Placebo Junkies (6 page)

So Castillo Finisterre, being the most awesome place on the planet, has this amazing spa. The website lists all sorts of crazy stuff they can slather you in, rub you with, and strip you of. I'm talking an entire catalog of muds, oils, lotions, potions, and I don't even know what else—tantric lava rocks and wax infused with emerald dust and the blood of virgins, probably. Serious rich-person voodoo shit. I'm not describing it well—I don't exactly speak fluent
spa
—but the bottom line is that they appear to be pretty damn proficient at turning you into something poreless, hairless, and tension-free. A pampered, wild-verbena-scented invertebrate. Again, that might not sound so appealing—there's a reason no one's hiring me to write advertising copy for luxury resorts. But believe me when I say that I mean this all in the best possible way. It's like platinum-card witchcraft or something—you look at the website and you
want
to be slathered in their moon-harvested Arctic lake mud; all of a sudden you
need
one of their goddamn green-tea and Jurassic-algae wraps before your parched and unexfoliated flesh shrivels up and suffocates you in a permanent skin sarcophagus.

Anyway, one of the pictures shows a couple getting a side-by-side massage. They're lying on their stomachs on tables a few inches apart in a room with floor-to-ceiling windows showing the end-of-the-world views the place is famous for, all ice and water and crisp utopian nothingness. They're stripped naked to the waist, and tended to by dark-haired women in pristine white uniforms, and their heads are turned so they're facing each other, staring into one another's eyes with expressions so blissed-out and tenderized that they almost look drugged.

Here, this morning, Charlotte and I are also half naked and lying side by side on tables, but other than that, everything else is pretty much the exact opposite of the image from the website.

We're lying on our backs, for starters, and unlike the blissfully invertebrate spa couple, we're undressed from the waist
down.
The stirrups are cold against my ankles, my own fault for not keeping my socks on, and instead of ocean-kissed sunlight prism-ing in through bay windows, the fluorescent lights flickering overhead are so bright they're making my eyes water.

Not that I'm complaining, since today's first gig is an easy one: medical modeling. We're pretend patients for doctors and nurses in training. If I had a business card, it would read:
Because sometimes a cadaver just won't do.
Occasionally it's fun—you get to follow a script, moaning and weeping about fictitious symptoms until the flustered students come up with the right diagnosis. I am particularly good at feigning migraines—I can even work myself up to a fluttering little eye tic on command.

For today's assignment we're little more than spread-eagled mannequins, though—unspeaking orifices (orifii?) for rent—and right now six medical students are staring wide-eyed at my cervix. Today's class: Gynecological Exams for Dummies.

It's a welcome breather, actually, since the schedule Charlotte created has otherwise been skewing heavily toward the testing of ingestibles and injectables, some of which are doing quite a number on my digestive system.

I said yes to the plan. Of course I did. We all knew I would, right?

Dylan's ribs clinched the deal. That, and seeing him round a corner in the hospital at a time of day when he should have been in AP Chemistry. He was with his mom and I didn't want to make a scene, so I ducked into a restroom and locked myself in a stall until I was sure they were long gone. While I was in there, I tallied up the clues: long periods of not returning calls, conflicting stories about his whereabouts, an ever-changing patchwork of bruises shifting across his body.

Dylan's sick again.

It seems sort of obvious now, so maybe some part of me didn't want to know.

But now I do know. I know, because he would've told me if it was no big deal. He would've said something if it was just a routine checkup. We spoke on the phone for twenty minutes that morning, and he didn't say a word about coming to the hospital.

I'm not going to confront him about it; he'll tell me when he's ready. But now I know that time is running out faster than I realized, and that Castillo Finisterre is rapidly becoming a Now or Never.

I choose Now.

So Charlotte and I are officially co-conspirators. She runs the show, really—I've taken a subordinate role. I sign my name to whatever papers I'm handed, do as I'm told, and then hold out my hand for payment. We're milking the system, doubling down, raising the stakes, going all or nothing. However you want to describe it, we're doing it. We're going to squeeze every possible cent out of the human-subject testing system, which of course is also to say that we're going to squeeze every possible cent out of our own flesh.

We're almost a week in, and things are going surprisingly well…with exceptions, of course.

The female students who gather round us this morning are matter-of-fact. Two of the three men look terrified. Like, full-blown, ready-to-bolt-from-the-room terrified. They're fidgety, plucking at their latex gloves, and I'm fairly certain they would rather do anything right now, anything at all, than stick their fingers in my vagina, but it's part of the med school curriculum, so they have no choice in the matter.
Welcome to my pelvis, boys!
Another winning slogan.

It's the third man—if you can call a skinny, oily-faced twenty-three-year-old medical student a man—who's getting to me. He's standing there, arms crossed high on his chest, upper lip curled in disgust, looking for all the world like he's being asked to dive into an open sewer. His narrowed eyes stare at my crotch like it's the enemy, and I can tell he isn't hearing a word the instructor is saying, not even pretending to listen to how to drape the patient in such a way to preserve dignity, or how to communicate the steps of the process to the patient to minimize surprise and discomfort. My body is horrific to him, this scowling MD-to-be, and I'm not surprised when he positions himself to be the last in the group to take his turn, like he's hoping to be saved by the bell from performing this loathsome task.

The lecturer finishes up and tells the group of students to divide themselves between the two “patients.” I brace myself and let my thoughts start drifting up into the buzzing fluorescent lights. This ain't my first time to this particular rodeo, and you'd be amazed by just how many ways a nervous student can fuck up a Pap smear.

My third exam is almost finished when young Dr. Misogyny finally takes his place on the stool at the end of Charlotte's table. I'm selfishly relieved that it's not me. Charlotte and I turn and give each other a look—she obviously caught a whiff of his sadistic asshole vibe, too—and for a second, lying side by side and staring into one another's eyes like that, we actually
do
look a little like the couple in the spa picture. But then the student picks up the speculum and gets started without so much as a single word of warning. Charlotte winces, hissing her discomfort, and the instructor snaps at the guy, which only makes him look more angry and disgusted than before.

I notice two of the female students watching him with razor-sharp eyes. They don't like him, either.

“You're going to have to get in closer. You need to visualize the anatomy,” the instructor warns him again. Junior-doctor Dickface makes a sour face, then scoots his stool forward between Charlotte's knees, and I can practically feel him twisting the metal instrument as he leans closer to what he apparently thinks of as her gaping hellhole.

Charlotte's eyes go wide, then narrow, and I'm pretty sure she's about to kick him in his shitty, smug face, and who could blame her, but then she smiles and lies back, suspiciously relaxed considering what's being done to her.

Now, I happen to know that Charlotte is on day four of a weight-loss testing protocol she enrolled in long before we teamed up. It's working—she can't stop crowing about the pounds melting off—but the side effects aren't pleasant.
Oily flatulence. Abdominal discomfort.
She doesn't care—Charlotte's willing to suffer for beauty. But now it appears that someone else is going to suffer along with her.

Everyone in the room hears it.

It's a loud, bitonal triumph. A jaw-dropping, gassy explosion that sounds as if a hole is being ripped through time and space—a righteous blast if ever there was one. The student leaps back so fast he bumps against a metal tray table, falling over and knocking sterile instruments to the floor with a clatter. His face is purple and contorted, and no one in the room can keep a straight face except Charlotte, who looks positively angelic. And very relaxed.

“Damn it!” the student yells out from the floor.

The other students are howling. The instructor is trying not to laugh, but she's not hiding it very well, and you can tell that even she knows what a jackass the guy is.

One of the female students takes a few steps over to Charlotte's table and pulls the paper blanket over her legs, covering her up. “Nicely done,” I hear her say to Charlotte in a low voice. “And thank you on behalf of all womankind, since that'll hopefully keep him away from obstetrics forever.”

“My pleasure,” Charlotte says sweetly. She stays reclined on the table until the class filters out. Dickface never looks back.

She checks her watch once everyone is gone. “Speaking of staying away from obstetrics, wanna go pee in a cup next?”

I nod, so we get dressed and head down the hall to the contraceptive study, still snickering about Charlotte's vigilante fart. The research office is already crowded (who doesn't want free birth control?), so we join the line for the single-stall restroom. One by one, brimming specimen cups in hand, women prove their un-pregnancies, making the research sponsors very, very happy. Empty-bladdered study participants filter out of the office with smiles on their faces, thrilled to be twenty-five dollars richer for doing what they were going to do anyway. Win-win. It almost goes to your head a bit, when the money is this easy. Like, you're so damn valuable that even your piss is worth something to someone. Almost makes you start believing crazy things.

The line moves fast and I go first. I flick the lock on the stall door, do my thing, and step out, moving slowly because I filled my cup a little higher than I meant to and I don't want to spill piss on my shoes. I'm holding the stall door open with my elbow, focusing on my too-full cup and thinking that I should probably be drinking more water since my pee is kind of a funky orangish color and I read somewhere that that's a sign of dehydration. “Your turn,” I say to Charlotte after a second, starting to get impatient.

“Charlotte?” I look up at the same time that I let the stall door slam shut, and a few drops of pee slosh over the edge of the cup and splash on the floor between us. Charlotte doesn't notice, though, because she's gone.

I don't mean
physically
gone, since she's still standing there, right in front of me, but there's no other way to describe it. Her face is slack and disturbingly expressionless, and her eyes have a flat, unfocused quality as she stares, unblinking, at nothing in particular. It's like someone somehow sucked the Charlotte out of Charlotte.

“Hey, are you okay?” I poke her shoulder with my free hand, kind of hard, actually, since I'm pretty sure she's just fucking with me—it's totally something she would do. I'm expecting her to snap out of it with a
gotcha
grin on her face, but she doesn't even seem to hear me, and she just keeps standing there, staring straight ahead.

The next person in line, a girl in a Hooters uniform, shoves between us and into the stall, already wrestling down those weird suntan-colored tights they wear under their butt-hugger shorts. “Sorry,” she calls out as she slams the door shut. “But if you're not gonna go, I will. I gotta pee like a racehorse—I've been holding it for way too long.”

I step to the side to let her through, and when I look back, Charlotte is coming around, squinting at me like
I'm
the one acting weird. “I thought they weren't allowed to wear their uniforms outside of work,” she mumbles in a strange, spit-strangled voice. Her head is tilted to the right, and she rocks slowly on her feet a few times, almost like she's sleepwalking.

I'm relieved to hear her say anything at all—there was something seriously messed up about that
there/not there
look on her face. “Let's go home,” I say, ignoring the stinkeye I get from the next person in line as I drop my full cup of pee in the trash can. “There goes twenty-five bucks' worth of liquid gold. You owe me,” I say, hoping to get some sort of response out of her, but Charlotte is silent and passive as I lead her out of the lab.

It takes a few minutes, but once Charlotte snaps out of whatever was wrong with her, she does it so abruptly that I start to think she really was just fucking with me back there. We're not even out of the building when it's like someone plugged her back in, and she goes from foot-dragging zombie chick to Energizer Bunny on speed. By the time we're outside, she's rambling on about how hungry she is and what she wants for lunch, babbling out words so fast I can barely understand what she's saying.

“Let's go get takeout somewhere and eat it in the park. I don't even care what as long as it's spicy. The spicier the better. I know—let's do Thai. The newish place on the corner. No, never mind. Not Thai. Last time we ate there I itched for three days. I think I'm developing an allergy to lemongrass. Is that even possible? Whatever, let's get Indian instead.”

She starts singing a stupid song she makes up as she goes along,
Vindaloo, for me and you,
and doing this stupid little hula dance move as we walk. She's gone from catatonic to manic in about ninety seconds flat, and as far as I can tell, she doesn't even realize that she shut down completely for a few minutes.

“We can get whatever you want, as long as you're paying,” I tell her. “Since you cost me twenty-five bucks back there.”

She gives me a one-eyebrow-up look that could be interpreted as either puzzled or annoyed, but then throws her hands in the air and shrugs flamboyantly. “Whatever, cheapskate. I'll pay, but I'm gonna tell them to make it so hot it's gonna burn just as much coming out as it does going in.” She takes off skipping—seriously,
skipping
—down the block, and doesn't look back.
Holla, holla, tikka masala!
I can hear her singing at the top of her lungs.

“What. The. Fuck,” I whisper. Then, louder, “I'm not going to
skip
after you, Charlotte!” I curse myself under my breath as I speed up into a trot.

By the time I catch up to her at the restaurant, she's already ordering. “Ex
cuse
me?” the man behind the cash register is saying. I've been here a few times with Charlotte, and I've never seen the guy be anything other than friendly, but he doesn't look so friendly now.

“I
said,
five-alarm ass-fire spicy,” Charlotte says in a voice too loud for the room. The other customers all look up from their food to stare.

“Jesus, Charlotte,” I say behind her. “Can you chill out a little?”

The restaurant guy's face goes hard, and without saying another word he scrawls something on the order slip and then hands it back through the window into the kitchen, where I can see another man cooking in a small, crowded space. It wouldn't surprise me a bit if he'd written instructions to put some choice ingredient
other
than spices in our food. I probably would've, anyway.

I convince Charlotte to wait with me outside the restaurant. Make that:
I
wait, she paces. Once our food is ready, handed over in thin-lipped silence by the guy behind the counter, we commandeer one of the two benches in the tiny park across the street.

“Holy fuck, this is spicy,” I say after a few bites. I can feel beads of sweat forming on my upper lip, and my tongue feels like it's being attacked by fire ants. Charlotte doesn't even seem to notice—she's eating her way through one of the takeout containers like she hasn't seen food in a month.

I blow my nose into a napkin and wish I'd ordered something to drink—anything to quench the fire in my mouth. “Dylan loves spicy food, too; I should bring him here. But I think I'll have to limit myself to two- or three-alarm ass-fire spicy. I can't handle it
this
hot.” I say it as a joke—I'm just trying to fit into Charlotte's manic, silly mood—but something dark flashes across her face and she tosses her half-full container of food in the general direction of a garbage can and misses by a mile.

“Yeah, you do that,” she says, all the bounce gone from her voice as fast as it came. “You go right on ahead and bring Dylan here for your next little date.”

I bite my lip and stop talking. I can't keep up with her mood swings. But I also probably should've known better than to bring up Dylan. Charlotte's always been a little weird about him. Like, she'll be perfectly nice to his face most of the time, but then she'll occasionally get all huffy and prickly when he stays the night, practically treating him like a home invader if she happens to run into him in the morning. “Geez, I hope no one ever gives that chick a real weapon,” I remember Dylan saying once after she threw a fork at him because she claimed he sneaked up on her. “Is she the morality police around here, or what?”

And once at the hospital I saw her walk right by him in the hallway—she didn't even acknowledge him, like he wasn't even worth the effort of a freaking single-syllable greeting. She didn't know I was walking right behind her, or she probably wouldn't have been such a blatant bitch to him—fork-throwing aside, her snubs are usually a little more subtle than that. I never said anything to her about it, but it still bugs me. Dylan doesn't deserve to be treated like that.

I don't know if it's a jealousy thing, or what, the way she is about him. This isn't the time to ask her about it, obviously. Not when she's acting this weird about
everything.

I'm about to take off—I'm not going to sit there and listen to her start trashing Dylan—when she apologizes. “I'm sorry, Audie, don't be mad. I've just got such a raging headache right now I can't even think straight.”

She moans a little and bends over at the waist, cupping her head in her hands. She lets out a few more groans, like she's being tortured, and after a minute she peeks over at me to make sure I'm paying attention. When she sees that I see her checking, she grins like a Cheshire cat.

“Okay, drama queen,” I say. “You can knock off the phony misery show. I forgive you.”

She sits up and shakes her head from side to side a few times, the way you do when you have water in your ears. “No show; I really do feel weird.” She opens her eyes extra wide at me, bats her eyelashes a few times. “Audie, can you do me the hugest favor ever? Pretty please?”

She wants me to take her two o'clock appointment. It's the third in a series of four clinic visits, and she doesn't want to get kicked out before she gets paid. “Please, Audie?” she whines. “I feel like hell. My head is seriously killing me right now.”

She does look pale and shaky. And even if she's 95 percent full of shit, I know she'd do it for me if I asked. That's what friends are for, right? Not to mention the fact that we're supposed to be business partners now, in a manner of speaking.

“I'll split the money with you fifty-fifty,” she says. “I'm pretty sure it's just a blood draw at this visit. If you were a real friend, you'd do it for free.”

“Make it seventy-five/twenty-five,” I say, and when she agrees immediately, I know I could've bargained even harder. Still, money is money.

“Just tell me where to go,” I sigh.