by Carrie Ryan
The princess shall grow into a young woman strong and pure, but when she finds her one true love, she shall be the downfall of the king.
Prophecies, the people said, were not always straightforward, but if they were real, they were true. None who saw the way that Essylt and Sadiya held each other that day could deny the strength of their love. But for many years to come, they debated whether it was Essylt or Sadiya who had been the downfall of the king.
• • •
No one stopped Essylt and Sadiya as they left the city. No soldier lifted a weapon to harm them; no man or woman shouted a curse. They rode as far as they could before stopping to rest their horse. They found a sweet little spring bubbling out of a rocky cleft in a hill near the road, and dismounted to allow the mare to drink.
Then Essylt took off her armor, and Sadiya peeled off her soiled dress, and they waded into the water and scrubbed the dried blood and sweat and dirt from their skin. When they emerged from the spring, naked and wet in the warm evening air, they saw each other as if for the first time: one woman dark and slender; one woman fair and muscular. Essylt took Sadiya’s hands in her own and pulled her close, their breasts and hips sliding together, slick and soft, and her breath caught in her throat as Sadiya whispered, “You are my one true love.”
Essylt wrapped her arms around Sadiya’s waist. Her fingers found the hollow of Sadiya’s lower back, her spine like a string of jewels, and she leaned in, pausing to remember this moment always, and kissed her.
This Is a Mortal Wound
MICHAEL GRANT
Here is what I said to Ms. Gill: “All you care about is being in charge and pushing us around. I thought school was supposed to be about learning stuff.”
Here is what Ms. Gill had said to make me react that way: “You were told exactly what to read, Tomaso. And, Tomaso, you were told exactly how to write the report. I did not give you an F because what you wrote was wrong, Tomaso. I gave you an F, Tomaso, because you didn’t do what I told you to do.”
Notice the way she kept saying “Tomaso”? Like she relished the sound of it. It came spitting out of her lipsticked mouth like it had hard edges and could hurt me. Like she was spitting Tomaso darts at me.
Clearly she started it. Right? Maybe I escalated it. But where did she get off with that “my way or screw you” stuff?
So next—after I’d said the thing about her just wanting to push me around—she got very pale. I would say that the blood drained out of her face, but that would make it sound more gross than it was. She did not gush blood. She just got very pale. The only color her lips had came from the makeup counter at CVS, and those mean pomegranate (or possibly currant) lips drew back a little, like she wanted to show me her teeth. If the next sound out of her had been “Grrr!” I wouldn’t have been surprised.
“You. Rotten. Brat.” Each word sounded like she had just discovered it in her vocabulary list and really, really enjoyed it. Then she did a variation. “You. Rotten. Arrogant. Privileged. Narcissistic. Brat.”
That last word was like, bRRRR-at!
And her hands, which were at her sides, clenched and made little half fists. Twitchy, hesitating fists. Fists that wanted to, wanted to oh so badly, but couldn’t.
At this point I escalated things again. Why? Because I’m a passionate lover of fairness, that’s why. Because I believe in justice, that’s why.
Can you already kind of picture me waving a “Don’t Tread on Me” flag? Like one of those guys in the Revolutionary War? Standing up for liberty? No?
Okay, actually, if you want to picture me, just Google Tomaso Hockmeier. Believe me, with that name you’re not going to get a million hits. There are only two. One is a seventy-two-year-old retired plumber from upstate New York, with a white fringe beard. The other is a thirteen-year-old kid with dark, longish hair, sort-of-green eyes, and the amazing body of a star athlete. If by “amazing body” you mean average-sized and completely undistinguished.
Look at my profile pics, check me out for yourself. And ignore the baby pics my parents put up thirteen years ago. Especially the one with the gigantic fat cheeks and the tiny wiener. (Yeah, thanks, Mom and Dad, that was just so excellent of you to do that.)
Anyway, I said to Ms. Gill, “Look, you can’t just call me names unless you’re going to stand there while I call you a burned-out old witch who hates kids and isn’t smart enough to get a job salting the fries at Wendy’s.”
Later accounts would vary on this detail: some kids claimed I said “McDonald’s,” others said I mentioned In-N-Out. But it was Wendy’s. Because I prefer the fries at Wendy’s.
And of course some kids claimed the word I used wasn’t exactly, precisely witch.
I think I’ll just leave that ambiguous. Consider it a mystery.
Anyway, later that day I was invited to leave the school immediately and never come back. Which turned out to be okay because my mom had just taken a new job in San Francisco and my dad was going to look for something there as well.
And San Francisco, according to everything we had read, was much more advanced when it came to schooling. They were part of the new OutSchooling thing.
In fact, I said as much to Ms. Gill as she watched ever-so-happily while the security dude and the vice principal escorted me to the front door to be picked up by my poor father.
I said, “Your day is over, you old witch. This school is over. The days of mean, ignorant old frauds like you pushing kids around is over! No more teachers! No more schools! Wake up and smell the 2017!”
Excellent parting shot, I thought.
But then Ms. Gill said something that froze me. Knocked a step out of my swagger.
“You think you’re free of teachers, Tomaso? You’ll never be free of teachers. You’ll never be free of me, Tomaso! Do you hear me, you little brat? You’ll never be free!”
My dad explained that what she probably meant was that some memory of her, some influence from her, would be with me always. That she wasn’t making some kind of prediction or laying some eternal curse on me. Or threatening me.
But I was inclined to be more literal. And more worried. I was just a wee bit scared, to tell the truth.
Until I finally moved.
So, let us leap forward in time. Shall we? It’s a two-year leap. Earlier I was thirteen. Now I’m fifteen. The year is no longer 2017 but … okay, I’ll let you do the math.
Now we live in the Marina District in San Francisco. My mom ended up hating her job and got a different one. My dad loves his job, which is … Well, I’m not totally clear on it, something to do with design. (Maybe later I’ll look him up and see.) So we’re here in San Fran and probably for good. And whoa, school? The whole OutSchooling thing?
Well, let me walk you through it.
My school day starts whenever I’m ready.
I’m usually ready about ten-thirty. In the morning, not at night—I’m not a vampire. I just seem to naturally wake up around nine or nine-thirty, depending. Then I take a shower and drink a Red Bull and eat something tasty instead of whatever grotesquely nutritious thing my mom left for me.
Yes, I know that caffeine and a s’mores tart are not the best way to start the morning. I’ve dipped some nutrition, so I get the whole “food pyramid, diversified diet, blah, blah, blah” thing. But just because you have knowledge doesn’t mean you have to apply it in real life.
Anyway, I like to get math out of the way first thing, because it’s my most suckalicious subject and once I get it done I feel free, freeee!
I do math at home, before I head out. Because if you’re basically a moron at something, it’s better to be a private moron than a public one.
So I dip some math and it’s a lecture from Neal Stephenson on codes and encryption, and it’s actually kind of cool because he’s got some high-end video and then does a thing where he plays some music and you can see the math kind of concealed within the music. And it’s really a great lesson and all, and I kind of sort of understand it. The PT (’Puter
Tutor, for those not familiar with current Bay Area slang) says I have a 72 percent comprehension, which my friend Crystal pops up on my screen to say is too optimistic.
“Yeah, right, like you understood any of that,” she says from the three-inch square on the corner of my screen. She’s still at home, obviously, since her hair is all up in a towel and her bare shoulders are still beaded with shower water.
She does this just to mess with me. You realize that, right?
“I understood it,” I argue. “And I will continue to understand it for at least the next ten minutes or so. Now. Are you going to tilt that camera down or not?”
“Oh, you want me to tilt it down?” she teases. “Like … like this?”
At which point she tilts the camera down to reveal that she’s wearing a tube top and jeans. She takes the towel from her perfectly dry hair and laughs at me. “You are so easy.”
“You’re a very bad person, Crystal.”
“Well, duh. See you at Sweek?”
“On my way. But I still hate you.”
Of course I don’t so much hate Crystal as kind of, you know, the other thing.
Anyhoo, all of that takes us to eleven-fifteen-ish, at which point I head to Sweek. Sweek is a so-called edu-pub. Which means it’s mostly a coffee shop, but on school days half the place is given over to kids. I guess it’s a new thing, because my folks both bitch about how great things are for kids “nowadays.” And how back in their day …
Off-topic: what is the exact time frame of “nowadays”? And when exactly was “their day”? Why is “nowadays” plural and “their day” singular?
Back on topic: I get to Sweek and Crystal’s already there and I can tell from the three grins pointed my way that she’s told everyone about the fake shower thing. So I give everyone a good-natured middle finger, grab a beverage, and flop onto the couch beside my best friend, Allison.
“You are such a loser,” she says by way of hello.
Next to Allison is her girlfriend, Jen, who’s okay but is kind of jealous that Allison and I share a love of Magnum bars, which we talk about far too much.
But seriously: they are the best. Especially the white chocolate. (No. Do not argue with me about this. Best ice cream bar ever.)
And in the big Morris chair—which I will grab the first chance I get—is Turbo. Turbo … Well, let’s just say Turbo has not been entirely successful with his bipolar meds. The boy is in one of his down phases.
“Did you hear about the kidnapping?” he calls out instead of saying “Hi.”
“And a fine good day to you, too, Turbo,” I say. I pull my Link out of my pocket and say, “Full screen,” and the unit unfolds itself to forty-four-centimeter size, stands itself up—avoiding Allison’s raspberry scone—and pulls up what it guesses will be my first course. It guesses right: epistemology. The menu gives me an array of lectures, text, video, TV/movie references, whole books, animations, comedy bits, and so on. I often like to start with a comic take on a new topic, so the Link already has a Penn and Teller magic bit on epistemology at the top of the queue.
“It’s serious, man,” Turbo says. “Third kid in like two weeks. No bodies. No clues. And they’re all about our age.”
“Yeah, well, the cops’ll get them,” I mutter, wanting to get to work, not deal with Turbo’s paranoia.
“You know how many crimes go unsolved in San Francisco?” Turbo says.
With a conspiratorial glance, Allison, Crystal, and even Jen say, “Query: How many crimes go unsolved in San Francisco?” so that all our Links answer in unison with a whole array of statistics.
“Very funny,” Turbo says, pouting.
We all think it’s pretty funny.
A brief digression:
The other day I was cleaning out my files and came across the report that got me in trouble with Ms. Gill. It was about Alexander Hamilton.
Who was Alexander Hamilton? Well, if you believe the nine-pound book I used to haul around at my old school, he was one of the most boring people ever to live. I read that book—just as Ms. Gill had told me—but then I Googled him. You know, just on a whim, just in the desperate hope that maybe there was something interesting … Turned out, um, yeah, there was.
Alexander’s parents weren’t married. His dad took off and his mom died when Al was either twelve or thirteen. Then his worthless father claimed Al’s mother was a whore and ended up taking everything she had left to Al and his brother.
Nice, huh?
That wasn’t in the book.
He didn’t get much school, but he educated himself. He even became a lawyer after studying for like three months. But before he did all that, he joined up with Washington and became a pretty good soldier. Later he was secretary of the treasury.
That was in the book. But this next part? Not:
Once he was secretary of the treasury, Al was set up by his political enemies with what used to be called a “honey trap” back in the day. This dude James Reynolds got Al to hook up with his wife, Maria. Yes, you got that right, some guy pimped his own wife out to Alexander Hamilton.
Then he blackmailed Al: Give me money or I will rat you out for sleeping with my wife.
Now, okay, Al was in the wrong here because he was married himself. So, definitely uncool. But still you have to give the top uncool points to Maria and her amazingly sleazy husband.
The whole thing was investigated and it turned out that Al was definitely a hound, and yes, he had paid blackmail money to pimpster James Reynolds. But he’d used his own money, not the money from the treasury, which would have been a crime.
Then—and here’s the reason I ended up liking old Al—he totally overreacts and writes a ninety-seven-page pamphlet laying it all out. Including a whole lot of details about his thing with the lovely Maria.
As my mom would say while attempting to sound young and cool: Can you say Too Much Information? And she’d be right. It’s TMI colonial-style. And the whole colonial country was like, “Seriously? He said that?”
Also, the book did mention that Al died in a duel with Aaron Burr, who was vice president. Yes: the vice president shot the secretary of the treasury in the guts for dissing him.
But the book didn’t have the details. The way they all had to sneak around. The way they had to row across the river from New York to Jersey. The way no one knows who shot first, or whether Al even meant to shoot. And it left out the fact that Al, with a pistol bullet through his stomach and lodged in his spine, diagnosed his own case before the doctor could even check his insurance card.
“This is a mortal wound, Doctor.”
The story starts out with a smart loser of a kid, a dead mom, and a less-than-admirable father, but the kid says forget all that, nothing is going to stop me! And he becomes a soldier and one of George freaking Washington’s posse, figures out how to be a lawyer, gets to be secretary of the treasury, gets trapped with a married babe, writes a scarily detailed pamphlet, and ends up bleeding out from a gut shot on a misty August morning in New Jersey.
See, to me that was a better story. So I didn’t really care about sticking to what Ms. Gill told me to stick to. In the book he was some guy in a wig who did some good but kind of boring stuff.
I didn’t care about that boring stuff until after I realized that I kind of liked the dude.
So, day over, heading back home from Sweek, walking along right at the corner of Avila and Beach and a van pulls up and stops, double-parking like maybe they’re making a delivery or whatever.
I pay no attention to the van because I’m more thinking that the woman walking toward me down Avila looks kind of familiar.
About fifty feet away my brain makes the connection. And my mouth says, “No way.”
And Ms. Gill says, “Wrong again, Tomaso.”
I gulp and my heart skips a couple of beats, because seriously, what is she doing here? This is a long way from Utah.
But what can I do? I can’t turn away like I’m scared. I’m not scared. I’m creeped
out, not scared.
“Ms. Gill. It’s … good to see you?”
“Get into the van.”
“Actually, I have to get home. But, you know …”
At which point a beefy, hunched-over dude in a cheap short-sleeve shirt appears, coming around the van. Holding a gun.
Have you ever had a gun pointed at you? Well, time stops. Just stops.
And your visual field suddenly shrinks down so that you don’t see the sky or the street around you. You don’t see the person holding the gun. You just see the gun.
It looks very large.
For once in my fifteen years of life, I have nothing clever to say.
The only reason I don’t wet my pants is that I’d prudently taken a leak before leaving Sweek.
But still, I’m not going to get into that van. I might be paralyzed with shock, but I’m not stupid. You never get in the van. Never. Everyone knows that. Much better to let whatever is going to happen play out in a public place.
I say, “No, I’m not—”
And then I wake up in the van. Hog-tied. This means that my ankles are tied by rough rope, that my wrists are also tied, that I’m facedown, and that my ankles are tied to my wrists in such a way that I form a sort of squashed letter U.
It’s very uncomfortable. The van’s suspension’s pretty bad and every time we hit a bump it’s like a kick to my stomach.
I haven’t been shot. But I have an amazingly painful headache and a swelling on my neck where someone must have hit me with something hard.
