Elijah swallowed. “I—” He thought back. Hard. “I guess I did trip on my way out the door. Is he okay?”
“Hand me your bowl.”
Elijah didn’t understand this command, but he reached for his bowl and placed it in Shane’s outstretched hand.
Shane dumped the milk and cereal on Rob’s bloody head.
Rob sat up, spluttering. “What the hell!”
Elijah rushed over. “My God, Rob, are you okay?” he asked the skull-like head oozing red blood and white milk. “Who beat you up? Do you want us to call the police?”
“I am the police!” Rob pulled himself up to standing, bracing himself on Shane. Then he poked his finger in Elijah’s face. “You get the idea to put a hand on Holly Starr again,” he spat through the milk, “you remember I found her first.”
“You found her first?” Elijah asked indignantly. “Like she’s a . . .” He meant to make Rob hear how disrespectful he sounded. But Elijah was so groggy, he couldn’t think of the other end of this simile, an object that people commonly found. Then he remembered, “But you didn’t find her first. I asked her out in ninth grade.”
Rob folded his bloody arms. “Did you do her?”
“No, I— What kind of question is that?”
Rob shoved Elijah.
“Hey,” said Shane.
“Ew,” said Elijah, because Rob had left a milky handprint on his shirt.
“She’s mine,” Rob barked. “She belongs to me. You remember that. Stay the fuck away from her.” He stormed inside and slammed the door. The sharp crack echoed against the quiet houses across the street.
Which was silly—the symbolic finality of that door slam, shutting them out—because Elijah and Shane lived there too, and Elijah had to go inside to get another cereal bowl and a mop. Shane sat at the table and watched Elijah clean up the mess.
Finally Elijah slid into the chair next to Shane. “Some night, huh?” He reached for a second helping of cereal and milk. “Hey, I meant to ask you. Last night at Glitterati, before the shit went down, why didn’t you hit on Kaylee? You’d been talking about her at the table, and I thought you were going to ask her out.”
Shane shook his head slowly. “I wanted to, but then I changed my mind. I wonder why she keeps doing that to me. It’s insulting.”
“Doing what to you? You’re the one who changed your mind.”
“I’m not so sure about that.”
Elijah didn’t get a chance to ask Shane what he was talking about before Rob burst out of the house again. He lugged two suitcases down the sidewalk between the decorative cacti, toward his sheriff’s car parked at the curb.
“Rob!” Elijah called. “What are you doing? Are you moving out?”
Rob shouted without turning around, “No, I’m spending a week at band camp.”
“Should we help him pack?” Shane asked. His eyes were inscrutable behind his vintage Wayfarers, but Elijah could tell from his dry tone that Shane loved this scene.
After everything Rob had said and thought about Holly in the past few days, Elijah felt the same way. “No, let’s not.”
Even without help, it didn’t take Rob long. His bedroom furniture belonged to the house, and in a week he hadn’t accumulated much else. He glared at Elijah and Shane one last time, roared off in his sheriff’s car with the siren disturbing the peace just for spite, and was gone.
“Fucker,” Shane declared, walking inside.
The excitement over, Elijah settled back into his breakfast and his own blankness. A few minutes later, or perhaps a few hours, Shane reemerged from the house, carrying his guitar case. “I’m going to class and then work. Will you be okay here by yourself?”
“Sure.” Elijah took a sip of coffee, wishing the caffeine would work. Boy, the Mentafixol label wasn’t kidding when it said DO NOT MIX WITH ALCOHOL.
Shane stood directly in front of him and bent down to look into his eyes. “Will you call me if you’re not?”
“Sure.”
“Are you hearing me, Elijah?” Shane rapped with his knuckles on Elijah’s forehead. Elijah’s hair padded the knocking, but it still almost hurt. “Call me if anybody you don’t know comes to the house,” Shane said. “Don’t go anywhere with a stranger.”
“Okay.” This was easy to agree to. Strangers didn’t approach Elijah out of the blue and try to get friendly.
Except Shane, a year ago.
And Rob, a week ago.
Shane must have left then. Elijah got lost in his own thoughts, or lack of them, and didn’t notice Shane’s 1963 Pontiac Catalina leave the driveway. But he watched it pull into the driveway and park again. Shane opened the door in a pool of light from the streetlamp. It was night.
Carrying his guitar case, Shane walked up to Elijah on the porch. “You’re sitting in exactly the same spot and exactly the same position as when I left this morning. Did you go to work?”
“I must have.” Elijah sipped his coffee. “My mom would have called to check on me if I didn’t go in.” At some level he knew he should be concerned about losing a day of memory, but it was like a shield protected his brain, preventing alarm from punching through and taking hold.
“Your mom’s out of town on vacation,” Shane pointed out. “She won’t be back until Monday.”
“Oh, yeah,” Elijah said, remembering. He snapped his fingers as more came back to him. That afternoon Holly had come up to him in the employee break room in a sparkling red bikini with panels of pink transparent fabric floating around her long legs. She’d looked like a genie. She’d pressed a folded note into his palm as she swept past the lockers and disappeared into the hall.
In the note she asked whether he was okay after their adventure last night. She told him she’d passed out after a few sips of beer in high school, so she understood what had happened. She apologized for Rob trying to kill him. She’d gone out with Rob only that once, and it was over. She hoped Elijah wouldn’t have any more trouble out of him because of her. And Elijah should burn this note.
Actually, now that he thought about it, the note had been very sweet, almost as if Holly liked him. He should ask her out. Except he might get his mom fired. He’d definitely get himself fired. Or perhaps the threat from Holly’s dad and Mr. Diamond no longer applied seven years later?
“Elijah!” Shane tapped on the table. “Did it ever occur to you to try weaning yourself off that pill?”
The tapping created ripples in Elijah’s coffee cup. He watched them, mesmerized, then realized Shane had asked him something. “What?”
“I mean, you may not feel it day to day, but that’s a serious elephant tranquilizer of a drug, if you’re not supposed to drive while you’re taking it, and it makes you pass out cold after one beer and walk around like the living dead the next day.”
Elijah had a hard time following what Shane said. “What?”
“In the past few days, when you were off that drug, you seemed jumpy and anxious because you wanted to get back on the drug and you couldn’t find any. But you did not seem crazy.”
Elijah opened his mouth to protest, then closed it again. For years he’d kept his delusion that he could read minds a secret. He wasn’t about to spill it now.
Shane set his guitar case down, then touched the top of Elijah’s head. His hand bounced along Elijah’s waves and slid downward. He squeezed Elijah’s shoulder, as if comforting a younger relative, a child. He picked up his guitar and turned for the door.
“Don’t tell me that I’m not crazy,” Elijah whispered.
“I’m telling you that you don’t need to be medicated,” Shane shot back. “Oh, never mind. Do you want me to stay in tonight? I have a hot date with a UNLV cheerleader, but I can cancel.”
“No thanks,” Elijah managed.
As Shane opened and closed the door, light from the house shot across the lawn, then shrank to a sliver and disappeared, leaving Elijah in the blackness.
When he tried to recall it later, he wasn’t sure what he did for th
e rest of the night. After serving up a pot roast for Shane, he probably returned outside to stare at the night for an hour more, then moved inside to read for a while, then fell asleep.
But when he woke the following morning, the grogginess was gone. Thirty-six hours had passed since he’d taken Holly’s pill. He was twelve hours past his usual dose, and he felt it. Shane in the room next door lay in bed, wondering whether Kaylee liked sushi. Elijah could read Shane’s mind again. Elijah was crazy. He remembered the crazy things he’d said to Holly at Glitterati, and the crazy thought that somebody in the club had the power of mind control. He remembered that Rob had moved out, that he was possessive of Holly, that he carried a gun.
As the day wore on, Elijah made his rounds and his phone calls. His pills still hadn’t arrived at the casino pharmacy, his mom was still out of town, his doctor was still disconnected, and Elijah knew what he had to do.
8
Sunday night, Holly climbed onto the bus outside the casino, collapsed into a choice window seat, and waited to depart. Her parents had offered, as they did every night, to drop her off at her apartment in their limo, but she’d refused. She liked to get away from them sometimes, and Kaylee too, just to be independent for twenty minutes. She looked forward to the bus and her nightly routine of watching the enormous buildings and flashing signs and scantily clad workers and tourists on the Strip gradually calm into normal people, modest houses, well-kept cactus lawns like in any desert city—just as most Vegas performers hit the casino stages in their twenties but settled down to calmer jobs and families and marriages as they got older.
Holly’s life wouldn’t follow this pattern. She dwelled on this sad fact tonight because, as Elijah had predicted, she hadn’t been able to refill her prescription for Mentafixol. She was twenty-four hours off the drug now and feeling the first sparkles of insanity coming back. She had every confidence the casino pharmacy would receive a shipment of the drug tomorrow. But the pesky sparkles needled her about her disability.
She’d wondered all weekend how Elijah was doing. After missing his Friday and Saturday doses, he’d be feeling mighty funny right about now. If his delusions were like hers, he would be barely conscious of objects in his mind and suddenly, out the corner of his eye, they would move.
Uh-oh. Here was a more serious hallucination. Elijah was on her bus. She blinked several times. No, it really was Elijah, bounding down the aisle with his eyes on her. As the motor’s idling monotone grumbled into a roar and the bus pulled away from the casino, he swung around one of the poles in the center of the aisle like a seasoned bus rider, or a stripper, and slid into the seat next to her.
“Elijah!” she exclaimed.
“Hey, Holly,” he said smoothly, not the least bit surprised, as if he’d known he would find her here.
“What are you doing on my bus?”
“Oh, is this your bus?” he asked. “Like, your personal bus.” He cut his green eyes sideways at her. A few days’ growth of stubble had turned him into a movie hero two-thirds of the way through an action flick, dangerous and haggard. He could make anything seem sexy, even waiting for his crazy pills to come in at the pharmacy.
“I’m a diva,” she said. “I like to be chauffeured.” With one hand she gestured gracefully to the entirety of the bus as if it were her own magic carpet. “But that would be cool, if it were my personal bus that I didn’t have to share with other riders, and it would take me wherever I wanted to go. Actually I wouldn’t need such a big bus for this. It could be smaller and more environmentally responsible if it wasn’t built to hold all these other people.” She shot herself in the head with her fingers. “Wait, there is already a name for this incredible invention of my imagination and it is called a car.”
“Which neither of us can drive,” Elijah said, “because we’re on—”
“Mentafixol,” they said simultaneously, lowering their voices.
He chuckled. “I try to get rides from Shane or Rob. I won’t be bumming rides from Rob in the future.”
She shifted in her seat and let her brown curls fall forward to graze his shoulder as she said, “I’m so sorry about everything that happened Thursday night.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Elijah said, sounding sincere. “I’m the one who’s sorry. I dragged you to Glitterati. I—”
He was on the cusp of a mea culpa about that kiss. Watching him, she smiled, ready for anything, even a sudden admission that the kiss had meant something.
He skipped over that part. Running his hand through his wavy hair, he went on, “And I may have said something odd to you while we were there. I was feeling really crazy.” He looked past her out the bus window, as if revisiting that strange episode in his mind. “Rob moved out the next morning, which was for the best. We should have run him off for firing a gun at the ceiling, or for chasing you out the bathroom window. Shane and I treat our women better than that.”
“Do you, now,” Holly mused. He was only kidding, of course, but the macho crack about “our women” turned her on despite herself. She would have loved for Elijah to feel possessive about her like that for real.
But he’d lost interest in her already. He scowled at her right thigh. Poor thing. He was trying his best to carry on intelligent conversation, but he must be feeling awfully mental adolescent dysfunctiony. She would gladly have offered him another Mentafixol if she’d had one left herself.
Suddenly he looked straight into her eyes and burst out, “What were you doing with Rob?”
She sat back in surprise. “I—”
“I could not have been more astounded if he’d walked through the front door of my house with Queen Elizabeth. Or a llama.”
“A llama?” Holly asked. “Thanks a lot.”
“You and Rob aren’t a good match,” Elijah persisted.
“Obviously I agreed with you by the time I jumped out your bathroom window.”
Elijah opened both hands palms-up on his jeans, acceding the point.
“Last week I was walking through the casino a few minutes before my dad’s show,” Holly explained, “headed for the sushi place. Do you like sushi?”
“Love sushi,” Elijah said with gusto.
“I comped them tickets to the show one time, and now they serve me the ends they cut off California rolls whenever I come in. Only seventy-five calories or so. Tides me over until my next helping of edamame.”
Elijah gave her a skeptical look. “You’re counting calories?” His eyes flitted away from Holly’s face, down to her exposed flat tummy, and settled halfway up, on her bespangled boobs. Holly was used to this. Men could never help it. At least he had the decency to look embarrassed as he forced his eyes back up to her face.
“Always.” She may have sat up a bit straighter to poke her breasts out. Men’s lustful looks were rote to her, but with Elijah it felt new and exciting, as if she were still a teenager. “Anyway, I was walking through the casino, thinking how—”
ironic it was that the gamblers she passed undressed her with their eyes, tossing off the wisps of clothes she wore, when in reality she was a twenty-one-year-old virgin
“—I’d been invited to a graduation after-party and sadly didn’t have a boyfriend to go with, when Rob appeared. Just walked up and started talking to me, and he was charming, and smart, and—”
She paused when she noticed Elijah’s expression. He was scowling again, this time not at her thigh but at her, as if he were jealous of Rob. This thought sent a fresh chill of pleasure across her skin. She didn’t want him to think Rob was her type, though. Especially when she increasingly suspected Elijah was her type, MAD and all.
She finished with a shrug. “I don’t know. He was friendly at the beginning. I took him to meet my parents and he charmed them. I took him to meet Kaylee and he charmed her.”
“He charmed Kaylee?” Elijah repeated. “I don’t know her that well, but word around the casino is, nobody charms Kaylee.”
Holly nodded. “She said as much after I jumpe
d out your window. She wondered how Rob had won her over.”
“It aaaaaall comes back to the bathroom window,” Elijah said sagely. “Disappearing into the black abyss. Magical illusions are metaphors for sex, you know.”
Holly watched his lips and wished he would repeat that. She swallowed.
“I majored in psychology,” he explained with a grin.
“Psychology! No wonder you’re working as a carpenter.” Instantly she regretted that joke, which had come out as more of an insult. Who was she to talk about college grads with blue-collar jobs? At least his work uniform didn’t involve sequins.
He laughed, making her feel better. “I haven’t even looked for a psychology job or applied to grad school or anything. I’ve been thinking an opportunity was going to fall in my lap this summer. I should probably do some research into why I feel that way. I’m sure I’m repressing something.”
“Speaking of which,” she piped up, “since you’re clearly a student of human nature, how’d you end up with Rob as a roommate, instead of Queen Elizabeth, or a llama?”
“Actually, it sounds a lot like your story,” Elijah said. “Last week I had just re-signed the lease on the house—”
“Oh, that’s your house?” Holly asked, impressed. His rental still wasn’t the responsible home ownership she’d imagined for Rob, but it was a mature and sexy something.
“My mom and I always lived in an apartment, so . . .” He glanced at her and then looked away, and Holly recognized that sequence. Everybody was expected to understand hard times, and doing without when you were a kid, and wanting more as an adult—except Holly, whom everyone assumed to be a rich spoiled brat. She kept smiling.
“Last year one of my original roommates moved in with her boyfriend,” he said. “That’s when I found Shane to replace her. Or Shane found me. Then, last week, my other roommate graduated and split for California. I was at work, repairing the baseboard in the Peacock Room, wondering where I could get another new roommate to share the rent with Shane and me, when Rob approached me out of the blue.”
The similarity between their stories was strange. But of course it was only coincidence—there was no other explanation for it. Rob couldn’t read minds. Besides, Holly was more interested in what Elijah had said before. “You had a girl roommate?”