Chapter 7: Eighty-Nine Degrees

The Glow Drop launch was in a glass atrium in SoHo with six hundred guests and a stage built for television.

I came as Nathaniel's guest, in a green dress I had bought for myself.

He walked beside me through the crowd with his hands in his pockets, and people looked at us and then looked at their drinks.

"Stay close," he murmured. "Trevor is here."

"I see him," I said. "Stand still. I'm watching."

Everyone was watching Madison.

She stood on the stage in a white gown with a bottle of Glow Drop in her hand, under a battery of hot white lights.

A thermometer on the display table read eighty-nine degrees.

I looked at it for a long time.

"Ladies and gentlemen," the host called, "tonight, a live reveal of the serum that will change your skin."

A young model sat down in a chair at the center of the stage.

She was nineteen, nervous, and beautiful, and she had been chosen to show the camera a glow.

Madison filled the dropper herself.

She smiled into six cameras and pressed the serum into the model's cheeks.

"It absorbs instantly," Madison said. "Look at that radiance."

I watched the model's face.

First she blinked, confused.

Then her hand flew to her cheek.

A moment later, she began to scream.

Red welts rose across both cheeks in front of six hundred people.

The cameras kept rolling.

For one long moment nobody in the atrium moved.

Then the model stumbled out of the chair with her hands on her face, and two staff members ran to her with towels.

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