The Apocalypse of Elena Mendoza

by Shaun David Hutchinson

  “Fine,” I said. “I’ll consider it. I promise.”

  NINE

  WHO CAME UP with the incredibly brilliant idea of putting locker rooms in high schools? Being a teenager means surviving puberty. It means dealing with acne and awkward changes to our bodies that don’t make any sense. It’s the most vulnerable time in our lives, even though we’re all going through it, and often the easiest way to deflect our insecurity is to make fun of anyone who’s different. So, sure, let’s dump gasoline on that fire by forcing us to publicly expose our freaky, misshapen bodies before and after mandatory athletic competition. Sounds like a super plan.

  Coach Foster loved volleyball. It was more than a game with a ball and a net to her. It was life. I fully believed she spent her evenings making little dolls of her students that she set up on a miniature volleyball court so she could work out game strategies while she watched TV shows about people competing to live in the tiniest house or cooking competitions where all the chefs were required to prepare a meal using some weird animal’s tongue.

  I hated volleyball. No, I loathed it. I’d never been athletically gifted, and nothing showcased my lack of skills better than trying to hit a ball over a net that someone had spiked at my face.

  To make matters worse, Tori Thrash was in my gym class. Usually she ignored me, but sometimes she’d get in a mood and take every opportunity to embarrass me and prove that she was awesome and I wasn’t and, oh hey! Look at the freak who can’t even hit the ball! I wished Friday was one of the days she’d chosen to ignore me, but I was not that lucky. She and her friends had been loudly talking about me when I’d walked into the locker room to change, and they’d continued when we’d gotten to the court. I could hear her whispering nearby since she was on my team. Not that Coach Foster noticed.

  “Come on, Mendoza!” Coach Foster shouted. “Get your head in the game!”

  I stood in the back right corner, trying to pray the ball away. I’d healed Freddie, so maybe I could deflect the volleyball with my mind. Turning invisible during the pep rally hadn’t worked, but surely this would. Corinne Spieler served the ball in a high graceful arc that sent it hurtling directly toward me. I held my hands out and closed my eyes, bracing for impact. Instead of being hit with the ball, Tori rammed into me, shoving me to the ground. I slammed into the floor, banged my elbow, and yelped in pain. Telekinesis wasn’t one of my powers either.

  Coach Foster blew her whistle.

  “What the hell, Tori?” I sat up and rubbed my elbow. Currents of electric pain scurried up my arm into my fingers.

  “What’re you going to do, Mary?” Tori asked, standing over me. “Vanish me like you did Combs?”

  “I—”

  Coach Foster helped me to my feet. “You can’t hit the ball with your eyes closed, Mendoza.” She clapped Tori on the back. “Nice hustle, Thrash.”

  Nice hustle? Was she kidding with that? Tori practically body-checked me and she got commended for it? I started to argue, but I didn’t want to draw more attention to myself and make it worse.

  “I don’t think I can play anymore, Coach,” I said. “My elbow.”

  Coach Foster rolled her eyes. “Fine. Bleachers. But you better pay attention to the game. Watch how the other girls play.”

  I nodded and trudged to the bleachers. Without me playing, my team evened the score and then pulled ahead to win. I was grateful when Coach finally told us to head back to the locker room to shower and change. I hadn’t played long enough to need a shower, so I sat in front of my locker after I’d gotten out of my gym clothes and checked my phone. Only two days since the shooting and I’d already become a nonstory. Every credible news source had decided the shooting and healing were hoaxes, and had changed their focus to the search for David Combs.

  A slamming locker door broke my concentration, and I heard Tori talking to Ava Sutter. I shouldn’t have eavesdropped, but I couldn’t help myself.

  “Fuck her,” Tori said. “Mary didn’t do anything. She was probably blowing that weirdo.”

  “But Freddie said—”

  “Freddie’s lost it, Ava. Girl hardly even talks to me anymore.”

  “But what if it’s true?” Ava said.

  “You don’t seriously believe that shit, do you?”

  I quietly slipped away.

  The bell rang and I grabbed my backpack out of my locker. As I walked toward the exit, I passed Ava and stopped. Tori glared at me. “What’re you looking at?”

  “Nothing,” I said. Then to Ava, “I did heal Freddie.”

  “Don’t talk to her,” Tori said. “Don’t even look at her.” She pulled her arm tight around Ava.

  I left the locker room without another word.

  TEN

  A PRETTY DECENT drawing of me dressed as the Virgin Mary was decorating my locker in black marker after third period. The detail and shading were quality work, but whoever had drawn it had ruined it by writing “slut” underneath.

  I forgot to mention that after our breakup, Javi told his new friends that we’d definitely had sex and that I was a nymphomaniac, even though I’d only let him feel me up. I hadn’t bothered disputing the rumors, because Javi had already written my story and nothing I said would change it. The same way others were writing the story of what had happened in front of Starbucks with Freddie and David Combs. Soon the whispers would solidify and their version of the truth would be the only one that mattered.

  Fourth period was anatomy with Mrs. Burchfield. It was the class I slept through most often and was also the one class I shared with Freddie. She was already at her desk when I arrived, and I walked to my seat without looking at her.

  I sat near the front of the room, and I felt Freddie’s eyes burning a hole through me while Mrs. Burchfield lectured us on the musculature system. I tried to put what Tori and Ava had said out of my mind, but I couldn’t. I’d gotten the impression that Ava wanted to ask me to heal someone she knew, or possibly even herself. I’d already healed Freddie, a cat, and a cut on Fadil’s hand; maybe I could use my newfound powers to get on Ava’s good side. Only, that felt exploitative. No better than Sean’s suggestion.

  Hey! What’s a skeleton’s favorite musical instrument?

  My head jerked up. “What?”

  A trombone. Get it? A trom-bone?

  Mrs. Burchfield stopped speaking and turned her attention to me. She was standing next to an anatomy skeleton that I was 99 percent sure had told the worst joke I’d ever heard. “Did you have a question, Elena?” A couple of kids behind me snickered.

  I dipped my head. “No. Sorry.”

  Mrs. Burchfield continued identifying the individual muscles in the hands and arms.

  Could this lecture get any more boring? Seriously. How can you tell which one of us is dead?

  I did my best to ignore the skeleton. I squeezed my eyes shut and counted backward from a thousand in an attempt to drown out his voice. As much as I wanted to interrogate the voices, I didn’t want to do it in anatomy class.

  Real talk time, Elena. What you did when you healed Winifred Petrine? That was only the beginning. We have plans, and we need to know we can count on you. Nod your cranium if you understand.

  876, 875, 874, 873.

  I understand you’re scared, but we don’t have time for you to be all emo about it.

  851, 850, 849.

  The bell finally rang. The other students around me grabbed their books and surged toward the door. I hung back.

  “Did you need something, Elena?” Mrs. Burchfield asked.

  “I wanted to finish filling in the names of the muscle groups off the board before I forget.” It was a stupid excuse, seeing as they were in my book, but I hoped she’d buy it.

  Mrs. Burchfield gathered her purse and stood. “Well, this is my lunch period and I need to leave,” she said. “Shut the door behind you when you’re done.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Mrs. Burchfield took off, leaving me mostly alone.

  Wasting no ti
me, I stood and moved closer to the anatomy skeleton. “What plans?” I asked. “And what’s with the terrible jokes?”

  You’re going to save the human race. The jokes are a bonus. Get it? Bone-us?

  I chose to ignore the obnoxious wordplay. “Enough with the games. Tell me what’s going on.”

  You’re no fun today, Elena.

  “And you’re a dick.” I wasn’t sure it was wise to piss off the voices, but I also didn’t care.

  If the skeleton could have sighed, I think it would have. Fine. You need to keep healing people. As many as you can.

  “Are you serious?”

  Dead serious.

  “What happens if I don’t?”

  The explanation is complicated, and I’m not certain your brain is sufficiently developed to understand the intricacies.

  “Then give me the dumbed-down version,” I said, ignoring the insult.

  Your world go boom.

  “Not that dumb.”

  Humanity is in danger. We—and please don’t ask who “we” are because you really are too stupid to comprehend even the idiot version of that answer—are attempting to preserve as many lives as possible. You, regretfully, are the vessel through which we are forced to act.

  “I have questions.”

  Of course you do.

  “First: You’re a jerk. Second: How am I supposed to help?”

  You’ve already begun by healing Winifred Petrine, the skeleton said. Keep healing the sick and we’ll take care of the rest.

  “The rest of what?”

  I wish I had eyes to roll.

  “How am I able to heal people? What happened to the boy who shot Freddie? And how, exactly, is humanity in danger?”

  Someone cleared her throat behind me, and I stopped, frozen where I was standing, afraid to turn around.

  “Are you talking to a skeleton?”

  I was relieved the person who’d interrupted me wasn’t Mrs. Burchfield, but my relief vanished when I realized I recognized the voice. I slowly turned and found Freddie standing in the doorway. She was wearing jeans and a gauzy seventies-inspired top flared at the bottom. Her face was inscrutable. The pinched mouth and furrowed brow might have been curiosity. Or it might have been revulsion. I couldn’t tell.

  “Obviously not.” I tried to laugh it off. “I was thinking out loud and the skeleton made for a captive audience.”

  “Oh.” Freddie moved two steps deeper into the room.

  “How are you?” I asked. “Which is a stupid question seeing as neither of us is okay even though we’re trying to act like we are. I mean, someone shot you and now we’re back in school dealing with classes and homecoming and all the stupid nonsense—”

  “Why did you heal me?” Freddie said, interrupting.

  That wasn’t the question I’d been dreading. I’d expected her to ask me how I’d healed her, which, despite what the skeleton had told me, I still couldn’t explain, but she hadn’t and it caught me off guard.

  “We’re not friends, I’ve never been nice to you, so why did you do it?”

  I flashed back to Freddie bleeding out on the sidewalk. I’d healed her and she was alive, but that moment where I wasn’t sure she’d survive still haunted me.

  “Everything happened so fast and you got shot and I reacted.”

  “Before the shooting, I actually thought your name was Mary.”

  I frowned. “But we’ve had classes together for years. I figured you called me Mary because that was the joke.”

  Freddie shook her head. “People called you Mary, so I assumed that was your name. Honestly, I didn’t care enough about you to know I was wrong.”

  I’m not sure if it was worse believing she’d called me Mary as an insult or the truth that she’d been too indifferent to my existence to learn my real name.

  “My name’s Elena Mendoza.”

  “Yeah,” Freddie said. “I got that from the news.” She took another step toward me. I resisted the urge to move back. “So then why?” she asked again. “Why heal someone who couldn’t be bothered to learn your name?”

  “Don’t you want to know how?” I asked. “Most people want to know how I did it; even the ones who think we planned the whole thing as some kind of hoax.”

  “Most people are idiots. Tell me why.”

  “He shot you and you were bleeding and dying and I . . . What do you want me to say?”

  Freddie didn’t speak for a moment. She looked at me with her soft leather-brown eyes, stripping me down one layer at a time. Clothes, skin, muscles, until I was as naked as that dumb-joke-telling anatomy skeleton. She wanted answers that I didn’t have. Answers that I also wanted.

  Then she said, “So you didn’t bother asking yourself whether I wanted you to save my life?”

  “Wait, what?”

  Freddie moved in closer, and now she was barely an arm’s length away. “That boy shot me. I felt the bullet tear into my side and I knew I was dying.” Her husky voice had dropped low, so much that she was almost whispering. “And I was happy. For the first time in as long as I can remember, I was happy.”

  I thought she’d been smiling when I healed her because of me. Because she’d seen me. But she hadn’t been happy to see me or grateful I’d saved her life. She hadn’t even known my name. A killer had, but the girl I had a crush on, whose life I’d saved with a miracle, hadn’t.

  “I should go.” I started to make my way past Freddie when she grabbed my wrist.

  “The next time someone shoots me,” she said. “Let me die.”

  ELEVEN

  FADIL’S VOICE ROSE and fell from the back of the apartment as he prayed. The rhythm of it was soothing and peaceful, and I wondered if I could hand my worries over to a force greater than myself and trust that they had a plan. All I had were the voices, and though they’d spoken to me my entire life, I didn’t entirely trust them.

  “Does he have to do that here?” Sean asked, coming from the bedroom. “Natalia’s trying to sleep.” He shut the door gently behind him and padded into the kitchen, where I was sitting at the table with Conor and Sofie, helping them finish their homework.

  “He’s praying,” I said. “It’s not a crime.”

  Sean growled, grabbed a couple of beers from the fridge, and plopped down in front of the TV, where he’d spend the rest of the night getting drunk and watching sports.

  “I think it’s nice,” Sofie whispered. “His voice is pretty.”

  “I think so too.”

  Conor rolled his eyes. “I wish he’d hurry up so he can help me with my science project.”

  “Can you do that another time?” I asked. “Fadil and I have to take care of some things.”

  Mr. Murakami had given me lunch detention for showing up late in fifth period without a good excuse, so I hadn’t had time to talk to Fadil since my run-in with Freddie. He’d brought me home after school, but had spent the entire drive telling me what I’d missed at lunch, which had included Mr. Grossman bursting into tears for no reason and running from the cafeteria. Then Sofie and Conor had gotten home and I’d had to throw together dinner using what little we had in our fridge, since Sean had “forgotten” to go grocery shopping.

  Conor didn’t argue, but his adorable pout was evidence enough of his disappointment. I was glad Conor had a guy to look up to, seeing as Sean wasn’t someone you looked up to so much as looked down on.

  “Hey, Mr. Malloy!”

  Sean grunted at Fadil as he traipsed through the living room into the kitchen.

  Before Conor or Sofie could steal Fadil’s attention, I dragged him out of the house. I would have preferred to hang out at his place—especially since he had his own room—but Sean would have fed the kids cereal for dinner, and they deserved better.

  We walked in silence around my neighborhood, toward the lawsuit-waiting-to-happen that stood in for a playground, and sat on the swings. The sun’s light was draining from the sky, signaling to the mosquitoes that it was time to attack. I swatted them away
absently.

  “So I talked to Freddie after anatomy.”

  Fadil kicked off on the old brown mulch until he was swinging in a long, lazy arc. “Did you ask her out?”

  “Sure, ‘Hey, since I totally saved your life, we should go out.’ ”

  “Or maybe with a little more enthusiasm.”

  I’d been replaying the conversation in my head, looking for some other way to interpret Freddie’s words. They didn’t make sense based on what I knew of her. She wasn’t the most popular girl in school, but everyone liked her. She took dance classes and was in theater and she fought to make the world better. In ninth grade, the school had put up posters in the cafeteria for Taco Tuesdays, which had included a pudgy-faced Mexican with a bushy mustache who was wearing a sombrero. I couldn’t look at those stupid posters hanging in the cafeteria without wanting to tear them all down and set them on fire in the middle of the quad, but Freddie actually created protest posters highlighting the racism inherent in the Taco Tuesday posters. She’d made one for every day of the week, each more offensive than the last, including posters for Matza Mondays, General Tso’s Tuesdays, and Fried Chicken Fridays.

  By the time Freddie was done, Taco Tuesdays became Turkey Tetrazzini Tuesdays and all the posters were replaced with goofy cartoons depicting the dangers of gonorrhea, genital warts, and herpes. She’d gotten a week’s worth of detention for her trouble.

  That was when my crush had gone critical. And I didn’t know how to reconcile that girl with the one who was upset I’d saved her life.

  “Well?” Fadil asked. “What did she say? Did she thank you, at least?”

  “Hardly.” I was afraid to swing too high, out of fear that the groaning structure would collapse on top of me. “She asked me why I’d healed her, if I’d considered whether she’d wanted to live, and then she told me not to bother next time.”

  “Next time?” he asked. “Does she think someone’s going to try to take another shot at her?”

  “Maybe.”

  I stood and walked to the slide and sat on the edge. There was an empty condom wrapper a couple of feet away and dried dog shit someone had neglected to pick up. Who the hell saw dog poo and thought, Let’s get naked!