Today it’s our group’s turn to give an updated report on our final project, but when Raymond takes out the papers he prepared, I lean over and slap a wide-open palm on them. My first words in days to him are: “We don’t need your contribution anymore.”
I motion for Alix, Stephanie, and Ambrosia to follow me to the front of the room. “Our report.” I drop the papers on Ms. Pallas’s desk. “It’s a script. You said we could be creative, so we wrote and memorized a scene, based on the works of Aeschylus.”
One of the Double Ds takes out her cell phone, holds it in my direction, and snaps a picture, a reminder that it will be a long time before Halloween night is forgotten. Half the class laughs; the other half looks away embarrassed.
“Dawn, put that away now,” Ms. Pallas orders.
I don’t care. I strike a pose, hand on hip, chest thrust forward. Take all the pictures you want. I’m about to show them whom they are dealing with. Let’s see how much they laugh then. I face the class.
“The princess,” I announce.
Ambrosia takes three steps forward and holds her arms out to the sides, palms up and head back in prayer to the gods. She recites, “I have been wronged and I have called up the Furies to punish the ones who harmed me.”
Ambrosia then gestures—“My Furies”—and I link arms with Alix and Stephanie and the three of us say, “Hunt,” so that the
H
emerges in a rasp from the back of our throats and the
T
is hard and final, like a trapdoor slamming closed.
Ambrosia: “My contempt will stab your liver, a spurt of bile to prick the conscience. Give him a blast of your reeking, bloody breath, send it into his waking hours, ignite the fuel of his endless nightmares.”
“Hunt,” we say. “Hunt.”
“Burn him in your stomach’s acid fire. Track him down!”
“Hunt, hunt, hunt.”
“He will not escape.”
Speeding up. “Hunt, hunt, hunt.”
“He can run to the ends of the earth.”
Speeding up more, a race. “Hunt, hunt, hunt.”
“But he’ll never be free.”
“Enough,” Ms. Pallas tries to break in.
I feel the powerful tug of her but draw on my own power, our combined power of three. We don’t need to listen to her. We have no one to obey but ourselves. “Hunt, hunt, hunt, hunt, hunt, hunt, hunt.”
Let them try to escape me. Let them—
This time there are two voices—Ms. Pallas and Raymond shouting in unison “Enough!”—and I stop. But not because of them, only because
I
decide to. I want to savor all the expressions of shock, fear, and confusion. I stare at Brendon. His lips part and he mouths a string of words in my direction—
Meg, please stop! We need to talk! I can
—but I shut him down with a cold glare. Hope slides off his face. Good! He feels the rush of the misery that’s coming his way.
On the outside, only a small scrape on Brendon’s mouth and a purple bruise on his elbow are visible. But inside, my enemy is now hemorrhaging. It’s not blood and not anything that would register on an X-ray or that a doctor could stitch up. It’s his sanity, and we will make it bleed right out of him.
* * *
The next day Brendon’s eyes look sunken into his skull. He seems to have shrunk an inch overnight. By the next week his lips are cracked and he wanders the school hallways like he’s lost in a nightmare.
The rumors grow thicker and darker. I am doing this to him and I won’t ever stop. Me and Alix and Stephanie. No one dares accuse me out loud. No one laughs, either, or points a cell phone camera in my face anymore. Even the Plagues step aside as we pass.
Brendon soon stops coming to school. I hear things. The Double Ds say that he stopped eating, not a bite. One of his cousins reports that he’s not sleeping at all; no amount of medication can knock him out. His skin is breaking out in pustules. He complains of migraines and arthritis in his toes. His medical doctor recommends a psychiatrist and the psychiatrist recommends a neurologist, but nobody can bring him any relief.
For days he flails at invisible enemies, and then for a solid night he cries deep, animal sobs. His pleas for forgiveness turn into loud, wordless moans, which dissolve into near-silent whines of pain.
Then, not a sound from him. I hear that he huddles in a corner of his room.
“Like some dude trapped under glass,” Pox tells a group of surfers.
“No!” Gnat disagrees. “Like he’s being held underwater.”
Exactly, I think. Under glass, underwater, like the figures in Ambrosia’s snow globe. It is not a piece of art. It is a prison. Brendon’s essence is there, with all the other princes. Trapped with sharp, black shards of guilt falling all over them.
28
Curtain down.
Exodos
in the Greek theatrical tradition. All the players, major and minor, having served their purpose, exit the scene. The princess avenged. The Prince doomed. My enemy Pallas defeated.
So why when I shake my snow globe do I not taste the soul-tingling relief I so long for? I need a calculator to add up all my princely pounds of flesh cooked into a stew and served up for supper in my House of Revenge.
Yet I am still not released from this appetite as I wander the dank netherworld and the locker-lined halls of Hunter High.
What gives?
Warning: anti-drug message coming at you.
Revenge is like any of those other gateway drugs that you have been warned against. Your first experience? It’s what it’s cracked up to be: an all-encompassing, headlong rush of endorphins into sheer transcendence.
The second time? Well, that was pretty good, but it lacked something, a certain zesty zing. As the Hunter High bathroom stoners always complain:
You should have been here for that
other
shit
.
Ambrosia’s Law: The most recent act of revenge is never as satisfying as the one before it.
It’s all about recapturing the first time, a desperate chase to relive and reclaim your moment of the undiluted bliss of vengeance. You always want more.
Chase. Chase. Chase.
That’s why I have to double the dose. Triple it. Hunt it down and ingest it straight.
Keep hunting, I order.
Hunt. Hunt. Hunt.
FIFTH STASIMON,
THE BOOK OF FURIOUS
29
Definition of satisfaction:
knowing that you got back at someone who stabbed you in the back. Brendon will never forget what he did to me. Justice has been done. I feel at peace.
But then, I don’t.
The peaceful feeling turns into an irritating itch, and the itch works on me until I’m half crazy with frustration. My mind won’t rest. I can’t sleep or eat. I can’t stop thinking about all the others.
“Why should they get away with it?” I demand of Alix and Stephanie. “The Double Ds laughed at me. The surfers hid in the closet. All those people who did nothing to stop it. What about
them
?”
Stephanie loops her arm around my waist. “Ambrosia said that there’s nothing to fear from the Furies if you don’t get in their way. She warned them. They
are
in your way.”
Alix smacks a fist into her palm. “Eye for an eye. They shouldn’t get away with it. They should feel what you felt.”
“Suffer what I suffered.”
* * *
Here is an undeniable truth of human nature that we Furies take advantage of: everyone has a point of entry. We are like mice that can always find a way into the foundation of the most fortified building. We mutate our shapes and squeeze into the tiniest crack in a person’s thick wall of defense.
Our experience with Brendon taught us how to go deeper, to burrow down to the very core of shame that exists in everyone. We find the thing that you can’t ever truly apologize for, that you can’t deny or rationalize.
Like the first hurtful lie you told before you learned to justify your lies.
Like the first heart you broke before you figured out how to harden your own heart.
Everyone has a memory that sits at the cusp, dividing life into before and after.
Before: You fumble your words when you lie. You feel the sting of your own mean actions. You experience the hurt of others like it’s your own hurt.
After: You don’t give a shit. You want what you want, and you take it.
That’s the long-buried memory that we dust off and stick in each of their faces.
In the late afternoon, we stand on the cliff and home in on Gnat in the surfer lineup. He’s straddling his board while waiting for a wave. Into this serene scene we unleash his personal vision:
He was seven, stole five dollars from his mother’s purse and lied about it, claimed his little brother took the money, and his parents believed him.
In the middle of the ocean, he tries to blink away the memory. We show him his mother’s face and the disbelief in his brother’s deceived eyes, the monumental bond of trust that he broke and never got back.
This was the start
, we remind him.
After this lie, your whole life became a string of lying to others and lying to yourself.
Gnat stares directly into the sun. A wave slams him on the head. He doesn’t even try to paddle. Two surfers—we’ll deal with them next—haul him in to shore.
* * *
At midnight we position ourselves outside of Pox’s house. While standing under a streetlamp, we sing into his sleep to play and replay his moment of truth lost:
He was six, and in a snit he walked up to his sweet, trusting dog and kicked her, just because he could. Pox jolts awake and turns on a light, but he can’t stop living in the nightmare of his dog’s betrayed eyes.
* * *
On the bus, we sit behind the Double Ds and take them back to age eight, when they made every kid in their class stop talking to a girl who thought she was their best friend. They announced all of her secrets. We force them to experience the full brunt of their treachery. They feel that girl’s shock and loneliness. By the time we get to school, they are curled up in their seats and unable to move, paralyzed by regret.
* * *
And when the pleasure of that payback leaves us longing for more, we usher in others. The friends of our enemies are guilty by association. Soon they move like sleepwalkers in an endless nightmare of sadness, fear, and regret. They twitch and stutter. Their minds wreck their bodies with weight loss and hives, immune systems sent into complete disarray. We multiply their pain past the point of unbearable.
* * *
It’s fantastic. Who doesn’t deserve it?
We want even more.
The principal convenes a special parent-teacher conference to enact emergency health precautions. Everyone washes their hands so much they get dry and raw, even bleed. Mr. and Mrs. H start a trend by wearing surgical masks to school. Students stay home even when they feel perfectly fine. PE classes are cancelled. E-mails swirl. There must be something toxic in the air ducts. A ventilation specialist comes in. There’s nothing in the air ducts.
We keep bringing them down.
The show-off lead in this year’s production of
The Sound of Music.
Our class treasurer who gave Stephanie only $100 for her anti-littering campaign.
The Eagle Scout who keeps bragging about getting early admission to Stanford.
The girl whom we just find to be irritating. She chews too loud.
The local TV station does a special report on the mysterious illness at Hunter High. A parent blogger lists the names and symptoms of the fallen.
An expert from the Centers for Disease Control flies out from Washington, DC, to investigate the possibility of a terrible new viral strain that invades the cells of healthy high school students. She looks down throats, draws blood, and orders X-rays. I wonder if Raymond is going to denounce us, but what can he say that anyone would believe? There are three girls who have the power of the Furies? He’s way too smart to try explaining the truth. The doctor leaves town with lots of notes, but no diagnosis.
It remains a mystery, except to a few of us.
* * *
“Meg, a moment of your precious, valuable time.”
A familiar voice with a sardonic, elevated tone equals Raymond equals a lecture that I don’t want to hear. With my back to him, I finish hanging up my jacket in my locker and fuss with some other stuff—as if killing a little time will make him give up. But he’s not leaving. I swing around. It’s not only Raymond, but sneaky Ms. Pallas beside him, both of them with their color guard batons propped in front of their chests.
“Pray tell, what’s this?” I can be sardonic and elevated, too. “An intervention? You’re here to say that you love me deeply but are concerned about my anger-management problem. Oh goody. How thoughtful.”
They exchange looks and have an entire conversation with their eyes that I can’t interpret, other than the fact that it ends with Ms. Pallas giving Raymond an encouraging pat on the back. Aren’t they the perfect pair? He doesn’t say anything until she and her swishing silver outfit are down the hall. Good riddance.
Then a thump of his baton. “Meg, what the hell are you doing?”
Innocent me with a singsong in my voice. “What do you mean? I’m not doing anything.”
“Stop that! I need you to tell me the—what’s that thing called again?—oh right, the truth. No, wait, I already know. You’re not fooling anyone else, either. The whole school knows that it’s you behind the Hunter High epidemic. They don’t know exactly what you’re doing or how or why, but they know it’s you.”