“I finally got my new admonition, and it warns against someone who is marked by the number seventeen.” Mariette pulled out her notebook. “Here.” She wiped the page with her hand and four lines appeared in place of her notes:
Beware the one who hides in sight
And seeks the darkness, not the light
Who knows seventeen many ways
And offers wrong disguised as right.
“Where’d you get your admonition?”
“This one came in a fortune cookie! It was crazy. We went out to dinner, and I took one of the cookies off the little tray at the end, and there were three slips of paper in it, with all this tiny writing. I can’t understand how it happens. I mean, what if my brother had picked up that cookie?”
“Where’s the rest of the admonition?”
“I can’t show you that,” Mariette said. “But Skip is number seventeen on the football team.”
“I didn’t know his number. What about the basketball team?”
“No, no one has that number on the basketball team. Or the soccer team. I don’t know if he’s Unkind, but just be careful around him, okay?”
“It is weird that you would say that. I was going to tell you I’ve seen him around almost every time a girl has been injured.”
“Really?”
“He was there in the parking lot when Elsie got stung, and he was there in the hallway when Tillie passed out. He was there when Lacie had the seizure.” Celia hesitated. “But he wasn’t in the chem lab when the beaker blew up. Maybe it isn’t a pattern. And it’s not like I’ve witnessed all the injuries.”
“Still, it’s very interesting if he’s been around for most of them. He might have been close by for the others and you just didn’t see him,” Mariette said. “I think we have to treat him as our strongest suspect.”
“But what do we do? Are we supposed to catch him doing something? How do we prove he’s the Unkind?”
“I don’t know. We have to think very hard about this. Anything could be a clue.” Mariette ran off to her homeroom, and Celia wondered if there was anything she could do, really. Then again, she had seen Mariette do things no one else had noticed. Perhaps if Celia watched Skip she might notice him doing things, too.
ONLY TWO WEEKS REMAINED in the semester, and the next-to-last girl on the birthday list before the holiday recess got scalded when a pipe broke. Celia saw the concern in her friends’ eyes—not for the burned girl, but for Celia. The Rosary kept their promise not to bring it up, but the curse had draped its malaise over the whole school, making it both ominous and stagnant, like a room that has been shut up too long.
“Is that what I think it is?” Celia asked Regine in the library.
“The birthday list?” Regine showed it to her. “I’m surprised you don’t have a copy.”
“It just seems so, I don’t know, callous.”
“Yeah, probably.” Regine crossed the scalded girl’s name off the list. “Well, this is interesting. You know who’s next? Skip’s sister, Stella.” Regine pointed to the girl’s name. “The second-to-last day of school before the break.”
“Stella is Skip’s sister? I had no idea. She’s in my English class.”
“She is. Oh, there’s Ivo. He’s helping me with my Chem Two midterm. I have to get an A on it to get a B for the class, and I never thought I would get a B in a class, much less a C.” Regine left Celia with the list and shifted over to the next table, where Ivo was settling in. Celia watched as Regine pulled her chair in close to Ivo’s and Ivo eased his chair farther away from her.
Celia returned to the list and found her name, and then Mariette’s after that. She returned to Skip’s sister’s name and got excited.
She waited impatiently for chemistry class, and as soon as Mr. Sumeletso turned the experiment over to them, she told Mariette, “I think I know how we can find out about Skip.”
“Really?”
“Did you know Stella Miller is Skip’s sister?”
“She is? I never thought about it. Miller is a pretty common last name.”
“Well, she is, and her birthday is next week, the next-to-last day of school before the break.”
Mariette’s eyes opened wider. “If Skip is the Unkind one behind this, he wouldn’t try to kill his sister, would he?” Doubt crept into her face. “Do you think she’s had sex? If she has, it wouldn’t make a difference.”
“I don’t know. Stella is pretty quiet, and she’s not nearly as social or popular as her older brother. I’ve never heard about her dating anyone at school.”
“So it’s pretty likely she hasn’t lost her virginity, and she’s vulnerable to the curse! That means if nothing happens to her, we can be pretty sure it’s because Skip spared her.”
Now it was Celia’s turn to doubt. “Would it be conclusive? We might be wrong. She might have slept with someone outside of school and no one knows about it. Or she might figure out how to avoid the curse some other way.” Celia had regretted drawing the Rosary’s attention to Mariette, and she wondered if she should have learned a lesson about making accusations lightly. Or did the possibility of someone’s getting killed take precedence over that?
“You’re right, but if Skip’s our best suspect, we have to pay attention to this, even if it’s only circumstantial. Should we try to make friends with her, see if she’ll tell us whether she’s had sex?”
“That sounds horrible. ‘Hi, I know we’ve never talked before now, but we we’re just curious: have you had sex?’” Celia shook her head.
“Yeah. We may have to ask her afterward, though, if she isn’t hurt.”
THE NEXT DAY ONLY IVO and Liz had lunch at the same time as Celia. With Liz still out with the flu, Celia was uneasy about eating alone with Ivo. She hadn't connected with him very much, and she wanted to ask him why he was suffering Regine's advances but not reciprocating, but that didn't seem like a wise topic. She decided to be optimistic and hope maybe this would be her opportunity to make some inroads with him.
“Are you excited about college?” she asked him at lunch.
“You know, I’m a little freaked out about it,” Ivo said. Lately his lunches were composed entirely of raw foods. Celia wasn’t sure what had prompted him to adopt the diet. Today he had yellowtail sashimi, pine nuts, cucumber slices, a wedge of mozzarella, a blood orange, and Pellegrino. “Liz wants to be a writer. Brenden wants to be a music critic.”
“I thought you wanted to be an architect.”
“I don’t know. Architecture is kind of a compromise for me. I feel like I’m good at a lot of things, but I’m not sure enough about any of them to say ‘This is what I want to do with my life.’ I feel like a dilettante,” Ivo said.
“Really? That’s not my impression of you.”
“Well, high school has been easy. I’ve never had to really work hard—none of us have. Who knows what’s happening to Regine in Chem Two. While that’s great, it hasn’t helped me to focus in on what I’m really good at, what I really want to do. I’m scared I’ll go to college and realize I don’t want to be an architect and then have no idea what to do instead.”
“Well, you still have time,” Celia offered. “And there’s no harm in changing your mind.”
“I’m just not used to not being sure,” he said. “I’ve always known how to get what I wanted out of wherever I’ve been at the time. Some people are happy just to get through high school and move on to the next thing. I’m proud we’ve done it our way, on our terms. And when I get to college I’m going to try to do the same thing. The difference is, college is when I’m supposed to make big decisions about who I want to be for the rest of my life. I’ve never done that. I’ve always been focused on who I want to be right now. So I don’t know if it’s going to come so easily. I feel like the thing I have to do, and soon, is figure out what I want to be when I grow up.”
“Liz always uses that John Updike quote about imagining your life and then it happens. What do you imagine?”
Ivo was quiet for a moment. The way he looked at her, Celia thought he was trying to decide how much of his confidence she deserved to receive. Then he said, “I want to have a space that’s kind of like Diaboliques, but not just a nightclub. I want it to be the kind of place the people from Diaboliques would go for coffee, or dinner, to see an art show or even a performance. It would be like a black box version of Diaboliques, changing over the course of the day. It would be a coffee shop in the morning and then convert into a restaurant for lunch and dinner. Change the tables again and it’s a cocktail lounge. Take the tables away and it’s a performance space, or a nightclub. But always with the same dark, exotic ambiance, you know? Beautiful furnishings and attention to all the little details. And the best music, all the great music around which we build our lives. I even know what I’d call it.” Ivo was caught up in his vision now, and Celia was right there with him. “Darkland: a place for the cognoscenti, anytime of day or night.”
“That sounds awesome! So what do you study in college in order to do that?”
“I have no idea.” Ivo smiled a little sadly, and in her mind’s eye Celia saw the picture he had painted fade away like skywriting. “I almost wonder if you need to go to college for it at all. But I have to go to college, no matter what. I want to be an educated bar owner, not an ignorant one.” They laughed at that.
“It’s going to be strange not having you guys here next year,” Celia said.
“It’s going to be strange not being here,” he said. “I kind of wish you all could come along with us and we could just keep doing this at college.”
“That’s nice, but I barely have high school figured out.” She smiled.
“You’re doing great. I hope you guys keep it up next year, being creative and doing your own thing, whether it’s popular or not.”
“I hope so, too,” Celia said. “But we’re not even halfway done with this year. I can’t think about next year yet.”
For a moment Ivo’s façade had come down. Celia was thrilled to have seen a little of the real Ivo behind it, even if he was nervous and conflicted. She wondered if Ivo had told anyone else about Darkland. Celia hoped he hadn’t. If he had privileged her with this small piece of himself that no one else had seen, she could believe she truly had made it into his good graces and her place in the Rosary was solid and secure.
“I want an apple. Can I get you anything?” Celia stood up from the table.
“No, thank you. Do you mind if I look at your drawings? I keep glimpsing them upside down, across the table from you, and I’ve always wanted to have a better look.”
“Sure, go right ahead.” Celia flushed with satisfaction at Ivo’s interest. She waited in line at the lunch counter, believing for the first time that Ivo really considered her a friend. She wasn’t sure why she wanted the Rosary’s approval so much, but it felt good to have won it.
Oh god, she thought. I wrote the Unkind admonition in my sketchbook! She turned and looked across the sea of tables at Ivo. He was bent over her book. He turned a page and she tried to see what was on it, but they were too far apart. He won’t turn all the way to the last page. There are at least a hundred pages of drawings in there, and even if he looks at all of them, when he gets to the blank pages he’ll stop. All the same, she willed the cashier to move faster.
Finally she got her apple and strode briskly back to the table. Ivo looked up from the page open before him—twelve lines of her handwriting plainly visible.
“What is this?” he asked.
“What is what? Oh, that’s a poem.”
“It’s a pretty grisly poem,” Ivo said.
“Yeah,” Celia said, all plausible ideas about how to change the subject running out of her mind like water through a sieve.
“And it’s awfully similar to what’s going on around here at school. An innocent girl, the day before she turns sixteen?”
“Well, not really. Nobody’s getting killed.” She sat down, the apple forgotten.
“Celia, what’s going on?”
“What do you mean?”
“Apparently you’re taking this curse pretty seriously. Is there something going on that isn’t an accident? Are you involved in something I don’t know about?”
“No!”
“People don’t write random poems like this for fun.” Ivo tapped the page.
“I didn’t write it!” Celia protested.
“Then where did you get it?”
“I can’t tell you!”
“It’s okay—I bet I can guess. You’ve only suspected one of your friends of witchcraft so far this year. Or are there others?” Ivo studied her face, and while Celia couldn’t imagine how her expression looked, she was sure it wasn’t helping. “Did Mariette write this? I don’t have a problem with people being pagan or vegan and all that, but a lot of girls have gotten hurt. What is she doing?”
“It’s not Mariette—she’s trying to stop it!” Celia saw Ivo’s eyebrows go up and realized too late that she had revealed far too much. “You can’t tell anyone! No one’s supposed to know!”
“If you expect me to keep a secret, you’re going to have to tell me what the secret is that I’m keeping,” Ivo said, his face a mixture of disapproval, curiosity, protectiveness, and envy all at the same time.
“There isn’t any way you could just forget about it?” she asked him.
“Not on your life. Not if someone is trying to make this little poem come true.” Ivo stabbed his finger onto the admonition.
“It’s just, I’m not supposed to tell anyone. Could you please just let me talk to Mariette first? I don’t know what I can tell you. It’s really up to her.”
“You, Mariette, and me—before the break is over. Or else I will tell my parents, and they will tell the school. I’m serious.”
“Yes. I’ll get her to come. Thank you.”
The moment Celia was away from Ivo, she tore the page with the admonition out of the back of her sketchbook. Then she didn’t know what to do with the page, so she folded it up and put it in her purse. Until now this secret had been exciting, mysterious, even a little glamorous, and the danger had felt remote. All of a sudden she felt burdened with this knowledge. And she wondered how Mariette would react when Celia confessed what had happened with Ivo.
TWO PERIODS LATER CELIA FOUND Mariette in the hall. "I have to tell you something that you're not going to like."
“What?”
“Ivo found the admonition in my sketchbook.”
“Are you kidding? How did he find it?”
“I thought he was looking at the drawings in the front. I didn’t think he’d flip all the way to the back! I was only gone for a minute!”
“No one was supposed to see that—I trusted you!”
“I know—I’m so sorry! But I didn’t tell him anything else. He promised he wouldn’t do anything until I had the chance to talk to you.”
“Talk to me? Wait, he knows about me?”
“He guessed, because of that time with your locker, and— I didn’t tell him anything about you!” Celia felt as if a rodent were gnawing her from the inside. She never had failed someone like this before. It was a new torment she hated immediately. “It would have been okay if he had just thought I had written a twisted poem about the curse, but I said I hadn’t written it, and then he accused you, and I let it slip that you’re trying to stop it.”
“This is really bad. I have to talk to him,” Mariette said. She was totally focused, serious. “I have to fix this.”
“I don’t know how to fix it.”
“I do. When can I see him?”
“He wants to meet over the break. The three of us.”
“As soon as possible.”
“I’ll find out. I’ll call you tonight. Mariette, I’m sorry.”
Mariette sighed. “It’s okay. I know you didn’t do it on purpose. It’s just, how well do you know Ivo? Do you know anything about him outside of school? What if he accuses me of something and I get asked a whole
bunch of questions I can’t answer? Or what if he says something to the person who happens to be the Unkind who’s doing all this and I’m exposed? Or what if—and I don’t know, but I’m just saying—what if he’s the Unkind, and I just can’t detect him because I’m too new? This could be very dangerous for me.”
“I’m sorry.”
“And it could be just as dangerous for you, too! The Unkind would know you know something since you have the admonition. And at this point you aren’t even able to defend yourself if someone comes after you, because you haven’t developed any powers yet. You see why I’m freaking out about this?”
“Yes. I feel horrible!” Celia didn’t bother to protest that she really thought she wasn’t one of the Kind and never would develop powers.
“We just have to hope Ivo keeps his word and doesn’t say anything to anyone until I get to talk to him, or else we’re screwed. You have to be careful. Don’t go out by yourself unless you absolutely have to, okay? And we need to have that meeting as soon as possible.”
“Okay,” Celia said meekly.
WHEN CELIA GOT HOME SHE went straight to her room, dug the Unkind admonition out of her purse, and looked for a place to hide it. She pulled an old sketchbook off the shelf and opened it in the middle, intending to shove the admonition in there and close it up again. She stopped short when she saw the page to which she had opened.
It was a sketch she had copied from a perfume ad. A woman in a black dress gazed out of the page, one strap slipping from the arc of her shoulder, her eyes open and wondering, her lips parted as though she had paused in the middle of a thought, her hair weightless around her face like a cloud.
A dark line mustache was scribbled in pen under her delicate nose, and devilish arched eyebrows had been jabbed onto the page over the thin eyebrows Celia had drawn. The memory of a certain day in eighth grade returned to Celia like a baseball hitting her in the chest: an afternoon period during which her sketchbook had gone missing, only to be found later in the cafeteria with dozens of pages vandalized like this one. Celia sat down at her desk as the memory unspooled.
The Suburban Strange Page 14
