The Replacement Read online

  I didn’t have my notebook, so I started going through my pockets, looking for ticket stubs, gum wrappers, receipts. Finally, I found a piece of a band flier and wrote on the back, Can I walk you home?

  When Tate got to my seat, I held out the note, but she didn’t look at it. She turned the quiz facedown on my desk and went to keep moving down the row.

  I caught her wrist. This wasn’t something I’d planned ahead of time, and it took me by surprise. Her skin was cool and her bones felt small in my hand.

  For a second, we stayed like that, me holding her by the wrist and her letting me. Then she jerked back like I was contagious.

  She handed back the rest of the quizzes and took her seat without looking at Mrs. Brummel or at anyone else. I watched her, but she didn’t raise her head or glance around.

  We spent the class period going through the answers to the quiz and discussing each one in mind-numbing detail. I flipped through my textbook, looking for interesting pictures or maybe some magic solution to all my problems.

  I was skimming the Romantics section when I turned the page to a photo of a painted jar. The people on the jar were all in profile. They danced and capered and sprawled around playing little flutes. They reminded me of the after party in the House of Mayhem, all celebration and awkward, spooky grace.

  On the opposite page, there was a poem. It described how beauty and truth mattered more than anything else. They were the same thing.

  But it didn’t matter how pretty you painted the world. The fact was, my friends didn’t know me, Tate didn’t want me, and the truth was a really ugly thing.

  I closed the book and stared at the clock, willing it to move faster.

  In front of me, Alice and Jenna were discussing the Halloween party out at the lake and whether there’d be a bonfire this year or if the rain would mean they’d have to settle for little campfires in the barbecue pits under the picnic shelters. I watched them because they were both pretty and it was kind of nice to have something normal to distract me from my life.

  Alice was wearing another installment in her wide selection of low-cut shirts, and I was enjoying tormenting myself a little, which Roswell would say is a very masochistic attitude. Also, self-indulgent, but her hair was honey brown and shiny, and thinking about Tate made me feel like an idiot.

  Alice turned and caught me watching them. She gave me a bored look. “Are you going to the party, Mackie?” Her eyebrows were raised, but her lids were half lowered, like looking at me was making her tired.

  On another day—any other day—I would have taken the question for what it was. Her version of being better than me, of writing me off and making me feel inferior. But things had been massively screwed up lately. They’d been downright obnoxious, and I just smiled, raising my eyebrows, leaning forward like I’d seen Roswell do a million times. “Why? Did you want to go with me?”

  Alice opened her mouth and blinked. She closed her mouth, and I was surprised and kind of gratified to see that she was blushing. Beyond her, Tate was making dutiful notes on her quiz. I thought I saw her shoulders tighten but wasn’t sure.

  Alice gaped at me and then recovered. “Are you asking me to go with you?”

  Her voice was playful, challenging, and I kept smiling, liking how her mouth looked soft and shiny. “Well, that depends on whether or not you’re saying yes.”

  “Yes,” she said, biting her lip, giving me a conspiratorial smile.

  Behind her, Tate sat stubbornly at her desk, staring down at her quiz like the answers mattered.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  THE LAKE

  It wasn’t a date. Or at least, it made things easier to keep telling myself that.

  It wasn’t a date because I was meeting Alice there. But it was something, because I’d made actual plans to meet her, like normal people go to parties and make plans with girls.

  Roswell was still intent on hooking up with Stephanie, but the prospect didn’t seem to cause him much anxiety. When I asked how I should proceed with Alice, he just shrugged and said, “Well, you could start by having a conversation.”

  After dinner, I went over to his house. His mom let me in with her hair up in some kind of fancy braid. She was in the middle of fastening the clasp on her necklace and gave me a smile. “He’s in his room, getting all dolled up for his fans. Do you think you can prevail on him to drive responsibly?”

  “I can try. I don’t know how much influence I have.”

  That made her laugh, and when she did, she looked like him. Her eyes were the same shape and the same deep, frosty blue. She adjusted her grip on the necklace and gave me a one-armed hug. “Don’t sell yourself short, buster. He listens to you.”

  Roswell was upstairs, trying to attach his enamel fangs. He’d put in a little more effort now that it was actually Halloween, and his hair was slicked back in a weird-looking pompadour.

  I sat at his desk, which was covered with the pieces of his latest clock project, and watched him fumble with the tooth adhesive, squirting it on his fingers and then wiping it off on his jeans.

  After he’d positioned the fangs to his satisfaction, he gave me a disapproving look. “What did you say to my mom to make her giggle like a schoolgirl?”

  “Nothing untoward. Why does she always seem to think you drive like we’re holding up a bank?”

  Roswell grinned and rolled his eyes. “Because that’s what teenagers do, right? They also carve swastikas into their arms, steal prescription drugs from old people, and freebase cocaine. I need to institute a policy where she stops watching 60 Minutes and pretty much all public service announcements.”

  I studied the half-built clock. The housing was an old rotary phone, the dial replaced with mismatched foreign coins for the numbers. His desktop was covered with pins and little cogs.

  I picked up a brass coin with a hole through the center and studied it. “She never says any of those things to me.”

  “That’s because she thinks you’re the good one.”

  “I am the good one. Where’d you get all these clock parts?”

  “Where do you think? The twins gave them to me. Swear to God, every time Danny fixes something, he winds up with a whole shit ton of ‘extra’ pieces.” Roswell folded his arms and looked me up and down. “No costume?”

  I shook my head. “Since when do I need a costume?”

  He grinned and thumped me on the shoulder. “Since you stopped looking all weird and cracked out on your own and started looking halfway normal.”

  I raised my eyebrows and stood up. “Hey, maybe this is my costume.”

  The lake was dry and had been since before I was born.

  It sat on the outskirts of town, smelly and empty, a big muddy gouge. The shore was jagged with rocks, but out in the center, it had turned swampy as it filled with rainwater. The area around the lake bed had been a park, with picnic shelters and wooden docks for boating and fishing, but the recreational activities had all been abandoned when the lake dried up. People still went jogging on the paths and walked their dogs through the brush, but mostly, it was prime for minor drug deals and high school parties.

  At the south end of the lake, we pulled up to a dilapidated cluster of picnic shelters. The fire pits were all lit, burning like lighthouse beacons. They flickered in a damp breeze as we turned into the gravel parking lot. The path to the shelters was choked with weeds and littered with fast-food wrappers and beer cans. The rain was the same thin drizzle that it had been for weeks.

  Alice, Jenna, and Stephanie were huddled together in the middle shelter, wearing winter coats over their costumes. Alice was holding a beer can with both hands, standing close to the fire and hunching her shoulders against the cold.

  Roswell and I came up to them and when Alice saw me, she smiled and waved me over to stand with her. Roswell tossed me a beer and I popped it open. It was disorienting to be standing at the center of things instead of watching from the periphery.

  Jeremy Sayers came up next to me. He was
dressed as a pirate, with a three-cornered hat and an eye patch. “Doyle,” he said, clapping me hard on the shoulder. “You weird pansy fuck!”

  It was hard to tell if the designation was supposed to be a compliment. He was smiling, so I took a shot at normalcy and smiled back.

  Tyson Knoll squeezed in on the other side of our circle. Also a pirate. “Dude, did you tell him about the blood?”

  I tried hard not to sound apprehensive. “What blood?”

  “On your locker! Did you freaking love that or what?”

  I took a drink of my beer and nodded, not sure what he expected me to say. I would have used a different word. Not love. Definitely not love.

  Jeremy swung an arm over my shoulders. He smelled like Axe deodorant and hard alcohol. “Remember how Mason cut his lip in PE last year and you hit the court like a total pussy? Do you remember that? It was so freaking funny!”

  I stood next to Alice, trying to look like the story was not completely embarrassing, but she just smiled up at me. I was surprised at how paranoid the years of keeping a low profile had made me. How every unusual occurrence was a threat and every encounter was suspicious. I’d spent so long protecting myself from everything that I didn’t even know how to tell the difference between what was dangerous and what wasn’t.

  They were loud and unpredictable, and before, I’d always watched them with the same fascination I had when I watched Roswell. The way some of the less-popular girls were watching Jenna and Alice now, not resentful or jealous exactly, but like they just wanted to be them. Cammie Winslow stood by the railing, one shelter over. She was dressed in an oversized clown costume, looking lost and hopeful, like she would have given anything to be standing with the rest of us, laughing and drinking cheap beer with people like Jeremy and Tyson. And yeah, they were basically idiots, but I’d never known what it felt like to be included before and now, they were acting like I belonged there.

  The air was damp and chilly, and the heat from the fire hit my face in a dry rush even though I stayed farther back than the others. The barbecue enclosure and the grate were steel, burned black and caked with soot, but a fog of iron still drifted out through the smoke. I was steady, though, and happy. Everything felt good, like this was how it should be.

  Out in the gravel parking lot, some of the guys from the wrestling team were trying to get a fire started so they could burn a straw-and-burlap scarecrow of the Dirt Witch, but the rain was too heavy and mostly they just got a lot of smoke. It drifted toward us in dark billows and smelled unpleasantly like lighter fluid.

  Alice moved closer, reaching for my hand. Hers was smaller and broader than Tate’s, with smooth, soft palms and electric-blue nail polish. Her grip was firm and I thought of the Morrigan suddenly, how she always wanted to stand close or be touching me. Like a little kid, always reaching to make sure I was close by.

  Alice was beautiful, though, nothing like the monsters in the House of Mayhem. Her beauty wasn’t conditional the way Janice and Carlina’s was, but stable and constant, catching people’s attention, making them want her to notice them, even for a second.

  We stood with the guys from wrestling and football while they told stories about dickish things they’d done to other people—in the name of fun, of course—and passed a bottle of Maker’s Mark around the circle. Roswell and Stephanie had gone off to talk, which probably meant to make out. I was on my own, navigating the world of normal people, but it was easier than I’d ever thought it could be. I wasn’t failing at it.

  I took the bottle from Alice, and when I drank, the heat felt good, burning all the way down. I thought I tasted a metallic whisper of her tongue stud but couldn’t be sure.

  Alice was looking up at me. Her eyes were deep, radiant blue and she was smiling that sweet smile, like everything was and would always be good. I put my hands on her shoulders and I kissed her.

  The pressure of her mouth was warm. She tasted like Maker’s and something indefinable, followed by a breath of surgical steel, making my head spin.

  I kissed her again, moving closer. The fire was hot and the rain made soft pattering sounds out on the gravel parking lot. Her hands moved over my back and I was very aware of her body against mine and then her tongue, venomous with the barbell, moving over my bottom lip, sliding into my mouth.

  Then pain.

  For a second, I didn’t know where I was or where the hurt was coming from. It was like a bright, scorching light. It glared down on me and there was nothing else in the whole world.

  Alice pressed against me. She had her hand on the back of my neck, pulling me close to her mouth and her cold, excruciating kiss, holding me there. Then I jerked free and staggered back.

  I stumbled away from the circle of firelight, bracing my hands on the wooden rail that ran around the outside of the picnic shelter, and tried to think. The pain was immense, like nothing I’d ever felt. I’d never known there could be so many different ways to hurt.

  My arms were numb and heavy. I fumbled in my coat for the glass bottle, prying the cork out, slopping it all over my hands in the process.

  I drank a huge swallow of the analeptic and pressed my forehead against the rail, curling in on myself as nothing happened, nothing happened, nothing fucking happened. Then something did, but it wasn’t anything good. It came in a hard rush that wasn’t fixed or better, and I hung over the wooden railing, retching. It was grim and miserable and went on forever.

  Alice was saying my name, but I couldn’t answer. The party seemed to be happening a million miles away from me, in another country. Another universe. There was just the ground and the railing and nothing else.

  “He’s tanked,” Roswell said from somewhere above me, and then I felt his hand between my shoulders. “Shit, he’s completely gone.”

  “Should we get him some water?” said Alice, and I kept my eyes closed, leaning on the railing as the cold got worse and then the shaking started.

  Roswell stood next to me with his hand on the back of my neck. “It’s cool, don’t worry about it. I’ll make sure he gets home okay.”

  “Yeah, that might be a good idea,” Alice said, and the tone of her voice was flat and far away. “Jesus, that’s nasty.”

  I was aware of certain things, that Roswell was holding me up, making me walk to his car. Stopping and letting me lean down so I could heave into the gravel. He dropped me into the passenger seat, cranked the window down, and closed the door.

  Then he got in and started the car, glancing over at me.

  “What’s wrong?” His voice was loud, so sharp that he sounded angry.

  I knew I should be careful, keep the secret, but I was too far gone to talk around it. My chest was working in huge spasms and I could barely breathe. “I kissed her.”

  “And then you went into anaphylactic shock?”

  I closed my eyes and let the rain patter against my face through the open window. “She has her tongue pierced.”

  Roswell didn’t say anything else. He jerked the car into reverse and swung out of the parking lot, then turned down the bumpy stretch of dirt that led out to the main road. I slumped in the passenger seat, resting my head against the door and trying not to puke in his car.

  Somewhere in the sickness and the pain, I remembered Luther’s voice. It echoed in my head, that whispered declaration, You’re dying. Before the ruinous kiss, the night had been almost normal, but it couldn’t last. There was no normal. Not for people like me.

  Out on the paved road, Roswell started asking questions again, sounding more agitated than ever. He was talking too fast, making it hard to follow the line of conversation. “Okay, what should I be doing? If you need to pull over, just tell me. Should I find you some water? Should I call Emma, tell her I’m bringing you home right now and you look like hell?”

  “Take me to the dead end at Orchard.”

  Roswell took a deep breath, sounding rigidly calm. “Okay, you’re slurring. Say that again, because it sounded like you just asked for something comple
tely insane.”

  “You have to take me to the end of Orchard. I have to go to the slag heap.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  HORRIBLE LITTLE WORLD

  Roswell parked at the top of the ravine and opened his door. In the glare of the dome light, I saw his face, hollowed by shadows and so rigid and watchful I barely recognized him.

  I expected an argument, but he just pulled me out of the car and steered me down the path to the bridge. I reflected dully that he was a good friend, if you could call leaving someone half conscious alone on a bridge being a good friend.

  As soon as I reached the bottom of the ravine, I felt desperately relieved. And much, much worse. I knelt in the mud, pressing my forehead against the wet slag, whispering for Carlina, Janice, anyone. When the door materialized out of the gravel, I slumped against it and fell inside.

  The way down was choppy and disconnected, a series of slides that froze for a second and then switched over. Then I was back in the cavernous lobby, in the House of Mayhem, and I had the deep hopeless feeling that I was never going to get away from their horrible little world. My world. I had no place else to go.

  The Morrigan was on the floor by the reception desk, running a little tin train back and forth across the stone. She glanced up when I stumbled into the lobby, and I knew then, from the look on her face, that it was bad. She jumped up, kicking the train out of her way, and came tearing across the room to me.

  She grabbed my hand and tugged so hard I almost fell. “Goodness, what happened? Who did this?”

  I shook my head, too far gone to explain that I was way more at fault than anyone else.

  The Morrigan let me go and ran back to the desk. She opened the top drawer and pulled out a heavy brass bell. She held it over her head, ringing it and shouting, “Janice!” She went to one of the doorways, still clanging the bell, and I had a half-formed thought that I might black out from the noise. “Janice! Bring the exigency serum and the needle.”