiden voyage down the rabbit hole.”
“Underage drinking is bad,” Sophia whispers, then laughs. “Except I can’t wait until I’m of age. Because by then I’ll be dead!”
I flinch. Sophia stops laughing, her smile fading.
“Sorry,” she says. “I don’t mean to be a drag.”
“The only thing that’s dragging is your shot count.” I pass her another bottle. “But it’s okay for you to drink, right? You won’t—”
“I’m not that fragile.” She frowns.
“Sometimes medication makes people fragile! I was just checking.”
“Why would you care?” Sophia snaps. “We barely know each other.”
I freeze. Sophia goes still, too, her dark blue eyes widening.
“I’m sorry,” she murmurs. “I’m sorry. Sometimes it happens like this, I say things without thinking. It just comes out and I can’t stop it and then I feel so horrible.”
“Hey, shhh.” I pat her back. “It’s okay.”
“That’s what they all say. They all say it’s okay when it’s not, and the resentment festers in them until they hate me.”
“You…you don’t know that. You can’t read people’s minds! It would be tight if you could, and you’d probably be some young adult novel protagonist with fairy powers, but you can’t! Unless…” I look her over suspiciously. “You can?”
“I can’t.” She frowns. “But that doesn’t change the fact everyone learns to hate me. Eventually. You’ll be no different.”
“No.” I set my chin. “You were right. We barely know each other. That’s the truth. But that doesn’t mean I can’t care. People like to say time is a big deal, but it’s not. I care more than I should, faster than I should—”
The memory of someone’s lips touching mine, someone I wanted to be happy. Someone I cared about, was starting to care about, more than I cared for anyone in a long time—
I shake my head.
“Time doesn’t matter, okay? You’re my friend. I don’t hate you.”
“You will.” She stares sadly at another bottle. “Words hurt. And I say words without thinking.”
“Why?”
She shrugs. “It’s part of my condition. Irritability. Mood swings. Behavioral changes. I’m not who I used to be, and people are starting to leave me because of it.”
There’s a quiet, and then she laughs despairingly.
“You got off easy. Head injury, but nothing psychological. Except for—”
“The memories,” I finish. She smiles.
“Sometimes forgetting can be a blessing. If I could forget him like you have, if I could forget it all, move somewhere new, start over fresh—”
She stops herself. I lean over and grab her shoulder.
“Wait, what? ‘Him’ who? What are you talking about?”
She chews her lip, then bolts off the bed and grabs the can of spray paint.
“Last one to the guard box is a pile of garbage!” she shouts, suddenly all joy and effervescence. Confusion ringing in my ears, I chase after her through the halls. The interns shout at us to slow down, but I can barely hear them over Sophia’s chiming laughter. I follow it like a bloodhound, down the steps, around the hedges outside. The hospital is still and quiet on the east side—no parking lot, only an expanse of garden they grew for rehabilitating patients. The guard patrols the parking lot more than here, which makes it the perfect time to commit a crime and not do time for said crime.
“Sophia! Wait!” I shout after her, but she’s so fast. She shouldn’t be this fast—she’s sick. Or is she only sick in the head? Is that what’s wrong with her? I contemplate it as I catch up to her. She kneels by the guard box and shakes the spray can. She spritzes the air experimentally and wrinkles her nose.
“Oh, it smells gross.”
“Here.” I fish out a napkin from dinner and shove it at her. “Cover your mouth and nose so you don’t breathe it in.”
“It’s nice of you to play mom.” She laughs, takes it, and starts spraying a delightfully realistic middle finger on the white wall. “I never had a mom.”
I’m quiet, half keeping lookout and half burning alive with curiosity.
“Well, I did.” Sophia shakes the can and starts on the other half of the graffiti. “But she decided she didn’t want me. Or Dad. No, Mrs. Welles decided she’d had enough of both.”
“Soph—”
She finishes the middle finger and nods, satisfied. She offers the can to me.
“Anything you want to add?”
I shake the can once, admiring the vivid black obscenity staring back at me. I add a tiny, misshapen heart below the middle finger, like a signature. Sophia laughs and pulls me by the hand back into the hospital, the both of us high on adrenaline and paint fumes.
But it wears off, like all things do. Sophia goes back to her room for her medicine, and I spend some quality time with my laptop. Facebook is about as interesting as a sack of rotting tomatoes, except at least tomatoes don’t post racist-slash-sexist rants.
Before I know it, I’m staring at an empty Google search bar. My fingers fly across the keys.
Sophia Welles Ohio.
I never knew Sophia’s last name before now. And suddenly a world opens in front of me, a dark, twisted world. Article after article details exactly what happened to Sophia’s family. Her mother, after struggling for years with schizophrenia and a heroin addiction, snapped one day and killed her father, then overdosed. Sophia came home from school and found the two of them when she was only seven years old. Her grandmother took her out of the big city of Columbus and came to Northplains to get away from it all.
Sophia’s been through more shit than anyone.
I close my laptop and stare at the ceiling for a moment. How the hell do you keep moving on from something like that?
You don’t.
You end up somewhere like here, covered in mental scars.
It takes me two days to work up the courage to go see Sophia again. She hasn’t missed me, considering she’s been going in and out of CAT scans and minor surgeries for twenty-two hours of it. When I open her door, she’s lying in bed with deep purple circles under her eyes, a patch of shaved hair on the base of her neck split in half by an ugly threaded scar, and a faint smile.
“Hey,” she croaks.
“What did they do to you?” I stroke her hand.
“Oh, rummage around in my head, pull out a few lumps, sew my cranium back up. The usual.”
“You have lumps in there?”
She motions for her water bottle on the side table, and I give it to her. She unscrews the lid and takes a deep drink before sighing.
“I’m a drug baby. Lots of complications. I’ve been in and out of hospitals my whole life. And then one day, when I came with Gran, they found the tumor.” She winces. “I didn’t let it stop me, though. I convinced Gran to let me stay in school until at least the first year of high school. But then—”
Sophia looks at her hands. A bird outside her window chirps eagerly, its red breast bright against the bleak gray sleet of Ohio. We watch it fly off together.
“I should’ve died a long time ago.” Her voice is small. “But they won’t let me. They keep making me live.”
“Because they care about you,” I insist. “Who else in their lives is going to be as disastrously kind and beautiful as you? Who else will break the hearts of a thousand men and also ships because…your face launched them!”
Sophia sputters a laugh. “You mixed up those sayings a bit.”
“Like a cake batter,” I chime in. “Smooth and delicious.”
Her laughter lightens her expression, the shadows gone from it for a moment. For a second I’d been scared. For a second she sounded like Mom used to sound, at the beginning, when we were first reunited after her breakup with Leo. Hopeless.
“Isis?” Naomi knocks on the door and pokes her head into the room. “Ah! There you are. I knew you’d be here. Let’s go. It’s time for your session with Dr. Mernich. Hi, Sophia. How are you feeling?”
“Better,” Sophia says, and smiles at me. “You should go.”
“Ugh, no thank you. Mernich’s going to ask about my feelings, and frankly I’d rather swallow a centipede than talk about those things. Or become a centipede and crawl away. Can I become a centipede? Do they allow that in America?”
“Isis,” Naomi says sternly.
“You can become a certified light saber maintenance engineer in America, so I really think you should be allowed to become a bug—”
“Arthropod,” Sophia corrects.
“—arthropod. And Naomi! My, what big hands you have. The better to grab me with, am I right? Ack, gently, woman! I’m damaged goods!”
Naomi steers me out of the room, Sophia cheerily waving as we leave.
Dr. Mernich is the kind of woman who forgets to brush her wild red hair but somehow makes the crazed lunatic look work for her, which is weird, because she works with crazies. Not that crazies are bad. I’ve met a few and am probably one of them. I just don’t know it. Or I do. But I refuse to let it get in the way of my fabulousness hard enough to require a shrink. Mernich is my way out of this place, in any case. She’s the one who’s keeping me here until she’s satisfied I’m all right in the head. Which is dumb, because mentally I am a diamond fortress of impenetrable logic and sexiness.
Dr. Mernich clears her throat. “Isis, you’re—”
“Someday I will not think aloud, and that will be a sad day for humanity. Also, quieter.”
She heaves a sigh. “How are you feeling today?”
“Parts of me are feeling lots of things! For instance, my intestines are feeling lots of things. That means I need to visit a restroom. Sometime in the next hour. In addition to this riveting prospect, I’m slightly worried about Mom’s meager finances and recent trauma, so if you could just write me a note so I can get out of here, that’d be great.”
“What have we said about avoiding the subject with flippant jokes?”
I squirm. “Uh, it’s vaguely negative. I think.”
“And why is it vaguely negative?” she asks patiently and scribbles some more.
“Because I don’t confront anything, I just run away from it,” I recite.
“That’s right.”
“But to be clear, I run away from it like a Baywatch babe, not a roly-poly kid in gym class. I mean, I still am roly-poly, but it’s an alluring sort of roly, you feel me?”
“Isis, do you really think you’re large?”
There’s a beat. The scale told me I’d lost eighty-five pounds years ago, but it never really sank in. I still catch myself thinking I won’t fit into chairs, constantly worrying about how much space I’ll take up, how much space people will see and laugh at me for, judge me for. I can’t wear bathing suits without bursting into hives of stress. Even that pretty blouse my stepmother gave me was pushing it.
You’re beautiful.
The words echo in my memories, but I can’t put my finger on them. Who said that? And when? I shake them out of my head and refocus.
“Duh, I’m big,” I reply. “And unlovable. But you already know that.”
Her eyes spark. Of course she already knows that; she’s spent two weeks with me, talking about my life. I’d stalled around her with jokes and lies for a good week, until I realized she was the one who gives the go-ahead to let me out. And then I had to start actually cooperating with an adult and Telling The Truth™. Ugh.
“You already know everything about me, right?” I tilt my head. “So c’mon. Why don’t you just let me out of this—pardon my French—absolute shithole?”
She adjusts her glasses. “I’m afraid I can’t do that. I’m certain there are still some things we need to work on. You’re close but not quite there.”
Even this shrink is full of herself. Her self-satisfied little smile as she says that gives it all away. The trophies and awards lining her stuffy walls give it away.
“You like it. Knowing things about people. It makes you feel powerful.”
Dr. Mernich looks up from her scribbling, the faintest whiff of startled hanging around her. “Excuse me?”
“You. Like. The. Ego. Trip. Shrinking. Gives. You,” I say slowly. “Aw, don’t give me that look. I’m not judging you. I just understand. I see things about people, too, and I love knowing I know. It’s weird. It’s stupid. Knowledge is a heady drug. But mostly it’s fun and it makes me feel superior. Maybe I’ll turn it into a way to make money someday, too. I gotta think about that kind of stuff, you know, with college and everything a few months away.”
Mernich is completely frozen for point-four seconds, and then she starts scribbling madly. She does that when I say something super interesting that she can dissect. So she scribbles a lot. Because I am, objectively, an insanely interesting person. I’d better be! I work hard to be interesting, dammit!
“Anyway, what was I saying?” I scratch my chin. “Right, I feel really cooped up and sort of tired of hospitals. Also I feel bad for Sophia. Did you know she has no parents? And her grandma died? How sucky is all that death? Majorly sucktastic.”
Mernich nods. “I’m her psychologist as well. She’s quite the strong girl, if a little tragic.”
“Wow. That’s sort of condescending? I said I feel bad for her, but you went straight to giving her labels like ‘tragic’? Wow. That’s interesting. Wow.”
I can see Mernich start a glare behind her glasses, but she quickly cuts it off and resumes her usual passive face. Oh, she’s good. But not better than me. Not better than Jack.
I pause, my swinging legs stopping under the chair.
“Jack?” I mutter. “Where did that come from?”
How would I know Jack is any good? I haven’t been around him for more than thirty seconds that first time when I woke up and he yelled at me.
“What about Jack, Isis?” Mernich presses.
“Uh, I don’t know. It just…it just popped into my head. Which is weird. I mean, most things that pop into my head are really weird, like that one time when I thought about Shrek in Victoria’s Secret underwear, but I think this actually beats Shrek’s Secret.”
Mernich leans back in her chair. “What do you remember before the incident, Isis?”
“I was applying to colleges. Boring.”
“And before that?”
“I…I was at school. And I—I yelled. At someone. I don’t remember who. Kayla, maybe. Maybe Wren? Yeah, I think Wren.”
“What did you yell about?”
My palm suddenly stings, and I remember the harsh feeling of skin-on-skin.
“I slapped someone. I yelled and I slapped him. Wren must’ve done something stupid, I don’t know.”
“And before that? Do you remember any major events?”
“There was a party. A big one. Avery’s house. Halloween—I dressed up as Batman. No—Batgirl?”
“Did Kayla go?”
“Yeah, she was a mermaid. She and her boyfriend—ugh, what’s his name? I don’t remember his name, but I know I slightly despised him.”
“Despise is an awfully strong feeling.”
“Yes, well, being alive is an awfully strong feeling.”
“Isis—”
“I didn’t like him. Or, something about him rubbed me the wrong way. I don’t know.”
“And can you recall what happened at the party?”
My head suddenly gives a massive throb, my spine tingling with pain. I squeeze my eyes shut and rub them.
“Isis? What can you remember?”
Leo’s face comes back, leering at me from the doorway. Panic wells up in my throat. I’m not going to be able to save Mom.
“I don’t know! Stuff!”
“Try to remember specifics. Did you drink anything? Did you dance? Who was wearing what costume?”
“Wren was… He was a green guy. Link! Link from Zelda. And I drank…Coke. I think. With rum. Don’t tell Mom that. We joke about me drinking, but she doesn’t know I really drink, because I don’t want to worry her, and I danced and there was someone—”
He’s going to hurt her. He’s hurt someone before. He hurt Sophia. Sophia? No, that’s not right. Leo doesn’t know her. Who, then, has hurt Sophia? A baseball bat. Avery came at me with a baseball bat, and someone grabbed it. I can see a broad, spidery hand wrapped around it, wrenching it from her, a low voice saying something with an amused tone to a startled, frozen Avery—
The pain ricochets through my head like a tennis ball on fire.
“Fuck!” I grab my forehead and put it between my knees.
“Take deep breaths, Isis,” Mernich says softly. “You’re doing well, but don’t give up now. What else happened there?”
A bed. A soft bed, someone’s soft lips, someone whispering my name.
The pain splinters, blossoming in my brain like a demented flower. I can’t see anything. The world goes black and my ears ring.
That’s what you get for trusting someone.
Ugly.
Maybe I’ll love you. If you hold still.
Mernich says something, but I can’t hear her. It hurts. It hurts and I want it all to stop.
You got guts. I like that.
Have fucking fun trusting nobody for the rest of your life!
I don’t go out with ugly girls.
Ugly.
Ugly.
“Isis! Look at me!”
I look up. Mernich’s face is pale.
“It’s okay. You don’t have to push yourself anymore. I’m sorry. Just breathe. In and out. There you go. Slowly. Sit up.”
When I lean back into the chair, I realize my hands are shaking. My whole body is trembling, like a thread in the breeze.
“Why?” I murmur. “Why can’t I remember what happened?”
She pulls her clipboard out again and clicks her pen. “Well, to find that out, we need to go to the beginning.”
“You mean like, biblical Genesis? Because I have three rules for a happy, fulfilling life, and ‘Never Time Travel Ever’ is one of them. Because, you know. Dinosaurs killed things. And the bubonic plague killed things. And let’s face it—with my supreme amounts of unnatural charm, I’d be burned as a witch.”
She chuckles. “No. Not that far. I just want you to tell me your story. The real one. The one about Will.”
I flinch, my skin crawling at the sound of his name.
“Pulling my own tongue out and setting it on fire would be preferable to talking about that guy.”
“I know. But I think it’s time to stop running. I think you know that, too.”
I hate her. I hate her so much. She’s the reason I can’t leave. I’m racking up more and more pricey bills the longer I stay here. She’s the reason Mom worries. But I can tell she really wants to know about Nameless. If I tell her the story, maybe she’ll let me go. Nothing else has worked so far. It’s worth a shot, even if that shot will pierce through my guts and leave me to bleed all over the floor.
“From the beginning?” I ask softly.
“From the beginning.” She nods.
I inhale and then let it out as a long sigh. Somewhere outside, a bird chirps. I want its freedom more than anything.
“When I was in fifth grade, I developed a crush on a boy. This was my first mistake. He wasn’t a particularly attractive boy, he was sort of quiet and spit sometimes, but he had pretty, dark, silky hair. The female teachers complimented him on it. I wrote him a love note that said, ‘I like your hair,’ and he wiped his nose on it and gave it back to me at recess. I should’ve seen the warning signs in the mucus. But I was smitten. He’d paid attention to me! Me, the fat roly-poly girl with frizzy hair and a constant cloud of BO surrounding her. He actually didn’t snub me, or push me in the mud, or call me a fat whale, he just wiped his nose on my declaration of love and gave it back to me. It was the most promising social signal I’d received in my short ten years of life on the planet earth.”
Thus began my descent into utter madness.
“I did anything short of committing crimes to get his attention. Also, I committed actual crimes. Like riding my bike on the freeway shoulder lane to get to his house and stare at him through his window while he played video games. But then I found out it was illegal! You can’t ride your bike on the freeway at all! So I started taking the bus to look at him through his window while he played video games.
“Anyway, so there I was, in the prime of my life, and by prime I mean not prime at all. Mom and Dad were going through the divorce, which involved a lot of shouting and money and guilt, so Aunt Beth offered her home for a few months so I wouldn’t have to switch schools, which turned into nearly five years, but Aunt Beth was totally cool about it. We had grilled cheese almost every night and she let me watch R-rated movies. So basically I’d died and gone to heaven, and neither of my parents gave a diddly-damn except Mom who sometimes got guilty and sent me lots of exceptional socks. I love her, but really, socks?
“So while my lovable gene donors were off debating who owned what vase for sixty months, I grew up in the loudest ways possible. Well, I wasn’t exactly loud back then, I was more an indoor-mouse-whisper kind of gal, but you get my drift. There were fights. One time, a girl tried to run me over with her scooter! Do you remember scooters? I remember scooters. My shinbone remembers scooters. One time that girl even gave me a frog! Because she was so nice! I found it in my locker! Actually I had tons of friends and by tons I mean everyone in the library who squeezed around my bulk to reach their books.”
“And what were you doing in the library?”
“Hiding. I read a lot of Jane Austen and cried. It was a formative experience.”
Mernich nods, motioning for me to continue. She’s doing it. She’s making me bring out the big guns. I sigh.
“All right. No more pussyfooting around it. I talked to…Nameless…I can still call him that, right?”
“If that’s most comfortable for you, yes.”
I take a deep breath.
“After stalking him for most of middle school, the first time I exchanged words with Nameless was at Jenna Monroe’s beach party in seventh grade. The girls were wearing pastel tankinis and swimming. I was wearing two sweatshirts and yoga pants and sitting with her mom. I was still at a loss as to why Jenna Monroe invited me at all—Jenna was all legs and brown ponytails and glitter pens, the total opposite of my pudge and pencils. We’d been friends once, when we were still pooping ourselves and learning not to eat said poop, but judging by the way Jenna’s mom waved to me when I first came, I got the impression Jenna had no hand in inviting me at all.
“Anyway, there I was, waist-deep in an element that sure as hell wasn’t mine. Girls were giggling, splashing water on each other’s boobs, and boys were around! Staring at the girls! Well, all the girls except Jenna’s mom and me. Nameless was there, so I hid behind the soda cans on the picnic table and tried to look like I wasn’t there. Being almost two hundred pounds is sort of counterproductive to invisibility, though. Everyone saw me. Even Nameless. It was like, two seconds of eye contact, and then he looked away. And I thought I was done for! Because, you know, when people look at you and you’re fat, you think you’re done for.”
I look up, and I can see the faintest glaze coming over Mernich’s eyes. She’s skinnier than a beanpole. Probably has been her whole life. She has no idea what I’m talking about. No amount of college can teach her that. I laugh.
“You know what? Screw it. Just…I’ll just talk about the part you really wanna know. It’s what everyone wants to know. They don’t care about the how or the whys, just when and where and how quickly they can say, ‘awww, I’m sorry’ or try to fix it.”
“That’s…that’s not what I meant by this, Isis—”
“No, you know what? It’s fine. It’s probably better this way. This way I don’t have to drag out my entire sordid history for you to pore over. Saves you time! I’m sure you’re a busy lady with a lot of crazy people to talk to and I’m, frankly, a total purveyor of common sense and not––time wasting. So you know what? Yeah. The day it happened it was raining. I was at his house. The frogs were outside and croaking because he lived near a marsh. That’s what Florida is. Marshes. Marshes and assholes. His mom made us popcorn. My hands were oily. His hands were oily. We’d been secretly going out for two months, but he wouldn’t let me tell anyone and when I tried to talk to him at school, he ignored me, laughed at me, and told me to buzz off. But then he’d apologize. When we were alone he was nice. Nicer. Marginally. I was fourteen. Fourteen, okay? I was fourteen and I thought I was in love and I would have done anything to keep him from leaving me—”
Bile rises in my throat, but I swallow it back and clench my fists on the armrests.
“Do you know what it’s like? Never wanting to lose another someone? Everyone else leaves. Mom and Dad left. I didn’t want him to leave. If he left, I would’ve lost it. He was the only normal thing in my life. He made me feel… When he smiled at me, he made me feel pretty. Do you know what that’s like, either? Feeling huge and gross and then finding someone who makes you feel pretty? Do you know what you’d do to keep that person? You’d do anything. Anything in this world short of killing yourself. Maybe even that, if he asked for it.”
Mernich’s eyes are softer now. But I don’t trust them anymore. This is what she wanted. She’s getting it. Her pen is scrabbling madly across the paper even as she opens her mouth to speak.
“I’m sorry, Isis. I didn’t mean to seem callous. But this is good. You, saying these things aloud, even if you hate me for bringing them out…it’s good. It’s helping.”
“Sure. Whatever.”
I’m shaking. My body trembles with a rage I can’t express. It’s not all anger at Mernich’s voracious curiosity, though. I’m not all mad at her. The anger is directed at someone else, too. Nameless for hurting me. Mom and Dad for leaving me. Myself, for letting them do these things to me.
Mernich pushes back in the chair. “We’ll stop here.”
She gets up and doubles around her desk, pulling out a familiar yellow slip.
“What are you doing?” I demand.
“Writing you a discharge.”
“Not gonna grill me more? Not gonna ask me to come right out and say it? You were the one who said I needed to confront it, not run away.”
“This isn’t running away,” she says calmly, and rips the paper off and hands it to me. “I’ve been doing this for fifteen years, Isis. Some people need me—a total stranger—to listen. However, some people are only further injured when a total stranger listens. As a doctor, and with you as my patient, I can’t suggest you continue speaking to me on this matter with a good conscience. I’m not the one who should hear it. Someone else—your mother, your father, maybe Kayla, or Sophia, or perhaps someone you haven’t met yet—one of them will make you feel safe enough to say it. One of them will be the one you decide to tell. It’s up to you.”
I stand and grab the paper warily, like it’s a trap. But Mernich just smiles.
“Would you like your diagnosis?”
“I’m crazy.”
“Not at all. Do you know what disassociation is?”
“Something crazy people have.”
Mernich’s smile turns patient. “It’s what occurs when a person goes through a traumatic experience. It’s a… Think of it like a coping mechanism for the brain. Say someone throws a snowball, and it’s going to hit your eye. Your eyelids react much faster than the snowball flies to protect the cornea. Disassociation is like an eyelid for the brain. A traumatic event can cause the brain to disassociate the event. Sometimes this manifests as a simple case of shock that quickly wears off. Other times, we see intense reactions, such as withdrawal, PTSD, and in your case—”
She looks up, and I dread the next words to fall from her mouth.
“—memory gaps.”
“What?” I scowl. “I don’t—”
“You have periods of painful blackouts when you try to recall a certain person in your life. Your brain has identified this person as the source of overstimulation, and perhaps pain. You have what’s called lacunar amnesia. It’s a very centralized and rare thing.”
“So I’ve lost my brain? Part of my memories? I’ve totally forgotten them?”
“You haven’t really forgotten—the brain never truly forgets. I believe in your case, the memories are still there but buried beneath layers. It might take months to get them back. But you may also never get them back at all.”
“Who…which person was it? The one I forgot?”
“Think back. What have your friends told you? Have they been acting strangely toward you, concerning a certain person?”
It filters in slowly—weeks of Kayla’s weird looks, of Wren’s concerned sighs, and Sophia, shaking her head and saying it’s sad. And then Jack’s fractured expression when I first woke up and said I didn’t know him. I stare, wide-eyed, at Mernich’s passive face.
“Jack. That Jack guy. Everything they say about him doesn’t make sense. But why do I have this lactose amnesia thing? I mean, my head was bad, but…”
“You suffered significant head trauma. I believe the lacunar amnesia is a combination of that and your own disassociation of the traumatic event of fighting off your mother’s attacker.”
“Did Jack— How do I know him?”
“You’d be better off asking Sophia that question, perhaps. But you’re leaving the hospital with that discharge slip right away, aren’t you? You were quite eager to go.”
I look at the crumpled yellow note in my hand and close my fist around it.
“It can wait.”
Mernich smiles at me.
“Yes. Yes it can.”