Being Nikki Read online

Chapter 4

  WELL, THAT DID KIND OF EXPLAIN THE nasty looks he kept giving me. And continued to give me, now that I’d brought him up to the loft. Not that I blamed him. It wasn’t like I knew what to say to him, exactly, and was nervously buzzing around, making him an espresso from our deluxe cappuccino/espresso maker, which Lulu had only recently showed me how to work. I wasn’t sure what else to do, other than offer him coffee, really. I mean, I’d never had a big brother before. Let alone a big brother who was really mad at me for losing our mother, for whom apparently Nikki was responsible while he was on duty. He didn’t seem too enthused about the espresso, but at least he’d finally accepted the amnesia explanation. Sort of. Lulu was a big help in this capacity. She’d come staggering out of her room (wearing nothing but a shiny peach-colored camisole and a pair of tap pants, with her hair doing something crazy because she had evidently just woken up, even though it was two in the afternoon—early for her, really) while I was trying to get the espresso maker to work. Lulu took one look at the uniformed man taking up so much space in our living room (not that he was fat or anything. He was just tall and muscular and…well, the kind of guy who took up a lot of space) and went, “Well, hell-ooooo there,” with this big smile on her face. I wanted to go, Not now, Lulu, because I knew exactly what she was up to. Lulu was getting ready to make Steven fall in love with her, the way she did every cute guy she encountered. Making cute guys fall in love with her was Lulu’s hobby, besides shopping, drinking mojitos, and occasionally recording songs for her record album that never seemed to get finished. But I needn’t have worried. Because Steven—Nikki’s brother—just went, “Hi,” to Lulu in this totally uninterested way and kept right on saying what he’d been saying the whole time we were coming up in the elevator together, which was, “Amnesia? Like people get on soap operas?” “Not exactly,” I assured him. Even though, from what I understand, there isn’t such a thing, really. Well, there is, but not the way Nikki Howard was supposed to have it. People don’t conk their head and just selectively forget some stuff when they get amnesia. They forget everything. Like their own names and the country they live in. Sometimes they even forget how to tie their shoes. “And you’re telling me you don’t remember,” Steven went on, completely ignoring Lulu, who was now sauntering past him in her shiny getup, which she’d accessorized with a pair of matching feathered mules, “that you promised to look after Mom while I was gone, make sure she was paying her rent on time and that things were running smoothly with the dog grooming kennel?” Dog grooming kennel? Nikki Howard’s mom owned a dog grooming kennel? This was information it might have been helpful for someone to have shared with me—along with the fact that Nikki had a brother in the navy—earlier than, oh, say, now. All anyone had ever said to me was that Nikki was an emancipated minor who hadn’t gotten along with her family. For this reason I shot Lulu a dirty look as she hopped up onto one of the kitchen counter stools—careful to cross her spraytanned legs so that Steven had as full a view of them as possible. But Lulu completely ignored me, all her attention being focused on the handsome blond man in the uniform standing in the middle of our living room. “Um,” I said, fumbling with the espresso machine. Better to concentrate on the coffeemaker than on what was happening in the living room, which was precisely what it looked like: trouble. Nice of Nikki, by the way, to have a whole drawer of press clippings about herself and not a single photo of her own family. “Up until you told me, I didn’t even know I had a brother. So, the answer is no, I don’t remember telling you that. Or about Mom and her dog grooming business, either, for that matter. ” “So what rank are you?” Lulu wanted to know, her gaze raking Steven’s buff form as he stood with his arms crossed, consequently making his biceps bulge a little beneath his uniform. Lulu couldn’t seem to keep her foot from jiggling, and this was causing one of her feathered mules to bobble up and down in a very distracting manner. She was doing this on purpose, of course, to get Steven to look at her recently waxed legs. Steven continued to ignore her. “And what about all the messages I left you,” he asked me. “You just thought it was better to ignore those?” “I get a ton of messages from guys I don’t know,” I explained. This was excruciating. “They all say they’re related to me and that I owe them money for something. I stopped listening to Nikki’s—I mean, my messages a long time ago. ” “Great,” Steven said. He turned away, running a hand through his hair…the exact same color and texture hair, I realized, that sprouted from my own head. Only his hadn’t been treated to some golden honey highlights. “That’s just fantastic. Do you still have them? Those messages. Maybe Mom tried to reach you, left you a message or something, telling you where she’s gone. ” “Are you, like, an officer?” Lulu asked Steven, her foot still bobbing like mad. I noticed she’d had a pedicure—Ballet Slipper Pink. Don’t ask me how I know these things when, three months ago, I wouldn’t have been able to tell the different nail polish colors apart if you’d held a gun to my head. “Do you give people orders all day? I love taking orders from a man. It’s so sexy. ” “Sorry,” I said, apologizing both for my roommate and for what I was about to tell him. Because I really was sorry. For both. “I deleted all Nikki’s—I mean, my messages. But”—I slipped a tiny espresso cup under the appropriate spout and pressed the button with a small cup on it—“I’m sure she’ll call back. Right?” Steven shook his head, looking more exhausted than ever, and slid onto one of the kitchen counter stools like he couldn’t support his own weight anymore. Lulu looked delighted, because the seat he’d chosen was only two stools down from hers. Apparently, she didn’t get the subtle message that he’d chosen the stool farthest away from her. She immediately straightened up to show her chest area to better advantage and gave him a dazzling smile, which he ignored. “You really do have amnesia,” he said to me. His face was a mask of misery. I felt so sorry for him, my heart twisted. “Mom never calls back. She’s always been one and done. Why do you think I’m here checking to see if she’s been in touch with you instead of waiting to hear from her back in Gasper?” Lulu completely forgot about making Steven fall in love with her and choked on some of her own saliva. “Did you say G-Gasper?” she gasped between coughs. Steven actually looked at her for a second, then back at me. “You never told her?” he said. It was more of a statement than a question, and it caused me to pause as I slid the espresso, complete with a foamy crème cap on top, in front of him. “Um…apparently not,” I said. I had no idea what he was talking about, either, of course, since I wasn’t actually his sister. His sister was dead. Or at least, her brain was sitting in formaldehyde in a jar somewhere in the bowels of the Stark Institute for Neurology and Neurosurgery, even if the rest of her might have been walking around with my brain inside it, using her credit cards and making her brother espressos. Which made her dead enough. I just couldn’t tell her brother that. Steven was looking at me over his steaming espresso like he couldn’t quite believe what he’d heard. “Wait,” he said, his blue-eyed gaze incredulous. “You don’t remember home, either?” Hesitantly, I shook my head. I didn’t want to hurt him. The truth was, he looked like he’d been hurt enough. But I couldn’t outright lie to him, either, no matter how much Stark Enterprises might expect me to. And now I knew where I’d seen those eyes before: In the mirror, every time I glanced at my new reflection. They were Nikki’s eyes. Only without Chanel Inimitable Multi-Dimensional Mascara in noir/black on the lashes. Steven folded his arms, leaned against the back of his stool, and stared at the ceiling. For a second, I wondered if he was noticing the same thing I’d come home and noticed the other day…the two round holes, no bigger than pennies, on either side of the sunken halogen lamps, that hadn’t been there before and had obviously been filled in, but rapidly and badly, as if someone had been placing something in there and gotten the news that one of the loft’s occupants was coming home early. What were those holes for? They were too high up for me to ever climb up there and check myself—the cei
lings were twenty feet high, at least. But they couldn’t possibly serve any purpose—other than a nefarious, Stark-related one. Maybe I was just being paranoid. When I asked Karl about the holes, he consulted a maintenance schedule, and told me it looked like a routine wiring check. Wiring, my butt. Maybe “routine wiring” was the reason the RF transmitter—or bug detector, I bought at one of the surveillance gear stores in Midtown shortly after I noticed the holes in the ceiling and my paranoia got the better of me—went crazy every time I turned it on inside the loft. The place was either loaded with listening devices or the detector itself was a total scam (but for the money I paid, it ought to have been genuine). Besides, it didn’t go off anywhere else—school, for instance. But Steven, it appeared, hadn’t noticed the holes. Instead, it looked as if he was staring at the ceiling because he might be trying to hold back tears. Tears over his missing mom, and the fact that I didn’t even remember the hometown we shared in common. I threw a panicky glance at Lulu, who dropped her vamp act for a millisecond and looked just as alarmed as I was. What do we do? our gazes seemed to ask as we stared at each other. We had a big strong military man in our girly loft…and he was crying! Over his lost mother! Oh, this was awful. How could Stark Enterprises have put me in a position like this? It was one thing when I just had to fool makeup artists and Nikki’s mostly heinous ex-boyfriends that I was her and not me. But this was different! Poor guy. I was such a loser. I mean, here I was in all these AP classes at one of the best high schools in Manhattan—I was more capable of using a bug detector, diagramming a complex sentence, using Manolo tips (which, it turned out, meant standing on tiptoe in the water during a beach shoot, to make your legs look longer), and writing a simple string processor than anyone at Tribeca Alternative. But help Nikki Howard’s brother find his mom? My hands were tied, thanks to the confidentiality clause Stark had my parents sign. I couldn’t say a word—especially not here, in the loft. Then I heard a sound come from Nikki’s brother. For one breathless moment, I thought it must have been a sob. A single glance at Lulu revealed she felt the same way I did—like crying, too. It really was just the sweetest thing, this big strong guy, crying over his mom. It took us a second or two to realize Steven wasn’t crying at all. He was laughing. And not like someone who found something genuinely funny, though. “You are a piece of work, Nik,” he finally said, when he looked away from the ceiling. There were tears in his eyes, all right. But they were tears of amusement. “You’re so ashamed of where you come from, you never even told anyone the name of the town you were born in? Not even your best friend?” I blinked at him in confusion. Wait. He was laughing? “Wait. ” Lulu leaned forward on her stool. “You’re laughing?” “Hell, yeah,” Steven said. “How can you not? Did you know this girl used to tell people she was from New York, New York, when we were growing up? That’s how ashamed she was to say she was from Gasper. I’m not surprised she never told you. ” Lulu looked over at me. “Really, Nikki?” she asked. “You used to tell people you were from here?” “How would I know?” I asked. I couldn’t believe I’d thought Nikki’s brother was crying, when he’d been laughing—at me—the whole time. “I have amnesia, remember?” “Yes, she did,” Steven said, in reply to Lulu’s question. Now, instead of ignoring Lulu, he was ignoring me. “Are you saying she never even told you she had a brother?” Lulu shook her head, delighted he was paying attention to her. Her brown eyes were enormous, thanks to last night’s makeup being sexily smudged around her lashes. She looked, as always, adorable, like a doll. “Noooo,” she said. She leaned an elbow on the counter and cupped her pointed chin in her hand so she could peer up at him. “I’d have remembered if she’d mentioned having someone like you around while she was growing up. ” Steven snorted and threw a disgusted look at me. Typical, the look seemed to say. Great. Now my roommate and brother were ganging up on me. Which was so unfair. I was getting blamed for something I didn’t even do. Nikki did it! Or had she? “Look, I don’t mean to be rude or anything…,” I said. Which I knew was a horrible way to start a sentence, because of course whenever you say I don’t mean to be rude, whatever you’re about to say is going to be rude. That was something the Walking Dead, and especially Whitney Robertson, had taught me, since she used to preface all her most tactless barbs with I don’t mean to be rude, but. “I don’t mean to be rude, Em, but have you ever thought about going on a diet? Your butt is so big, it’s almost impossible to pass you in the hallway. Maybe you need to put a sign on your ass that says Wide Load. ” “I don’t mean to be rude, Em, but have you ever considered wearing a bra during PE? Those things are flopping around so much, you’re going to put someone’s eye out. ” “I don’t mean to be rude, Em, but has it ever occurred to you that your harping on how not enough women are entering the sciences might be one of the reasons none of them wants to? Maybe they don’t want to hang around with girls like you. ” Still, even though Whitney’s I don’t mean to be rudes had stung me so many times, I found myself saying the exact same words—and to my own brother, of all people. Well, Nikki’s brother. “…but how do I even know for sure you’re who you say you are?” I asked. The difference between me and Whitney, though, was that I felt awful for my I don’t mean to be rude. I really did. At the same time, how did I know Steven really was Nikki’s brother? I mean, he seemed sincere, and yeah, he looked a lot like the reflection I saw every day in the mirror (and in magazines, and on billboards, and on the sides of buses, and okay, just about everywhere). But there’d been guys (and even some women) showing up in our lobby for weeks now with stories saying they were related to me. How did I know this one was legit? And, I mean, I knew from the way everyone (except Brandon) reacted to me that Nikki must have been pretty awful back in the day. But I had a hard time believing she’d cut her own big brother out of her life…not to mention never having said a word about him to her best friend. Who, by the way, was shooting me an astonished look over my I don’t mean to be rude. “Nikki!” Lulu cried. “Of course Steven is who he says he is! How could you even ask such a thing?” “Well,” I said. I felt bad for having to ask. I really did. If Nikki had kept a family photo instead of press clippings of herself anywhere in the loft, I wouldn’t have had to. But none of this was my fault. “I’m sorry. But you have to admit, Lu, there’ve been a lot of guys lately with kind of similar stories, and I’m just trying to…” My voice trailed off. This was because Steven had reached around to his back pocket, pulled out a wallet, opened it, and unveiled a school photo of a smiling young blond girl in pigtails and braces. He held the wallet, photo dangling forward, in front of me. Wait. What was this?