by Bryan Camp
“No moment like this moment,” the voice said. “It’s a gift. That’s why they call it the present.” Renai looked around but saw no one, certainly no one close enough to be able to hear her. A trilling, two-note whistle, off to her right, and then the voice said, “Over here.” The first thing Renai saw was a bronze statue of a clean-shaven man, one hand holding the wrist of the other, which held a rolled-up scroll of paper. Shit had gotten just weird enough that she was willing to believe that the statue had spoken, but then she saw the small bird standing on the black pedestal, next to the statue’s feet. “Hi there,” the bird said. “I’m Cordelia. You must be Renaissance.”
Renai paused the music and tucked the earbuds into her pocket. “You can call me Renai.”
Cordelia was a small brown bird with a long tail of coarse feathers, stripes of darker brown running down her wings, a white underbelly, and a short beak that curved down to a sharp point. A spiky crest of reddish-brown feathers bristled atop her head like the crest on a Spartan helmet. She had the faintest hint of Victorian aloofness in her voice, like she wished she’d been born British, but not enough to fake the accent. “Nice to meet you, Renai,” she said. “You can call me Cordelia.” She hopped to the edge of the pedestal in a couple of quick, jerky movements. “Apparently you need a little help locating a certain lost someone?”
“Great,” Renai muttered, “another ’pomp. Did Sal send you?”
She tilted her head to the side in a bird’s version of a furrowed brow. “A ’pomp . . . oh, yes, I like that. Fits what we do very nicely, don’t you think? Just a bunch of pomp and circumstance.” She spread her wings and hopped off the pedestal, swooping through the air and mimicking the trumpeting song that played at every graduation, sweeping past Renai and landing on Kyrie’s handlebars. “Of course, you’ve found yourself in quite a different kind of circumstance, haven’t you?” There was a hint of a grin in her tone, a kind of polite mischievousness, as if she were laughing, if not at you, then certainly at a joke you probably wouldn’t get. She had the easy confidence of a person who took what they wanted and set fire to the rest, who took zero bullshit but dished theirs out with both hands.
Renai liked her right from the start.
“So you’re here to help me find Ramses?”
The little bird tilted her head to the side. “‘Help’ is not the word I would use. ‘Evaluate’? ‘Assess’? These are better terms for what I am here to do.”
Renai clenched her jaw. The Thrones did love to pass judgment. She and Sal must have really fucked up. She hoped the grumpy old dog was okay, wherever he was. She let out a long, slow breath and forced herself to relax. Nobody never fixed nothin’ by frettin’ ’bout it, her grandmother would have said. “Can you at least tell me what’s going on there?” Renai asked, aiming her thumb at the abandoned First Gate.
Cordelia angled a single yellow eye in that direction. “You mean the Gate? Or the Underworld?”
“I mean the fact that there’s no one there to open it.”
Cordelia made a sound halfway between a chirp and a giggle. “Oh, that,” she said, wiggling her flight feathers at the Gate in a disconcertingly human gesture. “The Thrones are having themselves a bit of an identity crisis. Way above your pay grade, not to worry. Mine too, frankly. They’ll work it out before the Hallows, I’m sure. At any rate, to the task at hand.” She gave a little come-hither wave with one of her wings. “You know this lost boy better than I do. Where should we start?”
Hands still tucked into her jacket pocket, Renai rolled the tiny slip of paper Seth had given her between her thumb and index finger. She’d caught herself doing that all morning, as if the little scroll had some kind of talismanic power, as if it could show her the way. It must be made of something more durable than modern paper, though, because it hadn’t torn no matter how much she worried at it. Cordelia’s explanation about Masaka’s absence didn’t exactly put her at ease. It didn’t even really count as an explanation. In her experience, “Don’t worry about it” belonged on the same list as “It won’t hurt much” and “I’m doing this for your own good” and “Trust me.”
Even though she didn’t entirely trust the psychopomp, Renai knew she wouldn’t learn anything new by staring at a cemetery wall all day. Besides, she thought, Cordelia looks about as threatening as a hummingbird, even with that punk rock frill. Let her try something. I wish she would. “I drove over to the St. Cyr house first thing this morning,” she said, pushing away from the trunk of the palm tree and crossing over to where Kyrie and Cordelia waited. “I figured that just because he didn’t die at his appointed time didn’t mean he wouldn’t go home. I mean, he probably doesn’t know he’s supposed to be dead, right?”
“Smart,” Cordelia said. Renai lifted an eyebrow, but if the little bird was mocking her, she couldn’t tell. “But if you’ve found our lost lamb already, I have to say, you really hid the rose among the brambles.”
It took Renai a second for the context clues to catch up with that expression, but she didn’t waste time asking about it. “He wasn’t there this morning,” she said, “but I’m pretty sure he went home last night because the bullet hole in the window had a piece of cardboard taped over it, and his mom was asleep in her bed.”
Cordelia nuzzled at an errant feather on her wing, absently it seemed, like a person chewing their nail. “Why does the one lead to the other?”
“You know any mother in the history of ever who would stretch out for a good night’s rest after her house got shot up if her baby wasn’t sleeping right where she could watch him breathe?” She pursed her lips and leaned in, as if waiting for a rebuttal. “Yeah, me neither. And on top of that, his textbooks were all over the dining room table last night, but this morning they were gone.” She swung a leg over Kyrie, tilting the handlebars and making Cordelia shift over to stay level. “Which means,” she continued, “that I know where he went when he left the house.”
The psychopomp might be in a tiny little bird form, but she was sharp. It only took her a second to get it. “Ah,” she said. “School.”
“School,” Renai repeated, making a kick-starting gesture with her leg as Kyrie’s engine roared to life.
Between his report card and his uniform, Renai knew that Ramses went to a charter school out in the Bywater, which wasn’t surprising. These days, it seemed like just about all the schools in the city that weren’t private—which, aside from a couple of exceptions that proved the rule, meant Catholic—were charter schools of one form or another. Seemed like after the storm, everybody and their grandmother figured that they knew how to fix what was wrong with education in this city. Some of them were one-off local start-ups; some were part of larger out-of-state organizations. Ramses had gone to one of the latter, a national group that called itself EITA—which was an acronym for something Renai couldn’t remember—that sometimes gave its individual schools a single inspiring noun for a name, unlike the saints and saviors of the parochial schools. Ramses went to EITA: Empower, and from the look of his grades, he went often enough to do well. As a young black woman, Renai had some opinions about a national chain coming into the inner city to educate the poor urban community, but as a good Catholic girl whose middle-class parents had the means to send her to one of those private schools in explicit avoidance of the public school system in New Orleans, she figured her opinions might ring pretty hollow and so kept them to herself.
Cordelia had struggled to remain perched on Renai’s shoulder as Kyrie prowled down the edge of the Quarter on Rampart and then shifted over onto St. Claude out toward the Bywater, eventually giving up and burrowing into the cloth hood of her jacket. Renai didn’t mind. It freed her from having to make small talk, from having to decide whether she wanted to question the psychopomp’s motives or trust her at face value. She’d grown weary of thinking these past few days, of the constant litany of doubt and evaluation that had invaded her spartan predictable life of routine. The tempest within her stretched and moved, aching to
move, to act.
The predictable, tourist-friendly antiquity of the Quarter fell away as they crossed Esplanade and headed toward the Upper Ninth Ward, becoming a murky mix of entropy and gentrification that had invaded pockets of the city since the storm. Buildings here and there were tagged with graffiti—sometimes they were homes left vacant for years; sometimes they were food co-ops and reclaimed building material thrift stores. One block might have a handful of black men in plain white tees gathered around one front stoop, while the next would have a trio of bike-riding white folk with their hair in grungy, pocket-lint dreads. Some parts of the city weren’t segregated so much as they were striated, like two or three disparate neighborhoods squeezed together until they occupied the same space.
She picked up details here and there out of the blur of Kyrie’s rush down St. Claude: a house decorated with a glittering mosaic mandala made out of broken chrome and polished glass and reflective tile, a corner store turned daiquiri shop, a place that advertised AFRICAN HAIR BRAIDING with pictures taped to the plate glass to show what styles a customer might choose, so faded they’d might’ve been there since before the storm. And then Kyrie slowed and leaned to the side and rolled up onto the gravel shoulder. The bike came to rest in front of a three-story building with wide cement steps leading to three narrow glass doors, above which hung a banner that read: EITA: EMPOWER HIGH SCHOOL—EDUCATION IS THE ANSWER.
So that’s what it stands for, Renai thought, as Kyrie’s engine eased silent and Cordelia poked her head out of Renai’s hood. “Wake up, buttercup,” Renai said, “we’re here.”
Renai had expected that Ramses’ school would be different from her own, but the metal detectors at the door still surprised her. The three narrow doors at the front seemed designed with them in mind, creating a space where—when the students crowded in at the beginning of the day—three single-file lines would form, pass through the elongated empty door frames of the detectors, and then diffuse into the halls. She told herself that if they had them, they were probably necessary, but that thought started the flood of anger swirling inside of her. She made herself take a deep breath, pushed it back down.
The building that EITA had taken over had been a school when it was built in the ’40s, had remained a school even after the storm, though it had hardly been a place of education then. Her father would bring it up whenever she’d brought home a grade lower than a B, that school back in the Ninth Ward where they set trash cans on fire. The bones of the place persisted even after all those years and EITA’s renovations, high ceilings and creaking hardwood floors and wide, sturdy staircases at the end of the long hallway. Come name changes and hurricanes and metal detectors all, this place was built to last.
“So we’re here,” Cordelia said from Renai’s shoulder, “where’s the boy?”
“Can you, I don’t know, sense him?” Renai asked, thinking of the way Sal zeroed in on his dead like a homing pigeon.
Cordelia made an exasperated cough in the back of her throat. “If I could find him, why would I need—”
She was interrupted by a set of ancient bells briiinnnging into life and the hallway exploding with teenagers and noise. It felt both eerily familiar and somehow alien as well. For one, it was strange to see boys as students. Her four years in halls like these had been at an all-girls school, so seeing the antics of boys posturing and insulting and braying that Renai had only ever seen at dances and parties made the whole scene feel oddly false, like she’d wandered onto a movie set. She also realized, after a moment, that almost every single student was black. Her school had been predominately white, and though she’d never been the only black student in her classes, there had been a couple of times where she’d been one of just two. She’d had classmates who were Latina, who were of Vietnamese descent, and a couple of girls from Middle Eastern families who wore hijabs along with their plaid skirts and white blouses. Here though, aside from a couple of white teachers, every person Renai could see had dark skin.
She couldn’t quite process how she felt about all of it—the de facto segregation and the privilege and cultural gaps—couldn’t decide what it meant about her and her perspective on the world and the life she might’ve lived if she hadn’t died, so she pushed it to the side and focused on the details. These kids all wore uniforms just like the ones Renai had seen scattered across Ramses’ bedroom: white polo shirts with a shield on the chest and dark blue or khaki pants—even the girls, an option Renai, who had been forced into four years of plaid skirts, envied. She smiled a little, remembering how teenager-in-skirts Renai had obsessed about how ashy her knees would get.
These kids didn’t wear name tags like she’d had to, so she couldn’t just wander the halls and classrooms looking for Ramses. She hadn’t really considered how she’d find him, she realized, had just assumed that Cordelia would share Sal’s unerring sense of their quarry.
“Sal always just knew,” she said over the noise. “I figured you would too. Didn’t know if it was a psychopomp thing or a bird thing or—”
“Whatever talent he possessed, I do not,” Cordelia said. “Not one of these mortals looks any closer to death than the next one, to my eyes.”
The crowd jostled and swarmed past Renai, ignoring her as the living always did. She kept having to sway and shift out of people’s path, otherwise they’d walk right over her. At least she never had to worry about doing that awkward back-and-forth synchronized dance of avoidance people did when both were polite enough to move out of the other’s way. It was harder to stay still than to flow with the crowd, so Renai just picked a direction and started moving. The momentum carried her along, almost as though the students as a collective were leading her toward Ramses, and that thought gave her an idea. She pulled her cell phone out of her pocket and scrolled through the pictures she’d taken at the St. Cyr house that morning, searching for the report card on the fridge.
She leaned over to the person next to her, a tall light-skinned girl with long relaxed hair, and said, in a kind of oh-shit-I’m-totally-lost voice, “Do you know what period this is?” The girl looked at her with the startled double take that Renai had come to the expect, the almost-comical mixture of surprise, confusion, and immediate acceptance that came with her sudden intrusion into their awareness. “I’m new here,” Renai continued, not having to stretch very hard for a memory of being overwhelmed by everything and everyone around her, “and I don’t know where I’m going and I lost the girl who was supposed to help and I don’t even know what period it is and—”
“Third period,” the girl said, half her attention on Renai and half on where she was going. “That your schedule?” she asked, dipping her chin at the phone in Renai’s hand. When Renai nodded, the girl just waited with an expectant expression on her face.
“Oh, right,” Renai said, “uh, Brennan, 208.”
“Ms. B on the second floor,” the girl said, “up them stairs and two rooms down. She cool, don’t even stress.” She started to turn away, Renai already dismissed from her attention, but she looked back. “She catch you with that phone, though, you gonna lose it. She cool, but she don’t play, neither.” And then the girl was gone, slipping out of the rush and into the open door of a classroom with ease.
“That was easy,” Cordelia said.
Too easy, Renai thought, but kept it to herself. Her heart rate increased the closer they got to room 208. What happened when they found him? Would Cordelia insist on taking his life right there, in front of his classmates and teacher? Or did he have to die in the right place in order to close off that wound his escape had left behind? Could she convince the psychopomp to let him live? Could she convince the Thrones to spare him?
And if trying to save Ramses meant Renai failed Cordelia’s “evaluation,” what would the Thrones do to her?
She got to the classroom just as the bell rang again, alongside another student who grinned as he walked in like he timed it that way every day. Renai scanned the students who were already seated in their desks,
but couldn’t see them well enough from the back of the room to be able to tell one way or the other if any of them were Ramses. Renai leaned against a table in the far corner that held handouts and college application flyers. Before she could say anything to Cordelia, the teacher—a short, middle-aged white woman she assumed was Ms. Brennan—projected her voice over the collective murmur of her students.
“Okay, my lovelies, you know the routine. Your bell-ringer is on the board, a short-response question that you should put in your Social Justice notebooks, which I will remind you is part of your Force for Change assignment. Which is due . . . ?” A mumbled chorus of voices replied that it was due at the end of the nine weeks. “It is indeed, and that day is fast approaching.” Her gaze swept the room, making sure that everyone did as she said, and for a moment Renai thought the teacher looked right at her, even raised an eyebrow. She couldn’t be sure, as the woman wore thick glasses that gave her an owlish expression.
The teacher stepped over to her desk and scribbled something on a piece of paper, and then began reading off the names of her students, getting mostly “here,” in reply, though one boy said, “present” in the exaggerated, nasally voice of a stereotypical white person, which earned a couple of snickers, and another girl who—without taking her eyes off her paper—threw up a fist and sang out, “A-hey, yo-ya-ya-yooo,” which must have been a reference Renai didn’t get, because half the class laughed and even the teacher crooked an indulgent smile.
When she asked for Ramses St. Cyr, her only answer was silence.
Once she finished with the roll, she did something at her computer—presumably entering attendance, since she stayed standing while she did it—then walked up and down the aisles of the classroom, glancing down at her students’ work. When she got to the end of the row closest to Renai, she kept walking, looking straight at her and, saying nothing, handed her a sheet of paper folded in half.
