Mythos (The Descendants, #1)

by Vrinda Pendred

  * * *

  Itzy shook herself before she could go back down that path. It never led anywhere good.

  She needed someone - someone who would listen, someone who would get it, who would comfort her.

  With a stab of longing, she realised the person she really wanted was Ash. He had always been there for her. When her mother was admitted to the hospital the year before, after falling down the stairs in one of her stupors, he’d been the one to take Itzy to see her. He came back home with her and stayed with her all night. Even though they had been dating for almost two years by that point, and even though he had just turned seventeen and she was sixteen and there had been no parents around to tell them what they couldn’t do, he hadn’t taken advantage of the situation.

  But that was all over, and she had no one to blame but herself.

  Itzy peeled herself off the bed and hunched down on the carpet. It was beige and hideous and covered with a rug showing what her father once told her was a mandala. It was something they drew in places like India and Tibet. The Tibetan monks would spend months creating beautiful intricate mandalas out of coloured sand, a few painstaking grains at a time. When the pictures were completed, the monks would sweep their hands through them and destroy them.

  It was meant to teach them that nothing was forever, so there was no point in getting too attached; you would only hurt for it later. She’d never understood the point of it, until now.

  Itzy picked up her much-abused mobile phone and inspected it for damage. It had survived, this time. Thin lines spidered across the screen from all the other times she had thrown the phone in anger. She sometimes got like that, without knowing why and without seeing it coming first. It was those times when she most felt like her father’s daughter.

  There was only one person Itzy could ring.

  Itzy pressed a button on the touch-screen and put the phone to her ear. It rang once, twice, three times, before a cheerful voice answered.

  ‘Hey, Itzy, you alright?’

  ‘…Devon….’ The words got all jumbled up in her head. She could see the letters swarming in front of her like a plague of wasps, but she couldn’t make sense of them. They refused to connect, to make a sentence.

  Her best friend could tell something was wrong. ‘Itz, what is it?’ she asked, the cheer fading from her voice.

  ‘My dad….’

  That was all she needed to say.

  ‘I’ll be right round,’ Devon said, and she hung up without saying goodbye.

  THREE

  ‘I can’t believe he did that,’ Devon said.

  They were both in Itzy’s bedroom now. It was what estate agents would have called a ‘good-sized room’, which meant it wasn’t exactly a cupboard, but it wasn’t very big either, and all the posters crammed wherever there was space only made it feel smaller.

  But it had always been the one place that was hers. It was where she could go to be with herself, to implode, as she thought of it. It was where she could hide.

  Itzy didn’t like blank space - it felt lonely - so she had covered every inch of her room in imagery, words and the loud colour she never quite managed to exhibit in her own appearance.

  On the walls were arty black and white photographs of bands and singers Itzy loved; drawings Ash had done of manga-style monsters opening their jaws and gaping stupidly out of the paper; quotations from famous writers that Itzy had printed in oversized coloured fonts so no one could miss their twisted and perhaps misguided approaches to optimism; a large poster board covered in photographs of Devon and Itzy posing in a variety of outfits and fancy dress costumes, their faces moulded into faux-model expressions.

  When she ran out of walls, she’d turned to the ceiling. Up there were glow-in-the-dark stars and posters of planets, nebulae, places she often went to in her fantasies. All this was bordered with multi-coloured fairy lights.

  Amidst this landscape, Itzy lay on the floor, on her stomach, yanking loose threads out of the mandala rug in her own rendition of the Tibetan lesson in impermanence.

  Devon caught her eyes. ‘I always knew your dad was an arse,’ she said in her pragmatic way, ‘but this? It’s something else. It’s…I don’t know what it is.’

  Itzy sighed. Devon may not have been blessed with Itzy’s talent for words, but she somehow always got it. She was the one person Itzy never had to explain herself to.

  Itzy met Devon Anderson when they were five. They went to school together. The other kids used to say Devon was really a boy, because of her short hair. Her mother had got so sick of cutting chewing gum and dirt out of her daughter’s hair that she made her get it sheared around her ears. It didn’t help that Devon was ginger.

  Itzy, on the other hand, had the pretty girl hair, black flowing down her back like a waterfall, with dark piercing eyes. But she was still a target for bullying, because she had a weird name and her hair reminded her classmates of Roald Dahl’s The Witches.

  Itzy had immediately felt an affinity with the other girl and, one day, decided to sit with her during free play. They coloured pictures together, without speaking. Several pictures later, Devon had looked up from her drawing, her hands smattered in felt tip ink, and said, ‘I like your hair.’

  There were times, early on, when Devon came round Itzy’s house to play. Itzy had thought it would be safe because Stephen had a habit of being on his best behaviour when they had company. It was useful, because it meant Itzy didn’t have to sacrifice what little social life she had as a little girl simply because of her father’s unpredictable outbursts of violence. It was also infuriating, because it meant that if Itzy had told anyone what her father could be like, she was convinced no one would have believed her.

  Then, inevitably, when they were seven years old, Devon saw it herself.

  They hid in her bedroom wardrobe in silence for a long, long, long, long time. It wasn’t the first time Itzy had hidden in there, but it was the first someone had ever hidden with her, and she realised it made all the difference in the world.

  She thought, after that, Devon would never speak to her again. She would be too afraid, too upset. She would tell her parents, who would forbid her from playing with Itzy.

  But to her shock, she felt Devon reach for her hand and squeeze it. She didn’t let go until the screaming finally died down and the front door slammed, as Stephen left for one of his walks he went on to forget everything he had just done.

  When Devon finally spoke, it was to ask, ‘Does that happen a lot?’

  And for the first time in her life, Itzy admitted the truth. She told her everything, and Devon didn’t run. She never told her parents. Rightly or wrongly, it became a secret Itzy and Devon shared.

  Now, she looked up at her friend where she sat at the desk, her long legs crossed over each other. She was impossibly thin, but with curves that made her look stunning even in the skinny jeans and strappy tops she wore.

  A lot had changed since they were little girls. Itzy still had the long black hair and piercing eyes, but there was a toughness that went with the look and scared boys away. She never quite took shape, remaining waifish, while Devon had finally been allowed to grow her hair, had filled out and become the subject of badly written poetry and drunken proposals in the college bar she technically wasn’t supposed to go to until she was eighteen. Her fair skin made her look almost angelic, and the light freckles dashing their way up her nose and cheeks lent her a sense of innocence that boys were desperate to take away from her.

  Devon’s voice snapped her out of her thoughts. ‘What’s this?’

  Itzy blinked. ‘What’s what?’

  ‘This.’ Devon waved one of her braceleted arms at Itzy’s notebook, which still lay open on the desk, demanding to be deciphered.

  ‘Oh.’ Then, ‘Oh.’ Itzy lifted herself from the floor and walked over to the other girl. ‘That.’

  ‘Yeah, that. What is it?’

  ‘
What does it look like?’

  Devon let out an exaggerated sigh. ‘It looks like one of your stories.’

  ‘So there’s your answer, right? Mystery solved.’

  Devon gripped Itzy by the wrist and forced her to make eye contact. ‘You think you killed him,’ she said more than asked.

  Itzy bit her lip. A layer of skin tore and she tasted the familiar iron of her own blood in her mouth. For the second time that day, she worried she might be sick.

  Devon still held her dark, pupil-less eyes with her own green ones, but she let go of Itzy’s arm. ‘Itzy, this is not your fault, yeah? You didn’t kill him. He swallowed a bunch of pills like the coward he is. No one made him do that. It was his stupid choice, not yours.’

  ‘But the stories -’

  ‘Are stories!’ Devon yelled in her face. She closed her eyes for a count of three and took a breath. When she reopened her eyes, she looked calmer, like she’d reached inside and found her happy place. ‘Look, Itzy, I know how hard this must be for you. Actually, I tell a lie. I haven’t the foggiest how hard this must be for you. It’s just so, so big.’ Her arms formed the shape of an expanding bubble in the air, to exemplify her point. ‘But you can’t go blaming yourself, on top of everything else you must be feeling. You don’t need that. And you don’t deserve it.’

  Itzy knew she was right. But knowing something wasn’t the same as feeling it.

  ‘I can’t stop seeing it,’ Itzy said. ‘I keep seeing him doing it. I want to climb into the picture and touch him, maybe stop him, you know? But it’s like a bad dream. Every time I try to speak, to tell him there must be some other way, my voice just doesn’t work.’

  Devon’s face filled with sympathy. ‘Oh, Itz,’ she said. Then she was on her feet, wrapping her long faintly freckled arms around her the way Myra should have done. She pulled her close and held her there. ‘I know you hadn’t spoken to him in…’

  ‘Seven years,’ Itzy supplied in a dull voice.

  Devon nodded. ‘Right. But you know…it’s okay to cry.’

  Itzy leaned into her friend. ‘I wish I could,’ she whispered. The truth was she had never allowed herself to cry over her father. And now, try as she might, she couldn’t make the tears fall. They sat lodged in the backs of her eyes, the telltale lump ominously blocking her throat. She would have no relief.

  ‘Gwen invited me to the funeral,’ Itzy made out through Devon’s burnt-orange hair.

  Devon drew back so she could look at her. She smoothed her friend’s black mane with one of her hands. ‘Are you going?’

  Itzy nodded. ‘I think I have to.’

  Devon frowned. ‘You don’t. Not if you don’t want to. No one would expect it.’

  ‘No, I mean…this is for me. I just feel like I have to be there.’

  ‘Do you want me to come with you?’ Devon offered. ‘You need someone. I doubt your mum will go.’

  Itzy pulled away and stood very still. ‘I’d like that.’ She gave a small smile. ‘Thank you.’

  Devon rolled her eyes to lighten the mood. ‘You know I’ll always be there for you, yeah?’

  Yes, Itzy knew. Devon had proven herself time and time again. Even when….

  The two of them moved to the bed and sat down, facing each other. ‘How are things with Ash?’ Itzy asked.

  Devon raised a golden eyebrow. ‘You really want to talk about that? After what’s happened?’

  ‘I can’t face thinking about it anymore,’ Itzy told her. ‘It’s horrible. I need distraction. Please.’

  Devon studied her friend’s face. Itzy’s skin was darker than Devon’s, but not in that sought-after tanned way; more like it was perpetually covered in sand.

  Devon leaned back on her palms. ‘Things are fine.’

  ‘Fine? That’s it?’

  Devon sighed. ‘I guess I still don’t feel comfortable talking about this with you.’

  ‘Dev. You don’t need to feel awkward about it. It’s not like you went behind my back or something, right? You asked if I minded if you went out with him and I said no.’

  An idea danced in Devon’s eyes. ‘But did you really mean it?’

  ‘Have I ever lied to you?’ Itzy said.

  ‘No. But there’s always a first time.’

  ‘Devon!’ Itzy grabbed a pillow and threw it at her. It bounced off her head, messing up the side of her hair. ‘I didn’t lie to you, and I don’t mind that you’re going out. I’m even chuffed for you, I really am. Ash and me…we just didn’t work.’

  Devon looked like she wanted to ask something, but wasn’t sure how to say it. Then, changing tracks, she said softly, ‘Do you think your brother will be there?’

  Itzy flicked a piece of hair out of her face. ‘Where?’

  ‘The funeral.’

  ‘Oh.’ Itzy scooted backward on the bed and leaned back so her spine and head touched the wall. ‘Probably.’

  ‘Do you think maybe he’ll talk to you now?’

  Itzy shrugged, as if to say, Who knows? Who cares? Except she cared very much. For Itzy, the discovery that she had a brother out there made her feel like her whole life had been a lie. It changed the reasons behind so many early events in her life. It rewrote the story of her life, by giving it a foreword.

  Itzy had always wanted a brother. Then, in one brief earth-shattering moment, she learned she had one. But the events of the past made it so she couldn’t connect with him in the present. She’d only met him once, and then -

  ‘He’s always made it clear he wants nothing to do with me,’ she reminded Devon. ‘And I don’t blame him. Maybe we didn’t find out about them until I was ten, but he’s still older. At the end of the day, he was our dad’s first family. Of course he resents me.’

  ‘Maybe it’ll be different now,’ Devon suggested.

  But Itzy very much doubted this possibility.