Throughout the night Brenden gave her background details about the music she heard. “Ah, this is a classic! Killing Joke, ‘Love Like Blood.’ I’ll make a copy of it for you. The lead singer decided the world was going to end, and he moved somewhere like Iceland to prepare for it, and then it didn’t happen, at least not yet. The words are really intense.” Celia made another mental note to look up Brenden’s blog the next day.
“How did you find this place?” she asked Liz.
“Ivo found out about it. But if you start looking around for places to hear this kind of music, there really isn’t anywhere else. When Ivo and I started coming here, it was like we had found Wonderland. We never expected to hear these songs anywhere outside our own houses, and we definitely didn’t think there were all these other people who loved it, too! We were so reverential about it, we didn’t talk to anyone here for six months,” Liz said. “Brenden was the first to crack. He was hearing songs and having no idea who they were by, and it drove him crazy, so he started asking Patrick. And then we gradually met the rest of Patrick’s regulars.”
Too soon it was midnight and Ivo rounded them up to make their departure. Celia stole a final glance at the silver-eyed boy as they started off. She had a twinge, wondering if he would be there next Friday, if she would feel the strange current flow through her again. When she looked over at him she thought he could tell she was leaving, and he almost seemed to be fighting the impulse to approach her, but that could have been wishful thinking on her part. She processed with the group to the booth, where Patrick kissed them all again. “Leaving so early?” he asked.
“We’re still earning Celia’s mother’s trust,” Ivo told him. “So it’ll be early for a little while.”
“You could stay,” Celia said to the other four, hoping Regine wouldn’t resent her for having to take her home.
“No, we’re a group. We arrive together, and we leave together,” Ivo said firmly. Celia was touched. It was the clearest demonstration the Rosary had made that they considered her one of them. She wished they could have stayed until Diaboliques closed.
They made their way through the other rooms, down and out to the cars. The aura of Diaboliques gradually lifted as Celia traveled farther from the inner sanctum where Patrick was king and mysterious tall boys waited. Rufus called her Paperwhite again and wished them good night.
“Did you have a good time?” Marco asked as the other four walked ahead.
“I loved it! Thank you so much for bringing me,” Celia said.
“Well, we do it every Friday. It’s like church,” Marco joked. “Were Regine and Liz keeping you from talking to that guy?”
“I wouldn’t have talked to him anyway. They’re just being protective.”
“Sure.” Marco’s tone was a little sarcastic. “And the two of them manage their own love lives so well. Someday I’ll have to tell you about Regine’s unrequited love for Ivo and Liz’s unrequited love for one of the football players, of all people.”
“The guy in the parking lot on the first day of school, right? Who is he?”
“His name is Skip—I know, Skip, right? His favorite color is orange. What more do you need to know? Liz refuses to talk about him, so don’t bring it up or I’ll just get in trouble for gossiping again,” Marco said.
They said good night by the cars. As she put the key in the ignition, Regine told Celia, “When you’re allowed to stay out later, we can stop at the all-night diner and get food before we head home. On a good night we don’t get back until three or four.”
Celia sank back in the passenger seat, enveloped by the sumptuous music on the second half of Brenden’s mix. She thought life really was better with the right soundtrack. Out the window she could see the stars, and she felt as though all of it had been made for her. After she slipped in her front door and crept up her stairs, the thing that kept Celia from falling asleep was her happiness. The beginning of school had been a lovely adventure, but now another adventure had overshadowed it, one that felt even more vivid, more life-changing. Celia wondered if moments like these would happen all her life, or if they were a special kind of alchemy that was only possible for teenagers. She took out her sketchbook and made a quick drawing of Regine at Diaboliques, her arms unfurled, one foot touching lightly in front of the other, her head tilted to the side. She was tempted to draw the silver-eyed boy, but she resisted. It felt like a girlish, lovesick thing to do, and not at all behavior of which the Rosary would approve. She wanted to be cool and unaffected like her friends. Celia looked around her bedroom, full of pastel colors and frills, and thought, I need to redecorate.
THE NEXT DAY CELIA SAT in front of her computer and typed in the website address Brenden had given her for his blog. The dark and lush graphic design reminded her of the d´cor at Diaboliques. There were categories of posts from which to choose, and she clicked on "Strangers in Open Cars —Songs You Should Know." The first entry on the list was Cocteau Twins— "The Spangle Maker." In the margin she clicked on an audio player to hear the song while she was reading Brenden's essay-length post.
“The Spangle Maker” was unlike anything Celia had ever heard, even including all the new music she’d encountered in the previous months. It was a song that would have mystified her just a few months ago, but now it seemed to unfold like a treasure map, revealing details and ideas as Brenden pointed them out to her. When the song ended, she clicked the player link to start it again. As it began a second time, she felt that already she was hearing it differently. The song’s strangeness was wrapping around her like a shawl.
Brenden had been right about the lyrics. Celia barely could make out more than a word or two, and those didn’t really add up to anything. In the chorus she heard what sounded like “It’s pomegranate” and smiled. It felt as if the song was about her, just a little. Celia played the song yet again, and she reread Brenden’s post. Then she kept clicking the link, until she had heard “The Spangle Maker” a dozen times. It was just as strange and wonderful as Brenden had described it, and his writing was the perfect tour guide to embrace the strangeness, wade into it, accept it on its own terms. Celia remembered what Brenden had said about having heroes to inspire her, and she wondered if she should tell him he, and the rest of the Rosary, had attained that status for her.
The aroma of Diaboliques lingered in her memory—a mixture of industrial space, exotic perfumes, and alcohol. The people posed and danced in her mind. Celia’s first impulse was to open her sketchbook again and see how well she could re-create it all. But her hand stopped on the cover. I have to learn to dance, she thought. And not just dancing acceptable in a high school gymnasium. I have to learn to dance well enough for Diaboliques.
Celia went to her bureau, where her treasured stack of discs from Regine and Brenden sat next to her CD player. She chose one and put it on. In a moment Gene Loves Jezebel’s “Desire” began to play, and Celia looked at herself in the mirror.
What do I do? She moved her feet back and forth and felt awkward. She waved her arms around but felt foolish. This is not going to be easy.
Celia closed her eyes and tried to imagine a time when she would feel completely at home at Diaboliques. When she, too, would stand and speak with the Rosary as though posing for a portrait. She would hear a song she liked and step out onto the dance floor. Celia felt her hips moving smoothly from side to side, and her hand rose, sweeping back and forth in front of her.
She opened her eyes and found herself in the mirror, looking like a flamingo caught in a bog. She laughed in horror and returned to her desk to open her sketchbook and draw.
4. SOME GIRLS WANDER BY MISTAKE
THAT WEEKEND CELIA FOUND a job at a small bookstore in a cluster of shops on a charming street about a mile from her house. She could walk there when the weather was nice. She wasn’t sure why the owner hired her, though. Celia had confessed she wasn’t very well read, but the woman had laughed and said she couldn’t imagine how Celia would be, at her age. “I have the oppo
site problem.” She smiled. “I’ve read everything, and now I’m down to the dregs.” She held up a book. “The Correspondence of Edwin and Morcar, Earls of Mercia and Northumbria. It’s the driest thing I’ve ever read. What I wouldn’t give to be blown away by Faulkner for the first time, all over again.” Celia nodded, wishing she knew who Faulkner was.
Regine had advised Celia to say she was available on Saturdays only after one o’clock so she wouldn’t have to get up too early after Diaboliques. When Celia’s mother learned Regine was the impetus behind her employment, Mrs. Balaustine admitted Regine permanently into her good graces and extended Celia’s Friday curfew to two a.m. “I’m probably crazy, but I’m glad you’re making friends,” her mother told her.
“Me too,” Celia said. “I think I’d like to paint my bedroom.”
“We just painted it last year!”
“I know, but I didn’t pick the color! You did!”
“I just thought you liked your old room, and it matches your comforter! I suppose it’s all not dark enough for you, now?” her mother teased. “All right, we’ll do it again. How about this weekend?”
On a whim, Celia dug out their Polaroid camera and took a picture of her room before the transformation began. Changing her clothes, making friends at Suburban, and now redecorating her room, Celia had a profound sense of leaving a part of her life behind—not by chance, but deliberately. It was a new feeling, like shedding her skin, revealing a new self. She wasn’t entirely sure who her new self was yet. She wondered if that was something she would create, or discover, or maybe a little of both.
Changing her room was a daunting prospect because Celia had a better sense of what she didn’t want it to be—pink, ruffled, childish—than what she did. But she felt strongly she must figure it out herself, rather than ask for suggestions from Regine or any of the others. She wanted her room to be a reflection of herself, not of how they saw her or how they might want her to be.
Her closet was quite sparse already—Regine had seen to that. Celia filled a few boxes with the trinkets and toys that cluttered her shelves and banished them to the attic. Only her sketchbooks were allowed to stay, lined up on one shelf. She evicted the overstuffed chair in which she never sat and a rag rug whose best years had passed. Her mother helped her paint the walls a warm gray color, not too light and not too dark. They went out and found a set of charcoal bedding, and when she had remade the bed, Celia looked around, a little shocked. She was pleased because the room felt chic, in part just because it looked new and different. It also looked like a place in which the new person she thought she was becoming would feel at home. At the same time, the smell of paint lingered. Every sound seemed to echo now, and the empty walls stared back at her expectantly, as if to ask, Who are you? That night she sat looking around her Spartan new room, wondering what to put in it. She vowed she would choose carefully; anything that came in really had to deserve to be there. She compared her surroundings to the photograph of her room in its prior incarnation, tucked into the frame of the mirror over her dresser. Outside her window the moon was about half full. Celia thought that was appropriate.
BY THE SECOND WEEK OF SCHOOL Celia had settled into the rhythms of Suburban. Her classes were challenging but manageable, and she went into each day anticipating the times she would spend with various members of the Rosary. Now and then something would pull her anxiety back up—being called on to speak in class, finding herself in the midst of a group of cheerleaders in the hall—but there was no doubt things were going much better than they had last year.
At lunchtime that Wednesday, Celia rounded the corner into the short hallway that led past the teachers’ lounge and into one end of the cafeteria, on her way to meet the Rosary. Her path was blocked by a group of students in a huddle, studying something on the floor by the wall. A pair of legs extended into the middle of the hall, and as Celia drew near she glimpsed a girl lying there, her head and shoulders slumped against the base of the wall. She looked exhausted.
Another girl stood up from where she had been squatting next to the victim. “She said it’s never happened before,” this girl told the others.
“That doesn’t mean she’s not epileptic,” another girl chimed in. “My dad’s a doctor. Epilepsy can start at any time.”
“It’s such a shame. Tomorrow’s her birthday.”
Then the nurse arrived and shooed the onlookers away to get to the girl on the floor.
Celia wondered again if Suburban was cursed. None of these things by themselves—the bee sting, the girl passing out, the epileptic seizure—would be more than a tragic interruption to a day. But when she considered them together, it was hard not to connect them, even if there was no way the health problems of three different girls could be related.
Celia moved on. As she entered the cafeteria she crossed paths with Skip, the jock she seemed to see everywhere. Today he was wearing an orange and gray striped polo. Their eyes met for a moment, and Celia had to admit his face was kind. But she couldn’t ignore a pattern: Skip had been close by each time these bad things had happened.
5. STRANGEWAYS, HERE WE COME
SUBURBAN HIGH SCHOOL WAS surrounded by a grove of maples, and gingko trees flanked its walls. Celia began to track the leaves’ progress from emerald to golden orange as the autumn unfolded. She had stopped at a favorite window in the front stairwell to look over a cluster of them on Friday morning when a bus pulled up on the other side of the golden trees. The kids streamed out, but several of them waited by the bus door. Then Mariette got off, and Celia was dismayed to witness the taunting the other kids heaped on her lab partner. Mariette hunched her shoulders over the books in her arms and hurried past them. In the slanted morning sun, her shadow lunged across the pavement, and it flickered like a weak candle flame, as though Mariette were turning invisible briefly. Celia blinked and Mariette passed into the building below her. When Celia looked up at the trees again, some of the lowest leaves had turned from gold to crimson, as though a droplet of blood were diffusing into a bowl of apricot juice.
AT LUNCH CELIA LOOKED AROUND at Regine, Liz, Ivo, and Brenden. Though she felt more comfortable with them, still she rarely initiated conversation, being content to be included whenever they saw fit. Now she summoned her courage and said, "Do you think there's anything strange going on at school?" They looked blankly at her, and she half wished she had kept quiet. But she had to try to explain herself now. "Girls are getting hurt — having accidents, or some kind of health problem."
"Like a curse?" The way Liz said it, it was clear she was not inclined to give the idea much credence. "I guess I'm not that superstitious."
“I’m not either,” Celia quickly agreed. “Or I wouldn’t be . . . but I think there’s something strange about my chemistry lab partner, too.”
Regine took over as the voice of skepticism. “Like what?”
“I don’t know . . . She’s really nice, but she does some things that are hard to explain. She doesn’t measure anything when we do our experiments, but everything turns out perfectly. And this morning I saw her coming in from the bus, and I swear her shadow was flickering.”
“You think she’s what, a witch, and she’s putting curses on other girls?” Ivo asked. Celia couldn’t tell if he was mocking her, but she thought it was likely.
“A witch? Do people believe in witches anymore?” Brenden asked.
“Well, they still make movies about them,” Liz replied. She turned back to Celia. “Seriously, you think she’s a witch?”
“I don’t know. Some boys were being mean to her, and the leaves on the tree above her changed color.”
“Are you sure? I mean, that’s wild,” Liz said.
“I’m pretty sure.”
“It would be pretty crazy to make that up,” Ivo said. “So you’re wondering if the injuries aren’t accidents at all, but something more sinister. What does this girl look like?”
“She’s kind of plain—actually, she’s over there,” Celia said
, spotting Mariette across the cafeteria, “with the reddish blond hair and the pink sweater.”
The four of them watched Mariette put her books down at a table, and her notebook fell to the floor. She gathered it up, and then sat down to tie the frayed lace on her weather-beaten Converse. Her frazzled hair went in every direction, including over her face, and she pushed out her lower lip to blow the curls away. Celia saw Mariette through her friends’ eyes and knew they weren’t going to be impressed with her.
“Well, if she’s a—we’re going with witch, are we?—then she doesn’t seem to be doing anything to help herself,” Brenden said. “I’m sorry, but wouldn’t she use her powers to look a little more put-together? She just looks kind of a mess.”
They turned back to the table. “Yeah, I’m crazy,” Celia said, suddenly wishing she never had brought this scrutiny to Mariette.
“If she’s a good chem partner, no problem there,” Regine said. “Isn’t Mr. Sumeletso insanely hard?”
“Not really. We got an A on our first experiment,” Celia told her.
“See, Regine, it’s just you,” Ivo said.
“That’s not true! I got the highest grade on our first lab, and it was a C-plus!”
“Hey, do you want to do an illustration for the school paper?” Liz asked Celia. “The next issue is in two weeks, and I was going to run a photo of the school that features the new wing, but a drawing might be a nice touch.”
The Suburban Strange Page 6
