Free The Replacement by Brenna Yovanoff Page A

shirt. I crossed the room and started going through my dresser. Usually, sleeping all day would be enough to get rid of the spins, but every time I turned my head, the room seemed to execute a lazy half turn, and I had to keep my hand on top of the dresser for balance.
    "Mackie?"
    When I glanced over my shoulder, Emma was standing in the doorway watching me. She was wearing sweats, and her hair was twisted into its customary knot. It looked soft and messy, like it had since we were kids. She didn't go out much, and it looked like she was all set for a night of reading.
    I closed the drawer and turned to face her. "You can come in, you know."
    She took a couple steps, then stopped again.
    "Janice--my lab partner, Janice--she gave me something," she said. She was holding a paper bag. "She said it was a special kind of . . . holistic extract." The sound of her voice was weirdly shrill, like I was making her nervous. "She said--she just said it would be good for you." She crossed the room to my desk.
    "Thanks," I said, watching as she set the bag down and backed away. "Emma--"
    But she'd already turned and walked out of my room.
    I picked up the bag and opened it. Inside, there was a tiny bottle made of brown glass. It had a paper label, and someone had written: Most Beneficial Hawthorn. To drink.
    Instead of a cap or a cork, the bottle was sealed with wax. When I cracked the seal with my thumbnail, the odor of leaves was sharp, but it didn't smell spoiled or poisonous.
    I trusted Emma. All my life, she'd made it her mission to take care of me, to make sure I was okay. But drinking something unidentified was a very sketchy thing, and while I trusted Emma, I wasn't at all sure that I trusted Janice.
    But more insistent was the feeling that if something didn't change, if things just kept going on the same way they had been, I was going to wake up one day and not be able to get out of bed. Or, more likely, I was going to go to sleep and not wake up at all.
    I touched the mouth of the bottle, then licked the residue off the tip of my finger and waited. After a few minutes of rummaging through old homework assignments and laundry, I figured Janice's hippie voodoo hadn't killed me yet, so I took a good-sized drink and then another. It wasn't bad. It wasn't good , but it wasn't bad. It kind of tasted like Everclear and dirt.
    I put the empty bottle back in the bag and found a shirt with a collar and not too many wrinkles. I was pulling the shirt down over my head when I realized that I suddenly felt better--all-over better. I'd been exhausted for so long that I'd sort of forgotten I felt exhausted until I didn't anymore. I stretched and the muscles in my shoulders felt good, flexing restlessly.
    In the bathroom, I stood in front of the mirror. My eyes were still dark but not freakish. They were just normal, black at the pupil and a deep, muddy brown in the iris. My skin was still pale, but it would be called "fair" instead of "terminal." I looked like a regular person, going out on a Saturday night. I looked normal.
    I went back into my room and studied the bottle. The label was plain, heavy paper, with nothing else written on it besides the mysterious notation Most Beneficial Hawthorn and the instruction to drink it. I knew that hawthorn was a low, thorny tree that grew out along the country roads, but the label gave no other indication about what the drink actually was.
    My head was cluttered with questions. What was it really, and how did it work? Was feeling better the same thing as a cure? Had Emma saved me? Even while my first instinct was to doubt it, I felt the grin spreading across my mouth. Huge, relieved. I hadn't felt this good in weeks. Months , maybe.
    I had a sudden, overwhelming urge to do something that took a lot of energy. I needed to jump around the room or laugh uncontrollably or find Emma and hug her until she started laughing too and we both couldn't breathe and had to sit down on the floor. I wanted to do