Heartless (6 page)

“Well,” Lucy said in the ensuing silence as she pulled back the thin shower curtain. “That didn’t go well.”

“No. Not so much.”

“And you’ve probably woken up the whole building by now.”

“Yep.”

Sure enough, there was a knock at the door. “It’s okay, we’re fine!” Lucy called over her shoulder.

A masculine voice answered. “You sure? Are you girls on fire?”

“No, we’re
fine
, thanks. I promise. Don’t…um, don’t worry?”

There was a husky laugh. “Then shut up in there! People are trying to sleep.”

Lucy rolled her eyes. “Oh-
kay
. Sorry.” She turned back to me, waving smoke away from her face. “Urgh, I didn’t know you could, but now you smell even worse. Jo! What are we going to do?”

“Damn if I know.” Water dripped out of my hair, over my body. Every so often a droplet attempted to settle on one of my new metal nipples, and it sparked and then sizzled into the air. “At least now I know what
not
to do,” I laughed weakly.

“Don’t laugh. This is very serious,” Lucy said, but her hand covered her mouth and her eyes smiled a little.

“I was just saying a couple weeks ago that maybe Eli and I didn’t have any spark.”

“Now he would find you truly electrifying.”

There’s something about two girls together in a terrible situation. I stood in a puddle of possibly-charged water, naked, dripping, eviscerated from chin to chest. Lucy, my best friend, gazed at me in utter terror and confusion. And all we could do was laugh.

So we did. Lucy sat down on the lid of the toilet, pulled her knees to her chest, and laid her head down on her legs. Her body shook with the force of her laughter. I leaned against the concrete shower wall and slid down to the ground, where I rocked back and forth.

After a few minutes, Lucy’s laughter turned to tears. I wasn’t surprised; I wanted to cry, too, even while I laughed. I crawled out of the stall to kneel in front of her and laid my wet head against her leg. She reached down and stroked my hair, her face still hidden from view.

“It’s going to be okay,” I said, even though I knew it was a lie.

“How?” Her breath sounded ragged, thick with tears and saliva.

“I don’t know. I just need to figure some things out.”

“Like what?”

I shrugged. “First and foremost, who did this to me, and why. After that, I guess I’ll figure out the next step.”

“But you’re dead.”

“I know.”

“Murdered.”

“Lucy, I
know
!”

Her head popped up and she jumped to her feet, knocking me back against the wall. Her face was flushed, her eyes red-rimmed, but she was suddenly determined, too. I’d seen that look on her face before, usually before telling off some frat boy at a party. Something bad was about to happen. “What? What are you thinking?” I asked, nervous.

“You’re
murdered.
Someone
did this to you.
This is bad! I have to call my mother! She’ll know what to do!”

She reached for her cell phone, which sat atop her dresser, right outside the bathroom door, and she started dialing. I struggled to my feet, wincing when I heard something tear behind me, grimacing as my feet slipped on the slick tile floor.

For the second time that morning, I knocked the phone to the floor. “No!”

She jumped back, startled. “What?”

“Don’t you see?” I said. When she shook her head I continued. “I’m dead, but I’m alive. I’m still talking to you. I can still think. If you call your mother, the cops’ll come! They’ll be here in, like, less than thirty seconds! And they’ll take me away! To a hospital or a laboratory! They’ll have to! And the doctors? What if they can’t fix this! They might make it worse! And then I…I might…” I couldn’t say it.

“You might die,” Lucy finished for me, staring at the electrodes on my stomach. “All the way this time.”

“Exactly. So please don’t call the cops. At least not yet. Please, will you just help me?” I sighed, a weighty sound I felt compelled to make even without breath in my lungs. “We can do this together. We can find out what happened. Find whoever did this. Maybe they can fix me. I can be persuasive, right?”

“I don’t know. What about your parents? Don’t they deserve to know what happened? Can’t they do something?”

I took Lucy’s hand, trying to ignore the squeamish look in her eye when her arm brushed my breast. This was all new to me, too. I wasn’t used to being a monster. “I don’t want to scare them,” I said. “Or bring them into it if I don’t need to. I think I can fix this on my own. I really do.”

“But how?”

“First, I need to rejoin the land of the living,” I said. “If I’ve been missing three days, people are going to start to worry. My mom’s probably already worried.”

“You’re probably right,” Lucy said. “About that, at least. So you better go boot up your computer. If people are looking for you, someone’s gonna call out the cavalry soon. Even if I don’t.”

Another choice. A joint one this time. One that would lead us further into disaster. Of course, we didn’t know that at the time.

Instead of contemplating the decision to go it alone, not to seek the normal authorities, I nodded, and stood up to head to my room. Lucy reached out a hand to stop me. I thought we were about to have another moment when she said, “But…can you please put your robe back on first? You’re grossing me out.”

B
efore I could sit down at the computer to “rejoin the land of the living,” we had a bit of work to do. First I had to scrub the green spot from the interior of my robe so I could stomach the idea of putting it on again. (Not that my stomach seemed to mind anything at that point, mind you. Not that I was even sure I
had
a stomach anymore.) As I scrubbed, Lucy tried unsuccessfully not to stare at me.

“You know,” she said, leaning over my shoulder and pointing. “It’s just going to get all goopy again if you don’t do something about your back.” Then she backed away, gasping. “Ew, sorry. Just got another whiff of you. Can we speed up the cleaning-up process? So you can be destinkified?”

I gave her a look. “Yes, if you help me. I can’t do anything about my back on my own, and since that’s the part of me that’s open and oozing, I’m guessing that’s where the stink is coming from.”

“I can help, but I can’t get close to you,” Lucy said, frowning. She leaned against the wall on the opposite side of the room, looking greenish and disgusted. Then her face lit up, and her eyes danced like a little kid with a big idea. She grinned. “I’ve got it,” she said. “I need a mask!”

She trotted over to my closet and began to rummage through my scarf collection. She selected a bright red one and began to tie it around her face.

“No, come on,” I said. “That one came from India. My mother brought it back from her first trip there. Use a different one.”

It was Lucy’s turn to give the dirty look. She pulled out another, and I shook my head. “No, that’s my favorite.”

After three more failed attempts, Lucy threw up her hands in frustration. “Jolene. I cannot help you if I cannot get close to you without vomiting. The only way to make that happen is to wrap something around my face. Find me something. Please.”

I pulled myself up from my desk chair, and Lucy cringed. “You moving makes it worse,” she said, holding my blue silk scarf in front of her nose. I ignored her and marched to the door. Beneath my ski jacket was a ski mask, last worn on a trip to Snowy Lodge before Christmas. I tossed the mask to Lucy.

“Here,” I said. “It’s thick, and it’s wool. All you’ll smell is sheep.”

She put it on before stretching her arms out before her, cracking her knuckles like a doctor prepping for surgery. “Okay. I’m ready. Lie down.”

I lay on the carpet, stretching out on my stomach to give her a better view of my mangled back. She knelt over me. I couldn’t see her face, but she pressed down in a few spots on my back with something akin to clinical probing.

“Ew, the wires are sticking out,” she said, and then she ran for the bathroom. I thought she’d gone to throw up, but in a second she was back, holding Q-tips and hydrogen peroxide. Her voice was muffled by scratchy wool, but she’d turned matter-of-fact. Definitely clinical. “There’s green goo inside you, Jo. Why is there green goo inside you?”

I tilted my head to the side. “I’m sure
some
of the goo inside
you
is green, don’t you think? And anyway, I’m guessing it’s some kind of formaldehyde mixture. Isn’t that green? Maybe it’s some embalming fluid? I have no idea.”

“Stop it,” Lucy said, gagging again behind the mask. “You’re gonna make me hurl. But yeah, that’s what it smells like. Formaldehyde. That, and rotten eggs.”

“Sorry about that.” I spoke into the crook of my arm, ashamed of my own stench. In real life—because this was very quickly starting to feel like an alternate reality—I was always clean and good-smelling. I loved fancy soaps and body sprays. This stinking thing was humiliating.

There was pressure on my back as she pressed down. “Ooh, if only I…could just…I need to…snap it…something needs to snap into place!” But instead of a healthy snap, we heard a crack.

“Um, was that a bone?” I asked. “Or some plastic?”

“Did it hurt?”

“No, not really.”

She sighed. “Then does it matter?”

“
Yes
, it matters!” I pushed up on my hands and craned my neck to get a look. “Just because I can’t feel it doesn’t mean you get to be all careless and break my bones!”

“Well, whatever it was, you’re as repaired as I know how to get you. We really need to get you to a professional at some point.”

I groaned. “A professional what? Doctor? Electrician? What
kind
of professional exactly do you envision knowing how to help me?”

She shrugged, and then pulled me to my feet. “No need to be a bitch about it. Come on, let’s bandage you up. Lucky for you, I have gauze!”

I rolled my eyes. “Lucky for me you’re accident prone.”

She grinned, then held a piece of gauze up to my back and began wrapping it around my waist. “A couple more wraps and, there you go, good as new.”

I shot her a look. I was definitely
not
as good as new. But then I turned to look in the mirror. I still couldn’t quite see the back, but the bandage was smooth, and I didn’t see any green ooze dripping down my legs. “Hey, nice job. You should be a doctor.”

“Maybe I will.” She tossed me my robe. “Someday.
Now
will you please get dressed? Maybe even, imagine this, put on some underwear?”

“Let me just wipe myself down a little more. You said I stink right?”

Lucy rolled her eyes, a strange-looking thing behind the ski mask. “I hardly even notice it anymore.”

“Still, though.” I grabbed a washcloth from the sink and began carefully wiping down my arms and legs. Before I could finish, though, there came a knock at Lucy’s door.

It was forceful, purposeful, and before we could blink, a male voice called from the other side.

“Police. Open up.”

“O
h crap-a-doo,” Lucy spoke in a forced whisper as she hopped to her feet and pulled off the ski mask. Her hair was a tangle of tumbled red curls. “What do we do?”

I looked around, frantic. “Why do you have a cop at your door?”

“I don’t know! I shouldn’t have a cop at my door! I’m an ambassador’s daughter! My mother will kill me!”

“What are we going to do?”

Lucy smiled. “Wait. I’m an
ambassador’s daughter
. That means I’m great at diplomacy, just by association. I can handle this. Right?”

“I don’t know!”

We paced the room in tight, frantic circles. I don’t think either of us was particularly confident in Lucy’s diplomatic skills, but we had little else upon which to rely.

He knocked again, a more forceful sound. “Open up please.”

“At least he’s polite,” Lucy said. She shrugged. “Maybe someone finally reported you missing, and he’s here to investigate? I swear I haven’t done anything wrong this week. But he’s going to wake the whole dorm if he keeps banging like that.”