“Now,” she said, her eyes widening and her nostrils flaring, “we both die.” She paused for a heartbeat. “Poison,” she said. “Very painful.”
Mitchell dropped the wine glass. It hit the side of a table then clinked on the tile floor, and somehow it didn’t break. Mitchell stepped back, staring at the wine spill spreading along the skinny grout lines, holding onto his chest, drawing a breath.
Lesley finally smiled. Smiling, she threw her head back, so the dark geometries etched on her throat were in full view, and laughed, then twisted her head to the side and she smiled even more, and looked back at Mitchell, and said:
“Mmmm, look at him. So scared of dying.”
“Why wouldn’t he be?” said Trudy. She looked at Mitchell. “She was kidding.”
Mitchell had worked that out. About the same time that he worked out that he hated Lesley Woolfe. He bent down and picked up the wine glass, and looked around. The faces looking back at him might as well have been smooth skin, no eyes or mouths or noses, staring in blank, blind disapproval. Like mannequins.
One of the mannequins came over with a roll of paper towels and bent to his feet, spreading them over the spill so the wine stain blossomed in fractal majesty over the bumps and divots. The mannequin turned its head and presented its blank face to Mitchell. Then it swiped up the paper towel and crumpled in its hand, and replaced it with a fresh one.
“What’s going on with him?” said a mannequin from the living room.
“I think,” said the voice of Stefan, “that he’s having an episode. Good fucking going, Les.”
Another voice: “Is this, like — dangerous?”
“Of course it’s dangerous,” said Lesley fucking Woolfe’s voice. “That’s why we chose him. Delectable Delilah. For Dangerous Mitchell. That’s the point.”
Someone giggled. Someone else said, “Shut the fuck up,” and someone else said, in a whisper, “Will you fucking look at him?” and then the mannequins fell quiet.
Mitchell took a breath and closed his eyes. This had happened before: often enough that he’d been to doctors for it. They had tried drugs and other therapies but mostly drugs, until Mitchell started gaining weight and breaking out and doctors started worrying about his penis maybe not developing properly. His mom finally went to a woman who taught transcendental meditation out of her basement, and Mitchell had learned a mantra, and at bad times he found that helped. So he started to say his mantra, which was a secret, and he said it again and again with his eyes closed until he thought he could open his eyes.
Stefan looked back at him from a dining room chair that he’d pulled over. The rest of the mannequins — the people — were gone. But Stefan was there, arms folded over his skinny chest, hard to say whether he was smiling or not.
“Where did everybody go?” asked Mitchell.
“Lesley took them across the hall.”
“Mr. Piccininni’s apartment.” Mitchell didn’t know Stefan had a key. “What for?”
“A little show and tell,” said Stefan, “before the show. You doing okay now?”
“What are they looking at?” said Mitchell.
Stefan motioned over his shoulder to the Media Centre. Mitchell looked. It was a view from another security camera. But this one wasn’t in the lobby — it looked to be mounted on the ceiling of a bedroom filled with nice dark furniture and with the painting of a waterfall on one wall. There was a big double bed on the far side of the room, covered in a thick comforter. Something was moving under it, just a little bit. Mitchell stepped closer to get a look, but the picture was fuzzy and then someone stepped in front of it and he couldn’t see the bed. Then other people stepped around the bed: Shelly, the bald guy… Lesley Woolfe, her arms crossed and chin pressed down against her collarbone so it wrinkled and puckered… Trudy.
Trudy stepped around between Lesley Woolfe and what looked like a dresser, then leaned over the bed. She looked at Lesley and said something, and Lesley shrugged, and Trudy reached over to the comforter, and lifted the edge of it, and with her other hand covered her mouth and her eyes went wide. But she smiled so whatever she saw must have been okay.
“You’re welcome,” said Stefan.
“Pardon?”
Stefan leaned over to him. “Look at that grin. You know what’s coming, don’t you, pal?”
Mitchell looked at Stefan, who was grinning broadly. “It was supposed to be a surprise. That’s what Lesley wanted to do. Just bring you in there, and voila! Leave you to your devices. But I know you, Mitch. You don’t like surprises. They make you squirrelly.”
“Squirrelly.”
Stefan wiggled his fingers by his ears. “You know. Buggy. Nutzoid.”
“Oh.”
“I’d have told you sooner,” he said. “But I figured it was better to wait until at least the police had talked to you. You know, just in case. You know the saying: ‘what you don’t know—’”
“‘—can’t hurt you.’”
Stefan pointed at Mitchell with his index finger, twisting at the wrist, and he winked. “Just lookin’ out for you, bro.”
Mitchell pointed back at Stefan. “Back at you,” he said, and Stefan laughed.
Stefan reached over the back of the sofa and picked up a remote, and turned the Media Centre off.
“Just try to act surprised,” he said.
“Okay.” Mitchell stepped around the sofa and sat down beside Stefan, who inched away but kept smiling.
“You’re doing better now,” he said, “without the big group.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s part of it with you, isn’t it? Big groups.” Stefan shook his head. “Man, high school must just be hell for you.”
“Yeah.” Mitchell looked into the empty wine glass, which he was still holding onto. “Just hell.”
“That where you first met her?”
“Her?”
“Her. Delilah.”
“Oh. No. Not high school.”
“Grade school?”
“Yeah. Grade Three. She was pretty and strong. She stuck up for me when these guys tried to beat me up.”
Stefan let out a long, low whistle. “Grade Three. That’s pretty serious.”
Mitchell shrugged, starting to feel impatient. He’d told Stefan about all this stuff weeks ago, in the chat room. “Where’d you meet?” he asked.
“Me?”
“You. You and Trudy. You meet in Grade Three?”
Stefan grinned and slunk down on the sofa. “Oh no. Not Grade Three. Not my Trudy. We met through the news group. Started posting on the same topics, you know? Started IMing each other, built up, you know, a rapport. We actually saw each other face-to-face the first time Lesley called a meeting. After fucking AOL shut us down.”
Mitchell held the wine glass up to his eye. The distortion at the base of the glass made the very narrow stem seem huge, a concentric storm of glassy circles. The middle, though, was perfectly clear. He could see the fabric of his jeans through it, made tiny by the four-inch lens the stem made. “She’s beautiful,” he said.
Stefan nodded. “Trudy’s a hottie,” he said, staring at the blank Media Centre screen. “She’s also real compatible, you get what I mean. Not every woman knows what to do with a guy like me… But she can be a fucking cunt sometimes. Not like your Delilah.”
“My Delilah.” Mitchell turned the wine glass onto its side. He examined the stem, looked through it. Everything was squashed down and stretched out: it made the living room unrecognizable.