“Which?” I gasped. I’d made it to the office in record time, but burned with shame when I thought about all the traffic laws I’d violated to do it. No one was above the law, no matter how many personalities she has. Or boyfriends. Or boyfriend, singular, in jail.
“Which twitchy SOB? Or which shit?”
“George, I haven’t been here for about twenty-four hours. Pretend you care, and pretend I’m being fooled by your faux care, and let me know what I missed.”
“Well, you missed a lot of the pure simple Awesomeness That Is George Pinkman,” he said. Ah. Instead of faux care, it was faux modesty. “And it was pretty great! Like I have to tell you that. But what happened was, Paul came away from the crime scene—you remember, Aaron Mickelson, Edina, that weird Dr. Gallo who may yet be my wingman?”
“Yeah, yeah. We didn’t think copycat, we thought JBK might be getting a little fed up with his extracurricular activities. We didn’t bounce Gallo into a cell because he’s related to one of the victims.”
“Yeah, I found out that’s why he moved here in the first place. Guess his family’s taking it pretty har— You’re nodding, you already knew that. Fine. Well, after all that, Paul pretty much vanished into whatever geek hell hole he occupies when he’s not out in the real world trying to vibrate himself to death. Hours later he pops out, he’s got HOAP.1 running and all kinds of new tidbits for us. Me and the New Girl started plowing through it, and—”
“You’re back!” Emma Jan had come bustling out of the kitchen—the office kitchen, not Michaela’s other office—carrying Cup-a-Soup. Ugh. I’d rather drink Cup-a-Barf. We’ve got synesthetes designing software that can tell a computer how to think for itself, but instant noodles still tasted like broiled Styrofoam no matter what we did to them? If God was on vacation, I wish he’d finish with the barhopping and get back to running the universe already. “Great! Listen, Shiro, Paul was—”
“That’s Cadence.” George was looking rumpled, which told me he’d been intrigued by Paul’s invention in spite of himself and hadn’t gone home in a while. No one here had to worry, though. If he thought he’d worn one of his ties too long, he’d switch it out with one of the fifteen he kept in his lower-left desk drawer. Today’s model sported grasshoppers that seemed to be mating. Uh. No. After a closer glance I realized they were cannibalizing each other. Against a peach background.
Whenever I wondered what the dealio was with George’s ties, I could almost feel my freaked-out psyche contemplating growing a fourth personality just to deal with all the necktie fallout. So I never thought about them for very long.
“It’s Cadence,” he was saying. “You can tell because no matter how shitty I am to her, she won’t be shitty back. Oh, and her swearing sucks. She’s also freaked about keeping Michaela waiting, when Shiro wouldn’t give a shit.”
“Oh.” To my annoyance, Emma Jan looked crestfallen. Crestfallen! Not disappointed. Not mildly annoyed. Not somewhat sad. Crestfallen! The way you feel when something really important—like finding out if you got into your dream college or not—happened! “Sorry, Cadence.”
“Sorry I’m not who you were expecting.” I put every shred of sugar I could into my tone, which, since I repress a lot of rage, was considerable.
There was a short silence while Emma Jan fidgeted. She was wearing the green pantsuit again, but with a black blouse. The gigantic purse was still the same, practically bursting with … were those dog treats? Did she know that Behrman didn’t have a dog anymore, but I did? Has Shiro been telling her my secrets?
“Listen, uh, don’t take this the wrong way—” she began.
“Aw, fuck.” George slumped into his chair. “Don’t do it, Emma Jan. She’ll cry and everything will take longer.”
“I will not!”
“I don’t, y’know, care all that much, I’m just curious … because of the case.”
“Because of the case, what?” I asked.
She shrugged and met my gaze. “I just wanted to know if you knew when Shiro would be back.” She turned to George. “What, is that not cool etiquette with these three? Look, if Shiro was a real person, Cadence wouldn’t be mad if I wanted to know when someone who wasn’t her was gonna be around, right?”
George leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling. “Oh, fuck me twice, here we go.”
“Not a real person?” I noticed for the first time I sort of towered over her. Especially when I was ticked off. Especially when I’d been quietly moving closer to her while she babbled about why I shouldn’t be offended if she didn’t want me around. “Shiro’s as real as you are, Emma Jan Thyme! As real as I am! Or do you think I’m not real, either?”
“And me without popcorn.”
“Shut up, George.” Hmm. New Girl was catching on fast. Sort of. “Listen, don’t get mad, Cadence. There’s just a bunch of new stuff about JBK I think Shiro’s gonna need to know about.”
“And she will. When she comes back. Until then, you’re stuck with me. So … so just be stuck with me!”
“Toldya. She can’t even muster a ‘damn.’ If she tried for ‘shit’ she’d blow up. Seriously. The stress would shred her tiny mind like shrapnel.”
“Shut up, George!” I whirled back to my prey. “It’s amazing to me that someone who thinks their reflection is out to get them has the nerve to decide what part of my psyche is real and what’s just … what? Made up so I can get more attention? That tends to be an assumption made by idiots who don’t know what they’re talking about, and don’t care to do a little research to find out.”
“I can’t help it,” Emma Jan forced through gritted teeth, “if no one believes me about Her.”
“You know intellectually none of it is real,” I raged. “It’s been explained to you your whole life! So just cough up and swallow it down emotionally and your life—and ours!—will get a lot easier.”
“How’s she supposed to cough up and swallow at the same—”
“Shut up, George!” we screamed. Then, from Emma Jan: “Oh, that’s nice, white bread!”
“‘White bread’? Is that supposed to be some sort of racial—”
“Who the hell cares? This isn’t about race, it’s about attitude. But as long as we’re giving each other advice on how to stop being a pain in the other’s ass, you might consider the fact that since Shiro and Adrienne are parts of your mind, they’re no more real than you think the Mirror Bitch is! After all, you understand it intellectually. It’s been explained to you your whole life, right?”
“I’m having,” George said, peeking into his pants, “the biggest hard-on of my life.”
“You’re about to understand a broken nose intellectually,” I promised in a rage. I could feel my pulse beating away like mad from the middle of my brain. Was that normal? Was there a pulse in the middle of my brain? And why was I asking myself a question I had no hope of being able to answer? “If you’re lucky, maybe she’ll be satisfied with that.”
“She? Oh yeah? You gonna sic one of your imaginary friends on me? S’matter, Cadence, you’re not up to taking care of your own business?”
“Oh no she dih uhnt,” George chanted, then threw his arms in front of his face. “Okay, okay! I’m shutting up.”
I couldn’t remember ever being this ticked. I mean, ever. Okay, there was the repressed rage thing, sure, that would account for a lot of would-be fights that never happened, but still. Maybe the pressure of the job was getting to me? Maybe wondering why Patrick was locked up? And what Dr. Gallo had to do with any of this? He had something to do with this, right?
“You’re gonna get soooo messed up.” Yeah! After Adrienne showed up (she should be here any second … in fact, why hadn’t she been here ten seconds ago?), Emma Jan Thyme wouldn’t ever wish one of my personalities was here instead of me. Ha!
That would teach her to wish me gone. At my own desk, she wished me gone! Just stood there and wished I was somebody else, someone she liked. I almost envied Adrienne getting to bring on the beat-d
own. “Don’t worry, though. I’ll come visit you in the hospital. I’m great at post-Adrienne apologetic flower bouquet drop-offs.”
“Just like I thought. God forbid you stick around and actually see something all the way through to the end. You just like the easy part. You just like bringing flowers.”
George let out a squeak of terror, clutched the arms of his office chair, and shoved with his feet, hard enough to make his chair zoom several feet to the left.
Oooooh, that did it! I stopped circling and stood still, confidently expecting Adrienne to jump into the driver’s seat and kick some serious patootey.
chapter fifty-nine
Wait. Why was I still here?
“Why am I still me?” I asked aloud.
George came out of his cringe. Emma Jan took a step closer.
I couldn’t believe it. The one time, the one time I actually wanted that redheaded maniac to catapult herself into my life like a neutron bomb, she couldn’t be bothered.
“Dammit!”
“Holy God, Cadence, was that an actual epithet to part your virgin l—”
“Shut up!” I practically screamed. I rounded on Emma Jan. “This doesn’t change anything.”
“Really?” She smiled. “That’s good, because I don’t really care which of us gets the beat-down, as long as somebody gets smacked.”
“Your cheap rayon blouse is about to get wrecked.”
“Bring it, white bread! And it’s a silk blend. I’ve been wanting to smack the shit out of someone in this medicine chest of a department, and any one of the yous who live in your head will do fine! Do you ever actually catch bad guys, or just talk about catchin’ bad guys?”
“Your accent gets thicker when you’re mad!”
“I know!”
“But you’ll be punching Shiro’s face, too,” George began, holding his hands up like a referee. “So would that qualify as a lover’s—”
“Shut up!” Emma Jan was shrugging out of her jacket. Hmm, that was pretty smart. Decreased the chance of the jacket getting trashed, and increased mobility. I started taking off mine, too. “I figured it’d be him, that smirking sumbitch, he seems the type who needs his ass regularly kicked—”
“Oh, ladies, that is so unfair. Wherever I roam, I am misunderstood.”
“—but smacking around your smug face will be a pretty great substitute.”
“Smug? I’m never smug!”
“Yeah, you’re wrong on that one, because you’re sorta the poster child for smug,” George began. Then, when we glared at him with the bloodred intensity of recently awakened volcanoes, he mimed zipping his lips shut, locking said lips, and tossing the key over his shoulder.
Jacket-free, we circled each other like sharks looking for the best place to bite. “Shiro has a boyfriend, you know. She’s dating my boyfriend.”
“No, I don’t know, and it’s none of my business anyway, because we’re not dating, and I think we might be friends—someday—and … what? You think I’m trying to steal her away from you?”
Yes. “No!”
“You think I’m gonna try and start a romantic relationship with someone I work with ’fore I’ve even turned in my rental car slip?”
Yes. “No!”
“What, Shiro can’t make a friend unless Cadence signs off on it? Do you use a form, or is it more a verbal OK?”
Well, there was never a need for an actual paper form before all this … aw, darn it to the furthest reaches of heck! “Stop trying to distract me with your silly questions. You just don’t want to get punched in your stupid face.”
“That’s what this is really about, isn’t it, Ms. Get-Along Girl? You don’t like Shiro being her own person. You don’t like me … so Shiro can’t like me, neither.”
“Either.”
“That’s pretty threatening to you, huh?”
“Proper English?”
“Chickenshit.” If she’d been younger, she probably would have spit on the floor. It had been spat on before, unfortunately. “Sure, make it about grammar, that’ll help.”
She was correct to sneer—and rats! I forced myself back to the actual problem. “You yourself reminded me that we’re all the same person!”
“Yeah, except when it’s inconvenient. Like now. You were really pissed when your other self, the fighting self, didn’t get you out of this, weren’t you?”
“No, I was glad.” A tiny white lie. “Okay, I was surprised at first, but then I was glad because she’s very disruptive and … Wait. Is this about Adrienne and me, or you and Shiro, or me and Shiro, or you and me? Because there are a lot of things for me to keep track of in this fight.”
“Well, shoot.” She puffed a breath, making her bangs tremble (but in a block, not as individual hairs; she used a lot of gel). “If we haveta start thinking about what it’s about, I’m gonna lose my mad-on.”
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. “Your mad-on? Is that what that is? No wonder you don’t want to lose it.” I was losing mine, too. Emma Jan was right. Why’d we let what was probably going to be a satisfying fight get screwed up with thinking?
“It’s swell you two kissed and made up,” George said, dismayed, “but now I have to go into the bathroom and beat off. Dammit! A perfectly good hard-on, and no chick-fight follow-up. You two really let me down.”
“Awwwww.” Emma Jan almost sounded contrite and everything. I snickered.
“Look!” he practically screamed. “You were getting down to it—finally. You were supposed to kick and scratch and spit—”
“Spitting isn’t my style,” Emma Jan said, a smirk still playing around her lips.
“Gross,” I added.
“—and rip each other’s clothes, but during the fight you’d realize you were both super-horny, so you’d go from the spitting and the scratching to tenderly helping each other out of your lacy bras and delicate pastel silk panties—”
“It’s laundry day. I’m rocking granny panties right now,” Emma Jan confessed.
George’s groan of dismay almost made the whole silly argument worthwhile. “You can’t beat ’em for comfort,” I agreed, now forever loyal to Emma Jan’s granny panties. Wait. I had best rephrase that … “Besides, she and Shiro are friends, not lovers. Right? Not lovers? So her panties are irrelevant.”
“Shut up!” George demanded. Was that … was that a tear in the corner of his eye? “Then, after you made sweet-yet-nasty love on this disgusting lab experiment of a carpet, you’d decide to adjourn to the steam room—”
“We don’t have a—”
“And instead, this.” George made a gesture encompassing the two of us, and from the disgust in his voice it was a poor substitute to what he’d hoped for.
“Guess you’ll just have to stick to your feverish imagination.”
“Don’t tell him that,” I cautioned. “He will, and his imagination is something to be feared.”
“No, I won’t. I don’t want to have to use my imagination! That’s what you two were supposed to do. Right in front of me! Now I’ve got this useless hard-on while you two are practically ready to exchange recipes. I’d be psyched you were going to kiss and make up, except you won’t even kiss! I should have known, Cadence, I should have fucking known. You can screw up anything with your weird stupid niceness.”
“I have been waiting.”
Ulp. Michaela’s voice.
“Hard-on’s gone,” George said, going at least two shades paler.
chapter sixty
“So,” Michaela began. “Updates.” Thwackthwackthwack! “If it isn’t too much trouble.”
We had assembled in her other office, and she was attacking a pile of celery stalks stacked so high, they looked like pale green firewood.
George plunged ahead, and for once I was grateful. Something had Michaela in a mood, and I wasn’t certain it was just the JBJ update.
“Tell you this: Paul took one look at the crime scene and figured out that the pattern was way, way off. He’s been twitchin
g and jerking and practically having seizures since he got back from the Mickelson place.”
“Poor guy.”
George and I shook our heads. “Genius guy,” I said. “It sounds mean, but the more like that Paul gets, the better for BOFFO. The stuff he’s come up with, Emma Jan … you wouldn’t believe it. He’s not just a synesthete. His savantism—”
Emma Jan leaned forward, cupping her elbows in her hands. She wriggled on the bar stool—some people had trouble getting comfortable on them, especially in work situations. “We were talking about that earlier.”
“Right.”
“Don’t call me Rainman.” Ah! The man himself. Paul stumbled into the kitchen, looking at the reams and reams of data in his hands instead of where he was going. His shirt was untucked; his shoes were untied. I jumped off my stool and went to help him. “That stopped being funny being funny a good ten years ago does anybody smell blue?”
“Here. Ack! Be careful, Paul,” I scolded as he stumbled. “Your glasses are filthy! How can you see anything? And it would help if you actually looked where you were—be careful, I said! You’re not much good to us with a shattered skull.”
“Don’t tease,” George sighed.
Thwack! Thwack! The sharp sound of four hundred-dollar German steel hitting a heavy cutting board brought Paul’s head out of his data in a hurry. “You must smell blue if you’re doing all that,” he told Michaela.
“Just bring everyone up to speed,” she ordered, thwacking so hard she had bits of celery in her eyebrows.
“The pattern the pattern was wrong, but HOAP.1 was able to find it. HOAP.1 can smell blue now. It couldn’t before. Then I saw the body. So now it can.”
We all stared at him. He looked back, calmly enough. He’d been stared at since birth, I figured … he remembered toilet training. Can you imagine?
He was usually carefully dressed, but he was a mess this morning. His shirt was dirty and both sleeves were unbuttoned. He’d obviously meant to roll them up to his elbows, but either it didn’t take or he got distracted between unbuttoning the cuffs and rolling up the sleeves. So his sleeves were flapping and grimy. His shirt was untucked. His glasses were smeared with what looked like … axle grease? But that was impossible. Where would Paul get axle grease? And why was my mind obsessing over the least important details in this meeting?
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