The Twilight of Lake Woebegotten (7 page)

But the Scullens and the Scales didn’t fit in. They were a little island off to the side, sharing connections only with one another, not hooked into the greater organism that was the school culture, and that meant they were essentially untouchable by all my preferred methods. Character assassination was pointless when they obviously didn’t care what anyone thought of them. Humiliation was out of the question; Rosemarie and Pleasance couldn’t be humiliated any more than the sun could be frozen: they
embodied
dignity and grace, which should have made them easier to topple or tarnish, but, frustratingly, somehow didn’t. I couldn’t turn them against each other because I didn’t have any leverage, or any way to
get
leverage. There were more direct approaches to comeuppance—I’d used them in the past—but increasingly, direct acts of violence seemed to be best used as a last resort, and probably indicative of a failed imagination. Far better to lead your enemies to destroy themselves.

But I didn’t give up. I like a challenge. And I can be very patient.

I just wished Edwin would come back. Plotting to destroy Rosemarie and Pleasance was fine, but when you have your heart set on seduction, assassination is a poor substitute.

RETURNITY

FROM THE JOURNAL OF BONNIE GRAYDUCK

M
y first weekend in Lake Woebegotten was also uneventful. A girl can get sick of uneventfulness. I mostly concentrated on making myself at home in Harry’s house, re-organizing the cupboards in the kitchen to better suit my preferences, and taking over the upstairs bathroom completely, quietly exiling all Harry’s crap to the smaller downstairs bathroom. He didn’t object. He struck me as a remarkably easygoing guy, which made me wonder how he’d ended up with my train wreck of a mother in the first place—though it did explain how he’d managed to put up with her for seven years before they broke up. Harry wasn’t around much. I tried to plot more against Rosemarie and Pleasance, but I couldn’t see any way to get to them that didn’t involve going through Edwin. What if he never came back?

On Monday, people greeted me by name at school, Ike nipping at my heels, J becoming increasingly cold toward me—she liked Ike, for some reason, perhaps a fat-cheeks fetish, and his obvious fascination with me bothered her. She kept spending time with me, though, in the best frenemies tradition, and for my part, I stopped flirting with Ike, and the other boys, too. Not to make J happy, though—mostly because I didn’t want Edwin to get any mixed messages… even if he wasn’t here to receive them. Word could get back to him through his luminous siblings, after all.

But that day, when I went into the lunch room, the Scullen and Scale table was full again: Edwin was back, chatting and laughing with his family as always. I didn’t stare—I
didn’t
—but he happened to look over at me just as I looked over at him, and our eyes met, and this time, there was no mask of hostility on his face, and he even gave me a little half-smile. I ignored him, pretending to pay attention to the prattlings of my tablemates, until Kelly whispered, “Edwin Scullen is staring at you.”

“Doesn’t cost anything to look,” I said breezily, and bit into my chicken sandwich.

“No, he’s really staring. Wow.”

I shrugged, but I was secretly gratified. If he were fascinated with me, for whatever reason, that was something I could use. I very deliberately didn’t look over at him again. No reason for him to know
I
was fascinated, after all. Ike went on about the trip to the lake again. I gathered cases of cheap beer and bags of undoubtedly skank weed would be involved. Typical teenage stuff, but not unpleasant, in a provincial way, and I found myself agreeing to join them. I just wished I’d brought some good stuff with me from Santa Cruz—my mom had an old back injury that got her a medical marijuana card, so she always had plenty in the house, and was sufficiently scatterbrained that I could take more or less as much as I wanted. Not a luxury I had with a cop as my dad. Though maybe if I could get access to the evidence locker…

After lunch I sailed out of the cafeteria, the gears in my mind locking and meshing and spinning beautifully. A lot would depend on how Edwin reacted to me in biology class. If he put up his wall-of-silence again, it would be tough; the Scullens were a tricky bunch, but if I could find a crack, I could exploit it.

Our lab table was empty when I arrived in class, even though I’d dawdled so I could make a nice entrance, and I had a flash of worry—was Edwin ditching? I sat down, looking without much interest at the microscope set up in the middle of the table. Just when I was ready to give up on him, Edwin burst in, looking like an underwear model late for a shoot, his hair beautifully tousled, his cheekbones so prominent they could have been handholds on a beginner’s climbing wall.

I looked away from him, down at my notepad, and ignored him thoroughly, though of course I noticed when he sat in the chair next to mine—and didn’t drag it as far away from me as possible this time. I continued ignoring him, doodling, though I realized I was doodling skulls, so I quickly started transforming them into flowers and other innocuous things with lots of dense little pen-strokes.

“Hello,” he said, and while it wasn’t the first time I’d heard his voice, it was the first time he’d spoken to
me
, and a shiver started in the soles of my feet and the top of my head all at once, one shiver traveling up, the other traveling down, with both shivers meeting in the middle—well. Slightly
lower
than the middle, to be totally honest.

I glanced at him. His eyes were focused intensely on me, and they were dark blue, like young stars. “Oh. Hi.” Back to my doodle. My interesting, interesting flowers.

“My name is Edwin Scullen.”

“Mm. I’m Bonnie. Grayduck.”

He chuckled warmly. “Oh, I know who
you
are.”

Promising. “Oh? Why would you pay any attention to someone like me?”

“I think you’re certainly worth paying attention to,” he said earnestly. “And it’s a small school, a small town. You’re the police chief’s daughter. Why, you’re a celebrity.”

This from one of the untouchable Scullens, but I didn’t get any sense of condescension or mockery from his tone, and those were tones I was highly sensitive to—since I often used them myself.

Just then Mr. Whatever explained what we were doing with the microscopes (some bullcrap with looking at slides and identifying some other bullcrap), and I gave Edwin a hapless little smile. “Could you start? I always break the slides, I’m so clumsy.”

Edwin heroically fitted slides in the microscope and peered through the eyepiece, and I looked in a few times too, and we drew pictures of the structure of whatever it was we were supposed to be looking at, and it was all strictly business. At one point his hand brushed mine, and it was ice-cold—that was a bummer. I was hoping to get Edwin into bed sometime, and cold hands also meant cold
feet
, which were no fun under the covers. Ah, well. Somebody that beautiful had to have
something
wrong with him, and lousy circulation wasn’t so bad, really. I was no closer to understanding why he’d been a total asshole before, only to be a gentleman this time. Maybe he’d been gone for a week of rehab or something—he did have a certain heroin-chic quality about him, all pale and everything, with the fine blue tracery of veins just barely visible beneath the skin of his wrists. But a week wasn’t long enough to kick any sort of habit. Mysterious. I don’t like mysteries, unless they’re mysteries I benefit from.

Once we finished the lab—well in advance of the bleating sheep elsewhere in the classroom—he turned the searchlight of his attention away from tiny glass slides and back to me, where it belonged. “How do you like Lake Woebegotten so far? I know it’s hard to start over in a new town.”

He was a transplant, too, I remembered. “Oh, I used to come here when I was a kid, to visit Harry—my dad. So it’s sort of familiar. It’s been, oh, maybe five years, but absolutely nothing’s changed, as far as I can tell.”

“Lake Woebegotten does have a certain timeless quality, I’ve heard,” Edwin said. “My adopted father Argyle’s family lived here, oh, in the early 1900s. The house where we live, on the north side of the lake, way back in the woods? It’s been in the family for generations.” He cocked his head. An adorable gesture. He basically exuded adorable. How could he go from looking like a dangerous rock star one moment to cuddly boyfriend material the next? He was as changeable as floating clouds viewed under the influence of psychedelic mushrooms. “This must be very different from—where is it you’re from? Somewhere in California?”

“Santa Cruz,” I said. “On the central coast.”

“The name sounds vaguely familiar,” he said.

“Ever see that old movie
The Lost Boys
?”

His eyes widened. “Ah? The one about…”

“Vampires, yeah, it has Pee-Wee Herman and Kiefer Sutherland before he got all old? The amusement park in the movie is the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk. Not that they called the town Santa Cruz in the movie, but it was shot there, maybe you heard about it that way. There were some serial killers there back in the ’70s too, I guess.” And more recently, though no one had realized that’s what I was. “Nowadays it’s mostly famous for, I don’t know. Hippies, surfing, the usual. It’s okay. Way different from Lake Woebegotten though, yeah.”

“Not a lot of surfing happens in the lake,” Edwin said gravely.

“Not a lot of ice fishing in Santa Cruz,” I said.

Then Mr. Whatever came over and looked at our drawing and said we did a good job (though he was so bored and perfunctory, who knew if it were true; then again, who cared?). He moved on to the next table, and Edwin stared at me again. His lips looked delicious. “Why did you come here, if you don’t mind me asking?”

Ah. Well, I was hardly going to tell the
truth
—a stupid girl died, and some people thought I might be indirectly responsible, and we thought it might be better if I finished up my senior year someplace else, where there wouldn’t be so much whispering and staring in the hallways. So instead I said, “My mom wanted to travel around with her boyfriend Dwayne—he plays arena football—but she felt bad about me being alone so much. And I hadn’t seen Harry in ages, so I figured, I’d come spend a little time with him before I go off to college or whatever.”

“Don’t you miss the friends you left behind?”

Time for a little creative storytelling. I looked away, pretending embarrassment. “My, ah, boyfriend… I had a bad breakup. Actually, he cheated on me with my best friend. So, no, I didn’t really want to see those people much anymore.”

“Bonnie, I’m so sorry.” The sympathy in his voice was warm as melting butter. “A betrayal like that… how terrible. You deserve better.”

Hmm. Sounded like he’d be faithful, but also suggested he’d be jealous. Both of which could be used to achieve various effects, of course. I looked at him, frankly. “So,” I said, “if I deserve better, why were you such a jerk to me last time we had a class together?”

His eyebrows went up, but just then Mr. Whatever called our attention to the front and started pointing at some crap on an overhead projector. A few moments later the bell rang, and Edwin was—
whoosh
—gone.

I’d spooked him. Oh well. I should’ve probably played up the wounded-bunny routine some more instead, but there was something about Edwin… I didn’t want to show him the
real
me, of course, but I didn’t want to hide myself utterly in a fake persona.

Ike joined me as I left the room. “Saw you talking to Scullen,” he said, rather sullenly. “He seemed nicer today.”

I nodded. “I still don’t know what his problem was, but he seems to be over it.” We went to gym class, where I pretended physical incompetence, as per usual, until I could finally get back to the only kind of competition that actually matters: real life.

In the parking lot, I started up Marmon and drove slowly out of the lot. There was Edwin, standing by a Subaru station wagon with some of his faux-siblings. He looked up at me, and his eyes were the color of pale blue skies this time, almost ice-blue. Weird. I’d heard of eyes that changed color depending on a person’s mood, but that’s just dumb—any changes like that are just the effect of light reflecting differently off the iris, and the fact that the iris changes shape as the pupil dilates or contracts. But Edwin’s eyes were dramatically lighter now, so maybe….

If so which mood did that particular shade of blue I’d seen in biology class indicate?

I’d find out. It was a problem vulnerable to an experimental solution.

GODS AND MEN
AND SO FORTH

NARRATOR

S
tevie Ray took his hat off when he entered the priest’s office, because it seemed like a show of respect was in order, even if Stevie Ray himself didn’t have any particular religion. He was, he supposed, technically an atheist, though it seemed to him just about everybody was an atheist: even Father Edsel, because even though he had faith in his Holy Trinity, there were thousands of other gods he didn’t believe in: Zeus, Ra, Ahuru Mazda, Yum Kaax, Tepeyollotl, Sakhmet, Napir, Bes, Gal Bapsi, and on and on. Stevie Ray’d found a book in the remainder bin at a going-out-of-business Borders in the Twin Cities called
The Encyclopedia of Gods,
and that thing was more than 300 pages long, nothing but the names of over 2,500 gods various people had worshipped at one time or another, or still did—gods they’d probably believed in enough to kill or die for (or at least change their diet or get up early on Sunday mornings for). And he’d heard that in Hinduism there were a hundred million gods, enough gods that every family could have one of their own if they wanted. Stevie Ray, who’d always fretted a bit about being spiritually bereft, had felt better when he realized that. Edsel and Pastor Inkfist—well, he wasn’t a pastor anymore, but still religious, no doubt—were almost as atheist as Stevie Ray was: he just believed in one fewer god than they did, and the difference between disbelieving in a hundred million gods and a hundred million and one gods just didn’t seem all that significant, really.