OUTPOURING: Typhoon Yolanda Relief Anthology
Page 52
For once it wasn’t Dominic who was hogging all the attention over on the boys’ side of the gym, where they were playing basketball, because his number-one sidekick, Matthew Fernando, was a fantastic basketball player and, unfortunately, knew it. (And it should tell you, in case you need reminding, something about the alleged ‘coeducation’ available at our school and the general views of gender roles at that point in time that the boys got to play basketball, while we did jumping jacks.) He would strut and preen whenever he made a shot or stole the ball, not minding in the least the sweat that would drip greasily off his nose or earlobes, thoroughly nauseating the repulsed viewers (us) on the far side of the court.
I said—I can’t be sure exactly, but something like, “Wouldn’t it be cool if Matthew just suddenly tripped?” “And fell flat on his fat face!” Melissa said (or words pretty much to that effect). And Ana squealed with delight and said, and Chinny said, and you get the picture. Call it roughly ten minutes of the same and more, until Ginny said, “Well, why don’t we make him?”
So we did, just a couple of weeks later, after the six of us (We dragged Lee into it, even though she was one of those Actually Athletic girls) had managed to squirrel away bits and pieces of things associated with Matthew: stray hairs, pencil shavings, candy wrappers, anything he’d touched and left behind for quick, malicious hands to find.
We cut this collection up and worked the pieces into the collage I’d sweetly suggested to Sister Savina Syncletica (You knew she’d come back into the story at some point, right?) as a group art project, which followed a particular pattern Ginny had researched and transposed for us from one of The Books. It must have all seemed perfectly innocuous, when we all sat around during PE (I was on my second supposed menstruation of the month by then) holding the edges of the collage, although careful observers might have noticed we weren’t actually looking at the collage, but at the basketball game.
I made sure that we did it softly enough that no one heard us chanting, “Fall, fall, fall, fall, fall.” Not even when Ginny and I looked at each other from the opposite ends of the group—North and South, earth and fire, that much we knew—and said the words: “We are alive, we have power, it is real.”
And Matthew fell. Got up, shook it off, tried to recover the ball he’d dropped, and fell again. Got up once more in time to intercept a pass from one player to another, managed to make it across the court to try for a jump shot, and fell for the last time, with a resounding crack of bone on wood you could hear all the way from the benches we were sitting on.
When he showed up for school a few days later with his leg in a cast, I know that Lee felt guilty. So did Melissa. So did Chinny. (But not Ana, because Matthew was one of the boys who laughed loudest when the chewing gum was stuck in her hair, and a sixth-grade girl’s hair is serious business, I kid you not.)
Me? Well, come on, if I was going to lie to you, there wouldn’t be much point in telling this story, would there?
about sleepovers
BY THEN I was spending every Friday night sleeping over at Ginny’s, and since Lee used to spend every Friday night sleeping over at my place, she tagged along now and then, though not all the time since, to be honest, she kind of cramped our style. I mean, she wasn’t really all that into the witchcraft thing—she only did it because I did, and actually spent more time messing with Ginny’s other stuff than practicing with The Books like we did. (Which was sort of understandable, in a way, because Ginny had practically more cool merchandise than your average department store, and most of it in mint condition except for Mr. Stuffy, a raggedy blue elephant her mother had won for her at Disneyland when she was little.) And anyway Lee’s parents knew my parents socially, but they didn’t know Ginny’s family, so she wasn’t always allowed to go.
In my case, Friday was gimmick night for my older brothers, as well as my parents’ weekly ‘alone together’ date night, so no one in my family cared that I wasn’t around the house, as long as I was somewhere safe. (Of course, I conveniently ‘forgot’ to tell them that Mr. Go kept a gun in the house, because that might have made them reconsider its relative safety as compared to, say, my own firearm-free home.) My mom worried that Ginny’s family might get sick of seeing me every damned week, though—she kept sending me off on Friday mornings with leche flan and stuff like that to hand over after school, which of course I just promptly shared with the Covenant Girls during recess—but Ginny’s dad was always nice enough to me, although not in a way that made me exactly comfortable, or like him all that much.
Vintage Mr. Go lines: “Gently, why can’t you sit with your back straight like your friend?” (Remember Ginny’s crummy real name? He always called her that, just like he always called me ‘your friend’, like I didn’t have a name, even though I had dinner at his house at least four times a month.) “Gently, why don’t you eat your vegetables like your friend?” and “See how your friend always calls her mother once she gets here? Why can’t you be responsible like that?”
The mom thing didn’t always come up, but when it did, Ginny would get riled up and fire off something like, “What are you talking about? You don’t even want me to talk to my mother!” because of course Ginny’s parents were divorced, and her mom still lived in California. And then Mr. Go would say, and Ginny would say, and he would say, and she would say, and then she’d either get sent off or go stomping off to her room, and I—or Lee and I—would be stuck at the dinner table, trying to pretend like nothing had just happened.
This totally freaked Lee out, so she wanted to stop going over to Ginny’s place, and she wanted me to stop too. Of course I wasn’t going to, but I made the dumb mistake of mentioning it to Ginny once, and she went and got pissed at me! Like I’d betrayed her in some way. Or maybe she was just still pissed over the fight at dinner (particularly nasty that time) and took it out on me; I know I reacted badly because I was still tense from having to sit in the dining room even though I obviously didn’t belong there, when Ginny wasn’t around. So we had a fight, and the worst part was that this happened in December, just before school let out for the holidays; by the time Christmas break started, we were speaking again (mostly because not speaking would have affected our co-leadership of the coven, and we were both too committed to let that happen), but not quite the closer-than-this buddies we had been before.
I wasn’t sure we’d still be best friends when January rolled around.
Stop!
NOW YOU’RE THINKING that this is going to be all The Craft or something, with Ginny turning evil like Fairuza Balk and me in the good witch role of Robin Tunney, and we’ll wind up duking it out in some awesome display of mystical powers, but this isn’t that story, okay?
Ginny came over to my house during the holidays (which was a huge deal, because she almost never went to my house; it was always the other way around, since her house was nearer to school and nicer, to boot) to give me an additional present from the one she’d sort of sullenly handed me at our class party. It was one of The Books, the one I liked best with the vines twined all over the cover in the shape of two joined hands. I gave her an extra present back (not nearly as cool, but I hadn’t expected her, and the neon pink legwarmers I’d gotten from my grand-aunt were the only decent new things I had lying around), and we made nice and were soon jabbering away like only preteen girls can do, and by the end of the break I was sleeping over at her place every week again, and we were burning up the phone lines practically every day in between.
So no, Ginny isn’t the villain of this piece.
But pretty soon after school started up again in the next year, the introduction I mentioned earlier at last occurred—in other words: shit, meet fan.
about school, part two
I FIGURE IT was Lee who ratted us out.
It could have been Chinny, I guess, or Melissa. It actually could have been almost anyone, because let me tell you, Christmas break is poison to anybody trying to maintain a regime of benevolent (more or less) dominance over a
significant segment of her classmates. More than two weeks is potentially enough time for people to develop Independent Thinking, which is definitely to be frowned upon. (I objected to the Catholic school system trying to turn me into a sheep. Me turning other people into sheep, obviously, was more than okay.)
Then there’s the fact that, while we were pretty scrupulous about keeping our little club secret from the boys and our teachers, we weren’t all that careful about other girls, even the ones who weren’t officially Covenant members, like Teret Andolong, or the other girls from my lunch group who weren’t in our section, like Janice and Rosetta. It could have been any of them, feeling left out or whatever.
But I’m betting on Lee. Probably she felt like I’d chosen Ginny over her (and let’s face it, I kind of did, didn’t I?), and probably she’d thought that Ginny’s and my little falling-out meant that she and I would be best friends again like before, only to be frustrated when it didn’t work out that way.
For someone pretty smart at getting what I wanted and thinking ahead and keeping people in line, I was pretty dumb, wasn’t I? I can only say—you know, I was eleven, and there were a lot of things I didn’t understand that I didn’t understand.
It was nearly February (I guess whoever the tattletale was needed some time to get her nerve up) when Sister Savina Syncletica—who was our grade-level supervisor as well our art teacher—barged into our classroom, marched right up to Ginny’s desk, and yanked Ginny’s bag open, ignoring our shocked protests. Of course The Books were there, all but the one she’d given me—we’d been really strict about not taking them to school when we started, but we’d kept our secret so successfully for so long (School months are like dog years, right?) that we’d gotten all casual about it, even the one with the huge skull and pentagram embossed on the cover, which of course was the one that Sister chose to brandish with overwrought accusation in Ginny’s face.
That was the first shocker (the barging in, not so much the brandishing; that part sort of followed logically, if you know what I mean). The second came hours later, in front of the faculty room firing squad, after My Father the Lawyer had delivered himself of a diatribe concerning Innocent Until Proven Guilty and the Right to Remain Silent (I always knew he wished he’d become a litigator instead of a tax attorney) in defense of my obstinate refusal to respond. My dad became my total hero that day, considering that those people were threatening to expel me (I told you this was all blown out of proportion—although considering that we did possibly break someone’s leg, maybe not horribly out of proportion, but still). I mean, he didn’t even ask me if I’d done what they said, this ‘spreading the practice of witchcraft’—maybe because the idea of preteen girls fomenting the black arts was completely absurd to him, but more, I think, because I was his daughter, and he wasn’t going to let a bunch of adults gang up on me, no matter what I might or might not have done.
Mr. Go, in complete contrast, slapped his daughter.
Right there, in front of everyone, and I figure that’s what ended the whole ruckus stone cold, because we were sent off not fifteen minutes later, even though nothing about the matter—innocence or guilt, punishment or lenience—had actually been resolved.
I need to remind you again here that this was 1984, and what parents did to their children was considered no one’s business but their own, and not even my hero dad said a word; he was utterly silent, as we drove all the way home.
He didn’t say a word later, either, when Ginny called me up that night in tears—he just got up from the sofa, grabbed his car keys, and we went.
about Ginny, part two
This part I remember pretty clearly, and you’ll see why. We got to Ginny’s house, and, “Pumpkin, go help Ginny pack some things, she’s staying with us for a while,” my dad told me, and that day of all days I wasn’t going to whine at him, just because he happened to like calling me by a pet name that compared me to a species of squash. Instead, I dragged Ginny after me to her room, and we both pretended not to hear Mr. Go yelling after us that we would do no such fucking thing, this was his fucking house, and no fucking lawyer was going to fucking judge how he fucking raised his fucking daughter. (This wasn’t the exact wording, I’m sure, but ‘fucking’ did come up a lot. Sadly, Mama Mary did not show up to smite the fucker.)
Ginny had bruises not just on her face, but on her arms and legs, which I could see for once because she was dressed in just a t-shirt and shorts (and I’m fairly certain this was the night I started to understand how little I really understood about anything). She wasn’t crying anymore, she was just saying, “I have to bring Mr. Stuffy, I have to bring Mr. Stuffy,” while I threw every piece of her clothing I could get my hands on into whatever bags I could find, because of course her suitcase was in one of the storage rooms with the rest of the family luggage.
We were both checking under the bed for Mr. Stuffy—the blue elephant from her mom, remember?—when her father slammed the door open, lurched into the room, and pointed his gun at us.
I hadn’t known before right at that moment that he’d been drinking—I wasn’t experienced enough then to tell the difference between drunken anger and ordinary belligerence. I could hear my father shouting something from the direction of the stairwell beyond, and Ginny’s brother’s voice too, from down the hallway, but I knew that neither of them could possibly get to him fast enough to do anything, and we were probably going to die.
Then Ginny grabbed my hand. I looked at her, but she wasn’t looking at me; she was just staring at her father—exactly as cool and in control as I always tried to be—and mumbling, “Fall, fall, fall, fall, fall, fall, fall.” So I twisted the fingers of my other hand the way I knew she was doing, into one of the gestures we’d practiced, and said, not anywhere near as clearly as I was supposed to, “I am alive, I have power, it is real.”
about me, part two
I’m sorry—I know when we started out I made it seem like this was going to be a perky school story, full of high-jinks at first and then winding up to some sort of minor scandal with the Powers that Be that would nevertheless end Happily Ever After, and in a way it still kind of is that, and in another way, obviously, it isn’t.
But that’s more or less what growing up is like, isn’t it? There’s all this shit going on inside and underneath that no one sees, not even you most of the time, and there isn’t all that much you can do to affect anything in a big way, except that the little things you do manage to do sometimes turn out big after all.
I found out from Joel later that their father had sustained a concussion, when he tripped over Mr. Stuffy; it was lucky, the doctors said, that the gun had discharged into the ceiling instead of him or one of us. This was, like, months after, because as soon as Ginny’s aunt arrived at the hospital, my dad hustled us girls away, and we packed Ginny off to her mom in California, practically before Mr. Go could even manage to regain consciousness.
There really was a bit of a scandal at school—I mean, the Concerned Parents got together, and the teachers got together, and they all got together with each other, and I teeter-tottered on the brink of expulsion for all the weeks that I was suspended (during which I discovered that I was getting too old to appreciate shows like Voltron). But eventually it was decided that Ginny and I had been through enough trauma, and all could be forgiven, if I swore never to even look at, much less talk about, anything to do with witchcraft again. (And yet, here I am—Sister Savina Syncletica, where art thou?)
I guess you’d think, after something like that, Ginny and I would’ve been best friends forever (BFFs, as girls say these days), but that isn’t what happened. I think it was too much to want to remember, too heavy to have to hold onto, with all the years we still had left to go through the normal horrors of approaching adulthood. We do write each other every few years or so: this is what’s happening in my life now, I’m with a new company, how’s the weather over where you are, like that. She’s a photographer. I’m (You may have noticed) a writer.
I still have the book that she gave me—I dug it out of storage the other day when I got her invite. I couldn’t bring myself to open it, because I’m thirty-nine years old now, and while I’m willing to consider that witchcraft may have the power to bring a man to his knees, I no longer have faith that it’s enough to get a girl back on her feet.
I can only hope that she’s managed to pick herself up, and try to be there for her, in case she falls—even from this distance of thousands of miles and twenty-eight years apart. It’s the only small magic I have left, because sadly (and you know that this is true, don’t you?), neither magic nor friendship is ever quite as powerful again as it was when we were eleven, when we were witches.
All the Little Gods We Are
By John Grant
It is an easy enough mistake to make—the most natural mistake in the world.
It’s late on a Thursday afternoon and, although the air is cool in the library, the day is hot enough outside that even just the sunlight roaring in through the windows is enough to put thoughts in mind of darkened bars and long cold beers, condensation silvering the outside of the glass... You know the kind of day, surely. The kind of day on which, when there’s just over an hour before you’ll be free to go home or at least away from here, you think it’d be a good idea to phone up one of your unmarried friends and suggest getting together after work to sink a few.