“We’d like you to come and work for us. I can offer you two hundred and fifty thousand a year. How does that sound?”
Li Jing coughed at that sum of money. She had no idea what to say to a quarter of a million dollars.
“You’re wondering what’s the catch?” Almstead said. “Clever girl.”
He’d mistaken her boggling as some kind of negotiating tactic.
“The catch is … the work really has to be a secret this time,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, we’d prefer to, hmmm, how can I say this? How do I say it, Phillips?”
“Mr. Almstead is proposing that you become a part of our top-secret research initiative,” Mr. Phillips explained. “The scientists we recruit agree to limit contact with friends and family. In some cases, we even create new identities for members of our team. Some of them, you understand, come from situations that require them to start anew. Countries that don’t want their top scientists recruited. That kind of thing. They live in our dormitories on our research campus.”
Li Jing was thinking now.
“We could make up a whole new identity for you. You could be Kim Sum or Jang Lang, I don’t know,” said Mr. Almstead. Li Jing didn’t bat an eye at the racism in his remarks. Old men were the worst. And they always thought they were being funny.
“Mr. Almstead,” she asked, “if I come to work for you, I get to continue my research—”
“Heck yeah, why do you think I sent in the SWAT team?”
“On human subjects?”
“We have volunteers, at our lab. They’re paid very, very well,” Mr. Phillips interjected.
“And they know how to keep their mouths shut,” Almstead said from the screen.
“When the time comes … could my new name be Elise?” Li Jing asked.
“Ha!” he barked. Then, “Girls. Can be one of the top scientists in all the world, and still got a pretty name in mind. Sure thing. Why Elise?”
She shrugged.
There had been another Chinese girl in Li Jing’s kindergarten class named Elise. She had been the darling of the class, while Li Jing had remained friendless week after week.
“Want a Chinese last name or a regular one?” Almstead said.
“Zhang,” Li Jing decided. “It is a very common Chinese last name.”
“Elise Zhang. Sounds like a scientist not to screw around with. I like it.”
“Excuse me, sir,” Mr. Phillips said. “We also need to ask Ms. Wu how many people know about the research.”
“Well, almost no one,” Li Jing answered. “My project advisor, and the head of the department, they both knew. And my roommate, Penelope Lindstrom. She’s the one who got me expelled.”
“Oh, believe me,” said Almstead, “all our best scientists got kicked out of school for one thing or another.”
“Is that all?” Phillips asked. “You’re quite certain?”
“I guess it’s possible that Penny could have told some of her friends, but I don’t know. Oh, and Carolann, of course. My test subject. She knows.”
Mr. Phillips nodded.
“I see. Well, Phillips, that manageable?” Almstead crowed.
“Yes, sir. Perfectly so.”
Li Jing got goose bumps all up and down her arms and legs. What did that mean, manageable?
Phillips crooked his arm up and rapped on the dividing glass twice. The driver reversed the car and drove backward, out toward the parking lot.
“What should we do about the test subject, Mr. Almstead?” Phillips asked. “She’s quite unstable. She assaulted Ms. Wu right as we arrived.”
“What do you think we should do about her, Li Jing?” Almstead asked.
Li Jing thought for a moment. “Her rapid weight loss and her growing aggression would be consistent with someone suffering from meth addiction,” she volunteered. “Maybe we could find a place where addicts are and … give her some and leave her there.”
“Thatta girl! You’re one of us, I can tell already! We’ll give her … rather too much meth, if I’m catching onto your idea.”
Li Jing nodded. It had never been a good experiment. No blinds. Only one subject. The dosage hadn’t been monitored as it should have been, she could admit that now. And it had been hard to keep up with Carolann’s increasing demand. Some of the product had not been as pure as it should have been. It had been a sloppy experiment.
The SUV had to make a three-point turn right in front of her father’s banged-up white delivery van.
Li Jing’s breath caught in her throat.
“He can’t see you, through the glass,” Mr. Phillips said.
Her father was leaning on the van and smoking a cigarette, watching for her. She could tell, just from his posture, by the tension in his body and the way he was jiggling one foot, how angry he was. How ready he was to lay into her, as soon as she rounded the corner.
“But we should talk about him,” Mr. Phillips said, as the SUV finished the turn and pulled away. “Would he believe it if you ran away?”
His eyes darted to her arm. Unintentionally, Li Jing thought. She put her hand over the ugly crescent-shaped marks.
“Yes. He would believe that.”
“Did he know about your research?” Mr. Almstead asked.
“No,” she said. Then she closed her eyes. The excitement and the adrenaline were wearing off and her body was beginning to remind her of the beating she had received. Her head pounded. Her shoulder ached. The swelling bruises and welts on her upper arm were thumping in time with her heartbeat. “Wait.”
Li Jing cleared her throat, “You know, I did mention it one time,” she said. She couldn’t quite look at Mr. Almstead on the screen.
“I almost forgot about it. Yes, he does know. He said I should try to sell it.” She knew the lie sounded hollow, but she couldn’t stop herself. “He offered to try to sell it for me.”
She glanced at Mr. Phillips and saw he was looking out the window, away from her.
“He’s very possessive of me,” Li Jing added. “He would try to find me if I disappeared.”
“I see,” Almstead said from the screen. “Well, then maybe we need to take care of that. Do you think so?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Yes,” Elise Zhang said.
Get ready for a dream vacation that first goes comically, then tragically, then horrifyingly wrong!
Keep reading for a sneak peek of
SWEET
LAUREL
DAY ONE
A GUY WEARING SKINNY JEANS and a neon-blue fedora is leaping into the air, vaulting up onto the backs of the people in the crowd, waving like crazy and shouting, “Baby Tom-Tom! Baby Tom-Tom!” like a man on fire calling for a bucket.
The dock is a zoo. Fans, maybe two thousand fans, are crammed into the space on either side of a red carpet that extends from the limo drop-off point, all the way up the dock, up a narrow gangplank and onto the luxury cruise liner, the Extravagance.
It’s dawning on me that I’ve made a terrible mistake: I walked.
My parents dropped me off way back at the ship terminal after besieging me with last-minute instructions about everything from cell phone usage to alcohol poisoning.
I should have come with Vivika. She begged me to join her in the limo her dad rented for her. But, eh, I felt like I didn’t want to show up like some pseudo-celebrity in a rented limo.
Well, it turns out that when you’re boarding a cruise that’s filled to the brim with wannabe rock stars and reality-TV almost-rans, you want to be chauffeured. A limo means you wind up on the right side of the security guards and the red velvet cords.
I see a curvy, tan girl with a razor-straight brown page-boy haircut get out of a Hummer limo (yes, they make them) at the start of the red carpet.
It’s Sabbi Ribiero, the Brazilian heiress from Teens of New York, along with several wealthy sidekicks. They all look polished and gorgeous, but not quite as polished and gorgeous as Sabbi, herself. Of co
urse.
The fans go ballistic.
Uniformed bellmen start unloading stacks of leather matchy-matchy suitcases and hanging bags and valises and, God, hatboxes (hatboxes!) out of the trunk of the monstrous Hummer.
The lanky fellow in the blue fedora yells, “Sabbi! Sabbi, we love you!” and puts his hand on my head, to push off me like you would a fence post.
“Hey!” I shout. “That’s my head!”
But he doesn’t care. He’s yelling to some off-site friend on his phone. “This scene is insane! I’d give anything to get on that boat!”
Hmmm, I feel the exact opposite way. I sorta feel like I’d give anything not to get on that boat. How did I let my best friend talk me into coming on this—the Solu “Cruise to Lose”? The most famous cruise since the Titanic?
I have to get onto the carpet. Vivika’s already on board and her texts are getting apoplectic in tone. I don’t blame her. I’m late, as usual.
If the ship is going to leave on time it’s leaving in the next, yikes, twenty minutes.
Okay, I tell myself. You can do this. I close my eyes and take a deep breath.
Being pushy is not really in my wheelhouse. But I told Viv I’d come with her on this freak show and unless I get through this crowd and onto the other side of the red stanchions, it ain’t gonna happen.
So I start shoving.
“Out of the way! Make way! Coming through!”
I elbow and push, dragging my mom’s rolling suitcase behind me and using my extra-large handbag (which Viv calls “the Boho beast”) as a kind of very soft and lumpy weapon. My guitar, safely strapped to my back in its hard shell, isn’t helping, although I do thwack a few irritating people on the head with it (by accident, mostly) on the way.
Finally, I make it to one of the guards standing at the left side of the red carpet.
“Hi!” I say.
He nods.
“I need to get in.”
He eyes my guitar.
“You gonna play for change?”
“Oh,” I say. “That’s funny. No. I’m actually a passenger.”
He arches his eyes in surprise.
“Yeah, I know,” I say. “Strange, but true.”
“You just walkin’ up, huh?”
“Yep.”
He’s enjoying this now. “Just walkin’. You a local?”
I nod. He’s really having fun. People are pressing up behind me and cursing my luggage.
“Couldn’t get a lift or nothin’?”
I rifle in my purse and come up with my ticket case, a slim padded leather case embossed with the single word: SOLU. Some kids behind me jostle forward as another celebrity passes on the carpet. I think it’s a famous chef guy.
“Ease up, now,” the guard bellows to the crowd behind, “this girl here has a ticket!”
I feel like Charlie Bucket for a second as people around me gasp and stare.
“Who is she?” a girl whispers.
“I don’t know … Nobody, I don’t think,” her friend answers.
Nice. (True, of course.)
I flash the man my ticket. The people around me are now taking my picture with their phones as the guard inspects my ticket.
“Maybe she’s a rock star!” somebody guesses.
Yeah, right. (I’m an amateur classical guitarist.)
“It’s legit,” the guard says, regarding my ticket. People around me literally gasp.
The guard unhooks the stanchion and lets me onto the carpet.
“Hey!” he yells. “We need a bellman over here!”
I shoulder my handbag and pull my mom’s rollaway bag onto the red carpet and stand there like the dork of the century.
Here’s the picture:
• Awkward, slightly chubby girl.
• Most of wavy, strawberry-blond hair escaping the “Easy Crown Braid” hairstyle I tried-really-hard-and-failed to copy from Seventeen magazine.
• Guitar on back.
• Freckles. Too many. Everywhere.
• Combat boots on feet with wool socks my grandma knit peeking out the top.
• Cool white Indian tunic from India Bazaar now crushed, sweaty, and ripped at hem.
• Jeans shorts looking dumb when I thought they’d look rocker classy.
• My face blushing beet red under the numerous freckles.
• My expression clearly showing that I would like to sink into the red carpet and disappear forever.
Also, I should have worn more makeup than Carmex and mascara.
Then, fate intervenes in the form of a slim black man with a magnificent handlebar mustache, dressed in a fashionable seersucker suit with a pocket square in a calming shade of lavender.
He strides toward me, holding a clipboard and looking like he was born and raised to run a red carpet.
“Darling! It’s me, Rich. Rich Weller, the publicist for the cruise,” he says, feigning some prior acquaintance. (As if anyone on earth could ever have met him and then forgotten him.) He kisses me on one cheek, then the other. I think we’re through, then he kisses me again on the first cheek. Three kisses.
“Come with me, sugar,” he says. His tone is intimate and friendly and clearly conveys that he knows I am a fish out of water and is doing his best to try to help me not make an ass out of myself. (Ass-Fish? Fish-ass?) “Leave your bags.”
When I don’t move immediately, he says, “Just drop them.”
I let go of the handle of my mom’s suitcase and, of course, it plonks over onto its belly with an awkward thomp. A grinning Indonesian bellman sweeps in and lifts the bag onto a cart.
“May I carry your instrument, miss?” the bellman asks, gesturing to my guitar. He gives me a friendly smile.
“That would be loverly, Imade,” Rich says for me. Rich takes the guitar off my shoulders and hands it over.
Now I’m conscious of the sweat stains on my back. The tunic, well, it’s a little see-through when you sweat like you’re facing the guillotine, so everyone can now see the back of my bra where the sweat has made my shirt transparent and the chub that flows over and under the band. This just gets better and better.
Behind us, there are screams as a new celebrity (an actual celebrity, I should say) arrives. Thank God, the attention’s off me.
“Tootsie pie, listen to me.” Rich murmurs. “Shoulders up, now. That’s good. Now you go and walk that carpet, sis. Come on, stand up straight or they’ll eat you alive.”
I gather myself up and square my shoulders to the carpet and the banks of photographers on either side.
You can do this, I tell myself.
I take two steps forward, and whack, Rich spanks me on the butt.
“Go get ’em, girl,” he tells me.
The photographers, God love them, don’t take my picture! Oh, a couple do, but most of them are angling to snap some shots of the guy coming up the gangplank behind me (he’s a reality-show God—survived on nothing but grubs for two weeks on some island where apparently all they have to eat is grubs).
At the top of the gangplank, a line is forming—the boarding passengers are backed up.
It’s a check-in line, where you give them your ticket and they hand you some kind of ID card, but that’s not why there’s a backup.
There’s a weigh station.
You hand them your card, then hop on a scale. They record your weight and swipe your card.
Okay, so I knew that this cruise had a weight-loss contingent. The Solu Cruise to Lose has been all over the talk shows and tabloids for months now. Solu is this new diet sweetener that not only sweetens your coffee, but makes you lose weight. And when the divorce between Viv’s parents became final, it seemed pretty clear that Vivvy’s dad would give her pretty much anything she wanted. Well, this was what she wanted. To go on the cruise. (She’s been unhappy with her weight since preschool. I remember her love-hate affair with graham crackers and apple juice.) They say that each of us will lose 5–10 percent of our body weight during the cruise’s seven-day trip
.
So I knew all that. And I agreed to go because—well, a luxury cruise? For free?! And living in Fort Lauderdale, we’re always seeing the big ships come and go. I was so excited to actually be on one. To wave good-bye from the prow is something I will never get to do again in my life, I am sure!
But I did not know that we’d be publicly weighed before we were allowed to board the ship!
I fumble in my giant purse for my cell phone. I’m going to do some angry texting to Viv. At least, she could have warned me! She knows I’m shy about stuff like this—weight is private. And, yeah, I could stand to lose five pounds (okay, fifteen) but that’s nobody’s business but my own.
To be weighed in public seems like a big fine to have to pay to go on the cruise.
Then I hear the deep, raspy, heavily accented voice all of America would recognize. Sabbi Ribiero: the infamous, hard-partying, and Maserati-wrecking Brazilian heiress.
She is talking. To me.
“Can you believe this?”
“No,” I say. “It’s so demeaning. It’s insulting. I mean, are we to be weighed like cows? Like luggage?”
Sabbi blinks her twenty-inch-long eyelashes, looking at me like I’m speaking a foreign language.
“I haven’t waited in line since I immigrated to America, when I was six years old,” she says pointedly, like I’m an idiot. To tell you the truth, I kind of act like an idiot because I’m mesmerized by her mouth. She forms each word like it’s a little masterpiece. And her voice is like a jaguar purring.
She cocks a perfect eyebrow at me, waiting for a response.
“I wait in line all the time.” I shrug.
One of her groupies laughs, then cuts it short when he sees no one else thinks I’m funny.
Sabbi tosses her hair and turns her back on me, without another word.
When Sabbi is motioned up to the scale, she removes her aqua-colored leather jacket and hands it to one of her people. She’s wearing a curve-hugging aqua-colored sweater and aqua pants with a little gold belt. She kicks off her gold stilettos and steps onto the scale. (It could be that her shoes are made of solid gold. That would not surprise me at all.)