Not to boast, though, but it was a really good fall—the entire cheerleading squad was on their feet and I’m pretty sure somebody even two-of-the-three digits for 911 dialed to report a death in the high school gymnasium. The coach was baffled how I’d managed to walk away from it without a broken neck or, in her exact words, “your head still attached.”
Cue the memory of my father throwing me headfirst out of a tree while Mom recorded it and repeated “REMEMBER WHAT WE TAUGHT YOU!” the whole way down.
Most kids go to Disney at that age. Me? I was going through tumbling lessons and learning to make lethal weapons out of rubber bands, paper towel tubing, and freshly sharpened pencils.
Go Team DiAngelo. Who needs a photo album when you’ve got a scar from every family vacation, right?
“You know that it’s better than the alternative, Abigail,” Daddy seems to answer my inner monologue with his go-to response to my complaint. “You’re an Olympic-level athlete. Acrobatics, speed, stamina, strength—you do realize you’re stronger than probably any other kid at your school—stamina, hand-to-hand comba—”
“I know. I know.” I cut him off before he could continue his no-doubt lengthy list of every conceivable area of expertise I possessed. The so-called praise could go on and on for days, but the fact that “friends” (either good ones or any for that matter) wouldn’t be included was the nature of my current problem. That, however, wasn’t something I could just say; I’d tried enough times to know how it would go. If conversations were chess boards, I’d mapped out every conceivable play to that one and found none that would give me the win. So instead I said, “I just hate being that great at everything and still having to pretend to be this klutzy idiot when the opportunity to show off comes around.”
I didn’t believe any of that—that I was as great as Daddy was saying or that I was that great at everything, or, most of all, that I saw any of that as a chance to show off; I saw it as what it was: a chance to be normal—but, again, if conversations were chess boards I had to play my pieces wisely.
Daddy unlaced his fingers, a good sign, and lifted himself from his chair then. “I understand how you feel”—no you don’t. No you don’t! NO… YOU… DON’T!—“but it doesn’t change that it’s the way it has to be. If people saw what you could do—what you could really do—then there’d be news teams circled around the school within minutes to interview the new ‘star athlete.’ Suddenly there’d be drafting coaches, interviews, offers… there’d be attention, Abby. Attention that would reach the wrong eyes. And that’s when things get dangerous. We can’t go threatening everything you’ve trained so hard for just for pom-poms or even gold medals. You can do the world a great service with those skills, but if those skills pull you out from behind the curtain then you’re just a sitting duck.” He wiped his face and let out a sigh that I’m sure he didn’t mean to be audible from where he stood, then added, “You saw what being a sitting duck meant for your mother.”
I so wasn’t having that conversation.
Distraction! Distraction! Distra—
“You realize you haven’t gone this long without a surprise attack since—”
My distraction works better than I’d hoped, and the whistling of Daddy’s trusted Fixation Bowie marks the end of the conversation before it’s even had the chance to begin. The time between the knife leaving his hand and reaching me feels like a vacation—yup, his office is that long—and my hand felt lazy with how long it had to wait before I caught it. The seven inch blade passed cleanly between the moderate space between the middle and ring fingers of my right hand, which I held only a hair over seven inches away from my face, before the hilt slapped to a stop. The tip of the black blade wavered between my vision—exactly between either eye if I knew my father’s skills, which I did—and I found myself more thankful for the interruption than my life-saving reflexes at that moment.
“Alright, kiddo,” Daddy was already at the armory wall, not stopping after throwing the knife to see if I’d catch it (that, I knew, was a compliment in and of itself), “what weapon will we be sparring with today?”
His question rang with the same casual tone that I’m sure other fathers use to ask their children what board game they want to play on Family Game Night, but “games” in our family are typically more life-threatening than anything Mattel ever put on a shelf.
Only slightly less deadly than Monopoly, though.
I was beginning to question whether that joke would pass for funny to others when I caught myself admiring Daddy’s knife. So much for trying to be normal. Hey, not my fault that the SOG Company makes such a nice fighting knife.
2
Daddy kicked my butt.
Not many girls my age can say something like that and not have a grounds to press charges, but I’m not like many girls my age. That’s been made abundantly and painfully clear. If it hadn’t been before it certainly was after turning myself into a laughing stock in front of everyone. And, boy, was it ever everyone. The cheerleading squad I couldn’t care less about—I mean, I’d have loved to be able to join the squad, if for no other reason than to have some claim to normalcy—but when I was done peeling myself off the floor after my purposefully botched back handspring and slurring out a dazed-sounding “gimme a ‘ouch’!” for effect I’d caught sight of Jason Menkin looking over at me. Suddenly all the faked dizziness and the limp I’d been nursing didn’t matter. The entire squad and their coach had been plenty confused by my sudden and more-than-apparent “revival” from a fall that I’m sure had many convinced they’d just witnessed a death, but the embarrassment that burned within me felt like injury enough to not have to fake anything else. I hated feeling like a stupid little girl with a crush, especially when I knew it was more than that, but I was humiliated enough at that moment to feel like it.
All ’cause of my “special” life.
Special.
Like, “Why isn’t Abby normal like everyone else? She special or something?”
Sure felt like it most of the time.
Sure felt like it back at tryouts.
Sure felt like it all the way home.
At that moment, though, with my entire body beaten and bruised from Daddy’s shinai, and barely a mark on him from my own to show for my trouble, I was feeling far from special at anything. Welts from repeated strikes of dried bamboo were starting to raise the skin across my back, sides, and arms—each one carrying the haunting “if this were a real sword” followed by a momentary lecture on how much meat I’d have just “allowed” to be carved from my body—and as I cast my shirt aside and took in the sight of my reflection in my bedroom mirror I took a small consolation in knowing that I wasn’t a part of a cheerleading squad that would be seeing all that while getting change before and after practice.
In Daddy’s defense, though—(as though he needed any help defending himself from the look of things)—he had warned me ahead of time not to even try out. That my name turned up on the list at all, that I was expected to try out at all, was something of another rebellious act that I’d had to lie my way out of taking responsibility for. I’d wanted what my father had said “no” to, so I’d gone through with the signup. Then, the day before, I’d tried to tell him that the coach had seen my performance during PE class and asked me to attend tryouts.
“What was I supposed to say?” I’d pressed, “If I refused then and there I would’ve seemed suspicious, and you know what you always tell me about avoiding suspicion, right?”
Daddy didn’t have an argument for that. What he did have was the counterstatement that I’d been greeted with. The counterstatement that reminded me of everything I’d already known and everything I’d been reminded of moments earlier:
I wasn’t normal.
I wasn’t meant for normal things.
And, because of that, my training could not be used to put me ahead of others in matters of—that’s right—normalcy.
Not that anybody would ever really know just how abnormal Abigail DiAngelo was.
A clue had been dropped once—ONCE—and it had earned a laugh and been as easy as a simple one-liner and a shrug to pass off.
Slipping into my night gown and tugging my journal out from under my pillow, I remembered that day with a minor sense of… what was that? Fondness? Excitement? Or was it something more wishful?
It was back when I still carried the journal with me everywhere I went. For Daddy it was all about documenting any chances I had to train during the day, but, for me, it was about having something—since I certainly didn’t have someone—to tell my thoughts to. That day, walking through the halls after spending my open lunch period bare-knuckle punching a birch tree into splinters, I’d dropped my journal on the floor. Unsurprisingly, it was scooped up and quickly leafed-through by one of my nosier peers, what a normal girl my age might even call a friend, and I’d watched in stunned horror as a series of events that I was certain would be another excuse for Daddy and me to have to move again unfolded.
“‘Journal of Abigail DiAngelo: Monster Hunter in Training’?” she’d finally read aloud, her corkscrewing inflection on the last four words seeming unable to decide between shock, doubt, and humor.
I’d forced a laugh when I’d caught the briefest moment of skepticism, deciding that was my best option for an out. Stretching the nervous chuckle as much as I could, I snatched the journal back—though I’m certain she’d have held onto it if she’d possessed the strength or reflexes to do so—and, giving the aforementioned shrug, said, “Yeah, I’m… uh, working on a creative writing piece.”
Mirroring the nervous chuckle then and rubbing the likely friction burned pads of her fingers, the girl had accepted that as explanation enough and beat a quick retreat.
No doubt to build up her shattered ego with a visit to her “besties” to squabble about what a “freak” I was.
I flipped through the journal at that moment, skimming past pages depicting encounters with vampires and werewolves (or “theriomorphs” as they were apparently known to professionals like my father… and, soon enough, like me) or various notes on the anatomical frailties of both of those and other nonhumans. There were the random quips and musings that made it, in some ways, recognizable as a teenage girl’s innermost thoughts, of course, but if it weren’t for the documented struggles of my first period or the complaints of running drills while suffering from cramps they could have just as easily been confused as an adult’s. Or, at the very least, somebody with more than a high school sophomore’s education. Which, of course, I did have—if my father’s gloating was ever any real indicator I was probably walking around with the equivalent of a dual major’s master’s degree from an Ivy League university. I just wasn’t allowed to let any of my teachers, who knew me as a steady B student, know that.
After all, how many normal teenage girls use lines like “anatomical frailties” in their own journals? Smart enough to know the words but not smart enough to just write “weaknesses,” huh?
I shook my head at myself and flipped the page again, finding the entry that I’d written just after Mom’s death.
She and Daddy had been raiding a vampire’s nest when an auric had gotten into her head.
Daddy told doctors she’d started having some sort of seizure after he’d dragged her away.
Doctors determined it had been some kind of aneurism.
They’d told us that she’d likely felt no pain.
Daddy told me about how she’d suffered.
And then… then we’d moved.
Again.
And I had the opportunity to be not normal—special—somewhere else.
Here.
I slammed the journal shut and threw it across the room. Staring after the trail of scattered pages and the bent spine, I wondered if it had been the act of my rebellious inner teen missing her mother or a heartbroken hunter mourning the death of a comrade. I resented the realization that there was no such thing as something in between.
Especially since I was beginning to hate the part of me that couldn’t just be a rebellious teenager.
Not like being a monster hunter had any immediate perks.
More like the complete opposite.
Short of breathing, which Daddy once called me on for being “too controlled” in a stressful situation, there wasn’t much I was allowed to not keep hidden. I could run a mile in under five minutes (and maintain that pace for over three straight hours), I could lift four times my bodyweight, I could recreate gold-medal Olympic performances from a photographic memory while reciting each move in any one of thirteen languages, and I’d already killed over a dozen-and-a-half nonhumans, one with nothing more than an unsharpened pencil and some plastic wrap left over from lunch. I could outperform just about any athlete or high-thinker I came across, but I wasn’t allowed to even cross the street without pretending to trip on my own shoelace just to prove to anybody watching that I was nothing more than a dumb, klutzy kid.
And what use would I be to a world in constant danger from the hidden monsters lurking about if I was, you know, on a cereal box or something?
I sighed as I heard Daddy call out that dinner would be ready in “approximately twelve-and-a-half minutes.” Wednesday night meant steamed cod and broccoli. Yeah… who wouldn’t want to be me?
At least I had work the next day. Though it had been one of the toughest plays—oops, I mean conversations—of my life, I’d managed to convince Daddy that letting me get a job at the local library was the sort of thing that would keep others from getting suspicious. After all, I wasn’t allowed to do anything that showcased anything I could do. Being such a Plain Jane in school meant I had to have something going on, right? At that point it was my civic duty to take on a job so I could help fulfill Daddy’s mission to remain under the radar. And what better place to work than somewhere that would also allow for late-night research—someplace filled with reference books?
Never mind the fact that I’d sooner let Daddy and his shinai turn me black-and-blue from head-to-toe than waste a single precious moment of “work”—because it felt like the furthest thing from that when I was there—on him, his missions, or the monsters that he and Mom had dedicated both their lives and mine to hunting down.
3
A library is so much more than books, so much more than the adventures or facts or philosophies stored within the pages on the shelves. There’s all that, too, I’d never dare overlook it, since it was those adventures and facts and philosophies that first drew me to libraries. But there’s something more. A library is… sanctuary. I’ve always been eager and, at the same time, reluctant to call it that—sanctuary—but find myself coming back to it again and again. There’s safety in a library, or at the very least the illusion of it.
And in my line of work, the illusion of safety is really all that we have.
When I was four years old I believed there were monsters under my bed. When I was six I watched from the passenger seat of my parents’ car—curled up and wide-eyed in my mother’s lap—as my father shot out a werewolf’s kneecap with a sawed off, pump-action twelve gauge and buried a modified hatchet into its carotid artery. That was the first day I was told that all my training up until that moment, what I’d passed off as play despite knowing no other kids “played” like I did, had been for a specific purpose. Then, when I turned eight I was given my first weapon: the very twelve gauge I’d watched Daddy use that night. In four years I’d never stopped believing in the monsters under my bed. I just had a better idea of who should be afraid of who.
That was my first lesson in the illusion of safety. It had taken a lot longer than most of my other lessons (Daddy said I was a “fast learner”), but there are two types of lessons in the world:
The ones you learn and know in your head.
And the ones you keep and carry in your heart.
I knew in my heart that a library was a safe place, every bit the sanctuary I believed it to be, even though I knew that there was not a single reason that a monster could just as easily str
oll past those doors as I had earlier that afternoon. All the same, it was my safe haven. It was my church, my holy place, my temple. Complete with its own bizarre form of patron saints…
“You would’ve liked her, I think,” Miss Leon, the head librarian, said with a heavy sigh.
I’d just finished organizing the magazines and gotten back to the front desk to find her staring at a picture of her and a young woman, maybe a year or so older than me when it was taken, that she kept framed on her desk. The picture itself wasn’t anything special, it was clearly taken in that exact library—right over in the reference section from the looks of it—and, judging from the shy and nervous expression on the girl’s face, she’d neither been expecting Miss Leon’s one-armed embrace around her shoulder or the snapshot she’d found herself in. Unsure if Miss Leon had heard me coming and not wanting to startle her, I started to clear my throat as a subtle warning when her words caught me off guard.
My response reflected all the elegance and cunning my father prided me for:
“Huh?”
Miss Leon barely moved to regard me then, tilting her head and dragging the corner of her lip back in a small smile. Gently, as though it might crack the glass or, worse yet, destroy the photograph behind it, she rapped the knuckle of her index finger against the picture, just over the girl’s face.
“Her name was Estella,” she offered, adding, “an intern, like you. A lot like you, actually: quiet, hard-working, and imbued with a love for books.”
I winced at that. Though I certainly liked books, what I loved was the library, itself. I didn’t have it in me to correct her, though, and so I dodged the would-be compliment and said, “What happened to her?”
It felt like a presumptuous statement the moment it was past my lips, but I figured she’d guided that presumption when she’d said that her name was Estella.
As it was, I didn’t presume out of turn.
“She… uh,” Miss Leon’s voice cracked then, and she took a few shallow, jagged breaths to regain herself. When she did, though, her voice was only slightly more intact and seemed in danger of breaking all over again. “She and her parents were killed a few years back,” she explained, shaking her head. “Some sort of home invasion or something. Who knows, really? People…” she sighed, “People can do such ugly things to one another, and I guess the lot of us are often stuck never knowing the reason. If there even is a reason.” She shook her head again, “Estella was…” she choked back a sob and then, strangely enough, smiled, seeming to recapture some memory at that moment, “she was magical. Truly magical.” Finding some sort of comfort there, she glanced over her shoulder at me then. “Like you, I suppose.”
Not Just Voodoo Page 14
