Suddenly, he had the overwhelming desire to take one and return to his dreams.
Madame Vileroy pulled the comforter over Thomas. She said, “There’s a glass of water on the nightstand. You should really take something for that headache.”
As she left, Thomas popped the cap on the bottle and reached for the water. . . .
Thomas was back in the Elixir Club. It had an island theme. Maybe the owner had been to Ibiza recently. Did they go together? Thomas swaggered up to the doorman, a Russian mixed martial artist, gave him a fist pound, slid a hundred-dollar bill in the man’s breast pocket, and said, “Just the tens tonight, Ivan. Nothing but tens. . . . Maybe a nine-point-five if she’s smiling.”
Ivan gave the best nod he could, considering he didn’t have a neck, and said, “Yes, Mr. Brown.”
The name — Mr. Brown — sounded weird to Thomas’s ear. He shrugged and continued toward the bar. A couple of party promoters were greasing up the Wall Street crowd with complimentary bottles of the cheap stuff. A table of post-op heiresses were sipping laxative cocktails and glaring at the Brazilian models on the dance floor with enough envy to crash a Facebook account. The rich cougars were overdressed. The even richer cocaine dealers were underdressed. Some Malaysian kid texting in the corner booth was supposedly the hottest artist in Chelsea.
The headache was long gone. Vileroy and the wedding weren’t even a memory. Thomas approached the glowing red bar and looked at his reflection in the mirror along the back wall. Something was different. He didn’t have a chance to look closer. The cute bartender saw him and dropped a shot in the lap of two dot-com millionaires (who were desperately hitting on her) in the rush to get to Thomas.
“Hey, Tara,” he said. “Do I look different to you?”
Tara was in her twenties, just out of Tisch Theatre, with a starlet’s face and a stuntwoman’s body. The black corsets the club used for uniforms would have been sleazy if there was even the slightest impression that Tara was available. She wasn’t.
“You look tasty,” she said. “Your breath smells a little.”
“Really?” said Thomas, raising an eyebrow. He knew this line already.
“Yeah,” said Tara, leaning over the bar. She grabbed the collar of the Prada suit and kissed him. Her mouth tasted like spearmint. As she pulled away, she said, “I’ll mix your favorite. The good stuff in the back.”
Tara disappeared into a back room. The dot-com guys down the bar stood with mouths hanging open.
Thomas blew out a breath. It was so cold he could see it in the air.
Wait. The last part might have been a chewing gum commercial.
Thomas shook his head. He looked in the mirror again. He did look different. His eyes were darker. They didn’t even look blue anymore. That could have been the club lighting, though. His forehead seemed to extend farther out, over his eyes. His eyebrows were thicker and lower. Thomas shrugged it off. A change didn’t seem like such a bad thing at this point.
The Brazilian models left the dance floor and sashayed up to the bar. The entire club watched, as if it was the Victoria’s Secret runway show. By the time they reached the bar, half a dozen guys were buying them drinks. One of them saw Thomas, and he pretended not to notice as she sidled up next to him. She had on a little black dress, black ballet slippers with ribbon crisscrossing up her calves, and nothing else. No purse. No jewelry. Just perfect skin. As if she had spirited up from the ground, out of nowhere. When she glanced back a second time, Thomas was looking at her. She smiled.
“What’s your name?” said Thomas.
“Carmina.”
“Nice to meet you, Carmina. My name is Edward.”
Thomas woke from the lancing pain in his forehead and bit down on the inside of his cheek. He started to taste blood in his mouth. His tongue felt like beef jerky. His eyes flapped opened. The corneas had a dry film that scraped his eyelids.
The mornings-after just kept getting worse.
The ceiling was different. It had some cursive script painted on it that said To Thine Own Self Be True — this wasn’t his room. The fog of sleep evaporated. Something was weighing him down. He lifted his head until his chin touched his bare chest. It was a girl. All he could see was the top of her head, but she was nestled up next to him. Her arm was draped over his chest. His left arm was under her — and totally numb.
He looked around the room. It was dark. Not just because of the night but because it had been painted dark colors, blacks and purples. On a nearby desk, a tiny white cotton doll, human shaped but completely featureless, glowed from the inside. It looked like a tiny spirit. On its head, which was about the size of an egg, two black dots of different shapes and sizes marked the eyes.
Thomas noticed more dolls around the room. On the footboard of the bed. On the floor by the door.
Blank little spirits with inky eyes.
One of them sat on a bookshelf covered with other knickknacks that Thomas could barely make out. A plaster skull glinted back the dull light in its gemstone eyes. The porcelain scales on the underside of a dragon statuette shimmered like fire in its belly. A geode opened its crystalline maw and devoured the rest of the light. Behind it were other figures, lost in the darkness.
The spirits seemed to pulsate. Were they from a movie he’d seen? Thomas felt panic rising in his chest. The nightmarish room was beginning to close in on him. Vileroy, thought Thomas. She must have brought him here — some kind of evil dungeon. He lifted himself on his right elbow and craned his neck to see the rest of the room.
Then he saw the image on the sidewall. It was a person — a close-up face of a boy with gelled black hair, eyeliner, and purple lipstick. He was looking up at Thomas with a disaffected glare. Above his head was a Gothic-typeface banner:
Wait . . . Maybe he still had W in his system. No, it couldn’t be the W. Everything felt so easy when he took it; he felt relaxed, and charming — every pill a different emotion, like pieces of a person, someone more confident than himself, as if the bottle contained the full range of that one person’s concrete personality. But this was just surreal. The sleeping girl began to stir. Thomas tried to pull his left arm out from under her while she adjusted her position, but it was too numb to move on its own. He had no choice but to wake her. He reached over to the nightstand and turned on the lamp.
The light shone on the girl’s face.
Thomas said, “Aw, crap.”
It was Marla. The resident angry goth girl of the Marlowe School. Thomas yanked the comforter away. She wasn’t naked. Neither was Thomas. Thank Diablo™.
Thomas’s chest was covered in purple lipstick, but his pants were still on. She was in her underwear.
As Marla stirred and shifted, Thomas pulled his arm away and began to rub the blood back into it. He rolled out of the bed to hunt for his shirt.
Marla took a deep breath and said, “It’s not morning yet.”
“Uh, yeah, hi, Marla.”
Thomas just wanted to get his shirt and get out of there. For all he knew, Marla had already texted pictures to half the school. He thought of Annie — the regret was worse than his headache. Why was he always hurting her? Maybe it was true what the therapist said — that he was sabotaging all his relationships since Belle.
Whatever it was, he could analyze it when he got home. For now, he needed the shirt. He lifted a pillow. Under it was his left shoe.
Marla sat up. “You threw the other one by the door,” she said.
“Thanks,” said Thomas. This was deeply uncomfortable. “So, Marla,” said Thomas, “did we . . . ?”
Marla smirked. “Come on, Goody Brown, say it.”
“You know what I mean,” said Thomas.
“No, I don’t.”
“Did we . . . you know?”
“Bump uglies?”
“Yeah.”
“No,” said Marla. “Even smashed out of your mind on W, you kept it PG-13.”
Thomas let out a breath. He walked over to the door and picked up the
other shoe. “That’s good,” he said. “I just don’t want it to be weird between us. We don’t really know each other, and we go to the same school, and, well, I’ve got . . .”
“You’ve got little girlfriend Annie to worry about? Your squeaky reputation?”
Thomas already felt like a grade-A dickhead. Now he was insulting Marla, too.
“Look, I’m really sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry to me, Golden Boy,” sneered Marla. “It was a hard PG-13. You done right by me, as far as I’m concerned.”
Thomas didn’t want to know what she meant by that. He flicked the light switch. Marla’s room looked like a Renaissance festival. His shirt was still nowhere to be found. A thought interrupted Thomas’s search.
“Wait a second,” he said. “How did you know about W?”
Marla rolled her eyes. She leaned over the side of the bed and grabbed the crumpled-up shirt. “I know way more than that,” she said. She threw the shirt at Thomas. “I know little Mister Goodman-Brown took a walk in the woods, found himself itching for a hate crime, and beat Roger into a coma. And I know he’s addicted to a designer drug nobody’s heard of. And I know you giggle when goth girls nibble on your earlobes.”
Thomas didn’t move. Had he told her the night before? When did they meet up? All he could remember was the Brazilian model named Carmina. How much had he forgotten?
“That’s a lie,” stammered Thomas. “I never hit Roger. That was just . . .”
“Sure, whatever,” said Marla. “You don’t need to kiss me good-bye or anything.”
For the first time, Thomas looked Marla in the eyes. Her tough shell wasn’t so convincing as she sat half naked in her bed. Thomas imagined that she must like him — even a little — for this to have happened. And now he was acting like she had Ebola. Thomas turned to leave. “I’m really sorry,” he said over his shoulder.
“I told you not to be sorry. I’m not gonna tell anyone, if that’s what you’re thinking. You don’t have to kiss my ass,” said Marla, but she didn’t sound so tough.
Thomas walked into the hall and snuck out of the Upper East Side apartment. It was only a couple blocks from his house. He crossed the street on a red light — a cab screeched its brakes to avoid hitting him. The cabbie honked his horn. Thomas didn’t notice. Inside his head, he could hear someone else’s voice.
It said, She knows about us, Thomas.
And Thomas found himself actually answering, “Yes, she does, Edward.”
“Thomas? Thomas? Do you hear me? Don’t you dare leave me alone in here, Thomas. You don’t want me to get angry, do you?”
“Go away! I don’t know who you are.”
“Of course you do. I’m you . . . only better.”
“Oh, God, I’m losing it. I’m losing my mind.”
“Stop being dramatic. Everyone talks to his better self at night, when no one is there to hear it. Just listen to me now. I have something cool to show you.”
“No! Go away. I don’t want to see any more of it.”
“Sure you do. Something to be proud of. Let’s look at the pictures again . . . all our best memories. Remember Roger? How he cried? . . .”
“NO!”
“Remember the fourth time we kicked him in the gut? He puked himself.”
“It wasn’t me. It wasn’t me. Oh, God, let me sleep.”
“Sleep’s for wimps. Let’s go out and have some fun.”
“No, please, Edward. Leave me alone. I can’t look at it anymore. I can’t live with this.”
“Don’t worry, you wuss. You won’t remember this when we wake up. You’re not ready for us to be properly introduced. Not just yet.”
Holy crap. Who is Edward? Why do I keep thinking of that name?
Thomas wasn’t typically prone to freak-outs, but this was insanity. He was changing. He knew it. How else do you explain hooking up with the local goth girl without any memory of it whatsoever? How else do you explain what he saw in the mirror at the bar? The name Edward, which he said aloud as he walked home from Marla’s? Nothing made sense.
What he needed was to lose himself in Manhattan — no parents, no teachers, no drivers. He hadn’t done that in months, and today was one of those crisp late-fall Sundays that are warm enough for just a light jacket. He had so much to think about, and he had to admit that this was the first day in a long time that he was sober enough to consider the freakiness of it all. He started near the waterside office buildings and sandwich shops in the Financial District. This was where his father wanted him to end up — crunching numbers and merging companies. But his future career was hardly a worry now that . . . Could he bring himself to think it? His stepmother . . . what was she? What had she done to him last year? And why did her apartment building look like the set from a horror movie? Could she be a witch? Or some other kind of supernatural thing? It was ludicrous. He decided soon after returning from the Faust apartment that he had hallucinated most of it — the dilapidated building, the eerie feeling, the door, the dead bugs, the knock to the head.
Maybe Nicola Vileroy was dabbling in some kind of voodoo or playing manipulative games, but she wasn’t supernatural. She couldn’t be.
He strolled up through Chinatown and Little Italy, stopping only for a chicken dumpling and a cannoli. After an hour of meandering, he found himself in a new cake shop in the East Village that his mom would have liked. He felt too sick for cake. His mind kept drifting back to Marla. She knew about the W. She thought he was the one who had attacked Roger. What if she wanted some kind of revenge for the failed hookup and tried to pin it on him? What if she told the cops? And what if they believed her? The name Edward kept flashing in his mind. He would ask himself questions and then he would answer them, as if he were talking to someone. Was that evidence of psychosis?
He decided to cut a sharp left and head west, all the way to Chelsea Market for a taco at his favorite T-shirt-store-turned-bistro. He ate alone at a table near a pant rack. He didn’t feel weird about it. Thomas ate alone all the time. He wedged some more avocado slices into his taco. Strange. He had never craved avocado before. As he brought the taco to his mouth, he noticed that it seemed much smaller than before. Stingy jerks, he thought, always skimping on portions and raising prices. But wait . . . Was the taco really smaller? He put it down and looked at his hands, moved them up and down across the table, as though measuring the length of it. No, it wasn’t that his food had shrunk. It was that his hands were bigger. Why were his hands swollen? They were a shade pastier, too.
What’s the matter, Thomas?
Shut up! Shut up! It was as if every few seconds, someone else would occupy his brain and then leave again.
Edward. Edward. Who was he? He had heard the name before it started popping up in his head. Did he know someone named Edward from school?
He hopped into a cab after lunch. Midtown was a wasteland — walls of yellow cabs blowing exhaust into hot-dog stands, miles of cell-phone shops and cheap black suits. As the cab sped uptown, he glanced at himself in the dirty window. Was that his face? Had his jaw always been so prominent? His brow so low over his eyes? His fingers trembled as he brought them up to his face, but he didn’t dare touch. He felt stronger now, a surge of bravado and excitement overtaking him as he tried to remember what he took last night. His breath grew quicker and he felt a slow hatred brewing in his chest. He could see himself punching something in the dark. Fists, blood, screaming. Someone begging for his life.
Please, Thomas. Please, stop!
Thomas looked away, suddenly frightened. He was panting hard, so the driver furrowed his brow and stared at him through the rearview mirror. Thomas asked the cabbie to drop him off at Sixtieth and Fifth, so he could walk up through Central Park and then back home. When he reached into his pocket to pay, his hands rolled across the bottle of W. The pills clinked in the jar.
Come to think of it, all of these problems had started when W came into his life. He wished he could find Nikki and ask her a few things. What wa
s W made of? Why did it make him crazy? And why couldn’t he stop taking it? It didn’t shock him that he’d hooked up with Marla and forgotten about it. But was it possible for a drug to cause someone’s hands to grow or their skin to fade?
No, that’s stupid. . . . There’s no such thing as a drug changing a person’s body.
Wait a minute.
Thomas stopped dead. A woman walking behind him ran her baby stroller right into Thomas’s legs. He mumbled an apology but didn’t look at her.
He did know of someone whose face had changed. Belle! His ex-girlfriend had changed her face entirely. He had seen it for himself the night of the spring dance when she turned into a monster before his eyes. His face was changing just as Belle’s had. And who did the two of them have in common? Nicola Vileroy. He had blacked out twice in his life, and both times he could link the event directly to her. Thomas had to know what W was. He clutched the bottle in his hand and started to jog back toward Marlowe. It was Sunday, but he knew one person who would be at school — just the person he needed.
Thomas could hear John Darling banging around in the basement all the way from the main entrance. Ever since the weird insect infestations and unexplainable leaks that had happened at Marlowe in the early fall, the basement had been boarded up. Recently, though, Professor Darling, John’s father, had converted it into a science lab, where his son spent his time doing experiments and Twittering about them on his phone.
Thomas dashed down the steps leading into the basement, but John didn’t notice. He was digging in a huge cardboard box of old test tubes and beakers, cursing as he pulled out the broken ones and tossed them into a pile.
“John!” Thomas called out. “Hey, kid!”
John looked up, his face flushed. When he saw Thomas, he seemed confused at first, then scared, as if he expected that Thomas had come here on a Sunday just to stick his head in a toilet. “You’re not supposed to be here,” he said. “I’ve got a weekend pass and I’ve gotta go home anyway. It’s almost dinner.”
Another Jekyll, Another Hyde Page 8
