Helen, approaching the desk afterward, had pretended she didn’t even know her and asked if she could rent the convertible, since the girl wouldn’t be taking it. The clerk and she had wagged their heads together over kids these days. Helen decided not to tell Cindy any of that. She probably wouldn’t have picked a fire-red convertible as the getaway car, but she had to admit it was fun driving it. It was a shame that by the time in life you could afford a car like this, you no longer looked good driving it.
“What kind of food do you want?” Helen asked.
“I don’t care. Just find someplace with a little life. I’m so bored!”
Helen laughed to herself. The younger Dr. Liu appeared, the younger she behaved. This beauty treatment must have been more than skin deep. Still, Helen felt she could go for a little liveliness herself.
Helen pulled up to the valet stand in front of a promising-looking bar and restaurant called “Cuba Libre.” She liked the music coming from inside, and the valet boys were good-looking. “Let’s try this one.”
Cindy got out of the car, and stood leaning into one hip impatiently while Helen handed over her keys and got her ticket. Cindy’s sullen expression brightened when they stepped inside. The place was busy but not yet packed. Helen was looking around at the Andy Warhol style canvas prints of Che Guevara and Marilyn Monroe when the hostess came to seat them.
“Taking your mother out tonight?” the hostess asked Cindy.
Now, it was Cindy’s turn to laugh, and Helen’s turn to look stern.
They took seats at the corner of the bar, where they could watch the room and easily get the attention of the bartender. Luckily, the bartender didn’t card Cindy. They were going to have to get her a fake ID. No one was going to buy her real one at the rate she was going.
Helen was getting worried about how quickly Cindy seemed to be getting younger. When they met, just a few days ago, Cindy looked like she might be forty-five. Helen knew now that she was sixty-seven. By the time the police came yesterday, she looked like she was in her later twenties. Now, she was having trouble passing for twenty-five.
She looked at her friend. Cindy was sipping something fruity through a straw and scanning the room. She had one foot hooked into the barstool and was leaning on her elbow. If she had snapped her chewing gum just then, Helen would have sworn she was seventeen.
She leaned in to her friend and whispered, “I think we’re going to have to get you a fake ID.”
Cindy nodded. “I’ve ordered one. We can pick it up tomorrow. But buying drinks and renting a car are the least of my worries. The process is accelerating. I need to get back into my lab and find a way to slow this down. At this rate, I’m going to be a teenager by Friday night.”
Helen had driven by the house that afternoon to check on things and found it wreathed in crime scene tape. Getting back in wasn’t going to be simple. “Can you work somewhere else?” she asked. She wondered if the foreclosure on Wild Oaks was still sitting empty. They could probably squat there unnoticed a good long while.
Just then, a young man popped up at Cindy’s shoulder, swaying a little unsteadily on his flip-flop clad feet. “I’m Dennis,” he yelled into Cindy’s ear.
Cindy made an annoyed face. “I’m busy,” she yelled over her shoulder before turning back to her conversation with Helen.
Helen thought Cindy might be passing up an opportunity. College boys were eager and easy to direct. It had been a long time since Helen had garnered attention from a man that young, but she remembered it fondly.
The boy dropped a heavy hand onto Cindy’s shoulder, pulling her blouse to the side with his clumsy fingers. Cindy picked up the hand and took it between hers, pinched the nerve between his fingers painfully, and then turned back to Helen and smiled sweetly.
The boy pulled back his hand and waved it around. “Ow! You don’t have to be a bitch about it,” he whined.
Cindy’s eyes narrowed. She might have struck the boy, but Helen caught her eye and shook a finger subtly. “Wait,” she mouthed.
Helen returned her gaze to the boy, or more specifically to the glass in his hand. She stretched out the finger holding her own glass, aiming it casually at the boy’s beverage. She concentrated briefly on the liquid inside, and then on the container itself. That was when the glass shattered, spilling surprisingly hot beer down the boy’s arm.
He shook his arm in dismay, yelling, “Fuck! What the fuck just happened?” until the bartender came around and led him toward the entrance and out into the street.
Cindy covered her mouth as if she was upset, but Helen saw her laughter when she made eye contact. She lifted her glass in a little salute, which Cindy returned.
t had been an eye-opening weekend. Patricia never would have suspected what a valuable ally Suzie could be. When she’d returned from the disastrous visit to Cindy, Suzie had been waiting for her, pacing in front of her condo. “I was so worried about you. Don’t you ever run off like that on me again!”
Suzie stopped short of hugging her, but Patricia thought that was as much due to uncertainty about the scales as it was to any reticence. She was also surprised to find she would have welcomed the hug.
Patricia had always taken the attitude that the only person she could rely on was herself, so she was shocked to find how grateful she felt that Suzie was there and cared about where she had been. She wasn’t sure, but she thought she felt tears in her eyes. Patricia never cried.
In the condo’s living room, sprawled on the floor to avoid damaging her leather furniture, she told Suzie the whole story: the eczema problem, the cream her friend had given her, the gunshot test, the discovery of what Cindy had done. She’d never told one person so much about herself in her life. It felt good. It calmed her. And as she calmed, she felt the scales retreat. By the time they finished talking, Patricia almost looked like herself again. The plates on her chest and back remained, but the scales and talons had retracted.
Suzie listened. When Patricia’s words finally ran dry, the two women sat there together on the floor, staring out the large windows that overlooked the city, and thinking. After a while, Suzie pulled a legal pad out of her messenger bag and began writing. When she was finished, she held it out for Patricia to see.
It was a sort of bubble map. In the middle was a circle that said “Cindy Liu.” There were lots of small bubbles around it with adjectives and questions. Patricia scanned over them, bouncing from “crazy” and “dangerous” to “police?” Other circles on the paper said “the cream” and “Patricia’s condition.” She couldn’t read all the notations in Suzie’s scrawling handwriting, but she could see the girl definitely was brewing a plan.
Finished reading, Patricia looked at Suzie questioningly. The younger woman chewed the eraser of her black Ticonderoga pencil thoughtfully. Then she said, “I think we should start with the cream and some clothes that will work for you. Let’s go to the mall.”
Patricia laughed. “That’s your big idea? The mall?”
Suzie joined in the laughter. “I’m serious, though. There’s a chem lab just around the corner from Holly Hills where we can get the cream analyzed to find out what’s in it. There’s an REI in the mall where we can get you some durable, flexible clothes that can handle your transformations. Plus, I want a smoothie.”
“What about Cindy?”
“We’ll need more time to think about that one and decide what to do. Involving the police is complicated. Our story isn’t all that believable, and I don’t know how deeply we want to be drawn into this. Let’s work on the other problems first and take time to think about Cindy.”
Patricia nodded. She was starting to think Suzie was a woman after her own heart. She was eminently practical and obviously a woman of action. If only she weren’t so damned young and cute.
A few hours later, they were sitting by the fountain in the center of the mall, drinking smoothies and trying to ignore the teen beauty pageant on the stage behind them. Several large shopping bags filled with y
oga pants and different kinds of athletic wear sat at their feet.
Patricia gestured behind her with her empty smoothie cup. “God, I hate these things.”
Suzie nodded, slurping something pink through her straw. She wiped her mouth on the back of her hand and said, “I don’t know what’s worse: the old men ogling not-yet legal girls or the girls themselves, pinning all their hopes on push-up bras and makeup.”
Patricia stared at her. “I’m surprised to hear you say that.”
Suzie said, “I’m just blonde, Patricia. Not stupid.”
Patricia cringed a little. “I know you’re not stupid. At least, I know that now. But look at you.”
Suzie looked down at her bright blue skirt and pink platform sandals. “I like bright colors.” She turned to face her boss. “Listen, Patricia. This is how I look. I can’t help that anymore than you can choose how you look. I was born this way. But how I look is not who I am.”
“I really underestimated you.”
“Of course you did. Everyone does. That’s part of what makes me so awesome. I’m a secret weapon.”
Patricia laughed.
Just then, a gunshot rang out. The crowds of people milling about transformed into a panic of pushing and screaming lunatics instantaneously. Patricia and Suzie crouched on the floor, using the bench as shelter as people streamed past them. Patricia saw the source of the gunfire first. The gunman was a twenty-something white kid with black emo hair hanging in his face, wearing an army coat over a black T-shirt that said, she was sure, something hip and ironic. He was holding a big black machine gun of some sort. Patricia guessed he was modeling himself after one of the hundreds of other skinny white boys who’d taken guns in hand in the past few years to fight their feelings of inadequacy and invisibility.
He was still standing on the stage, holding a bony little blonde girl by her up-do. The girl’s strapless blue sparkly dress stayed, amazingly, perfectly in place. Beauty queen duct tape, Patricia guessed. Her makeup, however, was running in black streaks down her cheeks as she sobbed and yelled, “Somebody help!”
The mall cops, who weren’t pushing customers to the exits, were gathered in a small, sad clump a few hundred feet from the stage, talking to each other and consulting their various devices. They were not equipped to deal with this sort of thing, and it would take the real police too long to get here. The girl was in serious danger.
Suzie pulled Patricia’s shoulder, and Patricia crouched down lower to listen. “You’ve got to do something, Patricia.”
“Me? What the hell could I do?”
“You’re bulletproof. You can get that girl away from him. You can save her.”
“Again, I say, why should I?”
“Because you can.” Suzie’s face was bright with something Patricia couldn’t read. Excitement? Sureness? Faith?
Patricia peeked over the bench again. There was a short chubby woman standing just below the stage, howling and sobbing. She had to be the girl’s mother. Her blonde helmet of hair didn’t move as she lunged at the stage, or when the mall cops pulled her to safety. Patricia turned back to her intern and friend. “Suzie, I’m not Peter Parker. I don’t buy the whole ‘great power comes with great responsibility’ racket. I didn’t ask for this, and I don’t owe anyone anything.”
“Everything happens for a reason, Patricia. That girl might be foolish, but she doesn’t deserve this. You can do something about it.”
Damn it. She was right. Breathing in deeply, Patricia took off her jacket and laid it on the bench neatly. She took off her low-heeled slides and slid them beneath. Then she took a deep breath and stretched her arms in a wide circle around her. She hadn’t tried to make the transformation happen on purpose before, but she figured it must be the opposite of making it go away. She needed to get herself worked up.
As she pushed out her breath through her nose in fast, snorting breaths, she thought about what Cindy had done to her. Used her. Like a lab rat. Her anger building, she flexed her arms and upper back and felt the spikes pop out. It didn’t hurt. Very little could hurt her these days, at least physically, but it felt strange, sort of like feeling the rumble of thunder through your feet or chest; Patricia could feel it, but it was distant and vague. If it weren’t for the additional weight the plates put on her frame, she might have thought she imagined the prickly sort of feeling as they sprang up.
It was stranger still when she rotated her head and felt the scales spread up her neck and onto her cheeks. Those she could feel. It was like they slipped out from secret compartments in her skull and slid into place, forming a protective mask. There was a rustling sound as they configured themselves under her hair and around her eyes and ears. She’d never get used to that.
She heard Suzie gasp and turned to grin at her. “Guess my reputation as an old battle-axe is truer than they know, huh?”
Suzie grinned back. “Go get ‘em, Tiger,” she quipped, and then crouched behind the bench again to watch.
It was hard to sneak up on people when you were a six-foot-tall lizard woman, but Patricia tried to creep around the potted plants to approach the stage platform from the back. The mall was empty now. Even the mall cops had retreated, dragging the poor beauty queen’s mother with them.
Patricia caught a glimpse of herself in the reflective glass of the darkened Bible bookstore. The creature she saw there was broad and fierce, covered in gray-green scales with spikes sticking out of the back and shoulders. Her white tank top was stretched to its maximum and now had holes up the back where the back plates had sprouted bumps and then spikes. The black yoga pants were similarly strained. The only thing that still looked like her was the shock of red hair she paid her stylist to maintain. It looked very red against the scales. Otherwise, she looked like some kind of alien, or maybe a bipedal dinosaur, one wearing yoga clothes from North Face.
She walked through the deserted mall as quietly as she could, but her heavy footsteps seemed to echo against the glass storefronts. Some of the storefront windows and pull-down security cages shook as she walked by. She hadn’t weighed herself yet fully armored, but she had a feeling she wouldn’t like the number.
She saw the moment when the boy spotted her. He was pacing the stage, dragging the poor girl around by her hair. The girl was trying to get her feet back under herself so she could move with him, but he wouldn’t give her a moment’s pause. The spindly high-heeled shoes weren’t helping.
The boy must have heard Patricia’s thudding steps, because he turned in her direction, a defiant sneer on his face. The sneer melted when he spotted her, and, for a moment, his naked panic was clearly visible. If the beauty queen had looked up just then, she might have felt less afraid. She would have seen her captor was just a scared boy, probably not any older than her. The boy recovered from his fear quickly, though, and grabbed the girl more strongly, pulling her up and wrapping one arm around her waist so she was held against his chest. If not for the struggling, the weaponry, and her tears, they could have been posing for a couple’s portrait. The girl squeaked, like some kind of mouse or rabbit. As Patricia approached, the boy moved the gun back and forth between her and the girl a few times before deciding to keep it trained on Patricia. “St-st-stay back!” he stammered. “I’ll shoot you!”
“Go ahead, honey. If it makes you feel better,” Patricia said, stepping onto the stage. There was a groaning sound as she progressed, and the panels of the floor flexed under her heavy steps, but it seemed like the platform would hold.
Patricia could see the terror in the boy’s eyes, but he brought the gun level. “I mean it!” His voice shook, but she gave him credit for the steadiness of his hand. Surely, none of the scenarios he had imagined had featured anything like her. He’d envisioned himself fighting police officers and ordinary people, not science fiction creatures.
“I’m sure you do.” Patricia didn’t stop walking. The boy loosened his hold on the girl, who fell like a dropped handkerchief at his feet. He gripped the weapon with bo
th hands and opened fire. Patricia was sure the bullets had hit her. How could he miss at this distance, after all? But she didn’t feel a thing. Behind the boy’s left shoulder, a stage light shattered. Ricochet, Patricia thought.
She closed the remaining space between them in two steps, pulled the gun from his grip with one of her hands, and slapped him with the other. His head snapped back, and he fell like a scarecrow, boneless, out cold. Things like jaws didn’t hold up very well against her armored skin, even when she didn’t use much force. It was probably like being slapped by a rock. His jaw was probably broken. She’d been feeling kind of cranky when she slapped him.
Patricia turned to the young woman, still laying there playing damsel in distress. “Girl,” she hissed, “Get up.” The girl got to her feet, shaking, her arms wrapped around her slender body, her eyes darting between Patricia and her erstwhile captor, unconscious at her feet. “See what pretty gets you? Try for smart next time.” The girl stood wide-eyed, immobile. “Go, girl. Go home!” At last, the girl slid off the stage and ran sobbing toward the exit, leaving both of her ridiculous shoes behind.
Suzie jumped up from her hiding spot behind the bench, squealing and clapping. “You were great!”
Patricia smiled, saluted Suzie with two fingers, and bounded off the stage, stalking away with a confident stride, moving as quickly as her bulk allowed. As she walked, she began her calming breathing. She thought about the sound of the ocean, pictured wide calm water stretching to the horizon. She didn’t feel the scales retracting exactly, but she could tell that her steps were becoming lighter. She could move more quickly.
A few steps farther, and she was at the bench. Suzie was holding out Patricia’s new green jacket, and she quickly shrugged it on and slid into her shoes. “Let’s get out of here!” she said. Suzie handed her half the bags, and they walked off, looking for all the world like two friends who had just been shopping.
Going Through the Change Page 17