by Chris Howard
“Either of you heard from Olivia?” Limnoria asked brightly, ignoring Parresia’s second request.
“She’s still up at the lake, I suppose. Kassandra didn’t go in.” Helodes rolled her eyes. “She didn’t go anywhere near the water. We’d have heard of it from Olivia.”
“Who hasn’t shown up yet,” said Parresia ominously, and then asked her question again. “How powerful does this girl need to be?”
“She’s a child,” said Helodes. “What can she possibly know?”
There was silence again. Limnoria and Helodes withdrew from the viewing bubble as they watched the girl move closer into the water on her end. Kassandra pushed her face into the shower’s flow, her brows knotting up in suspicion, her head slanted to one side as if listening.
“So, there are three of you,” said Kassandra, her face moving deeper into the stream, mouth tilted up as if talking into a microphone. “Who are you? Will you tell me what’s going on?”
The naiads, standing in the tub in a motel just outside Mullen, gasped together.
“How do you know who I am? Tell me what you know about me,” demanded Kassandra, speaking into the shower head.
“Sweet Hera! Turn it off!” Limnoria shrieked.
“Tell me who I am. Answer me!”
“Dah! What’s with this?”
“Oh, let me do it, you dolt.”
“I got it!”
“The big knob!” Shouted Limnoria. “Other way!”
The pipes rumbled loudly and the water stopped flowing. The three of them huddled in the shower, leaning in on each other, puffing, out of breath.
“Why do they have to change these things? Why is there only one knob? What happened to two valves, one for hot, one for cold? Why change that?” Helodes asked, bewildered. She’d finally managed to turn the faucet right. “What is this thing? One dial for both and then this lever underneath for the shower? What kind of fool designed this?”
“Certainly not one of the naiads or Haliadai,” said Parresia, and then looked at the dripping pipe. “Or the Thalassogenêis.”
“Darn awkward.” Helodes turned to Limnoria as if she were to blame. “You could have told me before we got started.”
“Don’t get brackish with me! You saw me turn the water on. Looked right at me. Not my problem if half the things that reach your eyes don’t get into your head!”
The three huffed and snorted curses and made signs with their fingers in the air as they struggled to get out of the tub.
On my end, the water pushed past my face, cold, but I ignored the temperature.
“Who are you?”
I waited, my voice echoing off the tiles in the stall.
“I know you’re there.” Pulling away, a shocking thought occurred to me. “You can’t see me can you?”
Looking stupid, I’m sure, I tried to wrap my arms around myself, stepping back from the showerhead, hesitated and then elbowed the water off.
A whisper of the word, “Thalassogenêis” came with the last few drips into the drain at my feet.
“Tha-lass-oh-ghen-ace?” The word sounded familiar, but in a faint foggy way, like the name of someone or some place I once knew, but so long ago that the feeling was all that remained.
Can thoughts and memories slide around on their own, shifting into new thoughts to gang up on me, or fall into forgetfulness—without me wanting them to? That’s what it felt like. Is that what insanity is?
Shuffling through the anarchy in my head, I tried to put a bunch of new thoughts in order. First, the witch in the lake had appeared out of nowhere and grabbed me. Did anything happen before that? I wasn’t sure.
Now three more witches were talking about me, and I heard them through the pipes. For a second, I thought I’d seen them through the water, but wasn’t certain. And they spoke to each other as if I wasn’t able to hear them. Finally, they used words I didn’t understand, and it made me think of Ephoros speaking in a different language.
“Shit.”
I snapped the towel against the tiled wall, throwing a scowl at the showerhead. I didn’t like admitting it.
“They’re right. I think.”
Then I rolled my thoughts back to the lake witch curled in pain, falling into the depths of Red Bear Lake.
I was pretty sure it was me who did that.
A wave of cold spread up my back and the hair on my neck felt like it was standing up. I had listened to the soft singing voice, my mother’s song, for years, but in the lake it had spoken to me—in English, emerged from the melody, told me to breathe, and it took away my fear of water.
What the hell is going on? Witches talking through the pipes and gigantic watery kings springing out of my tear drops. Is this the start of something much bigger?
I let out an angry breath, mulling that over. The motherly voice had always been in a language I couldn’t understand, but I couldn’t drop the idea that under Red Bear Lake the woman had spoken English.
“What powers do I have?” I jumped, startled at hearing my own voice echo off the tiles. Then glanced at the door, hoping none of the others had heard. Most of the department already thought I was odd—at the very least. Some would have agreed with me and jumped right to psycho.
Either way, I didn’t need to be caught holding conversations out loud with myself.
I dressed and finished by cleaning the mirrors over the four sinks. Looking at my reflection, turning to the left and then right, I didn’t see any changes. I looked exactly as I had always looked. The chaos is on the inside. My hair fell smoothly, somewhat straight because it was still full of water. I didn’t feel any different, and yet something had changed in the last few days.
Pressing my hand to the cold glass, “Who are you?”
There was no answer, only the sharp echo off the crazy themed tiles.
And I could feel the water behind the tiles, pipes running with it.
I actually hadn’t really looked at the bathroom in years. It was just sort of there, with four old-fashioned sinks, four shower stalls and four enclosed toilets. The floor was tiled in a checkerboard pattern of pink and black, with solid light and dark pink for the walls. As if something inside me hadn’t been here for years, I had to take a fresh look around the room—noticing how absurd the design was. The whole room looked like it had been lifted intact from a drive-in diner from some past era and dropped into a boarding school in the middle of the Sand Hills of Nebraska.
Coming back to the sinks and the bucket of cleaning supplies, “Time to get busy.”
I mopped the floor, used the brush on the toilets and sprayed down the showers. The abrasive odor of ammonia attacked me, but I squinted against it, and pretended not to smell it, instead trying to hold my breath for two or three minutes at a time until I became light-headed and stopped. I wanted to see if I actually needed to breathe. Apparently it didn’t work that way underwater.
I kicked the bucket of cleaning tools and soaps under the sinks, opened the door into the dark hall, and switched off the lights in the bathroom.
Nothing but slow breathing and shadows draped over every bed I passed.
Pretty sure I was the last one to sleep that night. I had trouble calming down, opening my eyes at every noise against the windows and every creak of the floor.
I kicked in spasms, crying out once. The face of the lake witch with the sharp teeth appeared right in front of me, out of the gloomy water, a necklace of tiny skulls floating around her throat.
Deep in a foggy dream, something with claws grabbed my ankle., and I curled into a tight ball, pulling my knees against my chest, tucking the blanket tightly around me. I wasn’t cold, but I shivered, and decided I just wasn’t going to sleep anytime soon—stretching out on my back.
“Calm down.”
My eyes open, pointed at the ceiling, I concentrated on my mother’s song. It came to me easily, but it was like singing to myself rather than listening to another’s voice, and it was in that language I didn’t understand.
/> But the song soothed me, and without understanding how, it told me to close my eyes and dream of deep water.
Chapter 6 -The Math King
The school week began like most others, with alarms going off at 6:30 in the morning, and Ms. Matrothy banging the door against the wall, shouting at us for imaginary indiscretions.
The director paced at the head of the hall, glaring as each of us left for the school wing. She slapped the back of my head as I ran past with Jill and Nicole.
It’s a standard trick. She usually didn’t get me. I was quick, but I had to pause to give her a good look as I went by, just to see if anything had changed. Matrothy wore the same sneering expression she always wore, and showed no sign of being eaten and then spit up by an enormous king among water monsters the day before.
Good.
Everything seemed normal, then she shocked the hell out of me, calling me back, pointing one stiff finger at me. I glanced over my shoulder at Jill and Nicole to get some support. They looked as lost as I felt.
Matrothy jabbed me in the shoulder. “You’re going to end up just like your mother, a murderer, someone who stabs her best friend in the back. Then to waste away in some prison in the middle of the desert. No water. Not one drop.”
My mouth fell open.
Matrothy turned as if nothing had happened, waving and shouting at a couple girls holding open the bathroom door.
Took me a second to close my mouth.
I walked to class between Jill and Nicole.
Two tales of my mother in two days, one by my nasty, brutish and giant director, the other by a king among the offspring of a sea god. I knew who I preferred to believe, and steered my thoughts to Ephoros. It straightened my walk and fed my courage. I even whispered some of the new words to myself.
“Wreath-wearer.” It was like a title.
I’m wearing a victory wreath—something around my head—I cannot see or feel.
Ephoros was the name of the king made of water—who comes out of my fucking tears—sworn to defend me. I was trying to convince myself, anyway.
Princess.
That was the silliest part, and I had to force my thoughts on to something else, because I found myself grinning at the idea, and Nicole stared at me oddly. It was being the Wreath-wearer, the link to my mother, that kept my imagination busy.
I think I walked more firmly on the earth that morning than any other I could remember. Ephoros had immense power, and he was on my side.
Someone’s on my side.
For the first time in my life, I felt as if I had something of a grip on the way things were moving. Staring down the hall of the school wing, I let my gaze wander over the classroom doors, down long rows of lockers. The walls looked different, the ceiling lower, everything weaker.
Clement’s had always been a prison out in the middle of Nebraska, with high walls, fences and wide-open grassy fields, and no place to hide. Now it appeared less imposing.
Against the thought, you’re not strong enough—rising in my mind like an incoming tide—I let out my anger, just a whisper of it. I looked up the hall, over the heads of the students and a couple teachers. “I could escape from this.”
“What’d you say?” Jill turned to me just before we entered the classroom.
I snapped out of my daydream, blinked, and shook my head. “Just...nothing.”
Nicole, Jill, and I navigated the rows of desks and took our seats.
Looking around, the classroom seemed alien—and I mean more than it usually did, a tall box of painted cinder blocks on three sides and a fourth wall of a hundred glass rectangles, some of which could be winched open to let in a breeze. It looked as if someone had put down dark green plastic tiles and lined up forty old-fashioned one-piece desks in a steel mill.
At the far end was the solid wooden door we’d just come through, the only way in or out to the central hall running the length of the school wing.
Our teacher, Mrs. Vilnious, The Scourge of New England—that’s where she’s originally from—had her back to us, her skeletal arm high over her head as she wrote lines of neat numbers down the blackboard. Her hair was in one long gray braid that reached her waist, and her crazy cats-eye glasses that she only used while grading papers, were propped on her head.
Something different and alien about Mrs. Vilnious, too.
With her back to us, her gray hair moving fuzzily across her shoulders, her long dress of faded denim, Vilnious blended into the dusty slate background like a specter drifting along the front wall, back and forth, making little scratching noises as she moved the length of the blackboard.
There was the typical clamor of my fellow students settling into their desks, getting their books out, whispering, shouts, and the rustle of notebooks and pencils, followed by a short gap of silence that began when Mrs. Vilnious stepped away from the board. There were thirty-four long division problems in two rows of neat white chalk.
Shit.
Mrs. Vilnious examined the board again, comparing it to the problems and answers she’d written on the paper in her hand. The fluorescent lights caught the lenses of the glasses she wore on her head, and flashed at us like signal lamps. Thirty-four students groaned at the same time, and our teacher made the slightest smile.
“Just review. This is simple math.” She smiled when she said it.
They called Vilnious “The Scourge” because she was tough, not because she was evil. On the other hand, this was only her second year teaching at Clement’s. Perhaps that side of her would emerge in time. Here we were just starting the third week of the school year and we already knew what was coming. We’d heard every horrible detail about Vilnious over the summer from last year’s class.
She’d give us loads of homework, make us stand in front of the whole class and recite our reading assignments, and hit us with surprise quizzes.
This year was going to suck.
“Andrew!” Vilnious’ voice cut through the grumbling and whispered complaints. “Martin. Elizabeth. Jill. Toshi. Harriett. Luke...” She pointed at the board a few times as if we didn’t understand what she wanted from us, and continued calling the first seventeen names. The last she called for the first row was me.
“Take the last one, Kassandra.”
I dropped my pencil and scooted out from my desk. I hated division. Everything else was simple, adding, subtracting and multiplying. Division was a lot more work. Well, I don’t actually hate it. I’m just lazy. I understood it, knew how to work out the problems, even knew that it was all just a different way of looking at multiplication, but that didn’t make it easier, especially when I had to get up in front of the class to do it.
I picked up the stick of chalk under problem seventeen, the last one in the top row.
“25,305 divided by 35,” I whispered sourly, bit my lip and put the tip of the chalk to the board.
Seven hundred and twenty-three, said a man’s voice.
Startled, I snapped the chalk, clamped my mouth shut and almost drew blood. I’d heard the number. And it was pronounced funny, sort of old fashioned, with the r’s in “hundred” and “three” rolled.
I looked around and wrote 723 across the top of the problem. It looks right. I stole a sidelong glance at the others working at the board. None of them looked back.
They hadn’t heard the voice.
I wrote 723 over 35 and multiplied it out, whispering as I went. “...Nine plus one, ten, carry the one, six plus six...It’s right.”
I paused to look at it. If that’s the answer, do I need to do the work?
I turned from the board while everyone else was still busy scribbling numbers and lines.
“Show your work, Kassandra, and you can also do problem thirty-four.” Vilnious snapped the words off, glancing at the open math book on my desk, thinking I’d calculated the problem before coming to the front.
“20,052 divided by 12.” I read problem thirty-four off the board and a few seconds later, I heard the answer.
I looked around at the teacher. “1,671.”
Mrs. Vilnious tilted her head forward as if looking over her glasses, which were still propped on top of her head. Her focus pinned me to the blackboard for a few seconds and then she glanced down at her paper. “320,736 divided by 78?”
“320,736 by 78 is...4,112.”
Mildly impressed, Vilnious tilted her head sideways as if to attack from a different angle. “12,168 by 78?”
“156.”
Mrs. Vilnious didn’t seem to be able to hear the voice because nothing changed about the serious look on her face as she watched me. There was no reaction from others in the class.
A chill swept through me, my skin prickling.
It’s in my damn head. I’m a total freak.
“Take your seat. I still expect the problems to be worked out in your homework.” Vilnious watched me for a few seconds, and then her gaze moved over the rest of the class. “Francis. Kassandra’s given you the answers. Come up and work out numbers seventeen and thirty-four.”
Jill was still at the board scratching away with the chalk over 15,933 divided by 17. When I took my seat, Nicole turned to me and gave me a clear Why-haven’t-you-ever-told-us-you’re-a-math-genius? look.
I shrugged with my eyes innocently wide and mouthed, “I didn’t know.”
Then I picked up my pencil and bent over my math book. My face felt hot. I tried not to look up, but I couldn’t help it and glanced around a couple times.
I dropped my gaze. There were others staring at me from around the room, especially guys—many who had never looked at me before.
Ah, the life of a celebrity.
Kassandra the Weird. I had always been the one that Matrothy hated. Other than that, I was the weird angry girl with the messy hair, but today...well, today I had become the weird angry girl with the messy hair who was really good at math. Matrothy would hate me, freakish math skills or not.
Everybody knew that.
The day moved on normally from there, going from slow to nearly grinding to a halt over some subjects. In Mrs. Jarpe’s class, we studied the week’s forty spelling words, none of which were “latent” or “delirium”. We spent fifty minutes with Mr. Henderson, the science teacher for all grades, who went on at length about the germination of lima beans.
