The Cassandra Curse

by Chantel Acevedo

  Clio shook her head. She searched what was left of the case up and down, as if she could sense what was missing. She plucked a feather out from underneath a Superman lunchbox, and we all stared at it.

  “The sirens attacked us,” I said. “On the Underground. The woman in the pink suit was with them,” I added.

  Clio looked at us in alarm. “What form did the sirens take?”

  “Robins,” Mela said. “With human teeth.”

  “Incredibly creepy,” Thalia put in.

  “They were manipulating the pink-suit lady,” Nia said, still on the floor with the Falcon in her lap. “Why did they need her at all? Couldn’t they just take what they wanted on their own? Why do all of this?” Nia gestured at the broken toy on her lap.

  Elnaz pointed at the security cameras. “The police will keep busy looking for the lady in the pink suit.”

  “And when they catch her, she’ll be all confused and unaware. The sirens will have gotten their way, and also made a great mess of things, which they love. Am I right?” Thalia asked.

  “Well done. That’s their way,” Clio said. “You escaped them. How?”

  “Callie did it,” Thalia said. “She was brilliant. Inspired the woman to sit down and pick up a pen, and she just blinked and did as she was told. We got away, and the sirens flew off into the Underground, down the Central line headed east. They took the woman’s bag with them.”

  “Whatever they stole, it fits inside a briefcase,” I said, eyeing the scattered items.

  “Good eye,” Clio said. “We muses inspire the best in others. The sirens inspire the worst. They sing a tempting song, and the lyrics are always the same. They say give up. They say you aren’t smart enough. They say get angry. They say trust no one. It’s a powerful song. But we must sing a stronger one, a more compelling one. It’s the only way to defeat them.”

  “And as a last resort,” Elnaz said, “pull an Odysseus.”

  “Pull a what?” I asked.

  “An Odysseus. Greek hero. Bit of a jerk. But the sirens called out to his sailors and they nearly crashed their ships. He tied them to the mast and plugged their ears. Then he did the same to himself,” Elnaz said, mimicking the motion of shoving stuff into her ear canal. “It worked. They sailed on by.”

  Nia, Thalia, and Mela gave me a pointed look.

  “Callie did that. She pulled an Odysseus on the train. Saved us all,” Thalia said.

  Clio looked at me, laid a hand on my shoulder, and smiled. She actually smiled. “Calliope, the first of the original nine muses. Coming into her own. But not quite yet.” Then, Clio did the most unthinkable thing I could ever imagine her doing.

  She winked at me. Like a normal human being.

  I think I blushed all the way down to my toes. To break up the awkward moment, I said, “So, if we have to, we literally tie Maya Rivero down?” I asked.

  “And plug her ears!” Thalia said. She gave me two thumbs-up, then stuck her thumbs in her ears.

  “But first I need to figure out what drew them here.” Clio nodded at the others, and they took off down the stairs in search of clues. “Junior muses, come with me,” Clio said to us. Thalia opened her mouth, then closed it, the words “Muse Squad” hanging in the air, unspoken.

  Clio gave us a ride in a black cab back to the V and A. It was a long drive with the traffic. The cabbie went on and on about how much he hated bicyclists on the road, but we mostly ignored him. Every once in a while, Thalia would point out a landmark.

  “That’s St. Paul’s Cathedral,” or “There’s the River Thames.” We all looked at the river as we rode in bumper-to-bumper traffic. Suddenly, I saw a woman pop her head out of the water. She had a massive amount of green hair, and she seemed to be looking straight at us with eyes that glittered like aluminum foil. Clio raised her hand in a wave, and the woman waved back. Then she ducked under again, followed by a thick, glossy tail.

  My head was spinning. “Did I just see a mermaid?” I asked faintly.

  “A naiad,” Clio clarified. Mela was rubbing her eyes and staring hard at the water, while Nia had her face plastered against the cab window.

  “Bloody hell, I missed it!” Thalia whined.

  “You’re telling me that there are naiads in the Thames?” I whispered. “Can everybody see them?” The cabbie drove on, and it was as if he didn’t hear us.

  “He can’t hear us,” Clio said, guessing my thoughts. “We can see mythical creatures because we are, in a sense, mythical creatures ourselves.”

  That weirded me out a lot. I always thought that “mythical” meant pretend. Imaginary. I dug my nails into my thigh. Yes, I was very real. I might have a mythical secret identity, but I was still Callie Martinez-Silva. I spent the rest of the ride either watching the water, or trying to remember if I’d ever seen anything that strange, or that cool, in all my life.

  We reached the V and A at last. Clio gave money to the cabbie, and we all got out. On the way in, the security guards who had chased us gave us mean looks, but Clio waved them away and they began a lively discussion on the ancient Mesopotamians.

  “Isn’t history fascinating?” Clio mused as we passed the uniformed pair.

  We walked up to the third floor, and straight to my entrance point.

  “Find the three. Break the curse,” Clio said when we got there.

  “Save the future,” the rest of us added in unison as we slid underneath the Great Bed of Ware.

  “Easy-peasy,” Clio said.

  “Mermaids in the Thames,” Thalia said, and whistled a long, low note. “And all this time, I thought the only things in there were eels and old boots.”

  She was still chattering away when I closed my eyes and the world went dark.

  Chapter 22

  Parrots and Strategies

  “We need a plan,” Nia said as we walked home after school the next day. “We got lucky on the Tube. That whole mess could have been worse.”

  I agreed. “Waiting around for something to happen is not a good look,” I said.

  Thalia plucked a pink hibiscus flower from a tall bush. She nestled it behind her left ear as she talked. “I’m rather keen on my idea to start some kind of commotion and see if we can’t draw the sirens out.”

  “And what? Get kicked out of school? Not helpful,” Mela said.

  “A quiet commotion, obviously,” Thalia said.

  Nia sighed. “We don’t even know where to look for sirens. We just saw them across the Atlantic, for goodness’ sake. They certainly travel fast.”

  “So do we,” I reminded her. “Magic and all that.”

  “Clio said they were sticking close to Maya. And us, I guess,” Mela said. She whipped her head from side to side, as if sirens were going to just pop up beside us. As it was, every chirp we heard made us jumpy. Earlier, a flock of tiny green parrots had streaked loudly over our heads, and both Mela and Thalia had screamed.

  “All right,” I said. “If there’s a good time for it, we’ll let you do your chaos thing, okay, Thalia?”

  Thalia gave me a thumbs-up.

  “We need earplugs. To block out siren song. All of us,” Mela said.

  So we walked to the dollar store down the street from my house.

  “Hola, niñas,” the shopkeeper called out loudly.

  “Hola,” we all said back in a variety of accents. We passed rows of potato chips, shelves full of carwash supplies, a stack of kiddie pools, and finally found some earplugs in the medicine aisle.

  I plucked four packages off the rack, making sure I had enough pocket money. “Got them,” I said, turning around to see Nia, Mela, and Thalia standing there, arms full of things like face masks, lip gloss, candy bars, and a stuffed dinosaur.

  “What? I quite like dinosaurs,” Mela said.

  “It’s your money,” I said with a sigh.

  We were making our way to the cash register when we heard a shriek. Running, we saw the woman at the cash register waving a broom at three blue macaws. They were massive birds,
their claws as big as her face.

  “Quick!” I shouted, ripping open the earplugs, which we jammed into our ears. My whole body buzzed with magic.

  “Stop, you,” I heard Thalia shout. She chucked a candy bar at the parrots. The birds lifted up, seemed to pause in the air for a moment, then zoomed toward us.

  They stopped in mid-air, eye-level to us, their big wings flapping hard to keep them aloft. A gush of air hit my face with each flap, knocking loose one of my earplugs. One of the birds opened its mouth, and I heard it speak in a parrot-voice, “CAW! You won’t win. CAW!” In this form, the sirens could talk.

  “Polly want a cracker?” I heard Nia ask behind me, and a package of saltines sailed over my shoulder, hitting one of the birds in the chest.

  Out of the corner of one eye, I could see Mela’s hands fluttering, and I could have sworn that one of the parrots started to get a bit teary.

  The woman at the register hoisted a fire extinguisher over her head, and marched in our direction. She sent a blast of white foam at the macaws, who flew off, squawking loudly. We chased them out of the store, but they were gone, merely blue specks in the sky.

  “Oye, you need to pay for those things!” the shopkeeper yelled at us.

  Amazingly, Mela was still holding on to her stuffed dinosaur, and Thalia was clutching face masks in two hands. Plus, we all had earplugs in our ears.

  “Of course,” I said, apologizing in Spanish even as the woman kept grumbling at me about the birds, and people keeping wild animals as pets, and shoplifters. I noticed she wore a set of earbuds, the salsa music coming from them loud enough for me to hear. No wonder the sirens couldn’t get her to do anything.

  “That was intimidation, pure and simple,” Nia said later.

  “Maya wasn’t even with us,” Thalia said.

  Nia was right. “They had a message to give,” I said. The others nodded.

  “But they won’t win,” Mela added as we reached my house. I walked in last, scanning the sky before closing the door.

  Back home, we made our plan. Our first step was to list our siren suspects. At the top of the list was:

  Ms. Fovos. We all know substitute teachers get the short stick when it comes to student behavior, and it had made her mean. And she was especially mean to Maya Rivero, and oddly, very nice to . . .

  Violet Prado, suspect numero dos. Violet, who couldn’t stand to see anyone being more successful than she was. Violet, who tripped Raquel on stage, who had been drenched by Maya’s science project, and maybe had a reason to sabotage her later in front of Principal Jackson. And if we were including Violet, then we also had to consider . . .

  Max Pascal and Alain Riche. Those two were the evil sidekicks to all Violet’s best bullying moments, so that alone earned them the spot. Who was there when Violet put glue all over Kelly Bustamante’s desk, gluing her to her seat in the third grade? Alain was. Laughing his head off. Who helped Violet spread the rumor that the first of February was “Wear Your Clothes Backwards Day”? Max. And who took photos of all the backwards-clothes-wearing dummies who fell for it, including me? Ditto Max.

  And that was it. It wasn’t much to go on, but it was a start.

  We were sitting in my room, perched on our bunk beds, in our pajamas for the night. I’d been thinking. “Mela, I think you made that one siren a little sad.”

  “I tried. It was hard. Like trying to drive a nail into the wall with your bare hand,” she said. “I could feel it pushing me away.” She picked at her yellow pajama bottoms. They had tiny green dinosaurs on them.

  “Okay,” I said. “But they were parrots. Do they even have tear ducts?”

  “Nope,” Nia said. “I won a trivia contest knowing that.” Her pajama top read BLACK GIRL MAGIC IS STARDUST, and had shimmery silver stars all over it. I kept finding glitter all over my room.

  “But one of them did get all teary. I saw it,” I said. “Maybe when they’re in human form, we can affect them. Use our kódikas on them.”

  “Worth a try,” Thalia said. She picked up the list we’d written. “Divide and conquer, I say.”

  We heard my mom call out, “Buenas noches,” her cue to turn out the lights, lie down, and go to sleep.

  “’Night girls,” Thalia said, and the rest of us said our goodnights too.

  I didn’t sleep much, but when I did, I dreamed of a thousand birds on a telephone wire outside my house, the line sloping down so low it touched the ground. Every single bird had teeth, and they were all saying the same thing: “You can’t win, Callie. Maya Rivero belongs to us.”

  Chapter 23

  Maya Gets a Win

  Ms. Rinse was out for a teacher’s conference the next morning, and Ms. Fovos was our substitute. The first thing she did was yell at Thalia for wearing her Prince Harry hoodie over her uniform, and Thalia peeled it off slowly, grumbling the whole time. She looked over to me and mouthed the word E-vil.

  Ms. Fovos announced our assignment. “We, and by this I mean you, are going to work in groups to put together a model heart pump using these items.” On a table in the front of the class were water bottles, scissors, balloons, and plastic straws. Then Fovos quickly assembled the groups. “You, you, you, and you,” she said, pointing at students to form their teams.

  When she pointed at me, Nia, and Maya, I could have cheered. But then she added Violet, and all thoughts of cheering were gone. “Oh, crumbs,” I heard Maya mutter behind me.

  “Nobody ask for a bathroom pass,” Fovos shouted as everyone started to get into groups. “You aren’t getting one.”

  Letty, one of the triplets, spilled coffee, and Lisa slipped in it, soaking her uniform. Ms. Fovos angrily wrote out a bathroom pass for Lisa, then confiscated Letty’s coffee mug for good measure.

  Once the commotion was over, we settled our desks into a square, facing one another, while Maya fetched our materials.

  “There are three too many nerds in this group,” Violet said, then she huffed loudly so that the whole room could hear her.

  The rest of us ignored it, getting to work reading the instructions and laying out the parts of the model heart pump. “The balloons are the ventricles, and the straws are the arteries,” Maya said. “We need to start by connecting the two.”

  Violet huffed again.

  “Lay off,” Nia said.

  “Why should I? And who appointed Maya the leader of this group?” Violet demanded. She grabbed one of the balloons and started shoving it into a bottle.

  “Hey!” I said. “You heard Maya. We need to attach that to a straw first.”

  “Whatever,” Violet said, dropping the bottle and balloon, and going up to Ms. Fovos to ask for a bathroom pass.

  Of course Ms. Fovos gave her one.

  Maya was quiet, fiddling with one of the straws. Nia leaned forward, whispering, “You can’t let her treat you like that.”

  “How am I supposed to stop her?” Maya asked. It was a good question. Violet bossed everyone around. And she nearly always got her way.

  Nia wasn’t having it, though. She fiddled with her phone. “Maya, I can tell you have about ten brilliant ideas a minute. Maybe more. What’s in Violet’s head beyond trying to make people feel bad?”

  “Twelve. Twelve brilliant ideas a minute,” Maya said, laughing. Her eyes looked brighter, as if, in that instant, she really had thought up some amazing things. I glanced at Nia’s phone. She had a privacy screen on it, so I couldn’t tell if her kódikas app was open. I bet it was.

  “Exactly,” I said. I slung an arm around Maya, felt my fingertips slowly going numb, and that familiar buzz on my scalp. “You’re tougher than you give yourself credit for. Don’t you want to change the world?”

  Maya nodded rapidly. “I do. Very much.” She sniffed, wiping her nose with the back of her hand.

  “Then you’ve got to stand up for yourself,” I said. Maya looked at me, her eyes wide. Just then, Violet sauntered back into class.

  She started talking as soon as she sat down. “Okay, n
erds. First we—”

  “When you get straight As in science for, oh, your whole life, then you can lead this group. Straws in balloons, everybody,” Maya said.

  Nia and I jumped to it. Violet sat very still. “Fine,” she said at last, picking up a straw and a balloon. “This is stupid anyway.”

  I had a hard time keeping a smile off my face. Maya kicked me softly under the table. I didn’t look up at her, but I knew she was beaming.

  Phys ed class gave us a chance to investigate further. Our PE uniforms were simple—gray Miami Palms T-shirts and blue basketball shorts. It was a hot day, and Coach Navarro was sweating buckets. He had pulled a folding chair into the shade of a mahogany tree and announced, “Free play today. Take water breaks,” then looked at his phone for the rest of class.

  “Behold the dedicated educator,” Mela said.

  “Yes, shall we give him a prize?” Thalia asked.

  “Come on,” I said. “We’ve got a plan to put in place, and Coach just made it easy.”

  Nia went to go chat with Alain, who was throwing a squash ball against a wall. It rebounded hard and smacked him in the forehead. I watched as Nia swallowed a laugh and asked him to play a game.

  Meanwhile, Thalia threw a basketball at Max, shouting, “Game on!” She was cracking jokes as they played, and he was laughing hard. “Ever been to London?” I heard her ask.

  Mela was tagging along behind Violet, who kept telling her to buzz off. But Mela was nothing if not persistent. They walked along the chain-link fence for a while. I saw Violet swipe at her eyes with her sleeve, just at the moment when Mela asked, “Where did you get those feathers for the assembly?”

  Meanwhile, I worked on Maya. She’d recently ironed patches of molecules onto her PE shorts, and today, she had a purple sock on her left foot, and an orange one on her right. “Tell me about your science fair project,” I urged.

  Maya had arranged a series of leaves in order of decomposition on the sidewalk before us. “I’m working on a smaller model at the moment. The problem with sea level rise in Miami is this,” she said, and picked up a white rock from the ground. It was full of holes—like bleached coral, or Swiss cheese. “Limestone,” she said. “It’s beneath our feet. And it’s porous.”