She no longer struggled. Soon her body went limp.
He let her fall to the floor.
“Old inventory for now,” Sean said. “Soon? Inventory still in production.”
─Only Dogs─
I HANDED Judy her cappuccino and sat across from her in the booth. We were in the back of the cafeteria, as far away from other employees as we could get. This time of day most people just wanted a snack to take to their rooms. Only a handful of people actually sat to eat and socialize.
I had almost ditched Judy again so I could wait outside my room for Patton to bring Liu back. Flora wanted me to stay with her, frightened as she was by the blood on my shirt. Sean had insisted I change clothes, lest I wander around Level C scaring the shit out of everyone. I let Flora watch me change just to prove to her that I wasn’t hurt, but when she pressed me for the blood’s owner, I refused to say. She started crying and jumped on the bed, burying her face in a pillow.
That was how I left her.
“Sean’s guard,” Judy said, drawing me from my thoughts. “The one I bit.”
The one I bit. A nice way of saying, “The one whose dick I decapitated.”
“He’s been beating you.”
She looked up at me, alarmed. “How did you know?”
“I can tell you’re in pain, Judy. It’s obvious.”
She winced as if to prove my point. When she took a sip of her cappuccino her hands were shaking. “He comes into my room every few days. He takes off his clothes and makes me look at it. He makes me take my clothes off. And then he holds me down and punches me.”
I didn’t know what to say. If I hadn’t stumbled upon Brian’s late-night tryst with her, I’d be punching the table right now, vowing to murder Sean’s guard. I could easily put on a show right now, but I didn’t have it in me.
But I had to let her know I cared.
“Brian,” she whispered. Then she started crying.
I put my hand over hers and she grabbed my fingers, holding on tight.
“What about Brian?” I asked, trying to be as tender as possible.
“He’s the one,” she cried. “He’s letting the guard in my room. He’s letting him beat me. He told me to tell you. Because he thinks you’ll do something stupid and get yourself killed.” She looked up at me with her glossy, tear-filled eyes. “He told me he wants you dead, Melissa.”
I hadn’t expected this, and I had to stop myself from smiling. Judy had just solved so many of my problems. No longer did I have to figure out a way to tell her I knew Brian was behind this, which put me one step closer to convincing her to tell Patton.
Not only that, I now knew I could trust Judy. As much as I trusted Flora. More than I trusted Patton.
Brian wanted me dead. There was no longer any question. He wasn’t on the side of Mr. Shriver and Sean, but he wasn’t on our side either.
He wanted this company all to himself. Understandable, really, since his inventions—discoveries—were responsible for the company’s growth, but if he gained control, things would only get worse.
“We have to tell Patton.”
Judy shook her head violently. “No, if Brian finds out—”
“He won’t, I promise. You can trust Patton.”
“But how can you be sure?”
I told her everything, starting from when I was first brought here. It took nearly half an hour to catch her up to the present. The only thing I left out was Clifton’s labyrinth. That part I still wasn’t ready to share with anyone. Telling Flora had left me feeling like I’d set off a time bomb. I didn’t need another.
When I started talking about the Longevity Drug, Judy nodded and said, “They have a device in their arms just like the Favorite Girls, except it only secretes Longevity.”
“And the Favorite Girls have it too.”
“Yes.”
“Is this the research Brian talks about?”
“No,” she whispered. “My work is in another field.”
“Can you tell me about it?”
She surveyed the room, shook her head. “I can’t. He’s serious about keeping it a secret. Not even Mr. Shriver knows about it.”
“But he told Mr. Shriver, remember? That night, when you bit that guard’s dick off. He said you were vital to the research.”
“Mr. Shriver thinks the research is something that it’s not.”
“I won’t tell a soul, Judy, I promise.”
She leaned in close, eyes darting around. “Every morning he gives me a polygraph. I can’t tell you. I really wish I could, but I can’t.”
I sat back in my chair, sighed, and took a long swig of my cappuccino. I could feel a headache coming on. What a bad time to sober up.
What she said next I saw coming. It was almost as if we realized it simultaneously.
“Oh no.” She started shaking. “He’s going to ask me about this, too. He’ll ask if I told you about him. I screwed up.”
Her anxiety was contagious. Now I was shaking, too. She’d come to me with full disclosure, and tomorrow morning she would pay for it—not with her life, important as she was to Brian’s secret studies, but her situation just got a lot worse.
Because of me. Because she wanted to trust me.
“I’ll think of something,” I said, but with a tremble in my voice I hardly sounded convincing.
She took a napkin from the dispenser and wiped her nose. Sniffling, she said, “I guess there’s no reason not to tell Patton now.”
“Are you sure?”
“Can we do it now before I change my mind?”
I scooted out of the booth and held out my hand for her. She took it, and together we walked to my room, where Flora and Liu were sitting on the bed, Liu yapping about something, Flora listening patiently, successfully masking her disinterest.
“Who’s she?” Liu asked.
“Judy,” I told her. “I guess you’re not getting your own room?”
“Yes. Patton just has to get approval from Sean and then I’m out of here. I can’t wait.”
“Me neither!”
I steered Judy to the table and called Patton. While it rang, I watched Flora jump off the bed and walk over to greet her. Judy seemed to cheer up a little, an effect Flora could always be relied on to produce. I got so caught up staring at them that I didn’t hear Patton until the second, “Hello.”
He agreed to come down and escort us back to his apartment. Five minutes later he knocked on the door.
“Hey, Judy,” he said. He tried to hug me, but I brushed past him, took Judy by the hand, and headed down the hall. “What did I do now?”
I didn’t respond, and he walked behind us all the way to the elevator. I wanted to leave him guessing for a while, torment him a little. See if his eighty-eight-year-old heart could handle the stress.
When we were safe in his apartment, I asked Judy to turn around so I could show Patton her bruises. She resisted at first, but I insisted.
“He needs to see,” I told her.
The bruises were much worse than I’d even thought. Before I’d only seen them from a distance and through the vent cover. Up close, her back looked like rigor mortis.
“Who did this to you, Judy?”
Judy started crying again. “Sean’s guard.”
“Which one?”
“Damn it, Patton,” I said, letting the back of Judy’s shirt down. “Which one do you think?”
He stared blankly for a moment. Then he blinked. “Oh.”
I put a hand gently on Judy’s shoulder. “Do you want to sit down while you tell him the rest?”
She nodded and I led her over to the couch. I sat next to her and held her hand in my lap while she cried her way through the story. She told him about the guard suddenly appearing one day, then coming back repeatedly. How last night Brian brought her to his floor and told her he was the one sending the guard to her, and if she wanted it to stop, she had to tell me.
“He wants me to do something rash so Sean will kill me. He told
her he wants me dead.”
Patton stood on the other side of the coffee table, scratching his head.
“Is that true, Judy?”
“Yes,” Judy said. “Those were his exact words.”
“What are you going to do about it?” I demanded.
He plopped down in his recliner with a long sigh. “I honestly don’t know.”
“Well you better figure something out!”
“Melissa,” Judy whispered. “It’s okay.”
“No it’s not. He needs to get off his ass and fix this problem.”
“What the hell’s wrong with you?” Patton asked.
I glared at him. “You’ll find out soon enough. Now what are you going to do for Judy?”
“Right now? Nothing.”
“What?”
“Melissa, what do you expect me to do? If Brian turns against me, we’re all screwed. We need him.”
“For what?”
“Listen, I can’t go up against Mr. Shriver by myself. Brian is the only leverage we’ve got. Without him, we don’t have the Libido Drug or the Love Drug. Remove him from the equation and Mr. Shriver no longer has any use for any of us.”
“I can synthesize the drugs,” Judy murmured.
Patton looked at her. “Really?”
“Yes.”
“All of them?”
“All of them.”
“Interesting.”
A moment of silence passed, and my impatience rose inside me like vomit.
“That’s all you’ve got to say? Interesting?”
Patton stood. “I need time to think.”
“We don’t have time,” I growled. “Tomorrow morning she goes back to work, and if that little fucker gives her a polygraph …” I stopped. Best not to scare Judy further by speculating how Brian might punish her. “Fuck it,” I said, standing. “I’ll take care of this myself. Come on Judy.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to fix it.”
“How?”
“You’ll see.”
“Melissa, wait.”
I sighed and turned around. “I’m taking her back to her room. Is that okay?”
“You should come back later so we can talk more.”
“Fine. I’ll call you when I’m ready.”
“Okay,” he said, and for a moment I felt bad for him. He looked like a wounded animal.
Bitterly, I walked over and gave him a quick kiss on the cheek. “Don’t pout. I’ll call you.”
Patton followed us outside and escorted us to the elevator.
“We’ll figure this out, Judy, I promise,” he said.
I respected his effort to console her, but I already had a solution.
On Level C, I told Judy to take me to her room. It was in the same hallway as Sean’s quarters, which I still hadn’t seen. I’d forgotten how small her room was until I stood inside it. So plain, so boring. Take away the bathroom and it wasn’t much bigger than the prison cells on Level E.
Judy sat on the bed. “You can stay a while, if you want.”
“There’s no time. We have to move quickly.”
“Where are we going?”
I looked up at the vent cover. It was smaller than the one in my shower room but big enough that Judy could fit through.
“If you were going to leave right now, what would you take with you?”
“I … um … my books, I guess. I don’t really have any other possessions.”
A pathetically sad thought, but I didn’t have time to ruminate. I was already pulling the dresser out from the wall so I could get behind it and push it across the room underneath the vent.
“What are you doing?” Judy asked, pushing her glasses up on her nose.
“Moving this … freakin’ desk. Good God, what’s in this thing?”
“My books are in the bottom drawer.”
She came over and helped me push it, a surprising gesture, considering she still didn’t know its purpose.
At least I thought she didn’t. When the desk hit the wall, she immediately knelt, opened the bottom drawer, and started unloading her books, stacking them on the floor. I didn’t know any of the authors. Tolstoy, Conrad, some Russian-looking name that started with a V.
Judy closed the bottom drawer and opened the middle one about three inches. Then she stood.
“I can use that as a step,” she said, peering up at the vent cover. “Those are Phillips head screws. Hang on.”
How the fuck?
I watched, dumbfounded, as Judy hustled to the bathroom and returned drawing out the retractable file on a pair of fingernail clippers. She climbed onto the dresser clumsily, but when she got to her feet, she pulled the vent cover off with ease, handing it carefully to me and then stepping down.
“Where am I supposed to go?” she asked, picking up a stack of books. She grabbed her backpack off the desk and started cramming them in.
“There’s a secret room no one knows about except Clifton. He’s made a maze in the walls. Mostly the air ducts. There’s a trap door in the room that goes down to Level B, then another to Level A. Tomorrow I’ll get a deadbolt or something to keep him out, but I don’t think you have to worry about him. I think he’s too preoccupied with Kate right now.”
“How do I get there?”
I was surprised at how receptive she was to this idea.
“Just climb in, facing left, and crawl all the way to the fan. On the right you’ll find a vent. It has a staircase for you to climb down. There’s a light switch on the wall to your left. Just be careful. I’ll put the cover back on and move the desk back where it goes. Then I’ll go to my room and come meet you. Okay?”
“Okay. Thank you, Melissa.”
I gave her a hug and she winced.
“Oh, I’m so sorry.”
“I’m okay,” she said. “You’ll have to hand my books up to me, if you don’t mind.”
She crawled back up on the dresser and into the vent, a much easier task for someone with such a tiny frame. When she was all the way in, she backed up until she could see out. I heaved the bag of books onto the dresser, climbed up, and stuffed it into the air duct ahead of her.
“Didn’t think it would actually fit.”
“That would be a deal breaker,” Judy said. “I’d die without books.”
I’d poisoned the poor girl’s mind with hope. She was already cheering up, a bad omen around here. In truth, this idea had a fatal flaw: eventually Clifton would be back to his old self, wiggling through the walls to find someone new to torment. Like my ownership of Flora, Judy’s safety in the secret room had an indeterminate time limit.
But what other choice did we have?
“See you soon,” Judy said.
She gave her backpack a push, scooted forward, pushed, scooted. She looked like a worm.
Bookworm.
I smiled, and as though someone had pushed a button a wave of emotions washed over me. I cried as I fitted the cover on the vent, put in the screws, tightened them, but by the time I had the dresser back in its original place I felt nice and numb again, cold and calculating, the same self-righteous bitch I always saw when I looked in the mirror.
My natural condition. Just like the Favorite Girls, I was created by cruel men. Not in a lab, not in a test tube, but through years of undeserved mistreatment at a time in life that’s supposed to be magical. Early adulthood. Newfound freedom, newfound love.
I was too young for the harshness of reality when I fell in love with Ted, and even that was a reality I would take back if I could.
This reality—Your Favorite Girl, Incorporated—was too harsh for anyone.
It needed to not exist.
When I got back to my room, Liu was jumping up and down on the bed in her underwear, singing a pop song I didn’t know. Flora sat by herself on the couch.
I went to her.
“She took a bunch of shots,” she said.
“Can you watch her for a few minutes? I have to do somet
hing and I need you to keep her out of the shower room.”
“Sure. I don’t think she’ll follow you. She’s been saying really hateful things. She said she’s not even going to talk to you anymore.”
“Best news I’ve heard all day.”
I went to the closet and picked out the largest of Kate’s handbags and purses. In the kitchen, I grabbed three bottles of water from the refrigerator, then a bag of chips, some granola bars, and a cluster of bananas. I stuffed them all in the handbag and looked around for a moment longer, in case I was forgetting something.
My eyes stopped on the wine cooler.
Screw it.
I pulled out a bottle, stuffed it in the bag, added the corkscrew, and then rushed past Liu to the shower room.
Climbing onto the ledge, I suddenly felt the urge to pee. It could wait, but I realized Judy would need toilet paper so I went to the stalls and took two rolls from the small storage closet. I also grabbed a handful of small trash bags.
I made quick work of getting into the vent and crawling to the secret room, where I was relieved to find the lights on. I’d forgotten the flashlight and my fear of the dark never failed me.
Judy had already unpacked her books and was arranging them along the wall. I came down the steps, knelt beside her, and removed everything from the bag.
“Didn’t know what you like to eat. I can bring you anything you need tomorrow. You’ll have to pee in the bottles until I can get you something better.”
I pulled out the toilet paper and trash bags. Judy took one look at them and burst out laughing.
“Has it really come to this?” she asked. “It’s going to be so embarrassing.”
“Everybody shits,” I said.
“Yeah, but only dogs have someone carry it around in a bag.”
That got me laughing too.
─Another─
“FLORA IS making your famous brownies tonight.”
The smile on his face made him look embarrassed. I lay on his couch with my head resting in his lap. He was stroking my hair. By the time I finished setting Judy up in the secret room, I was too exhausted to fight.
Right now I just needed affection.
“Bet you didn’t know I’m a chef,” he said.
I gazed up at him. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”
“You hungry?”
“No. Too tired.”
His Favorite Girl Page 8
