Nine Lives of Chloe King

by Celia Thomson

  Throw a party, came the obvious answer.

  “So,” Amy said, turning back to Alyec. “How’s the music for the prom coming along, prom boy?”

  She cocked her head and sat down. Amy’s latest new look involved shorts almost like knickers, tights, leg warmers, and a cardigan over a T-shirt on top. Long used to looking at the outfits while carefully erasing her friend from the picture, Chloe could see it was a look that might actually grace a runway. Amy, while pretty in her own way, never really made a good model for the clothes she designed. Her looks were complicated, second-look beauty; she should have worn simpler outfits.

  And if Chloe didn’t know better, she would have thought Amy was interacting almost humanly with Alyec for once.

  “It’s not a prom,” Alyec said haughtily. “It’s a fall formal. And I managed to help snag Xtian Blu to spin for an hour.”

  “No way!” Paul said, his jaw dropping as he joined the conversation.

  “Yep,” Alyec said smugly. Amy and Chloe rolled their eyes, having no idea who the DJ was.

  “Doesn’t anyone ever hire bands anymore?” Chloe’s mom asked plaintively. “Even jazz?”

  “Who played at your prom?” Paul asked politely.

  “Formal,” Alyec corrected.

  Anna King sighed in happy memory. “The Creepy Sheep.”

  Chloe wasn’t the only one staring at her. Even Kim’s eyes widened. “It was the seventies. It was punk,” Anna protested.

  “This is a dance?” Kim asked. She finished her virgin colada down to its dregs, sticking her inhumanly long and narrow tongue into the core to scrape up the bits. Her fangy canines made little clicking noises against the glass. Chloe’s mom tried not to stare.

  “The theme is ’Something Wicked This Way Comes,’ Mrs. King,” Alyec said, not really answering her. “We’re getting a drama geek to do the lighting—make it look all like trees and stuff. The disco ball,” he said with great wisdom, “is the moon.”

  “Are all the DJ slots filled?” Paul asked casually, tracing the lip of his cup. Still full, Chloe noted, of virgin colada-y goodness.

  “There’s still nine to ten, for people who show up early. Do you want to take it?”

  “Sure,” he said, trying not to grin.

  “I’ve never been to a dance before,” Kim said, to no one in particular.

  The comment hung in the air. Even Chloe’s mom seemed like an awkward teenager, not knowing what to say.

  “Is it fun?” she demanded.

  “No…”

  “Not really…”

  “They’re actually kind of a drag.”

  “Totally boring …”

  “But you’re all going,” Kim noted.

  Again the silence.

  “You.” Paul coughed. “You, uh, want to go?”

  “I’d love to. Thanks,” Kim said promptly. She tried to make it sound as toneless as everything else, but she couldn’t hide the delight in her face.

  “Uh, ’scuse me, I gotta go use the euphemism,” Chloe said, trying to cover her giggles.

  Alyec extended his hand with a little flourish to help her out of the deep couch. She took it and pulled herself up, as effortlessly and gracefully as someone who wasn’t human. Someone Mai. Alyec showed no strain or effort; the tips of his fingers barely moved. For some reason, this little thing, this private moment that took less than five seconds to pass imprinted itself with crystal permanence in Chloe’s mind. She was not human. He was not human. According to ancient myth, they could not have sex with humans—only each other. The rest of the Pride already approved of the Chosen and Alyec as a lifelong couple.

  Tears sprang to her eyes.

  “I don’t want this,” she whispered, then headed for the bathroom, already crying.

  “I’ll go check on her,” Alyec said before Amy could. Their voices were muffled through the door—which she slammed shut. The cool tiles and porcelain in the bathroom were overwhelmingly appealing; Chloe sat down on the side of the tub and put her head in her hands.

  “Chloe?” Alyec knocked lightly on the door with his knuckle. “Are you … okay?”

  She began to sob, rocking back and forth.

  “Chloe,” Alyec said softly, opening the door and sitting down next to her.

  “I don’t want, I mean, I want”—she tried to say in between tears—“I want my old life again. I want my friends acting normal. I want my mom acting normal—this party is the craziest thing she’s done yet. I don’t want to be leader of the Pride,” she cried viciously. “I don’t. It’s not fair. They expect me to just pick up and rotate my life a full one-eighty—to stop being a highschool student and start leading them into glory.”

  “No one thinks—,” Alyec began.

  “Yes, they do-oo!” Chloe sobbed. “Everyone keeps saying I can have a normal life and go to Berkeley or whatever, but I have to do all these other things—rituals and stuff I don’t even believe in. I can’t lead anyone. I can’t lead myself. I suck.” It all came out, loud. Everything that had been growing in the back of her head, whispered cynicisms and sly doubts, finally burst forth. “I’ve been mean to you, I don’t deserve you, you shouldn’t be here. …”

  “You’re not mean to me,” Alyec said softly, with a faint smile. “You may be confused about a lot of things right now, Chloe King, but I can tell you that you are not mean. Except maybe to yourself.”

  Chloe kept crying.

  “I want to start the year over,” she moaned. “I want—this all—to stop.”

  “Shhh.” Alyec finally put his arms around Chloe and began to rock her.

  “Paul is taking Kim to the prom—dance, excuse me. Amy obviously wants to go with you. She totally does. Brian can’t go because he’s sort of almost dead. I couldn’t go anyway because I’m going to be really busy learning dead languages and leading the Pride and being on the math team and it’s not like I’m even part of high school anymore. …”

  She wiped her face with the back of her hand, eyes burning from the tears and nose definitely swollen. I probably look like shit. But most of the crying seemed to be over; Chloe was just angry.

  “It must be really confusing for you right now,” Alyec said, giving her shoulders a squeeze. “I wish I could help.”

  “Mai relationships are a lot less … complicated than human ones, aren’t they?” she asked, sighing.

  “I think they’re a lot more immediate,” Alyec said with a grin. “Instead of getting upset or running away, if you had been raised Mai and didn’t like seeing me with Amy, you probably would have let your claws out.”

  Chloe smiled a little at that.

  “I like that you care enough to be jealous,” he said gently, squeezing her arm. They sat quietly for a few minutes, Chloe resting her head up against his shoulder.

  It was nice, but if she was going to lead anyone anywhere, it had to begin with the truth. And here’s a good place to start.

  “Alyec, I think …” She took a deep breath. “I don’t think this is exactly what I want right now.”

  He looked a little upset but nodded. “I’ve been a little freaked out since the whole thing about marriages in the library. …” He struggled for words. “It’s a lot of pressure, and to be suddenly dating the One…” He trailed off for a second. “It’s not that I don’t think someday, maybe—and this wasn’t just all fun or anything—I didn’t think at the beginning anyone would be looking at it to be permanent. We’re dating, for chrissake. One thing about the Mai … our options for even dating are limited,” he said a little sadly.

  To her embarrassment, Chloe hadn’t thought about any of this from his perspective before; suddenly he wasn’t just fooling around with a new member of their community—he was going out with the Chosen One. In a lot of the older people’s minds they were probably already engaged, with children, and leading the Mai together into a whole new era of peace and prosperity. She breathed a deep sigh of relief and held herself back from telling him that the curse might be lifting and
that maybe they really could date other people—it just didn’t seem like the right time.

  Paul’s favorite episode of Star Trek came to her mind: “I found I did not wish to be married to a legend. …”

  Alyec as her consort. It just didn’t work.

  “Is there anything else you want to get off your chest?” Alyec asked gently.

  “Let’s see,” Chloe said, wiping the last of her tears away. “I have just been made leader to a people I know almost nothing about. People aren’t exactly rooting for me, you know. I’m still behind at school, and my relationship with my mom has been all fucked up since I’ve, um, fully become a Mai. I don’t belong anywhere, and my friends”—she indicated the kitchen with her thumb—“have their own things going on. Oh, and there’s someone following me.”

  “What are you talking about?” Alyec asked, meaning her last point. “The Rogue is dead; you sort of forced an uneasy truce on both us and the Tenth Blade. And no matter what Igor or anyone who supports Sergei really thinks, no Mai would ever dare lay a hand on you.”

  “I just have this feeling that someone is following me—I know it. What about that guy who hates Brian? Rick or Dick or whatever, who was with Whitney Rezza the night at the Presidio…”

  “I hardly think he could sneak up on you; he’s just a human and not even as good as the Rogue.”

  The streetlamp outside glowed through the frosted window, making everything in the bathroom bleak and soft at the same time, well defined but gray. Individual tiles stood out against old grout; larger things like the mirror and the sink seemed to fade into a matte painting of a bathroom. A car went by, breaking the silence for a few moments.

  “Do you know who tried to kill Brian?” Alyec asked softly.

  “No, I haven’t asked.” She pulled some toilet paper off the roll, wadded it up, and daubed her nose. “I guess I should.”

  “I wouldn’t worry too much.” He put his hands around her shoulders and gave her a squeeze. “You can take on whatever they dish out,” he added, brushing her cheek with his hand and pushing back a stray lock of her dark hair. “Why don’t we go back to the party?”

  She nodded, sniffing. He tore off some toilet paper for her to blow her nose on and they returned to the living room, Chloe hoping desperately she didn’t look like an idiot.

  “Everything okay?” Amy murmured.

  “Yep,” Chloe said, wiping her nose again and knowing what a liar her red and puffy face made her out to be. Kim looked alarmed. “I just—I had a little bit of a breakdown.”

  Her mother was stationed behind the kitchen island, clasping the sides like it was the wheel of a ship. Her knuckles were white.

  “I’m, uh, a little overstressed right now,” she added with faint smile. “It just kind of all got to me.”

  Chloe felt like she was eleven again, when she’d run to her room crying during her birthday party. All the boys had decided to play football in the street and Jason Pellerin told her that she couldn’t because she was in a dress. Chloe had stayed in her room a good long time, weeping. By the time she finally came out, the party was sort of stilted and over.

  “You know what you need?” Paul asked, breaking the silence. “Marriage wanna”

  “Paul,” her mom said warningly.

  “How about a Matrix marathon?” Amy asked, digging through her voluminous pink purse, whose trim matched the fringe on her leg warmers. “I was just going to lend these to someone. …”

  “That sounds … excellent,” Chloe said, breathing a deep sigh of relief. Suddenly the whole tension of the party was broken. TV—the ultimate party solution. Paul and Alyec were obviously interested, and Kim took the DVDs, turning them over curiously in her hand. Her mother went back to chopping pepperoni.

  “I’ve never actually seen the third one,” she said, without looking up from her cutting board and chef’s knife.

  “It sucked,” Alyec, Paul, Amy, and Chloe all said at the same time.

  “Like the dance,” Kim said wryly. “And like the dance, we are going to watch it anyway.”

  “Now you’re getting it,” Paul said, clapping her on the back.

  Chloe wiped her face but wasn’t embarrassed about it anymore. The boys took over the seemingly difficult process of putting in the DVDs and setting up the TV, and Amy made kettle corn in the microwave.

  “Are you feeling better?” Kim asked quietly.

  Chloe nodded and smiled. “I just needed to—I needed the cry.” Waves of endorphins and relief were still washing over her. Like it was all going to be all right now. “What did you all do while I was gone?”

  “Not much,” Kim admitted. “I thought I heard someone approaching the house; that was exciting for a moment. But no one was there.”

  Chloe felt her waves break. But before she could question her further, Kim turned abruptly to Paul. “Are you going to drink that?” she asked, pointing to his glass.

  “Huh?” Paul reluctantly dragged his attention away from wide-screen and Dolby digital options. Alyec grabbed the remote while he looked, distracted, at his still-full but slowly melting virgin colada. “Um, well.” He looked at Chloe’s mom, trying to decide what to do. “No,” he finally said.

  Kim reached over and took it with both hands, then began lapping at it greedily. “This,” she pronounced, licking the slightest bit of foam off her lips, “is a good party.”

  Eleven

  It Will be okay, Chloe told herself the next morning, sort of believing it this time. Her mom seemed satisfied—or possibly horrified—and likely to drop the whole needing-to-be-more-in-her-life thing for a while. After sitting through all six hours of the Matrix with Amy snoring through the first hour of Revolutions, Kim pausing the videos every few minutes to ask questions, and Alyec and Paul fighting during the middle of Reloaded about why Jet Li didn’t wind up being in it, Chloe’s mom was feeling pretty well acquainted with her friends.

  And her Mai friends were apparently not outside the range of normal teenage behavior; even Kim with her ears and slit eyes and claws.

  “She’s a little bit of a geek,” was all her mom had said about her after the guests had gone.

  Chloe had laughed. “Yeah, the Mai think so, too.”

  And now here she was, a normal high-school girl going to high school. She was almost caught up with her homework and exams and had sorted stuff out with Alyec, and Brian was recovering. It even looked like she and Brian could hook up without fatal consequences. Amy and Paul—well, they weren’t really her problem. After last night her two best friends seemed to realize the amount of stress she was under and lowered the weirdness meter a bit. No longer chanting the I will be the cool best friend mantra, Chloe told herself instead, They got to work their own shit out.

  After her last makeup French quiz, Chloe was so glad it was over and confident of her grade that she signed her test with a flourish and a fleur-de-lis. She handed it in with a little bow and merci beaucoup. Mme. Sassoon already had her car keys in her hand. Thanks to Kim, Chloe was pretty sure she would get an A.

  She checked her voice mail: two messages. One from Alyec, asking how she was doing, and one from Sergei.

  “Chloe, we found something on your dad. I have to look at this property near your school.” Sergei described exactly where it was and how to get there. “It’s an old theater. If you meet me there at four, we can talk.”

  “Sacre bleu”, Chloe muttered, snapping her phone shut. He had kept his word—he was really trying. Of course she would meet him.

  Speaking of French, where had Kim learned to speak it so well? She had never been to France, as far as Chloe knew. Many of the Mai had never been to San Francisco proper, much less Canada, much less France. Do they dream of doing other things? A few of the Mai had broken out, like Simone the dancer, but it was rare. It was a self-imposed ghetto. She wasn’t sure how much Sergei actually had to do to keep them there.

  What about her own dreams, while she was at it? Running a retail clothing empire. Would she j
ust substitute her slavery for Sergei’s; would the Mai insist on working for her?

  And, uh, speaking of retail empires, remember how you promised to go see Marisol…?

  Chloe had been putting it off for a long time, too smothered by guilt to even think about it. Now she was finally in a good enough mood that she could force herself through it and take whatever was thrown at her, whatever she deserved. She had already chalked up her relationship with the shop owner as over, so at the worst this wouldn’t change anything.

  She hadn’t even been by Pateena’s since coming back from Firebird. Once it was her safe haven, her home away from home and school. An entirely different set of people and problems and the first real hard work she had ever had to do. There was nothing to make you appreciate the weekends more than a La-Z-Boy-sized pile of jeans that needed to have their cuffs artfully ripped. Chloe’s short internship at Firebird had just been boring and strenuous.

  She stood outside the windows and looked at them for a moment. They had put up a Halloween display—probably Marisol’s doing. She was far more artistic than she had much of a chance to express. One mannequin hung upside down, wearing a leather jacket, like a bat; another wore all orange, like a pumpkin. A third had earmuffs redone as ears and long black Lee Press-On Nails for claws.

  A cat, Chloe realized.

  Marveling at the irony, she took a deep breath and went in.

  “Well, look who’s back,” Lania said immediately. Of course she had to be there. Of course. Chloe’s quest for redemption—and subsequent humiliation—wouldn’t have been complete without it. Though a menace to retail, snotty to the customers, and still not able to understand how to void a credit card sale, the girl had been allowed to work the cash register just because she was a couple of years older than Chloe. And there she was, now assistant manager.