“Amorous? That’s a great name.”
“Lee’s nice too.” We stopped shaking. I glanced at Tony’s book—The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka. “We had to read that last year,” I said, slowly pushing my own books behind my back.
“My dad recommended it,” Tony said, sitting at the edge of the window bench. Even though his glasses were kind of nerdy, nothing else about him was. His arms were tan and muscular, and he had high cheekbones and a big, confident smile. And those two freckles were adorable.
I nodded. He nodded. I chewed on my lower lip. He tapped his fingers on his thigh. The silence might have been bearable if physical attraction hadn’t been pulsating through me like a strobe light, magnifying every movement and breath. My mouth felt dry. I tried to think of something to say but what was the use? There was no time to get to know Tony, not with Untitled Work in Progress waiting to be written.
“Um, well, I have to go.” As I collected my books, one fell to the floor. Tony picked it up and I braced myself for a snide comment.
“Write a romance novel in one month. Hey, you want to be a writer? I thought you were going premed?”
“I am. I’m going premed, definitely. These books are just for fun.” Another book slipped from my arms.
“Here, let me help you.” Before I could protest, he scooped up the rest of my books. “You’re gonna check out all of these?”
“Yeah.” If another neighborhood girl wanted romance-writing guidebooks, she’d just have to wait. I, however, couldn’t wait and needed all the guidance I could get.
As we walked to the checkout counter, I felt kind of idiotic having a guy carry my books. But the attention, even if only for a few moments, was nice. Was Tony the kind of guy who held a door open and gave up his seat on the bus? The kind of guy that my mother and Mrs. Bobot always said was as extinct as a dodo? As he laid the books on the counter, pine and cedar drifted past—the scents of a guy’s deodorant. I reached past him to grab a free bookmark, inhaling his spiciness. He smelled so good.
Smothering heat pounced on us as we stepped out of the library’s front door. “Can’t believe this heat wave,” Tony said, transferring the books to my arms, then grabbing his skateboard. “I thought it was supposed to rain all the time in Seattle.”
“Not all the time,” I said. “Just most of the time.”
We walked down a ramp and stopped at the sidewalk. He took Kafka off the top of the stack and tucked it under his arm. “So, I’m just wondering …” He tapped his fingers on his board. “Are you sure you don’t want to go to a movie or something? I mean, maybe you have a boyfriend. If you do, then just tell me and I’ll stop asking.”
I pictured myself sitting in front of the air conditioner all afternoon outlining a novel. Then writing that novel into the evening. And tomorrow and the next day and the next. All alone. I was about to tell him that I didn’t have a boyfriend. I was about to tell him that I’d really love to go out. Anywhere. A movie, a coffeehouse, a corner bench at the park. This was what I’d been dreaming about! But as I pressed my lips together to form the first word, a creepy feeling tickled my neck. Someone was watching me.
Errol.
He stood across the street, looking right at me. Foreboding rolled over me, dark and sinister. If ever there was a time to run, it was then. But I didn’t run. I couldn’t. Like in a nightmare I stood rooted to the spot.
“Alice?” Tony touched my arm.
Errol’s hood concealed most of his face, but his mouth was tight with determination. He held his left arm straight out. Then he pulled his right hand to his chest. Something was going to happen. Something bad. I felt as helpless as a small creature caught in headlights.
And then, BAM!
Something collided with my chest. A jolt shot through my body, electrifying the tips of my fingers and toes.
The next thing I knew, I was lying on the sidewalk staring up into the faces of strangers.
“Is she hurt? Did she faint?”
“Maybe it’s the heat.”
“Can she talk?”
Tony’s worried face came into view, blocking the others. He squeezed my tingling hand. “Alice? Are you okay?”
I wasn’t sure. Cement pressed against my spine. My legs were splayed like a discarded rag doll. “What happened?” I murmured.
“You fell backward,” Tony said, helping me sit up. “I think you fainted. I couldn’t catch you, it happened so fast. Good thing you had those books. They protected your head.”
Sure enough, after flying out of my hands, the books had landed on the sidewalk a moment before my head. Anyone Can Write a Romance Novel had kept my skull from cracking open—a service its author hadn’t included in her introduction.
“I fainted?” That didn’t seem right. I’d never fainted before, though I’d come close during a frog dissection in seventh-grade biology. A splash of cold water on my face in the girls’ bathroom had calmed the wooziness. But this wasn’t a biology class. And it wasn’t a Regency romance novel where girls faint all the time—except in those stories the girls always manage to land in a handsome man’s arms, not spread-eagled on a sidewalk.
“Should I call an ambulance?” a lady asked.
“I’m fine,” I said. “I don’t need an ambulance.” I felt the back of my head. No bump or sore spot. No blood.
“Are you sure?” Tony asked.
“I’m fine.” God, how embarrassing.
“She’s okay,” Tony told the onlookers as he helped me to my feet. Dizziness swept over me, blacking out the world for a moment. As my vision cleared, Tony led me to a bus bench. I peeled a discarded coffee lid off my bottom, then sat. The crowd wandered away while Tony collected my library books.
“Where are my shoes?” I asked.
One of the flip-flops had flown down the sidewalk. Tony found the other behind a garbage can. “Weird. Look,” he said, handing them over. The rubber soles were misshapen as if they’d melted, then solidified. It looked like I’d stepped into enormous wads of chewing gum. “The sidewalk must be really hot.”
I stared at the deformed shoes. Nothing made sense. I’d fainted and my shoes had melted. And now my body tingled and my mind was fuzzy. Slipping my feet into the flip-flops, I tried to remember the moment just before falling. “I don’t get it,” I said. “Why would I faint?”
“Maybe you need to eat something. Maybe it’s a blood-sugar thing.”
“But I had breakfast.” Then, like a windshield wiper brushing away mist, the fuzziness cleared. “Errol,” I said, jumping to my feet. “Errol was over there.” I pointed across the street, but Errol was gone.
“Who’s Errol?” Tony asked.
“That guy from the bagel shop.” I scanned the street, then rushed to the end of the block and looked up and down the sidewalk. A woman walking a bulldog, a couple of kids carrying ice cream cones, but no black hoodie anywhere.
Tony followed me. “You mean that guy at Neighborhood Bagels? The one you gave the envelope to?”
“Yeah. That guy.”
“I don’t see him. Are you sure?”
“I saw him. And then something hit me.” My fingers flew to the point of impact, just below my left breast. It felt tender, a sure sign that a big ugly bruise was forming. “I think he threw something at me.” Why would he throw something at me? What kind of a person does that? Even if he was pissed because I’d refused to help him, that was no reason to hurt me.
Tony shoved his hands into his pockets. “I was standing next to you, Alice. I didn’t see anything hit you.”
“Something hit me.”
We walked back to the scene of the crime and searched the sidewalk for something, anything, that might have been thrown across the street. But we found nothing.
“I really think you fainted,” Tony said. “People faint all the time. You probably got too hot. I’m from LA and even I think it’s hot today. Let’s go back inside and get you some water.”
“I don’t need water.”
“Does your head hurt?” He ran his hand over the back of my head. “You could have a concussion.” He looked into my left eye, then my right eye, like he was practicing for medical school. “I had a friend who got a concussion skateboarding.”
I stepped away. “I don’t have a concussion.”
If I kept insisting that Errol had thrown something, Tony would think I was crazy. I just needed to get home and lie down for a bit. Maybe take a cool shower. A Tylenol would probably make the aching stop. I scooped up my books.
“I’ll walk you home,” he asked.
“No thanks. I’m fine.”
He adjusted his glasses. “I think I should, just in case you faint again.”
“I’m not going to faint,” I said. “I feel fine.” I didn’t, though. Something tugged at me. Just minutes ago, Tony Lee had asked me to go to the movies and I had almost said yes. Now I wanted nothing to do with Tony Lee. I wanted something else—but what? “Bye!” Books in hand, I hurried down the sidewalk, my mangled flip-flops making sucking sounds the entire way.
The early-afternoon sun beat mercilessly upon Capitol Hill, suffocating the breezes that usually drifted off Puget Sound. Tiny puddlelike mirages spread across the pavement. The air was stale and thick with car exhaust and human fatigue. Ice cream vendor carts had sprouted like weeds all over the urban landscape, but I didn’t stop to buy anything. I cut across Cal Anderson Park where every shady spot had been claimed. Shirtless men exposed rolls of belly fat. Women forgot about hiding their varicose veins and cellulite. Shoes lay strewn around the central fountain as people soothed their swollen feet. Kids of all ages splashed in the long ornamental pools. I might have joined them but a hollow, aching feeling had settled in the pit of my stomach. Like an Alzheimer’s patient who wants something but can’t remember the word, I struggled to define the feeling. Intangible, yet insistent. What was it?
It was Need.
I needed. But what, exactly, did I need?
Realm sat on the front stoop, defying the heat wave in leggings and an oversized men’s denim shirt. A journal lay on her lap and music squeaked out of her headphones. “What are you wearing?” she asked, curling her lip as she looked at me.
“What?”
“Those shoes. They’re all wrong.”
I started up the front steps. “Whatever.”
She yanked off the headphones and pointed. “Who’s that guy?”
Tony Lee stood across the street, at the edge of the park. He’d followed me. “Just wanted to make sure you got home,” he called, then jumped on his board and skated away.
Of course I got home. I wasn’t an idiot. And I didn’t have a concussion.
Realm smiled wickedly. “What’s up with your freaky hair? You look like you got struck by lightning.”
“Huh?” My reflection floated in the front door’s pane. My hair stuck out as if I’d rubbed a balloon all over it. I grabbed a clump. It felt freeze-dried.
Lightning? I held my breath as a new possibility took shape. Fainting didn’t cause a person’s hair to stick up all over or shoes to melt. Or fingers and toes to tingle. As I brushed a lock from my cheek, the hair made a crackling sound. “Lightning,” I said.
Rushing into my apartment, I dumped the library books onto the carpet and flipped open my phone. Directory assistance connected me to the local television station, where I was forwarded to the weather department. “Have there been any reports of lightning today?” I asked.
“No,” a man answered.
“Are you sure?”
“Just a minute.” He put me on hold for a few seconds. “Yes, I’m sure. No lightning.”
“But I think I was …” I’d sound crazy. “My friend thinks she was struck by lightning in front of the Capitol Hill library. About a half hour ago.”
“I don’t think so. There haven’t been any thunderstorms in weeks. We’re in the middle of a heat wave, or hadn’t you noticed?” The weather guy’s voice brimmed with testiness, as if the last thing he wanted to do was talk “weather.”
I snapped the phone closed, then tossed it onto a chair. That’s when Realm stomped into the living room, waving the copy of Death Cat. “Thanks a lot,” she snarled. “I just found this in a box of junk mail by your door. You said you’d give it to your mom.”
“She’s not home,” I said, cursing myself for not bolting the door. Why did my chest itch? I reached under my tank top and scratched. My fingers stopped on a small bump. What was that?
Realm picked an empty bag of Cheetos off the floor. “I didn’t know you ate junk food. I guess you can eat anything you want while your mom’s gone.”
I hurried to the bathroom, lifted my tank top, and pressed close to the mirror. An angry red welt glared back, just under my left breast. I examined the tank top. A tiny slit marked the spot where something had pierced the fabric.
Here was the proof that something had hit me. Should I tell Mrs. Bobot? We’d end up at the doctor’s office where she’d discover that I hadn’t gone in for my yearly physical, like I’d promised. And that would lead to a bunch of questions and she’d find out that I hadn’t been to the dentist either. And then she’d snoop around and find out that I hadn’t been taking my daily vitamins and that I’d been eating way too much junk food. “Just as I suspected,” she’d say. “You’re too young to take care of yourself.” And she’d move into my apartment so she could supervise 24/7 and it would only be a matter of days before she found out that I was writing my mother’s next book. “You can’t write your mother’s next book! What are you thinking?”
“What’s up with the blue teacup collection?” Realm hollered from the living room as she snooped around. “Did your mom really write all these books?”
I pressed closer to the mirror. The welt was the size of a dime, tender, with a small puncture mark in the center. Some cortisone cream and a Band-Aid were probably all I needed. And that tingling in my hands and feet had faded, which had to be a good sign.
“Why do you want to write a romance novel in one month?”
I bolted from the bathroom. “You need to go,” I said, pushing Realm toward the door. “I’m really busy.”
“Whatever. It’s not like I want to hang out with you. But just because you got struck by lightning, that’s no excuse for being so rude.” She shoved Death Cat into my face. “Just read this. Okay?”
“I said I would.”
As soon as I’d slammed and locked the door, I threw Death Cat back into the junk-mail box. Then I stripped off my clothes and stood in the shower, cool water tumbling over my shoulders. I worked a leave-on conditioner through my hair. The label promised to “fight the frizzies.” But though the texture of my hair returned to normal, the unsettled feeling in my stomach didn’t go away. It shifted, moving up through my torso.
Need. I need.
Cleaned and conditioned, cortisoned and bandaged, I sat on the couch. The air conditioner droned its refrain. The new writing books sat at my feet like eager puppies. Read us, read us, read us, they squealed. But reading was the last thing I wanted to do.
I really need.
Our brick building sits in the middle of the block. The Spanish lavender on the upstairs balcony and the stained glass window above the entry add splashes of color, but mostly the building is unexceptional. You might stroll past and not even notice it, eyes drawn to the Tudor next door or the pink stucco number around the corner. But on that particular day, at that particular time, while the exterior was as ordinary as dry wheat toast, the interior was a different matter altogether. For something extraordinary was happening inside one of the first-floor apartments.
When Franz Kafka’s hero woke up in The Metamorphosis, he’d grown a pair of antennae. His entire body, as it turned out, had transformed into an insect. As I sat on the couch in a tank top and shorts, though my long brown hair and short legs were the same, something was changing.
A yearning, the likes of which I’d never known, grew and grew until it churned like a busy swarm.
Errol, Errol, Errol, Errol, Errol, Errol, Errol.
I wanted, more than anything, to be near Errol. Yes, that demanding, handsome guy in the black hoodie who believed he was Cupid and who had thrown something at me. That guy.
When I reached out, I wanted to find him standing there. When I listened, I wanted to hear his voice. When I inhaled, I wanted to inhale his scent. I didn’t ask myself why I felt that way, didn’t wonder why my thoughts had moved from Tony—who was clearly obsession-worthy—to Errol, who was clearly … weird. Wait. The old me thought he was weird. The new me focused on the beauty of his name. A strong name. A hero’s name. I grabbed a notebook and wrote his name. Then I wrote Alice + Errol, the way you do when you’re a kid. I wrote it a second time, bigger and bolder. I wanted to write it everywhere, so I ran into the bathroom and grabbed a tube of pink lipstick and wrote across the mirror, Alice + Errol. Across the wall, Alice + Errol. Across the shower, Alice + Errol.
That’s when a scratching noise skipped down the hallway. Had Errol come for a visit? I threw the lipstick tube into the sink, stumbled down the hallway, and opened the door.
“Meow.”
“Oh, hi, Oscar.” A massive orange tomcat wound between my shins.
“Hello, Alice.” Reverend Ruttles stood in his own doorway, across the foyer. He wore a white button-up shirt, as always, but his reverend’s collar was reserved for church duties. “We’ve got chow mein,” he happily announced, for the reverend loved few things more than Chinese food. “It’s Wednesday lunch. Remember?”
Since my mother’s hospitalization, I’d been eating Wednesday lunch at the reverend’s. “I’m not hungry,” I said, scratching my bandaged welt.
“Not hungry? Nonsense. It’s Wednesday. Wanda will skin me alive if I don’t feed you a healthy lunch.”
“Alice, get your booty over here and eat,” a melodious voice called from the reverend’s apartment. Oscar the cat pranced toward the voice. “I made wontons especially for you.”
My stomach growled but I didn’t care. What was Errol’s last name? How would I find him if I didn’t know his last name? If I went back to Neighborhood Bagels and waited, maybe he’d show up. Maybe he was a regular and someone at the counter knew where he lived.
Mad Love Page 7