Mad Love Page 9

“I think it’s nice that he has a new girlfriend. Especially since he’s so sick. Hey, come by the Temple of Beauty anytime.” And then she walked off.

  I was Errol’s new girlfriend?

  Find me. Find me. Find me.

  “Alice, who is this boy?” Mrs. Bobot asked, trying to get the rental check, but I shoved it behind my back.

  “Errol,” I said. “He’s Errol.” And tomorrow he’d be moving in upstairs. We’d be together. Every day. Forever. I had to get ready. I had to pick out something special to wear.

  “Alice!” Mrs. Bobot followed me back into my apartment. “Exactly how did you meet him? And how old is he? And what did she mean when she said he was sick?”

  Waiting until tomorrow morning would seem like an eternity. I set the check on top of my dresser, then opened my closet door and shuffled through the clothes. What looked best on me? Why was everything in my closet so plain?

  “Alice!” Mrs. Bobot screeched. “Why are you ignoring me? Alice!”

  Archibald and Reverend Ruttles peered into my room. “Hello? We brought some leftover chow mein,” Archibald announced, clutching a Tupperware bowl. “Is everybody okay in here? What’s all the commotion?”

  Red blotches had broken out on Mrs. Bobot’s wrinkled neck. “I don’t know what I should be more worried about—the fact that Alice may have been struck by lightning or the fact that she’s got a secret boyfriend who’s moving in tomorrow.”

  Reverend Ruttles leaned on his cane and frowned. “Lightning?”

  Archibald smirked. “Boyfriend?”

  I pulled out a red shirt. “Go away,” I said. “I need to get ready. Errol’s coming.”

  “Go away?” Mrs. Bobot gasped. “Go away? Alice, how dare you speak to us like that?”

  “Uh, I’ll put this in the refrigerator,” Archibald said, then he headed toward the kitchen with his Tupperware.

  “Alice, you’re not acting like yourself,” Mrs. Bobot said. “We need to talk about this. If you got hit by lightning, like Realm said, then we should go see the doctor.”

  “What’s going on?” Realm asked, sticking her head into my bedroom.

  The red shirt was boring so I pulled out a black shirt. Errol liked black. He always wore that black hoodie. Did I have a black hoodie?

  Archibald’s voice called out, “Wanda? I think you should come in here.”

  Mrs. Bobot, Reverend Ruttles, and Realm hurried from my bedroom. Hopefully they’d go away forever. Really, why was everyone bugging me? Couldn’t they see that I had important things to do? Couldn’t they see that Errol was the only thing that mattered?

  They gathered in the bathroom, right next door to my bedroom. The bathroom walls amplified their voices so even though Errol’s voice still chanted in my head, I could hear their conversation perfectly. And here’s how it went:

  Realm: Holy crap! My mom would kill me if I wrote all over the walls.

  Reverend Ruttles: Alice plus Errol? Who’s Errol?

  Mrs. Bobot: He’s Alice’s secret boyfriend.

  Realm: Alice has a secret boyfriend?

  Archibald: I don’t know this Errol fellow but take it from me, most guys don’t like it when you plaster their name all over your apartment. I learned that lesson the hard way.

  Reverend Ruttles: Did someone say something about lightning?

  Mrs. Bobot: Realm? Answer me and don’t lie! Did Alice get struck by lightning?

  Realm: I don’t know. I wasn’t there.

  Mrs. Bobot: Writing all over the walls. Telling us to go away. She’s not acting like herself.

  Archibald: She wasn’t acting like herself at lunch, either. She kept hearing a voice but we couldn’t hear it.

  Mrs. Bobot: Hearing voices? Oh God, no. This can’t be happening. Please tell me this isn’t happening. She can’t be like her mother.

  Realm: What do you mean? Is there something wrong with Alice’s mother?

  Archibald: I think we’re jumping to conclusions. Alice is not her mother. She’s just having a little breakdown from all the stress. I have them all the time. That doesn’t mean I’m mentally ill.

  Realm: Oh. My. God. Is Alice’s mom crazy?

  The word “crazy” ricocheted off the bathroom walls, then made a beeline for my bedroom. The word hit me full on. It cut through my daze and ignited a memory. I grabbed a photo off my bureau, taken on the Halloween just before we’d moved to the apartment. Dust coated its gold-painted macaroni frame. Mom had set the camera on the railing of our front porch—the beautiful lake house we used to live in. We’d both dressed as gypsies, with strings of glass beads and big hoop earrings that had pinched my earlobes. It had been a good day. We’d made popcorn balls, heating the corn syrup and butter so that the kitchen smelled like a candy factory. We’d wrapped the balls in plastic, tied them up with black and orange ribbons. I’d walked our neighborhood with a girl from school while Mom stayed home to pass out the popcorn balls. My mother had thought it best to avoid the neighbors. There’d been some “incidents” that year, so the neighbors didn’t like her much.

  But on the way back, just two blocks from the house, I passed a little ghost and his mother. The little ghost held one of the popcorn balls. “Don’t eat that,” his mother scolded, taking the ball away. “We don’t know what that crazy lady might have put in it.”

  Crazy.

  The photo dropped from my hand, scattering golden macaroni shards across the floor. As I took a sharp breath, the real world tumbled back. What was I doing? Wasn’t I supposed to be working on something for my mother? Why did I care so much about Errol?

  Find me. Find me. Find me.

  As quickly as the real world had returned, it disappeared again and I scratched my bandaged wound.

  “Alice?” Mrs. Bobot stood beside me. Everyone had returned to my room.

  I sat at my vanity and opened a makeup kit my mother had given me last year. It came with twelve eye shadows, five lipsticks, and a row of gold-handled application brushes. I’d never wanted to use it until that moment. As I applied a heavy layer of Cherry Red to my lips, I mumbled, “Findhimfindhimfindhim.”

  “What’s she saying?” Archibald asked.

  “Findhimfindhimfindhim.”

  “She’s freaking out,” Realm said.

  “She’s speaking in tongues,” the reverend said. “By God, Alice is speaking in tongues.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Mrs. Bobot said. Then she gently touched my shoulder. “Alice?”

  “Findhimfindhimfindhim.”

  Mrs. Bobot threw her hands in the air. “Something’s definitely wrong with her. William, get my car!”

  The emergency room doctor clicked his ballpoint pen and wrote something in my file.

  Even though I’d journeyed into a sort of trance, I knew enough not to mention the voice. It was one thing to have a third-year resident shine a light in my eyes, another thing entirely to be shut away for psychiatric evaluation.

  When a technician slid me into a tunnel for a CAT scan, I told myself that everything was going to be okay because I was going to see Errol in the morning. And when I sat at the edge of the examination table, I forced myself to smile sweetly as the doctor discussed the results.

  “She looks fine. There’s no evidence that she was struck by lightning.”

  Mrs. Bobot folded her hands in front of her double Ds. “Are you certain? She’s acting so strangely. Look how she’s smiling.”

  The doctor shuffled through some papers. “No drugs in the urine. Everything checks out. But you’re right, she does seem dazed. Is she under any stress?”

  “I’m fine,” I said, a phrase I’d repeated throughout the visit. Then I scratched the bandaged welt.

  The doctor stepped closer. “Alice? You keep scratching the same spot. Can I take a look?”

  I pushed up my tank top and the doctor carefully peeled off the Band-Aid. “How long have you had this welt?”

  I shrugged, forcing my mind to focus. “Today, I think. Maybe yesterday. I don’t kno
w. It itches.” It didn’t seem important. Why couldn’t I just go home and get ready for Errol? I was about to be reunited with the person I yearned for, just like in one of my mother’s stories. He was my soul mate. My destiny.

  “It’s not Ebola, is it?” Mrs. Bobot clenched her hands. “I’ve read terrible things about Ebola.”

  The doctor grabbed some stuff off the counter. “It’s not Ebola. I think it’s a spider bite. Probably a brown recluse. They’re not deadly but their poison can have many effects. Dizziness, sleepiness, mild hallucinations.” He dabbed the welt with some ointment, then applied another Band-Aid. I pulled down my tank top. “The venom will run its course. She should be fine in a day.”

  A relieved grin spread across Mrs. Bobot’s face. “Yes, that’s it. Oh, wonderful. It’s only spider poison.” She hugged me. “That’s all. Nothing to worry about.”

  “The spider might still be in the house,” the doctor said. “When you get home, try to find it and kill it. They’re big and brown.”

  “I’ll call Archibald right now and tell him to start looking,” Mrs. Bobot said as she searched through her purse for her phone.

  A big brown spider had bitten my chest? I didn’t remember a big brown spider. On a normal day I would have been freaked about it lurking between my sheets or hiding under my bed, waiting to sink its fangs into my flesh. “Errol will kill it,” I said, jumping off the bench. “He’ll kill the spider. I know he will. He’ll kill it!”

  The doctor and Mrs. Bobot shared one of those worried looks. “She does seem agitated. If you’d like, I can give her something that will help her sleep.”

  “Yes, please,” Mrs. Bobot said.

  My thoughts raced toward the moment when Errol would arrive. I’d be waiting for him on the sidewalk. As soon as our eyes met, the voice would go away and I’d stop feeling like I was going to explode. Because then, everything would be as it should be.

  Find me. Find me. Find me.

  I drank something grape-flavored. Then the doctor sent me on my way. Reverend Ruttles sat in the waiting room, leafing through a stack of old magazines. I leaned on his arm, my legs feeling oddly wobbly as we left the hospital. Mrs. Bobot telephoned Archibald and told him about the spider. By the time I climbed into the backseat of Mrs. Bobot’s car, the chanting voice had drifted away and the world had turned dull. My eyelids fluttered as buildings whizzed past.

  Archibald was waiting in the alley when Mrs. Bobot pulled into her parking spot. He scooped me into his strong arms. My entire body felt like Jell-O. “I vacuumed all the rooms,” he said. “And changed her sheets. Hopefully that spider is long gone.”

  Mrs. Bobot helped me get into a pair of pajamas, then put me to bed. In my drug-induced daze, I could no longer follow the conversation. But the last thing I heard, as my face sank into my pillow, was this:

  “Realm! Get away from that desk. Those papers are none of your business.”

  Find me. Find me. Find me.

  I bolted out of bed. Morning sun seeped around the edges of the drawn curtains. The yearning that had plagued me yesterday, temporarily dulled by the doctor’s sleeping potion, was back in full force, burning like a swallowed torch. I threw off the sheet. I didn’t care that I was dressed in pink cotton pajamas. I didn’t care about the pillowcase lines embedded across my face. I didn’t run a brush through my tangles. The intensity of the burning could only mean one thing—Errol was near. And if I didn’t go to him I would burst into flames.

  Mrs. Bobot was fast asleep on my couch, a steady snore vibrating the edges of her nostrils.

  I stumbled into the foyer. Someone had propped open the building’s front door with a pot of geraniums, the morning’s heat filling the building. A moving van was parked out front and two sweating men lumbered up the stairs, carrying a floral sofa between them.

  “You didn’t tell me you had two boyfriends.” Realm sat on the foyer table where the mail carrier left packages. A long gray shirt hung over her black leggings.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The guy on the skateboard yesterday. The one who followed you home.” She took a sip from her latte cup. “He just skated by a few minutes ago. When he asked about you, I told him you went to the hospital last night but that you were fine.”

  This conversation wasn’t the least bit interesting. I rubbed my face. I needed to do something, but what?

  “And I met your other boyfriend, Errol. Do they know about each other?”

  “You met … Errol?” My heart skipped a beat.

  “Yeah.” She tapped her fingers on the side of her cup. “He’s so not your type. He’s way too tortured. He looks more like my type.”

  Her type? The spider bite itched like crazy as a primal reaction gripped my brain. At that moment, Realm was no longer the troubled girl who came for a month each summer to stay with her grandmother. She was a warm-blooded female. An available female. “He’s not your type. You got that? He’s MY type.” I clenched my fists. Words burst from my mouth. “You stay away from him, you hear me? He’s mine. If you try to take him away, I’ll kill you. I swear, I’ll kill you!”

  “Jeez, you’re a freak, you know that?” Realm slid off the table, then crept away, probably because I was breathing like an overheated bulldog.

  “Stay. Away. From. Him.”

  “Whatever.” Realm headed toward the safety of the front porch. “If I were you I’d be careful about threatening me. I know your secret. And if you make me mad, I might write all about it in my blog.”

  What was she talking about? And who cared?

  FIND ME!

  I took a deep breath. The rush of oxygen fed the fire, sending agonizing flames throughout my body. I didn’t need to ask where Errol was. He pulled at me like a compass needle to due north. In a blur of pink cotton, I raced up the stairs. With each step, the chanting voice grew louder.

  I reached the second floor in record time. The door to the building’s fourth unit stood open. The moving men passed me on their way downstairs. As I stepped into the apartment, the chanting pounded at my temples like a kettle drum. Everything blurred until the world was a sheet of rain-splattered glass. Sweat broke across my chest. He was near. The vibration of his footsteps rippled up my legs as he walked toward me, his face and body a smudge of color. The pounding intensified. I couldn’t move. Could barely breathe.

  He stood real close, his warm breath on my neck. Longing drizzled over me like hot honey. I threw myself at him. Wrapped my arms around his neck and kissed him on the lips—a hungry, long kiss. The yearning didn’t go away. I pushed my chest against his and kissed him harder. Why didn’t I feel better? I’d found him—we were together. But the chanting was everywhere and my body burned. I tightened my arms and for a moment, he kissed me back, his mouth as eager as mine. Then he pushed me away.

  “I shouldn’t have done that,” he said.

  I threw myself at him again but he held out his arms so that a space as wide as an ocean separated us. His words floated through the chaos that filled my head.

  “Do you want this to stop?”

  “Yes,” I pleaded. “Make it stop.”

  “Will you write my story?”

  “Yes,” I whispered.

  “Do you promise?”

  “Yes. I promise.”

  “Then drink this. It’s the antidote. You’ll feel like yourself again.”

  The cold edge of a can pressed against my lips. I tasted salt, sand, and kelp. With one swallow, the world came into focus.

  And so did he.

  I stood in the fourth unit’s kitchen and looked at the guy I’d been obsessed with for the last twenty-four hours. Only I wasn’t obsessed with him, not anymore. That feeling had washed away with the clam juice, leaving behind a painful combination of embarrassment and confusion.

  I’d kissed him! I’d kissed Errol! In my pink pajamas with my hair a mess, I’d thrown myself at him. My first kiss, and it had been with Errol! I didn’t even know him. I didn’t even like hi
m. What was the matter with me?

  He pushed off his hood. His hair was sheared to the scalp like Realm’s. Perhaps they shared the same blind hairdresser or had grabbed the same blunt scissors during a bout of self-loathing when they’d tried to change themselves—Lily to Realm, Errol to Cupid. But while Realm’s hair was dirty blond, Errol’s was white. Snow white.

  “Feeling better?” he asked, his voice no longer a tickling whisper.

  I stepped back, my recent words regurgitating in my mind. He’s mine. If you try to take him away, I’ll kill you. Oh God, had I really said that to Realm? I’d never live that down. But when those words had spewed out, all I’d felt was the blinding need to claim Errol as my own. And now there I stood, only a short time later, feeling no urge whatsoever except to crawl into a corner and hide. Clearly I’d had an out-of-body experience. My brain had taken a brief vacation, leaving my body behind to do a bunch of stupid, embarrassing things. I couldn’t blame drugs or alcohol. There’d been no beer this time, and the doctor’s sleeping potion had long worn off. The blame lay entirely on that catchy little term “genetic predisposition.” As I’d long feared, crazy had finished germinating and was ready to burst into full bloom.

  The ragged breath I released sounded as if it had been locked deep inside for a lifetime. Is this how my mother felt at the end of one of her episodes? Relief tainted by foreboding—wondering how much time she had before it happened again.

  “You’re wondering if you’re going insane,” Errol said, setting the can of clam juice on the counter. “You’re not. It was my doing. The voice saying ‘Find me.’ I made that happen.”

  “What? How did you …?”

  His serious gaze swept up and down my face, then side to side, studying me. “If it makes you feel better, only sane people worry about losing their sanity.”

  I took another step back. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m not worried about going insane.”

  The furrow between his eyes deepened and he leaned against the counter. “I’m the one who put the voice into your head. It was my doing. What I want to know is, can you still hear it? If you can, you need to drink more.” He grabbed the can and shoved it at me. Craig’s Clam Juice. Processed from 100 percent organic clams and organic brine. Sixteen ounces of mouth-watering goodness. Best served over ice. I gagged and covered my mouth as the taste of muddy bay made a repeat appearance. Then I pushed the can away.