The Apocalypse of Elena Mendoza

by Shaun David Hutchinson

  I shouldn’t have watched. I was stealing a private moment from her, one that I didn’t deserve to see, but I couldn’t leave. No. That’s not true. I didn’t want to leave. This was the real Freddie, the one I’d had a crush on. Gone was the girl who’d been angry with me for saving her life, replaced by this goofy, beautiful woman, and I couldn’t look away. I watched her bounce on her heels and bob her blue-haired head to the manic music’s beat as she sorted through the metal bits and wires on the table. Then she suddenly stopped what she was doing and performed a guitar solo in the air. A laugh escaped my lips that was so loud, Freddie stopped and turned around.

  She’d caught me. I suppose I could have run away. That might have been the prudent action, but instead I opened the door and walked inside and said, “If there was an air guitar competition, you’d totally win,” which was definitely a terrible line heavy on the cheese, but it was the first thing I thought of.

  Freddie reached behind her, grabbed her phone, which was plugged into a portable speaker, and turned the music down. “Why are you spying on me?”

  For a brief second, I’d seen her content. Happy, even. But now she was scowling, clearly annoyed I’d interrupted her. “I wasn’t spying. Well, I mean, I was, but not intentionally. I heard the music and was curious, and then I saw you dancing and I shouldn’t have watched but I did and—oh! What’s that you’re working on?” I pointed at the sculpture behind Freddie. It was approximately four feet tall, five counting the pedestal, and made of copper tubing and ribbon cables and wires.

  Freddie practically glared a hole through the center of my chest while I prayed my flimsy diversion would succeed. Finally, she said, “My end-of-the-year project for Mr. Aydin.”

  I moved toward the whatever-it-was and circled it slowly. “Is it a person?”

  “Possibly. I’m not sure what it’ll wind up being.”

  “You don’t work with clay or marble or normal stuff?” I motioned at a couple of the other projects sitting out. There was a brownish lump that looked like it might grow up to be a vase one day, and another that resembled a disembodied mouth full of crooked teeth.

  Freddie motioned with her hand like those other projects were so lame. “Garbage is kind of my thing.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Why would you?”

  Uh, because I had a crush on you and I thought I was the foremost expert in all things Winifred Petrine, but clearly I was wrong and am a gigantic moron. None of which I actually said because she’d already caught me spying on her and I didn’t want to make the situation any creepier.

  “So you’re not sure what you’re building?”

  Freddie ran her hands across a sheet of chicken wire that was stretched between two metal supports. “I’m not big on worrying about the end result. I let the materials dictate the form.”

  “What if the materials dictate a crappy form?”

  “Then I build something crappy.” Freddie stopped. “Why are you here, again?”

  The question sucker punched me in the gut. “I can leave.” I turned toward the door.

  “Wait,” she said. “I’m sorry. That was mean. You saved my life and all, and I repay you by being bitchy.”

  “You’re not bitchy. I was the one spying on you, after all.”

  “True.” She walked to a cabinet, grabbed a pair of gloves off a shelf, and tossed them to me. “But since you’re here, you can help me.” She motioned at the pile of trash. “Pull out whatever looks interesting.”

  I was kind of hungry, and Fadil was waiting for me in the cafeteria, and this wasn’t how I’d intended to spend my lunch period, but I dropped my bag on the floor and slipped the gloves on. “How will I know what’s interesting?”

  “You just will.”

  Freddie cranked the music back up. I didn’t know the band, but they screamed a lot.

  “Who is this?” I asked.

  “You wouldn’t recognize the name.” Freddie stood on a stool, bending what I thought was supposed to be an arm from the legs of a camera tripod.

  “Probably. It’s not the kind of stuff I usually listen to.” I prided myself on having decent taste in music, but I wasn’t a connoisseur.

  “Not because . . .” Freddie trailed off. “It’s old stuff. My dad gave it to me. He called it a history lesson. Some of it’s really, really bad. There’s this one band called The Suicide Machines. They’re pretty terrible. But there’s other stuff that’s cool. Patti Smith and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and this one is Operation Ivy. It’s from my dad’s short-lived punk rock phase.”

  It felt weird to be having a conversation about music with Freddie instead of discussing her being shot and me healing her and what it meant. “I have no idea what they’re saying, but I like it.”

  “Me too.”

  “And it was nice of your dad to do that.”

  Freddie paused. “Yeah, well, I guess he didn’t want to die without completing my music education.”

  I froze, a circuit board dangling from my hand. “Sorry. About your dad, I mean.”

  “It’s fine. He died last year. You don’t have to be weird.”

  And now I couldn’t stop being weird. “I don’t have a father at all.”

  “Right,” Freddie said. “Because you’re the Miracle Girl.”

  I tossed the PCB into a pile of stuff I thought Freddie might want to use and kept pawing half-heartedly through the junk. “It wasn’t a miracle. It was parthenogenesis.”

  Freddie climbed down off the stool. “Partheno-what?”

  “Parthenogenesis,” I said. “It’s a form of asexual reproduction.”

  Freddie stared at me like I was speaking French. “You’re not making this shit up? It’s a real thing?”

  I nodded. “This scientist, Dr. Milner, proved it and everything. There’s even a Wikipedia page.”

  “Honestly,” she said, “I always thought someone had made that virgin birth shit up.”

  “It’s all true.”

  Freddie moved closer and started looking through the pile of trash I’d added to. She smelled like dust and copper and melted plastic, and I think that was the first time I’d been turned on by the scent of garbage. She picked up a bundle of wires and began stringing them around and through the bars of one of what I thought might be a leg. “How come you don’t stand up for yourself when people mess with you about it?”

  “No matter what I say, they’re going to believe what they want. Besides, the words ‘virgin birth’ call to mind Jesus and the Virgin Mary, and the idea that a lower-middle-class Cuban girl could be in any way associated with Christ makes people uncomfortable. It’s really not that important.”

  “Of course it is. Those assholes are shitty to you because they think you made it up to get attention, and they’re wrong.”

  “It’s not like I care what anyone says.”

  “Lie.”

  “No it’s not!”

  “Of course it is. Everyone cares what others say about them. Especially the ones who claim not to.”

  The music shuffled to a less angry band. “Whatever. Besides, usually when I can talk to someone, like we’re talking now, they understand. I don’t need to change everyone’s minds, just the people who matter.”

  Freddie screwed up her face. “And you think I matter?”

  “I healed you, so you’re probably predisposed to believe the rest of it,” I said, sidestepping her question. “What’s one more miracle compared to coming back from the dead?”

  “I’m not sure I’d call that a miracle.”

  “Are you really not glad you’re alive?”

  Freddie sighed. “Sometimes. I guess. Can’t a girl have a bad day or a bad month or whatever without someone coming along and trying to tell her to smile more or be happy even when she’s not? None of this shit matters. Alive, dead? There’s no point to any of it.”

  “What if this is the point?” I said. “This moment and every moment that comes after.” She eyed me skeptically. “It’s all
connected, I think. Like two hundred years ago some guy in a small town in rural Pennsylvania bumped into a woman and they started talking and got married and popped out babies and now we’re here having this conversation. Everything we’ve done leads to everything we’re going to do.”

  “And I suppose that includes David Combs shooting me?” Freddie said. “I’m supposed to believe there was a reason for that, too?”

  “Maybe.”

  Freddie shucked off her gloves and tossed them onto the table. “That’s pretty fucked up. I’m not okay with a world where a fucked-up loser has to try to murder me in order for us to have this boring conversation.”

  Her words caught me off guard. She thought the conversation was boring. Which meant she thought I was boring. I’d dreamed of the day we’d finally talk and she’d realize she thought I was pretty and wanted to go out with me and it all felt stupid in light of everything else that had happened, but that didn’t make her words hurt less.

  I took off my gloves and grabbed my bag from the floor. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to bore you.”

  Freddie started to speak, but the door opened and Corinne Spieler, Tori Thrash, Wendy Nguyen, Ava Sutter, and Tori’s boyfriend, Daniel, rolled in laughing and talking. They stopped when they saw me.

  “Hey, Mary,” Tori said. “How’s your arm?”

  “What’s she doing here?” Daniel asked. He’d been nice in middle school. And then he’d gone through puberty and had come out the other side a smoking-hot asshole.

  “I thought you were coming to lunch today,” Ava said to Freddie. “We have a party to plan for tomorrow.”

  Corinne, Ava, Tori, and Wendy were the kind of girls who had the things I was supposed to want: beauty, popularity, friends. And they made having them look easy. But they also made it difficult for someone like me to have those things. Popularity was a zero-sum game. There was only so much room at the top, and I didn’t rank.

  “See you later,” I said to Freddie, making my way toward the door.

  “Later, Mary,” Daniel said.

  “Jesus Christ,” Freddie said. “Her name’s not Mary. It’s Elena.”

  I hesitated, pausing to see if Freddie said anything else, but she didn’t, so I left.

  NINETEEN

  FADIL WAVED AT me from the field where he was practicing with the marching band, and then promptly stumbled into Jennifer Swan’s back. I was watching from the bleachers, trying to do my homework, which I’d gotten a little behind on due to all the excitement with performing miracles. You know how it is. Two rows down and a few feet to the right, a small-framed girl with her hair in twists appeared to be working on a school assignment of her own. I kept replaying my conversation with Freddie in the art room. Look, I wasn’t stupid enough to believe that real life would play out the way it had in my many, many daydreams. I knew that my crush was based on my imagined perception of a girl who wasn’t real. Freddie wasn’t my soul mate. She wasn’t going to swoop in and rescue me from my life. We weren’t destined to begin an everlasting romance so passionate that poets would compose glorious sonnets in our honor that would wind up being used to bore future high school students. She was a girl I’d idealized because she was beautiful and seemed like a decent human being from afar.

  That’s how crushes work. They’re not based in reality. If they were, we wouldn’t call them crushes because we wouldn’t wind up crushed by the inevitable truth of the person.

  So, no, I wasn’t navigating our new whatever-it-was under the fallacious notion that we were going to fall in love and spend the rest of our lives together. I did, however, hope that we could continue to get to know each other. The way I saw it, there were only two ways to get over my crush. Either I realized she was a horrible person not worth my time or I got to know the real Winifred Petrine and built new feelings for her on a solid, honest foundation. Of course, there existed the very real possibility that Freddie would never share my feelings. But friendship with someone you like isn’t a second-place trophy; it’s a win all its own, and I thought I could be happy with that.

  Mrs. Naam shouted at the band, yanking me from my thoughts. Fadil was constantly complaining about how tough she was, but Arcadia West’s marching band was one of the best in the state, so her methods clearly got results. The girl I’d noticed earlier had moved closer, and she kept slyly stealing glances at me.

  “Hey,” I said.

  As if I’d given her the opening she’d been hoping for, the girl flipped on like a spotlight, beaming at me with a hundred-and-fifty-watt smile. “You’re Elena Mendoza, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Justina. Smith. Justina Smith.”

  “Okay.”

  Justina took the opportunity to scoot even nearer. I hadn’t been looking for a conversation, but she wasn’t going to give me a choice. “Did you really heal that girl who got shot at Starbucks?”

  “If this is some thing where I tell you I did and then you call me names or preach at me and tell me I’m going to hell, please do it so that we can move on with our lives.”

  Justina flinched. She had this whole wounded baby bird thing going on that made me instantly feel crappy for going off on her.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “I hear the stuff they say about you,” Justina said. “It’s trash. You saved a girl’s life. And I don’t believe you helped that boy get away, either.”

  “Is that so?”

  Justina moved fractionally closer. “I go to Lakeview Unitarian Church, and Pastor Stephanie says God works through us, you know? She says the world is full of miracles and that it’s regular folks who are performing them.”

  “Are you sure she wasn’t speaking about metaphorical miracles, like feeding the poor or whatever?”

  “She might have been, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t doing real stuff.” As she spoke, Justina’s hands zoomed through the air like they were controlled by wires. “There’s a girl in São Gonçalo who can heal the sick, and there are stories about miracles all over the Internet. I’m a believer.”

  “Is this the part where you tell me how your mom is sick and ask me to save her life?”

  Justina bowed her head. “My brother; he has cystic fibrosis. He’s a good kid, annoying sometimes, but what eight-year-old isn’t? I hate sitting with him watching other boys his age play sports and tag and knowing that, even though he doesn’t complain, he’ll never do those things. I just want Ben to get to run.”

  I was surprised it had taken this long for someone at school to approach me. Even with the world full of skeptics, there were those desperate enough to take a chance, no matter how slim. But aside from that creepy lawyer who’d stalked me at my apartment, Justina was the first.

  “Please?” Justina caught my eyes, and I wanted to say yes, but there were so many unknown variables. I didn’t know how many people would wind up sucked into the sky if I healed Justina’s brother, or where any of them went. The uncertainty was crushing. But then I remembered what Mama had said. Focus on one thing at a time and keep moving. I couldn’t answer all the questions I had, but I could help one boy breathe.

  “Does your brother go to our school?”

  “Arcadia Elementary,” she said.

  I sighed and nodded. “I’m not saying I’ll do it, but meet me here Monday after last period, and if I show up I’ll heal him.”

  Justina cranked up the wattage of her smile to dangerously bright levels. Brighter than a lighthouse. It was the second most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. She jumped up and nearly tripped down the bleachers in her haste to leave before I changed my mind.

  “And, hey,” I called after her. “Can you not tell anyone?”

  “I won’t,” she said. “I promise.”

  TWENTY

  FADIL SAT ON my bed with Sofie, playing checkers, while I tried to find clothes to wear on my stupid date with stupid Javi.

  “I still can’t believe you’re doing this,” he said.

  “We agreed that I need to figure out
why David Combs”—I paused and looked over my shoulder at Sofie—“did what he did. If Javi has answers, I can suffer through a few hours of dodging his grabby hands.”

  Sofie jumped two of Fadil’s red pieces and threw her hands up in victory. Then she said, “I liked Javi. He made me laugh.”

  “That’s because he has the mentality of an eight-year-old.” I settled on a pair of jeans and a plain gray scoop-neck top. It was an outfit that said, “I know I’m hot, but touching me will cost you your balls.”

  Fadil moved another of his pieces. I couldn’t tell whether he was letting Sofie win or was the worst checkers player in history. “You do realize this whole date thing is a lame attempt to win you back.”

  “A) I’m not a trophy. B) Javi doesn’t want me back.”

  “He might.”

  “His friends hate me.”

  “Men throughout history have risked the wrath of their friends for a girl they loved.”

  I mimed gagging. “Javi loves books. He loves his grandma. He loves himself. And he loves a good frita. He does not love me.” I couldn’t figure out what to do with my hair, so I gave up and let it fall loose around my shoulders. “Javi can’t stand the idea that I’m not soaking my jeans every time he flashes his grin at me, and he only wants me back to prove that he’s irresistible.”

  Fadil wrinkled his nose. “That’s gross. And graphic. Do you think all guys are like that?”

  “You’re not, but you might be the exception.”

  “I hope that’s not true,” Fadil said. “Anyway, have you decided if you’re going to heal that girl’s brother?” On the ride to my apartment I’d told him about Justina and what Baby Cthulhu had said the night before, but he hadn’t said much about either until now.

  “What girl?” Sofie piped up.