“I don’t know how to make this up to you. I know you didn’t have to do it,” Luke says.
This might be the biggest mistake I’ve made since I offed myself.
The irony has not escaped me. Naomi promised I could touch her tits when we were back in bodies. Without that promise, I would have gone ahead and ended it all at my parents’ house when the Shadow was stalking me, and she would be the new Doris without incident.
But that promise resuscitated me. And now she has skin bags that hang dangerously close to her belly button.
The train ride is more than four hours. We’ll have around fourteen hours left when we arrive in New York. Hopefully I’m famous enough to have easy access to Dylan Pine. Judging from the way the woman at the ticket counter smiled at me and gave me a ticket without asking for ID or money, I’m thinking it will work out. I don’t know why I’m famous, but I guess it doesn’t matter.
I take a seat on the train, expecting Naomi to sit beside me. She selects the seat behind me instead.
“What’s up?” I turn around and ask.
“I’m tired, okay?” She leans her head against the window and closes her eyes.
“Is this seat taken?” It’s a girl. A beautiful girl who never would have spoken to me when I was alive.
I shake my head because words aren’t making their way to my mouth.
She smiles and says, “Thanks.” She sits next to me, and a cloud of perfume travels through my sinuses.
I work up my nerve to give her a good look. She has long blonde hair and sun-kissed skin. She’s wearing a tight sundress.
“I’m Bree.” She holds out her hand and I shake it. It’s warm and soft.
“I’m Luke.”
Bree narrows her eyes and me and says, “You look just like Andy Sullivan.”
“Oh, yeah. I am. Just kidding.” I smile and hope she doesn’t think I’m a big weirdo.
“I don’t blame you for having an alternate identity. Things must be crazy for you right now.”
“Yeah. A little.” I wish I knew what the fuck she is talking about.
“I heard you were in Connecticut, but I didn’t believe it. My friend Shawna told me and she’s so full of shit, you know? She’s literally going to die when I tell her that I sat with you on the train.” She stuffs a piece of gum in her mouth and starts smacking. She pulls a phone from her purse and leans into me. It’s not like the phone I have. She pulls it open and says, “Smile!”
I smile and she snaps a photograph.
“Your phone takes pictures?”
“Yeah, duh!” She giggles and slaps her hand on my thigh. She pokes at the phone for a few seconds and says, “There we go! Undisputable truth. Shawna is going to D-I-E die!”
I turn around to see if Naomi is watching. Her eyes are still closed. Bree turns around to see what I’m looking at.
“Oh my God! Is that Juniper Haskell? She looks like shit.” Bree gasps and turns the phone toward Naomi.
“No. Don’t.” I push Bree’s phone away.
Bree frowns and says, “Okay.” She lowers the phone to her lap. “So, you’re going into the city?”
“Yeah. You?”
She nods and tells me her plans in detail. About the friend she’s staying with, the restaurant where they’re having dinner, the party they’re attending. She barely takes long enough breaks to breathe. I nod where it seems appropriate, but it’s really hard to pay attention.
At some point after the first hour she says, “I can’t wait to tell my friends that you’ll be at the party!”
“What?”
“You just said you’d meet me there.” She narrows her eyes and sticks out her bottom lip.
“I don’t know if I can make it. I’m sorry.”
Naomi leans forward and says, “He has big plans with me. Don’t you, stud?”
Bree looks from me to Juniper and back again. She has finally stopped talking.
Chapter 30
Luke and the girl in the tiny dress flirted all the way from Connecticut to New York. Three hours and forty-seven minutes. I tried to sleep through the trip, but I couldn’t get comfortable in Juniper’s bag of bones.
The giggling, the dumb questions, the obnoxious perfume, the fluttering eyelashes. It brought me to a startling realization: Doris was right.
Men are a distraction for me. They always have been. I let Luke bring me here even though I was set up to have a decent thing going. I know he didn’t actually bring me here. I came on my own volition. But I could’ve minded my own business. It wouldn’t have been fair to Luke, perhaps. But hadn’t I helped him out enough?
The girl’s name is Bree. Dumb fucking name.
As we get off the train, she keeps one hand on Luke’s back and looks to me repeatedly.
“Are you guys going to be together on the next season of House of Has-Beens?” she asks.
I answer her question with an icy glare.
Luke says, “We can’t tell you that.” He smiles at her with Andy’s smile. Charming, fake, rehearsed.
“I don’t know why they would call you has-been anyway,” she says to Luke. “I mean, that sex tape just came out like what, two months ago?”
“Uh yeah, that sounds about right.” Luke’s skin turns bright red, and I don’t bother to choke back my laughter.
“So, you’ll call me later, right?” she asks Luke.
“Sure.” Luke regards her for a second before putting his arm around her shoulder and kissing her on the cheek.
“Oh my God, oh my God! I’m never washing my face again. This has been the best day of my life!” Bree sort of jumps up and down, but more like bends at the knees a couple of times. Her heels are too high for jumping.
“Come on now, Andy dear. We have to get you to the VD clinic before it closes,” I say.
Bree’s expression deflates momentarily and then she shrugs. “Well, if you end up on antibiotics, we can go for coffee instead of cocktails. No biggie.”
She squeezes his arm and then walks away.
“Really, Naomi? VD clinic?”
“You don’t have time to fuck her anyway. Let me at least enjoy myself a little,” I say.
“I wasn’t going to have sex with her. I was just being nice. She thinks I’m some famous guy and it really made her day.”
“So, all of that carrying on was for her benefit? Aren’t you a prince?”
“Don’t do this. Okay? Let’s just find Doris.” A pained expression crosses his handsome face. Time to move on.
“Dylan has an apartment in Brooklyn. I don’t have the apartment number, but I have the address of the building.”
“How did you do that?”
“I checked the Internet this morning before breakfast. It’s freaking unbelievable.”
“There’s a cab,” Luke says.
He opens the door for me, and I slide in. The cab driver doesn’t seem to recognize either one of us. After spending a few hours with Andy’s biggest fan, I’m relieved.
I find the apartment building address on the slip of paper in Juniper’s purse and tell the cab driver where to go.
“When I died everybody was on this social media site called Myspace. Now everyone is on Facebook. And everyone puts all of their information on there. I looked up Dylan and found a ton of photographs. I know the block where he lives and the theater where he’s currently in a play.”
“I wonder if Doris knows the lines,” Luke says.
“No idea.”
“How will this work? We can’t make Doris do anything.”
“I think we have to kill her,” I say quietly.
“No, I think she has to kill herself. Right?”
I digest his words for a second. He’s right. And there’s no way we can do that.