Thomas rubbed his bloodshot eyes. This was another weird thing that kept happening since last night. He would get distracted by one thing — like the coach just now — and do and say things that he would immediately forget, as if something outside his own brain was in control for those few seconds. What had he told Annie about lunch? This W was insane — different from anything he’d ever tried. He wondered who made it, where he could get more when his bottle ran out, and when. Did he have Nikki’s number?
“I . . .” Thomas stammered, trying to remember.
“I told you,” said Roger. “He’s on something.”
“Back off, Roger!” Thomas snapped. A few kids turned. Roger took a step back. It was really time to go now. “Sorry, Annie,” Thomas blurted out, avoiding her gaze. “I’m busy all day. I don’t know why I said that.” When she didn’t respond, he added, “I’ll give you a ride home in my dad’s car, OK? Just wait in front of the school at three thirty.”
A dark look passed over her face, the kind of accusing look that he had seen only on adults. Belle never looked at him like that. He was always happy around her. Suddenly, Thomas just wanted to get away. He staggered off. He forced his way through the thick crowd of classmates — some of them saying his name or trying to get his attention in other ways — through the double doors, out into the sunshine.
Cornrow wasn’t in his dorm room. Thomas knocked a dozen or so times and then slumped down next to his door. He would rest here for a moment. He remembered coming home from Elixir, seeing his new stepmother entering her old apartment, looking a little ragged. He had no idea why the memory suddenly came back to him, but it made him shiver all over. Then he thought about Nicola’s new son and the missing Faust children. He tried hard to remember that night last year at the Faust home when he went to dinner with Belle. It was a Sunday. What happened to him there? He had flashes of memory that didn’t fit into the picture. At first, after coming home that night, he thought the evening had gone perfectly. Good food. The kind of boring conversation you have with parents. He had liked Nicola then. But lately, images would flash into his head that didn’t fit anything he had previously believed. The memories came out of nowhere, on their own.
Belle and Victoria shouting at each other.
Nicola standing off to the side, with her creepy other son, drinking red wine. Whispering.
People touching him.
Someone dropping a vase.
His head hurting, his body paralyzed.
Scrambling of moments, overlapping seconds, like botched-up film reels.
Stop! Something inside him lurched. He sat up with a start and noticed a patch of moths hovering near the door. He crushed one with his palm, and the others started flying around frantically, as if they knew what was coming. One of them flew right into the front pocket of his jacket, as if it were leading the way to something. Thomas reached in to pull it out. He scooped the contents of his pocket in one swift fistful.
A dead moth. His keys. An old penny. The cold glass jar from last night.
He held it up in front of his face. . . . What a little bottle, he thought, and yet it was quickly becoming his favorite possession. The red pills inside were shiny, like jewels held in sunlight. He wondered if Connor or Cornrow or any of his friends knew about W. How rare a drug was it? Where did Nikki find it? For now, he would keep it his own secret, since he had only this one small bottle of it. And besides, Nikki had said not to share. She must have meant that it was very illegal or expensive or hard to get. For all he knew, it could be the only small bottle of W in the whole city. Weird.
To be fair, it wasn’t so surprising that she had given him such a big gift. Upper East Side girls were always giving him things and pretending it was nothing. It was their way of showing they weren’t interested in his father’s money. Little did they know that the gift givers were the ones he always avoided. Neither Belle nor Annie had ever even thought to give him anything, which made him believe that they weren’t secretly plotting a takeover.
Tired of thinking about Nikki and his stepmother and the other mysteries surrounding last night, he popped off the cork and tossed one of the pills into his mouth. He swallowed hard.
He reached over his head and banged his fist against the dorm-room door again. “Let me in!” he shouted. After about three minutes, a groggy kid with blond cornrows, wearing a Tupac shirt over Brooks Brothers pajama bottoms, opened the door and said, “Dude, someone better be dead or I’m pulling teeth.”
When he saw Thomas slumped by his door, he motioned him in. “You look messed up. You can’t come to school like that, bro.”
Thomas shrugged. He tried to get up, but couldn’t lift himself. He felt half asleep, and the spot next to the door was starting to feel really comfortable. He thought about how different this was from last night’s pill, which was a whole lot nicer. Why were the two different? It was as if the bottle were its own person and each pill was one of its emotions. Last night was excitement. Today was a slumped-by-the-door blues. When he didn’t move, Cornrow reached down and grabbed the crook of his arm. He yanked Thomas’s arm hard, so that he tumbled into the room. Thomas considered telling him about the nightmares, the flashes of memory. Maybe he had a cure for it. But all he managed to get out was something about hiding his bottle. Suddenly, a part of him was very aware of the need to make Cornrow believe that he was OK. At the same time, another part of him was exhausted and slowly falling asleep.
Cornrow said something. Thomas couldn’t tell what.
Now Cornrow was just moving his lips, and Thomas worried that he would see him falling into a trance. He didn’t want to look out of control.
But he didn’t fall. Cornrow laughed as if Thomas had said something funny.
Did I say something funny? Did I say anything at all?
Then he felt himself nodding and heard himself replying to Cornrow. Again he had no idea what he said.
After that, there was just a series of bizarre half moments.
Cornrow laughing again. Pulling out his phone. Texting.
Thomas in the back of his father’s car, vaguely remembering a promise to Annie.
Annie’s number flashing twice across the screen of his phone.
Back in his room. Tossing his school uniform violently out onto the balcony. Hair gel. Cologne. Slipping into his favorite old jeans.
A flutter of red hair, like fire, then blond hair, somewhere in his room. Belle?
Then total blackness.
“Thomas, are you listening to me?”
“Yeah, yeah. Sorry. You were saying it’s all natural . . . the stuff with dad and his new wife. I already know all this.”
“Tell me more about these dreams . . . about the night with your friend Belle.”
“They’re not dreams.”
“What are they, then?”
“I think maybe memories. I keep remembering weird things. Being dragged around. Being hurt. Like someone torturing me.”
“Thomas, you do realize that’s preposterous, don’t you? You must be careful not to let that night become an obsession.”
“I’m not crazy.”
“No one said that you were. You are just missing your friend, I think. Maybe you don’t know how to handle the fact that she is gone, and it doesn’t help that you now share a mother . . . er . . . stepmother. Brings back old memories. But what about this new girl . . . Annie?”
“I don’t want to talk about her.”
“All right, well, you must continue on with your journal. . . . For yourself, of course.”
Nicola Vileroy sat alone in her room. She looked at her face in an ornately designed Victorian vanity mirror that sat atop her bedroom dresser. It used to belong to the first Mrs. Goodman-Brown. Faith, she was called. What a disgusting name. Faith. In what is a person to have faith? God? Family? The only family Nicola had ever had was a ragtag group of Egyptians to whom she was born, so many centuries ago, and her son. Edward Hyde. What a boy he was. When he was born, for an instant N
icola had felt human love. She had pushed it away, thinking that the call of destiny is a nobler feeling — bigger, capable of so much more. But here was Edward, her own flesh. Ah, but what is flesh? She had inhabited many kinds of flesh. And Edward’s, too, would die away. It was better to retain his essence, his soul. And so she did.
He remained with Nicola, and he would always do so — because Nicola had found a way to preserve him. To summon him to her.
“Call me Mom,” she had asked Thomas on so many occasions.
She didn’t care if he complied. He wasn’t her son, after all. Her own son would always come to her. He would always call her his mother. He surpassed all the children she watched, over the many decades, because he was unafraid of his own free will.
She looked at her face in the mirror again. She had surrounded her chair and the entire vanity and dresser with a thin silk mosquito net that was affixed to the ceiling. From outside it, she was only a shadow, and Charles knew not to disturb her inside the gauzy sanctuary. The school nurse was coming back again. She had to build up her strength and never let any of her new friends and family — especially the Darling children and the Lost Boys who had unveiled her — see anything of the missing nurse in the face of the magnificent Nicola Vileroy Goodman-Brown.
Though, she considered, there is something wonderful about a life with two faces. So much to be learned and accomplished when in disguise. Much like a fly on a wall.
She reached into her pocket and took out a jar of red pills. Each of them stamped with a W. Thomas was napping now. She would put it back before he woke up.
“Nice job, Nikki,” she said aloud. Thomas would never have accepted the pills from his stepmother. He didn’t trust her as he should. And he was slow in taking them. She couldn’t leave such an important task in his fickle teenage hands. Her plans, her son, her very life and survival, depended on it.
She took out two of the pills and ground them up into a fine powder, using the sharp back end of an eyebrow pencil. Then she poured the powder into an open sugar packet, replaced the cork on the bottle, and set out, first to replace the bottle in Thomas’s jacket pocket, then to the kitchen.
Thomas woke up later in the day, in his own bed, to the sounds of a Goodman-Brown evening. His father playing some old classic rock music on his office computer, once in a while shouting into a phone at some business partner. Either Nicola or the maid cooking in the kitchen. It must have been the maid, because he hadn’t been awake for a minute before his stepmother entered his room without knocking.
“How was school?” she asked. “Did you have a good day?”
“Did you forget to knock?” he shot back. He looked down at himself. He was wearing jeans, his favorite pair, and his wallet was on the floor beside the bed.
She answered as if she thought it was a real question. “No,” she said, and sat down at his desk. “You’re having trouble sleeping,” she said. This was definitely not a question, so he didn’t bother to answer. He wondered why he was sleeping in his clothes. Had he gone out, or was he on his way out?
“What time is it?” he asked. What day is it?
For a moment she looked sad, as if she were sorry about something or had been disappointed. Was she trying to look more like Belle? To remind him of her existence somewhere in the world? “I’m sorry you don’t like me,” said Nicola. “I’ve tried.”
He didn’t know what to say to that. His stepmother had never before admitted any kind of weakness. “We both know what you said the other night,” he said, forgetting about his clothes or the time. “We both know what happened back at your old apartment last year. I saw you there . . . the other night.”
“I’m sorry if you misunderstood,” said Nicola, with her honey-sweet French accent making every word seem tragic and sincere. “When I said those things, I thought we were just joking around, as they say. I thought we were bonding.”
Thomas sat up in bed. Was she kidding? No, she seemed entirely serious. Had he misheard some of what she’d said, what she’d implied? He had been sort of out of it lately. And it was true that he couldn’t completely sleep.
“Your friend Annie called,” said Nicola, her long fingers straightening out the papers on his desk. He felt uncomfortable having her touch them — his writings, his notes, the pages of his journal. But she seemed unconcerned with their contents and was busying herself with arranging them just right.
“What did she say?” He remembered now that he had forgotten to give Annie a ride home. He had promised. Thomas had been screwing up with Annie for weeks. He didn’t know why he did it. He would be sweet to her, invite her and Roger out, and then suddenly do something mean and careless. Surely she was tired of it. She would never speak to him again.
“She was upset that you broke your . . . um . . . appointment,” said Nicola. “I told her that you were ill and that I had told the driver to bring you home right away.”
Thomas raised an eyebrow. Why would Nicola cover for him with Annie?
“She seemed to believe me,” said Nicola with a conspiratorial smile. “Lucky boy. You get one more chance with the young lady.”
Thomas shrugged. He rolled over on his side and closed his eyes. He could hear Nicola getting up, moving around the room. He felt invaded by her presence here, wished she would just go away. Suddenly, he felt her cold hand on his forehead. His stomach lurched. He felt a shiver run through him and he desperately wanted to pull away, but he didn’t have the strength. She was leaning over him now, whispering. His whole body stiffened and he didn’t dare open his eyes. He imagined what she would look like up close, if he looked up right now and peered into her face. A nightmarish vision of Belle’s face suddenly overtook him. Belle’s face up close, just as he was about to kiss her at the dance, turning into something monstrous and ghoulish. His body shot up, almost on its own, and he hurled Nicola’s arm off him. He sat in bed, panting, his stepmother standing a foot or two away, not shocked or horrified but breaking into a curious smile.
“I’ve left you something on your desk,” she said, “to help you sleep.”
He didn’t respond. He noticed the smoothie, his favorite kind, just like the one he had spilled the last time she had offered it to him.
“I asked the young lady in the kitchen to teach me how you like it,” she said. “I spent a long time getting the fruits just right. And I added some lavender . . . from Provence.” She smiled big, as if she was proud of this accomplishment, and suddenly Thomas felt foolish, paranoid, cruel. At the same time, she was a mystery to him — each time they talked, her behavior was completely different. He thanked her. She swept out of the room. “Good night, dear,” her disembodied voice called from outside his door.
He let a few sleepless minutes pass before he pulled himself out of bed, his body aching, and looked on his desk for the smoothie. He could see chunks of unblended strawberry, exactly the way he liked it, floating all through the glass. Sometimes his new stepmother pulled the most surprising moves. Another person might even say she was cool for a mom type. The school therapist kept saying that he was imagining the random scenes from that night at the Faust home — that it was impossible, flashes of false memory resulting from his trauma over losing Belle, whom she admitted Thomas had genuinely loved. The therapist claimed that there were official records of the Faust children in their new Swiss school and that Nicola Vileroy was not capable of ridiculous things like torture or black magic. She said that Thomas’s dream about Belle’s face melting was a classic one after a breakup. Thomas had to admit that it all sounded ridiculous, even to his own ears.
He told himself to relax.
Then he thought of the W and began to panic. He rushed to his desk and checked his jacket pocket for the bottle. It was still there, cool and reassuring against his palm. He would have to find a good hiding place for it. He breathed out and reached for the glass. He needed nourishment now. He lifted the glass to his lips and gulped down the smoothie like a first drink of water after a marathon.
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br /> “It can’t be true,” said a female voice to his left. Thomas was walking through the halls at Marlowe, his head pounding despite a full night’s sleep, trying to figure out why everyone seemed so frantic. Marlowe’s halls were usually full of gossip and frenzy, but today it seemed somehow magnified. Everywhere he turned, there were whispers, fumes of everyone’s energy filling the air like some noxious gas. He saw Connor in a huddle of jocks, shaking his head and saying, “Why did he go by himself in the first place?”
The jocks were wearing sports jerseys, as they always did on game days. Was today a game day? He waved at Connor, who nodded back.
A group of girls with band instruments gathered around a single iPhone, posting something on Facebook. “I bet it’s just a rumor,” said one of them.
“I saw Thomas jump down his throat the other day,” said another one.
“I saw them take him away myself!” said a shrill-voiced girl with jet-black hair and pins all over her shirt, a goth named Marla. “You calling me a liar?” She was wearing her black street clothes instead of the Marlowe uniform. Casual clothes were allowed only on certain Fridays. . . . Not today.
Thomas squinted at Marla. She seemed energized by this firsthand news she was able to bestow upon her eager friends. He headed toward his locker, groggy eyes fixed toward the end of the hallway so he wouldn’t stumble. This has got to stop, he told himself, though he wasn’t sure what exactly he had done. He had only gone home and slept. He spotted a poster for the lacrosse game. MARLOWE VERSUS BARD TONIGHT! But the game was supposed to be on . . . Friday night. What’s wrong with me? he thought. How many days had passed?
Somebody whispered something about the missing school nurse, about all the strange things that had happened lately.
He spotted Annie standing by herself. “What’s going on?” he asked, and for once she didn’t look him up and down as if he were her patient.
“It’s Roger.” Her voice broke as she said his name. “Everyone’s talking about him, and they didn’t even know he existed before today!”
Another Jekyll, Another Hyde Page 5
