Desolate (Desolation) (4 page)

It surprised me to hear Miri make such a judgmental statement. Usually she seemed to like everyone—at least she always gave people the benefit of the doubt.

“It’s not their fault,” I said. “It’s Eleon. He’s seduced them, promised them an eternity of whatever they desire. He’s doing his job.”
My
job—the one Father sent me to Earth to do.

We sat in silence for a while and I tried to quell the nausea in my gut. Eleon and his
chosen
were another example of how blatant Father’s recruitment efforts had become. His minions barely even tried to keep a low-profile anymore. I could sense the darkness gathering and feel the building tension in the demons who clustered around St. Mary’s like it was the mecca for all things evil.

According to Miri, Eleon used to keep to himself. Sure, the school slackers had made him their ring-leader, but he didn’t go around promoting the cause of Hell like he did now. And there hadn’t been this freaky vamp-club.

I sighed again.

“What’s wrong?” Miri picked at her lunch, not really eating any of it.

“It’s just . . . Sometimes I wonder why I’m here. I’m not making things any better, and if I went away—I don’t know where, just away—then maybe Father would leave too. Maybe people wouldn’t be . . .” I looked at the door the vamps had taken.

Miri touched my arm. “It’s not your fault.” I gave her a look that said
Oh really?
“Hey, at least here there’s Longinus and Knowles—at least we know something. Cornelius is like a walking encyclopedia of all things Lucifer and knows more than anyone—well, except for you, of course.”

Miri picked up her sandwich and took a big bite. “Thing is,” she said around her food, “if I’m understanding anything at all about the dream, the Apocalypse is coming no matter what you do. But with you, at least we stand half a chance of surviving.”

Half a chance. That pretty much summed it up. But . . . half a chance was better than no chance at all.

I rubbed at the goose bumps that rose on my arms and Miri smiled sympathetically.

“You know I don’t really hate those kids, right? It’s this thing they’re in to. I hate the vampire bit. It’s creepy. And they kind of scare me.”

I laughed, but it came out more like a bitter-sounding snort. “They kind of scare me too.” And I didn’t say it only to make Miri feel better, either.

The dim chime of the bell sounded from the hallway. “Oh shoot,” Miri said. “Time to go.”

“So much for lunch.” I wrapped my delicious sandwich and sadly chucked it into the garbage can by the door.

“Consider it a well-meaning attempt to keep me from being too depressed that I was eating PB&J for the zillionth time while you ate one of my boyfriend’s delicious concoctions.”

“Ha,” I said, letting her link her arm in mine and walk me through the door.

chapter six

During our free period, Miri and I opted for study hall, despite the fact that not much studying ever got done there. But Miri said we needed a place where we could talk about the Shakespeare assignment, and since it still poured buckets outside, the study hall was our only choice. Neither of us were in a hurry to face Sister Mary Theresa, either.

The room looked like the reception hall after Sunday mass (Miri’d taken me a few times since I moved into Lucy’s place). A table at the front of the room should have held a plate of cookies. Poor Sister Margarite made bigger and bigger batches trying to accommodate our ravenous desire for her delicious double-chocolate-chip creations—never knowing that Marcus took them all and mainly threw them at the jocks while they walked down the hall.

Noisy talkers doing anything but studying, sat at the plain, round tables with uncomfortable plastic chairs.

Miri and I grabbed two chairs from a table where a couple (I couldn’t tell who) were mauling each other and contaminating the space around them in at least a three-foot radius. We set our chairs as far away from them as we could.

I didn’t like school—it seemed I wasn’t alone in that. But it gave me something to do, filled my time with something other than the constant guilt and self-loathing that occupied my mind 99% of the rest of the time. Plus, I understood school. Understood what the teachers wanted from me—and I could provide it. School was pretty much the only thing I could control in my life, and that was a good thing.

“We have got to get some work done on our scene,” Miri said, pulling out her book of plays, a notebook and pen. I knew she’d do the note-taking, so I took out my silver Sharpie, put my ankle on my knee and went to work embellishing my new black Chucks.

My old ones—the ones Aaron had doodled on—were still in my room in Hell. Sneakers or boots were not exactly dress code but since being exiled to this human life I decided I could only concede so much. The staff seemed to have gotten the memo that they shouldn’t push me on it. Maybe Knowles, maybe Cornelius, had said something to the Dean, I didn’t know. And I didn’t care.

“Should we act out a scene? Or should we paint or something? I mean—we’re pretty good at painting.” Miri laughed, high and fluty. I gave her a half-smile and accompanying eye roll. By “painting” she meant the extreme makeover we gave her bedroom from depths-of-Hell black to normal-girl pale green.

“Oh! Or we could make a modern version of the story. But I guess we should figure out which play we’re going to do, huh? I was thinking maybe King Lear—that could be funny. Or we could do . . .”

The smell of Sharpie takes me back to another day, almost a year ago now. Aaron and I hide under the bleachers during lunch, chocolate bars and a shared Coke our meal. Instead of my own hands, I see Aaron’s, his knuckles tattooed with Celtic knots.

“Why’d you do that?” I ask, tracing my finger over his skin. Aaron stops, frozen in place until I remove my finger. It must bug him, freak him out or something. “Forget it.”

It feels like forever in which we do nothing. Neither of us move or speak. I’m not even sure we are breathing.

Finally Aaron sighs, like a long, low whistle, and resumes his drawing. After a minute he says, “I don’t know.” He draws an intricate knot that looks a lot like the crosses on his hands. I figure he isn’t going to say anything more, so it surprises me when he clears his throat.

“See, there’s this thing. You’re gonna think I’m a total freak.” He looks up, startled at his own words, an apology already on his lips—and we both bust up laughing. Everyone calls Aaron a
freak—and since I hang around him, everyone calls me a freak, too. If this is what it means to be one, then I like it.

Time seems to stand still around us, and it’s like I’m standing outside of myself, watching the scene instead of living it. I’ve never laughed before. Never felt the sensation that starts in my head and moves all the way into my stomach. Even my feet feel different.

I am different.

Our eyes meet, our laughter trickling away. Aaron leans forward and I hold my breath. I don’t know what he’s doing, but I see something new in his eyes. Something like hope. My mind races—I can’t be responsible for his hope. I am desolation—not hope. I jerk back, knocking the Sharpie out of Aaron’s hand with my foot.

“Oh! Sorry,” I say, though I’m not sorry at all. I lean over to grab the pen at the same moment Aaron does and our heads thwack together with an audible thunk.

“Shit,” Aaron says, slapping his hand to his head.

Belatedly I remember I’m supposed to be human and that the head-bonk should have hurt me too. “Ow,” I add and wrack my brain for something. Something to say or do to make things better. “What’s the thing?” I practically shout in my effort to get it out, to fill up the heavy air between us with something other than this awkward silence.

“Thing?” For a moment, Aaron’s expression is blank before his eyes light up with understanding. “Oh. The thing.” He reaches over and pulls my foot back toward him, then holds out his hand for the Sharpie. I put it in his palm, careful not to let our fingers touch. I suspect I’ve given him the wrong impression about our friendship, and I’m unsure of how to change it. But not touching him seems like a good idea.

I’m intensely aware of my ankle on his knee, but I leave it there because I like the contact. I am forever, always, selfish.

“Yeah. The thing. What is it?”

Aaron laughs, sort of, and flicks the rod in his lower lip with his tongue. He goes back to drawing, leaning down and paying extra attention. I can’t see his face behind the curtain of black hair that hides him from view.

“See, I started having these dreams—wild dreams with crazy creatures and bad dudes and . . . Have you ever seen
Nosferatu
?” He doesn’t look up, but he pauses, waiting for my answer which I don’t give. Of course I’ve seen it—Father takes great enjoyment from the dark tales humans tell.

“Well, anyway, these dreams have demons and all kinds of scary crap in them. And I’m not
talking Bram Stoker’s vampires either. These aren’t Count Dracula types. These are bad-as-all-get-out, straight-from-the-fires-of-hell evil things.” I shiver and he rubs my leg, but withdraws his hand like I’ve burned him, though I know I’m as cold as they come.
“Sorry,” he says, and I hear the tiny tink-tink sound his lip stud makes when it clatters against his teeth.

“Anyway, I don’t need to tell you all that crap, I guess. Thing is, I had these funky dreams and they totally freaked me out. But every time I had one, when I woke up, I’d have these images in my head. Knots and crosses—I  looked them up, and they’re all Celtic things. Like from thousands of years ago. When I look at them, and especially when I draw them, I feel safer.”

Silently, he adds another knot spiraling out from the Converse logo on the ankle of my shoe. I don’t want him to stop talking. At first I was afraid of what he’d say—that he’d say he’d seen me in his dreams as this horrible awful, black-as-night creature—but now I need to know more. I want to feel safe too.

“Keep going.” I hope he knows I don’t mean the drawing—though I don’t want him to stop that, either.

“Anyway, it’s weird, like I said. Maybe I really am a freak.”

“But what about the designs—the tattoos on your hands?”

He sighs, and I know the sound. It isn’t frustration or anger; it’s hope. Hope that I really want to know. Hope that he hasn’t scared me away. He has no idea how much neither of those fears are true.

“I fell asleep one night with my sketchbook. And I had the same dream—or at least, I started to. But then it was like the monsters couldn’t cut through, like they were stuck behind a glass wall or something. At first I didn’t know what the deal was, but when I slept over at a friend’s house one night, it was the whole carnival of freakiness all over again.”

He finishes the design on my left shoe and pulls my other foot onto his lap. “So I started keeping the drawings on me all the time—and I felt better.” He shrugs. “I got my first tattoo right after that and while the bad guys still show up in my dreams, it’s better than before. And the more knots I have, the safer I feel.” He looks up at me, then and wiggles his fingers, each one decorated with a protective tattoo. “So that’s why I’ve got these babies.” His dark brown eyes glint with a hint of humor—something foreign in Aaron’s eyes. “And others too.”

His face flames red and he drops his gaze. I can hear his lip ring clicking against his teeth even over the scritch of the pen on my shoe.

“Earth to Desi. Come in, Desi.”

“What?” I struggled to bring Miri into focus, and had to look around to get my bearings. Study hall, rain pounding the windows, kids talking (or other stuff). Not the gym, not the past. Not with Aaron.

“Where the heck were you? You missed my brilliant ideas.”

I blew out a breath. “Sorry. What’d I miss?”

“You okay? Was it . . . like . . .” She waved her hand in the air.

“No, it wasn’t Father. It was just . . .” I put the cap back on the pen. “Just a memory.”