The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-Volume Three

by Jonathan Strahan

  "That's for us to know," Nikki says.

  "I need to say something before we get out of the van," Bad says. "The rules of the Ordeal are in effect. For both of you, Parci. Both of you have to do whatever we say. Okay?"

  "Okay," Czigany says. Parci nods vigorously. She is visibly trembling with excitement. Czigany, too, is alert, and Lee thinks that just as Czigany was pretending to be asleep, she is still playacting, concealing some other, deeper reflex.

  Lee and Bad and Nikki and Maureen have lived all of their lives on Long Island. The school that they attend is small: in all, their graduating class will be nineteen girls, if Meg Finnerton manages the miraculous and passes Advanced Algebra.

  The Khulhats move from country to country whenever Czigany and Parci's father is reassigned to a new embassy. Czigany has lived, for two years or less, in the following places: Bosnia, Albania, England, Israel, and Ukraine, and Lee is undoubtedly forgetting one or two others.

  When Czigany moves again, in another year or two, what will she remember? Lee hopes with all of her heart that the Ordeal, at least this part of it, will be something that Czigany remembers for all of her life. Dodo and her farm are the best, most secret secret Lee knows. She has been sure since the first time her mother took her to visit Dodo that there isn't anywhere in the world as magical as Peaceable Kingdom with the pink house and the Ferris wheel and Dodo's goats, so smart they know how to open the front door when Dodo forgets to lock it. But perhaps it will be nothing to Czigany. Lee thinks this, and then wonders why it matters so much that Czigany is impressed.

  Lee looks from Czigany's shuttered face to Bad.

  Bad says, "Go for it, Lee."

  C

  The wedding was a disaster from the beginning. After the hurricane warning, they had to take down the wedding tent and the dinner tents up on the bluff and relocate to the pavilion beside the parking lot where kids went in the summer to play Ping-Pong and eat ice-cream sandwiches. When it came to weather, you had to be sensible, even though most warnings came to nothing. Clementine's parents' house had been flooded so many times they'd given up trying to qualify for insurance policies. Instead they just kept everything valuable on the second floor of the house.

  The hurricane turned out to be not even a baby hurricane. Not even a tropical storm. Instead it just rained so hard that the caterers couldn't get the fire going in the pits where they were supposed to set up their clambake.

  Dancy didn't look pregnant until you saw her from the side, but Mrs. Meadows had had to let the dress out that morning. Clementine had helped decorate the ladies' room on the beach with orange blossoms and crape myrtle the night before. An hour before the ceremony was supposed to begin, Mrs. Meadows had sent her off to dig through the trunk of the maid of honor's car for tit tape. Clementine came back in triumph and was immediately sent off again, this time for ginger ale and soda crackers. Dancy's face, all afternoon, had been the color of Clementine's sea-foam dress. Meanwhile, John Cleary had lain down in his tuxedo in the sand under the pier with all of his old high-school friends standing over him. Nobody could persuade him to stand up again; he was still hungover from his bachelor party the night before. Clementine and her father had a bet going over who would puke first, the bride or the groom.

  When the bagpipes started up—no Cleary had ever managed to make it down the aisle without a lot of wailing and woe to make it clear that marriage, like going into battle, was serious business—Clementine was standing beside her mother on the damp concrete floor of the pavilion, trying not to slap at her legs. Beach weddings rapidly became less romantic once the sand fleas found you. Wet seeped down through rotted places in the roof. Her mother leaned over and said into Clementine's ear, "Don't you ever do this to me."

  "Do what?" Clementine said.

  "You know what," her mother said.

  "Get married?"

  "Not until you're at least thirty-five."

  It had always been clear to Clementine that her mother found marriage to be something of a trial, although why, exactly, was less clear. Clementine's father chewed with his mouth shut, never left the toilet seat up, and all of his hair was his own. The previous year on her birthday he had given his wife an emerald-cut diamond pendant and taken her to the nicest Italian restaurant in Myrtle Beach. The following morning Clementine heard her complaining on the phone to some friend that her husband didn't have a romantic bone in his body and she might as well have married a wooden post.

  "Swear to God," Clementine said, but her mother only sighed.

  Cabell stood with the rest of the wedding party, wearing the same purple plaid bow tie Dancy had made all the groomsmen wear. He was tall and he was blond and tan and his hair was only a little bit long around the ears. There was something about the way he wore his tuxedo that seemed both natural and also unnatural, as if he was only wearing it in order to disappear into his surroundings. As if weddings and black bears were both things that required you to get as close as possible without anyone ever realizing that you were there at all. When she'd bought her dress, Clementine had imagined it was something like the color of Cabell's eyes. It wasn't. Why had he stayed away for so long?

  John Cleary and Dancy Meadows were making the kinds of promises that hardly anyone ever manages to keep. Clementine strained to catch every single word, moved despite knowing Dancy had picked Headless Point for her wedding because Headless Point was where she and Clementine's uncle had first had drunken, unprotected, sand-in-underwear sex under a tipped canoe. Dancy had given Clementine all the details. It wasn't the way things would go with Cabell.

  No bagpipes. No caterers. No sand fleas or tit tape or mutant bow ties. When, looking at Dancy, Clementine tried to visualize this mysterious future of togetherness with Cabell, it was like that first time on the surfboard. Only this time, instead of wading in to Headless Point, Cabell and Clementine floated out to sea and never came back.

  Dancy and John Cleary kissed. They mashed their lips together so hard Clementine expected to see blood afterwards. But instead Dancy laughed. She threw her bouquet straight up so that it hit the roof of the pavilion. "Now there's an omen for you," Clementine's mother said. She picked a clump of baby's breath out of Clementine's hair.

  When the bagpipes started up again, Clementine for the first time in her life felt in need of a stiff drink. Then she would go and find Cabell. They'd dance. Or sit in a car and talk until the rain stopped and the sun came up over the ocean.

  Dancy had once said that vodka was practically tasteless, and just outside the pavilion was the ten-gallon cooler Clementine had helped fill with ice and soft drinks and beer. She'd seen a bottle of Smirnoff, too.

  She found a can of Coke and poured half of it out. Poured vodka in. It was almost as not-bad as everyone had said. As long as she was borrowing things, she decided, she might as well take the golf umbrella someone had left propped against the pavilion and the towel on top of the cooler. Well supplied, she crept off with the Coke and the rest of the Smirnoff to hide in the dunes.

  Eventually all the Coke was gone, and because she wasn't entirely sure whether or not she was drunk yet, Clementine stayed put, sipping from the Smirnoff bottle. Her butt, on the towel, got wetter and wetter. Down below the dunes the Ping-Pong pavilion seemed as far away as a dream. Slowly, as the last heavy gray light evaporated, she became aware of little breathless yips, shadows rustling the coarse, rain-beaten tubes of dune grass. Wild dogs, or even coyotes, six or seven, perhaps: she guessed they were hunting mice or frogs. They ignored Clementine, miserably invisible beneath her umbrella. Now running, now halted; backs hunched, muzzles down, paws tearing at the caked gray sand. There were bats dipping down, as if unzipping the rain, and the dogs in the dunes chased them, too, empty jaws snapping like porcelain traps.

  When Clementine stood up at last, they looked at her as if she were a party crasher. She shook the umbrella and the dogs fled. Later it was clear that this was the good part of the evening, where she'd managed to get drunk and not be e
aten by wild dogs.

  Things went downhill after that. There was the trip to the bathroom where Clementine saw what had happened to her hair and her makeup. Where she tore the hem of her dress on the plywood door of the bathroom stall. When she found Cabell, he was dancing with slutty Lizzy York, the maid of honor.

  It didn't matter. Not even the hideous, antiquated music mattered. "Hey, Cabell," Clementine yelled.

  "Hey, Clementine," Cabell yelled back. He executed a dance move. "Your mom was looking for you. What's up?"

  "Sorry, Lizzy," Clementine said. "I need to show Cabell something. We'll be right back. Promise."

  Lizzy gave Clementine the finger; Clementine shrugged and smiled and pulled Cabell through the dancers, out into the rain. She'd left the umbrella somewhere, but never mind. The rain fizzed on her skin.

  "What did you want to show me?" her sweet love said.

  They walked along the tidemark. Tiny, ghostly crabs did mysterious things to the wet sand. They were writing the story of Clementine's life. Cabell Meadows, Cabell Meadows. Clementine loves Cabell.

  "Clementine? What did you want me to see?"

  She waved her arm. "The ocean!"

  Cabell laughed, and Clementine decided that this was a good thing. She was amusing.

  "Not just the ocean!" she said. "The things in it. There might be, you know, sharks. Or mermaids. Like the wild dogs in the dunes. The world is full of things and nobody ever sees them! Nobody except for you and me." Her hair stuck in wet coils to her neck. Maybe she looked like a mermaid.

  "Do you think I look like a mermaid?" she asked her love.

  "Clementine, sweetheart," Cabell said. "I think you look drunk. And we're both soaked. Let's go back."

  "It's romantic here, isn't it?" Clementine said. "If you wanted to kiss me, I'd understand."

  No stars, only rain. She wanted more than anything to get rid of her hose, but first she had to take off her pumps. Perhaps it had been a mistake to wear stilettos to a beach wedding. Every step Clementine had taken, all night long, she'd left a little hole in the poor, blameless sand.

  "Don't think I don't appreciate the offer, Clementine," Cabell said, "but hell, no."

  "Oh shit," Clementine said. "You're gay?"

  "No!" Cabell said. "And stop taking off your clothes, okay? I'm not gay, I'm just not interested. Not to be an asshole, but you're not my type."

  "I'm not taking off my clothes," Clementine said. "Just my shoes. And my pantyhose. And what do you care? Dancy said you sleep in the nude. Do you still sleep in the nude? There's sand in my pantyhose. And what do you mean I'm not your type? What type am I?"

  "Underage," Cabell said. "Unlike your uncle, I don't go for babies." And having offered up this retort, which could have come straight out of one of Clementine's romance novels, he turned and walked away and left Clementine all alone in the rain with one shoe off and her pantyhose down around both ankles.

  When Clementine finally got the damn stilettos off, she pretended that the ocean was the whole stupid wedding, balled up the hose, and threw them at it. Then the stilettos. On the way back to the pavilion, she took a shortcut through the parking lot and sliced her left foot so badly on a broken beer bottle that she ended up needing sixteen stitches and four pints of blood. They also pumped her stomach, just in case. Want to know who found her passed out and gushing blood and called the ambulance?

  Go on. Three guesses.

  L

  Dodo gives them a lunch of goat cheese and apples and dark, chewy bread in the kitchen. There is a hard cheese and a soft, runny cheese, and a cheese-and-herb spread. Dodo tells them about her life as an anarchist, while a chorus of goats bleats threats through the screen door. How she blew up a bank. "It was three in the morning, and I know it was stupid to stay, but I wanted to see what all that money and paperwork would look like, raining down in the air. Instead, minutes before the explosives were wired to go off, there was this flood of rats and cockroaches, all pouring out of the building and across the street where I was standing in an alley behind a Dumpster. It was like they knew it was going to happen. I took off, too. Not because of the bomb, but because of the cockroaches. I can't stand roaches. It was even worse finding out that they have ESP."

  She tells them how she has been shot with rubber bullets, sprayed with hoses, pistol-whipped by a D.C. cop. Look, here's the scar on her cheek. Here's the sexy mermaid tattoo another inmate gave Dodo with a ballpoint pen and a sharpened toothbrush. Bad is smitten. The others giggle nervously whenever Dodo swears, which is often.

  After lunch, Dodo gives the girls the tour. She shows them the cheese-making room and the cheese cave. She takes them down to the goat barn with its threadbare brocade armchairs and hairy, goat-eaten couches where every evening she and the goats watch movies on her old projection screen. She passes out handfuls of corn to feed the goats and explains why Tennessee Fainting Goats faint. The goats are alternately curious and standoffish. Sometimes crowding around the girls, sometimes going off to confer, noisily, among themselves.

  They take the corn daintily from Lee's palm but ignore the hand that Parci holds out.

  "Funny little bastards," Dodo says fondly. "They just don't get along with some people."

  Parci throws her corn into the grass, and still the goats won't go near it.

  "This is my Ordeal? To come and feed goats and listen to your aunt talk about how to make bombs?" Czigany says to Lee.

  "It's too bad you have to be home so early," Lee says, testing. "We could spend the night here. Sleep in the barn. Watch old movies."

  "Or we could get home before five, like you promised, and then my parents won't murder Parci and me. I am not kidding, Lee." Czigany watches Lee carefully as she says this, as if she is waiting for Lee to give away the secret of the Ordeal.

  Bad is allowing a Toggenburg to chew the fringes off her ratty sweater. She says, "Hey, Lee? Dodo says she's going to show us a midden heap. We're going to go look for arrowheads."

  "You should go check it out, Czigany," Lee says. "Once Dodo found a piece of pottery down there and it turned out it wasn't pottery after all, it was a piece of skull."

  Czigany gives Lee one last look and then follows the others. The goats lag behind, having no interest in arrowheads. Lee, who has her own rituals when she comes to Peaceable Kingdom, goes to visit the Ferris wheel. She climbs inside the bottommost carriage and opens up her book.

  C

  When Clementine's mother was angry, she didn't throw things or shout. Instead she began to talk slowly, as if words had lots of extra syllables that only got used when you were in real trouble. The morning after Dancy's wedding, Clementine woke up and discovered her mother looking through her drawers. Not quietly, either.

  Clementine lay on her bed wanting to die, watching her mother look for whatever it was that she was looking for. Her head, her stomach, her throat, her foot were blobs of raw sensation. There was a hole in her arm where someone had put the blood back into her, and an orange band around her wrist. She was too weak to pull it off.

  Her mother said, "Everybody in town heard you yelling down on the beach last night about how much you love that Meadows boy."

  "Was I yelling?" Clementine said. She gave up wishing she could die and began to wish, instead, that she had never been born. Her mouth tasted like vomit. "I don't remember. I think I was drunk."

  "Which makes it all better," her mother said. "Is Cabell why you went to Myrtle Beach and bought a six-hundred-dollar dress?"

  "Three hundred," Clementine said. "It was on sale. Some of the rhinestones were missing. Are you spying on me?"

  "As if I would spy on my own child," her mother said. "The very idea. Geraldine Turkle happened to be picking up some Clinique foundation at Lord & Taylor's. When she saw you over in the designer dresses, she thought she ought to keep an eye on you."

  "She thought I was shoplifting," Clementine said.

  "She didn't say that," her mother said, equivocating. "You remember her daughter, Robin
, bless her heart, who got caught on camera in the CVS with five hundred dollars' worth of Sudafed? You can hardly blame her for being concerned. And stop trying to change the subject. What's going on with you and Dancy Meadows's brother? He's a grown man and you're a little girl!"

  "Nothing, nothing, nothing is going on! I can't talk about this right now. Can I have some Advil? What's wrong with my foot?"

  Her mother said, "You sliced up your tendon. You would have bled to death in the parking lot if Cabell Meadows hadn't called 911. And not even a baby aspirin until you tell me the truth. Did that boy give you alcohol?"

  "Nothing is going on and I'm telling you the truth! I just like him, okay? He saved my life. And I didn't know I was drinking alcohol. I thought I was drinking Coke, okay? Somebody must've put something in it. Not Cabell. You can ground me if you want. But stop asking me about Cabell Meadows. Okay? This is so embarrassing. I wish I were dead." At which point Clementine forced a couple of tears from her eyes. It wasn't hard.

  Her mother went away. She came back with ginger ale and three Advil. She said, "Dancy has asked me to pass on how much she appreciates you ruining her wedding. Not to mention ruining Cabell's rented tuxedo. They've tried everything but they don't think they can get the blood out. And Clementine? Here's something to think about. Every time you and Cabell meet up, you almost die. Does that sound like a healthy relationship to you?"

  "Every time we meet up he saves my life," Clementine said.

  Her mother said, "Clementine. He's nothing special. He's just some boy."

  DARLINGSEA: u saved my life again

  TRUEBALOO: dont mention it

  DARLINGSEA: you saved my life 2X now. u didnt take advantage. u know, even tho I was drunk and obnoxious and sed that u were gay. ;)

  TRUEBALOO: clementine, its ok. really dont mention it. ok?

  DARLINGSEA: your not, right? i mean your not gay r u? even if your not im sorry about the tux. did the blood come out?

  TRUEBALOO: not last time i checked