Pox pounds his fists on his chest, Tarzan-style. “Not me, monkey girl. I’m human and humans rule. Top of the food chain. Survival of the fittest.”
Stephanie’s bells jingle in frustration. “Are you a complete moron, Pox? How can you quote Darwin—survival of the fittest—and not understand evolution?”
“Evolution sucks.” As usual, Pox doesn’t let facts get in the way of his beliefs. “Humans are the alpha dog.” He launches into an exaggerated bodybuilder routine, flexing his biceps and triceps, thrusting a hip, bouncing his tilted pelvis.
Meanwhile I’m doing everything I can to sneak peeks at Brendon and not get caught doing it. I’m fixated on him, I admit it. He’s wearing faded jeans and a brown-and-beige plaid flannel shirt, the top three buttons undone so I can make out the shape of his collarbones and the hollow between them. I sense him maybe looking at me, so I quickly inspect my feet. I study my hands. I turn my attention to the sky, but just my luck, I glance back right when Pox happens to swing around in my direction. My eyes land directly on the zipper of his jeans, and that’s all he needs to target me as his next victim.
A knowing smirk. I want to punch that smirk right off his face. He puckers his mouth and makes a loud smacking noise at me. It’s like his lips are moving in slow motion, which should give me plenty of time to look away in irritation. But I don’t. I am so lame. I can’t. I’m stuck on Pause, and I’m fully aware that Brendon is taking all of this in.
What if he thinks that I actually have the hots for Pox, who is now wagging his tongue at me, heavy-metal style? It’s wide and coated with bright, Cheeto-colored orange. Gross. He steps closer to whisper in my ear. “Tired of hanging around with Gay Ray? Want a taste of the alpha male?”
Brendon then, to my amazement, steps between us and puts a hand on Pox’s big, square shoulder. “Hey dude,” he says. “Lay off a little. She’s not…”
She’s not … I’m not … what?
What does this mean? Is Brendon standing up for me? Why would Brendon stand up for me?
These questions and thinking of all the possible answers make my cheeks explode with heat. I want to pound the traitorous things, but that would only make them more pink.
For a second Pox looks at Brendon, puzzled, and then glares at the hand on his shoulder like it’s a mortal threat. But his sharp, warning look disappears as soon as Brendon finishes his sentence. “Dude, she’s not … worth the energy.”
Pox scans me head to feet and dismisses what he sees with a shrug of boredom. “Yeah, yeah, right. Bigger fish to fry.”
I feel like a scrawny minnow, no good to anyone, thrown back into the ocean.
Why won’t the traffic light turn? What’s wrong with the light? The red finally changes, but only to a green arrow, so we’re still trapped while a long line of cars makes left turns. But at least some other people are gathered at the corner now, and I’m grateful for that. Regular, normal people, grown-ups, a mom with a baby. Surely this crowd will keep Pox in check. In another minute we can cross and it will all be over.
Pox starts humming something, like a jingle, and drifts to the back of the small group, maneuvering until he’s right behind Alix and practically singing into her ear. The humming turns to a song. I’m close enough to make out some words. It’s a nursery rhyme.
“Met a pieman going to the fair … let me taste your ware.”
The light finally switches to green and I tug on Alix’s arm. “Come on, Alix! Ignore him,” I practically beg, but I know it’s pointless. She’s not going anywhere. She doesn’t even hear me. Her anger at Pox has shut down her ears, her eyes, her brain. All the regular people cross the street. That leaves the six of us and we drift into a semicircle.
Alix, her chin jutting: “What did you say, asshole?”
He puffs out his chest. “You heard me.”
“Say it again and I’ll…”
“You’ll what?”
He turns to his friends with a mocking tone. “She’ll what?” He repeats the rhyme, taunting. “Simple Simon met a pieman going to the fair.”
I sense Alix’s body poised to spring forward, and I guess Brendon senses it, too, because he tries to maneuver Pox out of the way. But getting Pox to do something that’s not his idea is like trying to move a bear.
“Leave it be,” Brendon urges. “Why get into it with some girl over nothing?”
“Go on, beat it. You too, Gnat. This is between her and me.”
Brendon hesitates, still trying to figure out a way to defuse the situation. I’m grateful to him for that, but it’s no use. When the light turns green again, he crosses the street with Gnat reluctantly following.
That’s all the time we need. That’s our cue. I feel Alix’s anger drawing me to her. It sucks me in and feeds my own. We don’t discuss the next step, or even make eye contact with each other. Our agreement is wordless and without thought, beyond the usual ways of communicating. We don’t think, we just do. The three of us surround him and cut him off from the curb. We edge in, guiding him backward until his back presses flat against the bricks of a building.
He throws up his palms. “What the hell are you doing? Am I gonna have to smack all of you? Don’t push me.”
Alix takes the lead. This is her injustice, her wrong to be righted. She hooks her elbow into the crook of my arm and Stephanie does the same on my other side. I am the center of the chain and I squeeze them close to me, feeling the pressure of Stephanie’s long thighbone and Alix’s solid hip. She sounds the first note. I join in on the second, Stephanie the third.
“Singing? What the hell? Why are you singing?” Pox asks.
That’s the last we hear of his repulsive voice. After that it’s nine notes,
our
notes, the amazing melody repeating itself. We’re in perfect harmony. We’re … in.
In
.
I embody the true meaning of that simple preposition, two letters that are the source of all our power. This is what we do and how we do it. We are in his head. Dark and light and color and colorless and flashes of storm.
We know the direction to take, as if we’ve been handed a drawing of his brain that shows all the wiring.
We override his thoughts, reroute his feelings, hijack his emotions.
From our fingertips we shoot him full of regret.
He covers his ears, but he can’t drown out the voices.
With our combined breath we pump him full of guilt.
We punish him by making sure he punishes himself, the worst sentence of all.
He shakes his head, but he can’t shake off the knowledge of his own wrongs.
We use the strands of our wild hair to cross the wires of his thinking and shock him into seeing his true, hateful self.
We sing.
He moans.
He’s lost and we’re found.
One hundred and eight notes, and then we feel satisfied. We’ve done our job. It’s over.
A final shiver returns me to the ordinary world. I shake my head a couple of times to clear it. Everything is the way it was before—a full moon, a busy downtown, a traffic light that’s green again. A small crowd has gathered and they applaud politely. We must have sounded pretty awesome. A little girl, coaxed by her mom, lays a couple of quarters at our feet.
“That’s different music,” a man says, scratching behind his ear. “Can’t say whether I like it or not.” Some college kid asks: “You guys got a CD for sale?”
“Show’s over!” Alix announces. They see she’s not messing around, and everyone scatters.
Not everyone.
At a downtown corner on a perfectly ordinary October evening, Kai “Pox” Small, death-defying big-wave rider, major hypocrite, unapologetic insensitive sexist pig, stands with his shoulders caved in. He blinks several times, trying to get his bearings. He’s sweating through his T-shirt. He takes a step toward Alix, who throws up her fists in defense.
Only there’s no need for that because he bows his head and lets his arms dangle slack at his sides. “Alix, slug me, go ahead. I deserve it.”
At this point, Gnat—without Brendon, I note with disappointment—returns to collect his fearless leader. He assumes the apology he just overheard is some big joke. Only when he starts yucking it up, Pox whirls on him, tells him to “shut the hell up and apologize, too.”
“Dude!” Gnat snaps. Then, puzzled: “Dude?” With a swirl to us: “What the fuck did you do to him? Something! You did something.”
Pox ignores his friend and continues to apologize, peering earnestly into Alix’s face. He runs his fingers through his hair, practically tears at it. “I’m such a jerk. I can’t believe I made fun of some retard kid. Your brother.”
“Not retard! Don’t call him that. Developmentally…” Alix checks with Stephanie, who nods in confirmation. “Different.”
“Don’t hate me, okay?” Pox is pleading, and in his open expression I see what he must have looked like as a little kid, the first time he got caught being naughty and couldn’t live with the shame and guilt. “Forgive me?”
Together, the three of us answer as one: “Maybe.”
I wonder how long this new Pox will last. An hour? A day? A week? Could it be forever?
The light is red, but Alix, Stephanie, and I cross anyway. We don’t even bother to check both ways. We know the cars will stop for us, and they do. No one even leans on a horn. It’s our turn.
As we continue down the street, I take a long drink from Stephanie’s water bottle. Being a Fury is dehydrating. When we pass an empty store window, I catch a glimpse of our reflections in the dusty, warped glass. We are three figures attached at the shoulders, stretched, distorted, and unrecognizable.
14
I
wake the next morning
after ten hours of dreamless sleep and remember again with wonder everything that happened yesterday. The song, joining with the others, the ant, the anger, the power, Pox groveling at our feet.
It’s true, then.
I’m not who I think I am. I’m not who I used to be. All my life, I’ve been waiting, listening, hoping to find this
thing
—some special talent, something unique—that tells me why I am me and not someone else, why I was born, why my life hasn’t been like everyone else’s, and what I’m supposed to be doing with that life. Now I’ve gotten exactly what I wished for. True personal discovery. This is forcing me to reconsider everything I think I know about myself, every assumption of who I am and where I came from and what my future will look like. I no longer have to be secretly terrified that there is nothing special brewing inside of me and that my life will never, ever change.
I can change. I have already changed. Life has changed. I have a special purpose, a destiny. There’s no doubt about it. I’m Megaera, a Fury. This is the new normal.
Don’t you think a personal revelation of this magnitude deserves a day off from school?
It does, doesn’t it? This tops a fever. I should get to turn in a note that says:
Please excuse Meg for the day because she needs to contemplate the idea that she is the reincarnation of a mythical being, quite possibly capable of ridding the world of wrongdoing and injustice.
But no such luck. While I am lolling around in bed with He-Cat curled at my feet, my phone vibrates with a text from Ambrosia, like she can read my mind. Come to think of it, maybe she can:
No cutting today!
Right after that, a similar message from Raymond, another mind reader, pops up on my phone:
Up and “Atom,” my powerful friend
.
They’re right. There’s so much to figure out and so much to do. With a sense of purpose that I’ve never felt before, I perform my usual morning rituals: tooth-brushing and face-washing, backpack-loading and cat-feeding. It’s sweet the way He-Cat follows me everywhere now. I pick him up, and as I stroke his fur and listen to his grateful purr I wonder if people will immediately sense the enormous change in me. I feel so different. How can the world not recognize it? When I enter the kitchen a few minutes later, I take special satisfaction when the Leech doesn’t immediately order me to rub her gross feet or clean the dishes. She’s studying me with a perplexed expression.
“What?” I ask, certain that I have a new, un-ignorable Fury glow.
“Did you do something different with your hair, Meg? You look … You seem more…” She fumbles for the right word. In my mind, I provide several that I’ve always wanted to hear attached to my name. How about poised? Self-assured? Positive, confident, endowed with a whole new set of amazing, superhuman mental powers?
“Taller,” she finally says. “That’s it. You probably grew a whole inch lately. Don’t you dare think that means I’m gonna buy you any new clothes. Am I made out of money? You’re going to have to make do with the ones you already have.”
So much for my glowing radiance. It’s more than my height that’s changed. How can she not see it? This isn’t about a stupid inch; it’s about ten thousand million megawatts of power that I don’t fully understand yet. I want her to notice, and I’m annoyed that she doesn’t. I have courage this morning, a hangover from yesterday, and that stops me from pushing down my anger the way I usually would. I put a sarcastic edge on my voice. “Did I grow, Lottie?”
Her head snaps around at the unfamiliar challenge in my tone.
It feels good,
so
good, to confront her this way. “What else have you noticed, Lottie?”
Her lids flutter, like something sharp and painful flew into her eyes, and I think for a moment it’s because she’s finally getting a glimpse of the new me. But then her features bunch tight in the center of her face as she reaches for the closest object, a ceramic pitcher, and hurls it in my direction. I duck. He-Cat springs out of my arms and pottery shatters on the wall behind me.
Everything
has
changed. But in the reality of my life, where my life must be lived every day, everything is still exactly the same.
For now.
Before I leave the house, the new me, the powerful me, the furious avenger me, is on her hands and knees silently picking up every little sliver.