The Apocalypse of Elena Mendoza

by Shaun David Hutchinson

I’m not sure I would have reacted so calmly to a strange girl in my grandmother’s room who claimed to have the power to heal.

  “I’m not sure I should.”

  “You already healed someone here though, right?”

  “Yeah, but it was for a friend. And I’m not even certain I should have done that.”

  “Why?”

  “Would you believe me if I said it involved the fate of the entire world?”

  Henry laughed, and the sound filled the room. “Is there a red button?”

  “Uh, no. Why would there be?”

  “No reason,” he said. “Go on.”

  “Forget it. You wouldn’t understand.” I started to leave, but Henry blocked the doorway.

  “Try me.”

  I had no reason to trust this strange boy. For all I knew the sleeping woman wasn’t even his real grandmother. Maybe it was his smile or the way he seemed to accept that I really could perform miracles, but he made me want to trust him.

  “The short version is that I have the power to heal, but each time I do, strangers around the world vanish, and these voices say that the disappearances are part of the plan to save humanity, but I’m not sure I believe them and I don’t know what to do.”

  Henry didn’t blink. He stood there with his hands in his pockets and listened. When I finished, he said, “It’s always the end of the world, isn’t it?”

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “Look, I can’t tell you what to do. No one can, though trust me when I say that everyone will have an opinion. You have to do what you think is right. Forget the end of the world, forget saving humanity. Those things aren’t your responsibility. The only things you can control are the choices you make, and that has to be enough.”

  “How do you know?”

  “This is one area I have a little experience with.”

  “I should go.”

  Henry stepped out of the way, and I moved to leave. But before I did, I crossed the room to the old woman in the bed, touched her arm, and healed her. Nine hundred and eighty-seven souls were raptured.

  “Did you . . . ?” Henry said.

  I nodded. “I hope it’s enough.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  FADIL FINALLY WORKED up the nerve to ask Naomi to sit with us at lunch. All through high school, Fadil and I had been our own lunch group, and I was content for it to remain that way. But I couldn’t argue the point, because I’d allowed Freddie to squeeze in between us whenever the mood struck her, and denying Fadil the chance to sit with the girl he liked at lunch would have been hypocritical. Still, sometimes I wanted to hog-tie Naomi and tape her mouth shut, but I managed to restrain myself.

  “You should go on Ellen,” Naomi said. “She could bring a hundred kids on her show for you to heal all at once and then no one would be able to doubt you.”

  “That’s a fucking ridiculous idea,” Freddie said. “She’s not one of those religious faith healers bilking the ignorant and desperate out of cash. She doesn’t need to go on TV.”

  “It wouldn’t work,” I said. “Javi said he tried to record me healing Ben Smith, but that nothing showed up on video.”

  “Then what’s the point?” Naomi asked. “Aside from healing the sick, I mean? Tori says—”

  “I don’t care,” I said. “Tori’s mean.” And she’d become meaner since Ava had vanished. No one was openly blaming me, but I knew they did anyway.

  Freddie, who was picking at a slice of greasy pizza, stopped and looked at me pointedly. “Actually, she’s not.”

  “She is to me,” I said.

  “Tori’s difficult, judgmental, and opinionated,” Freddie said. “But she’s also one of the most loyal friends I’ve ever known.”

  Fadil’s phone vibrated, and he started gathering his trash. “Then why aren’t you sitting with her?”

  Freddie glanced at her old table, where Tori and the others were sitting. They’d left a chair empty for Ava. “They’re not my friends anymore.”

  Naomi either couldn’t sense the tension or was actively attempting to ignore it. “I only wanted to understand what the point of all this is. You healed my grandpa, and I can’t thank you enough for that, but what’s the endgame? Are you going to keep doing it forever? And what’s with the people disappearing? Ava’s mom thinks she was kidnapped. Did anyone disappear when you healed my grandfather?”

  Fadil hadn’t told Naomi about the terrible tradeoff of performing miracles. I wasn’t sure she would have understood it when I didn’t understand it myself.

  “Wanna walk with me?” Fadil asked Naomi, nudging her shoulder. She nodded and they left.

  When Freddie and I were alone, I kind of wished we weren’t.

  “That girl’s nice and all, but damn does she talk a lot.”

  I laughed. “Right? I keep wondering if she talks while they’re making out.” I put my hand over my mouth and mimed kissing it. “Mmmphm let me tell you what I think. Mmmphm.”

  Freddie busted up and smiled, and my crush, which I’d managed to drag down to manageable levels, exploded. “She does have a point, though.”

  “About?”

  “The endgame. Why you’re doing this. You can’t ignore the disappearances.” When I started to talk over her, she held up her hand. “Yeah, I get that you’re looking for answers and focusing on helping those you can until you find them, but you’re still playing by someone else’s rules.”

  My smile had faded. In the weeks since the shooting, since I’d healed Freddie, I’d learned practically nothing. Not about the voices or the end of the world or David Combs. “I heal people. Isn’t that enough?”

  “What if you were capable of something greater? Like cleaning the oceans or solving world hunger or resurrecting the dead or getting rid of all the garbage in landfills?”

  “I tried to make myself invisible during the pep rally after the shooting,” I said. “Does that count?”

  Freddie snorted. “Not really.”

  “If I had the power to do more, the voices would have told me,” I said.

  “Would they?” Freddie asked. “You’ve wasted weeks agonizing over what you should do, but you haven’t bothered to ask yourself what you can do. You think you’re the one making the choices, but you’re choosing between the options those fucking voices laid out for you.”

  “That’s not true,” I said. “I make my own decisions. I healed you.”

  “Because the Starbucks mermaid told you to!” Freddie looked at me thoughtfully. Her eyes had this lazy quality to them that made her look like she was on the verge of falling asleep and that I found insanely attractive. “Why did they choose me, Elena?”

  “What?” I stumbled over the word.

  “You’d never healed anyone before—you weren’t even aware you could—so I figure the voices had to choose someone you’d be really motivated to heal. Why me? Why not Fadil or your mom?”

  The question caught me totally off guard. I was still considering the possibility that my powers extended beyond mere healing, and I blurted out, “I had a crush on you, all right?”

  Freddie narrowed her eyes. “You had a crush on me?”

  “It was before I knew you,” I went on. “I mean, you’re beautiful, and you made those posters protesting Taco Tuesdays, and you seemed nice.”

  “Even though I called you the wrong name?”

  I pretended to brush it off, trying desperately to regain my composure and certain I was failing. “Crushes aren’t rational.”

  Outside, I was trying to act like admitting I’d had feelings for Freddie was no big deal, but inside I was flailing and freaking out because I’d tossed it out there and now she knew and I had no idea how she was going to react.

  “But you don’t have a crush on me anymore?”

  “I don’t know! Like I said, you’re not who I expected you to be.”

  “Neither are you.” Freddie stated it like a challenge.

  “Then we should go out sometime and settle the question once and
for all.”

  It slipped out. I mean, I’d had these feelings for Freddie even when I didn’t know who she was, and now that she was sitting at my lunch table, eating with me and Fadil and talking about the end of the world, I wanted to find out if those feelings could become something real.

  Because here’s the thing about falling in love: It’s an illusion. We watch television and movies, we read books, and we see all these examples of how two people meet and fall in love over the course of a couple of hours or a couple of hundred pages, and we think that’s how it’s supposed to be. But it never is. Not really. Falling in love is about hormones and pheromones and powerful emotions that overwhelm our better judgment. Staying in love requires time and effort and knowledge and trust that has to be earned over the course of lifetimes. Falling in love is the illusion. Staying in love is the real miracle. And while I knew I wasn’t in love with Freddie or even if we could pretend to fall in love for a while, I was still hoping for a miracle.

  Freddie stared at me for a moment. Then she stood and walked away without saying a word.

  THIRTY-THREE

  MAYBE I SHOULD have let Freddie go. My feelings for her before I’d healed her at Starbucks had been, admittedly, irrational. That Winifred Petrine had been a two-dimensional construct onto which I’d projected my desires. The real person was more complicated than I’d imagined and didn’t seem to like me so much as tolerate me. Despite that, I didn’t want to let her go. Even if she wasn’t interested in me romantically, I genuinely believed she needed a friend, and not in the way that boys often think befriending a girl is merely a stepping-stone to getting into her pants.

  I went to the art room because that was the only place I could think to look for her, and I heard the music before I reached the door. She was listening to Sharon Jones, whose voice was unmistakable. I opened the door and walked in.

  In the couple of weeks since I’d last seen Freddie’s sculpture, she’d refined and changed it so much that I hardly recognized it. Wings of wires and aluminum grew from its back, frayed copper wiring made up its hair. One arm was raised over its head while the other was bent in front of its body like it was defending itself. The details had transformed it from a mess of scraps into a figure both menacing and divine. It was a mad warrior angel, or a demon looking for redemption.

  “Wow,” I said over the music. “It’s looking really good.”

  “It’s shit.” Freddie stood with her back to me.

  “Hardly.”

  “So you’re a fucking art expert now?”

  I moved farther into the room. “About what I said—”

  “It’s already forgotten.”

  “Who says I want to forget it?”

  “You fucking embarrassed yourself back there,” Freddie said. “I’d want to forget that if I were you.”

  “What is your problem?”

  Freddie yanked the cord from her phone, killing the music instantly, and suddenly everything was too loud. “You put your life in danger and practically brought me back from the dead because you have a thing for me? I called you by the wrong name, my friends think you’re a joke, and all you really know about me is that I did some shit freshman year. Who the fuck does that?”

  “An idiot, apparently.”

  She leaned against the worktable and crossed her arms over her chest. “You think I made those posters, why? Because I was protesting the school’s shitty racism?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “Nope. Sorry to disappoint you. I was trying to get expelled. I hate this fucking school and I hate this fucking town and my parents kept threatening to send me to live with my uncle in Utah because he’s military and they thought he’d whip me into shape, and I wanted to go. I didn’t give a shit about you or anyone else.” Freddie laughed bitterly. “You act like there’s this grand design to our lives, but there’s not. It’s all pointless. Our lives, our deaths, and all the bullshit in between. Nothing happens for a reason, Elena. Everything just happens, and none of it matters.”

  “Do you really believe that?”

  “Yes!” Freddie threw her hands up. “You think David Combs shooting me and you healing me and everything else are all connected, but they’re not! Combs was a fucking psycho. He didn’t shoot me at Starbucks so that you would heal me and we would fall in love and fuck like bunnies or whatever bullshit you’ve worked up in your head. Combs shot me because he wanted to kill me. I was fine with it because I didn’t care if lived or died. And you healed me because you were tripping on some weird fantasy that you loved me or whatever.”

  “I never said I loved you. And, in fact, I kind of hate you right now.”

  “Good!” she said. “You should hate me, Mary. You should hate me and hate Tori and hate everyone. None of us give a single fuck about you. Those people who say you’re a miracle or a messiah? They only want to use you to heal their sick whatever, after which they won’t care whether you heal the rest of the world or get hit by a bus. You’re nothing to them but a thing to be used.”

  My cheeks flushed and pressure built behind my eyes, but I wasn’t going to cry in front of her. Winifred Petrine didn’t deserve my tears. “Maybe I should have let you die,” I said.

  “You definitely should have let me die, Mary.”

  “Stop calling me Mary.”

  “But you didn’t just bring me back; you brought me back wrong.”

  “Screw you,” I said. “You were probably wrong from the start.”

  “That’s the first smart thing you’ve said since I met you.” She plugged her phone back into the speaker and turned on the punk band she’d been listening to the first time I’d walked in on her. “Get out,” she said.

  I managed to hold back the tears until I made it to the restroom.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  I STOOD BEHIND Fadil as he pawed through the bins of the mostly useless and broken toys at the Goodwill he’d dragged me to. He was looking for a birthday gift for his father, who collected action figures from the 1980s, though I didn’t think Fadil was going to find any hidden gems in that sad mess of plastic body parts.

  “And then she called me Mary,” I said, still fuming. “I don’t understand what her problem is. One minute she’s laughing at my jokes and flirting and the next she’s acting like my face is a giant scab.”

  “Gross mental image,” Fadil said. He was bent at practically a 45-degree angle with his ass sticking into the air while he searched. “But can you blame her? If someone shot you, would you want to be reminded of it every ten minutes?”

  “I didn’t—”

  “You never shut up about it.” Fadil put his hands on his hips and faced me. “Humanity’s in danger. I don’t know who to heal. All those people are vanishing. Poor me.” Fadil said it all in a deeply offensive falsetto.

  My face turned red and the tips of my ears burned. “I do not sound like that.”

  “Lately you have.”

  “Screw you.” I stomped off to another part of the store and left Fadil to sort through his dirty toys. I would have gone home and stranded him there if he hadn’t driven. I walked up and down the aisles, scanning them for anything we could use at home. Almost everything we’d ever owned had belonged to someone else first. Furniture, dishes, clothes. Not that I minded. When we died, the only things we’d leave behind of importance were our deeds. Our corpses would rot and our treasured belongings would wind up in someone else’s house or in a landfill. Our clothes don’t tell the stories of our lives, and no one would remember what kind of dishes we had. But they’d remember the things we’d done. Our actions would live on and tell the stories of our lives long after we’d vanished from the earth.

  Hey, girl! Stop being such a downer!

  I closed my eyes and prayed for the voice to go away. The last thing I wanted was to deal with that noise in the middle of Goodwill right after Fadil had insisted Freddie was annoyed because I made everything about me.

  You best listen to me, Miss Thang.

  “Oh my
God, stop,” I said under my breath. I finally had to open my eyes, and the first thing I saw was a six-inch-tall statue of the Virgin Mary, because of course the voices would choose her to speak to me through.

  There’s no stopping the miracle train, Elena. Choo! Choo!

  I grabbed the Virgin Mary off the shelf and held her close to my face. “Why are you doing this to me?”

  Stop frowning and get clowning, Miracle Girl! We got work to do!

  “Why does the Virgin Mary sound like a fifty-year-old high school teacher doing her worst impression of teen slang?”

  Fadil turned the corner and spotted me holding the statue. “See?” he said. “This is exactly what I was saying.”

  “She talked to me first!”

  “I’m not the one who has a problem with it,” Fadil said, walking toward me.

  Elena. Elena. Elena. Elena. Listen to me. Listen. Are you listening? Listen. Elena. Elena.

  “Well, I do,” I said. “She’s annoying the hell out of me.”

  “Then tell her to shut up,” Fadil said.

  “I told her I should’ve let her die.”

  Fadil frowned. “Are we still talking about Mary?”

  “Freddie.”

  “Oh.”

  I started to put the statue back, but changed my mind. “I’m buying this.”

  Elena! Elena, Elena bo-belena!

  “Why?”

  “So I can smash it with a hammer.” I marched to the cash register and paid for the stupid statue, though three dollars was far too expensive.

  When we were back in the car, I tossed the statue onto the floor. I didn’t have to tell Fadil that I didn’t want to go home, and though I wouldn’t have been able to tell him where I wanted to go, he knew the perfect place to take me.

  Banana-fana fo-felena. Fee-fi-mo-melena. Elena!

  Fadil and I had made a pact when we’d first discovered the Pie Hole that we would go there a maximum of three times a year. If I had my choice, I would have eaten there every single day. I also would have had to run ten miles daily or buy a new wardrobe, which is why we limited how often we allowed ourselves to go.