by Holly Black
God, please, please, God.
Not, of course, that she really put too much faith in that particular fable, any more than she truly “believed” any of the other mildly comforting stories she’d told herself over the years. Or maybe she did—but only at moments like these. Only when the stakes were high, and all other avenues of escape closed.
Make Wang not tell. Make Janice not be home when the school calls.
A bird sang suddenly, somewhere in the gathering dark.
Make Doug not come home. Not yet. Not ever.
It was cold.
Yeah, and why not ask for a smaller rack while you’re at it, reality sneered back at her, from every visible angle.
Rustling in the bushes, now, on either side. Snide whispers. Giggling.
“Hey, Heather … ”
Just two weeks before, Mrs. Diamond (Jenny’s mother, the school nurse and that most contradictory of things, a nice adult) had maintained cheerily that all these girls would be jealous of her in a year—even, improbably enough, Jenny herself. In a year, they’d be desperate to have what she had, to be what they thought she was. The same Jenny who’d already decided it was real good fun to make sure an open box of Tampax somehow snuck onto her desk during recess, or rifle through her bag at lunch and then leave one of her pads—oh so artistically arranged—where everybody could see it, snicker, make comments. A white-winged hunk of cotton squatting in the homeroom doorway like some flattened mouse: Ooh, hey, guys. What’cha think this is, huh?
(Well, we know who it prob’ly belongs to, at least … )
Snicker, snicker, snicker.
Dropping squashed packages of McDonald’s ketchup in her binder, knowing they’d smear and dry like brown Krazy Glue all across her journal, her poems. Just looked like the kinda thing you’d like, Heyyy-ther. Soh-REE.
Didn’t matter how many words she strung together, or how well—how many plants she could raise, catalogue, research or harvest, to what mysterious and potentially fatal purposes. In the world outside her own freakishly pubescent body, it was the Jenny Diamonds who had the real power, always. Always.
But: Poor Mrs. Diamond, bound and determined to put the best possible face on everything, however bleak. While she just sat there, thinking—
Yeah, well. In a year, a thousand different things could happen. I could be dead in a year.
Or rather: Christ, I hope so.
“Yo, Heyyyy-ther … ”
She levered up, made the stream’s far side in one long-legged jump. Heard yelps rise behind her at the flicker of movement (there she is, there she IS!), and ducked headlong into the underbrush without a backwards glance, heading directly up: Up through the poison oak, up under the shifting grey-green shadows of trees, up where the hiking trail’s woodchip-lined trail turned to mud and mush. Remembered the last time the clique had chased her down here, running her through the blackberry bushes till she was breathless with stinging scratches. Like she’d accidentally grabbed the Black Spot and just not known it; like she was marked with fluorescent paint, invisible to everyone but them. Like she was some kind of, what was that word—scapegoat?
Chosen ahead of time, like around kindergarten, to sink and drown under a steady tide of bullying, or picked on simply because she’d been unlucky enough to have grown boobs a year earlier than everybody else—to have them when they were still age-inappropriate enough to be weird instead of jealousy-bait, before they were prized collateral on instant cool. On top of every other unlucky goddamn thing.
And then that older guy Paul—fifteen at least, a kept-back retard hanging with the Fives and playing Master Of The Universe ’cause everybody else didn’t know any better—had caught up to her at last, shot out in front of everybody else to grab her by the sleeve and wrench, so the two of them went down in a heap together with her hair in the mud, and him on top. Grinning a wet, dumb smile as he stuck his hand down her shirt, like he was fishing for some kind of surprise gift-bag through a carny peep-hole.
“Heather, baby—man, that set feels nice. Just like a couple a’ water-balloons.”
“Get off—”
“Aw, you know you want it. Just be cool and go ’long, baby, everybody knows you’re fifty pounds of slut in a five-pound bag … ”
(They can, y’know—just smell it on you.)
She felt poison well in her heart, a cold black spurt; rolled and got on top of him all in one crazy lurch, using both fists to hammer his head down hard against the nearest hard thing: A root, a rock.
“Crazy mother b—”
He jumped back, bleeding, and the fear on his face was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. But the rush of it drained away, so fast.
If this was a movie, it only occurred to her now (as she pulled herself ever further upwards through the mucky treeline, her boots sopping-slippery with mud), then Jenny and her gang would later turn out to have cut the first girl to menstruate from the school herd every year. There’d be some conspiracy. These girls would disappear, never to be seen again—bleached bones under a swatch of weeds somewhere in the Ravine, after a terrifying midnight hunt …
But it wasn’t a movie: Just life, nothing more or less. Considerably less interesting. Considerably more hurtful.
Further up the hill, the house’s porch-light had come on. A car was pulling up outside—driver’s side door painted with a coal-bright tiger, crouched and ready to pounce. The other was hidden from this angle; a voluptuous woman, censored by flowers.
God, you bastard.
The tiger opened. So did the front door.
She straightened, suddenly composed.
Tell you what, she thought. Make you a deal. You don’t really have to make anything happen, okay? Just make me not care, when it does.
That’s all.
A heartfelt prayer. Yet God, as usual, stayed silent.
And oh but she knew, so very very well, that her whole stupid life was an Afterschool Special cliché from top to bottom—her problems clichés too, each and every one of them. Plot twists so stale they all but gave off dust. Ludicrous. Laughable. Lame.
None of which made the pain any easier to take, however, if and—
(no, just when)
—it came.
The rats, sated, had long since gone their ways. Janice was heading down the yard, already almost to the Ravine’s lip. Beside her was a shadow in embroidered jeans, sizeable hand on equally sizeable hip. No visible means of escape.
Before her parents could start to call, therefore, she stood up. And waved.
“You decent?” Doug asked, pushing the door open; luckily, she was. This time.
She stood in front of the mirror, flossing carefully. One side, then the other, each tooth in turn. Wrap and pull. Up, down and all around, like a see-saw.
The dentist was a luxury. If she’d left it up to them, she wouldn’t have a tooth left in her head.
Go away.
“Missed you at dinner, pie.”
Right hand on her shoulder, heavy as a full vacuum-cleaner bag. The warped mirror bent his fingers back, blurring them together: One strange flipper.
“Ah elt ick,” she said, mid-wrap.
“Put that down, babe. Let me look at you a while.”
That’s an order, she thought, bracing herself. Floss to the garbage, with a flick. She turned, eyes shaded, as if to some erratic light-source more apt to blind than to illuminate. He grinned back, eyes glued to her chest, watching it bounce with the movement.
“Jan told me you did some more growing up while I was gone this time,” he said. “And I thought she was joking. My oh my.”
A whiff of dope from down the hall; Van Morrison on the stereo. She could almost hear him now, soft and infinitely plausible, at least to a woman kite-high on Doug’s own no-name brand of weed: Just leave us two alone to get reacquainted a while, Jan—play Daddy, y’know. All that good crap.
“’Course, I already saw you when I got back.”
The cap was off the toothpaste. “
Driving up, you mean.”
Big grin. “Naaah, I mean last night. I was just off shopping, that’s why I wasn’t there at breakfast. But I saw you, all right. Was about three, so you were fast asleep, cute as a button, lyin’ there in that big t-shirt … you sure you don’t remember?”
She swallowed; the vise was back again. “No.”
“Well, here I was watching you—and it being so long and all, I decided I’d give you a kiss. So I bend down, put my hand up to touch your face, and you know what you did?” Pause for reaction. None forthcoming, so: “Latched onto my fingers, and then you start—licking ’em, right? Like each one was some old lollipop. Licking and licking.” Still nothing. “Isn’t that just the sweetest?”
“I’d never.”
A shrug. “’Cept you did.”
She finally spotted the cap, a red smudge wedged between divisions, halfway down the drain. Have to use the tweezers on that. “You’re lying,” she said, not looking up.
“Now, would I lie?”
Only every day of my life.
“I gotta go to bed. School.”
But he caught her in mid-stride, backing the door shut; licorice on his breath, rank with time. Pinning both her hands as he reached high over her head for the nearest bottle of moisturizer.
“Dad, please don’t,” she whispered. “Not anymore. Please, it hurts.”
“But sweetie,” he said, almost genuinely shocked. “You know I only do this for you, right? All part’a growing up.”
Don’t break you in now, it just hurts that much worse, later on …
And then they were down on the floor, the tiles cold on her face. Let me not care, let me not care. His hands. Grunting. Distant shapes in the mirror, blurred and distorted beyond recognition.
Plus God, somewhere, laughing his nonexistent ass off.
She dreamed, later—for the first time since she was seven or so, that she could recall. The year it either all started going to hell or she started noticing how bad it already was, whichever came first.
In the dream, she was wearing her long black dress—the one with the stiff Afghani embroidery, red and yellow with little round bits of mirror sewn across the bodice and down the front. A witch’s dress. In real life, it didn’t fit anymore; she slept with it tucked inside her pillow-case, rough against her cheek in darkness.
Hepzibah, a voice called. Hep-zi-bah.
She brushed red hair from her eyes—thigh-long, bloody with a power that crackled through her fingers. The voice seemed to be coming from outside, in the backyard, or further: Yes, from the Ravine. She knelt down from the trumpet-vine’s main knot, awaiting further instructions.
What do you want? The voice asked, finally.
Janice and Doug gone. And Wang. And Jenny Diamond. I don’t want to have to go to school. I want people to leave me alone, or die.
As quick as she said it, the words bred and splintered. A thousand thousand shades of grey, but one true meaning: I want them all to be as much afraid of me as I am, of them.
And it came to her, sitting there in the cool, impossible dirt of her impossible garden—all her carefully-tended poisons abloom at last, ripe and lush for plucking—that there might still be a way to unpick the thread between her and the world around her, even now. To give up all hope of love. To give up pain. To be free, free, free at last.
She felt it all collect, hard and hot, in a lump just below her sternum—a smooth black egg, finally about to hatch.
And: This is the gift, came that same whisper again—from inside, outside or maybe just everywhere, at once. This is what you were marked for. To live.
Confirmation, finally, that the fantasy which had sustained her so far might actually be meant to be … more. Truth, or truth-to-be.
Foreshadowing.
To OUTlive, Hepzibah. Everyone.
Repeating the words, tasting every inch of them, and wondering at the welcome, impossible weight of them.
(everyone)
After all, what did she owe anyone still left inside this shell she called her life? Really?
I always knew it, she thought, amazed at her own perceptiveness. That if I only didn’t have to feel—then nobody could hurt me. Because when you feel nothing, you can do …
… anything.
Later that night, after Doug and Janice had smoked and screwed themselves to sleep, she found their stash, their money, Doug’s ridiculously “high-class” straight-razor. Turned it in her hands thoughtfully, thinking about what if this was America, what if the razor were a gun. Standing over them in the dark, watching them breathe and grumble until the weight of her shadow brought Doug up from sleep.
“Pie—” he’d begin. And: “My name is Hepzibah,” she’d answer. Then shoot him in the face.
Janice might even have time to scream, once.
Resurfacing in darkness, turning away. Musing how in a perfect world, a movie world, this ultimate revelation would have come to her just in time for the nightshade harvest, so she’d have already had time to gather and dry enough atropine-laced leaves to cut her parents’ brownie-hash with dementia and blindness. But you couldn’t always get what you wanted, as she knew all too well; daffodil bulbs stolen from the corner flower-shop and added to tomorrow’s left-out salad-makings would simply have to do, in terms of a stop-gap. Not that she suspected either Doug or Janice would be in any ultra-big hurry to call the cops, anyway, especially over something like the famous disappearing kid having finally just, well—disappeared. For good.
Hepzibah slipped the razor in her jeans pocket and the pre-baggie’d weed down the back of her waistband, pulling her sweatshirt down to cover it. She paused by the hall closet to “choose” between her usual thin coat and Doug’s thick sheepskin jacket, then paused again by the front door to dredge a single, marvelously unfamiliar word up from the very bottom of herself, a new mantra, well worth saying over and over and over.
“No,” she whispered, into the newfound night—an ornate and intact sound, utterly crackless. It pleased her so much that she made it again and again, in time with her own footsteps: Down the stairs, onto the pavement, ’round the corner.
Gone.
A new poem growing, unstoppable, in every fresh beat of her tread.
But beyond their art still lies my heart
Which no one knows, or owns.
A porcelain frame for my secret name;
An eggshell, crammed with broken bones.
It would be thirteen more years and too many dreams of murder to count—fulfilled, unfulfilled, otherwise—before she finally made her first mistake.
The Disappearance of James H___
Hal Duncan
1. The New Boy
There is a new boy at the school. He sits at the desk where Brown once sat, and carved his name in the wood with a pocketknife’s point, and was caned for it; but he is not Brown. He is green. His eyes flash emerald and jade, the colour of gemstones and jungles, foreign seas and forest serpents. He sits where Brown once sat but the master does not notice, nor order him to read from Homer, nor snap his name as he gazes out the window. As he turns to look at me, languid, smiling in his sly silence.
2. A Fob Watch
We watch the fifth formers in the cloisters, all tall enough to wear tailcoats, dandies in top hats, thin cigars in their mouths. I have studied the way they stand, perfected the slouch—both knees bent a little, one shoulder slightly higher than the other, one hand jammed into a pocket. But I still need my fob watch to strike that pose, to be fetching it out to check the time, not simply, self-assuredly louche. So Scottish in my reserve.
—Why do you want to be like them? he says.
—I do not want to be like Brown, I say.
3. In the Dormitory
He takes off the starched collar and the bum-freezer jacket, unbuttons his shirt. In his white breeches and shirt open to the waist but still tucked in, he looks like some prince kidnapped by pirates to serve as cabin boy, or some pauper taken in by a kind doctor, scrubbed
clean to wear a lost son’s clothes. Half-dressed, he seems half-costumed. An actor changing between scenes. His nightshirt lies on the bed, long flowing white as if he is to play Juliet. But it is my cheeks that are blushed and virginal. He removes his shirt. His breeches. His drawers.
4. Never Never
—Shall I play the pipes for you, James? he asks. Shall I play a hornpipe that’ll make you jig?
The others lie asleep in their dormitory beds while I sit on the edge of mine, watching him in the moonlight, the way it throws the shadow of his cock’s-comb shock of hair on the wall behind him, spikes on either side like horns. In the shadow his peter rises to his jutting chin, cocky with his cocked head, cocked hip.
—Come with me, he says quietly.
—I can’t, I say.
A whisper:
—Come with me.
—Never, I say. Never never.
5. A Roasting
—What happened to Brown? he asks.
I look at the empty bed where Brown lay sobbing from the pain and humiliation after Flashman was done.
—Flashman gave him a roasting, I say.
I picture them holding Brown to the roaring fire, turning him, laughing. But that is not how it happened, not how it happened to me. I picture them stripping him, spit-roasting him between them, fingers twisted in his hair, holding his head down, fingernails digging into his hips. That is what the fifth form do here, why Flashman left in disgrace.
—How savage, he says. How truly beastly.
6. A Crocodile Tear
He lies on top of the bed, on top of the empty nightshirt, knees curled up to his chin, arms wrapped around them. His eyes glint green even in the moonlight. He does not sleep, does not close his eyes and sleep, only bats his lashes slowly closed and open again, once, twice. It seems a considered, reptilian action, as inscrutable as the tear that trickles down his cheek. A crocodile tear.