chapter 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…”
Her sentence fades out. A frown. A flash of resentment.
I swivel to see the cause. Someone is coming up behind me. I take in the determined look on Ms. Pallas’s face, the unblinking blue of her eyes, the swish of her iron-colored clothes, the way she’s floating a few inches above the floor. Blink. Of course she isn’t floating. In her hand she carries a long baton with a gold knob at the top, which makes sense only because she’s the faculty advisor of the color guard that practices during lunch.
“Take my seat,” Ambrosia offers with too much politeness. “I was just leaving.”
Only that said, she doesn’t get up. First she licks two fingertips and smooths the sides of her hair into place, even though it’s already perfect. Then, very slowly and deliberately, she separates trash from things that can be recycled, returns the book to her backpack, arranges and rearranges the contents. She pulls out her iPod, debates between several songs, and slips the speaker buds into her ears. She takes her time doing all of this, while Ms. Pallas is forced to stand and wait.
“All yours,” Ambrosia finally says, and way too loudly. I have the definite sense that the music’s not blaring and that she is shouting on purpose to be rude. To the rest of us, Ambrosia mimes talking into a phone, thumb at her ear, pinky at her mouth. Her lips move, pomegranate red, and I read them: I’ll call you.
When Ambrosia is out of earshot, Ms. Pallas sits and says, “We have openings in the color guard. The three of you would be—”
Alix practically spews out her milk. “Me? Marching? Tasseled boots?”
Stephanie hands Alix a napkin. “Sorry, Ms. Pallas. No disrespect intended, but I definitely move to a different drummer.”
Our teacher turns to me, the color of her eyes so unsettling I can’t look away. She asked me to join the guard yesterday and the day before that and the day before that. At first I was kind of flattered and told her that I’d think about it. But she’s gotten so pushy. Why does she keep asking? Can’t she take a hint? What am I, her personal mission? Why doesn’t she back off?
The bell rings and I’m glad. Saved again.
“Sorry,” I mumble, and hurry off. “Guess I’m not much of a joiner.”
* * *
Ambrosia texts each of us about when to meet (right after school) and where (at the cliff with the statue overlooking the famous surf spot). I’m first to get there, so I lean over the rail. My thoughts, as I sort through all that’s been happening, feel as churned up as the ocean below. I’m hoping that Ambrosia will clear things up. Obviously she knows a lot more that any of us do. I wonder if there’s some simple, logical explanation for everything that’s been happening. Somehow I don’t think there is. I have a feeling that what Ambrosia will tell us is more complicated than I can imagine.
I hear something that makes me turn away from the surf. My name, deep as a foghorn.
“Meg!”
A little down the path, someone waves. My name again, and out of the gray the figure comes toward me, walking and then jogging a little. It’s Stephanie and her mouth is moving. I assume she’s already talking about Ambrosia and Ms. Pallas and He-Cat, everything that’s been happening. How could she be thinking about anything else? Only when she reaches me, she points an accusing finger to where a thick metal pipe juts out of the cliff, like the cigar in the Monopoly tycoon’s mouth. A stream of gunk-colored water spews out of it and into the ocean. “The color of that ocean foam! Can you believe it? That’s not from any natural causes.”
When a wave hits the beach, it leaves behind a jagged line of foamy crud. Stephanie keeps talking, too outraged to take a breath. “Runoff. All kinds of crap—cigarette butts, dog shit, lawn fertilizer—washes right into the gutters and directly into the ocean. An otter can’t shower off. Can you imagine the germ count right now? You have to be a nut to be in the water.”
We turn together to watch the nut, suddenly visible in the haze, paddling hard through what I now imagine to be a wave of skin-eating bacteria that look like jaw-snapping Pac-Men. Of course, the surfer is Alix. She must have cut her last class to get here early. Her arm shoots into the air and we wave back, and soon she’s washed onto shore, climbing the cliff, and standing next to us. I’m freezing just looking at her, but she doesn’t seem to mind the weather.
“Think she’ll show up?” she asks, and when Stephanie doesn’t answer immediately, Alix turns on her. “Well, do you?”
“Do what?” Stephanie’s eyes keep returning to the pipe that’s coughing out the pollution.
“Ambrosia! She can’t say the stuff she said and not explain.”
Stephanie turns back to the pipe. “That’s disgusting. Criminal!”
Alix pulls off her neoprene surf hood and shakes her head. Her saltwater-caked hair spikes out like underwater snake creatures, their hungry mouths probing the air in search of food for their insatiable appetites. “I’m with you on that. Think what it’s like surfing out there, getting a mouthful of that crap every day.”
Stephanie, her jaw clenched: “The people responsible? They should be forced to drink it.”
From behind us then, a disembodied voice: “Wanting revenge but being helpless in the face of injustice. I know the unbearable ache of that.”
We see her now, Ambrosia, a figure in the fog in a black raincoat, her hair hidden in a man’s-style hat. She’s standing at the surfer statue and runs her fingernails along the bare metal feet. I notice that one of them, the pointer finger on her right hand, is painted black while the others are red.
No hello, no small talk, just:
“You three want to know what you are? I’ll be direct. I’ll say what I know. And if you look into your hearts, you already know it, too.”
Something shifts in the light. I can’t see the ball of the sun, but the rays must be bending through the nasty-looking clump of clouds to produce so many sparks of gold, orange, pink. The Prince of the Waves takes on a sickly greenish glow. If this were a disaster movie and the ocean and sky looked like this, everyone would be yelling and crawling over each to get to high ground fast.
Ambrosia rubs her hands together like sticks for making a fire. She shows us the palms. In the unnatural light, those hands appear to have no love lines, no life lines, few lines at all. Her words seem to emerge from some bottomless pit: “O Furies, born of sky, ocean, earth, and blood, mothered on foul human emotions, nursed on the tainted milk of greed, hate, and delusion, nourished with an appetite for ancient, twisted karma. Those Who Walk in Darkness, ceaselessly hunting and haunting those who have gone unpunished. Ferocious, powerful, unstoppable.”
Alix’s legs start vibrating and she drums her hands against the thighs of her wet suit. She’s either freezing or unnerved. I know I am. Both. Her lips drain of their ordinary color, turning blue.
Ambrosia addresses her directly: “Alecto the Unceasing. Restless, endless maker of grief who revels in war and quarrels.”
She faces Stephanie: “Tisiphone the Avenger. The retaliator who punishes those who harm the guiltless, the vulnerable, the innocent.”
She swivels and her eyes lock onto mine like suction cups.
“And Megaera the Envious…”
Not me.
“Angry, untrusting, resentful. The undisputed master of holding a grudge.”
Everything on the periphery of my vision—the pelicans overhead, the crashing waves, a hunched-over man walking his dog, the surfer statue—disappears into even thicker fog. I feel light-headed, like the time I guzzled wine on an empty stomach. This is a dream. I’ll wait until I wake up, I tell myself. Only, a dream has a certain quality to it, and it’s not like this. This is real. This is happening.
Overhead, the strangled cry of a gull. Within me, something peeks out of its dark hole and demands to be acknowledged.
Angry, resentful. Yes. Underneath, that’s what I am.
Ferocious, powerful, unstoppable. That’s what I want to be. I’d give anything to be that.
Ambrosia breaks eye contact. The world returns. A seabird drops like a dagger to snag an unlucky fish.
“There you have it, ladies. Ring a bell?”