• • •
Pathetic, right? But this is how I chose to deal. My negativity seemed to be running roughshod through the school, ripping people apart, and if I spent my time pondering who these people actually were—as Dylan might’ve wanted me do—then how could I possibly live with myself?
To be fair, I wasn’t staring kids down in the hall, casting evil hexes, and watching them explode. I was actively trying to rid myself of every emotion I had. If this part of my life were a book, it’d be titled None of the Feels. Didn’t change the fact that I’d already produced a surplus of bad vibes. No matter how many emotions I tried to stifle, the amount of animosity I’d already released into the world was pushing these bodies to the limit. Even the smallest annoyance was likely to set someone off.
It was impossible to predict the who and the when, even if I did understand the why. Tess’s analogy about spoiling bread and milk suddenly made perfect sense. Not everyone blew up at the same moment because it was a cumulative environmental effect. I had hated some people more passionately and more often, and some bodies were more resilient than others. Their times came when their times came. There wasn’t much I could do about it anymore.
So yes, I was powerful, and yet I was powerless. That fact (along with the booze) is why I stopped caring altogether. I might have been more disturbed by how easy apathy came to me, if apathy weren’t so en vogue. My classmates were taking all the deaths in stride too, and the dead were doomed to be statistics to anyone who didn’t truly care for them. Not everyone could have their wakes at the State Street Theater, after all, and so the victims were treated to a few RIPs that were hardly shared outside their inner circles. It was like they’d been living in the Rosedale Assisted Living Center, where the best they could have expected was an ice-cream sandwich and a kiss on the cheek before they left this mortal coil. And after they left? One could only hope the obituary writer spelled their names right.
Our janitor, poor Mr. Garvin, was tasked with cleaning them all up, but we made sure it was worth his while. The constant stream of donations coming our way meant we could pay him, Kiki, and the four teachers well into the six figures. As bad as it got—and it got bad—they stayed on.
Of course, Rosetti wasn’t walking the halls anymore. I hadn’t seen or heard from her since The Event, when she blabbered her accusations and slipped off right before Dylan’s death. She had told me that “they” were “coming.” Well, whoever they were—the government, I figured—they never showed up. Unless you count Rosetti’s partner, Demetri Meadows. Sheriff Tibble didn’t bother to investigate anymore, but Meadows poked around after every combustion.
Buoyed by vodka, I cornered him one day in the cafeteria and asked, “Where the hell is she?”
“Who?” he responded as he removed an air duct grate.
“Your partner, partna,” I said.
“I haven’t had a partner since November.”
“Um, you forgettin’ Ms. Rosetti?”
He shook his head the way Mom once did when she fired this kid from Covington Kitchen and then that kid’s parents showed up a few weeks later, clueless that their little darling had been shitcanned for gross incompetence.
“Wait,” I said. “She transfer or something?”
“A lot of things fell apart the night of those riots, including our theory about the dentist,” Meadows said nonchalantly, as he flicked on a flashlight and peered into the air ducts. “Didn’t mean Rosetti had the right to beat the piss out of the man. No matter how frustrated she was. No matter how much we’d all love to beat the piss out of a dentist.”
“Wonderman? So this . . . this hasn’t been her case since . . . November?”
“They took the woman’s badge when you were all on your little camping trip,” he said, flicking the flashlight off. “This is my case and my case alone. If you have information that’ll help, feel free to share. Otherwise, move along.”
I did. I moved along to the corner of the cafeteria where I pulled out the burner. I texted Rosetti:
Where you been?
The text bounced back. Rosetti’s number had been disconnected.
let’s not forget
Tess. Tess. Tess.
She was still around, but not really. After I had given her the finger in the hall, I had done other things to alienate her in those first few weeks following Dylan’s death. When she’d text me or send me a silly Vine to cheer me up, I’d ignore her. When she’d sit with me at lunch and tell me it was okay to cry or that if I wanted a hug, I could have “the biggest hug in the universe,” I’d usually shrug and sip whatever cocktail I was wielding.
She either got the message, or she got distracted, because as school became wilder, she became even more scarce, popping in for the occasional class, but rarely staying a full day. Deep down, I wanted her to keep trying, to grab me by the cheeks and yell, “Do better, Mara! Be better!” Of course, I didn’t tell her that. Because then I’d be tempted to confess and I feared she’d never forgive me.
On top of it all, I worried that she was developing a drinking problem of her own. Every time I saw her, she was carrying a Nalgene bottle filled with a milky concoction that made her wince when she sipped it. Anyone who was close to Tess knew she had sworn off alcohol after a few bad experiences, so this was not a good sign.
But did I say anything? Did I try to make her laugh or offer galaxy-wide hugs?
Of course I didn’t. I went about my own drinking. And I went to classes. When I could hold my head up, I participated. I wanted to be oblivious to the hell I had unleashed and continued to unleash, so my waking moments needed to be filled with distraction. Most of the time, Spiros’s class took my brain down intellectual paths instead of emotional ones, and while I didn’t contribute to the videos anymore, I craved Ms. Felson’s calming presence as an antidote to my disillusion with Rosetti and Krook.
“If I was your age, and this happened to me, I would have done all the same things you’ve done,” Felson told me once before class.
“You have no idea what I’ve done,” I mumbled to her.
“Maybe not. But that hardly matters. I know what I was capable of. Which was everything.”
She was right about that.
Sometimes Krav Maga let my brain off the hook and let my muscles and lungs temporarily work through whatever one feels when one feels capable of everything. Sometimes it made me collapse on the mats in the corner of the room where I’d zone out until lunch, when Kiki gave me solids to sop up all the liquids I’d been consuming. After that, it was time for more of the Good Book, which . . . well, I usually skipped. Once Dodd’s motives became clear, I didn’t need to hear about how I was doomed in both the present and the hereafter.
I didn’t go home when I skipped, though. I usually napped in the sand by the pool, in an attempt to steady my head before facing my parents. They weren’t clueless. They could see me sinking deeper and deeper. They also weren’t warlocks. They couldn’t magically pull me out of this. The least I could do for them was pretend to be sober.
I have no idea what the official population of Covington was in May. A few hundred at best. The seniors and their families, basically, and even some of those families had jumped ship. Many of my classmates were already eighteen and it was perfectly legal for their parents to say, “Sayonara, suckas, we’re moving to West Palm. Make sure to mow the grass while we’re gone.”
After the elementary and middle schools closed, and classes at Shop City Mall were canceled, almost every other kid who had the means had fled town. Why not, right? As far as I knew, no one was tracking them. Sure, they had a good chance of being ostracized in their new communities, but it was still better than being here.
This is all to say that the handful of people like my parents, who stuck around to watch things go from bad to worse, suffered mightily and silently. They had each other, of course, and sometimes they’d get toge
ther for drinks or dinners where they’d blow off steam. But mostly they watched over us, trying not to remind us of our predicament or trying to keep us comfortable, if not hopeful. It was like hospice. Only our parents weren’t trained to deal with this nonsense.
Now I know what you might be thinking.
But, Mara, weren’t you immune to the Curse? Seeing that you were the Curse? You could have spared your parents some misery by assuring them that no matter what, you’d be okay.
I considered that. I even imagined the confession.
“I’ve got some good news and bad news,” I’d tell them.
“Bad first,” Mom would say. “Always the bad shit first.”
“I’m the Covington Curse. I’ve been causing all of this. With my big bad brain.”
After the requisite ten minutes of jaw-dropping shock, Dad would say, “And . . . the . . . good news?”
“They’re all going to die, but I’m going to live!” I’d shout. “Yay me! Now let’s go have some ice cream!”
Only that ice cream would have to wait, because the thing was, how could I know I was immune? How could I be sure that I couldn’t do this to myself? What sort of damage does a season full of self-hate do to a girl? And what would it take to push that girl over the edge?
So, no. I kept my lips zipped and my emotions dull and I tried to act sober around my parents. It was the least I could do.
what I didn’t know
There were only a few weeks left before graduation when I discovered the squeaky clean underbelly of our seedy school. I was skipping Dodd’s Bible-thumping session and stumbling toward the beach when I noticed a light on in a former bio lab. Donations had brought improvements to the building—refurbished theater, cafeteria, and bathrooms were the main ones—but all classes continued to be held in four rooms: Rooms the First and Second, and Rooms the Third and Fourth, which had been added in April. Other rooms were occasionally used for trysts and miscellaneous mischief, but that was always under the veil of darkness.
So when I entered the bio lab to investigate the suspicious brightness, what I found truly shocked me. A dozen students sitting at desks, hunched over test sheets. Skye Sanchez was there. So were Malik Deely and Laura Riggs. Even Dougie O’Shea was hard at work, penciling in bubbles. These weren’t necessarily the smartest kids or the biggest do-gooders, but there was one quality they shared. They could all be accused of having ambition.
School Board President Louise Mender was slumped in the corner, contemplating a word search, doing the duties of a proctor. When she saw me, she put a finger to her lips, then motioned with her chin to an empty desk. At the next desk over, an unmistakable set of bangs hung over a face that was twisted up in concentration.
“Tess!” I hollered.
As Tess’s head shot up, Mender’s crooked finger shot out. “If you’re going to cause a ruckus, then vamoose!”
Which I did. I had no other choice. Shocked by the studiousness I had witnessed, I vamoosed. Vamoosed like hell. I needed the beach more than ever. Sure, there was usually some variety of shenanigans going on there, but it was as close to tranquil as school got. There was always a dune to hide behind, always sand on my skin, always a shimmering dimness.
When I got there, I plopped down and tried to process what I’d seen. It was an AP exam, obviously, because what other exam would a senior take? What I found so mysterious was that I didn’t know it was happening. Had I heard and forgotten? Or had no one bothered to tell me?
Either way, it meant I was clueless, not only about what was going on with this school, but about what was going on with my best friend. In years past, Tess and I stressed over exams together, studied together, traded texts as soon as we exited testing rooms to reassure each other that we’d done better than we feared. It seemed such an inconsequential part of our friendship back then. But now? Huge.
I lay back in the sand and I wept for entirely too long. When I finished weeping, I closed my eyes and wondered. Not about where it all went wrong—because I was pretty sure I knew where that was—but about where it could possibly, ever, conceivably go right again. I wondered and wondered and wondered . . . until I heard something. Tess’s voice.
“Hey, kid,” she said as she sat down next to me. “I thought you might be here.”
“Well, look who finally found her way to paradise?” I grumbled as I opened my eyes, sat up, and wiped off my shoulders.
Tess kicked her shoes off and put her toes in the sand. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“For what?”
“For not being there for you.”
I shrugged. “You gave it a shot. But I pushed you away. Now I’m trying to figure out what I pushed you into? An AP physics exam?”
“History,” she said. “Physics is tomorrow.”
“So what have you been doing? Studying this whole time? This party not good enough for you?” I motioned to the mounds of sand and to the pool and its wobbly turquoise glow, to the cigarette butts and the empty bottles, to the bikini tops dangling from the graffiti-riddled lifeguard chair.
“I never judged you and the others for how you’ve been dealing. Some of us are simply focusing on other things. Doing all it takes to move on.”
Then she handed me something. A warm, leathery book with a cover design that resembled a cereal box, but instead of pieces of cereal, it had small, square pictures of my classmates, piled together in a bowl, a breakfast of smiling faces.
Quaker Life was the title. It was our yearbook.
I knew Tess had served on the committee prior to The Event, but I didn’t know the committee had actually stuck with it afterward. I flipped the book open and began to browse. The dedication at the beginning took up thirty-something pages. A page for every victim. The profiles were glossy and glowing and more or less bullshit. A rebel with a heart of gold was printed beneath a goofy still of Dylan that the editors had screencapped from one of the videos.
“The caption wasn’t my idea,” Tess said. “I wanted to ask you how you thought he should be remembered but—”
“This is fine,” I said. “What I want shouldn’t matter.”
I kept browsing. One small section featured the portraits taken on Picture Day (back before The Event) but only a handful of candids commemorated our peaceful era of learning. Mostly it was our unhinged finale. In fact, the yearbook barely showed teachers or classes or anything that resembled school. Beer bongs beat out Bunsen burners, and to the casual viewer this would have appeared to be a meticulously documented kegger, not a tribute to our education. It was meant to seem celebratory, but to me it seemed sad, and I felt guilty about the massive part I had played in it. It also didn’t help that almost all the pictures of yours truly showed me passed out or in the process of passing out, a bottle always nearby.
“They were going for a certain vibe,” Tess said. “I mean, it’s what people were taking pictures of and what they said they wanted to remember. Our perseverance. And I’ll freely admit, I was too busy with other things to veto any inclusions.”
“It’s fine,” I told her. “It tells the truth. It is what it is.”
“Go to the end.”
I flipped through the final third of the book until I saw it. A full page covered in an old snapshot of me and Tess. We were sitting on the back deck of my house brandishing smiles of pure, if temporary, happiness. The gaps in our teeth told me this was from third or fourth grade, probably not long after Tess’s dad took off. Below the picture, Tess had written a message.
We made it.
I ran my hand across the image, as if I were petting these two innocent girls, imploring them to not give a single thought to their futures. “We’re not quite there yet,” I said.
“We will be,” Tess replied.
I closed the book and tucked it under my arm. I was thankful to have it, if only just for that one picture, but I wasn’t sure what it
was supposed to mean. Was Tess telling me to be proud? Or embarrassed? Was I supposed to be happy or heartbroken to leave this all behind?
“So have you become like my dad and Skye and everyone else?” I asked. “Are you clinging to the hope that it’s all going to stop at graduation?”
“No,” she said. “Because that’s not science. Science says there’s a way to solve this, and I’m working on that. I’ve been reading about Amur leopards.”
“As one does,” I snarked.
“I’m serious,” she said. “Amur leopards are very rare and hard to capture, but scientists have recently been keeping tabs on them, thanks to, you guessed it, tiny biological tracking devices.”
“It wasn’t me who guessed it, but go on.”
Tess didn’t even bother to roll her eyes. She just kept speaking to me in the calm cadence of a teacher. “The scientists start by putting the devices on the liver of the Manchurian wapiti, whose only predator is the Amur leopard. The Amur leopards gobble up the livers, like we gobbled up everything they gave us in the tents, and the devices implant themselves. Well, the bad news for Amur-leopard-tracking scientists is good news for us. A toxic waste spill in the Amur River, where the leopards drink from, effectively disabled the devices early last year. Stands to reason it would do the same to what’s inside of us. Now, the chemical compound is hard to replicate, but I have some online friends in the Russian Far East and they’ve been willing to send me some jarred samples.”
Spontaneous Page 22
