Beautiful Musician (2 page)

To cover my tracks, I named the brand,
as if identifying the product had been my agenda.

She merely blinked. The heat between
us had gone minty fresh. I craved another taste. I pointed to her
blouse instead.

“
You better fix that
before you go to breakfast,” I said.

Visibly dazed, she glanced down. “It
doesn’t matter.”

“
Yes, it does.”

She debated what to do, the indecision
evident in her baby blues. She didn’t know whether to turn her back
or fix it in front of me.

My pulse pounded with
anticipation.

Waiting
…

Hoping
…

She remained where she was. A bold
step for her. Bold for me, too, because I shouldn’t have stood
there and watched, not with the way I was feeling.

She undid the buttons, one by one, her
hands unsteady. I didn’t dare offer to help. She was the least
deliberately sexy girl I knew, yet I’d never been so aroused. A
barely-there glimpse of her plain beige bra was enough to give me a
hard-on.

Her cheeks flushed. Not because she
noticed my skinny black jeans were getting tighter, but because she
was shy about what she was doing.

She finally completed her task and
neither of us breathed for what seemed like a century.

“
Did I…get it…right?” she
asked, her voice crumbling like a deliciously iced cake.

“
Yes.” I expelled the air
from my pent-up lungs. The buttons were in their respective
holes.

Truthfully, neither of us was getting
any of this right. We’d both gone silent again. I was behaving like
a dumbstruck schoolboy. Every song I wrote these days was a tribute
to Abby.

She slipped on a pair of
sandals, the huarache kind the Beach Boys sang about.
Surfin’ USA
. I thought
Brian Wilson was a genius. Not only because of his stellar
contribution to music, but because he suffered from a
schizoaffective disorder that mimicked schizophrenia. His troubled
mind made me admire him even more. Anyone who was similar to Abby
was sure to captivate me.

I glanced at her toes peeking out from
the woven leather. She needed a pedicure something awful. I would
gladly massage her feet and paint her toenails, but not at the risk
of getting another boner.

“
I better go,” she
said.

“
Yeah, you
better.”

More silence.

She hesitated. Then she furrowed her
eyebrows. “I’m not crazy. They just think I am.”

“
I know.” What else could
I say? “You’re as sane as I am.” Which was about as insane as it
got, considering.

“
The medicine they give me
is a waste. They should save it for someone who needs
it.”

“
Just humor them and take
it, okay?”

“
Okay. But I only agreed
to come here to get away from Aunt Carol.”

I was well aware of how she felt about
her aunt. She was terribly paranoid of Carol. But I had to admit
that there was something unnatural about the way her aunt
interacted with her.

She fussed with the tails of her
properly buttoned shirt. “I’m scared, Seven.”

“
I know you are.” She
wasn’t talking about her aunt anymore. She was making a reference
to me, to us, to our shaky future.

At some point, I was going to get
stranded in Room 105, losing my ability to return to Abby, which
would make me a target for the monsters who patrolled the 105
border. All of Abby’s people were going to get stuck there. This
happened to 105ers who were created by kids.

The border monsters were the same type
of horrific creatures that sometimes hid under children’s beds and
scared them half to death, which was why they preyed upon those of
us who’d originally come from the minds of children. Their favorite
victims were 105ers like me. At one time, I’d been a kid, created
by a kid. I was a monster’s dream. They would have ambushed me a
long time ago if it had been allowed. But they weren’t permitted to
attack a child. They’d been waiting for me to grow up, toying with
my future and preparing to seize the moment. When they decided the
time was right, they would try to take out Abby’s other people with
me.

The only way for us to survive was to
be rescued by a man known as the warrior. He wasn’t going to be
invisible like me, though. When he appeared, he would be a regular
person, seen by everyone he came into contact with.

The clincher was that Abby had given
Vanessa the responsibly of creating him. Yes, Vanessa. The
non-schizophrenic sister who worried about being becoming mentally
ill. How that was going to resolve itself was beyond me.

“
We just have to wait it
out,” I said.

“
What if the warrior never
appears?”

“
He will,” I assured her,
when in fact, I had no idea if we could count on him. Vanessa
certainly didn’t want him to appear. She wanted absolutely nothing
to do with him.

And that made the possibility of Abby
and I losing each other a terrible reality. If the warrior didn’t
show up when Abby and I needed him, we were doomed.

He was our only solution. I couldn’t
stay here, instead of traveling between both worlds, to eliminate
the risk of getting stuck in my homeland. Defecting wasn’t an
option. I was connected to 105, and it had a permanent hold on me.
If I tried to escape, it would pull me right back.

Abby fussed with her shirt again. “I
wish you could come to breakfast with me.”

I should insist that she go by
herself, forcing her to be independent of me. It wasn’t wise for me
to keep coddling her, especially with our separation looming in the
balance.

But I caved in, falling deeper under
her mentally mixed-up spell. “I’ll come with you, and I’ll bring
Dingo, too. But you shouldn’t talk to us while you’re
there.”

She gave me an adoring look. “I’ll be
good. I just need you to be with me.”

I scooped Dingo into my arms, and the
three of us left the room together. Hell and damnation, but I
needed her, too.

Chapter Three

We entered the dining hall, where a
cafeteria-style breakfast was underway. Some of the other patients
were already seated at circular tables and others stood in line,
waiting to be served.

Abby shuffled forward. She didn’t like
being around groups of people. She glanced back, making sure I was
there. I definitely was, right behind her in line, even if I
wouldn’t be receiving any food. Dingo squirmed in my arms and
sniffed the sausage-and-bacon-scented air.

I could tell that Abby wanted to talk
to me. I shook my head, reminding her not to give in to the
temptation.

Curious, I glanced around at the other
patients. Most of them looked much more normal than Abby. But I
suspected the majority of them were on the road to
recovery.

Schizophrenia was a freaky disease,
where the victim struggled to separate reality from fantasy. It was
often confused with having multiple personality disorder or
dissociative identity disorder or whatever the fuck it was called
these days. But the fact of the matter was, schizophrenics only had
one wacked-out personality.

Abby frowned at the tray in her hand.
She was a picky eater. I nudged her arm, encouraging her to accept
another helping of eggs.

Once her plate was full, she looked
for a safe place to sit. She chose an empty table in the back, and
we took our seats. Dingo settled in on my lap, and Abby slipped him
pieces of meat when no one was watching.

Truthfully, no one seemed to care what
she was doing. Abby was so antisocial, so detached from everyone
else, that sometimes it seemed as if no one at The Manor saw her,
almost as if she was as invisible as I was.

Even the staff let her be. Abby had
been in therapy for most of her life, but she was a fairly new
patient here, so they weren’t putting pressure on her. For now, all
that was required of her was to be part of the daily routine, even
if she chose to stay in the background.

I guess they figured that some of it
would sink in, helping her develop at least a few of the skills she
needed to manage her disease, no matter how minimal those things
seemed to the rest of us. But for someone like Abby, remembering to
shower and put on clean clothes was a major ordeal.

I wished she was healthy, and I was
real. In my dreams, I would become rich and famous, and Abby and I
would move in together, get married, and raise a family.

How amazing would our kids be? Little
rockers going on the road with their mama and daddy.

My heart clenched with the
thought.

I didn’t have parents. Abby had never
given me a family in Room 105. It hadn’t occurred to her to create
anyone for me.

Sweet, scatterbrained Abby. I would
never forget the first time I appeared to her, the very moment she
brought me to life. She was nine, and I was eleven, and she was
sitting alone on her bedroom floor. Although her room had been
typically girlish, with pastel colors, lacy curtains, and stuffed
animals all over the bed, she was listening to Mötley
Crüe.

Music that darkened the
environment.

Home Sweet Home
was the song that had been playing. A haunting
ballad. Lyrics that would come to define me.

When she’d glanced up and saw me
standing off to the side, we stared at each other. Instantly drawn
to her, I’d lifted my hand and waved in a silent greeting. She’d
waved back, waggling her fingers and making me smile.

I thought she was weirdly cute, with
her matted hair and enormous blue eyes. It hadn’t occurred to me
back then that I was going to fall in love with her when we got
older.

After I walked over to her, she said,
“Your name is Smiling Seven.”

I wasn’t wild about the name she’d
just given me, but I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, so I kept
smiling, letting it become part of who I was.

“
You’re sort of like him.”
She showed me an album cover and pointed to a picture of Nikki
Sixx. Her dead mother’s record collection was piled on the floor.
Some of them were CDs, some were cassettes, and some were
vinyl.

Granted, it was odd for her to be
telling me who I was, but it felt right, too. She was treating me
as if I was important.

I sat down next to her, and with a
boy’s cocky pride, I said, “Someday I’m going to be a musician. I’m
going to sing and play guitar and write songs and make it big.” I
gestured to the album cover. “Like them.” Already their music was
filling my young soul, shaping me into the pierced-and-tattooed man
I would become.

Abby said, “You’re from Room 105. It’s
an otherworld created from people’s imaginations, and I just
created you.” She leaned forward. “When you’re here, no one but me
is going to be able to see you.”

“
Have you ever been to
Room 105?”

She shook her head. “The door to it is
in a secret location, and I don’t know where it is. You don’t know
where it is, either.”

I was getting confused. “Then how did
I get here?”

“
You just walked across
the border. People from 105 can do that.”

I dragged a hand through my hair.
Walking across the border made me sound pretty cool.

“
They have monsters
there,” she said.

Holy crap. “Monsters?”

“
That patrol the border.
Someday they’re going to try to hurt you, but it won’t happen until
you’re older. The monsters are mean and ugly and they like to scare
kids, but they aren’t allowed to kill them.”

“
But they can kill me when
I’m grown up?”

She nodded.

I shrugged as if it didn’t matter. If
it was a ways off, then I wasn’t going to dwell on it, even if it
gave me the creeps. Besides, it was better to be tough and
brave.

She tugged on her top. She was wearing
a Tinker Bell T-shirt and cut-off shorts.

“
You kind of look like a
fairy,” I told her.

“
My sister says that,
too.”

“
What’s your name?” I
asked. She’d yet to introduce herself. For all I knew, she really
was a fairy. I imagined her with paper wings, decorated with
glue-clumped glitter.

“
I’m Abby Winston.” She
tapped her chin. “And you know what I think?”

“
What?”

“
That your smile makes
your powers stronger.”

“
I have
powers?”

“
You’re a psychic, Seven.
But your abilities are just starting to develop.”

“
Really? Damn.” I was
going to smile all the time. I liked the idea of knowing stuff
other people didn’t know.

She sat up a little straighter. “I’m
going to use you as my private consultant.” Her pretentious
attitude intrigued me. I figured that she must have been smarter
than she looked. I was impressed with how bright she
was.