The Suburban Strange (25 page)

“Okay . . .” Celia closed her book.

“I know we promised not to bring it up again until April, but it’s March, and your birthday is a few weeks away, and I know you heard about the girl who stayed home for her curse day yesterday.” A rotting tree in her backyard had fallen on her, breaking a dozen bones. “So it seems like we’re back to the way it was before, and the only girls who are really safe are the ones who’ve had sex,” Marco said.

“Are you going to try to convince me to lose my virginity?” Celia sighed.

Marco wouldn’t be deterred. “Yes, I am. But more than that—you shouldn’t pick some random guy.”

“Well, that’s pretty much what I would have to do.”

“It should be with someone who cares about you,” Marco said. “Brenden and I talked about it, and we both would be willing to—I mean, either one of us would be willing to do this for you, if you want.”

“You’re offering to have sex with me?”

“I am. Or Brenden is.”

“What about Ivo?”

“Ivo is probably just as in need of being deflowered as you are,” Marco said wryly. “Even if he weren’t, I don’t think he’d be a very good lay.”

“Oh, and you would be?” Celia laughed.

“Hell, yeah,” Marco said, and puffed up his chest. “I can give you a reference if you need one.”

“A girl?”

“No, haven’t ever done that. But seriously”—and Celia couldn’t help but be touched by his expression—“I would do anything for you, and so would Brenden. Wherever, whenever, however. If it would make you safe.”

Celia looked at him for a moment. “You’re really sweet.”

“Thanks.”

“I will consider your offer.”

“Who would you pick, Brenden or me?”

“I’m not going to answer that!” Celia rolled her eyes, and they laughed. But the seriousness of the moment returned. “I guess I really have to think about this. I’ve pretty much been living in denial about the whole thing.” They sat for a moment. “What was it like, your first time?”

“For me? Pretty hot, actually. You want the gory details?”

“Well, no, what I meant was, how did it feel? Did you feel any different after you’d done it?”

“Yes. Definitely. Not in the way I thought I would, like
Now I’m an adult
or something. But sex is knowledge, in some way. You know yourself differently. And you know the other person differently, even if it’s just for a little while. I’m not doing a very good job of explaining.”

“I think I understand what you mean,” Celia said.

“So, on one hand, you should want to wait until it’s the right time, because it is deep, and it does change you, and you get to know someone in a way you never would otherwise. But on the other hand, if you’ve already driven the car around the parking lot a few times, you’re probably going to do better once you get it out on the street.” Marco grinned.

“Ooh, are you using a car metaphor for sex?”

“That’s never been done before.”

“I look at people sometimes and try to imagine them having sex.”

“Really? Dirty girl!”

“I can never really get a clear picture, though.”

“You should watch pornography,” Marco said in serious voice while his eyes laughed. “It’s bizarre, but it definitely clarifies a lot of stuff.”

“The things you say!” Celia covered her face with her hands.

“Well, I’ll tell you this: I love getting laid on a regular basis.” Marco sat back, stretching his arms out to either side.

“Of course you do! You’re the horniest creature I know.”

“You have no idea.” Marco bugged his eyes at her.

“And you don’t even have to worry about getting some girl pregnant.”

“Cool, isn’t it?”

The bell rang and they got up. “Seriously, though,” he said. “I meant what I said before, and Brenden does, too. If there’s anything we can do for you, you let us know. And no one else has to know about it, not even the other little black beads on our string.”

“Thank you.” Celia hugged him.

Are you there?

Here I m.

How was your day?

Gd, same. U?

It was fine. I had a nice talk with Marco—he’s the shorter one with the curly hair. He’s making me a dress. Did you do anything after school?

Home, thts it. Rdng P oa Lady.

Haven’t you already read it?

Yes, but yr rdng it.

I like
talking
writing to you every night. I wish we could talk. I wish it was easier for you.

Me 2.

I still have homework. Talk to you tomorrow?

Dfntly. Gdnt. XO

Good night! XO

"OKAY, IF YOU COULD HAVE
one album while you were stranded on a desert island, what would it be?" Brenden asked. "I'd take Cocteau Twins'
The Pink Opaque."

“That’s not an album. It’s a compilation,” Ivo said.

“Compilations count.”

“Oh, this is hard!” Liz thought. “Well, if we can do compilations, I’ll go with the Cure’s
Staring at the Sea
.”

“I’ll commit,” Ivo said. “Peter Murphy,
Love Hysteria
.”

Marco looked surprised. “No one’s going with Kate Bush’s
Hounds of Love
?”

“Oh, that is a good one,” Liz said. “Regine, we know it will be Siouxsie and the Banshees, so which one?”

“I don’t care,” Regine said, tossing her pencil down. “If you’re not going to help me pass Chem Two, you’re dead to me.”

“You are not failing Chem Two!” Marco said.

“No, but it’s killing my grade point average. Seriously, I have never felt so lost in a class in my life.”

“I don’t understand,” Marco said. “You did fine in Chem One. We were in the same class.”

“But we didn’t have Mr. Sumeletso! There might be a curse on sophomore girls, but I think we need to seriously consider whether Mr. Sumeletso has cursed his chem classes!”

“But Celia’s doing fine in his class,” Liz said, and Celia had to nod in agreement.

“Yeah, and apparently you have the perfect lab partner,” Regine said. “Maybe you have to be a witch to do chemistry well enough to pass his class.”

“Are you saying
I’m
a witch?” Celia asked.

“I don’t know what I’m saying.” Regine picked up her pencil and started another chemistry problem. “Ivo, will you help me?”

“I keep telling you, I barely remember this stuff. And I’m more interested in talking about Celia’s secrets,” Ivo said.

“What secrets?” Celia hated that she blushed without even knowing what Ivo meant.

“Do you think we don’t notice all the little intrigues that follow you wherever you go?” Liz said, though her smile made it clear she was teasing. “You know every time I see Mariette in the hall, she stares at me like you’ve told her things about us.”

“No more than I’ve told you about her!” Celia protested.

“And I’m pretty sure Tomasi hasn’t disappeared as completely as you’d like us to think,” Brenden said. “Because every time a guy has tried to talk to you at Diaboliques, you’ve blown him off. And some of them have been pretty hot.”

“That doesn’t mean— Okay, fine, I have seen him! Once! He stopped in the bookstore over—”

“Winter break, when you started reading
Portrait of a Lady
? Yeah, we noticed,” Brenden said.

“What is going on here?” Celia looked around at them. “Yes, I saw him then! But that’s it! His parents never let him out of the house!”

“You love the bad boys, then, do you?” Marco smiled.

“Why didn’t you tell us?” Regine asked.

“I didn’t know what to say! ‘Hey, guys, I saw Tomasi again, but he’s probably not going to come back to Diaboliques, and I’m really not sure why.’ ”

“That is kind of weird. You don’t know why?”

“No. It sounds like he doesn’t get along with his parents. I think it’s been a rough year for him.”

“That’s too bad. I know you like him,” Brenden said sincerely.

“It’s okay. It’s probably for the best,” Celia said, just to try to stop the conversation.

“There’s another secret Celia’s kept from us,” Ivo said. He paused for dramatic effect, and everyone looked from him to her. Celia’s stomach sank again. “Who is your mysterious friend who you visit on the mezzanine at Diaboliques?”

“Aha! I knew you were going somewhere besides the bathroom,” Liz said. “I could never find you!”

“I knew where you were going. I followed you once,” Ivo said. “It’s the woman with the fantastic red hair who’s always on that couch by the wall.” This elicited dramatic
oohs
from everyone. Celia realized her mouth was open and closed it.

“I can do better than that,” Marco boasted. “I’ve talked to her!” More noises from everyone. “I told her I knew you, and I asked her how she knew you.”

“What did she say?” Ivo asked.

“She said you thought your life was in danger, and she kept trying to reassure you you’d be fine.”

“Do you think your life is in danger?” Brenden asked her.

“I never said that to her!” Celia was puzzled.

“I’d be scared if I were you,” Liz said. “I mean, a lot of these girls could have died, if things had gone just a little differently.” The table had become quiet now.

“I’ve never asked her about the curse,” Celia said, wondering why the fortuneteller would have told Marco such a thing.

“Maybe you should. She seems to know her stuff. She told me my ring finger looked empty, and that was right before Valentine’s Day,” Marco said, holding up his hand with Brenden’s class ring on it.

“Do you believe people can tell the future?” Celia asked, grasping at anything that might shift the focus to someone else.

“It doesn’t matter if you believe in it, does it, if it’s true?” Ivo said. He picked up Regine’s pencil and held it over the edge of the table. “I don’t believe in gravity.” He dropped the pencil, and Regine yelled at him to pick it up.

"YOU HAVE A PHONE CALL,"
her mother said to her. "From a boy."

“Marco or Brenden?”

“I know who they are,” her mother said. “I do not, however, know anyone named Tomasi.” She watched for Celia’s reaction.

“Really?” Celia gasped. “He’s a . . . well, he’s— Can I tell you about him afterward?”

“Sure,” her mother laughed, and handed her the phone.

“I can’t believe it!” Celia said into the receiver. “Is this because I’m running out of pages in my sketchbook?”

“Funny,” he said. She had missed the sound of his voice. “I don’t know what changed. I finished dinner and went up to my room, like I always do, and then my mom knocked on my door and told me I could use the phone if I wanted. We made a deal. If I go to some therapist once a week, they’ll start letting me out of their sight now and then.”

“How did it get so bad? Why did you run away? I mean, you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. How can you write in my notebook? I’m sorry, that was a lot of questions.”

Celia heard him sigh, and she waited. “In eighth grade we had to read this book in school,
The Scarlet Pimpernel
. Except it wasn’t the original book, you know, by Orczy. It was some condensed student version, because of course eighth graders aren’t going to read that book for real. I was having a lot of trouble with it. On every page there was a jumble of words crowded together, like there were enough words to fill up ten pages. I thought the book was defective or something, but when I showed it to my teacher she didn’t see anything wrong. It took me an hour to read one page in the right order.

“The teacher couldn’t figure it out. I couldn’t read aloud in class, but I knew parts of the story that weren’t in the condensed version. It was scary. I spent all this time trying to read everything that was there, and the answers I gave were right, because they came from the real book, but they were wrong, too, because they weren’t in the condensed version.

“The teacher told my parents she thought I had a learning disability, and I went to a remedial reading teacher. Fortunately, that teacher was, well, one of the Kind. He figured out immediately I was seeing the words from the real book. I have a different relationship with books. I can only see them as they were really written, not as they’ve been edited. It’s pretty rare, and he told me the only other person he knew about who had this power was a very respected translator of ancient texts—naturally, it would come in handy for that kind of work. Anyway, the remedial teacher explained to me what was happening and how I had to be careful not to let people know about it because they wouldn’t understand. And that’s how I found out I was one of the Kind.

“But my parents wouldn’t let it go. My dad would take books from our shelves and put them in front of me, and some of them I could read just fine, because they were by English authors. But if he picked something translated from a foreign language, I was hopeless, because all the words in the original language were there over the translation. It just freaked him out more and more. My parents are kind of religious, and they tried to make me read the Bible, but you can imagine how crazy that book would look to me, considering how many times that text has changed, and the other languages on the pages.”

“Oh my. That must have been bad,” Celia said.

“It was really bad. They convinced themselves I was somehow evil, and it got worse and worse from there. They threatened to pack me off to my grandfather’s farm. It’s out in the middle of nowhere, and Grandpa makes my parents look like softies. He’s super religious, and he works from sunup to sundown every day, even though he’s in his eighties. It’s like the family labor camp.”

“So you can only read books that are the original text?”

“Pretty much. It’s one of the reasons I like classic literature so much. Or at least, classic English literature.”

“And your parents—are they cruel to you?”

“They act so angry, but really I think they’re scared. They just changed into different people. They talked to Grandpa, and he decided we had to fast, and we had to pray all the time, and I knew it wouldn’t work. I had to get out of there.”