You know, come to think of it, I guess fear can be a pretty pathetic monster. But still. There’s no denying it. Overcoming these little daily fears is what gives people … I don’t know … joy. It’s what gives them a reason to live, I guess. So where does that leave me?
I think I know the answer to that question, though. I think a lot of what I’ll do every day will be the same thing. Only now it won’t just be to pass the time. It won’t just be a way to cope. Now maybe it will actually bring me some joy. Maybe I’ll experience some of that mysterious pleasure that I’ve been standing here and watching everyone else have.
Because I won’t be fearless anymore. No, this time I’ll feel the fear … and I’ll overcome it. I’ll finally know what it feels like to be brave.
red velvet lips
His grin doubled in size as he turned up to the woman’s face and gazed at her adoringly.
Faithful Soldiers
“HEATHER! WAIT UP!”
Heather shut her eyes and froze at the end of the hall. It was Megan. Dammit. And Heather was only two steps from the stairs. She’d been paying strict attention to all of their schedules—Carrie, Megan, Melanie, and Laura—to make sure that she didn’t run into any of them for the rest of the day. She’d made it as far as sixth period, but somehow Megan had caught up to her in the third-floor hallway. Heather hung her head. Megan must have bagged her last class just to seek Heather out. Just to get the scoop. The scoop that Heather didn’t have.
Heather turned around slowly, applying the most comfortable smile she could manage. But the smile didn’t hold. Megan wasn’t alone. All four of them had apparently bagged their last classes and formed a very giddy semicircle behind her.
“What’s up?” Heather asked, feigning ignorance.
“Come on,” Carrie said, bouncing slightly in place. “Did we, like, save Gaia’s ass yesterday or what?”
“Yeah,” Melanie chimed in. “How did our faux-blond full-force posse work out?”
“Um, excuse me,” Carrie said. “Quick correction. We may have all worn blond wigs, but we are not all faux blonds.”
“Yeah, right,” Melanie replied. “Why don’t you just give me the three hundred bucks you spend at Privé every month, and then you can be officially discharged from the faux-blond full-force posse?”
I have to get out of here, Heather thought, suddenly feeling sick to her stomach.
“Okay, quick lesson,” Carrie shot back. “Highlights are not faux; they are called enhancements—”
“You guys!” Laura interrupted. “Later, maybe, you think? Can we stick to the matter at hand here?”
“Yes,” Megan bubbled apologetically. She turned to Heather. “The matter at hand. Is Gaia okay? What happened last night?”
Heather surveyed the well-made-up, perfectly coifed, desperately excited faces of her dear friends, and her sickness morphed into the very feeling she’d been trying all day to avoid. The feeling she’d been putting off ever since her unfortunate encounter with Ed.
The terrible feeling of failure.
The fact was, even if their little antistalker plan had been Gaia’s idea, Heather was still the one who’d gathered her “soldiers” for the “operation.” She knew her friends all had their own reasons for agreeing to the big stunt, but in the end they’d really done it out of loyalty to Heather. And now she felt… well, kind of like a general who’d led her troops into battle and couldn’t even tell them who’d won the war.
“Um—um…,” she stammered through her smile. “I’m… not sure.”
“What do you mean?” Laura asked.
“Did you talk to Gaia?” Carrie asked.
“Did you talk to Ed?” Melanie tacked on, overlapping them both.
Heather felt her toes scrunching inside her shoes. Had she talked to Ed? The one she’d risked her life for? And the lives of her friends as well? The one she’d been trying so hard to prove herself to, to make a real sacrifice for? Yes. She’d talked to him. He just hadn’t really talked to her. In fact, he’d pretty much flat out ignored her.
Being confronted by her friends had only served to magnify the awkward and uneasy sensation that had been growing inside Heather since the morning. She had behaved more nobly than she ever had in her whole life… and the only responses she’d gotten so far were angry words and a door basically slammed in her face. She had no idea what to think. Was Gaia in much deeper trouble than she thought? Or had she just moved on from New York without a word, in her own inimitable, existential loner fashion? Maybe that was it. Maybe Gaia had just had it with New York and VS and Ed. Maybe that’s why Ed was so upset.
Or did it have something to do with Sam? Maybe Ed was just sulking because Gaia had run off and worked things out with Sam. If that was the case, then welcome to the club, Fargo. Welcome to the side of Gaia Moore you seem to have been missing for the past year.
Whoa, Heather. Watch yourself. You’re slipping.
She had to get hold of her frustration. She wasn’t going to let herself slide back into selfish pettiness based on nothing but a bunch of unanswered questions. And that was really all she had right now. That and an increasingly frustrating sense of wasted nobility. And four friends who deserved better.
“I talked to him, but…” Heather left the sentence hanging.
“But what?” Megan asked insistently.
Carrie stepped forward. “Heather, hello, what’s going on?”
“Yeah,” Laura agreed, frowning. “Why are you acting so weird? They’re simple questions. Is Gaia all right? And did you talk to Ed or not?”
The troops were getting restless. Simple questions, maybe, but not such simple answers.
“Well, here’s the deal,” Heather began, trying to share some reassuring eye contact with each one of them. “I did talk to Ed, but I’m not sure we understood each other so well.” That was one way of putting it. “So I think we’ll need to have another little chat.”
None of them looked very happy with the reply. And Heather couldn’t blame them. Her reply was lame. Unfortunately, though, Ed was the only person who had the answers they deserved. Which meant that she’d have to go back to him. A repeat of the morning’s conversation was not high up on Heather’s list of self-esteem builders, but she supposed it would have to be done. She would have to march back up to Ed for some well-deserved clarity. If not for her own self-esteem, then at least to satisfy her faithful soldiers. Although… probably more for her own self-esteem. And maybe it didn’t have to be today….
Hmmm. This whole “unselfish” thing was much harder than it sounded.
Steel Coils
“GAIA? CAN YOU HEAR ME?”
The voice was so familiar. A man’s. Her father? Her uncle? She couldn’t think. Thinking hurt. Everything hurt so bad. Every limb on her body was being pecked by invisible vultures. Or could she see the vultures, hovering over her face? Were her eyes even open yet?
She was so hot. Maybe she was in the desert? Buried in the sand? No, mud. She felt like she’d been buried in hot mud… or a cake? That was it. Someone had dropped her into boiling batter, and now they were trying to bake her into a cake.
“Gaia, open your eyes,” the voice said. “You’re safe now. It’s over.”
Fine. Just please turn off the oven and stick a fork in me. Her eyes fluttered open, but the shapes came much too close—the talking vultures, like white oval apparitions. Heads that could float. Or faces? Faces were watching her. Gaia chose the face hovering over her to the left and tried to pencil in all the missing details. The chin came through first, covered in salt-and-pepper stubble. Then the weathered cheeks and finally the translucent blue eyes. The eyes … My uncle’s or my father’s?
“Gaia, can you hear me?” he asked again.
“The oven,” she whispered. “Please. Turn off the goddamn oven.”
“I think she’s delirious,” the other face said. It spoke with the most beautiful Russian accent Gaia had heard since she was a child.
Or w
as it the same accent she’d heard as a child? That wasn’t possible. Unless Gaia was dead and this hot and muddy desert cake world was heaven …
“Gaia,” the man said with an angelic smile, “it’s your father. I’m here now. You’re safe from Loki. Can you hear me, sweetheart? There’s someone here who wants to meet you….”
His grin doubled in size as he turned up to the woman’s face and gazed at her adoringly. Gaia turned with him, trying desperately to make out the face, trying to see if the face matched the unforgettable voice—the soothing voice that Gaia had wanted to hear ten times a day for the last five years. But it couldn’t be who she thought it was. Could it? Maybe they were all dead now. All three of them. Was that possible?
Gaia raced from feature to feature, filling in every detail of this golden white apparition’s face. Her red velvet lips, her elegant sharp cheekbones and creamy skin. Maybe she never died? Maybe that was just a bad dream. The last five years, just a bad dream. Her brown eyes flecked with orange, the dark glossy hair … She had to touch her to be sure. She couldn’t just trust her vision. Not while she was in this miserable state of being cooked alive.
She reached out for the ghost. But she couldn’t be a ghost because she took Gaia’s hand. If she was just an apparition, then how could she be so real to the touch? Real flesh, gripping tightly to Gaia’s hand. Blood pumping through the fingers and giving the cheeks a healthy red flush. She was. She was alive.
Gaia’s mother was alive.
She was flesh and blood, and she was holding Gaia’s hand in bed, just as she’d always done when Gaia was sick.
“I knew you weren’t dead,” Gaia whispered. A rush of tears began to flow from her glassy eyes and pour down her sweltering face. “I knew it.”
“No, Gaia,” her mother said, flashing her smile. “You don’t understand, darling.” Her mother laid her hand on Gaia’s face and then turned worriedly to her father. “Oh God, Tom, she is burning.”
“I know,” he agreed, matching her mother’s worried expression and looking down at Gaia.
“I am,” Gaia uttered. “I am burning. Can we turn off the oven, Mom? Please?”
“What is she talking about?” a troubled voice chimed in from behind her mother. The question had been asked in Russian, but the voice was so incredibly familiar. A young woman’s voice, somehow even more familiar than her mother’s.
“English,” her mother said, turning behind her. “We speak English now.”
“Does she even know where she is?” the girl asked in a thick Russian accent.
“That voice …,” Gaia moaned, staring up at the ceiling. “Why do I know that voice?” She raised her throbbing head as much as she could, trying to see the young woman’s face in the shadows. “I can’t see you. Let me see you.”
The girl finally stepped out from the shadows, and when she appeared in the light, Gaia felt all the blood drain from her body. The long blond hair, the excessively muscular frame, the permanent frown of muted bitterness in the lips. Gaia had stared at this ugly face a million times. She’d been disappointed by it, cursed it, ignored it, but it never went away. Of course the voice was familiar. It was familiar because it was her own.
Gaia was staring at herself. She watched as her mirror image placed a hand on her mother’s shoulder and stared down at her with a particularly cold scowl—even by Gaia’s standards.
“What’s the matter?” Gaia begged of her mirror image. “Why are you so angry at me?”
“Don’t you know?” she spat back bitterly, staring into Gaia’s eyes. “We’re dying, Gaia.” The anger began to drop away as tears fell from her eyes as well. “Don’t you see what you’ve done? You’ve killed us. Now our whole family is dead.”
“Shut up!” Gaia screamed, writhing in pain as she tried to climb out of the bed. “I’m not dead. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Gaia turned to her mother and grabbed at her arms. “Tell her, Mom! Tell her I’m not dead!”
Gaia’s mother backed away and looked helplessly to her father for answers.
“Gaia, stop it!” her father shouted. He clamped his hands on her shoulders and struggled to push her back down on the bed. “Sweetheart, relax—you’re delirious.”
She raised herself far enough out of bed to take a swipe at her mirror image, but the apparition backed away before Gaia could get a good punch in. “You shut your goddamn mouth!” Gaia howled. “I won’t die if someone will just turn off this oven!”
Her father held tight to her shoulders and pressed her back down on the bed. He shook her gently, lightly slapping his hand against her boiling face. “Gaia, listen to me,” he said. “Listen to me. Loki gave you something. We don’t know what it is, but it’s given you a very high fever and you’re hallucinating, do you understand me? You need to calm down. You need to relax.”
Stitches of memory floated faintly through Gaia’s mind as her father shook her: her uncle’s satisfied grin, the syringe filled with yellowish liquid shooting deep into her vein, a warning from Dr. Kessler. “Possibly drowsiness, disorientation,” he’d said. “You may have a high fever….”
Her body felt like Jell-O spiked with steel coils. Her father’s grip had shaken everything into a blur. The light slaps to her face were far more painful than they should have been. But as the vibrations began to subside, her surroundings started to come more clearly into focus. The shaking had actually done her some good. She was breaking from her feverish delirium and slowly returning to reality.
Yes. She was lying in a bed soaked through with sweat, in a room she had never seen before.
She turned to her mother. But this woman wasn’t her mother at all. There was actually only the slightest resemblance. This woman’s nose was much shorter, much less defined, without the long, perfect elegance of her mother’s. And the shape of her face was completely different. Turning her head slightly, Gaia then saw that the girl she had seen as herself had even less of a resemblance. With the exception of long blond hair and an age range similar to Gaia’s, she and Gaia really had very little physically in common. She doesn’t look like me at all. No, she’s graceful and beautiful. Whoever she is.
“I think she’s coming out of it,” Gaia’s father said. The older woman flashed Gaia a warm smile. But the beautiful girl continued to stare at her, cold and distrustful, from the end of the bed. She took a step back into the shadow of the room.
“You see, Gaia?” the woman said in her thick but refined Russian accent. “You were right. You are not dead.”
“Who are you?” Gaia croaked. She wiped the thick film of sweat from around her mouth. “Where are we?” Her vision was still blurry, and sound was still popping in and out. Continuous reality checks were a necessity.
The woman turned to Gaia’s father as if it wasn’t her place to answer Gaia’s questions. He laid his sizable hand over Gaia’s forehead and smoothed the moist hairs back from her face.
“Well, this is an awkward time for introductions,” he said with a smile, “but there’s nothing we can do about that now. Gaia, this is Natasha. Natasha is going to take care of you for a while, just while I’m away.” He turned to the end of the bed, referencing the graceful girl hidden in the shadows. “This is Tatiana, her daughter. She’ll be living with you as well.”
Gaia felt like she was in some hellish reworking of the Wizard of Oz. Everything seemed otherworldly and tentative, and she felt much more like a child than she should have. She’d only been truly awake for a moment or so, and she still had very little faith in her ability to separate reality from dreams. “What are you talking about?” she asked, drowning in confusion. “Where are we?”
“We’re home,” he said. “On East Seventy-second Street.” He smiled at that Natasha woman again. “This is going to be your new home for a while. When you feel ready to stand up, you can take a look around. It’s really a beautiful apartment, Gaia. Natasha and Tatiana helped me pick it out. As a matter of fact, they are actually very distant relations of your mother�
�s, going back a few generations on your grandmother’s side. So I’d like it if you’d think of them as family.”
Was this all a hallucination as well? What the hell was he talking about? East Seventy-second Street? Natasha and who? Did he say something about family …?
The room was officially spinning again, which only brought Gaia back to the last conscious moment she could remember. Her uncle’s makeshift lab spinning around her ceaselessly. Being torn apart by all those black-hooded soldiers.
“There were so many of them,” she thought aloud, aware that she was tangled up in non sequiturs at this point. “They were clutching me so hard. They wanted to kill me. What happened?”
Gaia’s father turned away for a moment, almost as if he were ashamed. When he looked back at Gaia, all the joy and ease had been stripped from his expression, leaving only feeble humiliation in the furrowed corners of his mouth. “I think I’ll always be apologizing to you, Gaia,” he said timidly. “And here I am doing it again. It took us so long to find you. I’m sorry,” he confessed with a catch in his voice. “But you’re safe now, and you are alive. Believe me, Gaia. You are alive.”
“But why?” Gaia asked. “Why didn’t they kill me? They were shooting everything in sight. Everyone.”
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