We Won't Feel a Thing (20 page)

Stop.
She struggles to sit up.
I want to stop now, okay?

How come?

I just do.

But—why? Did I do something wrong?

No. You—

C’mon. Let’s try again, all right? I’ll do it different this time.
He leans in, his hand hot on her thigh.
Relax, okay? I’ll—

No!
She pushes his hand away.
Look, I’m sorry, but I’m just—not attracted to you. Like that.

Like…at all?

She nods. The truth seems most efficient.
Like at all.

Darkness creeps over Chad’s face. Had he been a cartoon villain and not her date, she might have found it impressive.
Wow, okay.
He kicks his little sister’s pink sippy cup under the front seat.
You want to tell me why the hell you went out with me, then?

She has no answer.

You using me, Ray? That it?
He pins her with a glare.
Using me to make him jealous?

Who?

I see the way you look at him. The way you talk about him. Like he’s the most special-est little snowflake in the universe. Oh, Riley’s so talented. Riley’s so funny—

Screw you.
She fumbles for the door handle. He lunges across her, covers her hand with his.

Speaking on behalf of the whole entire world,
he says in her ear,
it’s still pretty fucking gross to date your brother.

She shoves him away, yanks the door handle. She tumbles out of the van so fast she lands sideways on her boot heel, hears it crack away from the sole.

Back at the house, Riley’s pencil point snaps. He pushes away Jonah’s lady. He backs up the chorus of “Bleed My Love” and pops the lid on the cheap box of chocolates Chad brought Rachel. The woman sings,
This used to be easy, this used to be fun.
He chews a cherry cordial, lets a rush of synths drench him in misery.
Now I’m bleeding love for you, and all you do is run.

Bridge

She runs across Stonemill Bridge, down a lonely snaking stretch of Gunmetal Road, with the “Bleed My Love” drumbeat pummeling her insides and the singer’s wail wavering in her own throat. Her dress reeks of Chad’s cologne and she wants to tear it off, toss it in a cornfield.
Chad knows. He knows.
Did that mean everyone knew? Could they spot it on her face when she was with Riley, the way she could spot a typo from fifty yards?

She hums a line from the “Bleed My Love” bridge:
Get yourself together or you might just fall apart.

On Puckatoe’s main street, restaurant windows glow with amber light and sparkly hearts in pink and red and silver. The wind knifes through her dress. She thinks of what Riley would do if he were here: fix her heel with his super-strong glue, wrap his rumpled jacket around her shoulders, take her to the pharmacy to read Valentine cards in terrible British accents.

She hobbles for the safe purple awning of Jonah’s Junque.

There’s a black paper heart on his door and the bell wreath jingles when she enters. His eyebrows lift, and then he goes back to knitting a grubby brown scarf. She doesn’t know what she’s looking for. She just walks the aisles until she sees it on the NEW ARRIVALS table outside the Boutique Room: a wide, flat mahogany box veined with gold and inlaid with mother-of-pearl.

Riley kept his best art tools—his chipping hammer, his charcoals, the good brushes he’d had to save up for—in a dented shoebox he’d wanted to replace for years. This box was perfect. He had to have it. It even had a tiny lock and key, like the one on his old leatherbound journal.

She checks the price tag: $150.00 FIRM. REAL 24K GOLD.

Rachel cradles the box and walks it to the register. She hands over the forty-six dollars in her purse.
What can I do?
she asks Jonah.
You can have the purse too. And my earrings.

Nah. That’s bargain-bin stuff.
Jonah strokes his gray beard. Then he points at her with a sly smile she can’t read.
What about that, now?

She looks down.
The dress?

It’s vintage Mosconi, nearly mint. I’d say it’s worth a hundred, hundred-twenty. Would be worth more if a button wasn’t missing, but—

She strips down to her thin black slip with no hesitation, like she’s sloughing off the last of Chad. Jonah rings her up, not looking her in the eye. To cover up for the walk home, she trades her pearl hair clip—an Aunt Jerrie original—for a worn velour track suit. He gives her some duct tape for her heel.

Should I wrap the box?
he says.

She thinks. She couldn’t come home early, in different clothes, toting the art toolbox of his dreams wrapped in Valentine paper.
He’ll know. My face will do something stupid and he’ll see it, and he’ll know I’m in love with him.

Under the velour, her chest starts to burn. She turns to Jonah.

Do you deliver?

Chorus

Riley doesn’t hear the door when she opens it. He’s still at his desk, blasting the “Bleed My Love” chorus for the thirty-seventh time and contouring the nude breasts of Jonah’s lady, too embarrassed to look his drawing in the eye.

He feels her boots clack the floorboards.

He pulls off the headphones and tries to slide the sketch and Jonah’s photo out of view, but he knows from her face that she’s seen it. Then he sees what’s going on below her neck: the dress is gone. She’s in a stranger’s clothes. He knows all her outfits like he knows their constellations, and seeing her in a track suit two sizes too big sends a chill rolling through him.

Are you okay?
he says.

I’m fine. What’re you doing?

Nothing.

Silence throbs between them.

What happened to your dress?
says Riley.

She stares at his desk. On the shoebox where he keeps his tools, his wooden artist model is separated from its mate, twisted into a vampy pose.

She shrugs.
Gave it to the needy,
she says. Then she retreats to their bathroom, shuts the door, and locks it.

Two days later, a package arrives for Riley. He cuts the tape and pries it open, and there it is, sparkling in a nest of purple tissue paper.

Rach,
he says.
Look at this! It’s INCREDIBLE.

She’s stretched on her bed with her earbuds in, trying to diagram a Cormac McCarthy sentence.

Who’s it from?
she mutters.

Aunt Jerrie!
He reads the card Rachel dictated to Jonah. Rachel hopes Aunt Jerrie will keep up the ruse when Riley calls to say thank you.
Are you sure about this, sweetie?
Jerrie had said. And Rachel had fibbed:
Yeah…if he finds out how much money I spent, he’ll just return it.

Wow.
Riley says.
She’s like, possibly the greatest person on the planet.

Yeah.
Rachel twists her earbud wire.
She’s pretty awesome.

The room fills with happy bustling Riley sounds: tissue paper crunching, the shoebox breaking down for recycling, tongs and brushes clanking in place in their perfect new home.

She hides her smile and turns up her music. Zuzu Omari, with her lo-fi acoustic punk-soul cover of “Bleed My Love.”

***

A sharp ding made them jump. The sound of Bob and Athena marking time. The pull-down screen in The Echo Location shot up with a
zzzzziiiiip!
Rachel and Riley peered at each other through half-closed eyes, both of them weak from blood loss and love and the labor of bringing forth secrets.

Gannon stood between their chairs, his green eyes smug and knowing. He grasped the arrows in their chests. With a jaunty whistle, he ripped them out, and Rachel and Riley bolted awake.

Chapter Twelve

They pulled off the headphones, popped the latches on the privacy shields. They wrenched around in the pods to face each other. Their hands brushed their chests where the dream-wounds were.

“Tell me…” Rachel tried to steady her voice. “Tell me what you just dreamed.”

“You tell me.”

It seemed too incredible. They cross-examined each other.

“…You sent me that dress?”

“You sent me the toolbox?”

“This is not happening.” Rachel blinked at the ceiling. “We’re a living, breathing O. Henry story.
Shit.
”

Why you gotta beeeeee this wayyyy… .

A faint tinny voice floated up from Rachel’s lap. She grabbed the headphones and held them to her ear. They were still playing: not the soothing swoosh of the Auditory Intervention track, but a pulsating pop song called “Why U Gotta,” which she knew from Mr. Woodlawn’s radio and the Skateland couples-skate songs she always sat out.

“What the—” She struggled out of the sleep pod and reached for the MP3 player, which was sitting on the console in front of Bob and Athena at an angle she didn’t recall. She checked the track listing. Something had gone awry. The Auditory Intervention track had been switched to a playlist titled THE UNCEASING HORRORS OF LOVE. The NOW PLAYING arrow pointed at “Why U Gotta.”

The track before it was “Bleed My Love.”

Rachel dropped the MP3 player on the table. She rushed down the aisle to the front desk, where Flann and Clancy were doing a crossword puzzle and looking vaguely guilty.

She held up her index fingers. “Did you guys,” she said, “tamper with our equipment?”

Clancy folded instantly. “I
told
him to stop!” He poked Flann hard with his pencil eraser. “You said you’d turn it back to the track they had on.”

“I got distracted!”

“Oh no.” Rachel pressed her eyelids with her fingertips.

“I didn’t
hurt
anything,” said Flann. “I was just curious. You guys are quite the enigma! We thought we had you pegged, but then there’s all this stuffy classical music and some bizarre album called Auditory Intervention, and then you have this Horrors of Love mix with all these gloopy pop ballads like ‘Pickled Heart (Jar on a Shelf)’ and ‘Bleed My Love’—”

“Oh
god.”

“You guys were sleeping,” said Flann. “What’s the difference?”

“Don’t tell our manager. Please, please.” Clancy clutched Flann’s hand. “She’ll never put us on the same shift again. This jerk’s the only thing that makes life tolerable.”

“Rach.” Riley hurried to her side, the console packed and slung over his shoulder. “What’s going on?”

She made the mistake of looking at him. A vision of Riley bargaining with Jonah popped into her head, and a terrible rush of tenderness washed over her.

She escaped.

Rachel dashed down the hall and punched the elevator button. Riley ran after her. She ducked into the stairwell and thundered down seven flights of steps, Riley stumbling close behind, calling her name.

She burst through the lobby doors into weak sunlight. The sidewalk was flooded with office types marching to lunch in high heels and dresses, suits and ties; her eyes flitted from face to face, half hoping they’d catch her in their current.

Riley caught up, pulled her away from the crowd.

“They ruined it,” Rachel said to the curb. “We have to go back. Do it again. They should—”

“I don’t think it’s their fault.”

She glanced up at him. Riley’s eyes were grave and wide. She knew that look. He put it on when he was about to submit some crazy theory about cryptids or ask, for the millionth time,
What if the Matrix is real?

“Riley,” she said, “they
changed the track.
They left it on that stupid ‘Bleed My Love’ song and—”

“I know, I know! But I think they’re just, like…” He peeked over his shoulder. “Pawns, kind of.”

“Do I want to hear this?”

“Yes. Please. Hear me out.”

Rachel thunked against a streetlamp.

“Remember at DERT? When I said Gary Gannon maybe…cursed us?”

“Uh-huh.” Rachel rolled her eyes, but the hair on her arms prickled. “Like the time you saw the chupacabra in the Watsons’ backyard.”

“This is different!” Riley put down the console bag. “I
saw
him, Rach. I saw him in Step Two, in the restaurant. I think I saw him through the goggles in Step Three. And just now in the dream—” She shook her head. He caught her by the shoulders. “You saw him too! Right?
”

“Curses aren’t real.”

“What about all those things he said to us? What were they?”

“Words! Stupid, regular words.”

“Why does he keep popping up, then?”

“We’re doing it to ourselves,” Rachel insisted. “We’re sabotaging things subconsciously—”

“I don’t believe that.” He squinted up at the seventh floor of the Forthwith Corporate Plaza. “How come we keep meeting people who mess everything up? The waiter? Flann and Clancy? And those books—if Jeanette hadn’t assigned us—”

A passing bus hit a deep muddy puddle and splattered them.

“So you’re telling me,” Rachel said, raising a dripping finger, “that you think all these random people are—what?
In league
with Gary Gannon?”

“Not consciously.”

Rachel raked her hair. “I have no idea what you’re saying right now.”

“I don’t get it either. Not completely. I just think Gannon’s fighting David somehow. They’re fighting over us. For us.” Riley rubbed his wet arms and shivered. “And David’s losing.”

Rachel stiffened. She couldn’t stop looking at Riley’s hands. She pictured them draping the red velvet coatdress over Jonah’s counter, sketching female curves with shy authority, skimming her own skin in all the places she wanted him to touch her. She drew in a long breath and let it go slowly.

“That’s—quite a story,” she said.

“I think it’s true.”

“Well, we’ll find out.”

“How?”

Rachel hoisted the console bag onto her shoulder.

“You and I,” she said, nodding in the direction of the bus station, “are going on a fact-finding mission.”

***

She had one objective: to get to the phone as fast as possible.

When Rachel and Riley got home, Mr. and Mrs. Woodlawn were still in the living room, singing a campfire song about a hole in the bottom of the sea. Mr. Woodlawn was raking up debris. Mrs. Woodlawn was scrubbing the walls with a sponge the size of her head. Five overstuffed trash bags sat under the window.