The Elizas: A Novel(55)

“My aunt loves me!” Dot cried. “She wouldn’t roofie me! Take it back!”

He threw up his hands. “I didn’t want to tell you this, but I looked up some facts about that Otufu story. Where your aunt visited is fairly stable. There are no warlords.”

“So what? She got her story mixed up.”

“Or maybe she was making all of it up. I talked to my grandparents, too. They said she was a real nut. Used to walk around the Magnolia grounds naked. Don’t ever swim in her bungalow’s pool. She used to have orgies in there.” He made a face.

Dot got up from the bed and pulled on her sweatshirt. “You were asking around about her? What gives you the right?”

“I was just asking some questions. I want to protect you.”

Dot glared at him. “Even if all of this is true, does that make her a bad person? A person who’d roofie someone?”

“I don’t know. Maybe?”

“I can’t believe you’re saying this.” She stepped into her underwear and jeans, grabbed her backpack, and headed toward the door. “Call me when you grow up.”

“Come on. Don’t be like that. Don’t kill the messenger.”

Dot stared into the grungy dorm hallway. “I think we should break up.”

“Dot! I love you. I’m not saying this to hurt you.”

Dot shut her eyes. She knew he did. But why couldn’t he love Dorothy? Why was he trying to undermine her?

“Please don’t go out with her anymore,” Marlon said. “Just for a little while. Just until we can figure out what’s true and what’s not.”

Dot stared at the door that led to the hall. There was a thin beam of fluorescent light poking through the peephole. “I can’t do that.”

Behind her, he sighed. His hands moved away from her; she could feel his heat recede. She flung open the door and ran, a ball lodged in her throat. She ran down the hall and entered the little nook that held the dorm’s vending machines, wedged herself between the Pepsi machine and the ice maker, and rested her head between her knees for a long, long time.





ELIZA


MONDAY MORNING, I start awake, disoriented. Where am I? A hazy scene around me: green-and-white-striped curtains, a luxurious California King bed. But then the furniture turns to mist. I open my eyes, and I am in my canopy bed in my bedroom. Where else would I be?

Someone pounds at the door. Judging by the lack of noises to right the situation, I am guessing Kiki and Steadman aren’t home. I sit up slowly, a sticky, rotting taste in my mouth. There is one message on my phone from Laura: Uh, I got this weird voice mail from this woman who said she’s your mother? She wants us not to publish your book? Nothing from my mother, though—I don’t know why I’m even checking. Nothing from Bill, apologizing for her. Nothing from Lance the forensic psychologist. Nothing from Richie the bartender.

More pounds. I glance in the mirror at myself and try to tamp down my wild, witchlike hair. Mascara is caked around my eyes, and I must have reapplied lipstick in between drinks number seven and eight, because it makes a wobbly circle around my general mouth region, hitting a good bit of my teeth, too. The knot on my head where I fell on Friday has morphed over the weekend from a garish blackish-purple to an even uglier greenish-yellow. It still hurts when I touch it.

I dart into the bathroom and scrub my face raw. With the makeup gone, my eyes are tiny, my lips puffy, my cheeks the color of raw cauliflower. I smooth my hair down my forehead and arrange it so it’s kind of covering up the bruise. I down twenty varieties of vitamins in hopes that their wonder-powers will counteract all the alcohol. Then I take a deep breath and listen, hoping the knocking has ceased. If anything, whoever it is has begun to pound harder.

What if it’s Leonidas down there? What if he knows I’m alone and has come to hurt me for looking through his phone?

I part the curtain at the top of the stairs and peer out the window. The Batmobile is in the driveway. I’m so astonished that I laugh. I would have thought that after Friday Desmond would want to be rid of me.

I hurry down the stairs and open the door. I find him in a disarmingly normal black T-shirt, old black jeans, and lace-up boots that are suede and pointed and perhaps like something a minstrel might wear. He cocks his head at me. “Were you slumbering?”

“No, but I was sleeping,” I mutter. “I tossed and turned all night.”

“Up solving your mystery? You should have called me.”

I cross my arms over my chest. “I thought you were out of the detective game.”

“Oh, now, I never said I was out for good.”

I remember my hope that he was coming to spin me around to kiss me. I think I’d dreamed about it last night; I have vague flashes of his pointy little face above mine, that thick, glossy hair brushing against my cheek, those little hands deft.

I place my hands in my pockets, and the shock of hair covering my bruise falls out of position and reveals the greenish skin. Desmond notices it and gasps. “What happened?”

“Just a fall.”

“Onto what, someone’s fist?”

He reaches out to touch the gash, but I squirm to the left. Begrudgingly, I tell him about what happened in the parking lot on Friday and that the picture I’d taken was now missing. He looks aghast. “I should have stayed with you! Made sure you got safely into the Uber!”