Spontaneous (23 page)

W
hat I had started the week before took a firm hold. Half the kids showed up to school drunk or stoned the following Monday morning. Dr. Wonderman had been out on bail for months and, while he was no longer facing murder charges, he wasn't going to be straightening any teeth or tilting any minds anytime soon. So someone else swooped in and scooped up his business. Who? I don't know and I don't care. All I can say is that business was booming.

We came to refer to the day that Dylan, Jane, and the others died as The Event, and it marked the moment when our experiment in free-form schooling fell apart, when our little utopia crumbled.

“This isn't going to make things better,” Spiros told us as the booze and dope were openly shared. “It's only delaying the inevitable nuclear fallout.”

“Fallout has already happened, dude,” Greer told him as she took a hit. “We're living in a postapocalyptic—”

And Greer blew up.

That was late April into May for you. Spiros's class was as spirited as ever, with blitzed teens saying whatever was on their
minds. Occasionally blowing up in the process. Before long, Spiros was as battle weary as the rest of us. A splattering student became as innocuous as the bell between classes.

Phones were always poised, capturing the sex, drugs, and spontaneous combustions. It was not uncommon to hear the phrases “Is this too snuffy?” or “Is this too porny?” in the video editing bay after school. The snuffy and porny stuff got in, more often than not. We didn't even care if people were watching. We didn't care if they were thrilled or disgusted. This was simply how it was and we weren't going to sugarcoat it.

Remember those virgins I knew? Unheard of now. Of course, we weren't animals. It's not like kids were having sex in class or in the hallways. But if the sand by the pool could talk, it would ask for years of therapy. And poor, poor Kylton Connors.

“Why do I let every bi-curious future frat-boy convince me that he can give a decent BJ?” he confessed in one of the videos. “When did I become the crash-test dummy for your careening sexuality? There are other gay guys in this class, you know? Subject them to your confusion and teeth.”

Careening sexuality pretty much covered it. Hunks like Clint Jessup were always conveniently shirtless, trouncing down the halls and hoping the sheen of their waxed torsos were enough to entice a few ladies behind a dune. It often worked, but not on me. As much as I craved arms around me, as much as I missed lips on me, I didn't want what they wanted, which was fast and loud and stupid. Rodeo sex.

And it should probably go without saying that there was also a lot of pent-up aggression. Consequently there were more than a
few fistfights. When a brawl broke out in yoga and Jalen Howard punched Patrick McCoy and Patrick McCoy blew up and splattered all over Mr. Harmsa, Mr. Harmsa decided that maybe yoga wasn't the answer. The next day he shifted to Krav Maga, an Israeli self-defense technique that was supposed to teach us focus and discipline, but primarily became an excuse for us to toss our friends and frenemies around in a controlled environment. Didn't stop the explosions, of course, but they'd never again interrupt a nice quiet session of downward dog.

Mrs. Dodd's class was more or less the same—passionate readings from the Bible with little to no discussion—though her motives were suddenly clear. She didn't object to any of our behavior, which seemed counterintuitive at first, considering we assumed she was there to save us. It turns out saving had nothing to do with it. We were the Sodomites. She was there to watch us burn, to make sure we burned. Every last one of us.

When I use the words
we
and
us
, I'm talking about the senior class in general, obviously. There were teetotalers and prudes who refused to partake in the debauchery. Some of them had been among the most debaucherous in years past, but their conversion to priggishness didn't mean they were immune. Sure, they could pass a pee test, but the Curse blew a few of them up too.

Then there was me. One of the last things Dylan had said to me was that someone needed to tell the victims' stories. I promised I'd be that someone. It was a promise I most certainly did not keep. Because when things really went off the rails, when spontaneous combustions were so common that we hardly stopped classes for
them, when my blood alcohol concentration reached whatever blood alcohol concentration is required to make blackouts a daily thing, I began to lose track of who the victims were.

In just over a month, we had

1. Greer Holloway, who I've already told you about on the account of her death in Livin' 101, her association with the crack tree house and Kamal Patel, her pot-leaf tattoos, and her general flakiness. But she wasn't a flake, not really. She loved animals. She was going to be a veterinarian someday, which I know is such a clichéd thing to say when someone loves animals, but she actually interned at a vet's office and did more than hold dogs while they got shots. She had a passion for all things fuzzy.
   
2. Patrick McCoy, who died during that yoga brawl and was one of the three. One of the three guys I slept with, that is, before I slept with Dylan. He was one of the inspirations for
   All the Feels,
   come to think of it. He had an infectious laugh and was damn good at guitar. A nice-enough guy, most of the time, though he did have a temper he bottled up and uncorked every now and again. That's why we broke it off. Because he called me a bitch. Which, obviously, I often am. Though I hardly deserve to be called one because I overslept and missed a brunch date at Houlihan's once.
   
3. through 19 (I think). There was Poul Dawes, a skater who wore polka-dotted shirts and slept with a lot of girls. And Helen Reedy, a girl who was sleeping with Poul Dawes when he blew up, a girl who had a full forty minutes to bask in that horror—to pick the polka-dotted fabric from her teeth—before she was gone too. Rahul Sneed, a loner who almost never made eye contact except that one time I saw him working at Rosedale Assisted Living Center, handing out ice-cream sandwiches to patients, my ailing grandma included. Stephanie Stupinksi, the captain of the volleyball team who shouted
   shazam!
   every time she spiked the ball. Cole Hooper, a guy who was superhot but no one else seemed to notice he was superhot, so I pretended he wasn't superhot because I didn't want to be the girl who thought a guy was superhot who was so super
   not
   , if you know what I mean. Oh yeah, and he's the one who made that suit of armor out of duct tape. Didn't hold him together, obviously, but thankfully it made cleanup a lot easier. Then there were like . . . eleven others? Twelve? I'm not sure.
   

• • •

Pathetic, right? But this is how I chose to deal. My negativity seemed to be running roughshod through the school, ripping people apart, and if I spent my time pondering who these people
actually were—as Dylan might've wanted me do—then how could I possibly live with myself?

To be fair, I wasn't staring kids down in the hall, casting evil hexes, and watching them explode. I was actively trying to rid myself of every emotion I had. If this part of my life were a book, it'd be titled
None of the Feels
. Didn't change the fact that I'd already produced a surplus of bad vibes. No matter how many emotions I tried to stifle, the amount of animosity I'd already released into the world was pushing these bodies to the limit. Even the smallest annoyance was likely to set someone off.

It was impossible to predict the who and the when, even if I did understand the why. Tess's analogy about spoiling bread and milk suddenly made perfect sense. Not everyone blew up at the same moment because it was a cumulative environmental effect. I had hated some people more passionately and more often, and some bodies were more resilient than others. Their times came when their times came. There wasn't much I could do about it anymore.

So yes, I was powerful, and yet I was powerless. That fact (along with the booze) is why I stopped caring altogether. I might have been more disturbed by how easy apathy came to me, if apathy weren't so en vogue. My classmates were taking all the deaths in stride too, and the dead were doomed to be statistics to anyone who didn't truly care for them. Not everyone could have their wakes at the State Street Theater, after all, and so the victims were treated to a few RIPs that were hardly shared outside their inner circles. It was like they'd been living in the Rosedale Assisted Living Center, where the best they could have expected was an
ice-cream sandwich and a kiss on the cheek before they left this mortal coil. And after they left? One could only hope the obituary writer spelled their names right.

Our janitor, poor Mr. Garvin, was tasked with cleaning them all up, but we made sure it was worth his while. The constant stream of donations coming our way meant we could pay him, Kiki, and the four teachers well into the six figures. As bad as it got—and it got bad—they stayed on.

Of course, Rosetti wasn't walking the halls anymore. I hadn't seen or heard from her since The Event, when she blabbered her accusations and slipped off right before Dylan's death. She had told me that “they” were “coming.” Well, whoever
they
were—the government, I figured—they never showed up. Unless you count Rosetti's partner, Demetri Meadows. Sheriff Tibble didn't bother to investigate anymore, but Meadows poked around after every combustion.

Buoyed by vodka, I cornered him one day in the cafeteria and asked, “Where the hell is she?”

“Who?” he responded as he removed an air duct grate.

“Your partner, partna,” I said.

“I haven't had a partner since November.”

“Um, you forgettin' Ms. Rosetti?”

He shook his head the way Mom once did when she fired this kid from Covington Kitchen and then that kid's parents showed up a few weeks later, clueless that their little darling had been shitcanned for gross incompetence.

“Wait,” I said. “She transfer or something?”

“A lot of things fell apart the night of those riots, including
our theory about the dentist,” Meadows said nonchalantly, as he flicked on a flashlight and peered into the air ducts. “Didn't mean Rosetti had the right to beat the piss out of the man. No matter how frustrated she was. No matter how much we'd all love to beat the piss out of a dentist.”

“Wonderman? So this . . . this hasn't been her case since . . . November?”

“They took the woman's badge when you were all on your little camping trip,” he said, flicking the flashlight off. “This is my case and my case alone. If you have information that'll help, feel free to share. Otherwise, move along.”

I did. I moved along to the corner of the cafeteria where I pulled out the burner. I texted Rosetti:

Where you been?

The text bounced back. Rosetti's number had been disconnected.

T
ess. Tess. Tess.

She was still around, but not really. After I had given her the finger in the hall, I had done other things to alienate her in those first few weeks following Dylan's death. When she'd text me or send me a silly Vine to cheer me up, I'd ignore her. When she'd sit with me at lunch and tell me it was okay to cry or that if I wanted a hug, I could have “the biggest hug in the universe,” I'd usually shrug and sip whatever cocktail I was wielding.

She either got the message, or she got distracted, because as school became wilder, she became even more scarce, popping in for the occasional class, but rarely staying a full day. Deep down, I wanted her to keep trying, to grab me by the cheeks and yell, “Do better, Mara! Be better!” Of course, I didn't tell her that. Because then I'd be tempted to confess and I feared she'd never forgive me.

On top of it all, I worried that she was developing a drinking
problem of her own. Every time I saw her, she was carrying a Nalgene bottle filled with a milky concoction that made her wince when she sipped it. Anyone who was close to Tess knew she had sworn off alcohol after a few bad experiences, so this was not a good sign.

But did I say anything? Did I try to make her laugh or offer galaxy-wide hugs?

Of course I didn't. I went about my own drinking. And I went to classes. When I could hold my head up, I participated. I wanted to be oblivious to the hell I had unleashed and continued to unleash, so my waking moments needed to be filled with distraction. Most of the time, Spiros's class took my brain down intellectual paths instead of emotional ones, and while I didn't contribute to the videos anymore, I craved Ms. Felson's calming presence as an antidote to my disillusion with Rosetti and Krook.

“If I was your age, and this happened to me, I would have done all the same things you've done,” Felson told me once before class.

“You have no idea what I've done,” I mumbled to her.

“Maybe not. But that hardly matters. I know what I was capable of. Which was everything.”

She was right about that.

Sometimes Krav Maga let my brain off the hook and let my muscles and lungs temporarily work through whatever one feels when one feels capable of everything. Sometimes it made me collapse on the mats in the corner of the room where I'd zone out until lunch, when Kiki gave me solids to sop up all the liquids I'd been consuming. After that, it was time for more of the Good Book, which . . .
well, I usually skipped. Once Dodd's motives became clear, I didn't need to hear about how I was doomed in both the present
and
the hereafter.

I didn't go home when I skipped, though. I usually napped in the sand by the pool, in an attempt to steady my head before facing my parents. They weren't clueless. They could see me sinking deeper and deeper. They also weren't warlocks. They couldn't magically pull me out of this. The least I could do for them was pretend to be sober.

I have no idea what the official population of Covington was in May. A few hundred at best. The seniors and their families, basically, and even some of those families had jumped ship. Many of my classmates were already eighteen and it was perfectly legal for their parents to say, “Sayonara, suckas, we're moving to West Palm. Make sure to mow the grass while we're gone.”

After the elementary and middle schools closed, and classes at Shop City Mall were canceled, almost every other kid who had the means had fled town. Why not, right? As far as I knew, no one was tracking them. Sure, they had a good chance of being ostracized in their new communities, but it was still better than being here.

This is all to say that the handful of people like my parents, who stuck around to watch things go from bad to worse, suffered mightily and silently. They had each other, of course, and sometimes they'd get together for drinks or dinners where they'd blow off steam. But mostly they watched over us, trying not to remind us of our predicament or trying to keep us comfortable, if not hopeful. It was like hospice. Only our parents weren't trained to deal with this nonsense.

Now I know what you might be thinking.

But, Mara, weren't you immune to the Curse? Seeing that you were the Curse? You could have spared your parents some misery by assuring them that no matter what, you'd be okay.

I considered that. I even imagined the confession.

“I've got some good news and bad news,” I'd tell them.

“Bad first,” Mom would say. “Always the bad shit first.”

“I'm the Covington Curse. I've been causing all of this. With my big bad brain.”

After the requisite ten minutes of jaw-dropping shock, Dad would say, “And . . . the . . . good news?”

“They're all going to die, but I'm going to live!” I'd shout. “Yay me! Now let's go have some ice cream!”

Only that ice cream would have to wait, because the thing was, how could I know I was immune? How could I be sure that I couldn't do this to myself? What sort of damage does a season full of self-hate do to a girl? And what would it take to push that girl over the edge?

So, no. I kept my lips zipped and my emotions dull and I tried to act sober around my parents. It was the least I could do.