“You look good for a ghost,” he said through puffed lips.
“You look awful for a living person.” I could see why it would hurt him to shout. He was so bruised, he could have passed for the twin brother of an eggplant. “Though you don’t look bad for a corpse.”
Cheater nodded. “Exquisite corpse.”
“What?” Martin asked.
That was one piece of trivia I knew, since it involved some of my favorite artists. But I didn’t want to spoil Cheater’s fun, so I let him explain.
“Exquisite corpse is the name of a word game the surrealist painters played,” he said. “They’d write a phrase on a piece of paper and then—” He stopped and scrunched up his face in pain.
“Hurts to talk?” I asked.
He nodded again.
“Maybe you should let us do the talking.”
“Like Cyrano de Bergerac?” he asked.
He had me with that one. I was clueless. But I didn’t wait for an explanation. “So, you’re okay?” I asked.
“Yeah. I have a new understanding of some of the finer aspects of physics. Astronomy, too. I saw a lot more than stars. Constellations, at the very least. I think I might have also witnessed the big bang. Ouch.” He grabbed his face and groaned.
“You keep talking, I’m going to have to smack you,” Martin said.
Cheater grinned at him, which also seemed to hurt. “I miss the way you always kidded me. It reminds me—”
“I’m not kidding,” Martin said. “Give your face a rest. Trash has a lot to tell you.”
I described how I’d been abducted, and Martin told him about running away. Cheater tried to keep his mouth shut, but he couldn’t help interrupting us every minute or two to toss in some essential facts.
“Now what?” he asked when we were done.
“Not sure,” I said. “Hide out, think up a plan.”
“It better be a good plan. This disrupter is really bad news,” he said. “Are you going to stick around Philly?”
“Not sure about that, either,” I said. I was tired of hunching down and waiting for someone to shove me in a van or shoot me in the neck with another dart.
“I think we have to stay around,” Martin said. “That’s the only way we can find out what’s going on. The answer isn’t in Trenton. Or in New York. It’s here. Even if they can block your power, or maybe even all of our powers, this is where we need to be. This Bowdler guy sounds like someone who won’t give up until he gets what he wants. You can’t run from that.”
“Besides,” Cheater said, “I think Lucky is down the hall. And I’m pretty sure he’s in worse shape than I am.”
“You saw him here?” I asked.
“Just a little while ago,” Cheater said. “I just caught a glimpse, but the nurse called him ‘Dominic,’ and it sure looked like him.”
“Let’s check it out.”
Martin and I went down the hall and tried to find out about Lucky. The nurse at the desk wouldn’t tell us anything.
I was about to give up when Martin said to her, “You look familiar.”
He stared at her for a moment, then said, “Were you in Guys and Dolls last month?”
She beamed a huge smile at him. “Yes. At the community playhouse. You saw it?”
“You were marvelous. I went with my friend Dominic Calabrizi. He loves musicals even more than I do. You should sing a song for him when you have the chance.”
“I will. The poor boy. He’s been through so much.” She gulped, glanced around, and added, “I shouldn’t talk about the patients.”
“Of course.”
Martin turned away.
“That was amazing,” I said once we’d moved away from the desk.
“It’s no big deal.”
We went back to Cheater’s room. “Lucky’s definitely here.”
“I’ll see if I can learn anything,” Cheater said.
We talked a bit more, but I could tell Cheater was pretty tired. I figured he’d get more rest if we left. On my way out of the room, I paused and looked back. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I’m a quick healer. The human body is amazingly resilient. There was a book about a guy, Phineas Gauge, who survived getting a spike through his head. And I heard about this woman whose parachute didn’t open, but she survived her fall. There are even cases of spontaneous healing. Little kids can sometimes grow back a severed finger.”
“I’ll take that as a yes,” I said. He might have gotten stomped, but it hadn’t crushed his enthusiasm for weird facts.
“At least we can rule out brain damage,” Martin said after we’d left the hospital.