The Temptation of Demetrio Vigil (35 page)

“You okay?” Logan asked, as he held my chair for me
to sit down.

“Huh? Yeah. Why?” I’d been looking at the twinkling
of light on a woman’s wineglass and wondering if it were Demetrio
somehow.

“You seem distracted,” he said suspiciously.

“I’m fine.” I realized I needed to do a better job
of acting like I was having a good time, so I poured the happy-face
on thick.

He smiled at me, and took his own seat. We ordered
fancy things, like caviar and crusted salmon, the kinds of things
we thought, then, that adults like us might eat. We drank sparkling
cider from champagne flutes, and Thomas even got up to give a
heartfelt toast expressing his love for all of us, as his best
friends, and especially his love for Victoria. We had chocolate
cake for dessert.

After dinner we returned to the limo and took a ride
back to Coronado Prep. The gym was decorated beautifully for the
event, as only happens, I would imagine, at very expensive private
schools - with ice sculptures, and curtains draped over the walls,
pooling romantically upon the floor. The tables had candles
flickering in the centers, and again I was haunted by his memory,
and thought I felt him. It was all very elegant and gorgeous. I
wanted to enjoy it more than I did. I couldn’t focus. All I could
think about was him. Him. Demetrio.

We all took a table, and then Logan showed us
something he had in the inside pocket of his suit jacket. It was a
flask of whiskey. Everyone’s eyes lit up, even Kelsey’s. She was
trying to pretend she liked Logan, too, because she loved me so
much. I adored her for this effort she made. I normally wouldn’t
have approved of something like drinking at a school dance, but
given how much pain I was in, and how much I hated being with
Logan, and seeing how none of us would be driving ourselves home
later, I didn’t protest. This was when the other two boys showed
their own flasks, in their own jacket pockets, and everyone sort of
laughed secretively. We couldn’t let the chaperones see the stuff,
or we would have been thrown out of not just the dance, but more
than likely the entire school. It wasn’t like we were the kinds of
kids who drank all the time, or ever. Once wouldn’t kill us. Or so
I thought then.

“C’mon,” said Victoria, eyeing a
side door that led out to a dark part of the campus. “Let’s get
some fresh air. God knows you need it, Maria.”

We were up then, all six of us, and walking as
casually as we could toward the door while all around us our
classmates danced and talked and partied to the loud, excellent
music being spun by the DJ. Thomas was the first one out the door.
Soon, we were all huddled near a dumpster, taking sips of the
horrible-tasting, bitter liquid, directly from the flask. I needed
it. That’s what I told myself. I needed to forget. I needed to
loosen up. I wanted to have a good time and stop sulking.

It was like liquid fire going down, and I coughed
and grew red in the face. Yet and still, when the flask came around
a second time, I partook of more. And a third, and a fourth. Pretty
soon, I didn’t mind the burn so much, and everything seemed sort of
fuzzy and faraway, and silly and fun and perfectly manageable.
Victoria watched me closely, and didn’t drink as much as I did.

“Be careful,” she said, as we were
somehow walking back toward the gym. I didn’t remember getting up
or moving, but here I was anyway. “I know you’re feeling pretty
good right now, Maria, but whatever you do, don’t talk about him.
They won’t understand. Got that?”

“Yeah,” I said.

We went back through the front door, as the side
door we’d used to exit locked itself automatically once you were
out. We were all chewing mint gum now. I couldn’t remember exactly
how I’d gotten it, or who’d given it to me, but I did know that my
mouth was wintergreen fresh. The thought made me laugh. Kelsey and
Victoria took me by the elbow and led me past the parents at the
front door, both of my friends, I think, less drunk than I was.

“Act naturally,” said Victoria. “Don’t breathe on
them, dragon breath.”

This made me giggle. That was bad.
I turned my head away from the chaperones, and walked into the
darkness, where a moody rap anthem was blaring. I felt the bass
beat upon my sternum. The preps were out on the floor, getting down
in their own special way. I watched for a while, and felt sort of
sickened by the way my classmates tried to imitate a reggaeton
video, dirty dancing. Something very sad about it. We were cruel,
Kelsey, Victoria and I, joking and laughing about the rotten
dancing we saw going on. The other kids? They couldn’t all be us,
now
could
they?

Meanwhile, the guys we were with had grown in
confidence exponentially with the addition of alcohol. Something
unmistakably hungry and manlike came over them now, all the boyish
tentativeness gone from their eyes and bodies, testosterone boiling
in their veins. That’s what I liked so much about Demetrio, I
realized: confidence. Add confidence to a boy, and he became a
man.

At this point, I spotted some of the other girls
from the dance team, and I remembered that we had agreed that we’d
meet up here and perform a number from our repertoire. Before I
knew it, I was being whisked away from my friends, around the
room, gathering others from the troupe like a magnet with metal
shavings, and then there we were at the DJ booth, requesting the
song, and then there we were, taking over the dance floor, as the
song bumped on, and in formation, doing our thing. I was loose, and
free, and my body newly awakened in ways it never had been. I
shook, shimmied, moved, lived, breathed, and was. I felt alive, and
this was melancholy, wonderful, horrible, and in spite of the pain,
my dancing was better. I was better. I felt stronger.

Delectation
.

I finally understood what he’d meant about the pain
of unrequited love being different from other kinds of pain.

My pain hadn’t killed me. It hadn’t destroyed me. It
had made the colors brighter, even if they hurt my head; it had
made the songs more dimensional, even if my body moved to them
completely alone; it had made everything somehow more than it had
been before. I was more for having loved him, even though I felt
like less without him. I smiled with this understanding, and looked
up, toward the end of our routine, feeling energized and cared for
by The Maker, like everything was going to be alright, even if I
never saw Demetrio again.

It was at that moment exactly that I saw him,
shimmering in a flash of light, materializing out of the ether in a
darkened corner of the gym, hidden from view by his ghostliness,
flashing visible for just one small second, before flickering away
again.

He was here.

And though I initially thought he was watching me as
I shook up the dance floor, the next flash of light he gave me
showed him to be watching someone else, who was watching me like a
tiger.

Logan.

I stopped dancing, in the middle of the routine, so
spooked was I by the apparition of Demetrio at my Winter Ball,
staring down my date. Kelsey saw me, and caught me before I
literally fell to the floor. She held me up.

“Keep going, Maria, don’t
stop.”

“He’s here,” I told her, breathless.

“Who?”

It must have been the alcohol that made me stop
dancing, and tell Kelsey the truth about Demetrio, there, in the
middle of the dance. “He actually is a ghost, Kelsey. I’m not
supposed to tell you, but you need to know.”

She looked doubtful. “Someone’s had a little too
much to drink.”

“No, it’s true! You have to believe me.” I felt
sick. Dizzy.

“It’s okay,” she said, though her eyes widened with
fear. “Just dance. We’ll deal with it later.”

I shook myself out of my fear, and
looked at the other girls to get my place. I continued, I soldiered
on. My eyes kept straying to the corner where I’d seen him, but he
was gone. I danced like my life depended on it, tears coming,
laughter coming, so many emotions welling up within me at once. I
saw Logan watching me with a predatory look that I’d credited to
the alcohol. Demetrio didn’t like that look. How could he be
jealous? He’d told me there was no such thing for his kind, and yet
I saw it all over his face.

Demetrio had told me at the cafe that he was capable
of doing everything human beings did.

Everything
? I’d asked him.

Everything
, he’d said.

Even, I thought as the dance came to a stop,
lying.

♦

The crowd clapped wildly for us when we
finished, and the DJ immediately began to play another song. We
stayed on the floor, and Kelsey and Victoria and the guys joined
us. I tried to look normal, but my eyes kept roaming the room,
trying to see him. I felt dizzy suddenly, and sick.

“What’s wrong?” asked Logan.

“I don’t feel well,” I told him.

“Let’s get you some air,” he suggested.

“You look green,” said Kelsey.
“Doesn’t she look green?”

“She looks green,” Logan agreed.

I was afraid I was going to throw up on them.

“Let’s get her out of here,” said Logan, and the
next thing I knew, he and Kelsey were leading me outside, through
the front door, telling the chaperones I had a bit of stomach flu
and needed air. It was all sort of a blur, but soon I was out on
school grounds, with Kelsey rubbing my shoulders and Logan watching
me with a cold, hard look on his face that I did not recognize as
anything I’d ever seen on him before.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” I asked him,
shivering under his mean gaze.

He laughed cruelly.

Kelsey gripped my hand now, hard, because she saw
the same sinister look that I did on him.

“I think we should get back inside,” she said.

“No, I think the party’s just getting started,
ladies,” said Logan, as he snapped his fingers. All around us,
shadowy figures emerged now from the trees, three of them that I
could see, dark, quiet and stealthy as ninjas. They wore the same
red robes I’d seen at the pond with Dr. Bergant.

I turned to run the other way, but there were more
of them behind us. About ten in all.

“Oh my God. What is this?” asked Kelsey, fear in her
eyes and voice.

“Girls, I’d like you to meet my friends.”

“You?” I asked Logan, horrified.

The shadows rushed us then, soundlessly, surrounded
us, and I could see that they were people, or spirits, in dark
robes with hoods. They picked me and Kelsey up from the ground, and
began to carry us off, kicking and struggling, to the wild part of
the campus, the running and hiking fields, which was completely
dark at this time of night. I started to scream, but Logan clamped
his cold fist like a stone over my mouth.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” he said with a
bit of a snarl. It was so out of character for the boy I’d thought
he was that I was stunned silent.

Kelsey began to scream now, and in spite of his
warnings for her to stop, she didn’t. She kept shrieking and
calling for help. Logan handled the situation by taking what
appeared to be a handkerchief from his pocket and holding it over
her nose and mouth as she struggled. I watched in horror as she
appeared to suffocate, and passed out, her arms and legs splaying
limply in every direction.

“No!” I screamed. This wasn’t happening! It couldn’t
be happening. And yet it was. And now we were being herded toward a
black Cadillac Escalade that was parked along one of the hiking
trails, and shoved inside.

Logan was on top of me then, binding my wrists and
ankles with rope and duct tape. He tied Kelsey up in the same way
even though she wasn’t conscious. The hooded figures helped. One of
them held a cloth like the one Logan had used on Kelsey, and
brought it toward me, placing it over my nose and mouth. As I
breathed in the noxious poison it contained, I caught the edge of
his face in a scrap of light from the streetlamps on Academy
Boulevard. He had beautiful green eyes.

They were familiar to me.

I tried to remember where I’d seen them before. The
world was growing fuzzier, and further away, quieter, more echoing
and vague, and it took me a moment, but I remembered. I’d seen
these eyes in the face of a young boy, in Demetrio’s memory. It was
his half-brother. Hilario.

“No,” I tried to say, but my voice was gone.

Then the men disappeared, and I was fading, fading,
and the doors were closing, and the car was starting, and I didn’t
know where Logan was taking us, but I knew it wasn’t going to be
good.

♦

When I regained consciousness, I was still
tied up, and my wrists and ankles hurt badly. I found myself in a
half-dark room, on a stained, lumpy mattress, and at first I was
panicked because my mind went to the worst possible place it could
go. I prayed then. I wasn’t used to praying. But at that moment, I
prayed that nothing horrible had happened to me, that I hadn’t been
violated as my first experience as a woman.

My dress and stockings seemed to still be in tact,
though, and I took comfort in the fact that I had no pain anywhere
but at the ends of my extremities. And my head. My head pounded as
though my brain were swelling in pulsating rhythm, growing larger
and more filled with fluid with every heartbeat. My mouth was dry,
but there was nothing in it. I could move my lips, my tongue, I
could breathe. I was on my side, with my hands behind my back. My
shoulders ached from the awkward position. My neck, too. So maybe I
was wrong in my initial assessment of my physical state. As I came
to, little by little, I began to realize that every part of me
ached a bit.

I struggled to get myself into a sitting position,
and turned my head this way and that, searching for Kelsey. All I
saw was a very small, very dingy room, with a bed and a dresser and
chair that appeared to be falling apart. There was a smell of
mildew and stale cigarette smoke, and a single naked bulb dangled
from a frayed cord in the ceiling above me. The only light in the
room came from a streetlight outside, the dim and slightly orange
kind you often found in rural places. There were curtains on the
windows, but they were open. My pulse raced, and all I could think
about was getting out of here. How could I do it? I opened my mouth
to cry out, but thought better of it. What if the only people - or
things - who would be here to hear my cry were bad? What if my
scream brought nothing but Logan, and more poison? I clamped my jaw
shut, and began to look for something, anything. Something sharp,
maybe, to cut the binds. This is when I noticed the man standing in
the shadows near the closed door. He blended in, tall and lean,
dressed all in black, but his green eyes shone in the dark, and
they were watching me. I saw a red ember just below them. It grew
brighter for a moment, then dimmed again. Someone was in the room
with me, and he was smoking.