Brenna Yovanoff - The Replacement

I rolled onto my back and squeezed my eyes shut. “I don’t think so.”

Roswell sighed. “Come on, you don’t want to miss this. ’Tis the season for girls to dress like hookers. We’ll catch up with the twins, get a little socially lubricated. I have this feeling that Alice is particularly looking forward to your company.”

I scrubbed my hand over my eyes. “I’m not ditching out on you. Okay, I am . But not like that. Jesus, what time is it?”

“Almost nine.”

On the other end of the line, a door opened and Roswell sighed. I could hear his mom in the background, telling him that someone needed to feed the dog and it had better be him. He said something back, but it was muffled, and I heard her laugh from somewhere far away.

The idea came to me that I’d gotten up for a little in the morning and that I’d had a really awful conversation with my mom. The whole thing was like a bad dream, though, and I couldn’t pull all the threads together.

Then Roswell was back, talking into the receiver. “Is everything okay?”

“It’s fine. I’m just not into going out right now. Not tonight.”

After I hung up, I put the pillow over my head and was just starting to drift back into a pleasant state of oblivion when the phone rang again.

This time, I checked the caller ID but didn’t recognize the number. I answered anyway, thinking it could be someone from school, calling about homework or something else just as improbable. I was thinking, but not admitting, that it could be Alice.

If I’d had any trouble recognizing Tate’s voice, the lack of formal greeting would have tipped me off.

“Mackie,” she said, “I need you to listen to me.”

I took a deep breath and flopped back down on the bed. “How did you get my number?”

“If you didn’t want me calling, you should have told Danny not to give it to me. Now, where can we meet, because I really need to talk to you.”

“I can’t,” I said.

“Yes, you can. Okay, fine. I’m coming to your house. Are you at home? I’ll be at your house in ten minutes, so you’d better be home.”

“ No! —I mean, I won’t be here. I’m going to this party with Roswell and I’m just about to leave.”

“Party,” she said. Her voice sounded cold, and I could picture the look on her face suddenly—this weird mix of frustration and hurt. I had a miniature daydream, just a half second, where I imagined touching her, running the ball of my thumb over her cheek in an attempt to make her stop looking so sad, but it guttered out the next second when she said, “Something is disgustingly wrong, and you know it, and you’re going to a party? You’re unbelievable.”

“I don’t know anything , okay? I’m hanging up now.”

“Mackie, you are such a—”

“Goodbye,” I said, and hit End .

Then I called Roswell back.

He answered on the first ring, sounding easy and cheerful. “What’s up? Are you calling to wish me luck in my quest to rescue Stephanie from the tyranny of clothing?”

“Is it okay if I come with you?”

“Yeah, that’s fine. Not with the clothing thing, though, right? I mean, that’s kind of a one-man job.”

I laughed and was relieved to find that I sounded almost normal.

Roswell went on in a fake-conversational voice. “So, you remember that I called you fifteen minutes ago, right? And during the course of that conversation, I asked if you wanted to go to a party and get chemically altered and possibly ravish Alice—I mean, I think I really sold the ravishing—but you said no? I mean, you do remember that, right?”

I cleared my throat. “I changed my mind.”

He was quiet on the line for a long time. Then he said, “You sound like shit, though. Do you feel okay?”

“No, but it doesn’t matter.”

“Mackie. Are you sure you actually want to go to a party?”

I took a deep breath. “All I want right now is to get out of the house.”

After I hung up, I closed my eyes and tried to get my head together. Then I rolled off the bed and stood up. If I was going to go with Roswell, I needed to do something about the rumpled state of my hair and also put on a shirt. I crossed the room and started going through my dresser. Usually, sleeping all day would be enough to get rid of the spins, but every time I turned my head, the room seemed to execute a lazy half turn, and I had to keep my hand on top of the dresser for balance.

“Mackie?”

When I glanced over my shoulder, Emma was standing in the doorway watching me. She was wearing sweats, and her hair was twisted into its customary knot. It looked soft and messy, like it had since we were kids. She didn’t go out much, and it looked like she was all set for a night of reading.

I closed the drawer and turned to face her. “You can come in, you know.”

She took a couple steps, then stopped again.

“Janice—my lab partner, Janice—she gave me something,” she said. She was holding a paper bag. “She said it was a special kind of . . . holistic extract.” The sound of her voice was weirdly shrill, like I was making her nervous. “She said—she just said it would be good for you.” She crossed the room to my desk.

“Thanks,” I said, watching as she set the bag down and backed away. “Emma—”

But she’d already turned and walked out of my room.

I picked up the bag and opened it. Inside, there was a tiny bottle made of brown glass. It had a paper label, and someone had written: Most Beneficial Hawthorn. To drink.

Instead of a cap or a cork, the bottle was sealed with wax. When I cracked the seal with my thumbnail, the odor of leaves was sharp, but it didn’t smell spoiled or poisonous.

I trusted Emma. All my life, she’d made it her mission to take care of me, to make sure I was okay. But drinking something unidentified was a very sketchy thing, and while I trusted Emma, I wasn’t at all sure that I trusted Janice.

But more insistent was the feeling that if something didn’t change, if things just kept going on the same way they had been, I was going to wake up one day and not be able to get out of bed. Or, more likely, I was going to go to sleep and not wake up at all.

I touched the mouth of the bottle, then licked the residue off the tip of my finger and waited. After a few minutes of rummaging through old homework assignments and laundry, I figured Janice’s hippie voodoo hadn’t killed me yet, so I took a good-sized drink and then another. It wasn’t bad. It wasn’t good , but it wasn’t bad. It kind of tasted like Everclear and dirt.

I put the empty bottle back in the bag and found a shirt with a collar and not too many wrinkles. I was pulling the shirt down over my head when I realized that I suddenly felt better—all-over better. I’d been exhausted for so long that I’d sort of forgotten I felt exhausted until I didn’t anymore. I stretched and the muscles in my shoulders felt good, flexing restlessly.

In the bathroom, I stood in front of the mirror. My eyes were still dark but not freakish. They were just normal, black at the pupil and a deep, muddy brown in the iris. My skin was still pale, but it would be called “fair” instead of “terminal.” I looked like a regular person, going out on a Saturday night. I looked normal.

I went back into my room and studied the bottle. The label was plain, heavy paper, with nothing else written on it besides the mysterious notation Most Beneficial Hawthorn and the instruction to drink it. I knew that hawthorn was a low, thorny tree that grew out along the country roads, but the label gave no other indication about what the drink actually was.

My head was cluttered with questions. What was it really, and how did it work? Was feeling better the same thing as a cure? Had Emma saved me? Even while my first instinct was to doubt it, I felt the grin spreading across my mouth. Huge, relieved. I hadn’t felt this good in weeks. Months , maybe.