“Bozhe moy.”
Lucy’s eyes flipped open, a stranger’s face looming above her. It took a moment for Lucy to focus. Why did she look so familiar? Oh, she’d stolen her key card. Techno blasted from the headphones around the maid’s neck. Not what Lucy needed. Her head pounded like she’d been on a bender.
“Bozhe moy,” the maid repeated. Was that Russian?
Lucy sat up like a shot as panic hit. She was on the floor. She was on the floor of the New Yorker Hotel.
Holy crap. Her days as a free woman were over. Charges of destruction of private property would be added to burglary. Not that she’d stolen anything. She twisted her torso in the direction of Tesla’s secret lab. How would she explain that to the NYPD?
Lucy gasped. The door was gone. As if it had never been there. Had it?
She panned her gaze across the walls—the seamless beige wallpaper—and anxiety rose in her chest like a tsunami.
A gentle hand grazed her brow; Lucy rocked backward.
“You … okay?” the maid asked, face pinched with concern, crow’s feet gathering around her shock-filled eyes. “I thought you … dead. Bozhe moy.”
Lucy forced an inappropriately cheery smile. “Not dead,” she said. Although her parents would kill her if they ever learned what she’d been up to.
Pulling back her hand, the other woman’s attitude grew more leery.
“Fever?”
Lucy sensed the relief the maid felt at the strange girl on the bedroom floor still having a pulse was dissipating and rapidly being replaced with well-founded suspicion. She needed to come up with a credible story to keep the woman from calling hotel security. Fast. Unfortunately, two heavyweight champions had just gone ten rounds inside her skull.
“No fever,” Lucy replied.
She hated to do this, it went against every fiber of her being, but she raised her left arm slowly. A silver bracelet dangled from her wrist. From a distance it looked like a regular charm bracelet: a tiny Eiffel Tower, a shooting star, a four-leaf clover. On the center charm, however, there was no mistaking the bright-red lettering.
MEDIC ALERT. EPILEPSY.
Claudia added the charms as a surprise right before Lucy started at Eaton High. Wearing the bracelet had been one of her parents’ conditions for letting her attend. Her bestie understood better than anyone Lucy’s need not to be defined by the label that already determined too much of her life. Claudia had done such a clever job at camouflaging it that most of the time Lucy could forget it was anything but a charm bracelet.
She had promised herself she would never use her condition as a get-out-of-jail-free card. But that was precisely what she was doing now.
The familiar combination of pity and a trace of fear flitted through the other woman’s eyes.
“I’m sorry,” Lucy said, talking a mile a minute. “The concierge let me in. I must have had a seizure.” She rubbed her temples for emphasis. “I’m so embarrassed.” When had lying become so easy for Lucy?
Before the maid could answer, she continued, “Could I borrow your phone, please?” Lucy pointed at the phone peeking out from her apron pocket. “I need to call someone to meet me.”
“Da.” She handed over the phone as gingerly as if Lucy were an unexploded bomb.
To be fair, her hands were trembling. She inhaled a deep breath and dialed.
It seemed like forever before anyone answered. Lucy’s eyes strayed toward the window. The sun was much lower in the sky.
“Hello?” came a skeptical voice on the other end of the line. Warmth spread through Lucy at the sound. Claudia always made her feel like things would be all right.
“Clauds, it’s me. Lucy.”
“Luce? Why are you calling me from this number?”
“Broke my phone.”
“Again?” Claudia laughed. “Where are you?” she asked.
“Still in the city. I’m gonna catch the next train. Could you get me at the station?”
There was a pause. Claudia could read Lucy too well. If she was calling for chauffeur service it meant something was wrong. Lucy was fiercely stubborn about riding her bike everywhere.
“Are you okay, Luce?”
No. Not at all. “Just a little lightheaded.”
Lucy could picture Claudia’s head bob. She never judged Lucy or made her feel limited, which was why Claudia was the only person she opened up to about her condition.
“Okay,” replied her friend. “The Mystery Minivan will be waiting. With bells on.”
Only Claudia could make Lucy smile at a time like this. Claudia had a thing for Scooby-Doo. She had also inherited the minivan from her three older brothers, so the mystery was how it could still be in one piece.
“Love you, Clauds.” Lucy tried to keep her tone breezy as she hung up. Glancing at the maid, whose expression was still panicked, she said, “Thank you,” and the phone slipped from her sweaty fingers.
“Welcome,” the woman mumbled, brow furrowed.
Lucy scrambled to her feet. She needed to skedaddle before the woman changed her mind and decided to alert the authorities.
Her hand was on the doorknob when she heard, “Wait—”
Lucy froze. She pictured the disappointment on her mother’s face as she received a call from the police.
“Your bag?”
The maid held out a beat-up messenger bag branded with an OMg (oxygen, magnesium) bumper sticker. Like everything else, it had totally slipped Lucy’s mind. She wouldn’t get far without her wallet.
Cheeks sizzling, Lucy thanked the woman again, shouldered her bag, and hightailed it out of there.
After making her way downstairs, she stepped out onto the chaotic city street and rubbed her bracelet, unable to suppress a smile. Lucy’s shoulders curled forward as she exhaled.
She’d made a clean getaway.