Now he smiled his most winning, least insane smile at the pharmacy clerk. “I have a prescription in your computer for Mentafixol. When I came in to fill it two days ago, the clerk said you’re out. I’m just checking to see if the shipment came in.”

“Mentafixol,” the girl murmured like this was a new one to her. She took his name and typed on her computer. Obviously no one had gotten wise and included a message with his prescription information that said “WATCH OUT FOR THIS ONE! HE’S CRAZY WHEN UNMEDICATED!” because the girl didn’t hit a panic button under the counter—anyway, not that Elijah could sense with his imagined mind-reading abilities. She said simply, “Let me check in the back,” and disappeared behind shelves of colorful boxes and bottles.

While Elijah leaned against the counter for strength, praying that his medicine would miraculously appear, a large brown bear shuffled in. He was from the Animal Instincts sexy acrobatics show, Stage 3. Elijah had fixed their trampoline last week. The bear went to a second cash register. Elijah was too far away to hear the bear’s conversation with another clerk, but in his mind he heard perfectly that the bear was picking up his blood pressure medicine. Elijah hoped this bear appreciated the ease with which he refilled his prescription. Having MAD was a bummer, but Mentafixol at least allowed Elijah to function. He swore that when he finally got his hands on this drug, he would never, ever take modern medicine for granted again.

Two Mile High Candy Co.

Icarus, CO

With a start, Elijah blinked the words away and looked around. Visions like this, voices in his head—these were exactly the symptoms MAD had served him seven years ago. But this time they came with a side order of panic, because he recognized them for what they were: a dinner reservation in the loony bin. Sure enough, even before the clerk reappeared around the shelf, Elijah knew she was coming, with bad news.

She held an empty box. “Sorry! That shipment still hasn’t come in. Have you tried other pharmacies around town?”

“I have,” Elijah said. That morning he’d called half the pharmacies in Las Vegas. Shane had called the other half while eyeing Elijah and telling him he didn’t look so hot. “They’ve never heard of Mentafixol.”

“I hadn’t either, until now. I wonder if we get it on special order just for you.”

Elijah knew they didn’t get it just for him. For him and Holly, maybe, but not just for him. “Is there a generic?”

“Your doctor would have to prescribe the generic.” The clerk examined the empty box curiously.

Two Mile High Candy Co.

Icarus, CO

Elijah blinked and leaned weakly against the counter. It was unnerving to have something pop into his head like that. This was not how normal brains worked, and it was not how his own brain worked—not in the last seven years, anyway.

The clerk continued to stare at the box, unaware that she was giving Elijah a conniption. Edging closer, Elijah glimpsed the address label that held her attention. Surely it didn’t say “Two Mile High Candy Co., Icarus, CO.” If it did, he was going to freak out, because that would certify he could see in his head what someone else was reading. He nodded to the box. “Can I look at that?”

The clerk made a motion to hand it over, then froze. Elijah heard what she was thinking: Oh no, this is the guy they were talking about on dinner break, the one who’s been in here five times in the past forty-eight hours and has some kind of mental illness. Should I call the police?

He had to know whether he’d really predicted what the box said. But he couldn’t risk snatching it from her and landing himself in jail, then the loony bin. “Never mind. Thanks.” He backed out of the room.

He pushed open the door and hurried toward the elevators, trying not to look like he was hurrying, because the casino had surveillance cameras everywhere. The underground corridors recently had been repainted from dull white to gloss white to fool employees into thinking they weren’t underneath megatons of concrete and steel that could collapse on them at any second. Don’t panic.

The elevator ride was torture. The imagined problems of strangers assaulted him from all sides. Finally he escaped onto the casino floor, which was crowded at 9 p.m., the busiest time of night. Carefully he wound his way through the gaming tables and the islands of beeping, blinking slot machines, staying as far away from people as possible so their thoughts couldn’t stomp into his consciousness. Veering toward the far wall, he swung open a door and ducked inside.

After the hyperactive lights of the casino floor, the Peacock Room was so dark that he could hardly see at first. He waited until his eyes adjusted and the giant peacock feathers appeared, the design starting in the center of the room and extending through the carpet and up the walls to touch the ceiling. Elijah had always thought the room looked as if a giant bird were sitting on him until he cried uncle, but he’d never felt the pressure of the peacock’s gargantuan ass until his MAD started acting up.

He slid into a chair at the nearest empty table and braced himself against the bar waitress’s X-rated thoughts about him. She slid a nonalcoholic beer in front of him and kissed him on the cheek, leaving oily lipstick that he rubbed off his skin when she wasn’t looking. He couldn’t mix alcohol with Mentafixol, so when he’d started coming in to see Shane’s band and she’d offered to bring him anything he wanted, he’d given her a line about not wanting to drink because his dad had been an alcoholic—which could have been true, for all he knew. Of course, now that he was off Mentafixol, he supposed he could drink real beer. It might do him good. He watched the drops of perspiration on the bottle loosen with the vibration of the music and scoot down the brown glass, onto his shaking hand.

Onstage, Shane’s dad, looking every inch Frank Sinatra in the early 1960s, ended “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” with a flourish of his guitar. He took a bow along with the other members of the band: Shane in the shadows, Shane’s uncle on drums, and Shane’s brother playing bass. Over the smattering of applause, Shane’s dad turned around and said something to Shane.

Shane stepped forward to the edge of the stage and squinted at Elijah. He held up one finger: one more song until the end of that set. He spoke in his dad’s ear before melting into the background.

“This next one goes out to our friend Elijah,” Frank Sinatra announced into the microphone. “ ‘The Best Is Yet to Come.’ One, two . . .” Either Shane was optimistic about Elijah’s prognosis and wanted to cheer him up, or he knew Elijah was doomed and had a sick sense of humor.

After the song, the rest of the band cleared the stage to take ten. Shane motioned Elijah into the wings, where he sat in a chair with his guitar in his lap and twisted one of the tuning pegs, unwinding a string.

“I need you to go with me to Glitterati,” Elijah said.

“Glitterati!” Shane exclaimed without looking up. He pulled the slack string out the back of the guitar and bent down to fish in his case for a replacement. “That’s a dance club for girls and transvestites. We won’t fit in.”

He had a point. Perhaps fifty percent of Glitterati’s patrons would be wearing feather boas. Elijah might not fit in, but he was used to that. MAD was never far from his mind. He didn’t fit in anywhere. And he could have said something droll in response to Shane’s claim that Shane himself didn’t fit in with weirdos, what with the tux and the slick 1960s hairdo. But Elijah wasn’t in the mood to laugh right now. He was in some serious shit.

“I asked Holly Starr to meet me at midnight because she may have an extra pill she can loan me,” he explained.

Shane looked up from unrolling the new string from its package. “Holly Starr has a Mentafixol pill?”

Elijah nodded. “She has MAD like I do.” Next Shane would ask how Elijah knew this, and Elijah wouldn’t know what to say. He’d probably overheard her talking about it to a friend sometime in the past seven years and subconsciously filed it away, but he couldn’t know for sure. And he didn’t want to admit that the way he perceived things, he’d read her mind when she came to their house with Rob last night. He hated to lie, especially to Shane, but he wasn’t sure how the whole I have a delusion that I can read minds thing would go over.

Shane only watched him intently.

“And . . . girls like girly bars,” Elijah ventured. “I chose a place she might go on her own, so it won’t seem strange to her parents.”

“Why do you care what her parents think?” Shane asked. “Why don’t you just go up to her here at the casino and ask to borrow a pill, instead of sneaking around like this? In ninth grade, if her dad and Mr. Diamond told me to stay away from her, I would have shit my pants. But now?” He raised one eyebrow. He was thinking that Elijah was even more of a pu**y than he’d previously assumed.

Elijah glared at Shane as if he’d only seen the raised eyebrow. He did not kick over the chair and throttle Shane. That would give away that he’d sensed the pu**y accusation because he could read minds, hello!

“Holly’s dad had enough clout even back then to order me around while threatening my mom’s job, with the owner of the casino in the room,” Elijah explained. “Mr. Starr has even more sway now. I have to be careful not to get my mom fired.” Res Res Res blah blah blah.

“But even if you meet Holly and get your pill without her parents knowing, she won’t be able to go to Glitterati without the casino tagging along,” Shane said. Kaylee jumped into his mind.

Elijah’s pulse picked up to match Shane’s excitement about Kaylee. “Exactly,” Elijah said. “The beautiful, blond, five-foot-four casino.”

“The beautiful, blond casino who packs a subcompact Beretta,” Shane said.

“You pack a Glock,” Elijah pointed out. In fact, he’d never understood Shane’s paranoia about the dangers of Vegas. But it was an attitude Shane seemed to share with the rest of his well-armed family. After a year, Elijah had begun to grow used to the idea of guns in his house—until Rob shot a hole in the ceiling last night.

“I need you to go with me and distract Kaylee,” Elijah explained. “It’s easy to get lost in Glitterati. All I need is five minutes to convince Holly to give me one pill.”

Shane drew the new string all the way up the neck of the guitar and threaded it into the tuning peg. He’d tried to ask Kaylee out dozens of times in the past year, but for some reason, just as he was about to open his mouth, he changed his mind. It wasn’t like him to freeze around the ladies. He should probably give up and stay away from her.

“I would do it for you,” Elijah said.

Shane knew this. Then Shane was thinking something very complicated about Elijah being a better brother to him than his own brother. He recalled the last time he and his brother had beaten the shit out of each other.

Elijah grabbed the guitar out of Shane’s hands to snap Shane out of it. Elijah had enough problems. He couldn’t handle Shane’s too. Not now.

“All right!” Shane said. “I’ll go with you to Glitterati and do my best to keep you out of trouble.” He took the guitar carefully out of Elijah’s hands and plucked the new string. “But you’re playing with fire.” His voice switched to a spot-on imitation of his dad impersonating Ol’ Blue Eyes. “Thank you very much. Here’s another one for my good friend Elijah Brown, who’s in a world of hurt.” He strummed the opening of “Someone to Watch Over Me.”

6

“Do you feel okay, kiddo?” Holly’s dad asked her. “You missed a cue or two. You never miss a cue.”

Holly shrank back against the velvet couch that had seen the rise and fall of more than one Vegas showbiz career. She’d spent so much time in this dressing room that the couch seemed like her second home—until her dad questioned her about the night’s performance. She didn’t want to get Elijah in trouble.

Before she could think of an excuse for zoning out during the act, her mom swept in from behind a battered Japanese screen in her billowing silk dressing gown. “Elijah Brown,” she said.

“What?” Holly and her dad both exclaimed.

“Elijah Brown was in the audience,” her mom told her dad, “shining a mirror in Holly’s eyes to distract her.” She turned to Holly. “I can see out of that box, you know.”

Looming closer over Holly on the couch, her dad flexed his fingers and said through his teeth, “I’ll kill that little shit.”

“Dad!” Holly protested.

“Peter.” Holly’s mom rebuffed him without taking her eyes off Holly. Sliding onto the couch, she squeezed Holly’s shoulders. “We told you a long time ago to stay away from that boy, for your own good. His mother is a dealer. My God. I’ve seen him hanging around the casino, doing menial labor.”

“It’s called carpentry, Mom.” Holly was leery of defending him when she was trying to stay on her parents’ good side. But their distaste for him made zero sense. After they’d gotten so upset when he’d asked her to the ninth-grade prom, she’d expected them to turn snobby about her other friends too, but they hadn’t. Their snobbery was reserved for Elijah only. And she couldn’t stand to hear them talk about him like that. “He just graduated from UNLV like m—”

“What if you made a mistake one night and got stuck with him?” her mom wailed, as if Holly had just revealed a grand plan to seduce Elijah and bear his children. “You have to look out for yourself better than that. Your father and I won’t be around to take care of you forever. What was wrong with that nice policeman you went out with?”