Читать книгу As I Descended - Robin Talley - Страница 9
ОглавлениеHOURS DREADFUL AND THINGS STRANGE
For the life of him, Mateo couldn’t figure out what the hell Maria was doing.
She was still sitting next to him from when she’d fallen, but she was scribbling on a notepad now. Off to one side, in the dark, where the others wouldn’t see.
He could’ve asked her, but ever since he’d come to Acheron, Mateo had made it a policy not to ask the rich girls too many questions. They only got flustered and made something up, and at the end of it he was just as embarrassed as they were.
Now that he knew the truth about Maria, though, it was harder to hold back. Last week, Brandon had told him about her and Lily Boiten. They were “in loooove,” Brandon had said, giggling. Maria thought she was probably bi, Brandon said, but Lily was all-the-way gay.
Mateo didn’t believe it at first. Both those girls seemed way too uptight to like pussy. Now that he was paying attention, though, he was surprised he hadn’t figured it out before.
There was the way Maria was staring at Lily, for one thing. As if she wanted to shove everyone else out the door so Maria could have her all to herself.
There was something about the way they were with each other, too. An easiness. They looked like they could have whole conversations without ever needing to talk out loud.
It made Mateo kind of jealous, honestly. Not of the part where the girls felt like they had to stay closeted—which was kind of weird, actually, since for him, being gay had only upped his stud factor at school. Maybe Maria felt like she had to keep quiet since her mom was a state senator?
No, the part that made him jealous was that he’d definitely never been “in loooove.” He’d been hooking up with Brandon for a few weeks, but he didn’t see it lasting through the semester. He liked the guy, sure, but there just wasn’t that much there. It was more of a we’re the only two gay guys in this backwater school, so let’s screw already thing than a Romeo-and-Juliet one.
Or Romeo-and-Romeo. Whatever. Beer.
“Hey.” Mateo nudged Maria’s shoulder. Another dare was starting on the far side of the room. “You okay?”
“What? Oh. Yeah.” Maria shrugged. “Thinking about the match.”
Mateo smiled at her. She didn’t smile back. Caitlin and Emily had started a contest to see who could touch their noses with their tongues. All the guys except Mateo were watching, rapt.
“Don’t worry,” he told Maria. “You ladies have been working your asses off in practice. You’ll crush ’em.”
The girls’ soccer team was playing its league championship next week, and it was going to be a lot harder than the guys’ game had been. Mateo’s team had won easily, and a WVU scout even showed up to watch. Mateo had been checking the mail every day since, praying for a scholarship offer.
But the girls were gearing up to play Acheron’s big rival, Birnam Academy. Birnam had won the Virginia state championship two years in a row, and all the girls on Acheron’s team were freaking out about the game. Why? He couldn’t really say. It wasn’t like any of them would need scholarships to go to college.
Some people thought the Kingsley Prize committee cared about the team’s record, but Mateo was pretty sure that theory was mostly bullshit. Just like the Kingsley Prize itself. He hadn’t even bothered to put his name in for the thing. Delilah Dufrey had it in the bag.
Mateo liked Delilah. They’d been friends since Mateo first transferred to Acheron in ninth grade. He could’ve been the weird new brown kid at school—and the gay one, to boot—but Delilah had started hanging out with him right away. When he told her he wanted to start a Gay-Straight Alliance, she said she’d be vice president. Thanks to Delilah, joining the GSA became cool, and so did Mateo.
But if anyone had asked his opinion of the Kingsley thing, he’d have said that if some rich, dead dude wanted to give out a free ride to college, he should give it to someone who actually needed one. Not someone whose parents could afford the most expensive school on the planet four times over.
The championship game was a matter of pride for Maria and the others, though, and Mateo certainly understood about pride. Soccer was the whole reason he’d come here. Acheron had recruited him from Birnam back in middle school. Offered him a full scholarship in exchange for captaining the soccer team and upping Acheron’s diversity quotient. Getting into college didn’t feel half as sweet as listening to that crowd cheering your name.
Just then, the air conditioner stopped humming. The hall light went out. The room sank into dim candlelight.
Great. Another power failure. Acheron’s electrical system was about as old as the house itself. Someone, somewhere, was probably microwaving popcorn.
The room fell silent. Even Delilah’s giggling trailed off. Emily, who’d just been dared to dance like Beyoncé, stopped mid-hip-thrust. Mateo rummaged in his pocket for the matches they all carried and lit two extra candles on the bedside table. Across the room, Austin lit three more.
A sharp clang came from the far corner—the dark, empty corner near the boarded-over fireplace, on the wall the room shared with the old dining hall.
Caitlin squealed. Everyone turned to look in the direction of the clattering sound.
“Emily, was that you?” Mateo asked. Emily had been closest to that side of the room. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” Emily shook her head. “I mean, no. Whatever that noise was, I didn’t make it.”
Maria walked unsteadily into the dark, empty corner and bent down. A photo frame lay facedown on the ground. She flipped it over. It was an old picture of her and Brandon from her beach house last summer, in a pink novelty frame that said “BFFs 4-EVA!” in block letters along the bottom. Brandon had the same picture up in his room.
The glass in the frame Maria held was cracked neatly in half, the fracture running right over Brandon’s face.
Maria frowned and turned the frame over in her hands. Lily whispered from her perch on the bed, “Don’t worry, Ree, it was a crappy picture of you anyway.”
They all laughed, even Maria.
It was weird, her and Brandon being best friends. They seemed like total opposites.
Mateo had always liked Maria, of course. Everyone did. She was smart and cute and funny. She had dimples that flashed when she smiled, and she had a way of looking at you that made you feel like you were the most important person in the world. She was the school princess, only one step down from Queen Delilah herself. Which Delilah never let Maria, or anyone else, forget.
No matter how much they adored Maria, though, the popular crowd seemed to think Brandon was barely good enough to be allowed across their threshold. That was Acheron for you. The school used to be a farm run by slaves, now it was a factory for shallowness and broken souls.
And for Maria and Brandon, most of what they had in common wasn’t stuff they talked about with everyone else. In fact, they seemed to spend most of their time together talking about everyone else.
Brandon had shown Mateo the list they used to keep in his old bio notebook. Freshman year, Brandon and Maria had made up nicknames for everyone in their class. Austin was “Pseudo-Vamp,” because he dressed all in black even though his favorite song was “Love Story” by Taylor Swift. Caitlin was “Dumber Than a Dumb Blonde Joke.” Delilah was “Her Most Insufferable Majesty.” Mateo was “Gay or Eurotrash?” (which made Mateo laugh harder than it probably should’ve). At the very bottom of the list was a name that had been crossed through so many times it was barely legible. Lily’s name. Before she and Maria got together they’d called her “Braided Just a Little Too Tight.”
Brandon kept giggling as he pointed down the list. Mateo smiled too. The names weren’t really that funny, but he was sure they’d seemed hilarious in ninth grade. He could picture the two of them lying side by side on Maria’s bed, telling jokes at their friends’ expense. Brandon had been doing it for the shits and giggles, but Mateo had a feeling Maria meant every word she wrote.
You wouldn’t know it to look at her, standing there smiling at everyone like they were her favorite people in the world, but Maria knew exactly what she wanted. How much of her was real and how much was her playing at what she thought these people expected from her?
“Hey,” Kei said. “I’ve got a scary story, actually.”
“Oh, come on,” Lily said. “Just because the lights went out that doesn’t mean we have to pretend we’re at a little kids’ slumber party.”
“What’s the matter, Lily, you scared?” Mateo grinned at her. “It’s just another blackout. What, you think La Llorona’s gonna get you in the dark?”
Lily kept her lips in a tight line. Most girls cheered up when Mateo teased them, but Lily wasn’t most girls.
When Mateo turned away, he saw Maria looking right at him. Her face was pale, her eyes narrow.
“What did you say?” she asked Mateo.
“What? About your roommate being a wuss?”
“No, the other part.”
Maria looked drunk all of a sudden. Really drunk. Mateo felt bad for not noticing sooner.
“You sure you’re okay?” Mateo asked her.
Maria must’ve imagined it. He couldn’t have said La Llorona’s name. No one knew about La Llorona except Maria.
And her old nanny, Altagracia. But Altagracia was dead.
“I’m okay,” she told Mateo.
She was not at all okay. Tonight was not a normal night. “Okay, so here’s my story,” Kei said. “Back in the Civil War, there were a bunch of Union officers camped out here, using the house as their command base, and there was a mutiny, and—”
“Everybody knows that story,” Tamika interrupted him. “The ambassadors tell it to you on the tour.”
Maria’s eyes drifted in and out of focus as she gazed from face to face. Room parties always felt endless.
“Yeah, but did you know the security guards still hear them?” Kei said. “They said you can hear the soldiers marching out on the grounds at night. They say that one lieutenant—the one who was shot by his own soldiers—you can still hear screaming at midnight when the moon’s full.”
“Oh, that’s so not true,” Emily said.
“I’ve never heard any soldiers, and I’ve been going to this school since the fourth grade,” Ryan said.
“Yeah, that’s bull,” Tamika said. “Like the one about the ghost of the old lady who’s supposed to come sit on your chest and smother you at night. Or the rampaging Indian spirits who stalk little kids. I mean, come on.”
“They’re not Indians, they’re Native Americans,” Caitlin said. “And you’d be pissed too if your land got invaded and your whole tribe got slaughtered.”
“Yes, please, tell me more about the evil things white folks have done,” Tamika said.
“Has anybody ever seen the kids on the lake?” Caitlin asked.
A hush fell over the room.
Oh God. Had someone else seen the kids on the lake? Maria had been sure she was the only one.
“Have you?” Austin asked.
“Well, no,” Caitlin said. “But you know the story, right?”
“Oh, sure,” Ryan said. “I mean, they teach that story to all the ambassadors, too. But it’s bullshit about there being stupid lake ghosts. Come on.”
“Wait, what story?” Mateo asked.
“The little kids say the lake has ghosts,” Ryan said. “The true part of the story is, back in the seventies, when the school grounds first got extended to include the lake, there were three kids who drowned all in one night.”
Everyone was quiet for a moment. It was one thing to think about Civil War soldiers dying on their campus, but the seventies weren’t that long ago.
“That’s why no one’s allowed to swim there,” Kei added. “I heard there’s, like, a whirlpool way out in the deep part that sucks you under.”
“The little kids think there’s a bogeyman who grabs you and drags you to the bottom,” Ryan said. “I think the school made that up so people would be too scared to go swim there. Like the one about the football players.”
“No, that one’s true too,” Mateo said. “I heard it before I came here. My parents told me they’d kill me if I ever went near the football field during a thunderstorm.”
“That’s an urban legend,” Ryan said. “You can’t really die just because you’re on a football field and lightning hits the goalposts. Do you pay attention in physics at all?”
“But the one about the lake is totally true,” Caitlin said. “There are pictures of the kids who died in an old yearbook. They were a guy and two girls and they were all in, like, a love triangle.”
“A love triangle?” Austin said. “Spare me.”
Maria had seen the kids on the lake. And there were four of them, not three. But she’d only told Lily and Brandon about that.
Brandon. Oh God, Brandon. She still had to figure out what to say to him about last night.
He’d pulled her into a side corridor that morning after class, breaking away from Felicia, the little freshman who always followed him around like a puppy.
“What the hell happened last night?” Brandon had whispered to Maria. “Did you have a psychotic break or something?”
“Of course not.” Maria had shifted her backpack strap on her shoulder, her heart pounding. She should’ve come up with some reasonable-sounding explanation, but all she’d been able to do since the chandelier fell was replay the spirit’s message in her head. The chiming voice she’d heard sing each line as the planchette spelled them out.
“So what was that?” Brandon asked. “How was that thing writing stuff when you and Lily had your eyes closed?”
“I don’t . . .” Maria shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. It was just a game.”
“Just a game my ass. You took it seriously.”
Maria kissed Brandon on the cheek, the way she did when she wanted to make him laugh. It didn’t work this time.
He shrugged. “We can talk about this later, I guess.”
Maria nodded and promised to meet him during dinner tomorrow at the corner table by the salad bar, where they could talk without being overheard.
She’d have to figure out some way out of it between now and then. There was no way she could tell Brandon the truth.
Maria wished she’d never told him about any of it. The mirror on her grandmother’s porch—or the strange things that had happened when she was younger.
It was just that before Lily came along, Maria had never had anyone to talk to. Not anyone who actually understood her. Brandon was so good at listening.
It had been that way ever since he’d first come to Acheron. They’d put him at the bio table next to Maria’s, and when he’d been too squeamish to slice open his fetal pig, Maria had snuck over and done all his incisions at lightning speed. Maria, it turned out, was something of a fetal-pig-dissection prodigy.
They sat together at lunch after that. Brandon gave Maria his yogurt as a thank-you present. He told her she had the prettiest eyes he’d seen since Enrique Iglesias’s. Maria asked who Enrique Iglesias was. They’d been best friends ever since.
That was before she got to know Lily. Before she understood what it meant to really care about someone. To feel like you’d disappear into the air if that person wasn’t always right beside you.
But it took years for Maria to understand that. In the meantime, she told Brandon about all of it. The voices that whispered outside her room at night when she was little, low enough that she couldn’t make out the words. The time in kindergarten when she woke up in the middle of the night to see her Raggedy Ann doll laughing at her from the shelf over her bed.
About how sometimes, even in the middle of August, she’d walk past a certain spot in a room and feel an icy chill, the room growing so cold she could see her breath. She’d know someone was watching her, but when she turned, she saw only her own shadow.
She’d told Brandon about the worst time, too. She’d been eight years old then. She was fast asleep when she felt a weight settling onto the edge of her bed. She opened her eyes, expecting to see her mother, but the room was empty, save for that icy chill. And the faint outline of a little boy with black eyes sitting on the foot of her bed.
The boy whispered her name.
Maria had screamed, and Altagracia had come running. Maria told her about the boy, and Altagracia searched her room from floor to ceiling. She didn’t find anything, but Maria knew what she’d seen. What she’d felt.
That was when Altagracia first told her about La Llorona. She was a guardian angel, Altagracia said. She watched out for girls like Maria and protected them fiercely. She’d watched out for Altagracia, too, when she was a girl. As long as La Llorona was with her, and Maria hid her fear, she’d be safe from the dark spirits that walked the earth.
Maria had forgotten all about La Llorona, and Altagracia too. She’d thought about her old nanny only a handful of times since she’d come to Acheron.
Today, though, Maria hadn’t been able to stop thinking about either of them. Ever since she’d listened to the audio from their Ouija session.
Most of the recording was Brandon giggling and shuffling papers around, but the knocking was there, too. It sounded ten times louder on the playback than it had last night.
As soon as the knocking ended, the humming began.
On the recording, Maria recognized the tune the voice had been humming in her ear. Something about it was a little off, but it sounded like “Estoy Contigo.” The song Altagracia used to whistle under her breath as she baked.
“Estoy Contigo.” In English, it meant “I Am with You.”
Maria couldn’t quite make sense of it all. There had to be an explanation. Some key answer that connected all the pieces.
Altagracia had died the summer before Maria’s first year at Acheron. She could’ve become a spirit, Maria supposed, and followed Maria away to school. To protect her from the dark spirits, like La Llorona.
That all felt so far away now, sitting on the floor of her dorm room, surrounded by the people who made up Maria’s new world. The Truth or Dare game had gotten off track. Caitlin and Ryan were kissing on Maria’s bed. Austin and Mateo were telling dumb jokes. Delilah was wearing that idiotic look she always got when she was high and playing with her stupid plastic lip gloss tube.
Maria peered down at her notepad. She should really double-check the math, but she was sure she’d gotten it right.
That afternoon she’d gotten back her French extra-credit paper, an essay on the paradox of free will in L’Étranger. That paper counted as an extra test grade, and she’d gotten an A-plus. When she factored that in to her overall grade, it canceled out the quiz from the week she’d had bronchitis and brought her semester average up to a solid A.
That made Maria’s GPA exactly the same as Delilah’s. As of today, they were tied for first in their class. If graduation were held right now, they’d be co-valedictorians.
“Lo que es segundo sera primero,” the Ouija board had said.
That which is second shall be first. Maria had only been behind Delilah in the class rankings by a tiny fraction of a point. Numbers three and four in their class, Lily and Mateo, were far behind them, out of the running.
The spirit in the board had been right.
Valedictorian. Maria could feel it. Standing up on that stage, clutching the podium with her fists, every set of eyes in the room on her. They’d all know she’d earned it. If she could talk her history teacher into letting her do one more extra-credit project, she could surge ahead in the class rankings when Delilah wasn’t even looking.
But it was only November. Between now and graduation there would be more papers. More tests. More chances for Delilah to cheat and screw her way back into first place.
And even if things stayed the way they were, being tied for first in the class wasn’t enough to push her over the edge for the Kingsley Prize.
Being valedictorian wouldn’t make her soccer captain. Or class president. Or even homecoming queen. Not as long as Delilah Dufrey still reigned.
“It’s all such bullshit,” Maria muttered.
“Sorry, what?” Mateo turned back to her, raising his eyebrows.
“Nothing.”
She leaned back against the bed. It was a fight just to keep her eyes open. Until she spotted Lily smiling their private half smile at her.
Lily was the only person here who actually mattered. The one Maria could honestly say was her equal. No, not her equal; Lily was better than Maria in every way that mattered.
Lily drew her eyes away from Maria after a long minute. She was in the same spot on the edge of her bed where she’d been since the party began, talking to Tamika about how hot their French teacher, Monsieur Seyton, was supposed to be. Tamika was shooting angry looks at Caitlin and Ryan at the same time.
“Hey, I have a story,” Maria said suddenly.
Everyone turned to look at her. “What, another ghost story?” Mateo said.
“Yeah.” Maria wasn’t sure what had made her want to talk about this. Now that she’d started, though, she couldn’t stop. “There was a huge fire here back in the sixteen hundreds. Everyone on the whole plantation died. The family that lived here, their slaves, even their animals. First, though, they all had to go into this dark tunnel underground. Everyone was packed so tight they couldn’t move. That’s where they died. It was pitch-black, and the smoke was so thick no one could see anything except the fire. All you could hear was screaming. Thousands and thousands of screams.”
The room was silent for a long moment. On Lily’s side of the room, the candle flames danced in the darkness.
“Did you make that up?” Caitlin finally said.
Maria shook her head, though she couldn’t remember where she’d heard that story. She hadn’t realized she’d known it until just now.
Huh. Something didn’t feel right.
She took another long drink. Half a can, gone. Still, her alcohol haze was fading as quickly as it had come on.
Lily looked at her pointedly. Telling her to act normal. She was right. Maria blinked fast, trying to shake off this feeling.
“This is dumb,” Austin said. “Enough stupid stories. I dare two girls to make out with each other.”
Everyone laughed, louder than they should have.
“Which two?” Emily asked, giggling.
“Any two!” Austin looked hopefully up toward the bed where Lily and Tamika were sitting.
Maria and Lily locked eyes again. This was the only thing they still disagreed on.
Maria had wanted to tell everyone the truth from the beginning. From the earliest days—those first kisses at the end of long nights of talking; the startling discovery that yes, she really did like girls, too, and this girl in particular—Maria didn’t see the point of keeping it a secret.
Maria didn’t want her parents to know yet, obviously. Her mother was a state senator, and Maria didn’t think she’d take the news well, at least not until she quit politics. But no one bothered keeping secrets at Acheron. It was basically impossible when you lived on top of everyone you knew.
Besides, this was good news, wasn’t it? Weren’t you supposed to share good news with your friends?
Lily didn’t think so. After their fourth straight night of fooling around after lights-out, Maria mentioned that she’d told Brandon, and Lily freaked. She was positive word would somehow get back to her very conservative parents. She thought the guys at school would tease them and the girls would be grossed out. She was afraid Mateo would make them join the GSA and sit around every night talking about boring gay political stuff. She even worried it would hurt Maria’s mom’s reelection campaign.
Maria didn’t think it would be so bad if their friends knew. No one outside of school would have to find out. But she’d agreed to keep the secret since it was so important to Lily.
After all, it wasn’t as if Lily was being this way just to upset her. She knew how much Maria wanted to tell everyone the truth. There had been more than one night already this year when Maria had held Lily while she cried. Lily always said she wished she could come out, but she wasn’t ready. Maybe next year.
Maybe in a few years.
Maria promised never to rush her. She never wanted Lily to do anything she wasn’t comfortable with.
Now they’d been together almost a year, and Maria was more in love with Lily than ever. She’d do whatever it took to keep the two of them together, here at Acheron and next year at Stanford.
But she still hadn’t gotten used to the constant lying.
Maria tossed her empty beer can into the paper garbage bag Ryan would smuggle out later and reached for a fresh one. Mateo, ever the gentleman, popped the tab for her and said, “You sure you want to keep going? You look kind of out of it.”
“I’m fine.” Maria took a long drink of the cool yellow liquid and stood up. The room swayed. Ryan and Caitlin were on Maria’s bed, limbs squirming together like some water creature in one of Brandon’s manga books.
Maria shook her head. “I’m going to the bathroom.”
“You need help?” Mateo tried to catch her arm. “You going to puke?”
Maria ignored him and caught Lily’s eye. Lily stood up to follow her, and Maria’s rapid heartbeat began to slow.
They’d figure all this out. Together.
