Empty. Nothing but water gushing from the faucet and swirling down the drain.
He was relieved, and not. Relieved that she was okay, that she had left the house. Horrified that his instinct about her had been right. If he started to believe he could read minds, he was really crazy.
He turned off the tap. The relative silence was filled up again by Rob’s pounding. Elijah crossed the room to unlock and open the door.
Rob didn’t look surprised to see Elijah standing there instead of Holly. He looked furious, as if he’d expected Elijah all along.
This thought stuck in Elijah’s mind as something important, but of course he was no judge while he was going insane again. To cover for himself, he uttered the sort of joke he would have made if he still had all his marbles. “Abracadabra.”
“Where is she?” Rob shoved past Elijah into the room.
Shane eyed Elijah, blond eyebrows raised in question.
Elijah shook his head no: Holly wasn’t inside.
Shane called to Rob, “Your little magician vanished into thin air.”
Shane and Elijah jumped out of the way as Rob stormed out of the bathroom and down the hall. His bedroom door slammed.
Elijah turned to Shane and lowered his voice. “Why do we room with him?”
“I’ve been asking myself that question all week,” Shane said. “You’re the one who took us both in.”
True. Shane had moved in a year ago and had rapidly become Elijah’s closest friend. Rob had moved in a week ago and had seemed normal, too, at first. It was only in the last fifteen minutes that he’d topped Elijah’s shit list. “You don’t think he’ll hunt Holly down or something, do you?” Elijah asked.
“Nah,” Shane said. “Or if he does, she’s safe. She lives with Kaylee Michaels. She probably called Kaylee to come pick her up. Nobody messes with the head of security at the casino.”
Elijah didn’t ask Shane how he knew Holly lived with Kaylee. Kaylee had been on Shane’s mind since he and Elijah had gotten home from work, to the point that Elijah would get the hots for her too if he wasn’t careful. Shane was whipped.
Shane crossed the living room and flopped on the chair, pulling his guitar into his lap. Over quiet chords, he asked, “You and Holly have met before?”
Elijah headed back to the kitchen to check the Tuna Helper simmering on the stove, and to make one last search for a stray Mentafixol that he might have misplaced over the four years he’d lived there, back when each pill wasn’t as precious to him as the gold it was made to look like. He knew some pills had gone missing over the years. He specifically remembered dropping one between the seat and the console of his mom’s Camry when he was in high school. If he’d known then that the pill would be worth so much to him now, he never would have let her trade that car in.
He opened a drawer and poked around between the spoons. “I asked Holly out in ninth grade,” he said without looking up. “Her parents thought I wasn’t good enough for her. Her dad told me to stay away from her. He even got Mr. Diamond involved to make me feel as low on the food chain as possible. I got called to his office.” And then I had a mental meltdown and punched Holly’s dad in the eye! He left this part out.
The guitar chords stopped. Shane exclaimed, “Ouch!”
“Yeah.” Elijah sighed. “That was a long time ago.” At least, it had seemed like a long time ago until Holly showed up at his door with Rob, of all people. Every pang of longing he’d felt for her throughout high school had come back to knock the breath out of him when he touched her hand.
He’d lost his breath again when she stomped into the bathroom. That’s when he’d sensed what was going through her mind. She felt vulnerable as a victim of MAD, and her parents seemed keen on pairing her off with a man like Rob who would take care of her, but damned if she was going to put up with the kind of treatment two-faced Rob had been giving her tonight. All these thoughts had rushed at Elijah in a wave: she had MAD just like him and four doses of Mentafixol left. Then she would refill her prescription—or she assumed she would, anyway—at the same casino pharmacy where his own pills had gone missing.
“Elijah,” Shane called. “You look like shit. Are you getting worse?”
Elijah’s mom had conditioned him over the years not to reveal his illness to anyone lest he get fired and she get fired and he suffer the hardscrabble life she had suffered at the Res, etc., etc. He was still hiding it from Rob.
But that morning, Shane had noticed something was wrong after Elijah couldn’t refill his prescription. Elijah had finally admitted he had a mental illness—though he didn’t reveal the scary specifics of imagined mind reading. Shane had cracked only a few jokes about living with a maniac for the past year.
Elijah resumed searching the kitchen drawer for a stray pill. If he did find one, likely it would be coated with a mix of tequila and Tabasco and dirt, a victim of four years in a house with college students. That was okay. He would swallow it without even scrubbing it first. “Yeah, you could say I’m getting worse.”
“Do you want me to make dinner tonight?”
Elijah let a bitter puff of laughter escape. He and Shane and Rob worked second shift, which moved their bedtimes and mealtimes a few hours later. Normally Elijah didn’t mind making Tuna Helper for the three of them at 11 p.m. He was used to cooking dinner for himself because his mom had always worked at night when he was a kid.
However, amid the torture of going crazy, cooking was the furthest thing from his mind. Shane watching the Tuna Helper on the stove would not alleviate the delusion that Elijah could read people’s minds. But Shane was only trying to help. Elijah could sense that from across the room by reading his mind. Jesus!
“No thanks,” Elijah said. “I’ll do it, unless you’re afraid I might stab somebody with my serving fork. Besides, it’s mostly made.” He slammed the drawer shut and opened the next one, which was full of knives. There was no reason he would have dropped one of his pills in the knife drawer during the past four years. He dumped the knives onto the counter anyway with a metallic crash and gingerly scooted them around, looking for his gold pill.
He jumped. As several knives flew through the air and clattered onto the counter, he realized what had startled him. His phone was ringing in his back pocket.
Shane was thinking he should take Elijah to the emergency room.
“Don’t you dare!” Elijah yelled over his ringing phone.