Scarlett Fever

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STRANGE GAMES

The next day, Scarlett got superpowers. Her brain bounced quickly along, remembering details of articles read long before in International Politics, and an obscure verb she didn’t even remember learning in French. It allowed her to make a comment so intelligent in English that it concluded a fifteen-minute discussion. For a few hours, she wondered if she just might be a genius.

That there was a possibility that she might be seeing Eric, that he might call at any point, well, perhaps that had something to do with the pulse and the charge. It didn’t slow as the day went on, and by Biology, with no call or message, it was so high and frantic that she couldn’t even listen or concentrate enough to be annoyed by Max or take any notes. Her brain was burning.

When she emerged at the end of the day, the air was sticky and the sky had a greenish tint. There was an inescapable promise of a storm, something ugly and massive that would wash out the streets and flood the subways. She hurried in the direction of Mrs. Amberson’s to walk Murray, her brain giving her the vague warning that this was not something she wanted to be caught in. Dakota, however, was positively glowing. She had done her job so well the night before that Scarlett was left waiting at the theater for almost a half hour. She accompanied Scarlett on her walk across Central Park to Mrs. Amberson’s, detailing everything she and Spencer had talked about. She wasn’t even making her usual effort to sound unexcited.

“Didn’t he…didn’t you say there was some girl he liked all summer, someone from the show?”

“Stephanie,” Scarlett said absently. She was clotheslined at ankle level by a dog leash because she was busy looking at her phone. And she could only get away with this behavior because Dakota was so consumed in her awkward questions about Spencer. They were mutually guilty.

“Oh right, yeah. Whatever happened with her?”

“Nothing,” Scarlett replied.

“Stop looking at that phone,” Dakota said. “Stop looking at that phone or I’ll eat it.”

Scarlett sighed, and shoved it in her pocket.

“He thinks I’m pressuring him,” she heard herself say. “I shouldn’t have given him the ticket. But he looked like he wanted to go. He was laughing.”

Dakota stepped ahead and stretched out her arm to prevent Scarlett from going any farther.

“I say this as someone who loves you. It’s going to keep happening. So either you stop dealing with him, or you stop talking about it. But this has to be done. You’re making me crazy.”

“I just felt like something was going to happen today,” Scarlett said. “Something huge. I can’t explain it.”

“It’s been two months now,” Dakota replied. “I need the old you to come back. I need to have a different conversation. I have to…I have to go meet Andy.”

“Who’s Andy?” Scarlett asked.

“Some grad student my parents found for me to work on French conversation with. I have to meet him up on One Hundred Eleventh Street in a half an hour.”

“Oh,” Scarlett said. Had Dakota told her this before? Had she just tuned it out? It seemed like something she should have heard about. “I’m going to try harder, I promise.”

“Yeah,” Dakota said sadly. “I know you are.”

When she got home, the door to the Jazz Suite was shut tightly, and she could hear low voices from inside.

“In here,” Marlene called.

Scarlett cautiously peered around the doorway into Marlene’s room.

“Do you want to sit down?” she asked, somewhat formally.

Scarlett didn’t know if she wanted to sit down. She had never been asked to come and sit on Marlene’s bed. It seemed unwise to say no.

Like Spencer, Marlene had her own room. Hers was the only one in the hotel that had truly been redecorated. The walls had been redone in light yellow, because that was her favorite color. Marlene was propped up by her massive supply of pillows and stuffed animals. Scarlett was never really clear where all the pillows had come from, but the stuffed animals were a byproduct of her illness; they are just what people bring when they visit a kid in a hospital. She had well over a hundred. Most of them were in a box in the attic. She kept the choicest ones in her room to form her strange little throne. Scarlett stared at the little monkeys, bears, fish, tigers, and other strange creatures that were smooshed under her weight, yet still looked happy to give their stuffing to support their queen. She was holding a large biography of Princess Diana, one thick with glossy photos.

“Lola’s home.”

“Oh,” Scarlett said, nodding in the direction of the Jazz Suite. “That’s what’s going on.”

Marlene nodded sagely.

“They’ve been in there for an hour. She’s in trouble.”

“Yeah,” Scarlett said, “I figured.”

They both ran out of things to say at this point, and a tense silence fell.

“So,” Scarlett said. “Princess Diana, huh? Is that for school?”

“I bet if Princess Diana had been alive when I was little, I could have met her,” she said. “She went to a lot of hospitals all over the world. She was always going to hospitals.”

“Maybe,” Scarlett said. “I think she went to a lot of hospitals in England.”

“She went to hospitals everywhere,” Marlene said firmly.

“You’re the one reading the book,” Scarlett quickly conceded.

“And she touched people with AIDS when a lot of people were afraid to. She showed people it was okay.”

“That’s…great?”

“Prince Charles never loved her. I think he just married her because she was pretty and his mom said he had to get married. He cheated on her with that woman he married…”

“Camilla,” Scarlett said.

“Right, so she made her whole life about charity because she knew she would never be happy. So she made everyone else happy.”

“Oh. Right.”

Marlene played with the book a bit, opening it a bit wider until the spine creaked.

“When I was sick,” Marlene went on, “I could always tell the people who really wanted to be there visiting us, or giving us stuff, and the people who didn’t. A lot of celebrities do it just to get their picture taken. They’re nice and all, but you can tell they only want to get it over with. The ones who mean it, you can always tell. I think she really meant it.” With that, she slammed the book shut and set it aside.

“I have to go. We’re going to a Yankees game. They’re letting us catch balls with the players before it starts. What are you doing tonight…nothing?”

“Homework,” Scarlett said rigidly. She held out her very heavy bag to prove her point. It was important to remind Marlene that she was older and a sophomore at a very hard school and at least try to give the impression that she had a lot to do, at all times. Otherwise, Marlene would quickly get out of control. If she was making these kinds of remarks at eleven, she would only get more dangerous as time went on.

Of course, when Scarlett got back to her room, she dropped the heavy bag to the floor and promptly ignored it in favor of getting out her computer and checking to make sure Eric hadn’t sent her a message, and to generally track his whereabouts online. There was no message, though. She pushed the computer aside. Dakota was right. She was going to drive everyone away from her if she couldn’t find a way to stop. Of course, that sounded good on paper. It sounded like something you should just be able to do—just not care anymore. Just forget.

Still, there was something in Dakota’s manner today that Scarlett had never seen before, and it alarmed her. She had pressed her friends a bit too far. She quickly texted Dakota an apology, and a response of forgiveness came right back. No major damage there.

There was a bang at the end of the hall, the sound of the elevator gate being pushed back with extreme force. The only person this could be was Spencer, but he wasn’t normally home this early, and he wouldn’t normally slam the gate in that manner. He appeared at her open door a moment later. There was some kind of substance slicking down his hair and glossing his face on one side. Whatever it was, it had run down his shoulder and arm in a long pinkish stain on his shirt.

“Ask me about my day,” he said. “Go on. Ask me.”

“How…was your day?”

“My day was fine up until about ten minutes ago. They let me go early, so I thought it was a nice day out. Had a couple errands I wanted to do. Thought I’d walk, you know, get some exercise, save the environment. I had my sunglasses on. I figured no one would recognize me. Guess I was wrong.”

He dropped his bag to the floor. It was also covered in the substance.

“I was just a few blocks away, I was on Park, and some guy came along in a Hummer and stopped at the red light. He opened the window and asked me if I was David Frieze, and before I could even answer, he tossed a milk shake on me. He just reached out and dumped it over my head. Would have been a good day to have my bike, which has still not been stolen. That was my day. How was yours?”

“Lola’s home. She’s getting yelled at. We think.”

This calmed him a little. He leaned backward out the door to have a look. He seemed contented by the fact that Lola was being dealt some justice.

“I guess I should shower,” he said. “But all these flies are following me, and they think I’m their god. I feel responsible.”

“Power corrupts,” Scarlett said.

He was about to leave, but then remembered something and stepped back inside.

“You have to help me learn some pages. Script’s in the bag. Let’s do the jail scene, the one where I’m locked to the chair. It’s in the middle.”

He dropped the bag and went off. Scarlett went over and carefully extracted the script. The next episode was a very confusing one. The writers were clearly struggling to work fast and fill some space until they figured out what to do next. The entire episode was just scenes of the police mourning Sonny in their own ways—excessive drinking, emotional outbursts, making bad decisions and smacking people around—and David Frieze sneaking around the city doing suspicious-looking things until they caught him. There was a scene at Columbia, which took place in a lab. He was stealing chemicals when the police burst in and took him off to the station.

“Why are you stealing this stuff?” Scarlett asked when Spencer returned.

“I think I’m building a bomb or something.” He dropped to the floor and ran his hands through his clean, wet hair. “It doesn’t really make any sense.”

“And why is Benzo always so stupid?” she asked. “He punches you in the face while you’re handcuffed to a chair at the station?”

“Yup.”

“Won’t that, like, ruin the trial? Beating up the defendant?”

“I do what they tell me,” Spencer said. “I’m just the actor. I think they’re just writing that in because people want to see me get hit.”

He reached around and felt the back of his neck, as if the sensation of the milk shake running down it was still with him.

“Okay.” He rubbed his hands together. “I was looking at these earlier. I think I have them. Let’s try it.”

They had gotten through the scene four times when the door opened slightly and Lola poked her head inside.

“Hey,” she said. “We, um, need you guys for a second.”

“Need us for what?” Spencer asked. “How was Boston? Did Chip show you all the coloring projects he made in school?”

“We didn’t stay in Boston,” Lola said.

“No?”

“No. We went to Vegas.”

For once, Spencer looked like he might actually approve of a Chip and Lola adventure.

“Trip to Vegas,” he said, nodding. “I respect that. You did it right. Finally, Chip did something worth doing with that credit card of his. You totally beat anything I ever did. From now on, you are master.”

“Vegas?” Scarlett said. “That’s kind of…far.”

“It’s not that long of a flight,” Lola replied. “We did it on the spur of the moment.”

“I like it when you get crazy,” Spencer added. “Pretty soon you’ll be putting unironed sheets on the beds and forgetting to moisturize.”

“Spencer…”

“I mean it,” he said. “I think that’s great. It’s good for you. You need a wild phase. So what did you do? Did you get one of those rooms with a champagne-glass hot tub? Did you get one of those old-timey photos? Or one where you’re dressed like you’re in Star Trek? I love those. Chip would look so good dressed as a Klingon. I can see it now…”

“You should come down,” she said, and vanished.

Spencer and Scarlett looked at each other in bafflement.

“My trials were never public,” he said, shrugging. “Maybe we’re the jury?”

There was an air of manufactured calm in the Jazz Suite. Scarlett’s parents were sitting side by side in a stiff tableau. Lola was on one of the sagging armchairs that used to be in the Sterling Suite.

“Shut the door and sit down,” Scarlett’s dad said. “We all need to talk.”

“This is kind of awesome,” Spencer said in a low voice. “I never got this.”

“Lola?” Scarlett’s mom’s eyes were a bit red, and it sounded like keeping an even tone took effort. “Why don’t you go ahead?”

“We already know,” Spencer said. “You two are back together. We’ve accepted it. All I want to know is…does this change the being-nice-to-Chip rule? Because I think that was just when you two were broken up.”

“She didn’t say that,” Scarlett said.

“Traitor.”

“Guys,” their dad said.

“I think it was pretty clear,” Scarlett cut in.

“We’re on the same side here.”

“Guys!” he said again, more firmly.

“Come on, Lo,” Spencer said. “What’s the ruling? Be kind, for the sake of my sanity. I had a really bad day.”

“You have to be nice,” Lola said. “All the time. Because…”

“All the time?” Spencer said in disgust.

Lola looked to their parents helplessly, as if she needed assistance thinking up a comeback to her brother. Scarlett’s mom raised her hand in a gentle “go on” motion.

“Because,” Lola repeated, “he’s my husband.”