No Chains Shall Bind Me (The Good Doctor's Tales Folio Seven) (9 page)

“Useful,” Daisy said.  She shook her head.  “I heard what you did to your parents.  You
’ve got to do the same with mine, before they mess you guys up with their ahem help ahem.”

Gail smiled and held up the spoiling mac salad.  “They really
are trying, which is more than my parents could manage.  We can live through their chaos.”

Daisy, of all things, smiled.  “Neat.”

“Neat?”

“You
’ve grown, Gail.  And I don’t mean the half inch taller crap, either.”

Gail didn
’t think she had grown any since she last suffered through Daisy.  “Huh?”

“You
’re not trying to organize my parents.  You always used to.”

“Organizing them made everyone unhappy,” Gail said.  “I
’ve got too much to worry about now, without having to worry about organizing the impossible to organize.”

“As I
’ve said, grown.”

Gail studied Daisy, closely.  Especially the insides of her elbows.  She had to be high.  No way would she be compl
imenting Gail
sober
.

Daisy noticed Gail
’s inspection.  “I’m still not doing IV drugs,” she said.  Unlike normal, Daisy didn’t seem bothered.  Perhaps what Daisy disliked about Gail was her effect on Daisy’s parents.  “Go ahead and scrape.  I didn’t cover them up with makeup, either.”

Daisy
’s makeup today was ‘young hooker’, not an uncommon style for her.  ‘Young hooker’ made the proper social statement, on one hand, and went over her mother’s head, nearly as important.  What Daisy wore when her mother wasn’t around, in her infrequent visits to Van, was pure hippie.  She took the Franklin Roosevelt liberalism of her parents and quadrupled it, becoming in her mind a true proletarian revolutionary.  Gail tried not to think about Daisy’s confused politics and philosophies; for one thing, Van had cautioned Gail that Daisy’s espousal of Marxist-Leninist revolution was an act, simply to pull her parent’s chain.

Gail held out her hand; Daisy provided an elbow and Gail did check.  Daisy rolled eyes and lit another cigarette.  “You want to check between my toes, perhaps?”

Probably too much.  Gail declined.  “So, what’s with the nice, today?”  Daisy’s last question almost sounded friendly.

Gail
’s old antagonist paused for a drag and a moment of cogitation.  “You’ve joined the freak show,” Daisy said.  “Makes you more pleasant.”

Daisy considered herself a long-time member of the freak show.  Pretty much everything Gail disliked about Daisy – the smoking, the drugs, the insane sex, the lying, cheating and petty theft, the idiots she normally hung out with – were due to Daisy
’s freak show membership.

Have I changed so much, so quickly? Gail wondered.

“It’s that obvious?”  Hell.  Gail even felt camaraderie for the, well, normally hated slut.  Daisy’s reaction sure beat the icy glacier avalanche she got today from her normal confidante, Abby.  Abby had even told Gail to stop talking to her.  To go away.  For fucking ever.  “Sorry.  Becoming a Focus hit me hard.”

“No shit.  I
’ve talked with a couple of Transforms in my day, and juice is, in their mind, worse than H.  I can’t imagine what sort of hell you’re going through, especially since this isn’t a habit you can kick until you’re dead.”  Daisy took a deep drag and leaned back, loosing a volcanic exhale.  “You even look like a death-spiral druggie.”

“I know,” Gail said.  “This Focuses-are-beautiful crap is taking its own sweet time coming in.”

“I can already see some changes, though,” Daisy said.  She rolled over on her stomach and studied Gail, a strange longing in her eyes.  “It’s subtle.  Your face is going from bland to oh-my-god striking.  Modelicious.  Groovy hot.  Heroin chic.”

“Thanks.  I think.”

“In a year you’ll be able to run this madhouse simply by simpering and looking helpless,” Daisy said.  “Get naked and you’ll probably be able to get them to put leather collars around their necks for you and bark.”

Gail could
imagine them doing something equivalently appalling, unfortunately.  “That’s just what I don’t need,” she said.  “I’m already too tempted.  I mean, all I would have to do to take over and make the Transforms worship me is use the juice weapon.  It’s just sitting there, whispering to me, every damned day.  Uuuuse meeee.”  She hadn’t expected to have fun talking to Daisy.  She couldn’t even unburden herself to Van this way.

He would just say
‘go ahead and use it when you need to’.  What he wouldn’t understand was that once she started, she would never be able to stop.  Van just didn’t understand emotions, or how emotions ruled people.

Daisy stubbed out her smoke and lit another.  The kid had been chain-smoking, at least outside of home, since she rumbled through Junior High.  “Gail, I know you want to be miss goody two-shoes, but it ain
’t goin’ to fly.  Even the Perfesser, the most goody of them all, can’t pull it off when he’s at work.”

Gail leaned forward, picked up a fallen acorn, a careful survivor from last fall, stripped off the nut, and whistled through the cap.  Of all things, Metonomy came running.  Giving Daisy the eye, he circled around and put his head in Gail
’s lap.  “I need to be good, because if I start being bad, I’m not sure I can stop myself before I become horrifically evil.”  She caught where Daisy gazed, finally recognized the look on her face, and sighed.  “So, you’re bi, as well as everything else?”

“Of course.  I suppose I shouldn
’t be making a play for my bro’s girl, but I’m not sure how much more he can take.”  Gail winced.  “He hasn’t said anything to you, has he.”  Gail shook her head.  “This place disturbs his inner balance.  Not enough privacy.  You can see it in the crinkles in the corners of his eyes.”  Daisy laughed.  “At least you won’t hear any complaints from him about living in a tent.  He spent about ten summers living in a tent, back home.  Living in a tent was the only way to keep hisself from being ordered around non-stop by Mom and Abby.”

Oh, that’s why he hadn’t pitched a fit about the tent. 
“If I lose him, I think I’d just die.”

“Good fucking luck keeping him,” Daisy said.  “Us Schubers have a little problem.  We
’re somewhat self-centered.”  Pause.  “One of the reasons you’re his perfect match.  You’re just as.”

Gail nodded.  The Schubers were indeed self-centered, just not very organized or ambitious.  She once supplied both for Van.  She realized she owed him a few dozen hours of organizational work on his dissertation.  Hopefully, she could continue to fake
competence, not knowing any French or the tony 18
th
Century British English colloquialisms.  “Right now, I’m not self-centered, I’m overwhelmed.”

“That
’s easy, then.  Get him to help you.  We’re all suckers for helping people.  Look at Mom and the Perfesser,” Daisy said.  “They can’t help but try to help, even when they’re so utterly clueless it’s embarrassing to be around.”

“I can do that.”  Gail looked over at Daisy, who hadn
’t lost her come-hither eyes.  However, Gail caught something more.

“So – your turn, Daisy,” she said.  This was
definitely fun.  Her memories said Daisy was the enemy, someone who would use anything she revealed to cut her down behind her back.  Her gut said they played on the same team now.

A most disquieting revelation.  Last Gail knew, she didn
’t do things like have illegal underaged affairs with a forty-something, then extract college money from him by threatening to go to the police.  Daisy wasn’t someone Gail would ever use as a role model.  At least, not before Gail became a Focus.

Bad.  This was bad.  Very bad.

“My turn?”

“You
’re sitting on something you want to ask me about,” Gail said.

Daisy frowned, her first frown of the late afternoon.  “Freaky.  Can you read minds?”

Gail shrugged.  “Not in the classical sense, but, yes, sort of.”  She sighed.  Yet another embarrassing thing the pamphlets didn’t mention.  She had only hinted to Van about this, afraid of his reaction about her reading
him
.  “I have no idea what I can do, how I’m doing it, or anything of the sort.  It’s something, though.”

“Where
’s journalist Gail?  Why aren’t you after this like a hound after a rabbit?”

Gail shrugged again.

“You really are strung out,” Daisy said.  Concerned.  “You’ve got to find a way to work around the shit in your system or the world’s going to eat you alive.  I’ve seen it happen far too many times.”  Daisy meant hard drug users, but Gail had a bad feeling she now fit the description.  Even thinking about her problem amplified her need for more juice, and made her head pound like a snare drum.

“Sitting on something?” Gail said.  She did
have a little journalist left in her.

Daisy stubbed out another cigarette butt and added it to the substantial pile beside her.  She lit another.  “I
’ve got a problem.  It’s almost analogous to yours, but I’m hoping it’ll stay far less portentous and life threatening.”

“I didn
’t think you had problems, just life experiences that made you stronger.”

That
earned Gail a stuck-out tongue.  “It’s…  Hell.  The ultimate image-breaker,” Daisy said.  “You see, I’m competitive.”

“Never would have guessed.”

Glare.  “On tests.  Specifically, on SAT tests.”

Van had mentioned that Daisy beat his SAT scores, which Gail found hard to believe, given Van
’s 1560.  “Tell me.”

“Double 800s.”  Daisy rolled her eyeballs.  “It was an accident.  I just got caught up in the competition of the thing.”  Pause.  “…and there it was, dammit.”

Gail sighed.  She had worked her tail off, hitting the test prep strategy books and reading all those crazy vocabulary enhancement books and math prep books to get her 1420.  Well, she already knew everyone in Van’s family was flat out brilliant.  With her help, Van had learned some practicality, far beyond where his parents and siblings strayed.  “Most of us wouldn’t consider those scores a problem.”

“They ruined my cred with my people,” Daisy said.  “Not to mention the damned science fair project.”

Daisy had started the project in 8
th
grade.  For years, her project had been a running joke in her family and in her school, until she found a way to finish the crazy thing as a senior, not long before Gail transformed.  “I heard you got to State with it.”

Daisy nodded.  “It
’s patented and sold to a top secret defense contractor, of all things.  So much for needing my elaborate money-making schemes for college,” she said.  “Defense contractor!  Talk about selling out!  Hell, I just wanted to come up with a better way to find double stars.”  Daisy had put together an elaborate four-curved-mirror telescope that instead of blocking a star’s light with a diffraction-inducing round metal plate did it with holes and shadows.  Gail didn’t comprehend, or want to.  “How was I to know my little contraption would have a defense application?  Just a side effect, messing up the phases of the incoming light.”

Gail didn
’t understand the details, and Van’s comment about ‘making it easy to defend against lasers’ didn’t help her, either.  “So, what’s the real problem?”  She knew Daisy wouldn’t be going off to college in the fall.  Completing a university application form took organizational skills.

“This isn
’t me!”  Daisy took an extra-deep lung-killing drag.  “I eventually gave Harvard and Harvey Mudd enough hints to chase them off, but Cal Tech refuses to stop recruiting me,” she said.  “Cal Tech!  Boys with no social skills I can take, but the alpha no-social-skill boys who go there are impossible; they do the no-social-skill shtick by being aggressively nasty and unpleasant and aggressively anti-social.  It’s like testosterone fueled fisticuffs, which I can handle” and likely win at least a few, Gail suspected “but instead, they’re dueling with arcane bits of irrelevant nonsense knowledge as their weapons.”

“You have the brainpower, but you don
’t have the encyclopedic background,” Gail said.  She would never do this, but… “So play dumb.”

“I…”  Daisy stopped.  “Oh.”

“Playing dumb, in your old crowd, would have just gotten you violated,” Gail said.  Raped.  How did she know this stuff?  It just leapt into her mind, as if she had gained some extra smarts or wisdom from her transformation.  She found that hard to believe; much the opposite, instead.  “Not in this new crowd.”

“I can
’t play it dumb dumb, though,” Daisy said.  She ground out another cigarette butt and lit another.  “I need something to be smart about.”

“Drugs.  I
’m sure there’s a drug crowd there.”  Drugs were Daisy’s thing.  Gail was sure Daisy had tried them all, including a bunch Gail didn’t even know the names of.

“I
made nice with the drug crowd during my visit,” Daisy said.  “They’re, uh, too urban.  Different tastes than I have.”

“You
’re still into the hallucinogens?”

Daisy nodded.

Gail sighed.  “You’re right.  The people I knew at U of M into that stuff were more of the artsy crowd, not your hard core science freaks.”  The hard-core science freaks were mostly into weed and speed.  “I think you can cope, though.  You’ll have to watch out for the sexual pressure, though.  It’s counter-intuitive, what happens in situations with lots of men and few women.  You’ll get objectified.”