by JL Bryan
Jenny had a million questions now, but he was pulled into a deep conversation with the men from the village.
Mayan musicians in bright woven costumes ornamented with tropical feathers played drums, flutes and a horn made from a conch shell, filling the party with fast-thumping music that attracted a number of party guests to dance. So far, most of the attendees were Mayan, and they wore a mixture of traditional and modern clothing.
The sun vanished into the ocean, the entire yard was lit only by candles. Costumed fire dancers performed to the music, swinging burning flames around themselves to create elaborate trace patterns in the air.
“What do you think?” Alexander asked, pouring Jenny a second glass of the spicy wine.
“This is amazing,” Jenny said, watching the musicians. Dancers in tall headdresses had joined them. One had two huge white wings made of real feathers, which fanned out from his back each time he raised an arm. “Is this some kind of holiday?”
“This is your welcome party,” Alexander said. “I brought everyone here to celebrate you. Still hate parties?”
“This one's pretty nice so far,” Jenny admitted. Not knowing any of the guests, or their language, actually put her at ease. All she could was smile and say, “Taal teelo,” a greeting she'd picked up.
“I have something for you.” Alexander placed a dark wooden box on the table in front of her, small enough that she could pick it up in one hand if she wanted. Its lid was engraved with a stylized image of a spotted jaguar with a squarish head and large teeth.
Jenny traced her finger over the carving. She tapped her fingers nervously on the little box. She was a little scared to see what he was offering.
“Go ahead,” Alexander said.
She slowly lifted the lid and set it aside. Inside, arranged on a bed of black velvet, was a silver bracelet wrought to look like a ring of Mayan skulls. Intricate little floral and geometrical glyphs were carved into each skull. The eyes were black opals with faint traces of blue and violet.
“Oh...” Jenny breathed. It was scary and beautiful all at once, overwhelming her. She felt her heart beating faster.
“You love it,” Alexander said.
Jenny couldn't take her eyes off the bracelet. “This is really mine?”
“That's how presents work. You love it, don't you?”
“Of course.” Jenny slid the bracelet onto her left wrist. It was sized to fit her perfectly. “Oh, thanks, Alexander.” She looked up at him and hesitated. Her first instinct was to kiss him. But Jenny had spent a lifetime learning not to touch people, especially out of affection. She reached out an arm toward him, thinking she might give him a hug. Alexander embraced her and kissed her cheek.
Jenny laughed and pulled away. The spot where his lips had touched her face felt like it was on fire.
“Thanks,” Jenny said. She studied the bracelet again, unable to look at him for fear of blushing or just losing control of herself. She struggled to ignore the deep, dangerous feelings he conjured up inside her.
“How did you know I would like this?” Jenny asked him, without daring to look at him. “A lot of girls wouldn't.”
“I told you,” he said. “I know you.”
“I'm into skulls and death, apparently.” Jenny thought of her first date with Seth, on Halloween, how much fun they'd had dressing as members of the undead and hitting the haunted houses. It had somehow been the most romantic night of her life. She tried not to think about it.
Fortunately, more guests arrived to distract her. Manuel escorted a group of four Hispanic men in dark suits and ties toward the table, and Alexander rose to greet them in Spanish. Alexander paid particular attention to one of them, a middle-aged man wearing several gold rings. The other three men were much younger than him.
“Jenny,” Alexander said, “This is Ernesto Calderon, Papa Calderon's nephew.”
Jenny smiled at the man and spoke one of her new Mayan greetings, which brought a bemused expression to his face. Alexander laughed.
“Maybe we should try English,” Ernesto said. “I have brought someone to meet you.” He nodded at his men, and they stood aside. An old Latina woman in a plain dress and some kind of black head scarf approached. She was very short, and leaned on a cane with one gnarled, trembling hand. Her mouth was wrinkled and collapsed into itself, and her sparse hair was white. She stared at Jenny with small, black eyes.
“Señora Emygdia is one of my uncle's advisors,” Ernesto said, while old woman hobbled closer to Jenny. There was a horrific smell, like the rot of a dead animal, emanating from the woman, and Jenny was feeling a little scared of her. The woman raised one small, misshapen claw of a hand and pawed at the air while she stared unblinking at Jenny. This strange gesture did not put Jenny at ease.
“My uncle wishes that she study you,” Ernesto said. Everyone around the dining table had fallen silent, watching the old woman and Jenny.
“Why?” Jenny asked.
“To assess you,” Alexander said. “She's a holy woman. Or a very unholy woman. Whatever. A very old bruja. She's been sent to look you over for Papa Calderon.”
The old woman reached her clawed hand towards Jenny's face.
“Um, can we warn her about the not-touching-me thing?” Jenny asked.
Alexander spoke in Spanish, and the woman drew her hand back and asked him a question. Her voice was low and hissing. Alexander replied, and the woman's eyes opened a little wider.
She closed her eyes and waved her hand around Jenny's head and body, walking in a slow circle around Jenny. Jenny didn't know what to do, so she crossed her arms and tried to look calm.
Finally, the old woman opened her eyes. She spoke in a low, croaking voice to Ernesto. Then one of Ernesto's younger companions escorted her back inside.
Ernesto and Alexander conversed in Spanish. Ernesto frowned, with a few wary glances at Jenny, while Alexander seemed to smile wider as he spoke.
“What's happening?” Jenny asked Alexander.
“One second,” Alexander said. “Kisa.” The girl straightened up at the sound of her name. Alexander made a gesture with his hand, and she nodded and hurried inside.
“What did the old woman say?” Jenny asked.
“She said you had a deadly power, and you cannot be trusted,” Alexander said. “Which is just how I remember you.”
“Thanks,” Jenny said.
Kisa returned with a large glass bottle of tequila and several shot glasses.
Ernesto took one glass and spoke to Jenny in English
“Papa Calderon welcomes you into our house,” Ernesto said. “May God grant us a full harvest and a shitload of money.”
Alexander raised a glass to that and motioned for Jenny to take one, too. Jenny, Alexander, Ernesto and Ernesto's two remaining companions drank together.
The tequila scalded Jenny's throat and chest, and she went into an unstoppable coughing fit. The two younger men laughed and pointed at her, which made her angry enough to glare at them. She was amazed that they actually fell silent under her look and decided to walk off for a look at the roasting deer.
Kisa pressed a glass of water into Jenny's hand. Jenny drank it down, then gave her a grateful smile. “Thanks.”
Kisa returned with a different drink for Jenny, something called taxcalate that tasted like milk sweetened with cinnamon. This was also delicious.
More food arrived, first shrimp with tortillas and tomatoes and spicy peppered salsa, and then tender fish in a tangy tomato sauce seasoned with bright herbs, fried plantains and freshly cut mangoes. Jenny ate and drank and watched the dancers in their incredibly elaborate costumes and makeup. This whole event seemed terribly expensive to her.
She looked up and down the crowded table, where everyone was talking in either Spanish or Mayan. She felt a warm glow towards all these people, though she barely knew them. Maybe because they seemed to value the exact thing that made Jenny such a freak, and they had a place for someone like her.
After she ate,
the party broke into smaller groups, and many people went to dance.
“Jenny, I have to go up to my office with Ernesto for a minute,” Alexander said. “Boring stuff. Back in a minute.”
“Oh, yeah.” Jenny drunkenly waved him away. She invited Kisa to finally sit down and stop hovering over her. The girl hesitated.
“Come on.” Jenny pointed at the chair beside her. “You're off duty. Have a drink.” She held up her wineglass to Kisa.
Kisa smiled, looked around, then sat beside Jenny and poured herself some wine. Jenny clinked her glass against Kisa's, and they drank.
The wine made Jenny chatty, and so she talked to Kisa and to anyone else who came and went at the table. Though nobody really understood her, they seemed friendly enough. At one point, Kisa and Jenny managed to discuss how Jenny's gloves didn't match the beaded scarlet red dress Kisa had provided Jenny for the party. Kisa offered to make new gloves for Jenny, but Jenny insisted it would be too much trouble.
Later, Jenny staggered inside and found her way to the back stairs, which led up to the bathroom near Jenny's room. She tugged at the door handle, but it was locked, so she slumped against the wall.
She felt a little dizzy and a little panicky, too. She was in a place where everything and everyone was unfamiliar, and she had no idea how to get home from here. She wondered about her dad, whether he'd recovered from Tommy's fear-inducing touch, whether he was worried about her. And what about Seth? Did he miss Jenny...or was he relieved she was gone?
Two Latina girls in skimpy dresses stumbled out of the bathroom, laughing, and wandered away down the hall. Jenny hurried inside to use it. When she was done, she washed her hands and splashed handfuls of cool water on her face. She wanted to forget about her problems back home. Things were like a dream world here, and that was just what she needed.
When she stepped back into the hall, she smelled something burning. She followed the smell to a cloud of blue smoke hanging in front of a closed door. Somebody was smoking weed in there, and Jenny felt like joining them.
The old Jenny would have stood there for a minute, then turned away, too shy to approach strangers. But now she was filled with drunken resolve. She wasn't poor little Jenny Mittens anymore, suffering abusive songs on the playground, disdained and dismissed by everyone. She was a killer. A monster. And Alexander understood that and embraced it. Here, she could be herself, whoever that turned out to be.
Jenny pushed open the door. It wasn't a bedroom, but a large office, and Alexander himself sat with his legs crossed on top of a hand-carved wooden desk. Some of the party guests were here, seated on long leather couches, including Ernesto Calderon and two of the men who'd come with him, and a few young women in tight, low-cut dresses, including the two who'd stumbled out of the bathroom earlier. One of the girls was making out with one of Ernesto's men. The Clash pulsed out of a sleek black stereo, a very different sound from the Mayan band performing outside.
“Jenny.” Alexander smiled, and smoke curled up from his mouth. He held a long wooden pipe decorated with feathers. “How do you like your party?”
“I'd like it more if you'd share.” Jenny closed the door behind her and crossed the room toward Alexander, holding out one hand. Alexander grinned and passed her the pipe, and Jenny puffed on it. She coughed out a hot cloud of smoke, her eyes watering.
“Don't be so greedy,” Alexander said, still smiling.
“Very funny. I needed this.” Jenny took a couple more puffs and held the pipe toward Alexander, but he motioned for her to pass it to one of Ernesto's men who sat nearby. “Good stuff,” Jenny commented as she handed it off. “Kind of minty.”
“Only the best for my parties,” Alexander said.
“Alexander, this is all great, and I'm glad you're hiding me here.” Jenny's words came out slurred. “I just keep waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
“It's not all parties down here. We have a lot of work to do.”
“What kind of work?”
“No need to talk about it tonight,” Alexander said, with a glance and a smile at Ernesto. “Tonight, we eat, drink and get fucked up.”
Ernesto slapped the ass of the girl on his lap, and she giggled and stood. Ernesto pushed to his feet and approached Alexander, speaking in Spanish and grinning.
“A little more?” Alexander asked. He looked at Jenny and shrugged. “Why not?”
“A little more what?” Jenny asked.
Alexander pushed off the table and landed on his feet. Behind where he'd been sitting, an antique mirror in an ornate ebony frame lay flat on the table, though it looked like it was intended to be hung on a wall. Rows of white powder as thick as Jenny's middle finger had been laid out across it, and a razor blade and a glass straw sat at one edge of the mirror.
Jenny watched Ernesto pick up the straw and snort some powder into each nostril, consuming about half of one of the thick lines. Ernesto pinched his nose and looked up while his female companion sniffed up the rest of the line.
“Is that cocaine?” Jenny asked. She'd never done cocaine, but she knew that if you were sniffing a powder, it was probably coke or crystal meth. She'd seen cocaine once, when Ashleigh framed Jenny for using drugs at Seth's family Christmas party. Seth's parents happened to love Ashleigh and hate Jenny, so they hadn't believed the truth.
“It's our stock in trade,” Alexander said. He watched one of Ernesto's men and another of the young women sniff white powder from the mirror. “The great provider of all things.”
“What's it like?” she asked.
“As high-grade as anything on the market. Took a little jiggering to get it to grow this far north, but we had a top botanist on the case. We're going to make a fortune on this crop, cutting out the middleman.” He laughed. “Well, we're the middleman. We're cutting out the supplier. Jenny, I can't wait to take you up and show what we have going. Things are going to pick up big with you around, though.” He took her hand, and Jenny felt that dangerous electricity between them, crackling almost palpably between his palm and hers.
“But what about the law? Won't we go to jail?”
“The law is what men make of it,” Alexander said. “The key is to buy the men who make the laws. Or the men who enforce them. Ideally, both. You'd be amazed how little money it takes.”
“You're crazy.” Jenny shook her head. There was a lot of danger lurking right under the surface here. Over on the couches, Ernesto's men had shed their suit coats, revealing large firearms holstered under their armpits. Most of the men she'd seen were armed. Part of her felt afraid to be among such people...but part of her was excited, too.
“I have to get out of here,” Jenny told Alexander. “I'm going back outside.”
“Wait,” Alexander said, but Jenny didn't. She hurried down the hall and the steps, out past the patio full of eating and drinking and dancing and drums, past the candlelit region of the yard and into the darkness beyond. She was moving in the general direction of the barn and the dark, partially collapsed building.
She stopped when she heard snarls ahead, like wild animals ready to attack. It came from the direction of the partially collapsed building. With a thought, she summoned up the pox as strongly as she could. Blisters tore open from her fingertips to her shoulder blades. If some fierce creature meant to jump on her, she was ready.
Jenny moved closer to the sound. She couldn't see anything inside the old building. Its window and door holes showed only complete darkness, from which the snarls were rolling out.
The snarls from the building grew louder. Jenny raised her arms, ready to fight back.
Someone grabbed her shoulder, and Jenny grabbed the person's arm and pumped it full of Jenny pox. It was a purely defensive response—this was a human, not a beast, and she wouldn't have done it if she'd had time to think.
“Watch out,” Alexander said. “You could kill a man that way.”
“I thought something was attacking me.”
“Are you sure I'm not?” he asked. The stran
ge throaty snarls and growls sounded again from the abandoned building, louder and angrier this time.
“What's in there?” Jenny asked.
“Just some unspeakable, inhuman horrors words cannot describe. Did you have dessert?”
“I'm serious.”
“I am, too. Flan with cacao sauce? You don't want to miss that.”
“I'm not hungry.” Jenny looked down the dark, sloping stretch of yard toward the moonlit sea. “I feel like running. Want to race me to the cliff?”
“Half the cliff's crumbled away. It's not safe.”
“That's what makes it fun.” Jenny let go of his arm and raced toward the cliff.
“Look out!” He chased after her. “You can't see where the wall's broken.”
Jenny headed directly for the largest gap in the wall, where there was nothing but stars beyond, but she pretended not to notice at all. She was going to make him catch her. She put on speed.
“Jenny!” he called after her, running faster. “You have to slow down!”
“You're just slow!” she yelled back over her shoulder. Jenny ran frequently in the woods on her dad's land. It was a great way to beat back stress and anxiety, to feel like you were putting the world behind you.
She lowered her head and pressed forward. The toothy, broken gap in the wall yawned in front of her. The ground there was broken and craggy. A misstep could send her tumbling down the cliff to the beach.
She heard his footsteps behind her, but realized she didn't really care whether he caught her or not. If she went over the cliff, so what? She would die and reincarnate again, bringing all her evil back with her. Even death wasn't an escape.
She reached the crumbling edge of the cliff and saw the endless dark of the ocean below, glimmering with reflected starlight. It might not be a permanent escape, but it was something.
