The Immortal by Christopher Pike

in it. He disappeared into the night.
    The truck was a sad affair. It looked as if it had been driven underwater and taken a few years to arrive.
    The paint was peeling, the front bumper was ready to kiss the ground, and the tires could have been balloons painted with tread to pass for Michelins. But Pascal was delighted to see it, shaking his keys with excitement. He pointed to his back before he climbed inside the two-seater front compartment.
    "Bags of legumes —heavy," he said. "Need le camion —truck."
    So we lost Pascal then. He wanted to drive his camion, and no one wanted to go with him. As he sped away, Helen gave me a glance like it might not be a bad time for me to get lost as well. But the subtlety of it was deliberately lost on me, Tom being fair game and all. I was having too much fun, but maybe ll
    wouldn't have been such a bitch about it if the wine hadn't loosened my stride and my mouth. I knew I would pay for it the next day with a hangover and Helen's bad humor, but sometimes a little pain was a good investment. In fact, I felt like another bottle of wine. Tom looked at both of us, as if he was about to get in double trouble.
    "What would you ladies like to do now?" he asked.
    I think both of us would have liked to have sex with him, but we were too proper to say so. Helen continued to stare at me as if I might dematerialize under the power of her gaze. But I was a happy-go-lucky California babe.
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    "Let's go get drunk," I said.
    "You never get drunk," Helen protested. "You hate drunks. You hate Silk."
    "I am a young lithe female jam-filled with contradictions," I said.
    Tom laughed. "We're all going to hate ourselves in the morning, but I know a great bar buried in the center of the city. It's off the main alleyways, located a few stories up. You have to know exactly where it is and follow a winding route to find it. But the atmosphere is brilliant."
    "I think you use the word brilliant different from us," I said. "It's not smart, is it? It's more like bitchin', isn't it? I want to go there."
    "You should rest after that attack you had today," Helen said.
    I gave her a look. "I was not 'attacked.' I was 'rescued.' They are completely opposite things."
    We went to the bar. Tom had been right. It was buried deep in the city, off the beaten paths. The atmosphere was more subdued, the music low. We took a booth by the window, the north wind a caress on our sleeves. Helen was definitely not happy with me. While Tom and I ordered more wine, she asked for a Scotch and soda. She was going to try to drink me under the table. Did she think Tom would be impressed? I didn't know. I honestly didn't understand Helen at all, and I had grown up with her. Lately I had begun to think we weren't even friends. The fault wasn't with her alone, I realized, but with both of 54

    THE IMMORTAL
    us. We didn't look out for each other. I was always stealing her boys and she was always competing with me on issues of sheer stupidity. Oh well, I thought, if she won in the hangover department, she was welcome to it.
    I knew I hadn't been looking out for Helen the previous summer, that was for sure. It was good her parents had taken her to Greece, to get away from it all—whatever had caused her to do what she had to herself. To this day I still don't know all the details. Maybe I hadn't wanted to know. I got sick right after that. Helen had only returned from Greece the day I was released from the hospital.
    When we met that day, it was as if we were seeing each other for the first time. We both looked like hell.
    Our conversation started well enough in the bar with no name. It was more balanced, for a while. Helen even told a couple of obscene jokes, and Tom described what Oxford was like for a poor undergraduate on a scholarship. But Helen quickly had three Scotch and sodas in a row, then she was just blubbering.
    She started to talk about how awesome Tom's body was, how brilliant his ass was in his shorts,