Scarlett Fever

by Maureen Johnson

  “Own key, huh? She couldn’t do anything without you.”

  Scarlett scooped Murray from the ground, where he had been scratching an ineffective paw at the door. As gestures went, this was like throwing a rock at the moon in an attempt to knock it out of orbit. It was nice to have Murray in that respect—only he had less control over his situation than she did over hers.

  Scarlett called out for Mrs. Amberson, just in case she was ensconced in her bedroom and maybe about to emerge half-undressed. There was total silence.

  “I think she’s out,” Scarlett said, gripping Murray tight. She mustered the courage to look at Eric now. Maybe he would just leave. That would make sense, since the apartment’s occupant wasn’t there. But he didn’t. He walked right inside, making appreciative noises as he took in the airy living room with its white furniture, and straight to the windows that looked out over the park.

  “Don’t these kinds of apartments cost, like, millions?” he said.

  There was something in his manner that made Scarlett feel like it was somehow her fault that Mrs. Amberson lived in a very nice apartment, and that she had to make excuses for it.

  “It’s actually her friend’s,” Scarlett said. “She’s subletting it for cheap.”

  “When you say cheap, you probably don’t mean the kind of cheap I go for. Because I go for cheap. Where I come from, a car on the lawn is considered landscaping.”

  He wandered past the desk, pausing to look at the photo array, which now included five pictures of Chelsea. He lingered on the photograph he was in for just a moment, then sat on one of the silver bar stools and swiveled. He slipped into one of those slow smiles of his—the ones that said, “I’m so irresistible and harmless.”

  Scarlett sat down on the sofa, holding a quivering Murray firmly on her lap. She told herself that if she could just calm Murray, she would be calm. But Murray would never be calm. He was an exposed, throbbing nerve, set loose into the world in the form of a dog.

  “Things getting back to normal at home?” Eric asked.

  “We don’t really know what that means,” she replied.

  This resulted in an even slower, more dangerously charming smile. Murray vibrated like a cell phone in a box, impossible to ignore.

  “Spencer still complaining about that day with the sock?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” she said, unable to keep herself from smiling—a queasy, wracked smile that hurt her face from the inside. “He’s mentioned it once or twice. A day.”

  “God, I’ve never seen him so mad. Well, actually, I have, but…”

  He laughed a quick, terse laugh and looked down. Of course he had seen Spencer angrier. Like right before Spencer’s fist “accidentally” hit his face. Because of Scarlett.

  Tension took over her body. Murray could feel what she suppressed. In protest, he broke free from her grip in terror, rocketing across the sofa. Unfortunately, a nervous Murray was a tinkling Murray, and he dribbled an erratic, golden trail across the white fabric before making a heroic leap from the armrest and splatting on the ground. Scarlett didn’t want to bring attention to the fact that there was dog pee next to her, because that is considered unsexy in most cultures, but it was impossible to hide against the snowy whiteness of the sofa. It didn’t help that Murray was making rapid, insane circuits of the room, his little nails acting like ice skates against the polished floor, sending him speeding and sliding and skidding into every single piece of furniture. Every blow just propelled him faster, bouncing him from kitchen bar to end table to desk to chair to potted plant, around and around.

  Eric watched this with a detached, clinical interest.

  “When did Amy get a dog?” he asked.

  “He’s borrowed,” Scarlett said. “And he has issues. He has every issue.”

  “Yeah, I can see that. We should get that out before it sets in.”

  He was pointing at the yellow pee road next to Scarlett. He got off the bar stool and went into Mrs. Amberson’s tiny kitchen. Scarlett could hear him rummaging around, and a moment later he returned with a bottle of sparkling mineral water and a roll of unbleached paper towels. He calmly started drizzling the water on the spots and blotting them up with a paper towel.

  “I should be doing that,” Scarlett said.

  “I have four dogs back home,” he said. “I’m used to this. You city people, living in your fancy hotels, you don’t have to deal with animals like we country folks do.”

  “You should see some of the things we do have to deal with,” Scarlett said. “Hotel guests make dogs seem really clean.”

  He laughed a little.

  Scarlett grabbed some towels and started on the opposite end of the sofa. She tried to work long and hard on her spot, holding her ground, but Eric was clipping along. Soon, he was next to her. His arm rubbed against hers. He didn’t seem to notice this, but it went on for almost a minute, this gentle brushing.

  When she was trying to forget about Eric, she had to make an extra effort to erase the mental image of his arms. They were extraordinary arms—not gross, steroid big, but full and solid, just large enough to slightly strain the fabric of his shirt. They were even developed on the lower half, from the elbow to the hand, so that he had to have a really big watchband to make it all the way around his sturdy wrist. One day in a hot, empty theater, those arms had lifted her up like she was nothing at all.

  Scarlett had to steady herself, even though she was kneeling. Eric stopped moving, but his arm was still touching hers. Just barely, but it was, maybe just a millimeter of contact she could feel through her whole body. He turned, his face just inches from hers, looking her right in the eye. They were alone in an empty apartment (except for Murray, who had calmed down and was meditatively chewing on the inside of his own thigh).

  “Come here often?” he said, slipping into a leer.

  Scarlett tried not to smile. A smile would be giving in—to what, she didn’t know. But he kept the face up until she cracked. The wall was down completely.

  “Gotcha,” Eric said, clearly very satisfied with himself. He stood, taking the wad of used paper towels into the kitchen to dispose of them. Scarlett grabbed the water and the roll. They shuffled for position at the sink, sharing the soap and the flow of water, washing their hands. But the current passing between them was impossible to ignore. He moved back to make room for her but didn’t leave the small room. He just leaned against the refrigerator until she was done.

  “So,” he asked, “you’re good?”

  “Yeah,” Scarlett said, picking up an empty ice cube tray and twisting it. “I’m…good.”

  “And school?”

  “Same crap, new year. But, good. I guess.”

  “NYU is scary,” he said. “I guess I knew when I moved to New York that I wouldn’t be the big kid on the block anymore, the guy who got all the leads in the school show…but I didn’t know how much better everyone would be.”

  He pushed his hands into the pockets of his shorts and let out a long sigh—the song of insecurity.

  “You’re good,” Scarlett said before she could help herself.

  The speed of the compliment seemed to ruin whatever feeling was in the room.

  “I guess I should get back,” he said. “I have a rehearsal in an hour. But I just wanted to drop by. Say hi to your boss for me?”

  “Sure,” Scarlett said. She tried to sound casual, but her voice had gone all croaky. He looked at the granite floor for a moment, black and twinkling with golden flecks of mica.

  “Okay,” he said, “so…”

  Some decision was being made. Something was being considered. They were so close. Scarlett had the mad urge to step forward and grab him around the waist, hug him close. He would be, at the very least, too polite to push her away. He would hug her back, and he would look down into her face, and then they would…

  No. You can’t go flinging yourself at people. Especially people you are trying not to think about even if they are standing in a tiny kitchen with y
ou and even if you have just cleaned up dog pee with them.

  Eric didn’t know what words should come next, either, so he held up a hand of good-bye and retreat, backing up out of the kitchen, the apartment, and Scarlett’s life in general.

  It took her almost forty-five minutes to calm back down, most of which was spent on the phone to Dakota.

  “Let’s have him killed!” Dakota suggested cheerfully.

  “I’m serious,” Scarlett said. “Help me. I’m under a table.”

  “Is that a Shakespeare expression? Like, ‘Gadzooks! I am under a table, milord! Prithee, handeth me the pointy stick for to stab the cad!’ Is that what you mean?”

  “I mean I’m under a table.”

  This was true. Scarlett was crouching on the fluffy white rug under the unused dining table on the side of the living room. She had no idea why she was doing this, except that it seemed kind of safe there.

  “He came to see me,” Scarlett said, getting back to the matter at hand. “Why did he come to see me?”

  There was a long pause on Dakota’s end of the line.

  “He didn’t actually come to see you,” she finally said. “Think about it. Where do you work now?”

  “For Mrs. Amberson.”

  “Who is an…”

  “Agent,” Scarlett said. How had she been so stupid? Eric wasn’t standing around in front of Mrs. Amberson’s apartment building hoping to see Scarlett—he wanted to see her boss. He wanted to see an agent. The fact that he had run into Scarlett was purely accidental. Her brain was so hopped-up on hormones and adrenaline that she couldn’t see what was going on.

  “You okay?” Dakota asked after a long pause.

  “Fine,” Scarlett replied. “I’d better go.”

  “Call me if you need me, okay?”

  “Thanks.”

  She hung up and dropped her phone into the thickly piled rug and willed herself to think. So he had come here. So they had spoken. So he really just wanted to talk to her boss. Big deal. So what if she had to wrap her arms around herself to make the quivering feeling stop, or that she wanted to run out and find him, follow him, see where he went and who he talked to and if the girls in his class were as pretty as they were in Scarlett’s nightmares. She had seen him, and she had lived. That made her strong, right? You didn’t win the war until you faced your foe, and she had just done some full-on foe-facing, which was both brave and alliterative.

  The intercom buzzed, startling Scarlett so much that she popped up her head and whacked it on the underside of the table. Downstairs, Murray had to be holding his finger down on the buzzer on purpose, because it was a solid, unbroken sound, one that could rip any thought in two. No wonder Dog Murray looked the way he did.

  Scarlett crawled out of her hiding space rubbing her head and answered.

  “Messenger,” Murray growled. “You gotta come sign. I’m not sendin’ him up. He’s got a motorbike runnin’ outside. Can’t have that bike outside.”

  When she got to the lobby, she found a motorcycle courier in a white helmet waiting for her with a clipboard. He tipped up the visor on her approach.

  “AAA?”

  “Yeah,” Scarlett said, taking the clipboard and signing. She was passed a thick envelope.

  “Can’t idle that bike outside my door…” Murray was saying, as Scarlett crept off to take the package upstairs. She carelessly ripped it open in the elevator, remembering her last ride upstairs one hour before, when Eric had been by her side. So this was how her brain was going to be—constant replay.

  She yanked out some papers as she reached the nineteenth floor and looked at them ruefully. Some other dumb script to file somewhere on Mrs. Amberson’s desk.

  And then she noticed the front page: CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, EPISODE 391, “CROSSFIRE.” SHOOTING COPY, DO NOT DUPLICATE. There was another paper attached, a list of times and locations, and a name at the top: SPENCER MARTIN.

  Demo version limitation

  THAT SPECIAL SOMETHING

  Scarlett showed up at the appointed time the next day, malice in her heart, and twenty-five of the promised fifty dollars in her pocket. Chelsea lived in an old building in the East Thirties. Not a massive, fancy one like Mrs. Amberson’s. A smaller one, with no doorman. The elevator was one of those ridiculously small ones that only held two people. The hall was dark, and there were only three doors. One had been left ajar, and Scarlett pushed it open, feeling it make cushy contact with what must have been a bunch of coats hanging on the wall behind.

  “Is that Scarlett?” Mrs. Biggs said. “Come in!”

  Scarlett stepped into a tiny hallway, which was halved in size by all the coats. The living room was absolutely packed, every inch of space used to death. There was a full-size sofa, bookshelves, a set of drawers, a crowded console with the television and stereo equipment, stacks of DVDs of musicals, and books on acting. The space around it was taken up by an electronic keyboard, an exercise ball, free weights, and piles of music. It seemed like an excessive amount of activity went on in here—a lot of living.

  Mrs. Biggs was sitting at a tiny table over by the kitchen alcove, doing something on a computer. She was wearing the dress that Scarlett had seen Chelsea in when they met. It also fit her perfectly. She and Chelsea were almost identical in size.

  “Chelsea will be home in a minute,” she said, waving Scarlett to the sofa without even looking up. “Give me just a second. Chelsea got two fan mail letters today. I’m just answering them. Have a seat.”

  The sofa was crowded at one end with piled blankets and pillows and clothes. There was a strong plug-in air freshener at the end of the sofa—a sickly one that was probably supposed to smell like clean linen but smelled more like sticky, floral bleach. The scent rang a bell in Scarlett’s mind. She knew it.

  This was Max’s bed. Max trailed that air freshener smell all day. That’s what it was.

  Scarlett quickly turned herself away from the sofa she was about to sit on and made a circuit around the room instead, pretending to take an interest in the things on the walls. There was a clear theme in the decorating scheme, and that theme was Chelsea. Somewhere in Scarlett’s mind, where things she didn’t know she was thinking were being thought, this had been expected. It seemed like every inch of wall space was encrusted with a show poster or a photo. There was no sign of Max except for the pile of clothes and bedding. It was like some kind of nature documentary, where you had to hunt for evidence that the animal had a den nearby.

  Miranda noticed that Scarlett hadn’t sat, then looked over and saw why.

  “Oh sorry,” she said, nodding at the pile in annoyance. “I tell Max to put his things away when he wakes up, but he never does.”

  To be fair to Max, which was something Scarlett didn’t really feel like being, there didn’t seem to be anywhere for his stuff to go. This apartment was full. It would have been a tight fit for one person, or one really close couple. Three people—three people who needed their own space—that was impossible. Living like this would have made her insane.

  Scarlett stood there uncomfortably while Mrs. Biggs typed. It was weird enough being invited here—but stranger still to be ignored once she arrived. As someone raised in the hospitality industry, Scarlett disapproved of this.

  “There,” Miranda said, finishing up and shutting the computer. “So…I thought it might be nice for Chelsea to talk to you some more…and Max. We’re new to the city, so we don’t know many…Chelsea’s busy with the show, and Max doesn’t…”

  None of those sentences were complete, but Scarlett grasped the missing concept. They don’t have friends. Friends, luckily, were something that Scarlett never felt short of. She might not have studied dance for a dozen years or been in a commercial or a Broadway show…but she had people she could call at one in the morning.

  “So,” Miranda said, getting up and stepping into the kitchen, “was school good?”

  When normal adults asked this question, Scarlett would move through a rote response indi
cating that school was school and the experience had yet to kill her. But Miranda Biggs didn’t ask innocent, polite questions. She wanted to know about Max. Of that, Scarlett was sure, and she wasn’t going to tell. Scarlett decided that she would talk about absolutely everything else, much more than she wanted to know. She walked Miranda through periods one through seven, everything but Bio. Scarlett listened to the impatient thwack of vegetables being chopped.

  “Right,” Miranda said, her voice barely concealing her impatience, “but don’t you and Max have a class together? Biology?”

  “Oh,” Scarlett said as if just remembering this. “Yeah.”

  “And how’s that?”

  “Fine.”

  “Fine?”

  “Well,” Scarlett said, “it’s just been a few days.”

  More dismemberment of vegetables. Scarlett smiled to herself.

  There was a jangle of keys, and Chelsea appeared. Her hair was back in two chunky little braids, and she wore a sleek exercise outfit. She was makeup-free, but had flushed little apple cheeks, fresh from a workout of some kind.

  “Oh hi!” she chirped. “Just had to meet my trainer for a session.”

  “Good,” Miranda said. “You’re here. I have to go out and get more broccoli. Did you do free weights?”

  “No. I think I pulled something in my neck. Derrick told me I’d better not push it or I might have trouble during the show tonight.”

  “I know the muscle mass is making your weight go up a little, but as long as we balance out the rest…”

  “He’s checking every day,” Chelsea said. “I’ve gained five pounds, but I’m obviously leaner.”

  “As long as he’s checking.”

  On that unpleasant note, Miranda left to get her broccoli, and Chelsea excused herself to take a shower. Scarlett finally took a seat on the sofa and stared at the piles of Max’s things.

  Chelsea was a quick showerer. She was back in a few minutes, wrapped in a towel.