“It’s not true, you know,” Javi said.
“You don’t think Cedric’s death was the turning point in the series?”
“No, about Cedric being the first real death.”
I rolled my eyes because I’d been expecting this. “Yeah, Harry’s parents, but—”
“Professor Quirrell.”
“Quirrell?”
Javi nodded. “He dies when Voldemort leaves his body.”
“He was Voldemort, though.”
“Voldemort possessed him. He wasn’t in control. Quirrell didn’t deserve to die any more than Cedric. He was just this random nerd who winds up a prisoner of Voldemort, and kicks it as a result. And Quirrell’s death is fucking tragic because no one mourns him. He dies, and everyone goes on levitating feathers and conjuring dinner like whatever. His death is senseless and cruel, but we all shrug that shit off and move on. Why is that?”
I sat on one of the benches, no longer concerned about being late to class. “I guess we’re meant to assume that Quirrell isn’t innocent. That he was somehow complicit.”
“But why? Did he ask Voldemort to possess him? Was he given a choice?” Javi cast his shadow across my face. “No one’s innocent, Elena. Not even the Cedric Diggorys of the world.”
“That doesn’t make me hate it any less.”
Javi nudged me. “I gotta run, but listen, I’d skip that shit on the football field if I were you.”
“Is that so?”
“Yeah.” Javi had the emotional IQ of a potato, so his casual warning was the equivalent of another person’s frantic concern and was worth taking seriously. “I think it’s good and all what you’re doing, but you don’t want the kind of shit this is going to bring down on you.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
TWENTY-NINE
JUSTINA SMITH DIDN’T care about saving the world. When she’d asked me to heal her little brother, she hadn’t been concerned with who might vanish or whether my miracles were part of a larger plan. All she wanted from me was to fix what was wrong with someone she loved. Saving the world was a task so enormous that thinking about it made me sick to my stomach.
When a doctor takes a patient into surgery, she doesn’t worry over the other patients who might need her help. She doesn’t consider who might die while she’s patching up a bullet hole or removing a tumor. She focuses on the person in front of her. She turns all her attention to the life she can save.
Maybe the world was in danger, maybe it wasn’t. I didn’t know if I was capable of saving humanity, but I could heal one boy who couldn’t breathe.
Part of me expected to walk onto the football field and find it empty except for the marching band and the few students who sometimes sat in the stands to watch and do their homework like I did when I was waiting for a ride home from Fadil. Another part of me expected to find the stands packed to capacity; to see reporters with video cameras and microphones who’d snuck onto campus to witness a miracle. The reality was closer to A than B. The marching band was on the field, though they were clustered in small groups while they waited for Mrs. Naam to arrive, and there were about a dozen students waiting by the bleachers. Included in the group were Javi, with a couple of his annoying friends, Freddie, standing alone, and other students whose faces I knew but whose names I couldn’t recall. Some of them had their phones out, waiting to record whatever was going to happen here so they could be the first to post it to Snowflake or whatever. I was surprised Freddie had shown, but glad she had. Even though I’d saved her life, even though she knew my name and I’d talked to her and rescued her from a party and she’d sat with me at lunch, I still felt like she didn’t really see me, and I hoped watching me heal Ben Smith might finally open her eyes.
Trying unsuccessfully to hide behind the bleachers stood Carmen Ballard in a cream suit, wearing oversized sunglasses that made her look like a glamorous alien. She smiled in my direction and I ignored her. There was something slimy about her that freaked me out, and I wondered if I should tell Deputy Akers about her.
Justina Smith, surprisingly, was not part of the crowd. Instead, she sat with her brother on the bleachers, huddled close to him, pointing at a book he was reading. He was a small boy, gangly and thin. His face lit up every time Justina spoke. A nasal cannula was positioned in his nose, and the tubes ran back over his ears to an oxygen tank on wheels, decorated with patches of superheroes and Dora the Explorer.
The crowd fell quiet as I strode across the field. Justina saw me and stood, still holding her little brother’s hand. She said something to him I couldn’t hear, and he smiled, all bright teeth and dimples.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a few of the members of the marching band pointing at me. Some moved closer to the small crowd that had assembled. A couple of the people nearest to Justina held up their phones, waiting for me to perform a miracle. I ignored them.
“Hi,” I said to Ben Smith when I reached him. I knelt down so he didn’t have to stand. “I’m Elena.”
“I’m Benjamin Jefferson Smith.” He spoke his full name like he was applying for a job. It was the cutest thing I’d ever heard, and he reminded me a little of Conor.
“Your sister tells me you have trouble breathing.”
Ben nodded. “It’s hard walking up stairs and Mommy says I’m not supposed to run.”
“Would you like to be able to run?”
“I think so,” he said, though he sounded confused.
“Did your sister tell you why you’re here?”
“Just that you were her friend and she wanted me to meet you.”
I admired that she hadn’t told him why she’d brought him to the field, likely to avoid getting his hopes up in case I didn’t show or couldn’t do what I’d promised. I didn’t need to know anything else about her to understand how much she loved her brother.
“I’m going to help you,” I said. “I’m going to heal you. It won’t hurt, though; I promise.”
Ben’s wide, deep-set eyes remained unskeptical and curious, but I’m not sure he believed me. “Will I be able to breathe better?”
“I hope so.”
“Okay, then. I’m not scared.”
At least one of us wasn’t. My hands were shaking and I felt the eyes of everyone on the field watching me. There were more onlookers gathered than I’d expected, and I thought about what Javi and Deputy Akers had said. Even if no one managed to capture my “miracle” on their phones, they would still see it. They would still know, and I wasn’t sure what that would mean. There would be more disappearances, for sure, and that could bring the agents Akers had warned me about down on me. But I’d already made up my mind to do this, and there was no turning back.
I took Ben’s hand and closed my eyes.
Ben Smith shone brighter than anyone I’d ever seen. He might have been sick, but he was fire and electricity and his brilliance threatened to blind me. But there, in the center of his light, chains wrapped around his chest, squeezing tighter. Every second I watched, the chains constricted, and Ben’s light grew fractionally dimmer. He wouldn’t die today or tomorrow, or even a year from now, but eventually those chains would crush the life from him, so I reached out and broke them.
I opened my eyes and Ben was smiling. He pulled the tubes out of his nose, dropped them on the ground. And he ran.
THIRTY
I HEALED BRENDAN Landsman of his asthma and Sylvia Griffith of her type 1 diabetes before leaving the football field that night. Two hundred and eighty-eight people disappeared, including Ava Sutter from our school and the manager of a McDonald’s in town. Snippity Snap, which turned out to be the name of the My Little Pony, congratulated me when I got home and told me the number saved. I learned about Ava and the McDonald’s guy from the news. Despite the number of phones recording what I’d done, none actually managed to capture video of the event. Apparently the voices didn’t want me to have my own television show after all.
I’d expected Fadil to c
hange his mind on the whole healing thing after the light raptured Ava Sutter. It was one thing to say it was part of a divine plan when the voices were taking killers and strangers, but Fadil had known Ava. We’d gone to school with her and sat through classes with her. She was a real person rather than a hypothetical. But Fadil held on to his belief. He might have been scared that exposing my abilities would attract the kind of attention that could land me in a dark hole somewhere, but he still trusted that I was following the path laid out for me and that everything would work out for the best. It’s difficult to knock that kind of optimism, but I didn’t share it.
Freddie left without saying good-bye sometime after I’d healed Ben Smith, and I didn’t know whether she was proud I’d healed Justina’s brother or disappointed. Everything about that girl confused me. Then again, after the conversation we’d had at lunch, I was pretty certain she confused even herself.
My life didn’t change overnight and I didn’t become a superstar at school. Sure, I’d converted the students who’d been on the football field and had seen me perform a miracle into believers, but the majority of my classmates and teachers still considered me a fraud. They claimed the entire thing was a hoax perpetrated by a disturbed young woman desperate for attention. I’m not entirely certain if I became famous or merely infamous for healing Ben, Brendan, and Sylvia.
At school the following day, someone wrote “lying bitch” on my locker, which was better than “slut” I supposed. Another left flowers. I heard my classmates whispering everywhere I went. What I’d done on the football field might have turned me into even more of a social pariah, but that didn’t stop them from asking me for help. They had sick grandparents, dying parents, brothers and sisters with cancer or born with genetic ailments. Sunni Myers had a deadly peanut allergy and asked me to help her. I did. Two hundred and thirty-three vanished. Daniel Kokie caught me and Fadil on our way to the car after school and asked me to heal his cystic acne. He cried as he explained that the bullying he endured had gotten so bad he’d tried to buy generic Accutane over the Internet, but it had been a scam. Three hundred and seventy-seven strangers were raptured when I gave him blemish-free skin.
And on it went. The number of people taken in beams of light increased dramatically each time I healed someone, and I kept waiting for agents in black sunglasses to show up at my house and whisk me away in the middle of the night.
Fadil brought me stories of strange happenings around the world as proof that the voices had told the truth regarding humanity being in danger. An unexplained patch of darkness in the Sahara Desert, slowly spreading, that killed everything it touched; a sinkhole in New Zealand that grew incrementally wider every day; and more mundane events like a blight in Iowa killing cornfields and outbreaks of a virus in seemingly disconnected towns that spread fast, killed mercilessly, and then disappeared. There was an earthquake in Alaska that knocked out power to tens of thousands for a week, the sudden meltdown of the sole remaining nuclear power plant in Japan, and rolling, intermittent brownouts across the United States that the government couldn’t explain.
Fadil insisted these were signs, but I wasn’t convinced. I couldn’t simply attribute every bad event that happened in the world to the voices in my head. Were the riots at Harvard University that ended in the death of three caused by whatever danger the voices said we were in or by the reaction to a racist ideologue who’d been scheduled to give a speech at the school? Was the bombing of the US embassy in Germany a symptom of the world’s end or a response to the aggressive actions of our incompetent president? Horrible things were happening all the time, and I didn’t know whether I was the cause, if they were the effect, or if what I was doing was helping at all.
THIRTY-ONE
I’M NOT SURE anyone would have blamed me if I’d jumped out of the speeding car into the road and prayed for a nonlife-threatening injury.
“I can’t thank you enough for doing this,” Naomi said from the front seat. Yep, I’d been relegated to backseat passenger for the first time in the history of my friendship with Fadil, and I wasn’t handling the demotion gracefully.
“I haven’t done anything yet,” I said.
Fadil glanced back at me in the rearview mirror. I’d reluctantly said yes when he’d called and asked me to go with him and Naomi to the nursing home where her grandfather lived to heal his COPD. There was nothing the doctors could do for him except keep him comfortable, and without help he wouldn’t survive the year.
“I’m not doing this to help you get laid,” I’d said.
“You’re not doing this for me at all,” Fadil had countered. “You’re doing it for Naomi.”
“But I don’t even like Naomi.”
“Fine,” he’d said, “then you are doing it for me.”
I would have felt less weird if Naomi had asked me to do it herself, but Fadil asking made me feel like he was using me to score points with the girl he liked, and I wasn’t sure I was okay with that. But I’d agreed because I never wanted it said that I’d stood between Fadil and what he wanted.
“Still,” Naomi said, “thank you.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Sure.”
The Shady Lane Nursing Home was an okay place as far as nursing homes went. This might make me sound kind of horrible, but old people freaked me out. Not all of them—obviously I loved Mrs. Haimovitch—but the ones who were on the verge of dying. I still had an ocean of years between where I was in life and where they were, but I couldn’t look at them with their wrinkled skin and gray hair and failing health and not see my own distant future. And it scared me. It terrified me that one day I might not be the person I was, that one day I might not even remember who I used to be. Like I said, maybe it makes me a horrible person, but I think anyone who says they’re not afraid of the future is lying.
Naomi led us through the home. We signed in at the front desk, and she said hi to everyone we passed, nurses and residents alike. I might have only tolerated her presence for Fadil’s sake, but I couldn’t deny that she was a pretty decent person. Sometimes she talked too much, but she offered a smile to everyone she met, and she honestly did know more about K-pop than anyone had a right to. If I was going to lose my best friend to someone, I grudgingly accepted that he could have done worse than Naomi Brewer. Not that I would ever admit that to either of them.
Mr. Brewer, who insisted we call him Nelson, was exceptionally tall and made the chair he was sitting in look child-sized. He spoke haltingly, stopping every few words to catch his breath, and he told the filthiest jokes I’d ever heard. Healing him took barely a minute. Around the world 610 people vanished. Nelson hugged me and hugged Naomi and hugged Fadil, and he even hugged the nurse who came to see what was going on. I slipped out in the confusion to avoid the inevitable questions from the nurses and doctors who were beginning to show up, but also to dodge Naomi’s inevitable awkward attempt to hug me too.
I wandered through the nursing home until I found myself standing in front of an open door leading into a room filled with photographs. An elderly woman lay on her bed napping, and I tiptoed in to look at the pictures. The walls were covered with them. Framed photos of the woman’s life, I suspected. Next to each one were pages from a journal, also framed. I paused to read one from the day she was married. She’d been beautiful in her wedding dress, smiling at a handsome man who gazed at her with naked adoration.
“You look a little young to be a nurse.”
I turned and found a guy barely older than me with wavy brown hair and brown eyes standing in the doorway watching me, the hint of a smile on his lips.
“Sorry,” I said. “I wandered by and saw the pictures and . . . I’ll leave.”
“It’s fine. Breakfast foods are about the only things that wake Nana up these days.”
“Your grandmother?”
He nodded. “I’m Henry.”
“Elena.”
A nurse ran past in the hallway. “What’s going on out there?” Henry asked.
“Not s
ure,” I said. “What’s the deal with all the pictures?”
Henry walked into the room and stood near me, but not so close as to make me uncomfortable. “They were a Christmas present,” he said. “She has Alzheimer’s, and I wanted to make sure she’d never forget the amazing life she led.”
“That was sweet of you.”
“You look familiar,” Henry said. “Did you go to Calypso High?”
“Arcadia West. I’m a junior.”
“Then how—” He snapped his fingers and his eyes lit up. “You’re the girl from Starbucks. The one who . . .”
“Yep,” I said. “That’s me. The one who claimed she healed someone.”
“Is that why you’re here?” he asked. “Is that why the nurses are all freaking out? Did you heal someone?”
“Don’t you mean ‘supposedly’?”
“If I meant ‘supposedly,’ I would have said it.”
I couldn’t tell if Henry was mocking me or if he sincerely believed. “You don’t think I’m lying?”
“You’d be surprised at what I’m willing to believe.”
“You’re weird.”
“Says the girl who performs miracles. Supposedly.” He said the last with a wink.
I walked to where Henry’s grandmother was sleeping. “I could heal her.”
“So why don’t you?”
The Apocalypse of Elena Mendoza Page 15