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I laughed, peed my pants, and vomited long and hard into the toilet. It was hilarious how I was doing all three at the same time. Tears turned my makeup into a landslide. It was going to be so ridic if I upchucked on the amaz dress that I was supposed to have put on about 10 minutes ago, but I couldn’t stop hurling.
When the whole mess was out of me, I managed to stop guffawing like some kind of weird clown. My stomach hurt something wicked, like it had been scoured out. Sweat ran down my forehead, puddling up with little streams of deep blue and aqua eyeshadow and running down my cheeks past the red lipstick smears.
“You sure are a charmer,” I said to my face in the mirror. There was an extra annoying buzz. I swiped the air to take an incoming call, keeping the mobile in audio mode. No sense scaring anybody.
“Excuse me, Ms. Melada?”
“Yes.”
“This is Stellen, the director for the shoot.”
“Oh, hi. I’m so sorry I’m late. I had kind of a –” I choked.
“What?”
“Just a minute.” I struggled to get more stomach bile under control.
“Something wrong?”
“Not to worry. Could you send Enrique back in to patch up my face a little?”
Not to worry. Patch up my face. Those are the kind of word combos they taught down in Atlanta. I always talked that way more easily when the chems took hold—even though I liked to tease Dove into thinking I was a hopeless hick. As my mind floated higher and higher, the Elite parlance tripped off my tongue like a kind of delicious dance. (“Parlance”—another word I loved.)
Just as quickly as it had come over me, the terrible nausea and silliness just disappeared. I was ecstatic now, above everyone and every possible bad thought, in a state of serene enchantment.
“Darling,” the director was saying on my mobile, “we only have Studio H reserved for two hours, so get here pronto.”
Poor Enrique rushed in, staring at me in disbelief. “Oh, Gawd,” he choked. “You’re the most ravishing mess I’ve ever seen.”
“And that is the most lovely description of an ugly situation I’ve ever heard.”
He activated the room’s air freshening system. “It smells like a sewer. What the hell happened?”
“Have you ever had food poisoning? That’s my guess.”
We talked about everything I’d eaten over the last 24 hours as he cleaned me up. He looked at me in awe as I rattled off: “Four cups of latte, Caesar salad, two filet mignons with stuffed potatoes, a seafood béchamel sauce in puff pastry, a kind of chocolatey mousse thing, lots of Pino Grigio and Côtes du Rhône, strawberries and huevos rancheros with a mimosa for breakfast.”
He glanced up and down my slender body sarcastically. “You sure you’re not missing something?”
“Probably. Rico calls me a human disposal system.”
“Have you always eaten that way?”
No. I used to eat half a potato for breakfast and the other half for lunch. I felt faint half the time and dreamed of putting just a little jam on my stale bread.
“Just since I became an adult.” Since I started taking the chems that aged me five years in nine months flat.
“Somebody ought to clone your metabolism.”
“Do they do that sort of thing?”
“If they haven’t, they probably will. I can’t keep up with these so-called innovations.” Enrique stepped back to look at his handiwork. “There. You’re fresh as a rosebud in the morning light. Don’t muck it up!”
“Not a chance. This bud’s got work to do.” A faintness came over me, mixing in with the elation. Sleep would be so beautiful. I just wanted to lie down, right on that dressing room floor. But I had to do what Rico wanted. That’s all there was to it.
I swept into the studio about 20 minutes late wearing a strapless pale pink dress that rippled out behind me like a water stream. Rico was waiting for me with a kind of hungry edge about him. He looked like he wanted to lock lips. It made me want to slap him silly, but that would have been way out of line, and I was too damned high.
Instead, I said, “I just about puked my organs out.” It was so weird. All of a sudden, I had this kind of angelic voice. He was so excited by it.
“But you’re okay now?” he asked.
“Yeah. High as a damned spaceship. Thank you very much.”
His hands shook a little as he hovered his mobile screen just above my wrist, taking my pulse. “Bit of a gallop going on, but it will stabilize.”
Words dropped from my lips like sugar plums: “If it doesn’t kill me. Then where will we be?”
Rico grinned. “Now listen, everybody inside is of the male-loving persuasion, except the other actor. They won’t bother you.”
“We’ll see about that.”
“Lush! Don’t try to change anyone.”
“Of course not.”
“Except for the audience viewing your commercial, that is. Do you remember your lines?”
“You do recall that I learned advanced calculus in a month, and I’m only saying, like, four sentences.”
“Just checking. Stop drooping your eyes. We’ll make sure you have a nice long sleep after this. Don’t you worry. Keep those peepers way bright.”
“Yes, sir!” I floated past some huge black curtains and came out onto a holographic set transmitting a deserted, sandy beach and big frothy green waves thundering to shore. The salty, blue sea air was so crisp and a little bit golden, like it was three seconds to sundown. A faint jabbering of birds turned into three white gulls that swooped over my head and disappeared.
The whole set seemed so real. Stellen, the director, came toward me. His fat smile was framed by a thin beard. I greeted him with: “Wowza. Can I just move into this studio and live here forever?”
“Well, well, well, look at you,” Stellen rumbled. He pulled up a mirror on his air screen. Somehow the sea light had made my hair go all fiery, and my eyes were even more flecked with tiger gold than usual.
Off to the side, there were some big ole cameras. They looked like giant beetles and had these tiny red lights blinking on and off like people breathing when they were asleep.
“Do you need some water or anything before we start?” Stellan asked.
“I’m good.”
“Alrighty then.”
He waved to the first assistant director, who held up a clapperboard in front of a camera. “Take one. Riggles ad. Three, two, one, action!”
Way down the beach, this guy in loose white clothes emerged, walking through the water just at the ocean’s edge. He was one of the most delicious members of the male race I’d ever seen.
Stellan’s voice whispered out from my mobile: “Wait for it. Wait for it.” The gulls swooped overhead again. “Now!”
I gave the cameras a big smile. “There’s nothing quite so refreshing as the sensation of a bright, crisp day—right in your mouth,” I said in that new angel voice, throwing a piece of gum in the air and catching it between my lips. I bit into it and gave the cameras a look of sheer ecstasy. The guy actor reached me just as I said: “Taste the experience.”
He fell into a kind of lost, swoony look as I put a piece of the gum in his mouth. I turned back to the camera, concentrating so that the gold in my eyes intensified, just the way Dove taught me.
“Riggles Gum. Feel the explosion.”
The actor kissed me so long and hard. Which was pretty damned fabulous.
“Cut! ... CUT!” Stellan roared, but we kept up the smooching. “That’s it!” They had to pry us apart.
Stellan wrapped the production after just that one take, even though me and the guy wanted to go at it a few more times. Every human on the set was pretty loopy with the vibes I was throwing off. It didn’t matter that they usually liked men.
When I got back to the dressing room, I collapsed. The world lifted away, but Rico woke me up, trying to get me to drink glass after glass of water to flush out my system. I just wanted to slap him, but I didn’t have the energy. It was so delicious, just the idea of sleeping. I couldn’t stay awake. I just couldn’t.
“No!” he shouted. “Keep your eyes open!”
“Just a little nap.”
“Absolutely not. If you go to sleep before some of the chems wear off, you might never wake up. Wait until we get you to Jizelle’s.”
He tried to herd me down the hall, barely refraining from touching me. But then I remembered. I’d left Cupcake, my little caterpillar mobile stud, in the dressing room. “Wait. I’ll just be a minute.”
“Don’t you go to sleep in there!” Rico yelled.
I looked around a vase of flowers in front of the mirror, but it wasn’t there. Every time I’d used this dressing room, that’s where I’d put my valuables. My mind was getting kind of blurry, and I was so damned tired. But this was strange.
“Hey, where’d you go, Cupcake?” I called. There was a little giggle. The caterpillar was lying on a container of rouge. That stopped me cold. I boinged up into a really awake state in no time flat. I definitely wouldn’t have put it there. Who would have done that? The room had been locked up tight ever since I went off to the shoot. And the cleaning bots never came to Nuhope before the end of the workday.
The invisible spy! I’d already figured out that there was one. He must have been around me in that dressing room. Hot damn!
# # #
I COULDN’T STOP THINKING about the spy all the way back to Jizelle’s place. But the pain in my gut came back when I got there. There was no space in my brain for anything else. I started hurling again. It was like somebody had wrung out my innards and then stomped on them.
“What the hell did you do to her?” Jizelle asked Rico when they finally settled me in bed. She wore these big ole bunny rabbit slippers. And her long curtain of black hair slip-slided across her shiny loungewear whenever she moved. It made me kind of dizzy.
“It’s all going to be okay,” Rico said as he ushered her out of my bedroom. I could hear them arguing in the hallway. Jizelle sure was pissed.
After a while, Rico put Caldonia the bot in medical mode and had her take some CT scans of my body. Relief washed over him as he looked at the results. “Rest up. It’ll take a while, but you’ll get back to normal,” he said.
It sounded more like a hope than a prediction if you asked me. Not that anyone did. All that night, I was either sleeping or rolling from side to side, whimpering like a beat-up ole hound dog. And when I wasn’t doing that, I went back to thinking about that ghost spy.
I first heard that funny gushing sound he made just after I started working at Nuhope. It always seemed to come from doors or walls, or in the middle of a crowded room, and the air got kind of—well, warped—when he was around. It was hard to see or hear those things, and no one else seemed to notice he was there. I don’t know why. But maybe ‘cause everything in New York was so strange to me I was more on the alert than most people.
The spy was a man. Somehow that’s how it felt, but I couldn’t say why. I never was a scaredy-cat, and he didn’t change that. He just made me so curious. Who the hell did he work for? And what was he trying to learn? Was he involved with some Nuhope competitor, like Victory Star? Or maybe he was an international spy villain, working for some mucky-mucks in Moscow or Korea. Or maybe he was just some kind of dirty old man.
I decided to bide my time and see if I could somehow get him out of hiding. A lot of people probably would have just spread the word if they were me. “Hey! Ghost in the house!” or some damned thing. But I was mixed up about what to do.
On the one hand, I figured that if Dove or Rico knew, all hell would break loose. The spy might disappear, or be killed by Nuhope’s guards, and I’d never learn anything about him. Most of the guards were a bunch of lamebrains.
I kept my mouth shut, but sometimes it seemed like I was making a big mistake. It was cray-cray to think that somebody like me would know better than the higher-ups at Nuhope.
I probably would have told Dove after that commercial shoot, but when I got back to the dressing room and I found Cupcake the caterpillar stud in the wrong place, it changed things. It seemed so kind, somehow, for the spy to put it there. Sure, people could be both kind and cruel. But maybe he was not just watching me but watching over me.
Kind or evil or some fucked-up combo of the two? Protector or enemy? Tell or don’t tell? My mind was flitting around like a bat about the whole sitch.
“Hello!” Rico sang out as he came in the room the day after the Riggles shoot. Jizelle was keeping me company at the time. “You are something else. Here, this ought to make you feel better.” He pulled up a series of statistics about the commercial’s audience on his mobile screen, so proud.
“I’m sorry, Rico, but I just don’t care. I’m a space tumbler. That’s all I want to do.”
Jizelle glared at her brother. “Isn’t there something you can do to make her feel better?”
“Yeah,” I piped up. “I’m not vomiting anymore. But I feel like a pile of it.”
“That’ll pass. The best thing for you is just rest.”
Jizelle scrunched up her eyes, hurling him a silent insult as he left. “I’m so SICK of him acting like he’s the cat that swallowed the canary.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I feel like punching him.”
“Do it!”
She gave me that look I loved. It was like I’d filled in a blank in her heart that she hadn’t even known was there—like she was a spacewoman who’d found distant kin on another planet. Sometimes, it seemed as if she was silently calling out, “You’re REALLY there?” when she looked at me. I had to love her for that alone, even though she’d done so much else.
The way she watched over me was so amaz. I think I gave her something to do, something to be extra proud of. I kind of broke up the sameness of her life. Before I got so sick, I helped her a lot with the three little R girls, Rhodes, Riviera, and Rio. Her eight-armed bot nanny, Caldonia, could only do so much.
I couldn’t wait to get back to that. But mostly, I just wanted to get back to space tumbling and figuring out more about that damned spy.