catch himself and lowered his hand, looking around as several people standing nearby cried, ‘Oh my God — that’s Nikki Howard!’ One or two rushed up to ask for my autograph, but Brandon just grunted and kept walking, not pausing even for a moment.
Being carried out of the hottest dance club in Manhattan at two in the morning by Nikki Howard’s on-again, off-again boyfriend wasn’t too embarrassing. Especially when we encountered about nine thousand paparazzi on the sidewalk between the front of the club and the waiting doors of our limo. That was especially nice. I mean, not.
‘Great,’ I said, after Brandon had dumped me inside the car and I’d straightened out my skirt, which had hiked up past my hips. ‘You know what that looked like, right?’
‘What?’ Lulu asked blearily as she reapplied her lip-gloss.
‘Like I was too drunk to walk and Brandon was carrying me out of there.’
‘So?’ Lulu admired her own reflection in the Swarovski crystalencrusted compact she was holding. ‘You didn’t know any better than to drink too much. You forgot. You have amnesia. Remember? God, that’s the perfect excuse for everything.’ She looked up from the compact. ‘Oh, no, wait… how could you remember that? You have amnesia.’
Brandon, who’d piled into the limo after us, chose that moment to collapse on top of me.
‘Your place or mine?’ he asked my stomach.
‘Oh my God, get off,’ I said, giving him a shove. ‘I’m not going to your place and you’re not staying at mine. I don’t even like you that way I only kissed you to keep you from getting your face smashed in by that DJ. You’re in no condition to be fighting anyone.’
‘You’re nice,’ he said, not moving an inch and, in fact, snuggling more deeply into my lap. ‘You’re much nicer than you used to be, before you hit your head and scrambled your brains. You were so mean before. Remember, Lulu? When Nikki was so mean all the time?’
Lulu snapped open her bag and put her lipgloss away, cocking her head to study me thoughtfully. ‘She is a lot less bitchy,’ she said. ‘It must be because of the spirit transfer.’
‘I don’t care why it is,’ Brandon said, sighing happily as he hugged my belly. ‘I’m just glad she’s back. And so much nicer.’ A few seconds later, he let out a gentle snore.
I threw Lulu a helpless look, like, What am I supposed to do now?
‘Just push him off when we get home,’ she said with a shrug of her razor-sharp shoulder blades. ‘He won’t wake up. Tom’ll take him back to his place on Charles Street. It’s not like he’ll remember any of this tomorrow. He never does.’
‘He does this a lot?’ I asked, glancing down at Brandon’s handsome, peacefully dozing face.
Lulu looked at me blankly. ‘He likes to party,’ she said.
I could see that she had no idea what I was talking about — also that she was beginning to nod off herself, every bit as tired as I was. I was going to have to get to the bottom of the Brandon problem some day soon, I knew.
But not tonight. Tonight, I just wanted to go to bed.
Which I did, the minute we got home, carefully setting Nikki’s alarm for seven o’clock — giving me a grand total of four-hours’ sleep — so I could get to school on time.
Well, I guess no one had said it was going to be easy, this balancing high school with a full-time modelling career. I had no idea how I was going to pull it off.
All I knew was that I had to, if I was going to establish any kind of normality to my new life.
Normality. When I had Nikki Howard’s face and Emerson Watts’s brain. Right. Because that had been working out just great so far.
Twenty
I could see that the Walking Dead were in fine form when the cab I’d been lucky to snag let me off in front of TAHS the next morning. They were all leaning up against the chain-link fence around the construction site across the street (because why have a high school if it isn’t across the street from a former thread factory they’ve imploded to make room for more condos, so you can listen to the BEEP BEEP BEEP of trucks backing up all day?), text-messaging one another.
All but Whitney Robertson and Jason Klein. They were making out.
I felt some throw up come into my mouth, just looking at them.
But it might have been the Danish I’d snagged at deli near the loft and made the mistake of trying to eat for breakfast. It turns out Nikki Howard’s digestive system and Danish? Not so much.
I just hadn’t had time to make myself a decent breakfast. I’d hardly believed it when the alarm had gone off. It seemed like I’d only just closed my eyes, and it had been time to wake up again. I’d wanted to die when I saw what time it was. One thing I knew for sure — no more going out on a school night. Not for me.
And then, as I’d lain there, staring at Nikki Howard’s plain white walls — a housekeeper or someone must have come to clean, because Gabriel’s roses were gone. I guess they’d finally wilted and died — with Cosabella licking my face, eager for breakfast and a walk, it had occurred to me that I didn’t have to go. Really. No one was making me. Nikki Howard was an emancipated minor. She didn’t have to go to school if she didn’t want to. I could roll over and go right back to sleep — lovely, delicious sleep. The limo wasn’t coming to pick me up for the Elle shoot until three. I could stay in bed all day if I wanted to.
It was tempting. So tempting. Especially because I’d been too wired to go right to sleep when I’d gotten home last night and, after listening to Mom’s messages — seven of them, each one more aggravated than the last — had finally gone to Lulu’s room and checked her laptop while she slept and found that hers too had the same keystroke-tracking software on it that Nikki’s had.
I’d disconnected the modems to both, and found the keyboards worked perfectly when I plugged them back into the modems again.
It was true I still had only a Stark-brand PC… but once it was functioning without spyware, who needed school? I’d have to set up a whole new online identity for Nikki, since I knew my parents had disconnected my old ones (too much temptation, they’d told me, especially since I was supposed to be dead). But it was going to be so good to be online again! I could play Journeyquest, and IM Christopher –
Oh no, wait. I couldn’t. Because how would Nikki Howard know Christopher Maloney? In order for her to get to know him, she was going to have to go to school today…
Which, I will admit, is the only thing that sent me stumbling out of bed, grabbing blindly for clothes, pulling on the first things my fingers came into contact with, which turned out to be some kind of high-waisted dress I was supposed to wear over black leggings with these cowboy boots and a lot of long necklaces (Lulu had laid them out for me last night, giggling about how I needed to look good on my first day of school).
The ensemble actually turned out to be surprisingly comfortable. I mean, for something that wasn’t a T-shirt and jeans.
And after I’d brushed my teeth and washed my face and run a brush through my hair (careful of my still- tender surgery scar), I noticed in the mirror that… I actually looked kind of good.
Who knew you could look good and actually FEEL good at the same time? I mean, obviously you always feel good in sweats. But hardly anyone LOOKS good in them (at least, according to Frida). Not that I have ever let that stop me from wearing them to school, except on the occasions Frida spotted me and made me turn around and change into something else.
But when she didn’t, the Walking Dead would often stop and stare at me, because I so didn’t match their uniform of pressed khakis and collared shirt… never a drawstring at the waist!
Maybe that had something to do with why, when I got out of the cab and started heading up the steps for the main office, every single person loitering in front of the school stopped what they were doing and simply… stared at me.
Then I heard the whispered words Nikki Howard and remembered that it wasn’t me, Em Watts, they were staring at, or the fact that I was wearing a non-standard-issue Walking Dead uniform, but the fact that I was actually wearing a celebrity’s body.
