Alex Van Helsing Voice of the Undead - By Jason Henderson Page 0,18
each other. The two halves of the room were very different—one was done up in bright colors, and Alex made out blurred stacks of manga next to the bed. That must be Minhi’s.
Vienna’s half of the room reminded him in a blink of a madhouse for some reason, but he only had a moment to look before she led him to a vanity mirror and sink.
He washed his hands and pried his right eye open, pinching his thumb and forefinger against his eyeball. “Okay,” he said. Next to him, Vienna was rooting through various bottles around the sink. “Argh!” Alex hissed as the contact swam away from his fingers and slipped clean under his eyelid.
He tried to pry his eye open once more. Through the pain he became aware that she was clearing her throat, leaning patiently against the sink. He pressed his face very close to the mirror, trying to see the thin edge of the contact against the red eyeball. “Here,” Vienna said. She took him by the shoulders and turned him toward her. “Open your eye. Hold it open.” He relented and did what she said.
“Turn your eye around,” she said, and he was struck again by the cadence and throaty quality of her accent, Torn jor aiyy arond. “You know, all around. Now look down.”
Her delicate thumb and forefinger, their colored nails somehow avoiding the tender flesh of his eyeball, came close and in one swift movement plucked the contact from his eye.
She smiled, holding out the contact, and placed it in the palm of his hand. Then she handed him the lens solution.
“Thank you,” he said, holding the contact. His eye was red and he brought the contact up, his face very close to the mirror. He couldn’t bear to put it back in. Not right away, anyway. “Gimme a second.”
Vienna clicked her tongue. “How long have you been wearing contacts?”
“A couple of months,” he said. “You?”
“About the same, but you seem to have a more complicated relationship with them.”
Alex had to laugh, careful not to drop the contact, which was swimming in a small puddle of solution in the palm of his hand.
“They may not be correctly fitted,” said Vienna.
“That or I’m just pathetic,” he said ruefully. He looked at her, drawn once more to the scarf around her neck. The décor that had said “madhouse” to him caught his good eye in the mirror and he turned around, looking at the walls on her side.
What had looked at first like a padded wall was in fact a wall of white sheets of paper with pencil sketches on them. He couldn’t make them out very well from across the room. “What is all that?”
“Those?” Vienna said, the way someone might say, this old thing? “Oh, they change out all the time. It’s whatever I’m working on.”
“For class?” Alex asked. Now he took the contact in his fingers and leaned in close to the mirror. He placed the contact back in his eye. He braced for a little bit of pain, since the eye was still sore, but swirled his eye around and the contact stuck.
“Not all of them,” she was saying.
After a moment Alex turned back and stepped closer to the wall over her bed. Indeed, they were pencil sketches, some of them clearly figure drawings for some art class or another, a few still lifes. But an entire two columns of sheets were broken up into squares, panels, and he caught images of characters with big eyes and spiky hair. “This is manga,” he said.
“They’re Minhi’s,” Vienna said when he looked at her.
“She drew these?”
“No, she does the stories, the plots. I’m working on the art.”
“You’re doing a manga together?” He smiled, studying the characters. Now he could see the similarity—the pencil strokes in the subway stations and form of the hands of the characters did indeed look to be from the same creator as the more classical images. “That’s really seriously cool.”
He blinked again and she came close, peering at his eye. “It’s very red. Do you need to just take it out for the day?”
“I lost my glasses,” Alex said. “And I really like to see.” She was very close.
Someone cleared her throat and Alex looked at Minhi, who had come into the room. Minhi waved. “Get it all worked out?”
Alex nodded vigorously. “Oh, yeah, I’ll live.”
“Then you need to get out of here before we all get kicked out,” Minhi said. “Come on, the coast is clear.”