The Suburban Strange (13 page)

No really, kill me now.

Okay, I’m with you.

He waded back into the uncomfortable part. “Maybe the most important thing to express to you is that having sex is a very important decision, and certainly not a decision you need to make anytime soon. It is by no means a decision you should make because of peer pressure based on a superstitious rumor. If you have any questions, our school nurse is always available to talk to you, or, if you are more comfortable, any member of the faculty . . .” Mr. Sumeletso trailed off, having found the end of his speech and rushed to it in relief.

“Look at him, praying no one comes to talk to him about sex,” Mariette said under her breath. “I want to go ask him an anatomy question, just to watch him squirm.”

“They probably told all the teachers with sophomore classes they had to talk about it,” Celia said. “I can’t imagine he’d have done that voluntarily.”

That afternoon in the library no one in the Rosary had much work to do, and soon the dreaded topic found its way into their conversation. “Is it weird no one’s doing anything about it?” Brenden asked. “We all count down to the next curse day, but is anyone trying to figure out if it can be stopped?”

“Are you saying we should reopen our curse investigation with our prime subject, Celia’s friend Mariette?” Ivo asked.

“No!” Celia, Liz, and Marco said together.

“Because it went so well the first time?” Brenden asked.

“Have you seen her do anything else?” Regine asked Celia. “Anything . . .”

“Witchy?” Marco said mockingly.

“No!” Celia protested. “I must have been seeing things. There is nothing strange about her.”

“Here’s a better course of inquiry,” Liz said. “So, Celia, your birthday is in April, right?” She asked in a low voice, just loudly enough for their table to hear. “If nothing changes between now and then, would you consider losing your virginity in order to escape the curse?”

“Why are you so sure Celia’s a virgin?” Brenden whispered at Liz.

“I’m sorry, I was making an assumption.” Liz looked at Celia expectantly.

“Can we talk about anything in the world besides my virginity?” Celia hoarsely pleaded.

“Okay, so she’s a virgin,” Liz whispered, turning back to the others. “I’m not trying to harass her. It just seems like this is going to come up eventually, so why not talk about it now?”

“If we’re going to talk about Celia’s sex life, we should all be prepared to talk about our own,” Brenden whispered. “It’s only fair.”

“How about we don’t talk about anyone’s sex life?” Ivo said at nearly full volume, and the other five glared at him. He gave them a look of contempt and returned to his book.

“All right, then,” Liz whispered. “I lost my virginity at the beginning of my sophomore year.”

“Whoa, are we really doing this?” Marco said.

“You did?” Regine was astonished. “With whom?”

“You don’t need to know with whom,” Liz whispered. “It was a fling, and in the spirit of full disclosure, I haven’t done it since.”

“That’s sad, Liz,” Brenden murmured. “Don’t you miss it?”

“Honestly? No. What about you? Is it safe to say you guys are hitting it?” Liz asked, wearing a smile that made it clear she was sure of the answer.

“Yes, it is safe to say that we are having sex,” Brenden mumbled.

“Why are you embarrassed?” Marco asked him. He turned to the rest of them. “What do you want to know? Positions? How often? Places we’ve done it when you guys were there but you didn’t realize we were doing it?”

“No, no, too much information!” Regine waved her hand in front of her face.

“What about you, then?” Liz asked Regine, returning the volume to a whisper.

“No, I haven’t.” Regine tried to be offhand, but she glanced at Ivo. “I’m not sure if I’m ready. When the time is right.”

“What did you have in mind?” Marco asked.

“I don’t know, nothing earthshattering, but something meaningful,” Regine whispered. “Was it meaningful your first time?”

“It was earthshattering, my first time,” Marco replied. “But I’m a guy, so I can see how that might be different.”

“Congratulations, Brenden,” Regine whispered.

“How do you know my first time was with him?” Marco asked, provoking reactions from everyone but Ivo. “It’s all right—he knows if he was, and that’s all I care about.”

“How about you, Ivo?” Brenden asked.

“If divulging my sex life is a requirement for being in this conversation, I’ll sit it out, thanks,” Ivo said. This time he kept his voice down.

Liz turned back to Celia. “So, if you’ll probably lose your virginity at some point during high school anyway, would you consider doing it to avoid a curse?”

“That sounds incredibly romantic,” Regine scoffed.

“Except for a vague sentiment from Marco, there was nothing romantic about any of our descriptions of our first time. Well, I guess mine was, in a strange way,” Liz said, almost to herself.

“It didn’t sound romantic to me,” Brenden whispered.

“You weren’t there,” Liz retorted. She asked Celia, “Is it important for your first time to be romantic? Do you want to be in love?”

“I—I hadn’t given it much thought,” Celia stammered.

“What do you think?”

“Don’t do it just for the sake of doing it,” Brenden whispered.

“And don’t assume it’s going to change your life,” Liz added.    “Ouch,” Celia said.

“It’s definitely different when you care about the person,” Marco said.

They all looked at her, and she felt pressured to come up with an answer. “I don’t think it’s likely I’m going to meet someone, form some kind of romantic relationship with him, and decide to lose my virginity with him in the next five months.” Celia looked around, hoping for a tsunami, an airstrike, anything to change the subject.

“It could happen. What about Tomasi?” Liz asked.

“I haven’t seen Tomasi since we talked in the bookstore. He may never come back to Diaboliques, for all I know.”

“That’s too bad,” Brenden teased. “Is that a pattern for you? Meet a nice boy, have a nice conversation, boy disappears?”

“No.” Celia wrinkled her forehead at him. “Or at least, I hope not.”

“So we’re back to my original question.” Their conversation had grown louder, and Liz dropped her voice again. “If you’re not expecting to lose your virginity in the context of some meaningful relationship, would you do it for any other reason? Say, to avoid a curse?”

“I—I . . .” Celia realized she was looking around at them, open-mouthed. She put her hands to her head.

“We’ve made quite an about-face, haven’t we?” Marco chuckled. “Before, we were keeping all boys at ten paces from Celia, and now we’re asking her to plan her deflowering like it’s a flu shot.”

“Promise me we won’t talk about this again until April,” Celia begged. “Who knows, if these accidents are still happening then, and a whole lot more girls have gotten hurt, maybe I’ll feel different.”

10. IT’LL END IN TEARS

F
OR EVERY GIRL WHO
decided her virginity was not too precious to trade for a worry-free sixteenth birthday, there were four or five other girls who took the risk, and the general outcome, if not the specific result, was always the same. The virgins always suffered: dislocated shoulder, slipped disc, broken nose, torn Achilles tendon, diabetic coma. The titillating suspense gave way to beleaguered dread. The curse remained topic number one at Suburban, though, and the student body continued to check girls off the birthday list. Celia’s mother had described to her the stilted parent/teacher conference that attempted to address the issue, but little had been accomplished. The adults only seemed to care whether or not students were having sex.

Nothing had changed for Celia. She still felt the anxiety, but she had no desire to act. When she considered what she might do, she didn’t see many realistic options. She guessed there would be no shortage of candidates whose faces she barely recognized presenting themselves to her when the time drew near, but that only added to her sense of dread. If she tried to imagine losing her virginity with someone, the only person she could even remotely consider was Tomasi, but that was pointless, since she had no idea what had happened to him. Celia still hadn’t seen him again, either at Diaboliques or at the bookstore. Every day her thoughts found him at least once, and she wondered again what had happened. Every Friday at Diaboliques she looked for the faintest sign he ever had been there, even studying the area of the floor where he had stood, as though his footprints might somehow be visible, but she found nothing. It wouldn’t have made a difference. The bottom line was that Celia wasn’t ready to consider sex as a real course of action. It was like contemplating being an astronaut.

Regine had something else on her mind. “We have to get ready for Halloween,” she said.

“What do we do for Halloween?”

“We defy expectations.” Regine smiled over at her. “You remember that orange dress I told you to keep?”

“We’re all going to dress . . . normal?”

“I wouldn’t call it
normal
. I would call it bright and unexpected. We don’t wear costumes. We wear the opposite of what we normally wear. It’s the day the rest of the world wears black and puts on too much eyeliner, so we try to balance things out. We still look good, just . . . bright.”

“You did this last year?”

“And the year before. It’s hilarious. Last year I wore a red, white, and blue blouse and a red skirt. I looked like a cross between the French flag and a flight attendant! I just found a pink floral tapestry jacket that looks like it was made out of a sofa. It’s very Molly Ringwald in
Pretty in Pink
. I have to find something to wear with it.”

“Do we wear this to Diaboliques, too?”

“No, that’s a much bigger deal. Last year Marco made us beautiful masks, like something Marie Antoinette would have worn, and we really dressed up. I can’t wait to see what he’s come up with for us this year.”

THE NIGHT BEFORE HALLOWEEN
, traffic at the bookstore was particularly slow. Lippa came out of her office to pass the time. "Still reading about witchcraft?" she asked Celia.

“A little. It all sounds so old-fashioned. Even in the new books, it seems like it’s part of another time.”

“There’s a reason for that. Or at least,
I
think there is. Consider all the different crazy stories people have told for thousands of years—vampires, werewolves, magic, ghosts. At some point it all becomes a bit much, doesn’t it? I mean, how is anyone supposed to believe all of it?”

Celia nodded, a little relieved that Lippa’s interest in these things seemed to be skeptical. Celia might have had some strange experiences with Mariette recently, but everything was so much easier in the rational world, even if that meant turning a blind eye to certain things.

“But all those fanciful things remind me of that story about the blind men who find an elephant—have you heard it? One of them touches the elephant’s trunk and decides the elephant is like a tree branch. Another touches the leg and decides the elephant is like a column. Another touches the tail and describes the elephant as a rope. Each of them is partially right, but none of them understands what the elephant really is, how one animal is all these different things.

“I told you I’m a conspiracy theorist. That’s the Troika’s thing. So do you want to hear the greatest conspiracy of them all? There may be one explanation for all of the inexplicable things about which humans have told stories for thousands of years.”

“What do you mean?”

Lippa looked dramatically around the empty bookstore, as though they might be overheard. “One class of supernatural people with greatly different powers, who do their best to stay unknown to everyone else. Now and then they are revealed, but because they don’t all have the same powers, people don’t realize they are the same type of being.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Some of them can only use their powers at the full moon, and over time the legends called them werewolves. Others need human blood to activate their powers. They became known as vampires. Others can mix substances and make things happen from a distance. They are called witches.” Lippa tapped the book on the desk. “But in reality, they are all the same. The evil ones are the Unkind, and the good ones are the Kind.”

“The Unkind?”

“There are legends about books appearing and disappearing that contain information about the Kind and Unkind. The people who claim to have read those books can never prove what they have seen.”

“I don’t think I understand.” Celia stared at Lippa and then looked away, not wanting it to be obvious she thought her boss was crazy. Celia had entertained doubts about a curse at Suburban, about Mariette, but in the space of five minutes Lippa had just grabbed for the brass ring of crazy and fallen completely off the merry-go-round, as far as Celia was concerned.

“There isn’t much to understand, really. That’s what makes it such a great conspiracy theory!” Lippa’s eyes danced with excitement.

“So . . . do you believe it?”

“That’s not really the point. When you watch a scary movie, does it matter whether you believe it’s true? The point is to suspend disbelief for a little while and go along for the ride.”

“Everyone knows about vampires and werewolves. How come I’ve never heard about the Unkind?”

“They guard their secrets very well and leave us to make up our own stories about them, even if the stories are completely wrong. Halloween is another great example—a holiday grown out of people’s misunderstandings of the Unkind. If you’d like, you could join me and my friends tomorrow night. We could tell you more.”

“Oh, I’m going to a Halloween party with my friends,” Celia said. “But thank you for the invitation. I’ll keep it in mind.”

“You do. Anytime.” Lippa smiled at her and went back to the office.
Oh my god, she is crazy,
Celia thought, but then she remembered Mariette and thought,
What if she isn’t?

ON HALLOWEEN MORNING CELIA
put on the orange dress with her mother's coral cardigan, and until Regine arrived she was scared it was a prank and the rest of them would be in some kind of somber costume, ready to laugh at her expense. But Regine was decked out in her pink thrift-store find, and when they got to school they all laughed at the sight of themselves in the parking lot. Marco had made full-length pants in madras patchwork, and Ivo had on a magenta blazer. All day Celia enjoyed the confused looks from her classmates, and she lost count of the number of times she startled herself when she glanced down and saw the bright colors she was wearing.