“Cal,” Dana said tiredly.
He took her face in his hands and leaned down to kiss her sweetly on the mouth. “I love you,” he said, then told Morgan, “I’ve decided to tell her that every five minutes. She’s very freaked out by this whole thing.”
“As she should be,” Morgan said.
“When I was nine,” Cal told him—told all of us—suddenly super-serious, “right after the accident, I wasn’t expected to survive the night. But I did. And then I survived the year, and all of the years after that, through the reconstructive surgeries on my legs and my back. And I finally got to a place where I could breathe on my own, and then into my wheelchair, and finally I went back to school.
“They’d fixed me enough so I could roll around on my own, but they couldn’t fix the damage done to my heart. And they always sent me out of the room—the doctors—when they talked to my parents about my life expectancy, but I knew what they were saying. I listened in. And frankly, it’s been a miracle that I have reached eighteen—that I made it this far. Thirty was a crazy goal. Forty, unheard of.
“So if I get to spend the last day or week or month or however long it is that I’m gonna live feeling like this, able to walk and yes, dance, with this amazing woman right here, who loves me…?” Calvin smiled. “Well, I’m gonna take that as a win. And? FYI? I just found a website that gives detailed instructions on how to manage a Destiny addiction. There’s a ton of information—”
“You’re going to try to manage your addiction.” Morgan laughed as he shook his head. “That’s extremely delusional.”
“Yeah,” Cal said, “but right now, it’s all I’ve got.”
“No,” Morgan said, “it’s not. There’s another option, and yes, it’s an incredible long shot, and the truth is that you probably are going to die, but it sure as hell beats killing your friends when you joker—and you will joker, Calvin. You can’t manage that. It’s really just a matter of time.”
And that’s when we all got cozy on the couch and Morgan gave us the news that two (yes, the single digit that comes after one) former Destiny users had been cured of their addiction—out of all of the many thousands who’d died.
There were a lot of nines in the ninety-nine point mega-nines number that Morgan gave us, and my heart sank all the way down to my toes.
“The procedure was done up in Boston,” Morgan told us, “at a place called the Obermeyer Institute.”
I’d heard of OI—through Dana, in fact. It was a little-known research lab where neural integration was studied—neural integration being the scientific term for Greater-Than superpowers.
I looked over for her reaction, but she didn’t seem impressed. “Do you have proof?”
Morgan widened his eyes at her. “Yes, because I always carry around proof that obscure medical procedures work.” He exhaled his disgust. “I can show you online reports, and I can tell you that over the course of my medical studies, I had a conversation with one of the survivors. He’s definitely alive.” He looked at Cal. “But he was a former Navy SEAL. He was in excellent physical shape before he used Destiny. We can’t say the same about you.”
The news was just getting worse and worse.
Still, I clung to my teeny spark of hope. “So, road trip to Boston?” I suggested.
Calvin looked at me with disbelief. “You want me to spend three of the last days of my life in a car, driving to Boston?”
“No! I want you to go to Boston so you’ll live.” But as I looked from Cal to Dana and Garrett and Milo and even Morgan, I realized that I was the only one of us who held out any hope that Calvin could survive this. “Point zero-zero-zero-zero-one is not zero,” I exclaimed, but the conversation had moved on.
“You were talking earlier about managing your addiction,” Morgan told Cal. “That’s just not possible.”
“Each time you inject yourself with Destiny, you risk jokering,” Milo reminded him. He didn’t need to add the part that went, And when you do finally joker, you risk killing us all. Or maybe he should’ve, because it was possible that Calvin was starting to forget about that.
But before I could say it for Milo, he shifted to pull his phone out of his pocket. It was set on silent, but it must’ve been shaking, because he accessed his messages. Whatever he read there made his jaw clench.
“Rochelle?” I asked, unable to, well, not ask.
“No,” he said, “I already sent her an Oops, I got arrested, can you come bail me out, it’ll only cost ten thousand dollars text. As expected, she did not respond.” He looked over at Dana. “No, this is the police alert that Calvin set up for us. Our John Doe’s release from the hospital is pending.”
“Get over there.” Dana threw him the keys to her bike. Milo was already standing up and he snatched them effortlessly out of the air. “Trail him. I wanna know where he goes, what he does, who the hell he is.”
“I will,” he said, shrugging into his jacket.
“Keep us posted?” Somehow that came out as a question, so I added, “Please.”
I’d hoped to have a chance to talk to Milo privately tonight. Not only did I want to try to convince him that there was hope that Calvin could survive this, but I also wanted to know more about his time in that awful closet, about his stepfather, about all of his childhood. I knew very little—only that his father had died when he was tiny, like five or six, and that his mom had remarried, but she’d died soon after that.
His stepfather had also either vanished or died. I didn’t quite know which, but it was possible the man had been arrested after locking his stepson in the closet for seven months, so Milo had gone into foster care. That had been awful, too—I knew that—but that was where he’d met Dana.
Oh, and I also knew—not from Milo, but from something Dana had told me—that there was a warrant out for Milo’s arrest. Apparently when he and Dana had run away from their foster home, Milo had taken some money that his birth father had left him but that his foster parents were attempting to claim for themselves.
“And be careful,” I added that, too.
“I will,” Milo said, holding my gaze from across the room. He nodded once, and then turned and left.
I looked over to find Morgan watching me. Dana had leaned over and quietly given him the rundown on our John Doe—everything from my encounter with him at the Sav’A’Buck to his alleged amnesia after the cops found him unconscious in the parking lot.
“Oh good,” Morgan said now. “Because things just aren’t exciting enough, we also have a professional G-T bounty hunter on Skylar’s trail.”
“Professional bounty hunter,” I repeated, because yes, that’s exactly what our John Doe was. He found G-Ts, grabbed them, and sold them for serious money. Those girls went into Destiny farms—or maybe they ended up like Jilly, rented out to some D-bag-addict, locked in the closet…
“Five five four three!” Calvin said suddenly, and we all turned to look at him. He seemed as surprised as we were, and he added, “Excuse me,” as if he’d burped.
“Five five four three what?” Dana asked, but Cal made an I don’t know face.
“Destiny addicts who are prescient are extra dangerous,” Morgan said. Now we were all looking at him in some surprise, so he added, “It sounds like Cal might be nursing some seeing-the-future skills. Which, I’m sure you can imagine, can be dodgy.”
“Let me see that website that you found about managing the…you know,” Dana said to Calvin.
“Yeah, I want a look, too,” Morgan said, and I inwardly seethed, because it was clear to me that they were already putting Calvin into hospice-type care.
“What should I do?” Garrett asked. “Should I go to my father’s office and use his computer to try to find Jilly in the National Medical Records database?” His focus was still on the girl we’d left locked in Rochelle’s closet.
Morgan looked at Garrett as i
f seeing him for the first time. “Your father’s a doctor?” he asked, and Garrett nodded. “With an office.” Another nod. “With a medical scanner?”
“It’s a doctor’s office,” Garrett said impatiently. “It’s got a lot of shit—whatever he needs to do outpatient surgery. He’s a plastic surgeon. He nips; he tucks; he rakes in the cash.”
“Good to know,” Morgan said. “We won’t need to go to Boston after all. We can detox Calvin right here.”
Cal was already shaking his head. “I never said I was willing to—”
“And you’re going to be less and less willing as time goes by,” Morgan told him. “That’s part of the addiction—the monster grabbing hold of you.”
“Monster or no,” Cal said, looking from Dana to me and back, “it’d be hard enough to put my life in the hands of real doctors, let alone Mr. Homeschooled over here.”
“That’s Dr. Homeschooled,” Morgan said.
“Let’s just get through tonight,” Dana said. She turned to Garrett. “We need someone to monitor the Rochelle-cams—keep an eye on her when she gets home. We’ll get that info on Jilly tomorrow. Your dad’s still out of town for a while, right?”
“Until next week,” Garrett confirmed. “At least.”
I stood up. I needed to go home and pretend to be a normal seventeen-year-old for a few minutes with my mother. After which I’d pretend to go to bed and then sneak back out of the house—where once again, I’d be the G-T who’d just killed her best friend.
“I’ll be back later,” I said, but Calvin was the only one who noticed. Everyone else was already glued to various computer or TV screens around the room.
“I’ll walk you home,” Cal said and then smiled. “And this time, I’ll actually walk instead of roll.”
————
It was odd. Going home along the dimly lit sidewalks with Calvin walking at my side.
“Does it feel weird?” I asked him as two sets of feet smacked the concrete, replacing the quiet hum of his chair. “I mean, to walk again. Do your legs hurt?”
“What’s with all the focus on Am I hurt?” he asked.
I shrugged, then admitted, “I’m scared.”
He nodded and whispered, “I am, too.” But then, more loudly, he said, “It doesn’t hurt. It feels weird though.” He looked down at his jean-clad legs. “Looks weird. Must look weird to you, too.”
I nodded.
He rubbed his thighs through the thick denim. In the time that I’d known him, Calvin rarely wore shorts, mainly because he was embarrassed about letting people see the muscle atrophy. His legs were super-skinny, even with constant physical therapy.
“At first, I thought it would be kind of hard to balance, considering I haven’t put any weight on my feet in such a long time,” he told me. “Even that time Dana used her telekinesis to make me walk…it didn’t feel the same as it does to move myself using my own muscles.”
“So it’s hard to balance?”
“Well, that’s the thing.” Cal smiled and did a little shuffle step to the side and then back. “I thought it would be. But it’s not. And maybe it’s my imagination, but I feel like I’m already gaining strength and muscle tone.” He rubbed his thighs again. “Pants are getting tighter.”
“Maybe it’s not your imagination. Maybe that’s the D working,” I said.
“Or that.”
We were silent then, just walking in the darkness.
But then Cal sighed and said, “My vision’s crazy good right now. I don’t think I’ve ever been able to see so well, even in the dark. I keep thinking, this must be what it’s like to be you. Or Dana. And that thing with the numbers? That would be insane if I could just burp out winning lottery numbers.”
“If you’re prescient,” I reminded him, “you don’t get to pick which numbers you burp out. Five five four three could be the combination on Hobo Joe’s bus station locker. Congratulations, you just won a pair of socks that haven’t been washed in twenty-eight years.”
Cal laughed but then quickly sobered. “There’s a pretty intense Would You Rather question happening here.”
“Hobo socks or the lottery?” I quipped. “That’s not a hard one for me.”
“No,” he said, “I meant, Would you rather get injected with Destiny, walk again but die young, or live in a chair and still die young?”
I didn’t respond. I couldn’t. Not without bursting into tears.
“Man, would it be bad if I said that I wish I could stay like this?” he asked me.
I cleared my throat because crying wasn’t going to help. “I’d think there was something wrong with you if you didn’t want to stay like this,” I told him. “But you can’t. Not exactly like this. Not without turning into something…bad.” When I looked at Cal again, I knew he was thinking about Rochelle, too. Or maybe more precisely, about the awful lack of humanity in the D-addict’s eyes.
“But maybe,” I continued, “if you do the thing that Morgan wants to try, the detox procedure, you get to keep some of it. Not the numbers-burping prescience. And maybe not even the sharp night vision. But maybe the Destiny has healed your back. Maybe, after detox, you’ll still be able to walk. Maybe you’ll get to keep that.”
Cal was already shaking his head. “I don’t know why, but I don’t think so,” he told me. “Or maybe I just don’t believe I’ll survive. I won’t walk after detox because there’s no after detox. At least not for me.”
I didn’t want to question him, certainly not about any prescient signals he might be receiving. I knew firsthand what it was like to have people not believe me when I said I knew something was true, with nothing more than a gut feeling to back me up. Instead I asked, “But what if that’s just—how did Morgan put it—the monster talking?”
Cal was silent at that, looking over at the single wan porch light on what had once been the Rodriguez house, where little Sasha had lived with her parents.
All of her father’s awesomely artistic and brightly colored sculptures had been removed, and the house had been repainted a far more staid beige. A “For Sale” sign lurched crookedly on a bent wire frame jammed into the shells of the newly xeriscaped front yard, and I noticed with a pang that someone had recently added a bright-red “SOLD” banner to the bottom.
It was the death knell for my hope, and tears filled my eyes.
Cal put what I was thinking into words. “You knew they weren’t ever coming back,” he said quietly.
I nodded because he was right. I had known that, deep down inside.
“You’ll get to see Sasha tomorrow,” he reminded me. “Say hi for me.”
He’d been planning to go, too, but I realized now that he couldn’t. Sasha would know from just one look that Cal was now a D-addict, and that would terrify her.
Shoot, it terrified the crap out of me, and I wasn’t nine and on the autism spectrum.
“You really think…” he started to say, but then stopped.
“Just say it.”
“You think I’m a monster?” His voice was so low I could barely hear him.
“No,” I said, stopping and turning to face him. “Lord, Cal! No! But I think—no, I know that Destiny will turn you into one. That’s just how it works.” I kept going because I knew he was really listening. “And I also know your only chance is to at least find out more about this detox thing. I trust Morgan—I don’t know why, but I really do. I trust him more than any doctors up in Boston. I trust Dana, too.”
When I said Dana’s name, Cal’s face erupted into a megawatt smile.
“Promise me you’ll leave the option open,” I pushed.
He nodded. “Okay.”
And then, as we started walking again, I changed the subject because even with all this crap happening, Cal was still my best friend. “So. You. And Dana.”
I didn’t think it was even huma
nly possible. But Cal’s smile actually grew wider.
It was contagious, and I actually grinned, too.
“Me,” he said as he nodded his head. “And Dana.”
“I knew she had a thing for you,” I confided.
“And you only share this with me now…?” Cal’s voice went up an octave.
“I’m pretty sure I told you,” I countered.
“I thought you were kidding! I mean, you never said, Calvin, I am not kidding!”
“Well, it was more of a guess than a hundred percent know,” I admitted. “I mean, she’s Dana.”
“Yes, she is,” Cal said. “And I sure as hell didn’t think I stood a chance with her—especially since, up until recently, I couldn’t stand at all—literally.”
“Are you kidding?” It was my turn to do the higher-voice thing. “Dana never saw the wheelchair when she looked at you. All she saw—all she sees—is you. And you’re awesome.”
I could tell he didn’t believe me. “Well, now she doesn’t have to pretend not to see the wheelchair.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, stopping again, this time in front of my next-door neighbor’s house. “When was it that you and Dana shared your first very, very special pizza? I do believe that was before you started walking around. Let’s check the video, John. Why yes, yes it was. Check out the way neither Dana nor Calvin can quite look me in the eye as they come back into the playroom after enjoying said special pizza.”
Cal was laughing again. “That pizza was private,” he protested. “I can neither confirm nor deny—”
“You fooled exactly no one,” I told him. “Okay? And it’s very gallant that you won’t share details, but as your best friend, I just have to make sure that in addition to, ahem, pizza, ahem, consumption, you and Dana actually had a conversation. I mean, beyond discussion of personal preferences for things like, oh, extra cheese?”
Calvin was cracking up. “This is getting way too creepy, but yes, we’ve talked. A lot.”
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