The Suburban Strange (18 page)

“You know, I’m a little freaked out about it,” Ivo said. Lately his lunches were composed entirely of raw foods. Celia wasn’t sure what had prompted him to adopt the diet. Today he had yellowtail sashimi, pine nuts, cucumber slices, a wedge of mozzarella, a blood orange, and Pellegrino. “Liz wants to be a writer. Brenden wants to be a music critic.”

“I thought you wanted to be an architect.”

“I don’t know. Architecture is kind of a compromise for me. I feel like I’m good at a lot of things, but I’m not sure enough about any of them to say ‘This is what I want to do with my life.’ I feel like a dilettante,” Ivo said.

“Really? That’s not my impression of you.”

“Well, high school has been easy. I’ve never had to really work hard—none of us have. Who knows what’s happening to Regine in Chem Two. While that’s great, it hasn’t helped me to focus in on what I’m really good at, what I really want to do. I’m scared I’ll go to college and realize I don’t want to be an architect and then have no idea what to do instead.”

“Well, you still have time,” Celia offered. “And there’s no harm in changing your mind.”

“I’m just not used to not being sure,” he said. “I’ve always known how to get what I wanted out of wherever I’ve been at the time. Some people are happy just to get through high school and move on to the next thing. I’m proud we’ve done it our way, on our terms. And when I get to college I’m going to try to do the same thing. The difference is, college is when I’m supposed to make big decisions about who I want to be for the rest of my life. I’ve never done that. I’ve always been focused on who I want to be right now. So I don’t know if it’s going to come so easily. I feel like the thing I have to do, and soon, is figure out what I want to be when I grow up.”

“Liz always uses that John Updike quote about imagining your life and then it happens. What do you imagine?”

Ivo was quiet for a moment. The way he looked at her, Celia thought he was trying to decide how much of his confidence she deserved to receive. Then he said, “I want to have a space that’s kind of like Diaboliques, but not just a nightclub. I want it to be the kind of place the people from Diaboliques would go for coffee, or dinner, to see an art show or even a performance. It would be like a black box version of Diaboliques, changing over the course of the day. It would be a coffee shop in the morning and then convert into a restaurant for lunch and dinner. Change the tables again and it’s a cocktail lounge. Take the tables away and it’s a performance space, or a nightclub. But always with the same dark, exotic ambiance, you know? Beautiful furnishings and attention to all the little details. And the best music, all the great music around which we build our lives. I even know what I’d call it.” Ivo was caught up in his vision now, and Celia was right there with him. “Darkland: a place for the cognoscenti, anytime of day or night.”

“That sounds awesome! So what do you study in college in order to do that?”

“I have no idea.” Ivo smiled a little sadly, and in her mind’s eye Celia saw the picture he had painted fade away like skywriting. “I almost wonder if you need to go to college for it at all. But I have to go to college, no matter what. I want to be an educated bar owner, not an ignorant one.” They laughed at that.

   “It’s going to be strange not having you guys here next year,” Celia said.

“It’s going to be strange not being here,” he said. “I kind of wish you all could come along with us and we could just keep doing this at college.”

“That’s nice, but I barely have high school figured out.” She smiled.

“You’re doing great. I hope you guys keep it up next year, being creative and doing your own thing, whether it’s popular or not.”

“I hope so, too,” Celia said. “But we’re not even halfway done with this year. I can’t think about next year yet.”

For a moment Ivo’s façade had come down. Celia was thrilled to have seen a little of the real Ivo behind it, even if he was nervous and conflicted. She wondered if Ivo had told anyone else about Darkland. Celia hoped he hadn’t. If he had privileged her with this small piece of himself that no one else had seen, she could believe she truly had made it into his good graces and her place in the Rosary was solid and secure.

“I want an apple. Can I get you anything?” Celia stood up from the table.

“No, thank you. Do you mind if I look at your drawings? I keep glimpsing them upside down, across the table from you, and I’ve always wanted to have a better look.”

“Sure, go right ahead.” Celia flushed with satisfaction at Ivo’s interest. She waited in line at the lunch counter, believing for the first time that Ivo really considered her a friend. She wasn’t sure why she wanted the Rosary’s approval so much, but it felt good to have won it.

Oh god,
she thought.
I wrote the Unkind admonition in my sketchbook!
She turned and looked across the sea of tables at Ivo. He was bent over her book. He turned a page and she tried to see what was on it, but they were too far apart.
He won’t turn all the way to the last page. There are at least a hundred pages of drawings in there, and even if he looks at all of them, when he gets to the blank pages he’ll stop.
All the same, she willed the cashier to move faster.

Finally she got her apple and strode briskly back to the table. Ivo looked up from the page open before him—twelve lines of her handwriting plainly visible.

“What is this?” he asked.

“What is what? Oh, that’s a poem.”

“It’s a pretty grisly poem,” Ivo said.

“Yeah,” Celia said, all plausible ideas about how to change the subject running out of her mind like water through a sieve.

“And it’s awfully similar to what’s going on around here at school. An innocent girl, the day before she turns sixteen?”

“Well, not really. Nobody’s getting killed.” She sat down, the apple forgotten.

“Celia, what’s going on?”

“What do you mean?”

“Apparently you’re taking this curse pretty seriously. Is there something going on that isn’t an accident? Are you involved in something I don’t know about?”

“No!”

“People don’t write random poems like this for fun.” Ivo tapped the page.

“I didn’t write it!” Celia protested.

“Then where did you get it?”

“I can’t tell you!”

“It’s okay—I bet I can guess. You’ve only suspected one of your friends of witchcraft so far this year. Or are there others?” Ivo studied her face, and while Celia couldn’t imagine how her expression looked, she was sure it wasn’t helping. “Did Mariette write this? I don’t have a problem with people being pagan or vegan and all that, but a lot of girls have gotten hurt. What is she doing?”

“It’s not Mariette—she’s trying to stop it!” Celia saw Ivo’s eyebrows go up and realized too late that she had revealed far too much. “You can’t tell anyone! No one’s supposed to know!”

“If you expect me to keep a secret, you’re going to have to tell me what the secret is that I’m keeping,” Ivo said, his face a mixture of disapproval, curiosity, protectiveness, and envy all at the same time.

“There isn’t any way you could just forget about it?” she asked him.

“Not on your life. Not if someone is trying to make this little poem come true.” Ivo stabbed his finger onto the admonition.

“It’s just, I’m not supposed to tell anyone. Could you please just let me talk to Mariette first? I don’t know what I can tell you. It’s really up to her.”

“You, Mariette, and me—before the break is over. Or else I will tell my parents, and they will tell the school. I’m serious.”

“Yes. I’ll get her to come. Thank you.”

The moment Celia was away from Ivo, she tore the page with the admonition out of the back of her sketchbook. Then she didn’t know what to do with the page, so she folded it up and put it in her purse. Until now this secret had been exciting, mysterious, even a little glamorous, and the danger had felt remote. All of a sudden she felt burdened with this knowledge. And she wondered how Mariette would react when Celia confessed what had happened with Ivo.

TWO PERIODS LATER CELIA FOUND
Mariette in the hall. "I have to tell you something that you're not going to like."

“What?”

“Ivo found the admonition in my sketchbook.”

“Are you kidding? How did he find it?”

“I thought he was looking at the drawings in the front. I didn’t think he’d flip all the way to the back! I was only gone for a minute!”

“No one was supposed to see that—I trusted you!”

“I know—I’m so sorry! But I didn’t tell him anything else. He promised he wouldn’t do anything until I had the chance to talk to you.”

“Talk to me? Wait, he knows about
me?
”

“He guessed, because of that time with your locker, and— I didn’t tell him anything about you!” Celia felt as if a rodent were gnawing her from the inside. She never had failed someone like this before. It was a new torment she hated immediately. “It would have been okay if he had just thought I had written a twisted poem about the curse, but I said I hadn’t written it, and then he accused
you,
and I let it slip that you’re trying to stop it.”

“This is really bad. I have to talk to him,” Mariette said. She was totally focused, serious. “I have to fix this.”

“I don’t know how to fix it.”

“I do. When can I see him?”

“He wants to meet over the break. The three of us.”

“As soon as possible.”

“I’ll find out. I’ll call you tonight. Mariette, I’m sorry.”

Mariette sighed. “It’s okay. I know you didn’t do it on purpose. It’s just, how well do you know Ivo? Do you know anything about him outside of school? What if he accuses me of something and I get asked a whole bunch of questions I can’t answer? Or what if he says something to the person who happens to be the Unkind who’s doing all this and I’m exposed? Or what if—and I don’t know, but I’m just saying—what if
he’s
the Unkind, and I just can’t detect him because I’m too new? This could be very dangerous for me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“And it could be just as dangerous for you, too! The Unkind would know you know something since you have the admonition. And at this point you aren’t even able to defend yourself if someone comes after you, because you haven’t developed any powers yet. You see why I’m freaking out about this?”

“Yes. I feel horrible!” Celia didn’t bother to protest that she really thought she wasn’t one of the Kind and never would develop powers.

“We just have to hope Ivo keeps his word and doesn’t say anything to anyone until I get to talk to him, or else we’re screwed. You have to be careful. Don’t go out by yourself unless you absolutely have to, okay? And we need to have that meeting as soon as possible.”

“Okay,” Celia said meekly.

WHEN CELIA GOT HOME SHE
went straight to her room, dug the Unkind admonition out of her purse, and looked for a place to hide it. She pulled an old sketchbook off the shelf and opened it in the middle, intending to shove the admonition in there and close it up again. She stopped short when she saw the page to which she had opened.

It was a sketch she had copied from a perfume ad. A woman in a black dress gazed out of the page, one strap slipping from the arc of her shoulder, her eyes open and wondering, her lips parted as though she had paused in the middle of a thought, her hair weightless around her face like a cloud.

A dark line mustache was scribbled in pen under her delicate nose, and devilish arched eyebrows had been jabbed onto the page over the thin eyebrows Celia had drawn. The memory of a certain day in eighth grade returned to Celia like a baseball hitting her in the chest: an afternoon period during which her sketchbook had gone missing, only to be found later in the cafeteria with dozens of pages vandalized like this one. Celia sat down at her desk as the memory unspooled.

She had come home in tears and was curled on her bed when her father arrived home from work. She had sobbed the story to him and felt his warm hand smooth her frizzy hair and stroke her back through her baggy sweatshirt.

“I’m sorry, honey,” he had said gently. “Kids are stupid and cruel sometimes.”

“Can’t you
do
anything?” she had begged him.

“What do you want me to do?”

“I don’t know, complain to the school? Make them stop?”

Her father had sighed, and there was a long moment when Celia waited for him to speak. “Honey, if anyone ever hurts you—physically—I will skip the school and go straight to the police. If anyone ever threatens to hurt you, you can bet I will make sure the school knows about it. And if I thought you were being emotionally torn up by what was going on, I would be spending a lot of time making sure you got the help you needed, with a counselor or someone else.

“But this is what makes being a parent hard: trying to decide when to step in and protect you and when to step back and let you protect yourself. Because growing up includes realizing that some people are stupid and cruel and you have to figure out how to deal with them. Figuring that out makes you a stronger person. Now, if it goes beyond that—if someone is violent, or if the person seems more threatening than just typical middle school stupidity—please tell me. But it sounds like someone is jealous of your talent, and maybe resentful because you don’t like the same things they do, and they’re trying to get under your skin. Does that sound true?”

Celia took a tissue from the box on her bedside table. “I guess.”

“Can I say something else to you? Sometimes I wish you drew a little less. I certainly don’t want you to stop, because you’re too good and I hope you always use your talent to make beautiful things. But to be a good artist, you need to
live
. And that means spending time in the real world, with real people, doing lots of different things. Which also means occasionally getting hurt and picking yourself up. It’s one thing to be a spectator, off in the corner watching, drawing what you see. It’s another thing to be an artist, out there in the world, creating things that change the people who see them—things that change the world, even.”