by Joanna Wiebe
“Come on,” Molly says, stunting my mounting concerns. “My first high school party awaits. If I haven’t made out with three guys by the end of the night, it will not be due to a lack of effort.”
We make our way into the mansion, where the walls are vibrating as Pilot plays DJ Who Wants to Deafen Us. I see the Model UN from Hell early on, and Harper and Plum nod my way, but nothing more.
Venturing further in, I find a corner in the kitchen, near the wide-open backdoors that lead to the crowded deck, while Molly grabs us something to drink. I catch a glimpse of my pixie cut in the window’s reflection and have to smile; from Miss Saligia to this. Frankly, I prefer this.
“It’s growing on me,” Dia says as he comes to stand at my side. I see him in the reflection next to me. He doesn’t look like his old self, either; his broad shoulders slump now, and there’s a wheeziness in his breath. “You haven’t been here in so long. Not since the day you freaked out about my experiments.”
He’s got a lot of nerve talking to me after what he did. Of course, I’ve had some nerve looking him in the eye for the past few weeks even as I slowly enacted my plot. I guess you can’t expect much more from a couple of underworld leaders.
“Did you destroy those morbid beings?” I ask him.
“‘Course I did.”
I glare at him.
“I’m not as bad as you think I am,” he says.
“Saligia hated you.”
“Well, hate is love in the underworld.”
“And cheating on her was…adoring her?”
“I don’t know if I should take credit for mentoring you now,” he says, “or stand humbly in the shadow of what you were able to accomplish when you weren’t under my tutelage.”
“Nice topic change.”
“I can’t stop thinking about that painting.”
“Me neither.” And I mean it. That painting consumes my every thought.
Molly swoops in and hands me a can of soda. She’s shoving chips into her mouth as she smiles at Dia, excuses us, and pulls me into the dancing crowd, where no one can keep their hands off my short hair, which is especially short at the back.
When the music starts to get lame, we venture out back, where the most tormented of seniors have gathered to slice knives across their wrists and stab each other just to see how it feels. That gets old—and creepy—fast, so Molly and I move along, like we’re exploring sideshows. A prayer vigil is underway in the porte cochere. A dozen kids hold candles and pray for the souls of the seniors we’re about to lose.
“I think we promised to enjoy tonight,” Molly says, tugging me away. “Not that…I mean… We can sit and pray here if you want to.”
“I never took you for guilty, Mol.”
Verily and Justin bolt our way and hand Molly flash drives containing their good-bye speeches, meant for family, and then dash off, holding hands, with a final call of thanks. Molly tucks the drives into her pocket and shoves me when I look at her like she couldn’t be a bigger softie.
Around the next corner, to my heart-stopping dismay and delight, are Ben and Garnet. Molly tries to steer me away, but I won’t let her.
“You are such a masochist.”
I hush her.
Ben has his back against the house, and Garnet is standing an inch or two from him, bringing her lips to his, then pulling back, then smiling and kissing him again—on the nose, on his eyelids, on his forehead, and eventually on his lips—bobbing like one of those bird toys that sips from a cup of water.
When she notices us, she calls us over. I try not to look at Ben, even though I can feel his gaze moving through me like fire through dry wood. Last we spoke, I told him I hated him. If he wins tomorrow, will there be time for me to tell him the truth? Or will I have to use Mr. Watso to send notes to Ben in his new life?
“Anne, my prize student with the bold new look!” Garnet is all smiles. “And her friend—I forget your name, sweetheart.”
“It’s Molly.” She throws me a glance that says what I’m thinking: Garnet’s barely older than we are, so why is she calling Mol sweetheart?
“Yes!” Garnet exclaims. “Such a cute name.”
“That’s me,” Molly says. “Little cutie.”
I have to look away to keep from laughing.
“So, are you girls enjoying the party?” Garnet asks us.
“I’m thirsty, actually,” Molly says.
Ben’s face lights up. “Me, too. Let’s go grab a drink, Mol.”
“I’ll take a chardonnay,” Garnet calls after them. She drapes her arm over my shoulders. It smells like she’s already had a glass or two.
I drive a glare into Molly’s back, but she doesn’t turn to see.
“So, Anne, how exciting is the unveiling tomorrow? I just wish we could be around to see it.”
“You won’t be?”
“The unveiling happens after the Big V. If Ben loses, well, let’s not go there. But if—no, when—he wins, we’ll be leaving the island immediately.”
So that seals it. I won’t be able to talk to him.
“Oh, but it’s been so fantastic being your teacher,” she says. “Ben and I are planning to move to San Francisco until we can sort out our story. It’ll be like living in the Witness Protection Program, but we’ll be rich, of course. Beautiful, young, and rich. And in love.”
I look awkwardly around, desperate for a change of subject. Which is when Dia heads our way.
“Where’s my Saligia?” he asks me.
Ugh, he’s been drinking too.
“No, this is Anne,” Garnet corrects him. She looks at me like, Duh, he’s been sitting for you for months.
“No, this is Saligia, the underworld goddess. All full of trickery, this one.”
Oh, shit. I can’t believe I didn’t see this coming. Dia’s about three seconds from destroying everything.
“Tell me more about you and Ben in San Fran,” I say to Garnet and block Dia with my back.
“What do you mean?” Garnet asks Dia, forcing me to let him back into our space. “You mean she looks like the goddess Saligia? Didn’t she have long hair? I seem to remember a Rossetti painting of her with long, wavy hair.”
Panic sets in in five, four, three, two—
“No, no, she’s really Saligia,” Dia slurs. “Anne’s soul. Mephisto made her. She’s been running around here getting demons to follow her,” he hiccups, “and do bad shit.”
Realizing he’ll never stop talking, I slam my lips against his. Hard. To shut him up before he can utter another word. Dia grunts in pain but responds fast. I hear Garnet’s laughter transition from fast and surprised, to slow and confused. She gasps when I pin Dia to the wall exactly as she’d pinned Ben. Except I’m not light and kind and sweet when I kiss Dia. I’m rough. I’m openmouthed. I’m coming on as strong as I’ve got to if I want to shut him up and fill her mind with something new.
I think it works.
Except it works so well, Gia responds. Just like last time, I can feel her rising. My head has started swirling. Bright lights begin flashing. Fuuuck. She’s going to explode here like she did in Dia’s library, and she’s going to send everyone flying, and then it will be all over. Secret revealed. All lost.
I tear myself away from Dia, who collapses breathlessly into the wall. He had so little energy as it was; I’ve sapped him of what was left.
“Anne Merchant!” Garnet says with admiration. “I’m impressed. Role-playing—I never would have guessed you had such a wild side. And with Dia!”
“I—I—”
I can still feel Gia. She’s still here, close to the surface, because I’m still near Dia. So I bolt.
I dart away from him, from Garnet. Like I’m on fire and need water, I shove through the throngs that seem to move slower and thicken the more I need to get through them. I race to the nearby woods, praying I’ll make it into the cover of the first trees before Saligia appears. Stay away, I command her, but then I recall Dia’s kiss, and she’s here again, s
he’s with me again, right under my skin.
I leap over a fern. Collapse on the earth. In a whirl of leaves and branches and mud. In a tornado of violent energy.
I glance at my hands, clenching the ground. But where I expected long, slender, claw-like hands—her hands—I see mine, chipped black nail polish and all.
“You didn’t come,” I whisper and think, Once we do what we have to tomorrow, I won’t ever bother you again.
With my dress destroyed by forest-floor muck, I glance back at the party. Dia has wandered away. Good. As long as he doesn’t say anything else to Garnet, we should be okay. With that, I inch my way, crawling, through the woods and back to campus. I can’t return to the party covered in mud.
As I get ready for bed, I wonder if Molly’s going to kill me for abandoning her at the party. Probably not. She’s got three dudes to score with, and I would have cramped her style.
Like so many others will do tonight, I lie back and dream of really living again. Surrounded by sunshine and the warmth of the people I love. I let myself, for the first time in a long time, imagine Ben in that life, too. With me. I imagine the Christmas he’d envisioned for us, with his dad, with my dad—and with Jeannie.
In small groups, girls start returning to the dorms. I listen through my partly open door to them talking quietly about what the seniors are going through, about what it would be like to be so lucky as to win the Big V.
To live again, I think. Did we live before? Who here lived enough in their first thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years to even get to die? We’d barely started.
I’m half-asleep when I hear Molly sneak in, shuffle by my desk in the darkness, and scurry back out. I’m half-asleep when she returns, moments later, and whispers that she thinks I’m sleeping, which means she’s with someone. I’m half-asleep when I try my damnedest to hold in a big ol’ smile at the idea of Molly hooking up with some senior guy—I mean, what single person wouldn’t hook up a little on their last night on Earth? I’m half-asleep when she flicks her lamp on and excuses herself, leaving her friend behind.
I hope they don’t make a lot of noise.
I pretend to sleep.
But not for long.
“Anne?” Ben says. “Please, wake up.”
twenty-seven
BREAKING SPELLS
I ROLL IN SLOW MOTION ONTO MY BACK, AND THEN TO my side, to find Ben standing above me. He is gazing down at me with the strangest expression. In one hand, he holds a rolled up sheet of craft paper—my sketch of him in his casket—and in the other, a folded piece of paper, writing on both sides. It takes a moment, but I realize that it’s the breakup note Ben gave me; on one side is his cold good-bye, and on the other is my conversation with Molly, in which I explained to her that, for masochistic reasons, I’d kept my ties to him while severing his to me.
“I don’t mean to wake you,” he says, “but I don’t have a lot of time.”
For a moment, he looks like he might throw himself at the bed, at me. But he’s Ben. So he starts to move, and then he stops himself, always letting his reserved demeanor rule.
I sit up and pull my knees to me.
He moves tentatively, watching me watch him in the dim light, to sit where my feet just were.
He’s holding his breath.
So am I.
“This was all your doing,” he says. His eyes are glistening when he looks at me. He looks older than ever, like Dante must have looked after walking through Hell. “I think about breaking up with Garnet all the time, you know. I lie in my bed and wonder how I could have dated her for years when I’ve never been in love with her. But she and I have all these memories, so there’s no denying our history. Maybe I would have just accepted it,” he says, dropping his gaze, “if the spottiest memories of another girl hadn’t kept interjecting. A blonde girl. With wild hair.”
I absently stroke the velvety back of my head.
“It was you. She was you. Before you cut your hair.”
I wait.
“I have these random memories, you see. Memories of seeing you leave Gigi’s house and throw a jacket into the bushes.”
He saw that? Back on my first day here?
“I remember you and Pilot Stone walking down to the water one afternoon. I remember you washing the dishes in Gigi’s kitchen, talking or singing to yourself, as I sat in the shadows of my back deck. That was in September. That was when my dad and I still lived where Voletto is now. All these memories, Anne, of me watching you. But those conflict with this belief in my mind that I hate you, for reasons I can’t possibly identify. And then…”
He’s going through what I went through. A secret to unravel, all on his own, without more than glimpses of the truth to guide him. I know a secret that is protecting his life, just as he knew a secret that, in his eyes, protected my life and kept him and his father safe. As he didn’t tell me that I was in a coma and the entire student body was deceased, I won’t tell him the truth now. Not because I’m cruel, but because I know he’ll figure it out. I can see him figuring it out. Just as he once saw me figuring it out.
“And then there’s the Scrutiny challenge. Anne, you were everywhere in it. You were the lust I had to conquer.” He stares at his hands. “To finish the challenge, I had to give into that lust. My lust for you.”
I hold my breath. As he exhales.
“I remember feeling,” he says, his eyes bright with the memory, “like I had a hall pass. Like I never wanted the Scrutiny to end because this was my chance to have you as I’d wanted to, with no repercussions and no harm done. When I woke only moments after I started kissing you”—he stops like he’s holding back details—“I was more upset that it was over than I was that Toshio had beaten me.
“And then there’s my enrollment as a student,” he rushes on. “I couldn’t remember why. Something told me not to ask around, especially not to ask my dad, who’s been on the hard road back to sobriety. I thought asking wouldn’t help me in the here and now, so why do it? But tonight, I asked Dia. I asked him why I was a student.”
“Oh, Ben.” I temple my hands on my lips. “Not in front of Garnet.”
“There! Why would you say that? Why not in front of her?” His eyes flash. “It’s like you’re protecting me from her.”
I swallow.
“Well, it wasn’t in front of her,” he says. “Dia told me I was punished for helping you run from Mephistopheles. But I don’t have any memory of helping you. No, Anne, my few memories of you are memories you couldn’t possibly have known because they were happening only for me. And because you couldn’t know them,” he says, takes a breath, and runs his fingers under mine, “you couldn’t erase them. Could you? Using those powers you hinted at the other day?”
I close my eyes for a moment. In defeat.
He knows.
“What does Garnet know?” I ask him.
“I don’t have a clue.”
“What have you told her?”
“Nothing at all. Look, just tell me. Did you—did you do this all for me?”
He shifts to wrap his hands around mine. My pulse soars. And, for the first time in a long time, I feel like it’s my heart beating, not Saligia’s. I come to life when Ben’s near me, just as Gia came to life when Dia was near her.
“Did you love me?”
“Ben.”
“Did I love you? Or am I going crazy, trying to connect dots that are only coincidentally located near each other?”
“I didn’t do it for you,” I say at last. “I did it for me. I used this dark history of mine to make you win the Big V when you told me you’d never fight for it. I needed you to fight for it. Because I needed you. I did it because I selfishly want a life with you, Ben…even if you’ll have to battle feelings of hating me each day.”
“The hatred is strong,” he admits with a light laugh. “But not insurmountable.”
To my surprise, he pulls me into his arms. I’m back in his embrace, a place I’d worried I’d never again be. We lea
n back in bed, and I adjust my quilt around us. If we were to die now, with my head on Ben’s chest and his hand gently stroking my arm, I would be totally okay with that. My eyelids are heavy when I hear him whisper.
“If I win tomorrow…”
“When you win.”
“Promise me you’ll do everything you can to join me.”
Yawning, I nod. “I’m way ahead of you.”
“Because Anne?”
“Yes?”
“I love you.”
I smile to myself. “I love you, Ben.”
We’re fast asleep when Molly nudges us.
“Ben has to get back to his room,” she whispers. “Someone will notice. People will talk. Assumptions and all that.”
Groggily, Ben and I stand. I am counting my lucky stars when he looks into my eyes and takes my face in his hands. But I pull away before he can kiss me.
“Not when you’re with Garnet,” I say. “Not until we’re both back—Molly, too—in the real world.”
“What if I don’t win?”
It’s a thought I haven’t let enter my mind. But it’s a possibility, to be sure. As hard as I’ve tried, nothing’s guaranteed. I’ve never been through graduation day, and I have no idea what to expect.
“Positive thinking,” Molly offers.
“Positive thinking.”
It’s not until Ben slips out of our room that I start shaking. Molly rushes to me, and we fall into my bed, curling up just like Ben and I did. I’m floored by what’s happened. I can’t believe Ben put it all together.
“Did you ask him to come here?” I ask her. “Was this your plan?”
“He pulled me aside when we went to get drinks for you and Garnet. He asked for the truth. Said Dia had told him something about why he’s a student here.”
“And you told him about us?”
“I told him he might want to see a drawing you’d done. And a note he’d written.”
We smile in the dark, but only faintly. Because tomorrow will tell everything. Tomorrow will decide our fate. Wrapped up together, Molly and I fall asleep.
