Clone: A Contemporary Young Adult SciFi/Fantasy (Swann Series Book 3) Read online

  For the next hour, he ran and walked intermittently, thinking about this new direction in his life, thinking about Abby. He couldn’t fix his wide, beaked nose, or his scars, but the rest of his body he could most certainly continue to improve upon. There were plenty of guys with good bodies and shitty noses who got girls like Abby. Was it so hard to think he could be one of them?

  He told himself when he got back home he’d do more push ups and more sit ups. He started doing them on the side of the road instead. He did them on people’s lawns. He even tried to lift the back end of a VW Passat when he thought about his father not letting him get Gerhard’s makeover. The VW’s alarm went off and a morbidly obese woman with a half-ashed cigarette hanging out of her nasty, pitted face came hustling out of the front door telling him to get the hell off her car. She had gigantic breasts and a pulled-loose robe. It kind of scared him.

  Back at the bachelor pad—the executive estate Titan and Romeo rented for the summer—he hit the weights hard then gulped down a strawberry flavored protein shake. He felt better. Exhausted and pumped full of blood, but better.

  As a group, they stayed in that night, watching movies with the girls they met the night before. The girl he invited over seemed less interested in him than before when she gave Brayden her number. Then again, one look at his friends and any girl would realize she was with the ugliest guy in the room. Talk about blistering her self-confidence! He told himself he didn’t want her, that he wanted Abby instead, so he sort of shut down. Titan kept throwing him “WTF?!” looks.

  He went to bed alone that night thinking about Abby. To keep himself from feeling too bad, he tried to remember what she looked like when she was a giant, lopsided sea cow. It didn’t work. All he could see in his head was how amazing she looked now.

  The following morning Titan and Romeo ran with him, lifted weights with him, ate breakfast with him. Brayden wasn’t one to open himself up, but it felt natural to bond with these guys. They asked about him mentally checking out last night and he admitted he was thinking of Abby.

  They were like, “If you’re in love with her, you should transform yourself out here, then take that person back to her.”

  He was about to protest the part about being in love, but he couldn’t. Maybe he was in love. Or just stupid. He didn’t give it much thought because, truthfully, he appreciated what they were doing for him, and the things they knew about women. Also, secretly, he admired them because they weren’t rich kids with entitlement issues. Even Titan kept his A-list father’s identity to himself. He worked for what he got. They all worked to be beautiful.

  On the third night he, Titan, Romeo and Aniela found themselves at the ultra chic nightclub Pure in Caesar’s Palace. Around eleven, when Aniela was mingling with a three-set of two righteous blondes and a brunette, some girl he’d been talking to about the dangers of not having sex before you’re twenty leaned in and kissed him on the mouth. He kissed her back, but then the girl, Polly, pulled away and cleared her throat. Like she’d been caught. Her eyes flicked away from Brayden, then sunk to the floor with embarrassment. She got nervous all the sudden.

  Aniela sat down beside him and put her hand on his leg. Polly apologized to Aniela, but Aniela said, “He’s a big boy, he can kiss whoever he wants. In fact, I think he wants to kiss you again.” Polly looked at Brayden, then back at Aniela—who smiled—then back to Brayden. She leaned in and they made out for like five minutes before Polly went to the bathroom to freshen up. When she came back, Brayden got her number.

  “Her number is fine,” Aniela said after Polly left. “It’s just that you should have taken her home already. That’s what the bad ass home is for. You getting laid.”

  He shrugged his shoulders. The thought of being with a woman always left him thinking about how girls would see him. What they’d really think but wouldn’t say. That always brought him to Abby. She knew about his scars, but she didn’t judge him. She knew all about his defining tragedy and how it kept him closed up, and she trusted him enough to show him hers as well, when she had them.

  Maybe that’s why he liked her. She already knew him, and his insecurities, and still she didn’t seem to treat him better or worse for it.

  But she wasn’t here. He was. He was in Las-freaking-Vegas! Out here, reality was what you made it, and when you could be anyone you wanted, did you really want to be a Debby downer? Um, no! Titan said he could be whoever he wanted to be, so be creative.

  Later that night, out on the strip in front of Circus Circus, some guys in an SUV whistled at Aniela, or Titan perhaps; either way, Aniela, pressed one of her gigantic Polish breasts into Brayden’s arm, then squeezed his butt cheek and kissed him on the face. They howled and drove off, and Aniela laughed. They all kept walking.

  That was how Aniela was: flirtatious, unapologetic. Brayden liked her like that, but he also knew he was just a prop for her sexually-charged persona. If she liked him, it was not for who he was but for what she was doing for him. As much as he was hanging out with her, he was certain whomever the real Aniela was, he’d never meet her. And if he did, she would have nothing to do with him. But that didn’t matter because right now, they were out together, having fun, using each other for whatever it was they were using each other for.

  They got home around two A.M., and around two-thirty—as Brayden was drifting peacefully off to sleep—his bedroom door opened and a very naked Aniela crawled under the sheets. She curled up to him and he could feel the warmth and heat of her body pressing against his back. He panicked, thinking she was going to finally discover his worst secret. He also realized tonight was going to be the night and it made him sick with lust and need and fear and insecurity.

  After tonight, he wasn’t going to be a virgin.

  She started to slide her hands around to the front of his chest and he covered himself fast. It couldn’t be like this, he thought. She can’t be “the one.”

  “I had an accident,” he said, feeling her hands traveling over the rugged lines of his scarred skin.

  “You came already?” she teased.

  “No dummy, a car accident,” he lied.

  Her hands stopped moving.

  “My upper body…”

  That’s all he could say.

  “So,” she confirmed, slowly, “it’s not okay to touch your chest?”

  “I want you to, but I don’t want you to either.”

  “That’s alright,” she said. “I will confine my touching to the lower half of your body, if that’s okay with you.” He nodded in the darkness, and damn her if she was true to her word. She was so very, very true to her word.

  He rolled over into her and they kissed, and then she said, “We’re not going to do it tonight, but I thought you should know what it’s like to have a naked woman in your bed. It helps with visualization.”

  “Visualization?” he said, relief coming to his voice. Tonight wasn’t going to be the night and he found that was okay with him. For whatever reason, he began to relax.

  “All the best athletes do it. They see their success before it comes. They do this with the belief that seeing it in advance will bring them future success. It’s what you will begin doing to get more girls. It’s okay to touch me.” He hesitated. “Touch me, Enigma.”

  He did.

  “Put your hands on my ass,” she said.

  And he did.

  “Oh, and just so your dick’s not always in the dirt, chicks dig a guy with scars.”

  Tossed Trash and a Nose Job

  1

  Making my way out of the city, getting onto the freeway, I’m sweating bullets. It’s not hard for others to see inside my car. It’s even easier to see the knocked-out, half-nude girl in the front seat. The clone’s head, right now it’s slumped forward and unnatural looking. If not for a string of saliva drizzling from her mouth, she could be dead.

  I consider putting her seatbelt on, but now that the Audi’s seatbelt chime has stopped beeping, I tell myself she’ll be alright.


  We merge onto 101 South. The traffic is heavy for the moment, but not so heavy that we can’t go a few miles an hour above the speed limit.

  When it’s safe to do so, I lean over and push the clone’s body back against the seat. She flops over sideways against the window, her lab coat falling over her milky white breast. Her head smacks the glass with a weighty thunk! Crap. For a second, I’m sure her breast is exposed to other drivers. Without being too obvious about it, I reach over and pull her lab coat straight. The S5 swerves a little into the other lane, but whatevs.

  Using my Bluetooth, I dial Brayden. The line is ringing when I glance in my rearview mirror and see the cop.

  Oh, no. Oh, this is so very, very not good!

  He’s right behind me, changing lanes. He slows his pace, eases up beside me. Is he tracking me? God, I hope not! I let my hair fall over my bloodied face just in case.

  Now he’s dead even with the Audi. I hit the button on my steering wheel to hang up the phone. The line disconnects before Brayden answers.

  In my peripheral vision, because my fallen hair is now in the way, I don’t see the cop or what he’s doing. What I feel, however, is him looking inside my car. Dread coils my guts. I feel like peeing my pants. Right then and there, my heart all but stops beating.

  I can’t breathe. Can’t think straight.

  The cop continues on ahead of me, but before I can heave a sigh of relief, he matches my speed. Again. He’s angling to look at us in his rear view mirror. Is he trying to see the clone? It’s impossible not to panic. He reaches up to adjust his rear-view mirror in my direction. He is definitely trying to see the clone! My foot hits the gas, quickly but not recklessly. I ease into his blind spot.

  If he sees the clone, I’m done for.

  As in game over.

  The cop continues to push his cruiser forward. While in his blind spot, I refuse him the view by matching his pace. Except now I’m speeding. Knowing this is a game of chess and the odds are firmly stacked in his favor, I press the brake pedal just right. The cruiser shoots forward. To my utter horror, however, the bold move results in another thump! that startles me so bad I nearly jump out of my seat.

  My head whips around, and I see the clone smashed face-first into the dashboard. A muffled cry escapes me. I should have put her in the seat belt! Now, the way she’s face-planted into the dash, how her back is bowed in a deep, unnatural curve, I’m suddenly crossing new thresholds of panic.

  She isn’t moving.

  And dammit, her nose is bleeding!

  Thoughts in my head are crashing into each other. I’m tits deep in sensory overload! The phone rings too loudly through my speakers and this time I jump for real. I stab the answer button, say hello.

  “Did you just call?” Brayden says.

  I’m now glancing back and forth from the clone to the cop and back again. For a second, I wonder if the cop is going to slow back down.

  “Hold on,” I say, the tension in my voice as tight as piano wire.

  Moving fast, timing it as best as I can with where the cop is at, I lean over and shove the clone’s body against the seat. The Audi briefly swerves into another lane again; the driver in that lane leans on his horn. I jerk the wheel, get back in my lane. By now I’m sweating like a pig. By now, I’m sweating like a fat kid in front of entire plates of chocolate glazed donuts.

  “I think I’m in trouble, Brayden.”

  “Yeah, you sound like your asshole’s puckered pretty tight,” he says.

  When I get pulled over—and I’m convinced I will—if he can see past the beating I’m wearing, the cop’s going to want to know if I’ve got a concussion. He’s going to want me to walk a straight line, recite my abc’s backwards, touch my finger to my nose. But when he sees the kidnapped girl…when he sees the half-naked clone and her bloody nose, he’s going to arrest me.

  Then he’s going to start asking questions.

  The cop’s brake lights flash. I tap my brakes. He slows more. Still jockeying for position, I step on the accelerator and speed up. Right now, I’d kill to be in his blind spot. Knowing my game, he hits his brakes harder, causing me to shoot past him. He slips into the lane behind me, falling right into my rear view mirror. Shit, shit, shit.

  He’s reading my plates. Running them in his onboard computer.

  That’s it, I’m dead. Breaking and Entering. Assault. Kidnapping. Oh boy am I royally freaking screwed!

  “Abby?” Brayden says, his voice coming through my speakers startling me. I’d forgotten he was there.

  “Hang on,” I say, my tone clipped.

  To my sheer horror, the cruiser’s light bar blazes red and blue. I think about running. Then, in a burst of speed, the police cruiser roars past me, off to the scene of another crime, or an accident, or God knows what. Last call for donuts. Whatever the case, I feel every single karate-kicking beat of my heart as I will it to slow down. As some point, I tell myself, it’ll go back to normal.

  “Holy cow, that was close!” I say to Brayden.

  “Where are you?” he asks. His voice is coming through a dozen speakers, finely tuned by Bang & Olufsen, and it’s almost too much the way that cop nearly made me poop myself.

  “San Francisco. This cop was tailing me. Plus—” In the background, I hear what sounds like another person yawning.

  “Abby?” he says when I stop mid-sentence.

  “Is there someone with you?” I try not to sound jealous, or even mad. The way the question comes out though, it’s not exactly the most friendly of tones.

  “My friend, Aniela.”

  “What’s she doing there?”

  A long pause, then: “Waking up.”

  All the sudden, I completely forget about the clone beside me, the cop who almost busted me, my crimes against others and those leveled against me. “She slept over?”

  “Uh, yeah.”

  “With you?”

  “Is that so hard to believe?”

  “No, I mean yes. No, it’s just, like I said, I have a problem.”

  “You’ve got several problems,” he says with a fair amount of sarcasm.

  That’s when I tell him everything that happened—the breaking and entering, the tazing of Nurse Arabelle and the unknown doctor, the assault that bloodied my face and broke my arm, and the theft of the clone—and he’s like, “Are you insane?”

  “Look,” I say, pleading, “I really need a friend right now.”

  “What you need is professional help,” he says.

  “Gosh dammit, Brayden—”

  “What about Maggie?” he asks.

  As it is, I’m doing all I can to keep from cracking here. It has my eyes bouncing back and forth between the clone’s bloody nose and all my mirrors. For whatever reason, I keep expecting more cops.

  “Maggie’s on another planet right now,” I say. “I need you out here. Seriously!”

  “Abby, I’m doing things here. I have friends. I mean, why the hell did you even do that? Do you even know how stupid that was?!”

  “You know why I did it!” I’ve already told him several times how I think the use of clones to make average people beautiful is not only morally unconscionable, but inhumane.

  I hear him breathing heavy in and out, bewildered, contemplative. “I don’t know, Abby. Going to jail isn’t on my list of things to do this summer.”

  The giant black balloon expanding in my chest leaves me breathless and short tempered. My fuse is lit. The bomb is going off. “Holy freaking shitballs, Brayden,” I practically scream, “if you don’t get your ass out here and help me you can pretty much kiss our friendship goodbye!”

  There’s a lot of silence and angry breathing on the end of the line. My chest is pumping hard. I’m fairly certain I’m having a panic attack. Or a heart attack.

  “Hello?!” I say when he doesn’t respond.

  “I want a nose job,” comes the cool voice at the other end of the line.

  “What? You want what? How can you talk so casually ab
out nose jobs at a time like this?”

  “Jesus, take a breath,” he says, way more in control of his emotions than me. “If you’re going to screw up my summer, you’re going to pay for it. Get me the nose job, that’s the payment. Do that and I will come out.”

  Looking at the mess on the clone’s face, I pull off the highway and look for a parking lot. One that’s not terribly busy. Someplace to buckle the clone in properly. I brake for a yellow light, hold my hand out to keep the clone from pitching forward into the dashboard again. Someone behind me stands on their horn. Yep, right now I’m the bitch who power brakes for yellow lights.

  “Are you serious right now?” I say. “About me buying you a nose job?”

  “Serious as testicular cancer.”

  The yellow light finally turns red and some guy moseying across the crosswalk looks into the car and sees me with my hand on the clone’s almost bare chest. I pull the lab coat in place and put my hand back on the wheel. The clone is a beautiful wreck. Or tossed trash. It’s hard to tell anymore.

  “Fine,” I agree, “a nose job.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yes, just get on a damn plane and get out here already.”

  The guy crossing the street looks back once more and I wave him off. He shakes his head in dismay, keeps going. That’s when I see my reflection in the mirror. My face is a blood smeared mess; my hair has what Bridget/Tempest would call the freshly f*cked look; my eyes are swollen with abuse; and the whole right side of my cheek is hot as hell and puffed out with lumps and abrasions. This isn’t my face. This is a boxer’s face after a twelve round slug-fest.

  “You don’t know what I’m giving up for you,” he says, almost like he’s whispering into the phone.

  “I’m grateful never-the-less.”

  “Seriously,” he’s whispering into the phone so low I almost can’t hear him. “There is a gorgeous naked girl in my bed…”

  “Ew.”

  “Ew yourself,” he continues. I turn up the volume knob to hear him better. “I’m not exactly up for the hottest guy of the year award.”