Perfume (6 page)

Wing stormed upstairs, kicking the walls as she went. It would never have occurred to Dove to kick a wall. Dove could not actually feel the kick in her toes; it was Wing’s toe being dented.

“I don’t like just being a personality without having the body to go with it,” said Dove.

“Serves you right,” said Wing.

“What did you say?” Mrs. Daniel had hung up and come out to the stairwell to see what was making all those banging noises.

“She said,” said Wing, “that she wants her body back. I’ve got it, you see. I didn’t vanish after all. But I’m not giving it up now, am I?”

“Dove?” said Mother nervously.

Dove was strangely glad that Wing had gotten “the maternal attention.”

Wing went on upstairs, leaving the maternal body at the bottom, wondering what was going on. “I scared her,” said Wing with pleasure, once they were safe inside their bedroom.

“Probably not,” said Dove. “She’ll just read another fax and forget you.”

“Nobody will forget me,” said Wing with certainty. “Definitely not this—what’s his name?—that history teacher?”

“Phinney.”

“Phinney. Fat old fogey Phinney.” Wing went straight to the dressing table, picked up the snake bottle, and stuck it into the book bag. Then she turned the tiny bedroom television to MTV and began dancing a wild viperish dance, winding herself around the furniture and the walls like a snake about to bite.

“I need to do my homework,” said Dove.

“Forget homework,” said Wing. “I’m not interested.”

“Out I have a test in two days, and if I don’t—”

“Shut up,” said Wing, dancing on.

The bedroom door opened.

“Dove?” said her father, looking truly startled. “Who are you talking to, honey?”

Wing fixed her evil little snake smile on him. Then she told him where to go.

Dove lay back in the brain and moaned to herself. What was going to happen to her life? What was Wing going to do to her family and friends while Dove was trapped in here, helpless?

Dove wanted to cry. She wanted to be under the covers, hugging her pillow, weeping to her favorite music. But she had no body. Somebody else was wearing it. Dove was only a thought.

A mist.

A vapor of the brain.

I
N THE MORNING, HOMEWORK NOT
done, hair not washed, teeth not brushed, Wing set off for school.

Dove could take anything except not brushing her teeth. “Wing.”

“Yeah.”

“Brush your teeth.”

“No. I always hated that. It made me vibrate inside your head. I’m never going to do it.”

“Moss will grow on your teeth. You’ll smell bad. You’ll get cavities. You’ll have to go to the dentist and be drilled.”

Wing laughed. “I’ll let you do that. I’ll lie down inside and take a nap while you scream with pain at the dentist’s.”

The bus driver stopped the bus.

She walked back seven seats and looked at Dove. “Dove?” she said in a hushed voice. “Honey? What are you talking about? Who are you talking to? Are you all right?”

“We’re fine,” said Wing. “Don’t worry about us. We’ve always lived together. I’m just coming out more often, that’s all.” Wing ran a tongue over her lips, tasting her own venom.

The bus driver backed up to the front of the bus, never taking her eyes off the girl with two voices. At first she seemed afraid to turn her back, afraid to sit down and drive. And the other kids on the bus were very still.

Then one of the boys said lightly, “Trying out for the stage, Dove Bar? That’s a nice second voice you’ve learned there.”

Don’t say anything else, please, Wing? thought Dove.

But Wing, of course, said something else. Something Dove would never even have
read
to herself, let alone thought or spoken. Inside the dark skull Dove cringed. How will I ever go back again? she thought. Wing is ruining my life for me!

What if Dove now had to spend fifteen years up here, locked in the prison of the mind? Listening to Wing’s voice, rattling under the pressure of Wing’s thoughts, trembling with the violence of Wing’s hostility? “Let me out!” Dove shouted, and she began running around inside, biting and clawing at the gray matter, trying to get loose, trying to break free.

Wing whacked her head hard with her fist.

The bus arrived at school.

The rest got off.

Quickly. In ancient history, Wing uncapped the vial of
Venom
.

Here’s how it will work,
said Wing silently to Dove.

This will summon up his vanished twin. What’s happening to us will happen to him. That will fix him! All vanished twins are just in there, you know, waiting to be set free. And of course we’re all very angry, because we lost our bodies and you didn’t.

What
vanished twin?
Dove asked.
Everybody doesn’t have a vanished twin.

Wing looked puzzled. Then she fluffed herself like a bird on a cold day, feathery fat with pleasure.
Imagine Phinney actually saying the history of snakes is a lousy choice for a project
, she said to Dove.
I’ll show him venom.

She lifted the snake bottle from the book bag and caressed the smoky crystal.

“It’s that terrible perfume again!” said Connie. “I can’t stand that stuff. Dove, put it away. It’s too strong. It’s too—too something.”

“Smells like a sewer,” said Hesta.

“It sure doesn’t remind me of doves,” said Timmy O’Hay.

He was ever so slightly flirtatious; he wanted to exchange a quick intimate smile with Dove, and make another dove joke. Dove tried not to let Wing’s mind see what Dove had seen, or Wing would go after Timmy.

But Wing was intent on destroying Mr. Phinney.

Nothing happened during the class period, however, so Wing got up to take the perfume closer to Mr. Phinney. Perhaps he was not breathing deeply enough.

“Dove, you do not have permission to wander around the room,” Mr. Phinney said sharply.

Dove’s body, of course, continued to cross the room.

“Dove, what’s the matter with you?”

Wing was there, waving the perfume at him.

Mr. Phinney laughed. “Dove, kiddo, I coach boys’ soccer. There is no smell you can hit me with worse than a boys’ locker room after a soccer game. In fact, if that perfume of yours smells like anything, it smells like Eau de Athlete’s Foot.”

The class broke up laughing.

Wing was outraged. They were not taking
Venom
seriously.

For one terrible moment, Dove thought she would throw the
Venom
in their faces, and who knew what that would do? Was it really perfume? Or was it some terrible ancient acid that would burn off their personalities and their lives?

“I gotta get some fresh air,” said Timmy O’Hay. He made a big deal of flapping his homework papers in his face for a fan. He yanked up the window nearest him, blowing Dove a kiss as he did so.

The cool May morning breezed into the hot stuffy classroom.

The winds were filled with their own invisible personalities: new leaves and buds, pollens and scents, flowers and sap. It was the smell of new life and summer to come.

Wing dissolved.

As quickly as she had come, she was gone.

Dove was back in her body. Back in her mouth. Back at the front of her eyes.

She stoppered the
Venom
.

“I should never have bought this stuff,” she said, going back to her seat, leaving the
Venom
on Mr. Phinney’s desk. “It’s garbage. Leave it for the janitor to toss, okay? It’s making me crazy.”

“It’s toxic waste,” said Timmy O’Hay. “Needs a special disposal technique.”

Dove’s were the eyes focused on him and suddenly they were both anxious, the way ordinary teenagers are when they have ordinary crushes on each other. Neither knows what to say or where to look.

So they said nothing and looked nowhere.

Dove thought: I’m safe now. Was it Timmy’s kiss? Snow White was awakened from a hundred years’ sleep by a kiss. Perhaps a kiss in the wind can really save a life that way.

No more
Venom
.

But the other person in her skull laughed and laughed and laughed.

It was a horrid prickly tickly feeling, up out of reach, behind her eyes and her bones.

Without sound Wing said,
No, Dove, I will be back. There is more
Venom
where this came from. There will never be safety for you again, Dove. You will never know, when you open your mouth to speak, which one of us will do the talking: And your life
—
your precious dull little life
—
it will be mine again.

A
FTER SCHOOL.

It was a special space in time—classes done, dinner in the future—
after school.
As special and different a place in time as ancient Egypt.

And where had the soft spring gone?

Dissolved like a vanished twin.

After school, outside, the sky was as blue as the Nile. The sidewalks throbbed with reflected heat, as stones waiting to be made into pyramids must have throbbed thousands of years ago.

“This heat!” shrieked Connie. “I
cannot
bear it!”

(Connie had spent all winter saying she could not bear the cold.)

“Let’s go to the lake,” said Luce.

This meant a long drive, and a parking fee, and not quite enough time to do homework. Nobody was interested in going to the lake.

“The mall!” shrieked Connie. “The mall is air-conditioned. We have
got
to go to the mall.”

(Connie had spent the entire winter saying she was sick of the mall.)

“What do you think, Dove?” said Luce.

Dove was not paying much attention to Connie and Luce. She was very much aware of two other people close by and listening. Two
boy
people. Timmy and Laurence hadn’t quite joined the girls, weren’t entering the conversation, weren’t making suggestions … but they were there.

Now that she was back in control of her eyes again, owner of the hands, dictator of the body, Dove was also nervous again. Anxious. Wanting to do and say just the right thing at just the right moment to just the right boy.

It occurred to Dove that although she had been terrified, lying down in the back of the brain while Wing assaulted the world, she had also been slightly more comfortable. She had had no social choices to make—no recourse but to let somebody else function in the real world.

Dove tried to think of a casual meaningless way to invite Timmy and Laurence to go to the mall with them in Luce’s car, but nothing came to mind.

Because I hate Timmy and Laurence,
said the other person in her mind.

Dove held her jaws together to keep Wing from saying this out loud.

“You shouldn’t do that,” said Laurence seriously. (At least one of them had found an opening for talk.) “My sister grinds her teeth together like that and she’s ruined her jaw joints and has to take medication and maybe even have surgery.”

Dove dared not lose her hold on her jaw muscles, so she said with her teeth crunched hard together, “How awful.”

Laurence told Dove in boring detail about his sister’s medical problems. Everybody listened as if they cared.

Timmy said, “I wouldn’t mind going to the mall, actually. I want to look at that new kind of sneaker. I haven’t tried them on yet.”

“The double airlift kind?” said Luce.

“With the memory laces,” Timmy said, nodding.

“What’s a memory lace?” said Connie.

“The shoelace remembers how tight you like it,” he said, “and it retracts by itself and ties itself.”

“Wow!” said Connie, who would believe anything. “Wow, I want to try those on, too. Where did you see those advertised, Timmy? Who makes those? They sound really really really neat.”

Dove giggled. “They sound really really really made up,” she said. She felt at ease again. She could keep Wing out of her mouth; Timmy’s kiss had done it. She was safe. So Wing rattled around in her head; somehow Dove had not noticed this for the first fifteen years, and she would learn how not to notice it for the next fifteen, as well.

So there.

Luce said, “You guys want to meet us at the mall? We could all have a pizza at the Food Court and then go look at sneakers.”

Connie ruined it. “And Dry Ice,” she said, “I want to go into Dry Ice. You just never know what they will stock!”

The teenagers headed slowly for their cars, giggling, changing partners, making jokes, deciding which highway to take.

“Are you going to get more
Venom
?” said Timmy to Dove.

“No. I’m not even going into Dry Ice.”

“What is that? I never heard of it,” said Timmy.

“It’s a store Connie and Luce like,” said Dove. The usual shiver did not come. How surprising! Under the circumstances, Dove would have expected to pass out just thinking about Dry Ice. It’s because I left the perfume sitting on Mr. Phinney’s desk, thought Dove, and the janitors will toss it, and I’m safe with a nice boy named Timmy O’Hay. Such a nice solid ordinary name. What could go wrong with a person like Timmy O’Hay around?

“You want to come try on sneakers with me?” said Timmy.

“Oh, yes,” said Dove eagerly. She had absolutely no desire to have a pump sneaker; in fact, she hated sneakers that were as big as truck tires. She liked flimsy sneakers. Her favorite sneakers were light canvas, covered in lace. But for Timmy she would try on a hundred pairs that weighed as much as army boots.

She wanted to suggest that Laurence could drive to the mall with Connie and Luce, while she went with Timmy. She wanted to suggest that the other three go have pizza and visit Dry Ice while she and Timmy ran off and got married.

But of course she didn’t say anything, and Timmy got into his car, punching Laurence and throwing his book bag into the bushes the way boys did, and Laurence hit Timmy in the head with his trumpet case and, all in all, they seemed to be friends, insofar as boys ever seemed to be friends.

Dove found boys quite mysterious.

They drove to the mall, Luce at the wheel, Connie in the front seat changing radio stations at about the same speed Luce was driving, and Dove in the back, trying to restrain herself from turning around like a little kid, getting on her knees, and waving to Timmy.