Burnout

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Burnout Page 11

by Adrienne Maria Vrettos


  I tried to move her forward, but she stood firm. She looked up at me. “They won’t let me leave.”

  I glanced back, saw them both stand slowly, watching us.

  “What do you mean they won’t let you leave?” I whispered. “You can just walk away. Watch, like this.”

  I took a step, pulled her with me.

  “Hey.” Turner moved fast off the bench, stepping in front of us. “Where you going? Thought we were all going to party.”

  “She’s partied enough,” I answered, trying to move around him, glancing behind me to see Hooch still sitting on the bench, head tipped to the side, watching.

  “Not nearly.” I think he was trying to chuckle, but it came out a dry rasp. “She’s just getting started.”

  “We’re leaving,” I told him. He stepped in front of me again. Bastard. I had an inch and at least ten pounds on him. I imagined cracking my fist against his chin. I was scared to hit him, though. I didn’t want him to hit me back. So instead I asked, “You want to hear me scream?”

  He gave a half smile. “Kind of.”

  It took me a second to realize Seemy was pulling away. “Relax, Nanja,” she said nervously. “We’re all just going to hang out for a while, then we can leave. Right?” She directed the question at Turner.

  He nodded. “Sure, we’ll just all hang out for a little while and then you can leave.”

  “Seemy.” I tried to step closer to her, so I could lower my voice and speak without them hearing. She took a step back. “Seemy,” I said again, stepping forward. She stood on her tiptoes, pulled on my arm so I bent over, and then whispered in my ear. “They’ll find us.” I pulled back, looked at her. Her lower lip quivered. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

  Then she stepped away. “Come on, Nan,” she said. “Come out with us for a while. It’ll be fun.”

  “What’s wrong with your eyes?” I asked, leaning in to stare into her face. Her eyes were almost all pupil now, black holes in her head.

  Seemy looked at Turner, and Turner looked back at Hooch, and the two men laughed.

  “Guess it kicked in.” Turner said.

  “What kicked in?” I asked.

  “Liquid Gold.” He cackled, wiggling his fingers at me like he was casting a spell.

  I grabbed Seemy’s chin and looked into her eyes again, letting go as Seemy pulled free. She glared at the two men. “You told me it was just vodka.”

  “What’d you give her?” I demanded, stepping up to Turner.

  He laughed. “Told you. Liquid Gold.”

  “I don’t know what that is,” I snapped.

  “You’ll find out!” He cackled again.

  “What do you mean?” He didn’t answer, he just looked at Seemy. “Seemy?” My heart started pounding. “What does he mean?”

  Her chin dropped and I heard her sniff. “They said it was just vodka.” She held up the Vanilla Coke bottle. “I’m not . . . I’m not thinking right.”

  “You dosed me?” I yelled. “What the hell, Seemy?”

  Turner and Hooch cracked up laughing. I glared at Seemy. As angry as I was, I wasn’t going to leave her there. “Seemy, come on,” I said, taking her arm, “let’s go. We have to go.”

  But then something went wrong with my brain. I felt it. I could feel it changing. I could feel something like cold syrup seeping in and I was watching Seemy and she was watching me and I said again, “We have to go.” But I think my voice might have sounded weird, now because Turner and Hooch kept cracking up. Turner said, “We have to go!”

  And then we were walking out of the park and . . .

  Darkness. Like the space between pictures in a slide show. It was just for a moment.

  And when the show started again, we were walking with them even though we didn’t want to be and even though I wanted to run away. But Seemy had her arm through mine, and I didn’t know if I could get her to run away too and my body felt so strange and my head hurt so much and I didn’t know how I would do anything ever again.

  We were walking and walking down sidewalks crowded with people in costumes. Turner and Hooch were on either side of us. Bookends. Or jailers. They wanted us to go with them somewhere. I kept blacking out. A minute. Maybe five.

  Darkness.

  They kept making us turn corners.

  Darkness.

  First they said we were going to Turner’s apartment, and then they said to a friend’s place, and then they said they had a room at a hotel right in Times Square.

  Darkness.

  Everyone and everything I looked at was swimming and swaying and jerking and twitching. It was getting dark out, and the streetlights and the store lights and the apartment lights were all pulsing out different rhythms.

  Darkness.

  We were walking for a long time and Turner or maybe Hooch said, “We’re almost there,” and then all of a sudden Seemy said, “We need costumes!” and she ran in front of Turner and pulled me with her. We ran into Ricky’s, and even though there was a line out the door, she just cut right to the front. She turned around quickly, held up her hands to push back on Turner’s chest. “Wait outside,” she ordered. “Our costumes are a surprise!”

  Darkness.

  I was in the dressing room with Seemy. The dressing room was tiny, just enough room for a little leopard-print-covered stool and a mirror on the wall. She held two pink dresses. There wasn’t a door to the dressing room, just a vinyl curtain decorated with hula girls that ended a foot away from the floor. I pressed my back flat against the wall, a wave of dizziness threatening to knock me over. I let myself slide down until I was sitting on the little stool and held my head in my hands. “I keep losing time, Seemy. I keep blacking out.”

  “I know. Me too,” she said, nudging my arms out of the way with her hip and sitting on my lap. She dropped the dresses on the floor. And then we were looking at each other in the mirror and it was so familiar, the way we looked together. She was so small, and I was like her dark shadow sitting behind her.

  I wrapped my arms around her waist and buried my face in her back. Darkness.

  “We have to get away from them,” Seemy said. I could feel the vibrations of her voice against the bridge of my nose. I moved my head so I could rest my chin on her shoulder. “I know,” she whispered. “I have a plan. I’m going to save us.”

  But then she just went real still, and even though she was looking at me in the mirror, I could see she couldn’t see me. I could feel myself slipping into darkness and I shook my head hard to wake up, and the movement jostled Seemy back into herself.

  “I’m going to save us,” she said again.

  “Come on out!” We looked down and saw Turner’s boots at the bottom of the curtain. “We want to see.”

  “Hold on!” I called to him. “We just need a different size.”

  “I told you!” Seemy slipped off my lap and stuck her head out of the dressing room to say to Turner, “You have to go wait outside.” Turner grumbled, and Seemy said, “It will be worth it, promise!”

  She pulled back into the dressing room and squeezed my hand as we watched his boots under the curtain. They stayed put for a moment, and then they were gone. Seemy held up her hand, counting down from five on pale fingers, then she stuck her head out of the dressing room for a second. “He’s gone,” she said breathlessly.

  Darkness.

  “Nan! I said he’s gone.” Seemy was next to me, shaking my shoulder.

  “Let’s call the police,” I said.

  She shook her head frantically. “No cops!”

  “But why, Seemy?” Something about what she said didn’t make sense, but I couldn’t make my brain figure out the thoughts I was trying to think. “Why no cops?”

  “Because.” Her eyes went even wider. “Turner and Hooch . . . they have something on me.” She poked her head out of the dressing room for a second again. Then she leaned close to my ear and whispered with sour breath, “I’ve been doing bad things, Nan. I could go to jail.�
��

  She nodded off then, standing up, her eyes this time rolling back into her head, her mouth dropping open. I caught her as she fell, sat her down on the stool. She opened up her eyes, stood back up, and picked up the dresses off the floor. “We have to hurry before they come back inside. Come on. Get dressed.”

  I looked at the dresses. “But we haven’t paid for these yet.”

  She wrinkles her brow. “I did, Nan. You were standing right next to me. We have to hurry!” she whispered urgently, wiggling out of her clothes. I felt my jaw go loose at the sight of her shrunken body. She stepped into one of the dresses and yanked it up, spinning around so I could zip her up. Her back looked even worse than her front.

  Darkness.

  “Nan, please!”

  She was shaking me again. I zipped her up slowly; her body looked so brittle I didn’t want her to crack.

  “Now you!” she said, holding out the other dress. I looked at the tag. It was a size small. “The lady says there are no larger sizes. I’ll help you get it on. Come on.”

  She had to stand on the stool to get enough leverage to yank the dress up, and she could barely get it to zip. As soon as I took a breath, it split a little down the side, but at least that made it easier to breathe.

  “We have to hurry,” Seemy said, reaching into her pants on the floor and pulling out a jar of white face paint she’d lifted from the store. She opened it and stuck her fingers in and held my chin still with her other hand, quickly smearing the paint all over my face. She looked at our reflections in the mirror, and I finally figured out what her plan was.

  “You can still tell it’s me,” I said, and her eyes filled with tears. “Hold on.” I got my black Sharpie out of my backpack. “Use this for the eyes and mouth.”

  She nodded and pushed my hair back away from my face, rested her hand against my face as she drew. The fumes stung my eyes, made my nose run. She circled my eyes over and over again, making the skeleton eyeholes go all the way down to my cheeks. She pressed the pen hard on my mouth, scribbling back and forth and back again. When she was done, I looked terrible, like a lunatic clown, but I still looked like myself.

  “We have to cut off your hair,” she said. “They’ll know it’s you.”

  Darkness.

  She was walking into the dressing room with scissors. It hurt because my hair is so thick that she half cut, half sawed it off. It fell in loose ropes to the dressing-room floor, tickled my bare legs. We stuffed the hair into my backpack along with my clothes, and then I did her makeup. We left her hair because it was so short anyway. “We’ll take wigs on the way out,” Seemy said. “We should go. Put on your shoes.”

  First I got out my pen and wrote a message on the wall. Because I didn’t know if Seemy could save us. I didn’t know if anyone could.

  We heard Turner’s gravelly voice cut through the noise in the crowded store. “Samanthaaaa . . . where are yoooou?”

  Seemy grabbed my hand. “We have to go. We have to stay awake.”

  “But our clothes . . .”

  She kicked my backpack under the stool and peeked out the curtain. “We’ll come back for it,” she said.

  Darkness.

  We were running through the store and knocking into people and displays and racks of costumes and we burst out the front door and knocked right into Hooch.

  Turner came out with my backpack and our shoes. He said he saw our little note.

  They made sure to hold on to us after that.

  Turner was mad, but Hooch thought it was funny.

  They gave us some more to drink.

  Darkness.

  They said we were going to a hotel. We were trying to find their car.

  But then I heard myself say I was hungry. And Seemy said she was too. And Turner said, “We’ll order room service.”

  Darkness.

  But then we were at Duke’s and I didn’t know how we got there. It felt like there was a black curtain hanging halfway down my eyeballs, and even though I kept tilting my head up, I couldn’t see.

  I was in the bathroom with Seemy and we were trying to get off the face paint. I was crying about my hair. Some girl tried to help with the paint, but the wet cloth she gave me smelled like floor cleaner and it made me gag. Seemy said, “We should try to run again.” And she had to say it a few times before I could find my tongue to say, “Yes.”

  We were going to run right then, but we were scared to run by the table where Turner and Hooch were sitting. So we sat with them. And then Edie made us leave. I wanted to grab on to her legs and start screaming, but I couldn’t make my body do what I wanted to.

  Darkness.

  We were in a car. It smelled musty, and like engine oil. Turner and Hooch took our shoes. I said I was going to be sick. Turner rolled down my window. I hung my head out. It was a blue car. I reached back with one hand and did One, two, three with my fingers and then Seemy pushed me out of the window and climbed out after me. My backpack thumped against me as we ran. It was lucky we were in my neighborhood, because we snuck by the night doorman, went to my apartment, and hid in the bathroom for a while.

  Seemy’s phone rang, and when she picked up, she looked at me so scared.

  Darkness.

  We were on the street again. We were running. Seemy said Turner and Hooch knew where I lived now. They had followed us, but we got away from them.

  Darkness.

  They were right behind us. We ran across the street, through the parade. Turner was fast. He grabbed Seemy, but she reached out and grabbed my arm, digging her nails into my skin, scraping down from the elbow to my wrist. I pulled her away from him, ran between the legs of a puppet and into the crowd.

  The darkness was lasting longer now. I could feel myself being stuck inside of it, drowning in it, clawing to get out.

  It looked like we had lost them. And then I was pulling Seemy down the alley to the carriage house, and for a second I was so scared it was like I flew up out of myself and watched us from above: bare feet, pink dresses, eyes too big for our heads, our bare arms and legs stretching out like spider limbs as I pushed Seemy up over the gate.

  The yard was wet, the mud squished between our toes and over our feet. I stepped on something sharp and cried out.

  Darkness.

  We were upstairs in the carriage house, in the back hayloft, pressed into the storage closet. Seemy’s heart was thumping against my chest.

  “They’ll find us, Nan,” she whispered.

  “No they won’t,” I told her. “This is our place, remember? They won’t find us here.”

  Seemy’s knees buckled and I caught her under her arms. I had to open the closet door so I could lay her down. Her eyes were open, her eyelids twitched.

  I stood so I could see out the hole in the wall where the window used to be. The front yard and alley were empty, but I was terrified Turner and Hooch would find us here.

  I knelt next to her. “Seemy, you have to get up. We have to be ready to run.”

  She stared at me, unseeing for a moment, and then blinked and focused. “It keeps getting dark in my eyes, Nan.”

  “I know, me too.”

  “I want it to stay light.”

  “It will. You just have to sit up.”

  Her eyes went blank again. I waved my hands in front of her face, but she wouldn’t even blink. It was a full minute before she came to. “I’m so tired, Nan.” she said. “I’m just going to lay here for a while.”

  “I’m going to go get help,” I told her.

  She didn’t answer.

  “Seemy,” I said, shaking her shoulder. It took a moment, but her eyes focused on mine.

  “You’ll forget me,” she said.

  “I would never forget you.” I stood up. “I’m coming back for you.”

  “No,” she said. And she sounded so sad. “That’s part of it. What they gave us. It makes you forget things. You’re going to forget. And they’re going to find me.”

  I took the Sharpie out of my bac
kpack.

  “Don’t let me forget,” I told her, kneeling down again. She wrote hard on my chest.

  “Come back for me,” she said.

  “I won’t forget,” I promised. “I won’t forget.”

  Darkness.

  I woke up watching. There was a spilled cup of coffee under a subway seat. Oh man, I thought, all that coffee. And it looks nice and creamy, too. Probably lots of sugar. Someone’s good morning, just dumped out. That sucks.

  CHAPTER 27

  TODAY

  I am running through the rain in the night. The water soaks through the hood of my sweatshirt and runs down my head, my neck, my back.

  I say her name to the rhythm of my wet steps. “Seemy, Seemy, Seemy.”

  I take a side street that is empty except for a car that I can hear chugging along behind me, but it never passes. It coughs, like a dying thing.

  And then I am tearing down the alley to the carriage house, scrambling over the fence, across the muddy front lawn, and up the warped front steps. “Seemy Seemy Seemy.” Inside I scramble up the ladder to the hayloft. The storage closet door is closed, and I run to it but don’t open it up.

  I close my eyes, and pray her name. “Seemy Seemy Seemy.”

  I open the door.

  She lies crumpled on the floor, her body bent to fit the confines of the closet. I drop to my knees and with one hand cover my mouth and nose from the stench and with the other lay my fingers against her neck. Her blood pulses my name. Nan, Nan, Nan.

  She is alive.

  “Seemy.” My tears make it sound like I am swallowing the word, so I say it louder, “Seemy!”

  Her eyes stay closed.

  A car drives down the street outside, chug, chug, chug. It doesn’t pass by the alley. It stops and idles. Chug, chug, chug. I stand up and go to the window but can see nothing in the dark. Chug, chug, chug. Like a cough. Like a dying thing. Like the car behind me earlier today on the way to bring Chuck his pizza, and then on the way from Duke’s to Saint Marks. Like the car that drove behind me all the way here.

  I look down at Seemy and cover my mouth to keep from screaming.

  I led them right to her.

 

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