Devilish

by Maureen Johnson

  I didn’t have to turn and look to know that the red-headed girl smiled. I could feel it in my spine.

  I cornered Ally the second the bell rang.

  “Your hair,” I said. “What did you do to it?”

  She reached up and touched her head gently, as if she was petting a baby bunny I had just informed her was squatting there.

  “I just decided I needed a change,” she said. “So I went out last night and got my hair done. Do you like it?”

  “It’s nice,” I said uncertainly. “I’m just getting used to it. I wish you had told me.”

  “I don’t actually need permission from you to get my hair done,” she snapped.

  Ally had never snapped at me before.

  “I didn’t say that,” I said. “I was just worried.”

  “I think you’re pissed off that I knew something you didn’t,” she said. “Feeling stupid sucks, huh?”

  And with that, she walked away.

  I’d never argued with Allison before. Allison was my best friend. A fight between us was so unfamiliar and unexpected—something unthinkable, like someone in their first earthquake, unable to accept the fact that the earth is wiggling like jelly under their feet. Literally. I felt a little unsteady as I went down the hall.

  That’s when I noticed that all of those flyers were gone. Not even a piece of tape remained to show where they had been.

  nine

  At the end of the day, all I really wanted to do was go home. I still had no keys, though. That meant I had to go all the way across town to The Pink Peppercorn to borrow my mom’s. I snagged a chunk of apricot cheesecake on the way out and ate it with my fingers right out of the bag.

  As I was leaving, a little sports car approached. It was small and tight in an autobahn-ready kind of way and was a steely shade of silver. The back of it was swollen and curvy, and the front was very small, with the two front wheels set off from the body of the car. It pulled along the curb. A man in a very neat pin-striped suit stepped out and came over to the menu case, near where I was standing with my hand in a gloopy mess of cheesecake.

  “Can you tell me,” he said, “what time this restaurant opens? I have heard some very good things about it.”

  “I think … five, maybe?” I said.

  “Don’t you work here?”

  “No.”

  He stepped back and looked me up and down, then nodded in satisfaction.

  “That is a school uniform you’re wearing,” he said. “Not the uniform of a waitress. My apologies.”

  “Don’t worry about it. But it is a good restaurant. My mom works here.”

  “Does she?” He seemed delighted by this. He leaned over me to examine the menu in its little glass box, mumbling some appreciation under his breath.

  “A pumpkin risotto. How apropos for this time of year. And a lovely lamb chop with sauté of baby vegetables. Oh yes. Delectable. I do like my food young. But what would you recommend?”

  This was unpleasant and affected but not entirely unexpected. Providence does attract a lot of freaky foodies.

  “The squid’s good,” I said. “They stuff it with fennel. Or something.”

  “Ah. Calamari. Yes. Yes, yes, yes.”

  A dog’s black muzzle popped out of the car window and sniffed at the air eagerly.

  “Providence is a fine town for dining,” the man went on, tapping on the glass with his finger. “I think it rivals New York. And so many fine houses. Many of the lovely houses in this town …”

  He stopped tapping and swung his gaze up suddenly.

  “Do you know what paid for many of them?” he asked.

  I remained silent, like you’re supposed to do when someone wants to impress you with something they know.

  “Slavery,” he said, grinning slowly, revealing a mouth full of small, delicate teeth. “Strange how there’s a dark underbelly to so many beautiful things.”

  “There’s a lot of ugly history,” I said. “I guess every place has a hidden story.”

  “That is absolutely true,” he said. Something in my answer seemed to have pleased him because he extended his hand in a very businesslike fashion. I’m not used to getting handshakes, so I took it uncertainly. His hand was freezing, and his skin was almost gray, but his nails were better manicured than mine (meaning, they were manicured) and his grip was firm. If he noticed the traces of cheesecake on my fingers, he didn’t show it.

  “My name is Mr. Fields, by the way. And what is yours, young lady?”

  “Jane,” I said.

  “An excellent, simple name but one of greatness! And certainly one with history. There was a queen of England named Jane. She was queen for nine days.”

  “Jane Grey,” I said. “I know. I was named for her.”

  This was true. I was named for Jane Grey, and my sister was named for Joan of Arc. Both great women of history—both met very bad ends. I don’t know what my parents were trying to tell us with that one.

  “This interests me very much,” Mr. Fields said, pulling a pair of round glasses from his breast pocket and putting them on hastily to examine me more closely. “You were named for her, you say?”

  I nodded.

  “You must be an exceptional young lady,” he said. “I can see that. Lady Jane Grey—she too was an exceptional young lady. Fifteen years old and nine days of total power before they beheaded her.”

  He seemed to be drawing a line with his eyes across my neck. I pulled up the collar of my coat.

  “It was a pleasure speaking to you, Jane,” he said. “We will return at five to enjoy some lamb chops, which I am certain will be excellent. Have a very good day.”

  He walked back to his car and drove off. He slowly wove away, leaving me to wonder about the general weirdness that was following me. There was something wrong in Providence today, and I, for one, was going home to hide from it.

  ten

  On the trolley home, I tried to read our English assignment, the first two chapters of Moby Dick. It was a fish book. I wasn’t feeling it. I took out a vampire novel called Fondled by Shadows that Ally had given me a few weeks before and tried to lose myself in that. Vampires had never done much for me, but Ally loved them. (Basically, if it had a witch or a vampire in it, Ally was there.) I tried as hard as I could, but I bailed at the first glint of pointy teeth and shoved it back into my bag.

  I looked out of the window to see that the sky had gone from gray to a kind of milky green, and it had begun to move, like it was being slowly stirred by a great celestial spoon. The heat that had crushed us the entire day lifted all at once, and by the time I got off, there was a decidedly cool edge to the air. Weather, I knew, was not supposed to change that quickly—and if it did, something was about to happen. I had several blocks before I would be home, and I wanted to make it.

  As I exited the trolley, I felt a sharp sting on the soft, very thin skin just under my right eye. It felt exactly like the time Allison accidentally pennied me in the face when we were sophomores. I wiped it off my face. It was a tiny piece of ice.

  “Not good,” I said to myself, speeding up.

  Something landed by my feet—something that looked like a small Ping-Pong ball but was also a piece of ice. I heard a clunk. A car alarm behind me went off. Another clunk came from next to me. An ice ball bounced heavily off the hood of a car. The sound of ice hitting metal and the echo of car alarms ran the entire length of the street.

  I broke into a full run and the pelting really began. A chunk of ice punched right through someone’s mailbox like it was made of paper. My legs were pumping harder than I’d ever forced them to go. I heard a windshield break at the same time I felt something like a baseball hit my ankle and I went down in the street.

  “Move, Jane,” I told myself as I got to my feet. Ice clipped my ear, my left hand. I was hobbling, and I wasn’t sure where to go. There was ice smacking down all around, golf-ball-sized and getting bigger.

  Suddenly, an arm was scooping me up and hustling me a
long. I glanced over at its owner, a tall, young-looking guy.

  “Over there,” he said, dragging me in the direction of a large blue house with a full wraparound porch. We literally threw ourselves up its steps and under its overhang.

  I took a closer look at the guy who had just plucked me from the street. He was a very reedy Sebastian’s student. His uniform was grossly oversized, cinched together by a belt. He had slightly shaggy light red hair and a very finely featured face, with a tiny nose and thin, peaked eyebrows.

  “I don’t know about this porch roof,” he said, looking up at the beams overhead. The volley of ice struck our shelter with such force that it was hard to hear him speak. I had to move closer.

  “Well,” I said, “I don’t think we have much choice. It’s not like we can rebuild it right now.”

  “No,” he said thoughtfully, as if this had been a serious proposition.

  The rain gutter came down with a deafening clang, spearing a shrub like a big white toothpick through a cocktail olive.

  “You should get your weight off that ankle,” he said. “Sit down.”

  He helped me onto a rocking chair. I pushed down my sock and examined the fist-sized blue mark that was blossoming there. It immediately overshadowed the marks I’d gotten on my knees that morning.

  “I bet that hurts,” he said, squatting to have a good look. “But it’s probably not broken.”

  I realized I hadn’t had a chance to shave my legs that morning and pulled the sock up.

  “It’s fine,” I said. “I’m Jane, by the way.”

  “I’m Owen.”

  “So, you’re a freshman at Sebastian’s?”

  “Yeah. How did you know?”

  “Your uniform,” I said. “It has the freshman look. It’s too big.”

  I didn’t mean anything by it, but he pulled selfconsciously at his shirt. Sometimes I forget that guys also care about what their clothes look like.

  A small black cat scrambled up onto the porch and joined us. As soon as it had reached safety, it started meowing plaintively and ran to me as if it knew me. It wanted to rub against my ankle, but it was too sore. Owen found a plastic bag in his backpack and made me an impromptu ice pack, then he patrolled the edge of the porch, watching the progress of the storm.

  “So how do you like Sebastian’s?” I asked.

  “All high schools are the same,” he said. “I guess it’s kind of easier having all guys. It keeps you focused.”

  This was not the point of view of the average freshman Sebastianite. When not snorting, bouncing soccer balls off their heads, or destroying the mansion they occupied, they were up to other equally high-minded pursuits. These ranged from becoming acolytes just so they could hang out in our chapel, to clinging to the fence after school and shouting things like, “I like your bra. Can I see it?”

  “That’s one way of looking at it,” I said.

  “Yeah.” He shook his head. “I know. People tell me all the time that I’m too serious.”

  We settled into a comfortable silence as we waited out the storm. After about fifteen minutes, it slowed down. The deep green of the sky lifted to a more normal gray, then to sunshine. The ground was thick with ice balls, some smashed to pieces, some still perfectly round. I reached down and picked up one that was easily the size of an orange. People were coming out now, coming into the streets that were completely echoing with car alarms. The sunlight reflected off the ice, nearly blinding us all.

  “And they say there’s nothing weird happening to the climate,” I said, throwing my ice orange into the ground and smashing it. “Global warming’s a myth.”

  “I’ll walk you home,” Owen said.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Just let me,” he said. “Okay?”

  We had to kick our way through the ice at points, but we got back to my house in one piece. My sister was coming up the sidewalk at the same time we were.

  “You okay?” she asked. “This storm was the best!”

  Then she noticed Owen. And the fact that I was limping. And that he was supporting me.

  One thing I’m pretty certain of: My sister, Joan, will probably not end up on the faculty of MIT. The Nobel Committee will not be calling our house to inform us that she had won a prize. But let me tell you what my sister can do like no one else I’ve ever known: She can home in on an awkward situation involving me like an awkward-situation-seeking missile. She can read minds and see through walls if something weird is happening to me.

  “Don’t,” I said.

  “What?” she answered.

  “I mean it.”

  “I’m not!”

  She turned to Owen.

  “So you are … a guy,” she said.

  Owen neither confirmed nor denied. He just blinked at Joan. This conversation was clearly making him nervous.

  “I should go,” he said. “Since we’re here. Oh. And here. This is my … e-mail. And phone number. You should call me or something. And can I have yours?”

  He produced a pen and a piece of paper. With Joan looking on, I quickly wrote these down.

  “Thanks for the help,” I said.

  Joan was practically bouncing when he left. She took my bag so that I could hop up the steps to the door. I collapsed onto the sofa and propped up my leg.

  “Who’s the boyfriend?” she said. “He had his arm around you!”

  “The freshman is not my boyfriend.”

  “Does that mean you’re going to stop obsessing over Elton?”

  “I am not obsessed with Elton. I am not anything.”

  “Would you say that you have a neuter charge?” she said, clearly trying to show off. “Like a proton?”

  “Neutral charge,” I corrected her. “Protons are positive. Neutrons are neutral. And neuter is what we did to Crick so he wouldn’t hump every spaniel in town.”

  Crick, our little Scottie, looked up when he heard his name spoken. He looked like a grumpy old man who’d just been disturbed from reading his newspaper.

  “Poor widdle wumpkins!” Joan cooed. “They wook his little noodle! Come here, wumpkins!”

  Crick trotted over to Joan merrily, unaware that she had just been casually talking about what had to be one of the most painful and defining moments in his life.

  “If you don’t want the number,” she went on, “give it to me. I’ll call him.”

  “Forget it,” I said, quickly slipping the paper into one of my books.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t like Owen—it was more that I didn’t want to get Joan, or anyone else, started on discussions about me or my love life. I had taken a private vow not to even think about that stuff again until I was safely in college.

  Thankfully, my father arrived home, and the subject was dropped.

  eleven

  The TV news trucks rolled into town all through the night. They came from Providence, Boston, New York … they shot from the tops of the highest streets, through broken church windows, did close-ups of the chunks that had been knocked out of the concrete river walk wall.

  Our neighborhood had taken a pounding. There were holes punched through our neighbor’s car and our shed roof, so we spent the night watching my dad getting bright lights shone in his face while he happily rambled on about velocity and trajectories. (Not that they used any of that stuff in the end. They just said, “Professor Michael Jarvis of Brown University describes the damage to his property.” And my dad said, “The ice came through the shed roof.” And that was it. He was very disappointed.)

  I developed an ugly green bruise on my ankle but was otherwise okay. I didn’t reply to an e-mail that arrived late that night that read:

  Really good meeting you. Give me a call, okay? Owen

  • • •

  The first thing we noticed when we got to school the next morning was the statue of St. Teresa that stood by the front door looked like she’d just been in a bar fight and lost. She was pockmarked and blistered, and two of the finger-tips at the end of her bashe
d, outstretched arms had broken off. Eight huge windows at the front of the school had been smashed, and the beveled glass sign above the door was fragmented into a cloudy mess of filaments held together by nothing but luck, on the verge of blowing into a rain of glass shards.

  Inside, things were worse. The fire alarm kept going off. A massive power surge had blown out all the lights, and the hail had broken through a pipe. It was very dark. Water fountains and toilets kept turning themselves on, gushing high, spilling onto the floors. The baffled maintenance men rushed along with Sister Anna Thomas, our hale and hearty head of school. Some tapped on walls and dragged buckets, while the others carried long boxes of fluorescent lightbulbs.

  As I was struggling with my lock in the dark, there was an announcement that classes were postponed for an hour and that we were to go and wait in the gym. It was obvious that there was no way they’d be able to enforce this, and everyone seemed to know it. For the first time in my memory, orderly St. Teresa’s became a bit of a real free-for-all. It was impossible to really tell who was who, and there was a huge amount of noise as everyone started talking and randomly screaming when they got splashed and the alarms started going again.

  In the chaos, I almost didn’t notice the large figure of Brother Frank hustling through the dark, guiding Sister Charles in my direction.

  “Jane,” he said, clasping me by both shoulders and startling me. “Quite a storm, that. Last night, eh?”

  He was out of breath, for no apparent reason. It wasn’t like you walked that fast when you were with Sister Charles. Worry also made him more Irish-sounding.

  “Yeah. I got trapped on a porch with a guy.”

  “A guy, eh? What guy is this, then?”

  “Some freshman from Sebastian’s.”

  He turned and glanced back at Sister Charles. I could have smacked myself. Everything must seem sexual if you’re a nun or a brother.

  “It wasn’t anything,” I added quickly. “We just got stuck walking home. It was pretty bad.”

  “Right. No. Grand. Grand. Got home safely, then? Quiet night otherwise?”