Page 11 of Riot Act
I clench my jaw. “Not me. Sorry.”
“But…” She looks at her friend, frowning, but the other girl is just as perplexed.
I can’t really blame her. The elaborate angel on my neck, behind my left ear? The one who looks like she’s telling me a secret? She’s identical to the one you can see on the guy in the photo. Only the curled tail of the devil behind my right ear is visible in the ad campaign, but it’s an unmistakable tail. It couldn’t be confused for anything else. Neither can the coiled snake wrapped around my left forearm (her name is Bathsheba), peeking out from underneath the cuffed sleeve of my shirt, or the saints on my other arm. Saint Sebastian, Saint Moses the Black, and Joan of Arc, sitting around a poker table, a blunt hanging out of Joan’s mouth: a very specific tattoo by anyone’s standards. It’d be the coincidence of a lifetime if my doppelganger on the screen behind me bore the very same, bizarre ink, was identical to me in every other way, and was somehownotme.
The girl’s eyelids shutter. “Are you sure? ’Cause you…you do look just like the guy in that—”
“Look. I’m in med school. I don’t prance around in my underwear for money.” I’ve told some whoppers in the past and gotten away with my crimes, butthisis such an outrageous falsehood, there’s just no way I’m getting away with it. The girls don’t know what to do with themselves. What can they do, though? Call me a liar to my face? Hah. Awkwardly, they communicate through a series of exaggerated looks and head jerks. The girl on the left is more insistent than the one on the right. She wants her friend to push the issue…
“Uhh. Okay,” the timid one mutters. “Well, we’re sorry to bother you. We know you must get approached by people all the time. We were just wondering if we could get a photo with you in front of the screen or something?”
I rip the sunglasses from my face, setting my jaw. “Why? Why would you want a photo with some random guy in front of some random billboard?”
The girls jump back, reaching for each other’s hands. “I don’t—we—we just thought—”
“Itoldyou. I’m a med student. I have more self-respect thanthat.” I jab my finger at the ad, throwing an angry look over my shoulder at the editorial, but it’s gone now. The ad changed while I was talking, and now a doe-eyed brunette wearing the same doped, pouty look on her face that I was wearing a moment ago is posing seductively with a bottle of perfume, holding it up next to her face like it’s a dick that she’s about to deep throat.
People are really looking now. I slip the Wayfarers back onto the bridge of my nose, ducking my head. “Look. I had a shitty flight. I’m gonna get my bags and go the fuck home so I can sleep. Excuse me.”
The bags are starting to come out on the belt, emerging from a hole in the wall that looks like a yawning mouth. I skirt around the girls, moving to stand closer to the carousel, bouncing on the balls of my feet while I wait for my large suitcase to appear. Of course, it takes fucking forever; nearly everyone has cleared out and left by the time I snatch the handle of my case and beeline for the exit.
I’m sticky with sweat; I fuckinghatethat feeling. Outside, I eventually hail a taxi and climb onto the backseat.
“Where you going, kid?” the driver asks in a thick Bronx accent. I knuckle my forehead, contemplating the journey back to the academy. A five-hour drive in a cab. Four, if you have a lead foot and a knack for avoiding highway patrol. Either way, I can’t handle sitting down for that long after the cramped, miserable flight I just endured.
“Corner of West 59thand 5th. And I’ll tip you a hundred bucks if you get me there in under forty-five minutes.”
The taxi driver snorts. Ten-thirty on a Monday morning? We’ll be lucky to make it in twice that time. He knows he ain’t gonna see that money, so why bother bending over backwards for the spoiled shit sitting on the backseat?
He drives, button lipped. After a while, he puts the radio on, trawling from station to station, hunting for god only knows fucking what. Eventually he stops on an alt rock station and lets the music play, which is just fine by me…until the music breaks for the news.
“Detectives working the Bancroft murder case now believe that the man charged with the murder of Mara Bancroft, sixteen, may be responsible for a string of other killings across Texas, Connecticut, and New York State, spanning a timeframe of well over a decade. Thirty-eight-year-old Wesley Fitzpatrick, a former English professor at Wolf Hall Academy, an exclusive boarding school in the tiny town of Mountain Lakes, New Hampshire, is accused with the brutal assault and murder of one of his young students—”
I close my eyes.
I try not to listen.
I try not to seethe inside my own skin.
I never liked Wesley Fitzpatrick. He was a smug piece of shit and I knew there was something deeply wrong about him. I could do without seeing his face plastered all over the news. Now that he’s in the running for serial killer status, he’s going to be national headlines. There’ll be no escaping his ugly fucking mug for months.
It’s past midday when we reach our destination. I pay the guy and grab my own bags from the trunk, then head for the entrance to the looming building constructed out of glinting glass and steel that towers over the corner of 5th Ave and West 59th St.
The Excelsiorwas completed seven year
s ago with much pomp and celebration. The architects hoped it would dominate the New York skyline as one of the city’s tallest buildings, and it did for almost a year, but construction doesn’t rest in this town. It wasn’t long before the luxury apartment building was ranked number fifteen in height. God knows where it stands these days. Doesn’t really matter to me. I don’t give a shit. My mother owns the sprawling penthouse, and from that vantage point I’d say the building’s plenty high enough, thanks very much. I mean, what parent buys a penthouse apartment in a high rise when their son is deathly afraid of heights? Meredith Davis, that’s who.
It takes twenty-three seconds to get from the ground floor to the penthouse. I normally count them out. Not today, though. I blow down my nose, uncomfortable, too spent to do anything but wait out the ride. Eventually, the car glides to a whooshing stop, my ears popping right on cue as the doors peel back and my mother’s ostentatious-to-the-point-of-ridiculous foyer appears.
High ceilings. Parquet flooring. Mirrors everywhere. Boujee framed works by some of America’s most acclaimed contemporary artists. Dried flowers, and soft, off-white, feminine furnishings. This penthouse is an accurate representation of who Meredith is as a person—classy, subtle, effortless, well-heeled. Everything I’m not.
Meredith breaks out in hives if I dare sit on one of her precious white sofas. She shoos me out of the living room more often than not. Never really got over the injustice of my sex, I think. They told her I was a girl when she went for her gender scan. Imagine her disappointment when I came out with a penis. As a boy, she assumes that I exude dirt from my pores. No matter how recently I’ve showered, she’s convinced that her precious white sofas are unsafe around me. The irony of a chair that can’t even be fucking sat on, people. I fucking tell you.
I brace myself for the familiar smell of this place, readying myself for the delicate hint of apricot—the smell of my mother’s expensive hand cream—that normally lingers in the air. Only…the place doesn’t smell at all. I enter the hallway and look both ways, toward the main living area and down the long hallway that leads off toward the bedrooms.
Nothing. No cleaning products. No perfume. The warm, animal scent of polished leather that used to dominate the penthouse disappeared after my father died and Meredith tossed his ancient briefcase down the garbage chute, but her smell…hersmell hasalwaysbeen here.
She really hasn’t been home in weeks.
