We Won't Feel a Thing (6 page)

Chapter Four

The next day, Rachel and Riley waited.

Anticipation tightened their insides, transforming their schoolday routines from dull to excruciating. They suffered through lessons with a zesty and disheveled Mrs. Woodlawn, who smiled thirteen percent more than usual but still gave them a pop quiz on French negatives. They endured Laurie Semper, Mr. Woodlawn’s chatty old high school friend, who popped by in a tie-dyed pool tunic to check the progress of Riley’s mosaic and drop off the programs for her vow-renewal ceremony, which she had hired Rachel to proofread. Upstairs, during their two o’clock lesson break, Rachel forged Mrs. Woodlawn’s tight, precise signature on the WAVES consent form. Riley fiddled with the left mosaic wave, frowning. They sidestepped the secret thrills of brushing hands, bumping elbows, squeezing past each other in doorways.

It was nearly 8:00 when Mrs. Woodlawn ordered them down for dinner. David A. Kerning still hadn’t come. Rachel and Riley tapped their feet in the spotless dining room under the dull gaze of taxidermied foxes and stag heads. A charred pork roast seethed smoke on the table, and Mrs. Woodlawn’s classical music had been replaced by a CD of bongos and primal yawpings. Rachel and Riley sawed off slices of roast and forced some chitchat, terrified the senior Woodlawns would notice the distinctly un-platonic tension between them.

Six minutes into dinner, the truth became clear: Anne and Ed were otherwise occupied.

“Is there any white bread?” Mr. Woodlawn asked, taking a swig of strawberry milk.

Mrs. Woodlawn reached down beside her and brought up the DERT@Home box, an ugly fur-covered tin they had purchased at the seminar for three easy payments of twenty-nine dollars. She pulled out a stack of playing cards and tossed one on the clean white tablecloth. On the card, two silhouettes faced off inside a cartoon splat, talk lines shooting from their open mouths like tiny poison darts. Mrs. Woodlawn shook her hair savagely and thrummed her small bony hands on the table.

“I hate that,” Mrs. Woodlawn said.

“What?” Mr. Woodlawn blinked, a forkful of peas midway to his mouth.

“The way you ask me if there’s any bread, as if it’s somehow my responsibility to know.” She drummed her hands faster. “Also, I hate that you drink strawberry milk. It’s emasculating.” She balled up a pink paper napkin and tossed it at her husband’s face.

Rachel and Riley whistled without sound.

“Oh,” said Mr. Woodlawn. “Are we doing a Splatter Session now?”

“I don’t see why not. He said dinner is an optimal time to practice. And improving our marriage is nothing to be ashamed of.”

“You kids mind?” said Mr. Woodlawn.

“Go ahead.” Rachel massaged her temples.
Anything to distract.

Mr. Woodlawn took a card and tossed it on the table. He drummed his thick stumpy hands on the tablecloth. “Well, I hate the way you twist a simple question into something bigger. And I hate when you use big words with that smug look on your face, like I won’t know what it means. It’s insulting.” He surveyed his surroundings. He plucked a plastic chestnut from the centerpiece and chucked it at his wife. It bounced off her forehead and landed on her plate with a
ping.

Mrs. Woodlawn beamed. “This is good, Ed. The truth feels so good, doesn’t it?”

“That didn’t hurt?”

“It was a good pain. An honest pain.”

“Okay. Uh…yeah, then!”

“Your big lips make you look stupid.” She tossed a napkin ring at him. “I dislike them so much.”

“Well, you make me feel stupid,” —he lobbed a handful of peas at her— “by explaining things to me like I’m five.”

“Well, it’s ludicrous that I
have
to explain things to you after fifteen years, such as where we keep the peanut butter, and the difference between teaspoons and soup spoons, and how I feel when you laugh at
every preposterous comment
Laurie Semper makes!”

She flung her salad bowl at Mr. Woodlawn. It whizzed by his left ear and crashed against the wall, leaving streaks of raspberry vinaigrette. Rachel and Riley held their breath.

The doorbell made a quiet
ding
.

“We’ll get it,” they said.

They rushed through the living room, hearts galloping. Riley pressed his hand to the door before Rachel could open it.

“What?” said Rachel.

“Swear on your favorite book that we won’t end up like that.” He jerked his head toward the dining room.

“I swear on Book 3 of the Winterthorne series.” Rachel unlatched the door. “
This
is science.
That
is insanity.”

Riley opened his mouth, then closed it. Rachel pulled the door open.

Standing on their front porch was a woman no older than twenty-six, tall and cutely gawky with an outburst of tight brown curls. She wore the kind of dress Rachel despised: a full-skirted purple confection with yellow heart-shaped buttons. Over her shoulder was a canvas bag printed with owls. She carried a huge wooden box plastered with stickers that said REVOLUTIONARY TECHNOLOGY INSIDE and IF FOUND, DO NOT OPEN.

“
Hi.
Oh man, I’m so so sorry it took me so long.” Her mouth made a trapezoid of apology. “I got hung up at the farmer’s market and I took a wrong turn at the diner and then I had to pull over and watch the sun set over that cornfield on Honeyhill, you know which one I mean? It’s so wild, everything on that road’s a perfect Nebraska postcard and then you turn down here and it’s like, whoa, Weird Backroad America all of a sudden. Like, how is
every house
on your street different? There’s a Dutch Colonial next to a Spanish stucco next to a trailer with a random goat tied outside. It’s kind of magical! You don’t know what’s coming next.” She shifted her grip on the box. “Now you’re going to ask who I am, right?”

Rachel and Riley nodded.

“Oh, wow, you’re like a little matched set! Like ketchup and mustard. He told me your problem but he never gets very descriptive, you know?” She balanced the box on her knee and extended a hand. “Sorry. I’m Tilly Merriam. I work with David?”

“Hey.” Rachel shook her hand. “Sorry. We thought he was coming.”

“He was, he was! He likes to do these things personally but he had this emergency conference call with the rest of the WAVES Collective and you know him—well, you don’t, but trust me, there’s nothing that boy loves more than a conference call. Anyway, I’m supposed to drop off this equipment for you.” She transferred the box to Rachel’s arms as if she were handing off a baby. “It should all be in there. Don’t ask me to check because I wouldn’t know; I just do his marketing, like his brochures and things, and then I do the driving on his tours because he gets vertigo or impetigo or whatever-go if he drives for more than an hour at a time and I can go on and on forever.”

“I bet.” Rachel blinked.

“I don’t know what he’ll do without me next year—I’m probably getting married if my boyfriend gets his rear in gear so you know, no more gallivanting around with Mr. Emotional Discipline-Pants. My boyfriend’s always like ‘Oi, Tills, time to cut the cord!’ but it’s just so hard to walk away, you know?”

“Yeah,” said Riley.

“Oh, you do! I know. Well, life goes on. I’ve already opened a store on Artsey so I can sell my wishing balls from home after I quit. That’s my real passion. You want to see?”

“Sure, yeah,” said Riley. “I’m an artist too.”

“Yeah? Okay, so maybe you’ll like these. Don’t tell him I brought them along because he’ll be so mad. Not that he’d show it. He’s like, so above all that.”

Tilly Merriam bent down to rummage in her bag. Her dress gapped and they could see a small tattoo of two birds above her left breast. She unwrapped three blown-glass ornaments from a checkered dishtowel and hung them one by one on Riley’s fingers: a globe of swirly blues and greens, a clear ball flecked with cloudy milk-white, and a delicate red heart.

“They’re beautiful.” Riley smiled at Tilly, then darted his eyes to see if Rachel noticed.

“Really? Do you want one? You can have one, sweetie.”

“Ahh, I—”

“Have the heart.”

“I shouldn’t.”

“Doesn’t matter. It’s yours now.”

Something clattered behind them. A cookie sheet whacking a wall.

“Is everything okay?” Tilly peeked around Rachel and Riley.

Mr. and Mrs. Woodlawn had moved the fight to the kitchen. A hail of organic cereal rained down on the floor.

“I hate the wrinkles around your mouth!” yelled Mr. Woodlawn.

“I hate the flab around your middle!”

“I hate that you never dress sexy!”

“I hate seeing the waistband of your underwear every time you sit down, and so does the rest of the world!”

“I…ah…”

“Keep going, Ed. The
Pocket Guide
says—”

“I hate that antique couch you made me buy!” Mr. Woodlawn blurted. “It’s expensive and white and uncomfortable and you wanted it because you’re a snob and now I can’t even sit down in
my own goddamned living room!”

Riley shut his eyes.

“They did DERT yesterday,” said Rachel.

“Ooohh.” Tilly Merriam shuddered. “I’ll never understand people and their fix-me-fast programs and stuff. I mean, I know I work for one, but it’s just a job. Me, I feel what I feel when I feel it, and that’s fine with me.”

“Aren’t you lucky,” said Rachel. Riley elbowed her gently.

“Well, I’ll leave you guys to it—oh, wait! I need your forms.” Riley plucked them from Rachel’s back pocket and handed them over. “Oh good, your email’s on here. He says he’ll send instructions for Step One right away. I’ll get on him and make sure he does it; he’d never stop tinkering with stuff if it wasn’t for me!”

In the kitchen, Mr. and Mrs. Woodlawn yanked open the refrigerator door. Rachel and Riley bade hasty farewells to Tilly Merriam. She shook their hands and sized them up one last time, as if they were soldiers leaving for battle.

“Good luck, good luck,” she said, her hand lingering in Riley’s. “You take care of that heart, okay?”

***

Rachel slammed the upstairs door behind them. She sprang into action. She put on some loud thrashing music to drown out Mr. and Mrs. Woodlawn—an old CD she’d taken home from the library,
Hateful Little Apologies
by a dour quartet called Thirsty Herd.

She washed her hands and face in their bathroom sink, letting the sturdy drums regulate her heartbeat. This Tilly woman was nervy: smiling Riley silly, giving him a glass heart.
It’s yours now. Sweetie.
It was a rare outside reminder of the effect Riley would have on real-world girls. She knew it intellectually, knew from books and movies that women enjoyed men with curly dark hair and firm square carpenter’s hands and eyes like cadet-blue Crayolas, but when they were safe in their kingdom of two, the fact stayed theoretical. She blew off her burn of jealousy, confirmed to herself that WAVES could not start fast enough.

Rachel banged out of the bathroom. She propped her letter from Martinet College on her desk, where she could see it. She dismantled the nest of throw pillows and stacked them neatly in the closet. Then she set the wooden equipment box in the new empty space on the floor and pried the lid off with her ruler.

The first thing she saw was a pale blue flyer with the WAVES logo on it; the clean rounded lines and futuristic font looked silly now that she knew Tilly Merriam had designed it. The header read:

There were some warnings and disclaimers, but she had no patience for those. She tossed the flyer aside.

In the box’s upper level, in a nest of bubble wrap, gleamed the main WAVES console. It was a rectangular box of glossy white plastic about the size of a large toaster oven, with a line of round ports on one side. Above the ports was a gray screen the size of an index card. On top of the console was a circle of six pushbuttons, black with white numbers. Random seams here and there in the plastic hinted at the presence of secret slots and doors.

Rachel lifted out the console. She was a bit annoyed by its size and weight; a simple Forbidden Love app, she thought, would’ve been less cumbersome. She pawed away more bubble wrap and peeked in the bottom layer. There were six square white metal doors of equal size. Pinching and lifting their silver handles, Rachel opened the compartments. The ones labeled 1 through 4 held:

1. two small tablet computers
   
2. two sets of oxygen tubes
   
3. two pairs of goggles, smoked plastic rimmed in silver
   
4. two sets of white padded headphones and a strange, bulky MP3 player
   

Compartments 5 and 6 were empty, like two little coffins waiting to be filled. Rachel shivered, then shut them up and put them out of mind. She smiled at the symmetry of the compartments, the clean elegance of the equipment. Confidence swelled inside her. This was an intricate and meticulous system, created by geniuses who were so genius they had to work in secret. It would work. It had to. And everything would be okay.

“Come look.” She waved Riley over. “It’s
beautiful
.”

***

Using a bent paper clip as a hook, Riley hung Tilly Merriam’s wishing heart in their middle window, right above the sandcastle dollhouse. He emptied his pockets, which were full of white stones he didn’t remember picking up. Then he knelt beside Rachel and peered into the big box. His stomach burned. It was real now. The equipment was factual, laid out before them in neat compartments.

“Amazing,” said Rachel. “Right?”

Riley examined the tablets, the headphones, the oxygen tubes. “They look…freaky.”

“They do not!” She slipped on the goggles. “They’re so space-age dystopian cool.”

“Okay,
dystopian
is not a comforting word.”

“It’s just equipment, Ri.”

“I hate equipment. It gives me the creeps.”

“We know.” Rachel crossed her eyes at him through the goggles. “Valium for the eye doctor’s.
Every time.”

“Those air-puff tests are—”

“—from the devil.
Pfft.”

Rachel lunged forward and blew a playful puff of air in his face. Riley ducked and caught her by the arm, like it was any other day. This was one of his tiny pleasures. He often said silly things he knew she would tease him for, just so they could enact one of their pantomimes: a wrestle he’d let her win, a jostling of arms that would end with his fingers hugging her wrist for two seconds before he made himself let go.