Psychedelic Cinderella
The day that everything went bug nuts, a mess of my friends were helping me clean shelves in Gram’s grocery store. We were singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” to a crazy beat. The night before, we’d programmed our mobile ear studs to give us different dream stories. This big company behind them all, Nuhope, triggered different dreamisodes mostly based on what we plugged in — maybe we wanted a dream about meeting a hot dude or eating crazy-good food, that sort of thing. But sometimes it threw in something extra. Don’t think any of us even knew that “Spangled” song before those dreams.
My bestie Kirsten was yowling it the loudest. Gram zinged her with a fly swatter.
“What you do that fer?” Kirsten said.
“Prevention medicine. Against deviltry — and so’s you stop that song,” Gram said.
Kirsten shut up fast. She had a kitten sweetness about her, that girl, even though her cheeks were raw red and her hair all frizzy. Not that I was much better, with my kind of scrawny chicken look.
Righteous Sparks got all serious as he stacked up soup cans. “Guess I’ll be hearing a lot of music like that pretty soon.” He had this brassy hair that was cut way short, and lips puffed out when you looked at him sideways. He always gave me the jibbity jibs, that feeling you get when the whole worl’ starts spinning round. But he just saw me as somebody to talk to, comfortable as an old sweater.
“What you mean?” I asked.
“That’s what they sing in the Army. I dreamed about joining again last night.”
“Oh c’mon. Don’t pay no ’tention. It was just some kind of promo.”
“Maybe so, but the idea ain’t half-bad. At least it would get me out of this damned place.”
Criminy. He could be so dense sometimes. I wanted to get the hell out of Pompey Hollow too. It was boring as dirt. But so many young peeps in our town had volunteered to serve in the war with Venezuela. And not one of them had come home.
I could tell Gram overheard what Sparks said, the way she shouted at my friends to leave. After they shuffled out, she said, “I don’t want you to order any more dreams. Not a one!”
“I didn’t get that Army thing.”
“But what’ll you get tomorrow? Goddamned subliminal brainwashers!”
I was about to crab back, but just then Gram’s mobile chirped. She scribbled down a grocery order on some wrinkled paper. “Yeah. Shouldn’t be a problem … Okay … Uh-huh.” She stopped, then barked, “Excuse me? Salmon? No, that’s not something we stock … Uh-huh … uh-huh. Well, let me tell you somethin’. If I could even find some real fish, and then get the damned stuff here without selling my store to pay for it, that’d be all fine and dandy. But unless your Elite mistress wants to buy my store and help run it, she better get her fish someplace else. Now you want this other stuff or what?”
I kept my face hid as I swept the floor so Gram wouldn’t see my fat grin. The Elite class was the richest of the rich. They had golden skin — races all mixed together. Everybody in Pompey was a jumble of dark and light, except for Gram and me. That’s ’cause Gram’s mama had an affair with an Elite way back when. But we about as poor as you could get.
Gram swiped off the call. “You chile.” She held out the list to me, eyes bleary with tiredness. “Get this stuff together and take it up to the old Garvey place.”
The whole sitch was playing into my hands. I’d been waiting for the right reason to show up there and get a look at the Elite that bought the place after Mr. Garvey met his maker. It was a mind-twister. Why would somebody like that want to stay around our dumpy town?
It got me so excited, just to think about meeting an Elite in person. If only I could make them like me. Maybe I could become their maid or something. That was my dream, living with the Elites. Even though I’d be waiting on them, maybe some of their luxury would rub off.
The order cleared out most of Gram’s crackers, salt, flour, potatoes, apples, and bottles of milk. I stuck some feathers in my braids. That always made people smile. Luckily, I was wearing my special blue dress. Bottle caps were sewn all over it for decoration.
The delivery wagon’s wheels made a scrawky sound, lurching over the bone-grey stones as I climbed up Bald Top Road into the late May day. The air was hazy, like peering through a glass of water that had a few drops of milk in it.
It was hard work, pulling that wagon. I stood still a minute to stop breathing so heavy. But then my ears picked up the spraying sound of a waterfall. It was hidden in the woods behind the Garvey place. Knowing I was that near made me start moving again.
A sweetness grabbed my nose even before I rounded a bend and saw the thick lilac bushes fringing the lawn, bursting with big blossoms. They never were like that when old man Garvey was alive. The Elites must have revved up those bushes with chemicals in some way. I pushed past the grapey clusters and came out onto grass, so green and smooth.
The house was way different, too. Now all the rotted parts were replaced. And something else was going on. It took me a minute to figure it out: the air wasn’t hazy anymore. Everything was clean and sharp-edged, every tree leaf and grass blade. I felt super alive. My aches and tiredness had disappeared.
There was a little car in the drive that looked like a coppery fish. Beside it was a larger model that was chocolate brown and covered with golden scriggles that spelled out Tseng Motors, which was the hottest car company on the planet. Inside there was a guitar case on the furry black seat. Nobody had one of those in Pompey.
“Wo, girl,” said a smoky voice.
Shit. A middle-aged Elite was standing just behind me. “Where you going, darlin’?” His nose had an angle to it, like he’d been punched a way long time ago. He took in my feathers and bottle caps, how badly my dress fit. I suddenly knew how dumb and sickly I looked.
My face went fire hot, but I gruffed up some courage. “I’m just delivering some goods from Melada Grocery.”
He smiled like he already knew that. “Terrif. My name’s Federico, but everybody calls me Rico.”
“Pleased to meet you. I’m Luscious.”
“Why, yes you are.” I didn’t like the sticky fakeness, but I knew he didn’t mean anything bad. “Let me take this.” He tried to take the wagon handle, but I wouldn’t let him. That was my job. The wheels scrawked even worse as we started toward the house.
As soon as we stepped on the white porch, a big ole robot come out. It was supposed to look like a kind of aging mother on the pudgy side, except it had four sets of arms. It was holding three little girls, all screaming, “Hi! Hi! Hi! Hi! Hi! Hi!”
“No! No! No!” it barked back. The loudmouths shut up so fast; it was like the bot had hit a freeze button. The kids looked like poppies, with black-seed eyes peering out from bright yellow faces. The youngest was about a year old and was a tinier version of the oldest, who must have been around four. Both had scrunched-up hair that was shiny and black as crows’ wings. And the middle chile was all red-headed devilment.
The bot’s eyes bore into me as it pulled up information from my mobile’s ID signal. “Please put the groceries on the front table, Ms. Melada,” it said, all tight ass. No wonder Gram got bitchy. It must have been the bot that called her.
I picked up the bags, walked through the door and placed them carefully on a round table so they wouldn’t fall into a bouquet of peonies about the size of a bush.
“Melada Grocery license has expired. Please comply with law,” the bot said. Criminy. It had pulled up info on Gram’s legal records. How was the old lady going to find enough money to go legit?
“Now Caldonia, give the girl a break,” Rico told the bot, then turned to me. “Sorry darlin’. How about a little refreshment? You’ve walked a long way.”
Gram wouldn’t like that. “I-I’d best be getting back.”
“Oh, stay a minute.”
“Those feathers are SIMPLY WILD,” a woman called from the balcony on the second floor, then came downstairs.
“Thanks,” I said. Her skin looked like liquid almost, with a little glitter to it. And she had a curtain of long black hair that fell over a long dress made of something thin and glossy.
“Luscious, meet Jizelle — Jizelle, Luscious,” Rico said.
“Lovely to meet you,” I said.
The woman’s mouth twitched, like she guessed that I had practiced the word “lovely” before I got there. “Same here.” She cocked her head in Rico’s direction. “He’s my big bad brother.” Rico handed me a glass of some kind of alcohol.
“I-I’m sorry, but I’m only 15.”
Jizelle raised an eyebrow like she was thinking, “What’s your point?” Out loud she said, “Tell me, Luscious, what would you do with a brother who holes up in a laboratory all the live-long year, and FINALLY breaks away with promises to whisk you off to Bora Bora — but you end up here?”
Rico gave his sister a dismayed look. “Jizelle!”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I don’t know why anybody would want to come to Pompey.”
“There. YOU SEE?” Jizelle said. “Drink your scotch like a good girl.”
I took a big gulp. The liquid blasted inside me. I tried not to cough but had to let out a little pathetic one. Rico’s mouth quirked up, but Jizelle pretended not to notice, her gaze settling back on the feathers in my hair. “WHERE did you get those?”
“My papa found them a way long time ago. On the ground.” Shit. I sounded even more stupid. But it was a tender memory: walking through the fields, finding those feathers on Sunday afternoons — cardinals and blue jays and crows. There were hardly any birds now, just like there wasn’t any Papa anymore. He died in an accident five years before, and Mama was so sickly she passed six months later.
Jizelle gazed at my sadness, and that’s when I saw it: how lonely she was. She gave me a crooked smile, and it flew right down into my heart.
“Mummy! Mummy! Mummy!” The girls looked down from an upstairs hallway.
“HELLOOOO, my darlings!” Jizelle waved, then turned back to me. “That’s Rhodes, Riviera and Rio.”
I plucked some feathers out of my hair. “Here. You can have them.”
“How much?”
“What? Oh, n-nothing.” I just wanted her to like me.
A girl-woman walked down the stairs. I blinked. Myra Oldman? I had known her forever. She was about to graduate from our school in Pompey and had a curvy body, lazy gray eyes and light brown hair that went down to her waist. Usually Myra was kind of stuck on herself. But now she was in some kind of trance. And her lips were swollen up some. What was she doing here? And upstairs?
“Hey Luscious!” Myra looked so deeply relaxed. “See ya.” She blissed out the door.
A voice like whiskey and gravely velvet sounded from above. “Damn, my bones are beat.” A man walked down the steps in a silky bathrobe. Wowza, was his bare chest ripped! And he had this guitar on backwards so that it jiggled above his butt when he walked. They had two guitars around this place?
He had a swirling mass of dark hair and hadn’t shaved in days, blue eyes like cut glass and a play-with-me mouth that was saying: “Christ on a bloody cross this vacation is exhausting.” It was then that I remembered seeing him before. He was a reporter on one of the big media sites, NuhopeNews.
He walked toward me with a kind of rhythm, as if he was listening to some dance tune. Or maybe I was listening to it, but I just couldn’t hear. It was kind of confusing — especially because I was getting worked up about someone so old. He had to be way over 20. Then I remembered his name. Dove Brown! It was freaking crazy, that he’d be in Pompey.
Rico introduced us. “Pleased to meet you,” Dove said.
“Me too. I’m mean, pleased to meet you.”
His eyes flicked over my homely body. “Right. Well. You’ll have to excuse me. My bed’s yowling at me like a love-sick cat to get back.” He walked toward the stairs. It made my chest ache, to think about him leaving.
Rico coughed. “Luscious is the young lady that saved the kid in the lake.” That made Dove turn back around.
My face got all hot. “You know about that?” It had happened back in March when the ice was breaking up on Mirror Lake. I got such a bad case of pneumony, after jumping into the drink to save that little boy.
Rico smiled. “You’re famous around here, girl.”
Dove ran a hand down my arm. He was just being friendly, but I let out a little squawk. It felt like I’d run into an electric fence, only there was this thrill to it and no pain at all. Dove gave a soft little yelp like he felt it too. Yes siree. Myra must have had one helluva afternoon.
“That was a pretty amaz thing you did on the lake,” Dove purred.
I shrugged. “Nobody else was going to do anything, and I just got mad.”
“You got moxie, Lush. Don’t ever lose it.” Dove stretched his body and let out a roar. “Forget bed. I’m too hungry now.”
“Why don’t we go rustle up some oysters on the half shell?” Jizelle said.
I tried not to look too excited. They sure didn’t get oysters from Melada Grocery!
Rico smiled at me. “I got some bubbly with your name on it, kiddo.”
I don’t know exactly how it happened, ’cause we’d just met. But suddenly I felt like they were my oldest friends in the worl’.
# # #
For days after that, it was like I was in a real-life dreamisode. Jizelle, Dove, and Rico wanted me to drop by whenever I could sneak away. They didn’t want somebody to scrub floors; they wanted a friend. It was a head-scratcher, but I wasn’t complaining.
We had so much fun shooting pool, swimming, and just hanging out. Plus, there was so much lobster, wine, tender steak, and duck in special sauces. I was so used to just eating boiled potatoes and oatmeal, ’cause even though Gram ran a grocery, she wouldn’t take nothin’ off the shelves she couldn’t pay for.
The old lady would be so pissed if she knew I was hangin’ with the Elites. She’d heard rumors about all the young Pompey women comin’ to see Dove and decided he was a sex trader scouting for whores.
If I told Kirsten about my new friends, I’d just muck things up, given her big mouth. So I kept my visits to myself.
Everything started to change about five days in when Jizelle decided to leave with her three R children and the battle-axe bot. I’d overheard her arguing with Rico. Their voices were too muffled for me to make out much more than “Luscious.” It seemed like Jizelle was trying to protect me somehow. I wanted to know what they were saying so bad.
As the kids piled into her car, she said, “I’m sorry. I can only take so much country.”
“Don’t blame you.”
“Don’t you DARE let Dove and Rico screw up your head.”
“You think they will?”
She looked at me longer than usual and sighed, but she didn’t say nothing more. After she left, I missed her, for sure. But Rico and Dove were so much fun. One day, we belted out a bunch of ol’ tunes on the back porch, and I did a solo of my favorite, “Buster Big Stuff.”
“Do you believe the set of pipes on this girl?” Dove asked.
“That’s ’cause of her sweetness and sadness,” Rico said.
“I don’t suppose we could get you to make some of those mint lemonades,” Dove said.
I gave him a smirk and went in the kitchen. Fact was, Dove gave me such a bad case of the jibbity jibs he could get me to do most anything. Before long, I’d squeezed some lemons into three glasses, added some maple syrup, a glug-glug of vodka and a squirt of water.
The two of them probably thought of me as a kind of stray dog that was so ugly it seemed cute. I waved the glasses through the FlashFreeze machine to make them frosty, remembering what I’d discovered about Rico and Dove by asking the occasional question and doing some research on the BaseNet, which was the part of the web that poor people could use.
They were both on the payroll of that hot media company, Nuhope, and had been tight friends for a while now. Rico worked behind the scenes at Nuhope as a technology and science whiz. I already knew that Dove was in front of the cameras as a reporter. But I found out that he’d got in hot water for screwing a Senator’s wife, so he had to go on what they called a “hiatus” because of the scandal. That must be why they were laying low in Pompey.
There was other stuff going on too. It seemed like Dove might be sick. Rico kept checking his pulse. There was this medicine that Dove took every now and then when he didn’t think anybody was looking. It looked like clear syrup, thick and shiny.
As I washed off some spearmint sprigs and plunked them in the drinks, I practiced what I wanted to say about going to New York: “I wouldn’t be no burden. I’d clean up your places and sleep on a couch.”
I was about to press open the porch door when I heard Rico say: “There’s a plan I got going that I want to tell you about.” I froze in place. They couldn’t see me through the screen.
“What’s that?” Dove asked.
“I’m going to give the chems to somebody new.”
“What do you mean?”
“We need a female version of you.”
“I’m not enough?” Boy, did he sound jealous. “I don’t do too bad.”
“Oh, you’re super charismatic, no doubt about it. You just give certain politicians your seal of approval and they go on to landslide victories. A lot of people believe anything you say in those news reports. You could tell them that Saturn blew up, and they’d believe you.”
“I think you just killed your own argument, Rico. You don’t need another me.”
“Au contraire. Because, as you know, your magnetic powers only work on women and gay men. I want to see what happens when everybody’s under the influence, not just part of the population.”
“So you’re treating some chick?”
“Not yet. But I have one picked out.”
“Who?”
“Think about that jolt you got when you touched the girl.”
My skin started prickling. I just about dropped the drinks.
Dove guffawed. “Stop it. Lush?”
“You weren’t such hot stuff before I started giving you the chems,” Rico said. Which was true. I’d seen pictures of Dove on the BaseNet from eight years before, and he wasn’t nearly as sexy.
“Think about it,” Rico said. “Usually, when you touch someone, they get a huge jolt of excitement, but you don’t. Not usually. But when you touched Lush — boy, did you feel it.”
“Hmmm. I’ll give you that.”
“One thing I’ve figured out about this concoction is that if you start off with a human that is naturally charismatic, you can make a much more powerfully enhanced person than you would with an average Jane.”
“Can’t you find a pretty Elite with the same kind of zing? Somebody a little older?”
“Too many legal issues with an Elite. You know, if something goes wrong. Besides, the female I pick out has to be plenty brave. And we both know Luscious is that, the way she saved that boy. People love her, all over this town, even though she’s — well, not easy to look at. Funny thing is, I don’t think she gets what’s happening. She sees kids following her around, and how she makes everybody laugh and sort of come alive more. But she just doesn’t see how charismatic she is. Probably thinks it’s just because of those mangy feathers she wears.”
Dove laughed. “Oh, I get it. You researched the kid before we even got here. That’s why you insisted we stay in this place.”
“You’re giving me way too much credit.” Rico took in Dove’s smirk. “I really need you to be on board with this.”
“Well, if you really think she’s the one.”
I banged open the door, all innocent-like. “The one for what?”
Dove touched my arm, zinging me so soft. Something about the evening light seemed to make his eyes flick from green to deep blue. “Well, darlin’. How’d you like to be just like me?”
# # #
Gram aimed her old Smith & Wesson at Rico and Dove when they told her that they wanted to give me some chems. But Rico explained how they were going to send me to a first-class school and get me a job at Nuhope. And Dove did that funny thing with his eyes, so she gave in.
The old lady crossed herself and prayed to the crucifix over her bed the very first time that Rico give me the syrupy stuff. It filled me up with a fiery cramp. “Fuck a duck!” I yelped.
“You watch your tongue,” Gram growled.
“I’m sorry.” But then “Aaahh!” went through me as the pain went away.
“You see? It’ll be like that every single time,” Rico said. “Just a pinch, and then it disappears. Now keep an eye on yourself in the mirror over the next few days, and you’ll see some changes.”
First thing I noticed was how my eyes weren’t yellow and bird-ish anymore. Little by little they lengthened out and turned into kind of a gold-flecked chocolate brown. My raging pimples disappeared. And even though my skin had always been yellow, it was more golden and so darned smooth.
“What’s goin’ on with you?” Kirsten Louise asked, eyeing my larger breasts.
“Just puberty.”
She snorted. “You already done that.”
The boys started looking at me way different than before, which was kinda chill at first. But then Sparks started pawing me. I clobbered him something good. Criminy! Then other things started to change. Sparks and a bunch of his friends decided to join the Army. And Kirsten headed up to Canada to avoid military service.
“Thank God she did that,” I said to Rico one day. “I freaking hate that war.”
His face got more wrinkled. “You know what, kiddo? I think it’s time for you to leave this town too.” If I was a dog, my tail would have been whipping back and forth so hard. Gram bit her lip and turned away when I told her. It was a hard hurt, to leave her alone in Pompey.
When we got to New York I couldn’t stop staring at the buildings that shot up past the clouds, with all the huge wallscape screens twirling around them. They were advertising all sorts of stuff. A whole group of buildings jutted out into the Hudson River with gigundo pools and gardens on every balcony. Rico floated the car down on the roof of one of them, and we took an elevator down to Jizelle’s place.
“Look at YOU!” she said. The three R girls ran around me in circles. She gave me a huge bedroom to stay in and fed me all sorts of stuff I loved.
One day, when we were in a store and she was helping me pick out a bunch of posh clothes, she gave me this fierce look. “You know, just because Rico has turned you into his personal Cinderella doesn’t mean you need to do everything he says.”
“’Course not. I know how to resist.”
Sadness came over her, like she didn’t believe me but didn’t know what to do about it. There was so much else going on, I didn’t think much about it. Over the next few weeks, my teeth stopped looking like corn on the cob. They got kind of delicate and super white. And my thin little lips grew so full and moist. My fingers didn’t look like flat piano keys anymore. They were what Jizelle called “tapered.” And my belly didn’t stick out like a shelf no more. Best of all, my thin hair turned into a shiny cloud.
“Remember going through that?” Rico asked Dove one day when he stopped by to see me.
“Do I ever.” Dove shot me a serious look. “Now listen to me, Lush: the guys are going to come onto you even more hot-and-heavy than you’ve already experienced. Every time you kiss one, it’ll almost be like giving them an aphrodisiac.”
“Aphro what?”
“Disiac. In other words, you’re going to become kind of a sex addiction. So be really careful about that. Even your touch will give them a thrill.”
That sure explained why Dove turned girls into mush. But the funny thing was, I didn’t feel attracted to him anymore. The chems seemed to cancel all that out. I had a new take on Rico, too. Even though we’d hung out in Pompey so relaxed and all, now I was his scientific specimen. He was always watching over my health and fussed about all sorts of things, which was as annoying as frog’s spit.
“Stop walking like a farmer,” he’d say. “Have you been using your thumbnails as screwdrivers? Get a manicure!”
Even so, Rico could be so funny and kind. He’d tell me a bunch of silly jokes when I got freaked out about how the chems were morphing my body. All the stretching and molding of my muscles and bones got painful and creepy sometimes, especially around my face.
After a couple of months, all the changes settled in, and Rico sent me off to this private school called Graystone, down near Atlanta. I had the pick of the litter when it came to guys, and even some girls, if I wanted.
I was taking these enhancer chems that helped my brain absorb all kinds of info superfast. I majored in psychology in an accelerated program and took acting classes on the side. Rico had a tutor give me special instruction on what they called elocution and how to behave in Elite society.
The weird thing was, even though I’d wanted to get out of Pompey for years and years, now I was so homesick. The other students could be so snobby talking about poor people, like we were dirty underwear. It made me want to punch them. Instead, I learned what I could and had sex whenever I wanted. The lovemaking was pretty explosive. But afterwards, even the most whip-smart people got so besotted with me. (That was one of my new words, “besotted”.)
If there was a way to talk sense to them after we’d finished up the sex, I sure didn’t find it. They got so damned fragile. It was like the chems blinded them. Forget about having a normal conversation.
“I could use some coffee,” I’d say.
“Coffee?” Breathy voice there. “Can I make it for you? How do you take it? With cream? Sugar?”
“No, sauerkraut.”
“Really?”
“It was a joke.”
“Oh ha ha ha ha ha ha!”
It was so ridic. I didn’t want to be somebody’s damned idol.
# # #
After a while, Rico sprung me out of Graystone and took me to Nuhope. I entered the company’s program for starlets, and before long I had an acting gig. It was just for a commercial, but I wasn’t complaining.
Usually when I took the chems, it was all down the hatch in one dose. But Rico gave me seven more in the dressing room before the recording. Something exploded up and down the insides of my body. I laughed, peed my pants, and hurled into the toilet. When all that stopped, it felt like my stomach was scoured out. Streams of tears and deep blue eyeshadow ran down my cheeks past the red lipstick smears.
“You sure are a charmer,” I said to my face in the mirror. There was an annoying buzz. I swiped the air to take an incoming call, keeping the mobile in audio mode. No sense scaring anybody.
“Excuse me, Ms. Melada?”
“Yes.”
“This is Stellen, the director for the shoot.”
He was a bot; I could tell by the tinny voice. “Oh, hi. I’m sorry I’m late. I had kind of a …” I struggled to get more stomach bile under control.
“What? Is something wrong?”
“No. But if the makeup guy to come back in, it would be really good.”
“Okay. But we only have Studio H for two hours, so get here ASAP.”
The chems were making my mind float. All the terrible nausea and silliness disappeared. I was ecstatic, above everyone and every possible bad thought.
Enrique, the makeup guy, rushed in and stared at me in disbelief. He was of the male-sex persuasion, so I didn’t need to worry about him coming on to me. “Oh, Gawd,” he choked. “You’re the most ravishing wreck I’ve ever seen.” He activated the room’s air freshening system and started to fix me up. “What the hell happened?”
“Maybe food poisoning?” No way I was going to tell him the truth.
We talked about everything I’d eaten over the last 24 hours as he cleaned me up. He looked at me with a kind of an awe as I rattled off: “Four cups of latte, Caesar salad, two filet mignons with stuffed potatoes, a seafood béchamel sauce in puff pastry, a kind of chocolatey mousse thing, lots of Pino Grigio and Côtes du Rhône, strawberries and huevos rancheros with a mimosa for breakfast.”
Enrique glanced up and down my thin body. “Somebody ought to clone your metabolism.” Then he stepped back a little further to look at his handiwork. “There. You’re fresh as a rosebud. Don’t muck it up!”
I was about to put on a strapless pale pink dress that rippled out behind me like a water stream. But the wardrobe lady told me there was a change in plans and handed me some kind of uniform. I was high as a damned starship, so it seemed hilarious: me in a uniform. Rico was waiting for me with a kind of hungry edge about him. Usually he kept his attraction to me under control, but now he looked like he needed to strap himself down so he wouldn’t do something stupid.
“I just about puked my organs out,” I said in an angelic voice. Never sounded like that before.
“But you’re okay now?” he asked.
“Yeah. Did you ever give that much to Rico?”
“You’re the first.” His hands trembled as he hovered his mobile screen just above my wrist, taking my pulse. “Bit of a gallop going on, but it will stabilize. Now listen, there’s only bots on set, except for the actor playing opposite you. And he’s gay, so you don’t have to worry about his reaction to you. Do you remember your lines?”
“Did you forget that I learned advanced calculus in a month, and I’m only saying, like, two sentences?”
“Just checking.”
I went past some tall black curtains and came out onto the holographic set. It was projecting a long, smooth beach. Big frothy green waves rumbled to shore. The air was blushed up, like it was three seconds to sundown. A faint jabbering of birds turned into three white gulls that swooped over my head. I wanted to be there forever.
Stellen, the director bot, walked toward me. They’ve given it a satisfied smile under a skinny beard. Its pin-prick eyes looked me over as we said hello. Off to the side, there were some big ol’ cameras that reminded me of giant beetles. They had these red lights blinking on and off like people breathing when they were asleep. I could see in a monitor that my hair had gone all fiery in the sea light, and my eyes were even more flecked with tiger gold than usual.
Stellen shouted to the cameras: “Take one. Riggles ad. Three, two, one, action!”
Way down the beach, this guy in loose white clothes emerged, walking through the water just at the ocean’s edge. He was one of the most delicious members of the male species I’d ever seen.
Stellen’s voice whispered out from my mobile earpiece: “Wait for it. Wait for it.” The gulls swooped overhead again. “Now!”
I gave the cameras a huge smile, speaking in my new angel voice: “There’s nothing quite so refreshing as the sensation of a bright, crisp day — right in your mouth.” I threw a piece of gum in the air, caught it between my lips, and gave the cameras a look of enchantment.
The guy actor reached me, wearing this swoony look as I put a piece of the gum in his mouth. I turned back to the camera, squeezing my eyelids a little so the gold in my corneas sparkled, just the way Dove taught me.
“Riggles Gum. Feel the explosion.”
The actor kissed me so long and hard. Which was pretty damned fabulous. I don’t think Rico got his sex preferences quite right.
“Cut! … CUT!” Stellen roared, but we kept up the smooching. “That’s it!” They had to pry us apart. The production wrapped after just that one take, even though me and the guy wanted to go at it a few more times.
Back in the dressing room, the world lifted away as I started to fall asleep. Rico shook me hard and forced me to drink tons of water to flush out my system. “Keep your eyes open!”
“Just a little nap.”
“NO. If you go to sleep before the chems wear off, you might not wake up.”
# # #
Jizelle was pissed when we got to her place. She was wearing these big ol’ bunny rabbit slippers. And her long black hair slid across her shiny loungewear whenever she moved. It made me kind of dizzy.
She glared at her brother. “WHAT did you do to her?”
Rico had this crazy look in his eyes. “She’ll be fine.”
He led me to my bedroom and finally let me fall asleep. I finally woke up in the early afternoon to the blip, blip, blip of my mobile announcing I had an urgent message. When I gestured, a hologram sprang up before me of a soldier, blood seeping out of the dirty gauze covering his face and limbs.
The hole where the mouth was croaked, “Hey Luscious.”
“Holy Cow. Sparks? Is that you?”
He seemed to be in some gigantic tent. I could see rows and rows of maimed soldiers behind him. “So you’re a famous star now, eh?” he said.
“Pu-lease!”
“Listen to me. You can’t do stuff like that — that commercial.”
“What?” It made sense that the spot would already be out in the world, ’cause they did that sort of then superfast. But what was Sparks’ problem? I tried to get him to talk more, but he started to pass out. “Wake up, goddamnit!” I shouted. “It was a gum commercial!”
He jerked back to life. “That wasn’t no gum spot. Lush, we’re nothing but cannon fodder down here — all us soldiers. Nobody gives a bad bot’s behind about any of us. We don’t got the right equipment. Nobody’s protected. So if you’re going to make a message, do one that will make them stop sending us here! Please make them stop!” And then the recording ended.
It felt like I was falling. When I got out of bed, it took a minute to find my balance. Still so dizzy. I padded down the hall. Rico’s voice came from the living room. He was talking to somebody on his mobile. His back was turned away, so he didn’t know I was there.
“A hundred maybe?” a man’s voice asked. It was coming from Rico’s speaker.
“Try a thousand,” Rico said.
“You made a thousand different messages?”
“That’s right. Manipulated the girl’s footage all sorts of ways. Look at this.”
Rico pulled up a recording of Times Square and zoomed in on an Army recruitment station. There was a huge crowd of young people just busting to get inside. “Army enlistments are up 5,000 percent. She thought she was doing a gum commercial.”
“Why’d you tell her that?”
“Not a fan of war.”
The man on the speaker laughed. Rico was looking at a holo of me from a commercial. It didn’t make sense at first. The uniform they’d put on me was unbuttoned down to my cleavage, and my breasts were even larger. He swiped it away, and up popped another holo of me in the arms of that hot guy. It was like I was welcoming him home from the war as we kissed. And there were two little kids beside me. Then Rico flipped to another recording that looked just the same, only now I was kissing a woman. “I changed things up to match the psychographic profiles of the people we’re targeting.”
“That’s amaz,” the voice said. “What is it about that girl that makes her so magnetic?”
Rico smiled. “Some people just got it, I guess.”
“We’ve got to put her in more ads. I’ll have the sales team pitch her to the top 10 brands. We’ll make a goddamned fortune off her.”
My mind flipped past terror to super-charged fury. Rico was going to use me to make people do all kinds of things. It was bad enough that I was making them go off to war. What would come next?
Jizelle was there suddenly, standing beside me, filled up with guilt. “I didn’t think he’d do that. Other stuff, sure. But not that.”
We slipped away to my bedroom before Rico saw us. Dizziness swept over me again. I sat down to stop myself from falling. That’s when we came up with a plan. No one was up on the roof when we got in the car with the three R girls. “Getting off those chems is probably going to be MISERABLE, but I’ll get you through that,” she said.
“You think I’ll get back to normal?”
“Maybe not completely.” That wasn’t so bad, since I was uglier than bad breath — before.
“Rico will come after us,” I said.
“True. But if he actually finds us, he wouldn’t DARE do anything. I know too many of his secrets.” Jizelle gave her black hair a proud swish. The chattering of the three R girls put me to sleep. I didn’t care where Jizelle was taking me, as long as it was far away.
Luscious Melada is a character who appears in Janet Stilson’s sci-fi novels, The Juice and Universe of Lost Messages.
