Seven Deadlies

by Gigi Levangie

  When Connor was in the hospital, after he came out of his medically induced coma, he asked me how I knew to say that to him. That he was enough.

  When did I get so wise?

  I was born this way, I told him. It’s really my mother. You’d have to know her. And then I fed him another bite of my arroz con pollo.

  He told me, between bites, that he’d like that.

  Connor’s dad moved out a few months later. He’s awaiting trial on charges that he injected his son with illegal growth hormone and steroid-mimicking drugs to grow muscle, enhance sports performance, and get those sponsorships, yo!

  Unfortunately, the drugs weren’t regulated by the FDA. Their major side effect? Besides hair loss, acne, bloating, and gas?

  Turns healthy bones into dust.

  Connor’s spine is like an old man’s. His bones are punctured by tiny pinpricks. He’s lucky he’s still alive.

  After the divorce, Connor’s mom sold their huge estate to Eddie Murphy, who’s planning on tearing it down and building something bigger. She and Connor moved to a smaller, cozier home down the hill from the estate but still close to Mark Frost. One of his sisters transferred to UCLA and moved back home. Sometimes, I go over after school and tutor Connor in math—even though we all know he doesn’t need it.

  Sometimes, we sneak kisses. Because that’s something we both need.

  And he doesn’t run off anymore. And no, it’s not just because he’s paralyzed from the waist down.

  Smart asses.

  His mother walks Connor to and from school every day, pushing his wheelchair along the side of the road. The walking has helped her regain her shape.

  One morning, I waved to them from my mother’s car, then glanced back at my mom. “He’s much smaller than he was, huh, Mama?”

  “Oh, no, mija. Look at him. Really look. His pride made him small. He is so much bigger now.”

  I looked in the rearview mirror.

  My mother, as usual, was right.

  To other people, Connor is tragic. To me, he is heroic.

  You know how I know I love him?

  He beat me in math by one point the other day. And I didn’t even care.

  Meanwhile, Connor’s statue has been taken down.

  For repairs, they say.

  The End

  Alison Furia

  Bennington College Admissions Committee

  1 College Drive

  Bennington, VT 05201

  Dear Ms. Furia and Admissions Committee members,

  Thank you for your letter dated May 2, 20—. It was gratifying to learn that my somewhat unorthodox approach wasn’t wasted. And yes, as you said in your letter, I do have at least three years before I actually have to apply, but as you can see, these stories presented themselves to me, and I’m only human (mostly, as it turns out) and I couldn’t wait three years to expose them. Sometimes Christmas comes early, right? Sometimes life gives you improperly wrapped, complicated gifts that you have to open. Sometimes those gifts don’t seem like gifts at all, but like punishments that will only get worse if you ignore them.

  So you open the gift.

  And what you get is what you get (as my soccer coach would say).

  Which brings me to the Seven Deadlies.

  What I’ve discovered about myself since I sent off my application, Ms. Furia, will blow your mind. No, truly—it’s beyond comprehension. You won’t believe it. You may even think I’m crazy, or that I’m one of those creepers posing as a fourteen-year-old girl to get attention that I don’t get from my husband or wife. That maybe I have five kids at home or I just got laid off from my job and I came up with this idea at Starbucks, standing in line waiting for my nonfat latte.

  No. Not this time.

  But first, let me get back to our sins.

  You know, the Seven Deadlies, which I wrote of like they’re, I don’t know, fantasy, like vampires and zombies and smokin’ hot werewolves . . . no, the Seven are us, they’re the story of mankind. The Seven are our history, as old as the oldest tree, the first wave. I don’t look at people as people anymore. I look at them as sins. “What is your name?” is no longer my question. I never ask “What is your job? What do you do during the day?”

  Forget the labels—student, teacher, musician, grocer. That’s too easy.

  I look at someone and wonder, What is your sin?

  What about you, Ms. Furia? Be honest. Is it pride? Gluttony? Sloth? (I doubt it’s sloth—you’re the head of the Admissions Committee, and you wrote me back within three weeks of receiving my application—but you tell me. Compensation is a strong motivation.)

  Do you believe in fate, Ms. Furia? Do you believe that there’s a plan for all of us, a master plan laid down by an ancient hand before even the stars were born?

  Well, of course not. I mean, I doubt you’re going door-to-door on weekends carrying a passel of pamphlets. I know I didn’t believe.

  Now, I kinda sorta do.

  But first, you’re probably wondering if Connor (or “Pride”) and I are still an item.

  The answer is no. We had a good run, Ms. Furia. We’re not dating anymore—although our dating consisted of stealing sweet, soft kisses between calculus problems. I learned that the slightest brush of a hand could be as thrilling as those kisses . . . that gazing into another human being’s eyes for seconds could linger a lifetime in the heart.

  We’re still friends. But hey, this isn’t Twilight. I have band practice, you know. We didn’t last forever, but few things that beautiful last forever. We loved each other fully, but more like brother and sister, in the end, than boyfriend and girlfriend.

  He helped me through a difficult time. I helped him through a more difficult time. Life is like that. Love is like that. It picks you up and carries you on this magic carpet ride, and then suddenly you drop out of the sky into your normal life, back at your apartment, your band practice, your homework, and your clients. And all that you thought would make you the happiest girl on earth becomes . . . normal. Everyday. Pedestrian, even.

  And those lips that held a thousand dreams and endless promises, they are just lips, and they belong not to a god, not to your personal savior, not to a hero celebrated in stone, but a person. I’m sure this feeling happens to everyone, even to whoever married The Rock.

  My mother, the estimable Yelena Maria Gonzales, says this is the ultimate challenge of life—not to find happiness, but to see it.

  After I sent my application off, my mother sat me down for a talk. I knew she had become concerned over my obsession with the Seven, how I imbued bad behavior with biblical meaning. I had become a fanatic, spending every spare moment (spare moments being rather spare in my life) researching the Seven Deadlies, as I like to call them. (I wanted to make them hashtag-friendly, give them a catchy social media moniker.) I set up an Instagram account where I took pictures of people, babies, dogs, flowers, insects, anything that would fit into the #sevendeadlies chest of drawers. I tweeted about the #sevendeadlies (@perryseven). I gathered followers.

  And more followers.

  And before you knew it, Ms. Furia, I had ten thousand followers. And that ballooned to a hundred thousand. Then a million. Jimmy Kimmel’s people called me up to see if I would go on the show. My mother told them it was a ridiculous request of a fourteen-year-old, and that of course I couldn’t stay up that late, and how did they get this number?

  Ms. Furia, you may not know this, but I’m giving Justin Bieber a run for his money on Twitter. And Madonna, High Empress of the Seven Deadlies, follows little ol’ Perry Gonzales (@SevenDeadliesGurl) on Instagram.

  My research revealed that the Seven Deadlies preceded biblical times. Think about that—somewhere between dinosaurs and Baby Jesus, there were Lust, Gluttony, Envy, and so on. Thousands and thousands of years ago, some caveman in an animal skin was painting a rock in his own
blood after killing a lion. Pride!

  Thousands and thousands of years after that, some dude in a robe decided that he would show the rest of the robed dudes that he was smarter than they were and wrote his feelings and observations down on paper (or whatever passed for paper in those days—papyrus?) by candlelight. And he attached names to these feelings, or sins.

  And soon, each sin had a demon linked to it—and each sin had its own corresponding virtue. So someone decided—maybe someone in a fancier robe, like with gold thread and maybe a big satin hat and ermine collar—that gluttony should have temperance, that wrath would be coupled with patience, pride with humility . . . You get the drift.

  Each sin had its own demon; each virtue its own angel.

  Think about this, Ms. Furia: Basically what these guys were doing was working on their Ph.D.s in psychology. Because, of course, we all have these sins within us.

  #sevendeadlies #thehumancondition

  Well, my mom put her (tiny) foot down. I mean, I’d gotten through my first year of high school with flying colors (not sure where that phrase came from #flyingcolors)—but was basically drowning in a sea of hashtags and selfies.

  Yelena Maria Gonzales drew the line at selfies.

  “Mija,” she said, staring at me over the kitchen table. “These selfie things. They have to stop.”

  “Oh, Mom. Everyone selfies. Pride is, like, the collective sin of our generation. Pride and envy,” I said, then pursed my lips and took a picture of myself looking, I don’t know, prideful.

  She grabbed my phone. My mother has never been one to make fast moves. She’s more of a slow and steady, thoughtful-mom type. Patient, wise, accepting. But then, she’s never been up against a smartphone (yes, I broke down and got one).

  Ms. Furia, you’ll have to promise me that what I say to you, that these words, my recounting of my conversation with my mother, will never be repeated. For one thing, the world is counting on your utmost discretion.

  For another thing, I don’t want to disappoint my mom.

  (Plus, she would kill me.)

  “Mija,” she said, “I should have told you something at thirteen. At thirteen, you were old enough to hear, but you were starting a new school, and I didn’t want you to get distracted. You had already overcome so many challenges—”

  “Mom? What’s wrong?” My mother had a look on her face that I’d never seen before. She was pained. But I gleaned a more specific emotion: guilt.

  She rubbed my hands between hers, then reached out and touched my face.

  “I love you so much, angelita. You know, you are mi vida. Mi corazón.”

  “Of course, Mama.” I found myself starting to cry. I’m not too proud to admit it. And by now, you know it takes a lot for me to cry. My mother’s big, sad, guilty eyes devastated me.

  And then, as we sat there in the stillness of the kitchen, serenaded by the distant howls of a newborn, she told me the story of my birth.

  On the night of my mother’s sixteenth birthday, she was visited by a vision.

  The vision was frightening, overwhelming to a girl who’d grown up barefoot in the mountains, who called coyotes and wolves her friends and fed wild jackrabbits from her outstretched hands.

  The vision came to her in the blackest hour of night.

  He was an angel, the largest being she’d ever seen, with giant flapping wings that blew her long dark hair back from her face and revealed her nightgown under a thin blanket. He hovered above her, making a great noise as her baby sisters and parents slept soundly in the one-room adobe. His wings sounded like the sails on a phantom ship and felt like a windstorm had blown in through an open door. Her eyes were open, but she lay still, unable to move or cry out as her body shuddered and quaked.

  He spoke to her.

  “Do not be afraid, Yelena Maria. You will have a baby. She will be powerful and wise. She is the chosen one. You will raise her far away from here. En el norte.”

  Several months later, my mother ran away from home and gave birth to me at a Catholic hospital in San Diego, California. She named me Perry after a nurse who held her hand as I entered the world.

  And there, in San Diego, a few weeks later, as she nursed her new baby, she saw my father at the oldest church in California. No, not in the pews. Not in the congregation.

  My father was an oil painting.

  My mother couldn’t believe what she was seeing. She sat there, clutching her baby girl to her chest to keep her from crying, her eyes as wide as planets.

  His name was Michael.

  Like a bolt of lightning from the sky, her life, and mine, suddenly made sense to her.

  My father was the guardian angel Michael. The angel of all angels.

  So this is why I’m here. This is why I see things that others don’t see. This is why the Seven come to me, even in my dreams.

  This is what they call a “game changer” on ESPN.

  For obvious reasons, Ms. Furia, I am obligated to keep this information quiet. Like they say in the first ten minutes of those action movies where the fate of the world is resting on the shoulders of, say, Will Smith or Denzel Washington, no one must know.

  No one must know.

  The fact that I’m the offspring of the most powerful archangel in all history doesn’t change much of anything. Think about it. It doesn’t make me a better clarinetist or popular or even taller. (You’d think I’d be taller, by the way. I mean, my dad looks like he’s an NBA center.) If I quit school and tried to get a job, I couldn’t put his name down on my résumé. It’s not like I can even use nepotism to mop floors at the church.

  Being the daughter of a godlike figure is not as helpful as you would think. I’d be better off being the daughter of an agent, in this town. In this town, agents are gods.

  Who would believe me, anyway?

  Probably not even you.

  Once again, I thank you for your consideration. I hope your day is going well.

  Sincerely,

  Perry Gonzales

  Dear Ms. Furia,

  This is Perry’s mother. My name is Yelena Maria Gonzales.

  What I am about to say is very painful for me. A mother should never have to say what I’m about to say about her own child.

  Everything my daughter, Perry Gonzales, has told you is a lie. Everything. For her, there is no soccer practice, no band, no tutoring of misfit children.

  Forgive me.

  Her stories are, let’s say, manifestations of her elaborate imagination. These things are not real—angels, demons, devils . . . of course they are not real. Ms. Furia, I raised my daughter in the Church, and even as a tiny baby, she was fascinated by stories from the Bible, enamored of the magical elements of Catholicism. She’d ask me so many questions, Ms. Furia, even as we sat in on services. I went every day; maybe I shouldn’t have, looking back, but I was just a teenaged girl with a baby. I had no job, no money, God forgive me, nowhere else to go. The Church gave me peace.

  Perry was especially interested in the angels. She would ask me where her father was, and she knew his name was Miguel, and she would say, “Mama, my father is Michael, the Guardian of all Guardians.”

  She was three, Miss Furia.

  She was three, without a father. I was so young and lost. So I didn’t tell her she was mistaken. I never corrected her. She was three and she wanted a father, Ms. Furia. And it was just something that made her feel better, believing that her father didn’t choose to leave her, and me, her mother, but had to. And that he loved her very much, and even though he wasn’t living with us, he was always with us, always watching over us, keeping us safe. Making us special.

  You should have heard her, Ms. Furia. Perry was very verbal—at twelve months she was already speaking two languages. And everything in her mind was as real to her as if it were the concrete she walked on, as real as the chair she sat on,
the bowl she ate from.

  I never told her she was wrong.

  This is my sin. My greatest sin.

  I thought she’d long forgotten the notion of Michael being her father. I thought this chapter was behind us.

  This is not to say that my daughter is by nature a liar. By no stretch of the imagination. Because liars know, on some level, that they are lying. She does not know; she has no idea. She is convinced that these things are true. And Perry is advanced, let’s say, in her storytelling skills. Her IQ has been measured—and yes, it is, as various schools and doctors have told me, off the charts.

  This has not made her life easier.

  She can’t attend a normal school. She’s never actually stepped foot inside Mark Frost Academy. I can’t work. I earned my nursing degree, but had to quit so I could stay home and raise my daughter when her “unusual behaviors” and vivid stories crawled into her life, then choked it off. Her life, and mine.

  How do we live? Very carefully.

  I am assuming that this correspondence between you and my daughter will be kept under the utmost confidence. And, of course, it is a given that I expect and would be very grateful to you to keep this letter completely private.

  I thank you.

  Yours,

  Yelena Maria Gonzales

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  As always, years on, I am grateful to David Rosenthal for his wit and his faith; to Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, for her enduring friendship and wisdom; and to Stephanie Davis, for her partnership and belief in me. I am grateful to my editor, Sarah Hochman, for her encouragement and enthusiasm. Infinite thanks to Cecilia Ruiz, who brought my words to vivid life; I am awed by her talent. I also want to thank Britton Schey for her attention early on, and Aileen Boyle, Brian Ulicky, and everyone else at Blue Rider Press and Penguin. Thank you to my friends and TV writing partners Stacy Title and Jonathan Penner; may the Seven live on.

  Thank you to my family, especially my mother and father, who instilled in me a love of books, fostered my imagination from the earliest possible age, and showed me that the only risk is to not.