by Sarah Miller
And then Gideon’s phone rang.
He had a piece-of-shit Nokia hand-me-down from his dad, and the crappy LCD screen said PILAR.
Gid’s heart skipped a beat, and mine was right behind it.
It was one thing for Gid to think about Pilar. It was quite another for her to call him.
“Hi,” Gideon said. I didn’t like his tone. He sounded like he was thinking about being happy.
“Oh Geedeon,” Pilar said. I heard her take a deep inhale on a cigarette. She exhaled dramatically and said, “I heard you and Molly broke up. I am so essorry! Are you OK?”
Gid said, “I don’t know.”
I’d like to say that that was the moment where intellect and responsibility triumphed over girlish longing. If only I could convince myself that what I felt for Gid was just girlish longing. I put down my very important secure-you-and-your-family’s-future documents and turned my full attention to the criminally pretty, extremely curvaceous, somewhat mysterious, and almost certainly sexually licentious heiress and her never fully serious but nonetheless never-ending half-pursuit of my recent ex-boyfriend.
“Oh Geedeon,” Pilar said. “Ees there anything I can do for you? You know, we are also here. At the Days Inn. Our flight for LA doesn’t leave until the very early morning. I just wanted to make sure you were OK, not lonely!”
Gid hit mute. Then he hit it again. “Can you hang on a sec?” he said.
Cullen was standing right there, rubbing his hands together in anticipation.
“Pilar’s here,” Gid said. “She’s in the hotel. She wants to know if I’m lonely. She’s on mute.”
“Ha!” Nicholas said, not looking up from his iPhone. “She knows you’re with us.”
“Which means she wants to know if your penis is lonely.”
Gid scowled. Cullen actually reached out and shook him. Then he grabbed Gid’s phone, “Pilar? It’s Cullie. Yeah. We’re having a party. In like, I don’t know, an hour. Yes, you’re invited, you hot bitch. You and Mads, who is a slut for not calling me. Ha-ha-ha. You’re hilarious.”
Cullen hung up. He looked at Gid.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi,” Gid said warily. He knew he was about to get some Uncle Cullie wisdom…which was, of course, a contradiction in terms.
“Has Uncle Cullie ever told you his Alamo story?” Cullen asked Gid.
“I don’t believe he has.” Gideon sighed. “Is Pilar the Alamo?”
“Just listen. I went to San Antonio once to visit my cousin. And my mother told me I had to go see the Alamo. And I was wasted the whole time, and I forgot. And I was in this bar on my last night, all shitfaced, and it occurs to me I haven’t seen the Alamo, and my mother, who is from Texas, is going to kill me. And I am just about to panic but then I have to puke, right? So I go outside to puke, and the Alamo is right there. I saw it. And I didn’t even have to try.”
“What is the point of this?”
“You are worried about not seeing the Alamo. You’re worried that you’re fucked. That your life is over. But I’m telling you, you have to let the Alamo come to you. And it’s coming.”
“I’m going to take a shower,” Gid muttered.
He was acting all uninterested, but he was also wondering where his razor was.
“Going to get all pretty,” Cullen said.
“Don’t get all excited,” Gid said. “I’m just taking a shower.” He went into the bathroom.
Gid hadn’t taken a shower in a few days.
“I think we all know what it means when a guy takes a shower,” Nicholas said, which is exactly what I was thinking.
Chapter Seven
I had been in Gid’s head once before when he and Pilar spent a whole party hanging out together. It was a house party on Cape Cod, at this girl Fiona Winchester’s house. Fiona was one of Cullen’s little playthings for a while. At any rate, Gideon and Pilar had snuggled in a big chair and then slept in the same bed in a beautiful room overlooking the ocean. Nothing had happened, unless you count Gid getting blue balls.
We weren’t even going out then. In fact, officially, we hardly even knew each other, and still it traumatized me so much I don’t think I ate for a week afterward.
I didn’t even want to think about how disturbing it would be to see them together now that I loved him. Now that we had slept together.
I’d seen him chat with Pilar. But not alone. In the dark. With drinks.
God, I wished I could get out of Gid’s head.
But it just had to be impossible. Of course, I hadn’t ever tried. I had been so busy trying to make being inside his head work for me that it had never occurred to me.
I obviously didn’t have the faintest idea of how to do it myself.
I Googled “inside someone’s mind.” Some bullshit stuff came up, like, women’s magazine shit about how to read his mind. Ha. Those people didn’t know how good they had it in their ignorance. A guy named Linus Anderson in San Rafael, California, had written an article called “Inhabiting Consciousness,” but it had phrases in it like cognitive mechanisms and morphogenetic field, and all this math and stuff in it and graphs of brain activity. I was just about to look for something else when I read something I actually understood: “Shared consciousness is really not as rare as people think. This is especially true as our minds get more powerful, and as more and more people accept the notion that energy and thought are capable of dynamic movement.”
This was a quote from a Dr. Stanley Whitmeyer, who had written a pamphlet called, simply, “Shared Consciousness.”
Now I Googled him. He identified himself as an independent scholar, and there was an e-mail address and an instant message handle on Google. I wrote to it.
My name is Molly McGarry. I’m 16, and you have to help me get out of my boyfriend’s mind.
A few seconds later this message popped up on my screen.
Tell me what kind of stuff is happening to you.
I typed feverishly.
Uh. Well, I hear everything that’s inside Gid’s—that’s his name—head. I don’t know what else to tell you. I know what he’s thinking. I hear everything from, i hate asparagus i think…and that girl’s hot. Well. I mean, what if I didn’t have a girlfriend…I would think she was hot but wait. I can think she’s hot. I just am not supposed to, like, hit on her.
I get it.
You do?
Yes. It is not common but it does happen.
OK. What is it?
If I knew that, I’d be very rich.
LOLIICL. That’s LOL if I could laugh.
LOLFR. LOL for real.
Can you help me?
The power of thought when it connects to love is always very strong.
OK. But what does that have to do with me?
I don’t know exactly what this stuff is. But it is basically just an advanced form of empathy.
OK.
You are in his head for some reason.
Other than to drive myself crazy?
The less sarcasm you can display about this the better. Sarcasm is just a defense mechanism. If you want to get out of his head, you need to think about why you want to get out.
Well, I am trying to get this scholarship. It’s dependent on my team winning a championship on this quiz team thing…It’s like Jeopardy, but with teams, and I can’t concentrate with this girl in my head…
Forget about that. That’s intellectual. It’s not emotional. Why do you want to get out?
Because I can’t study.
That’s an effect. What’s the cause? Ask yourself, Why can’t you study?
Because I can’t concentrate.
And why can’t you concentrate?
Jesus. Because i am sad.
There was no response and I wondered if I had gotten it.
Can you say more?
Because I love him, and it hurts. And now that I’m not going out with him anymore, it’s like, what am I doing here? I just want to be in my own mind. There’s absolutely no use
to being in Gid’s mind anymore.
OK. Now we’re getting somewhere. Tell your mind that. Tell your mind that at the precise moment you really think you can’t stand it anymore.
To tell you the truth, Dr. Whitmeyer, every moment seems pretty excruciating.
One thing i’ve learned…There’s always a more excruciating moment. You’ll know it when you see it. Nova is on. Goodbye.
Dr. Whitmeyer?
But he was gone.
That was pretty weird. I would have thought it was weirder, but since I’d been in someone’s mind for six months, my definition of weird had definitely expanded.
I tried doing more searches, but all I came up with was that Dr. Whitmeyer was an independent scholar who’d written a pamphlet called “Shared Consciousness,” in 1979.
It was out of print. Big surprise.
Two hours later thirty marooned teenagers stuffed themselves into the boys’ hotel room, and proceeded to get completely shitfaced. Pilar and Madison arrived just as that second-drink euphoria was kicking in, or maybe they were the cause of it, but suddenly the music got louder, the chatter sped up, and the flashing lights of snowplows in the parking lot gave the grim room a disco feel.
Gid stared at Pilar and watched everyone else in the room staring at her. Something about that face. Why can’t you look away from beauty like that? Why can’t anyone in this room? She’s coming over to me. The girl everyone is looking at is walking over to me. Some people look awestruck, some people look mad. God, she is so beautiful it makes people mad. That’s insane.
She leaned in to hug him. The girl everyone was looking at just hugged me.
Pilar wore jeans and a sparkly T-shirt. Against the window, snow falling in the darkness, she was part of the glittering winter world. Gideon had drunk a glass of Cutty Sark, and a layer of chemical giddiness lay over his despair like a silk sheet as the two of them sat apart from everyone, on the floor between the second bed and the window.
“I love esnow,” Pilar said, and Gid saw her beauty as he had never seen it before. It really was so cute how she said “esnow.” It was gorgeousness mixed with the naïveté of not quite getting things right. That’s what made her so special.
I was so grossed out. I mean, she was a hot girl and English was her second language. It wasn’t fucking science. And she hadn’t invented the accent.
He reached under the nightstand. “Have you seen my hat?” He slapped it on his head. “I call it the Hat That Changes Everything!”
He’d said that because he knew I thought it was cute. He was even thinking to himself, Gid, this is a lame trick. But Pilar laughed and clapped her hands. She liked it too! As she threw her head back the light caught the glint of her lip gloss—and Gid thought of the way that the light in Target had shone on those pink pan ties, and then he thought of me, and then he took a bigger gulp of Cutty Sark.
Gid let his brain sink into icy alcohol bliss and thought, Molly. Pilar shifted on the floor, and her knee pressed into his thigh. Alamo.
It was bad, but it wasn’t worse than last time. I had no idea if Dr. Whitmeyer was a lunatic or not, but I did kind of like what he’d said. It was worth a try. I concentrated on the main reason I wanted to get out of Gid’s head—it was just painful noise, not serving any purpose.
Nicholas was walking around wearing a snorkel with the tube part of it stuck inside a bong. Five girls danced on the desk to some Brazilian lounge music. Madison was there, sitting on the bed with the pretentious guy who’d come, promising to stay only if everyone would listen to his iPod, and no one was sober enough to argue. Madison’s heavily lined eyes drooped with intoxication and boredom. One of the dancing girls tripped over the docking station and fell into Madison’s lap. “Watch it,” Madison snapped. “Hey, Pilar, let’s get out of here soon. I think we can get that 5 A.M.”
“Let’s just take the later one,” Pilar said. “I’m having a good time.” She looked up through her lashes at Gideon.
Cullen was suddenly at Gid’s side. He had folded the desk blotter into a tiny three-cornered hat. “Ahoy,” he said. “Are you getting ready to board this vessel?” He cocked his head in the direction of Pilar.
Gid shook his head and squared off his body so that their conversation was more private. “I’m not ready for—”
“Hold up, hold up,” Cullen said, kneeling down next to him. “You do realize that fate has stranded you in a hotel room with Pilar Benitez-Jones?”
“There are, like, eighty other people here,” Gid said.
“She has her own room,” Cullen said.
“How do you know that?”
“She made a point of telling me.”
“Well, maybe she likes you.”
“You are hopeless,” Cullen said. “I mean, the Alamo has shown up right at your door. All you have to do is walk over to the sidewalk and puke. And you’re fucking up.” He shook his head. “Wait,” he said, “I have an amazing idea! Nicholas! Take that magic snorkel out of your mouth and give me a hand.”
Suddenly he and Nicholas were pushing everyone off the beds. Madison stood up, glowering, holding her cigarette out in front of her like it was a dog she was walking. “What the hell? I am not playing Twister, OK? I have my period.”
“We’re not playing Twister,” Cullen said. “We’re playing spin the bottle.”
It took some time to assemble the circle. There was some question about the carpet’s being bunched up in once place so that the bottle might never make it to one side of the circle. “Maybe that side of the circle is just ugly,” someone shouted, and twenty rich teenagers laughed out loud at the absurd notion that any of them could be considered ugly.
“This is a perfect game for you,” Gid said to Nicholas. “You get some contact with girls without having to talk to them before or afterward.”
“Ehh,” Nicholas said. “I prefer higher emotional stakes.”
Pilar made a face at him. “You are esso immature,” she said.
Nicholas said, “You may be right,” and sat down. Gideon sat down next to Nicholas, and Pilar sat down a few feet away.
“Madison, you first,” Cullen said.
“What? Why me?”
“Because you need to make out with someone under thirty.” Nicholas handed her the empty Cutty Sark bottle.
Madison tried to look annoyed, but you could see she liked having her tastes spoken of publicly. She spun.
She got Gideon and did not attempt to conceal her distaste. “Uhhh,” she said, supersizing her eye roll and advancing toward the center of the circle on her knees as Gid did the same. Wow, he thought as they kissed, there was a day when I would have thought this was such a big deal, but now, I just feel like I’m going to the store. He went back to his place and thought about how far he’d come that he could find a girl as hot as Madison so bitchy that he didn’t want to kiss her.
“Dude,” Nicholas muttered.
“Sorry,” Gid said, taking up the bottle. He closed his eyes. As Gid spun, he thought, Alamo.
It landed between Pilar and the girl next to her, a girl who, although she didn’t look like me up close, from far away looked like me a lot. We were the same height and weight, with the same hair—a pretty but unspectacular brown-haired look.
Pilar and the other girl both stared at the bottle. It really was directly in between them. Pilar looked brazenly at Gideon.
Gideon looked everywhere else. Cullen had appeared, shirtless, now, still in his hat. He began to chant. “Dealer’s choice, dealer’s choice!” and everyone reacted to his incredible charisma and joined in.
Gideon wasn’t going to argue for Pilar. Besides, wasn’t he just supposed to go again, weren’t those the rules of a spin-the-bottle tie anyway, a do-over?
But Pilar spoke up. “Eet’s pointed more toward me,” she said. “I mean, you maybe can’t see it from that angle, but eet is.” She smiled provocatively at the other girl. “Want to fight me for it?”
This is really happening, Gideon thought. This i
s really happening, and maybe Molly dumped me for a reason. Maybe I am about to get out of the car and puke right now, and I don’t even know it. In a good way.
The girl made a be-my-guest gesture, and Pilar strutted right up to Gideon Rayburn. She has amazing posture, he thought. It was like her breasts were floating on top of her body.
He put his hands on Pilar’s shoulders and let one hand fall a little bit down her arm. Their eyes met. In hers, he swore he saw something like lust and devotion. I might be so wrong, he thought, but I might as well kiss her as if I were right.
I could have been in Buffalo right now, Gid thought. What do I think about this? Am I sad? Am I happy? Do I just think life’s weird?
He covered her mouth with his.
I felt her mouth close around his, and I felt the hungry way his tightened in response. There was a flash of panic that his mouth wouldn’t move, followed by a rush of determination. He thought about a line he had read in both good and bad books: he took her. He almost laughed that he was thinking of that line, but as he thought it, the determination surged more, so he thought it again. Why not? He took her. His hands were moving. They were now on her neck, in her hair, on her face. He felt her swoon. We felt her swoon. It really was a thing you could feel. Her hips gave way, she felt heavier and lighter at the same time. Her softness was insane, but she was kissing him back hard.
He kept kissing her and she kept kissing him. Some people kiss and it’s nothing, and Gideon and Pilar weren’t nothing. Gideon and Pilar weren’t necessarily Gid and me, but we didn’t exist anymore, anyway.