The Nine Lives of Chloe King (6 page)

I will be cool.

Paul was nominally on the school newspaper, which allowed him (and Amy and Chloe) access to the club’s better computers and equipment, as well as the old ratty couch and semiprivate room. Almost no one used it until after school, which allowed the three of them to hang there during the day if Paul was around. Chloe decided to use sixth period to catch up on some much-missed sleep.

Chloe knocked tentatively on the ancient, solid-oak door, praying that she wouldn’t catch her two best friends making out.

“Come,” Paul called, using his Captain Picard voice. Amy was definitely not around.

In fact, when Chloe went in, Paul actually appeared to be working on the paper, sitting on the edge of his desk and looking over an article.

“Crunchy cheese-baked scrod every Wednesday for the next
month.”
He sighed, throwing down the lunch schedule. It was Paul, Amy, and Chloe’s private opinion that the only reason anyone read
The Lantern
was for the cafeteria menu and Sabrina Anne’s often-banned column.

“Why don’t you get your mom to pack a lunch? PB and kimchi. Breakfast of champions.” Chloe threw her book bag, and then herself, onto the couch.

“Yeah, right.” Paul kicked his legs under the desk.

It was strange having him look down on her like that. Or maybe it was just an overall change in his demeanor since the whole hooking-up-with-Amy thing. He seemed calm and confident, like he was relaxing on a throne instead of perched on a desk. Actually, he looked pretty good today. He was wearing a simple black T-shirt and baggy jeans that complemented his square, compact body better than any of the bowling shirts or DJ wear he often sported.

Uh, what?
Chloe suddenly realized she was
admiring
Paul’s looks. Good ol’ Paul, with the harelip scar that tugged his mouth when he smiled.
Kind of endearing, really …

Chloe shook herself.

“So what’s been going on?” she asked quickly.

“Between you almost dying and Amy? Not a whole lot.” He looked at her with faint amusement in his dark brown eyes. Chloe felt her palms sweat. It was a small room, secluded from the rest of the high school; their aloneness was a very palpable third presence in the room with them.

It’s just because Amy likes him,
she told herself.
A competition thing.
In the still air of the room she could just smell the deodorant and soap he used and underneath, a saltiness that she realized was probably his skin. The way he was sitting there, it would be so easy just to walk over and push herself against him; they would be the same height. She could wrap her arms around his neck like she had with Xavier and pull him in—

“Robble robble, blah blah blah—hey, King, you listening?”

“Yes!” She leapt up, trying to shake off the desire. “No. I mean, I gotta go. I, uh, forgot to hand in my essay to Mingrone—shit, I hope he hasn’t left yet.”

She grabbed her bag and made for the door.

“I think he said we have until tomorrow,” Paul called after her. The door slammed between them.

I will be cool.

Yeah, right.

At work Chloe forced herself to seriously look over every guy who came in. Including a few who were gay. Things were very bad indeed when she found herself almost kissing her best friend. Who seemed to be her other best friend’s boyfriend.

Marisol didn’t help anything by putting the Eurythmics’ “I Need a Man” on the shop speakers. Chloe jumped guiltily when she heard the chorus.

“Is it that obvious?”

“Honey, you’re
dripping
hormones all over my nice clean floor.” The older woman smiled at her. Chloe wished her mom was more like her manager. She always seemed to understand Chloe’s moods immediately and unless there was a sale coming up, was often ready to talk and listen.

“Who put on this old shit?” Lania screamed from the shoe section, hands over her ears in horror.

Chloe and Marisol exchanged “what can you do” looks. “Go get yourself a boy, girl. You’re not concentrating; it’s obvious your attention is elsewhere,” Marisol said in a lighthearted voice.

As Chloe patiently ripped through the hem seams of more jeans, she reflected on what her boss had said. Maybe she
could
get it “out of her system.” Maybe she was due for a nice boyfriend.

Or a visit to Xavier.

Once Chloe had found the right street, she pulled the crumpled card out of her back pocket.
I’m going to have to get better at this.
She imagined herself in a business suit, somewhere in a steel-and-glass future, shaking someone’s hand and pulling out her own card, all rumpled and greasy. She checked the address against the building. Xavier must have had a little money or have been crashing with a friend who did: it was a
nice
old house, three floors, dark wood and bay windows on a street with soft green trees and no traffic. Of course, both sides of the street were stuffed with parked cars—rich neighborhood or not, this was still San Francisco.

The front door was propped open and there was a hand-scrawled note to FedEx posted over the buzzer. The lobby smelled of lemon wood cleaner. There was only one apartment per floor; Xavier had the attic. With gables. Chloe had always dreamed of living in a real old house like this instead of her bug-ugly vinyl-sided ranch. She climbed the stairs, letting her hand trail along the smoothly polished rail.

But in the half-light of the stairwell Chloe began to question what she was doing: going to some foreign older guy’s apartment by herself at twilight without anyone knowing where she was. He could turn out to be anything: a rapist or murderer. A vampire, even.

She paused briefly, but an image of herself kissing Paul pushed her forward.
I won’t go in. I’ll stand in the hallway and ask him if he wants to go out. Maybe grab a coffee.

His door was dark wood with molding and a little brass-and-glass peephole at eye height. She raised her hand to knock …

And realized the door was pushed open just the slightest bit.

“Uh, hello?” she called out, stepping back.

“Help …,”
a choked, wheezy voice called from inside.
“Help me!”

Chloe hesitated on the doorstep. It could be a trap. He could kidnap girls and rape them and sell them into slavery and …

“Please … someone …”

Chloe pushed open the door and stepped inside.

The apartment smelled of sickness and decay, which was strange against the clean, antique furniture and expensive, modern lighting. In each gable was a carefully designed nook for reading and sitting—
just like I would have done.
Chloe made herself follow the sound of wheezing.

Lying under the lintel to the bathroom was a very different Xavier.

He was wearing the same clothes from the club two nights ago, but they were torn and pulled like he had tried to rip them off his body. His face had bubbled up like the rind of a diseased grapefruit. His cheeks and forehead were swollen and red, with white liquid, lymph or pus, oozing out of giant sores.

“Help
—“He was trying to scream, but his throat was swollen so badly, he could barely breathe. He groaned and twisted, trying to crawl out of his skin. He flopped onto his stomach and Chloe got a look at his back. Long, oozing cankers and welts, like claw marks. Exactly where she had scratched and kneaded him outside the club.

Chloe backed up slowly.

Must call.

Without thought, like she was walking through syrup, Chloe found the handset of a cordless phone in the living room, resting on top of one of those expensive giant HEPA filters from Sharper Image, like the one her mom had. She dialed 911.

She recited the address when a brusque, disinterested voice came on. “There’s someone here. Covered in sores. Can barely breathe. It looks like he’s dying.”

It looks like he’s dying.

“We’ll be right there, ma’am. What’s your telephone number?”

“I don’t—“She looked at the card and gave them his cell. After hanging up she went back to Xavier. He was hissing and coughing and his eyes were crusty and half shut. She wondered if he could see her, if he would recognize her.

Exactly where she had scratched him.

Chloe waited until she heard sirens approaching, and then she ran.

Six

Friday passed normally,
and Xavier wasn’t mentioned in any obits or police beats, so Chloe was determined to have a normal weekend, too. Hormone free. Guy free. Falls-from-towers and formerly-hot-now-sick-strangers free.

She got up on Saturday, poured herself a big box of Lucky Charms, and watched new (really crappy) cartoons for a couple of hours. It was sunny out, so she drew the shades, just like she used to when she was young so she wouldn’t be tempted to leave the glowing light of the television for the great outdoors.

At two she met Amy at Relax Now. Chloe had casually suggested to Amy the night before that they treat themselves to manicures with some of her birthday money. Amy objected at first, calling it a middle-class, bourgeois ritual of the Burberry-knockoff set. Chloe told her to cut the crap and enjoy it; they had never done it before and might never do it again. Besides, she was paying.

And Amy actually seemed pretty cheerful, looking over her nails as they dried. She had talked the most artistic seeming of the women there into painting the lower half of all her nails black, then putting a single clawlike black stripe in the middle of each one. She flexed and re-flexed her fingers under the little lamps.

“Grrr,” she said.

Chloe was still having hers worked on. She’d opted for the hot paraffin, vitamin-wrap, extra-super-cleany options and was drilling the woman doing it with a battery of questions: Could fingernails be dirty even if they didn’t look it? Could you carry diseases under your nails? What about toxic fungi?

“Yes, yes, and yes,” the woman replied, zealously buffing. “I knew a girl once, she went to a place—not here, a
dirty
place—she got a pedicure and had to have her whole toe removed afterward. Nasty infection. Anyway, this will take care of all that. You could eat with them now.”

Chloe felt relieved. And guilty. She hoped Xavier was okay. She had to somehow check on him later.

It
was
kind of funny, though, that she’d managed to spread something diseaselike to her partner before she’d ever even had sex. Funny in a loose sense of the word, of course.

“This is
perfect,”
Amy said, admiring her nails. “We’re going to the Temple of Arts tonight—this will freak the shit out of all the vampire role players there.”

“Cool. I haven’t been there in so long.” Chloe didn’t have anything planned for that evening, except for cooking with her mother (mother-daughter time), something she was anxious to get out of. And it would be an excellent way to get over whatever weird rush she’d felt with Paul earlier that week. The three of them just hanging out would be a good thing. “I promised Mom I’d help her with some weird and complicated recipe tonight, but I should be done by nine or ten.”

“Oh.” Amy stared more intently at her nails, blushing. “I meant, like, just me and Paul. Like a date.”

“Like a
date?”
It had been just a casual, high-tension kissing session before. … When had their status changed? “Oh.” Chloe fidgeted, prompting a smack from the woman working on her. “Oh. That’s cool. No problem.”

I will be the cool friend.

“How about tomorrow? We could totally get together tomorrow,” Amy suggested eagerly.

“Nah. I’m taking my new bike for a ride.” Disappointment and embarrassment and anger raged through her brain, making it difficult to sound casual.

“All day?”

“Yeah,” Chloe said firmly, staring at her nails.
“All day.”

At home Chloe began to feel bad about breaking her “I will be cool” mantra when Amy obviously was already embarrassed by the whole discussion. And she had kind of acted like a baby. Of course she and Paul wanted to spend time together. They were
dating,
dummy. Chloe finally e-mailed:

You wanna hang Sunday night? Rent a movie or something … xo,
C

That didn’t stop her from being grumpy about it, though. Chloe drowsed on her bed, visions of Xavier, Alyec, and—yuck—Paul spinning around in her head before her mom finally demanded her help with dinner. She was silent in the kitchen.

“Is something wrong, Chloe?” Her mother was in a rare, selfless good mood.

“No.” She smashed a clove of garlic with the side of her knife for emphasis.

Her mom looked at her sideways but didn’t say anything.

Dinner was fabulous if weird, as all of her mom’s Saturday night attempts tended to be. While Mrs. King napped on the couch in the living room afterward, Chloe channel flipped, pausing at some sort of nighttime soap she never would have normally given a second thought to, but a handsome couple was making out on the beach at night. Chloe watched them wistfully, imagining sand under her own head and lips against hers.

“How was your bike ride, Chlo?” Amy asked in line for lunch on Monday.

“It was great.” It really had been. And if she hadn’t been so preoccupied with how pissed she was at Paul and Amy and how she really wanted her own boyfriend, it would have been perfect. She had never noticed how many goddamn happy couples there were all across San Francisco before. Making out in public. Everywhere.

She felt in her pocket for a quarter that wasn’t there and tried to find something interesting in what the lunch hag was doing. “You never replied to my e-mail.”

“Sorry about that,” Amy continued bravely. “My phone ran out of juice. I didn’t get the message until this morning.”

“No problem.” Chloe realized she couldn’t watch the pot of reddish glop—“chili”—being stirred around by the woman with the mustache. The beans looked suspiciously like cockroaches. She turned her head, but there was nothing else to look at in the small line but Amy.