by Ryan Schow
Him making a scene with me in front of Tavares and my almost new friends, I say, “Fine, leave.”
“No,” he replies. “Not until you tell me where you’ve been.”
“We’re not friends,” I say. Like that should be it and he should leave.
“Yes, we are.”
Huffing out a breath, I apologize to my almost friends, promise Tavares I’ll be right back, then stand and say, “Come with me you moron.”
Brayden follows like we’ve known each other for years. To me we’ve been best friends, so to me nothing is out of the ordinary. For everyone else though? Brayden following me—the new girl—is going to be completely out of the ordinary. That’s why I all but drag him out of the cafeteria into the hallway.
5
We’re in the hallway, all alone, and my temper flares. Looking at him, at my friend whom I have missed terribly, I want to hug him and baby-shake the living shit out of him at the same time.
“What the fuck are you doing with her?” I blurt out. I’m so mad, I can’t even sensor my bad language…sorry.
“What do you care?” he says, coolly. “You don’t even know me.”
“She’s pregnant,” I say. I shouldn’t have dropped that bomb, but gosh damn it needed to be said. What I saw crawling Julie’s brain, it was a horror show of incest, cruelty and deception.
“No she isn’t,” he laughs.
“Do you know whose baby’s inside her?” I ask, so angry now I’m seeing red.
For Julie to not only hook up with him, but fall in love with him and not tell him about the bastard child growing inside her otherwise flat little belly is a motherfreaking outrage!
“Let me guess, is it Satan’s child?” he teases, clearly familiar with his new honeypot’s former nickname, Julie Satan. “C’mon Raven. Rumors here are nastier than in most schools. You’ll learn that.”
For the moment I ignore his chiding, and his well timed but misplaced advice on how to survive in this cesspool of snobbery. “It’s her step-brother, Emery’s baby, and she’s not telling you for a reason. Did you have sex with her yet?”
His face flushes white, then he postures against me for the first time. “It’s none of your business,” he says. Swallowing hard, he says, “How do you know this anyway? Assuming any of it is true.”
“Look,” I say, quickly losing myself to this argument I absolutely have to win, “I know this Vegas routine works for you, that you’re interesting and muscular and all that, but the last time Emery got her pregnant, they had a boy just like you thrown out of school. He was arrested for statutory rape and branded a sex offender for life. Is that what you want? When this child she doesn’t know what to do with pops out of her, she’ll need a scapegoat. She’ll need someone to take the fall for her having sex with her step-brother.”
Without hacking his thoughts, I see the truth in his eyes. He knows about Emery.
“Jesus Christ, Brayden,” I say, flabbergasted, “you already know about Emery? And you’re still with her?”
Again, he asks, “How do you know all this?” I’m about to make something up when he says, “Oh, yeah. You’re working with the mad doctor. Which means you have access to Julie’s medical records. What you just did is called a violation of doctor/patient confidentiality. Do you realize I could have you arrested for that?”
“Don’t bluff me, butthole,” I say, getting in his face. “I have been gone about as long as she’s been pregnant. Besides, her pregnancy isn’t in any records. Her nipples are sore and she’s missed her period. Seriously, Brayden, dump her before something bad happens to you.”
“Nothing bad ever happens to me,” he says, leaning back like he’s got Aces up his sleeve. Like he’s untouchable. Which is hilarious because there is so much uncertainty in his demeanor it’s obvious.
“Really?” I ask. Jesus in heaven, he’s unbelievable sometimes! “How many community service hours have you completed with the Feds? Oh yeah, not one single hour. Don’t sell your dumb luck to me like it’s candy, Brayden.”
He doesn’t look so confident now. “You’ve been talking to Abby, haven’t you?”
“Why would I talk to that big faker?”
“Ever since the accident, she’s not been herself,” he says. “You can’t trust what she says, Raven. You can’t trust her. Do you hear me?”
“You and her were best friends.”
“I know,” he says. I’ve struck a chord in him. All the fight he has inside him, it’s on the fence now. For both of us, the fight is diminishing. Like we’re on the downside of proving our points and realizing things could get out of control quick. “I miss her, but she’s gone now. It’s like she’s someone different. We hardly even talk.”
“It’s probably because you’re dating that freaking demonic crotch cricket.”
“Ha!” he laughs. “Not as much as it’s because she’s dating that freaking douchebag.”
“Damien?”
“No, not him. Caden.”
“Caden Reynolds?” I ask. I didn’t expect that. Last time I saw Abby, she was rubbing on Damien like some puppy dog nuzzling its master’s pant leg.
“I thought she was into Damien.”
“Nope. Not anymore. She’s dating Caden and Damien’s dating Cicely. They’re totally perfect for each other.”
“Which one?”
“Both.”
Oh my God, what the hell is happening with my friends? Lines are being crossed. Is this going to be like Beverly Hills 90210 where everyone eventually dates everyone?
“So that’s why you’re with Julie? Because you can’t have Abby?”
He stalls a bit and I know I’ve stumbled on the truth. I didn’t even have to read his mind to get this information. “Me and Abby, we were just friends.”
“You wanted more.”
“People change, Raven.” When I remain silent, looking at him with purple eyes through thick lines of eyeliner, he just looks back. A pair of girls breeze on by us, pretending they’re not looking, but they’re soooo looking. Then, to me, he says, “So are we going to be friends or are we going to argue like an old couple? You should tell me because I have to get back to Julie.”
“I guess.”
“Good, now tell me how you know about Julie’s baby. And Emery. And don’t lie. If we’re going to be friends, you can’t lie to me.”
That he’s asked me this floors me. Then again, part of his Vegas training is him asking girls questions other guys are terrified to ask, and pushing the envelope further than most guys. That’s how you get to girls, he’d say. Be bold. Take senseless risks. Never think of no as the end. No is an opportunity. A pathway to yes.
Take a chance on him, I tell myself. Be bold. “People don’t even have to open their mouths for me to know what they’re thinking, Brayden. Like all of Gerhard’s dolls, I’ve got a talent.”
“Gerhard is gone,” he says.
“Gerhard, Holland, whatever. We are all products of different versions of him. Except you. You’re a product of your father, Titan and Romeo, and Abby’s cosmetic surgeon. The late Abby Swann, not this version of her.”
Brayden just stands there, his mouth flopped open, his wax-statue eyes looking lost in the perfect stillness. That said, I brush past him and return to Tavares and his crew. He looks happy to see me. And Brayden? I’m tapped into him and his head’s all over the place. If his head was a pack of cats, I just dropped a firecracker in the middle of them.
6
To me it seems Abby is doing fine, but the noise and distractions of the cafeteria are too much for my wide open mind. I head into a faraway bathroom where no one is doing their makeup or taking a dump or sobbing, or whatever. Inside the peace and quiet of the nearest stall, I open a psychic link to Abby. I need to know how she’s doing. And it’s a good thing that I do because crawling around in this girl’s brain is like wandering through an ER during rush hour where all the lights are out and most of the patients are either manic, catatonic or dead.
Whoa!
Thirty seconds inside her brain spikes my panic. The difficulty of this school…I warned her about this place, about these people. I warned her about the bullying. The toll it’s taking on her, though, it’s effecting her far worse than it affected me. Far worse than she’s showing. Then again, I came here with unusually thick skin and she came here a kidnapped, impoverished child bought from those who stole her.
The difficulties of her struggle move from her mind into mine where it settles in a thick, choking smog into the pores and organs of my new body. My muscles feel atrophied. My bones petrify from the burden she carries. The smile on her face is a catastrophic lie. She isn’t happy. She isn’t sane.
Being in Abby’s head, it’s like being stuffed in a fifty-five gallon drum while suffocating beneath the press of oily rags. The weight of her emotions bears a twisted familiarity to my past. It is life steeped in depression. The way she’s dying inside, it’s her fragile edges chipping away. Breaking. I feel helplessly sucked into her world, swallowed whole. I recognize the darkness in her heart, and I understand what she’s doing to hold on to the light. I know it and I vehemently hate it. The Abby stand-in has survived thus far by feasting on the attention of guys like Damien and Caden. It’s like smoking to stave off lung cancer. Or doing lines to get off meth. The way Abby’s playing the game…she won’t win. What she’s doing, it is the equivalent of committing social suicide.
Physically, on the outside, my replacement is Abby Swann; but inside, she is all Janice Millworth. Traipsing through Janice’s memories the way you traipse through the overgrowth of an abandoned cemetery or a South American rain forest, I learn that twice now she’s picked up the phone to dial her birth mother, and twice she stopped because of Holland’s threat to kill her parents. The mania running its course in this girl’s head, it’s reaching a tipping point.
“You’re crumbling way too soon,” I say in my head. I have to see her. I have to talk her off the ledge.
The flood of Janice/Abby memories surges on. My sanity stands breathless against the emotional assault. The sensation of Damien memories rush by.
I grab onto them, dive into them.
Two and a half weeks ago, Abby broke up with him. The not-so-quiet musings of Abby being the dumb-dumb with the pretty boy caused cracks in her foundation. She told him she was finished, that she couldn’t take the haters anymore. It was a bluff. Damien being the dumb shit that he is, he said, “Fine, if that’s what you want,” like it was no big thing. In her head, she was like, screw you if you can’t fight for me! So she said to leave her room, and that was that.
She saw Damien for who he was. This was inevitable.
Necessary.
Abby spent the night crying. And to my horror, she took to cutting herself with a pair of scissors. I feel like a voyeur at a murder scene, or a rape scene. I try to turn away, to not see all this, but this is Janice Millworth. My stand-in. So I can’t look away, no matter how desperate I am to do just that.
Watching the memory—like I’m there, like I’m her—Abby drags semi-sharp blades over her skin, scraping and splitting the flesh, bleeding because to her it felt so much better. This kind of self-mutilation was how she quelled the pain. Sinking even lower into her thoughts, I see her as Janice Millworth when Janice Millworth was an ugly girl in a dirty mirror with unwashed hair and wounded, watery eyes. Before she got her new body, Janice worked her long gone, deadbeat father’s straight razor over her arms, up her legs, across her sides.
My arms hurt where she cuts them. My legs, the same. And my sides…the way the lines of skin peel back and open red against the blade, her skin feels like my skin. These emotions, the unsteady tide of them, it’s this tremulous bond that now ties Abby to the late Janice Millworth.
I dig deeper. Find Caden. He’s there: a God amongst chickens. The way she feels being with him, it’s amazing. I’m feeling what she feels. Not so chaotic. Not so dangerous. Slowly, I pull myself out of the mire that was Janice Millworth only to step into the drama surrounding the Abby Swann stand-in.
Her hooking up with Caden was her dying to sleep with all the hot guys she could before this magical, genetically irresistible life was torn away from her. She saw this life as a buffet of perfection from where she could eat what and whom she wanted. I try not to wince. Gosh damn, I can’t help it! For the most part, I was chaste with my body when I was Abby. I was only flirty and sexual with one person: Jake. And now she wants to take my vagina on a test drive like it’s a f*cking numbers game?!
Guh.
Where I’m at, the bathroom’s main door opens; the bathroom’s main door shuts. I’m sitting in a stall, on the toilet seat, lid down and pants on. I draw my feet up. Wrap my arms around my knees. Pull them to my chest.
The metal stall door next to me opens; the stall door shuts.
A paper barrier gets pulled out of the plastic ass-gasket dispenser, then pants or a skirt or shorts come down and a butt plops spongy on the bowl. The rush of urine starts, a couple of soft farts fluff out followed by one boisterous fart barking against another. Her private giggle almost makes me laugh. The peeing eventually comes to an end. She wipes, stands, and flushes.
The stall door opens; the stall door shuts.
Hands don’t get washed as the girl leaves the bathroom. The main bathroom door opens; the main bathroom door shuts. It’s amazing to think of the girl who was just in here, that she just had that deeply personal moment thinking she was alone when she really wasn’t. This makes me realize I have to connect with Abby. Let her know she’s not alone. That as much as I might hate her, or love her, or want to protect her or kill her, she is not alone.
My stall door opens; I leave it—and the bathroom—and I go looking for her.
Still in Abby’s head, I now know why they called her dumb-dumb. She went from an A student with balls (me) to a spineless D student with confidence only in her looks. Headmistress Klein wanted her kicked out of school for her declining grades. Christian (my stand-in’s father), drove all the way here to re-explain Abby’s “accident” as a means of justifying her…condition. The word “condition” being code for my stand-in’s unexpected stupidity. Only by the elegance of our father’s exceptional negotiation skills and a few impeccably timed threats was Abby able to remain enrolled at Astor Academy.
At least she has her friends, I think to myself. But I’m reaching. She doesn’t even have them anymore. Georgia doesn’t talk to her, neither does Cicely, who’s dating Damien with far greater success than she had. This bothers Abby, but not much. Currently, she’s head over heels in lust with Caden. He’s a porno connoisseur and a closet sex addict, so she can’t get enough of him.
Ew, I’m thinking. God, ew!
Tempest adores the new Abby, though, and she’s dying to know what it’s like being with both Damien and Caden. Janice revealed enough of the two boys to make Tempest squirm with jealousy. She said, “Being with those two, it’s like hitting the hottie lottery.”
Yet deep down she dreamt of running away. She planned on disappearing after having her fill of Caden.
Part of her frustration with Astor, besides the people, is how freaking smart everyone is. From what I can tell, it’s only a matter of time before she throws in the towel. Her grades still suck. The problem she hasn’t solved yet, is Holland. He’s the type of person who would kill her parents to spite her. If she left school to go live with Christian, if Holland didn’t kill her parents, Christian wouldn’t forgive her for dropping out of Astor. She knew she was stupid Janice and not brilliant Abby, and soon Christian would know it, too. Stuck inside her head, trying to get out, I realize she’s beginning to hate me for being a better version of her.
I don’t blame her, I was better. A hell of a lot better than her.
7
When I return to the cafeteria, almost everyone is finished or finishing lunch. Half the dining hall is just people cleaning their trays and talking. Tavares and his friends are still at their table engaged in some
conversation about whatever.
“Didn’t think you’d come back,” Tavares says.
Be bold, I tell myself because of how damn good looking he is. “What are you doing tonight?”
“Nothing.”
We’re talking like there’s no one else at the table. He’s into me. I can see it in how his body turns all the way toward me. “You should come over,” I say. If I’ve learned anything from Brayden and his Vegas pick-up community, it’s that God hates a coward. Tavares’s friends are looking at me, then looking at Tavares.
Something unsettling clogs the air. A feeling of unease. Hitting on Tavares so brazenly, which is totally unlike me, it’s not me winning his friends over. It’s exactly the opposite. In fact, it’s me undoing all the good my stellar first impression made.
Jen is thinking, this kind of shit only happens in the movies, and the other boys, they want to rail me so bad they’re right now trying to decide whether or not to hate Tavares.
“What do you want to do?” Tavares asks.
Right now I’m standing on a tight rope a thousand feet in the air with no net and heavy gusts. Screw it, I tell myself. You like him so just go for it. Go for it!
“I’m thinking we’ll watch the unrated version of Fifty Shades of Grey and go from there.”
The way my head works, I’m finding I can crawl multiple minds at once. Jen officially hates me with the Fifty Shades, suggestion, and the two guys, they hate Tavares and they hate me because I’m hot and I don’t want either of them the way I so openly want Tavares. For one long moment, I am impressed with myself. With my ability to focus on many things at the same time with near perfect clarity.
“Um, yeah,” Tavares says. “Fifty Shades, okay.”
“Seven o’clock alright?” I ask.
“Yeah,” he says looking around at his friends. His soon-to-be-ex-friends. Then back at me, more definitively, he says, “Yeah, seven’s good.”