Twisted

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Available from POCKET PULSE

 

“Are you Gaia?”

“Uh, yeah.” Gaia was surprised on two counts. The first was that the girl knew her name at all; the second was that she
actually pronounced it right
on the first try.

“I'm Cassie”, said the girl. “Cassie Greenman.”

How wonderful for you, thought Gaia. She had noticed the girl in class before. Although she hadn't seen her running with the core popular-people crowd, Gaia assumed that Cassie was in on the anti-Gaia coalition.

“Aren't you worried?” Cassie asked.

“What am I supposed to be worried about?” Gaia wondered if she had missed the announcement of a history exam or some similar
nonevent
. Or maybe this girl was talking about Gaia's upcoming date. Maybe Heather and pals really were planning some horrible heap of humiliation.

Not that Gaia cared.

The girl rolled her eyes. “About being next.”

“The next what?” Gaia asked.

“You know.” Cassie raised a hand to her throat and drew one silver-blue-painted fingernail across the pale skin of her throat “
Being the next one killed
.”

To Johnny Stewart Carmen

 

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

An
Original
Publication
of
POCKET BOOKS

Copyright © 2000 by Francine Pascal

Cover art copyright © 2000 by 17th Street Productions, Inc.
Cover photography by St. Denis. Cover design by Mike Rivilis.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
For information address 17th Street Productions, Inc., 33 West 17th Street, New York, NY 10011, or Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.
www.SimonandSchuster.com

ISBN: 0-671-03944-X
eISBN: 978-0-7434-3408-9

First Pocket Pulse Paperback printing January 2000

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Fearless™ is a trademark of Francine Pascal.
POCKET PULSE and colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Printed in the U.S.A.

TWISTED

There
are circles in Hell.

My father-back when he still cared that I was alive and breathing-used to make me read. Not easy stuff. Even when I was a kid, there was no
Winnie-the-Pooh,
no
Little House on the Prairie.
Not for me.

It was all about the classics.
Hard
classics.

One of the moldy oldies he put under my nose was
The Inferno,
by Dante. This book was seriously tough sledding. The whole thing was written in verse, and it was full of political stuff that didn't always make a lot of sense, and the language was creaky to say the least. But there were good parts.

In this story a guy gets led all around Hell to see how everybody is punished. A lot of it is kind of like you would expect. Lots of demons with whips. Fire. Snakes. That kind of thing.

But the idea that stuck with me was the way Hell was divided
up in circles. The dead guys up in the first circle don't have it so bad. It's just kind of rainy and dull up there. But the really bad people, like murderers (or members of a political party Dante didn't like), they get shoved way down to a circle where they have to run around without feet or burst into flame or get eaten by big lizards or melt like candles.

I remembered this book the other day and started thinking that my life could be sliced up in the same way as hell.

There are the little things. Finding out the deli is out of Krispy Kreme. Losing a chess game against some moron I should have schooled. That's the gloomy, first-circle sort of hell.

Then there's having to live with George and Ella. George knew my father, but I don't really know him. Ella didn't know my father, doesn't know me, and I don't even
want
to know Ella.
She's definitely a deeper level of hell.

The next level down is high school. It gets a level of hell all to itself.

Below that comes Sam and Heather. I wouldn't throw Sam in a pit by himself. I mean, Sam's the guy I want to be with. The only guy I've ever wanted to be with. But Sam is with Heather, and together they deserve pitchforks and brimstone.

Then there's my father. My father disappears, doesn't write, doesn't call, and doesn't give me a clue about what's going on. Now we're getting really deep. Snakes and fire. Demons with weird Latin names.

And my mom. The way I feel when I think about her. When I think about her death. Well, that brings us right down to the bottom.

The way Dante tells it, the very bottom layer of hell isn't hot. Instead it's a big lake of ice with people frozen inside.
They're stuck forever with only their faces sticking out. and every time they cry, it just adds another layer of frost covering their eyes.

Put my whole life together, and that's where I am. Down on the ice. Some days I feel like I have a pair of skates. Other days I wonder if Dante didn't get it wrong. Maybe the ice isn't the lowest level after all.

Her big pal gave her a little love pat-enough to bounce her from the wall and back to his beefy hand.

PRETTY PEOPLE DO UGLY THINGS.
It was one of those laws of nature that Gaia had understood for years. If she ever started to forget that rule for a second, there always seemed to be some
good-looking asshole
ready to remind her.

She stumbled up the steps and pushed her way inside The Village School with five minutes to spare before her first class. Actually early. Of course, her hair was still wet from the shower and her homework wasn't done, but being there—actually physically inside the building before the bell rang—was a new experience. For twelve whole seconds after that, she thought she might have
an all right day.

Then she caught a glimpse of one of those things that absolutely defines the high school circle of hell.

Down at the end of the row of lockers, a tall, broad-shouldered guy was smiling a very confident smile, wearing very popular-crowd clothes, and using a very big hand to pin a very much smaller girl up against the wall. There was an amused expression on Mr. Handsome's face.

Only the girl who was stuck between his hand and fifty years' worth of ugly green paint didn't look like she thought it was funny.

Gaia had noticed the big boy in a couple of her classes but hadn't bothered to file away his name. Tad, she thought, or maybe it was Chip. She knew it was something like that.

From the way girls in class talked,
he was supposed to be cute
. Gaia could sort of see it. Big blue eyes. Good skin. Six-five even without the air soles in his two-hundred-dollar sneakers. His lips were a little puffy, but then, some people liked that. It was the hair that really eliminated him from Gaia's list of guys worth looking at.

He wore that stuff in his hair. The stuff that looked like a combination of
motor oil and maple syrup
. The stuff that made it look like he hadn't washed his hair this side of tenth grade. “What's the rush, Darla?” the Chipster said. “I just want to know what he said to you.”

The girl, Darla, shook her head. “He didn't . . .”

Her big pal gave her a little love pat—enough to bounce her from the wall and back to his beefy hand.

“Don't give me that,” he said, still all smiles. “I saw you two together.”

Gaia did a quick survey of the hall. There was a trio of khaki-crowd girls fifty yards down and two leather dudes hanging near the front door. A skinny guy stuck his head out of a classroom, saw who was doing the shoving, and quickly ducked back in. Gaia
had to give him some credit.
At least he looked
. Everybody else in the hallway was Not Noticing so hard, it hurt.