The Suburban Strange (15 page)

“That summer we went to visit my grandparents. They asked my dad if he would plant some flowers in the beds around the house, so he went to the greenhouse a few blocks away, and I went along. He picked out some tulips that were orange and yellow, but he wanted eight and there were only six plants there. The florist told him she thought they had more, and went off to another room. Dad wandered around, looking at other plants, but for some reason I decided to follow the florist. I peeked around a partition and saw her at a workbench. She had two pots of dirt.

“As I watched her, she held her hands over the pots, and two plants grew in them—in thirty seconds she grew two full-sized tulip plants! But when the flowers opened, they were pink instead of orange and yellow. She made a tsking noise and then she blew on one of the flowers, and the pink flower gradually turned orange yellow. She did it again and again, until all the flowers on both plants were the right color.

“I sneaked away and went back to my dad, and then the florist found us. She was carrying the two tulip plants she had just grown in the back, and I couldn’t tell the difference between those two and the other six.

“The greenhouse was only a few blocks from my grandparents’ house, so I went back as soon as I could get away. When I told the woman what I had seen her do, she was alarmed, but then I told her about the hydrangea at my house, and everything changed. ‘You must be new!’ she said, and asked me to try it with a rhododendron bush she had there. I’ll never forget it—she said, ‘Rhododendrons are really easy to train,’ like they were pets or something. And sure enough, the rhododendron flowers followed me as I walked past, just like the hydrangeas had.

“The woman started to tell me things, but customers kept coming in. I kept sneaking back to the greenhouse that whole visit, until my parents thought I was crazy. I only got the basics from her: I’m one of the Kind. My powers grow stronger if I fulfill my admonitions. I have to keep everything a secret, and I must only use my powers for good. If I use them for bad, even once, I will cross over to the Unkind, and it’s really hard to get back. She told me I would learn a lot more on my own just by keeping my eyes open and paying attention, and she was right. My first admonition came to me on the ride home. We were driving through Marietta, and the sign—the one on the edge of town that tells you what city you’re entering—didn’t say
Marietta, Next Five Exits
or whatever. It said
Mariette, Write This Down
. My parents and my brother didn’t notice. I grabbed my diary, and for the next twenty miles, every time we passed a road sign, billboard, anything, a phrase of my admonition was on it. As soon as I finished writing one line down, I would look up and the next line would be coming up on the next sign. And my parents, my brother, never noticed anything.”

“That’s amazing,” Celia said. “What did you have to do?”

“My first one was pretty easy, though the way it was worded, it wasn’t clear right away. But my parents were going to give me a choice between going to Suburban for high school or going to a private school, and the admonition told me to choose Suburban. I didn’t understand why. Nothing happened last year to make it clear why I was supposed to have chosen Suburban. But this year, I’m starting to think I’m there for a reason.”

“To fight the person—one of the Unkind?—who has the evil admonition?”

“Perhaps,” Mariette said, more shyly than Celia had expected. “I’m still learning. I have so much to learn. I don’t think it ever stops.”

“So there isn’t a school for the Kind?”

“Not a building or anything like that. This isn’t like a profession that you learn. It’s your
life,
and
my
life. Each of us develops different powers. It’s going on all the time, wherever we are. Once you get started, it’s like a machine turns on that runs by itself, and then the world around you becomes your school. You get to see things other people don’t see. You receive information from places you never expected. And you try things, when you’re ready. It’s like the world becomes your chemistry lab, but you have to be careful, because there’s no teacher with a fire extinguisher if you blow something up.”

“So what’s up with chemistry, anyway?”

“I know!” Mariette laughed. “There was no way I could hide it. I have this sense of how things are going to work together. Like when you pour cream into coffee, you look for it to turn a certain shade, and then you know it will taste the way you want it to? I get that from every natural substance. I can tell if two of them are going to work together, or if there’s too much of one or the other. I don’t know if we all have that instinct, but since I’ve freed mine up, it’s been really useful.”

“Hey, we’re acing chemistry, so no complaints here.” Celia smiled. “And considering the number of kids who failed Mr. S.’s other classes first semester, that’s no small feat.”

“You seemed to come to terms with my lab skills pretty quickly.” Mariette smiled back.

“But the woman in the flower shop—do you know other people? Others of the Kind?”

“Not really,” Mariette said. “I go see her when we visit my grandparents, but that’s only once or twice a year. She has helped me, and our powers overlap a little, but it’s not like she can just teach me to do the things she does. A couple times strangers have given me some sign that they recognize me, but it’s been in the middle of a crowd of citizens, so it wasn’t like we could talk about anything, really. That’s why I was so excited to meet you.”

“Me?”

“Don’t you see?” Mariette said. “The only reason I’m telling you all this, the only reason I didn’t hide all of this from you—the reason you noticed the things I was doing in the first place—is because I think you’re one of the Kind, too.”

“Me?” Celia stared. “Why do you think I’m one of the Kind?”

“I don’t know exactly, but I’ve heard that as Kind grow stronger, they are able to sense one another, like magnets or something. I don’t know if only some Kind can do it, or if they can detect all Kind or only some, but I felt something with you, the first day of school. I can’t describe it, but I can sense something in you. I think you’re one of the Kind.”

“I—I don’t have any powers.”

“You’ve never had anything happen that you can’t explain?”

Celia tried to come up with something, but she kept returning to the thought that nothing inexplicable ever had happened to her—other than what she had experienced with Mariette. Sure, plenty of her experiences with the Rosary had felt miraculous, but not in the way Mariette meant. Then she remembered the night before.

“Something happened last night that I can’t explain, but it wasn’t me—it was this woman at Diaboliques. I thought she was a fortuneteller, but she wouldn’t tell my fortune. Instead, she told me all these weird things about how the guy I used to see there wished he could see me, and how I was going to meet you today to talk about this.”

“That’s wild! She’s probably Kind. She didn’t tell you anything about yourself?”

“No. She said I wasn’t ready to hear it, whatever that means.”

“Maybe I’m wrong, but it’s too late now. You know my secret! I bet something happens very soon, though, and you find out you have powers, too. I think a lot of Kind discover who they are in high school. But I could be wrong about that, too.”

“So, what powers do you have?”

“So far, my thing seems to be very much about nature,” Mariette said. “I’ve always been an outdoor person, kind of a tomboy, so it makes sense. Most of what I’ve learned has to do with plants and natural substances, and physical and chemical changes.”

“Like the frost on the window?”

“You did see that. I wasn’t sure. Daydreaming is my worst enemy, because I do things without remembering where I am. Yeah, the frost.” Mariette tapped her glass on the table between them and ice crystals appeared, quickly melting away.

“And your shadow?”

“My shadow?”

“One day I saw you getting off the bus, and you were getting teased by some kids and your shadow flickered, like you were turning invisible.”

“Really? I actually hadn’t noticed that. It must mean that I’m getting closer. I really want to be able to turn invisible, but you don’t get to pick your powers. Maybe it’s coming though, and my shadow is the first thing to go. That would be so cool! I hate the bus. There are three guys who must spend every night thinking of new things to say to me in the morning. They don’t know anything about all this, of course. They’ve just chosen me for their amusement. They don’t play fair, and they shout so much I can’t hear myself speak to respond. It makes me insane to be around them.”

“I could tell you were upset, or stressed. The leaves on the tree above you changed color.”

“I have a really strong relationship with plants,” Mariette said. There was a half-dead rose in the bud vase on the table. Mariette stroked it with her knuckle and the color flushed back into it, and the sere edges smoothed out. The flower pulled down toward the stem, like a child ducking its chin to its chest when tickled. Celia caught her breath, partly because of what she was seeing, and partly because the fortuneteller at Diaboliques had described Mariette as the one who touches roses.

“So what happens next?”

“Well, nothing, really. I go to school, and I do everything you do. But at the same time I’m studying, trying to improve myself, and hopefully learning to do more things. I’m not trying to be hugely powerful or anything. You have to be a fool not to realize even a little power carries a huge responsibility, and if you screw it up it’s going to kick your ass.”

“What about the person who’s trying to kill a girl in our class, then?”

“There is a dark side,” Mariette said. “Some people get started, maybe by the wrong person, or maybe they get started by the right person but then they make bad decisions. And they turn from the Kind to the Unkind. They seek the darkness instead of the light. They try to develop their powers in ways that break things down rather than building them up.”

“Can the person who’s doing those things at school be stopped?”

“I think I’m supposed to stop it—maybe that’s why I was supposed to go to Suburban. But I haven’t figured out how yet. Maybe we’re supposed to do it together! It’s so frustrating, though, because I haven’t been able to figure out who it is. If I had more experience, if my powers were more advanced, I think I’d be able to pick the person out blindfolded, but I’m not sensitive enough. And I don’t have any experience trying to counteract the actions of someone else. I’m just a beginner, you know?” Mariette grinned. “I’m pretty sure it’s someone at school, because all the bad things take place at school or right outside. So it’s probably someone there. The best I’ve been able to do so far is to find this.” Mariette pulled her school notebook out of her bag and opened it. Celia eagerly looked onto the page, but even upside down she could see it contained nothing more interesting than chemistry notes.

Then Mariette passed her hand over the paper and the surface changed. The chemistry notes were wiped away, and other text in Mariette’s handwriting appeared in their place. “I was so happy when I learned how to do this!” she said. “It’s so much less to carry around.” She turned the notebook around so Celia could read. “I found an admonition that I think is addressed to the Unkind person behind all this,” Mariette said.

“So tell me, what is an admonition? Where do you find them?”

“An admonition is like the instructions for your personal quest. It tells you what you have to do to get to the next place in your journey, and things to be wary of as you go. There are all sorts of admonitions, and they’re usually very specific, to one person only. They’re hard to understand, and they’re even harder to understand if they’re not for you. I’ve seen some admonitions and been sure there wasn’t an atom of meaning in them, but of course there must be, to someone. You’ve never found a twelve-line poem in a strange place?” Celia shook her head. “If you’re Kind, your admonition tells you to do good things and rewards you with good powers. If you’re Unkind, your admonition tells you to do bad things and rewards you with bad powers. If I’m right, and this is the right admonition, these are the only clues I have to find the person who’s causing all the trouble at school.”

Celia read:

The shortest path to greatest power
Is found the day before the hour
An innocent girl attains sixteen
Her dying breath does not turn sour

Collect it with your kissing lips
And wait for the next moon’s eclipse
Then a new blood, dark and rich
Will flow through your own fingertips

Only beware a different girl
With talent hidden like a pearl
Her hands may render you as dead
And stop your power in this world

“An innocent girl. So that’s why nothing happened to the girls who have had sex?”

“That’s what it’s starting to seem like. Like I said, the meaning isn’t always obvious right away.”

“So you can vanquish him,” Celia said, pointing to the third stanza.

“If it’s a boy. Who knows, it could be a girl. I’m pretty sure I have the right admonition, but the clues are so vague.”

“Where did you find it?”

“This is going to sound really weird—well, I guess all of this sounds really weird, doesn’t it?” Mariette grinned. “I found it in a book. Ever since I found out about all this I’ve tried anything I can think to learn more about it. I’ve turned up practically nothing, though. Anyway, a week before school started I went to the public library. I searched for different key words like ‘Kind’ and ‘admonition.’ And the computer gave me only one result: a book called
You Are Here
. I had to climb up into this tiny room in the top floor of the library, and when I found the book, it looked like it was a hundred years old, and it wasn’t like any book I’d ever seen before. Some of the pages were printed, but there was handwriting on other pages—I wish I had read more of it! There was a chapter with the title ‘Suburban,’ so of course I looked at that first, and it had three pages. The first page had an admonition that must have been older. It had a line about the dark ages, and I have no idea how it was connected to Suburban. The second page had
my
last admonition, which I hadn’t fulfilled yet. And the third page had this one.” Mariette pointed to the ominous admonition on the table between them.