by Jill Wolfson
In times past, it would be up to the chorus to sing the stasimon. But that was then. Big choruses and girl groups are a thing of the past. We now live in a culture of solo acts, live journals, celebrity autobiographies penned by those who are known around the world by one name only.
Jesus. Madonna. Tupac.
Ambrosia. I fit right in.
In case you’re wondering, Ambrosia is not some nom de stasimon to hide my identity. I am not unavenged Clytemnestra, nor her wronged daughter Iphigenia, nor Cassandra whose woeful story echoes so perfectly with mine. Why Aeschylus didn’t jot down my tale for all eternity is a mystery to me. But his literary snub hasn’t stopped my need for revenge. That remains endless, enduring, immortal.
So given my longevity, who is better suited to make sure you understand how the plot is congealing and thickening?
I’ve called them and they’ve done their first experiment. It’s written down in my book. So for now, I let them sleep. But not for long. Too much rest and they will not feel enough rage for what I’ve endured. Sleep can suck the strength of the serpent.
Awake, awake, awake, you artists of pain. Ugly and beautiful, that potent and combustible mix.
FIRST STASIMON, THE BOOK OF FURIOUS
9
I couldn’t have been asleep for long, maybe only ten minutes, but when I wake I feel refreshed, like after a full night’s sleep. We laugh a little about my revenge fantasy. It was so much fun. After that, Stephanie takes off on her bike. Alix gives me a lift down the hill in her old car, and even though the drizzle has turned to steady rain, I ask to be dropped a couple of blocks away from the Leech’s house. I want to walk the rest of the way. I wish I could walk forever and avoid the reality of what’s waiting for me. I know that what we said and did in Ambrosia’s bedroom was just a silly game, but I’m still pumped and not ready to give up the feeling.
I turn the corner and there’s my living nightmare waiting for me: Lottie Leach in one of her old flowered muumuus on the front doorstep. This is not a good sign. As I tentatively approach the house, her eyes narrow hard in my direction. I know that look. She’s going to kill me for being late.
Gone is any hope of an apology. Gone is any hope of my life ever changing.
I hang back, trying to forestall the inevitable. She shifts her weight, moves one foot down a step and brings the other to meet it, another right foot, another left. For her, this qualifies as a rush toward me. I have plenty of time to run in the other direction, but my usual feelings of helplessness whoosh back and take over. Where am I going to run? Whom can I run to?
Her features look contorted. She’s yelling. She flings open her arms, and I flinch in memory of the last time those arms came in my direction.
Only this time she doesn’t slap me. She’s not screaming at me. Something drops from her arms, a black puddle that lands at my feet.
“Worthless!” she says to it, and then as an afterthought to me: “Both of you!”
He-Cat takes off running down the street.
What was that about? I’m not going to ask any questions and tick her off even more. I rush past the Leech into the house and close my bedroom door behind me.
* * *
Raymond! I forgot! I promised to call him as soon as I left Ambrosia’s house.
I check my cell and find a series of increasingly urgent texts from him.
First message:?
Second message:????????????????
Third message: You’re not still harboring ill feelings, are you???????????????????
Fourth message: Meg, did you get my messages of rapidly multiplying question marks that reflect my atypical lack of patience?
He picks up on the first ring and says something that takes a while to decipher: “About time!”
“What’s wrong with your voice?”
“A cold. So, what happened? Spill all.”
“She hates the cat.”
“Ambrosia? What cat?”
“No! The Leech. He-Cat. I came home and she was going ape on him.”
“Ape on a cat?”
“I don’t get it.” I hold up my phone in the direction of the locked bedroom door. “Hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“She’s stomping around the living room complaining about how the cat is eating her out of house and home. It’s weird. She’s treating He-Cat just like…” They come to me, my own words: I want to be treated the way she treats her cat. I laugh aloud.
“Meg, what’s so funny?”
There’s no doubt about it. “She’s treating the cat just like she treats me. And vice versa, I guess.”
Raymond blows his nose. “That qualifies as hilarious?”
“Not ha-ha funny, bizarre funny. You had to be there.”
“Be where?”
“Ambrosia’s house.”
Another nose blow. “Finally! We’re getting to the heart of the tale. Tell me all about it. Spare no detail.”
I prop myself up in bed, comforter around me, and let the particulars flow out in no special order, whatever pops into my mind: the red walls, the almost hypnotic taste of the fig-and-olive dip, the all-white garden with the awful smell, and the broken jack-in-the-box. I have a hard time describing the snow globe and get frustrated because I am in no way capturing the disgust that drained into my fingertips when I held that thing. I tell him about the squabble between Alix and Stephanie and the question Ambrosia asked me and how she ate a rose petal and how tired we all got and when Alix …
“Wait, wait, wait, stop, stop, stop. Back up. Ambrosia asked you what?”
“Who I hated more.”
Raymond sneezes and makes me repeat the exact words of the question.
“She actually used those words: threw you out like garbage? I can’t believe she did that. Rude!”
“That was my first reaction, too, but…”
“Cold!”
“But…”
“What did you say?”
“I…”
“What did you do?”
“I…”
“You know me, Meg, turning the other cheek is my specialty. We definitely have that in common. But what Ambrosia asked you? That’s hard to forgive.”
I give up trying to explain how I didn’t mind at all. It’s too complicated.
* * *
Later that night, I’m in the bathroom with the sink faucet running to do the experiment Mr. H assigned as physics homework. I hold a spoon lightly by its handle and slowly move the rounded bottom toward the water. You’d think that a gush of liquid would push the spoon away, but instead it draws it into the fast-moving stream.
“Bernoulli’s principle,” Mr. H said. “It explains how birds and airplanes fly.”
The way I understand it is this: Moving air creates low pressure. The faster the movement next to you, the lower the pressure and the quicker and harder a slower-moving object gets sucked into its void. It’s why a big rig passing you on the highway pulls you into its lane and causes a crash. What does Mr. H call it?
The attraction of curves.
I hear scratching at the bathroom window and look out on a face with whiskers and goop in the corner of one eye. Poor ugly He-Cat. I actually feel bad for him. What a shock to go from being the center of someone’s life to being a total outcast without having a clue why or what you did to deserve the terrible treatment. I let him in, and he allows me to pick him up without getting scratched. He’s not so bad. By the way he’s purring, I know he’s grateful to me. I sneak him into my bedroom, where he wanders around, sniffing at my things in an appreciative way.
That night He-Cat, my new buddy, sleeps in my bed. He has no trouble falling asleep, but I toss around until way after midnight. It’s hard getting comfortable. It’s impossible to slow my thoughts. I’m sure that what happened with the cat is total coincidence. I’m certain that I had nothing to do with it. How could I?
Why, then, do I have a sensation of being drawn into something that’s moving very fast and is ver
y dangerous?
* * *
The next morning I still can’t shake the feeling. I’m totally freaked out. I need to talk to someone who knows about things like coincidence and the probability of something that can’t happen actually happening.
At the end of first-period physics, I stand awkwardly in front of Mr. H’s desk. He’s got the absent-minded-professor thing going on, so it takes a few seconds for him to notice me standing there. He’s fooling around with his desk ornament, a Newton’s cradle, which is five shiny metal balls hanging from strings that he uses to demonstrate various science concepts. He looks up at me with curious eyebrows. “You have a burning question, Ms. Meg?”
“Let’s say you want something to happen. You’ve secretly prayed for it and imagined it for a long time. Nothing ever happened. But one day out of the blue, it actually does. Well, it kind of does. Only it’s a little messed up, but it’s close enough to get you thinking. What do I make of it?”
“If I understand your drift, this is an excellent question given our current class topic of cause and effect.”
Mr. H holds one of the shiny steel balls out to the right and releases it. There’s a bright, clanking sound of metal hitting metal. The three balls in the center stay still, while the sphere at the opposite end is thrown into the air. “Explain what’s going on here.”
I watch the end ball hit the line again and transfer its energy, back and forth, clang, clang, clang. “It’s demonstrating conservation of momentum and kinetic energy in a mechanical system. The ball on the opposite side gets the energy of the first ball and swings out in an arc.”
“Thank goodness someone wasn’t dozing during class. Exactly right! There are a few more things that come into play, but that’s it, more or less.”
The balls slow down, the arcs get smaller. I toss in some formulas that further impress him. “Momentum equals mass times velocity. Kinetic energy equals one-half mass times velocity squared.”
“Someone’s going to ace the next pop quiz, which—hint, hint—is tomorrow.” He starts the balls swinging again. “Back to your question. Show me the energy of this praying and wishful thinking. Put it in my hand. Make it burn something. Send it over a wire or transfer it from one of these balls to another.”
“I can’t.”
“Exactly! So without cause, there’s no effect.”
“But it happened!” I work hard to quickly calm my voice so I don’t sound like a maniac. “Hypothetically, of course. Something must have caused it.”
He reaches out and stops the balls. “Don’t make the mistake of confusing cause with coincidence. Most likely it was a totally random blip-blip, just two of the gazillion events going on in the universe that day. This hypothetical you just happened to notice it and made an incorrect assumption that tied things together. Make sense?”
Me, disappointed: “I guess so.”
“Remember. Blip-blip.” He checks the clock. We have a few more minutes until the next class. “Now, Meg, a question for you. Where does bad light end up?”
I shrug.
“In a prism.”
At the end of next period, still unsatisfied, I take my puzzle to Mrs. H. She’s making a pile of the essays we just turned in. A few papers flutter to the floor, but she ignores them because she’s thrilled with my question. “Ah! One of those amazing, glorious moments to cherish. A glimpse into the true nature of what is.”
“So yes? The praying caused it? We can do it again?” I catch myself. “I mean, wishing for something can make it happen?”
“What is wishing, Meg? What is cause? What is knowable? There are things that we can never understand fully, forces that are too complicated for our simple human minds to ever fathom and unravel. But that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. A tiny beat-beat of a butterfly’s wings can set off a whole complex chain of events that results in a tornado. Yet we don’t see the connection.”
I bend down and pick up the essays.
“Remember. Beat-beat. Any more questions, Meg?”
I have so many of them, but I’m not sure what they are. I fumble, give up. “Yes, where does bad light end up?”
She sighs. “You’ve been talking to my beloved husband.”
Blip-blip or beat-beat. I’m no closer to understanding than I was before.
10
Raymond is home sick with his cold, which means that along with being baffled about the Leech and He-Cat, I’m faced with the dreaded lunch-seat question. Without Raymond, where do I sit?
Ambrosia comes to the rescue. She spots me standing in the middle of the cafeteria like a little lost soul with a tray of chocolate pudding, and she waves me over. Today her hair is up in some kind of beehive style from the 1950s. Alix and Stephanie are already at the table, looking skeptical at this lunchroom seating arrangement. Doing a school report together is one thing. This overrides every social rule in the history of Hunter High, and it isn’t going unnoticed. Many eyes are on us. Pox’s eyes. Ambrosia’s friends’ jealous eyes. His eyes, Brendon’s eyes. We’re a real spectacle. The Double Ds walk by and try to eavesdrop, but Ambrosia shoos them away like they’re a pair of pesky mosquitoes.
“So?” she asks. “Something happened last night?” It’s a question, but not a question, like she already knows the answer. “You want to tell us. Tell us.”
“How did you know?” I walk them through everything that happened with the Leech and He-Cat. When I get to the end of the story, I’m practically hyperventilating.
“Cross your heart that happened,” Alix orders.
I cross. “I swear. It was like something got into the Leech’s brain and rewired it with a message: Treat Meg and He-Cat totally the same.”
“No shit! That’s awesome.”
Stephanie, too, is wowed. “That’s what you asked for!”
“Exactly!” I say. “Only … you know … not exactly.”
I feel starved all of a sudden. I want food and I want it now. I pick up my cheese-and-tomato sandwich, bite hard into the crust. “What do you all think? Is this coincidence or…?”
Alix puts down her fork with an annoyed clang. “Too bad it didn’t work the right way and give you what you wanted. She was supposed to feel guilty.”
“I would have been happy with an apology,” I agree.
Stephanie, lover of all animals, focuses on He-Cat. “I’m super glad nothing bad happened to the cat. You’ll give him lots of love, won’t you?”
Ambrosia has been quiet, but I notice her glowing at us the way most teachers look at Raymond, everyone’s prize student. She taps her fingertips together, giving us a dainty but enthusiastic round of applause. “I want to say brava to all three of you. Good job.”
I put down my sandwich. “What do you mean?”
“It’s good for a start, a little introductory flex of your muscles. Don’t fret about the unforeseen glitch. That’s to be expected. You’re new to this, and you’re not on fire yet.”
“New to what?” I ask.
“On fire how?” Stephanie says.
Without asking permission, Alix dips her spoon into my pudding. “You’re telling us that”—she licks the spoon clean, drops it back on my tray—“it was us: me, her, and her? We messed with the Leech? We’re witches? Yeah!”
I’m not surprised to hear Ambrosia’s distinctive laugh dismiss that possibility. “Witches? Of course you’re not witches!” She gives a dismissive puff. “A little something out of the ordinary happens, a female shows a talent for power, and right away she’s branded as a witch!” She makes some exaggerated sniffs. “Have you smelled any witch’s brew? That’s not something you’d likely miss. Talk about stinking to high heaven, a mix between old Brussels sprouts and dried menstrual blood.”
Stephanie gives a nervous laugh and we exchange quick, uncertain looks. Ambrosia must be joking, even though she’s not the jokey type and it’s definitely a creepy joke. Even her laugh sounds deadly serious. In fact, I get the feeling she was born without a real sense of humor.
She goes on with her witch checklist: “Is anyone here cackling? Does anyone even have a warty nose?”
Alix’s hand dashes to her face. “I’ve got a zit—a big, juicy one on the chin.”
“We’ve all got zits,” Stephanie says. “Except you, Ambrosia. I always wanted to ask: How come you never, ever get a zit?”
Alix stays with the subject. “So if we’re not witches, how about vampires?” Her voice sounds light, hopeful.
Ambrosia also dismisses that idea with a stern shake of her head. “What is it with you people and your fascination with the living dead? You have vampires on the brain. They are so overrated in terms of punishment. One bite and you join a crowd of others just like you. It’s a regular party every night for eternity. Where’s the suffering in that?”
“I wouldn’t mind being a vampire,” Alix insists.
Ambrosia leans forward on the lunch table, hands folded, all business. “This is not one of Pallas’s democracies, something you can simply vote on. Forget vampires and witches. Listen carefully.”
She clears a space, hauls up her backpack, and pulls out the scrapbook from home, the one with the gold ribbon. She opens to a bookmarked place. She’s come prepared. But prepared for what? She closes her eyes, revealing the thick line of deep-blue makeup ridged along her eyelashes. She doesn’t actually need the book. She’s got the section memorized.
“Mother who made me, Mother Night hear me, bred to avenge the sighted, the blind, bred to avenge the dead. What mortal feels not awe, nor trembles at our name, hearing our fate-appointed power sublime, fixed by the eternal law.”
Her voice is even deeper than usual. It seems cut from the same fabric as her black-velvet jacket, thick and rich, swallowing up all the other sound and light in the cafeteria. I feel that everything, including myself, is disappearing under the spell of those words and her perfume. I want to hear more. But abruptly she closes the book, plants a big, loud kiss on the cover. “As I was saying the other day, Aeschylus almost got it right. Except for his totally unsatisfying ending. That ending! We can change that. The three of you can…”