ALPHA INFIRMARY
PANACEA SUITE
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 28TH
7:02 A.M.
Allie pressed the CALL button on the clear screen hovering in front of her, and Madame Vandertramp, her scarf-draped French teacher, went instantly mute on the video screen. Allie watched as Madame stabbed a whiteboard with her glamorous French-manicured fingers and silently explained the importance of verbes reflexives.
“How can we help?” a melodic, health-promoting voice chirped from the screen.
“Um, could I have another pillow? And maybe some more soup?” Allie modulated her voice to sound pinched with a sinus infection.
“Right away, Allie. Some tea to go with it?”
“Sure,” Allie fake-coughed. “Thanks.” She pushed the CLASS button and was right back to French, having barely missed a thing. But her eyes drifted to the wall of her room, where a vertical waterfall burbled soothingly. Every few minutes, the waterfall was tinted a different color. Right now, it was purple. Allie smiled, leaned back into her 1,000-thread-count sheets, and decided she’d have to fake sick for at least a week—the Alpha Infirmary was more relaxing than a five-star hotel.
Nurse Nightengale, the infirmary’s efficient chief, appeared silently, wearing a white lab coat cinched in the middle by a white leather belt decorated with a red patent leather cross. She smiled, her brow creased in an empathetic worry-line that made Allie feel as protected as if it were her own mother’s face hovering above her bed in Santa Ana.
“How are we feeling?” Nurse Nightengale said softly.
“Not so good,” she whispered, rubbing her glands on either side of her throat.
“Drink this,” Nurse Nightengale said. “And just relax. If you feel too tired to attend your virtual classes, we have a video library with all the latest movies and TV shows you’ve been missing. Research shows that watching humorous programming can actually cure ailments, so this is the one place on the island where it’s available.”
Ohmuhgud, rom-coms! Allie’s fingers twitched in a Pavlovian response to her drug of choice, but she hid her hands under the covers and tried not to smile. She forced her head to nod slowly, hiding her excitement.
“I… I think I need to just lie here for a while and try to eat and sleep.”
“Of course, you do that. And just let me know if there’s anything else I can bring you.” With that, Nurse Nightengale’s clogs clomped out of the room, as she shut Allie’s door behind her.
Allie brought the soup spoon to her lips and smile-swallowed. The sick-meals here made her mother’s toast and ginger ale routine seem like prison food. The chamomile hibiscus tea tasted like it had been plucked straight from the tree. If you couldn’t get well and forget your problems here, Allie thought, you couldn’t be happy anywhere. Allie pushed another pillow behind her back and stretched out in bed, enjoying the feel of the temp-adjust sheets warming the soles of her feet and the knobby joints of her knees. It was so comfortable in this hospital that she could almost forget about Darwin rejecting her in the garden last night. Almost. She bit her lower lip hard enough to wince and squeezed her eyes shut, wondering how long she’d be able to hide out here.
“Pssst! Allie!”
Allie opened one navy blue eye and turned to the room’s window, where a set of twinkling brown eyes blinked back at her.
“Charlie!”
Charlie waved her over to the window and mimed opening it. “I brought you something.”
Charlie was such a good friend! Who else would bother to track her down here? Allie jumped out of bed, wrapping her shiny oyster-colored robe around her narrow waist, and rushed over to the huge window.
“You sure you don’t want to just come in the regular way? It’s an infirmary, not a jail.”
Charlie grinned up at her. “Nah. This is way more NCIS.”
Allie yanked harder and slid the huge pane of glass up. She hoisted Charlie through the window, both girls giggle-grunting as they toppled onto the floor.
“Um, Al?” Charlie said, once they were in the room together. “Are you even sick? I’m getting a pretty healthy vibe here.” Charlie pulled Allie up off the floor and pulled up a chair next to Allie’s bed.
“I’m emotionally sick,” Allie whined, flopping back into bed and pulling the covers up to her chin. “I needed a place to heal from my Darwin-inflicted wounds.” She lay back and sigh-stared at the ceiling, sneaking a peek at Charlie when her friend didn’t answer.
Charlie crossed her legs, and then uncrossed them. Then crossed them in the other direction. She looked preoccupied, and her eyes darted around the posh hospital room before they landed back on Allie. But before Allie could ask what was up, the doorknob turned, followed by a sharp double-knock on the door. “Allie, may I come in? I brought you some Tylenol,” Nurse Nightengale’s soothing voice called.
“Sure, of course,” Allie coughed, back in sick-Alpha mode. She immediately fell back on her pillows, grabbed a fistful of tissues, and blew her nose as the nurse walked back into the room.
“Take two,” the nurse said, nodding curtly at Charlie and handing Allie two silver tablets.
“Dank you, Durse,” Allie sigh-groaned, feeling her eyes turn watery and the color in her face drain out until she was a sickly shade of eggshell. Faking sick had always been something Allie was good at, ever since Jordan Janowitz had pushed her face into the sand in third-grade recess and she needed a mental-health day to plot her revenge.
“Feel better, Allie,” Nurse Nightengale replied soothingly, leaning over her and swiping a credit card–sized thermometer over Allie’s forehead. “You have a slight fever. One oh one point one. Make sure your friend doesn’t stay too long.”
“Sure,” Allie said, willing her sweat ducts to open up on her forehead and release a hint of clammy exhaustion. “She’s just telling me about our homework for, um, a project we’re doing.”
Once Nurse Nightengale slid Allie’s door shut, she resumed her discussion with Charlie.
“So anyway, yeah. I’m emotionally ill. I threw myself at Darwin and he rejected me. Not to mention that AJ sings these vicious songs about me, and everyone else in school except you and Skye still thinks I’m a psycho identity thief who deserves to be avoided like the plague.”
“But you’re about to hit your stride. All of this will just make you stronger!” Charlie smoothed out a wrinkle in her pleated mini and furrowed her brow emphatically.
“No, all of this would make you stronger,” Allie said, her voice wavering. She sat up and looked Charlie in the eye. “I’m not like you, Charlie. I’m not a real Alpha. I don’t have a real talent, or any idea of what it could be. It’s different for you. You go into that lab and you know exactly what you’re doing. I have no idea what I’m doing here. And without Darwin, I have no purpose—”
Just then, the door to her room opened, interrupting Allie and Charlie yet again. Seriousleh, can’t they let a girl recuperate? But she reasoned that it wouldn’t be the Alpha Island infirmary unless they pulled out all the stops.
“Knock knock, Allie,” Nurse Nightengale said, the mole on her chin wobbling as she talked. “I brought you a cool compress with juniper and begonia essence. Proven to reduce fever.”
Allie took the pink washcloth, monogrammed with two A’s in darker pink script, and fell back on her pillow. She whispered a tortured “thanks” before slapping the cloth onto her forehead and shutting her eyes.
“I’m going soon, I promise,” she heard Charlie say to the nurse.
When her door slid shut again, Allie continued.
“So for now, this is where I belong. In hiding. If I can’t be an Alpha at least I can do a great job of faking sick.”
“Faking sick is no way to get over…” Charlie stopped mid-rant and stared at Allie like she was her own personal science experiment. “Wait a second. Your performance in here, in front of the nurse! It’s Oscar-worthy, Allie. You’ve been sitting on this huge talent and calling it faking.”
“Faking is a talent?”
“Yeah,” Charlie laughed. “It is. It’s called acting.”
Allie ran an unsure hand through her honey-blond hair. Acting? She’d always been a good fake—she was great at faking being AJ, until the real AJ showed up and ruined it. She was great at faking deafness when AJ sang her crappy songs about her. She’d faked Cream of Wheat tasting good when she’d posed as a model for a supermarket coupon spread. And when she was ten, she’d done such a good job of faking sadness over the death of Sir Swimmy, her goldfish, that her father had gone out and bought her a kitten. Then she’d faked being allergic to Sizzles the kitten so she wouldn’t have to change his litter box.
“Maybe you’re right,” she conceded. “They are pretty much the same thing.”
“Of course I’m right.” Charlie grinned. “And I have a way to put your acting skills to use.”
“How?” asked Allie.
“I brought you this,” Charlie said, reaching into her bra. She rolled her brown eyes toward the ceiling as she pulled out a glossy page of a magazine that had been folded to the size of a stick of gum. “It’s from Italian Vogue.” Charlie passed it to Allie.
“You want me to fake being Kate Moss in Italy?” Allie unfolded it slowly, careful not to rip the glossy paper.
“Just open it,” Charlie said.
Gently smoothing out the paper on her rolling hospital tray, Allie sucked in her breath. Adorable! It was Darwin’s older brother, the blond and chiseled Melbourne, posing in an ad for an Italian denim company called Cara Mio. In the black-and-white picture, Melbourne was shirtless and leaning up against a wall, eyeing a miniskirted girl who was halfway out of the frame.
“Nice six-pack. Nice jaw. Good angles. Hot ad,” Allie murmured, studying the picture with the eye of a former model. Allie had to admit, Mel was more crushable than cardboard. If her heart hadn’t already been bulldozed by one of the Brazille Boys, she might have jumped on the bandwagon.
“It’s Mel!” Charlie exclaimed, as though the fact weren’t obvious.
“I know it’s Mel,” said Allie, struggling to keep irritation out of her voice. “But what does this have to do with me?”
“I know you’re not over Darwin,” Charlie said patiently. “But Mel is a mega-hawttie, and he’s single, and I think you two might have a lot in common. If nothing else, he’d be a distraction. One that’s healthier than”—she waved her hand dismissively around the room—“than pretending to be so unhealthy!”
“No thanks,” she said, shaking her head so her blond waves smacked her pillow. “I can’t just shut my feelings for Darwin off and turn on a crush on Mel. I’m not a fuse box!” She squinted her lash-fringed eyes at Charlie, wishing her aPod could read a person’s motives and not just their bio. How could Allie be sure Charlie’s intentions were pure? What if Charlie wanted to get back together with Darwin? They used to be soul mates—wasn’t it possible that Charlie decided she wanted him back? “You’re not… just doing this to get back together with Darwin, are you? If you like him, just be honest and tell me.”
Charlie recoiled in her chair, sitting back so fast it looked like she’d been punched by an invisible hand. Her cheeks reddened and she studied the tiles of the infirmary floor as if searching for what to say.
“I-I-I know you’re not a fuse box,” Charlie finally stammered, looking up from the floor and grabbing Allie’s hand. “And I don’t want Darwin back. I just want you to be happy. Will you go out with Mel once, just to see? If nothing else, you can practice your acting and get some of your self-confidence back. And it might make Darwin jealous enough to realize what he’s giving up.”
Allie breathed out a gushing sigh. If going out with Mel could get Darwin to like her again, maybe Charlie’s idea was worth considering. And the possibility of gaining some notoriety at the Academy for something other than impersonating Allie J was hard to resist. There was no point in trying to erase her feelings for Darwin by dating his brother, but maybe Charlie was right. Maybe hanging with a guy who actually liked her would be a good feeling? Allie had her doubts, but she shrugged them off like an ill-fitting trench.
“How do we make this happen?”
Allie nodded and listened as Charlie sketched the outlines of a plan for meeting up with Mel, acting excited as she went on. And on. Because, Allie told herself, that’s what actors do. They act.