The Suburban Strange (35 page)

When she got home from the last day of school, Celia felt stifled. The freedom from homework only meant that another evening stretched out before her, with nothing to distract her from her fate. She changed out of her school clothes and pulled out the only pair of jeans Regine had allowed her to keep and her father’s sweatshirt with gray stains on it from when she had painted her room. She crept downstairs and went to the garage to pull out a bicycle she hadn’t ridden in years. Celia wobbled down the driveway and eventually found her balance halfway down the block. Her knees came up too close to the handlebars, but she kept pumping, trekking several miles across town to a place she hadn’t been in almost a year.

The parking lot of the high school where she’d spent her first year was deserted. The flag hung limp, and the shadow of the pole lengthened in the evening sun. Celia wondered if she was being foolish, coming here alone when Mr. Sumeletso had promised to erase her at a time and place when the murder couldn’t be traced to him. But what difference did it make if he killed her now or in another twenty-four hours?

Her old high school was a massive cube pierced at regular intervals with windows and doors—the exact opposite of the sprawling complex that was Suburban. She dropped her bike and walked toward the building, but she stopped before she got there. A faint breeze rose and played in her hair, and she felt the coolness of the approaching nightfall. She used to dread coming to this place, but now those days seemed so much simpler. She had leapt from this cauldron of misery with such relief, and for a long time she had been sure she was in a better place—for a while all the risks she had taken had paid off, more richly than she ever would have guessed. But now she found herself in the fire, looking back up at the cauldron and wondering if it had been so bad after all.

The darkness loomed, and no one was going to come out of it holding a lantern to show her the way and make sure she got home safely. Her shoulders quivered as the evening air seeped through her sweatshirt. The chill finally forced her to take up the little bicycle and pedal back home. Her mother met her with concerned reproval and a plate of food. She was on her way out. Celia tried to eat and then went upstairs to prepare for Diaboliques.

Hours later, Regine looked over at her in the car. “Won’t you tell me what’s wrong? You’ve been somewhere else since promenade.”

“I miss Mariette.” It was the only thing Celia could think of to say.

“Oh, of course. I wondered about that. You didn’t seem to mourn as much as I expected. I guess you’re still dealing with it?”

“Yeah,” Celia murmured, looking out the window.

At Diaboliques Rufus still called her Paperwhite out of affection. She tried to find some solace in her favorite place. Other regulars nodded to her now, and sometimes she even spoke with them. Ivo chatted with Isadore while Regine stood indifferently just a few feet away from them. Celia felt Marco at her side. “Did he ever go on a date with her?” he asked.

“I think so.”

“She is pretty. I could see them as a couple.”

“I can, too.”

“Who knows, if he had gotten up the nerve to ask her out a few years back, maybe they could have been.”

Celia still knew how to be the quiet one, but what did these foolish secrets matter? She was too agitated to wait for the others to dance before she left the room. As she walked away she wondered if any of them would follow her, but she didn’t really care.

Down on the mezzanine she found the woman with the fiery red plume of hair. Once again the woman looked as though she had been expecting her. Her perfect white smile beamed up at Celia, and she patted the cushion on the sofa. Celia sat down.

“It’s been a little while. Let me see,” the woman said, and Celia willingly offered her hand. The tips of the woman’s nails moved lightly across her skin. It was so dark, Celia was sure the woman couldn’t possibly see anything on her hand.

“There’s been some deepening, but it’s all here.” The woman closed Celia’s hand inside her own and looked up at her.

“I need help!” Celia said. “I don’t know what to do!”

“See, that’s not true,” the woman said easily. “You don’t need help, and you will know what to do when the time comes. Really.” She looked at Celia with compassion. “I told you before you would be fine, and nothing has changed.”

“But my teacher is one of the Unkind! He killed my friend who was one of the Kind, and he’s going to kill me!”

None of that surprised the fortuneteller. “No, he is going to
try
to kill you.”

“But what’s going to stop him from
actually
killing me?”

“
You
are.”

“You can’t tell me what to do? Please, please, you have to help me!”

“No, I can’t. And, my dear, no one else can, either. The Leopard’s parents have taken him to his grandfather’s farm. I can tell you this.” The woman paused a moment to consider her words. “The thing that makes you who you really are is what gives you your power.”

“I have power?” Celia asked her.

“Of course you do,” the woman laughed. “How could you think otherwise?”

“Is that why he didn’t kill me? How did I stop him?”

“No, you didn’t stop him. The stupid man isn’t powerful enough to do what he tried to do, with his darkness and cold. He is a coward, after all. He only uses his bare hands as a last resort, you remember. But he is correct that his Unkind power is going to increase greatly, and then things will be very different.”

“Do I have an admonition?”

“What do you mean by that? Are you asking me if there are things you must do in order to become the person you want to be? Absolutely. But that is true of everyone. Every black bead on your chain has told you their admonitions this year.”

“They have?”

“Think back. At some point this year every one of them has told you something they know they have to do in order to become the person they want to be. If we are wise, we give ourselves admonitions our whole lives and do our best to fulfill them.”

“But the Kind—their admonitions are different.”

“Only because they come from a different place.”

“So what is
mine?
How am I supposed to stop him?”

“You will know what to do when the time comes.” The fortuneteller patted Celia’s hand and released it. “Go back to your friends. Patrick is going to play ‘Second Skin’ by the Chameleons, and I know you love that song.”

Celia couldn’t understand how this woman could send her away with the feeling she had learned something, when her answers never seemed to match up with Celia’s questions. Celia was tempted to hate her for not sharing every scrap of knowledge that might help Celia to save herself. She looked at the woman one last time, wondering if she would ever see her again, and then got up. At the bottom of the stairs she turned to look back, but in the sweep and flash of the lights she couldn’t see where they had been sitting. Back upstairs she joined her friends on the dance floor, and sure enough, as the song faded, she heard the slender keyboard notes that began “Second Skin.” Then the drums came, and the guitar, and while she knew the lyrics by heart, it was as though she was hearing them for the first time.

I realize a miracle is due
I dedicate this melody to you
But is this the stuff dreams are made of?
No wonder I feel like I’m floating on air
Everywhere
Oh, it feels like I’m everywhere
Like when you fail to make the connection, you
          know how vital it is
Or when something slips through your fingers you
          know how precious it is
And you reach the point where you know
It’s only your second skin
Someone’s banging on my door . . .

Celia cried a little as she danced, and she raised her eyes to the ceiling. At that moment, she felt so connected to the world around her, she might have been in a church. No mysteries were solved—they loomed on every side. But she felt more alive than she ever had before. For the rest of the evening the remnants of that moment trailed around her like a fog. Her mind was far away, chasing in all directions to find Tomasi, rushing down endless hallways in hopes of reaching Mariette in time, turning to see who was pursuing her in the darkness, clutching the armrest in the passenger seat of a car as the world flew by outside the window.

Everyone told her she was strong, stronger than before, and Celia wanted to believe them. But she knew the weakness hidden within her. She could welcome it back whenever she wanted, and now seemed like an excellent time. For each thing she had gained, it seemed she had lost something. In one moment the haze cleared, and Celia thought with incredible clarity,
I am going to die.

Eventually it was time to go. Regine was sensitive to Celia’s mood. In the car, she put on music and stayed quiet. The whole way home, Celia tried to be hopeful. Her flame-haired advisor had assured her she could solve this problem, meet this threat on her own. Celia couldn’t fathom how, but she wanted desperately to rediscover her faith in herself. If she was going to survive, that had to come first.

In her gray room Celia sat on the edge of her bed and felt the despair weighing her down like a lead overcoat. When she cleared away everything else—Mariette, Tomasi, the Rosary—she could see a straight line down the center of a very straight road. In less than twenty-four hours the moon would be eclipsed. Mr. Sumeletso would receive the Unkind power he had earned by killing Mariette and sucking away her dying breath. And his first priority, he had promised Celia, was to wipe away the only person who knew what he had done. He would destroy her in whatever way he could.

If he became as strong as he seemed to expect, and everything truly was different, as the fortuneteller said it would be, then he probably was going to be able to kill her without touching her, as he preferred. Celia felt herself withering away like a tree in a punishing drought, with no idea how to save herself, nowhere to turn. She imagined doctors telling her mother they couldn’t diagnose her and there was nothing they could do.

Or maybe she would be extinguished like a candle flame, gone in a single gust, her eyes instantly turned to glass. He would send a deadly spider, or an eighteen-wheeler, or just an aneurysm, and it would be over in an instant.

He wouldn’t let her off that easily. He would torture her first, she feared. Her skin would turn to boils and flake away. Her bones would yaw and snap inside her body, stabbing her from the inside. Her tongue would swell up, slowly clogging her mouth and then her throat until she suffocated. Celia wept with fear.

It was four in the morning. She ran a bath and sank into it.
The fortuneteller would have told me something very different if I were going to die, wouldn’t she? She wouldn’t have patted my hand and told me I didn’t need help and I would know what to do. Why am I placing so much faith in a woman whose name I don’t even know? What other option do I have?

She had added more hot water to the bath three times, and a feeble light was peeking through the trees before Celia finally got out and dried off. She studied the wrinkles on her fingertips and then examined her face in the mirror. Her hair clung in strings to her skin, and she imagined this was how she would look if she drowned. She ran her fingers through her hair to get it off her face. “What do I have to do to live?” she asked her reflection, but her voice sounded hollow and weary.

I will know what to do when the time comes
.
That’s what the woman said
. Celia didn’t know what to do, so did that mean the time hadn’t come? She hated how she had used this strategy of being passive so many times. In the drawing class last summer, when Regine had walked up to her and taken charge. In the parking lot at the beginning of the year, when she had stood there like a calf, waiting to be led into school. At Diaboliques, when she had waited for Tomasi to come to her. In April, when it had been her turn to face the curse. She hadn’t known what to do, so she had done nothing. But this time Mariette wouldn’t come to kneel on her back lawn and cast a spell to keep her safe. Tomasi was gone. Finally her mind grew as exhausted as her body, and Celia slept. She didn’t have to get up until it was time to get ready for the graduation ceremony in the afternoon.

25. BLACK CELEBRATION

C
ELIA SAT WITH REGINE
and Marco in the auditorium, waiting for their friends to march in. The stage looked like a meeting of the United Nations, with the faculty seated in departments, a number of flags arranged behind them. Celia could feel the clock ticking down to the eclipse, and she held her anger in check, knowing it was a desperate sword that would do nothing to protect her. When she had awakened in the early afternoon she hoped a plan would be waiting for her, but she felt no closer to understanding what she was supposed to do or how she was to escape the fate Mr. Sumeletso had promised her. At last the ceremony began, and they all stood and focused on the seniors in their caps and gowns.

“It’s strange how they all look the same,” Marco said. “We try so hard to be distinct, and look, Brenden couldn’t even do his hair.” Brenden saw them and waved as he passed, his face a little unfamiliar under his mortarboard. “We’re going to visit Metropolitan in July. I can’t wait to see where he’ll be.” Celia tried to listen to Marco, but she didn’t really care.

Once everyone was in place, Principal Spennicut stepped to the microphone. Celia was tempted to tune him out, but he spoke briefly about the tragedy the school had experienced that semester and asked for a moment of silence to honor the student they had lost. Celia looked at the floor, feeling Marco’s hand on her back, and her rage approached a boil again. Her mind unspooled the year, from Mariette’s funeral to the crazy things she had done to protect Celia, to the way she had cried over her gift, to Halloween, when she finally had shared her secret, to the inexplicable things Celia had witnessed, to that day in chemistry lab when she had laid eyes on Mariette for the first time. Celia had been so excited about the person she was becoming, about the people they all were becoming, but Mariette’s death was like a bucket of water over all those lovely hopes.