by Jill Wolfson
“But you are pissed off not to be one of us, right?” Alix asks.
“Jealous?” Stephanie tries. “Just a little?”
Raymond’s response? Totally supportive, but not in a syrupy and gushy way. That would be creepy. “Meg, here, she’s definitely ready for a power upgrade. It’s long overdue. But personally, I like me the way I am: busy with my violin and contemplating a long, brilliant career in law, perhaps. Or music. No change necessary. What I lack in—”
I slide my finger across my throat, the universal cease-and-desist sign, which makes Raymond laugh. That’s another example of what I mean. He’s able to laugh at himself instead of taking offense like most people do. We’re halfway across the school lawn when his laugh turns into a nervous titter. He points out that a large, square human being is rushing our way at full speed.
Pox.
Alix widens her stance, a linebacker ready to take a hit. Stephanie, fists bunched, moves to her side for backup. I try to determine if Pox has anything in his hands, such as a newly sharpened meat cleaver. He is holding on to something. A plastic bag. It’s definitely big enough to hold a cleaver. I look around anxiously. Where is school security when you actually need it?
“Hey guys!”
Well, he looks like Pox, he smells like Pox, but he sure isn’t acting like Pox. Not the old nasty Pox who would never in a billion years say “Hey guys!” with an open, eager, and uncertain smile plastered on face. His eyes are also bloodshot, and his skin is flushed but pale underneath the high color, like he didn’t sleep at all the night before but still got up and ran for miles. He positions himself in front of Alix and thrusts the plastic bag in her direction.
She’s suspicious. She stares at it without touching. I can’t blame her. Anything could have happened overnight. The old Pox lives to torture on land and sea, so this could be one of his sick tricks and he’s faking this cheery nature and the bag contains a big load of dog crap. I wouldn’t put that past him. Maybe our magic or our spell or our lesson—whatever you call what we did—lasts no longer than a typical change of heart. I see that all the time. Someone feels terrible about something they did and they vow never to do it again, but then break their own resolution the next day. That kind of thing happens every January 2.
“What’s in it?” Alix asks, still hands-off.
Pox assures her. “It’s okay. Peace offering. Go ahead. Take it. It’s for Simon.”
“You stick your face into it first,” she orders, and he does. Then she looks, too, and emerges with a half smile. “What is it?”
Pox, perky as a five-year-old girl at her own birthday party, pulls out a gadget still in the plastic shrink wrap. “It’s a Six-in-One Outdoor Survival Mini Kit.” He ticks off each item on a finger. “Whistle, compass, magnifier, flashlight, thermometer, and something else. I had one just like it when I was a Cub Scout.”
Alix smirks. “You were a Cub Scout.”
Pox looks sheepish. “Yeah, until I got kicked out for my bad attitude.” Pox, eager to please: “Do you think Simon will like it?”
“It’s cool. He’ll go totally nuts over it.”
“Nuts! That’s great!”
The warning bell for first period rings. We start walking across the lawn toward the front entrance, Pox in front facing us, moving backward, practically skipping. “So Alix, anything else Simon might like? I can’t stop thinking about what a jerk I am. I couldn’t sleep last night.”
I get an idea and tell everyone to hold up a minute. “Pox, there’s something else you should do.”
“Of course!” he gushes. “Anything.”
I motion to my left. “You should apologize to Raymond for … for what, Raymond?”
The look on my best friend’s face shifts from detached amusement to personal interest. Raymond has done so much for me; this is my chance to finally do something for him. He deserves it. He’s described some of the awful stuff Pox did to him starting in middle school. Raymond tries to make it sound like it wasn’t that big of a deal. He can turn anything into a joke. But I know that he downplays just how bad it got. I picture a younger version of Raymond—still Raymond, but even more trusting and not as sure of himself, Raymond before he learned not to care what other people thought about him. Pox must have made his life hell back then.
“There are so many grievous insults in our shared history together,” Raymond begins. He motions Pox to his side, like he’s calling a disobedient puppy, and that’s how Pox responds, shamed and repentant, with an invisible tail tucked between his legs. “How about the time you pushed me into my locker and superglued it shut? When was that? Seventh grade?”
Pox winces at the reminder. “Gee, Raymond. Superglue. That was a super jerky thing to do. Will you accept my apology?”
Raymond puts his hands on his hips, exaggerating the stance of a disappointed teacher. “That was such a pedestrian act of bullying, definitely not your finest moment. I exonerate you for the prank, Pox, but not for your lack of imagination.”
Pox turns to me, puzzled. “Did he accept?”
“Not quite.” Raymond’s features shift again, this time into something darker and more serious. His voice no longer has its playful, sarcastic edge. “Pox, it’s not only me you tortured. I got over your bullying. I figured out how not to let it hurt me. But there are other kids, kids who never get over it and walk around ashamed of who they are, and they have no reason to be ashamed. They hate themselves. Because of you. That’s who you need to apologize to.”
I think I see tears forming in the corners of Pox’s eyes. His chin drops to his chest.
“Start with the gay kids. And then the kids you call homo or faggot even if they aren’t gay. And the short guys. And the flat-chested girls. And the handicapped kids. And the Danish foreign exchange student. And the geeks and the freaks and the Mexican—”
“And you, Meg!” Pox adds. “What I said about you and your family. I’m an asshole.” He bangs his forehead with his palm. “Asshole! I will apologize. I will! I won’t miss anyone. Promise. And after that, Raymond, will you forgive me?”
When Raymond nods, Pox lets out a big puff of air. “It’s gonna feel great to get this off my chest.”
The late bell rings, so we make a mad dash to get to first period just in time. Raymond slides into the seat next to me. “That was my dream come true. How many times did I rehearse that conversation in my head?”
“A million?”
“It was even better than I imagined. Thank you, Meg.”
I raise my fists over my head, like I’m Winner and Still Champion. “You’re very welcome, Raymond.”
* * *
In Western Civ, Ms. Pallas gives us the first half of class to work on our projects, so Stephanie, Raymond, Ambrosia, and I drag our chairs to Alix’s spot in the back of the room. It’s a wasteland back there, which is perfect. We don’t want anyone overhearing our conversation. This is a prime opportunity to talk about our cosmic destiny.
I can tell that Raymond has something important on his mind. He laces his fingers together. Is he growing a little mustache? No, it’s just a smudge of ink on his upper lip. I point it out and he wipes it away.
“The fact is,” he says, “I do see a place for myself in this turn of events.”
Alix, smug: “Knew it! You want in. You’re jealous.”
“This is more of an offer. An exclusive offer of myself. Every power trio needs a manager.”
At the mention of a manager, I check Ambrosia’s reaction. Today her dark hair cascades over her head and ends in a long braid that lies against the front of her coal-black sweater like a hibernating snake. She must have added some highlights, because there’s a definitely flash of auburn when she flips that braid so hard that it slaps Raymond on his cheek. I’m not surprised to see irritation bloom across her features. Raymond is pushing it. If anyone should be our manager, it should be Ambrosia. She’s the one who recognized us and called us together. Without her FAQs and exercises, we wouldn’t have gotten
started.
Raymond, though, has an amazing ability to ignore glares of animosity. He slaps the back of his hand into his open palm. It’s a gesture he must have seen in an old movie, a salesman offering the deal of the century. “My services come to you totally pro bono.”
“Pro what?” Alix asks.
“Free. Out of the goodness of his heart.” Ambrosia does something with her voice that makes the word goodness sound distasteful and dirty. The word heart sounds even more revolting. “What pro bono service could you have that could possibly be of any benefit to them?”
Raymond makes another offer-you-can’t-refuse slap. “My dear friends, a manager would remember that today, third period, this very instant, our project description and outline are due.”
“Shit.” Alix pounds her desk. “I need to pass this class to graduate.”
Raymond gives her a there, there pat on the shoulder. He opens his backpack and pulls out a stack of papers. “Four pages, six copies, meticulously researched, facts from multiple sources, spell-checked and collated.”
“No argument from me,” Stephanie says. “You’re hired.”
Raymond makes a seated bow. “At your service. Please note my usual obsessive-compulsive’s delight with thoroughness and order. I also narrowed down our topic. Is everyone okay with it?”
I take my copy of the outline and pass the others along, noting how Ambrosia reads each page slowly, every word. She’s trying to find fault with it. When she’s done, she pronounces the title aloud: “‘The Furies—Eye for an Eye in the Ancient World.’ I have to admit that despite my initial skepticism, I’m pleasantly surprised. I’m very okay with this.”
Since Raymond did all the work, it makes sense for him to present our outline to the rest of the class during the second half of the period. Our group is scheduled second, right after the Double Ds giggle their way through their presentation, titled “Glam Makeup Ideas That We Got from the Egyptians.”
“So, to sum up,” DeeDee says, “there was Cleopatra with her hoochie-momma eyes and flawless skin. How did she and other ancient hotties get their unique look? Makeup, of course, and most of it was made out of lead and arsenic.”
“Totally toxic,” Dawn adds.
“Fantastic colors! And it only did minor damage to the nervous system.”
“Unless you were stupid enough to eat some, and then it killed you.”
“So that’s our thesis. Very often in this world, you have to suffer for beauty, and it’s worth it. A message from the past…”
“… that rings totally true today.”
The twins are clearly psyched about their topic, and Ms. Pallas agrees that it’s the perfect subject for them, “though you should adjust the thesis a little,” she suggests. They collect compliments in the form of air kisses from their friends on their way back to their seats.
Raymond is up next. He hands a copy of the outline to Ms. Pallas and then spins quickly on his toes, Michael Jackson–style, to face the class.
“In the beginning, before Greece was even ancient, there was the Father. This was a very bad father who hated all of his children. True, the kids were total monsters. Literally. There was the one-eyed flesh-devouring giant and the towering creature with a hundred hands and fifty heads. But hey, kids are kids and family is family. He brought them into the world, monsters or not. Yet this father—this Father Heaven, aka Uranus—hated his offspring so much that he imprisoned them in a secret place in the very bowels of the earth. Only one of his kids—the Titan Cronus—had the cojones to stand up to him.”
The room is silent, riveted. No one makes a crack about Raymond using bowels and cojones. No one even whispers Your Anus, the sixth-grade alternative pronunciation for Uranus that high school kids still find hilarious. That’s how well he’s telling the myth.
“After eons of this shameless child abuse, on a fateful day that will live in infamy, Cronus waited in secret for his abusive, deadbeat dad. With a chop-chop of his mighty sword, he hit below the belt and castrated Uranus. Then Cronus threw his father’s entire mutilated package of genitalia into the churning, swirling sea.”
“Ouch!” someone says.
“No kidding,” Raymond continues. “The wound, as you can imagine, was terrible. When the blood hit the water it created a mighty trio, conjured them right out of Father Heaven’s pain, blood, and desire for revenge. The Furies, aka Creatures of Darkness. Aka Sisters of the Night. Aka the Erinyes. They have writhing snakes for hair and eyes that weep tears of blood. Their job is pursuing and punishing sinners, avenging the innocent, and taking care of injustice.”
Ms. Pallas, I can’t help but notice, cringes at the description, actually shudders in distaste when Raymond mentions the name, the Furies. She’s seated at her desk, and even though it’s dingy inside and outside the room, she seems to be splashed in a pool of light, the strands of her thick crown of hair giving off sparks of it. I glance around for a source of the light. There’s nothing external. It’s an internal glow, which tells me something important: My instincts are right. Our teacher has something to do with what’s going on. I can no longer ignore that. She knows. She probably knows everything. She’s part of this somehow. She’s no more just a teacher than I’m just another student and Ambrosia is just another girl. Ms. Pallas—if that’s even her real name—has a crucial role in all of this—whatever this is.
Her voice, when she finally speaks, seems to come out of the light, rather than from the throat and mouth of a normal human being. It vibrates with barely contained anger, and everyone in the room shifts uncomfortably in their seats.
“Those Furies had the gall, the unbridled audacity, to take up residence in the sacred temple of a goddess. I don’t care who they were after, or what their target supposedly did. How dare they? A goddess’s space is a sanctuary, a shrine of light, no place for the dark ugliness of revenge.”
I thought I’d gotten used to Ms. Pallas’s intensity, but this takes teacher pontificating to a whole new level. A layer of nervous sweat pops out on my forehead and in my armpits. Ms. Pallas places her hand on a copy of the Aeschylus plays, hard, like the book is alive and dangerous, a vicious animal that requires all of her strength to keep it down and in its place. She closes her eyes. She recites, like she’s soaking up the passage through her fingertips:
“‘Monsters, who lap the blood of live men’s bodies, this temple is no place for such as ye. But there where criminals are slain or mutilated is meet abode, and the feast ye love, ye loathsome goddesses.’”
In the unnerving silence that follows, I hear my breathing quicken. Her eyes pop open, her voice demands an answer: “Raymond, how do we get rid of these Furies?”
Flustered in a way that I’ve never seen Raymond flustered, he runs his finger down his outline, flips some pages. “As far as I can tell…”
“Go on,” she orders.
“… as long as there’s unfairness and injustice happening in the world, they can never be driven away, not like other monsters.”
“Never?” someone blurts out. It takes me a second to realize that this someone is Brendon, whose voice sounds dry and slightly strangled.
“That seems to be the situation.” Raymond is still hesitant, so unlike him. “They go to sleep for long periods of time, until a powerful person who has been wronged summons them again. Conditions need to be perfect, the stars in alignment, the Furies ripe to go, that kind of thing.” He turns to Ms. Pallas. “Did I get it right?”
It’s Ambrosia who responds without being called on. Her tone manages to combine reassurance and threat. “Don’t fret, everyone. There’s nothing to fear from the Furies if you behave yourself. You’re perfectly safe if you don’t act stupid and get in their way.”
One of the Double Ds giggles nervously, but it quickly dries up.
Brendon’s arm is in the air again. I study his profile, which is still and solemn, unreadable. He directs his question to Raymond: “You called them monsters, right? Creatures of darkness?”
Raymond nods.
“But you also describe them like they’re heroes? They avenge the innocent and combat injustice. How can these Furies be both monsters and do-gooders?”
Raymond’s face empties with the question, and it makes me wonder, too. Why are we called loathsome goddesses when we are doing what’s right? Why so much talk of blood and snakes and tears when we are standing up for the innocent? I know that artists have sometimes portrayed us as beautiful, but more often we are shown as vicious hags. Why so hideous and loathsome if we’re on the side of fairness? Why did the goddess want to banish the Furies from her temple? Why are we hated so much?
I see Raymond thinking hard, and I know him well enough to know that he’s stumped, too, lost in the same questions I am.
Ms. Pallas’s voice, sharp and penetrating, snaps him out of the reverie. She fires her own set of questions. “What is punishment? What is revenge? Who has the right to determine what is just and fair? Who decides when justice has been served? Well, Raymond? What happens when an eye for an eye goes on and on unchecked?”
“I don’t—”
“Take it to the conclusion! Everyone winds up blind. The Furies can be called up. But then what? Who can put them back to sleep?”
The light around Ms. Pallas flickers before fading out, casting her into shadow. “You’re only at the beginning of your research. This is what Raymond”—she aims a stern look at the rest of our group—“what all of you have to figure out. You have your work cut out for you. Don’t take it lightly.”
“We’re up for any challenge,” Ambrosia says. “We aim for the highest grade.”
“I’ve no doubt that you do.” Ms. Pallas rubs her temples, like she’s fighting off a headache. Maybe she already has one.