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6

The Worst Date

M arisol checked her reflection in the mirror. She couldn’t believe that Annie picked this number out, and at this hour on a Saturday night, no place would be open to offer a more sensible alternative. The silver sequin gown hugged her body, displaying every curve, crease, and the divot of her belly button. The neckline’s deep V exposed the tops of her breasts, and the string-like straps crisscrossed her back, ending at the dimples above her buttocks. She adjusted her abuelita’s cross necklace at her collarbone. “That’s right. You need Jesus wearing this dress in public,” she said to her reflection.

Marisol tossed her straightened hair back. She finished her look with blood-red lipstick. Now for the real blood. She selected Annie’s number on her cell with the full intention of harassing her over the ridiculous dress, but it went straight to voicemail. “Annie! Pick up your phone! ”

The only other gown-adjacent attire she owned was a tennis dress with attached shorts. Though showing up in that might be a good laugh, she settled for half naked in silver. With one more glance in the mirror, she put on her worn, oversized coat, officially de-glamorizing her appearance. Her phone rang, and she answered it. “Annie?”

“This is Mr. Varian’s driver. I am waiting for you downstairs,” an oddly modulating but pleasant feminine voice greeted.

Maybe Annie was already with their ride to the ball. “Does there happen to be an over-caffeinated woman in that car with you?”

“I do not understand the question.”

“I’ll be right down.” She hung up the phone.

During the walk down the stairs to the car, she constructed reasons why Annie didn’t pick up. She was in the middle of sticking on eyelashes, or the psychic death glares Marisol sent out because the dress had actually killed Annie.

The backseat of the town car was empty, so Marisol tapped the tinted partition in search of answers.

The glass lowered, and she gasped as it revealed nothing. A voice spoke from all sides of the car. “Your driver aims to serve. How may I help you?”

The wave of the future hadn’t exactly reached Marisol’s side of Shadowhaven. She had read about driverless cars, but to see an unmanned dashboard in action stunned her like a ghost sighting. “Can you take me to 8th and Chavez?”

“Your driver aims to serve,” the voice said. The partition rolled up, and the car took off.

The driver stopped at Annie’s apartment. With the spare set of keys, Marisol entered the place. Annie’s ball gown hung on her closet door. She hadn’t been home. Marisol’s stomach knotted, but it was too early to worry. For now. If she hadn’t been home, there was only one other place Annie could be—her true home.

The car arrived at the alley behind Varian Family and Research Hospitals near the back entrance. Marisol followed the typical path down the dingy hallway and up the beat-up elevator to the lab, dragging Annie’s garment bag behind her. Why hadn’t she been answering her phone? Why hadn’t she been home today? When Marisol finally turned the corner, she saw Annie through the window. Disheveled and dressed in the same clothes she had worn the morning before, Annie stooped over a stack of old papers. Marisol caught her attention with a wave.

Annie opened the door. “Ball time?”

Marisol said, “You’re the worst date, you know?”

Annie resumed her perch over the scattered papers with a grunt.

“Why weren’t you answering your phone? I thought something horrible happened.” And the dreadful moment arrived—Marisol became her mother.

Annie said, “Phone dead. Can’t charge. Been busy.” Hours in the lab had worn away her ability to produce multisyllabic words. She studied a paper with brown edges and chewed the end of her pencil.

Marisol put her hands over Annie’s eyes, but backed away when she discovered over a day and a half in the lab coated Annie in a funk. “You need a bottle of dry shampoo and a shower.”

“I need to read one more thing.” Annie gripped onto the sheet of paper.

“We’re already late! And I’m dying to tell you about yesterday’s shift.” Marisol retreated to the counter and attempted to hop on top of it to take her usual seat by the mouse, but the gown impeded any movement that wasn’t sultry or graceful. In the cage on the counter, the mouse had a smooth, tumor-free body. “Did you get a new mouse?”

“No.” Annie kept her head bowed over the papers.

“Where did its tumors go?”

“Cured. I think.” Annie’s blank tone belied the scientific revelation.

“What?”

“I think I cured it?” Annie finally looked up.

Suddenly the temperature-controlled room grew hot and stuffy, and Marisol pulled at the collar of her coat. “Oh. That’s what I thought you said.”

Annie and Marisol raced out of the hospital, having primped with miraculous speed. Annie had showered away the funk of her research bender in the doctor’s locker room, and she styled her hair into a simple chignon. Unlike the spectacular gown she had ordered for Marisol, she wore a relatively simpler deep purple sheath gown. Yet Marisol’s anger over their dress discrepancy retreated behind the excitement of a possible new discovery.

They entered the town car, and Annie flipped on the overhead light to put on some makeup.

“So?” Marisol prodded. “How’d you do it?”

“The other day, after you saw those beautiful chromosomes. I clo—synthesized the molecular structure of the fifteenth chromosome. Eureka! Put it in my little mousy friend. To my surprise, its tumors disappeared before my eyes.”

Marisol laughed and shook her head. “You’re pulling my leg. It’s a new mouse.”

“I swear it’s the same one! But I haven’t told you the best part.”

Marisol mimed zipping her mouth shut.

“I dug up old records. I wanted to know who or what owned those chromosomes. Dr. Varian wrote something down but scribbled over it. Kind of like a government redaction? So, I traced my pencil over it and found out who the chromosomes belonged to.” Annie swallowed. She eyed the active dashboard and lowered her voice. “Dr. Varian. ”

“His chromosomes created a cure-all? We should tell people. Heck, we’ll see Vincent tonight.”

“Not so fast.” Annie placed her index finger over her lips. She gestured her head toward the driverless front seat and whispered, “No cellular decay and hyper-regeneration? Either Dr. Varian did something to himself, or the Varians are some kind of superhuman. A different species, even. Hence, the fewer chromosomes. No matter which option is true, both are reasons for a cover-up.” Annie gripped Marisol’s arm. “Do you know how Dr. Varian died?”

Marisol shrugged.

“Skiing accident in the Alps almost fifteen years ago.” Annie air-quoted on the word accident. “News said an avalanche threw his body, along with his wife’s, down a steep crevasse. They never found them. You can read all about it. I know I have.” Annie stopped putting on makeup and pulled her faux fur stole close around her. “Their caskets were empty at the funeral. Dr. Varian became something or was something. Something worth hiding. And the conspiracy got him.”

Perhaps rich and radioactive?

“You’re next then?” Marisol teased before chuckling to herself.

“I’m not paranoid,” Annie said, returning to a normal volume. She looked out the dimmed windows of the car. “But I bought a gun a while back. ”

“It’s Occam’s razor. The easiest explanation is the right one. Who really benefits from hiding research? Conspiracy theorists always say follow the money. If Varian had an ability or genetic component that could be replicated for therapeutic benefits, there would be so much money. Why would they want it to go away? It makes zero sense.”

“Who benefits?” Annie counted on her fingers. “Population control. The world economy. Shadow governments.” Annie sighed and put her compact in her purse. “How much longer until we’re there?”

The sprawl of the city faded as space grew between streetlights. “Reaching city limits. Five minutes?”

“Good. I have five minutes to rehearse in my head exactly how I’m going to ask the Vincent Varian for a sample of his DNA.” Annie sighed. “What did you want to say about your day?”

Marisol shrugged. “Nothing.” She never imagined someone outdoing her Patron Saint versus Izzy story, but compared to Annie’s, her story felt small.

The car pulled into the Varian estate, joining a short line of other latecomers in the roundabout driveway. A row of hulking Corinthian pillars marked the palatial home’s main entrance like a behemoth’s smile. Marisol and Annie walked up the entrance’s stairs. Marisol’s gaze traveled up the pillars to a phrase carved above them. AUT VIAM INVENIAM AUT FACIAM. The words emblazoned the estate with something ancient and ominous. They should’ve entered a darkened cave, but, to Marisol’s surprise, the foyer inside radiated gold.

Annie handed a uniformed attendant her invitation. “Dr. Park and guest.” The attendant crossed them off a list. To be known only as “guest” hit Marisol like a small jab—the continuing tradition of anonymous recognition of Marisol and people like her always received.

The invitation attendant’s white-gloved twin offered to take their coats. Marisol unbuttoned her coat, realizing that some of her buttons hung by a thread. As the attendant helped Marisol out of her coat, she felt a twinge of shame. She should’ve ditched her shabby coat eons ago like a real grownup. “Sorry we’re late,” Marisol said, actually apologizing for her coat.

“It’s okay. Mr. Varian isn’t even here yet.” The attendant held Marisol’s coat away like a soiled diaper before hanging it up.

A belch rumbled from Annie’s stomach. “I need food. Stat.” Annie dragged Marisol inside the ballroom. Marisol stared at the room’s domed ceiling around the massive chandelier. Every item in the room appeared in shades of gold and cream, except for the grand, red-carpeted staircase. The staircase, where two wings of the estate met, split the ballroom in two. Multiple sets of French doors adorned with heavy tasseled curtains stood perpendicular to the staircase. The doors opened to a terrace that overlooked a garden. Above the treetops, Shadowhaven’s skyline glowed in the distance. The riches and excess here mocked those who had so little back in the city. The disparity told Marisol to keep her eyes down and her mouth closed. Although she had to fight the oohs and aahs that threatened to escape her lips at the sight of flaxen swirls of marble shimmering in the soft, warm light.

Most of the attendees gathered around the long tables boasting spreads of fine food or collected around cocktail tables dotted along the room’s edges. Like a soggy puzzle piece to the classical ambience, a DJ played a mix of haunted jazz strings with a hip-hop beat, music far too trendy for this older, stuck-up crowd.

And the crowd was a sea of somber—men in traditional black and white tuxedos and women in dark gowns. Marisol’s sequins reflected fractals of light that buzzed around her like fruit flies. Dressed for the disco, she searched for a good hiding spot.

Marisol tugged Annie into the nook under the staircase. A server followed them, offering a tray of food. Annie took two canapés, stopped the server from leaving, and took two more, balancing a pile in her hand.

Annie stuffed two of them in her face. With her mouth full, she said, “I knew you could pull that dress off.”

“This dress is obnoxious. ”

“Please. You wear less when you work out.” Annie looked forlornly at her empty hand and waved over another server. She chowed down on another canapé. “You don’t realize how much you got it. One promenade around here, you’ll have someone offering to take you to Bermuda.”

Marisol crossed her arms to hide her cleavage. “So, you wanted to pimp me out tonight.”

“No! You’re the bravest person I know, and I thought you should wear something, well, brave.” She popped another morsel of food into her mouth and pushed it into the inside of her cheek. “And you’re wearing it, so a part of you thinks it’s a killer dress too.”

“I’m the only one here dressed for a party.”

“In all fairness, I imagined this crowd would be exponentially more festive.”

“Doctors, scientists, and the people who fund them are festive?”

“Don’t poke holes in my logic. I either invented a wonder drug, discovered a new species, or all the above. I want to celebrate.”

Marisol relaxed her arms and chuckled. “Congratulations.”

Inside the nook’s protection, a series of family portraits of the Varian family hanging on the wall drew Marisol’s focus. In one, a balding man resembled Albert Einstein’s hairless twin with sagging jowls and sad, brown puppy dog eyes. He sat on a chair and looked straight ahead while a young blue-eyed man stood behind him with his hand placed on the old man’s shoulder. It was labeled Leonard and Vincent.

Annie studied the portrait. “The Varians had a legacy of discovery and scientific progress. This one, Leonard, the nuclear physicist, was a wunderkind of the Manhattan Project and started the hospital. Before him, great-grandad Varian worked with Marie Curie. It’s all so cool. And Victor was an amazing medical doctor, but Vincent... gave operational control to the board a little over a year ago. Everything but the side project, some say. All he knows is how to spend the family money. How the mighty have fallen.” Annie sighed and positioned herself before a photo of Dr. Victor Varian and his wife, Staci. Annie’s gaze lingered over the photo, showing how much she admired the doctor.

Marisol squinted at the portrait of the two men. “They look nothing alike.”

“Looks must’ve skipped that generation because they are definitely strong with the doctor. He could be Vincent’s twin, except,” Annie lowered her volume to a whisper, “he’d be the smart one.”

The portrait hypnotized Marisol. “It must’ve been painted after the ski accident. Their eyes. They look so sad.”

“Let’s move. There’s shrimp cocktail.” Annie yanked Marisol away.

Before making it too far into the ballroom, Annie stopped and gasped. “Don’t look. My kind-of, sort-of archnemesis from undergrad is over there.”

“What?”

“Frickin’ Sandra Farraday. Dr. Farraday. I only had a few classes with her, but she had this interpretation of string theory that was positively…” Annie’s eyes crossed.

Marisol spotted a woman with a sharply angled bob in a black velvet gown. “That good, huh?”

“I thought she was all the way in Switzerland working for that particle accelerator.” Annie’s eyes widened, and she gripped Marisol’s arm. “What if she’s working on Varian’s secret project? I’ll find out.” Annie cleaned her glasses and smoothed her chignon just so. “She probably doesn’t remember me.” She headed toward Dr. Farraday.

Marisol stuck by the spread of food and watched as Annie grew livelier and less aware of her growing distance between them. Annie’s laugh traveled across the room, a sign that she and the other doctor had recalled an inside joke. One that Marisol would never get.

Vulnerable in the middle of the room, Marisol snuck to its edge and resolved to walk along the shadows, away from the crowd.

Flashes from photographers’ cameras popped over and over into a roar. The crowd applauded. Vincent Varian and his date, a young model made famous on social media, descended the stairs. She looked like a confection. Her hair dyed bright baby blue with a matching tight satin dress.

Although Marisol disdained the billionaire, in person and free of the armor of a coat, gloves, and sunglasses, he appeared all-the-more dashing. His tuxedo was tailored close to his body, emphasizing his broad shoulders. Definitely a middleweight. And the small cleft in his chin, Marisol couldn’t help but admit, was especially charming.

From the stairs, Vincent announced, “I hosted this party to emphasize the many ways our hospital and research have saved lives.” After years of prep school and surrounding himself with the country’s elites, he sounded like no one else in Shadowhaven with his crisp consonants and the occasional elongated vowel. Though deep and full, his voice grated her ears as he seemed to try so hard to sound sophisticated. He continued, “We’re here to raise awareness and fund treatment for our world’s most precious lives—children. In bringing together our doctors, our researchers, and Shadowhaven’s elite, we hope to raise enough money so that no child who walks in the doors of our hospital, regardless of ability to pay, is without the finest care. Cheers to you and your hard work. To the finer people!”

People cheered, and the music continued to play. Vincent’s date posed awkwardly against the ballroom’s filigree. A dutiful photographer snapped multiple angles of the blue-haired woman. It seemed she would’ve been willing to be anyone’s date as long as she got a good photo. Annie would find this hilarious. Where was she? Marisol traipsed the room to find her.

She found Annie finishing a flute of champagne and grabbing another from the conveniently stationed server’s tray. A semi-circle of stately elderly people hovered around Annie, as if she was the hired entertainment for the night. Annie’s face had gone pale, and she fidgeted with her champagne glass. If Annie’s nerves and the air of nobility from these people were any indication, Annie stood before the board. And their names were Fluffy Brows, Jowly Paunch, White Updo, Skeleton, and Dad ‘Stache. Not really, but Marisol rolled with the information available to her.

Fluffy Brows threw his head back and laughed. He pushed Skeleton toward Annie. “Meet this wonderful young lady who continues Dr. Varian’s research.”

“Hi, I’m Dr. An Jung Park or Annie, rather. I experiment in pharmaceuticals but specialize in coding chemical compounds to particular genetic traits.” Annie offered her hand to Skeleton, who shook it. And squeezed it and shook it again.

Marisol fluttered her eyes at Annie, psychically communicating, These people are weird.

Skeleton clenched his teeth together in a forced smile. To be all the more skeletal, my dear.

“How do you align chemicals with genetic traits?” Fluffy Brows waved his hands in the air as if he conjured the answer from Annie .

Annie sipped the champagne and rubbed her lips together. “In my work, we’ve looked at the genetic properties of superhumans. Not the type you’d read fantastical stories about in the comics, but you know, people with exaggerated physical characteristics such as overactive muscle development or extra lung capacity. We’ve studied the molecular properties of their DNA to synthesize and replicate those traits to help chronically ill lab mice. We haven’t been successful so far because cellular respiration loses any gains. But if I found the right molecular compound that made cells impervious? Varian Research could possibly create noninvasive, consumable gene therapy. Or a shot of perfection.” Annie finished her champagne. “Disease-free. Ageless. We could do it. In my lifetime. Maybe even within the year.”

Every one of the board members stifled a laugh. All but Skeleton. Annie’s head drooped. Afraid that Annie felt insulted, Marisol touched her back. “What is it?” Annie asked.

Marisol whispered in Annie’s ear, “I thought you wanted to keep your whole cure-all on the down-low.”

“I said it was possible. Under promise, over deliver. Or do you need a lesson on how to suck up to these blue bloods?” Annie whispered back.

Marisol forced a closed-mouth smile in the board’s direction and guided Annie to another part of the floor. “Those people creep me out. Especially Skeleton. ”

“Skeleton?”

“That one with the slicked back hair, thin lips, and exaggerated zygomatic bones? He looked like a walking skeleton and touched you for way too long.” Marisol pointed in the direction of the member who she had named “Skeleton.”

“Zygomatic? Look who’s still proud of her higher gross anatomy grade. You can say cheekbone like the rest of us. And that’s Mr. Ruthven.”

“The C.O.O.?”

“He’s actually the second most powerful man in the room. If he wants to touch me with his clammy, white hands, I’d let him if it means I keep my funding.” Annie stopped a waiter with champagne and helped herself to another glass. “I think if I talk to him long enough, I’ll get the courage to ask Varian for his tissue. Even if that courage is liquid.” Annie moved her way through the crowd, disappearing from Marisol’s sight.

Marisol picked at her freshly painted red nails. When she looked up, she saw Vincent Varian, who was stuck in a tuned-out stare at the margins of the party, ignored by his blue-haired date. Marisol’s gaze must’ve snapped him into the present. She watched him blink away his blank stare, and he returned a smile in her direction.

Heat rose from her chest to her cheeks, an embarrassing, visceral reaction. It frustrated her that handsome looks in a tuxedo overrode her repulsed feelings. To cover up her reaction, she gazed down again .

She searched for comfort and found it in the background music. Marisol bobbed her head to the beat and grew irritated at the partygoers who were far too occupied chatting and seeming important to appreciate the music. If this was a block party, there would be people dancing. Here, it seemed people didn’t want to give away that they could be joyful.

Marisol caught herself moving a bit too rhythmically. Uh-oh, guess who else noticed? Vincent. He looked at her and seemed to chuckle. After adjusting his bowtie and buttoning his jacket, he headed in her direction. Marisol bolted to Annie and jerked her away from her conversation. She dragged Annie to a large vanity room, safe from Vincent Varian.