The Suburban Strange (12 page)

“I heard the other class is not doing well—like, everyone. They’re trying to say it’s Mr. Sumeletso’s fault, that he’s too hard. But our class is doing fine, so that doesn’t really make sense. I heard his Chem Two classes are struggling, too.” They looked across the room at Mr. Sumeletso, who was setting up a demonstration of vapor pressure. He smiled amiably at the students as they gathered around him.

“My friend Regine is in his Chem Two class, and she’s completely stressed out about it. It’s weird. I mean, he expects a lot, but we’re doing fine. I don’t think anyone in our class is failing, are they?”

“Not that I know of. It is weird.”

THAT FRIDAY THE ROSARY ARRIVED
at Diaboliques, and Celia couldn't decide if she was more nervous to see Tomasi again or to see what would happen when he met her friends. She could imagine it only being awkward. The way their conversation had gone at the bookstore, she and Tomasi might as well have been on stilts, and it wouldn't be any easier with five people watching them. Once Celia told him all their names, the conversation probably would die a swift death. Then again, Regine probably would interrogate him, which would be mortifying, but at least that would prevent everyone from standing around staring into space. Celia resigned herself to all of it because she really wanted to see Tomasi, to attempt to talk more with him, maybe without blushing. Maybe she would touch him again. Not shaking hands this time. She might touch his shoulder or something . . .

But Tomasi wasn’t there when they made it upstairs at the club. And as the night wore on and he didn’t appear, Regine gave Celia a hard time about it. “Didn’t he say he was going to be here?”

“No, he didn’t. I just assumed because he’s been here every week,” Celia said.

“Ignore her,” Marco said when Regine had gone to dance. “That girl has her own plan for the world, and she spends way too much time trying to get the world to conform to it.” His voice turned conspiratorial. “You should have seen her at homecoming. It didn’t matter what Ivo did, as long as he was standing next to her. She had the time of her life.”

“I don’t understand—are they dating or not?”

“The simplest way to put it is this: she’s dating him, and he’s not dating her back,” Marco said. “Don’t tell me you can’t see it.”

Celia knew what Marco meant, and she struggled to understand how a smart, confident girl like Regine could cultivate such a large emotional blind spot. She also wondered why Ivo would lead Regine on, and why the rest of them were content to ignore this large, dark elephant that crashed around the two of them every time they were together. Celia feared it was inevitable Regine would have her heart broken.

Soon, though, Celia’s thoughts returned to her own disappointment. Fortunately the others had given up on Tomasi, and she could belabor it by herself. She wondered why he wasn’t there. Perhaps he had just taken the night off. That excuse rang hollow, since he had been there consistently, every week before. It was the first time Celia had experienced Diaboliques without the Leopard watching her from the other side of the floor, and while it still was a magic place, it wasn’t quite as miraculous without him.

CELIA HOPED TOMASI WOULD STOP
in at the bookstore that week, but he didn’t. And he wasn’t at Diaboliques the next Friday, either. Celia regretted that she hadn’t been forward enough to exchange phone numbers with him, but she knew it was foolish to reproach herself that way. It was a kind of courage she could muster only in hindsight. She reminded herself that she barely had carried on a somewhat intelligent conversation with him when they’d met, barely had managed to meet his gray stare when it was so close to her. She had taken for granted that she would see him at Diaboliques in a matter of days. And he had turned bashful and left so quickly . . .

Another week passed and Tomasi failed to return to Diaboliques. Though he had vanished, the curse reappeared just in time to catch the next girl on the birthday list completely off guard. The conventional wisdom at school had decreed confidently that the curse must have been broken by the girl who made it through unscathed—even though no one could explain why—and this next girl had expressed her relief to be safe from harm several times during the day before her birthday. In seventh period, her appendix ruptured and she was carted off, and the school returned to a state of agitation. How had the other girl escaped the curse? Was there something girls could do to protect themselves? Instead of being exasperated by it all, this time Celia was a little more credulous, as though the exception had somehow proven the rule. In taking the curse seriously, Celia’s interest in Mariette became more serious, too. All the unanswered questions Celia had pondered about her free-spirited friend returned to preoccupy her again.

In chemistry lab she watched Mariette, wishing she could read her mind. She couldn’t think how to start a conversation that would get Mariette to reveal the answers to her half-formed questions, and she didn’t have the nerve to just come out with it and interrogate her, as she imagined Regine would. To make matters worse, Mariette was going on about her attempts to learn to play the dulcimer. When Mariette finally wound down, Celia asked, “What do you think of the curse?”

“I think there’s definitely something going on, but I don’t think it’s a curse,” Mariette said, not looking up as she shuffled chemicals around. Celia noticed how seriously Mariette answered the question, almost as if she had been expecting to be asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, a curse is just causing someone harm or misfortune. I can understand why people would call what’s happening here a curse, because girls definitely are suffering harm or misfortune.” Mariette filled a beaker with water and sloshed a little back into the sink before she was satisfied with the amount. “But I think there’s more to it than that. I think there’s someone who stands to
gain
something if something bad happens to a girl before she turns sixteen, and so that person keeps trying to make it happen.”

“What do you mean, trying? It’s happened every time except one,” Celia said.

“Not if this isn’t the intended result. I don’t think the point is to hurt a girl,” Mariette said.

“What is it, then?”

“I think the point is to kill her.” Mariette looked Celia straight in the eye for a moment; then she turned back to the solution she was heating.

“Kill her?” Celia gasped. Mr. Sumeletso passed by and she dropped her voice, hoping he hadn’t heard her. “You think someone is trying to kill girls at Suburban?”

“Not all of them, just one. And then that person will be rewarded when they succeed, though I don’t know what the reward is.”

“Who would reward someone for killing an innocent girl?” Celia stared at Mariette, who stared back, only shrugging. “Have you lost your mind?”

“You tell me,” Mariette replied, partly amused and partly curt. “Clearly if you think there’s a curse, you’ve considered the possibility something supernatural is happening. Well, I agree with you about that, but there’s more to it than getting hurt before you turn sixteen. You asked me what I thought, and I told you.”

Celia repeated Mariette’s theory, in an attempt to consider it at face value. “So you think there is someone who believes killing a girl on the day before she turns sixteen will bring some kind of reward?” Around them their classmates labored at their experiments.

“Yes, some kind of power. The problem is, I don’t think this person is very skilled at it, so the spells are harming girls, but they aren’t strong enough to kill them.”

“The person is casting spells?”

“Well, trying to. That’s what I think.”

“So this is, like, black magic or something? Do you believe in that?”

Mariette’s curt amusement returned. “Doesn’t a curse count as black magic? And weren’t you prepared to believe there was a curse?”

“But people casting spells?”

“Someone casting spells in hopes of sacrificing a girl at a precise moment in her life, in order to gain some kind of supernatural reward. I’m just guessing,” Mariette said. She blew her hair out of her eyes and picked up a pencil to make notes on the experiment, as though she had been humoring Celia with the entire conversation.

Celia kept staring at her, and eventually Mariette turned back to meet her gaze, daring her to pursue it further. But Celia lost her nerve. She couldn’t bring herself to just come out and ask Mariette a question as insane as
Are you a witch?
She was disoriented by how serious Mariette was now, when usually she was so bubbly, so flighty. Celia wanted to believe that Mariette was a good, honest person, even if she suspected Mariette had secrets that were more significant than the type kept by most high school girls. But this conversation, almost completely made up of sentences Celia never would have expected to say or hear in real life, made her wonder things she never would have expected to wonder.

All afternoon she thought about it. As bizarre as her conversation with Mariette had been, Celia couldn’t imagine that she was responsible for the bad things that were happening to their classmates. Maybe it was taking the path of least resistance, but Celia decided that for the moment, as strange and scary as things were, she had faith in Mariette. She didn’t think she had much of a choice. And she knew for sure she couldn’t speak of her suspicions to anyone, not even to anyone in the Rosary.

Celia guessed Mariette could tell she was struggling with all this, because it seemed as though she made an effort to alleviate Celia’s concerns. A lock appeared on Mariette’s locker, and during their next chemistry lab Mariette made a good show of measuring things properly.
If anything, it’s for her own good,
Celia thought.
If other people notice the bizarre things she does, they may not be as timid as I am.

When the eleventh girl in the sophomore class reached the eve of her birthday later that week, the social microscope was focused on her. She behaved as expected, spending the uneventful day flinching at every surprise and nervously feeling the glands in her throat. The next morning the girl triumphantly appeared, boasting that she’d gotten a paper cut but that couldn’t really be enough to qualify for the curse, could it?

“I know you’re going to crack on me for saying it, but she’s kind of easy, too, isn’t she?” Marco said.

“You’re not the only one who’s noticed,” Regine said drily. “Is this whole thing going to ascend to the next order of magnitude of ridiculousness?”

“You mean the curse is only on fifteen-year-old
virgins?
” Brenden said.

Liz burst out laughing. “As if this weren’t already the most absurd thing I’d ever heard!”

“I have nothing to add to this conversation,” Ivo said, not looking up from his book.

“Well, if we were going to be scientific about this,” Marco said slowly, reasoning his way though, “the next sophomore girl . . . with a birthday . . . who’s a virgin . . . should have sex and see if she breaks the curse.”

“And I’ve already heard that suggested three times today,” Regine said. “Apparently we are living in some kind of tacky eighties horror film.”

Liz corrected her. “In the tacky eighties horror films, it was the people who had sex who died and the virgins who survived.”

“Who cares? Now every guy in school is going to start propositioning every girl who’s about to turn sixteen, figuring if the girls want to avoid the curse, they’re going to have to sleep with one of them.” Regine rolled her eyes.

“Not every guy,” Marco said, smiling at Brenden.

“And, statutory rape, anyone?” Ivo grumbled.

The story played out exactly as Regine had predicted: the next girl on the birthday list endured a week of open propositions and came close to a nervous breakdown. A few days before her curse day, a rumor flew around the school contending she had selected a stud and done the deed. When she made it to her birthday unscathed, the rumor was accepted as truth. Now the curse became topic number one at Suburban, expanding beyond the ranks of the students and into the faculty, and soon enough it made it home to the parents.

“Did you read this?” Celia’s mother asked her, the letter from the principal in her hand.

“Yes,” Celia said. “I don’t know what to tell you.”

“Do you feel like you’re in any kind of danger?”

“No. Well, not now. My birthday’s not for a while.” Celia thought her answer was oversimplified, but she couldn’t imagine trying to explain everything to her mother, so she left it at that.

“Why do people think having sex . . . Tell me this. Are you thinking of having sex? For any reason?” Her mother sat down across from her.

“Not really. Mom, I’ve never even kissed a boy.”

“Okay. Maybe now wouldn’t be the time to start,” she said. “At least, not for a reason as ridiculous as this.” She tossed the letter on the counter. “Dinner will be ready in ten minutes.”

AT THE BEGINNING OF THE
next chemistry class Mr. Sumeletso cleared his throat and looked nervously down at his crocodile loafers. "Oh god, is he really going to do this?" Mariette whispered to Celia. "And could he get some new clothes? He wears that plaid shirt and knit tie at least twice a week." Mr. Sumeletso began a halting speech.

“I don’t really know how to address this,” he started, staring out the window. “But it must be done. I’m sure your parents all have received the letter from Principal Spennicut by now . . . It seems many of you are under the impression there is some kind of curse here at school, on sophomore girls, at least. And many of you girls are considering, erm, losing your virginity as a means to escape whatever curse you think threatens you. Well, as scientists, I think we should apply the same scrutiny to these ideas that we do to our lab experiments.”

Kill me now,
Mariette wrote in her notebook.

Poor choice of words,
Celia scribbled back.

Mr. Sumeletso became more comfortable as he slipped into abstract terminology. “We know that just because there appears to be a correlation between two things—in this case, some injuries and the birthdays of the injured—that in no way guarantees that one has a causal relationship with the other. In the same way, any characteristics—say, being sexually experienced—of the people who have not been injured at the predicted time cannot be assumed to have a causal relationship to their deviation from the predicted outcome.”