Dusssie

by Nancy Springer

  Only it wasn’t hair. It was snakes.

  He was just trying to make me giggle and squeal, but I jumped away. “Don’t!”

  “Why not?” He tried again.

  Because I couldn’t let him find out about me, that was why not. I yelled, “Get off!” and whacked his hand down, but that just made him laugh, like it was a game, and he grabbed for my head again.

  I blocked him with both arms. “Troy, it’s not funny! Let me alone!”

  One of the creeps on my head, in my head, whatever, sounded a warning. sssevere vibrationsss.

  Predator! another one of them cried.

  Yet another hissed, prepare to ssstrike!

  Trying to ignore them, I walked away from Troy, but he followed me, and that pissed me off. I mean, recent events had put me in sooo not a very good mood anyway.

  Apparently my head residents didn’t appreciate being followed any more than I did. Their voices got louder and more urgent.

  Ssstalker!

  Prepare for ssself-defenssse!

  Someone else chimed in. Musssk!

  Deploy musssk! Deploy fecesss! Their loud brown thoughts smelled like snake musk, which believe me did not improve my mood.

  I had to keep looking over my shoulder at Troy, to make sure he wasn’t getting too close to my “hair,” and he grinned.

  “What’s the matter, Dusie?” he teased.

  “You’re ugly, that’s what!” I said just because he wasn’t.

  “Ooooh, that’s harsh!”

  “Get away from me!”

  “Hey, I’m just going to school.” He kept grinning and kept following.

  The snake chorus crescendoed, darker and darker. ssswell necksss! musssk! cannot deploy musssk! cannot deploy fecesss! No tail, no cloaca! ssshhh! Forget musssk! present necksss! Flatten necksss! Prepare to—

  I told Troy, “Go away and let me alone!”

  “What if I don’t want to?” And he grabbed me. By my right wrist, as his other hand shot toward my “hair” again.

  That did it.

  Without even thinking, or maybe letting my headful of creepy crawlies think for me, with my left hand I snatched off my do-rag. Flakes of face mud fell all around me as my snakes reared and showed their colors, threatening, hissing, spitting.

  Troy turned white, dropped my arm like it burned his hand, and took a step back, screaming, “What the—talk about ugly!”

  He never got to say any more. If looks could kill … but mine could. I didn’t realize in time, but I felt it happen as anger blazed in me, my snakes thrashed and struck at the air, my eyes flared fire, and Troy … Troy turned to white stone.

  “Did anyone see you?” Mom demanded.

  “How should I know? I just pushed him over, rolled him into the alley, and ran.” In other words, I’d panicked. Even now, at home, with the apartment door locked behind me, I was still pretty much hysterical. I kicked the sofa, then yelled, “Ow!” and burst out crying. I felt awful. Troy. Dead. Or petrified, whatever. Just for trying to yank my hair.

  On/in my head, some snake said to another snake, We sssaved her.

  She hasss to like usss now, another one agreed.

  I did not like. Not. Like. Snakes on my head. I must never go snake-crazy again. I must never do the killer look to anybody again. Never. I had to make sure not to let it happen ever again. Never never never.

  I wailed at Mom, “Why didn’t you tell me not to turn people to stone?”

  “I was hoping … I thought …” Her voice shook. She spun around and ran to the kitchen and hurried back with black plastic garbage bags; they rustled in her grip because her hands were shaking, too. “They’re such little snakes,” she managed to say, “I didn’t think you could. Or I was hoping you couldn’t. You’re half-human.” She grabbed her coat, stuffing the garbage bags into her pockets. “Wrap something around your head,” she ordered, “and come on. We have to go get him before …”

  She didn’t say before what, and I didn’t ask, just grabbed one of her silk scarves out of the coat closet, tied it over my snakes, and followed her. On the street, she got us a cab. We perched in the backseat. I dried my face on my sleeve, sniffled, and tried to calm down. Mom stared straight ahead.

  “It’s probably okay,” she said softly after a while. “In New York, most people just blink and keep walking.”

  I knew it was not okay and it never would be okay.

  “I’ve been through this before,” Mom went on. “If anybody notices, they’ll think it’s something that fell off a truck. A garden gnome. Or somebody’s art project.”

  She was trying to help. But she wasn’t helping.

  She had always been, like, my rock. Kind of a strict, old-fashioned rock—well, duh, she was way old, and so are rocks—but solid.

  But now my thoughts were making me feel as if I could never trust her again.

  “Your sculptures,” I said after a while, running some of them through my mind: Gladiator, Celtic Elk Hunter, Napoleonic Fusilier, Spartan Warrior, to name only a few in her Attacker series—the critics were always talking about how startlingly vital they were, coming at the viewer with weapons as if to kill, all so lifelike—Spartan Warrior with actual sword wounds, Gladiator with whip scars—done with what the critics called “nearly supernatural authority,” as if she had been there …

  Well, she had been there. Hundreds of years ago.

  And I knew now how the “artworks” had happened, and even to me my voice sounded dead. “Your sculptures. All so realistic. All in stone.”

  “Hush,” Mom said.

  I couldn’t hush. All of a sudden I hated her. I mean really, really hated her, because when I was a little girl I’d wanted to grow up to be just like her, but now—since “becoming a woman”—ow, it hurt. “Where are we going to take Troy?” I demanded. “To your studio?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, lovely. Are you going to exhibit him? Give him a title? ‘Schoolboy Stricken with Horror of Hideous—’”

  “Stop it,” Mom ordered, and even though it wasn’t time yet, she signaled the cab driver. “Let us out here.”

  I managed to keep my mouth shut until she’d paid him and he drove away.

  Then I demanded, “How many people have you—”

  “Stop it, Dusie.”

  We strode, hurrying, through the hardest, grayest place I’d ever been to. Hard gray street and hard gray sidewalk in the cold shadow of gray buildings under a gray winter sky.

  In a gray voice Mom said, “I’ve managed not to—not to lose control for centuries now. The sculptures are from long ago; I keep them in storage and bring one out when I need a new work.”

  My mother had been lying to me. All my life. She’d let me think that while I was in school she spent her days at some studio somewhere, chipping away like Michelangelo, when really … really she was a serial killer, sort of.

  “Most of them deserved it,” she added, glancing at me, hard-eyed.

  “Mom!” Suddenly I was almost crying. “Mom, no!”

  “I’m not a murderer, sweetie. It just happened. Usually to some thug who was trying to kill me. The ‘Attackers’ are just enemies I had stashed away. A couple of dozen in the last four thousand years; that’s not so bad.”

  “Sure it’s not.”

  “Merciful heavens, honey, when I was your age, the king of Gaul used to kill more people than that on an average day before breakfast.”

  Was she a murderer? If it was self-defense? Was I a murderer? Maybe not exactly, even though I felt like I was. I mean, I hadn’t known what was going to happen at the time. It was basically an accident, manslaughter or something.

  We sssaved you, complained a snake inside my head.

  Show sssome gratitude, added another.

  “Shut up, creeps,” I told them. I hated them; I hated everything—why hadn’t Mom warned me what might happen?

  I knew the answer to that one: because she hadn’t wanted me to know about—about her.

  Because s
he didn’t want me to know what she was.

  And what she wasn’t.

  The more I thought about it, the worse I felt. We rushed along hard sidewalks leading deeper and deeper into confusion, and I just stared at the concrete. I felt so hopeless.

  Finally we reached a corner near my school. Flashing lights—red, blue, white, yellow—caught my eye.

  I looked up.

  And almost screamed. Mom grabbed my wrist, stopping me where I stood and silently warning me to be quiet, her fake fingernails digging into my skin.

  So I just stared—at two NYPD cruisers with their light bars blinking. And a rescue truck. And an ambulance with its flashers going. All pulled up zigzag at the mouth of the alley where I’d dumped Troy.

  “Is that where …” Mom whispered.

  I nodded.

  “Too late,” she breathed. “Somebody must have seen.”

  I stood there as if Troy had turned me to stone.

  “Come on. We don’t want them to notice us.” Mom tried to tug me away.

  But just then some guy let out a yell from inside the alley. Even half a block away, we could hear him. “This thing has air going in and out of its mouth!” he shouted.

  Mom gasped. I whammed both hands over my own mouth to keep from screaming out loud.

  “What the hell?” one of the cops yelled back. “It’s just a stone—”

  “It’s stone, all right, but its mouth is open and it’s breathing. I can feel the air moving. Get the ambulance over here!”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “No, he’s not,” said a different voice, a medic, maybe. “There’s a heartbeat. This thing is alive!”

  By evening I felt so schizo glad, sad, mad, bad, and scared I had turned off my cell phone so my friends couldn’t call anymore to tell me about What Had Happened—I couldn’t handle talking with anybody, not even Keisha or Stephe. I couldn’t stand to watch the news anymore, either. It was so all about Troy, who was lying in NYU Medical Center with a dozen specialists trying to figure out what was the matter with him.

  “Mom, can we turn it off?”

  “… hospital spokesperson has now confirmed,” the anchorwoman was saying breathily, “that SoHo teenager Troy Lindquist has suffered some unknown disease, accident, foul play, or possibly even terrorist attack that has partially turned him to stone. While the mysterious incident has left his internal organs functioning normally, externally his entire body is now composed of a porous form of white marble, leaving him unable to move, eat, speak, or …”

  I’d heard it a dozen times. “Mom? Off? Please?”

  Perched beside me on the sofa, leaning toward the TV, she shook her head. “Not until I’m sure nobody saw you.”

  “Look, they said—”

  “I know.”

  They had actually interviewed the kids. Friends of Troy’s on their way to school had recognized the “statue” lying in the alley. When Troy hadn’t showed up for homeroom, they had told the teacher, and she’d thought they were talking about a body or something, so she’d called 911.

  “… stone clothing and shoes inseparable from the stone of his skin,” the anchorwoman was saying. “His fingernails, hair, and eyes also appear to have been turned to stone. While it is assumed he cannot see, his brain scan indicates heightened mental activity. There is no indication yet as to whether his condition might be contagious or criminally induced. The mayor is assembling a special task force to determine the cause of this unusual circumstance, and meanwhile, the governor is urging citizens to stay calm—”

  “Mom, please.” I wasn’t staying calm. I started to shake again, like I’d been doing off and on since the “incident.” One minute I’d feel so glad and thankful that Troy was still alive, which Mom said had never happened in her case. She thought it must be because I was half-human that I hadn’t completely turned him to stone, just petrified his outer layer. But then the next minute I’d feel awful, because how was Troy supposed to live like that? I mean, they had drilled holes in him for tubes to feed him and stuff, and he couldn’t even blink his blind eyes to show whether he knew what was happening. Poor Troy, they had to find a way to make him better.

  But then—this was what scared me—if they did help him and he got better, what would he tell them?

  If they found out about me, what would they do to me?

  I trembled so hard the sofa shook.

  Now the TV screen showed a middle-aged man and woman with rainy gray faces. “The afflicted teenager’s parents have agreed to be interviewed.”

  I closed my eyes and hid behind my hands.

  What’sss the matter with her? a snaky voice complained in my head. I felt crawly movements on my scalp—but also a movement beside me as Mom reached for the remote and killed the TV.

  Silence, except for the ragged sounds of my own sobbing. I hadn’t even realized I was crying.

  Mom put her arms around me, but I stiffened and pulled away.

  Mom’s arms fell into her lap like I’d shot them down.

  Silence.

  Then, in her most controlled voice, “It’s not your fault, honey,” Mom said.

  “I don’t care.” I wanted to tell her it was all her fault, actually, but I didn’t. “I’ve got to help him.”

  Isss she crazy? somebody hissed in my mind.

  Mom said, “You can’t. Dusie, have some sense. You can’t let them find out about us.”

  Us.

  Oh. Oh, my God.

  If they took me away, they’d take Mom, too.

  No. No. None of this could possibly be happening.

  But it was.

  As if something were choking me, I could barely talk. I whispered, “But, Mom, I have to do something—”

  “What can you possibly do that will make any difference for that boy?”

  I shook my head. I had no idea.

  “Dusie, look at me,” Mom said.

  When Mom told me to do something and she really meant it, I couldn’t not do it. And this was one of those times when she meant it. So I faced her.

  My mother. Like a classical sculpture. But not stone. All too alive, with deep, deep eyes. Something in those depths I could not read.

  “Dusie,” Mom told me, “You have to accept the way things are for you now. You’ll come to see the good side. Being my daughter, you have a very long life to look forward to.”

  Oh, terrific. “Look forward?” I almost screamed. “Putting people in the hospital? With snakes on my head?”

  “Honey, you’ll learn to cope with your—”

  I put my hands over my ears, loathing her. She wasn’t a great sculptor. She wasn’t anything she’d let me believe she was. Her whole life was a humongous lie. She wasn’t even—my mother wasn’t even human. I hated her worse than ever, yet I needed her so bad I couldn’t stand it.

  I jumped up and stamped my foot so hard it hurt. “Mom,” I begged, “what are we going to do?”

  But I already knew she had no answers for me. Because she wasn’t my perfect parent anymore.

  Sure enough, she said, “I don’t know.”

  “Mom—”

  “Sweetie, I don’t know. I never had a daughter before.” A tear rolled from each eye. And Mom never cried. Never. But never say never. “All those years,” she said, “and I never had a child.”

  “Please,” I whispered, because she had always been so strong, her pain hurt me even more than I was hurting already.

  “I think we need to go to the Sisterhood,” she said.

  THREE

  At midnight we strode into Central Park. “Don’t be afraid,” Mom told me.

  “Of what?”

  She didn’t answer, just kept walking. She was wearing an emerald silk gown and a matching headdress that framed her Greek-goddess face. I just wore a thin scarf over my snakes, and they coiled close to my scalp—because of the cold, I guess. I mean, I’m a city girl, and what I knew about snakes was mostly from horror movies, but it seemed to me I’d heard something abou
t snakes sunning themselves. They were reptiles, not like me, and they didn’t do cold very well, apparently. They were finally silent.

  “Don’t be afraid of what?” I insisted, so bummed I didn’t really care; I just wanted to argue. “Gangs?”

  But Mom actually chuckled. “Testosterone-prone youths are the last thing we have to worry about.”

  “Unless they’re carrying mirrors and swords,” said another voice. By the pale light of a thin moon, I saw a tall woman step out from between the trees to walk on the footpath by my side.

  I said, “Hi, Aunt Stheno.”

  “Sis, I don’t want to hear another word about mirrors and swords,” said my mother in knife-edged tones. “Get over it.”

  “I’ll never get over it! The three of us living peaceably at the very end of the known world, minding our own business, and that Perseus comes after us like—”

  “I don’t want to hear it!” Mom barked.

  “Dusie has a right to know.” Aunt Stheno stopped walking and grabbed my arm, turning me to face her. “Like a trophy hunter on safari, that’s what, and for no reason except that we were accursed to be ugly. ‘Ew, Gorgons, let’s go hunt them,’ as if it were the same as bagging a warthog or a rhino. Kill a Gorgon, take the head home to Athena. He—”

  “Stheno,” said Mother with iron in her voice, “that is enough.”

  Aunt Stheno turned away and strode on. “Hurry up. They’ll be waiting,” she grumbled.

  She and Mom walked so fast I had to trot to keep up, as they led me along a winding path to a secret place between three giant boulders. There they stopped. Looking around, at first I saw nothing except the zigzag silhouette of the Dakota building in the distance, rocks all around and bare trees holding the sickle moon in their twiggy fingers.

  “Greetings, Medusa,” said a voice overhead. I looked up and gasped as an angel, no, a monster—a birdwoman—flew in and thumped down to stand beside me on scaly clawed feet that would have looked better on an ostrich. “Sorry,” she told me, seeing that she had frightened me. “I don’t get much chance to fly anymore. Daytime, I—”

  “Greetings, Medusa,” interrupted a honeyed growl from atop a nearby craggy stone. I jerked around to look. A woman’s head stared at me with glittering topaz eyes, her chin resting on her—paws. Great golden, clawed paws. Lion paws.