by Meg Cabot
The doorbell rang.
“I think that’s our cue,” Steven said.
Mrs. Howard reappeared in the kitchen doorway, holding the same bag I’d seen her leave Dr. Fong’s house with nearly a week earlier.
“I’m assuming,” she said, “I shouldn’t get that.”
“No,” Christopher said. “You should not.”
Nikki leapt to her feet and threw herself at her mother.
“Mom,” she cried. “They’re making us go with them! And leave Brandon behind!”
I looked at Christopher. I knew he hated me now, and everything. And maybe he had reason to.
But he still had to listen to me. Because this was my escape, too.
“We have to take him with us,” I said.
Christopher looked back at me like he’d never seen me before in his life. In fact, it was a lot like those early days back in Mr. Greer’s Public Speaking class, when Christopher hadn’t known it was me, Em, looking out at him behind Nikki Howard’s famous sapphire blue eyes.
“Absolutely not,” he said, emphatically. “That is not part of the plan.”
I walked up to him and stood so that my face was just inches from his.
“We have to change the plan,” I said. “Because if we don’t, the minute the plane lands, we’re going to be surrounded by a bunch of feds. Brandon’s going to call them. I guarantee it.”
“He’s not going to tell anyone,” Christopher said. “He can’t. What’s he going to say? That he kidnapped you, and you escaped?”
“He’ll make something up about all of us,” I said. “He’ll say horrible things about what we did to him, and next thing we know, Steven will be on America’s Most Wanted.”
“I don’t think that show is even on anymore,” Christopher said, looking down at me with his eyebrows furrowed. His lips, I couldn’t help noticing, were very close to mine.
I hated myself for noticing this.
“Oh, that show is still on,” I said. “And you know who’s going to be starring on it soon? You, if you keep on the way you’ve been acting. What did you blow up, anyway, when you were out there ‘distracting Brandon’s security guards’? How do you know none of them got hurt?”
He bristled.
“Because none of them did,” he said. “I was there. It was only a pipe bomb, and I threw it toward the beach, away from everyone.”
“Including the paparazzi?” I demanded. “They’ve been hiding in the dunes.”
“I checked it out beforehand,” Christopher snapped. “No one was there. God, Em, what do you want from me?”
Obviously, I couldn’t tell him what I wanted from him. Because it wouldn’t have been exactly appropriate to say in the mixed company in which we were standing, part of it having to do with his tongue in my mouth.
“I want you to be responsible for your actions,” I said instead. I didn’t know what was wrong with me. Why was I yelling at him when he was only trying to help me, which was quite generous of him, considering the fact that he didn’t even like me anymore? “Not run around acting like your Journeyquest avatar, who by the way always attacked before thinking, too, which is exactly how you always got pwned—”
“You never pwned me,” Christopher snapped. “I pwned you—”
“Um,” Mrs. Howard said. The doorbell rang again. Now someone was pounding on the door, too. “I hate to interrupt. But I really think we ought to be leaving now—
“And I think taking Brandon along with us is probably the wisest course,” Mrs. Howard continued. “Otherwise I think he might do something…impulsive.”
“If you lay one hand on me,” Brandon roared, thrashing on the floor, “I’ll call my lawyers! I’m going to sue all of you! You, too, Lulu! Just because your mother and my mother both once lived in the same ashram, don’t think I won’t do it!”
Lulu looked down at Brandon with narrowed eyes. It was clear he’d made a big mistake bringing up her mother, about whom Lulu’d never been able to speak without emotion.
“He’s coming along,” she said, producing a dish towel from her apron pocket. “Gag him, Steven.”
It only took a few seconds for Steven to thrust the dish towel into Brandon’s wide-open, protesting mouth. The next thing I knew, he and Christopher were half dragging, half shuffling Brandon out the back door and around the side of the house toward a parked minivan. The sound of the waves hitting the beach a few dozen yards away was loud…
…but not as loud as the sound of even more approaching sirens.
The air outside was crisp and smelled of mingled wood smoke and salty ocean spray. Cosabella, excited to be on what she assumed was her morning walk, hurried along in front of me on the path, sniffing everything she came across and doing her business, along with Mrs. Howard’s dogs.
Nikki kept stumbling as she walked in her platform heels and looked back at the house.
“My operation,” she said faintly. “If we leave, I’m not going to get to have my operation.”
“Yeah,” her brother said, in a voice that was as unsympathetic as Lulu’s had been over Justin. “Well, that’s for the best. Mom said it would kill you, remember?”
“But,” Nikki said mournfully, “I just want to be pretty.”
I won’t lie: When I heard that, I stumbled.
I could barely look at her. I just want to be pretty. Oh, my God.
Nikki didn’t stumble again as we all got into the car (well, Brandon had to be scrunched down behind the backseats of the minivan, an indignity he did not seem to enjoy one bit, if the grunting that could be heard from back there was any indication) and started at top speed toward the airport, passing fire engines on our way.
Lulu, who still had on her chef’s hat, waved cheerfully at the handsome firemen, some of whom actually waved back at her, blithely unaware we’d been the ones who’d set the fire they were racing toward.
But Nikki’s face, when I glanced at it, was just about the saddest thing I had ever seen.
I just want to be pretty.
I may not have been a prisoner anymore…
…but Nikki suddenly looked as if she felt she were.
Nine
WE TOLD THE PILOTS AND FLIGHT attendants that the reason Brandon was tied up was because we were taking him to rehab against his will.
They knew enough about Brandon Stark from having read about him in the tabloids— and from even having flown with him once or twice— to believe it. They walked around during the flight shaking their heads to themselves as if thinking, Oh! Those poor, spoiled billionaires’ kids! I’m so glad my own kid doesn’t have any of those kinds of problems.
But that still left the problem of what Brandon was going to do to us when the plane landed.
“Have each and every one of you arrested,” he snarled at us once, when he worked the gag out of his mouth.
Lulu, rolling her eyes, popped the dish towel right back in.
Mrs. Howard thought we should hold a press conference, like the impromptu one I’d held when I’d been trying to find her.
“Nice idea,” Steven said, leaning his elbows on the slick tabletop in front of him. “But what, exactly, are we going to say at this press conference?”
“Well, the truth,” Mrs. Howard said. “That Robert Stark attempted to murder my daughter.”
“And where’s the proof?” Christopher wanted to know.
“You’re looking at her,” Mrs. Howard said, pointing at me.
Christopher had most definitely not been looking at me. He had been studiously looking everywhere but at me. Now that we were broken up— because of my alleged trust issues— he had taken the farthest seat from me on the large plane, at the dining table for six.
Not that I’d cared. Or pretended to, or even noticed. I’d taken a seat in front of the flat-screen TV and started flicking through the DVDs to check if they had anything new I hadn’t seen yet.
“But she’s clearly alive and well,” Steven pointed out, nodding at me. “I think it’s go
ing to be a bit difficult for the average American viewer to understand that Em isn’t Nikki Howard. I think by proof Christopher means something a little more substantive than just Em’s word that she’s not Nikki on the inside. Because she actually is, on the outside.”
“She’s got a scar,” Frida said. “Em could show them her scar from the surgery. Where they did the surgery.”
“I suppose we need more,” Steven said thoughtfully. “We need an actual witness. Maybe someone who was there when they performed the surgeries.”
“Well, you can forget Dr. Fong,” I said, moving back from the front of the cabin. I’d just hung up the jet’s phone.
“They killed him?” Lulu cried in horror.
Steven gave her a wary look. I really couldn’t tell whether he liked her or not. Sometimes I thought he did, and sometimes I wasn’t sure. While I considered her an utter delight, Lulu seemed to scare Nikki’s brother sometimes with her intensity.
I guess I could sort of see why. Since getting back onto the plane, she’d changed from her chef’s uniform into a leopard print bodysuit and a purple tutu and sequined jacket, along with a cherry red beret that sat on her bleached blond pageboy at a rakish angle and brought out the café au lait tone of her skin.
Still, I thought she looked cute.
Steven, on the other hand, seemed to regard her as a sort of species he’d never observed before, in the wild or captivity or anywhere, really.
I suppose there hadn’t been many girls in Gasper like Lulu.
“Uh, no,” I said. “I think he’s on the run, like we are. The operator says his house phone is no longer in service, and when I called the Stark Institute for Neurology and Neurosurgery and asked for him, they said he had given notice.”
From the very back of the plane, I heard a mournful sob. Looking around, I saw that it had come from Nikki, curled up in a seat by a window.
I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. Dr. Fong had been her last hope for getting her old body back.
I just want to be pretty, she’d said, in the most pitiful voice I’d ever heard.
Who didn’t?
Well, okay…I didn’t. Pretty was the last thing I used to care about. Back in the days before that plasma screen had hit me on the head, I never used to make any effort whatsoever to look good.
That’s why Frida had never wanted to be seen with me. I’d just throw on whatever of my clothes was lying closest on the floor. A haircut was whatever was cheapest at Supercuts. Makeup was…nothing. I guess maybe I’d tried once or twice to make an effort, but only halfheartedly, and it had always ended in disaster. It was, like, I’d just decided, Well, I can’t look like Nikki Howard, so I guess I’ll just give up completely.
Which could be partly why the guy I’d liked had never noticed I was actually female….
The trouble was, from what I now had been in a pretty decent position to observe, Nikki Howard herself had never been too pretty, either…on the inside, anyway. Maybe if she could just work on being that now, it might start showing on the outside, too….
On the other hand…if I had to look at somebody else walking around in my body, I guess I wouldn’t be feeling too pretty on the inside, either.
“What about the thing with the computers,” Frida asked. She held up her Stark Quark, which she’d received as a gift from Robert Stark. “Can’t we tell the press or the police about that? The thing Nikki overheard?”
“But we don’t have any proof regarding that, either,” Steven said, reaching for the laptop. “At least, not yet.” He looked questioningly over at Christopher.
But all Christopher did was hold up both hands, still in their fingerless gloves, in a helpless gesture.
“Don’t look at me,” he said. “I’m out.”
I narrowed my eyes at him.
“What do you mean,” I asked, “you’re out?”
Lulu looked at me and, pressing her cherry red lips together— she was using a pretty heavy hand with the gloss these days, due, I knew, to a certain someone whose initials were S.H.— said, “Christopher said he’d come with us to help get you away from Brandon, because he felt that was the right thing to do and he owed you that much. But after that he didn’t want anything more to do with any of this.”
“So,” I said, still regarding him through narrowed eyes. I couldn’t believe he was serious. “We’re just supposed to figure out this whole thing with the Stark Quarks on our own?”
“Hey,” he said. “You’re the one who’s so concerned about putting the rest of us in danger. It’s probably for the best, then, that I just walk away. For my own safety. Right?”
I glared at him. “Whatever happened to Take it down?” I asked. “Wasn’t that your plan? To take Stark down? You’re just going to forget about all that?”
“Em Watts isn’t dead anymore,” Christopher said, giving me a brittle smile. “Is she?”
“So it’s all good?” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “What about that speech you gave in class? The three hundred billion dollars in profit Stark made last year that just went to line Robert Stark’s pocket. The cheap, Chinese-made knockoffs they sell that our American-made products can’t compete with. The locally owned businesses the Stark Megastores drive out of town. How, if we’re going to keep from going the way of ancient Rome, with a collapsing economy and a society dependent on imported goods, we have to become producers again and stop consuming so much….”
Christopher shrugged.
“Not my problem,” he said. “You don’t need my help. You don’t even trust me enough to ask for my help. Remember?”
I looked at him, not sure if he really meant it or not. A part of me was pretty sure he did. His gaze on mine was steady and unblinking, and there was an upward curl at the corners of his mouth…he was smiling like he was actually enjoying this.
But I couldn’t help feeling as if, behind those blue eyes, there was a different Christopher— the old Christopher— begging me to call him on his asinine behavior. To say, I’m asking for your help now. Will you help us? Will you help me?
Only I didn’t.
Because I was too angry with him. Why was he acting like such a four-year-old? I’d already explained to him why I’d made the decisions I had. They’d been perfectly decent, rational decisions.
So why was he acting this way?
“We don’t even know that they’re necessarily doing anything wrong with the information, other than storing it,” Steven said hesitantly. “Do we? If we just knew what they were collecting it for…”
I watched as Christopher turned his head to look stubbornly out one of the jet’s many windows.
“I don’t care anymore,” he said to the window.
But I knew he wasn’t saying it to the window.
He was saying it to me.
And it wouldn’t be exaggerating to say it was like he had thrust his hand past my ribs, ripped my heart from the walls of my chest, pulled it out, and tossed it thirty thousand feet to the ground (I think we were somewhere over Pennsylvania at the time), just like I had that morning outside Dr. Fong’s.
Really? All this because I hadn’t wanted to leave without Nikki last night, and he’d had to switch to plan B, calling in Lulu and Frida for support?
Or was it really because of my issues?
Well, if you asked me, Christopher was the one with issues.
I glanced at Lulu to see what she was making of all this and wasn’t too surprised to see her roll her eyes. Boys, she mouthed. Then she made a gesture like I should go over and sit down next to him.
I’m sorry, but had Lulu been nipping at the emergency oxygen? Because no, this was not going to happen.
Instead, I turned my attention back to the conversation at the table, ignoring Christopher, who was ignoring everyone else…
…even though I’d known what was coming. I’d known it before it had even come out of Frida’s mouth.
“Maybe,” she’d said, “maybe if Christopher doesn’t want
to help, his cousin could figure it out.”
Of course. Christopher’s computer genius cousin, Felix, who was already under house arrest for having bilked a televangelist out of tens of thousands of dollars by programming a local pay phone to autodial his show’s 1-800 number several hundred thousand times in a row (who knew the owners of 1-800 numbers actually had to pay every time you called them?).
Why not drag Felix into all this, even though he was Frida’s age? Felix had nothing more to lose, after all.
“No,” Christopher said, turning his head back to face us, sharply. I knew he’d been paying attention. “If I’m out, he’s out, too.”
I couldn’t help wondering how Felix was going to feel about this decision. Felix seemed like the kind of kid who, once involved in a project, wasn’t going to let go of it quite that easily.
And Felix had already found a way into Stark’s computer mainframe because of me.
I couldn’t even deal with Christopher anymore. Instead, I decided just to ignore him. There were too many more important things to think about.
One of them was Brandon, and how we were going to get him to leave us alone. I decided I’d handle this one.
I sat down across from him in one of the Gulfstream’s soft, cream-colored leather seats.
“Brandon,” I said, leaning forward to lay a hand on one of his…which were getting a little puffy from having been tied up for so long. “If your dad’s company goes down, there’s going to be a great big opening for a new CEO. It would be a shame if you couldn’t step into his shoes because you’d been arrested, too, for all the stuff you did to me. You know, like blackmailing me and threatening me and taking me across state lines against my will even though I’m a minor, and all. That’s going to look really bad on Fox News. I mean, I don’t want to press charges against you for doing all that stuff. Because the way I see it, you’re still a Stark, which isn’t exactly a good thing… but at least you don’t seem to be into killing people. But I totally will go to the feds about you if you mess with my friends after we all get back to New York.”
