Devilish

by Maureen Johnson

  I stepped aside so that Sister Albert could come over and see for herself. She reached in and poked around a bit. When that produced nothing, she took out books and shook out the pages. When she grabbed my Calculus II book, four red sparkling envelopes fluttered to the ground. Leafing through a notebook, she found a draft of the letter that had obviously come in the envelopes.

  “I’m surprised, Miss Jarvis,” Sister said, bending to pick up the envelopes. “I’m very surprised you kept any of these things here. You are much smarter than that. Maybe you weren’t finished?”

  “Those aren’t mine,” I said. “Someone put them in my locker. You’re right. If I had been doing this, there’s no way I would have kept the stuff here.”

  And that’s when Ally chimed in.

  “She tried to get me to do it with her, Sister,” she said, turning a cold gaze on me. “She said she hated it here. The Poodle Club thing was just the beginning.”

  “What?” I said.

  “I think you should wait in my office, Jane,” Sister Albert said.

  “I will take her, Sister.”

  It was Sister Charles, looping up behind me and catching me by the arm. She walked me halfway to the office before she spoke.

  “You know who I am, I presume,” she said quietly.

  “Brother Frank told me,” I said. “What happens now?”

  “You’ll be expelled,” she said. “I think there is little question of that.”

  “Can’t you do something? You know I didn’t do it.”

  “That is not important now.”

  “Yes, it is!” I said. “My whole life could change! I can’t get kicked out of high school!”

  “Jane,” she said, stopping and backing me up in the corner behind the statue of St. Sebastian, to the point where I nearly had a fake arrow in my eye. “If you think for even one moment that is important now, we are sunk. We are now in the battle for eternal souls. There is only one way, Jane. You must give all but your soul. School is nothing. Your possessions are nothing. Your body is nothing. Your life is nothing. Toss these things away like garbage. But hold on to your soul.”

  “It’s a little late for that,” I said. “Maybe you could have mentioned this in class?”

  “It is not too late,” she snapped. Her eyes glowed under her thin, bluish eyelids. Her pupils had gone milky, but I could see, looking at them at close range, that her gaze was still young and strong. Her skin was excessively wrinkled, but it still retained a faint hint of peachy youthfulness. It was like the aging process had been started from the outside but hadn’t penetrated the core.

  “It’s not?” I asked.

  “It is never too late,” she said. “Soul eaters are greedy, Jane, and the greedy make mistakes. As long as there is desire, there will be mistakes. Know that you are pure and know that you are fearless and you can make no mistakes. We will be in touch. Brother Frank or Owen will contact you, and I will continue to watch Lanalee.”

  “Does she recognize you?” I asked.

  “Oh yes,” she said. “She certainly knows who I am. She takes great delight in what she did to me. But I know I am very fortunate. Now, Jane, is your hour to be everything you can possibly be. Now you must be your best, far beyond what you’ve ever imagined. This is your time, Jane.”

  And with that, she gently took my arm again and led me to my academic doom.

  twenty-nine

  There was no big judicial procedure involved in my expulsion. A private school like St. T.’s can throw you out at their discretion. They had a file drawer full of proof that I was a problem. They had physical evidence linking me to the Poodle Club. Case closed. My mother was called. My official St. Teresa’s insignia was removed from my blazer with a small pair of scissors. Sister Rose Marie escorted me to my locker to clean it out. A crowd gathered and watched me. I was out on the new, smooth driveway within the hour, my belongings in shopping bags.

  When my mother pulled up, she had only one question.

  “Is this about Elton?” she asked.

  Other than that, she was surprisingly quiet and thoughtful. I was permitted to go to my room while she spoke to my father. I waited all day to hear from Owen, but he never called. No one called. It was a silent wait. In the late afternoon, I was told we were going for dinner, but no explanation was given.

  At least Joan was impressed.

  “Were you really going to blow the place up?” she asked as she burst into my room after school.

  “What?”

  “I heard you wanted to blow up your school.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “I can’t remember,” she said. “Someone. You could probably build a bomb. You’re good at stuff like that. Maybe Dad taught you.”

  Every once in a while I get this paranoid idea that my sister is actually a genius and she says these kinds of things to test me.

  “No, Joan. He didn’t teach me how to build bombs. He just taught me to kill with my bare hands.”

  “Or were you just going to burn it down?”

  “I wasn’t going to burn anything down or blow anything up,” I said. “Have you met me?”

  “You burned your book.”

  Oh, right. There was the whole book-exploding thing. Points to Joan on that one.

  “Is this about Elton?” she asked.

  “Not everything is about Elton,” I said. “Elton is not the center of the universe.”

  “Sorry,” she said, flopping down on her bed. “This is just so—not you. You’ve been acting weird. And now you’ve been kicked out of school. I don’t understand.”

  She flopped over on her back and gazed at me upside down.

  “There’s just something going on right now,” I said. “There’s a problem I have to solve, and once I do, everything will be fine.”

  “What?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “Why not?” She flipped over to her stomach. “I can help. I want to help.”

  She did want to help. Maybe in this new, rearranged universe I lived in, Joan was the smart one. There was no point in not letting her try. I hadn’t exactly come up with anything.

  “Okay,” I said. “But you can’t tell Mom or Dad.”

  “I won’t,” she said excitedly.

  “What if you had to get into an event at the Biltmore Hotel, but you couldn’t get an invitation. How would you do it?”

  She buried her face into my bed and devoted herself to thought. After maybe five minutes of silence, her head jerked upright.

  “I’d call Carbo and ask him to get me a job,” she said.

  “Who is Carbo?”

  “This guy who used to go to my school, Chris Carbolini. He runs part of the catering service now. He hires people all the time to do little jobs. He can probably get you in.”

  “Joan … are you serious?”

  “I can call Harvest, who can call Britney, and she can call Rina, who used to date Carbo’s brother!”

  Within minutes, the thing was done. I had an in at the Biltmore—and all because of Joan. There was a knock on my door. My mother stood there, smiling. Joan and I exchanged worried looks.

  “Your father’s home,” she said. “We’re going to go to Linda’s for some pizza. Come on downstairs.”

  This was a completely illogical turn of events. My parents had delayed their total mental breakdown and instead taken me to my favorite pizza place for dinner. This hardly seemed like a punishment. They even insisted that I got to pick everything and that I should order anything that looked good. We ended up with a massive Greek salad, garlic knots, a bowl of black olives, a four-cheese pizza with ham and pineapple, and another with artichokes and sausage.

  “I did some research today,” my dad said, grabbing a slice of pizza and carefully picking off the pineapple. “I let my TAs take over, and I talked to some people in the school of education. And now, we have some good news for you, Jane.”

  “Obviously,” my mom cut in, “we’re not happy about the expulsio
n, but to be fair, St. Teresa’s was never a good fit for you. We wanted to send you to a more-specialized school, but it simply wasn’t affordable.”

  “But something’s come up,” my dad went on. “Have you ever heard of the Weddle Program?”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s a new program for highly advanced learners in Boston. It’s a self-paced, extremely innovative place. It’s beautiful, Jane. The students live in two brownstone mansions, and you use classrooms at Boston University and MIT for your work. Here are some pictures and information.”

  He pulled some printed-out web site pages from inside his coat. It was all that he had described—two long, coppery-colored buildings. A happy dorm room with half a dozen people crammed in, hanging out together. Glowing reports of academic freedom, the absence of useless rules and standards. Just a happy home for the smart and slightly ill-adjusted, smack in the middle of the biggest college town in the country. In short, paradise.

  “They do one major field research trip a year,” he said. “This year, they’ll be going to do rain forest studies in Brazil.”

  “You get kicked out of school, and you get to go to Brazil?” Joan asked. “I can get kicked out.”

  “It’s to do lab work, Joan,” my dad said kindly. “They do biology and chemistry all day.”

  “Oh. Never mind.”

  “It’s a great place, Jane,” my mother said, reaching for my hand. “There are only thirty people in the whole program, all just as intelligent as you. We think this could be where you really belong. We’ll be sad not to have you at home, but you’ll be close. And you can come home for weekends in the spring if you want. And we can be there in an hour if you need us.”

  “And there’s one other thing,” my dad said. “We got lucky. Purely by coincidence, they just got a late-filing grant to accept one more student, and as long as that student is in place by November first, it’s fine. Which means that you’d have to leave tomorrow and get settled in and registered. In order to make up the time, you’d have to do class work on the weekends through December, but then you should be all caught up. But this grant will pay for the entire program. They’ll give it to you, Jane, if you accept right now. Isn’t that great!”

  I picked all of the green olives off my pizza and set them to one side. Obviously, this was not a tricky choice. At least not on the surface. One option was a cutting-edge program in Boston that would salvage my whole future. The other option was … to do nothing. I only had a day. I needed that day.

  “Can’t they wait a day or two?” I asked.

  “Why wait?” my dad said. “The only other option is trying to get you into Joan’s school, but you’re already behind. This school will set things right, Jane. If you want to go to Harvard or Yale or MIT or wherever, this is where you need to go. They’ll repair your record, and you’ll meet and work with the right people. Frankly, this school is a miracle. What’s there to think about? All you have to do is say yes now.”

  I stared into the grotesque grin of the tiny carved pumpkin that glowed on our table. It was a miracle, all right. A perfect school, a grant at the last minute for the first student who came along. It was just the kind of thing that might happen to someone who—oh, I don’t know—absentmindedly signed a contract with the devil.

  I sifted through the pages again. This time, the name popped off one, as if it was bolded and three-dimensional:

  Headmaster Lazarus Fields welcomes you to a community of truly unique learners.

  “Oh my God,” I said out loud.

  “It’s great, huh?” my mom said cheerfully.

  I looked across at my two beaming, well-meaning parents and my glistening-eyed, supportive sister … all of whom were delighted, albeit unintentionally, to be packing me off to Devil Prep.

  “I need a day,” I said, my throat suddenly dry. “It’s all happening so fast.”

  The delight faded from my parents’ expressions, and my sister quickly turned her interest to identifying all four cheeses on the pizza in front of her.

  “Jane,” my mother said firmly, “we don’t have a day. Trust me, we don’t like the thought of you not living at home, but this is a one-in-a-million opportunity that just fell together at the right time. And it’s you who got kicked out. We’re trying to be positive about it—but this is your doing.”

  “So what is it?” my father said.

  I had no choice. I had to say something. And the smartest move seemed to be to say the thing that caused me the least trouble right now.

  “Sure,” I said. “Okay. I don’t know what I was just thinking. You’re right. It’s perfect.”

  The ride home was fairly joyous, considering. My mom starting making a list of all the things I would need for my dorm room. My father tried to explain to Joan the difference between the American South and South America.

  We all went to bed early in preparation for the day ahead, but I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t go to Boston the next day. I couldn’t go to this perfect, wonderful program that was waiting for me with open arms. No. I had to stay in Providence and fight the devil.

  I paced.

  At around two in the morning, as I went down to get what had to be my twentieth glass of juice, I was not surprised to look out the window and find Owen silently waiting in the cold.

  thirty

  “I guess you heard the news,” I said.

  I was sitting on my front porch, bundled in a bathrobe and my sister’s silver ski jacket. Owen sat beside me in a oversized plaid lumberjack kind of coat, an obvious hand-me-down.

  “We heard. Allison turned on you. Not to depress you, but that’s not shocking.”

  “Yup. And then magically, the perfect school in Boston decided to let me in. They just happened to get a grant today, which they need to use by tomorrow. Which is when I’m supposed to leave.”

  “Tomorrow? You can’t go tomorrow.”

  “I know that,” I said. “I have to wash dishes for a guy named Carbo tomorrow. Somehow, though, I don’t think my parents are going to accept that. We’re supposed to be packing my things in the morning. Oh, and Lazarus Fields is the headmaster. You have a plan, right?”

  “Working on it.”

  Even though my coat was warmer, he reached over and rubbed my arm hard to get the circulation going.

  “Can I ask you a personal question?” I said.

  “What?”

  “How did it happen?”

  “How did what happen?”

  “How did you … you know?”

  “What?”

  “Die,” I finally said. “How did you die?”

  “Oh, that. Accident.”

  “What kind of accident?”

  “I worked for a grocer,” he said. “Mr. Bioni. He wasn’t a really friendly guy. He used to make me sleep in the store to take early morning deliveries. He would lock me in because he thought that would keep me from stealing his things—not that I ever did. I worked really hard for him. My family needed the money. I was sort of the main support. My dad was sick and couldn’t work. So I was there, sleeping, when a huge fire broke out at the bakery next door. The flames went right through the wall. I couldn’t get out. That was pretty much that.”

  “That’s horrible,” I said. “Lanalee said something about you knowing about fire.”

  “Oh yeah,” he said dismissively. “She would. It’s been a while. It doesn’t bother me anymore. I think my death was even mentioned in a book on reforming working conditions in the early twentieth century.”

  “The what?” I asked. “When was this?”

  “1904.”

  “You’re over a hundred years old?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How old were you when you died?”

  “Same age I am now,” he said. “Fourteen.”

  “You died when you were fourteen? At work?”

  “It doesn’t matter how old you are,” he said. “Age is a human thing. It’s kind of meaningless, something people get hung up on, like clothe
s or something.”

  “But you died kind of … prematurely.”

  “There is no dying prematurely,” he said. “Whenever you die, that’s the right time for you. Maybe your time is when you’re three, maybe it’s when you’re a hundred and three.”

  “So, Lanalee’s dead too?”

  “Yeah, but she died old. Really old. I think she was ninety-five or something. The evil live a long time. They tend to be good at stuff—making money, taking care of themselves. They don’t usually get stuck in fires at locked grocery stores.”

  He was trying to keep his voice level, but it gave way a bit. There was resentment there.

  “But she looks young.”

  “She took that body from a girl in France, maybe a year ago. See, they take things to help themselves. They take souls, bodies—they take whatever they need or want to sustain themselves. They’re like parasites. Sure, maybe they’ll give you some stuff to get you to sign, but they always do it for themselves.”

  “So, what do you do it for?”

  “I like to make things right,” he said. “I like to take care of people.”

  He paused a minute.

  “Allison sold out today,” he said.

  “Good to know you were paying attention.”

  “There can only be one reason for that,” he said. “The stakes must have changed again.”

  “What?”

  “A deal,” he said simply. “Lanalee’s done another deal.”

  thirty-one

  It was about three in the morning as we approached the Tremone house.

  She came to the door in a pair of red Chinese silk pajamas. A fuzzy red eye-cover embroidered with the words The bitch is sleeping was pulled back over her forehead.

  “Oh,” she said. “It’s you. I don’t hold court at this hour usually, but seeing it’s a special day, I’ll make an exception. Come on. And bring Owen. I’m sure he’s lurking around out there somewhere.”

  I went back down the steps, over to the tree that Owen was, in fact, lurking behind.