Belle of the Brawl (12 page)

The Post-it Note was one of Dr. G’s favorite examples of modern-day success. Something as simple as small squares of paper had made billions of dollars, simply because someone added adhesive.
Simple, elegant, effective
, Dr. G liked to say.

Charlie wrinkled her nose, stood up and headed toward the LCD note board that covered a wall of her workstation. She put a writing thimble on her index finger and began to grope for inspiration.

Improve your life TODAY,
she wrote, then ran her palm
over the glowing script and erased the phrase. After a moment, the perfect name for her new invention came to her. It was only thing that could improve her life today, but it would be impossible to invent. Sighing, she wrote it down in big capital letters anyway:
HEARTBREAK HELPER.

Charlie smiled at the shimmering board for a moment before heading over to her computer to do some research.

She Googled “what makes humans feel happy?” and eagerly read the first fifty hits that seemed to have research on their side. Why hadn’t she ever thought to approach her own happiness with the scientific methods she used in her studies?

In a few minutes, Charlie compiled a list of scientifically proven happiness helpers and hastily wrote them in bullet points on her invention board. After she crossed off everything that couldn’t be simulated, her list looked like this:

THINGS THAT INCREASE HAPPINESS:

—Smiling (fake smiling leads to real smiling!)

—Strong connections to community, friends, and family

—Sense of purpose

—Pets, houseplants (though there was that baby seal invented in Japan….)

—Exercise

—Nature

—Aromatherapy (tangerine!)

Tangerines and smiling. Charlie leaned forward on her lab stool and rested her chin in her palm to think. It wasn’t a lot to work with, but it was a start. Charlie opened up the 3–D rendering program on her laptop and began to sketch some ideas. A few minutes of aimless sketching ticked by, but the faces of Darwin and Allie still loomed more 3–D in Charlie’s mind than any invention.

Charlie rubbed her tired eyes with fisted hands. She was at a loss. How could she invent something to cure heartbreak when she was such an emotional wreck?

Beep!

A blinking box popped up on her laptop screen. It was Bee, wanting to IM from across the Atlantic in Oxford.

Bee:
Hallo luv. How is my brilliant girl?

Charlie:
OK…

Bee:
Just OK?

Charlie didn’t want to explain the whole sordid story to her mother. After all, Bee had given up a thirteen-year career as Shira’s assistant so that Charlie could attend the Academy. The last thing Charlie wanted was for her mother to think she wasn’t serious about her education or that she was compromising her place at the Academy by stewing over Darwin. Besides, her IM window wasn’t big enough and her time wasn’t unlimited enough
to even scratch the surface. So she settled on generic loneliness.

Charlie:
Lonely. Miss you. Miss the way things used to be with Darwin.

Bee:
In this world, you have to count on yourself for your own happiness. And lucky for you, you inherited your father’s talent with his hands.

Charlie:
But what if that isn’t enough?

Bee:
It has to be. You can’t depend on anything in life to always go your way, but your talent is yours forever. Make me proud.

Charlie:
I will. Promise. Gotta run. Big kiss.

Charlie nibbled on her lower lip and twirled her three cameo bracelets around her wrists—the bracelets were the only things she owned that had belonged to her dad. One bracelet had a picture of Bee from 1980, when her mother looked a lot like Charlie did now. One had a picture of her father in his Royal Navy uniform. And the other cameo was empty. It used to have a picture of Darwin inside it, until Shira forced her to hand it over as a condition of acceptance into the Academy.

Ignoring the crash of a shattered tray of beakers one of the IM’s dropped somewhere behind her, Charlie ran her finger along the ivory cameos, desperate for an idea. She
looked over her shoulder at her notes on the board.
Smiling… tangerine… smiling… tangerine.

Suddenly, a lightbulb went off. She had it.

Charlie raced over to the LCD vending machine and punched in the components she needed. A few minutes later, a shiny white lab robot that looked like an ottoman on wheels sped up to her cubicle with all the materials: an oscillating fan, which she would repurpose as an aromatherapy delivery device, and a series of pulleys that Charlie hoped would get a user to smile.

An hour later, Charlie set down her soldering iron and looked up at the clock. She had only a few minutes to test her device. She sat down and put her head through the hole in the helmet she’d rigged up as part of her Heartbreak Helper.

Two tiny plastic prongs pushed Charlie’s lips—which had been set in frown mode for so long that they seemed to have lead weights on their corners—into a forced-yet-comfortable smile. Then her own recorded voice said “please close your eyes” and a light mist of tangerine essence filled her nostrils.

Charlie felt ridiculous under her Heartbreak Helper helmet, but after twenty seconds of forced smiling and sniffing tangerines, she had to giggle at the silliness of her synthetic happiness producer. And giggling made her
feel… happy. Which meant the helmet actually worked! For a few minutes, at least.

When she pulled the Heartbreak Helper off, Charlie did an emotional assessment. She felt a tiny bit less panicked, less miserable, and ever-so-slightly more hopeful that things would be okay, that she would survive this glitch with Darwin and maybe even be a better person for it. Which led her to consider Allie. Post-helmet, Charlie decided that even the Allie question would resolve itself somehow. Allie wouldn’t—
couldn’t
!—hate Charlie again. Not after everything they’d been through together. Maybe Charlie would manage to make Bee proud after all, even from the middle of the most lopsided love triangle in history.

Charlie stood up and smoothed out her platinum coveralls and a faint smile spread over her lips, no helmet required.

HEALTH AND WELLNESS COMPOUND
ACHILLES TRACK

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 7TH
7:08 P.M.

Crouched in a deep lunge on the clay track, Allie sniffed the air around her. The smell of the ocean mingled with cut grass in the soft night breeze, almost masking the faint tang of sweaty socks still lingering from the Alphas in Motion class. Allie rose from her lunge and swung her arms around in big circles, fully embracing her performance in the role of Casual Jogger. She had dressed the part, donning a reflective Alphas unitard with matching hood that covered everything but her face in stretchy, shiny silver. Patented by Brazille Industries the unitard pressed down body hair and flab, making the person inside it sleek and fast, all while monitoring body heat, wicking sweat away, and cooling the skin. Her Pro-Woman Sneakers—another Brazille product—beamed an LCD display onto the track just in front of wherever Allie stood, informing her of how many steps she’d taken (46), calories she’d burned (12), and miles she’d completed (.04).

The track was on a low cliff next to the ink-black ocean, and the sounds of crashing waves filled Allie’s ears. She cocked her head, hoping to pick up the sound of Darwin’s footsteps. She’d heard he came here every day at seven to run. Unable to pick up any Pumas headed her way, Allie began a slow shuffle around the track, hoping she wouldn’t break an actual sweat and ruin her eye makeup before Darwin showed up.

But Allie wasn’t here to jog. Not for long, anyway. She was here to fall.

Getting into character, she forced her sneakers to pick up the pace, careful to keep her stomach sucked in and her shoulders back as she ran—her unitard didn’t leave anything to the imagination. Channeling her inner runner wasn’t that hard. All she had to do was
go
. Allie pumped her Lycra-encased arms and forced her legs to bound along the rubberized track. In a few seconds, she was already exhausted.

As the clock ticked, Allie cursed whoever invented such an unpleasant activity.
People do this for fun?
Allie’s chest felt like someone had parked a car on it, and her muscles burned so badly she could almost hear them shrieking. Channeling Careen’s advice again, Allie tried to turn off her thoughts and pretend that she wasn’t about to take a fall on purpose. She needed to look totally natural when she fell in front of Darwin. But what if she broke a tooth? What if she did permanent
damage to her face and needed a nose job or a skin graft, and wound up looking like Heidi Montag?

She pressed on and tried to focus on how much Darwin would dig dating a fellow runner—especially one he had
rescued
after a fall. Hopefully, Allie thought as she rounded a bend in the track, he wouldn’t notice how red her face was from the exertion, or the unladylike, extra-large beads of sweat pooling on her upper lip and dripping down her chin…

Out of nowhere, Allie’s thin-soled track shoes skidded on a patch of gravel, and before she knew it, her upper body was sailing out ahead of her while her legs bent back, sending her feet flying into the air behind her. She was falling
for real
, and Darwin wasn’t even there to save her! Before she had time to break her fall with her hands, Allie landed chin-first on the clay track.

“Ooof!” She gasped feebly for air. The fall had knocked the wind out of her. She tried to roll over, but found that she didn’t have the strength. Allie felt like a giant beetle between two windowpanes—helpless and highly unattractive. She put her arms under her head and moaned into them, wondering where her aPod was and if her injuries were serious enough to warrant a medi-copter to take her off the island. If there was any chance of a chin scar, Allie would demand plastic surgery. Her chin—neither too pointy nor too square—was one of her best features!

With her eyes still closed, Allie realized the ringing in her ears had been replaced by the sound of footsteps.
Darwin!
Not moving a muscle, Allie began to moan louder, suppressing a relieved smile. It wasn’t too late to put her rescued-puppy plan back into action.

The footsteps got closer, and moments later two fingers gently pressed against her neck, taking her pulse. Strong hands grabbed her shoulders and turned her around onto her back. Giddy with the romance of the moment, Allie opened her eyes, ready to blurt out a shaken thanks to Darwin for rescuing her. But the boy crouched above her was enshrouded in shadows, his outline backlit by the klieg lights.

Allie blinked hard, suddenly not even sure it was Darwin at all. He was more muscular than usual, and he smelled musky, manly—closer to Dior Homme than cinnamon.

“Thanks,” she managed to squeak.

“Are you okay?”

Mel!

“I… I think so.”

“Let’s see if you can sit up.”

Allie should have been devastated. Darwin not saving her meant her fall was pointless. Strangely, though, Darwin had all but vanished from her mind.

Mel put his warm hands back on her shoulders and gently helped her up to a seated position. Allie stared into
his violet eyes, where she could see her own reflection, suddenly mesmerized by how adorable the boy in front of her was. How competent and mature, and just plain hawt
.
How could she have dissed him after writing class today? What had she been thinking?

“I’m, um, sorry I ran off earlier today,” Allie blurted. “I had a lot on my mind.”

“It’s cool,” Mel murmured. “You’re focused on your acting now. That’s awesome.”

Now Allie might not need to act the part. Looking at Mel, it suddenly seemed as if they were already linked somehow.

Mel cringed as he noticed her knee. “That’s pretty deep,” he said.

Allie looked down at the bloody wound and shrugged. She couldn’t feel any pain whatsoever, just a warm tingle of attraction for her mega-hot savior.

“I wish I had some Purell to clean it out.” Mel sighed, patting his pockets. “I left mine at home.”

“I have some,” said Allie, her heart melting further over their mutual germaphobia. “I never leave home without it.”

She dug her Purell bottle out of the tiny pocket in the hip of the running suit, and Mel smiled. Not just with his mouth, but with his eyes.

“Great minds think alike,” he said, squirting some on
his hands and then into Allie’s cut. “This might sting a little.”

“I’m tough,” she whispered. And for once, she actually believed it. Mel’s square jaw clenched adorably as he concentrated on cleaning her cut knee.

Suddenly remembering her own chin, Allie reached up and patted it with her hand. She brought her fingers in front of her eyes and saw that there was blood there. “Uh-oh,” she whispered, her stomach clenching at the thought of facial disfigurement. Why hadn’t Mel mentioned the cut on her face? It must be so awful that he didn’t want to bring it up.

“You have a tiny scrape on your chin,” Mel said as if reading her mind. “It’s nothing. Probably be gone by morning. You can still model, don’t worry.” He smiled at Allie, exposing a row of teeth so white that in the moonlight they almost looked blue.

“Thanks,” breathed Allie. “I mean, I don’t want to model anymore. But I do hope to act.”

“I’m not modeling anymore either,” Mel said. “Too boring.” Though his abs were swathed in the thick cotton of his workout hoodie, Allie could tell by his posture Mel still sported a six-pack. Maybe even an eight-pack. “My ultimate goal is to open a mall that’s better and bigger than the Mall of America.” Mel flipped his blond hair out of his eyes and grinned at Allie.

“I’ve been wishing for a more futuristic mall for years!” Allie squealed, leaning in closer to Mel and getting another whiff of his musky, yummy cologne. “Bigger than the Glendale Galleria, and with more attractions. The time has come.”

“Roller coasters, moving sidewalks, a laser light show and planetarium that’s woven seamlessly into the shopping experience… ,” Mel listed, nodding at Allie.