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It’s been a long time since Fezco was sick. He can’t remember if he’s ever been sick, actually, at least not in this stupid way, snotty and wheezing and grabbing a box of tissues from the back of the store, where no one has ever touched them. He just assumed he couldn’t get sick, that maybe his brain was so fucked up that the wires don’t cross the way they should. It had worked out fine for him—sick is for people who didn’t have other shit to do, and Fez always has other shit to do.
But that was then, and this is now: ringing up a few handles for a group of high school kids with letterman jackets and half-hoping he’ll puke on their sneakers. Maybe then they’ll stop trying to negotiate the price, like Fez is selling fucking antiques. It’s a game for them, he knows—not like they don’t have the money for alcohol. Not like they couldn’t raid their parents’ liquor cabinets, or slip cash from their wallets, if that money ran out.
“Yo, I don’t gotta do this with you,” he says, swallowing down the goop in his throat and eyeing the tall motherfucker in the middle, distinguishable from the others only in size. He wonders whether he’d even recognize Nate Jacobs if he came in here, with the way his vision is blurry right now, all underwater shapes. “You buy it, don’t buy it, don’t matter to me. We ain’t coming to no fucking arrangement.”
He does his best to stiffen his posture, something he hasn’t had much occasion to do since puberty. Hold yourself like a brick wall and that’s how they’ll see you. Immovable, unbendable, whatever the fuck it takes to be taken seriously. But his hands are shaking without his permission—another one of those brain-body misfires that’s been way too common since his head got scrambled, all those years ago. This time, it feels like his hands are taking orders from the pounding in his skull, the chill at the back of his neck. If these kids were anyone else, that could be suicide. Sick is as good as dead, in his line of work—he doesn’t need his grandma here to tell him that. He sniffles, noisily, against his better judgment.
“You good, dude? Jesus,” one of the guys says, and Fez can see him shift, a little blob of motion—like a ton of tiny wheels clustered into a person-shape. He’s not asking to be nice, because no one’s ever nice; he’s probably testing whether they can just run out with the bottles now, no cash necessary. Not like Fez would remember their faces. Not like Fez can remember most people’s faces, sick or not—there are other clues he uses, the way people hold themselves, the way they speak, the way they move, smell, breathe. It’s fucking scary, with some of those senses gone radio-silent like this. He wonders, idly, if that’s how his grandma feels, and then he stops the thought before it can go any further.
Someone is tapping on the counter; Fez doesn’t know who. For a second, a split-second, no sound comes out when he opens his mouth. And a split-second is all it ever takes.
“This is what happens when you’re high off your own supply,” another kid says. “It like, scrapes the fuck out of your nose.”
Fez swallows, has to consciously tell his mouth to move and hope it listens. “You better watch yourself, man,” he says, and it comes out hoarse. “Not like you can get that supply from nobody else.”
The tall guy grabs a handful of twenties from his wallet, crumples them into balls, drops them on the counter. They hit the ground like rain, or silenced bullets.
“Use that change for a doctor, my good man,” the guy says, “or rehab, what have you,” and they’re out of the store before Fez can blink. Sometimes he worries he’ll stop being able to blink entirely, just live with his eyes sewn open. He eyes the cash—it’s a little more than he asked them for, and he knows that’s part of the game too, proving they could pay all along. They won, just getting to watch him freeze. Or—not freeze. Shift around like a puppet with no fucking strings. Usually it doesn’t bother him, the power plays from teenagers who don’t know shit. Business is business, and the biggest assholes spend the most. But he feels weird, now, like a body outside of a body, or something. And the store is so fucking cold.
He can’t tell how long he’s been staring at nothing when the door opens again; he blinks himself back, focuses his eyes on the register, then on the movement in front of him. Runs through everything he knows, everything he needs to know if the shape through the door is Cal Jacobs or his bitch-ass son—or someone worse, because there’s always someone worse. Guns in back. Ash in back. Blade in pocket, blade in drawer. On loop, until the shape gets closer.
But his nose must not be as fucked as he thought it was, because this shape has smell—some flower-fruit thing—and the sense-memory goes right to Fez’s dick, sends his heart pounding in overtime, brings back the shake in his hands except he can’t tell what part of his body is driving it, not now. He’s no good with faces, but he couldn’t forget hers, and he sees it crystal-fucking-clearly now. And that goddamn smile, all blood-red and white. Yellow shirt that makes her look like a sunflower.
“Hey,” she says, moving closer to his register. “How’s it hanging?” She wrinkles her nose when the words come out, and Fez likes that. She’s ten times smarter than him on his least-stupid days, but he can tell that her brain doesn’t always line up with her mouth, either.
“Lexi Howard,” he says. “You bringing trouble again?”
She huffs, one short breath. “Trouble seems to find me, of late. Well, of always, actually, which is—ironic.” She takes another breath, in and out, and he can see her hands twisting out of the corner of his eye. He dreamed about those hands. He doesn’t dream often. “Relevant segue, actually, because I wanted to apologize to you. My sister—you know Cassie?”
He doesn’t feel like explaining that he doesn’t know anyone, really, that every kid but Rue and Ash is a blur. Rue, Ash, and now Lexi. So he just nods. Lexi’s mouth droops a little, like he said the wrong thing. He wonders if he’ll ever say the right thing around her, but he’s too slow to know what it is. Both conversations he’s had with Lexi, it’s been like floating, the kind of high he could sell for thousands. He doesn’t have a filter, can barely keep up, just rests in the lull of her talking. Her words have shapes, whenever he hears them. Little squares, little circles, forming a painting in his head.
“Right, everyone knows Cassie,” she says. “Well, last time I was here, I was coming to tell you that Cal Jacobs was at our house”—and fuck if that doesn’t wake Fez up; he can feel his body straighten—“and kind of interrogating us, about what happened to Nate. And I didn’t say anything, I wouldn’t do that to you, but Cassie can be kind of dumb. So she did. And I was supposed to tell you that, and I didn’t. And it doesn’t matter now, I realize, but—I don’t know, I wanted to say sorry?”
He wants to laugh, but he’s scared it would turn into a cough, so he just huffs instead. Tries to smile, so she’ll look a little less miserable. “You askin’ me or tellin’ me?”
Lexi shifts, but before he can apologize right back, she straightens. “Telling you. I’m sorry.”
This time he does laugh, the sound only a little guttural. “Look, you don’t got nothing to apologize for. S’not your fault. If I had to answer for every stupid thing my brother did, I’d be dead already.” He wonders how much he should tell her about Cal, and settles on: “And playboy’s daddy won’t be a problem for you no more.”
Lexi’s mouth opens, a little “O” that makes him fucking crazy. “He won’t?”
“Nah. Me and Ash handled it.”
“Oh.” She’s worrying the bottom of her lip with her teeth now, and he’s wondering how he’s supposed to get through a normal conversation with her when she does shit like this, shit designed to drive him up a wall. He feels weird, like he’s spying on her when she’s looking right at him. At the party, he thought something different—but she sprinted out of the store so fast last time, you’d think he was chasing her with Ash’s gun.
He can feel his back getting cold again, and he wonders if that’s another thing she can do: fuck with his body, mess with his temperature from the inside. He wouldn’t be surprised. He’s never felt like this before, a live wire of pure want. If being sick dulls his senses, Lexi does the opposite, but he gets stupider either way. His grandma was right about everything else; she might as well be right about this, too.
Her words hit him a little late—I wouldn’t do that to you—and he wonders if she was trying to protect him. He wonders how to ask her not to do that for his benefit—the same thing he’d tell Rue, or Ash—and he wonders why he doesn’t want to.
“Your hair looks different like that,” he says before he can stop himself. She blinks.
“Yeah,” she says. “It was down the last time.”
He nods; he remembers. Not like he could forget the image of her in his store, looking so out of place—like he'd copy-and-pasted her from the party. “It looks nice. I like it.” Because it does, and he does. He feels stupid, but less so when he watches red steadily creep up Lexi’s cheeks.
“Thanks,” she says eventually, like she had to think about it.
“How’s school?” It wasn’t anywhere near this hard to get her to talk last time, but he feels like he’ll die if she doesn’t—the burn in his throat will get worse, the pounding in his head, the shivery feeling under his skin. “Rue says you, like, really into theater.”
She looks even redder now, but he can’t trust his eyes. Thank whatever God Lexi doesn’t believe in, because he figured out the thing that would get her talking, her shape of her words dulling the blank nothingness in his head. “Oh. Yeah, I am. School’s good. I don’t know if she—I’m directing a play? Well, I wrote a play, and I’m directing it. It’s kind of—a personal history, I guess. Me taking all the crazy shit around me, writing it down, making it fictional. Including everything that’s going on with Rue, which is…admittedly dramatic. Cinematic. Well, you know.” She laughs slightly. “Is that exploitative? I don’t know. Rue isn’t going to read it anyway. It’s like, either I do this for me or I worry about her until I die, you know?”
“I think it’s mad cool,” he says honestly. He feels like he’s pushing his luck already, but—“Yo, it’s like—I don’t read many plays, but if you sharing it with people, you could send it to me. If you want. I ain’t Rue, but.” He shrugs, trying not to sniffle. “I like the way you talk. S’probably the same written down, right?”
She stares at him. “You—no, you don’t.”
He snorts. “Feel like I told you to stop doin’ that, Lexi.”
“I—yeah.” Maybe he’s imagining it, but he thinks she starts breathing a little heavier. “Okay. I’ll send it to you.” Then they’re just smiling at each other, and Fez thinks that he must have made her up, a hallucination born of his sore throat. And of course that’s when her smile fades and a frown appears between her eyebrows. Well, there goes that.
“So,” she starts, and then stops, and for a minute he thinks she’s not going to say anything else. She’s leaning against a shelf now, and he can see her still breathing heavy, chest straining against her shirt. It makes him feel creepy again, the way blood rushes south. When Fez was younger, it didn’t take much to set him off, but his wants were always disconnected: tits, ass, mouth. He can’t see Lexi chopped up like that, and he doesn’t think it would do much for him, if he could.
He wonders if her breathing means she’s nervous again. He tries to slouch down—whatever the opposite of a brick wall is, that’s how he wants her to see him. Fucking pipe dream, probably.
Now that he’s got himself going, he wonders what she’s about to say, what changed her mood, which thing she’s decided to hate him for: his business, Rue, Nate. Laundry list of things that he won’t apologize for. A wave of nausea hits him, and he doesn’t know if it’s coming from his stomach or his brain.
“So,” she says again. “How’s Faye?” Her voice is a little higher than it was, and he blinks: that’s the last thing he expected her to say.
“Uh,” he says. “She’s chilling. At the house. Probably painting her nails, or, I dunno. Whatever she does.”
Lexi nods seriously. “Are you—um, what are you guys up to this weekend?” There’s that nose-wrinkle again, that slightly panicked glint in her eyes. Fez can’t even begin to follow her train of thought, not when the world is starting to feel slow again—from her warmth of her presence, from the cold of his body. He wonders if he could fall asleep like this, wonders whether she’d stick around if he did. Lock up the store, make sure Ash eats. It’s a weird thought, comes from some deep part of his brain that’s been whacked a little too hard, and he shoves it back where it belongs.
“I been trying to be wherever Faye’s not, you feel?” he says. “It ain’t exactly easy. But she makes my head hurt sometimes.” It’s not what he meant to say at all—too close to the truth. Fez doesn’t usually advertise that his brain is fucked up, wants people to think that when he’s not saying anything, it’s because he’s thinking about how he can hurt them. But if he’s ever been fully present at all, he isn’t today—he can feel another cough coming on, can feel his arms slackening where he leans on them. And he’s never fully present around Lexi, not when it’s so easy to let her lead him, let her pull words from his mouth. It doesn’t bother him, not like it does around other people.
Lexi’s frowning, now, her eyes wide. Like a doll, but a pretty one. “Are you guys fighting?”
Fez blinks. Lexi’s perfume is making him feel heavy, limbs all wrung out, and he fights to keep his eyes open, to keep looking at her while he can. He fixates on her hair, tucked behind her shoulders in a long braid. “I mean, nah, I don’t got enough stake in it for a fight. She’s cool. Just been here too long.”
Her eyes are still wide, smudged with brown. “Uh, how long?”
“I dunno,” he says. “Few weeks?”
“You’ve only been together a few weeks?”
Fez hears the words like he’s underwater, and at first, they don’t seem to be English; he can’t figure out where the question becomes a question, and the shapes aren’t clear like they usually are when Lexi talks. He starts to feel like he’s missed something, which always shoots raw panic up his spine. Miss something you need to know, end up dead.
But Lexi isn’t pointing a gun at him. She’s just Lexi, except with sharper lines: eyebrows pointed toward each other, mouth flat, tiny wrinkles in her forehead. Her words start to trickle back into his head, one by one. The second clarity hits him—a couple minutes too late, but it always hits him eventually—he starts laughing, and this time he can’t keep himself from coughing. Lexi’s eyes get wider, if that’s possible.
“Ah, man,” he says, choking the words out. “We ain’t together. She’s an associate’s girl, she’s hiding out at my place.” He coughs again, hoping he’s making sense—it’s important to him that Lexi gets this, and maybe her confusion explains some things he couldn’t explain before. Maybe, if he thinks about it all tonight, when his head’s back to normal, everything she’s saying will make sense, too.
But Lexi looks frightened now. Never something he can avoid for long, apparently.
“Fez, are you okay?”
Letterman Jacket had asked him the same thing earlier, but coming from Lexi, the question sounds sincere. Which is weird, maybe, because even though her face is showing up in his vision three times, even though he can’t think so much, so fast, he could swear that she’s smiling, the fear wiped off her face. He can’t fit all those things together—the frown, the care, the smile—and he’s way too tired to try.
His only coherent thought is that he likes how she says his name, triangle-shaped. He doesn’t think she’s said it before, and all he wants is for her to do it again. Here, now. In his car. In his bed.
“Yeah, I’m good,” he says, trying to direct the question at the middle version of her, not exactly sure where he starts and ends. He misses her movement, or maybe he’s sleeping already, but he can feel a cool pressure on his forehead, and eventually he realizes it’s her hand. Like a dream, but he thinks he’d enjoy it more, in a dream. Right now—
“Your hand is fucking hot,” he says, and Lexi huffs out a breath; he smells mint.
“You’re fucking hot,” she says. “Or—that’s not what I meant. I meant, you’re physically warm. You have a fever.” Fez fights down his reaction to her words, the jump of his heart. If this was a dream, she wouldn’t have corrected herself. His body is on high alert even as it shuts down; he can feel every inch of her hand, like tiny pinpricks on his skull.
“I think you have to go home,” she says. “Is there someone who can watch the store?”
Fez shakes his head, trying to say no, but it’s like she’s a fucking hypnotist at a carnival, the way her words always feel true. She could tell him to do anything, and he’d probably listen. He yells for Ashtray, and Lexi’s eyes widen when his brother walks out front. Fez knows she must have seen him around, at all those parties if nothing else, but he also knows there’s something different about seeing a kid like Ash in the daylight. Fez had been on the receiving end of that look enough times to recognize it, even now.
“Yo, can you lock up?” he asks Ash, or in Ash’s general direction. “Gotta lie down for a bit. I’ll be back.”
“Who the fuck is she,” Ash says, and Fez thinks he’d find the question funny, any other day. In his head, everyone knows her. Fucking household name.
“S’just Lexi. She’s cool, Ash, chill out.” He grabs his keys from behind the counter and starts to walk to the door, as steadily as he can, but he’s stopped just before he gets there, a burning pressure on his wrist.
“Can I drive? You probably shouldn’t drive,” Lexi says. Then, because she’s always correcting herself: “I have to drive.” At this point, it’s kind of a disembodied voice, disconnected from the rest of her, and he works on lifting his eyelids a little higher. Lexi’s not going to stick around long; he doesn’t want to miss her, while she’s here. He should tell her no, he thinks—she didn’t come here to deal with this, whatever she did come here for. But if he tells her no, then she’ll leave. The problem feels unsolvable.
“Man, who is this bitch? What’s wrong with you?” Ash barks, and Fez bites back something sharp. He knows Ash can tell when his brain’s all fucked, knows he’s probably never seen him this out of it, all snot-nosed and shit, and he knows he’s worried. And he knows that when Ash is worried, it comes out of him all ugly. That’s something Fez understands. He thinks Lexi might, too.
“Show some fucking respect, man,” he says, enunciating each syllable as he hands her his keys. Their fingers brush, just a little, and Fez can feel it all the way down to his toes. When she pulls him outside, fingers like a cuff on his skin, almost painful, he realizes that the feeling scares him. There’s not much that does.
“Yeah,” he says. “Okay, yeah.”
***
It’s trippy, watching her drive his car. He’d imagined it lots of times over the past few weeks, but his vision now is hazier than it was in his head, and there’s lots he didn’t think to imagine. Her fingers tapping on the wheel, even as she turns it. Her lead foot, always crashing them to a halt at the last possible second.
“Sorry,” she says, after the second—third?—time. “I’m normally a good driver. I’m a lot better than Cassie, if you can believe it.”
“S’cool,” he says, and he means it. The jerky motions are keeping him awake, more alert than he was at the store, and he wants to be alert.
She hums. Pauses. Then: “Did you know that a fever isn’t actually sickness? It’s your body’s way of fighting whatever virus or bacteria is in your body. It’s a nice way of thinking about it, I guess—like, the fever is trying to help you. It just doesn’t know how to do it without hurting.”
Fez sniffles, then nods. “Didn’t know that. Thought, you know—you have a fever. Fevers make your head hurt.”
“Yeah, but nothing’s that simple, right? It makes sense to me,” Lexi says, weirdly insistent. “I can understand it.”
He gets the feeling, not for the first time today, that they’re talking about two different things. He waits for understanding to come—patient like always, holding out until he stops being stupid—but this time, it doesn’t. Body too achy, throat too sore. He just stares at the side of her face, the way the light hits her cheekbones and makes them sparkle.
“I gotta think about that,” he says, and she nods, like he’s said something smart.
***
She’s a blur of motion when they get to the house—Faye is nowhere to be seen, and the last rational part of his brain is glad about that. He wonders why Lexi was worried they were together, if it means what he wants it to mean, if he should want it to mean anything at all. The last one, at least, should be easily asked and answered, especially with his grandma in the same house. The thought makes his headache worse, and then it’s like he conjured her up with his brain—Lexi, smiling without teeth, pressing a pill in his palm.
“Um, Tylenol,” she says. “It was in my bag—I wasn’t sure what you had.” She shakes her head. “I mean, I know what you have. I didn’t want to mess with anything.”
He smiles, dry-swallows it. “Thanks. We got Tylenol. S’well as everything else.”
If she’s scared, mad, whatever, she doesn’t show it, or he doesn’t notice. She just looks around, eyes jumping everywhere. It’s his house, his shit, so her gaze feels almost like touch. He shivers, but whether it’s from her or his fever is anyone’s guess.
“Look, Lexi,” he says, not knowing where the sentence will end when he starts it. “It was real nice of you to drive me, but you don’t gotta worry about me.” Does she? Did she? His brain is on a crash-course to shutdown, and he wants to get the rest out. “I know you got enough shit to deal with, and this shit shouldn’t be your shit, you know?” He gestures with the arm that feels least heavy, hoping she gets what he means. The business. Nate. Rue. Him. Everything that touches him, right down to his grandma, who he can almost feel in the room. Watching Fez’s heart beat too fast, watching him sweat more than a fever could explain away. And if fever isn’t sickness, then maybe the way his body feels—jittery, achy—all begins and ends with Lexi. If he were somebody else, the thought might piss him off.
She just stares at him, looking calmer than before. “Friends help each other, right?”
He shrugs, trying to hide his reaction to that word, friends, the way it comes out of Lexi’s mouth jagged. Doesn’t fit with the rest of her words in his head, the image they make. “Don’t got a lot of friends.”
She huffs out. “Yeah. Me either.” He sways a little, and of course she notices that. “Where’s your room? You should sleep.” Barely taking a breath: “Did you know your dreams are always super vivid when you have a fever? Not always bad, just vivid. It’s because fever can interrupt your REM sleep and changes the way you process information at night. Normally everything is pretty regulated, but the fever takes up too much brainspace.”
Fez, who stopped processing information after “where’s your room,” grins, hoping his face doesn’t look too jacked from the fever and the snot and the fucking headache. He wants her to think he looks good. It’s a weird feeling—sometimes, he doesn’t remember he even has a face. “How you know all that, for real?”
She smiles back. “That one I Googled when I got here.”
He doesn’t mention that he has no brainspace left for a fever to fuck with, that everything she says to him filters in all wrong. That her words turn into shapes that make a weird-ass painting that leave him wanting her to fucking—run his life. Tell him what to do, like this, forever. He feels scared, like he did by the car, and he forgot he could feel that.
And if, after his whole fucking speech, he lets her pull him to his room, lets her drag him into bed, lets her wipe sweat from his forehead and watches her perch on the edge of his bed and thinks, You should lay down, you should stay here forever, well—Ash and his grandma aren’t here. Nobody has to know.
He’s halfway to sleep, drifting with her hand firmly on his arm, like she’s holding him down, when he thinks of something he wants to know.
“Hey.” She hums in response. “Why’d you come today?”
She doesn’t say anything for a long time, and he wonders if she’s going to leave. Then she says, “Why did you look at me, after you beat Nate up? You looked right at me.”
It’s a weird question, but that’s the kind he’s come to expect from Lexi. Face half-buried in his pillow, it’s easier to be honest.
“I dunno,” he says, slurring the words. “Figured you’d be scared of me, or something.”
“And you looking was supposed to make me less scared?”
He shook his head. “No. Just—wanted you to see. I dunno.”
She nods; he feels the motion in his arm. “Okay. I wanted you to see, too.” Then, because she’s always doubting herself: “Does that make sense?”
He thinks about it. The way she makes him feel, high on nothing, led by just a bone-deep desire to have the feeling never stop. The way the feeling starts when she just fucking. Looks at him.
“Yeah,” he says. “Okay, yeah.”
***
His dreams that night are vivid, like she promised—she doesn’t lie to him, even when she should. It’s all Lexi, all night—Lexi falling from huge heights, Lexi swimming toward him, her body caving in on itself like one of those paintings with the clocks. Lexi, light spewing from her mouth like puke, landing on his shoulder—all he has is a shoulder, in the dream, no body. All he has are the parts of him she touches, and for a while, all she has are hands.
When they kiss in the dream, he feels his body coming back, like she decided he could keep it after all. His brain never listens, but it listens to her. And when he wakes up, she’s still there, curled around his back, and he wonders if maybe it wasn’t a dream, or if all of it was.