I have to admit, it made me think that when I died, I hoped people remembered the real me better, even if it’s not all good.
There was a small reception afterward, at the funeral home. The casket had been closed, though no one explained why. I figured that the morticians hadn’t been able to change the expression of terror on his face, or maybe they just thought it was too depressing for high school students to see a dead teacher.
We had fruit punch in plastic cups and Chex Mix that one of the mothers had made and brought. To me, it tasted like brimstone. But then again, since I’d muttered the words of the demon summoning spell, almost everything did these days. I thought about it all the time, fought against the temptation even in my sleep, and imagined what my soul must look like—if there really was such a thing.
“Are you OK?” asked Georgia, afterward.
“I guess.”
“You don’t look so good.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“I meant—you look devastated.”
“Mr. Barry was a great teacher. I feel like people are talking about him in all the ordinary ways and they ought to be talking about him in extraordinary ways.”
“You really liked him, didn’t you?”
I nodded, catching my breath to avoid bursting into tears. I’d had enough of tears already this week.
“I already had a guy ask me out on a date. It was so incredibly annoying. At a funeral?”
“You turned him down?” I asked.
“Duh!” said Georgia. “I’m not that desperate.”
“We should go do something fun. Something just for us.” Something to remind us that we were still alive, and that life was good.
“How about going out for sushi?” asked Georgia.
Georgia loved all kinds of sushi. I’m a vegetables and cooked sushi only kind of girl. But between the two of us, we could put away a lot of sushi.
“You know why I like you?” asked Georgia, when we’d ordered a fifth round.
“Because I eat more than you do?”
“Yes! And also because you don’t tell me all the time that you’re on a diet and can’t have that or ask me if you look fat in something. You have a great body, don’t get me wrong. But you actually use it for stuff. You don’t just want it to look good. You want it to feel good.”
“Which reminds me, I have to go to the gym tomorrow morning, so we can’t stay up too late.” I hadn’t been to the gym at the school since last week, when all this began with Carter. I’d sort of blocked out going there. I had probably already lost some muscle mass.
“I should go with you,” said Georgia.
“Sure. I could show you how to do some machines,” I said. Georgia had never shown any interest in the gym before.
“I said I should go with you, but I won’t. Because I am not as tough as you are.”
“I’m not that tough,” I said. I was scared. That was the truth. And besides that, I wished I had some way to contact Rumpy. Where was the bat signal when you needed it?
“If you’re not tough, then I’m not a redhead,” said Georgia.
I laughed at that. She was a redhead all the way through, from her fair skin that burned even in the winter if she was out too long to her artwork, which she couldn’t bear to let anyone see. She wasn’t even in any art classes at school because she didn’t want to show anyone. If I was lucky, sometimes she would show me.
She had walls of drawings and paintings up in her room, and she was always ripping stuff up and throwing it away as not good enough. She was really good, but she had high standards. Like if she didn’t measure up to Rembrandt or DaVinci, it went into the garbage.
“I think I just need to sleep,” I said. So we went home.
I slept in short bursts that night, waking up every half hour in case I was mumbling the demon summoning spell. But it didn’t happen. Maybe I had forgotten it?
In the morning I woke up with my alarm and headed into the gym. It felt good to plan out what machines I was going to do that day. I always liked upper body and made sure I got in at least half of that, but I decided I was going to do a double session to make up for the last week. I’d be so sore tomorrow I wouldn’t be able to walk, but sometimes physical pain can keep you distracted from other kinds of pain.
I did the chest fly machine, at my maximum, times three sets of ten reps. Then biceps and triceps, then chin-ups and dips. I did some back rows and shoulder lifts. Then I finished up my upper body with pushups until my arms were trembling so badly I fell to the ground.
“Looking good,” said Will, one of the football captains. He came over and helped me stand up.
I think I dripped sweat on him, which would have made Georgia nervous, but Will and I were used to it. He flung sweat around himself plenty.
“Can you come spot me on a set?” he asked.
So I went over and made sure that he didn’t kill himself doing presses on the bench. He was absolutely ripped. He was also gay, which is a bit of a shame, I guess. He was an awesome football player, but he took me for granted even more than the other guys did. Not that I was looking for dates at the moment.
After that, it was on top abs and lower body work. I did squats and lunges, which didn’t hurt now, but were going to later. Then I did some calf raises.
“Hurts so good,” said Will, flipping his towel at me. There were a couple of other guys in the gym by then, watching me out of the corners of their eyes.
Don’t worry, I wanted to tell them. I’m not going to out press you. Not yet, anyway. Although if there had ever been a day when I wanted to push past my physical limits, today was that day.
I finished up with a killer set of reverse incline situps holding a 35 pound weight. I could hear myself grunting loudly at the end, each time I came up off the bench. It felt good to make the noise, to declare how I felt about the world. Noise is another sign of life. I was alive, and I was using my body to its limits.
Before I headed to the shower, I helped Will with another set. Then one of the younger guys came up to ask me rather shyly if I could give him some tips on getting killer abs.
“You a freshman?” I asked. He was shorter than me, and probably weighed under a hundred pounds.
He nodded. “I’m Jayden , by the way. I’ve seen you in here before, lots of times, but I don’t think we ever met.”
“Jayden ,” I said. I told him he had to do abs twice a week, and he had to really focus on the movement. Lots of people (especially girls) think that if you do a hundred crunches a day, you’ll get killer abs, but the truth is, you have to treat those muscles the same as any other. Really kill them, then let them recover. So heavy weights.
“What about the abs machines?” asked Jayden .
I waved a hand. “Worthless. At least, I think so. It’s better to engage all your core muscles in something like situps or pushups or even chin-ups than do that. That machine is like trying to use a pin when you need a hammer.”
He nodded at me and I could see he was impressed. Maybe if he wasn’t so young, I would have asked him out. Or if he hadn’t been so much in awe of me, he’d have tried it. But he was a baby, only fourteen, and that seemed as weird as anything happening between me and Rumpy.
“You keep coming and you’ll get stronger. Don’t give up,” I said to Jayden , on my way out.
“Nick used to say the same thing,” said Jayden .
“Nick?” I said, feeling like I ought to know the name.
“He used to come in here with me, too. He was a sophomore, and he wasn’t on any of the teams. He was quiet, but we came in after you had arrived. We used to watch you.”
“Nick—the one who is missing,” I said, finally understanding why the hairs on the back of my neck had risen. The one Mr. Barry had talked about.
“Yeah. No one knows where he went.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. I wanted to offer him some hope, but I wasn’t sure I had any. If Nick had made a bargain with a demon, he wasn’t going to be found whole a
nd brought home.
“Well, see you later,” said Jayden .
It was weird that this Nick kid had been at the gym so many times during the past year, but I had no recollection of seeing him. I should look him up in the yearbook, just so that I had his face in mine. But that wouldn’t help him any, and it would make me feel worse.
I showered as quickly as I could in the girl’s locker room. There were a few girls from the track team in there already, after having spent an extra morning doing laps. They looked strong, but also so thin that I wondered if I could pick them up and use them as weights. Or snap them in half. You have to really push your weight down to be a good runner, because the less weight you’re carrying around, the faster you go. Even if it’s muscle, you don’t want too much of it.
They didn’t talk to me, though, and I didn’t talk to them. They weren’t like the cheerleaders, but whenever I tried to make conversation, it never worked. Maybe the reason Georgia and I were friends were because we were both misfits. Being an artist around here wasn’t something anyone valued, and when Georgia was so likely to put her own work down, no one told her she was wrong.
I got dressed, noticing that the track girls went to dress in stalls, which I always thought was weird. It was the girls’ locker room so we didn’t have to do that, right? But I guess I’d been subjected to enough comments on my body to know what it was like to want to hide away. I just had the opposite reaction, and let people say what they wanted about me. It didn’t phase me. I just let it roll off my back and went on with my life. You can’t stop living because other people have nasty things to say.
Chapter 10
Friday morning, I walked toward Mr. Barry’s class, my hair still wet, my body just beginning to feel the hot ache of a hard weights workout. I had expected to see yellow caution tape on everything, and maybe a sign posted that would tell us where we should go now that he was gone. The last few days, we’d been told to meet in the library, but yesterday the librarian said there were other plans for us.
There was no yellow tape. No sign of burned wood on the door. No sign that there had been a fire at all.
Someone cleaned this up fast, I thought. I figured that meant the school was really trying hard to help us move on after Mr. Barry’s death.
But when I opened the door and looked inside, I stopped short. The classroom looked completely different. Not only were all of Mr. Barry’s books gone (which Rumpy would like), but the whole room seemed like it had gone through some kind of cheesy makeover. Instead of the standard beige carpet, it was a bright green. The paint on the walls was striped yellow and pink. There were pictures posted up all over the wall. I guess they were German, but they didn’t feel German to me, which ought to have been dark and dreary. They were sunlit and unreal.
I almost didn’t notice the woman standing at the front of the room, young and blone and perky-looking.
“My first student. I’m glad to meet you,” she said. “I’m the new substitute teacher for Mr. Barry’s class, Ms. Forest.”
“You speak German?” I asked.
She answered me in German, and added a quote from Goethe about poetry. Then she smiled widely. “And you are?” she asked.
I told her my name without a thought. “Is there a seating chart?” I asked, considering the fact that the desks were now all in neat rows. Mr. Barry had let us go wherever we wanted.
“No, no, sit wherever you like. I want you all to feel comfortable. We’ll be reviewing for a while until I see where you’re at and determine how best to help you with your goals at the end of the school year.”
“Uh, right,” I said. Was that teacher-speak? I tried not to make any judgments. Maybe she was a native German and her English came out a little formal. She didn’t sound like she had an accent to me, but she could be really good.
I sat down and the other students came trickling in, as awed by the change in the room décor as I was. When the bell rang, Ms. Forest clapped her hands (yes, she really did that) and asked for us to give her “undivided attention.”
The room went quiet as death, something that had never happened while Mr. Barry was around. Somehow, it made me miss him even more.
She handed out some worksheets and then had us come up individually and talk to her for a few minutes. The worksheet was one of the most boring things I’d ever seen. It had a list of verbs, and you had to write in the right form of the verb for each person—first, second, third, and plural. And then the same thing in different tenses.
I’m sure that some people learn languages like robots, but Mr. Barry had been more of a holistic approach. I had a bad feeling that German was not going to be one of my favorite classes anymore. I shouldn’t have been thinking like that, considering everything that had happened. I mean, in comparison to people dying, having one bad class in your schedule should be bearable. But it was one more thing added to all the others.
When it was finally my turn to go up and talk to her, I was pretty stiff.
“You look unhappy,” said Ms. Forest. “Are you, Fallin?”
“I’m fine,” I said.
“Would you mind speaking to me in German?” she asked in German.
I shrugged. That was German, wasn’t it?
“You are in a bakery. What would you like to buy?” she said.
I told her I wanted blackforest cake and some Toblerones. In Germ-English. I had a fair accent, though, and I think I didn’t fool her.
She switched back to English. “You miss Mr. Barry, yes?” she said.
“He was the best teacher I’ve ever had,” I said.
“And it must be difficult for you to see someone take his place.”
“I’m sure your German is very good,” I said.
“But is it fun? That’s what you are thinking. And the other students, yes? Despite my attempts to make the classroom a happy place, you doubt how fun I am.”
If there were a dictionary entry for fun, I’m pretty sure her face would be the last on the list of entries.
“What do you want, Fallin? Not just out of this German class, but out of life?”
“To be happy,” I said vaguely.
“Yes, but what kind of happy. Tell me about yourself. Who are you? What makes you unique? What are your hopes and fears and dreams?”
“Kind of big questions,” I said.
“Yes, but I want to know. I want to get to know all of you. I am not Mr. Barry, but I can help you in different ways, I think. I can teach you things that he could not.”
Like how to dress like a hot school teacher from some porno flick? Or how to make eyes roll out of your head with boredom?
“I don’t need help,” I said. “But thanks for the offer.”
“Oh, I’m sure you do need help. Everyone needs help,” she said, and she leaned into me.
I pulled back. Sometimes people try to get too close too fast. And for her, it was so fake that it was never going to work. I wondered who she was. Related to someone on the school board? How in the world had she gotten this job? She knew German, I guess, but she was so wrong for this job. I could see her working at an ad agency, trying to sell something. Or maybe at a newspaper. A secretary who took appointments and then shooed everyone away.
Actually, the woman ought to have been in the military or something. She dressed the part. She talked the part. And I bet she would love being a general and ordering people to get shot.
“Are you finished?” I asked.
“Not quite,” she said. “Just give me another moment.”
I sat there, tapping my fingers on the desk. The problem with high school is that it’s so much like jail. You have to stay there for a certain number of hours a day. You don’t get to choose who you have to spend time with. And mostly all the other people there are the ones you would do anything to get away from, if you could.
“Would you tell me if I’m on the right track? I’m very good at guessing people’s needs.”
I highly doubted that.
“You
are a young girl. Fit. Black. In a high school of mostly whites who are not at all aware of you. Am I right?”
“So?” I said. That wasn’t hard to guess at. That was obvious to anyone who had eyes. Not that many people around here seemed to have that.
“Would you like to go places? Away from here? Exotic places like Hawaii or China or Europe?”
“Are you talking about some tour?” I said.
She waved a hand. “Maybe and maybe not. I want to know what you want, not what you think I can give you.”
“I want—” I started to say. Then I stopped.
“What? What do you want?”
“I don’t know. That’s the problem. I don’t really know what I want yet.”
“Surely you have some idea,” she said. Her face grew dark and impatient. “Do you want to be rich?”
“Not really.” My parents had enough money. I didn’t think either of them would quit their jobs, even if they could. They liked work, and it seemed to me that was the way it should be.
“You want to be popular, then?”
“Popular? At this school? No, thanks.” That might be the equivalent of wanting to be stupid.
“Then success? You want to pass your AP tests with flying colors, get perfect scores on the SATs and get into the best college in the country?”
Where I would be surrounded by other snobs? No, thanks. I shook my head.
“You are a tough cookie,” said Ms. Forest. She smiled at me as if she was excited by the prospect of the challenge I presented, but it looked like a grimace.
I was also pretty sure that we’d gone past the limit of the few minutes she’d set by for me.
“How about knowing everything there is to know?”
I laughed at that. “Uh, no. That sounds like a perfect way to go crazy. Really, Ms. Forest. I’m fine the way I am. I just want to keep going to school and learning German the way I was before.”
“You want things to go back to the way they were before?” she asked in a quiet, solemn voice that frightened me a little. “You want Mr. Barry never to have died.”
The Gift of the Demons Page 8
