Heartless Read online

  Suddenly sparks flew everywhere, and the lights in the bathroom surged. A bulb over the sink popped.

  “Crap!” I shouted. “Stay back!”

  Lucy shrieked from the bedroom, and I screamed as well while I reached through the flying sparks to turn off the water. Since nothing hurt, I was able to do it pretty easily. I stood, dripping, in the cement shower in the middle of a steamy, smoke-filled room.

  “Well,” Lucy said in the ensuing silence as she pulled back the thin shower curtain. “That didn’t go well.”

  “No. Not so much.”

  “And you’ve probably woken up the whole building by now.”

  “Yep.”

  Sure enough, there was a knock at the door. “It’s okay, we’re fine!” Lucy called over her shoulder.

  A masculine voice answered. “You sure? Are you girls on fire?”

  “No, we’re fine, thanks. I promise. Don’t…um, don’t worry?”

  There was a husky laugh. “Then shut up in there! People are trying to sleep.”

  Lucy rolled her eyes. “Oh-kay. Sorry.” She turned back to me, waving smoke away from her face. “Urgh, I didn’t know you could, but now you smell even worse. Jo! What are we going to do?”

  “Damn if I know.” Water dripped out of my hair, over my body. Every so often a droplet attempted to settle on one of my new metal nipples, and it sparked and then sizzled into the air. “At least now I know what not to do,” I laughed weakly.

  “Don’t laugh. This is very serious,” Lucy said, but her hand covered her mouth and her eyes smiled a little.

  “I was just saying a couple weeks ago that maybe Eli and I didn’t have any spark.”

  “Now he would find you truly electrifying.”

  There’s something about two girls together in a terrible situation. I stood in a puddle of possibly-charged water, naked, dripping, eviscerated from chin to chest. Lucy, my best friend, gazed at me in utter terror and confusion. And all we could do was laugh.

  So we did. Lucy sat down on the lid of the toilet, pulled her knees to her chest, and laid her head down on her legs. Her body shook with the force of her laughter. I leaned against the concrete shower wall and slid down to the ground, where I rocked back and forth.

  After a few minutes, Lucy’s laughter turned to tears. I wasn’t surprised; I wanted to cry, too, even while I laughed. I crawled out of the stall to kneel in front of her and laid my wet head against her leg. She reached down and stroked my hair, her face still hidden from view.

  “It’s going to be okay,” I said, even though I knew it was a lie.

  “How?” Her breath sounded ragged, thick with tears and saliva.

  “I don’t know. I just need to figure some things out.”

  “Like what?”

  I shrugged. “First and foremost, who did this to me, and why. After that, I guess I’ll figure out the next step.”

  “But you’re dead.”

  “I know.”

  “Murdered.”

  “Lucy, I know!”

  Her head popped up and she jumped to her feet, knocking me back against the wall. Her face was flushed, her eyes red-rimmed, but she was suddenly determined, too. I’d seen that look on her face before, usually before telling off some frat boy at a party. Something bad was about to happen. “What? What are you thinking?” I asked, nervous.

  “You’re murdered. Someone did this to you. This is bad! I have to call my mother! She’ll know what to do!”

  She reached for her cell phone, which sat atop her dresser, right outside the bathroom door, and she started dialing. I struggled to my feet, wincing when I heard something tear behind me, grimacing as my feet slipped on the slick tile floor.

  For the second time that morning, I knocked the phone to the floor. “No!”

  She jumped back, startled. “What?”

  “Don’t you see?” I said. When she shook her head I continued. “I’m dead, but I’m alive. I’m still talking to you. I can still think. If you call your mother, the cops’ll come! They’ll be here in, like, less than thirty seconds! And they’ll take me away! To a hospital or a laboratory! They’ll have to! And the doctors? What if they can’t fix this! They might make it worse! And then I…I might…” I couldn’t say it.

  “You might die,” Lucy finished for me, staring at the electrodes on my stomach. “All the way this time.”

  “Exactly. So please don’t call the cops. At least not yet. Please, will you just help me?” I sighed, a weighty sound I felt compelled to make even without breath in my lungs. “We can do this together. We can find out what happened. Find whoever did this. Maybe they can fix me. I can be persuasive, right?”

  “I don’t know. What about your parents? Don’t they deserve to know what happened? Can’t they do something?”

  I took Lucy’s hand, trying to ignore the squeamish look in her eye when her arm brushed my breast. This was all new to me, too. I wasn’t used to being a monster. “I don’t want to scare them,” I said. “Or bring them into it if I don’t need to. I think I can fix this on my own. I really do.”

  “But how?”

  “First, I need to rejoin the land of the living,” I said. “If I’ve been missing three days, people are going to start to worry. My mom’s probably already worried.”

  “You’re probably right,” Lucy said. “About that, at least. So you better go boot up your computer. If people are looking for you, someone’s gonna call out the cavalry soon. Even if I don’t.”

  Another choice. A joint one this time. One that would lead us further into disaster. Of course, we didn’t know that at the time.

  Instead of contemplating the decision to go it alone, not to seek the normal authorities, I nodded, and stood up to head to my room. Lucy reached out a hand to stop me. I thought we were about to have another moment when she said, “But…can you please put your robe back on first? You’re grossing me out.”

  Before I could sit down at the computer to “rejoin the land of the living,” we had a bit of work to do. First I had to scrub the green spot from the interior of my robe so I could stomach the idea of putting it on again. (Not that my stomach seemed to mind anything at that point, mind you. Not that I was even sure I had a stomach anymore.) As I scrubbed, Lucy tried unsuccessfully not to stare at me.

  “You know,” she said, leaning over my shoulder and pointing. “It’s just going to get all goopy again if you don’t do something about your back.” Then she backed away, gasping. “Ew, sorry. Just got another whiff of you. Can we speed up the cleaning-up process? So you can be destinkified?”

  I gave her a look. “Yes, if you help me. I can’t do anything about my back on my own, and since that’s the part of me that’s open and oozing, I’m guessing that’s where the stink is coming from.”

  “I can help, but I can’t get close to you,” Lucy said, frowning. She leaned against the wall on the opposite side of the room, looking greenish and disgusted. Then her face lit up, and her eyes danced like a little kid with a big idea. She grinned. “I’ve got it,” she said. “I need a mask!”

  She trotted over to my closet and began to rummage through my scarf collection. She selected a bright red one and began to tie it around her face.

  “No, come on,” I said. “That one came from India. My mother brought it back from her first trip there. Use a different one.”

  It was Lucy’s turn to give the dirty look. She pulled out another, and I shook my head. “No, that’s my favorite.”

  After three more failed attempts, Lucy threw up her hands in frustration. “Jolene. I cannot help you if I cannot get close to you without vomiting. The only way to make that happen is to wrap something around my face. Find me something. Please.”

  I pulled myself up from my desk chair, and Lucy cringed. “You moving makes it worse,” she said, holding my blue silk scarf in front of her nose. I ignored her and marched to the door. Beneath my ski jacket was a ski mask, last worn on a trip to Snowy Lodge before Christmas. I tossed the mask to L
ucy.

  “Here,” I said. “It’s thick, and it’s wool. All you’ll smell is sheep.”

  She put it on before stretching her arms out before her, cracking her knuckles like a doctor prepping for surgery. “Okay. I’m ready. Lie down.”

  I lay on the carpet, stretching out on my stomach to give her a better view of my mangled back. She knelt over me. I couldn’t see her face, but she pressed down in a few spots on my back with something akin to clinical probing.

  “Ew, the wires are sticking out,” she said, and then she ran for the bathroom. I thought she’d gone to throw up, but in a second she was back, holding Q-tips and hydrogen peroxide. Her voice was muffled by scratchy wool, but she’d turned matter-of-fact. Definitely clinical. “There’s green goo inside you, Jo. Why is there green goo inside you?”

  I tilted my head to the side. “I’m sure some of the goo inside you is green, don’t you think? And anyway, I’m guessing it’s some kind of formaldehyde mixture. Isn’t that green? Maybe it’s some embalming fluid? I have no idea.”

  “Stop it,” Lucy said, gagging again behind the mask. “You’re gonna make me hurl. But yeah, that’s what it smells like. Formaldehyde. That, and rotten eggs.”

  “Sorry about that.” I spoke into the crook of my arm, ashamed of my own stench. In real life—because this was very quickly starting to feel like an alternate reality—I was always clean and good-smelling. I loved fancy soaps and body sprays. This stinking thing was humiliating.

  There was pressure on my back as she pressed down. “Ooh, if only I…could just…I need to…snap it…something needs to snap into place!” But instead of a healthy snap, we heard a crack.

  “Um, was that a bone?” I asked. “Or some plastic?”

  “Did it hurt?”

  “No, not really.”

  She sighed. “Then does it matter?”

  “Yes, it matters!” I pushed up on my hands and craned my neck to get a look. “Just because I can’t feel it doesn’t mean you get to be all careless and break my bones!”

  “Well, whatever it was, you’re as repaired as I know how to get you. We really need to get you to a professional at some point.”

  I groaned. “A professional what? Doctor? Electrician? What kind of professional exactly do you envision knowing how to help me?”

  She shrugged, and then pulled me to my feet. “No need to be a bitch about it. Come on, let’s bandage you up. Lucky for you, I have gauze!”

  I rolled my eyes. “Lucky for me you’re accident prone.”

  She grinned, then held a piece of gauze up to my back and began wrapping it around my waist. “A couple more wraps and, there you go, good as new.”

  I shot her a look. I was definitely not as good as new. But then I turned to look in the mirror. I still couldn’t quite see the back, but the bandage was smooth, and I didn’t see any green ooze dripping down my legs. “Hey, nice job. You should be a doctor.”

  “Maybe I will.” She tossed me my robe. “Someday. Now will you please get dressed? Maybe even, imagine this, put on some underwear?”

  “Let me just wipe myself down a little more. You said I stink right?”

  Lucy rolled her eyes, a strange-looking thing behind the ski mask. “I hardly even notice it anymore.”

  “Still, though.” I grabbed a washcloth from the sink and began carefully wiping down my arms and legs. Before I could finish, though, there came a knock at Lucy’s door.

  It was forceful, purposeful, and before we could blink, a male voice called from the other side.

  “Police. Open up.”

  “Oh crap-a-doo,” Lucy spoke in a forced whisper as she hopped to her feet and pulled off the ski mask. Her hair was a tangle of tumbled red curls. “What do we do?”

  I looked around, frantic. “Why do you have a cop at your door?”

  “I don’t know! I shouldn’t have a cop at my door! I’m an ambassador’s daughter! My mother will kill me!”

  “What are we going to do?”

  Lucy smiled. “Wait. I’m an ambassador’s daughter. That means I’m great at diplomacy, just by association. I can handle this. Right?”

  “I don’t know!”

  We paced the room in tight, frantic circles. I don’t think either of us was particularly confident in Lucy’s diplomatic skills, but we had little else upon which to rely.

  He knocked again, a more forceful sound. “Open up please.”

  “At least he’s polite,” Lucy said. She shrugged. “Maybe someone finally reported you missing, and he’s here to investigate? I swear I haven’t done anything wrong this week. But he’s going to wake the whole dorm if he keeps banging like that.”

  It was 9 o’clock. We’d woken up a few of our hall mates with our bathroom shenanigans, but for the moment, they’d been leaving us alone. A cop, on the other hand, banging on our door would bring the whole Smytheville student body a-runnin’. I wasn’t ready for that.

  “Okay, I have a plan,” I said after what felt like a millennium. I darted to the bathroom, as best as a mostly-dead girl could dart. As I closed the door I said, “Give me three minutes. Just stall him. I’ll come out in a sec.”

  “Stall?” she hissed. “How?”

  “I don’t know,” I whispered back. “You’re Lucy. Do your Lucy thing. Trust me.”

  Through the crack in the door I watched Lucy wrap herself back up in the bulky, tattered comforter. She set her glasses crooked on her nose as she walked toward the banging.

  She opened the door, a crack. “Hello? Can I help you?” Her voice was little, shaky, but not at all unsexy. She had a husky thing going.

  I grinned. Lucy was a pro. She knew exactly what to do.

  While she had the door handled, for better or for worse, I turned back to the bathroom. In the medicine cabinet I found exactly what I needed: a goopy, green, exfoliating mud mask. Not that I cared so much about exfoliation in that moment; what I liked was the “mask.” I squeezed a glob of green goo onto my hand and smeared it across my face, taking care to cover as much of my pasty, dead-looking skin as possible. Soon I looked like a whole new girl—a Frankenstein-girl, perhaps, but no less new. I wrapped an orange bath towel around my hair and pulled my robe on, tying it tight to cover me up to the neck. Though I’d have killed to find a pair of leggings to cover my legs, I didn’t think I could pull them on by myself without breaking something, so I had to hope the long robe covered enough. I shoved my feet into a pair of fuzzy pink slippers left over from an old Halloween costume, and, for better or worse, I considered myself ready. I took a glance at myself in the full-length mirror.

  I looked ridiculous.

  But at least I looked alive. Ish. Enough, anyway, to keep the cop from calling an ambulance, because I had a vague idea of what would happen if an EMT tried to find my heartbeat and failed. It wouldn’t be pretty.

  I went back to the bathroom door and pressed my ear to it, listening.

  “What do you mean, missing?” Lucy said. “She just in her room over there. She was with me all night.”

  “Then why do I have her boyfriend calling our station, saying she’s gone?”

  I’d heard enough. I opened the door. “Gone?” I said, trying to play up my voice’s new rasp. I can play husky and sexy, too. “Who’s gone?”

  The officer stood, leaning against the closed hallway door, blocking any escape that might have been rendered necessary if the meeting went downhill. He was tall and blond and quite handsome, and I thought I caught a bit of swoon in Lucy’s eyes. He jumped when I walked into Lucy’s room, and I was pretty sure I saw a silent giggle cross Lucy’s lips. I had to keep a poker-face on, though, despite the fact that I looked like a clown. I stepped nearer to the shadowy room corners.

  “Jolene Hall?” the officer said.

  “Yes, sir. Well, it’s Jo. Only my parents call me Jolene.” I tried to smile. “And you are?”

  “Officer Adam Strong, Smytheville Police Department. I’m here investigating your disappearance. Do you have any id
entification?” He was suppressing a smile.

  “Sure,” I said, a picture of innocence. “What’s so funny?”

  Next to Officer Strong, Lucy’s giggle was becoming less silent, more manic, and I shot her a look. She covered her face with her blanket, but her shoulders still shook. I understood—I was fighting hard to keep hysteria at bay, too.

  “What’s with the getup?” the officer said, pointing to my face.

  I shrugged. “Sunday morning spa time. Normally Lucy’s in on this, too, but someone overslept today. It’s how we get ready for church.” I tried to grin, but the mask cracked and crumbled. My bone-dry skin had sucked all the moisture out of it already. “I’ll go get my ID.”

  I tried to walk bouncily from the room, like a typical college girl, while behind me Lucy gave up and burst out laughing, her face buried in the comforter. “I swear I don’t look like that, ever,” she said, choking. If Officer Strong responded, I didn’t hear him.

  In my own room, I looked around frantically. I didn’t see my purse, and I tossed a few pillows around, looking for it, before realizing I’d probably lost my purse at the same time I was kidnapped and turned into a monster. “Craptastic,” I whispered. But I had to do something, so I walked back through the bathroom. In the mirror, I saw the tail of white thread starting to poke out of the green goo on my face, and with one finger I wiggled it back into place.

  When I reentered Lucy’s room, I stayed as far from Officer Strong as I could. I tried to look sheepish. “Sorry, Officer. It’s still early and I forgot. I lost my purse last week and haven’t found it yet.”

  “Did you report it stolen?”

  “No, because it’s not stolen. It’s lost. I lose stuff all the time, right Luce?”

  “Yes, sir, she does. Once she lost my favorite hat for a month before she found it under her pillow. True story.” Lucy’s freckles had darkened as blood rushed to her face. She was flushed and gorgeous.

  I gave her a dirty look, but smiled at the cop. “Yeah, so I can’t say it was stolen, right? I was hoping it would turn up this weekend, around the dorm, but I plan to start getting stuff replaced first thing tomorrow morning. Girl Scouts’ honor.” I tried to make the salute, but was frustrated by knuckles that didn’t bend the right way. I slid my hand back down to my side and laughed weakly. “I was never actually a Girl Scout.”