by Molly Joseph
“How do you feel?” he asked. “Are you awake enough to talk?”
She wanted to stay awake so he wouldn’t leave her, but her eyes started to drift closed.
“Lola.” His voice pried them open again. “Try to stay awake until the nurse gets here.”
She didn’t remember anything after that. She woke to muted sunlight and a woman taking her blood pressure. She looked around the room and saw Ransom in a chair by the window. His eyes were closed. He was asleep.
“What time is it?” she asked the nurse in a hushed voice.
“Time for you to sit up and eat something,” she replied in a heavily accented whisper. “It’s four o’clock in the afternoon.”
The nurse seemed pleased with the blood pressure numbers and undid the Velcro cuff with a rrrip. The noise woke Ransom and he sat up, his shoulders taut. His intense gaze fixed immediately on her.
She stared back at him, and darker memories assailed her. The worry in his voice, the humid night air, his harsh breaths against her ear.
“You’re awake,” he said, as the nurse bustled out.
She didn’t reply. There were words she knew she should say, but she couldn’t get them out. I’m sorry. Thank you. Are you pissed at me? Will they fire you for this?
Why are you still wearing a tie?
When she didn’t speak, he stood and walked to the side of her bed. She saw a lot of emotions in his face. Reproach, frustration, relief. He sat on the edge of the thin hospital mattress, nudging the IV tubing out of his way. She felt crowded and a little scared as he peered down at her.
“You look better,” he said.
“I feel awful.”
“You deserve to feel awful.” A muscle ticked in his sculptured jaw, just visible through a few days’ worth of stubble.
“Where’s Greg?” she asked.
“Gone. Fired. There’s a new guy named Don. As far as I can tell, he’s a raging prick.”
She digested this news. “I’m getting everyone fired, aren’t I?”
“Almost everyone.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “The tour guys flew out here, and so did my boss. I wasn’t fired, but they weren’t happy. There was a long, uncomfortable discussion about what happens next, about how to keep this from happening again. Your overdose and hospitalization is all over the news, although some people are being kind and calling it an episode of ‘exhaustion.’”
“I feel exhausted.”
“I do, too.” He brought his hands to his face and rubbed his forehead with unnerving ferocity. “Listen, kid. This can’t happen again, because next time it might not be a hospital. It might be a coroner, and I’m being paid to keep you alive.”
“Will they take that money back if I die?”
“This isn’t funny. Look at me.”
She did, even though she felt ashamed and sick and frightened. His voice was low, vibrating with an iron warning.
“No more drugs,” he said. “Swear to me. You don’t take a single fucking Advil without notifying me first.”
“I won’t. I don’t want to.” That was the honest truth. She’d thought taking ecstasy was a harmless habit, a way to let off steam and have fun. She didn’t think that anymore.
“Promise me.” His dark brown eyes hardened to fearsome black. “A promise is your fucking word, for what it’s worth.”
“I promise.”
He stood from the bed and walked to the window, then turned to look at her with his hands jammed in his pockets. “The thing is, I don’t believe you. I don’t trust you. I was starting to trust you, but now…”
Lola closed her eyes. She wanted to scream at him to stop staring with that disappointed, accusing gaze, but she felt too weak to scream.
God, she felt so weak.
“I don’t care if you trust me,” she said. “None of it matters anyway.” Tears squeezed from under her eyelids. Her face felt out of control, like her emotions. She opened her eyes and then covered them again. “Stop staring at me. Please.”
She didn’t know if she was crying because she was such a mess, or because he knew she was a mess. It was getting too hard to maintain the party girl persona everyone cheered for, the Lady Paradise character that wasn’t really her. She missed being Lola Mae and getting hugs from her father. She missed her laid-back circle of friends in Memphis. That was a whole other world, a whole other life that she’d lost.
She blinked, peeking out from between her fingers. He was still watching her with a concerned frown. The more she tried to stifle her sobs, the more gasps and sniffles escaped.
“What can I do?” he asked. “Tell me how to help you.”
“You can’t help me. Just go away.”
Instead of going away, he came closer. He placed a big, strong hand over her hand, over the taped IV tubing. It felt gentle and comforting, but it was his hand, and she was confused how she felt about him. Part of her hated him. Part of her wanted to curl up in his arms until this emotional maelstrom calmed.
But he was her bodyguard, not her boyfriend. She couldn’t have boyfriends anymore, because she traveled too much and worked too much, and partied for the sake of partying, and slept with too many guys. She stared at his fingers and felt miserable and needy and stupid.
“My job is to help you,” he said, and then repeated, “What can I do?”
“There’s nothing you can do. I chose this life. I chose this tour.”
“Do you want to quit?”
Yes, sometimes she wanted to quit, but that was spoiled and weak. She turned her face into the covers. “I can’t.”
“You’d lose a lot of money, but you could quit if you wanted to, if the pressure’s too much. We could call the producers today.”
She peered out at him through a haze of tears. He was serious. He would help her quit if she wanted it. She’d seen enough of his fucking face to understand that his expressions never lied. Did she want to quit the tour?
No, not really.
She just wanted to get better at living this life.
“I don’t want to quit. I just don’t know…how to handle it.” Her words whispered out between sobs. “I want all of…this…but sometimes I think…I can’t…handle it.”
“That’s common. That’s normal, Lola.”
Something in his steady tone calmed her down, at least enough to listen to his words.
“Fame’s an adjustment for anyone,” he went on, “and you’re so young. But if you don’t figure out how to handle it, you’ll be dead by twenty-five, and no one wants that.” He paused until she met his gaze. “I can help you learn to handle it, if you’ll let me. We can work together. That’s what I’m here to do. That’s my job.”
His hand still rested over hers. That’s my job. He wasn’t her boyfriend, as much as she wanted to curl up in his arms. He was her bodyguard. She hadn’t really admitted until now that he was mainly guarding her from her own immature lack of control. She was drawn to his strength and sincerity, while he saw her as a total fuck up. Ugh.
She pulled her hand from beneath his, feeling the sickly twinge of the IV in her vein. “I need help,” she admitted. “But I don’t know if you can help me. I’m pretty fucked up.”
“I’ll try.” He touched her cheek, a soft, fleeting touch. “We’ll work on life strategies and coping skills. You’ll figure things out.”
His kindness filled her with self-loathing. Confusion. Shame. It was so difficult to admit she needed help. Rather than taunt her for her weakness, he was offering his strength, even after she’d almost gotten him fired. He wasn’t an asshole at all. He was a good guy, a hero.
If she wasn’t careful, she’d fall in love with him. She buried her head in her hands.
“You okay?”
She nodded so he wouldn’t touch her face again in that tender way, or come any closer. “I’ll be okay. When’s the next show?”
“Five days away. Saturday, in France, if you’re well enough to perform.”
“Paris?”
“Lyon.”
She massaged her temples. “Do you think I’ll be able to do it?”
“I think you’ll bounce back stronger than ever, if you stop medicating yourself and get your shit in order. I don’t think you want to live like this.”
Her eyes leaked a few residual tears. “I don’t. But I think I perform better when I’m…medicating.”
“You only think you perform better. The pills make you think you’re doing better sets, but you were sober in Hamburg and you were amazing. You don’t need the drugs.”
“Yeah, but…” She bit her lip.
“But what?”
“If I don’t use drugs, then maybe I won’t be…” She blinked her eyes against a new flood. Damn.
“You won’t be what?” he asked.
“You know. Fun enough. Crazy enough. People expect this person…”
“What person? They expect you.”
“No, they expect Lady Paradise!” She said it too loud, with too much freaked out anger. Where was the nurse? Why was she stuck here with him, melting down, tethered by machines and IVs? “You don’t understand how hard it is to be this famous, exciting person all the time.”
“Don’t be, then.” He sighed, brushing away her tears. “Rest sometimes. Be human. You’re an amazing human, believe me.” He wiped away more tears, then pushed her bangs back from her eyes. “I keep meaning to ask…are you naturally pink? Or do you dye this?”
A choked laugh escaped her. It kind of hurt her chest. “It’s not natural,” she admitted. “I’m a blonde.”
He gave her a look that pretty much substituted for a blonde joke. He wasn’t an asshole, but he wasn’t always nice either. “I like your pink hair,” he said. “And I’m looking forward to more sober performances. I think they’re better. I think you’re more real when you’re not wacked out on chemicals. What do you think?”
“Maybe.” That was all she was going to give him for now. Maybe she mixed better when she was sober. It was hard to know. “The Lyon festival’s not that big,” she said. “There’s a bigger one the week after, outside Paris.”
“I know. You have a few days to get up to speed.”
A few days? She was scared. She didn’t know when she’d become such a coward. She thought maybe it was the first time she’d taken the drugs Marty offered her. It’ll make things easier, he’d said. So not true.
The nurse returned with a tray of food that looked surprisingly appetizing. “I ordered one for you, too,” she said to Ransom, “even though you aren’t a patient here. You will be,” she scolded in a thicker accent, “if you do not get some rest.”
The woman looked between the two of them. Lola wondered if she knew their story, that she was a performer, and that this was her bodyguard, who was sometimes a jerk but also sometimes a rock for her to cling to. Maybe he could help her. He was pretty damn strong.
Ransom thanked the nurse as another woman entered with a tray. Both of them stared at him far longer than necessary before filing out. Lola thought she heard them giggling in the hall.
She couldn’t blame them. Ransom was hot, which was fucking hard to live with since she wasn’t getting any sex. She tried not to dwell on that as she took inventory of her tray. Chicken, gravy, roll, some kind of white substance that might be mashed potatoes or cauliflower. Apple slices and a pink soufflé thing for dessert. I like your pink hair. That meant a lot, coming from a guy so straitlaced he hardly ever took off his tie.
He sat back in the chair where he’d slept, and balanced his tray on his lap while she ate in her hospital bed. She wondered how much they were paying him to work with her. This was combat duty for sure, sleeping in a chair in a hospital room, and eating bland hospital food.
“I don’t want to be in any more hospitals,” she said.
He looked up at her, mid-bite. She could tell by the way he ate that he’d been really hungry, but he hadn’t left her to go get some food. He’d stayed with her instead so she wouldn’t wake up alone. He was her bodyguard, her protector. Maybe, a little bit, her friend. Crap, she was dissolving in tears again.
“It’s okay.” His firm, steady voice really made things seem okay. “No more hospitals. We’ll figure things out.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Lightning
Ransom opened the ecstasy test kit and lined up the reagent bottles beside the white ceramic plate he’d borrowed from the hotel kitchen. They were lingering in Lyon, taking a couple days off before Paris. Lola was mostly better, but her brush with death still haunted him. He had nightmares about running with her to the medical tent, and woke in a cold sweat, gasping for breath.
They’d spent the last week or so getting her stronger, taking walks, eating healthier, getting more sleep. She was mostly cooperative. Her overdose had gone a long way to scaring her straight. But you never knew when someone might relapse, especially if they were stressed. Lola butted heads with the new manager daily. Belligerent, pushy Don was the opposite of laid-back Greg, and Ransom suspected MadDance had hired the prickly manager to put the screws to Lola.
Ransom tried to stay out of their spats, but it fell to him to calm her down afterward—and she couldn’t always be calmed. If she decided to buy drugs again in some rebellious fit, he wanted her to know how to test them for adulterants. He opened the ecstasy kit’s chemical indicator chart, a meticulously laid out rainbow of danger and death.
Lola glanced at the ladder of colored rectangles and crossed her eyes. He ignored that vote of non-confidence and pulled on a pair of latex gloves, and made her do the same. Then he used a knife to scrape some powder from the ecstasy tablet onto different quadrants of the plate.
“We don’t have to do this,” she said.
“Yes, we do. If you take ecstasy, you need to know how to test it.”
“I’m not going to take it anymore.”
“Anymore is a very long time, and I can’t be your watchdog forever,” he said, brushing the powder into separate sections.
“But—”
“Lola, please. I just want to know that you know how to do this.”
She relented, pressed her lips shut, and turned her attention back to the kit. He put the first reagent bottle in her hand.
“Okay, take off the cap and squeeze a single drop onto the first bit of powder. Don’t get any in your eyes, or on your skin.”
She wrinkled her nose at the sharp smell. “Jesus, what’s in this shit?”
Your safety, he thought. Aloud, he said, “Caustic compounds. Sulfuric acid and other dangerous chemicals. Just be careful.”
He hovered over her as she dripped the various chemicals on the tiny hills of powder he’d created. There were six tests, because there were so many things they were adding to tablets these days. Just be careful.
He needed her to stop being reckless and start being careful, because something had happened in the past few days. He’d stopped thinking of her as an irritating work duty and started thinking of her as more of a friend. He’d come to recognize not just her bad behaviors, but her internal struggles with the unrelenting pressure of fame.
As she fought to turn her life around in this three ring circus of a rave tour, he’d become more and more aware of her resilience and strength.
“Okay,” he said. “Show me how to read the test. Look at the colors of the powder. What do you see as far as adulterants?”
She sighed, glancing at the chart. “I told you, this is pointless. I’m not going to take drugs anymore. I’m done.”
“Show me,” he insisted.
Done, my ass. He trusted her about as far as he could throw her, which wasn’t very far, even with the positive strides she’d taken. A month and a half from now she’d be back in L.A. with her party posse, and he expected her to go crazy and do a bunch of stupid shit.
“This pill has caffeine mixed into it,” she finally said, poring over the indicator chart.
He nodded. “Most of them do. It’s a cheap stimulant, often mixed with amphetamines—and yo
u remember what amphetamines do.”
She wouldn’t look at him. He wondered if she remembered that night as clearly as he did, if she remembered how fast her heart had hammered in her chest. “What else?” he asked.
She looked back at the chart. “Looks like there’s…pa-ra-cee… How the fuck do you pronounce this?”
“Paracetamol. It’s a painkiller.”
“They sure do put a lot of random shit in these pills.”
“Some of it more benign than others. A tablet mixed with PMA can kill you. Bath salts, ketamine, heroin, they’ve all been found in ecstasy tablets. One bad batch full of fentanyl, and dozens of people die. The truth is, you don’t know what you’re getting unless you do one of these tests.” He sounded like a cop giving the Just Say No talk to a bunch of sixth graders. Whatever. She needed it. “So, having done the tests, we understand that this pill’s not too bad. You could take this and not have too many problems.”
He looked at her and waited. She blinked at him.
“No, Ransom. I would never, ever consider taking that. Sooo unsafe, even if it’s relatively pure. Where’d you get it?”
“None of your business.”
He’d bummed it from someone in the groupie crowd outside the bus last night. Two guys and one girl had offered ecstasy to him in hopes their favorite DJ would get high off it. Ransom had accepted all three tablets even though he only needed one. Did he think taking three measly pills out of circulation would do anything about EDM’s rampant drug culture?
Sadly, no.
He capped the test reagents, then went to the bathroom to wash the tablet and powder down the drain. By the time he returned, Lola was curled up in a pile of pillows, strumming through a series of chords. She hadn’t offered him any more lessons since the bus ride to Amsterdam, but he’d come to enjoy her impromptu concerts. As it turned out, she’d written a lot of songs, some of which she played for him, quietly, like secrets.
He understood why she kept them a secret. If her sweet, folksy emo songs ever got out, they would mortally wound her dance cred. Her guitar tunes had no beats, no rolls, no drops, nor were they very much like the heavy blues her father played.
