Melissa, Queen of Evil

by Mardi McConnochie

  I looked up and realised that, just as it had the day Amanda Dean got struck by lightning, the sky was filling with black clouds.

  ‘My mum said I’m not allowed to play if it looks like there’s going to be a thunderstorm,’ one of the girls said.

  Thunder rumbled ominously. I hoped and prayed that the batters would walk.

  They didn’t.

  ‘Okay,’ our captain said, rubbing her hands together. ‘Let’s wrap this up.’

  And wouldn’t you know it? They put the ball into my hands. It was my turn to bowl.

  Fitting the ball into my fingers, I found my place at the start of my run-up. (It was not a long run-up.) I stood and watched as the girl I was bowling to fussed with her pads and fiddled with her gloves and took up her stance and then looked up and faced me. And although my fingers were itching to unleash that ball at her at a million screaming miles an hour, an image like a premonition flashed into my mind, and I saw the ball smacking hard onto the pitch and rebounding up, up, straight at that girl’s head and crunching against bone. I saw her go down like she’d been hit by an express train, I saw skull fractures and brain damage and another person being carted off to hospital, and I knew that I’d pushed things as far as I could go and that any minute now something terrible was going to happen. But everyone was waiting for me, and before I’d even decided what I was going to do my feet began to move and I began to run.

  And then something miraculous happened. I hit a lumpy tuft of grass and my foot turned and I lost my balance and stumbled – and I realised I’d been given a chance.

  ‘Ow!’ I howled, and keeled over onto the grass. ‘My ankle!’

  My team-mates came running.

  ‘What happened?’ asked the captain.

  ‘My ankle –’ I gasped. ‘I think I’ve sprained it.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ the captain asked anxiously. She could see the match slipping away from her. ‘Maybe if you just rest it for a few minutes you’ll be all right. Can you move it?’

  I moved it. ‘Argh!’ I howled.

  I was supported off the field, limping pathetically. Ice was brought.

  ‘Do you think you’ll be able to bat?’ the coach asked. ‘We could give you a runner.’

  The thunder rumbled again, warningly.

  ‘I don’t think that would be such a good idea,’ I said.

  I watched the rest of the match from the sidelines. We lost.

  ‘Never mind,’ Dad said, looking rather down in the mouth as he drove me home. ‘There’ll always be next time.’

  For a while after I got home I congratulated myself on how cleverly I’d managed to avert disaster: there’d been no lightning, no skull fractures, and my run of good luck in the field hadn’t been so spectacularly good that I’d made my team-mates wonder what the hell was going on. But as I got out of the shower, I began to realise that the danger hadn’t passed at all. All that power I’d sucked up on the cricket pitch was still humming and buzzing around inside me. I had a full head of steam and I was ready to explode.

  I sat down to watch some telly, hoping that the energy might just dissipate if I distracted myself (even though Ben had warned me that it wouldn’t). But Jason was having none of that. Jason was having a day. Jason was having a corker. He kept running through the room every 3.5 seconds shrieking ‘Loolaloolaloolaloola! Hahahaha!’ and bopping me on the head with a gigantic inflatable baseball bat and running away again and then running back into the room and shouting ‘Loolaloolaloolaloola! Hahahaha!’ and bopping me on the head some more and then running out and running in and – you get the idea. (Did I mention he’s eleven?)

  ‘Jason!’ I screamed. ‘Piss off!’

  ‘Language!’ called my mum.

  ‘He’s being an idiot!’ I shouted.

  ‘Just ignore him!’ called my mum.

  ‘Loolaloolaloolaloola! Hahahaha!’ cackled Jason.

  I’d had enough. ‘I’m going for a walk!’ I snapped and stalked out the front door.

  ‘I thought she hurt her ankle,’ I heard Mum say as the door closed behind me.

  I could feel the back of my neck tingling as I marched down the street. Energy crackled through my fingertips and it felt like my bracelet was actually vibrating. All I could think about was how insanely annoying Jason was. Man, there were times I just wanted to tear his head off his shoulders!

  But I knew I couldn’t think like that because the way I was feeling right now, it could actually happen, and annoying as he was I didn’t want to risk maiming or killing him.

  There was a sound in my ears now like a distant helicopter. I was going to discharge, I knew it. I tried to remember the second verse of the national anthem, the twelve times table, anything to keep the thought of Jason out of my head. Shivers were zipping up and down my spine. There was a park at the end of the street and I turned into it, not really knowing what I was doing. It was nearly dinnertime and the park was deserted – the little kids had all gone home and the older kids who sat around on the equipment, smoking cigarettes and drinking alcohol they’d stolen from their parents’ liquor cabinets, wouldn’t be here for another couple of hours. Even the dog-walkers had gone home.

  I climbed up the stairs of the wooden fort where me and Soph used to hang out when we were younger and sprawled out on the boards, staring up at the sky, trying to empty my head of all thought. It was brilliant and cloudless, the late summer light golden and perfect. And as I stared into that beautiful void, I had an idea. I didn’t have to smite Jason – I didn’t have to smite anyone. I could turn my energy into a summer storm and all that energy would be dissipated and I’d be able to go safely home to dinner. I thought about clouds. I thought about powerful winds and rolling surf. I thought about streets turned into torrents of rain. I imagined all that energy and all that rage and all that destructive force playing out high above the city, and no-one getting hurt.

  I closed my eyes and visualised all the storm footage I’d ever seen on the news.

  And then I felt it. A buffet of wind, the leading edge of a storm front, one of those curvy lines they show you on the weather maps. It hit me with a whomp, blowing my skirt hard against my legs, and the sudden cold of it in the warm afternoon made my skin prickle into goose-bumps. I stayed where I was, thinking about blocked storm drains and rattling fences and branches lashing in the wind. And the more I thought about wind and rain and rough weather, the colder it got; that first buffet of wind turned gusty and then started to blow hard. Clouds began to mass on the horizon; a huge thunderhead built over the city. My skin was crawling so much it felt like it was trying to shed itself, like a snake. And then I heard a strange roaring sound. I sat up, trying to see what it was – it sounded like a really huge truck or an aircraft was idling right beside me – and then I noticed the air was full of birds flying hard to outrun the storm, and as I watched I saw one after another of them drop suddenly through the air and then recover and flap on. For a moment I couldn’t work out what I was seeing, and then it hit me – literally. A huge hailstorm was blowing in, and the hailstones were striking the birds as they tried to fly away to shelter. The temperature plummeted and then chunk! Chunk! Chunkchunkchunk! Massive hunks of ice were slamming down like missiles all around me.

  There was no time to get home. I fled down the stairs of the little wooden fort and crouched down in the disgusting pee-smelling room underneath. For ten minutes ice smashed down out of the sky all around me and I sat there watching as the summery park was transformed into a ski run. And then the clouds passed over, the hail stopped, the wind dropped, and all was still and silent again – except for the car alarms which were shrilling up and down the street.

  I walked slowly back towards my house. The street was littered with smashed foliage and bits of roof tile. The cat from across the road stared out from under a parked (alarmless) car with an expression of absolute outrage. All my residual power had been vented, leaving me drained and exhausted – but in a good way. As I walked up our drive my brother
came charging out in a state of high excitement, scooped up a handful of ice and hurled it at me. It disintegrated into sharp icy fragments, but his aim was rotten so it missed me.

  ‘Snowball fight!’ he screamed.

  And even though I was really too mature to retaliate, I had to throw some hail back at him. So we threw hail at each other until it had all melted away again.

  Perfect Outfit

  The next day Soph called and asked me to go to the mall with her.

  ‘Do you think your ankle can take it?’ Mum asked dryly.

  I told her it was feeling a lot better today.

  The first thing we did when we got to the mall was go and look for Ravi at the juice bar, but he wasn’t there. We decided we would come back and have another look for him later, and in the meantime we’d go shopping.

  Soph is a great person to go shopping with. She’s got a great eye, and if something looks bad on you she’ll tell it like it is – but if it looks good on you she’s the world’s biggest enthusiast (ohmigod, Meliss, you look amazing in that dress, you have to buy it, etc etc). She’s also tireless, and fearless. No shop is too expensive, no salesgirl too snooty. I don’t like to shop outside my demographic, but Soph doesn’t give a damn about whether she can afford something or not. If it’s there to be tried on, she’ll try it on. The mall is her dressing-up box, and so what if the object of the exercise is to buy? As Soph always says, ‘I might come back and buy some of this stuff when I’m rich, so they’d better be nice to me now.’

  We went from shop to shop, trying on everything that caught our eye. We tried on gorgeous sparkly dresses and devastatingly cool jeans that looked horrible on me and weird on Soph but to-die-for on the girl who worked in the shop. We decided it had something to do with her great haircut, depraved expression and total absence of bum.

  ‘I wish I looked depraved,’ I sighed, studying myself in the change-room mirror. The face that looked back at me was round, freckly, boneless, and stupidly smiley. ‘She looks more like the Queen of Evil than I do.’

  ‘You could look depraved if you wanted to,’ Soph said, peering over my shoulder. ‘Maybe if you wore lots of eyeliner.’

  ‘It wouldn’t work. I’d still look like a happy guinea pig.’

  Soph started to laugh. ‘You don’t look like a guinea pig,’ she said, although from the way she was giggling I knew she was just trying to make me feel better.

  ‘I do,’ I said. ‘I’d kill for cheekbones.’

  Soph had cheekbones. ‘Maybe you’ll grow into them,’ she suggested kindly.

  We shopped on. Soph found a fantastic little skirt and a great top and some earrings and some shoes, but nothing she found was quite right.

  ‘They’re all nice,’ she said. ‘But they’re not perfect.’

  Soph had a firm belief that somewhere in that mall, the perfect outfit was waiting for us, and that unless we found it, we could never make the school social work its magic.

  She dragged me off to one of those shops that cool 22-year-olds with no bums and depraved expressions (and credit cards) shopped in, picked about twenty things off the racks and then hit the change-rooms. Between us we fussed and fiddled and tried on different combinations until at last we found it: the perfect outfit. I tried it on. Soph tried it on. It looked good on both of us. It was truly amazing. You know that feeling you get when you find an outfit that fits you like it was made for you, which shows off all your assets and hides away anything you’re not so sure about, the kind of outfit that makes you start smiling and humming and swooshing around in the mirror because it makes you feel like the ultimate perfect you? This was that outfit.

  ‘But how will we decide who gets it?’ I asked.

  ‘We could both buy it and then we could share it,’ Soph suggested, striking delighted poses in the mirror.

  And just as me and Soph were starting to workshop how we could pay for it, the door of the end change-room opened and someone stepped out.

  It was Vicky Lind. And she was wearing the same outfit. Only it looked about a million times better on her than it did on either of us.

  She looked Soph up and down with the slightly pitying expression of the very beautiful. ‘Snap!’ she said.

  ‘It’s a great outfit, isn’t it?’ I said, although my heart was sinking.

  ‘Mm,’ Vicky said, turning and twisting in front of the mirror, a slight frown furrowing her perfect brow. ‘I guess so.’

  ‘Did you see it in the blue?’ I asked, hoping to steer her in a different direction.

  ‘I like the pink better,’ Vicky said coolly. Which was fair enough really – the pink outfit was definitely the nicest, and while it looked great on us it looked sensational on her. Then again, most things did. She walked past us and struck a pose in the doorway. ‘What do you think, babe?’

  From the corner of my eye I saw Soph freeze.

  No – he couldn’t be.

  He was.

  ‘You look hot.’ Ravi was there in the doorway, twining his arms around Vicky and pulling her in for a big kiss. For a good minute they stood there with their tongues down each other’s throats.

  ‘Get a room,’ I muttered, but not loud enough for them to hear.

  At last they drew apart again. And as they did I saw Vicky shoot Soph an icy stare, as if to say, this boy’s mine, and don’t you forget it. Ravi had eyes for no-one but Vicky. Me and Soph might as well not have even been there.

  Abruptly Soph disappeared into the change-room. I heard buttons popping as she stripped off her finery.

  Vicky turned back to the mirror. ‘Do you think I should get it?’ she asked, turning and pouting and flicking her hair.

  ‘Sure,’ yawned Ravi. ‘If you want it.’

  Vicky struck a few more poses and then let a teeny tiny little frown furrow her brow. ‘Nah. It’s not that good,’ she said, and flounced back to her own change-room.

  I smiled at Ravi but he completely blanked me. He may have remembered banana girl, but banana girl’s friend hadn’t made it onto his radar.

  ‘Are you getting it?’ I asked, when Soph emerged again, dressed in her own clothes.

  ‘No,’ she said, hustling me towards the door.

  ‘But why not? You looked amazing in it!’

  ‘You know why not,’ she said.

  ‘She’s not even going to buy it,’ I said, hurrying to keep up with her.

  ‘So?’ Soph said. ‘He’s seen her in it. How can I buy it now?’ And then, a minute later. ‘I hate Vicky Lind!’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Me too.’

  And I did. Not because of Ravi, who I couldn’t give a toss about, but because she was just so damn smug. I hated her poise. I hated the way people admired her. I hated the way things just seemed to fall into place for her. Good things just happened to Vicky Lind. She won a car in a raffle, can you believe that? Not just any car either – a really cool convertible. Her parents were keeping it for her until she was old enough to get her Ls. And it’s not like she didn’t already have money either. She had tons, you could tell by the way she always had new clothes all the time. She was too rich, too blonde, too thin, too perfect. No-one deserved to have that many blessings. No-one.

  And before I even knew what I was doing I felt it – pow! – a pulse of destructive energy burst out of me and dispersed invisibly through the shopping mall. I had unleashed the forces of destruction on Vicky Lind.

  ‘Oops,’ I said.

  ‘What?’ asked Soph.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

  Mr Granger

  I turned up to school on Monday nursing the horrible suspicion that I had done something terrible to Vicky Lind. As I headed for my locker I kept my ears open for news that some bizarre misadventure had befallen her, but as I walked to my first lesson of the day I spotted Vicky herself, all lip gloss and attitude, as large as life and in perfect health. Clearly, if there had been a disaster in her life, it was not a visible one. I listened out over the course of the day to
see whether the gossip grapevine revealed a family tragedy or the theft of her never-driven personal convertible. But there was nothing.

  This was very puzzling, because I knew perfectly well I’d done something to her, although I had no idea what. But maybe I’d given her some kind of personal affliction, like warts or bad breath, which you wouldn’t know about unless you got up close. I couldn’t quite believe that the smiting simply hadn’t worked on her. Vicky Lind was lucky, but she wasn’t that lucky.

  Nonetheless, I told myself that the casual smiting really, really had to stop and that this would be absolutely the last time.

  My good intentions lasted for exactly four days.

  On Thursday night I rang Soph for a chat. We talked about this and that for a while and then Soph said, ‘I don’t believe I’m saying this, but I’ve got to go.’

  ‘Why?’ I said, a little hurt.

  ‘Because we’ve got that big science test tomorrow and I should probably do some study before University Hospital starts. I know I sound like a girlie swot but if I fail another test my dad’s going to kill me.’

  I went cold. ‘Which science test is that then?’ I said faintly.

  ‘You know,’ Soph said. ‘The science test Mr Granger’s been going on about all week.’

  It was all coming back to me now. ‘The one that’s worth a big chunk of our mark for this term?’

  ‘That’s the one.’ There was a pause. ‘You haven’t studied for it?’

  ‘Not exactly.’ I hadn’t even brought my science book home. This was not good.

  ‘You’re great at science,’ Soph said reassuringly, ‘I’m sure you’ll be fine.’

  ‘Mm,’ I said. ‘Well, see you tomorrow.’

  I hung up.

  What was I going to do? Whatever Soph might have said, I was not great at science and I really couldn’t afford to stuff up a science test. I’m not one of these people who lives to study and wants to kill themselves if they don’t get an A for everything, but I do hate to do badly, and the thought that I’d completely stuffed up out of sheer stupidity was more than I could face. Fear of failure began to churn in my stomach like a vat of acid.