We Won't Feel a Thing (4 page)

“
Listen
to the truths buried deep in your darkest places.” Gary Gannon rubbed his hands together. “Do you feel them? Feel them stirring in the dirt, scrabbling for the sunlight?”

Rachel and Riley felt them.

“Give them permission now. Tell them to climb!” Gannon leaped off the stage and began to stalk the aisles. “
Feel
them in your throat.
Feel
those beautiful beasts of truth clawing higher, higher,
higher
.”

The drums rumbled low and steady. Rachel and Riley folded their arms. The tingle in their chests deepened into angry buzzing. In the other cow pens, men and women in ponchos were bending down in a trance, dipping into mud, bringing up dripping handfuls.

“Higher…higher…higher!”

Gary Gannon clapped his hands, rattled the bars of random pens. The bongos went ballistic. Rachel and Riley began to panic.
Why did we eat four cupcakes?
All around them on the walls, red EXIT signs glared like the eyes of evil things waiting in the dark.

“And now,” shouted Gannon, flinging both arms in the air, “
release them!”

The room went wild.

Chaos was instant and deafening. Mud and secrets splattered everywhere; confessions and complaints made a blender-blur of babble:
You never— You always— I hate when— I hate your—
Three stalls down, Mrs. Woodlawn flung a mudball straight at Mr. Woodlawn’s head.

Rachel and Riley gripped the steel bars of the stall, shut their eyes tight. They begged the secrets burning their tongues.
Stop. Stop.

“YEAAAHHH!” Gary Gannon stomped his feet, whooping like a warlord. “Go! Go!”

“Correlative conjunctions are always used in pairs!”

Riley opened his eyes. “What?” He had to shout over the din.

“Truth. I’m telling the truth!” yelled Rachel.
We’ll say little ones that don’t matter. The big one will go away.
“An isosceles triangle has two equal sides and two equal angles!”

Riley combed through memories of his mother’s lessons. “Galileo!” he said. “Galileo invented the thermometer in 1607.”

“Shakespeare wrote 37 plays.”

“Wolves, swans, and gibbons mate for life.”

“The heart beats a hundred thousand times a day!”

“You’re doing great!” Gannon stalked closer, thrusting a red-tipped arrow high in the air. “Bolder now! Let those beasts
howwwwwwl!”

Rachel covered her ears. “I stole condoms from the drugstore for no reason!”

“I broke my mom’s GO AWAY I’M WRITING mug and I let her blame Dad!”

“I hate books everyone loves.”

“I pee in the shower.”

“I judge people who don’t use Oxford commas.”

“I didn’t know narwhals were real until last year.”

“I—”

Rachel broke off. She looked at him.

“What?” said Riley.

“Drag it up! Drag it out!” Gannon roared.

Keep it down, keep it down.

“Nothing,” she said.

“Whoaaaa, now. Hold up.” Gary Gannon stopped at the end of their aisle, fondling the tip of his arrow. “I’m sensing a real humdinger of entrapped energy right…around…here.
Some
of you are holding back.” He turned down the aisle. “
Some
of you still have that boulder rolled in front of the ol’ cave door.”

Rachel and Riley studied their muddy feet.
Keep walking. Keep walking.
Gannon stopped directly in front of Stall 42. He pointed the arrow at them.

“It’s the two of you, isn’t it?”

They took a step back. His eyes were an eerie bright green, like the eyes of a B-movie predator. He smelled of raw meat and some musky cologne with a name like Swagger.

“We’re telling the truth,” said Rachel.

“You’re telling truths that don’t matter. I can tell.”

“How?”

“You’re not dirty. Just your feet.”

“So?”

“So, friends,” he said, tapping his palm with the arrow, “your energy is bringing the room down.”

Riley looked mortified. Rachel’s eyes glittered with anger. She stepped right up to Gannon and stared him straight in the eye.

“We’re not your friends,” she said, “first of all.”

“No? I’m helping you folks out.” He pointed the arrow at Rachel’s nose. “Seems that’s the definition of friend.”

“We don’t need your help,” said Rachel.

Riley touched her arm. “Rach.”

“We don’t need help, and also, we think you’re a condescending buttwad and your seminar is a fraud, and your cupcakes are disgusting and sinister. You’re lucky there are this many stupid people with sixty-five extra dollars under their mattresses.” Gannon had the nerve to look amused. Rachel snatched the arrow from him and snapped it in two.

Gary Gannon sucked in his lips slowly. Then he released them with a moist
smack
.

“I don’t think I care for you. Nope. Not at all.” He hitched his thumbs in the waistband of his pelt-kilt. “I think you’ve got a lot to learn, little lady.”

Riley whistled. “You shouldn’t call her that.”

“Oh, is that right?” He chuckled, rocking on his heels. “You’re in
my
kingdom now. I do what I like.”

“We’re leaving,” said Rachel.

“Now hold on a second.” He advanced on them, green eyes alight. “You paid your sixty-five dollars, just like everyone else. Or mommy and daddy did, at least. It’s my job to make
damn
sure you folks get your money’s worth.”

Gary Gannon reached out and seized their hands—Riley’s left, Rachel’s right. His eyes bored into them, two hard beams in the soft sprinkler mist.

“Veritas vos liberabit,”
he murmured.

“What are you doing?” Rachel tried to pull away.

“Making sure you get nice and cozy with the truth.” He gripped them harder and shut his eyes.
“Veritas vincet. Raro pura et simplex est veritas. Veritas est pulchritudo. Veritas vos liberabit; primum autem miseri fietis.”
His eyes opened. “Starting, ohhhhhh—let’s see—
now
.”

All the noise around them muted, as if they were underwater. Gary Gannon released them, grinning a terrible grin, and ambled away. Rachel and Riley felt pleasantly unmoored, like they did long ago when Beechwood Lake was still open and they spent summer days drifting in rowboats, telling each other stories.

Riley stepped close to Rachel, his feet squishing in the mud. He reached out and seized her face in both hands. He was tough and hard for a moment, a guy in a movie who cracked his knuckles and fought for what he wanted and would never leave a mosaic unfinished.

“I won’t leave you,” he said. He swung the words like a mace. “I won’t let you leave.”

“Oh,” said Rachel. She saw her own hand unfurling in front of her, reaching out for Riley. She was soft for a moment, a girl in a book who daydreamed of dresses and kisses and doodled her beloved’s name in steamed-up bathroom mirrors.

“Why?” she said.

“Because I’m in love with you,”
said Riley.

Onstage, Gary Gannon blew a flat note on a ram’s-horn bugle. All the sound in the room came jolting back, a blast of shouts and snarls and the smack of mud on ponchos. Rachel and Riley jerked apart, dazed and surrounded by spots of white light, as if a hundred tiny cameras had flashed in their faces.

Rachel blinked at Riley’s poncho.

She whispered, “I love you too.”

Then she shoved him hard, into the mud, and ran for the nearest red EXIT.

Chapter Three

“Oh my god, Riley.
You blockhead.”

Riley found Rachel outside the building, sharp-tongued and poncho-less, stalking around a giant brass ear of corn. She had yanked her black hightops back on but the laces flapped free, threatening to trip her. At a distance of twenty-five feet, a man in white was setting up card tables in front of an ice cream truck in the carefully casual manner of someone pretending not to listen.

“Rach.” Riley pulled off his poncho and fit his steps to hers. His head whirled. Her hand bumped his side and he wanted to grab it, take her, run and run until nothing looked familiar and everything felt possible.

“I’m sorry,” he lied.

“You’re sincerely demented.”

“You said it too.”

“It slipped out!” Rachel raked her fingers through her hair. “You started it.”

“That wasn’t me. The truth cupcakes—”

“DO NOT SAY ‘TRUTH CUPCAKES.’”

“Plus he did something weird! I think Gannon…” Riley peeked over his shoulder. “I think he
cursed
us.”

Rachel gripped the corn statue and thumped her forehead against it. “We need a rewind button,” she muttered into the kernels. “If a merciful higher power existed we’d totally have one. Just a short one. Just two minutes.”

“What were we supposed to do? Keep it a secret forever?”

“Yes!”
She wheeled around, fists clenched. “YES. That is
actually
what you’re supposed to do when you’re in love with exactly, precisely the wrong person. Keep it a secret. FOREVER.”

“I don’t know.” Riley wiggled his bare toes. “I’m kind of relieved.”

“Well, that’s sick.”

“Why?”

“Why?”

“It’s not like we’re related.”

Rachel gave an incredulous laugh, the same one she gave him that time he suggested the past tense of
nosedive
should be
nosedove
.

“You know what? You’re right.” She stepped closer to him, dropped her voice low. “Let’s go make out in the car right now, and then when Anne and Ed are done hurling mud at each other, we’ll sit them down and tell them the good news.”

Riley stared at his toenails. “Don’t.”

“They’ll think we’re so cute! This is just what they wanted when we were nine and they were like ‘hey, meet your new sister,’ right? I’m sure they’ll want a big wedding. How about next June? A backyard barbecue. We’ll invite the whole town!”

“Stop. Rach.”

“The thing is, that’s not even the
worst
problem,” Rachel said to the sky. “I can deal with us being vaguely creepy. But I
cannot
deal with ‘oh hey, surprise, the person you’re secretly in love with totally loves you That Way too,’ because now I’m thinking how can I rearrange my future so we don’t have to say goodbye, and I’m picturing what our plates and sheets and curtains would look like in California, which is bullshit, because there is only one kind of girl I can tolerate being, and it is
not
the girl who Gives It All Up for Love.”

She turned to walk away. His hand shot out fast to stop her. It landed in a place he didn’t plan: the center of her chest, just above her heart. They froze. He’d never touched her there before. He let his hot palm linger, felt her heart thrash against her breastbone, and for a moment he was scandalously proud.
I did that to her.

Then he felt like a blockhead.

“You don’t have to.” He retracted his hand. “You don’t have to give up anything.”

“Don’t say it.”

“I told you I’d go with you.”

“Riley. I will
murder
you if you turn down that internship.”

“Life is overrated.”

“Yeah, well.” She knotted her arms. “So is love.”

A soft chugging sound interrupted, like a very small lawn mower trying to start. Riley turned around. It was the man in white, clearing his throat from behind his card table. His vehicle was not an ice cream truck after all, but a white company van stamped with five silver letters: WAVES.

Rachel took a step back. “Can we help you?”

“Probably not.” The man gestured to two folding chairs, each shaded by a clear umbrella. “But if I may be bold: I think I can help
you
.”

***

Rachel sat, because her legs felt new and useless and she didn’t know what else to do. When Riley took the other chair, she jerked hers two inches away. She crossed her arms tight across her chest. Her brain frothed with all the things she wanted to do: poison Gary Gannon, crank the
I love you
back into her throat, sue Mr. and Mrs. Woodlawn for knowingly exposing them to truth cupcakes. She and Riley would have been fine. They would have gone home, swallowed their feelings, made neat pro and con lists, agreed to part ways and seize their separate dreams like normal friends who didn’t do things like read each other’s minds and invent private kingdoms. Now they were here in front of a stranger in a lab coat, who would probably guilt them into giving blood or donating their corpses to science.

The man in white sized them up and passed them two towels for their dripping hair. He looked like a mannequin brought to life. His face was finely contoured, his groomed brows arched over glassy blue eyes, and his sculpted hair—prematurely silver—might have been unwrapped from a separate box and placed whole on his head. The only thing disorderly about him was his nose, which looked as if it had been broken in three places and repaired at a discount. It was impossible to tell his age.

“I’m surprised. Normally it takes at least—” He checked his watch. “—seven more minutes for the first disgruntled customers to jump ship. You must be smarter than average.”

They toweled their hair in silence. Mrs. Woodlawn had taught them to distrust compliments.

“Forgive me. Introductions.” He extended a hand. “I’m David A. Kerning. And you are?”

“Bob,” said Riley.

“Athena,” said Rachel.

“Ah, the goddess of wisdom and war. And…her mechanic.” David A. Kerning had a restful, just-the-facts voice, like the narrator of a documentary on tide pools. He turned on a tablet computer and tapped some notes. “You both look suitably miserable. How is the good
Doctor
Gannon these days?”

“Not so good,” said Rachel.

“Let me guess: aggressively spray-tanned, grandiose beard, a twinkle of cubic zirconium in the left ear.”

“And a ponytail,” muttered Riley.

“Oh, he’s had that since high school.”

“You’ve known him since high school?” said Rachel.

“Longer.” David folded his smooth hairless hands. “We were neighbors as children. My earliest memory is that fat-headed weasel pedaling his Big Wheel through my favorite anthill. Then when we were eighteen he stole my girlfriend.” He gave them a serene smile. “That’s her in there with him. Lotte? Perpetuating bogus pop psychology. Getting pelted with mud.”