by JL Bryan
“Pedro, stop it!” She kicked open the car door.
He took her arm and pulled her close.
“Let me go!” she said.
“I just don’t like to see you with some other guy,” he said. “I love you, Esmeralda.”
“And I love you. Don’t be so jealous.”
“Look in my eyes and tell me he is nothing to you.”
Esmeralda looked Pedro in the eyes. “He is nothing,” she said, but her eyes blinked involuntarily when she said “nothing.”
He frowned at her. “I have to get to class. I’ll call you later.”
Esmeralda stepped into the two-room apartment she shared with her mother. Immediately the sound of a Telemundo soap opera, weeping confessions backed by sappy music, jangled her ears. Her mother sat on the couch, watching the TV.
“Hola, Mamà,” Esmeralda said.
“You should not upset Pedro like that,” her mother said in Spanish.
“Like what?”
“I was watching you through the window, and he did not look happy. What did you do?”
“You spy on me and you take his side,” Esmeralda said.
“What were you fighting about?”
“It was nothing. He is jealous of everything.”
“You should keep him happy,” Esmeralda’s mother said. “That boy is going to be very successful one day.”
“A very successful asshole,” Esmeralda muttered in English as she walked into her room.
“What did you say?”
“Nothing!” Esmeralda closed her door. Then she locked it, which she rarely did. She even made sure the blinds were down, as if Pedro would be outside her room, staring at her. Sometimes she felt like he was. She’d had enough of her mother always taking Pedro’s side, too. Her mother wasn’t exactly a master in the art of picking good men, anyway.
Esmeralda opened her closet door, stood on her tiptoes, and felt around on the top shelf. She brought down a Reebok shoe box, which she had long ago decorated with glue, glitter, butterfly stickers, and markers. Much of the glitter had fallen off over the years, and the butterflies were curling off the cardboard.
She sat down on her bed and took off the box lid.
The shoe box held a few pictures from her childhood, a letter from her grandmother in Matehuala, one of Esmeralda’s baby teeth, some Valentines she had received in middle school. Esmeralda dug through these to the bottom of the box.
She took out the gold coin. It was engraved with an Indian chief’s head, and the word “Liberty,” on the front, and a bald eagle on the back. The coin was dated 1908. She had never taken it to a coin shop to check its value, for fear her mother would somehow find out and ask questions.
Esmeralda had also never turned over the thousand dollars to her mother.
When Tommy suggested she hide the money, it was the first inkling Esmeralda had that she could hide anything from her mother, even for a minute. The farmer woman who had called them to the middle of nowhere, in Oklahoma, had been livid when she opened the dead man’s trunk and found nothing. Esmeralda’s mother had screamed at her, but Esmeralda had kept the secret.
As they drove home, Esmeralda wasn’t sure how to tell her mother what happened. The longer they drove, the more possible it seemed that Esmeralda could keep the secret forever.
The real secret, though, wasn’t about the stolen money.
“What is wrong with you?” her mother had screamed as they drove back to Texas. “Why did you lie?”
“I can’t do it anymore,” Esmeralda had whispered.
“Can’t do it? Can’t do what?”
“I can’t talk to the dead anymore,” Esmeralda had said. “I don’t remember how.”
“Remember? What is to remember? You have always done this.”
“Yes,” Esmeralda said. “But maybe I am too old now.” At the age of thirteen, Esmeralda was sick of her mother dragging her around like a freakshow attraction, charging people money to hear from their dead relatives. The dead didn’t bother Esmeralda, but the living did—people greedy to find money, jealous wives wanting to know whether their husbands had cheated on them or not, and too often, there were children crying and upset as they learned the pain of losing someone close.
Esmeralda didn’t like it. And if she could get away with lying about money, maybe she could get away with more.
And she had. Her mother hadn’t dragged her out to read the dead again. Instead, her mother had finally gone back to her housekeeping job at the hotel and stopped living off her daughter’s strange gift.
As far as Esmeralda’s mother knew, Esmeralda hadn’t had the special touch in nine years.
Esmeralda rubbed the gold coin. The paper dollars had trickled away over the years, on movies and candy and shoes, but she kept this because it reminded her of him. His unreal gray eyes, the power in his hands and lips. He had frightened her deeply…but she had liked it, and relished the memory again and again.
Until today, she had almost forgotten he was a real person, and not a dream or a fantasy.
He had found her, after all these years. Esmeralda didn’t know what it meant, but she felt scared and exhilarated. She needed to see him again.
She closed her hand around the gold coin and held it tight.
Chapter Nineteen
When Fallen Oak High School re-opened at the beginning of May, Jenny drove herself there for the first time ever. She’d always ridden the bus, until the past few months when Seth had started picking her up. The school issued a limited number of the jealously guarded student parking passes, and those were earmarked for certain juniors and seniors—student council, varsity football players, people like that.
Jenny had killed a lot of those people, though, so there was probably room for parking.
She drove to school, listening to Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard sing “Pancho and Lefty” on the country-gold radio station. Her dad had been distant for days now, ever since her confession. Jenny knew he didn’t see her the same. It was hard to adjust to your only child being a mass murderer, she thought. And it looked like she was going to get away with it, which, in a weird way, only made things worse.
Not that Jenny really believed she would get away with murder. People were investigating. They’d taken the bodies, and they’d taken all kinds of medical samples from Jenny. Someone was going to put it together.
She now understood the meaning of the phrase “living on borrowed time.”
School was strange and quiet. Several teachers were dead, and the state had brought in some befuddled substitutes. People trudged through the hallways, saying very little to each other.
They did whisper, though, when Jenny walked in the front door of the school. They whispered a lot, about how she was supposed to be dead, everyone had seen her drown.
As usual, nobody talked to her directly. She sensed something different, though. Where there had once been cold dismissal, if not outright loathing, the feeling she got from people now was one of fear. Ashleigh, and even Dr. Goodling, had accused her of witchcraft, and now a bunch of people were dead with no explanation. Including all of Jenny’s enemies.
Notes and photographs were taped all over Ashleigh Goodling’s locker, and there was a heap of flowers and a couple of little teddy bears in front of it. People had even left packs of Twix and unopened cans of Cherry Coke—Ashleigh’s favorite morning vending-machine treats—at the foot of her locker, like an offering to a pagan god.
In Jenny’s homeroom, there were a lot of empty desks. Several of the girls were pregnant, and they gave Jenny the strongest looks of fear or revulsion. Alison Newton, Brenda Purcell, and Ronella Jones, all former cheerleaders now quite visibly pregnant, whispered to each other in the front row, looking back over their shoulders at Jenny.
Jenny sat in the back corner of the back row.
Darcy Metcalf arrived, and her pregnancy was really starting to show. She sat in the back row, too, at the opposite end from Jenny, away from everybody. Abject misery radi
ated from Darcy’s face and slumped posture. Jenny knew the feeling.
Assistant Principal Varney—now acting principal, since Ashleigh had gotten Principal Harris suspended—gave the morning announcements over the intercom.
“First,” her deep bass voice crackled over the boxy intercom, “Let us have a moment of silence for the teachers and students lost in the tragic accident.”
Jenny’s substitute homeroom teacher, an elderly man with a bulky hearing aid, closed his wrinkled eyes solemnly.
The pregnant girls, and a few other kids, stared at Jenny. Jenny lowered her head, and her eyes, but she didn’t close her eyes all the way. She had a feeling that people might pounce on her if she gave them a chance.
“All students are invited to visit with our guidance counselor, Mrs. Gerbler, for grief counseling.” Assistant Principal Varney said over the intercom. “She will be available in the main office all week, along with Mr. Ellerton, a grief specialist sent by the State Department of Education. Now, despite the tragedy, we must finish out the school year. Contrary to rumor, final exams will be held.” This brought groans from all over the school. “Other announcements will follow as plans become finalized.”
Jenny wondered what that meant.
“Please be respectful of the new substitute teachers around the school,” Mrs. Varney continued. “They’re here to help us through these difficult times. Major extracurricular activities are suspended until further notice. Lunch today will be Salisbury steak, tater tots and okra medley. Now rise for the Pledge of Allegiance.”
Jenny rose with everyone else and quietly pledged allegiance to the rectangle of cloth hanging over the chalkboard, and to the republic for which it stood.
The school remained quiet as a funeral parlor all morning. At lunch, Jenny sat with Seth in their usual lunch place on dry days, under the shade of one of the big, gnarled old oak trees that were everywhere in town. This was one of three big oaks on the narrow lawn between the school and the student parking lot. The roots were wide enough to use as benches and tables, if you didn’t mind sitting close to the ground.
Jenny had brought a peanut butter and jelly, plus an empty butter container full of carrots. She eyeballed Seth’s lunch with a little disgust. He’d not only bought the mystery brown rectangle of Salisbury steak, he’d actually paid extra for a double order.
“Well, all my friends are gone,” Seth said. “But they did all gang up and murder me. True friends don’t really do that.”
“They couldn’t help it,” Jenny said. “They were under Ashleigh’s spell.”
“Could she really keep that many people under control at once?” Seth said. “She got them going, but it’s not like they tried real hard to stop themselves. I mean, they kept coming at you, right?”
“At first,” Jenny said.
Seth wolfed down a Salisbury slice. Jenny barely had any appetite.
“What’s it like having your parents in town again?” Jenny asked.
“Back to the old family sitcom. Mom’s medicated and talking on the phone with her old sorority friends. Dad’s drunk and talking to my great-grandfather’s ghost. Or fighting with Mr. Burris about the stupid bank. They try to parent me around like they didn’t just leave me by myself since Christmas.”
“Do they know we’re still together?” Jenny said.
“That’s kind of hard to do,” Seth said. “Last time my mom saw you, she was busting you with cocaine at our Christmas party.”
“It wasn’t mine!” Jenny said. “It was Ashleigh’s. And not even hers, but some of your stupid preppy rich-kid friends.”
“Not my friends,” Seth said. “My parents and their parents are friends. And not even real friends, most of them, it’s just business.”
“Whatever,” Jenny said.
“I told them what really happened,” Seth said. “But they don’t believe me.”
“Because Ashleigh was such a perfect angel.”
“And you’re a wicked devil, trying to suck out my soul.” Seth grabbed Jenny, bit at her head and made sounds like a starving zombie.
“Stop it!” Jenny slapped him, but not very hard, and she let her fingers linger on his face for a second. She was wearing gloves for school, as always. “I’m eating.”
“Actually, you’re not.”
“I was thinking about it.”
“I also heard prom might be canceled,” Seth said.
“Could be,” Jenny said. “I killed the whole prom planning committee.”
“Jenny!” Seth looked around. “You can’t just say that out in public.”
“There’s nobody close by. Nobody would sit near us if we asked them to.” Jenny looked around at the scattered little groups of people. There was no big central crowd at the picnic tables now, orbiting Ashleigh like she was the sun. Everybody had broken off into tiny clumps here and there. The entire social order of the school had been destroyed.
A lot of people, like Darcy Metcalf, sat all alone—Darcy’s main purpose in life had been to suck up to Ashleigh Goodling. Isolated people like Darcy seemed to have no friends left in the world, which was just the way Jenny had been most of her life. She felt sick.
“Everyone’s talking about how many people are missing,” Seth said. “The news made it sound like it was only a few deaths, and with the phones out, people didn’t realize just how many people—”
“Okay, Seth!” Jenny said. “I get it. It was a lot of people. I think I’m going to puke now.”
“Sorry.” He rubbed a hand along her back. “I think a lot of people are skipping, too, though. I mean, who really wanted to come back?”
“It’s so weird now,” Jenny said. “I just feel sick all the time, thinking about what I did. It’s going to be like this forever, too. What can I even do?”
“I don’t know.”
“I wish somebody knew,” Jenny said. “I wish somebody could tell me.”
And then the bell rang.
In her dream, Jenny rode in the back of a cart towards the center of Athens, awed by the city. Sparta had been little more than a rough and sprawling village, despite its military might and its position as chief power of the Peloponnesian League of cities.
Athens, in contrast, had fed well on its Delian League cities as its empire grew, and put up massive monuments and temples to the entire pantheon. Everywhere she looked, she gaped at marble steps, marble columns, imposing statues of heroes and gods, all of them masterfully cut and brightly painted.
No wonder Sparta feared this city, she thought. It looked like an imperial capital. According to King Archidamus, that was exactly what Athens had become, a provoker of wars so that it might conquer, a threat to civilization itself.
It was her job to destroy this city, and thereby save all of Greece from tyranny.
She rode in a two-wheeled cart drawn by a horse, and two other girls rode with her. The three of them had arrived by galley in Piraeus, the port of Athens. She and the other girls were heavily made up, lots of black around their eyes and dark red on their lips. They were allegedly slave girls from a distant island near Persia. The man driving the cart would sell them to a certain wealthy Athenian citizen who stocked his household with exotic women.
Jenny reflected on how she had come to be here.
The old priest, whose name was Kyrillos, had taken an interest in her soon after she was born. (In this life, she now understood, she was called Euanthe.) Euanthe had been discovered as an infant, wailing and kicking in the low, filthy shed where her helot family lived. The rest of her family had died of some horrific disease, but Euanthe had survived, though cranky and hungry.
This apparent immunity to disease brought the attention of the priest Kyrillos, who had taken her for healthy slave-breeding stock. Soon he recognized her true nature. He entrusted her care with the priestesses of Aphrodite Areia, who served the warlike side of the love goddess, the sometimes consort of the war god Ares, and the most beloved goddess in Sparta.
The priest himself prov
ided much of her education. His main interest was in testing her abilities, helping her to control them and discover what they could do. They tried her magical infection on animals, and later he procured criminals and undesirables whom Sparta had sentenced to death. By experimenting, they learned a great deal, though the experiments themselves were nightmarish events.
He taught her that she had been cursed by the goddess, that Euanthe or her family must have done something to displease the goddess, and consequently she needed to spend her life in service to the goddess (and, by extension, the priest Kyrillos himself) until she regained the goddess’s favor and the curse was lifted.
And, she now understood, he had also been preparing her for this, intending to use her as a weapon on behalf of Sparta.
According to the story that the slave merchant had told the wealthy Athenian, the girls spoke no Greek at all. This freed Euanthe and the other girls from any need to craft and maintain careful lies.
The magnificent house was high upon a hill, much of it built from marble, painted bright blues and greens. The slave merchant led them on foot into the grand courtyard, and she gaped up at the second-floor galleries, on their thick marble columns.
Euanthe trembled. She did not know the other two girls, though she understood they might have been prostitutes. They seemed to know each other, and they wanted nothing to do with Euanthe. They stayed close together, even holding hands, and spoke only by whispering in each others’ ears.
The slave merchant presented them to the withered old slave who administered the wealthy household. He looked the three girls over and paid the merchant a few silver coins.
Euanthe and the other girls were sent into a side gallery, in which women were crammed together, weaving. The three new girls were put to work.
Soon, the lady of the house entered. She was a few years older than Euanthe, her golden hair coiled into fine braids and set atop her head with jeweled pins and clips.
A pretty servant girl trailed behind her like a dog.