Heartsick (8 page)

Chapter Thirteen

Not Danny. Oh, Danny.

I stare into his bright, purple eyes. His neck jerks and he looks at the ground. He tugs at his ear.

I don’t like to see him worry. I like to see him smile, like when we’re making fun of our art professor’s tics, such as saying “HELLO” loudly when she thinks something she’s saying is obvious, or the way she sometimes takes off her shoes and paces around our paintings in red socks with yellow-tipped toes.

But Danny’s not laughing at socks now. He’s rocking slightly and twisting his high school ring round and round his finger.

I get up, but he ducks his head and walks down the hall. He opens the large wooden door to the chapel.

A too-sweet voice wafts from the interrogation, um, I mean conference room. “You must be Quinn Bellingham. Please, come in.” I gingerly close the door behind me and approach a man in a gray suit with a peach shirt—which he would probably say was salmon but, trust me, it’s peach. He wears a surgical mask.

“Hello, I’m Mr. Jenkins,” Peachy says, holding his hand out but snapping it back, like we’re playing a game of Whack-a-Mole, with me filling the role of the ticket-hungry middle-schooler as he plays the role of said mole. Some public health person—he totally forgot I might have cooties.

Even with most of his face covered by the mask, I can tell he has an easy, fake smile. “Thank you for meeting with me.” His breathing is thick against the mask. “As Dr. Brown might have told you, I’m from the Allan County Department of Health. The folks at the Virginia Department of Health don’t think this is something to be alarmed at yet, given the minimal number of cases and the fact that, well, no one appears to be ill. But, off the record, I think they’re wrong. Multiple cases of iris color change, along with a possible corresponding abnormality in the white blood cell count should be investigated. There has to be a connection between the patients.”

He looks at me as though he’s waiting for me to agree. “Yes,” I say. “It’s strange, and I think it’s clear now that this isn’t caused by that new party drug. I’ve never taken that.”

“What new party drug? Do you use drugs recreationally?” he asks, tilting his head. Maybe there’s some patient confidentiality thing going on? Anyway, Zachary’s point is moot now, so whatever.

“No, I don’t do drugs,” I say. “I just want to know what’s going on.” I grasp at my hands but they slip from the moisture on my palms.

His voice is soft against the mask. “I’m sure, my dear, there is nothing to be alarmed about. You’re in good hands. But, in order for me to help you, you have to help me. I need you to be honest with me. I need to know some personal things if I’m going to get to the root of this.”

“What do you think is going on?” I ask.

“At this point, I’m trying to keep an open mind. Were you all poisoned? Were you all exposed to a plant that has properties we’re unaware of? Is there some combination of environmental factors at work? And, of course, I must discover as soon as possible if this is the worst case scenario.”

“What’s the worst case scenario?” I ask.

“That it’s communicable.” Peachy points to his mask. My stomach lurches. But, then again, I bet he has had that in a drawer for months, just waiting for the opportune moment to pull it out. “This mask is only a precaution, until we rule out that it is transmittable through the air. It’s unlikely, of course, or we would expect to see many more cases. Still, it’s always best to be safe. What is more likely, if it’s in fact a disease, is that it would be transmitted sexually or through some other exchange of fluids. Now, please be honest with me, are you sexually active?”

“Yes,” I say. No reason to beat around the bush.

“To your knowledge, have any of your sexual partners developed similar symptoms?”

“No,” I say. Luke’s eyes are sharp and green. But we had sex last night. I got purple eyes today. Could I have had this last night and not known it? Could I have accidentally given this to Luke?

“Are there others who you may have shared a drink with or kissed or engaged in any other fluid-exchanging activity with? Do any of them have similar symptoms?”

“No,” I say. Rashid has deep, warm brown eyes. Well, at least he did the last time I saw him.

“You’re sure?” He wrinkles his forehead.

“Yeah, I think so,” I say.

He nods and folds his hands on the table.

“Were you at the Alpha Chi Beta party last week?”

This is a rather specific question to jump to, but I nod.

“Was your roommate, Mandy Malone, with you?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“Did the two of you share a drink?”

“No,” I say, thinking sharing a beer at a frat party would be weird. I mean, you don’t have to pay for them. Frat guys just give everyone shitty beer. It’s a party. But then I remember her being pushed out of the frat house. She told me to finish her drink. I’d sipped the low-grade beer before plopping down the half-empty cup. Shit. “Yes,” I say. “I drank out of Mandy’s cup.”

“And do you recall if you finished her beverage or if you set it down with beer remaining in it?” he asks.

Another odd question. “I set it down when it was about half full.”

This seems like the wrong answer. He gets up and steps back and forth. He stops, arms crossed, right under the window, and looks at the floor for so long that I squirm and shift in my seat.

“So.” I break the silence. “Does this mean it’s contagious or something? Could I have given this to other people?”

Should I tell Rashid? Should I tell Luke? Will their eyes bloom with violet too? Is it just a matter of time? I bite my thumbnail.

Peachy scratches his chin. Or he tries to, but the mask is in the way. “We can’t know that yet. But I would like to know about anyone who might have exchanged fluids with you in the last month.”

“Sure,” I say, though I don’t love the idea of sharing the information. “I’ll also tell them that...well, what should I tell them?” I look up at him. I can hardly see his face because the light from the window behind him is so bright.

“Please don’t tell them anything. We don’t want to cause a panic. If I were to ask you to alert people now, word would spread, and then panic would spread, doing much more harm than whatever this is.”

Peachy may just be on top of this. He continues, “Sometimes panic can’t be avoided, but we must wait ’til we know more. Right now, all of the cases can be tied to one cup. Could that cup have been drugged? Could that cup not have anything to do with this?”

“How are the cases connected to one cup?” I ask. Danny didn’t share a drink with Mandy and me. Zachary wasn’t even at the party.

Peachy’s eyes shift. Instead of answering me, he sits back down and picks up his pen. “Can you please give me the names and contact information for the people who may have shared your fluids?”

“It sounds so romantic when you put it that way,” I say, bending my neck and smiling. He tilts his head and his eyes widen. I shoo my smile away and look at the table.

“Young lady,” Peachy says, “I hope you will treat this matter seriously.”

He waits, pen ready. I want to say that of course he can be all Mr. Serious about it. He isn’t the one with purple eyes.

Fortunately, I only have two men on my list. Or, maybe, given the short time period, that’s a lot? Whatever. Rashid and I just fooled around, but plenty of saliva was definitely, well, swapped. I run my fingers through my loose hair, allowing locks to brush my cheeks. “Okay, I’ve kissed Rashid Khan, he’s a grad student at Poe.” Peachy scribbles out the information. “But he doesn’t have purple eyes.”

“Well, perhaps not yet,” Peachy says, as though there is a tiny part of him that hopes this thing will explode. It would be quite the career-making case. “Anyone else?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Luke Peterson. He’s a...well, he lives in Allan,” I say. Peachy’s eyebrows tilt up above the mask, but he tames them quickly. “And he doesn’t have purple eyes, either.”

Peachy continues questioning me for another twenty minutes about any hikes I’ve been on and prescription drugs and products I might have recently started using. Anything at all that has been weird or unusual in the last few weeks. But aside from switching detergents and trying a new lip gloss, I’ve got nothing.

Chapter Fourteen

Peachy releases me but only after giving me his card and stressing that, as a precaution, I should refrain from any activities like sharing a drink or having sex...you know, intimate stuff. I wonder aloud if it would be best if we should all just lay low for a while. Maybe we should even be separated from the rest of the population?

He shakes his head. “We don’t know this is contagious. We know nothing right now. It would be unfair to ask you to disrupt your life based on so little evidence that this even is something that can be contracted.”

I want to say that not having sex with Luke is going to feel like a little bit of a life disruption. But I won’t be cheeky. And I get that it’s probably best to play it safe because we still don’t know what’s happening here. Like when AIDS first emerged. We just have four cases, right? And it’s not clear we’re contagious, and none of us are even sick. Isolating us would be pretty extreme.

But, hey, maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea if we took it easy on the tonsil hockey for a while.

Once I leave the sterile interrogation room, I walk down the hall and almost pass the chapel. But as I do, I peek in. Danny is praying against the railing. Alone. In the dark.

I open the door. I don’t want to disturb him while he’s in the middle of his business, so I tiptoe in. Despite my efforts, his body tenses. Instead of standing awkwardly, I move into one of the pews. I sit in the darkness and look at Jesus, arms out in highlighted glass, and wonder why none of the disciples thought maybe his miracles were actually a little freaky.

Danny crosses himself and stands up. It takes a beat, but when he does finally turn around, I wonder if my own fear is reflected in my purple eyes as I stare into his. In the dark, they shine. In a way, they are beautiful.

“Hey,” I say.

“Hey,” he says. He doesn’t move. He stays planted below the cross.

“How are you doing?”

He clears his throat. “Okay.”

I nod. He finally walks toward me.

Correction: he walks toward the door.

“Wait,” I say. “I’d like to, well...”

He holds a fist to his mouth. His eyes are round.

“Want to walk back to campus together?” I ask. “Maybe we should talk about some of this?”

“Um, okay,” he says, and we walk out of the chapel together.

The weather has turned rainy, so droplets hang in our hair as Danny and I exit the hospital and walk into the world. The smells of wet cement and brick and gravel fuse together. We pass Roy’s Sports Bar, and I make the mistake of peering through the glass. Natalie is next to the window, waitress tray in hand, and her eyes lock with mine. Her mouth opens and her forehead wrinkles before she turns over her shoulder, shouting to someone in the back.

My heart jitters. “Come on,” I say to Danny, who fortunately didn’t notice anything. “Let’s walk a little faster.”

He nods and picks up the pace as the door to the bar jangles open. I look back. Natalie and the bartender stare at us, necks tilted, arms folded, normal eyes smoldering. “We don’t need freaks like you in Allan,” Natalie screams.

“If I see you and your messed up eyes around Roy’s again, you’ll regret it,” the bartender bellows as Natalie nods at him approvingly, despite his bland, unspecific threat.

Danny’s hands shake.

“Come on.” I turn back around and focus on moving forward.

When we finally turn a corner, I start talking again. “So, how are you handling all this? Really.” I cock my head and slow just slightly so we can look at each other as we talk without worrying about stubbing our toes and propelling ourselves into the pavement.

He shrugs, and then sort of itches his ear with his shoulder. “Okay, I guess.”

“So,” I say, thinking about how I’m kind of like a dentist, slowly maneuvering around a mouth, extracting teeth, “Peachy said something about how we are—”

“Peachy?” Danny titters. (I forgot how much I enjoy hearing that chuckle.) Danny continues, “Do you call him that because of the shirt?”

I shrug and smile. “Yeah.” Of course Danny would get it. Our what-is-funny circles would overlap a lot in a Venn diagram. “Anyway, Peachy said something about how all the cases were tied to a cup at that Alpha Chi Beta party last week. But I don’t get it, we didn’t share a drink.”

Danny focuses on his high school ring, which he swirls around his finger again. “Well, we might have,” he says. I stare at him but his focus is on that ring. He goes on.

“I’m rushing, and they made me finish any unfinished beers at the party.”

Gross. In Mandy’s sorority, they just welcome the girls and give them cupcakes and stickers and what not. I’ve never gotten why frats have to do messed up disgusting things in order to bond.

“So, I might have had a sip of a drink you or Mandy—well, I guess now she’s Miracle Mandy—had.”

Of course he knows about Mandy. Everyone does. And, soon, they’ll know about us too. If it isn’t already news.

We walk in silence a little longer as we approach the quad. Danny coughs. “Do you really think we might have given this to other people? There’s this girl I, well, we made out, and I hate to think that she...” He swallows and scratches his forehead.

“Well, Peachy said not to worry about that for now.”

“I know, but I still wonder if I should call Lei. We kissed and...stuff. Maybe she has a right to know this is going on.”

Lei, the girl from my dance troupe who he was dancing with that night. Lei, who can do a triple pencil turn like no one else. Lei, who brought the troupe a hollowed out pumpkin filled with candy corn last week, just because she’s sweet. Lei, who saved the spider that had squirmed its way into our dance studio. (I was about to stomp it. Lei raised her hands and told me to stop as she clattered across the dance floor. For comic purposes—a troupe leader also needs to lighten the mood now and again—I stood there, mid-stomping-pose as she saved the spider, murmuring something about the Buddha.)

Part of me wants to slap Danny on the back, like
yeah, you go guy. Lei is awesome!
But another part of me thinks Lei might get dragged into this too. Lei might become all purple and weird.

“You know, she’s probably fine. I bet this is just some weird fluke, and they’ll figure it out soon,” I say to Danny but also to myself.

“I also shared a bong with some brothers a few days ago,” Danny says. His hands clasp one another. “I gave Peachy all of their names. I mean, I felt like I had to, but...”

He looks at me, worried, squirmy. I put my hand on his shoulder.

“Look, they’re just trying to figure out what’s going on. You aren’t going to get your friends in trouble, okay?”

He nods. “Yeah, Peachy said that too. I just...what if they all get it?”

“They won’t. Well, probably not. And if they do, it’s not your fault. You didn’t know, okay?” I squeeze his shoulder. We walk past the campus coffee shop. Students working on papers and laboring over textbooks on a Sunday morning.

“I’m sorry you have it too, whatever it is.” He holds his purple eyes with mine for no more than three seconds before red sneaks across his dark cheeks and he looks to the ground. “But I’m glad I’m not alone.”

“Well, Mandy and...” I start to say, but at her name he shakes his head and bites his lip. So all I say is, “You aren’t alone in this.”

I think he smiles, but I can’t tell because just as the corners of his lips tug upward, I’m distracted by a humming sound that roars across the quad. Danny notices it too and we turn toward it. There’s a flurry of commotion. Jared is in a group with other students. They hold posters saying God Can Save You, The Devil Marks His Followers and Stop the Students with Satan’s Sign. I admire the alliteration in that last one, except that it’s next to a large, purple eye.

“Let’s walk faster,” I say to Danny.

In a choked voice he says, “It’s too late, they saw us. I think one of them saw my eyes.”

As we walk, the humming sound gets louder. I look back. Unlike Natalie and the bartender, who were content to stare and holler from a distance, this group follows us. Slowly. Almost like zombies.

“Come on,” I say, but when Danny looks back, he freezes. His muscles are tense, and I can’t get him to look at me until I grab his shoulders and shake them, as though we’re in some sort of madcap 1950s movie.

He opens his mouth, barely releasing the words before the group is upon us. Talking in tongues and ranting. They circle us. They pray. They raise hands to the sky. One guy is crying and tears run over his lips as he talks fast, something incomprehensible, I guess something only his God can understand. But what Jared is saying is clear: we are an abomination. Of course Jared would say that. I don’t believe it, not one bit, but my breathing is still quick, my arms are still shaky. Jared doesn’t touch me, but he looks at me. His healthy blue eyes don’t look concerned. They look powerful.

“Save yourself!” he shouts, but not really at me. My heart ricochets against my breastbone. What had Luke said about me not feeling safe?

“Accept Jesus Christ as your Savior, and you will be forgiven. He will save you from Hell and your damnation,” Jared continues. I can see why people are crowding. He has the kind of voice that is strong and booming. Captivating. You want to go along with what the voice says, until you listen to the words.

“Let me bless you,” a girl says to Danny.

She doesn’t seem to notice his scowl and deep “no.” She tramples ahead, eager to save him. Her arms and hands get near his face. Danny shoves her off. “I’m a practicing Catholic, people!” His words are drowned out. I battle and twirl away from Jared, whose spittle is getting all over my face in wet pinpricks, as though he’s trying to baptize me with his holier-than-thou saliva.

I nudge Danny. I try to keep the tremors in my arms from showing as I shoulder into an opening. Danny pushes against the girl who blessed him. I use my crowded-party navigating skills to ram between two guys. Jared grabs my arm, his fingers dig into my skin. “We need to save you,” he whispers in my ear. His breath against that sensitive skin sends a shiver down my spine. I pull and twist and try to breathe. Finally, he lets go, and Danny and I make it out on the other side.

“My house isn’t far,” I say. They follow us anyway. We sprint, breathing hard with our bags bouncing against our sides. Danny slows down for me.

“This way,” I say when we get to my house. We flood inside and slam the door. I lock it with fumbling, shaking hands. Danny peers out the window. The group is still there. They sing a song. Not a hymn. A Christian rock song. One I actually like. Or I should say
liked.
I don’t think I can hear it again now without feeling fear. Their hands rise toward us. For us, supposedly.

“Shit,” Danny says as he rubs his finger along his lower lip. “I believe in God. I believe in Jesus. But that shit...” He nods out to the curb and shakes his head violently.

“It’s okay,” I say, putting my hand on his shoulder to calm him. His purple eyes are moist and red around the rims. He’s just a few years younger than me, but he’s so childlike. A kid more than a man. I’m sure he would love to know that I think that, but I don’t care. I hug him. He doesn’t resist.

“I have a feeling this is going to get worse before it gets better,” Danny says in a voice that betrays the lumps in his throat.

“Yeah,” I say softly, feeling some lumps myself. “I think you’re right.”