“Mm-hmm,” he prompted her.
“. . . but you think it’s a delusion caused by MAD . . .”
“Mm-hmm?”
“Are you ever right about what people are thinking? And if you’re right, how do you explain that?”
“Most of the time, I can’t tell whether I’m right or not,” he said. “Sometimes the person will say something or do something that lets me know I’m right. In those cases, I figure I’m really reading their body language or making an educated guess. I’m pretty good at that. I didn’t major in psychology for nothing. And my brain is interpreting that information as mind reading because I am mentally diseased.”
“Right,” Holly said. She wasn’t listening to him, though. She was thinking about her own magical power. She was thinking Elijah’s was hard to prove real, but hers wasn’t.
“Then do it,” he said.
Holly jumped. She watched him warily. “Do what?”
“Show me your power,” he said. His heart was full of dread. How awful, if she thought she was making the pillows sail through the air, and he could clearly see she wasn’t. He liked to picture her as a telekinetic force of womanhood, not a fragile and deluded beauty. But they needed closure. “Make something move.”
“My power isn’t as strong as it was when I was fourteen,” she apologized. “It’s stronger every hour, but not that strong.”
“Because you haven’t been off Mentafixol as long as I have,” Elijah said. “Show me what you’ve got.”
She focused on him. Without taking her eyes off him, she thought about the TV remote on the bedside table behind him. In her mind she fingered the switch.
The TV clicked off.
She thought about the light switch just inside the door in the bathroom.
The light extinguished.
She thought about the curtains.
They raked shut. Slivers of light careened around the room as the curtains swung, but slowly the fabric settled straight down, erasing the line of light between her and Elijah. The darkness was complete.
Elijah’s mind raced. He should do something. He should feel something. All he could feel was Holly. She was hyperaware of the pitch dark and her heart pounding so hard in her chest that it hurt. If she had magical power, that meant she wasn’t crazy. But if she wasn’t crazy, her parents had lied to her. Her whole life was built on a lie, and she had no life left.
“Stop.” He couldn’t see her at all in the dark, but he needed to touch her and stop her. He put his hand on what he thought was her bare knee.
Her thoughts did stop, or rather, rebooted, redirected. Now she was thinking about Elijah’s hot hand on her skin. Or Elijah was thinking this. Or they both were, their separate thoughts intertwining in his head until he couldn’t tell the difference.
He slid his hand off her knee and felt around on the bedside table next to him until he found the lamp. He switched it on. In the sudden light, she blinked long brown lashes at him. She had magical power, she was hot for him, and she was real.
“We have to make sure,” he said. “We have to know why. The candy store is open by now.” He stood and held out his hand to her. “Let’s go.”
She had to shower first.
“No, you don’t,” Elijah called from the bedroom. “We’re just going up the street to change our lives forever. No need to get fancy.”
Holly had no intention of getting fancy. She was in as big a hurry as he was. But now that she and Elijah had turned this corner, she felt more self-conscious. She wasn’t sure whether to be mortified that he’d heard her every lustful thought about him, or turned on. But as long as she was freshly showered and wore her false lashes, she could do anything. It wasn’t really her.
Though . . . she cupped her spangled boobs in her hands and turned to the side to examine herself in the mirror. This outfit might be a little much for Icarus. Or a little little. She would stand out, to say the least, and that might not be desirable while she and Elijah were hanging around the candy company, casing the joint. Maybe she should stop at one of the gift shops and buy herself whatever people wore up here. Dungarees. She wasn’t sure what dungarees were.
“I think you should wear what you’ve got,” Elijah called. “That way, if anything strange happens, we can shrug and explain that we’re from Vegas.” He opened the door and hung on the frame with his arms over his head, showing her those muscular triceps beneath his T-shirt sleeves. “I wish you could read my mind. You look so gorgeous exactly like that.”
She watched her bare cheeks redden in the mirror and her mouth widen into a grin. “You can take the girl out of Vegas, but you can’t take Vegas out of the girl.” She dug in her purse for her false eyelash glue.
He exhaled his impatience through his nose. Even with everything else spinning through her head, she was able to appreciate the beauty of this man hanging on the door frame. She swept on her cosmetics while he watched her darkly.
They cruised up the street in Shane’s car and parked in front of the candy company again. The difference this time was that the storefronts, the sidewalks, and even the streets were filled with pedestrians. Mounting the brick steps to the store, they passed someone going down, a gorilla wearing a metallic green leprechaun hat.
“Wait,” Holly said, spinning to follow the gorilla with her eyes. “I thought we left Vegas.” Now that she was about to discover the truth, she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear it.
Elijah could read her mind and wouldn’t let her stall. He took her hand and hauled her the rest of the way up the steps. He pulled her through the door of the store and didn’t let her go until they stood in front of the candy case, the café tables around them filled with more gorillas and cowgirls and a few pirates nibbling bonbons.
“What can I do ya for?” asked the portly, white-haired man in a plaid shirt and overalls who manned the old-fashioned metal cash register.
“We would like some Mentafixol,” Elijah said.
“And a half pound of those chocolate-covered seafoam candies,” Holly added.
“Mentafixol!” the candy man exclaimed. He shook open a small bag.
Holly was afraid he would say he’d never heard of the stuff, but Elijah flexed his hand down by his side, signaling her to wait.
“Nobody’s ever come in and asked for it before,” the man went on, scooping candies into the bag. Holly watched him carefully to make sure he was scooping from the seafoam tray and not the nut chew tray next to it.