We Won't Feel a Thing (21 page)

“My goodness,” said Mrs. Woodlawn, eyeing Rachel’s mud-spattered clothes. “What happened to—”

“Can’t talk!” said Rachel. “We’re researching the effects of coastal erosion.”

“Oh, how fun!” said Mrs. Woodlawn.

“Dinner’s in the fridge, guys,” said Mr. Woodlawn.

Rachel ignored them. She and Riley fled upstairs.

How had the room gotten so messy? It seemed to belong to other people, movie characters who were leaving town in a hurry after hearing their mortal enemy had just been paroled. Rachel tripped over an open box of Cocoa Crackles. Little brown pebbles scattered everywhere. She rifled through the clutter on her desk until she found what she was looking for: the
DERT@Home Pocket Guide
they’d been reading before the shed kiss.

“What’s that for?” said Riley.

“You’ll see.”

Rachel sat on her bed with their ancient gray business phone, which used to be in Mr. Woodlawn’s home office before Mrs. Woodlawn bought him a “much better one” he could never figure out how to work. Riley sat across from her in the desk chair. Rachel hunted down the number in the back of the
Pocket Guide
, at the bottom of an ad that said GET ALL THE DERT! and listed ten other products one would have to buy to accomplish this.

She dialed and pressed speakerphone. After three long purrs, the phone clicked and a big, hearty voice rang out:

“DERT headquarters. Melody speaking!”

Rachel glanced up at Riley. He made a
What gives?
face.

“Yes, hi,” said Rachel. “We have a DERT-related question.”

“Welp, that’s what I’m here for,” said Melody. “It’s my first week on the job, but I’ll do my best!”

“Okay. So my best friend and I attended the DERT seminar on July twentieth in Puckatoe, Nebraska—”

“Puck-a-toe! I had a friend who lived on Puckatoe Drive when I was a kid—oh, no wait, maybe it was Tuckahoe. Tuckahoe, Puckatoe—”

Rachel made a sound like a poked bull.

“I’m sorry. You were saying?” said Melody.

“My friend, who is—open-minded to a fault, believes Gary Gannon cursed us at the seminar,” Rachel said, ignoring Riley’s eyeroll, “and I’m just calling to verify that curses are not a regular feature of the DERT program.”

“Curses?”

“Yep.”

“C as in cat, u as in umbrella, r as in—”

“Yes.”

“Whoo. O-kay.” A keyboard clattered on Melody’s end. “Can you please describe the nature of the alleged curse?”

“Well…” Rachel gave Melody a concise rundown of the Gannon incident. “…And then he grabbed our hands and chanted a bunch of words in Latin, and my Latin’s really bad, but I think the last thing he said was
The truth will set you free, but first it will make you miserable
.”

“Really?” whispered Riley.

“Oh, whatever,” whispered Rachel.

“Uh-huh. Uh-huh.” The keyboard rattled again. “I’m just going to put you on hold, okay, while I talk to my manager.”

The phone beeped.

“Is this necessary?” said Riley.

“I’m putting your fears to rest,” said Rachel, “so we can move forward.”

The hold music was a dentist-office instrumental of “Bleed My Love.” Rachel and Riley crossed their legs.

“Don’t think about it,” she said.

“I’m not,” said Riley.

The song tootled without mercy. Rachel scratched h-e-l-p in the velvet of her quilt. The room started fading away. Their hearts were apple-red velvet with veins of real gold.

“—Hohhhhhhh-kay. Miss? Sir?” Melody broke in. “Whoever’s there?”

Rachel cleared her throat. “We’re here.”

“Okay, I have the FAQ sheets in front of me now. Sheesh, it was like murder getting them; no one wants to help the new girl.” There was a paper-flicking sound. “Anyhoodle, I can assure you both that you were definitely
not
cursed.”

Rachel nodded. “Thank you.”

“It was an incantation.”

“What?”

“What’s the difference?” said Riley.

“A curse is for negative purposes. An incantation is positive.”

Rachel stood up. “This has absolutely not been positive.”

“I’m just telling you what it says, miss.” Melody’s lips made a resolute
pop
. She scraped back another page. “It also says right here that Gary Gannon’s proven, field-tested Truth Incantations ‘are only used in extreme cases, to intervene where forcibly repressed truths are in danger of doing severe and lasting damage to a relationship if they are not adequately confronted.’”

“We
liked
the forcible repression part,” said Rachel. “It was working fine!”

“Again, miss, I’m just reporting the facts.”

“Can he take it back?” said Riley.

“Ah, hold on…” Melody clicked her tongue. Papers rustled. “Okie doke. Question 14. ‘Unfortunately, incantations aren’t like sweaters. Dr. Gannon always makes sure they fit, and he can’t accept returns.’”

Rachel flopped back on her bed.

“So, theoretically,” she said to the ceiling constellations, “proceeding from the premise that ‘incantations’ actually work, you’re telling us we’re
stuck
with it?”

“Well, ah, he says in Question 15—and again, these are his words, not mine—that the incantation ‘surrenders its power when you confront the truth properly and pay it its due.’”

“What does that mean?”

“This is just a FAQ, miss. ‘Fraid it doesn’t elaborate.”

“We could sue, you know.” Rachel sat up. “You can’t just curse someone! We could sue Gary Gannon for—”

“Look. You can try, but please be advised that incantations are well-covered in the consent forms for DERT, which—if you’re under 18—would have been signed by a parent or guardian.”

Rachel rubbed her forehead. “So what next?”

“Well, in Question 21, it makes the suggestion that you’re ‘just going to have to deal with it.’”

“Unbelievable.”

“Alternatively, it suggests you buy the
Gannon Guide to Hunting the Truth-Beast
for $49.95, and the Complete DERT Emergency Intervention Kit for $59.95. Or if money’s not an object—”

Rachel brought her fist down on the END CALL button.

The quiet was so loud it buzzed. Her head throbbed; her ears rang. She diagrammed a short sentence in her head, to calm herself, and then she said it out loud:

“What the hell do we do now?”

***

Riley knew what they had to do. It would require a considerable amount of courage, but he was game now. He’d taken on Chad. He’d charged Dream-Gannon. He could do this.

He got up and opened the windows. He went to their laptop, called up Zuzu Omari’s acoustic version of “Bleed My Love,” and clicked PLAY.

“What are you doing?” Rachel scrambled to her feet.

Riley gathered all the candles he could find: two Ocean Breeze votives in cobalt glass holders, a white emergency candle stuck in a red wine bottle, and a wax 1 and 7 from their last birthdays. He arranged them around Bob and Athena, on the nightstand next to Rachel’s bed. He took some matches from his art toolbox and lit them all.

“This isn’t funny,” said Rachel.

“No.” Riley blew out the match. “It isn’t.”

He folded her velvet quilt back, exposing the intimate white sheets that smelled like apples and sleep.

“Severe and
lasting damage.”
He eyeballed the bed. “If it isn’t adequately confronted.”

She looked away. “Don’t quote Melody at me.”

“Do you want to do it here or on my side?”

“I—”

“Because here’s what I’m thinking.” He clasped her cold hands in his. They twitched like the nervous guinea pigs in the pet store when he’d try to pick them up. He considered saying this to her, but since their shed kiss he had dreamed up more than ten romantic monologues containing lines better than
Your hands are like guinea pigs,
and he was going to use the best one now.

“We have thirty-five days left,” he began, “before you leave.”

“And you leave too,” she said.

“And I leave too,” he conceded. “We could be together. I mean like, together-together. Until then.”

“That’s not—”

“Because here’s the thing. We can do a lot in thirty-five days.” He sat on the bed and pulled her down next to him. “I mean, think about books and movies. You can watch a great love story in two hours, right? Or read one in maybe two days? So imagine what we can do with thirty-five. We can celebrate a whole year of holidays. We can lock the door at night and turn the music up and memorize each other. We can taste and smell and touch every single thing we love about this whole town, so we never forget, no matter who we turn into out there.” He hugged her hands tightly with his. “And then when it’s time to leave each other, we’ll go off smiling into the future, and we won’t be distracted by all that ‘when will I find true love’ stuff people always worry about because they don’t know how it feels. Because we’ll already know how it feels. And if neither one of us ever gets another great love story, this one will be enough to last our whole entire lives.”

A warm breeze sighed through the window. Rachel’s hair lifted, like it had years ago on the 7B balcony. Her eyes glistened. The thrill of having said something perfect fizzed through Riley’s veins. She was overcome. She’d smile at him and lean closer, and then she’d whisper…

“Do you have any idea how much harder you just made this?”

“What?”

“How the hell am I supposed to leave you now? Like, ever?”

Oh no.
“You will! You still will. You’ll just leave…you know.” He glanced at the bed. “Happy.”

“Right. So we have thirty-five amazing days together, and then we go about the rest of our lives. No complications at all.”

“I’m not saying it would be easy…”

“If we get in that bed, we’ll never get out. I know it. We’ll lock ourselves up—”

“We won’t.”

“We’ll give up everything for each other.”

“We won’t! I promise.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I trust us,” he said. “Don’t you?”

Rachel dropped down in her desk chair. She fiddled with the Martinet College letter, rubbing her thumb over the college crest.

“There has to be something else we can do,” she said.

“I don’t think there is,” He knelt in front of her. “I think this thing is like a phone, and it’ll just keep ringing and ringing until we pick it up.”

The phone rang on Rachel’s bed. They both jumped up.

“Whoa,” said Riley.

“Pick it up,” said Rachel.

“You pick it up.”

Rachel stepped over to the bed. She reached out and pressed the speakerphone button. They waited through three seconds of crackly silence.

“Rachel? Riley?”

It was David.

“I’ve been…concerned about you.” He sounded groggy, sniffly. “I, ah, wanted to check in personally to see how Step Four treated you.”

“Not very well, David,” Rachel said evenly.

“How so?”

“Well, we’re currently standing beside my bed,” reported Rachel, “trying not to get in it together.”

“What happened?”

Riley started filling him in. David mm-hmmmed with professional restraint. They heard the clackity-clack of his keyboard in the background. As Riley told David about the Echo Location, Rachel knelt down and began to pack the WAVES equipment back in the box, wearing the hollow expression of someone whose life raft has just been washed out to sea.

When Riley got to the part about the arrows, David let out a yelp.

“Gannon.
Gannon,”
he said, like a superhero calling out his nemesis. “Of course. Of course.”

“We called DERT Headquarters,” said Riley. “This woman named Melody said—”

“Gods, I should have guessed! One of his blasted incantations. Am I right?”

“Yeah.”

“His ‘secret weapon.’ Right.
Right
. Oh, this is rich. Why didn’t you tell me about this sooner?”

“You know about the incantations?”

“How else do you think he stole Lotte from me? She was loyal and kind! She would’ve tamped down that nasty little attraction if he hadn’t cornered her at the roller rink and used a Truth Incantation on her.
An old family secret,
he told me. Pah! I never dreamed he’d have the nerve to use them professionally.” A hard thing crashed against another hard thing on David’s end of the line. “That barnyard rat,” he raged. “That
stinking ass-mask.”

“It’s okay, Mr. Kerning.” Riley touched the phone lightly.

“…That pestilent, blustering turd cannon! That TRASH-TRUMPETING, PISS-PEDDLING—”

“Calm
down
.”

David blew his nose and cleared his throat. “Oh, my. I apologize,” he said. “That was a momentary lapse. It’s been a dreadful week.” His voice sounded like it weighed a thousand pounds. “I’m really very sorry. This has all been so disappointing. I’m afraid I’m…not sure what else I can do for you at the moment.”

Rachel said, “I know what you can do.”

***

She was staring into the WAVES equipment box, at the two compartments that looked like empty coffins. Scenes from their future flickered in the blank spaces. She pictured herself decaying with Riley in Puckatoe—or living with him in California, dreaming of the life she gave up, resenting his happy chatter about iridescent tiles and surfing lessons. She imagined their catastrophic breakup fight, the “we’ll still be friends” resolution they’d never be able to keep. She thought of a lifetime of awkward Woodlawn family reunions, the raw ache in her throat when she’d smell Tidal soap or hear a Modern Shirts song, the deadlines she’d blow ten years from now when Riley’s cute bohemian wedding invitation arrived in the mail and she’d stay in bed for three days with a bag of donuts and a giant box of tissues. There was no end to the hurt they’d cause each other. They’d invent new ways with each passing year—without meaning to, without even staying side by side.

“Tell us,” she said to David, “about Steps Five and Six.”

Riley paled.

“What about them?” David said quietly.

“You said they were the most powerful love interventions known to humankind.”

Riley shook his head, made slashing motions across his throat.

“I also said I didn’t recommend them,” said David.

“Why? What do they do?”