The Wicked Awakening of Anne Merchant (28 page)

I
did
come here for a fresh start. A second chance for me—not for Gia.

Molly said I had a choice. If she’s right, then I choose me.

Sorry, Teddy. Sorry, Mom. Sorry, Gia. But I choose Anne Merchant.

And that is how I find myself, that afternoon, back in my old room in Gigi’s attic. I am staring down the staircase. Its sharp wooden edges. Its narrow width.

It was at the bottom of these steps that I woke last. Things were different then. If this much has changed in four months, perhaps by the time May rolls around, I’ll have forgotten all about Ben and Garnet, Dia and Gia, Teddy, and Molly—and I’ll be living it up in California. So I take a deep breath. Close my eyes. And let myself fall. I tumble hard, feeling every wooden corner, every jutting nail, every thick sliver jabbing my skin. I land in a heap at the bottom.

But it’s not like it was so many months ago. Nothing happens.

“Damn pentobarbital,” I say to the ceiling.

The tears begin. With my hair all over my face, wet with sweat and blood, and splayed out on the landing of a house they’re bound to demo any day, I cry. In short sobs, I imagine what it would be like if I’d woken now. Would it be any better? I’d be livin’ it up at the ol’ Fair Oaks Funeral Home. Spending my weekdays shoegazing as I walk through Menlo-Atherton High—
Go Bears!
—and my weekends nerding out back at the library my mom used to work at. Living in a house with dead people, being ignored by rich high-schoolers, painting morbid drawings in my ample spare time, torturing myself with ideas of Ben and Garnet’s date-night activities. My dad would be free of this place, thanks to the arrangement I made so long ago, but then what?

It’d be just like life here.

Except I wouldn’t have Molly.

I’d escape my crazy responsibilities and crazier spiritual history. But would I be any better off in my old life? And if I go home, would I stand even the
remotest
, smallest, fleeting-est chance of seeing Ben
again? At least here I’ve got that. I can see Ben in the halls and remind myself that
there was a time when
. I can tell myself that he had to be put under a spell to be separated from me. I can tell myself that I loved him enough to do this for him.

“Waking up is always an option,” I tell the emptiness and get to my knees, crawling back up the steps. “I
choose
to stay. At least until Ben’s safe.”

I hunch on the top step and wrap my coat around myself. If things get awful—if I catch Ben and Garnet kissing or something equally nightmarish—I can always do a thousand swan-dives from this very step until I wake in sunny C-A.

I recall the goals I listed just yesterday as I walked to Dia’s office.

One, save Ben.

Two, help my mom by helping Teddy.

Three, get off this godforsaken island.

I glance at the chair Ben sat in so many nights ago. He was soaking wet and stunningly beautiful. I can almost see his glowing silhouette now in the shadows. There’s no question in my mind. I need to guarantee that Ben gets the Big V. And I need to use the resources at my disposal to do so.

“Be Saligia,” I whisper.

The house shudders with a gust of wind.

I know what I have to do. I know I’ll have to start with Pilot, a punk so low ranking Mephisto won’t notice his absence from his ranks. I just need to find the right moment to go for it—and hope the slippery slope I’m about to walk doesn’t send me flying back to Hell.

SEMESTER

TWO

seventeen

THE ROAD TO HELL

MOLLY AND I ARE SITTING BEHIND HARPER AND HER NEWEST
recruit, a girl named Jasmina, who enrolled at Cania days after Emo Boy and the other Unlucky Twenty were expelled. That was a little over a month ago. All twenty of the empty seats have been filled; it makes you wonder if Dia didn’t expel a tenth of the population just to cash in on a bunch of new tuition fees.

The second semester of our junior year starts today, bringing with it A Critical Exploration of the Supernatural in Literature and Society, known in normal schools as English class.

Superbia is our instructor. She elegantly sets stacks of novels on the first table of each row. She doesn’t tell us to take one and pass it back; there is little the goddess of pride would deign to do. Harper, a goddess in her own right, waits for Jasmina to hand a copy of Oscar Wilde’s
The Picture of Dorian Gray
to her and lets her do the work of passing the remaining four hardcovers back to us. Because, like Superbia, Harper doesn’t do grunt work.

Superbia stands, looking down her nose at us, at the front of the classroom. Her hair is pinned in a bun high on her head. She makes everything look small and futile. Especially her cowering students.

“Morality. Immorality. Meaning,” Superbia says. Her commanding voice silences us. “Mortality. Immortality.
Art
,” she adds, raising a copy of
The Picture of Dorian Gray
.

She flips open the book to exactly the page she wants, and as everyone scrambles to find where she is, she reads: “We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us.” She glances up at us, her violet eyes piercing, before continuing: “Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden itself.”

She places the book down.

You can feel a question coming.

The whole room tenses.

“The movement that Mr. Wilde, through Lord Henry, was referring to here,” Superbia begins, eying us. “What is it?”

I glance around as, one by one, my classmates drop their heads, pretend to read or, in Molly’s case, simply wait for someone else to answer.

I raise my hand.

“Miss Merchant,” Superbia says. She drags out the
s
and snaps her teeth together on the
t
. To her, my name is just a cover for my darker identity, the way
Superbia
is just a cover for
pride
.

“He was referring to aestheticism,” I say.

“Which is what?”

Dia and I discussed the most popular aesthetes, Whistler and Rossetti, in our first session. Spending all those Saturdays with him, even if I’ve skipped them since the Scrutiny, drove into my head his love for beauty and his own position as an aesthete.

“It’s a movement that holds that there’s no purpose for art outside of creating or representing beauty,” I say. “Art for art’s sake.”

“Very good. Thank you, Miss Merchant.”

She slowly paces the front of the room.

Molly writes on the top of her page,
Smarty pants
. I add a smiley face under it.

“Oscar Wilde is perhaps the best-known aesthete of his time in the literary world,” Superbia says, “though the debate continues as to whether he was promoting or condemning the intensity and, dare I say, meaningless gluttony in the novel you’ll read, dissect, and know by heart before the end of this term.”

When Superbia turns to write on the board, Harper scowls over her shoulder at me. Jasmina, realizing she must support her great leader, copies her. Molly rubs her cheek with her middle finger until they get the picture.

“Now what,” Superbia turns back to us, “might be problematic about pegging Mr. Wilde as an aesthete?”

When no one else raises their hand, Jasmina inches hers up. Like she’s scared Harper might flip out on her for having a brain. Superbia nods for Jasmina to speak.

“Well, Wilde’s the one that said, ‘To define is to limit,’ right?”

“In this very book. Chapter seventeen. To define is to limit,” Superbia says as pages flip. It occurs to me that I’ve heard that line before. Must be popular. “Who says it?”

Without having read the book, it’s almost impossible to know. Quotations in this scene are sparsely attributed, and the scene goes on forever. I don’t know who says that line—either this Lord Henry dude, or this Gladys chick, or Dorian Gray himself. I grimace at Molly, and she shrugs.

“Nobody knows?” Superbia asks.

Everyone’s madly skimming the lines.

“It’s Dorian!” Harper calls out at last.

“Try Lord Henry.” Superbia tsks at Harper. “Dorian rarely says anything interesting; he tends to quote others. Dorian is beauty; he is never wit. His existence both challenges and
is
the foundation of aestheticism.” I feel like she’s speaking directly to me when she adds, “Any artist would be wise to steer clear of Dorian.”

I can’t help but wonder if she’s talking about Dia, who’s as beautiful as Wilde might have imagined Dorian to be. Is she trying to warn me to stay away from him? From somebody, certainly. But whom?

For the rest of the hour, Superbia reads snippets of the book and asks questions few dare to answer. Harper tries to define art, at Superbia’s request, but fails so miserably Superbia bans her from speaking again. By the time class lets out, I understand that this is the story of a beautiful dude named Dorian Gray who trades his soul for eternal youth and beauty and winds up trapped in a painting that—spoiler alert—gets destroyed, killing him. I’m pleasantly surprised to know we’re going to be discussing art. It’ll be a nice reprieve from what these next few weeks have in store for me.

Life as I know it is about to change.

It has to.

Even if I don’t want to think about doing what Teddy said about getting demons to follow me somehow, I can’t put it off any longer.
And, if Ben’s going to win the Big V this May, I need to get moving on my plan. Stat.

“Everything okay?” Molly asks as we leave class.

“Peachy keen.”

Molly can’t know what I’m plotting. She’d never speak to me again.

That Friday afternoon, as drips of melting icicles rain down on campus, I put my plan in action. I find Pilot kicking back espressos in the cafeteria after school. He’s looking about as pissed as one punk can look. But it gets even worse when he spies me. His face scrunches up into a little knot.

“You’ve missed more of our meetings than I can count,” he snaps.

“Um, lest you forget, you totally bailed on me the second the Scrutiny gave me an out.” I pull out a chair. “You realized you couldn’t use me anymore, and you took off. And then when I won!”

“Hi, my name’s Pilot Stone. I’m selfish,” he growls. “Nice to meet you.”

“Whatever. I’m over it. Actually, that’s why I’m here. To help you. And me.”

“That’ll be the day.”

“I’m serious.”

“Seriously playing me.”

“You can keep going like this,” I tell him, “but you’re wasting precious time.”

Scoffing, he heads off to make a second espresso, looking over his shoulder at me every so often, like he’s not sure if I’m kidding or not. Like he’s indecisive. There’s no way he’s indecisive; I’m his only hope. And he’s not demon enough yet to have abandoned all hope. That said, he’s pretty angry. He starts rattling off his frustrations with me—and he’s got a lot of them—and the rumors before he’s even back at our table. I strain to hear the end of his tirade.

“They’re saying that, after the Scrutiny, Ben admitted he’d never been into you, like who didn’t see that coming, and he dropped that on you just as you were about to give him your second life.”

“Who’s saying that?”