Be Not Afraid (3 page)

Cassie was not one of the most beautiful girls in school. With her crooked teeth and slightly too-long nose, she had missed the Perfect Boat by an inch or two. Still, no one could say she was unattractive. Pretty even, in a hard sort of way. Now, though, she looked like an insane person, panting with effort, odd, guttural sounds coming out of her mouth like some kind of crazed animal. She clutched at the front of her St. Anselm’s dress shirt, pulling it away from her skin as if it were hot, and bent over in half as she tried to make her way toward the door. Foot by foot, she staggered up the aisle.

And then two seats away from me, she stopped.

I drew back and held my breath. A bright purple orb glowed in the middle of her tongue, where a piercing was infected, and I could see red slash marks under her sleeves, where she had just scratched at the skin. For a few seconds, she swayed in front of me, as if trying to get her bearings. She looked disoriented, her long blond hair sticking out where she had been pulling it, the pupils in her brown eyes as large as nickels. Without warning, her whole face began to pulse and twitch, as if something behind the skin were pulling on tiny strings.

Next to me, Lucy whimpered and clutched my sleeve.

Despite my horror, I could not take my eyes off her. For a split second, everything around us fell away as we held each other’s gaze. I braced myself for whatever might come next. For whatever
would
come next.

Cassie blinked rapidly, as if trying to bring my face into focus, and she fell to her knees. Raising her right arm, she pointed a finger in my direction. Her mouth contorted for a moment, like her lips were not quite sure how to work themselves, and her eyes widened. “You,” she whispered. Her voice was hoarse, ragged around the edges. “It’s
YOU.
”

It was then that I thought I glimpsed something. Inside her head, deep behind her eyes. It was a pain shape I had never seen before, a nonshape really, an inky liquid seeping in and around the spaces of her skull. Just as quickly as it appeared, it vanished again, as if it had slipped around a corner. At the opposite end of the aisle, Mr. Bobeck held
Dominic by both arms; he was straining, twisting, pleading to get to his sister, his face stricken.

Without warning, Cassie collapsed, falling back so hard that I heard her head crack against the floor. She lay limp for several seconds, and then her body began to shake. Students screamed as her arms and legs thrashed from side to side. Her back arched and her fingers clenched into fists. A thin trickle of foam leaked out of the corner of her mouth, and her eyes, still wide open, protruded from her skull.

A horde of teachers descended around her, blocking my view, but I could hear their shouts—“She’s having a seizure! Someone call nine-one-one! Where the hell is the nurse?”—until a single shriek sounded, rising above the rest of the din like a thread of smoke and winding its way up to the ceiling.

It was mine.

Someone brought me to a back room inside the main office, while Sister Paulina called Nan. Cassie had already been taken to the hospital, and I had been looked over by the school nurse, who, after determining that I was in a mild state of shock, advised that I be sent home for the rest of the day. It was cooler in the small room than it had been in the auditorium. An air conditioner hummed in one corner, and heavy red drapes covered the single window. The same portrait that hung in every classroom had been positioned on the far wall: a picture of a very good-looking Jesus, his narrow face and beautiful brown eyes framed by a cascade of thick, shoulder-length hair.
Hunky Jesus
, Lucy called him. St. Anselm’s way of making Our Lord more approachable.

I felt a twinge, thinking of Lucy. She had insisted on
following me to the nurse’s office and then remained there, hovering, refusing to leave.

“Luce, I’m okay,” I said for what must have been the hundredth time. “Seriously. You can go.”

“You’re not okay,” she kept insisting. “
I’m
not okay, and Cassie didn’t even look at me.” She pushed past the nurse, a short, fat woman named Mrs. Marcel who had a cluster of pink grapelike orbs inside her neck, and grabbed my hand. “What did that even mean, her saying ‘It’s you’ like that? What was she talking about?”

“I don’t know.” Again. For the hundredth time.

“Do you think she was delirious or something?” Lucy kept talking as Mrs. Marcel put both hands on her shoulders and moved her out of the way. “I mean, it’s possible that she was, right? Who knows
what
was going on in her brain? You know, I heard this rumor once about her grandmother. Cassie’s grandmother. She was crazy or something. Like for real. So maybe Cassie is too. I mean, Marin, she stopped right in front of you. Like she
knew
something. The way she looked at you, and then the way she pointed … I’m telling you, she was—”

“Oh my God, please just
stop
it, okay?” I jumped off the small cot before I realized my legs had moved. My voice was close to a shout, and I was inches away from Lucy’s face. “I told you a hundred times I have no idea what happened. Now just go away and leave me alone!”

Lucy’s face seemed to crumple in on itself at my words, as if she might cry. For a moment, I thought I might too. I
didn’t shout at people. Ever. And I never got in their face the way I just had with her. What was wrong with me? Mrs. Marcel, who was still standing there, watching me with wary eyes, clapped her hands. “All right now, come on, Lucy. Marin needs to rest. Come on. Let’s go.”

I could feel Lucy looking at me over the nurse’s big arm, her eyes already starting to rim with tears, but I stared at my shoes and bit the inside of my lip until the door closed. I winced now, still looking at the picture of Hunky Jesus, and then pulled out my phone.
I’m sorry I spazzed out on u,
I texted. She would reply in less than ten seconds, but that was okay. The apology had been made. I closed my eyes, my mind drifting, and tried not to think.

I’m fine. It was nothing, what I saw inside Cassie’s head. Nothing at all. I’m fine. I’m totally fine.

“… to go home and rest.” Sister Paulina opened the door, still talking to Nan. “It was a very upsetting incident. For everyone.” I stood up, steadying myself against the edge of the table. My fingers were trembling.

“Hello, my angel,” Nan said, reaching for me with both arms. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah.” I hugged my grandmother quickly, casually, not wanting her to worry any more than I knew she would. “I’m all right.”

Nan was dressed in her usual uniform of baggy pants and a man’s collared shirt with a red bandanna around her throat. Her white hair clouded the top of her head, and her
eyes, blue as cornflowers, shone out from her wide face. The blue beads inside her fingers chugged along, just like they always did, a small train moving beneath her knuckles. But I could also make out a new, very small shape just below her left shoulder. It was pink, and no larger than a pea. I reached out and slid one of my hands into hers.

“You’re sure you’re feeling all right?” Sister Paulina peered at me with her dark eyes.

I struggled not to roll mine. The only thing worse than a fake was a fake in a habit. Someone whose whole life was supposed to be about
not
being fake. “Positive,” I said.

“I’m so glad to hear you say that.” The nun’s eyes roved over me, as if looking for scars. “But I do want you to take it easy when you get home. Promise me.” The wide orange band beneath her wimple was a deep tangerine color now, and it had begun to shimmer around the edges. She’d probably have to take something pretty soon, before it got too painful.

I stretched out my other arm, ignoring the command. “You said I could have my book back. After Mass.”

Sister Paulina regarded my hand for a moment. It was still trembling.

“My book,” I said. “
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
?”

She nodded and reached into the side of her robes, withdrawing the small paperback from a cavernous pocket. “It’s wonderful that she reads so much on her own,” she said, addressing Nan. “We can’t
pay
kids these days to spend
their free time without some kind of electronic device glued to their hands.”

“Oh, Marin reads all the time,” Nan said to the nun. “But why do you have her book?”

Sister Paulina glanced in my direction and raised an eyebrow.

“I was reading it on the way into services,” I mumbled.

“Ah.” Nan put a hand on my back as Sister Paulina nodded. She knew. I didn’t have to go into any more detail. “Well, all right, then, Sister, if that’s everything?”

A look of confusion flickered over the nun’s face. Maybe she was hoping Nan would clap me on the back of the head or start yelling about how many times she had told me not to read during Mass. But then she caught herself. “Yes, yes, that’s everything. You go home and rest now, Marin. And come back to us only when you’re ready, you hear?” Her voice had adopted a clucking, falsetto quality, speaking to me now as if I were a second grader. “I mean it. You have my permission to take a full day or two. More, if you need it.”

Nan nudged me when I did not answer. “Okay,” I mumbled. “Thanks.”

“You’re very pale.” Nan looked worried as we pushed through the front doors. “Do you want to go to the doctor?”

“No.” I shook my head. “Absolutely not.” I was through with doctors. For good. For an entire month after I’d told Dad and Nan about the things I was seeing, I’d been poked and prodded, examined up close like some sort of specimen
on a microscopic slide. None of the doctors had been able to come up with any answers for my condition, and the series of tests they’d put me through—EKGs, CAT scans, MRIs—were returned with just as many blanks.

“Sister Paulina said that a girl had an epileptic seizure during Mass,” Nan said, getting in the car. “Right in front of you?”

“Something like that.”

“It must have been very frightening.” She started the engine and turned the steering wheel, the blue beads pulsing a little under her movements. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone have a seizure, not even in a movie. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to see in person.”

I looked out the window. Across the street, the large red dot of the Target store seemed to throb like a giant heartbeat. I was beginning to despise shapes of all kinds. Colors too. I looked away from it, steadying my gaze on the dull grain of asphalt instead.

It was nothing. What I thought I’d seen. Nothing at all.

“Marin?”

“Yeah.” I adjusted my sunglasses, fiddled with a stray piece of hair just above my ear. “It was kind of scary, I guess. I just … I didn’t really know what was happening. No one did. I didn’t know what to do.”

“Sister Paulina said the girl’s name is Cassie Jackson?”

A knot tightened in the back of my throat. “Yeah.”

“Isn’t that the girl who invited you to her house at the beginning of the year?”

I nodded, picking at a tiny hole in the gray upholstery. I’d never told Nan or Dad what happened that day at Cassie’s house, how she’d invited me over and then baited me into an argument. The fight had escalated until Cassie shoved me inside a dark closet and locked the door. It was a total bully move, like something a kindergartener might do after not getting her way. Still, it had been over an hour before someone heard me crying and screaming to be let out. Afterward, on my way home, I had taken the long way, even ducking inside a Barnes & Noble bathroom so I could splash cold water on my face until the swelling around my eyes went down. When Dad and Nan asked about the visit over dinner, I just shrugged. There was nothing about that visit that I was going to talk about. Not then. Not now. Not ever. “It was fine,” I had said, and that was the end of it.

Now Nan glanced at me. “Are you two still friends?”

“No. We weren’t ever friends.”

“I didn’t think so.” Her forehead wrinkled, as if she was trying to sort something out. “Did something happen between you two? Lately, I mean?”

“No.”

“It just seems strange that she would stop in front of you like that, don’t you think?” She waited, but I didn’t respond. “And Sister Paulina seemed to think she heard Cassie say something to you. Just before she had her fit?”

“ ‘You,’ ” I answered impatiently.

“ ‘You’?” Nan repeated.

“ ‘You,’ ” I said again. “She pointed at me and said, ‘It’s you.’ ”

“Why? What does that mean?”

“I have no idea. She freaked out on Father William too. Right up on the altar.”

“Father William?” Nan braked a little too sharply at a stop sign. The car shuddered to a halt and then sagged back into place again. “While he was saying
Mass
?”

“Yeah, everything happened during Mass. She pointed at the host while he was raising it up and started screaming ‘No’ and ‘Take it away.’ Then when she was running up the aisle, she stopped and yelled at me too.” The silence in the car passed with a beat. Even I could hear how insane the whole thing sounded. “Nan. The girl’s totally mental. You heard Sister Paulina tell you she was epileptic. Who knows? She probably just got all confused when she ran up the aisle and then saw me and she just … stopped. Jesus Christ. I don’t know.”

“Marin.” The reproach in Nan’s voice was obvious. She was not big on taking the Lord’s name in vain.

“Sorry. Geez, Louise, okay?”

Nan’s fingers tightened around the wheel. She drove for a few moments without saying anything. Outside my window, I looked at the sudden green the trees had assumed after days of spring rain, watched a single blue jay as it swooped overhead and then settled on a branch. How could
things look so normal on a day like this? How was it that everything just went on as usual, moving along in its steady, methodical beat, despite the chaos everywhere else?

“How are your eyes?” Nan asked me this question at least five or six times a day.

“The same,” I answered the way I always did.

“They don’t hurt?”

“Nope.”

“Any blurry vision?”

“No, Nan.”

“You’re sure?”

“Positive.”

But I wasn’t positive. At least, not 100 percent.
Had
I only imagined the weird blackness inside Cassie’s head? Maybe my vision had blurred. It was entirely possible. Whatever I had seen had come and gone so quickly, like a minnow darting in muddy water. There, and then not there, over in three seconds. It was hard to know.