I imagined myself getting out of bed really really early tomorrow morning and going to school and getting my science book out of my locker and going to the library and studying really hard until it was time to go to class. It might work. I could definitely do that. Even though I hated getting up early.
But then I had another thought. I could simply do something that would postpone the science test.
As soon as I thought it, I knew it was wrong. But it didn’t seem that wrong. All I had to do was delay it somehow – say, until after the weekend – to give myself more time to study. How wrong could that be? Not wrong at all! It might even help some of the other students in my class who’d been as slack as me!
And as soon as I’d let the idea into my head I felt a kind of rushing excitement building up in me, a thrilling, giddy surge of glee at my own cleverness. This wasn’t just a good solution – it was the only solution! Forget about getting up early and being all tired and sleepy for the test – what a stupid idea! This way was better. Much better. And then on Monday I’d absolutely ace the test!
I practised balancing a pen on my nose while I tried to think of a good way to stop the test. It would be nice to do something creative, like block a drain on the first floor of the school so that the whole building was flooded with sewage. I imagined water cascading everywhere, through the filing cabinets and the school computers and the photocopiers so that all the test papers and all the photocopies and all the computer files were washed away. We might even get a day off school if the whole place was awash in stinky muck.
Or maybe I could do something really clever like make everybody’s pens run out of ink at the same moment, so there wasn’t a single pen that worked in the whole school. Of course, I’d have to do something to the pencils too . . .
There was no point, I thought, doing anything horrible to our science teacher, Mr Granger. Mr Granger was vague and nice and told jokes and ran a business with his wife breeding Airedale dogs. He had Airedale stickers all over his car and spent most of his weekends at dog shows. He said most dog breeders were very strange people and sometimes he would waste half a lesson telling us stories about the other dog breeders. I liked Mr Granger and I didn’t want anything to happen to him, especially since I was pretty sure the test had already been written and it was sitting at the school waiting for us, and if anything happened to Mr Granger the substitute teacher would give us the test anyway.
No, the thing I had to focus on was the test itself. I pictured it in my mind’s eye, full of long, complicated questions about the periodic table. The test was my enemy. The test had to go. I closed my eyes and I focused on that test and the snake on my wrist gave a delighted shiver and before I knew what I was doing the energy was blasting out of me – thoom!
And the deed was done.
As it turned out, I was wrong about the test. It wasn’t already at the school, because Mr Granger had written it up on his home computer on Thursday night and printed it out so he could bring it to school and photocopy it the next morning. And the computer could have got a virus, or one of the Airedales could have weed on the computer, or Mr Granger could have left the printed-out test at home, or a sudden gust of wind could have made it blow out the window as he was driving to work. But none of those things happened. The morning of the test, the forces of destruction made a taxi driver fall asleep at the wheel and go slewing into the oncoming traffic – slewing, that is, into Mr Granger’s car with the Airedale stickers on it, just as he was about to turn into the school car park.
I was hanging around the school gates waiting for Soph when I heard the sudden screech of brakes and then a thud and a crash and a tinkling sound of glass and metal and then a lot more screeching brakes and honking car horns. And I didn’t really want to look round because I had a nasty sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach – almost as if I’d already known something horrible was about to happen and had simply forgotten about it – but something made me look anyway. And there was the taxi with its nose all smooshed in, and Mr Granger’s little yellow car, folded up like a piece of origami, sitting facing the oncoming traffic because it had been spun around by the impact. It was very quiet for a moment, and you could hear the engines of the two smashed cars hissing, and then all around me kids started to point and whisper as they recognised Mr Granger’s car, and then some of them started to wail and sob and scream, and then there were parents and passing motorists and other teachers running to look and running to get help and at least six people pulled their phones out and started calling the emergency services. But I couldn’t do anything. All I could do was stand there and stare at the mangled wreckage of Mr Granger’s car, because I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that I had made this happen. I had caused a car accident in order to get myself out of a science test, and now Mr Granger might be going to die. My head swam and I started to feel dizzy and then I lost my balance and the next thing I knew I was coming to in the sickroom because I’d fainted.
They rang my mum at work and asked her to come and pick me up. She took me home and put me to bed while she tried to get me an appointment with the doctor.
‘They can’t fit you in until five o’clock,’ she said, sitting down on the side of the bed.
‘I’m fine, Mum, I don’t need to see a doctor.’
‘Better be on the safe side,’ she said. She looked at me with concern. ‘Do you want me to stay with you?’
‘No. You’ve got to get back to work.’
‘I can call them and tell them I can’t come in.’
‘I’m fine now. I just fainted.’
Mum hesitated, studying me. ‘Is there anything you’d like to tell me?’ she asked. ‘Is something worrying you?’
I looked up into her big brown eyes, and for a moment it was on the tip of my tongue to tell her everything: Mum, I’ve been taken over by the forces of destruction. I made lightning strike Amanda Dean, I burnt down Mr Boris’s house, and now I think I’ve killed Mr Granger. But then reality intervened and I knew I couldn’t possibly tell her the truth, because even if she believed me – and it was a big if – there was nothing she could do about my real problem. She couldn’t save me from being a destroyer, any more than she could unmangle Mr Granger’s car.
‘I’m okay,’ I said. ‘You should get back to work.’
Mum’s brow crinkled as she studied me, and I think she knew I was lying. But she didn’t call me on it.
‘Well, if you’re sure you’re going to be all right,’ she said finally. ‘But I’m going to call you during the day, and I’ll be back in time to take you to the doctor. Okay?’
‘Okay,’ I said.
‘I love you,’ she said, and kissed me on the forehead.
‘I love you too,’ I mumbled.
As soon as she left I felt the tears welling up in my eyes. There was no way I could have told her what was really going on with me. None. But the fact that I couldn’t tell her made me feel just desperately sad.
There was only one person I could talk to about what had happened, and that was Ben. For the first time ever I used my bracelet to call him, and then spent the next half hour waiting expectantly for him to appear.
He didn’t appear.
After an hour had passed, I tried again, in case it hadn’t worked the first time. Still nothing. No Ben.
I couldn’t quite believe it. Wasn’t he supposed to be my guide? He’d said all I had to do was call him and he’d be there for me. But now that I really needed him, where was he? Nowhere to be seen.
Soph called me after school. ‘Are you okay?’
‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘Have you heard anything about Mr Granger?’
‘Nothing,’ Soph said. She paused. ‘There was no need to pretend to be sick, you know,’ she added. ‘We didn’t have to do the science test.’
That was it. I started to cry.
‘Hey, what’s wrong?’ Soph asked, her voice full of concern.
‘Nothing,’ I sobbed.
I couldn’t tell her
. I was too ashamed of what I’d done. There were plenty of things I could tell Soph, but not this. She’d hate me forever.
I was reckoning without Soph, of course. She didn’t need a bracelet to be able to read my mind. ‘Do you know something about what happened?’ she asked.
‘No!’ I said.
‘Meliss,’ Soph said, ‘it’s me.’
Suddenly the words were spilling out of me. ‘It was my fault. I made it happen. I hadn’t studied, and I forgot to take the book home, and I thought if I just postponed the test – but I never meant to hurt Mr Granger. I specifically tried not to involve him, I was only aiming for the test. But something must have gone wrong, and . . . ’
I broke off, trying not to think about that horrible moment of silence when the two cars were sitting there smashed on the road, hissing.
There was a long silence as Soph took this in. At last she spoke. ‘So it was an accident?’ she said. ‘I mean, you wouldn’t do something like that on purpose?’
‘Of course not!’ I said vehemently.
We were both silent for a moment.
‘Do you think he’s going to be okay?’ Soph asked.
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘But don’t you – know?’
‘How?’
‘Can’t you use your powers to find out whether he’s going to die or not?’
‘It doesn’t work like that,’ I said wretchedly. All I could think about was poor Mr Granger. Poor Mrs Granger too. What would she do if he died? What would happen to her, with all those Airedales to walk and feed?
‘I never meant for any of this to happen,’ I said, on the brink of tears again.
‘Hey,’ Soph said, ‘it’s not your fault. It’s the forces of destruction.’
‘It was my idea to stop the science test.’
‘But you never wanted to be the Queen of Evil in the first place,’ Soph said, ‘so it’s not like you’re really to blame. I mean, it’d be different if you’d conjured up the Devil and said, “Turn me into the destroyer of worlds right now” and he’d said, “You’re on, your time starts now.” But you didn’t. You told them you didn’t want to do it. So whatever happens, it’s really not your fault.’
‘Especially since from now on nothing is going to happen,’ I said. ‘I’m never going to use my powers again.’
‘No,’ Soph agreed. Then she added, ‘Not unless it’s absolutely necessary.’
‘What?’
‘There could be certain times when it’s necessary to unleash a bit of destruction on the world.’
‘Like when?’
‘Well I don’t know, do I? But what if there was, you know, a war or something, and they were going to drop a bomb on us?’
‘But what if my powers went wrong again and innocent people got hurt?’
‘If it was a war they might have gotten hurt anyway.’
‘I think it’s better,’ I said, ‘if I just don’t use them for anything. Ever.’
‘You’re probably right,’ Soph said.
We were quiet for a while. Soph had managed to comfort me a bit, but only a bit.
‘I really really hope he doesn’t die,’ I said.
After Soph hung up I rang our local hospital to see if Mr Granger was there and to ask if there was any news about him, but they told me they couldn’t give that information out unless I was a family member. I thought about ringing back and pretending I was his daughter, but I thought they might see through that cunning ruse, so I didn’t.
Later that afternoon Mum took me to the doctor, who pronounced me fit as a fiddle but warned me about stress and told me to make sure I ate a proper breakfast.
‘You know you can tell me anything, don’t you?’ she said, as we were driving home.
‘I know,’ I said. But I didn’t tell her anything.
The Bargain
I called Ben as soon as I got home from the doctor, and again after dinner, but he didn’t come. Where was he? If I ever needed a guide, it was now. I was desperate to know whether there was something, anything I could do to make things right for Mr Granger. There had to be a rewind button, surely? Some way to take back the forces of destruction after you’d unleashed them? I decided to try a little experiment. I wedged a chair against my bedroom door so that no-one could interrupt me and sat down in the lotus position on the floor. I closed my eyes and opened myself up to the forces of destruction and tried with all my might to put my powers into reverse.
Nothing happened. My heart didn’t race, my spine didn’t crawl, my fingers didn’t itch and my head didn’t spin. The forces of destruction ignored me.
But I couldn’t just leave it at that; my guilt wouldn’t let me. There had to be something I could do, some way of making amends. I was an agent of destruction! I wielded terrible dark powers! There had to be some way to invoke them to help Mr Granger.
I found myself bargaining with the forces of destruction: please let Mr Granger be all right and I’ll never ask for anything again. I’ll do whatever you want, destroy anything you want. Only let me take this one thing back, let me not hurt Mr Granger. I never meant for any of this to happen; please can’t you fix this for me?
But as I bargained with the forces I’d never seen and couldn’t quite imagine and still, in spite of everything, didn’t entirely believe in, I knew that what I was offering wasn’t much of a bargain. I already was a destroyer, I already was doing whatever they wanted me to. If I really wanted to bargain with them I was going to have to offer them something in return. Something I really cared about, something it would hurt me to give up. But what?
My parents? My brother? Soph?
The thought made me shiver. After what had happened to Mr Granger, I knew I couldn’t trust my powers not to do something hideous.
I was going to have to give up something else. Something that could only affect me.
And then I realised what it would have to be. I was going to have to give up cricket.
I knew perfectly well that the only reason I’d gotten so good at cricket was because I was using my powers in some way I didn’t quite understand yet. I’d never felt so powerful and exhilarated and connected with the universe before. Man, it had felt good! But I should have known that nothing comes for free. My powers had an upside, but they also had a terrible downside. Cricket was the upside; Mr Granger was the downside. To save one, I was going to have to sacrifice the other.
The part of me that felt guilty knew I had no choice. But there was another part of me too, and that part began to protest. I’d spent the last fourteen years not being special at anything and now, at last, I’d finally found a way to be good at something.
I thought about how it had felt that day, running and catching and throwing, knowing that every movement I made was perfectly calibrated, every muscle and nerve fibre perfectly in tune so that I couldn’t miss. For someone like me, who’s been a lifelong klutz, it was a truly astonishing feeling.
I thought about the look on the other girls’ faces when they saw how I was playing: the surprise, the excitement, the respect. People have never looked at me like that before.
And then I thought about my dad and how excited he was now that I was getting good at cricket, and tried to imagine what he’d say if I told him I was giving it up. He’d be so disappointed. Cricket was our thing. What would I say to him? How could I explain it? It didn’t make sense that I’d give it up now. At any other time in my life it would have made perfect sense, but not now. I tried to think of a convincing reason for quitting but couldn’t come up with anything that wouldn’t involve me pretending to have a limp for the rest of my life.
But I knew in my heart of hearts that it had to be cricket. There was nothing else I could give up. It was the only thing that would work.
Okay, I promised the forces of destruction. Make Mr Granger all right and I promise I’ll give up cricket.
I gazed deep into the green crystal eyes of my bracelet, hoping for a word, an echo, a stirring, a sign, a fee
ling that someone, something out there was listening, and had understood, and would take pity on me.
But the snake didn’t move and there was nothing in my head but an echoing silence. If the forces of destruction had accepted the bargain, they were giving no sign of it. But maybe, I thought, they were waiting to see if I kept my side of it?
Before I could lose my nerve I pulled the chair out from under my door handle and went out into the lounge room, where my parents were watching TV.
‘Dad,’ I said. ‘I have to talk to you about something.’
I saw Mum and Dad exchange a look and I knew that they’d been talking about me.
‘Sure,’ Dad said, doing his best to look relaxed and approachable, although he usually preferred to let my mother handle difficult topics. Funny how he already knew this was going to be a difficult topic.
‘I’ll just go and put the kettle on,’ Mum said, and made herself scarce.
‘What’s up, pudding?’ he said. Pudding was Dad’s old nickname for me. He hadn’t called me that in years.
‘It’s about cricket.’
‘Cricket?’
‘I don’t want to play anymore.’
Dad just stared at me in shock. This was clearly not what he’d thought we were going to talk about. As I watched, shock turned unmistakably to disappointment. ‘But why?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know,’ I said, and began sobbing uncontrollably.
‘There now, don’t cry,’ Dad said uncomfortably. ‘There must be a reason.’
I just shook my head and sobbed louder. Dad came and put an arm around my shoulder. ‘Is there someone in the team you don’t like?’ he asked.
‘No,’ I sobbed.
‘Is it the coach?’
‘No.’
‘Do some of your friends give you a hard time about playing a daggy sport?’
Melissa, Queen of Evil Page 7