Furious

by Jill Wolfson

  Quickly they unfurl him. “Don’t move!” a paramedic insists.

  But Brendon twists his head to show us his face, which is white and waxy with a line of smeared blood on his mouth, and the sight of it makes most everyone shriek. But this isn’t Halloween the movie. Brendon’s not a vampire, either. He’s alive.

  I smell Ambrosia’s perfume an instant before I hear her whisper in my ear. “Hound him to hell. Down, down, deep in the earth. He’ll never be free, protected, not even by death.”

  I whirl around. “What are you talking about?”

  “You hate him.”

  “I don’t.”

  “After what happened in the bedroom?”

  “But I didn’t want him to die. I’m glad he’s not dead.”

  “Of course you are!” Ambrosia sandwiches my hands between hers, gives them a supportive squeeze. “You don’t want him dead. That’s why you pulled him back.”

  “Me?”

  “You couldn’t let him take the easy route. Death would be so unsatisfying. Death would let him off the hook. You don’t want that.”

  Abruptly, I take back my hands. I reach behind my neck and undo the clasp of the snake necklace. I make Ambrosia take it. “I don’t want anything to do with this anymore!”

  She dangles the necklace in front of my face like a hypnotist. “Don’t play coy with me.”

  I slap at the jeweled serpent.

  The necklace disappears into her pocket. Her voice turns blunt. “When you thought he was dead, you felt guilty. I’ll give you that. You were also scared that you’d be caught. You even felt sad that your romance had to end on this tragic note.”

  “Shut up,” I insist.

  “But you felt something else, too. Look deep. Admit it. You were a little disappointed that it was over so soon.”

  I start to protest, but she presses a finger to my lips. “Death? The peace of the void? The perpetual rest of the night? Sleeping in the winged arms of Thanatos? A quick death would be like sentencing him to eternity in a hammock. Where’s the justice in that?”

  She runs her hand over my face. My eyelashes tickle slightly, and in the split-second that my eyes stay closed I’m whipped back into the night’s humiliation. Every second of it. My proclamation of love. His lie of love. The overhead light snapping on, the laughing, the photos. He planned it all. He must have planned it. Did he defend me? Did he hurl himself on Pox and fight for me? Did he do anything but stand there in his lame, pathetic way and claim to be innocent? He’s as guilty as all those other Plagues.

  Ambrosia is right. I’ll never get over this. Why should he? As long as I suffer, Brendon should suffer.

  Ambrosia gives me more words: “He threw you away like garbage, just like your parents did. This little two-story tumble isn’t enough payback. You want more. The score isn’t settled yet.”

  My cheeks flare hot with the recognition that she’s right. She cups them with her palms, which have turned icy in the night air. “No need to be self-conscious, Megaera. Is a spider self-conscious about its desire to weave? A snake about its need to swallow its prey whole? This is your nature and it’s your right. Don’t overthink it.”

  Across the crowd I spot Raymond trying to get my attention, the features of his blue-and-white face twisting into a dozen frantic expressions. He knows exactly what happened and I know what he’ll say, that we went too far and abused our power.

  Ambrosia notices where I’m looking. “Whom did Brendon betray? Who gets to decide when the score is settled? Who deserves justice?” She strokes my hair, which is no longer soft and wavy but a coarse mass of strands that keeps crawling over my eyes and into my mouth.

  I pretend not to see Raymond. I look away.

  Alix and Stephanie make their way to us, and we are standing together as Brendon is strapped back onto the stretcher and a paramedic orders us to clear a path to the ambulance. There’s a parade of ghosts, angels, wenches, and witches following him in a drunken line, joyful about their friend’s amazing good luck. To fall like that and to still be alive.

  Luck is deceiving.

  When Brendon passes us, Ambrosia flicks four spiky nails in his direction. I see that her hair has been cut very short and spikey. It frames her face like a ring of razors. “Sleep well, Prince,” she whispers. “Enjoy your dreams.”

  Overhead, the mockingbird mimics a squeaky gate, a train squealing around the corner, a human whistle of nine familiar notes.

  27

  Alone in my bedroom, looking into the mirror, I practice what I’m going to say to Raymond when he confronts me. I know he will. I make sure to keep my expression flat and certain, a shield against his arguments.

  He’ll say: “You almost killed him!”

  I’ll say: “I bet he doesn’t even have a broken bone.”

  Raymond: “You went too far!”

  Me: “We haven’t gone far enough.”

  Only Raymond doesn’t phone that night, not even a text. I’m puzzled but relieved. Why should I have to convince him of anything? Ambrosia got it right. This is my business. Brendon didn’t humiliate Raymond. Raymond wasn’t half-naked with half the school laughing in his face. I’m the one who gets to decide when justice has been served. I’m the one who deserves to pay him back.

  Who cares what Raymond thinks?

  It’s 2:00 a.m. by the time I get into bed. Lying in the dark with He-Cat at my head, I burrow into the sheets, imagining Brendon in the hospital and how he must be moaning fitfully in his sleep—if he can sleep—and I get a sense of satisfaction. If I can’t sleep, neither should he.

  And then it’s 2:30 a.m. and all I can think about now is how Brendon will eventually get over it. The doctors will stitch up his lip and he’ll be released from the hospital. His family will rally around him. His friends will offer sympathy and support. He’ll surf again and sleep well and have girlfriends, and gradually the memory of that fall through the window will fade. He’s a prince. Life is like that for the princes of this world. All the shame and guilt we put into him will disappear. This Halloween night will too quickly become a small, vague memory in his long, happy, entitled life.

  He will forget about what he did. He will forget me.

  Unless …

  I do something to keep the memory and the guilt alive.

  I check the clock. It’s 2:45 a.m., and now all I can think about is the refrigerator. I head into the kitchen and begin my raid. There’s a big slab of leftover lasagna that I don’t even bother to pop into the microwave. I down it cold right out of the casserole dish. I fill a bowl with ice cream and top it with a large dollop of Cool Whip. I eat a half jar of garlic pickles. I would eat more, but that’s all that’s left.

  He-Cat, excited by all this middle-of-night action, rubs against my legs, but I’m in no mood to give him or anyone any affection. I nudge him out of my way.

  I must be fed.

  I think of the Leech asleep in the next room. Why does she get to sleep so soundly when I can’t? Why did I settle for just a new bedroom when she owes me so much more? She should be racked with shame and guilt for the way she treated me. I want both of them, Brendon and her, to beg me for forgiveness. I want their sleep to be plagued by nightmares until they pay for what they did to me.

  This hunger gnaws, like I’m feeding some creature that’s all appetite. I grab a pen and a piece of paper and draw: a hungry ghost with a huge maw of a mouth, a neck so long and thin that everything eaten burns and hurts as it travels down to a bloated, bottomless pit of a stomach.

  That hungry ghost is inside of me. It is me.

  A word, coming from that hunger, springs into my thoughts. I text to Alix and Stephanie—Hunt—and right when I hit Send, two messages come in simultaneously.

  Hunt, says Alix.

  Hunt, says Stephanie.

  We can’t stop. We must be fed.

  * * *

  Over the next few days the police talk to a lot of kids who were at the party, and my name comes up in every interview. In
an empty classroom a policewoman gently guides me through every detail of the night. Was Brendon depressed? Did he ever talk about hurting himself? Did anyone ever threaten him? When did I last see him?

  I stick to my rehearsed story. He was drunk. I was drunk. There was the ugly, ugly scene in the bedroom, and I was mad and hurt. Who wouldn’t be? But when I left the bedroom, he was still standing. The window was shut. Yes, he did seem upset and remorseful about what he did to me. Alix and Stephanie back me up on that point.

  Brendon doesn’t remember much, so the police come to the conclusion that I lead them to: A distraught, drunken kid lucked out by not killing himself. The real victim is the poor, sensitive girl whose heart he broke.

  At the end of my interview, the soft-spoken policewoman asks if she can give me a hug. I let myself be folded into her arms. “Honey, he treated you wrong. None of this is your fault,” she says. “But don’t be surprised if the episode continues to haunt you for a while.”

  I know it will.

  * * *

  The hospital keeps Brendon under observation until mid-week. The doctors can’t get over how all his vital signs disappeared and yet he came out of it with no serious injuries. They draw blood and do an MRI, but they don’t see anything abnormal.

  At school, of course, everyone’s talking about Brendon’s miraculous escape from death. I overhear Mr. and Mrs. H in the cafeteria arguing about what happened.

  “Pure luck,” Mr. H says. “He must have hit at the exact angle to dissipate the impact. It’s all a matter of vectors.”

  “You and your vectors!” Mrs. H says. “Why can’t you admit that there are some things we’ll never understand?”

  I smirk, knowing how wrong they both are. I pulled him back. I am not done with him.

  That’s why I don’t care about the rude comments and snickering that follow me as I walk through the halls. That’s why it doesn’t matter to me that the photos of naked me have been e-mailed around. The Plagues spread a rumor that I did something terrible to Brendon. They don’t know what and they don’t know how, but they blame me.

  Let the rumors fly. Let everyone shun me. Let them laugh.

  Let them think that this is over and they have won.

  * * *

  Later that week, Brendon walks into Western Civ and is welcomed with applause and a gush of admiration that usually greets war heroes or someone who scored a fake ID. I notice how he doesn’t look in my direction, but lets himself be smothered in boobs by all the girls who insist on hugging him.

  “Dude!” Pox offers up a fist to bump. “Lookin’ good.”

  Rat Boy, always the master of the obvious, says, “You’re alive.”

  The Brendon lovefest ends only because Ms. Pallas, not looking her usual cool and calm self, enters the room and flicks the lights a couple of times. A few minutes after the late bell sounds, Raymond, equally frazzled, slides into his seat next to me. We haven’t talked since Halloween night. He hasn’t been in school. I didn’t call to find out why, and he didn’t call to tell me why.

  I do know one thing, though. He and Ms. Pallas didn’t both just happen to come in late. They don’t fool me. Nobody will ever fool me again. They were obviously having a private summit meeting, and it wasn’t about his grades. Ms. Pallas was no doubt filling his head with her so-called civilized ideas about justice. And Raymond was taking it all in with complete devotion. I catch him checking me out with a set of disapproving wrinkles etched on his forehead. I give him a mocking, tight-lipped smile that dares: What are you going to do about it?

  Today it’s our group’s turn to give an updated report on our final project, but when Raymond takes out the papers he prepared, I lean over and slap a wide-open palm on them. My first words in days to him are: “We don’t need your contribution anymore.”

  I motion for Alix, Stephanie, and Ambrosia to follow me to the front of the room. “Our report.” I drop the papers on Ms. Pallas’s desk. “It’s a script. You said we could be creative, so we wrote and memorized a scene, based on the works of Aeschylus.”

  One of the Double Ds takes out her cell phone, holds it in my direction, and snaps a picture, a reminder that it will be a long time before Halloween night is forgotten. Half the class laughs; the other half looks away embarrassed.

  “Dawn, put that away now,” Ms. Pallas orders.

  I don’t care. I strike a pose, hand on hip, chest thrust forward. Take all the pictures you want. I’m about to show them whom they are dealing with. Let’s see how much they laugh then. I face the class.

  “The princess,” I announce.

  Ambrosia takes three steps forward and holds her arms out to the sides, palms up and head back in prayer to the gods. She recites, “I have been wronged and I have called up the Furies to punish the ones who harmed me.”

  Ambrosia then gestures—“My Furies”—and I link arms with Alix and Stephanie and the three of us say, “Hunt,” so that the H emerges in a rasp from the back of our throats and the T is hard and final, like a trapdoor slamming closed.

  Ambrosia: “My contempt will stab your liver, a spurt of bile to prick the conscience. Give him a blast of your reeking, bloody breath, send it into his waking hours, ignite the fuel of his endless nightmares.”

  “Hunt,” we say. “Hunt.”

  “Burn him in your stomach’s acid fire. Track him down!”

  “Hunt, hunt, hunt.”

  “He will not escape.”

  Speeding up. “Hunt, hunt, hunt.”

  “He can run to the ends of the earth.”

  Speeding up more, a race. “Hunt, hunt, hunt.”

  “But he’ll never be free.”

  “Enough,” Ms. Pallas tries to break in.

  I feel the powerful tug of her but draw on my own power, our combined power of three. We don’t need to listen to her. We have no one to obey but ourselves. “Hunt, hunt, hunt, hunt, hunt, hunt, hunt.”

  Let them try to escape me. Let them—

  This time there are two voices—Ms. Pallas and Raymond shouting in unison “Enough!”—and I stop. But not because of them, only because I decide to. I want to savor all the expressions of shock, fear, and confusion. I stare at Brendon. His lips part and he mouths a string of words in my direction—Meg, please stop! We need to talk! I can—but I shut him down with a cold glare. Hope slides off his face. Good! He feels the rush of the misery that’s coming his way.

  On the outside, only a small scrape on Brendon’s mouth and a purple bruise on his elbow are visible. But inside, my enemy is now hemorrhaging. It’s not blood and not anything that would register on an X-ray or that a doctor could stitch up. It’s his sanity, and we will make it bleed right out of him.

  * * *

  The next day Brendon’s eyes look sunken into his skull. He seems to have shrunk an inch overnight. By the next week his lips are cracked and he wanders the school hallways like he’s lost in a nightmare.

  The rumors grow thicker and darker. I am doing this to him and I won’t ever stop. Me and Alix and Stephanie. No one dares accuse me out loud. No one laughs, either, or points a cell phone camera in my face anymore. Even the Plagues step aside as we pass.

  Brendon soon stops coming to school. I hear things. The Double Ds say that he stopped eating, not a bite. One of his cousins reports that he’s not sleeping at all; no amount of medication can knock him out. His skin is breaking out in pustules. He complains of migraines and arthritis in his toes. His medical doctor recommends a psychiatrist and the psychiatrist recommends a neurologist, but nobody can bring him any relief.

  For days he flails at invisible enemies, and then for a solid night he cries deep, animal sobs. His pleas for forgiveness turn into loud, wordless moans, which dissolve into near-silent whines of pain.

  Then, not a sound from him. I hear that he huddles in a corner of his room.

  “Like some dude trapped under glass,” Pox tells a group of surfers.

  “No!” Gnat disagrees. “Like he’s being held underwater.”


  Exactly, I think. Under glass, underwater, like the figures in Ambrosia’s snow globe. It is not a piece of art. It is a prison. Brendon’s essence is there, with all the other princes. Trapped with sharp, black shards of guilt falling all over them.

  28

  Curtain down. Exodos in the Greek theatrical tradition. All the players, major and minor, having served their purpose, exit the scene. The princess avenged. The Prince doomed. My enemy Pallas defeated.

  So why when I shake my snow globe do I not taste the soul-tingling relief I so long for? I need a calculator to add up all my princely pounds of flesh cooked into a stew and served up for supper in my House of Revenge.

  Yet I am still not released from this appetite as I wander the dank netherworld and the locker-lined halls of Hunter High.

  What gives?

  Warning: anti-drug message coming at you.

  Revenge is like any of those other gateway drugs that you have been warned against. Your first experience? It’s what it’s cracked up to be: an all-encompassing, headlong rush of endorphins into sheer transcendence.

  The second time? Well, that was pretty good, but it lacked something, a certain zesty zing. As the Hunter High bathroom stoners always complain: You should have been here for that other shit.

  Ambrosia’s Law: The most recent act of revenge is never as satisfying as the one before it.

  It’s all about recapturing the first time, a desperate chase to relive and reclaim your moment of the undiluted bliss of vengeance. You always want more.

  Chase. Chase. Chase.

  That’s why I have to double the dose. Triple it. Hunt it down and ingest it straight.

  Keep hunting, I order.

  Hunt. Hunt. Hunt.

  FIFTH STASIMON, THE BOOK OF FURIOUS

  29

  Definition of satisfaction: knowing that you got back at someone who stabbed you in the back. Brendon will never forget what he did to me. Justice has been done. I feel at peace.

  But then, I don’t.

  The peaceful feeling turns into an irritating itch, and the itch works on me until I’m half crazy with frustration. My mind won’t rest. I can’t sleep or eat. I can’t stop thinking about all the others.