I knew it as well as I knew I was a woman in the dream— and I was the queen. He and I were carrying out a tableau in front of the whole city, which looked, quite frankly, like something I’d made up. A whole array of pyramids and palaces with thatched roofs rose from a cleared plain, where the jungle had once grown. And every single weird, peculiar, absolutely bizarre building was painted and carved with amazing designs— it was nothing like the pictures you see of Mayan cities in which the buildings are mostly white. This one looked like the whole population did some drugs one day and got down and dirty with a bunch of paintbrushes.
We weren’t in the main square, or courtyard, we were kind of off to the side, but there were about a million people there, all about half-dressed, some wearing only loincloths.
My hair was tied back in something like a ponytail and on my head was a hat so elaborate it may have been a crown; in my ears were huge earrings that covered nearly half my face, and I wore a necklace as big as a Masai collar and bracelets nearly to my elbows. For clothing, I had on an embroidered cape-type thing— a royal robe. As I mentioned, I was kneeling. At my knees was a basket with a codex in it, one of those folding accordion books the Maya invented.
And I was doing the weirdest thing— I was pulling a rope with thorns attached to it through a hole in my tongue. I was drooling blood; I mean, totally leaking Yosemite Falls. Like in my other dream! But I could barely feel the pain. It was like I was in a trance, and the people were cheering or chanting or something. I could smell incense, copal, I think— that resin you get back at home that comes from Mexico.
The heat was vicious, but it felt good, and the light was kind of gold. Everything was gorgeous, almost heartbreakingly so. I don’t know how else to describe it. Colors were brighter than usual; the chanting was like the most beautiful singing, but it wasn’t singing, just chanting. There was shouting, too, and even that was beautiful. My skin was extra-sensitive, in a good way, and I felt kind of sexy, like I was getting off on the pain, which wasn’t really pain at all, just this very intense sensation. I’ve got to say it felt good, pulling those thorns through my tongue. Call me crazy, but I was in this very peaceful, serene frame of mind, and I felt that I loved everyone and everything— all those chanting people; that mean, relentless sun; even the thorns themselves.
And then I felt the worst pain I’d ever known, somewhere around my mid-section. I was screaming and moaning and I was lying on some kind of stone thing that was killing my back, and a woman was doing something to my most personal tissues, but I hurt so bad I didn’t care. “It’s coming, it’s coming!” she yelled, and a head popped out of me. Once again I felt that calm, serene peace, but there was still pain. And then this naked, slimy, bloody little human fell out into the woman’s hands, and I realized I’d just had a baby. I was just starting to get happy about it when the scene switched again.
I was wearing all white, but I was tattooed on my chest, and I had big plugs in my earlobes again. Only this time I was a man. I had really messy hair tied with a scarf, and I wore a sarong. But I guess pockets hadn’t yet been invented because I had a bunch of quill pens tied to my forehead, and I was writing with one on this kind of accordion thing— a codex— spread out in front of me. It wasn’t easy because I had a pet monkey that kept getting in my way. What I was writing was something about the thirteenth Baktun. I didn’t really have much sense of what I was putting down, but I was aware of a very queasy feeling in my stomach, a sense of imminent doom.
Which proved to be prophetic. Next thing you know, I was on my knees in front of this stone where they sacrificed people— don’t ask me how I knew what it was, but I would have found out anyhow, because they made me kneel with my head on it. My last thought was how beautiful the day was, and I took a good long breath, my nostrils filling with copal.
Then the scene shifted to some kind of soccer game, and they were using my head for a ball.
***
I woke up spooked— so spooked I grabbed for the stupid cat like he was a teddy bear, but he was out stalking mice or perps or something.
Kara was there instead, just walking in, looking almost Dijon again— a definite improvement. “Hey.”
“You feel better, huh?”
She shrugged.
“I know you do because I can see your aura.” I gloried in the new word.
“Yeah. I saw Sonya on the way up. Okay, you were right. I should have gone to the infirmary.” She sighed, as if I’d just said I told her so.
“I see auras, you throw books with your brain. Does that strike you as a little strange? That we’re both here. I mean what’s the likelihood?”
“I’m going to bed if you don’t mind, probably for days. I’m still on antibiotics and I still feel like… well, whatever color my aura is.”
That was by far the longest conversation we’d ever had. She undressed, got into her unkempt bed, and pulled the covers up. But just as I was dashing out for breakfast, words came from the depths: “Sonya said to tell you there’s a meeting tonight. Be there or beware.”
***
I couldn’t wait. Last night I’d had way too much information way too fast. And then that dream! I needed to debrief the worst kind of way. I also needed some answers from a certain furry fiend. But A.B. was nowhere to be found.
Until that evening. I arrived for the meeting straight from the dining hall, finding him curled up in the same spot he’d been in the night before. As if he’d never moved.
To my amazement, Kara was there! I hadn’t been back to the room all day, and I could see why antibiotics were called miracle drugs. She’d gone from Dijon halfway back to muddy French’s.
I’d had clean-up duty so I was slightly late, and the meeting was already in progress. “I move,” Julia was saying, “to accept the three new members.”
“Second the motion,” Sonya said.
“All in favor…”
And they voted us in. “Hey, wait a second,” Carlos said, “I’m a member now, right? I move to change our name to the Ozone Rangers.”
Cooper said, “Think that’ll make you feel more normal, Carlette?”
Carlos ignored him, the motion was carried, and boom, we were Ozone Rangers. Sweet! I hadn’t thought about it before, but Julia must be the president. “Let’s check in and see how everybody is,” she said. “Last night was a pretty heavy evening. Reeno, you want to start?”
I was dying to start. It was like she was psychic or something. “Sure. Love to. I think I realized something really really important about my life.”
“Duh,” Cooper said. “It’s all about you, right, Pinkoid?”
I looked straight at him, repelled by the vile, toxic cloud of his aura, yet for the first time understanding how trapped he was, that the vile and toxic Cooper wasn’t the real person at all, was instead a layer of evil someone had covered him with.
“Well, see, the thing in my life? The sad thing Julia said she could see? It’s that my sister has a horrible disease no one can diagnose.” I looked straight at Cooper. “Except that it’s not psychic Tourette’s. It’s a lot worse. She leaks blood. She’s going to die if we can’t find a way to stop it.”
Gasps went round the table, but Cooper pressed on, nasty as ever. “And your point is?”
“Your aura is exactly the same as hers.”
“Jesus, Reeno,” Carlos said. He reached across the table to take my hand.
“Oh, Lord, they’re both cursed!” Sonya looked as if it was her mom we were talking about. I’d never thought much about her because she was the best friend of the dreaded Kara. But I was starting to realize what a kind person she was.
I nodded. “I think that’s why so many people had visions about me instead of Cooper. I think that’s what our psyches were trying to tell us.
“And I’ve been having these dreams. I had a dream that I think was about my parents talking about getting married. Then there was this movie and… I don’t know, the gist was that they couldn’t because there wa
s a curse on my mom’s family— the kids died early, only not all of them. And now my sister’s dying!”
“The Curse of the Dimonds,” Cooper chanted. “Dum de Dum Dum.” Then he pulled a laptop out of his backpack and started searching the Internet. Real feeling guy.
But wait. He had a laptop! How had he gotten it?
Julia said, “Reeno? Are you there?”
“Sorry. Got distracted. So I had that dream about my parents and then I started dreaming about the Mayans.”
“Huh?” Carlos said.
“Mayans. Indians. You know, the guys with the pyramids. Like in Apocalypto.”
“And 2012,” Kara said. “They’re the ones who predicted the end of the world.”
“Not exactly,” said A.B., his first words of the evening; though no one heard them but me.
“Wait a minute,” Sonya said. “That Indian guy who cursed you…”
“Yeah. Maybe not Aztec.”
Cooper looked up from his laptop. “Here we are. Retrocognition. AKA postcognition. It means you know about events in the past.”
“By dreaming?”
He shrugged. “You just know.”
Well, I didn’t know if I knew, but then I hadn’t known the word “aura” till yesterday. But I could ask Dad about the curse dream— that is, if I could ever talk to him.
“What about the Mayans?” Sonya asked.
So I started telling them the Mayan dream, and when I was finished, Cooper showed me an image on his laptop, from a website he’d found on Mayan art. It was the first part of my dream! A woman pulling a rope of thorns through her tongue— same guy with the torch, Masai collar, the whole thing. Identical in every detail.
“Oh. My. God.”
“Maybe you’ve seen the picture before,” Julia suggested.
“Are you kidding? I’d remember that.”
“Maybe it’s you; maybe it’s a past life dream.”
I shook my head. “Uh-uh. I don’t think so. Because of the other dream— I dreamed about my parents and I definitely wasn’t either of them in a past life.”
“Uh-oh,” said Cooper. “Bad news. You know that thirteenth Baktun thing? Where you were the scribe and you felt a sense of doom?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, the thirteenth Baktun’s when the Mayan calendar ends. In the Gregorian calendar, that would be…”
“Oh, shit,” said Sonya. “2012.”
“Wait a minute,” Julia said. “All that happened was the calendar ended? They didn’t actually predict the end of the world?”
“No. That was it.” I knew that from my Mayan tapes.
“Then the big question is why did the calendar end.”
“And now, Student,” said A.B., “we are, at long last, getting somewhere. Extremely Important Assignment? Curse on your sister? Are things coming together yet?”
CHAPTER TWELVE—THE ASSIGNMENT PART II
I let that one go for awhile. A.B. and I had a lot to talk about, but one thing at a time. We had a curse to remove.
And it was very important to me to remove Cooper’s curse, because if we could remove one curse, we could remove two, right?
“Wait a minute,” I said to the group. “Could we get away from the end of the world for a minute? And maybe focus on what we’re actually trying to do here?”
“As above, so below,” Sonya said.
I almost fell off my chair. No one talked like that— at least no one human. “What did you say?”
She shrugged. “Found it in a book. It think it means, look at the little stuff first and then you can understand the big stuff.”
“For now,” intoned A.B., “that definition will have to suffice.”
“Well, okay, back to us and our little stuff. All the visualizations we had. Julia saw Cooper get cursed and Sonya saw me get cursed, right? But something’s funny here. If I’m cursed, then how come my sister’s sick instead of me?”
“They could have cursed your family,” Cooper said. “A lot of curses are like that. ‘First child in each generation’… you know, stuff like that.”
“Oh. My. God. My mom’s brother died really young. And my sister’s the oldest child in this generation— but she’s adopted. That’s what my first dream must have meant. That my parents adopted Haley because they were afraid to have children.”
“So what are you doing here, Raspberry?” Cooper asked.
Kara said, “It only happened to the oldest child.” She shrugged. “So it was, like… safe.” She looked around nervously, like she was afraid everyone would ridicule her. But it sounded right.
“Yeah. Yeah, that must have been it. But see, there’s a problem here. How can I be the one who’s cursed? I mean if this is a family thing that’s been going on for generations. Is there some kind of metaphor here that I’m not getting?”
“Oh, I don’t think so, human.” A.B. flicked his tail. “Chew on it.”
And Julia said, “Must be something. Otherwise, you’d have to time travel.”
The room started spinning. “Omigod.”
Carlos grabbed for me. “Reeno, what is it? You look like you’re going to faint.”
“A.B.,” I said, “A.B., is it time? Can they know about you?”
“NO!” he roared. Perfectly silently.
All righty, then. I’d have to go it alone for now. But I stated the obvious. “I’m not exactly sure we can rule that out.”
Blank stares.
“But could we come back to that? Because Cooper’s curse sounds like the same thing. Maybe some guy cursed him through his father— ‘may your first-born son…’ I don’t know… ‘insult everyone he meets.’ That doesn’t make sense. I man, what was the curse exactly? Why this weird, um, communications glitch. Or whatever it is.”
“Hey!” It was Cooper. “Good one, Pink Cloud. I mean for a bimbo. Wait a minute.”
He already had his laptop out. His fingers moved over the keyboard till he’d brought up the website for Allingham Communications. “That’s my dad. Mr. Communication.” AKA Bertrand Allingham, a name so famous everyone in the room recognized it.
A few of us gasped. Kara went further: “Holy shit!”
This was like saying your dad was Rupert Murdoch. His dad was a media king. A communications god. If you were going to curse Allingham’s offspring, this made perfect sense— you’d make them unable to communicate.
Sonya was trying to think it through. “So let’s say somebody got mad at him and cursed him. But for what?”
Carlos spoke up. “Had to be a news story.”
“Of course!” I could see exactly how it happened. People who got bad grades were always threatening my dad. “A revenge thing. But who’d do that?”
“Somebody really really mad,” Julia said. “Like a person whose career was ruined. Or who went to jail. Or lost their kid. Something really serious.”
“Oh, just brilliant,” Cooper said. “My dad’s only the investigative journalism king of the universe. He probably takes down an assweed a day.”
“Hmm,” Carlos said. “Which would be 365 a year, and he’s been business how long? About twenty-five years?”
I had an idea. “Hold it. Not everything’s a metaphor, right? Isn’t there this saying, about that— ‘sometimes a cigar is just a cigar’?”
“Huh?” asked Kara.
“Oh. Forgot you missed last night. We talked about how in dreams a cigar is supposed to represent a penis.”
Julia winced. “Do you have to use that word?”
“Well,” Carlos had this big naughty grin on his face, “considering the alternatives…”
But I was too impatient for goofing around. “Why don’t we take Cooper’s vision literally? Look for a Hispanic baseball player?”
“Now that,” said Carlos, “is a thought.”
Cooper’s fingers were already flying over the keys. “This could be it! Know how I said he was a ’roid monkey? Look at this freak.”
As advertised, the guy in the pictur
e looked overmuscled, as if pumped up on steroids. “He was involved in a steroid scandal that ruined his career. Got all his sports commercials cancelled. And guess who broke the story?”
“One of your dad’s papers.”
“Yeah, but that’s not all. There was this Tiger Woods thing too.”
“What? You mean he was like some Mr. Clean who cheated on his wife?”
“Uh-huh. That came out as a result of all the publicity. All these women came forward. Lost his career, lost his wife, lost his kids. Manny Diaz. Anyone remember him?”
“I b’lieve,” Sonya said, “I’d want me some revenge too. ’Bout when did this happen?”
“Good point,” Carlos said.
And Cooper replied, “Let me look. Uh-huh. Three years ago. And I’ve been… uh, like this… for almost three years.”
Julia nodded. “Timing’s right.”
“Hey, wait! He came back— he played baseball for a while and then retired. Now he’s a sportscaster.”
“Probably remarried. Just no sports drink commercials. So what’s the big deal now? Maybe he’s mellowed. He’d probably be really sorry if he knew he was ruining Cooper’s life.”
I suddenly had an idea. “Hey, why don’t we ask him?”
“Huh?”
“You know, call him up and just appeal to his better nature.”
“Are you nuts?” Cooper said.
“I’ll do it. What harm can come of it?”
“Yeah? With what phone?”
“You got a computer. I’m sure you can get a phone.”
***
“A.B.,” I said when the meeting was over, “I’m walking home with Carlos. Could you please meet me in my room?”
He groomed a paw. “Student, you cut me deeply. Surely you mean our room.”
It was weird, but that made me feel kind of good.
He was there when I arrived, as usual curled up on my pillow like a sweet little allergy-machine. I was about to explode with curiosity— and naked need. “A.B., what happened? Some Mayan cursed me, right? It’s my fault Haley’s sick. But it has to be your fault I got cursed— you’re the time traveler here. What did you do to me?”
Bad Girl School Page 10