by Joanna Wiebe
I rest my head on my desk. I pull the note closer to me and, with the working half of the pencil, begin sketching Ben and Garnet’s intertwined fingers in the top corner. The stroke of my pencil lulls my mind back into my conversation with Teddy last night, back to everything he told me in the stillness of the woods. I know now why I was allowed to step foot in this school. It had nothing to do with my dad’s position as a funeral director to the wealthy, although surely that’s been a perk for Mephisto. I’m here because I’m one of the bad guys.
Molly kicks my chair again. I jerk my head but don’t look at her.
I draw a heart around Ben and Garnet’s hands.
I catch a glimpse of my reflection in the window and squint to try to make out Gia, but I see only a wild-haired blonde with her dad’s eyes. Surely the reason I was able to see Gia that night in the mirror was because we are more spirit than flesh here, and something—what, I’m not sure—triggered it; I would never see her in California, and I might never have known about my soul’s past had I not been thrust into a coma at the hand of my mother.
Will I ever see Gia again?
Will I see her soon?
If I’m more spirit than flesh here, am I more Gia than Anne?
Do the demons here know who I am? Dia knows. Mephisto obviously does. And if the Seven Sinning Sisters served me, surely they’ve known my secret all along. That’s why they wanted to meet me in Dia’s office. I told myself they wanted to see the girl who’d outsmarted Mephisto, but they really wanted to see their former leader.
I glance at Harper and Agniezska, who are sitting on the opposite side of the room swapping lip glosses, kissing their compact mirrors, and blotting their lips clean to start again. All this time, I’ve accused Harper of profiting from her own objectification; I’ve never let the image of her on her knees before Trey Sedmoney, exchanging sexual favors like they’re some sort of currency, leave my mind. And yet she’s got nothing on Gia. I started as a succubus. I traded sex for souls.
I close my eyes.
I can’t bear the thought.
I can’t bear any of this. Especially not if I have to bear it alone.
So I scribble a note on the back of Ben’s and, stretching like I’m yawning, drop it on Molly’s desk. I listen for the familiar sounds—unfolding, pen scratching, refolding, fake scratch of her leg so she can drop the note and kick it my way—and scoop it up. We spend the rest of study hall feigning deep studying while writing back and forth.
I did come here for a fresh start. A second chance for me—not for Gia.
Molly said I had a choice. If she’s right, then I choose me.
Sorry, Teddy. Sorry, Mom. Sorry, Gia. But I choose Anne Merchant.
And that is how I find myself, that afternoon, back in my old room in Gigi’s attic. I am staring down the staircase. Its sharp wooden edges. Its narrow width.
It was at the bottom of these steps that I woke last. Things were different then. If this much has changed in four months, perhaps by the time May rolls around, I’ll have forgotten all about Ben and Garnet, Dia and Gia, Teddy, and Molly—and I’ll be living it up in California. So I take a deep breath. Close my eyes. And let myself fall. I tumble hard, feeling every wooden corner, every jutting nail, every thick sliver jabbing my skin. I land in a heap at the bottom.
But it’s not like it was so many months ago. Nothing happens.
“Damn pentobarbital,” I say to the ceiling.
The tears begin. With my hair all over my face, wet with sweat and blood, and splayed out on the landing of a house they’re bound to demo any day, I cry. In short sobs, I imagine what it would be like if I’d woken now. Would it be any better? I’d be livin’ it up at the ol’ Fair Oaks Funeral Home. Spending my weekdays shoegazing as I walk through Menlo-Atherton High—Go Bears!—and my weekends nerding out back at the library my mom used to work at. Living in a house with dead people, being ignored by rich high-schoolers, painting morbid drawings in my ample spare time, torturing myself with ideas of Ben and Garnet’s date-night activities. My dad would be free of this place, thanks to the arrangement I made so long ago, but then what?
It’d be just like life here.
Except I wouldn’t have Molly.
I’d escape my crazy responsibilities and crazier spiritual history. But would I be any better off in my old life? And if I go home, would I stand even the remotest, smallest, fleeting-est chance of seeing Ben again? At least here I’ve got that. I can see Ben in the halls and remind myself that there was a time when. I can tell myself that he had to be put under a spell to be separated from me. I can tell myself that I loved him enough to do this for him.
“Waking up is always an option,” I tell the emptiness and get to my knees, crawling back up the steps. “I choose to stay. At least until Ben’s safe.”
I hunch on the top step and wrap my coat around myself. If things get awful—if I catch Ben and Garnet kissing or something equally nightmarish—I can always do a thousand swan-dives from this very step until I wake in sunny C-A.
I recall the goals I listed just yesterday as I walked to Dia’s office.
One, save Ben.
Two, help my mom by helping Teddy.
Three, get off this godforsaken island.
I glance at the chair Ben sat in so many nights ago. He was soaking wet and stunningly beautiful. I can almost see his glowing silhouette now in the shadows. There’s no question in my mind. I need to guarantee that Ben gets the Big V. And I need to use the resources at my disposal to do so.
“Be Saligia,” I whisper.
The house shudders with a gust of wind.
I know what I have to do. I know I’ll have to start with Pilot, a punk so low ranking Mephisto won’t notice his absence from his ranks. I just need to find the right moment to go for it—and hope the slippery slope I’m about to walk doesn’t send me flying back to Hell.
SEMESTER
TWO
seventeen
THE ROAD TO HELL
MOLLY AND I ARE SITTING BEHIND HARPER AND HER NEWEST recruit, a girl named Jasmina, who enrolled at Cania days after Emo Boy and the other Unlucky Twenty were expelled. That was a little over a month ago. All twenty of the empty seats have been filled; it makes you wonder if Dia didn’t expel a tenth of the population just to cash in on a bunch of new tuition fees.
The second semester of our junior year starts today, bringing with it A Critical Exploration of the Supernatural in Literature and Society, known in normal schools as English class.
Superbia is our instructor. She elegantly sets stacks of novels on the first table of each row. She doesn’t tell us to take one and pass it back; there is little the goddess of pride would deign to do. Harper, a goddess in her own right, waits for Jasmina to hand a copy of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray to her and lets her do the work of passing the remaining four hardcovers back to us. Because, like Superbia, Harper doesn’t do grunt work.
Superbia stands, looking down her nose at us, at the front of the classroom. Her hair is pinned in a bun high on her head. She makes everything look small and futile. Especially her cowering students.
“Morality. Immorality. Meaning,” Superbia says. Her commanding voice silences us. “Mortality. Immortality. Art,” she adds, raising a copy of The Picture of Dorian Gray.
She flips open the book to exactly the page she wants, and as everyone scrambles to find where she is, she reads: “We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us.” She glances up at us, her violet eyes piercing, before continuing: “Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden itself.”
She places the book down.
You can feel a question coming.
The whole room tenses.
“The movement that Mr. Wilde, through Lord Henry, was referring to here,” Superbia begins, eying us. “What is it?”
I glance around as, one by one, my classmates drop their heads, preten
d to read or, in Molly’s case, simply wait for someone else to answer.
I raise my hand.
“Miss Merchant,” Superbia says. She drags out the s and snaps her teeth together on the t. To her, my name is just a cover for my darker identity, the way Superbia is just a cover for pride.
“He was referring to aestheticism,” I say.
“Which is what?”
Dia and I discussed the most popular aesthetes, Whistler and Rossetti, in our first session. Spending all those Saturdays with him, even if I’ve skipped them since the Scrutiny, drove into my head his love for beauty and his own position as an aesthete.
“It’s a movement that holds that there’s no purpose for art outside of creating or representing beauty,” I say. “Art for art’s sake.”
“Very good. Thank you, Miss Merchant.”
She slowly paces the front of the room.
Molly writes on the top of her page, Smarty pants. I add a smiley face under it.
“Oscar Wilde is perhaps the best-known aesthete of his time in the literary world,” Superbia says, “though the debate continues as to whether he was promoting or condemning the intensity and, dare I say, meaningless gluttony in the novel you’ll read, dissect, and know by heart before the end of this term.”
When Superbia turns to write on the board, Harper scowls over her shoulder at me. Jasmina, realizing she must support her great leader, copies her. Molly rubs her cheek with her middle finger until they get the picture.
“Now what,” Superbia turns back to us, “might be problematic about pegging Mr. Wilde as an aesthete?”
When no one else raises their hand, Jasmina inches hers up. Like she’s scared Harper might flip out on her for having a brain. Superbia nods for Jasmina to speak.
“Well, Wilde’s the one that said, ‘To define is to limit,’ right?”
“In this very book. Chapter seventeen. To define is to limit,” Superbia says as pages flip. It occurs to me that I’ve heard that line before. Must be popular. “Who says it?”
Without having read the book, it’s almost impossible to know. Quotations in this scene are sparsely attributed, and the scene goes on forever. I don’t know who says that line—either this Lord Henry dude, or this Gladys chick, or Dorian Gray himself. I grimace at Molly, and she shrugs.
“Nobody knows?” Superbia asks.
Everyone’s madly skimming the lines.
“It’s Dorian!” Harper calls out at last.
“Try Lord Henry.” Superbia tsks at Harper. “Dorian rarely says anything interesting; he tends to quote others. Dorian is beauty; he is never wit. His existence both challenges and is the foundation of aestheticism.” I feel like she’s speaking directly to me when she adds, “Any artist would be wise to steer clear of Dorian.”
I can’t help but wonder if she’s talking about Dia, who’s as beautiful as Wilde might have imagined Dorian to be. Is she trying to warn me to stay away from him? From somebody, certainly. But whom?
For the rest of the hour, Superbia reads snippets of the book and asks questions few dare to answer. Harper tries to define art, at Superbia’s request, but fails so miserably Superbia bans her from speaking again. By the time class lets out, I understand that this is the story of a beautiful dude named Dorian Gray who trades his soul for eternal youth and beauty and winds up trapped in a painting that—spoiler alert—gets destroyed, killing him. I’m pleasantly surprised to know we’re going to be discussing art. It’ll be a nice reprieve from what these next few weeks have in store for me.
Life as I know it is about to change.
It has to.
Even if I don’t want to think about doing what Teddy said about getting demons to follow me somehow, I can’t put it off any longer. And, if Ben’s going to win the Big V this May, I need to get moving on my plan. Stat.
“Everything okay?” Molly asks as we leave class.
“Peachy keen.”
Molly can’t know what I’m plotting. She’d never speak to me again.
That Friday afternoon, as drips of melting icicles rain down on campus, I put my plan in action. I find Pilot kicking back espressos in the cafeteria after school. He’s looking about as pissed as one punk can look. But it gets even worse when he spies me. His face scrunches up into a little knot.
“You’ve missed more of our meetings than I can count,” he snaps.
“Um, lest you forget, you totally bailed on me the second the Scrutiny gave me an out.” I pull out a chair. “You realized you couldn’t use me anymore, and you took off. And then when I won!”
“Hi, my name’s Pilot Stone. I’m selfish,” he growls. “Nice to meet you.”
“Whatever. I’m over it. Actually, that’s why I’m here. To help you. And me.”
“That’ll be the day.”
“I’m serious.”
“Seriously playing me.”
“You can keep going like this,” I tell him, “but you’re wasting precious time.”
Scoffing, he heads off to make a second espresso, looking over his shoulder at me every so often, like he’s not sure if I’m kidding or not. Like he’s indecisive. There’s no way he’s indecisive; I’m his only hope. And he’s not demon enough yet to have abandoned all hope. That said, he’s pretty angry. He starts rattling off his frustrations with me—and he’s got a lot of them—and the rumors before he’s even back at our table. I strain to hear the end of his tirade.
“They’re saying that, after the Scrutiny, Ben admitted he’d never been into you, like who didn’t see that coming, and he dropped that on you just as you were about to give him your second life.”
“Who’s saying that?”
“Only everyone. And, instead of asking for something that would help you, jealous little chick you are, you asked Dia to deform Ben and Garnet’s babies.” He shoves the demitasse into my hands. “Here. You like coffee, and I’ve spent so many afternoons here waiting for you, I’ve learned to make it like a prize barista.”
I take the tiny cup and saucer.
“Well, the rumor mill’s turning out some real crap.” I watch Pilot sit again. “People actually believe Ben dumped me just as I was about to save his life—because that would be super-smart of him—and my oh-so brilliant response was to…curse his future kids?”
“It’s not true?”
I roll my eyes.
“Likely story, Merchant. So now Ben’s back with Garnet, where he belongs,” he says, “and Little Miss Artsy-Fartsy realizes she’s pissed away her Get Out of Jail Free card on the boy who broke her heart. And comes crawling back to me. Is that it?” He watches me sip my espresso. “And now you wanna get serious about the Big V so you don’t have to watch them anymore, right?”
His assumptions are starting to irritate me. So I cut to the chase.
“Pi, I know who I am.”
“You know you’re a loser death chick who got her ass dumped.”
“No.” I try to stare into his head, as if that might help him focus. “I know who I am. Who I was.”
We sit in silence. He blinks.
“I was Gia. Miss Saligia. The underworld goddess.”
Wheezing through his teeth, like he’s torn between smiling and wondering if he’s got even more to worry about now, Pilot eyes me up. I swirl the black liquid through its perfectly brown crema in the porcelain demitasse. He’s taking a while to process this.
“Look, before you start making BS jokes,” I begin.
He leans in, closer this time, conspiratorially. “Anne, as much as I want out of the underworld, I’m not a moron. I know my rank here. And I know you’ve got—” he lowers his voice until it’s little more than a rumble. “Anne, you’ve still got a lot of demons who dig you around this place. And in other places. You saw how Invidia bitched me out when I blinked wrong at you. I’m not gonna talk smack.”
I was hoping to hear how the demons feel about me. But Pilot doesn’t need to know that. I act stupid so he’ll keep talking.
“Are you sayin
g demons here know who I used to be?” I ask him.
“Not who you were. Who you are.”
“But I’m not her.”
“Yes, you are. You just don’t have any servants. I mean, Harper has more followers than you do.”
I was thinking the same thing. Dia said it himself: Trey Sedmoney worships Harper. And then there’s the Model UN from Hell—slaves if I ever saw them.
“The people who know Anne Merchant think she’s the girl in a coma,” Pilot continues. “The people who know Miss Saligia think she’s on, like, a vacation. Both sides are waiting for you to come back. Wake up. Be your old self again. Question for you: Which side will you choose?”
I focus on the warmth of the cup against my fingertips.
He sips his coffee, and I sip mine.
“You should change your PT,” he says at last. “Embrace who you were. Use it. You were a succubus in the beginning, and then you led thousands of them.”
“What would I do with a different PT? Bat my eyelashes and host a kissing booth…on the off chance that Dia or Hiltop agree to let me, with my history, leave this island? You honestly think that’s the best plan? You think I’m going anywhere the old-fashioned way?”
“Well, if you’re not gonna win it,” he says, “then why are we even talking?”
“I’m wondering the same thing.” I shake my head, disappointed in him. “I would’ve thought you’d have something more creative worked out by now, Stone. Instead, you spent the last month perfecting espresso.”
He rests his chin on his fist and goes quiet for a bit. Thinking, thinking.
“You had powers and legions and all that amazing stuff—stuff I’d sell my soul for, if it was worth anything,” he says. “Do you have any powers now?”
“Only the power to drive people away from me.”
“Depending on the person, that can be useful.”
“Ha.”
He looks caught between jumping ship and taking the wheel. I can only wait for him to come up with the idea I need him to. I can’t suggest it or he might not go for it—but if he starts thinking what I’m thinking, this could get interesting fast.