chapter 26
What happened? What did we do?
I have no solid recollection. It was different from the other Fury times. We were in, but we did not seek out any particular incident, not even the memory of what just happened between Brendon and me. I was too far gone. We latched onto everything at once—a whirling mass of his regrets and guilty feelings. I saw splashes of old girlfriends hurt and lies told. Then, quickly, even those visions shut down. An intense wind of rage blew out any light in my mind, leaving me blind.
The sound of a window opening. The touch of a curtain blowing.
I remember ordering, Jump.
And then I am back in the whiteness of Ambrosia’s bedroom. I have to shake my head to regain my vision. The world slowly comes back into view. The door is still closed. There’s no Brendon. Curtains are pulled apart. I hear screams rising from beneath the window. My stomach lurches from the stench of rotting meat.
What happened?
Quickly, I wrap the remnants of my costume around me. Alix, Stephanie, and I rush down the stairs, and by the time we get outside everyone has gathered under the window. I tremble from the first blast of cold on my half-naked body. The chaos of the scene that greets me matches the chaos in my mind. There’s yelling and crying, and my heart is pounding so hard I can hear the whooshing pulse in my ears. Girls dressed as mermaids and flappers hold on to each other and sob, mascara dripping down their cheeks. Devils, cowboys, and astronauts shout overlapping orders that contradict each other. “Elevate his head!” “No, don’t move him!” “Raise his feet!”
My body feels disjointed, as if the parts of it—legs, arms, tongue, toes, elbows, head—are strangers to each other and have traveled a long distance to meet up here for the first time. They are awkward, uncertain of how to act naturally with each other. I check around frantically. How bad is it? What do people know? Do they suspect me? What about Brendon? Is he…? I can’t let myself think the end of that thought.
Pox is shouting at 911 through his cell phone.
The Double Ds keep repeating, “Oh my God, oh my God.”
Their red-haired best friend whimpers into her phone, “Mom, pick me up. Now!”
Gnat to Bubonic: “Dude, we better get rid of any drugs.”
Off in the distance, an ambulance siren illustrates the Doppler effect that Mr. H explained in class. The sound shrieks at a higher and higher pitch as it gets closer.
I want to see.
I don’t want to see.
I can’t see.
Then: “I need to see him.”
Stephanie tries holding me back by grabbing on to my wrist, but I break free and inch my way through the crowd. My fingers pull at my hair as I weave between clusters of people. I push through four layers of costumes and finally stumble into the inner circle.
I can see him now. Brendon. He’s all alone in the center, spotlighted by a long beam of moonlight. His face is pressed against the bush he landed in, his curly hair falling over a neck that’s twisted in an unnatural position. I shudder. Only a few minutes ago I was running my fingers through that hair.
He was running his fingers through mine.
My gaze darts from detail to detail: the ruffled cuffs of his Prince shirt, the square of his muscled back, the way that back doesn’t rise and fall with an inhale and exhale. I can’t breathe, either. It’s like all the oxygen is being sucked out of my head. A buzzing fills my skull; my vision starts shutting down like the ring of darkness at the end of an old-fashioned movie. I’m going to faint.
I reach out to the person next to me. Alix! Thank goodness it’s her. I drape myself against her shoulders for support. Chunks of her silver makeup are gone; it looks like her skin is sliding off.
“Get a grip!” she orders from the corner of her mouth. “Don’t freak out.”
“Alix, what did we do?”
In a harsh whisper: “Exactly what he deserved.”
“He did … he shouldn’t have … I wanted him to—”
“Shhhh!”
“Alix! He’s not moving. I can’t believe we did—”
She pinches my upper arm hard. “Did? What are you talking about?” She widens her eyes dramatically, a signal that draws Stephanie through the crowd to my side. “Steph, do you know what Meg is talking about? Who did anything?”
Stephanie positions herself between me and Brendon, expanding her wings slightly to block my view of his body. The flowers have fallen out of her hair and the dreads look like thick hairballs coughed up by a prehistoric cat. I notice that two of her teeth are long and pointed. When did that happen? She could puncture a can with those fangs. Her voice comes out preachy, a vice-principal’s scold. “Meg, you had too much to drink.”
The explanation and reprimand are for the benefit of two guys who are eavesdropping on our argument. I see how they are looking at me. Word of what happened between Brendon and me has clearly spread. All those cell phone pictures have made the rounds. They know. I turn my head left and right and notice others glancing my way, some gawking, others whispering. Everyone must know. And not just about the sex. I don’t care about that anymore. Everyone must know everything. This! What we did to him.
Alix, hostile, turns to the group closest to us—“What the hell are you all staring at? Meg can’t hold her booze. She’s talking crazy”—and everyone quickly backs away.
Alix’s hair, too, has come undone, and there are stains—oil? blood?—down the front of her costume. She takes me by both shoulders, gives them a hard shake, leans in so only I can hear. “If anybody did anything, there would be fingerprints. Witnesses. There would be evidence. There is no evidence.”
“He jumped,” Stephanie hisses. “He must have felt guilty about what he did to you. No one touched him. No one saw anything. We left the room before any of this happened. Understand?”
There’s new commotion then—sirens, shouts, doors slamming—and I’m moved aside with the rest of the crowd as a team of paramedics forces us to step back and give them room to work. They hunch over Brendon’s motionless form and gently lower him to the ground. A stethoscope, tubes, and wires appear from bags like a series of magic tricks. A breathing tube is hauled over, but not used. I see a monitor turned on, stared at, and turned off.
And then all activity comes to a stop. The only sound is the metallic, deep-throated caw of a mockingbird overhead. The four paramedics sit on the ground, heads bowed, shoulder to shoulder, showing us the backs of their uniforms.
Get up, I urge silently. Tell me it isn’t true. Tell me everything is going to be all right.
A long beat of silence until the paramedics push themselves to standing, and one of them, the tallest and oldest, brushes some dry grass off his knees. “A parent?” he asks. “Is there an adult in charge here?”
Pirates, cowgirls, and bunnies look at their feet.
The paramedics exchange defeated looks, one of them swearing, “Shit.” Another shakes his head. “Of course, no parent. Perfect.”
A small voice from the crowd then. “Brendon’s going to be okay, right?”
The main paramedic suddenly looks tired and older, like he’s grown a gray stubble on his face in only the last few minutes. “I’m afraid … Brendon, that’s his name?… I have some bad…”
“No!” someone shouts.
“Do something else!”
“Try!”
The hysteria starts all over again. Some parents have arrived by now, and they’re shouting, too, and there’s so much turmoil that I might be the only one watching as two paramedics gingerly lift Brendon and a third slides a stretcher under him.
I want to look away, but I can’t. What did we do? What did I do? I think I should be crying like everyone else, but I don’t. Nothing about me is working. Not even my tears can move. I’m paralyzed, stuck in the horrible understanding of what we did to him. I’ve never been this close to a dead person before and I stare at the figure, trying to make sense of it. This is Brendon. This is not Brendon. Death does not look how I thought it would look, not like sleep or sickness. Death looks more like a series of nots—familiar things about a person that are no longer there: Brendon’s not warm. Brendon’s not breathing, not moving, not thinking or planning or eating or dreaming or wishing.
One of his arms, pulled by gravity, slips and dangles over the side of the stretcher. I recall the feel of that arm around my shoulder and down the center of my back. That was … when? Only minutes ago. I try to shake away the memory but it doesn’t budge. A paramedic lifts and tucks the arm under the torso. I see him take a deep breath as he pulls a sheet over the body, over Brendon, and tucks it tight.
I’m following every detail, which is why I should have been the first one to scream. Only I don’t. I see it, but shock prevents me from reacting.
It’s one of the Double Ds who lets out the first piercing cry that sounds like part firecracker, part speaker feedback. At first only a few people look her way because there’s so much other noise in the garden. But then she starts doing this extreme screaming/pointing/eye-widening/hand-flapping dance and then someone else sees what she sees and joins in.
The paramedics drop their bags and their jaws and rush to the stretcher.
Brendon’s hand with the hair on the knuckles that once filled me with such longing. It’s come out from under his torso. It’s moving. It’s tearing at the sheet.
Quickly they unfurl him. “Don’t move!” a paramedic insists.
But Brendon twists his head to show us his face, which is white and waxy with a line of smeared blood on his mouth, and the sight of it makes most everyone shriek. But this isn’t Halloween the movie. Brendon’s not a vampire, either. He’s alive.
I smell Ambrosia’s perfume an instant before I hear her whisper in my ear. “Hound him to hell. Down, down, deep in the earth. He’ll never be free, protected, not even by death.”
I whirl around. “What are you talking about?”
“You hate him.”
“I don’t.”
“After what happened in the bedroom?”
“But I didn’t want him to die. I’m glad he’s not dead.”
“Of course you are!” Ambrosia sandwiches my hands between hers, gives them a supportive squeeze. “You don’t want him dead. That’s why you pulled him back.”
“Me?”
“You couldn’t let him take the easy route. Death would be so unsatisfying. Death would let him off the hook. You don’t want that.”
Abruptly, I take back my hands. I reach behind my neck and undo the clasp of the snake necklace. I make Ambrosia take it. “I don’t want anything to do with this anymore!”
She dangles the necklace in front of my face like a hypnotist. “Don’t play coy with me.”
I slap at the jeweled serpent.
The necklace disappears into her pocket. Her voice turns blunt. “When you thought he was dead, you felt guilty. I’ll give you that. You were also scared that you’d be caught. You even felt sad that your romance had to end on this tragic note.”
“Shut up,” I insist.
“But you felt something else, too. Look deep. Admit it. You were a little disappointed that it was over so soon.”
I start to protest, but she presses a finger to my lips. “Death? The peace of the void? The perpetual rest of the night? Sleeping in the winged arms of Thanatos? A quick death would be like sentencing him to eternity in a hammock. Where’s the justice in that?”
She runs her hand over my face. My eyelashes tickle slightly, and in the split-second that my eyes stay closed I’m whipped back into the night’s humiliation. Every second of it. My proclamation of love. His lie of love. The overhead light snapping on, the laughing, the photos. He planned it all. He must have planned it. Did he defend me? Did he hurl himself on Pox and fight for me? Did he do anything but stand there in his lame, pathetic way and claim to be innocent? He’s as guilty as all those other Plagues.
Ambrosia is right. I’ll never get over this. Why should he? As long as I suffer, Brendon should suffer.
Ambrosia gives me more words: “He threw you away like garbage, just like your parents did. This little two-story tumble isn’t enough payback. You want more. The score isn’t settled yet.”
My cheeks flare hot with the recognition that she’s right. She cups them with her palms, which have turned icy in the night air. “No need to be self-conscious, Megaera. Is a spider self-conscious about its desire to weave? A snake about its need to swallow its prey whole? This is your nature and it’s your right. Don’t overthink it.”
Across the crowd I spot Raymond trying to get my attention, the features of his blue-and-white face twisting into a dozen frantic expressions. He knows exactly what happened and I know what he’ll say, that we went too far and abused our power.
Ambrosia notices where I’m looking. “Whom did Brendon betray? Who gets to decide when the score is settled? Who deserves justice?” She strokes my hair, which is no longer soft and wavy but a coarse mass of strands that keeps crawling over my eyes and into my mouth.
I pretend not to see Raymond. I look away.
Alix and Stephanie make their way to us, and we are standing together as Brendon is strapped back onto the stretcher and a paramedic orders us to clear a path to the ambulance. There’s a parade of ghosts, angels, wenches, and witches following him in a drunken line, joyful about their friend’s amazing good luck. To fall like that and to still be alive.
Luck is deceiving.
When Brendon passes us, Ambrosia flicks four spiky nails in his direction. I see that her hair has been cut very short and spikey. It frames her face like a ring of razors. “Sleep well, Prince,” she whispers. “Enjoy your dreams.”
Overhead, the mockingbird mimics a squeaky gate, a train squealing around the corner, a human whistle of nine familiar notes.