by Schow, Ryan
“Don’t do this!” I warn her. I raise the tazer; she keeps coming. Her rage seems to stabilize her, and her impossibly large eyes narrow as she picks up speed.
“Dammit Arabelle, don’t do this!”
When she’s mere feet away, I shoot her square in the chest. The voltage hits her with force. She reacts the way you’d expect someone to react when they’re struck by lightning. She crashes to the floor like a toppled plank, her face hitting the tile with a sickening thud. I crank the juice, loosen my trigger finger after a long burst, pop the dart pack and go for my handheld tazer. The fallen man in a lab coat is trying to get to his feet.
“Nein,” he says, his German accent impossibly thick.
I torch the son of a bitch even though his deep-set eyes are woozy looking and wounded. Even though he’s holding his hand up for mercy. For what he did to me, for his viciousness, his unrelenting assault, he deserves nothing less.
Time to go, I’m thinking. Like right freaking now.
In the lab, the clone’s canister is fully drained of the pink goop. I swing the glass chamber to its horizontal position, then find a lab coat and dress the red headed clone’s naked body. She isn’t moving.
Son of a bitch!
I smack her face lightly, urge her to wake up. No response. I strike her cheek this time with force and still nothing. Is it sad that I’m thinking, when she wakes up I don’t want her vomiting pink fluid all over my car?
Time to change plans. I wheel over a gurney, my mind churning out what could be called plan C, or plan D, or whatever.
Working the clone’s body onto the gurney is practically impossible, but somehow I manage. I roll her out of the lab, gently but quickly scooting both Arabelle and the downed man in the lab coat aside to make way. That’s when her body starts convulsing.
Oh, no.
I turn her on her side and out comes the pink goop. Over and over again, she vomits, her eyes wide, her body wracked with seizure-like effects. Then it stops. Looking at her, she’s not even awake.
WTF?
With no time to spare, I wheel her outside on the street. Pedestrians are staring at me, but that’s probably because the clone’s lab coat isn’t secured and half her breast is exposed. Or maybe it’s all the blood on me and her looking dead. Jesus H. motherfreaking Christ, what a disaster!
After a short, exhausting push uphill to my car, I wrestle the door open all the while ignoring the growing sounds of people talking about me. Talking to me. The clone’s eyes flicker open, but she shuts them and her hand sort of spasms. Some hippie kid says, “Whoa, I thought she was dead.”
“Clearly she’s not,” I frantically spit out. “But if she doesn’t get to a hospital, she will be.”
Someone steps forward to help. A boy with a patchy beard and eyes that won’t stop seeing the clone’s small pink nipple. At this point I don’t care. And the clone? She probably doesn’t care either. What is modesty when you’ve spent your entire life naked, floating in a glass canister in a lab?
“Thanks,” I say.
“Is she going to be alright?” he asks.
“Her and her nipple will probably be fine, thanks to you.”
He scoffs out loud, but in seeing me leaving so quickly, he says, “What about you?” Strangely enough, I actually feel fine. I tell him just that, then slide behind the wheel of the S5, fire it up and tear the hell out of there as fast as possible.
Marquee
1
Vegas at night, according to Brayden’s new friends, was a players’ utopia. Forget gambling. They told him to think of Vegas as the ultimate sexual playground. Think bright lights and inebriated party girls. Think eager and corruptible. Think sexy as hell. That’s what Brayden’s friends and mentors from last Christmas break told him when he migrated to the Nevada desert for the summer.
His wingmen, Titan and Romeo—both older than Brayden by at least four years—said he would get laid every single night. They said with the right ID and a skillset in the art of seduction, he’d have so much sex that by the time school started he wouldn’t even want to think about girls for months. Titan told Brayden this was how he would get good grades. How he’d really focus on his studies for a change.
They told him similar things when he originally went to their seminar over Christmas break. It was a hands-on, in the field workshop he attended with several other guys as dorky as him. Apparently all those guys were getting laid now.
The truth Brayden didn’t tell Romeo and Titan was that he just wanted to be good at talking and interacting with women. That he wasn’t necessarily on a pilgrimage to lose his virginity. The kind of girls those two pulled, though, they weren’t the type of girls who would do the dirty in-and-out with a guy like Brayden anyway. His friends didn’t know about him, about his scarred torso, and he couldn’t stop thinking about it. For Christ’s sake he was road-mapped with the abuse that had since defined him. No girl would ever think of him as dreamy or seductive, and they most certainly wouldn’t tear off their panties and throw away their inhibitions for a damaged kid like him.
The way he thought of himself when he was with his friends was the way you’d think of a beat to crap Camaro in a parking lot full of Ferrari’s, Bentley’s and Rolls Royce’s.
Titan looked like a male model, the kind of guy you would see on those giant posters all around Abercrombie & Fitch. The very same posters that once made all the girls in the mall say A&F was the best store ever. Titan was six foot one, with a solid build, black hair and the darkest blue eyes you’ve ever seen. His mother was Spanish and his father was an A-list actor, so yeah, the cards were stacked in his favor. Last winter, when Brayden first met Titan, they were at a club and some girl who—on a scale of one to ten was a high twelve—asked Titan if his mother blew the gods to get such a sumptuous child, and he was like, “You know, that’s what I heard.” He just said it straight faced, like girls said that kind of thing to him all the time. Not to belabor the point, but Titan was so good looking you could hear girls aching to have his child just by staring at him. Just by dreaming of him. Just by lusting after him.
And Romeo? He was five nine with blonde hair and brown eyes, and his rail thin body somehow intrigued the ladies. Romeo exuded an air of recklessness, or perhaps indulgence, like he wasn’t afraid to stay up all night laughing and drinking and doing coke and having sex with four girls at a time. Girls were always saying he smelled good, that he was hilarious. The life of the party. Titan was the obvious catch, but Romeo, he kind of snuck up on girls in such a way that made them powerless. And when he really wanted to wreck a broad, he’d lay down his lines in his most practiced English accent. Some girl said he was Emo-Metal, and he thanked her, telling her it was the sexiest compliment ever. Even though it wasn’t. To this day, Brayden still had no idea what Emo-Metal was. Neither did Romeo.
When Brayden first arrived for the summer, Romeo picked him up at the airport, then he picked up two more girls not twenty minutes later. Both girls told Romeo they just dropped their boyfriends off, that they were being deployed to Afghanistan, and then they said they totally wanted to party that night. When Brayden told him he was amazing, Romeo was like, “One day you’ll be like me. Better probably.”
Brayden couldn’t imagine that.
On the way to the summer house, Titan said, “Are you ready to move to the master level?” and Brayden was like, “I’m not here for the weather if that’s what you mean.” Master level meant sex every night to pick-up artists like Titan and Romeo. Of course, Brayden was still a virgin, partly because of his looks, but mostly because he was terrified of how women would respond to his scarred body. Still, at the thought of losing his virginity, he was thrilled and terrified. Either way, virgin or not, by the end of summer he was going to be a different person. That was his promise to himself.
“First off,” Romeo said in his brilliant English accent, “we need to get you your own style.”
“And second,” Titan added, “you need a wingman with tits
.”
To Brayden, Romeo said, “Here it is my man, follow this closely. The thing about guys like you is you need DHV’s. Demonstrations of Higher Value. If we send you into the clubs as a solo act, or if we try to be your wingmen at this point, you’ll go home every night alone. But if we send you clubbing with the kind of girl most girls hate because she’s that hot, chicks will stare at you, their minds boggling with the idea that something makes you special. They won’t know what it is. They’ll be thinking about it for hours.”
Titan said, “Yeah, man. It’ll kill them not to know.” Brayden couldn’t stop the smile spreading across his face. “The girl we’ve got in mind for you, she’s going to turn you into a fucking rock star.”
“When do I meet her?” Brayden asked.
“Ten minutes.”
Ten minutes later Brayden met Aniela. The minute he saw her, he got very, very nervous. Maybe it was love at first sight. Maybe it was lust amplified. Either way, he damn near passed out when he first saw her.
Some of Brayden’s friends from grade school used to make jokes about the Polish, about how dumb they were, but Aniela was full blown Polish and she was not only witty and smart as hell, she was an absolute angel to look at. We’re talking blonde hair shoulder length, d-cup breasts that weren’t obscene, itty-bitty waist and a perfectly rounded butt that looked more at home on a Brazilian yoga instructor than a pale-skinned Pollock. How he was even standing in the same room as her made no sense at all.
Immediately he stuck out his hand and said, “I’m Brayden, pleased to meet you,” but she looked at his hand like it was offensive and said, “What kind of cock-suckery is this?”
He dropped his hand, unsurprised by the rejection (uh, duh, anyone could’ve seen that coming). That’s when she stepped forward, planted a soft kiss on his mouth and said, “When I’m done with you, you’re going to make the Marlboro man look like a gigantic pussy. Lesson number one, when you meet a girl who’s way hotter than you, never act so eager to know her. Just give a ‘what’s up’ nod, as if she doesn’t really matter all that much. Trust me, that shit works.”
Titan and Romeo both laughed, but in a good way, then Titan said, “How many times have I told you to stop using your real name?”
Brayden was like, good freaking God, did that just happen? She hadn’t rejected him; she merely rejected his greeting.
“You want me to use that name? Even with her?” Brayden asked Titan, nodding at Aniela. Last semester, his friend Cicely Wright, a.k.a. Victoria Galloway, said, “What is it about gorgeous women that makes boys turn stupid?” In that moment he knew the answer.
The non-triplets were more beautiful than Aniela, but there was a rawness, a realness to Aniela the non-triplets could never match. There was something firm and certain about her, a confidence that came from cultivating the kind of sex appeal no straight man could ignore.
“Use the name,” Aniela said, “even with me. Especially with me.”
“Enigma,” Brayden finally said. “That’s my avatar.”
“Enigma,” she said, her smile so seductive it nearly hobbled his knees. “I like that sooo much better.”
Brayden was scared to say the wrong thing, nervous to the point of perspiring. His bowels felt loose and unpredictable; he wanted to go to his bedroom, but he also wanted to know what she looked like naked. For the love of God, he was thirteen years old all over again!
Romeo just stood there looking at him, grinning.
“Holy shit,” Romeo said, “I think he’s in love.” This snapped Brayden out of it. But before he could say anything to save himself from further humiliation, Titan leaned in and kissed her on the cheek and said, “I’m in love, too. Every time I see her.”
Aniela smiled, then turned into Titan’s face and said, “Where are we going first, lover?”
One word fell from Titan’s sculpted mouth, and only later would Brayden realize this one word represented everything sexy and hip and perfect about Vegas.
That one word was Marquee.
2
Dusk fell hard and fast on the desert landscape, and the Vegas strip lit the night so bright the glow could be seen not only from their second floor window, but from space. Aniela had long ago plopped down on the long, art deco styled couch. She was practically bored. Romeo yelled upstairs telling Brayden and Titan to hurry up, that it was time to go.
Upstairs, Brayden stood rooted in front of the vanity mirror trying but failing to figure out how to look good with such a weak chin and an ugly nose.
Inside, his insecurities raged.
Titan finished his hair, hit it with the Big & Sexy ultra hold hairspray, then looked at Brayden and said, “Dudes with big noses get laid, too, you know. It’s all about your personality, your lines and how interesting and funny and at ease you are around gorgeous women. Guys with game, their looks almost never matter. Serious. If you think I’m full of crap, go talk to Neil Strauss.”
Brayden fought not to get discouraged. It felt like a losing fight.
“Here,” Titan said. He turned Brayden around, then penciled a thicker line of guyliner on his lower eyelid and said, “Now chicks will look more at your eyes and less at your nose. You just had to go darker is all.”
Aniela appeared in the doorway looking like sexual candy and said, “What the hell already?”
“It’s his nose,” Titan said. “I’m pushing it into the background.”
Aniela walked over to Brayden, grabbed his baby-maker and held on. Leaning in dangerously close, in a sultry, spearmint-flavored voice, she said, “Girls like guys with big noses because usually their dicks are big, too.”
She practically whispered this into his ear.
She turned into Brayden’s face a gave him a knowing smile and a wink, then let go of his junk and nonchalantly said, “Let’s roll bitches.”
The four of them piled into Aniela’s pearl white Maserati Quattroporte and headed for the Cosmopolitan Hotel where Marquee was located. Instead of waiting with hundreds of people trying to get into the club on the ground floor, they found the third floor entrance where Titan knew the doorman. He was an old roommate, and a friend, and he let them in ahead of everyone else.
“That’s the first DHV, Enigma,” Titan said loudly so as to be heard over the noise in the club. “When you skip the line, when the doorman shows you that kind of splendid nepotism, it means you’re someone more important than everyone else. Make sure the people standing in line see your face. Trust me, you’ll be remembered.”
3
Marquee was Vegas’s sexiest, most popular club, which meant it was not only packed night after night, but it was for ages 21 and over. Brayden’s fake ID was flawless. It cost him pretty penny and was, of course, as illegal as any fake ID should be. If you want to hit the town with masters of seduction, you sometimes do things that might later land you in jail. Ask anyone though, it’s totally worth the risk.
Inside the club, it was another world entirely. The heart pounding throb and rhythm of music mixed with the white noise of people talking, laughing and flirting, mixed with the airy scents of body heat and perfume, proved to be a dizzying combination. He felt primed with anticipation. Drunk with excitement and fear. These girls, they were nothing like the ones he knew at Astor Academy. These weren’t girls. No, the girls at Marquee, they were one hundred percent real women.
Their clothes were too tight, their blouses way too low, their dresses so short you saw flashes of underwear when they walked, when they sat, when they giggled in groups. If a girl had piercings on her nipples, you knew it without even looking too hard. And dudes, even the dudes wore their clothes way too tight. One guy, he was wearing leather pants so snug, everyone in the club—whether they wanted to or not—knew he was circumcised. The guys, they didn’t want to acknowledge this, but for a minute it was all everyone talked about. Then it was this girl with no panties and too short a skirt, then two girls making out in front of everyone, then the music, the dancing and the drinks.
“Is this heaven?” he leaned over and asked Titan. All his friend could do was smile.
Before long, they were settled in with a four-set of girls with this one girl who said she just loved Aniela’s breasts. Aniela curled up beside Brayden, snaked her hands around him and said, “So does he, don’t you Enigma?”
“I do,” Brayden replied, smooth, casually. “I really, really do.”
“You can touch them if you want,” Aniela said to the girl, and she did, and that’s how the night began.
It was perfect.
After awhile, Brayden ran out of interesting things to say so he just sort of sat there smiling, wondering where he fit into this kind of scene. If he would ever be like Romeo or Titan. Just when he was starting to feel like a wallflower unbecoming of this lifestyle, one of the girls started talking to him again. He thought she reminded him of Abby and he missed her. Suddenly he didn’t want to be at the club, or with Titan and Romeo. Or even with Aniela. What he wanted most, and the admission almost surprised him, was to see Abby again.
It surprised him how much he missed her.
4
To his minor disappointment and his huge relief, Brayden did not get laid that night. He did however, get two phone numbers from two semi-hot girls Titan said he could have had if he wanted. Looking at Titan, Romeo and Aniela, the truth was, deep down he didn’t think he deserved to be laid. Not looking the way he did. Not with his multitude of imperfections. He hauled himself out of bed the next morning and went for a run because he felt emotionally constipated. Mentally vexed.
The cool desert air drifted lazily across him, like silk draping over his body, and though it was refreshing, after the first mile, his lungs began to seize. He hated running. He hated not being able to breathe. He hated being around so many beautiful people because it only made him feel worse about himself.
