by J. A. Curtis
“Fine,” I snapped. “Let’s do it.” I reached for the door handle to join Arius on the sidewalk.
“You have to stay out of the way, Mina. Let Arius do his thing.”
“Yeah, whatever.”
I got out of the car and slammed the door shut. Apparently, my thing consisted of getting on people’s bad sides and pissing them off, while Arius’s thing was to have beautiful popular girls fawn all over him.
Great.
I slouched up next to Arius. “You should ask Chels to Homecoming.”
“If that’s necessary.” He shrugged. “I have a question.”
I looked up to meet his questioning eyes.
“What is Homecoming?”
I STEERED CLEAR OF the lunchroom, but not the bathroom, during lunch. If Arius needed space to make his move on Chels, then that was fine, but I wasn’t about to let some other poor kid fall victim to Chels—or any other bully.
But the bathroom was clear of drama.
As I exited the bathroom, I saw a pair of feet jutting out between the row of lockers and the exit door. Curious, and with nothing better to do, I headed over to make sure the person sitting there wasn’t a bullied kid hiding from torment.
The bent head, the mousy red hair was all too familiar. She was sitting with a waterlogged and a fresh notebook on her lap, side by side, transferring the information from damaged to new.
“Hey,” I said.
Her head came up slowly.
“Oh, it’s you.” She pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose.
“I wanted to apologize. Yesterday—I didn’t make anything better for you by interfering.” I stuck my hand out. “I’m Jazrael.”
“Nellie,” she said without taking my hand.
I retracted mine. “Can I help you? Maybe read the notes to you and you can transcribe? It’d go faster.”
She laughed. “You wouldn’t be able to understand a thing I’ve written.”
Well, that was a bit rude. Not to mention presumptuous. We were, after all, in the same grade.
“Then you can read the notes and I can transcribe.”
She flipped back a page in the new notebook and held it out to me. “Tell me, how much of that do you understand?”
The page was filled with a combination of symbols and numbers that meant nothing to me.
“What is this?” I asked in awe.
Nellie sighed. “Months and months of work. I was getting ready to put together a proposal for funding. I was hoping to have it ready for this year’s tech fair in Salt Lake City. I’d be one of the youngest entries. But now...” She stared at the waterlogged notebook and sighed again.
“You’re an inventor,” I said.
Her face screwed up, and she squinted at me. “You sound like Sheryl, my foster mom. Coder. I write code for computer.”
I moved to hand the notebook back. But as I did, a small rectangular card floated from between the pages and landed at my feet. I recognized the glossy finish of photo paper. I bent and picked it up, unconsciously flipping it to the picture side before handing it back.
It was black and white, taken from an odd angle—a screenshot from a video camera sitting above the subjects’ heads. In the photo stood two women, one, dressed in scrubs with her back to the lens, was a nurse.
The woman facing the camera had long hair, tied back, and wore jeans and a T-shirt. She was handing the nurse a small bundle.
A small bundle with a face.
I would have continued to hand over the picture, except I knew I had seen the woman before, in one of my visions. The T-shirt, the jeans, the little bundle in her arms. I had seen it all before.
Icy coldness shot through me, and my eyes locked on the little face of the baby the woman was handing over.
Nellie jumped to her feet, notebooks spilled off her lap and landed open and forgotten on the floor as she snatched the picture from my grasp. “That’s mine.”
I tried to swallow, but my mouth was too dry. “Is that you? In the photo? Are you the baby?”
She seemed taken aback for a moment by my questions, but then she stepped forward, shoving the picture at me. I stumbled back away from it, and my back slammed painfully into the lockers behind.
“This,” Nellie hissed, her voice shaking, “is why you shouldn’t waste your time on me. When your own mother doesn’t want you, you don’t deserve to be saved.” She lowered the picture and turned her back on me. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have Chels’s homework to work on for tomorrow.”
I made it into the empty bathroom before sinking to the floor. After all the attempts to block out the pain of my family, I had never fully processed what had happened to the two human babies after they had been switched at birth—where they had ended up, what kind of life they lived.
Chels, the faerie queen, had stolen Nellie’s life.
I switched out the faerie queen and left Nellie at the hospital in the photo fifteen years ago. Or, at least my past-self had. But seeing Nellie’s pain, her torment at the hands of the girl living the life she should have lived...
I’d stolen someone’s family, too. Jazrael had ordered Dramian to make my switch fifteen years ago. Was there another girl out there suffering because I had taken her life with her family?
If so, I was to blame. For both of them. I pulled myself up to the sink and stared at my reflection.
Jazrael. I had always thought of myself as Mina pretending to be the general, but the opposite was true. I was Jazrael pretending to be Mina.
Throughout my life, I was the person who stood up to those who thought they were better than others. But really, I was no better. I had taken, from two human girls, life and love and family because I had thought faerie problems were more important than petty human concerns.
Jazrael made that decision. I would never do such a thing.
But I was Jazrael. She was me.
As I took in my reflection, all I saw was the makeup covering my face. I twisted the knob on the faucet and thrust my hands into the water, splashing it onto my face and scrubbed until my skin felt red and raw, every ounce of makeup washed away. The makeup had made me feel nice. I didn’t deserve to feel nice.
After drying my face on some paper towels, I exited the bathroom. I peeked back down the hall, but Nellie was no longer sitting in her spot.
I heard the burst of a cheer rise up and then die off. A few moments passed, and the cheer rose up again and died off just as suddenly. I walked toward the noise when it came a third time. Instead of watching Arius flirt with Chels in the cafeteria, I would find out where all the commotion was coming from.
I realized too late that a boy was approaching.
“Hi,” he said as he drew close. His defined cheekbones and copper-toned skin indicated his native ancestry. “You’re the new girl, right? Jaz—something?”
He flashed a friendly smile, his dark eyebrows rising. I took in the Jimi Hendrix shirt hanging from his tall, thin frame and the electric guitar pin stuck to the strap of his backpack.
“Jazrael,” I said. Having discovered all that it signified, I flinched as the name escaped my lips.
“Right, Jazrael,” he said. “I’m Preston. You probably didn’t notice, but we have second period history together—”
Another cheer rose up. It was coming from the gym. I peered around the boy to the gym doors down the hall. What was going on in there?
“Well, I wanted to say that I liked your comment. I think you’re right. Too often generals used their foot soldiers’ lives to seek their own glory. It was despicable,” he said.
“Umm... thanks.” I cut around him and headed for the gym. The cheering got louder as I drew closer.
“So I was wondering if you’d want to go to Homecoming with me?” he blurted.
I nearly tripped as I stopped and turned back toward him. “You’re inviting me to Homecoming?”
He shrugged, but his cheeks held a tinge of red. “Yeah—I mean, I thought—I’m still kind of new and don�
��t know many people, and you’re new—not that you don’t know people—but I thought maybe if nobody’s asked you—but if someone has already, that’s totally fine—”
I needed to put this guy out of his misery. “I haven’t been asked,” I said, “but I don’t think I can go.”
“Oh, um, okay. Can I give you my number? In case you can go, you can call me.”
“Sure.” The cheering rose up yet again. “What is that?”
“Just some new kid showing off,” he said as he scrounged around in his backpack for something to write on. He paused, then ducked his head farther into his backpack. “Not that there's anything wrong with being the new kid...”
New kid? I threw the gym doors wide as I hurried into the gym.
The room was full. The gym class for that period lined the bleachers. Students with lunches finished and unfinished sat behind them. Even the gym coach watched, the whistle forgotten between her teeth. Everyone stared with rapt attention at the figure at the far end of the gym.
If he moved any farther back or to the side, he would be against the wall. The exit sign in the right-hand corner hung almost completely above his head, a portion of the bleachers partially obscuring him from view. He held a basketball held in his hands.
He jumped, and the ball sailed up into the air. All eyes followed, breaths held, as if the slightest upset to the air current might throw the ball off course. No one moved. No one spoke.
Swish.
The room erupted in riotous cheers. Kids rose to their feet, and the whistle fell from the gym teacher’s open mouth.
“That’s the hundred and tenth ball in a row this guy has sunk. He never misses. Every time nothing but net,” a girl said from the bleachers nearby, talking to her friend who was clapping wildly with a star-struck expression on her face.
“Who is he?” her friend said in an awed voice.
“Wow!” Preston said from behind me. He must have followed me into the gym. “That guy is inhuman.”
Inhuman. The words goaded me forward. What did Arius think he was doing? He should know that a normal human kid couldn’t sink a ball from that distance with that kind of consistency. I stalked across the gym toward wonder boy.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a figure slip from the bleachers. Her blue eyes, which had been ice cold yesterday in the bathroom, were now large and round. Her long golden hair, now pulled up off her neck, whipped back and forth flirtatiously as she sauntered up to Arius. Without hesitating, she slid an arm around his neck and pressed her lips to his.
I couldn’t move. I was spiraling like water down a drain, spilling out onto the floor. The entire room seemed to gasp for air, then the roar that had started when Arius sank the ball in the basket rose in magnitude. There was laughing and catcalling, jeers and feet banging against the bleachers in approval. The gym teacher seemed to realize that things had gone too far and was blowing her whistle, trying to regain control to no avail.
Arius grabbed Chels by the shoulders and forced her back. The din in the room rose even louder. He looked shocked. He held Chels there, away from him amid the chaos and noise. Where was the anger? He should be angry. His eyes rose, and he didn’t even have to search as they locked onto mine.
Boys climbed over the bleachers and surrounded Arius, beating him on the back, blocking him from my view. I spun around. Someone had sucked all the air from the room. I forced my trembling knees not to run and walked back through the doors I had come through and back into the hall. The doors banged shut behind me, muffling the sounds coming from the gym. I collapsed on a bench nearby and forced myself to take slow, even breaths.
“Jazrael, are you okay?” Preston asked.
Again, he must have followed me. I forced a nod. Lifting my head to glance at him, I saw the crease of worry on his face.
I clenched my teeth. I didn’t know what happened in there, but I would NOT let it get to me. I would not let him get to me. “Preston,” I said through gritted teeth, “I would love to be your date for Homecoming.”
13
Wolpertinger Proves His Worth
Mina
“You do know it’s okay to defend yourself when someone attacks you, don’t you, Mina?”—Nana
THE BRAZEN LITTLE HARPY really thought she owned the entire school.
I glared at the back of the blond-haired head sitting two rows in front of me. Her hair now free of the ponytail, she occasionally ran her fingers through the long strands or flipped them back, distracting the boy sitting behind her from his science test every time. My science test lay on my desk, blank, except for my faerie name.
I couldn’t get it out of my head, the way she had waltzed up to Arius, the way she had slid her arm around his neck and kissed him, all in front of a teacher and half the school, like she had a right to. As if now that Arius was part of the school, she owned him as well. And everyone—everyone—had gone along, congratulating and celebrating the display.
Congratulations Arius, you are now the property of Her Majesty Queen Chels of Lake City High.
The bottom of the test page crumpled beneath my clenched fist. It was sick. She was sick. How could a sophomore wield such power? How many lives had she destroyed to get it?
I regretted saying yes to Preston almost immediately. My only defense was that I had been reacting, not thinking, and he had been so happy after I agreed. It felt unreasonably cruel to back out mere seconds later. But now I was stuck with a commitment I didn’t want. Didn’t need. I had a ruthless, bullying faerie queen I had to decide what to do with. This wasn’t the time to worry about boys.
Chels flipped her hair again, and the boy sitting behind her gave up on his test and allowed himself to lean forward and take a whiff of her long locks. By the way he almost melted, I could tell it smelled exquisite. Had Arius smelled that hair when Chels had kissed him? Had he wanted to melt?
The boy’s shifting revealed the phone hidden in Chels’s lap. I watched as she flipped her hair again, this time hitting the boy full-on in the face—but he didn’t mind—and while she did so, she glanced down at the phone. Then her eyes were back on her test, and she was writing furiously.
A smile spread across my face. I had her. It was the perfect opportunity to put Chelsea Herrington in her place.
My hand shot into the air. The teacher didn’t notice, so I called out, “Mrs. Reyes.” The teacher glanced up and so did half the class. “Chels has a cell phone in her lap.”
Now the class paid attention as the science teacher rose from her desk and walked up to Chels. “Give me the phone,” the teacher said quietly, but silence reigned in the room, so every student heard her speak with perfect clarity.
Chels sat ramrod straight. She stared at the board as she lifted the phone from her lap and placed it in Mrs. Reyes’s outstretched hand.
“I will see you after class,” Mrs. Reyes said. She took Chels’s test in her hand, crumpled it into a ball, and threw it in the trash on the way back to her desk.
Inch by inch, Chels turned. Her perfectly manicured nails dug into the edges of the desk as she turned her icy-blue daggers to me. I covered my mouth to keep from laughing. The rage on her face, the threat in her eyes, it was all so, so satisfying. I couldn’t help myself. I wiggled my fingers at her in a little wave and shrugged my shoulders innocently.
That’s when I realized the others were still looking at me. At us. I smiled at them. They needed to know that someone was willing to stand up to Chels. That it was okay to take her on and win. But they were looking at me with horror on their faces and something else... sadness? No, more like pity. A few shook their heads before returning to their test.
AFTER SCHOOL, I WENT to the locker rooms to shower. Arius and I had planned to use the school showers to stay clean, so we didn’t impose on Kris more than we already were. Of course, Arius was off showering in the boy’s locker room. We had planned to meet up outside afterward and walk back to Kris’s together.
I hadn’t seen him since the gym inciden
t, which was probably a good thing. When I did see him, I would be calm, collected. Act like nothing had happened. I was General, and he was my lieutenant general. That was all there was between us. At least, that was what he thought. In fact, I was just the general who, according to him, had selfishly risked everything to save his life. He’d made it clear—I had no more claim to him than Chels.
After I finished dressing, I slipped on my shoes and reached up to the towel atop my head.
When I straightened from toweling off my hair, I found myself surrounded by five teenage girls. I recognized at least two of them as part of the posse that hung out with Chels. Two more looked wiry and hardy, like they got into fights often. The last girl was large and brawny—a scar cut under one eye. She could probably flatten me with one massive swing of her arm.
“Hello Mina,” said one of Chels’s regulars. She stood to my right. “We heard what happened between you and Chels today. Not very kind of you to get her in trouble.”
The girls stepped a bit closer, diminishing the half circle and forcing me back up against the lockers.
“Seems Chels is the type to send a bunch of brainless goons to do her dirty work,” I said.
The girls closed in tighter, and I searched for a way out. The large brawny girl was on my far left. I wanted to avoid tangling with her. The two wiry girls stood next to her. Chels’s two friends were on my right. They would be the easiest to take down in a fight. Both of them were likely drawing their courage from the other three, more experienced, fighters. Plus, the exit doors to the outside were on my right.
“Chels wouldn’t sully her hands with the likes of you,” the second of Chels’s regulars spat.
Take the hit, then stay down, my brain argued. In the past, when I intervened with bullies, that had worked. But there was no adult currently in the locker room. Nobody who could stop the fight.
This time, I needed to protect myself. “How unlucky for me.”