The Suburban Strange (14 page)

“I get it. That’s funny,” Mariette said as they walked to chemistry class. She was wearing brown corduroys and a lumpy green sweater, which Celia took to mean she had not made any special effort to mark the holiday. “It’s nice to see you in actual colors. Don’t you get tired of all the black and gray?”

“Not really. Do you ever dress up?”

“Not really. I like being comfortable, but I definitely like color.” After a moment Mariette asked, “Do you want to go trick-or-treating together tonight?”

“I can’t. My friends and I are going to dress up as shipwrecked ghosts and haunt Brenden’s front yard for the trick-or-treaters,” Celia said. “I think there’s even a fog machine involved.”

Mariette nodded. “I’ll probably go out and get some candy. I’m short enough I can still get away with it. You spend a lot of time with those guys, don’t you?”

“They’re my best friends,” Celia said. “They’re the reason I’m surviving this year.”

“It’s great to have friends like that.”

Mariette was unusually quiet during the experiment. Midway through she said, “I have to go to the bathroom. Can you finish up?”

“Sure, we’re almost done,” Celia said. She watched Mariette grab her bag and hurry up to Mr. Sumeletso, then out the door.

   Celia turned back to the experiment, and the room seemed dimmer, as though clouds were moving across the sun. The lab seemed to lose some of its color. Celia felt lazy, and she was tempted to stop working and wait for Mariette to return, but the timing of the experiment was crucial, so she forced herself to continue.

Five minutes later Celia had managed to finish the experiment, but Mariette hadn’t returned. Around Celia their classmates slumped over their lab tables, chins in hands, experiments neglected. Celia went up to Mr. Sumeletso’s desk. “Do you mind if I go check on Mariette? I think she might be sick.” He gave her a concerned nod. Celia went down the hall to the bathroom. She pushed open the door and breathed in humid air.

When Celia turned the corner inside the bathroom, she found Mariette alone in front of the frosted windows at the far end of the rows of sinks and stalls. One of the windows was cranked open, and a charm of hummingbirds hovered around Mariette. Her head was down, and her shoulders trembled.

“Mariette?” Celia walked up to her. Mariette hastily put her hands to her face before she turned around, but her eyes were red and puffy. The hummingbirds darted out the window. “What– Are you okay? What’s going on?”

“I’m fine,” Mariette said, doing her best to brighten up. She closed the window.

“I told him I thought you were sick.”

“No, I just needed a few minutes. Let’s go back.”

“Mariette.” Celia still didn’t know what question to ask out loud, so she asked with her eyes, and Mariette understood.

“You’ve known for a long time, haven’t you?” Mariette shouldered her bag, and they stood facing each other by the window.

“Yes.”

“There were a bunch of times you wanted to ask me, weren’t there?”

“Yeah.”

“I would have told you the truth.”

“I don’t know what the right questions are,” Celia said. “You have . . . powers, don’t you?” Mariette nodded. “And there really is a curse, isn’t there—or not a curse, but something.”

“It’s as bad as I told you. Someone is trying to kill one of us girls in order to gain personal powers. I’m pretty sure it’s someone here at school, but I can’t figure out who. It makes it so hard to protect the other girls. I’m not that strong myself.”

“How do you know? What are you?”

“I’ll tell you, but I don’t want to tell you here,” Mariette said. Her voice echoed off the tiles of the big empty bathroom. “We should go back to class.” They went out into the hall and headed back to the chemistry lab. Under her breath, Mariette said, “You won’t tell anyone?”

“I’ve never told anyone,” Celia said.

“That’s not true,” Mariette corrected her.

Celia felt her face grow warm. “I only said something once, and I haven’t ever again since then.”

“Trying to break into my locker.” Mariette rolled her eyes.

“Do you have to kill someone to gain power, too?” Celia asked quietly.

“No!” Mariette dropped her voice to a whisper again. “I want nothing of the darkness, only the light. Although I would kill someone if it would stop them from fulfilling this admonition.”

“Admonition?”

“What you call the curse. It’s really an admonition.”

“There are so many things I want to ask you,” Celia said outside the classroom door.

“And there are so many things I want to tell you,” Mariette said. “Let’s hang out this weekend, okay?”

“Okay.”

Celia was surprised by how calm she was. In hindsight, her entire friendship with Mariette had led up to this moment. Now she was relieved, excited to learn Mariette’s secrets at last, even if they meant coming to terms with more disturbing ideas. Celia thought it must be like having a friend and suspecting she was gay, but never having the guts to ask. It had hung there between them, unspoken by some sort of silent agreement. She wondered if Mariette felt oppressed by her differentness, if she struggled in ways Celia couldn’t understand. Now she knew that the curse—or whatever Mariette had called it—was real. It was even worse than everyone else at school believed. For the moment, though, Celia’s feelings of protectiveness toward Mariette overshadowed everything else, and her biggest fear was that her mouth would fly open and she would reveal something that would bring scrutiny or even persecution down on Mariette.

Celia’s adventures at the beginning of the year had been like the dizzy time in her backyard when she had attempted her first cartwheel. It all had been mildly disorienting, mostly fun, and she had righted herself quickly, proud of herself, in a better place than she had been before. This time was going to be a harder stunt. Celia was on her way heels over head again, and already the dizziness was more severe. She couldn’t be sure it would go quite so smoothly, or that the ground would come around when she turned right side up again.

Later, in the library, she pretended to be concerned about an exam in order to stay out of the Rosary’s conversation. The shock had set in, and she kept replaying what had happened in the bathroom.

11. DARK ADAPTED EYE

T
HAT NIGHT THE DENIZENS
of Diaboliques were all out to impress for Halloween. On the first floor the kids were more wildly costumed than ever, and even taller on their thick-soled shoes. Throughout the club there were fortunetellers. On the mezzanine a man sat with tarot cards, and by the main bar a woman read tea leaves. Patrick’s room was always a panorama of sophisticated outfits, but even on Halloween the emphasis was not so much on costumes as on characters. Celia saw a priest with a white collar in a black leather suit and a woman in a shroudlike dress with dotted lines on her face, as though a surgeon had marked her for a face-lift. Marco was blown away by a merman in a fishtail gown made of rubber bands.

The girls of the Rosary had gowns and the boys had suits, all sharply tailored in charcoal wool crepe. They had lightened their faces to a deathly pallor, darkened their eye sockets, and draped bits of seaweed and fishing net in their hair and on their shoulders. The merman came up to them to say he wished he had been there to help.

Through the netting that angled across her face Celia looked for Tomasi, but her hopes weren’t high, and her disappointment gradually had dulled over the previous weeks. Midway through the night she went into the hall to wait in line for the bathroom, crossing paths with a woman she’d never noticed before. Celia admired her fiery red hair, which rose from the top of her head in a weightless spiral plume. She flashed a perfect white smile. “You’re beautiful,” she said to Celia.

“I was going to say the same thing to you,” Celia said. The woman wore a china blue dress with a series of buckles up the bodice.

“We’re all beautiful here,” the woman said. “I’m beautiful. You’re beautiful.”

“I don’t think I’m quite in the same league as the rest of you,” Celia said from behind her fishnet veil.

“Of course you are. You must be,” the woman said, “or you wouldn’t have come here. Shall I read your palm?” she asked. Celia nodded and held out her hand.

“Left hand, always the left hand,” the woman said, smoothing Celia’s pleated cuff off her palm. “My goodness—so much going on here.” The woman traced her fingernails over Celia’s skin. They were an inch long, and painted crimson except for the tips, which had the white rim of a French manicure. “So nice to see you’re not obsessed with the same old things: health, shape, body weight . . . Well, it doesn’t look like you need my help. You’re all set.” The woman closed Celia’s hand and smiled. She studied Celia with a strange intensity.

“What? What kind of reading is that?”

“The truth.”

“I thought you were supposed to tell me my future?”

“I could, but you’re not ready to hear it.” The woman smiled kindly. “You’ve had enough revelations for this week already, haven’t you? Certain things are likely, that’s for sure. When the time comes, you’ll know what to do, and that’s all that matters.”

Celia stared at her, feeling that the stranger was toying with her and wondering if she really told fortunes at all. She turned back to the line for the bathroom. Her head felt cloudy, as though she’d been hypnotized rather than had her palm read.

“I love
The Awakening,
too,” she heard the woman say, and Celia whirled around, but the fiery red plume was floating away from her. Celia looked after it, not sure she had heard correctly. The woman faded into the crowd until Celia could only see the top of her hair at the end of the hall. Impulsively she rushed after her, tracking the red hair down the stairs and onto the mezzanine, but Celia lost sight of her in the darkness, which was pierced at odd angles by the flashing lights. She had given up and turned to go back upstairs when she caught a glimpse of the mysterious woman, seated on a couch in the shadows against the wall. She looked up unsurprised at Celia and leaned closer to her when Celia perched hesitantly on the edge of the sofa next to her.

Before Celia could speak, the woman brought her lips close to Celia’s ear. “I can only tell you this: the moment he can come to you, he will.” Then she sat back and looked pleasantly at Celia, who gaped at her, wondering how to have a conversation with someone who only seemed to say half of the words required out loud.

“Where is he?”

“The Leopard is in his room. Wishing he could see you.”

“How do you know?”

“How do you know where your hands are when you’re not looking at them?” the woman asked, causing Celia to look down at her hands.

“Will he come back here? When will I see him again?”

“If I tell you all the answers, won’t that take the fun out of it? The hoping, and the wondering, and the tingly feelings? Patrick is about to play ‘Spellbound’ and I know you like Siouxsie and the Banshees. It’s really time you started dancing.”

Celia realized she was staring mutely at the woman. She felt foolish, sitting there next to a stranger, and she moved to get up, then turned back. “So is there such a thing as curses? Or admonitions? I have a friend who—”

“Your friend who touches roses—her greatest strength will be her greatest weakness,” the woman said a little wistfully. “She is so excited to share her secrets with you tomorrow. I won’t spoil it.”

Everything this incredible woman said opened up another box of questions in Celia, but the look on the woman’s face made it clear that the interview was over. Celia reluctantly left her and went back upstairs. She rejoined her friends just in time to hear the watery guitar notes that began “Spellbound.” Her meeting with the fortuneteller had been so disconcerting, Celia figured dancing couldn’t be any stranger. The others smiled happily when she joined them, but during the entire song Celia was preoccupied, sorting through the pieces of her fragmented conversation with the woman on the mezzanine. When it was over, she had no idea whether she had danced well.

THE NOVEMBER AIR WAS CRISP
and dry when Mariette sat down facing Celia at the little café across the street from Lippa's store. Celia felt as though it had been much longer than a day since she'd last seen Mariette, and she wondered if it was the difference of location that distorted her sense of time. "I've never seen you outside of school!"

“I know. We both look exactly the same as we do at Suburban, though.” Mariette giggled. “Have some.” She pulled apart a small cake encrusted with currants and pushed the plate to the center of the table. Celia nodded at the sweet taste.

“Well, there is so much to tell you. I’m just going to jump in,” Mariette said, and they settled in for the conversation they both had been anticipating. “I’m a little freaked out to be telling you about these things. I’ve barely talked to anyone about this. I’ve been waiting to tell you since the moment we met. I didn’t think you knew yet, and I had to wait to be sure. But I’m so excited I found you! Now I have someone to share all this with. We have to keep everything a secret from citizens.”

“Citizens?”

“Ordinary people. Well, maybe not ordinary. People without powers.”

“What . . . who are you, then?”

“We don’t really have a name, really. I guess people just say that we’re one of the Kind.”

Celia gasped. “The Kind? Really?”

“So you have heard of us?”

“My boss at the bookstore—she told me something about it, but it sounded like some bizarre story, like alchemists.”

“She didn’t say anything about having powers herself?”

“I don’t think so—she and her friends just like to read about spooky things. They think all monsters are really the Unkind, or something.”

“Sounds like a nosy citizen. You can’t tell her it’s true, or any of this.”

“Have you always known you were Kind?”

“No. I’ve only been doing all this for about a year, so there are lots of things I don’t completely understand. It’s partly knowing, but it’s also seeking it out. When I was younger I thought I had ESP, but most kids think that, don’t they? And then you find out it’s only wishful thinking and you move on. But I had some things happen I couldn’t explain. One time I was walking around a hydrangea bush in our yard, and I noticed the flowers on the bush were turning to face me, wherever I stood. I couldn’t believe it. I went in and told my parents, but they just thought I was being overimaginative. I guess I
am
overimaginative.” Mariette was amused and embarrassed by this self-awareness. “But I knew what I had seen, and I kept going back to the bush. Sometimes the flowers would follow me, and sometimes they wouldn’t. I couldn’t figure out why.