by Brian Keene
Grayce Aberdine (her mother had kept her maiden name) used to call Kamerynne “my little changeling” and it wasn’t until the girl read a book of fairy tales that it dawned on her the term had nothing to do with diapers. After her Oscar nomination for her role as the priestess in Cthylla, Kamerynne’s mother got a lot of acting offers. Grayce wasn’t ever the leading lady, but she was often her best friend or a quirky neighbor. She always had a shoot someplace, or an appointment with her shrink or her acting coach, or she was off at a spiritual retreat.
Kamerynne sometimes wondered if she’d just been prettier, like an actress, if things would have been different. She wondered if her mother would have found reasons to be home instead of worshipping some goddess at the beach or centering her chakras. On the other hand, the other kids at her school complained bitterly about their parents getting up in their business all the time, so maybe her mother’s being gone was for the best.
Her father was gone a lot, too, but he had his company to run. He’d dropped out in his freshman year at Cal Tech to start up a software company in a friend’s garage, back when that was a legitimate career move for whiz kids. Years later, Kamerynne would realize his absence was just as much a choice as her mother’s.
Her parents met at the Sundance party for Cthylla, nine months before Kamerynne was born. As far as Kamerynne knew, they hadn’t shared a bed since then, but they both grew up in old-fashioned households and they believed in the institution of marriage, particularly when a child was involved. Past that, neither of them carried any particular expectations into the marriage.
Her mother’s sister Cherity stepped in to fill the unspoken maternal void when Kamerynne was three. Where her mom was willowy and elegant, Cherity was stocky and strong. Her aunt played softball for a team called the Oakland Outlanders, and Kamerynne loved going to games. She and her aunt had the same way of smiling and laughing and they both really loved The Muppet Show. Once, when they were hiking in Redwood Park, someone mistook them for mother and daughter, and Kamerynne was secretly pleased.
But then her aunt started feeling too ill to play ball or go hiking, and she went to the doctor and found out she had blood cancer. She still took Kamerynne out places, not as often because the chemo really took it out of her, but everyone spoke of it as a temporary thing. Almost two years after her diagnosis, Cherity died.
I’m going to die, too.
Her body would turn into something like that steak her mom had forgotten in the trunk of the Jaguar for a week, stinking and slimy and crawling with maggots. She’d cease to exist. Would her soul go to heaven? What if there wasn’t a heaven? What if this—this frustrating, confusing, unasked-for existence on Earth—was all she’d have?
Her parents had their fame. People wrote her mom fan mail and, because Cthylla had become a cult favorite, some people had tattooed her character’s face on their bodies. Nobody got her father’s face tattooed, but his picture had been on the cover of Time. His software ran computers that ran hospitals that kept people alive. They were both heroes. They’d be remembered.
Her teachers and her parents spoke of everyone having an individual calling, a place in the world. But what if that wasn’t true? What if she was only ever going to be pretty good at things that didn’t really matter, and there wasn’t a place for her soul to go afterward?
“Let a kid be a kid,” her father always said—but as the years went on her mother bore a palpable air of disappointment. Kamerynne tried singing and school plays but she had a hard time remembering lyrics and lines and standing up in front of a bunch of strangers inevitably tied her tongue. Nobody seemed eager for her to get up on stage anyhow, not with her unfashionable pudge and poofy hair.
Was there a reason she was here on Earth, other than that one night her mother and her father both went to a party, got a little tipsy and didn’t bother with condoms?
What if her life was just a meaningless accident?
It was suddenly hard to breathe. An enormous, cold, unfathomable blackness had opened up inside her, and she was teetering, about to fall into it. She wanted to run screaming down the street, as though she could outrun death and the pain of mediocrity. But some kid at school had run naked down the street once and a paparazzi took a picture and his whole family was embarrassed. The kid had to see a shrink and surrender his thoughts and feelings every week like one of the kids in Oliver Twist giving his money to Fagin.
Kamerynne didn’t want to see a shrink. She was afraid that talking about her fears out loud might make them real, like saying “Bloody Mary” three times in front of a mirror.
Three years passed in which Kamerynne went to school, didn’t cultivate any friends, and played video games and read thick fantasy novels (when she wasn’t reading one of her father’s endless book assignments) to keep herself from thinking about death and the probable meaninglessness of her existence. She wasn’t getting into drugs or drinking like some of her classmates, so her parents mostly just vaguely fretted about her lack of fresh air and exercise and made the housekeeper take her to the gym three times a week. Her mother sometimes spoke of getting her some liposuction and plastic surgery when she was ready for college. Her father started sitting with her to show her how to code, and he took her to work with him more often, showing her bits and pieces of his business. She was being tested, she could tell, and although she tried to please him, she couldn’t work up much enthusiasm.
“You like games, right? You could become a game designer,” he said as they got ice cream at the company cafe. “It would be harder, because you’re a girl, but you could do it.”
“I could.” She swirled the hot fudge into her sundae with her spoon, not sure if he meant it would be harder because girls just weren’t very good at designing games or it would be harder because people would be dismissive if she tried. “But would it matter?”
He frowned, puzzled. “Matter? What do you mean?”
She realized she’d said the first “Bloody Mary” and quickly shrugged, blushing. “I don’t know.”
Kamerynne might have spent the rest of her teen years and young adulthood in a video game cocoon if her mother hadn’t caught Darla, their housekeeper, smoking a joint by the pool. Her mother fired Darla and three days later brought in a new woman named Olga Moroz who was very pretty; her mother said she’d been an actress back in the Ukraine and they’d met at a spiritual retreat. Olga went about her chores with quick, silent efficiency. After Kamerynne tried to make small talk, she realized the woman couldn’t speak much English, which was probably why she hadn’t been able to get many acting jobs in the U.S.
On the third weekend of Olga’s tenure as their new housekeeper, she brought a teenaged girl with her.
“Is my daughter, Natalya,” Olga explained. “I hope you do not mind.”
“It’s fine,” Kamerynne replied, her throat suddenly dry. Natalya was like nobody she’d ever seen before. Certainly she’d seen the individual parts of Natalya’s wardrobe on a hundred other girls: the magenta-and-black bob, the silver nose ring, the black jeans and Doc Martens and Bauhaus tee shirt. But it wasn’t her wardrobe, or her porcelain skin, or her dark green eyes. There was something luminous about the girl, something beyond mere physical beauty that Kamerynne would never have the words to describe.
Natalya never noticed Kamerynne gawking at her because her own eyes were fixed on the huge painting of the Cthylla movie poster on the living room wall.
“Oh. My. God! That is my favorite movie!” Natalya gushed. She stepped forward and touched the polished mahogany frame reverently. “Grayce Aberdine was amazing as the priestess. She should have won an Oscar. She was robbed.”
“She’s my mom,” Kamerynne said, trying to sound cool. “This is her house.”
“What!” Natalya looked shocked and did a little dance as if she was trying to levitate, afraid to have her mere-mortal feet touching the creamy white carpet of her movie idol. Then she danced around to face her mother. “Mom …?”
“Is tru
e!” Her mother beamed, clearly aware that she’d just earned herself premium Cool Mom points.
Natalya let out a delighted shriek and practically bowled Olga over giving her a bear hug. “You are the best! Ohmigod this is the best!”
“Loves you, too. But work. I have to.” Her mother gently pushed her away.
“Hey, um, Natalya.” Kamerynne had fallen out of the habit of trying to impress anyone, but now every neuron in her brain was firing, fixed on solving the problem of making this amazing luminous girl like her.
“Nat. My friends call me Nat.” She pushed her magenta bangs out of her eyes.
“We could go watch the director’s extended cut of Cthylla downstairs in the theatre if you want.”
Nat frowned and squinted as though she suspected Kamerynne of playing a prank. “What? There’s no director’s cut.”
“Oh yeah there is. It just isn’t out yet; they haven’t even told the trade mags because the director is still messing with it. He had to cut some scenes to get it down to an R—”
Nat clapped her hands and pogoed excitedly. “Omigod yes!”
Kamerynne led her down the big spiral staircase to the theatre that her mother always called a screening room. It seated twenty-four people in three rows lined with little blue LEDs along the aisles. The screen was a genuine antique her parents had rescued from an old theatre before it was torn down. Her mother said it was the first place she’d ever seen a movie.
“If you want, there’s soda and candy and stuff.” Kamerynne waved toward the wet bar at the back of the room.
“You got any Sprite and vodka?”
“Um … yeah.” Kamerynne felt a pang of guilt; her mother was into clean living and would not approve. But she felt far too anxious to tell Nat “no.”
So she just turned on the media server and queued up the movie while Nat made herself a tall drink. They settled down on the front row, the screen huge above them, and Kamerynne hit PLAY on the remote.
Kamerynne hadn’t actually seen more than bits and pieces of her mother’s movie; her parents said it wasn’t suitable for children. She wasn’t a child anymore, but she hadn’t gotten around to watching it, either. It seemed like old news somehow. She’d heard everyone chat about it so much that she’d felt as though she’d seen it about twenty times over.
But the talk and the trailers hadn’t truly prepared her for the film, and as the opening credits rolled, she found herself mesmerized by the dark, strange story about a cult of women raising an ancient goddess from the ocean. The goddess was like a mermaid, if the bottom half of a mermaid was an octopus instead of a fish. She wondered if the animators at Disney had seen the movie and ripped off the goddess to create Ursula the Sea Witch in The Little Mermaid. But Ursula was all cartoon wickedness and the goddess in Cthylla was terrifying and breathtaking.
“It’s all real, you know,” Nat whispered as the eight-legged goddess rose from the water flickering above them.
“What?” Kamerynne blinked at her, feeling disoriented; she’d gotten so engrossed in the movie she’d nearly forgotten Nat was there.
“Well, it’s not real now, but it will be, someday.”
“Oh.” Kamerynne blinked again, suspecting she’d missed something important, and then she realized that Nat’s hand was on her knee. Suddenly she felt as though her stomach was filled with a hundred buzzing, stingless bees.
“This is so hot,” Nat breathed, staring raptly at the screen.
Kamerynne looked up again, and her mother had dropped her red priestess robe and was standing there completely bare-ass naked, embracing the glistening goddess, whose purple tentacles were creeping up her bare legs …
“Jesus. That’s my mom. I can’t watch this.” Kamerynne could feel herself blushing right down to the soles of her feet.
She began to stand, but Nat grabbed her wrist.
“Don’t go,” she said. “Sit on my lap and look at me instead.”
Nat was pulling her wrist insistently, not letting go, so Kamerynne knelt across the girl’s slender legs and blinked at her as she gazed at the screen over her shoulder. Kamerynne tried to ignore the moans and wet noises coming in crisp remastered Dolby audio through the speakers. Nat held both of Kamerynne’s hands very tightly, her breath perfumed with alcohol.
“When I first saw you, I didn’t think you looked anything at all like your mom,” Nat whispered, not taking her eyes off whatever was happening on the screen behind Kamerynne. “But now I can see it. You have her neck and her ears.”
And suddenly, Nat was kissing her just below her left ear, and Kamerynne’s body filled with decalescent electricity, and she no longer gave a damn about what was the cephalopod goddess was doing to her mother in the movie.
A month later, the two girls sat making out on Kamerynne’s bed.
“Could I, like, show you something?” Nat asked, oddly shy.
Kamerynne had seen Nat top to bottom, so what could possibly make her this bashful? “Sure, anything.”
“Okay, but I mean, don’t laugh if you think it’s stupid or whatever.”
“I’m not gonna think it’s stupid. Just show me.”
“’Kay.” Nat retrieved her black nylon Jansport backpack from the floor, unzipped it and pulled out a sketchbook. “I sorta want to be an artist someday, just sort of wanted you to see my stuff …”
Kamerynne opened the sketchbook, and at first she thought she was looking at a black-and-white photograph of a man with rats’ toothed maws where his eyes should have been, but then she saw the smudge of pencil graphite and realized it was a hyperrealistic sketch. She carefully turned the page, and saw another: this was a woman in a tawdry hotel room cradling a baby made entirely of insects’ eyes. The book contained page after page of beautiful monstrosity.
“You did all these?” Kamerynne asked.
“Yeah, I mean, they’re not how I want them to be, but maybe someday …”
“What do you mean ‘someday’? These are amazing, right now! These are, like, better than the art that my dad drops a grand on down at the galleries!”
“Aw, you’re a sweetheart. But nah, I’m not that good.”
“I mean, okay, I’m not an expert, but my dad made me read like fifty billion art books. This is really really good. I mean, you are an artist, right now. Why do you think it’s not good?”
“I just … I just want to get what’s in my head down on paper, you know? I want it to look the same as I see it in my mind, but it never does. It never comes close. I’m okay with pencils, I guess, but I need to get better with oil and acrylic. Maybe I need to learn how to work a computer or whatever.”
“So learn to work a computer.” Kamerynne blinked at her.
“I don’t have the money to buy a computer, and I feel weird working on my stuff at the computers at the library. People see naked bits and freak out. And the library doesn’t even have Photoshop or anything I could really use anyway.”
In that moment, Kamerynne experience another major revelation: she herself might have no talents to speak of, but Nat had a talent that absolutely took her breath away. And it would be so easy to help her become the artist she was clearly born to be. Maybe helping was Kamerynne’s reason for being alive on the Earth.
“Put your shirt back on; I’m taking you to the mall. You want a laptop or a desktop?”
Nat stared at her as if she’d sprouted a tentacle in the middle of her forehead. “Are you serious?”
“Totally. Let’s go.”
A year later, Kamerynne was sticking her finger down Nat’s throat in a filthy McDonald’s restroom in Oakland, desperately trying to get her to throw up the bottle of tranquilizers she’d swallowed. It seemed obvious to Kamerynne, finally, that someone like Nat who had such wild nightmares spilling out of her imagination might have had some of that darkness seep into and poison her soul. And truly helping her might be a bit more harrowing than spending a few dollars here and there.
“Why’d you do that?” Kamerynne asked, wonder
ing whether she wanted to cry or slap Nat as the other girl retched melting blue pills and orange juice and vodka into the stained toilet. “You’re my best friend; you could have talked to me.”
Nat collapsed back on the piss-stained floor, shaking her head. “Nah. You’d be berr off wi’out me.”
“I love you.”
“I hate me,” she sobbed.
Kamerynne picked up Nat after she was released from the hospital.
“I have to go to the pharmacy to get some meds.” She smoothed the crumpled prescription on her lap.
“Okay. Matter which one?” Kamerynne turned the key in her BMW’s ignition.
“Nope.”
They drove in silence for a few minutes.
“I’m sorry I scared you,” Nat said.
“It’s okay,” Kamerynne replied. “It could have been a lot worse.” She cleared her throat. “You know, I wouldn’t be better off without you. I love you.”
“I love you too,” Nat said.
“I forbid you from dying, okay?”
Nat laughed. “It doesn’t work that way, I don’t think.”
“You’re smart, you’re beautiful, and you’re so much more talented than anybody I’ve ever met … look, if you decide you don’t deserve to live, how are the rest of us supposed to feel like we deserve to keep breathing, huh?” Kamerynne meant for it to all sound like a joke, but when the words left her mouth, she realized it wasn’t the least bit funny.
Nat smiled at her anyhow. “It’s different for you. I see the Goddess in my dreams, and I know I’m a disappointment to her.”
Kamerynne swallowed. Nat mentioned the Goddess sometimes, just in passing, but when Kamerynne asked her about her religion, Nat always said she wasn’t really supposed to talk about it. The whole thing seemed weird, but she didn’t want to be disrespectful. “How could you disappoint her?”
“I have a role in her Coming. Not now, but later. And I’m too scared to do it. I’m a coward, and worthless, and She knows it.”
