Levitating Las Vegas

7




As Holly regained her balance, she realized Rob had shoved her and Elijah at once, pushing them away from each other. Now Rob turned his back on her and moved toward Elijah with a balled fist. Elijah still faced in the other direction. He couldn’t see the fist coming at the back of his head. Holly opened her mouth to shriek a warning.

Inexplicably, Elijah ducked.

Rob’s dense body followed the unchecked momentum of his fist. He crashed into the empty table behind Elijah. Chairs bounced against the wall. Rob came up holding one of them. Time seemed to stop as he stood with the heavy metal chair above him like a movie monster rising from the sea and towering over Tokyo.

Elijah was taller than Rob, but he was dwarfed by Rob plus chair. He crouched underneath with nowhere to go. Holly screamed as she watched Elijah move forward to grab Rob around the middle. She could tell this wouldn’t work. The chair would make contact with Elijah before he reached Rob.

Rob brought the chair down—and stopped only inches into the swing.

Elijah tackled him. They both fell into the tables and chairs. Holly danced backward as Rob’s chair, shaken loose by Elijah’s hit, tumbled toward her across the floor.

“Break it up!” bellowed a six-foot-four Diana Ross advancing toward them. Holly teetered on her heels and got caught in a wave of brawny transvestite bouncers grabbing Elijah and hustling him out the back door of the club. He halted suddenly in the corridor, bending down to pick something up from the floor, and Cher nearly tripped over him. Elijah put his hand to his mouth—he’d found Holly’s pill where it had rolled on the dirty floor and had swallowed it dry, oh, gross—but the trannies mistook his hesitation for another attempt to tackle Rob. They muscled him out the door and didn’t stop until they and Elijah and Holly all burst into the dark parking lot behind the club.

Holly glanced back once and saw Rob in the corridor, struggling to follow them, face pinched with rage, and little Marilyn Monroe reaching up to shove his chest. The door swung closed, blocking the image out.

“Sorry, honey.” Diana took Holly by the shoulders to steady her. “If you’re going to start fights, you need to learn to duck and cover better than that.”

“Right.” Holly sighed with relief in the hot June night. The bass beat, distant and muffled, boomed against the cinder-block wall like a dragon pounding on the castle gate.

Diana and Cher and Elijah stood around her, panting, in the parking lot full of cars. Rob’s cop car occupied a dark corner next to the fence. Funny—last night she’d found it strange that he drove it when off duty and out of uniform instead of buying another car. Now that he’d stalked her at her apartment, then followed her to this club and attacked Elijah, it seemed less strange and more Loser.

“Holly,” Elijah called. He leaned with his shoulder against the wall of the building, breathing more laboriously every second. He shivered and crossed his arms.

“I’m beginning to see why Rob calls you Dangermouse,” she joked, stepping around Diana to meet Elijah at the wall.

Elijah gave her a lopsided grin. “I think it’s meant to be ironic. I’m not dangerous.” He certainly didn’t look dangerous anymore with his wavy hair falling into his vacant eyes. He seemed to space out before he completed his sentence.

“Are you okay?” Holly asked suspiciously. “You look sick. Did Rob hit you?” Holly hadn’t seen Rob land a punch, but it had all happened so fast, from conversation to kiss to attack in less than sixty seconds.

“No,” Elijah said weakly. “I had a beer, so—”

“You drank a beer before you took a pill? A real beer with alcohol?”

“I doubted I’d get a pill,” Elijah said sheepishly. “But without the pill I felt like I’d stuck my finger in a light socket. I drank the beer to calm down. Holly, listen—”

“We’ve got to get you home before that pill hits your system with that beer.” Holly turned to get help from Diana and Cher. Even better, now Shane had come outside. He chatted with the transvestites, hands in the pockets of his jeans. She started to call to him.

Elijah grabbed her forearm, hard. “Listen to me,” he hissed.

She turned back to him in surprise.

His green eyes were wide in drunken earnest. “You’ve got to get out of here. Someone in Glitterati can control minds.”

“Really?” she breathed, heart breaking for him. When her parents suggested he was having an exacerbation, they hadn’t been kidding.

Elijah nodded, and his eyes lost focus again. “Usually I can tell whose thoughts I’m reading. This time Rob was about to hit me, so I couldn’t concentrate. But this powerful command flew right past my head and changed the decisions somebody made.” He splayed his hand and turned it in the air in front of him, as if changing another person’s decisions worked like unscrewing a lightbulb. “A mind-control thing.” He watched his hand curiously.

“Okay,” Holly chirped. “Thanks for letting me know.” Since he seemed absorbed in his own hand, she backed a few steps away. She turned to Shane, who gentlemanly flicked a chrome lighter to Cher’s cigarette while arguing with Diana over the relative merits of early Motown versus rockabilly. Holly cleared her throat. “Excuse me, Shane.”

Shane looked around at her. She was taken aback at how handsome he was, even without the early 1960s rock star tux. And she was baffled all over again that Kaylee didn’t go after him.

“Miss Starr.” He grinned. “We missed you when you left last night. Come over and jump out our bathroom window anytime.”

She made a face at him. “I didn’t know what to do about Rob. Something told me he wouldn’t take no for an answer, and I didn’t want to drag you and Elijah into it.”

“That worked well,” Shane said.

She glanced briefly back at Elijah, who had given up examining his hand because now he needed it to hold himself up against the wall. “Can you get Elijah home? He’s not supposed to drink on Mentafixol, and he’s acting a little loco.” She circled her finger at her ear.

“He had one beer,” Shane protested. “What could one beer hurt?”

An enormous weight slammed into Holly’s back. She reeled and grabbed Shane to keep herself upright. Elijah had fallen on her.

“I’ve got him.” Cher hurried around them and pulled Elijah’s limp body off Holly. “Diana, give me a hand here. Shane, where’s your car?” Diana bustled over to take Elijah’s legs, and the two giant starlets hoisted him under their arms.

Holly followed the others around the side of the building to the muscle car she’d seen parked in the guys’ driveway. Then she bent over Elijah’s supine body in the backseat. His face was slack, as dead as she must have been that stupid night as a high school sophomore, when she drank a few sips of beer on top of Mentafixol, and anything could have happened to her.

“Getting in?” Shane asked from the driver’s seat. Red and orange lights from another nightclub flashed and reflected in the windshield as he waited for her answer.

Yes, Holly wanted to help Elijah home and take care of him. Kaylee wouldn’t want her to go on such an adventure alone, but maybe Holly could argue Kaylee into going with her, and this would throw Kaylee together with Shane.

There was no way, Holly decided. Her parents would find out and have a fit. If Elijah had wanted a relationship with her, if he’d shown any real interest in her at all, defying her parents and jeopardizing her career in magic might be worth it. As it was, all she had from him was a request for a pill and one crazy kiss, with an emphasis on crazy.

“How will you get him inside the house by yourself?” she asked uneasily. “And how will you handle Rob when he comes home?”

“I’m stronger than I look. There’s more to me than meets the eye.” Shane turned all the way around with his elbow on the back of the seat. He looked like an impatient young father scolding his children on their family road trip down Route 66. But then his eyes met hers, and his expression softened. “I’ve got him, Holly, really.”

She took one last wistful glance at Elijah, his arm limp across his chest in the rock band T-shirt. Poor Elijah.

Poor Holly.

Then she stepped back, closed the heavy door as gently as she could, and retreated to the sidewalk in front of the nightclub. The car started with a shout of unmuffled, eight-cylinder exuberance, backed out of the lot, and roared down the black street lined with glittering signs for other nightclubs, with other secret meetings and close encounters going down inside.

“Mmm, mmm, mmm.” Diana shook her head. “I wish I could get men to fight like that over me.”

Holly looked down into her cleavage. “I think it’s the bikini top. I didn’t get a chance to go home and change after work.”

“Girl,” said Cher, “if I had real tits like that, I’d be wearing my bikini top to Walmart.”

“These old things?” Holly hooked a finger in the center of her top, pulled it taut, and peered curiously inside.

Diana guffawed. “I’d wear my bikini top with my candy striper apron down at the hospital as a service to the community. Give everybody the will to live.” She batted Holly’s hand away from her top. “Stop that and come on inside before you get us all arrested. As long as you’re standing between the two of us, you might get thrown in the wrong tank. Come on.”

The three of them linked arms, with Holly in the middle. She felt out of place more because she was shorter by eight inches than because she was the only genuine girl. But when they reached the front door, they stopped. Rob glared through the glass at them with a scowl on his face and his hands on his hips.

Cher stamped her platform shoe. “Why didn’t Marilyn kick that a*shole out?”

“I told her not to,” Diana said. “He’s a cop. I don’t want to make a cop mad. Half the people in here have a pocket full of ecstasy.” She looked down at Holly. “I will kick him out, for you.”

Wouldn’t that be nice! But Rob really might cause problems for Glitterati—he was that petty, Holly was learning—and she didn’t want anyone to get in trouble on her account.

“Thanks, but no thanks.” She patted Diana’s arm. “I have to face the music sooner or later.” She pulled the door open.

“We’re right here behind you if you need us, girl,” Cher called, and Holly was glad Cher had said this within Rob’s hearing. Rob loomed in front of her, blocking her way into the party.

And he wobbled a bit. She thought this was an optical illusion of the pink light strobing across his face—but no, he alternately swayed on his feet, then pulled himself up straighter to look more imperious, then swayed again. She’d thought she smelled liquor on him last night. Tonight he’d outdone himself.

She should have told him off rather than running away last night. Now she needed to handle him like the diva she was not. She picked up her feet and put on a pout as she approached him. “I’m here with Kaylee,” she shouted above the music. “Not you.”

“I didn’t see you with Kaylee,” he yelled back, too loud, too close to her ear. “I saw Dangermouse ramming his tongue down your throat.”

“It’s none of your business,” Holly said. “I don’t want to go out with you anymore. Stop hanging around my apartment. Don’t follow me. And don’t take this out on Elijah when you get home. You have no reason to be mad at him, or at me either.” She tried to step around Rob.

As she passed, he grabbed her forearm. “Why don’t we call it a night?” he growled, wilting her curls with a cloud of alcoholic breath. “You can make it up to me.”

“Ask Marilyn to call you a taxi.” Holly nodded toward the superstar at the door, who winked at her. “I didn’t come with you, Rob, and I’m not leaving.” She flounced away, half expecting him to grab her again.

But he didn’t. Miraculously she made it all the way into the center of the throbbing melee, where Kaylee was doing the Cupid Shuffle with a Celine Dion the size of a linebacker. Holly nearly hopped up and down on her high heels with glee at the prospect of dancing the night away with Kaylee. Every night onstage at the casino, she twirled and circled and presented. She toned her muscles with exercises in ballet and yoga classes. She didn’t do enough dancing.

First things first, though. She boogied up to Kaylee and stepped to the left with her, then to the right. “Where were you?” she shouted. “Rob tried to kill Elijah!”

“I wouldn’t have let you get in any trouble,” Kaylee yelled back calmly.

Holly knew this was true. Kaylee had her reasons for doing what she did. As Holly had surmised earlier, Kaylee’s phone call must have been official casino business.

Holly danced, concerned about nothing but her own body. Rob hung around, lurking at the edge of the crowd, but he never tried to approach her. He watched them dance from the periphery of their circling arms and legs.

Late that night, the crowd still hadn’t thinned. Kaylee took a turn in the rest room, and Holly was left doing the electric slide with a group of ladies from a librarians’ convention who were way too old for this club. As the whole double line of them leaned to the front and turned to the right, facing the corridor where Holly’s encounter with Elijah had taken place, she noticed Rob staggering toward the back door.

She leaped out of line, glancing around for Kaylee’s white-blond head or any transvestite bouncer to help her. All she saw was the tangle of dancers in shifting colors. Rob might have shoved his keys into the ignition of his sheriff’s car by now. Angry as she was at him, she couldn’t let him drive drunk. He might cause a wreck and kill someone, all because he’d tied one on, upset over her.

She skittered out the back door and into the parking lot. The brake lights of his car glowed already. She dashed the last twenty yards across the asphalt and knocked on the trunk to keep him from backing over her. Rounding the car, she conjured up her lecture. It should be persuasive but not patronizing, which would only make him madder. She opened the passenger door.

He looked up at her with too-bright eyes, watery at the edges, and turned off the engine. Good.

And then he yanked her into the car.

The passenger door sagged behind her but didn’t shut completely. She poised to spring right back out of the car again. But he held her with a hard grip on her forearm.

“Rob!” she roared.

“I couldn’t get close to you all night,” he complained. “I wanted to ask you to go with me to meet my brothers.”

He’d told her during their week of acquaintance that he and his brothers spent a lot of time together out in his sheriff’s jurisdiction, near Hoover Dam. At the time, she’d puzzled over why he didn’t live with his brothers, which would be more convenient for getting to work than living inside the city limits with Elijah and Shane. Now she wondered why a meeting with his brothers, of all things, was his proposed second date. He was really drunk.

“No.” She tried to jerk her arm out of his grasp. His fingers tightened around her. “Rob. I don’t want to go out with you anymore, okay? Let me go.”

In answer, he reached around and caught her other arm too, pulling her closer. His breath reeked of alcohol, but he looked straight into her eyes and sounded startlingly sober as he said, “Try it. You might like it.” He slipped one hand inside her top.

She had to get out the half-open door of this car and away from him. But intending to run didn’t count for anything. Though her muscles stretched taut, ready to bolt, Rob held her as firmly as before. His thumb rubbed her nipple.

“Rob!” she gasped. “Okay. Enough. I’ll call a taxi to take you home.” She moved her hand toward her pocket to take out her phone.

She managed to move only a millimeter before Rob’s grip stiffened further. “You’d love that,” he growled. “Go home with me. Do it in the same house with Elijah.”

The alarm Holly had felt the day she came down with MAD was nothing compared with her terror at this bizarre conversation. “Rob!” she shouted. “That’s crazy. I am not doing it with you at all. Let me call you a—”

“When you meet my brothers, you’ll find out what crazy means.” He laid her flat on the seat and pinned her wrists above her head with one big hand. His other hand worked on the buttons of her jeans. “And when you feel powerful in a few days, remember how powerless you felt right now. Remember how much you enjoyed this, because that’s how my brothers will make you feel.”

“Rob!” Holly squealed. She took a breath to scream, doubting anyone inside the club would hear her.

Abruptly he slid off her and sat back on the driver’s side of the car, against the door, still watching her with his hard brown eyes.

Holly didn’t waste time puzzling out his terrifying behavior or his equally terrifying one-eighty. She scooted away from him across the seat and hit the passenger door. Tumbling out onto the asphalt, she came face-to-face with wicked high-heeled sandals and a killer pedicure.

“Did he hurt you?” Kaylee cried, hauling Holly up by her sore arm. Her eyes stopped on Holly’s open fly. “That f*ck!”

Holly stood, resting against Kaylee for a moment. Then she slammed the passenger door shut and pulled Kaylee a pace farther away from the car to put more distance between them and Rob. She took a deep breath to relax her nerves and clear her head after every horrible thing that had happened in the last five minutes. She buttoned her fly and gathered her very small sweater closer around her to ward off the chill that had come over her. It was no use. She assured Kaylee, “He hurt me, but not like you mean.”

Without a word, Kaylee reared back and kicked the bottom panel of the car with the heel of her sandal, leaving a small round dent.

Holly watched silently, unsure she was seeing what she thought she was seeing. Despite the fact that Kaylee was head of security at an institution rumored to be full of Mafia, Holly had never seen her do anything remotely violent before, and she had just dented a cop car with her shoe.

“You would have loved it, Holly,” Rob shouted through the back window with surprising clarity for a mostly passed-out drunk. “That bitch Kaylee wants to keep you a virgin until you’re thirty. You don’t know what you’re missing.”

Kaylee snapped open her purse, moved her handgun aside, and pulled out her phone.

“Who are you calling?” Holly asked worriedly.

“The cops,” Kaylee said without looking up from the keypad.

“They’ll want me to make a statement,” Holly protested. “I don’t want to make a statement.”

Kaylee looked up at Holly and cocked her head to one side. “Noooo, we don’t want you to make a statement.” The timbre of her voice changed from that of Holly’s angry friend to the calculating security officer at the casino, concerned about publicity if one of the scantily clad assistants for the casino’s popular magician were attacked.

“But we can’t just walk away from this,” Kaylee said. “He needs to be punished and then taken home and put to bed where he can’t hurt anybody else. Besides, if you don’t do something, he’ll just come after you again. Remember this morning at the apartment? He’s got stalker written all over him.” She moved her thumbs on her keypad.

“Now who are you calling?” Holly asked.

“My goons.”

Those Mafia rumors resurfaced in Holly’s brain. “Wait, no. Can you ask them not to beat him up?”

Kaylee shrugged. “It’s what they do. One or the other. Cops or thugs. Make a decision.”

No decision to make. “Beat him up. He deserves it.” Holly put her hand over her mouth, shocked at herself.

“Excellent choice.” Kaylee put the phone to her ear. Waiting for the call to go through, she said, “Holly, I’m really sorry. I told you I wouldn’t let you get in any trouble, but I lost sight of you for a minute. Even goddesses have to pee. I’m dropping the ball lately.”

“How can you say that?” Holly asked in astonishment. She was grateful for Kaylee’s protection, but she understood the limits of that protection. Kaylee couldn’t be everywhere. “You had no idea what he was going to do. You can’t read minds.”

“No,” Kaylee whispered, glowing like an angel in the night as the hot breeze rippled her gold lamé top and fingered her white-blond hair. “I can’t do that.”



A quarter hour later, safe in her apartment, Holly was surprised by the finger-shaped bruises on her hips. She stared into the bathroom mirror at the dark stains on her white skin. They didn’t jive with what she’d been through with Rob. He’d ripped open her fly against her will, yes, but when she thought back on what had happened, she framed it as sexual politics gone wrong, rather than a—

Rape.

Not a rape, she corrected herself, pressing her clammy fingertips to her temples, willing away the nausea. It looked so bad only because of the bruises. He’d read her wrong because he’d been drunk. She’d read him wrong because she was inexperienced with men.

Undoubtedly she was the only twenty-one-year-old virgin in Las Vegas. Surely to God she could have found a way to hook up with somebody by now. Of course, all the girls she’d known who’d had one-night stands had been aided by alcohol. On Mentafixol, Holly would have fallen asleep after half a beer, just like Elijah. She could have done it, but the escapade would have had a roofie-like flavor.

She leaned forward with her elbows on the counter and examined herself more closely at what had to be the lowest point of her life. Her careful brunette half updo had survived more or less intact through a night of dancing and abuse, as had her false lashes and makeup. A beautiful girl even to her own eyes, with glossy tendrils of her hair curling around her bare shoulders in her glittering brassiere, blaming herself for her own sexual battery. She’d assumed her low point was seven years ago when she’d lost her marbles. But at least that night she’d relished those exquisite tingles. At least she’d been powerful in her own mind. Now, at this moment, she was nothing. Her parents might have lied to her about her potential career, and she had abysmal taste in boyfriends. The one quasi boyfriend she had lingering feelings for after all these years was just as sick as she was. There was no future in this.

Well. There was no future in staring at herself in the mirror, either. She changed into pj’s, not feeling any better, but thinking she might feel better if she could talk to Kaylee about it. As a twenty-two-year-old responsible for the security of millions of dollars every day, and a calm twenty-two-year-old at that, Kaylee was always helpful putting Holly’s problems in perspective. And though it was incredibly late, Kaylee would still be up. She was awake when Holly went to bed and gone to work by the time Holly woke some mornings.

Holly padded down the hall in her bare feet and knocked gently on Kaylee’s door. When there was no response, she figured Kaylee was listening in on a conference call with her underlings at the casino. Holly eased the door open.

Bathed in the gentle light of the lamp on her nightstand, Kaylee was sprawled on top of her bedcovers, fully clothed in her clubbing pants and gold lamé top, her platinum-blond hair likewise sprawled on the pillow. She was asleep, not assassinated by rivals at Caesars Palace, which was Holly’s first thought. To make sure, Holly watched Kaylee’s petite chest expand with one, two, three slow breaths. The news squawked quietly on the TV mounted on the wall, and sections of the newspaper spooned next to her like a lover. One arm was flung over her head, and her limp hand rested dangerously close to the grip of her ubiquitous pistol glinting underneath the pillow.

Holly took a step into the clutter of a normal twenty-two-year-old woman’s room: girl rock-band posters; an open closet with a pair of dirty tennis shoes next to a pair of deep-discount designer heels; a huge teddy bear sent by Kaylee’s mom, whom Kaylee did not like to talk about (she was supposed to hug the teddy bear when she wanted to hug her mom); Chinese paper lanterns hanging from the ceiling. With perfect features and a porcelain complexion, the unconscious Kaylee looked too delicate to be part of this saucy materialism, like some slender-necked white waterfowl blown from typhoon to Santa Ana to desert wind and dropped into an apartment complex in Vegas. Holly wondered what had tired Kaylee to the point that she actually succumbed to sleep.

Out of the corner of her eye, Holly caught a movement.

Not in the apartment—she sucked in a long, quiet breath and let it out slowly as she realized this. In the parking lot. She stepped to the window for a better view.

Her heart beat faster as the movement fluttered toward Kaylee’s black BMW. Two figures, a young man and woman dressed in black, squeezed on either side of the car in its parking space in the full lot. They looked through the back windows, then the front. The woman said something, and both figures looked up at the apartment building. Their eyes slid over it from Holly’s right to left, skipping over the window from which Holly gazed. They stopped. Came back to her window. Stared straight at her. Pointed.

This was not happening to Holly. This was a flare-up of MAD brought on by the distress of seeing Elijah pass out earlier, and the threat of running out of medicine. After all, she’d been dead sure when she was fourteen that she could float up to the level of her parents’ chandelier. But she could have sworn these two strangers knew who she was, and where she lived, and had a particular interest in her. From Kaylee’s car they crossed the parking lot without even looking both ways—it was three in the morning with no traffic, but if Holly had been them she would have looked up and down the parking lot before crossing anyway—and they stepped up onto the crushed rock around the apartment building.

As they drew closer, she could see their black clothes weren’t for prowling and skulking around strangers’ apartments in the wee hours. They were Goths. The man—more of a boy, really, not much older than her—wore a black trench coat, ridiculously hot in the Vegas night, and black jeans. The woman—a girl, also around her age—had dyed her hair a vibrant unnatural red, but otherwise wore a black dress, black leggings, and clunky black shoes. She should have worn heels, which would have made her legs look longer.

The boy’s shoulders shook with laughter as Holly thought this.

They kept walking toward Holly’s window. She could have written it off as curious when they looked in Kaylee’s car, it could have been a coincidence as they eyeballed her apartment, but now they walked up to the window and looked at her on the second story. They could see her in the lamplight. They stared right at her.

Holly was near panic. She wasn’t sure what she expected them to do—throw gravel at her window? uproot a cactus and heave that toward her too?—but their very presence was so threatening, their stare, their knowledge that she was there and she was linked with Kaylee’s car. They did know who she was.

She opened her mouth to wake Kaylee. She wanted Kaylee to see this too, Kaylee who was head of security, Kaylee who was sane. She took a breath to call to Kaylee and—

Suddenly that did not seem like a good idea.

The Goths still stared at her. They still made her decidedly uneasy. But she didn’t need to call to Kaylee. That was not a good idea. She simply stared back at them, watching them watch her. Her heart descended from panic mode and maintained a rapid beat of only mild alarm.

The man said something.

The woman held up one finger where he could see it: wait.

They stared at Holly, and Holly stood still, for another two minutes. Finally the man spoke again. The woman blew Holly a kiss. The two of them turned their backs on her, crossed the gravel, and disappeared around the corner of the building.

Holly’s alarm remained but didn’t grow. It hadn’t been a good idea to tell Kaylee about the Goths. So it wasn’t as big a deal as she’d first thought. She retreated from Kaylee’s room and went to her own. As she lay down, her hips hurt where Rob’s fingers had been. She curled into the fetal position and stared at the wall.



Elijah woke the next morning in his own bed, fully clothed, cognizant of everything that had happened the night before, but terribly groggy with his one-beer hangover. His habit since graduation had been to take his breakfast onto his front porch, where he could watch the traffic zoom by as people hurried to work. This morning was no different, or so he thought at first. He was so groggy that he hardly noticed how groggy he was. He wasn’t sure how long he’d sat at the patio table with his cereal turning soggy in milk when Shane poked his head outside. “Good morning.”

“Good morning,” Elijah replied. Barely aware that he should be embarrassed at staring into space like an imbecile, he finally ate a mushy spoonful.

“And good morning to you,” Shane said to the doormat.

Elijah half rose and peered over the table to see what Shane was really looking at. Rob lay on the threshold, unconscious, face bloody and swollen.

“Oh!” Elijah exclaimed with his mouth full.

“Did you even notice this?” Shane asked Elijah. He knelt to put a hand on Rob’s wrist, checking his pulse.

Elijah swallowed. “I—” He thought back. Hard. “I guess I did trip on my way out the door. Is he okay?”

“Hand me your bowl.”

Elijah didn’t understand this command, but he reached for his bowl and placed it in Shane’s outstretched hand.

Shane dumped the milk and cereal on Rob’s bloody head.

Rob sat up, spluttering. “What the hell!”

Elijah rushed over. “My God, Rob, are you okay?” he asked the skull-like head oozing red blood and white milk. “Who beat you up? Do you want us to call the police?”

“I am the police!” Rob pulled himself up to standing, bracing himself on Shane. Then he poked his finger in Elijah’s face. “You get the idea to put a hand on Holly Starr again,” he spat through the milk, “you remember I found her first.”

“You found her first?” Elijah asked indignantly. “Like she’s a . . .” He meant to make Rob hear how disrespectful he sounded. But Elijah was so groggy, he couldn’t think of the other end of this simile, an object that people commonly found. Then he remembered, “But you didn’t find her first. I asked her out in ninth grade.”

Rob folded his bloody arms. “Did you do her?”

“No, I— What kind of question is that?”

Rob shoved Elijah.

“Hey,” said Shane.

“Ew,” said Elijah, because Rob had left a milky handprint on his shirt.

“She’s mine,” Rob barked. “She belongs to me. You remember that. Stay the f*ck away from her.” He stormed inside and slammed the door. The sharp crack echoed against the quiet houses across the street.

Which was silly—the symbolic finality of that door slam, shutting them out—because Elijah and Shane lived there too, and Elijah had to go inside to get another cereal bowl and a mop. Shane sat at the table and watched Elijah clean up the mess.

Finally Elijah slid into the chair next to Shane. “Some night, huh?” He reached for a second helping of cereal and milk. “Hey, I meant to ask you. Last night at Glitterati, before the shit went down, why didn’t you hit on Kaylee? You’d been talking about her at the table, and I thought you were going to ask her out.”

Shane shook his head slowly. “I wanted to, but then I changed my mind. I wonder why she keeps doing that to me. It’s insulting.”

“Doing what to you? You’re the one who changed your mind.”

“I’m not so sure about that.”

Elijah didn’t get a chance to ask Shane what he was talking about before Rob burst out of the house again. He lugged two suitcases down the sidewalk between the decorative cacti, toward his sheriff’s car parked at the curb.

“Rob!” Elijah called. “What are you doing? Are you moving out?”

Rob shouted without turning around, “No, I’m spending a week at band camp.”

“Should we help him pack?” Shane asked. His eyes were inscrutable behind his vintage Wayfarers, but Elijah could tell from his dry tone that Shane loved this scene.

After everything Rob had said and thought about Holly in the past few days, Elijah felt the same way. “No, let’s not.”

Even without help, it didn’t take Rob long. His bedroom furniture belonged to the house, and in a week he hadn’t accumulated much else. He glared at Elijah and Shane one last time, roared off in his sheriff’s car with the siren disturbing the peace just for spite, and was gone.

“F*cker,” Shane declared, walking inside.

The excitement over, Elijah settled back into his breakfast and his own blankness. A few minutes later, or perhaps a few hours, Shane reemerged from the house, carrying his guitar case. “I’m going to class and then work. Will you be okay here by yourself?”

“Sure.” Elijah took a sip of coffee, wishing the caffeine would work. Boy, the Mentafixol label wasn’t kidding when it said DO NOT MIX WITH ALCOHOL.

Shane stood directly in front of him and bent down to look into his eyes. “Will you call me if you’re not?”

“Sure.”

“Are you hearing me, Elijah?” Shane rapped with his knuckles on Elijah’s forehead. Elijah’s hair padded the knocking, but it still almost hurt. “Call me if anybody you don’t know comes to the house,” Shane said. “Don’t go anywhere with a stranger.”

“Okay.” This was easy to agree to. Strangers didn’t approach Elijah out of the blue and try to get friendly.

Except Shane, a year ago.

And Rob, a week ago.

Shane must have left then. Elijah got lost in his own thoughts, or lack of them, and didn’t notice Shane’s 1963 Pontiac Catalina leave the driveway. But he watched it pull into the driveway and park again. Shane opened the door in a pool of light from the streetlamp. It was night.

Carrying his guitar case, Shane walked up to Elijah on the porch. “You’re sitting in exactly the same spot and exactly the same position as when I left this morning. Did you go to work?”

“I must have.” Elijah sipped his coffee. “My mom would have called to check on me if I didn’t go in.” At some level he knew he should be concerned about losing a day of memory, but it was like a shield protected his brain, preventing alarm from punching through and taking hold.

“Your mom’s out of town on vacation,” Shane pointed out. “She won’t be back until Monday.”

“Oh, yeah,” Elijah said, remembering. He snapped his fingers as more came back to him. That afternoon Holly had come up to him in the employee break room in a sparkling red bikini with panels of pink transparent fabric floating around her long legs. She’d looked like a genie. She’d pressed a folded note into his palm as she swept past the lockers and disappeared into the hall.

In the note she asked whether he was okay after their adventure last night. She told him she’d passed out after a few sips of beer in high school, so she understood what had happened. She apologized for Rob trying to kill him. She’d gone out with Rob only that once, and it was over. She hoped Elijah wouldn’t have any more trouble out of him because of her. And Elijah should burn this note.

Actually, now that he thought about it, the note had been very sweet, almost as if Holly liked him. He should ask her out. Except he might get his mom fired. He’d definitely get himself fired. Or perhaps the threat from Holly’s dad and Mr. Diamond no longer applied seven years later?

“Elijah!” Shane tapped on the table. “Did it ever occur to you to try weaning yourself off that pill?”

The tapping created ripples in Elijah’s coffee cup. He watched them, mesmerized, then realized Shane had asked him something. “What?”

“I mean, you may not feel it day to day, but that’s a serious elephant tranquilizer of a drug, if you’re not supposed to drive while you’re taking it, and it makes you pass out cold after one beer and walk around like the living dead the next day.”

Elijah had a hard time following what Shane said. “What?”

“In the past few days, when you were off that drug, you seemed jumpy and anxious because you wanted to get back on the drug and you couldn’t find any. But you did not seem crazy.”

Elijah opened his mouth to protest, then closed it again. For years he’d kept his delusion that he could read minds a secret. He wasn’t about to spill it now.

Shane set his guitar case down, then touched the top of Elijah’s head. His hand bounced along Elijah’s waves and slid downward. He squeezed Elijah’s shoulder, as if comforting a younger relative, a child. He picked up his guitar and turned for the door.

“Don’t tell me that I’m not crazy,” Elijah whispered.

“I’m telling you that you don’t need to be medicated,” Shane shot back. “Oh, never mind. Do you want me to stay in tonight? I have a hot date with a UNLV cheerleader, but I can cancel.”

“No thanks,” Elijah managed.

As Shane opened and closed the door, light from the house shot across the lawn, then shrank to a sliver and disappeared, leaving Elijah in the blackness.

When he tried to recall it later, he wasn’t sure what he did for the rest of the night. After serving up a pot roast for Shane, he probably returned outside to stare at the night for an hour more, then moved inside to read for a while, then fell asleep.

But when he woke the following morning, the grogginess was gone. Thirty-six hours had passed since he’d taken Holly’s pill. He was twelve hours past his usual dose, and he felt it. Shane in the room next door lay in bed, wondering whether Kaylee liked sushi. Elijah could read Shane’s mind again. Elijah was crazy. He remembered the crazy things he’d said to Holly at Glitterati, and the crazy thought that somebody in the club had the power of mind control. He remembered that Rob had moved out, that he was possessive of Holly, that he carried a gun.

As the day wore on, Elijah made his rounds and his phone calls. His pills still hadn’t arrived at the casino pharmacy, his mom was still out of town, his doctor was still disconnected, and Elijah knew what he had to do.