Placebo Junkies Page 5

  He yelps as I kick him under the table and the waiter glares at us again. He seems to be making a point of not clearing our dishes or refilling our water glasses.

  We’re used to it.

  It’s a dinner date. Italian. I’m letting Dylan make up for his disappearing act earlier, and I have to say, he’s doing a fine job of it. His apology was a little vague on details, but that’s okay. Real gentlemen don’t make flimsy excuses—they just make things right. And right we are.

  Besides, I don’t think it’s even possible to stay mad at a guy with an actual, real-life chin cleft. I mean, his eyes freaking twinkle when he reaches over to tuck a piece of hair behind my ear, I swear to god. It’s hilariously unreal.

  Aren’t we so suh-weet you could just puke? Yeah, we’re kissy-face and crostini, a fucking lasagna baked for two—all except for Dylan’s grayscale chemo-sheen and med-alert bracelet, that is. And then there are my hands, shaking so hard I keep rattling the fork against the plate and fumbling my knife, which makes the waiter harrumph behind me and look pointedly at the line of fresh needle tracks marching up my inner arm.

  We probably should have stuck to the hospital cafeteria, but screw it. I’m a sucker for a good plate of pasta.

  “Are you okay?” Dylan reaches over and gently takes my knife and fork, cuts my meat into little bites.

  “Yeah, I’m fine. I’m just starving. Are you going to eat the last piece of bread?” I reach over and grab it before he answers. Medically induced hypoglycemic state equals Very Hungry Audie. My stomach feels like an empty pit, a monster growling for prey.

  I feed the monster. Fill the pit. Have a cookie, I tell the beast. Un biscotto.

  I’m more than fine. I’m happy. Italian with Dylan, and I added a nice chunk to the trip fund today. “This is nice,” I say, making sure my smile doesn’t run away from me and expose the two chipped teeth on the left. Gotta get those fixed one of these days.

  He smiles back at me, but he’s barely touched his food. He moves penne around with his fork, makes figure eights in the pesto sauce. I try not to let him catch me staring at his plate, but now that I’ve noticed, I can’t see anything else. I’m pigging out, shoveling carbs into my face like I haven’t been fed in a week, and he’s just sitting there, poking at the ice in his water glass now, playing with the pepper shaker next. Why isn’t he eating?

  My mind starts to grind with low-blood-sugar angst. Is he upset about something? Is he getting sick again? He hates it when I hover over him about his health, but he does seem a little thinner than usual lately, and with his history …

  Stop, Audie, I tell myself. Don’t go off the cliff. I do that sometimes, I know I do. I get so much as a splinter of a bad thought in my head and it just starts burrowing in, deeper and deeper, until the only thing I can think about is the worst thing ever. I swear, I can go Zero to Catastrophe in seconds flat. I try to keep it to myself most of the time, hysteria not exactly being considered a redeeming quality in girlfriends these days.

  I match Dylan’s chewing pace until my heart stops pounding. Chill the fuck out, I tell my brain cells. Just enjoy the evening.

  “Can we get more bread over here when you have a chance?” Dylan calls out to the waiter, who slow-raises one sullen eyebrow in response.

  Ten minutes later the waiter comes back—the scent of his cigarette break wafting across our table as he tosses down a basket filled with crumbs and mangled crusts. “Never mind,” Dylan laughs. “Can you just get us our check, please?”

  I love that about him, how he doesn’t get worked up over stupid things. How, as far as he’s concerned, the past is truly the past. Dylan never brings up yesterday’s argument. Dylan never loses sleep over last week’s bullshit. The serenity of the almost-dead, he calls it, cancer being the ultimate don’t sweat the small stuff lesson, I guess.

  I, on the other hand, don’t have a terminal illness, so I tear open sweetener packets and spill-spell twat in swirly cursive letters across the table, and then grab every last mint from the bowl on the hostess stand as we walk out.

  I still have my health, so I am permitted to embrace petty grudges and small acts of cheerful revenge.

  “Audie,” Dylan says as he opens the door for me, but he’s kind of laughing, and I can tell he’s glad I did it. I pop a mint into my mouth, then one into his, and then I stand on my tiptoes to kiss him. “God, you’re awful,” he says, and then sweeps me up, off my feet, spinning me around in a bear hug.

  I force myself not to notice the new sharpness of his shoulder blades. I shift my embrace slightly to help me ignore the prominence of his ribs.

  I focus, instead, on how effortlessly he lifts me into the air. I move my hands to less worrisome terrain. His chest. His biceps. His ass.

  “Like what you find?,” he asks, grinning, and then pulls me even closer.

  He’s strong. Solid.

  Nothing to worry about at all.

  You hear that?

  Chapter 10

  So Castillo Finisterre, being the most awesome place on the planet, has this amazing spa. The website lists all sorts of crazy stuff they can slather you in, rub you with, and strip you of. I’m talking an entire catalogue of muds, oils, lotions, and potions, and I don’t even know what else—tantric lava rocks and wax infused with emerald dust and the blood of virgins, probably. Serious rich-person voodoo shit. I’m not describing it well—I don’t exactly speak fluent spa—but the bottom line is that they appear to be pretty damn proficient at turning you into something poreless, hairless, and tension-free. A pampered, wild-verbena-scented invertebrate. Again, that might not sound so appealing—there’s a reason no one’s hiring me to write advertising copy for luxury resorts. But believe me when I say that I mean this all in the best possible way. It’s like platinum-card witchcraft or something—you look at the website and you want to be slathered in their moon-harvested Arctic lake mud; all of a sudden you need one of their goddamn green-tea and Jurassic-algae wraps before your parched and unexfoliated flesh shrivels up and suffocates you in a permanent skin sarcophagus.

  Anyway, one of the pictures shows a couple getting a side-by-side massage. They’re lying on their stomachs on tables a few inches apart in a room with floor-to-ceiling windows showing the end-of-the-world views the place is famous for, all ice and water and crisp utopian nothingness. They’re stripped naked to the waist as they’re being tended to by dark-haired women in pristine white uniforms, and their heads are turned so they’re facing each other, staring into one another’s eyes with expressions so blissed-out and tenderized that they almost look drugged.

  Here, this morning, Charlotte and I are also half naked and lying side by side on tables, but other than that, everything else is pretty much the exact opposite of the image from the website.

  We’re lying on our backs, for starters, and unlike the blissfully invertebrate spa couple, we’re undressed from the waist down. The stirrups are cold against my ankles, my own fault for not keeping my socks on, and instead of ocean-kissed sunlight prism-ing in through bay windows, the fluorescent lights flickering overhead are so bright they’re making my eyes water.

  Not that I’m complaining, since today’s first gig is an easy one: medical modeling. We’re pretend patients for doctors and nurses in training. If I had a business card, it would read: Because sometimes a cadaver just won’t do. Occasionally it’s fun—you get to follow a script, moaning and weeping about fictitious symptoms until the flustered students come up with the right diagnosis. I am particularly good at feigning migraines—I can even work myself up to a fluttering little eye tic on command.

  For today’s assignment we’re little more than spread-eagled mannequins, though—unspeaking orifices (orifii?) for rent—and right now six medical students are staring wide-eyed at my cervix. Today’s class: Gynecological Exams for Dummies.

  It’s a welcome breather, actually, since the schedule Cha
rlotte created has otherwise been skewing heavily toward the testing of ingestibles and injectables, some of which are doing quite a number on my digestive system.

  I said yes to the plan. Of course I did. We all knew I would, right?

  Dylan’s ribs clinched the deal. That, and seeing him round a corner in the hospital at a time of day when he should have been in AP Chemistry. He was with his mom and I didn’t want to make a scene, so I ducked into a restroom and locked myself in a stall until I was sure they were long gone. While I was in there, I tallied up the clues: long periods of not returning calls, conflicting stories about his whereabouts, an ever-changing patchwork of bruises shifting across his body.

  Dylan’s sick again.

  It seems sort of obvious now, so maybe some part of me didn’t want to know.

  But now I do know. I know, because he would’ve told me if it was no big deal. He would’ve said something if it was just a routine checkup. We spoke on the phone for twenty minutes that morning, and he didn’t say a word about coming to the hospital.

  I’m not going to confront him about it; he’ll tell me when he’s ready. But now I know that time is running out faster than I realized, and that Castillo Finisterre is rapidly becoming a Now or Never.

  I choose Now.

  So Charlotte and I are officially co-conspirators. She runs the show, really—I’ve taken a subordinate role. I sign my name to whatever papers I’m handed, do as I’m told, and then hold out my hand for payment. We’re milking the system, doubling down, raising the stakes, going all or nothing. However you want to describe it, we’re doing it. We’re going to squeeze every possible cent out of the human-subject testing system, which of course is also to say that we’re going to squeeze every possible cent out of our own flesh.

  We’re almost a week in, and things are going surprisingly well … with exceptions, of course.

  The female students who gather round us this morning are matter-of-fact. Two of the three men look terrified. Like, full-blown, ready-to-bolt-from-the-room terrified. They’re fidgety, plucking at their latex gloves, and I’m fairly certain they would rather do anything right now, anything at all, than stick their fingers in my vagina, but it’s part of the med school curriculum, so they have no choice in the matter. Welcome to my pelvis, boys! Another winning slogan.

  It’s the third man, if you can call a skinny, oily-faced twenty-three-year-old medical student a man, who’s getting to me. He’s standing there, arms crossed high on his chest, upper lip curled in disgust, looking for all the world like he’s being asked to dive into an open sewer. His narrowed eyes stare at my crotch like it’s the enemy, and I can tell he isn’t hearing a word the instructor says, not even pretending to listen to how to drape the patient in such a way to preserve dignity, or how to communicate the steps of the process to the patient to minimize surprise and discomfort. My body is horrific to him, this scowling MD-to-be, and I’m not surprised when he positions himself to be the last in the group to take his turn, like he’s hoping to be saved by the bell from performing this loathsome task.

  The lecturer finishes up and tells the students to split up between the two “patients.” I brace myself and let my thoughts start drifting up into the buzzing fluorescent lights. This ain’t my first time to this particular rodeo, and you’d be surprised at just how many ways a nervous student can fuck up a Pap smear.

  My third exam is almost finished when young Dr. Misogyny finally takes his place on the stool at the end of Charlotte’s table. I’m selfishly relieved that it’s not me. Charlotte and I turn and give each other a look—she obviously caught a whiff of his sadistic asshole vibe, too—and for a second, lying side by side and staring into one another’s eyes like that, we actually do look a little like the couple in the spa picture. But then the student picks up the speculum and gets started without so much as a single word of warning. Charlotte winces, hissing her discomfort, and the instructor snaps at the guy, which only makes him look more angry and disgusted than before.

  I notice two of the female students watching him with razor-sharp eyes. They don’t like him, either.

  “You’re going to have to get in closer. You need to visualize the anatomy,” the instructor warns him again. Junior-doctor Dickface makes a sour face, then scoots his stool forward between Charlotte’s knees, and I can practically feel him twisting the metal instrument as he leans closer to what he apparently thinks of as her gaping hellhole.

  Charlotte’s eyes go wide, then narrow, and I’m pretty sure she’s about to kick him in his shitty, smug face, and who could blame her, but then she smiles and lies back, suspiciously relaxed considering what’s being done to her.

  Now, I happen to know that Charlotte is on day four of a weight-loss testing protocol she signed up for long before we teamed up. It’s working—she can’t stop crowing about the pounds melting off—but the side effects aren’t pleasant. Oily flatulence. Abdominal discomfort. She doesn’t care—Charlotte’s willing to suffer for beauty. But now it appears that someone else is going to suffer along with her.

  Everyone in the room hears it.

  It’s a loud, bitonal triumph. A jaw-dropping, gassy explosion that sounds as if a hole is being ripped through time and space—a righteous blast if ever there was one. The student leaps back so fast he bumps against a metal tray table, falling over and knocking sterile instruments to the floor with a clatter. His face is purple and contorted, and no one in the room can keep a straight face except Charlotte, who looks positively angelic. And very relaxed.

  “Damn it!” the student yells out from the floor.

  The other students are howling. The instructor is trying not to laugh, but she‘s not hiding it very well, and you can tell that even she knows what a jackass the guy is.

  One of the female students takes a few steps over to Charlotte’s table and pulls the paper blanket over her legs, covering her up. “Nicely done,” I hear her say to Charlotte in a low voice. “And thank you on behalf of all womankind, since that’ll hopefully keep him away from obstetrics forever.”

  “My pleasure,” says Charlotte. She stays reclined on the table until the class filters out. Dickface never looks back.

  She checks her watch once everyone is gone. “Speaking of staying away from obstetrics, wanna go pee in a cup next?”

  I nod, so we get dressed and head down the hall to the contraceptive study, still snickering about Charlotte’s vigilante fart. The research office is already crowded (who doesn’t want free birth control?), so we join the line for the single-stall restroom. One by one, brimming specimen cups in hand, women prove their un-pregnancies, making the research sponsors very, very happy. Empty-bladdered study participants filter out of the office with smiles on their faces, thrilled to be twenty-five dollars richer for doing what they were going to do anyway. Win-win. It almost goes to your head a bit, when the money is this easy. Like, you’re so damn valuable that even your piss is worth something to someone. Almost makes you start believing crazy things.

  The line moves fast and I go first. I flick the lock on the stall door, do my thing and step out, moving slowly because I’d filled my cup a little higher than I’d meant to and I don’t want to spill piss on my shoes. I’m holding the stall door open with my elbow, focusing on my too-full cup and thinking that I should probably be drinking more water since my pee is kind of a funky orangish color and I read somewhere that that’s a sign of dehydration. “Your turn,” I say to Charlotte after a second, starting to get impatient.

  “Charlotte?” I look up at the same time as I let the stall door slam shut, and a few drops of pee slosh over the edge of the cup and splash on the floor between us. Charlotte doesn’t notice, though, because she’s gone.

  I don’t mean physically gone, since she’s still standing there, right in front of me, but there’s no other way to describe it. Her face is slack and disturbingly expressionless, and her eyes have a flat, unfocuse
d quality as she stares, unblinking, at nothing in particular. It’s like someone somehow sucked the Charlotte out of Charlotte.

  “Hey, are you okay?” I poke her shoulder with my free hand, kind of hard, actually, since I’m pretty sure she’s just fucking with me—it’s totally something she would do. I’m expecting her to snap out of it with a gotcha grin on her face, but she doesn’t even seem to hear me, and she just keeps standing there, staring straight ahead.

  The next person in line, a girl in a Hooters uniform, shoves between us and into the stall, already wrestling down those weird suntan-colored tights they wear under their butt-hugger shorts. “Sorry,” she calls out as she slams the door shut. “But if you’re not gonna go, I will. I gotta pee like a racehorse—I’ve been holding it for way too long.”

  I step to the side to let her through, and when I look back, Charlotte is coming around, squinting at me like I’m the one acting weird. “I thought they weren’t allowed to wear their uniforms outside of work,” she mumbles in a strange, spit-strangled voice. Her head is tilted to the right, and she rocks slowly on her feet a few times, almost like she’s sleepwalking.

  I’m relieved to hear her say anything at all—there was something seriously messed up about that there/not there look on her face. “Let’s go home,” I say, ignoring the stinkeye I get from the next person in line as I drop my full cup of pee in the trash can. “There goes twenty-five bucks worth of liquid gold. You owe me,” I say, hoping to get some sort of response out of her, but Charlotte is silent and passive as I lead her out of the lab.

  Chapter 11

  It takes a few minutes, but once Charlotte snaps out of whatever was wrong with her, she does it so abruptly that I start to think she really was just fucking with me back there. We’re not even out of the building when it’s like someone plugged her back in, and she goes from foot-dragging zombie chick to Energizer bunny on speed. By the time we’re outside, she’s rambling on about how hungry she is and what she wants for lunch, babbling out words so fast I can barely understand what she’s saying.