Being Nikki

Chapter 7
THE PART I WAS PROBABLY GOING TO need the most therapy for was the expression I saw on Mom’s face every time I let myself into the apartment.   Like just now—after lying about my identity to the doorman—and saying, “Hi, Mom. It’s me. ”   It was all about the flicker—it only lasted an instant—of excitement, followed by disappointment, then resignation. She was expecting the old Em, and instead, she got Nikki…well, outwardly, anyway. So, for a split second, she was disappointed. It passed in a flash, to be replaced with her normal, oh-of-course-it’s-you face.   But it was always there, every time she saw me—the disappointment. Because the truth was, I wasn’t her daughter. Not really. Not anymore.   On the inside maybe. But not on the outside.   And she hadn’t accepted the new me. Not completely.   And a part of me knew she never would.   I couldn’t blame her, really, I guess.   “Oh, Em, honey,” she said. The flicker was gone, and she recognized me, the stranger in her apartment, the tall blonde with the miniature poodle in the waterproof coat, prancing at her side. I guess she’d never come to accept me—in Nikki’s body—unless I got rid of the poodle, stopped washing my hair, gained fifty pounds, and started wearing nothing but sweats again, like the old me. People are funny. “I can’t believe you came all the way over in this weather! Weren’t you supposed to be in Aruba or something today?”   “St. John,” I said, leaning down to kiss her. Before the accident, Mom had been taller than me. Now I was taller than Dad. Even in my Stark brand imitation Uggs. “We flew back this morning. I came over as soon as I could. ” I wasn’t going to tell her about the long-lost brother I had found waiting for me in my lobby. I don’t know why. She just had enough problems, and I wasn’t going to burden her with mine. Instead, I shrugged out of my outdoor things, which were rapidly becoming sopping wet in the over-radiated heat of the apartment. “What’s this I hear about cheerleading camp?”   Mom rolled her eyes and said, “Don’t get me started,” just as Frida burst from her bedroom, having heard me come in.   “You came!” Her eyes were wide with excitement. “You’re the awesomest! Did you bring Lulu?”   On my sister’s registry of all things awesome, Lulu Collins rated only slightly below Nikki Howard. The fact that both of them were now in her life on an almost daily basis had put her into a kind of teen girl nirvana from which I feared she wouldn’t emerge until college.   “Uh, Lulu’s busy,” I said, deeming it unnecessary to mention that Lulu was busy staring at my ceiling, planning her wedding to Nikki Howard’s estranged big brother. “Is Dad around?”   “Dad went back to New Haven,” Frida said. “He couldn’t stand the fighting. ”   “There was no fighting,” Mom corrected her. “Fighting implies that the issue was ever negotiable, and it isn’t. ”   Frida threw me a help me look. “See?” she said.   Mom glared at me. “And I can’t believe,” she added, going back to the sofa and the Sunday Times, which she had strewn all around her, her normal weekend habit, “that you knew all this time, and you didn’t tell me. ”   “Well,” I said lamely. If she only knew the things I knew and hadn’t told her. “I don’t see what’s wrong with it, really. Cheerleading is a sport, after all. ”   Mom didn’t even look up from the Week in Review section. “Name a sport you play in a miniskirt,” she said.   I almost laughed, since I’d tried the same argument on Frida when I’d first heard about her going out for the team.   “Well,” I said. “Figure skaters wear even shorter skirts, and figure skating is an Olympic sport. And so is gymnastics. And cheerleading is basically all gymnastics. ”   Mom just rattled the paper. There was classical music playing softly over the stereo. The whole apartment looked so cozy and warm, I almost wanted to cry. Somewhere, I knew, were bagels Dad had picked up that morning from H&H. With vegetable cream cheese (I couldn’t eat bagels anymore because they caused Nikki massive acid reflux. Anything doughy did).   But looks, of course, were deceiving. Cozy as the place looked, I couldn’t help suspecting it was every bit as wired as the loft was. I didn’t know where the bugs were, but I was sure they were there, somewhere, and that Stark was listening. Hadn’t Dr. Holcombe, during my last checkup, asked me if I thought it was such a good idea to introduce Lulu to my family…something he could have known I’d done only if Stark had been listening in that time Lulu and I dropped by my old apartment with a pizza?   And hadn’t the Stark Institute for Neurology and Neurosurgery handed us all brand-new Stark brand cell phones on which to call one another? Phones that had been way more staticky than any mobile phone I’d ever owned—clear proof, to me, anyway, that they were tapped.   It had been kind of hard after that not to believe Stark wasn’t spying on us, especially since my pocket bug detector—yes, I’d gone off the deep end and bought every spy gadget I could get my hands on—whined like crazy every time I walked in the door. I didn’t know where the bugs were, but they were there, somewhere. Which was why I had encouraged my family to use the non-Stark brand, nonstaticky cell phones I’d bought them, and why I now usually kept my visits to my old home brief.   “The thing is,” Frida said to Mom, “I have to go with the team to winter camp. We have all our routines down, and I’m, like, the most important person. I’m a base, and without me, basically all our pyramids, our stunts, anything involving a flyer, everything falls down. Furthermore, if I don’t receive proper training, someone—including me—could be badly injured. Which isn’t to say our coach isn’t magnificent, because she is, but at this weeklong training camp, we learn proper techniques to avoid injuries as well as new stunts and routines that will blow the competition out of the water. Besides, cheerleading is a really good extracurricular. It looks great on your college apps. I mean, do you want me to look like a total loser, like Em, who has no extracurriculars whatsoever?”   “Hey,” I said, coming to my own defense.   “Sorry,” Frida said, throwing me an apologetic look. “But it’s true. Until your surgery, you never did anything after school, except boring computer stuff with Christopher. Now at least you go to tropical islands for swimsuit shoots and stuff. ”   “I do not like,” Mom said, finally lowering her paper, “the tone that this conversation has taken. I do not want my daughters’ extracurricular activities to be swimsuit shoots and being the base supports of human pyramids. ”   “Mom,” Frida said, going to sit on the couch beside her. “It’s so much more than that. I’m learning teamwork and physics and making new friends, while at the same time getting physically fit and staying healthy—”   I brightened up a little. The truth was, I’d been feeling a little depressed since this afternoon, coming home and finding Steven Howard, not Christopher, waiting for me in my lobby, then getting the news about Nikki’s mom. That, followed by the information that I was now a Stark Angel, hadn’t really done much to cheer me up since the whole sitting-at-the-bottom-of-the-ocean thing.   But seeing how much Frida had matured over the past couple of months? That was doing the trick. I mean, she wasn’t half the whiny, self-centered kid she’d been before my accident, always insisting on getting her way. Not anymore.   “That’s why it’s so important you let me go to this cheerleading camp over break,” Frida went on. “I swear I won’t do anything to make you regret it, Mom. Because, the best part is, the camp is in Miami, which is really close to where Grandma lives in Boca Raton. We’re going there, anyway, for winter break. So I can still be with you guys at night, only during the day, I can go to camp with everybody else. I don’t even have to stay in the hotel with the rest of the team. ”   See? Frida had learned how to compromise and see things from other people’s points of view. This was something she’d rarely, if ever, done before. I couldn’t believe how my little sister had grown! She was practically a mature young woman now! Never mind that she was wearing a pair of pants that said “Juicy” on the butt.   “That sounds totally reasonable,” I said. “We can all fly down together and stay at Grandma’s, and then Frida can go off to cheerleading camp with her friends, and, Mom, you and Dad and I can hang with Gran. Won’t that be fun?”   Before the words were fully out of my mouth, though, I noticed both Mom and Frida were staring at me with odd looks on their faces. I couldn’t figure out why. I mean, we always went to Grandma’s in Boca for the holidays. Mom’s Jewish and Dad’s not, so in our house we’d always celebrated both Christmas (the secular, Santa version) and Hanukkah. Gran was always fine with that, and it was nice to spend Christmas Day at the beach, getting a little sun after enduring the first part of a New York winter.   Was this year going to be different somehow? That’s what Mom’s and Frida’s looks seemed to imply.   “Em, honey,” Mom said, after a tense silence. “You weren’t thinking…I know we never discussed it, but I just assumed…I mean, you know you can’t go to Grandma’s this year. Or any year. Stark would never allow it. You know you’re not supposed to be seen with us. How would they explain it if the paparazzi snapped a picture of you with us on the beach in Florida over the holidays?”   I blinked at her.   Oh. Right. Stark. My employer. The contract. The people bugging my apartment and following me…maybe. Probably.   Definitely.   “And besides,” she went on, “you know we told Grandma—everyone in the family, actually—that you…died. How would we explain to her—and her friends—what Nikki Howard was doing, joining us for our family vacation? Obviously, you couldn’t be Em around her…”   Of course. My obituary. The memorial service. The story on CNN about my gory death by plasma screen TV. Everyone at school had seen it, too.   “Right,” I said. My bones did that frozen thing again, the way they had outside the Stark Megastore, the scene of the accident that had caused all this. Only this time I wasn’t outside, with so many windows filled with posters of Nikki Howard smiling blandly down at me. So there was no rational explanation for why I suddenly felt like I was freezing cold. “Grandma thinks I’m dead. ”   How stupid of me to have thought I was going to her condo for the holidays with the rest of my family. How stupid of me to have brought that tote bag, sitting over by the door, filled with wrapped gifts for all of them, to take down to Florida to open with Grandma.   Everyone thought I was dead.   I was Nikki Howard now.   Em Watts was dead.   “It’s okay,” I said, with a careless laugh—or a laugh that I hoped sounded careless. It actually sounded more brittle, I think, than careless. Suddenly, I was blinking back tears—where did those come from?—but I hoped Mom and Frida couldn’t see them. “How dumb. I totally forgot about Stark. And the contract. And everything. Geez. I’m so stupid. ”   “Honey. ” Mom put down the paper and got up off the couch to wrap an arm around me, even though I took a step back, away from her. “Are you all right? We probably should have discussed this, but I just assumed you’d be working, anyway, so…”   “I’m fine,” I said, still moving away from her. I didn’t want her to see my tears, that I wasn’t fine. Also, I was afraid that her touch would cause me to crumble. “Actually, it’s much better this way, because Lulu is having this huge party, and I was worried about how I was going to break the news to her that I wasn’t going to be able to be there, and now I won’t have to. So, phew!”   Mom didn’t look convinced that I was all right.   “You know what,” she said. “This is silly. We’ll just stay here in town for the holidays this year. I’ll give Gran a call. I’m sure we can work something out—”   Frida didn’t seem to hear what Mom had just said. She was too excited about something else. “Lulu’s having a party?” she asked. “A holiday party? Am I invited?”   Yeah. Forget everything I said about Frida being so much more mature now.   “No,” I said. I started reaching for the outdoor things I’d only just put down, like Cosy’s coat and leash and my gloves and stuff. “You know what, I forgot, I promised Lulu, actually, that I’d pick up some stuff for her party, and here it is getting close to five and the party store is going to close since it’s Sunday, so I better go—”   “Em,” Mom said, reaching for me again, looking as if her heart were breaking on my behalf.   But I was too quick for her. I sidestepped her and was halfway out the door and down the hall before either of them seemed to realize what was happening.   “I’ll call you guys later,” I tossed back over my shoulder as I heard Mom say my name again.   But I was hurrying toward the elevator, hoping I’d get there before the tears did, and before either of them caught up to me…   And I made it, but barely. I actually managed to get past the doorman and into the driveway in front of the building, under the protective canopy, before I burst.   And then my face melted. Or at least that’s what it felt like. The tears in my eyes overflowed, coursing hotly down my cheeks. I couldn’t see anything in front of or around me, because it all kind of disappeared into a hot mess of little dots and smears, like the Impressionistic paintings in the nineteenth-century wing in the Metropolitan, as the tears took over everything. I’m pretty sure there was snot involved, too.   And even as I was doing it—crying, I mean—I knew it was ridiculous. I never actually liked going to Grandma’s that much, except for the beach and her pool. Her condo was way too small for the four of us plus her, and I always had to sleep on a foldout cot that was too short for me, and she gave us frozen bagels for breakfast instead of the real kind you could get here in New York, still warm from the oven, crusty on the outside, and warm and gooey in the middle.   But somehow, being told I couldn’t go, because I was dead…   Well, it just made me wish I’d stayed down at the bottom of the ocean last night. It had been so nice down there, so quiet and calm and, okay, cold, but still. No one had been demanding things of me, like Climb This Cliff, Find My Missing Mom, Wear This Diamond Bra, or Don’t Go to Florida with Us, You’re Dead, Remember?   Although, I guess in a way, I was at the bottom of that ocean again. I was just as cold, anyway, and just as alone—except for Cosy—and soon I’d have to go out into that sleet, and then I’d be just as wet, since I didn’t bring an umbrella.   Suddenly, I decided I couldn’t take it. I just couldn’t take it! I knew I must have looked like an idiot, but I didn’t care. There was no one around. Only a fool would have been out in weather like this, anyway. I decided just to stand there and cry. At least until a cab went by and I could try to hail it.   Because no way was I walking home in this crappy weather.   I was standing there in front of my parents’ building, crying and feeling sorry for myself, when I felt a hand on my shoulder. Thinking it was Eddie the doorman, asking if I wanted him to flag down a cab—which, good luck finding one in this weather—I turned my head, sniffling. I still couldn’t exactly see because of my face melting, but I could sort of vaguely make out a masculine shape beside me.   “What?” I asked, sniffling.   “Nikki?” a familiar voice asked. As familiar to me, almost, as my own. Or as familiar as my own voice used to be, before my larynx was crushed beneath three hundred pounds of plasma television.   It wasn’t Eddie. It was someone else who lived in my parents’ building. I’d just forgotten that little fact during the pity party I’d been throwing for myself.   And for a second, I nearly choked on my own tears.   Because it was Christopher.