Runaway (Airhead #3) Read online

  “Because we all sat in the same room with Dr. Fong,” Mrs. Howard explained patiently. “And heard him reveal that you didn’t have an embolism, Nikki—”

  “But they forced him to do the surgery, anyway,” Steven interrupted. “They were going to throw your brain away. He saved your life by transplanting it into the body you have now. Why don’t you get that? Just tell us what you were going to blackmail Robert Stark about, and we can all go back to our old lives.”

  “Oh.” Suddenly, Nikki’s eyes were bright with unshed tears. “Can we? Can we all go back to our old lives, Steven? I’m sorry, but you seem to have forgotten that that isn’t possible for some of us. Because there’s another girl living in my old body.”

  She shot me a look that sent chills up my spine. No one— not even Whitney Robertson, back at Tribeca Alternative, who I’m pretty sure had disliked me more than any human being in the entire universe, and only because when I was on her volleyball team during PE, I’d sometimes miss the ball— had ever given me a look of such pure, unadulterated hatred.

  “So I can’t go back to my old life,” Nikki said to her brother. “That girl right there is living in my apartment, using my money, taking my gigs; even my dog likes her better than me.” She pointed through the glass tabletop at Cosabella, who was sitting at the side of my chair, panting up at me eagerly, hoping I might slip her a piece of whatever food was about to be served (which, I have to admit, I’d been known on occasion to do).

  “So excuse me,” Nikki went on, “if I’m not exactly in a rush to get out of here. I happen to like things exactly as they are, considering the alternatives. Because if you think I’m going back home to live in redneck Gasper, USA, with you and Mom, Steven, well, you can just think again. I’m never going back there. Never.”

  “Nikki,” I said. I felt terrible about what had happened to her. I really did. Even though none of it had been my fault— hey, I definitely hadn’t chosen to be the new brain behind the Face of Stark— I felt like I owed her something.

  But I had to get out of Brandon Stark’s control before I went crazy.

  Or lit something else of his on fire. Like his pants, for instance.

  “Maybe we could work something out.” I lowered my voice just in case Brandon, even tied up as he seemed to be in his phone call, happened to overhear me.

  She narrowed her eyes at me.

  “What do you mean, work something out?”

  “Well,” I half whispered. “Like, I could give you the money back. The money in your bank account. I’d also offer you a cut of anything I make in the future. You know, from future jobs.”

  Nikki leaned back in her chair. The chef’s assistant had set decoratively arranged plates of peekytoe salad in front of each of us, including in front of Brandon’s empty seat. Brandon was still pacing at the bottom of the stairs, on the phone with his lawyer. Every once in a while a burst of his conversation would reach us. It sounded like, “What do you mean, I need proof?” and “No, I don’t see why I should have to do that!” He was clearly lost in his own little world.

  “That sounds fair, Nikki,” Mrs. Howard said, moving some of her peekytoe salad around on her plate. “You really ought to consider it.”

  “I don’t have to consider anything,” Nikki said. “She’s not offering me anything I wouldn’t have if none of this had happened in the first place. She’s offering me less, actually, than I would have had.”

  “But you ruined your career,” Steven pointed out, his voice raised a little in frustration, “by trying to blackmail your boss. Which he should have fired you for. But instead, he tried to have you killed. Either way, Emerson’s the one who would be doing all the work.”

  Nikki stared at him like he was stupid.

  “You think modeling is work?” she demanded. “Getting paid to stand around in five-thousand-dollar dresses while people airbrush makeup onto you and compliment you while taking your picture? That isn’t work. That’s freaking fun, dude.”

  I had no idea what she was talking about. Modeling was totally work. Sure, it wasn’t standing over a fryer at McDonald’s in a polyester uniform, getting grease all over you, for minimum wage while people yelled at you that they wanted a Diet Coke with their Big Mac, fries, McNuggets, and apple turnover. And Supersize it.

  But I had never worked so hard in my life on most of the shoots I got sent out on. That whole thing where Tyra was going on about smiling with your eyes? Yeah, not so easy, it turns out, when you’re in nothing but a bustier and a thong and standing in freezing cold water up to your butt and you’re shivering and all you want to do is go home and cry.

  “Look, Nikki,” I said, feeling like we were getting off topic. “With that kind of money you wouldn’t have to live in Gasper. You could live in a duplex with a doorman and in-house gym in SoHo.”

  “And do what?” Nikki demanded.

  “Go to college,” Mrs. Howard said promptly.

  Nikki snorted again. “Oh, right, Mom,” she said, rolling her eyes.

  “What’s wrong with that idea?” her mother asked. “There’s all sorts of things you could get degrees in, things you already know all about and could bring a specialized knowledge to because of your background…photography, fashion design or merchandising, business, publicity, media, entertainment law—”

  Nikki cut her mother short.

  “There’s only one thing I want,” she hissed.

  “And what’s that?” I asked.

  Not the dog, I prayed. I wasn’t sure I could part with Cosabella. In the months that I’d gotten to know her, the two of us had really bonded. True, it was kind of annoying having a four-legged little shadow follow me everywhere I went.

  But I had kind of gotten used to it.

  But what else could Nikki want? I’d already offered her all the money I had, and a split of my future earnings. Should I offer her all of my future earnings? It was going to be tough to figure out how I was going to pay the mortgage on the loft….

  Wait. Did Nikki want the loft? Was I going to have to move? What about Lulu? Lulu paid me rent to live in the loft.

  Well, I guess we were just going to have to find some other place to live.

  “What I want,” Nikki said, in the nastiest voice I think I’ve heard— and that includes when Whitney Robertson used to ask me if I’d ever even heard of conditioner— “is my old body back.”

  Four

  STUNNED, I LOOKED DOWN AT THE BODY Nikki was talking about. Her body. The body I’d woken up in so many months earlier, in so much confusion. The body I had had to get accustomed to seeing myself in, to walking around in, to living in. The body that had caused me so much pain and heartache and astonishment as I’d tried to get used to it.

  The body I had hated, railed against, refused to believe was now my own, and had cursed.

  The body I’d been convinced was ruining my life.

  And then later, the body in which I’d experienced so much laughter, having whipped cream fights with Lulu in the kitchen. And wonder, as I’d felt what it could do on a treadmill, actually experiencing runner’s high for the first time in my life (I’d certainly never exerted myself in my old body, especially in PE… except to try to duck the volleyballs Whitney Robertson spiked at my head).

  And finally joy, as I’d lain beneath Christopher and felt his mouth moving over my lips, his heart drumming against mine.

  And I realized, with a shock like the cold seawater I’d felt once pouring over me when I’d flung myself backward off a cliff into it, I wasn’t giving this body up.

  No way.

  I may have hated it at times— I may have longed for my old life back.

  But this was my new life. It was the only life I had.

  I wasn’t about to give it up.

  “Over my dead body,” Mrs. Howard burst out, basically summing up my feelings exactly.

  “Well,” Nikki said, looking over at her mother. “Good thing it’s not your body we’re talking about, isn’t it? So why don�
��t you just butt out?”

  “Nikki,” Mrs. Howard said. She’d pushed back her chair and risen from the table angrily. “Dr. Fong and I spent weeks nursing you after you nearly died the last time they did the surgery. Your new heart couldn’t take the strain of being under anesthesia for so long. It was a miracle you even survived. And without brain damage.”

  “I’m not so sure she didn’t suffer brain damage,” Steven remarked, with the sarcasm only a sibling could display.

  “Shut up,” Nikki snapped at him. Her chin was sticking out again, a sign, I had figured out, that she’d made up her mind. To her mother she said, “I’m willing to risk it. I want my old life back. All of it. That includes my old body. Give it to me, or no deal.”

  Wow.

  I had seen Nikki in a lot of moods since we’d moved into adjacent bedrooms…

  …but I’d never seen her this adamant about anything.

  “You’re being ridiculous. I don’t see how this surgery is even going to be possible,” Mrs. Howard went on, throwing a beseeching look at Brandon, “considering the fact that the only doctors who can perform it work for Brandon’s father at the Stark Institute for Neurology and Neurosurgery. And how is he possibly going to get them to do it without his father finding out?”

  “Dr. Fong can do it,” Nikki said. “He did it once for me. He can do it again.”

  Well. That much was true.

  I looked down at the elegant hands I’d grown so accustomed to seeing at the ends of my slender wrists. The hands that had shaken so badly the first time I’d tried to feed myself. The hands with which I’d been forced to learn to write a new name— Nikki’s, not my own— on all the slips of paper autograph seekers had thrust at me every time I’d set foot in public. The hands that had slipped under Christopher’s leather jacket— had it really only been a few nights ago?— and felt his skin burning beneath mine.

  But I guess they’d never really been my hands after all.

  They were her hands. Nikki’s hands.

  And now she wanted them back.

  I clenched Nikki’s hands into fists.

  They may have been her hands.

  But it was my brain that had made them do all those things.

  “Dr. Fong doesn’t have his own facilities to perform a complicated procedure like this,” Mrs. Howard was saying. “You know he doesn’t. Why do you think your recovery took so much longer than Em’s, besides the fact that you nearly died during it, because the body you have now isn’t as strong as your old one? Because he didn’t have access to—”

  “Well,” Nikki said. “We can just set up an operating room here. If Brandon wants this information badly enough, he’ll pay whatever it costs to give me what I want. Right, Brandon?”

  “Oh, Nikki,” her mother said. “Don’t be so—”

  “Right, Brandon?” Nikki said, interrupting her mother.

  Brandon, who’d shoved his iPhone into his pocket and strode over to sit in his chair at the head of the dining table, looked up from his plate and said the words that sent a chill through my heart…Nikki’s heart:

  “Uh…I guess.”

  Wait— he was actually considering this? Did he even realize what we were talking about?

  “See?” Nikki turned shining eyes on us. “It’s all set, then.” Her eyes, I saw, weren’t shining because they were tear-filled. They were bright with triumph. Goody, her eyes seemed to be saying. “Now that that’s settled—”

  “Nikki,” Steven said, raising his head and swiveling it to send a steely-eyed look at his sister. “No.”

  The word was simple. And final. Just no.

  I realized then how much I loved Steven. He may have been Nikki’s brother.

  But he was my hero.

  “What do you mean, no?” Nikki demanded, whipping her head toward her brother. No one ever said no to Nikki. I should know. “If they took it out, they can put it back in. You asked what I wanted in exchange for telling what I know, and that’s what I want. I want my body back.”

  “Well, you can’t have it back,” Steven said. Steven’s tone was brusque. “It could kill her. And you. You can’t ask her to risk her life. She’s already done it once. You can’t ask her to do it again.”

  “Yes,” Nikki said, her eyes narrowed, “I can.”

  And in that Yes, I can I finally saw the girl from the tiny town who was so determined to make it big that she was willing to break her mother’s heart by having herself declared an emancipated minor before the age of sixteen.

  And had signed her first million-dollar contract a week later.

  “No,” her brother said, with just as much determination. And I saw in him the self-made man, the soldier with whom my loft-mate, Lulu, was so head over heels in love, and about whom she asked me so breathlessly every time she called. “You’re asking too much.”

  Now the shininess I saw in Nikki’s eyes really was tears. She glared at all of us.

  “Nobody thinks about me,” she said. The flintiness wasn’t gone. It was just being directed somewhere else. At forcing herself to appear sympathetic by crying, I suspected. “How I feel. I mean, how do you think it feels for me, to know I’m going to have to go around for the rest of my life in this body, looking like this hideous hag?”

  She flung herself into the nearest chair, lowering her head onto the table, and burst into dramatic sobs.

  Brandon and Steven exchanged incredulous glances, while Mrs. Howard hurried over to comfort her weeping daughter.

  “Nikki,” Mrs. Howard was saying. “How can you say that? You’re a normal, healthy-looking girl. No, you don’t look like you used to. But you’re not hideous. You’re still beautiful to me, just different than you used to be—”

  “Normal?” Nikki echoed, in a tone that suggested her mother had used a dirty word. “Healthy-looking? Are you kidding me, Mother? I don’t want to be normal. I don’t want to be healthy-looking, or beautiful to you. I want to be freaking gorgeous, like I used to be! I don’t want to be stuck in this stubby-looking body, with this plain-Jane face and this useless, ugly hair! I want to be hot! I want to be sexy! I want to be Nikki Howard!”

  I don’t know if it was my imagination or not, but the phrase I want to be Nikki Howard seemed to bounce off the cold hard windows around us and echo around the room. I want to be Nikki Howard! I want to be Nikki Howard! I want to be Nikki Howard!

  “Well, you can’t,” Mrs. Howard said exasperatedly. “And you’re not going to get anywhere if you don’t stop putting yourself down. Just look in that window there and see what I see: a bright young girl, with so much to offer….”

  But Nikki wouldn’t look up. She was too busy crying into her statement necklace.

  Because Nikki wouldn’t look up, I did. What I saw was my own reflection…the reflection Nikki used to have.

  Perfect. Not a feature, not even a hair, out of place. Exactly what you would expect to see on the cover of a magazine or modeling an expensive dress or piece of jewelry in an ad. Telling you what to buy or where to go or what was hot now.

  And because she looked so perfect— or what we’d been told for so long was how a perfect person was supposed to look— you would believe her. You’d want to buy whatever she was selling you, or go where she said to go. You’d want to make sure you had whatever it was she assured you was hot now.

  If you weren’t one of those people, like I’d always been, who hated her on sight. What did I need Nikki Howard for, telling me what to wear, what to buy, where to go? I’d never been able to stand the sight of her perfect, vapid face and body, towering over me on the sides of buildings or winking out at me from the pages of magazines.

  And now that face and body were mine. I couldn’t get away from them. No matter where I went, or how far I tried to run. Her face was my face. What she touched, I touched. What she experienced, I experienced.

  But the thing was, I couldn’t imagine not being her. Not anymore. She and I were one…

  …and, I had to admit, I liked
being her. I did. It wasn’t always easy being Nikki.

  But it was me. I was Nikki now.

  Beneath me, I felt Cosabella— realizing I wasn’t going to drop any food tonight— give up on her vigilant stand at my side and lay down to rest her head on my foot with a sigh. It was where she lay at every meal. It felt warm and natural to have her head there, soft as velvet….

  My heart jerked.

  If what Nikki wanted to happen actually happened, I’d never feel Cosabella’s head on my foot again.

  Oh, I supposed I could get a new dog…if I lived through the surgery. She wouldn’t be exactly like Cosabella, but it would be all right.

  Wouldn’t it?

  Even if I ran— even if I took off tonight, with Cosabella— they’d find me. Where could I go that Brandon couldn’t find me? I had the most recognizable face in the world. Maybe there was some tribal village in the wilds of the Amazon where they’d never seen Nikki Howard before.

  But how long was I going to last without cable? I’m not even talking about the premium channels, but Bravo and BBC America? I started freaking out after even a few hours without the Internet.

  I had to face it: I was screwed.

  “No,” Steven said again. “Nikki. It’s not going to happen. It’s too dangerous. And it’s not medically necessary. No surgeon in his right mind would do it. Not even Dr. Fong.”

  “Why,” Nikki sobbed, lifting her head and revealing that mascara had begun to run down her face, “does everyone hate me?”

  “Nikki,” her mother said. “No one hates you. It isn’t that. It’s because you two aren’t—”

  “It’s not up to you,” Nikki yelled, just as the chef’s assistant came out with a tray to collect the empty plates from the second course. “It’s up to Brandon!”

  The assistant turned around and headed right back into the kitchen, Harry and Winston looking after him disappointedly. Apparently, he’d realized now wasn’t the best time to interrupt the conversation.

  “Uh,” Brandon said, shifting in his seat as he realized all eyes were on him. “If Nikki wants her body back, then that’s what Nikki’s gonna get. She’s what matters here.”