Peeps Read Online Free PDF

that going anyway?” she added.
    “What? The enforced celibacy? Just great. Loving it.”
    “Did you try the rubber band trick?”
    I held up my wrist. The Shrink had suggested I wear a rubber band there and ping myself with it every time I had a sexual thought. Negative reinforcement, like swatting your dog with a rolled-up newspaper.
    “Mmm. A bit raw, isn’t it?” she said.
    I glanced down at my wrist, which looked like I’d been wearing a razor-wire bracelet. “Evolution versus a rubber band. Which would you bet on?”
    She nodded sympathetically. “Shall we turn back to Sarah?”
    “Please. At least I know she really loved me; she almost killed me.” I stretched in the chair, my still-tender ribs creaking. “Here’s the funny thing, though. She was nested upstairs, with these big-ass windows looking out over the river. You could see Manhattan perfectly.”
    “What’s so strange about that, Cal?”
    I glanced away from her gaze, but the blank eyes of the dolls weren’t much better. Finally, I stared at the floor, where a tiny tumbleweed of dust was being sucked toward Dr. Prolix. Inescapably.
    “Sarah was in love with Manhattan. The streets, the parks, everything about it. She owned all these New York photo books, knew the histories of buildings. How could she stand to look at the skyline?” I glanced up at Dr. Prolix. “Could her anathema be, like, broken somehow?”
    The Shrink’s fingers steepled again as she shook her head. “Not broken, exactly. The anathema can work in mysterious ways. My patients and the legends both report similar obsessions. I believe your generation calls it stalking .”
    “Um, maybe. How do you mean?”
    “The anathema creates a great hatred for beloved things. But that doesn’t mean that the love itself is entirely extinguished.”
    I frowned. “But I thought that was the point. Getting you to reject your old life.”
    “Yes, but the human heart is a strange vessel. Love and hatred can exist side by side.” Dr. Prolix leaned back in her chair. “You’re nineteen, Cal. Haven’t you ever known someone rejected by a lover, who, consumed by rage and jealousy, never lets go? They look on from a distance, unseen but boiling inside. The emotion never seems to tire, this hatred mixed with intense obsession, even with a kind of twisted love.”
    “Uh, yeah. That would pretty much be stalking.” I nodded. “Kind of a fatal attraction thing?”
    “Yes, fatal is an apt word. It happens among the undead as well.”
    A little shiver went through me. Only the really old hunters use the word undead , but you have to admit it has a certain ring to it.
    “There are legends,” she said, “and modern case studies in my files. Some of the undead find a balancing point between the attraction of their old obsessions and the revulsion of the anathema. They live on this knife’s edge, always pushed and pulled.”
    “Hoboken,” I said softly. Or my sex life, for that matter.
    We were silent for a while, and I remembered Sarah’s face after the pills had taken effect. She’d gazed at me without terror. I wondered if Sarah had ever stalked me, watching from the darkness after disappearing from my life, wanting a last glimpse before her Manhattan anathema had driven her across the river.
    I cleared my throat. “Couldn’t that mean that Sarah might be more human than most peeps? After I gave her the pills, she wanted to see her Elvis doll . . . that is, the anathema I’d brought. She asked to see it.”
    Dr. Prolix raised an eyebrow. “Cal, you aren’t fantasizing that Sarah might recover completely, are you?”
    “Um . . . no?”
    “That you might one day get back together? That you could have a lover again? One your own age, whom you couldn’t infect, because she already carries the disease?”
    I swallowed and shook my head no, not wanting the lecture in Peeps 101 repeated to me: Full-blown peeps never come back.
    You can whack the parasite into submission with drugs,