One day, in the school dining hall, get some meat loaf with peanuts in it. At this point you don’t know you’re allergic—your parents are not into PB&J sandwiches, so you’ve never had any, or maybe you did once and your parents dismissed the redness around your mouth, thinking you’d scratched yourself. I don’t know.
The important thing is: you should eat the meat loaf, then very quickly suffer a massive anaphylaxis that swells your throat and bronchioles, fills you with a sense of black dread bearing down upon you like the grill of a massive truck, stops the air to your lungs, meaning that everyone in the dining hall panics as you lie twitching on the floor, until the school nurse finally gets there and takes the EpiPen from her bag and stabs it into your thigh, flooding your system with adrenaline and probably saving your life since the paramedics don’t get there for another twenty minutes.
After this, you will truly have no friends.
BUT BE WARNED!
Some new kids might turn up once you’re in high school, and they don’t know about the pi?ata, or the time Nurse Kelly did a Pulp Fiction on you. They don’t care about the stories either and they’re into books too, just like you, so you start to hang out. They may or may not be called Scott and Trish.
In this scenario, as I have already intimated, there is only one thing to do: make sure that your mother dies horribly, so that you are forever cursed, forever doomed like Cassandra of myth—the girl who leaves a trail of violence in her wake. That should be enough to see off fair-weather friends like, oh, Scott, or—for the sake of argument—Trish.
Got that?
The recipe for being totally and utterly alone:
Accidental eye surgery
+
Major medical incident on school grounds
+
Unpleasant tragedy
=
No friends for Cassandra.
Which is a very long explanation for why I didn’t like to speak in class, but thanks for bearing with me. The point is: I probably should have been more consciously shocked by the foot on the beach. It maybe seems odd that I wasn’t more shaken by it, but I think in the waking part of my mind I just saw it as the latest installment in the curse of Cassie.
Unconsciously was a different story, of course. I think you can probably guess that already.
For instance:
How it was thanks to the voice that things started to go wrong at school. See, later on that very first day, I was in math class. The teacher, Mr. Fortey, was doing matrices. Afternoon sunlight was hazy through the windows, a distant view of the ocean and the piers visible beyond oceans of prefabricated buildings. We get seagulls in the schoolyard—they take your fries, if you’re not careful, and they’re not gentle about it.
Mr. Fortey had written five problems on the whiteboard, and we were supposed to be solving them. They weren’t so hard. I was working on the third one when the voice said, “Don’t finish them.”
“What?” I said, under my breath. By this point I knew something truly screwed up was happening to me. It wasn’t a prank—it couldn’t be. I mean, the voice had been in my room, on the street, in the classroom. In the bathroom at the police station. It was like my mind was a house and the voice was an intruder, stalking the corridors.
“Don’t finish the problems,” repeated the voice. “You do them, and I’ll hurt you.”
I looked around as if someone was going to explain to me what was going on.
“Shut up,” I whispered. “Go away.”
Silence. Daisy Merkel glanced over at me from the neighboring desk like I was a freak, though that was normal.
“Do what I say or I will make you suffer,” said the voice, its tone as cold as dark night air.
I ignored it. I pressed my pen very deliberately down on the paper and filled in the missing numbers in the third matrix problem.
Now.
What happened next, I know it now, was a coincidence. There’s no way it was anything more. But you cannot imagine how much it freaked me out.
First, the tip of the pen snapped from the pressure I’d exerted on it. Blue ink splattered the page and I cursed, putting the pen aside and reaching into my bag for another one.
My movement was abrupt, quick. My index finger, therefore, impaled itself quite deep on the pair of compasses that I had left open inside—we’d been doing a lot of work on geometry. Maybe half an inch of the sharp steel point was embedded in the soft pad of the finger.
I yanked my hand out of the case, yelping, like a spider had bitten me, which for a stupid moment was even what I thought had happened. Red blood pattered onto the paper, mixing with the ink, sounding really loud somehow. I thought: Do what I say or I will make you suffer.
Mr. Fortey rushed over. “Cassie, you all right?” he asked.
I was staring at my finger.
“You feel that, *****?” said the voice. “That’s what happens when you disobey me.”
“Leave me alone,” I said.
Mr. Fortey stared at me. “Now, Cassie, you’ve been hurt. Let’s get you to—”
Simultaneously, the voice said:
“Tell him to **** off, or I take the whole finger next time.”
I put my hands over my ears. My palm was tacky with blood; I could feel it sticking to my hair. I hated cursing. Cursing was what my dad did.
I looked up.
“**** off,” I said to Mr. Fortey.