by Meg Cabot
I looked at the bartender and he slid another Nikki special towards me.
‘You shouldn’t be talking to me,’ I said to Justin. ‘You’re Lulu’s boyfriend. And no, I don’t remember anything. That’s what the word amnesia means. Memory loss. It’s Greek for forgetfulness.’
‘Oooh,’ Justin said, wrapping his arm around my waist and leaning his face down to nuzzle my neck. ‘One bang on the head and you’re Miss Smarty Pants, aren’t you? And you know good and well that I can trigger your memory, if anyone can… ’
It was amazing. My body’s reaction to his warm lips on my neck was instantaneous. I felt like an electric current went up and down my spine. Only it was not unpleasant.
The thing was, Lulu was dancing not twenty feet away.
What happened next was as instantaneous as the reaction of my skin to his lips.
And that was that I dumped the contents of the cocktail glass the bartender had just slid towards me on to Justin’s head.
All the people around us hooted with surprise as Justin sputtered and leaped off the bar stool. To say he seemed astonished would be an understatement. He looked completely horrified — the more so when he licked his dripping lips.
‘You’re drinking water?’ he cried.
‘It’s called a Nikki,’ I said grandly, slipping off my bar stool. ‘I don’t do alcohol. Or other people’s boyfriends. And don’t you forget it.’
I stalked away to the sound of applause.
I found Lulu dancing with three other girls, all of whom were dressed in the height of eighties chic as well. It was if she’d sent out some secret coded message before we’d even left the loft. Here I was, one of the world’s hottest supermodels, and I still didn’t get how girls did that. Figured out what to wear, I mean.
‘Lulu,’ I shouted at her, to be heard over the incredibly loud music, ‘I’m going home. You can stay if you want, but I just wanted you to know, I’m leaving.’
Lulu stopped dancing and stared at me.
‘No,’ she said, shaking her wild-looking hair. ‘We never leave without the other person. If you’re leaving I’m leaving too. Let me just go tell Justin.’
‘Uh,’ I yelled, ‘Justin’s kind of… mad right now.’
‘Oh,’ Lulu said, comprehension dawning instantly. ‘Has he been hitting on you?’
Now it was my turn to stare. ‘You knew?’
Lulu rolled her huge eyes. ‘Duh. I know Nikki has a problem saying no to boys when they start kissing her… and also that boys have a problem saying no to kissing Nikki. But I thought that first part might have been cleared up by the spirit transfer.’
‘Well, I said no,’ I said uncomfortably. ‘And now he’s mad.’
I felt absurd standing there on the dance floor, having this conversation… especially since some guy who was wearing a ton of gold chains and very big trousers that showed off a lot of his underwear danced up and started grinding on me.
‘Aren’t you Nikki Howard?’ he asked me.
‘No,’ I said to him. Then I turned back to Lulu. ‘You mean, you knew this whole time?’
‘I suspected,’ Lulu said with a shrug. ‘But look, it’s not like Justin and I ever had this big love connection. He just always gives me really nice presents whenever he hooks up with someone else. And ever since you got back from the shows in Paris, there’ve been a lot of really nice presents.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ I said, meaning it. I felt terrible. Even though it wasn’t my fault. It was Nikki’s.
And I wasn’t Nikki. Or at least, I hadn’t been at the time she’d done the terrible things that had hurt Lulu.
‘You are too Nikki Howard,’ Big Pants insisted, dancing up on me again. ‘Damn, girl! You are one fine piece —’
I turned, placed my hand in the centre of his chest as he ground his pelvis against my leg, and pushed him down.
‘It’s all right,’ Lulu said, stepping neatly over Big Pants as he sprawled across the dance floor. ‘You really can’t help it. It’s like you’re powerless over kissing. Anyway, if we’re leaving, we should probably get Brandon. Last time I saw him he was — Oh, there he is. See, this isn’t good.’
Lulu pointed. Brandon was in the DJ’s booth, arguing with the DJ about something.
‘I’ll get him,’ I said, and hurried over just in time to hear Brandon saying, ‘You never want to play my songs, man. Why is that?’
The DJ’s reply was calm, but brutal. ‘Because your songs suck.’
Brandon pulled back his arm as if he was going to punch the DJ in the face. I flung myself forward and grabbed his arm, throwing all my body weight on to it so that he staggered backwards with me.
‘What’re you doing?’ he demanded, his words drunkenly slurred. ‘Did you hear what this guy just said? I’m gonna take him out.’
‘No, you’re not,’ I assured him. ‘We have to go now.’
‘I can’t go now,’ Brandon said, trying to shake me off. ‘I gotta kill this guy first.’
‘No,’ I said, digging my stiletto heels into the grout of the tiled floor to keep him from moving forward. ‘Brandon, you can’t. We gotta go. The limo’s waiting for us—’
‘Good,’ Brandon said, dragging me inexorably forward. ‘I’ll be there in a minute. Soon as I’ve killed this guy.’
Not knowing what else to do — but knowing I had to distract him somehow — I gave a sort of leap, keeping one arm wrapped around Brandon’s arm and throwing the other around his neck, and clamped my mouth over his.
As I’d hoped, Brandon’s reflexes weren’t too badly affected by alcohol for him not to catch me the moment I leaped into his arms. And he became too preoccupied with kissing me to remember his animosity towards the DJ. Kissing really is wonderful that way. I almost forgot myself that I was doing it just to get Brandon to quit wanting to fight…
… until, that is, someone standing close by cleared his throat, and I dragged my lips away from Brandon’s and saw Gabriel Luna standing there staring at us, holding a CD in his hand and looking vaguely bemused.
‘Oh,’ I said, colour rushing into my face. I was, after all, being held in the air by Brandon Stark. Although at least this time he hadn’t slung me over his shoulder, fireman style, like when he’d stuffed me into the limo the night he and Lulu kidnapped me. ‘Hi.’
‘Uh,’ Gabriel said. ‘Hello. Everything all right?’
‘Oh,’ I said, trying to sound breezy. ‘Yes. We were just leaving. Brandon, you can put me down now.’
‘No,’ Brandon said sullenly as he stared at Gabriel, apparently recognizing him from the grainy photo of the two of us on Gabriel’s Vespa that had been all over the place the day before.
‘Ha.’ I gave a nervous laugh, and tried to smile my dewiest at Gabriel.
‘He’s kidding. Put me down now, Brandon.’
‘No,’ Brandon said again.
I closed my eyes briefly, praying there wouldn’t now be a fight between Gabriel and Brandon.
But I needn’t have worried. Because of course Gabriel doesn’t like me that way, considering the fact that he thinks Nikki Howard is a recovering addict and all. When I opened my eyes again, he was still gazing at me with that same bemused expression.
And Lulu had come up behind him and was scowling.
‘God, what is taking so long?’ she demanded, in a surprisingly loud voice. She looked like a five-foot-tall angry general. ‘The car’s waiting, you guys. Move it, or lose it!’
Obediently Brandon followed her, not seeming to notice that he was still carrying me. Not knowing what else to do, I waved goodbye to Gabriel from over Brandon’s broad shoulder. Gabriel waved back — then seemed to catch himself and lowered his hand, looking around as several people standing nearby cried, ‘Oh my God — that’s Nikki Howard!’ One or two rushed up to ask for my autograph, but Brandon just grunted and kept walking, not pausing even for a moment.
Being carried out of the hottest dance club in Manhattan at two in the morning by Nikki Howard’s on-again, off-again boyf
riend wasn’t too embarrassing. Especially when we encountered about nine thousand paparazzi on the sidewalk between the front of the club and the waiting doors of our limo. That was especially nice. I mean, not.
‘Great,’ I said, after Brandon had dumped me inside the car and I’d straightened out my skirt, which had hiked up past my hips. ‘You know what that looked like, right?’
‘What?’ Lulu asked blearily as she reapplied her lip-gloss.
‘Like I was too drunk to walk and Brandon was carrying me out of there.’
‘So?’ Lulu admired her own reflection in the Swarovski crystalencrusted compact she was holding. ‘You didn’t know any better than to drink too much. You forgot. You have amnesia. Remember? God, that’s the perfect excuse for everything.’ She looked up from the compact. ‘Oh, no, wait… how could you remember that? You have amnesia.’
Brandon, who’d piled into the limo after us, chose that moment to collapse on top of me.
‘Your place or mine?’ he asked my stomach.
‘Oh my God, get off,’ I said, giving him a shove. ‘I’m not going to your place and you’re not staying at mine. I don’t even like you that way I only kissed you to keep you from getting your face smashed in by that DJ. You’re in no condition to be fighting anyone.’
‘You’re nice,’ he said, not moving an inch and, in fact, snuggling more deeply into my lap. ‘You’re much nicer than you used to be, before you hit your head and scrambled your brains. You were so mean before. Remember, Lulu? When Nikki was so mean all the time?’
Lulu snapped open her bag and put her lipgloss away, cocking her head to study me thoughtfully. ‘She is a lot less bitchy,’ she said. ‘It must be because of the spirit transfer.’
‘I don’t care why it is,’ Brandon said, sighing happily as he hugged my belly. ‘I’m just glad she’s back. And so much nicer.’ A few seconds later, he let out a gentle snore.
I threw Lulu a helpless look, like, What am I supposed to do now?
‘Just push him off when we get home,’ she said with a shrug of her razor-sharp shoulder blades. ‘He won’t wake up. Tom’ll take him back to his place on Charles Street. It’s not like he’ll remember any of this tomorrow. He never does.’
‘He does this a lot?’ I asked, glancing down at Brandon’s handsome, peacefully dozing face.
Lulu looked at me blankly. ‘He likes to party,’ she said.
I could see that she had no idea what I was talking about — also that she was beginning to nod off herself, every bit as tired as I was. I was going to have to get to the bottom of the Brandon problem some day soon, I knew.
But not tonight. Tonight, I just wanted to go to bed.
Which I did, the minute we got home, carefully setting Nikki’s alarm for seven o’clock — giving me a grand total of four-hours’ sleep — so I could get to school on time.
Well, I guess no one had said it was going to be easy, this balancing high school with a full-time modelling career. I had no idea how I was going to pull it off.
All I knew was that I had to, if I was going to establish any kind of normality to my new life.
Normality. When I had Nikki Howard’s face and Emerson Watts’s brain. Right. Because that had been working out just great so far.
Twenty
I could see that the Walking Dead were in fine form when the cab I’d been lucky to snag let me off in front of TAHS the next morning. They were all leaning up against the chain-link fence around the construction site across the street (because why have a high school if it isn’t across the street from a former thread factory they’ve imploded to make room for more condos, so you can listen to the BEEP BEEP BEEP of trucks backing up all day?), text-messaging one another.
All but Whitney Robertson and Jason Klein. They were making out.
I felt some throw up come into my mouth, just looking at them.
But it might have been the Danish I’d snagged at deli near the loft and made the mistake of trying to eat for breakfast. It turns out Nikki Howard’s digestive system and Danish? Not so much.
I just hadn’t had time to make myself a decent breakfast. I’d hardly believed it when the alarm had gone off. It seemed like I’d only just closed my eyes, and it had been time to wake up again. I’d wanted to die when I saw what time it was. One thing I knew for sure — no more going out on a school night. Not for me.
And then, as I’d lain there, staring at Nikki Howard’s plain white walls — a housekeeper or someone must have come to clean, because Gabriel’s roses were gone. I guess they’d finally wilted and died — with Cosabella licking my face, eager for breakfast and a walk, it had occurred to me that I didn’t have to go. Really. No one was making me. Nikki Howard was an emancipated minor. She didn’t have to go to school if she didn’t want to. I could roll over and go right back to sleep — lovely, delicious sleep. The limo wasn’t coming to pick me up for the Elle shoot until three. I could stay in bed all day if I wanted to.
It was tempting. So tempting. Especially because I’d been too wired to go right to sleep when I’d gotten home last night and, after listening to Mom’s messages — seven of them, each one more aggravated than the last — had finally gone to Lulu’s room and checked her laptop while she slept and found that hers too had the same keystroke-tracking software on it that Nikki’s had.
I’d disconnected the modems to both, and found the keyboards worked perfectly when I plugged them back into the modems again.
It was true I still had only a Stark-brand PC… but once it was functioning without spyware, who needed school? I’d have to set up a whole new online identity for Nikki, since I knew my parents had disconnected my old ones (too much temptation, they’d told me, especially since I was supposed to be dead). But it was going to be so good to be online again! I could play Journeyquest, and IM Christopher –
Oh no, wait. I couldn’t. Because how would Nikki Howard know Christopher Maloney? In order for her to get to know him, she was going to have to go to school today…
Which, I will admit, is the only thing that sent me stumbling out of bed, grabbing blindly for clothes, pulling on the first things my fingers came into contact with, which turned out to be some kind of high-waisted dress I was supposed to wear over black leggings with these cowboy boots and a lot of long necklaces (Lulu had laid them out for me last night, giggling about how I needed to look good on my first day of school).
The ensemble actually turned out to be surprisingly comfortable. I mean, for something that wasn’t a T-shirt and jeans.
And after I’d brushed my teeth and washed my face and run a brush through my hair (careful of my still-tender surgery scar), I noticed in the mirror that… I actually looked kind of good.
Who knew you could look good and actually FEEL good at the same time? I mean, obviously you always feel good in sweats. But hardly anyone LOOKS good in them (at least, according to Frida). Not that I have ever let that stop me from wearing them to school, except on the occasions Frida spotted me and made me turn around and change into something else.
But when she didn’t, the Walking Dead would often stop and stare at me, because I so didn’t match their uniform of pressed khakis and collared shirt… never a drawstring at the waist!
Maybe that had something to do with why, when I got out of the cab and started heading up the steps for the main office, every single person loitering in front of the school stopped what they were doing and simply… stared at me.
Then I heard the whispered words Nikki Howard and remembered that it wasn’t me, Em Watts, they were staring at, or the fact that I was wearing a non-standard-issue Walking Dead uniform, but the fact that I was actually wearing a celebrity’s body.
Oh, yeah. That’s right.
A second later, I saw one of them detach itself from the nest and slink over. It took a second for me to register that it was my sister, Frida. That’s how much she’d been assimilated to resemble all the others.
‘Uh, Nikki?’ she said, pretending like she didn
’t know it was actually me.
I stopped in my tracks and stared at her. That’s because she was wearing a red and gold TAHS cheerleading uniform.
And looked totally adorable in it.
‘Did you change into that when you got here?’ I blurted. It was the first thing that popped into my head. Fortunately, we were far enough from everyone that there was no way anyone could overhear us. ‘Because Mom would never have let you out of the house in that. Does she even know you made the squad?’
‘I changed when I got here,’ Frida said impatiently. ‘And no. And you’re supposed to act like you don’t know me.’
‘I don’t know you,’ I said, taking in the short pleated skirt. ‘But… it looks… it looks… ’
‘Don’t even say it, Em,’ Frida said, her eyes narrowing.
‘… cute.’
Frida’s jaw sagged. ‘Wait… did you just say what I think you said?’
‘I think Nikki is catching or something,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘I’m starting to like all kinds of things I used to hate.’
‘Like Brandon Stark?’ Frida wanted to know. ‘Because there was a picture of you on TMZ this morning, being carried out of Cave last night by him. Also one that showed you with your legs spread apart as you fell into the limo, and you could see your—’
My blood went cold. ‘Mom didn’t see it, did she?’
‘Like she checks PerezHilton first thing in the morning. She’s too busy trying to call you. Are you ever going to answer that cellphone she gave you? All I can say is, good thing you were wearing panties. Oh my God,’ Frida said to me under her breath. ‘Don’t look now, but, like, everyone is checking you out. They’re all staring — I said, DON’T LOOK. But they’re all looking. They’re — hey. Where did you get those necklaces?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘They’re Nikki’s. I think they’re from her Stark clothing line. I can get you some, I think—’
That’d be awesome. Just look at them,’ she said with relish, glancing back at Whitney and the other dead-eyed wannabes. ‘They’re trying to figure out what I’m doing, talking to you. I said, DON’T LOOK.’ Then she added, ‘Oh my God, Whitney is looking over here. WHITNEY ROBERTSON IS LOOKING OVER HERE — this is amazing. Whitney Robertson is actually looking at me. ME. She’s never looked at me before, ever. This is the best day of my life.’