‘I’m more than your friend,’ Brandon said, coming to sit beside me. A little too close to me, actually. Why was he… looking at me like that? The neon lights from the signs on the buildings we were driving past along Second Avenue flickered across his face, turning it from pink to blue to green and then back again. ‘I’m your boyfriend. How can you not remember me?’
I had to hand it to him… he sounded genuinely upset. He wasn’t faking it. His deep voice broke on the word boyfriend, and everything. It was almost moving.
Or at least, it would have been, if I hadn’t been convinced the two of them were completely off their rockers.
‘If you guys make this limo turn round,’ I said, trying to keep my voice from shaking (yeah. Good luck with that), ‘and take me back to the hospital, I promise I won’t press kidnapping charges. No one will have to know. Just drop me off and I’ll never mention it again.’
‘Kidnapping?’ Brandon looked stunned. ‘We aren’t kidnapping you!’
‘Yes, we are, actually,’ Lulu said to him. She’d dug an energy drink from the limo’s mini-fridge and was gulping from it. ‘I mean, that’s what this is, really. Only I prefer the term intervention.’
‘How can she not know who we are?’ Brandon asked her. ‘Who she is?’
Lulu shook her head. ‘I told her to stay away from those Scientologists… ’
I took a deep breath, still fighting for calm.
‘I don’t know what the two of you are talking about, but I think there’s been some kind of misunderstanding. My name is Emerson Watts. My parents — who are going to be very upset when they find out I’m missing from my hospital room, by the way — are Daniel Watts and Karen Rosenthal-Watts. I don’t know why you guys seem to think I’m Nikki – Howard, I presume. Because I’m not.’
The two of them blinked at me with a lack of comprehension that was, to say the least, absolute. Their gazes were as blank as Frida’s always got when I was trying to explain the finer points of role-play gaming to her.
But I’d never let that stop me before, and I wasn’t about to now either.
‘Up until very recently,’ I went on, ‘I was an eleventh-grader at Tribeca Alternative High School. Then about a month ago, I was… I don’t know. In an accident of some kind. I’m not real clear about the details, actually. But when I woke up, I was in the hospital you just kidnapped me from. Which I would like to go back to. Now.’
My voice rose a little hysterically on the word now. But overall I managed to deliver that speech with a reasonable amount of composure. Certainly more than I actually felt, considering I was being held in a limo against my will by a couple of teenaged socialites.
Also, I noticed no one had offered me an energy drink. And I was really thirsty.
‘My God,’ was all Brandon said about my speech. And he sort of let that slip out like he hadn’t wanted it to.
‘I know,’ Lulu said, not taking her completely blank gaze off me. ‘It’ll be all right when we get her home. When she sees her stuff she’ll be fine. I mean, look at that dress. You know she’d never be caught dead in a dress like that if she was in her right mind.’
That’s when I realized she was referring to my hospital gown. As a dress.
‘That’s it,’ I said. I turned in my seat and spoke directly to Tom, the limo driver. ‘Pull over and let me out, or you’ll be joining these two in jail for unlawful imprisonment.’
To my surprise, the limo stopped. But only, it turned out, because we’d reached our destination.
‘Sorry, Ms Howard,’ the limo driver said, sounding like he meant it. ‘Just following orders.’
Why does everyone keep calling me that?’ I practically shrieked.
‘Calling you what, ma’am?’ Tom wanted to know.
‘Ms Howard,’ I hissed. ‘And Nikki.’
‘Well,’ Tom said, looking uncomfortable, ‘maybe because that’s your name, ma’am?’
‘I told you people,’ I said, still addressing the limo driver. ‘My name is Emerson Watts. I’m not Nikki Howard.’
‘Um, actually, ma’am,’ he said, turning the rear-view mirror in my direction, ‘you are.’
And I raised my gaze.
And screamed.
Eight
Well, you’d probably have screamed too, if the face you saw looking back at you from a mirror belonged to someone else.
Not just someone else, but someone whose face happened to be plastered on magazines and the sides of buses and phone booths all over town. Wearing nothing but a bra and a pair of panties.
Seriously. I looked into the limo’s rear-view mirror, and I saw Nikki Howard’s face staring back at me.
Only when I raised my hand to cover my mouth in horror — Nikki raised her hand too.
And when I dropped my hand away — so did Nikki.
That’s when I started to shake.
And I couldn’t stop.
‘How… ’ I asked no one in particular. ‘How could this have happened?’
‘That’s what WE’VE been trying to figure out,’ Lulu said. ‘Now do you see why we had to kidnap you? I mean, stage an intervention on you?’
I lifted trembling fingers to my hair… I mean, to Nikki Howard’s hair. It cascaded from the top of my head (or Nikki’s head) from a sloppy ponytail, which was how I hadn’t noticed the long blonde strands around my shoulders: because they’d been just out of my sight line. And there hadn’t been any mirrors in my hospital room.
‘I’m… I’m a model,’ I wailed to my reflection.
And now, finally, the reason my voice sounded so strange made sense. Because the voice I was hearing wasn’t my own. It was Nikki Howard’s voice, breathy, high-pitched and girlie… completely unlike my own.
‘Right,’ Lulu said slowly. ‘Do you remember me now? Lu-lu. Lulu Collins. Your room-mate? I mean, loft-mate?’
I looked at her. She appeared to be genuinely concerned about me. I mean, despite the ridiculous Mission: Impossible black catsuit — obviously her idea of how a kidnapper would dress… if any kidnapper in her right mind would put on black suede thigh-highs with five-inch stiletto heels — she looked vulnerable and sort of sweet, with her kohlrimmed eyes, bird-like bone structure and sparkle lipgloss.
But then I remembered. It wasn’t ME she was concerned about. It was Nikki Howard.
Whom I — despite what the mirror was telling me — most definitely was NOT.
‘Come on,’ Brandon said, gently taking my arm. ‘Let’s go up to the loft to talk about this. You probably want to change into your own clothes, right? Have a little something to eat?’
In spite of everything — the fact that I was wearing someone else’s face; the fact that Brandon Stark, voted one of People magazine’s most eligible bachelors, and Lulu Collins had just kidnapped me; the fact that my parents had no idea where I was and were probably worried to death about me; the fact that my entire family had apparently been lying to me this whole time, not to mention keeping me from seeing my reflection — I couldn’t keep my stomach from giving a massive, angry gurgle at the word eat. The truth was, whoever I was… I was starving.
Everyone heard it. Brandon put a hand on my wrist — or should I say Nikki Howard’s wrist, which, now that I was looking at it, looked nothing like my own wrist, being both bony and devoid of not only a yellow Live strong band but also the forever bracelet Frida had made for me last summer when we’d both been camp counsellors — and said gently, ‘Come on inside and we’ll get you some food.’
‘Yeah,’ Lulu said, suddenly seeming to perk up. ‘There’s some leftover blackened sea bass from Nobu. Your favourite. I just have to pop it in the microwave.’
The next thing I knew, we were crossing a colossal marble lobby – Lulu Collins and Nikki Howard, it turns out, share a loft in a converted nineteenth-century police station in SoHo, not five blocks from my own apartment building — and getting into a brass and mahogany elevator, with a uniformed lift operator, who tipped his gold-braid-trimmed hat at me and said, ‘Miss Howard. Nice to see you. Been awhile.’