The Suburban Strange

by Nathan Kotecki

  “Liz, come back,” Celia said.

  “Is Skip still there?”

  “He is—he’s a really nice guy.”

  “You’ve been talking to him?”

  “We all have. He just wants to have one last memory with you before school’s over.”

  “Did he say that?”

  “He didn’t have to. It’s obvious. And it’s really romantic. He came to prom alone, and he’s hanging out with us, and I’m sure he’s taken a lot of ridicule from his friends already.” Celia thought for a moment. “You lost your virginity with him, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” Liz sighed.

  “So, what happened?”

  “It was a mistake.”

  “How?”

  “I wasn’t ready. I mean, I wanted to, but when it was over, I wished I hadn’t done it, you know?”

  “I think so.”

  “When I think about it now, it’s so hard to sort it all out. I didn’t know what I wanted, but I regretted doing it. Ivo was starting with these dark things we do now, and I jumped in. I used it as a way to get away from Skip.”

  “Did Skip pressure you?”

  “No, he never did. He was such a good guy. He still is. I remember he told me he didn’t care if we didn’t have sex again. He practically begged me to keep going out with him. But I . . . You don’t always do things for the right reasons, you know? You don’t always think about how what you’re doing affects someone else.” Liz looked at the ceiling. “He gave up, eventually. And after a while I thought it was all behind me. But something about senior year . . . it made me think back on everything, and the truth is, I was a jerk to Skip. I have been for years, just because it made it easier for me to justify the way I’d made a mess of it.” Liz paused. “I wonder what might have happened.”

  “I think Skip might be wondering the same thing,” Celia said. “I can understand why he needs closure with you.”

  “And I probably need it with him, too.” Liz sighed.

  “Come back.” Celia held out her hands to Liz. “Talk to him. It’ll be good for both of you.”

  Liz allowed Celia to pull her up from the floor and lead her back to the hall. Skip was still there, and he stood up as they came over. “I’m sorry,” she said to him.

  “It’s okay.”

  “I guess we should talk.” Liz’s face had relaxed, but she had trouble looking directly at him.

  Skip turned to the table. “We’ll be back. Thanks, guys.” The two of them headed off. Skip put his hand on the small of Liz’s back, and Celia was happy Liz didn’t brush it away.

  “There’s more to that story. I’m sure of it,” Regine said. “Does anyone else feel like something’s been going on right under our noses and we just haven’t noticed it?”

  “I don’t know,” Celia said. “Sometimes things really are exactly how they look.”

  The dance was in full swing, and the Rosary observed it stoically from their seats. Celia kept looking for Liz, but it was ten minutes before she returned. She looked drained, and Celia wondered if she had been crying. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I am.” Liz was sincere. “But I don’t want to talk about it, okay?”

  “Sure.” Celia put her arm around her, and Liz turned and hugged her for a moment. Celia had acquired yet another secret to keep, this one about Liz. Of all the revelations Celia had experienced in the last months, this secret ranked rather low on her list.

  Brenden got up. “Well, I guess it’s time for me to talk to the DJ.”

  When “Nemesis” started with a crash, the Rosary made their way onto the floor, and the rest of the students ceded it to them with barely any display of confusion. Celia thought they even might have been expecting it. The six of them danced in the middle of the floor while everyone else stood in the dimness on either side. Her friends’ faces were cool, but Celia saw the joy in their eyes, more than she had ever seen it at Diaboliques. Celia remembered standing off to the side, those first times she had been there with them, watching and admiring the other five. Now she was fully a member of the group. The rosary bracelets on their wrists were proof, but she knew it much more deeply than that.

  Celia was elated. This moment of solidarity with her friends felt like the ultimate proof that her life was returning to normal. She might have lost a beautiful, secretly powerful friend. She might have to content herself with fleeting moments with a beautiful, secretly powerful boy. But these were her friends, too—the ones who had no preternatural powers, no deadly secrets, only their love for darkly beautiful things and their fierce devotion to one another.

  When the song began to fade, the six of them smiled, sharing their final triumph together. The rest of the students began to applaud, and Celia looked around in surprise. Her friends seemed just as taken aback. “Maybe we weren’t as intimidating as we thought,” Liz said as they returned to their table.

  “Do you need any more proof we have been a central part of this school?” Ivo replied.

  “I think we’ve made our mark,” Brenden agreed. “It makes it even more bittersweet that this is almost the end.”

  As the night wore on, the Rosary enjoyed themselves more than they would have admitted, even giving in and dancing to popular songs they would have scorned at any other time. Celia slow danced with Marco, and then Brenden, and then adored them as they danced with each other. Ivo danced with Regine, and Liz even danced with Skip. Later, when another slow song came on, Ivo came over to Celia. “We should dance,” he said.

  “To this song?” She smiled, taking his hand.

  In the middle of the dance floor, he said, “I’ve been meaning to tell you something for two months.”

  “Really?”

  “There’s something I’ve never been able to figure out. It was right before your birthday. The day before—no, it must have been two days before—I was at home and I had an idea for the class mosaic. So I put a note in my knapsack, to make sure I remembered the next day.” Celia felt a flush on the back of her neck. “I got to school the next morning, and I found the note. Tell Celia about idea was all it said. But I had no idea who Celia was. All day I looked at that note, but I couldn’t figure out who it meant. It was the strangest thing. I left the note in my bag, because I didn’t know what else to do with it.

  “The next morning, your birthday, I found the note again when I was getting ready for school, and I knew who you were. And you remember, I told you my idea in the parking lot, after we gave you your present.”

  “I remember,” Celia said. She was breathless, waiting to hear what he would say next. Just a moment ago she had been caught up in the quintessential high school dance. Of course nothing could be that simple.

  “When I found that poem in your sketchbook, maybe I overreacted. I mean, Edgar Allan Poe never did all those things he wrote, so why should I think you would? It bothered me for a long time, but eventually I decided it was none of my business and let it go. But when the thing with the note happened, well, I couldn’t get over it. Things like that just don’t happen. People don’t just fade away for a day and then come back. Plus, it was your curse day, and that didn’t seem like a coincidence. It was like you disappeared for a reason. If you had just stayed home from school one day . . . but to stay home from everybody’s memory is something completely different.” He looked at her, and she met his gaze as sweat dripped down her back under her dress.

  “I think something has been going on, maybe this whole year. I don’t expect you to tell me anything. I value my own privacy, so I respect yours.” Ivo thought for a moment. “At the beginning, before we took the Rosary as our name, we called ourselves ‘the Suburban cognoscenti.’ We like to learn and share things the rest of these people don’t know, whether it’s music or art or culture. But I’m starting to think if anyone belongs to a real Suburban cognoscenti, it’s you. What’s the singular of cognoscenti? Cognoscente?” Ivo smiled at his confusion, and Celia hoped it meant he was moving on to a lighter subject. He grew serious ag
ain.

  “I’m just going to ask you this: will you take care of the others—Marco and Regine—next year? If I’ve learned anything this year, it’s that anything can happen, even things we never would have guessed. If next year there’s a curse on seniors or something . . .”

  “Ivo,” Celia said. “You’re right. Anything can happen. And I would do anything I could for Marco and Regine, for any of you. But if you think I have some kind of power or something—I don’t.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Ivo said, not harshly, but with a quiet resolve that made it clear he wasn’t going to be swayed. “I don’t think everything can be explained, and so I won’t ask you to explain. You can say whatever you want, and I understand why you wouldn’t want to tell me something like this. I’m just asking you to look out for them.”

  “Okay,” Celia said, choosing the path of least resistance.

  “Thank you.”

  They danced in silence for a while, and then Celia said, “How long have you been dating Isadore?”

  “Two years.”

  At the end of the night Liz began to look under chairs. “Has anyone seen my purse?” She carefully knelt and lifted the tablecloth to check underneath. “I know I had it at dinner.”

  Celia remembered all of a sudden. “I know where it is!” She left them, crossing the empty dance floor and going out the door to the side hall, back to the side lobby where she had found Liz and coaxed her back to the dance. Celia was sure they had left Liz’s clutch on the floor there, and she thought it unlikely someone else would have come across it. The sconces were still dim, and it didn’t seem as if anyone else would have used this hallway all night. She pushed through the inner doors to the side lobby. One of the outer doors was still open, and the night air coming in through it had grown cooler. Sure enough, the clutch was there by the wall. Celia stooped to pick it up.

  She was startled when the lobby door banged closed. “It must be windy,” she said to herself, and turned to go back.

  He was standing there, ten feet away from her. Celia had no idea how he had gotten in without her noticing. Celia let out a shriek, but Mr. Sumeletso regarded her with the same benevolent expression he’d worn all year at school.

  “Hi, Celia. Did I startle you? You look beautiful. Did you have a good time?”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I had volunteered to be a chaperon for the dance. I’m kind of disappointed I didn’t get to be a part of it. But I also wanted to see you. I have something to return to you.” His voice was pleasant and mild, and after weeks of imagining him as nothing but a murderer, it confused Celia. He held up a copy of The Awakening. She stared at the book, but neither of them moved from where they stood on opposite sides of the lobby. “It was Mariette’s. I know you gave it to her because of the inscription you wrote in the front.”

  “Where did you get that?”

  “I had to take it away from her. It was so hard to come down on Mariette. She was so nice, and it wasn’t like she was struggling in my class. But she never paid attention.” Mr. Sumeletso laughed quietly, and he really looked like he was having a nice memory of Mariette. “It was the day before your birthday, when you were out, and she was reading it in class—not even trying to hide it. I told her I would give it back to her at the end of the year, but I guess that’s not going to happen now.

  “I never got to tell you how proud I was of you. I’m glad I got to teach you, and Mariette, too. You make it easy to enjoy teaching. There are a lot of things I won’t miss about Suburban, but I do miss students like you.”

  Celia didn’t believe he had come looking for her at prom to compliment her on her grades. She waited for his real purpose to become clear. No matter how harmless he acted, she was sure something worse was coming. But he kept up with the small talk. “You know, you don’t seem like the rest of the students.”

  “Really? How?” Her mind kept racing away. He might have no idea. Don’t give yourself away, she begged herself.

  “Well, you dress differently. You carry yourself differently. You’re interested in different things,” he said offhandedly. “And that’s good. Too many people are content to do what everyone else is doing, and they never learn to make their own way.”

  “I guess so.” What do you want?

  “But I think you’re different in other ways, too. Less obvious ways.” He was charming and curious. “When things started happening to your classmates this year—the injuries, the accidents—it was very unsettling, and I was surprised people weren’t even more upset. I mean, things like that don’t happen over and over, do they?”

  Celia felt like she had to respond. “It didn’t really make sense.”

  “Now, not everyone got hurt. Apparently, the girls who lost their virginity didn’t. It seems like such a ridiculous reason to do something so momentous, but it worked for the girls who did, so I suppose it was defensible, somehow.”

  Celia just stared at him.

  “And you—you just vanished from the planet for a day when it was your turn. Where did you go?”

  “I just stayed home,” Celia said.

  “Okay . . .” He didn’t sound convinced. “This is what I really want to know, then. On the day Mariette drowned, why did you come down to the pool, in the middle of a period? Surely you had to cut class to do it, and you’re not the type to do that. You knew Mariette and I would be there, because I had told you that morning, but why would you come looking for us?”

  “I—I was concerned. I knew she couldn’t swim, and I thought maybe—maybe I should remind her to wear a life jacket, or something—” Celia caught her breath as Mr. Sumeletso took a step toward her. But his face still was mild.

  “Of course. You are a good friend. But you also knew it was Mariette’s day for the ‘curse.’” Again he made quotations with his fingers in the air. “Who would have guessed, way back on the first day of school, when that girl got stung in the parking lot? But why was Mariette’s curse day different? I mean, Mariette died because she fell in the pool and she couldn’t swim. But if it was because of a curse that caused girls to get hurt, why wasn’t Mariette just injured, like everyone else? Why did she have to die?”

  “Because none of the other girls had,” Celia said, and immediately she felt her throat close up, as if to choke the words off and keep them from passing out of her mouth. But it was too late.

  “Yes!” He pointed the paperback in his hand at her as if she’d answered a chemistry question correctly. “If that first girl had died from her allergic reaction, no one else would have been injured. Your friend Mariette would be alive today. This whole year would have been radically different. I wasn’t sure you realized that. I mean, why would you even think such a thing? In all the time the school talked about a curse, no one ever said anything about someone dying. But now you’ve confirmed you knew the curse wasn’t about girls getting hurt, that it was really about someone dying. That makes me a lot surer of my theory. And that is this: you are the reason all those other girls didn’t die!” He frowned like a thunderstorm, and suddenly he was menacing, even though he was still six feet away from her. Celia flinched. “With the first few girls, I wasn’t doing a very good job with the spells, so I could understand when they didn’t turn out the way I wanted. But I got better! I was sure I had it figured out, yet somehow the girls didn’t die! Someone was protecting them.”

  Celia’s legs were stone. She could stand up just barely, but she couldn’t move.

  “For a while I thought it must be another teacher,” he continued. “But none of them have any powers. Then I thought it must be someone very new, like I was, because I couldn’t sense her power. It was someone who knew just enough to get in my way, but nothing more. And I might have gone the whole year without ever figuring it out—until you showed up at the pool that day. You had saved the other girls, and you had saved yourself. The year was almost over. But Mariette, being the free spirit that she was, decided she was invincible, and you couldn’t
convince her to stay home. Am I right?”

  “No, I couldn’t,” Celia whispered. She was holding Liz’s clutch so tightly she could feel the lipstick and phone inside through the fabric.

  “I’m right. And so this is the last part of my theory: You didn’t know it was I, just like I didn’t know it was you, but you figured it out that afternoon. Maybe you remembered the stupid speech I gave months before about not having sex, or maybe you finally found a way to identify me. And you came down to the pool, knowing I was going to take one of my last opportunities, with my bare hands, to make sure things finally turned out the way I wanted them to.” He glowered at her, pleased with his deductions. “And you were too late. You surprised me, but the hard work was over before you arrived, so it didn’t matter. There was no reason why you wouldn’t just accept my version of the story. It wasn’t until later that I realized you knew what had really happened. You knew, and you were playing along to keep your own secret.” He waved his hand and the bulbs in the chandelier over their heads sputtered to life and then kept blinking.

  “I couldn’t be sure. After all, you are such a timid thing, or at least, you were for most of the year. I had a hard time believing it could be you. But now I know your secret. Just like you know mine. All that’s left is to figure out what we’re going to do about it.”

  “But I’m not the one—it was Mariette! Mariette was the Kind!” Celia protested. The rapidly blinking lights made pinging noises and she was terrified they would explode and shards of glass would pour down on her.

  He looked at her blankly for a moment. “Mariette was? That would be . . . No, of course you would say that! There’s no way to prove it. But even if you’re right, that doesn’t change the fact that you know far too much. It doesn’t change anything.” Mr. Sumeletso rose up to hover a few inches off the floor. Celia heard a little scream escape her mouth.

  “Obviously you are a liability to me, and so you will have to die, too.” He looked with satisfaction at her widened eyes. “What did you think I was going to say? Enjoy the summer, and good luck next year? No. You may not be able to convince anyone what really happened in the pool, but surely you will find people who can help you, if you haven’t already. You really should have done something by now. You could have come for me before I came for you. Not anymore.” Mr. Sumeletso waved his hand and the lobby plunged into darkness.