The Erotic Mind-Control Story Archive

There were three of us already in the car when I drove to the University’s Nonlinear Physics Building to pick up Susan, and when she saw us pull up she dragged me out of the driver’s seat to talk privately.

“Laura, you said we’d be going out to talk,” she hissed at me, and twisted the strap of her bag in her hands.

“We are,” I said. “But you’ve earned yourself some drinks to relax, and it’d be unfair if you were the only one getting drunk, so: friends.”

“I can’t talk about... you know... in front of them.”

“Sure you can. Rachel there”—a nod at the petite redhead riding shotgun—“is in the business, and Claire”—a nod at the brunette talking Rachel’s ear off from the back—“is, um, a subcontractor of sorts.”

“Then how come I don’t already know them?”

“Well, ’cause Rachel keeps her head down and her nose clean, and Claire, for, uh, good and sufficient reasons. See, clearly they can keep a secret.” Actually, I was kinda taking a risk introducing my ‘subcontractor’ to an actual coworker, since neurotypicals tend not to appreciate people smearing sentient memes all over the place, which was basically what I hired Claire to do; but I figured I could count on Susan’s personal reservoir of anxiety to paper over a multitude of sins on the rest of our parts. Besides, this was the first Friday in months that I hadn’t been nursing a colossal headache, or bruised ribs, or—worst of all—Susan’s little workplace romance, and having Claire’s chipper personality along was a must.

“I don’t know...” She had the strap of her bag wrapped around her forearm now and was still working it with one hand.

“It’ll be fine.”

She shot me a disgusted look. “You only say that because you don’t even bother trying to keep your personal life and the job separate.”

This stupid evening is my personal life for the last two months, I managed not to say, and hazarded a smile. “My power is gratuitously ignoring what other people think I should do. It works out.” She chuckled a little at that and let the tight loop of leather slip off her arm. That was better. “Come on.” I pulled the door open and Claire obligingly scootched over. “Susan Muñoz, Claire Sumner, Rachel Wade, Susan Muñoz.”

“My pleasure,” said Rachel, politely.

Claire, cheerfully oblivious: “So, how do you like being a superhero?”

By the time we’d found a parking spot and walked to the nightclub Susan had calmed down a bit—Rachel doing her best to make her feel comfortable in the car, me leaning on Claire to shut the hell up. It was hardly perfect, but it got us to Empire State without Susan flinging herself bodily onto the sidewalk, which was about all I had hoped for. Get her in the door and we were good.

Getting in the door looked like more of a problem. There was a lineup along most of the block and they were to a one better dressed and richer-looking than us. Susan wasn’t that bad—she was in a nice blue dress that showed off her figure well (I had politely not commented on the fact that she’d worn it to three of her last five dates; I suspected she only had the two decent outfits). I couldn’t really speak anyways; my dressy clothes amounted to my good black pants, my second-best blouse (the best was getting bloodstains laundered out, don’t ask) and my non-steel-toed shoes. Meanwhile, I’d told Claire over and over again that we were going to an upscale joint, and she’d still shown up wearing jeans, sneakers, and her damn “memetic hazard” tee.

But it was all ok, because our ace was striding confidently to the door. Rachel’s dress (red, inevitably) was a reasonable modest number, and her hair and makeup were done in the quick, sketchy manner of someone who understands how but doesn’t usually bother; nothing at all to stand out against the mob of pretty young things outside the club. But as she’d noted when I picked her up, the way she looked in the car was just a baseline to save her some effort at the actual club.

As I followed her, her figure started squirming unpleasantly in my eyeballs.

“Hello!” said Rachel to the bouncer, in a cheery voice with a side of boxing my ears. “You’re going to let me and my friends in.”

The bouncer looked her up and down—I have no idea what he was looking at, or indeed what he’d just heard. But after a moment he smiled and said “Of course, Ms Wade. You and your —” and here he looked at the rest of us and hesitated: me, squinting painfully at the blank brick wall a few feet to their left; Susan, a few paces back, gaping in incomprehension; Claire, in her tee and jeans, standing there with the bland indifference of the totally socially graceless.

“They’re with me,” said Rachel, loudly, and I tanked through the earache. The bouncer abruptly nodded and pulled the door open. We all filed in—Rachel pacifying the unruly line with a look—and Susan grabbed my arm as we started to descend to the club floor.

“What the hell just happened,” she asked, sharp and nervous.

“Um, Rachel got us into the club.”

“How?” She looked genuinely freaked out. “You know I’m not you, you can be friends with all these people with freaky powers —”

“You have freaky powers.”

Susan snapped her head around frantically. There was nobody nearby—we’d stopped on the landing halfway down the stairs—and in any case the music filtering up from the floor was more than enough to drown out our conversation. She leaned in to hiss right to my ear anyways. “Don’t say that out loud and you know what I mean!”

I sighed. “All right. Rachel is a friend of mine from way back. Yes, she has some kind of crazy seduction ability. You haven’t heard of her because she behaves because she doesn’t want to get in the shit. To the best of my knowledge, she’s never done anything more immoral with it than cutting lines at a club. She —” someone wandered up the stairs and I paused, more for the sake of Susan’s anxiety than any worry that a dude who was already transparently tanked at 7 PM was going to pay attention to us—“she is entirely trustworthy and” I rolled my eyes “I will be around at all times to make sure nothing bad happens. OK?”

“All right,” mumbled Susan, uncertainly.

“Come on,” I said, and dragged her down the stairs. Claire waved at us from a table at the edge of the floor; Rachel had already snagged a round of beers for it.

“What were you up to?” asked Claire.

“Girl talk,” I said.

“Oh, ok. Wait, hey!” said Claire. “I’m a girl!”

We made it through the entire first round without Claire driving Susan screaming out of the club, which counted as a victory in my books. We actually ended up on the subject of my drinking, of all things; I suppose Susan had never seen me drink alcohol before.

“What’s the point?” she asked.

“Well, it tastes good and helps me feel at home.”

“You didn’t drink on any of our dates.”

“That’s ’cause I was paying my own way then. Booze is too expensive to just get on a whim.”

“Who’s paying for —” began Susan, but Claire cut in.

“You two are dating? Oh, that’s so cute.” She clapped her hands together excitedly.

Susan stiffened like she’d been slapped and I sighed. “No, we are not dating. I am going out on dates with with her, yes, but it’s a long story and no, you don’t get to hear it.”

“Honey trap for a supervillain who’s into lesbians?” asked Claire, anyways.

“Yeah, sure. Run with that.”

Rachel, meanwhile, was glancing from me to the rigid, almost trembling Susan and back again, and abruptly said “come on, Claire, let’s go dancing.” Thank God someone at this table could pick up on the obvious.

“I don’t dance —” started Claire, but Rachel grabbed her by the shoulder and hauled her away from the table.

Susan slumped in her chair. “This was a bad idea,” she moaned.

“You say that every damn time I go somewhere with you, and you always end up having a good time.”

“Only ’cause of the booze,” muttered Susan, and then stared at her half-full beer glass, and then downed it in one convulsive go.

“That’s the spirit,” I said, callously encouraging intoxication amongst the alcohol-metabolizing populace.

“But even if your friends are ok, that’s not the point. We can’t keep doing this.”

“Damn right,” I said, maybe a little more forcefully than I intended. Susan looked like she was going to cry. Christ but she was wound up tonight. “Look,” I said, more gently, “all relationships are built on trust, right? At some point, you just have to trust the other person. That he really cares about you, that he’ll put in the effort for you, that he’ll, um, not mind-control you the moment my back is turned.”

“I met him because he tried to mind-control me, like, seven times.”

“No, you met him at that university bash and hit it off. Then you met in the business, and then he tried all the hypno-crap, because he liked you and he has all the social confidence of —” you “— Claire over there.”

We both glanced over to the main floor, where a wide gap had developed around Claire, who was shouting something to Rachel while “dancing” like she’d spontaneously developed some significant motor dysfunction. OK, confidence wasn’t really her problem. Susan still got my point.

“I don’t know,” she mumbled, rolling her empty glass around in her hands.

I took a minute to respond; a combination of exasperation, desire to come up with the right words to convince Susan to move forward, and simple distraction. There weren’t a lot of people on the dance floor, so I had a clear view all the way to Claire trying to dance with some poor dude and then immediately clock him with her elbow. Rachel dragged her off the floor right quick after that.

“Look,” I said. “You like him. You enjoy spending time with him. You want in his fucking pants. I am going to draw the line before the last of those, so either you stop wasting your time, and his time, and my time, or you suck it up and go on a date unchaperoned, OK?”

Susan gave me a plaintive look. I sighed and shoved my half-finished beer over to her. She took another moreose drag. “I know, I know, it’s just...”

“Hard, I know,” I said, with all the sympathy I could muster. The closest thing I’d had to a date in the last six months had been this damn business with Susan and Franz; the amount of sympathy I could muster was strictly limited. “But, um, nothing ventured, nothing gained.”

“You’re not the one dating a mind-controlling—why yes Laura I do think the Knights will go all the way this season.” I looked behind me. Claire and Rachel were meandering back to the table with another stick of drinks.

They pretty evidently weren’t listening: Claire was in full lecture mode. “...So after that it kinda became a thing for the whole army pretty quick, and then they folded the Army of the Valley back into the Army of Northern Virginia and then cycled Longstreet’s Corps out to Tennessee and basically spread it over the whole Confederate Army.”

“Come on. They didn’t have memes in the 1850s.”

Claire snorted. “1860s, thank you, and of course they did. They didn’t have sentient memetic entities—that we know of—but they had memes. ‘Oh my God lay me down’ qualifies by any standard you want.”

“OK, fine, sure. Then why are you all over this thing?”

“Well, cause it’s fun, for starters. Hear a good joke? ‘Oh my God lay me down.’ Superpowered fight in the middle of town? ‘Oh my God lay me down.’ Works for everything, that’s why it spread so fast. And also cause it’s a good project. I mean, if those guys over at Penn can try to clone themselves a dodo out of, what, two skeletons and a feather, then I can try to resurrect a dead meme.”

Rachel shook her head. “You are something else.”

“Hey, it’s just think it’s a really cool thing, with the blacklight saint flying the pottery and hey the dodo thing is neat and on the sigma eight ways by the carpenter and the sack and it would be fun to talk to my cousin and purple lamedh overcame an arch.” She thought for a second, then rolled her eyes. “You can’t talk to it, it’s not complicated enough to be sentient. Jeez.”

“Who are you talking to? Wait, are you talking to Blacklight? Did you just whack me?”

“Oh, yeah, sorry. Got kinda distracted there.”

I turned back to Susan and rolled my eyes. “Your dark and sinister secret is safe.”

“Secret?” asked Claire, chirpily. Rachel whacked her lightly on the back of the head.

Well, Susan wasn’t going to keep talking about her love life with my friends back, which was fine with me—there’s only so many ways you can say “suck it up” before the conversation stalls out and dies. I turned to Rachel instead. “Thanks for the drinks.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Damn straight I am. You owe me after last week.”

“Last week? What happened last week?”

“Your asshole phone call.”

“Oh, right,” said Rachel, and giggled. “I’d forgotten about that. The rest of the weekend kind of drove it out of my mind.”

“Not helping,” I growled.

“OK, yes, it was rude, but I had to get the phone away from him. You see, um—” She was actually blushing. That was new.

“What exactly is more embarrassing than calling me mid-sex?”

“Look, it was his birthday, and I kinda decided to give him a mind-blowing and, um, kinda sorta non-consensual experience for a present. He, um, tried to phone you for help.”

“And you sat on his face and took the phone from him.”

“...Basically.”

“Lord. You two are screwed up.”

“Maybe a little. But we all had a good time and I’m treating you to a nice night, right?”

I rolled my eyes. But whatever, Rachel was right; in the long run of things, unsolicited sex line calls were practically freebies. And the booze was tasty.

Across the table, Claire was trying to wear down Susan’s intransigence. “OK, if you won’t tell me I’ll guess! How’s that?”

“No.”

“Mindwipe! ...Starlight!” Susan’s poker face was good, when she needed it. “...Storm Crow! ...Thunderstrike!”

“He’s a guy.”

“Aha, so you admit your superhero identity is female!”

“Claire, for the love of God, knock it off,” I said.

“Femme Fatale!”

“She’s in the shit for kidnapping you—you know what, forget it. We’re getting more drinks.” I dragged Claire away from the table again.

“Wait —” started Susan, looking from me to Rachel.

“Crunch time,” I called over my shoulder as I walked to the bar.

Claire and I loitered by the bar for a little while, drinking cocktails—I got the fanciest, fruitiest one on the menu, on the grounds that I was treating it as a smoothie anyways—and fending off drunks. Claire eventually adopted the tactic of snuggling up to me and proclaiming that we were already in a relationship, thank you very much, which of course didn’t actually discourage any of the assholes in the slightest. But it gave her something to do while I watched Rachel and Susan from across the room.

Susan had edged away from Rachel once I left, and kept shooting panicky glances to me and Claire. I shook my head every time she tried to get up and eventually she got the hint and turned to Rachel, who’d been waiting with an impressive lack of rancour, given the way Susan had been behaving around her. I couldn’t hear anything, but I could guess what was happening:

Susan: Please don’t eat my soul, evil succubus!

Rachel: I have a boyfriend. And am straight.

Susan: Please don’t feed my soul to your incubus mate, evil succubus!

...Maybe not quite like that. But there was definitely quite a lot of back and forth with Rachel making slow calming gestures, with her hands visible at all times, while Susan sat ramrod straight and none-too-subtly avoided skin contact. Finally Rachel threw up her hands and looked at me as if to say See what I have to work with?. I gave her a nod. A moment later her figure wobbled unpleasantly in my sight, and, as Susan sat gaping, she said something. Susan slowly, deliberately, reached up to touch her nose with the palm of her hand.

Rachel turned it off immediately. Susan sat there, hyperventilating, her hand trembling in front of her face. But after a moment, she lowered her hand, swallowed, and said something to Rachel, who smiled. I smiled too: Lord knows this was nothing like the hassle I was going to have getting her alone with Franz, but at least I would be able to stop juggling the cabbage, the goat, and the wolf this particular evening. I turned back to Claire, who was still clinging to my arm.

“— already told you, we’re a couple! Buzz off!”

“Yes, sure, a couple, definitely,” I said, and death-glared the barfly away. His place was quickly taken by another, who at least seemed uneager to jump in where his predecessor had left off. There really weren’t a lot of women at the bar; us two, another a few feet down, a fourth a bit further past her, each with their own little clump of asshole suitors. Maybe the club was always like this? I hadn’t been here often. But there were a bunch of women here; they just all seemed to be milling around the booths on the far side of the room.

“Come on, Claire,” I said, and we both took off from the bar. The last of of the douchebags started following us but I managed to glare him away too. Why wasn’t I wearing my steel-toed shoes? Asshole deserved a good shin-kicking at the very least. “OK, Claire, the old ‘sorry, already taken’ trick isn’t exactly the most feminist to begin with, but whatever; it just works a lot better when you’re not trying to use lesbianism to discourage a bunch of drunk, horny jackasses.”

“Yeah, OK, fine.”

“So we all friends now?” I called out as we approached the table again.

“That was needlessly cruel,” said Rachel.

“What are you on her side for?”

“Susan’s one big ball of anxiety and you left her here alone with an evil mind-controlling seductress.”

“What? But you—she—you—fine, whatever.” I rubbed my temples. “Gang up on me for trying to help, why don’t you.”

“We will,” said Claire, and stuck out her tongue at me.

“I swear to God, the next time somebody mind-rays the town and turns you all into drones, I’m going to point and laugh and take pictures.”

I didn’t mean it, of course. The fact that it sometimes seems like I’m holding the whole damn town together on my lonesome is always exhausting, usually frustrating and occasionally infuriating, but what can I really do? I can’t just not act. Case in point: by about the fourth round of drinks the movement of female patrons over to the far side of the club was too obvious even for my desperate need for a night off to overcome. “Why, God, why,” I mumbled, pulling my hair in melodramatic distraction. “Just a fucking night out with my friends! That’s all I fucking want!”

“Huh?” asked Claire, too buzzed to figure out what I meant. Rachel just sipped her drink, and Susan, buzzed or not, gave me a sharp look.

“We in business, Laura?” she asked.

“Oh, God, probably,” I moaned. “Far wall. Booth in the middle—don’t fucking look, Claire,” I said, as she started to spin her chair around to gawp at the booth swarming with nubile, underclothed young clubgoers. Susan gave it a more circumspect, professional glance.

“Yeah, that looks weird,” agreed Susan. “But you sure?”

“No, just a really bad feeling. I mean, why would I go out drinking if some fucking asshole didn’t show up with some fucking mind-ray? What would the fucking odds of that —”

“Laura,” said Susan, firmly. “We’re on the clock now.” Maybe that’s how I’d deal with this whole Franz thing; convince her it was work, and she’d get all decisive and forget to be anxious.

“Three of them,” said Rachel, in a casual tone, without looking away from the far side of the club. “Men, in the back, behind all the zombies. One of them’s got… some kind of metal thing, he’s holding.”

“We can handle this,” said Susan, a little stiffly. “And it’s ‘victims in need of rescue’, not ‘zombies’.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I said. “We can call this in and ignore it, or we can use the help we’ve got. It’s not like I’ve never gotten backup from Rachel or Claire before. They’re fine.” As I spoke a woman in a tight white tank top and minishorts came from the stairs into the club, blinked, and without looking around made a beeline for the booth.

“Yeah, that ain’t natural,” said Rachel, still doing a drunkenly exaggerated act of nonchalance as she watched the floor. “Guy on the right. Pointed the tube at her right when she got whammied. I’m guessing that’s it.”

“OK, so what do we do?” I asked. No, wait, I was sober, everyone else was at least three drinks down. I was in charge. “So, uh, we need to wreck that thing. Susan, you up for it?”

“I am totally up for it,” said Susan, at the same moment as Claire drunkenly gushed “if you’re going to blow it up, you must be Thunderstrike. QED.”

“Claire,” I said. “All right. I take point. Claire, you leave Susan alone and back me up. Rachel, you too. I’m going to go for the device. The moment I get it clear, or make him pull it out to shoot me, Susan, you blast it, OK?”

“Not where everyone can see my face.”

Right. “OK, Rachel, you’re going to disguise the fuck out of Susan before shit goes down.”

“She can do that?” said Susan and Claire, together.

“Yes, she can. Alright, Susan, you got this? Rachel, you got this? Claire, you got this?” A round of more or less giddy, drunken nods. “Let’s do this.”

Rachel turned to Susan and furrowed her brow. Susan swirled painfully before I could look away from her, and Claire’s jaw dropped, so I guess Rachel was successfully working her mojo. I grabbed Claire and strode across the club floor.

As I got closer I saw that the milling herd of women—and Christ but Rachel was right, they looked a lot like zombies, slack-jawed and glassy eyed—were pawing each other and making out in a pretty crude manner. Because of course they were. Franz’s attempts to “flirt” with Susan were looking practically mature. “Wait here,” I said to Claire, as we hit the edge of the mob. Then I grabbed a zombie by the shoulder—victim! victim!—and shoved her out of the way.

In the booth were three men, young, beefy, with the slack-jawed look of people who are at that very moment receiving under-the-table blowjobs. Because of course they were. This job is nothing but the worst people from morning to night. The one on the right had his hand on the table, loosely holding a weird, mechanical rod. I grabbed for it and then yelled—the thing stung like a cattle prod. The guy noticed, said “hey,” in a distracted, pre-orgasmic kind of way, and raised it, his wobbly arm taking aim at my face.

“Backup!” I shouted, and grabbed his wrist. The rod made a soft wumph but I had it aimed at the ceiling. He stood up—a thud and a groan from under the table—and grabbed my hand with his other hand.

Above me, the florescent panels started to flow and dim.

Throughout the club, light slid sideways from all directions towards Susan. She had walked out into the centre of the room, one arm upraised, and the light swirled slowly around it in blatant contravention of everything anyone had ever said about, eg, photons. The room went dark as every overhead light turned into a streamer pouring towards Susan, walking forward, glowing with power. Wisp and tatters of light flickered lazily around her body while her left hand turned into a blinding-bright vortex of energy, hungrily devouring the overhead fluorescents and the multicoloured dance floor lights and the screens of people’s cell phones. The entire club watched her—it was hard not to. I had seen it all before, several times, and was wrestling with a man for some kind of horrible mind-ray device, and looking at Susan hurt because of the camouflage Rachel was thinking at her, and I still glanced over my shoulder at the spectacle. She levelled her arm, pointed her fist at us, and I realized in a bit of a panic that I was mostly blocking her shot at the rod; before I could do anything about it, Susan just blasted the guy right in the face.

The guy yelled and fell back into the vinyl booth cushions, and the rod went flying. “Fuck!” I shouted, made a clumsy, failed grab at it, spinning and half falling over onto the table in the process. It bounced off a zombie, hit the floor, slid through into darkness somewhere behind Claire. “Claire!” I yelled, pushing myself off the table. Susan was calmly raising her arm up again, the maelstrom undiminished by the tiny amount of power it had taken to knock the guy flying. Claire tire herself away from the sight and turned towards me. “It’s on the ground! Get it!”

Claire fumbled in the dark for a moment. I rushed through the crowd of zombies—victims, dammit—and had almost reached her when she said “Found it! It’s, uh, uh, whoa.” She stood up and shot a bartender.

Fuck fuck fuck. Of course the rod wasn’t electrified, the guy had been holding it all night. What I’d felt was it trying to take me over and turn me into a horny, rapey asshole like the guys in the booth. It was the fucking One Ring of mind control paraphernalia. I had to save Claire.

Which in this case meant laying into her pretty hard. I had no idea if the bartender was leaping the bar and rushing over to defend her or if the rod only worked for sex, but I figured it was best to not wait. I said “sorry,” gut-punched Claire, and grabbed the rod from her limp fingers before she even finished doubling over, wheezing. It burned in my hand something awful, but I was the only one who could safely get rid of it. As usual. I hate my job.

“Susan!” I shouted, through tears and gritted teeth. “Shoot it!” Susan turned, slowly, gracefully, like some kind of goddess of fire—the pain in my upraised hand was so much I almost didn’t notice Rachel’s disguise still shimmering around her—and unloaded the entire fistful of light into the rod.

The rod was blasted out of my hand so hard my whole arm stung, and hit the wall behind me practically molten. The overheads seemed to snap back on as Susan stopped sucking down every flicker of light in the room, and then turned off for real as the sprinklers started dousing the smouldering remains of the rod. I threw my arm around Claire and helped her back up—she seemed pretty woozy from holding the rod, I am sure it was the aftereffects of the rod and not her best friend sucker-punching her that did it. The zombies and the bartender seemed woozy too, but conscious at least, so hopefully there wouldn’t be any lasting effects. I looked around at the shocked, confused, and wet clubgoers around me. I had no idea what to say.

“Thanks very much!” said Rachel, walking only a little unsteadily over to the rest of us, waving and flashing her winning smile. “We’ll be here all week. Be sure to tip your servers.”

That’d do. The four of us ran for the staff exit.

I was the designated driver, obviously. I’d been matching the rest of the group for drinks, but I was cold stone sober and once my hand stopped stinging I had no problem driving everyone home. Which is why when I say crashing the car was not my fault, you should believe me. It was the fault of... well, basically everyone else in the car, really, but not mine.

It was Claire who started it. She’d bounced back from getting controlled by the rod pretty quick, and I’d made her promise to come with me and Susan to Base Camp in the morning for debriefing so we could start to figure out what this damn rod portended. Claire seemed pretty chuffed about getting to visit Base Camp, and that and the booze had gotten her right back into full go-ahead mode.

Now that we were in the relative privacy of the car, she’d started pestering Susan to show off her party trick (“Knew you were Starlight! Said so all along!”) and when Susan, already starting to get anxious again that Claire knew who she was, demurred, I shut that down on the grounds that I needed to see to drive. Claire, of course, just turned her attention to Rachel up in the passenger seat. Rachel had been drunk enough to go along. “Blonde hair now! Longer! Longer!” I couldn’t see any changes, of course, but it made looking out the right side of the car unpleasant since I had to look past Rachel’s eyestrain-inducing form to do so. “Oh! Can you do taller? Yeah! And bigger boobs!”

After about five minutes of that, Susan had chimed in and suggested impressions. “How ’bout Ilana Halleck? Can you do her?”

“The who?”

“Actress, in... what’cha’m’call’it, that movie last year. The one with the guy, and he falls in love with her, and, and, you know, that one.”

“Oh, right, sure. Here goes.” I’m not sure Rachel had actually figured out who Ilana Halleck was, but apparently the accuracy of her “impression” was enough for Claire and Susan’s sossed perceptions, because they both oohed.

“Wow! Can you do the, the, the Queen?”

Rachel gave Susan a confused look. “You think Queen Mary is sexy?”

“No, she’s like 80!”

“Then nope.”

“Oh.” Susan sounded disappointed. “Well, OK... uh, you said you could do other people?”

“Yeah... tha’s what I was just doing.”

“Do Laura!”

“Oh, OK,” said Rachel, and screwed up her face one more time. I’ll admit I glanced over but of course Rachel just looked like Rachel, plus the inevitable stab of pain behind my eyes.

“I’m touched you think I’m sexy,” I said dryly, at the same time as Claire was oohing at the likeness again, but Susan’s mind was elsewhere.

“No, I mean, make Laura look like somebody. Like you did with me, but on her, so I can see?”

“Wait, that’s not a good idea,” I said.

“Oh, sure,” said Rachel. “It’s tougher but sure.”

“No, don’t do it,” I said.

“Who do you want?” said Rachel.

“Don’t,” I said.

“Oooh, make her look like you,” said Claire.

“Stop,” I said.

“Right,” said Rachel, and then grunted like she’d been punched, and then I grunted like I’d been punched because the sight of my own hands on the steering wheel was causing me pain. I instinctively jerked both hands out of my line of sight and shut my eyes, which helped the headache a bit but of course did nothing for my driving. That was when the car went off the road and clipped the light pole. When the airbag got out of my face there was a policeman walking over from the patrol car parked not ten meters away, the pain was gone, and Rachel was looking appalled.

“Never do that again,” I shouted at her. Rachel whimpered and shrank into her seat a little. I wasn’t exactly sympathetic. The cop came up to the window and I rolled it down. “Good evening, officer.”

“Is everyone all right?” he asked, glancing into the car.

“I have a diagnosed biochemical abnormality,” I said, preemptively, “and your breathalyzer test is not going to be accurate.”

The cop took my explanation for defensiveness. “Ma’am, could you come with me, please.”

I got out. “Seriously, I’m entirely sober and your device is not going to accurately reflect that.”

“Blow, ma’am.”

The test definitely wasn’t accurate: I’d only had three drinks but I blew 0.087, which was well past ‘spectacularly fatal’ and into ‘pickled for posterity’. I guess that week my system was dumping chemicals it didn’t like through my lungs. The cop was horrified. “Um, ma’am, you need to get to —”

“I told you, I’m fine, it’s diagnosed.” I rifled through my wallet and picked out my license and medical papers—it’s generally easier just to keep those on hand, I’ve found. The cop took them.

“Laura Monroe, with, uh, ‘neuropsychic autarky’?”

OK, I did like that euphemism. Sounds much classier than ‘doesn’t get drunk’. On the other hand, it sometimes takes some explaining. “It means I don’t get drunk,” I explained.

“Then why the crash?”

“My friends who are drunk distracted me.”

He walked over to the car. “You all all right in there?”

“We’re fine, ossifer,” said Rachel. She’d perked back up in the thirty seconds I’d been out of the car. “I can handle this.”

Oh shit. “Please don’t help, Rachel.”

“We’re all fine, you can let us go on our way.” She scrunched her face up for the last; I felt nothing and I doubted the cop did either. Of course she’d only have run out of juice after making me crash the car.

“Please stop helping.”

“You should listen to your friend here,” agreed the cop.

“No, I’ve this. Let us go.” The cop didn’t even blink. Rachel looked confused and then insulted. “What are you, gay or something?”

Oh God. “Rachel, just leave it.” Claire and Susan were giggling in the back.

“No, I can do gay. It’s just a bit harder.” She thought about what she said and then tittered. Claire’s laughter, by contrast, now sounded like she was having trouble breathing.

“Rachel, stop it —” I said, but she’d already locked eyes with the severely unimpressed cop and started making a really intent face. I got this tiny feeling in the base of my skull—not even pain, just this weird little fluttery sensation—and then Rachel’s eyes went wide and she threw up all over the driver’s seat.

There was a moment of shocked silence, and then Susan asked “Does this call for an ‘oh my God lay me down’?”

I turned back to the cop and spoke over Claire’s hysterics. “Never mind, you’ve sold me. Let’s all go to the drunk tank and sleep it off.”