Not a damn thing meant a hill of beans to Summer Ashton. Or was it Tina Halifax? Chrissy?

Whatever.

She didn’t fight it those first couple times she’d come to and found her stomach being pumped, or her body fallen to convulsions. When she’d opened her eyes and found the doctor with his knee at her midsection, beating hard on her chest and shouting for her to wake up, please wake the fuck up.

She didn’t bat an eye that morning she’d found her mother and Larry standing over her hospital bed. The old lady couldn’t keep her hands off Summer’s face. Couldn’t stop hacking at her hair with a brush she hadn’t seen since she was a child.

And she certainly couldn’t be bothered with the handsome older fella across the table from her in the little room of that farm house, the one who had been talking for God knew how long before finally she slowed her brain enough to understand a single word coming from his mouth. All she could think about was how the first thing he did when he sat down was take his hair out of its ponytail and shake it loose, so it hung down to his shoulders. How the whole world changed when he did that. It brought out his eyes. Don’t get her started on his eyes. His eyes, and how green they were, like twin bottles of Tanqueray, and how they say gin makes you crazy. All the juniper, they say, and maybe—looking back—she could have given up the gin, given her predilection for so many other culprits which daily assaulted her sanity. For want of a glass of gin… Actually, given the chance, she’d forsake the booze for a pill. Two pills. Three pills, which she would grind into a fine meal and snort, for more immediate access to the brain, then quickly followed with another down the gullet. God, what she wouldn’t give for a pill. The man before her—droning on and on—looked like a doctor or a shrink or at least someone who could prescribe a pill, so she’d better pay attention to what the hell he was saying, so at the very least she could reckon how best to sweet talk him.

“Could you repeat that last part again?”

“I said you are nothing short of a miracle.” Those minty eyes sparkled in the light from the nearby lamp. “To have survived what you did. There are dead rock stars who couldn’t hang with half of what you’d taken. Sister, I’ve got to say, you can sure handle your drugs.”

Summer sat straighter in her chair. She thought it best not to look into those eyes any longer.

“I bet there were some weekends you wish Guinness World Records would have been on hand because you might have broken one or two of them. What do you think?”

Summer’s lip quivered to an almost-smile. She had to hand it to him.

“I mean, when I was coming up, they had a word for it when you took acid and ecstasy in the same night. It was called candy-flipping. Lord knows what they call it now.”

“It’s still candy-flipping.”

The fella smiled sideways. “Wow. That takes me back.” He returned to business. “But they ain’t got a word for when you take speed and Xannies and LSD and…what is this other shit they found in your system? Did I see…what is this?”

Summer shrugged.

What’s this guy playing? What’s his angle?

“Don’t they give that shit to hospice patients dying of cancer?”

“It walks them to the door with quite the smile.”

The man nodded. “That’s a new one on me. What’s the high? Is it a body blow, or does it take you out at the head? It says it’s opiate-based, so maybe it’s like that ecstasy going around back in the day…”

“What do you know about it?”

“What do I know about it?” Barney could not contain himself. “Girl, I know plenty.”

He’s too pretty to have gone at it as hard as you have. He wouldn’t last a weekend.

Summer had to agree. His skin hadn’t taken to rot like it would with speed. He was too lucid for Oxy. Not lucid enough for heroin. He maintained a mean front—the ponytail, the beatific grin—like one of those old-timers, always talking about how great the seventies or eighties were, or, in some cases, even the nineties. She tried to picture him in drum circles or political protests or chaining himself to a tree, but she just couldn’t, because she couldn’t be bothered with it.

“I don’t need a rehab,” she said. “I ain’t addicted to nothing.”

Barney nodded.

“I’m sure you get lots of folks in here to tell you the same thing.” She leaned back in her chair and kept focused on his eyes and how fine the crinkles around them were. “Isn’t that the definition of an addict: someone who says they ain’t got a problem? Fine, but that’s not me. I’ll tell you straight up I got lots of problems, but the drugs ain’t one of them. That’s something I can kick plenty easy.”

Barney said nothing.

“I know this makes me sound like a wing nut, but I didn’t take half of what they said was in me. Someone stuck me with something. I was partying, just like any normal, healthy college kid would be doing on a Saturday night, and some asshole came along and stuck me with a hypo full of gunk. Why? Probably trying to get fancy with me while I lay unconscious, if you want my honest opinion. That’s between him and me, when I find him. And if you want to know something about me, I’m going to find him. Trust you me, that weaselly bastard won’t be able to hide…”

She needed to regulate her breathing. The edges had begun to whiten. Bright whiten. Summer stopped talking and put both hands on her thighs and rubbed them warm. She waited for Barney to say something, but he wouldn’t budge. She imagined he could go on like this for days.

So can you.

No, she couldn’t. “I reckon you’ve heard this from here and back, folks saying they don’t have a problem. Denial ain’t just a river in South America, and all that. And that everything I’m telling ain’t nothing more than a junkie’s rationalizations, but I’m telling you the truth. I ain’t supposed to be here.”

When finally Barney spoke, he said, “Summer, you strike me as a pretty smart girl.”

“When I need to be.”

“I bet you’re used to being the smartest person in the room.” His hand fidgeted with a leather ball strung by a strap around his neck. “Am I right?”

“So far, I ain’t been disappointed.”

“How about this room?”

She shrugged. “It ain’t that big a room.”

“Maybe you think you’re in the wrong chair.”

“I know what I’d do if I was in the other one.”

“And what’s that?”

Said Summer, “Prescribe myself a bottle of Valium.”

That got the fella laughing and soon she was laughing along with him. They carried on as such for a good while until he came along and ruined it.

“How much longer you think you can go on like this?”

“My back hurts,” she said. “It’s hard for me to think when my muscles spasm like this. They were giving me something for it at the hospital, but I haven’t had it in a couple days.”

“You’ll find no chemicals here on the ranch.” His smile ate the entire bottom half of his face. “We grow our own produce. When we eat meat, it is purchased from a farm up the road. We don’t even allow caffeine or nicotine on the premises.”

“I’m sure you could get your hands on methadone for the, you know…” She tapped the inside of her arm with two fingers.

“That’s not our way.”

“You get people off drugs, but you don’t use methadone? What do you use?”

“We’re straight-edge, man.” He smiled like a gargoyle. He twirled that necklace of his round and round his finger. “We are slaves to nothing.”

“What, you mean get high on life?”

“Now you’re talking.”

Suddenly, Summer’s backbone didn’t work so well. Life had dealt her many blows, but finally she had been delivered a knockout. She collapsed from her chair to the floor, where she’d never felt so cold.

“This is cruel and unusual,” she howled. “This is the behavior of a sadist. I demand to see your licensure! Terms in the Geneva Convention dictate you must not deny medicine to the sick, and, brother, I am infirmed. What you are doing is a war crime! It is sorcery!”

Barney’s arms loosed at the sockets and stretched like tentacles beneath the table until he took hold of her shoulders with both hands and returned her to his chair. After he’d reassumed human form, he maintained his smile, as if what he had done was no great feat.

“Dear God,” whispered Summer. “I know what you are.”

Barney twirled that necklace, round and round.

“You think I can’t see, but I can see.”

Barney bit his lower lip and squinched his eyes.

Said Summer in a low voice, “You are an alien.”

When Summer got something stuck in her craw, she was like a dog with a bone. She crawled atop the table on her hands and knees until she was nose to nose with Barney.

“Tell the truth,” she said. “Are you an alien?”

Barney appeared not able to respond. She had him dead to rights. He’d played one hell of a game of Three Card Monti to get her there, but until now had never faced the likes of her. His mouth hung on a hinge and she pulled him closer by both cheeks.

“Luther,” she said to the room, “what do you think? Is he one of you?”

Stand down, Summer.

“Of course, he is,” she said. “How else could he know so much?”

Summer, you are beginning to act like—

“I know he’s lying about something.” She pressed their foreheads together. “Don’t you know you can tell me the truth? Don’t you know you don’t have to lie to me? Tell him, Luther. Tell him we can talk to each other. We don’t have to hide, we don’t have to play bullshit mind games. If you feel sad, then say you are sad. If you want to laugh, then all you have to do is laugh.”

To prove this, Summer detonated a fit of laughter. She went at it so hard, she fell over top of the table and landed flat on her backside. She folded and unfolded herself a dozen times until plum tuckered out.

“See?” She lay her back flat on the floor and stared at the ceiling. “That was pretty funny, but you didn’t laugh. Not even once. This is how I know you are lying.”

She added through a stream of tears, “Maybe you aren’t alien after all.”

“One thing I will assure you,” said Barney, “is that I am not like everybody else.”

“Prove it.”

Barney motioned with his head for her to return to the chair. She resisted with every ounce of energy in her body, but could not hold out for longer than a half minute before she found herself seated.

“I’m going to ask you something,” he said. “It’s something I’ll bet no one has ever asked you.”

Summer didn’t blink.

“If I’m wrong, and someone, anyone in your whole life out there on the streets, getting high, has asked you this one question, then you can leave the ranch.”

“Leave?”

“Yep. You can get up from that chair and take off to do whatever you like with what’s left of your life. I imagine it to be a short life, but you won’t spend another minute of it listening to my blather.”

“You will let me bail?”

“I’ll hold open the door for you.”

Summer liked the sound of that. She nodded her head.

“But if I’m right,” he said, “and nobody has ever asked you this question, then you’ve got to hear me out. You’ve got to give me a chance to save your life, man.”

“A chance? What kind of chance?”

“Thirty days.”

“Thirty days for what?”

He had a smile like Jesus. “Thirty days to show you a new way of life. Because the girl I see in the chair across from me is beautiful. She’s a fighter. She’s always been a fighter. If she wasn’t, she wouldn’t be here. Am I right?”

Her cheeks burned red. Her eyes stung. She damned this man to high heaven.

“And no fair lying to me,” he said. “You talk high and mighty about honesty, so you have to hold your end of the bargain. You might pull one over on me, but you can’t pull one over on yourself. No, you will forever know if you have been disingenuous with me here on this day.”

Don’t take the deal, Summer.

“I can be more honest than you, or anyone else on this planet,” she said.

It’s a trap. Don’t fall for it.

“Then all you’ve got to do is answer my question.”

“Maybe you ought to cut the prologue and ask it.”

Summer…

“Are you happy?”

Summer’s first instinct was to laugh. She stopped shy of opening her mouth. She covered it with both hands.

Her next instinct was to fight. Those hands turned to fists. She sat on them before they could inflict further damage.

“Think about it,” he said, with no idea how close to danger he’d come. “I want you to think long and hard about it. Are you happy?”

Teardrops stung at her eyeballs. A lump the size of Oklahoma took root in her throat.

“I’m not talking about the way you feel after you take a drink,” said Barney, “or swallow a pill. I’m talking about how you feel before you do those things. I’m talking about the overall scheme.”

Her hands shook beneath her.

“I want you to stop bullshitting me and stop bullshitting everyone else, but most of all, I want you to stop bullshitting yourself. I want you to embrace the next five minutes with absolute clarity and ask yourself if you are happy.”

Was she happy? She hadn’t time to think about it. Her mind seized upon a million other ideas. Not so much a million others, more like the same one, but a million times. Mostly how the dude was right and hadn’t nobody ever asked if she was happy. How well a card he had played and how could he guarantee the outcome? Was there something written across her forehead? Something that said her parents never cared and Jack or Craig or Grant never cared? What about Scovak? Sure, she’d had him killed, but that didn’t change the fact that he never once asked if she was happy. This man before her was a charlatan, a false prophet, but he had asked if she was happy, and she was, if nothing else, a woman of her word.

Still, she kept zipped her lip.

“I’ll ask you one more time,” he said. “Are you happy?”

Her intention was to say it loud and clear. To shout it, perhaps. To leap again atop the table and beat her chest and say of course she was not happy, you idiot. She flat-lined in the emergency room. She saw the bright light at the end of the tunnel. She saw the darkness. She felt the presence of something warm. But she did none of this because she couldn’t remember if it was only something she had told the nurses and the doctors and her mother, who wouldn’t listen, or if it was something that had actually happened. All she needed was a little time to think about it, to discern what was true or untrue. All she wanted was to put both hands over her ears until she could hear nothing else but her own voice screaming, shouting, hollering to high heaven that no, she was not happy. And from the looks of things, she was bound never to be happy, so she must hope now that, with it in the open, maybe somebody would finally set about fetching her a goddamned pill.

Instead, she crumpled to sobs.

Amidst her hullabaloo, Barney’s hand found a way to her head. He stroked her hair and tucked it behind her ears. He gave her time to get it out, there, there, get it all out, before whispering into her ear:

“You deserve to be happy, Summer.”

“No, I don’t,” she choked. “I don’t deserve it at all.”

“Of course you do. We all do.”

“You don’t know,” she said. In the event he really could read minds, she thought of other things. “You can’t possibly know what I’ve done.”

“I know…”

“But you don’t. You really don’t.”

“What you’ve done is survive,” he whispered. “Whatever you did, you did it to survive, because if God did not want you right here, right now, he would never have put you here. Do you believe that?”

“I…I, uh…”

“I’m sure you’ve been thrown a lot of obstacles, but you overcame them. This is because he was watching out for you. He sent someone to protect you. You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?”

She felt all the blood in her body leave out the back door. She stared at him through wide eyes, as if he had ten heads.

“You’ve been screwed over so many times,” he said. “You’ve been given this raw deal so often that anytime someone has arrived to offer a helping hand, you’ve got this little voice inside your head telling you it’s too good to be true. It has to be a trap.”

Oh shit.

He put both hands on her shoulders and squared her to him.

“Those voices in your head, where have they gotten you?” he asked her. “They got you here. You don’t need them anymore.”

Damn.

“You’ve been in the getting high racket for a long, long while, and look where it got you.” He pinched her chin, then turned her eyes to his. “Why don’t you let me show you the other half of the racket?”

She could hold no air in her lungs.

“Would you do anything to be happy?” he asked.

Unable to speak, she nodded.

“Anything at all?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

“Take my hand,” he said.

She didn’t.

“In thirty days,” he told her, “I’m going to ask you again if you are happy. I guarantee you will say yes. If you don’t, I will give you one hundred dollars and send you on your way with the phone numbers of a couple guys in town who will find whatever you want. But you won’t take that number because I will show you happiness you have never before felt. I will show you fulfillment and perfection. I will show you the beautiful girl I see before me and soon you will show the entire world because isn’t it about time the world got to know Summer for who she really is?”

He held out his hand.

“I just want the pain to go away,” she said.

“It will.”

“I want it to go away right now.”

The light shining off him was so bright, she covered her eyes with her forearm.

“Take my hand,” he said, “and all the pain will go away.”

Summer waited. She listened for anyone to say something to stop her. When nothing happened, her stomach lurched because she no longer wished to be stopped. Maybe, just maybe, she could never act fast enough.

She snatched up his hand.