Placebo Junkies (8 page)

A brief crack in the darkness appears, and I wake to find myself in four-point cuffs. I take careful inventory:

My captors are clearly fools, though. They forgot the most dangerous parts.

Next to me a nurse bustles. She's squat and home-permed, all no-nonsense and bifocals.

“Can you…?” I lift a hand as high as the restraints allow and try to look pitiful and harmless. My voice sounds hoarse, like I've either been screaming for hours or silent for days.

She turns to me with a bright smile on her grandmotherly face, then leans in close to answer. “No chance of that, you nasty little bitch. You're crazy. The old-fashioned kind of crazy. You're exactly where you should be.”

She hums as she tugs at the buckles on the restraints, her coral-lipsticked mouth pinched smug and superior as she double-, triple-checks, and then turns around and makes a big show of inspecting and rearranging a series of filled syringes.

I go quiet and stare at the back of her head until she gets nervous and turns around to look at me. “I'm going to cut you into a million pieces,” I say in a loud whisper.

I don't really mean it. Jesus, I was smiling and everything as I said it to her, but I guess she can't take a joke because something steely drops across her eyes and she doesn't turn her back on me again.

“Look, here comes the doctor,” she says, sweet as sugar, sounding like an entirely different person, as she hears footsteps coming down the hall. “He'll fix you right up.”

I've come a long way since those early days. I know my limits now. I do my homework. And I don't like to brag, but I've gotten pretty good at working the system, picking and choosing the studies that pay the most and hurt the least.

But sometimes I pick wrong. Sometimes it can't be helped.

Or sometimes someone steers you wrong. Someone you trusted.

Like today.

Because now, everything is dark and everything hurts.

And even before I open my eyes, I know things.

I have been here before, oh yes I have.

I have been facedown on cold asphalt. (Welcome home!) I know the taste of gravel mixed with blood. (Earthy, metallic.) I know scrapes, and I know bruises, so even though I don't know exactly what has happened to me or precisely where I am, the one thing I
don't
feel right now is surprise.

I know betrayal.

Charlotte was right about the people running the study. No one gave me so much as a lingering glance when I checked in using her name. No one doubted me for a second. And no one saw the need to warn me about what was coming.

I coax my pain-squeezed eyes open and the daylight nudges the knot of pain that is my left temple to the next level. My
where
is clear enough—I'm sprawled on the ground behind the hospital, in the alley used to whisk away all manner of garbage and biohazards and contaminated materials. The
how
and
when,
on the other hand, are murky. The last thing I remember is swallowing something chalky and then sliding into an MRI machine—just another day in the salt mines
.

I try to pull more detail out of the throbbing darkness, but there's little else there. Even without remembering anything else, though, I remember very clearly that this was supposed to be Charlotte's gig. I remember how she practically begged me to take her appointment.

I remember how she set me up.

The flare of anger that comes with this realization is almost immediately extinguished by icy dread, however, as I notice my backpack lying open on the ground next to me. A quick grope confirms my fear: the money is gone. All of it. A blockbuster week's worth of earnings, a nauseatingly significant portion of my (previously) growing nest egg, replaced by nothing but a rapidly growing lump on my head.

It occurs to me that I should check for blood, but the effort seems painful and pointless, so I give up. Right now the loss of the money feels far more vital than the loss of any amount of blood.

No money means no trip. No trip means no goal. No goal means no hope.

No postcards. No corny souvenirs. No holding hands during a bumpy takeoff, no room-service breakfast. No happy ending. No future photo album version of Us.

No future Us at all.

This and only this is clear in my mind—everything else a hopeless smear of jumbled images and fuzzy thoughts. (
Fuck you.
Just
fuck you
if you're going to lecture me about carrying that much cash on me. Where's an underage vein grifter like me gonna get a checking account, genius?)

“Fuck!” I scream it to the wind.

Somewhere behind me I hear a door open and then slam shut. “Are you okay?” someone asks.

It's the Professor, creeping around and watching like always. Of course he's here—back-alley academic that he is. Except he's changed. He's huge now, the size of an elephant, and my brain scrambles to understand why everything around me looks supersized. The Dumpster on my right is the size of a building, and the bricks in the wall are the size of car windshields.

Pieces of conversation return to me in jagged bursts, and I remember. Something about the study—
Charlotte's
study—went wrong. Lilliputian effect. Just a minor hallucination, boys and girls, nothing to worry about. A few synapses crossed, a few neural pathways scrambled. The scene reassembles itself in my aching brain: the lab tech going practically giddy as I described what was happening to me in a whimper that didn't even sound like my voice.
“I'm shrinking, why am I shrinking?”

I am a unicorn, it would seem. A (prickly, pissed-off) four-leaf clover. My reaction to their test product, their million-dollar moonshine, unique enough to compel the tech to call in the supervisor, and then the senior researcher. There was talk of a journal article about me, little old me (literally little, at least to my drug-fucked eyes and miswired brain).

I vaguely recall overhearing snippets of muttered conversation:
We screened her for mmmph, didn't we? Of course we did…but these things happen…we should blargle grph…
I wonder briefly what it is that I have in my blood that Charlotte does not that made me react this way, but I'm too groggy and battered to really care.

Lilliputian effect: I am small and you are tall. A problem of perception not grounded in reality. Does it sound funny? Imagine it happening, imagine seeing everything around you spinning, growing bigger and bigger as you descend toward the floor, toward oblivion. Not so funny.

I'm Alice in Wonderland, nibbling from the wrong side of the mushroom. A temporary visual disturbance, they said. A rare and minor side effect, which should (should!) resolve without medical intervention.

I surely fucking hope so. Why was I there again? What were they testing on me? My memories elbow each other, jostling and scrapping, trickling in out of sorts and out of order, the gaps between them stuffed with dark nothingness. Me, insisting I was fine to walk out on my own; me, running, desperate for fresh air; me, signing forms with Charlotte's name, not bothering to read the small print.

“Oh, it's you. What are you doing out here?” The Professor is slowly shrinking back to normal; he's only the size of a Clydesdale now. He offers me a hand, but I wave him away and stand up on my own.

“Did you steal my money?” I ask him as soon as I'm steady on my feet. I try to sound threatening, but it comes out in a watery-sounding bleat.

“Me?” He looks insulted. “I didn't take anything from you. How could I? I just got here.”

“Well, did you see who did?”

He shakes his head and then puts on a pair of reading glasses to inspect me more closely. “That's a nasty bump on your head. Maybe we should get that looked at?”

I take a step away from him, blinking away a waterfall of neon eye floaters. “No, I'm fine. I mean, I'm not, but I will be. I just want to go home.”

“Care for company, then? I'm going in the same direction.” He extends his arm, and it looks as long as a python.
He's a snake.
The thought bubbles out of the center of the pain over my eye, but I take his arm anyway. I don't trust myself not to black out again.

I don't want to go anywhere with him, but it's not like I have many choices. What I want, what I
need,
is Dylan, but he's in class right now, and I know he can't answer his phone.

So I just nod. I start to ask the Professor how he knows where I live, but then I think about the money, what I went through to get it, what it
meant,
and I know that if I open my mouth I'll start to cry. So I don't say anything, not even when he starts in with his questions.
Opportunistic little prick.
I just focus on putting one foot in front of another, tuning out everything else.

He finally takes the hint and shuts up, walking me all the way to my door in silence.

I'm perched on the bathroom counter, the edge of the sink pressing into the back of my thighs. I feel drained, like whoever stole my money also emptied me of blood. Stranger things have happened around the labs, if you believe the rumors, which I don't.

I do look like I lost a fight with a brick wall, though.

Fortunately, Charlotte is an artist. Charlotte is a magician. She's back to her old self again, and I have to keep reminding myself that it's her fault in the first place.

She switches to a lighter shade, switches to a different brush, and I watch in the mirror as my black eye disappears. She's good at this. Very good.

“If there's one thing I've learned from my shitty taste in guys, it's how to cover up a bruise,” she says as she dabs more concealer under my eye and all the way up to my hairline. “See? Good as new.”

Personally, I don't see the point. In my own experience, facial bruises function like an invisibility cloak. Nothing like a fresh-baked shiner to make people dance that little
I don't want to get involved
jig and leave you alone to do your thing, but I don't say this out loud. Charlotte's too busy feeling useful.

“Voilà!” She takes a deep bow as I applaud her work.

“You're a master of disguise,” I tell her. Dylan's coming over any minute now, dropping everything to come take care of me, so I don't have time to confront Charlotte about tricking me into taking her place in the study. I don't have the energy, either, since my head feels like a semi drove over it.

Besides, my anger is fading. It's like a fizzy drink gone flat from sitting out, and I'm starting to see that it was ridiculous to think Charlotte intentionally set me up, that she could have known what would happen. At this rate, I'm about two blows to the head from turning into one of those crackpot conspiracy theorists, ranting about black-market organ harvests and the evils of fluoride.

Charlotte makes a face. “Yeah, awesome. Why is it that no matter what I do, no matter where I go, I always end up painting over bruises?” She zips up her makeup bag and leans against the wall, chewing on the inside of her cheek a little, the way she does when she's nervous about something, and I wait for what I'm assuming is going to be an apology. I mean, even if she didn't set me up, it was still
her
appointment that did this to me.

But I'm wrong about Charlotte yet again, since what actually comes out of her mouth is about the furthest thing from an apology possible. “Don't you think it's time you took a little break from this thing with Dylan? I mean, come on, Audie, just look at yourself.” She squints at me, then reaches over to gently blend an errant smudge of concealer with her thumb. “Look what's happening to you. You're young, you're hot, and you could do a hell of a lot better if you just moved on—”

I bat her hand away from my face and cut her off. “Wait, are you kidding me? You think Dylan did this to me? Charlotte, I told you. I passed out after I left
your
freaking appointment, where I took
your
freaking test meds—thanks a lot for that, by the way—and I hit my head on the curb or something.”

She doesn't answer—she just stands there, chewing on her lip now, and I can see that she doesn't believe me. She really
does
think Dylan did this to me.

Whatever anger I had left in me melts away. I mean, how sad is that? I feel awful for Charlotte all of a sudden. All the time she's spent around him, around us, all the times she's seen the way he treats me, how good he is to me, and she still can't get over the assumption that if I come home with a black eye, it must be from my boyfriend.

I sort of get it. When you grow up surrounded by rabbit turds, you don't look at what the Easter Bunny left behind and first think
mmmm, chocolate.

“Oh, Charlotte. Not every guy is a jerk. You'll meet a nice one one of these days—someone who deserves you.” I hop down off the counter and give her a hug. She goes stiff, doesn't return my embrace, but I don't let it bother me. I get it. We're all just products of our environment. Not everyone has the strength to break free from their past.

She finally relaxes a little, and when I step back, she raises an eyebrow, looks like she's about to say something, but then stops herself. “Eh,” she says after a few seconds. “Fine. You're right. It's none of my business anyway. Just take care of yourself, okay? You're one of the good ones.” She steps around me, gently, and walks into her room.

I can tell she's upset, so I follow her. I finally understand why she's so weird about Dylan, and I feel like a total asshole for not getting it sooner. It's so obvious now—someone like Charlotte, with her background and her baggage, can't possibly see the goodness in someone like Dylan. Because of the life she's had, she just has no concept of genuine, un-fucked-up love. As far as she's concerned, what I have with Dylan might as well be a bullshit fairy tale.

I sit down on Charlotte's bed and watch her for a few minutes. I promise myself that I'm going to be nicer to her, to stop rubbing her face in my relationship. It's not fair to go around flaunting my good luck.

She seems to have moved on, though. She peels off her shirt, sniffing it before she tosses it into a pile on the floor. “Yuck. I need to do laundry. Where'd the damn maid wander off to?”

I laugh with her, glad that we can change the subject, and then watch as she rummages through her closet for something to change into. She looks bonier than I remember. The weight-loss drugs must be working double time. Wasn't she rounder, softer, just a week or two ago? Is it even possible to lose that much weight in so little time?

I'm about to ask her about it when I get distracted by the tattoos on her back. Small circles, a whole series of them, running down the length of her spine. I would've taken her for more of a dolphin-on-the-ass-cheek kind of gal. Maybe a butterfly on the hip, or the Chinese symbol for something or other. Instead, these tats are sloppy and unevenly spaced, almost haphazard, and the one right in the center of her back must be brand-new because the skin around it is a puffy, angry red.

“Hey, what's up with the new ink?” I ask her. Looking closer, I can see that they're not actually circles—they're snakes, chasing their own tails.

She frowns, then grabs a shirt out of the dirty pile and yanks it over her head. “Are you going to the party this weekend?”

She's changing the subject, which is kind of weird, but whatever. If she doesn't want to talk about something, it usually has to do with a guy—Charlotte's the reigning champ of bad breakups. All the more reason I should quit rubbing Dylan in her face.

Besides, who doesn't have certain things they don't want to talk about?

“Wouldn't miss it,” I say.