Melissa, Queen of Evil

by Mardi McConnochie

  I nodded.

  ‘Destroyers follow our own path and do our own thing. There’s no organisation, no structure, no rules. But the agents of order are more like an army, or the secret police. They’ve got a central organising committee who run everything, and their agents work in teams of five.’

  ‘What kind of work do they do?’

  ‘Well, as far as I can tell, they hunt down destroyers so they can stop us causing chaos.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, in a small voice.

  ‘I was on my way home from training. I always went home a certain way, taking a short cut through a park. There were five of them, waiting for me. I think they must have been watching me, learning my routines, working out when I’d be alone so they wouldn’t be disturbed. As soon as I saw them I – I panicked.’

  He stopped, swallowing. ‘My bracelet called Marcus. I didn’t do it on purpose, but if you’re in trouble, and you’re scared, sometimes it’ll just send out a distress call and – so anyway I called him, and he came and – It was what they wanted, you see. They weren’t interested in me. They wanted him. They could have neutralised me as soon as they saw me, but they didn’t. They waited until he got there and –’

  He broke off.

  For a long moment, neither of us said anything.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said finally.

  Ben shrugged, although I could tell from his face he was struggling with his emotions. I was beginning to understand now what was behind his air of reserve. He’d packed a whole world of trouble into just a few years. My own problems seemed relatively minor in comparison.

  ‘But if you’re right about them following you home from school –’ I began.

  ‘It means they knew where I went to school, where I lived, everything,’ Ben confirmed.

  A sick, creepy feeling was inching up my spine. ‘But if their mission in life is to track down destroyers and neutralise us, then . . . ’

  ‘Why haven’t they finished the job?’ He gave me a little smile. ‘I got lucky. My dad got transferred and we moved. They haven’t caught up with me yet.’

  ‘Yet?’ I squeaked. ‘You mean, you think they’re still after you?’

  ‘I expect so,’ Ben said, with surprising calm. ‘But I don’t think I’m a very high priority for them. I’m not very powerful and I’m not very destructive, so I’m not a major target.’

  ‘But Marcus was?’

  Ben nodded. ‘He never talked about himself much. But I think he was one of the most powerful destroyers around.’

  ‘But – but – how can you even leave the house in the morning?’ I asked. ‘How can you stand it, knowing they’re out there looking for you?’

  ‘What’s the alternative?’ Ben asked, his eyes crinkling at the corners. ‘Stay in bed for the rest of my life? If they come for me, they come for me. Maybe next time I’ll be ready for them.’

  I was deeply impressed. Terrified, but deeply impressed.

  ‘Your mum’s going to think you’ve fallen in,’ Ben said.

  ‘What? Oh!’ I remembered I’d told Mum I was going to the loo. ‘She’ll be sending out search parties,’ I said.

  For a moment we stood there looking at each other, both a little reluctant to part. Well, I was.

  ‘Your science teacher might still be okay,’ Ben said.

  ‘I hope so,’ I said.

  I waited to see if he’d say something else, but he didn’t. I turned and started to make for the door.

  ‘Wait,’ Ben said. ‘Have you got a pen?’

  ‘Sure.’ I dug around in my handbag and found one. It even worked. Ben wrote something down and handed it to me. It was his phone number.

  ‘Don’t call me unless it’s an emergency,’ he said, and grinned.

  Mum was seriously miffed when I turned up back at the food hall. ‘I was about to call the police,’ she said, ‘I thought you’d been abducted. Where were you?’

  ‘I ran into somebody I really needed to talk to,’ I said.

  ‘What was so important you couldn’t tell me where you were? I was worried sick!’

  ‘I didn’t realise I’d been so long,’ I said, although I knew it had been ages. ‘Sorry.’

  Mum had had enough of the mall by then, so we went home.

  Dad was snoozing in front of the test match when I came in but he raised an eyelid as I sat down next to him. ‘What’s the score?’ I asked, although the score was perfectly visible in the corner of the screen.

  ‘Three for four hundred and one,’ Dad said cheerfully. We were batting. ‘Davis is playing an absolute corker of an innings.’

  ‘So who’s in?’

  ‘Davis and Grieves.’

  ‘How’d Malcolm do?’

  Dad blew a raspberry. ‘Out for twelve.’

  ‘Dud.’

  ‘Dud.’

  I sat quietly and watched the remainder of the over.

  ‘Dad,’ I said, when the ads for hardware stores came on.

  ‘Mm?’

  ‘About my cricket. I think I’ve changed my mind about it.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘I think I would like to keep playing after all.’

  Dad glanced over at me, but I kept on watching the ad as if the price of stepladders was the most interesting thing I’d ever seen.

  ‘Good-o,’ he said.

  And that was all we said on the matter.

  The Kiss

  The phone rang in the dying stages of the day’s play.

  ‘Big news!’ Soph said importantly. ‘You’ve got to come over!’

  ‘Mum, can I go over to Soph’s?’ I asked.

  ‘Ask her over here,’ Mum said. ‘We’re having a barbecue, she’s very welcome.’

  So Soph came to my place instead.

  ‘You are not going to believe what happened,’ Soph said, as soon as we were safely tucked away in my room. ‘I went to the mall today to visit Ravi.’

  ‘Really? I was there with Mum. We went past the juice bar but he wasn’t there.’

  ‘There’s a reason for that,’ Soph said. ‘He was with me!’

  This was, indeed, big.

  ‘I got there just as he was about to go on his break, and he said what are you doing now and I said not much and he said do you want to come for a walk and I said sure and so we both went and sat outside and we chatted for the whole twenty minutes, and ohmigod, Meliss, he is so cute and so funny I can’t tell you.’

  ‘Why, what did he say?’

  ‘Oh, I can’t remember, but he’s just the funniest guy. So when his break was over he said what are you doing later and I said not much and he said his shift finished at three and would I like to do something after that.’

  ‘And what did you say?’

  ‘What do you think I said? I said yes!’

  ‘So then what happened?’

  ‘I shopped until three and then I went back to the juice bar. And then,’ Soph paused, giving me a long, meaningful look, ‘it got really interesting. You know that park round the corner from the mall with the duck pond in it?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘We went down there and we talked for ages. And then he kissed me.’

  ‘You’re not serious!’ I screamed.

  ‘I’m totally serious!’ Soph screamed back. ‘We kissed and kissed and kissed for ages.’

  ‘What was it like?’ I had never kissed an actual boy before. To the best of my knowledge, neither had Soph.

  ‘It was fantastic. He’s an amazing kisser.’

  ‘Did he use his tongue?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘Was it gross?’

  ‘Well, maybe a bit at first. But once I got used to it, it was amazing.’

  ‘And then what happened?’

  ‘Well, it was getting late so I had to go home.’

  ‘So when are you going to see him again?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘Is he working tomorrow?’

  ‘I’m not sure about that either.’

  ‘So what
did he say after you finished kissing?’

  ‘I said I had to go home and he said stay and I said I couldn’t, so he said okay and that he’d see me later.’ She paused. ‘You know, now I’m wondering what he meant by that. Do you think I should have stayed?’

  ‘Well, you couldn’t. Your mum would have freaked.’

  ‘Do you think he was miffed?’

  ‘How should I know?’ I said. ‘Did he seem miffed?’

  ‘No. But he might have been. Oh, I wish I’d stayed now!’

  ‘If he kissed you, it means he likes you,’ I said, with way more authority than I had a right to. ‘It won’t matter whether you stayed or not.’

  ‘Yeah, I guess,’ Soph said.

  We were both silent for a moment.

  ‘So, does this mean you’re his girlfriend now?’ I asked.

  ‘I guess so,’ Soph said.

  ‘Wow. He must have dumped Vicky Lind!’

  ‘Yeah.’ Soph’s brow furrowed. ‘Although you’d think he’d have mentioned it if he had.’

  ‘He didn’t mention it?’

  ‘No.’

  This was perplexing.

  ‘But he wouldn’t have been kissing you if he was still going out with Vicky,’ I said. ‘Would he?’

  ‘No,’ Soph said firmly. ‘He wouldn’t do that.’

  ‘So he must have dumped her.’

  ‘Mm,’ Soph said.

  After dinner we commandeered the TV so we could watch that week’s episodes of Summerdale High. As you know, Summerdale High is my favourite show in the whole world, but that night as I settled in to watch it I began to feel that something about it had changed. At first I couldn’t work out what it was. It wasn’t the cast. It wasn’t the stories. It wasn’t the locations. It wasn’t anything you could put your finger on. But somehow, it all seemed different.

  Then I realised: for some reason, I just couldn’t quite believe in it anymore.

  On the face of it, Summerdale was a very believable show. It had people in it my own age who talked like I did and went to school like I did and it was full of the little hassles life really is full of: mean teachers, cranky parents, homework. But in so many other ways, it wasn’t very realistic at all. For example, the kids from Summerdale all had extensive wardrobes, and although sometimes they complained about having no money (and if someone did complain about having no money, you could just about count on one of the characters giving them a job the very next day) they always seemed to have enough money to go to the movies on weekends and sit around the café near the school drinking milkshakes. My weekly pocket money was just about wiped out by one trip to the movies, and as for drinking milkshakes on a daily basis, forget it. Another example: their love lives. I know a show like Summerdale is all about the romance, but really, I don’t know anyone who’s even half as romantically active as the characters on Summerdale, and the only person I know as good-looking, confident, and self-assured as they are is Vicky Lind.

  But the other thing I began to realise was that nothing really bad ever happened on Summerdale High. I mean, sure, big dramatic things happened fairly often. They’ve had a fire, an earthquake, a light plane crash, and at least three hostage dramas in the time I’ve been watching the show. Characters have been lost down mine shafts, trampled by horses, drowned, shot, and bitten by a rabid monkey smuggled into the country by unscrupulous pet-shop owners. But people hardly ever died – and even when they did, you had a suspicion that they weren’t really dead. (I’m sure Bella’s going to come back eventually, since they never found her body.) Disasters of every kind happened all the time, but they left no lasting scars. There were no wounds that couldn’t be healed. The characters bounced on from week to week, unhurt, untarnished, bloodied but unbowed, not because they’re resilient but because nothing really touched them. The Summerdale world was sunny and beautiful, and the people were sunny and beautiful, but when terrible things happened they were never too terrible. People cried, and offered their support to each other, and there were hugs, but life went on. The forces of destruction had no place in the Summerdale universe. In Summerdale, every sort of trauma was erased as if it never happened, and although people were often sad about things they’d lost, the sadness didn’t last, and neither did the loss.

  When Summerdale High was over we retreated to my room and started talking about the social again. Soph couldn’t wait for the social.

  ‘It’s going to be so great,’ she enthused. ‘Especially if I go with Ravi.’

  Her doubts about whether or not Ravi had really dumped Vicky Lind seemed to have evaporated.

  ‘What will I do if you’re spending the whole social with him?’ I asked, feeling a twinge of social panic.

  ‘Maybe you could go with one of Ravi’s friends,’ Soph suggested.

  Ravi’s friends were all seriously appalling meatheads. ‘No thanks,’ I said.

  ‘But you can’t go by yourself if I’m going with Ravi,’ Soph said. ‘We’ll have to find you somebody to go with.’

  ‘I’ll go with the girls,’ I said. Kelly, Emily, Sarah, Mina and Celeste were as dateless as me and they were all going. ‘Or maybe I just won’t go.’

  ‘You have to go!’ Soph insisted. ‘Trust me, I’ll find you someone.’

  I didn’t want to be someone’s charity date. What could be more humiliating? ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘I meant someone nice.’

  ‘Thanks, but I’m capable of finding my own dates,’ I said rashly.

  ‘Meliss,’ Soph said, ‘it’s me. Who are you going to get? I mean, seriously?’

  ‘I could ask Ben,’ I said.

  The words had come out of my mouth before I’d thought about it.

  ‘Ben? The evil guy?’ Soph was very excited. ‘I’ve been dying to meet him!’

  I tried to think of a way of backing out of this. But if I changed my mind now and said he probably couldn’t come it would look like (a) I’d been shooting my mouth off, (b) I had no pulling power, or (c) he was not really presentable, and I didn’t want Soph thinking any of those things.

  ‘Great,’ I said, ‘I’ll ask him.’

  Ben is going to kill me, I thought.

  Vicky’s Revenge

  Soph hadn’t got Ravi’s phone number and Ravi hadn’t asked for hers, so the only way she could locate him was to visit him at the mall. (She tried looking him up in the phone book but there were a lot of people with the same surname as him and she wasn’t exactly sure where he lived.) But the girl behind the counter said that Ravi didn’t work on Sundays, so we had to wait until Monday to find out where things really stood with Soph, Vicky and Ravi.

  Soph was waiting for me at the school gates when I arrived.

  ‘Is he here yet?’ I asked. ‘Have you seen him?’

  ‘Not yet,’ Soph said.

  ‘Do you want to wait for him, or . . . ?’

  ‘No, I don’t want to look desperate.’

  We started walking towards the main building, but Soph couldn’t stop glancing over her shoulder the whole time. We paused on the front steps and scanned the schoolyard.

  ‘He might have got here early,’ I suggested. ‘If he did, he’s already inside.’

  ‘Do you have to make such a big deal about it?’ Soph said crossly. ‘I’ll see him when I see him.’

  But she did another scan of the schoolyard before we went into the building.

  ‘Hey, Meliss, how are you feeling?’ It was one of my cricket team-mates. I felt myself turning red.

  ‘Better,’ I said. ‘How was the match?’

  ‘We lost.’

  ‘Bummer.’

  She shrugged philosophically. ‘Can’t say it was much of a surprise. See you at training.’

  My team-mate headed off, and as she moved away I spotted Ravi further down the corridor. ‘Soph?’ I said, nudging her.

  Ravi spotted us at the same time as we spotted him. A big happy smile spread across Soph’s face, but no answering smile spread across Ravi’s face. His eyes seemed to
skate across Soph as if there was nothing there but a girl-shaped space and his expression became fixed and rigid, almost as if he was willing himself not to see her. And then I saw the reason for this strange behaviour.

  Vicky Lind had arrived, all blonde hair and lip gloss, and as I watched she tucked herself in beside Ravi without showing the slightest awareness that she had been dumped. Ravi slung his arm casually around her while he finished what he was saying to a mate, and when he’d finished his sentence he planted the first kiss of the morning on Vicky Lind before sashaying off down the corridor with her, turning his back firmly on Soph.

  It was all too clear. Vicky had not been dumped after all.

  Soph stared at Ravi’s departing back. She was gutted.

  I tried to think of something to say.

  ‘The bastard,’ I said, finally.

  Tears sprang to Soph’s eyes. But instead of turning and running away, which is what I probably would have done, she squared her shoulders and lifted her chin and said, ‘Well, that was just rude.’ And with her head held high she stalked off to her locker.

  Our teacher announced during rollcall that she had bought a get-well-soon card for Mr Granger and that she would be passing it round so we could all sign it.

  I put my hand up. ‘Is Mr Granger going to be all right?’ I asked her.

  ‘It’s too soon to tell,’ my teacher said.

  ‘But he must be going to be okay if we’re sending him a card,’ I said, persisting. ‘I mean, if he was on the brink of death there wouldn’t be much point, would there?’

  A couple of people laughed and my teacher narrowed her eyes at me. ‘That’s a rather morbid thing to say, Melissa,’ she said, and kept on reading the morning notices.

  But I didn’t care. I was elated. Mr Granger wasn’t dead! And where there was life, there was hope. I felt like a great weight had been lifted off me.

  ‘It’s great news about Mr Granger, isn’t it?’ I said to Soph as we were heading for class.

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘Well, him not being dead.’

  ‘Oh,’ Soph said. ‘Sure.’ But I could tell she wasn’t very interested in my emotional turmoil. Vicky Lind and Ravi were taking up all the available space.