Another Pan (2 page)

The statue shook.

Then the eye was gone, the last wisps of fog snaking their way into the long but featureless head. For a brief moment, stone became flesh and the statue’s head turned. An alabaster ball that had been its left eye fell out and rolled across the floor. A new eye flashed blue in its place and broke into four parts.

Out in the streets, the morning came alive again.

A woman felt a chill and blamed it on a splash of rainwater.

A bicyclist reeled at a stench and turned his nose at a tourist.

A businessman spit out a mouthful of sour cappuccino.

The governess Vileroy was gone. But not truly gone. The night began to end, but the darkness was only just starting, preparing once again to haunt the Marlowe School.

For the three months of summer vacation, when the school was empty and no teachers or parents were watching for signs of excess dirt, unexplained toxins, or any kind of danger to their children’s health or comfort, the darkness lurked, rebuilding a lost strength, polluting Marlowe from below, slowly blackening the air, so that in the fall, when the administration came back from their European travels to open the doors onto a new academic year, they couldn’t really tell what was different. Something was different, though. . . .

No one had seen the bland, plain-looking woman with poor posture crawling out of a closet in the basement — clearly sick, she coughed into a white lace handkerchief and wiped the sweat from her pale face. She hadn’t wanted to be summoned into the world so soon. Three months is nothing on the eternal scale, and the once-beautiful governess had not yet gained back all that she had lost. She was desperate to creep back into the dark, past the ancient statue, and into the unseen places where injured demons recover and lick their wounds. But an old child had come looking for her, and so she was back in the world of the living in this frail human body — not fully healed. She was no longer beautiful. No longer tall or regal. Her face was scrunched together, her nose too fat, her eyes (even the unchanging branded eye) too small. Her blue sweater was moth-eaten and smelled like disease. And so no one noticed the new school nurse as she staggered into her office.

New York (summer)

The summer between middle school and high school is an irreversibly, undeniably crucial time for an image makeover — in fact, if you’re looking to reinvent yourself, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Particularly if you happen to be a thirteen-year-old, skinny
ex
-nerdling who is starting high school a year early. It won’t help if you’re a teacher’s kid, that’s for sure. And it won’t help if you have an older sister already going to your super-exclusive, socially impossible high school (in this case Marlowe) — unless, of course, you’ve spent a whole summer with a killer game plan.

John Darling happened to be a grand master of game plans. And in his entire thirteen years of life, he had never wanted a plan to work as much as this. Sure, John was shorter than the other kids at school. He was thinner, weaker, and less . . . well, just less, as far as he could tell. Less of everything. But in high school, he would eradicate all vestiges of his previous self. No more John the Loser. No more John the Gaming Nerd. No more John the Joke.

“This is the
Year of John,
” he said to himself, and sometimes to his sister, Wendy, who told him to just relax, because everybody liked him the way he was. But John didn’t want to hear that. What did Wendy know about not being cool? And about starting at a new school a year too young? She was hot (strawberry blond hair, cute little freckles, and a tennis-team build) and popular (but definitely still in the three digits if you’re counting Facebook friends, which John did). And now Connor Wirth, aka Captain Marlowe, was hitting on her. Wendy couldn’t possibly know anything about John’s problems — about being alone at lunch, worrying if anyone will come to your birthday, wondering if you’ll have to spend your free period in the science lab instead of out on the front lawn with the popular kids. But John wasn’t one to give up. He was a man of action. “This is the year I’m gonna be a badass . . . get some respect.”

Last spring, John had gotten in to Finnegan High, the city’s toughest school in terms of pure academics and a place where he would have fit in perfectly. It was just as selective as Marlowe, but it was no rich-kid haven. Its admissions were based only on test results. If you got in, they’d pay your way, whatever your family’s needs. But John had turned it down in favor of Marlowe (which was also free of charge for him and Wendy, since their father taught ancient civilizations there). He knew that he
could
make it there. Even though his father had resisted, urged him to take the Finnegan offer, John knew that if he tried hard enough, he could be one of them — not just part of the intellectual elite, but the social elite too. He could graduate from Marlowe a part of something so much better, so much bigger, than just the clique of super smart New Yorkers headed to MIT. He could come out of it with an acceptance to a top college
and
the friendship of the people who would
really
run the world. Those Finnegan guys, sure, they’d be successful, but they would probably all be crunching numbers for the overprivileged party boys from Marlowe. That’s the way the world worked, and John knew that.

He had spent the last three months lifting weights, cultivating the slightest Hamptons tan in his backyard, scoping online discount stores for all the designer duds he could afford on his meager allowance, and trying to hang out with Connor Wirth, who had invited Wendy (and therefore John) to his family’s Fourth of July party. Usually, John hated having Wendy involved in his life, but this Connor thing, whatever it was, could be his ticket. After the party, John started methodically changing his Facebook image.

The thing about Facebook is that you can’t just change yourself all at once. People will know and then they’ll fire back, calling you out on your wall, tagging you in all sorts of embarrassing old pictures (and John had been to enough Cosplay conventions to be worried). So, since leaving middle school in June, and especially after the party, John had uploaded cool new pictures of himself with all the right people, joined less embarrassing groups and fan pages, and started tailoring his status updates. He kept ignoring or deleting any mocking comments from his old gaming buddies until they finally shut up about it.

Poor John,
Wendy thought as another one of her brother’s transparent Facebook updates dropped onto her mini-feed.
What? He’s telling people he used to have a drug problem?
Wendy had tried to be understanding the previous week when he started talking about his supposed sex life and his summer fling with a Bulgarian girl who was too Bohemian to have a Facebook profile, but this was too much. He could actually get himself into trouble for this. She couldn’t say anything to John, of course, because he was so sensitive about his summer reinvention campaign that he would have a fit if Wendy even suggested that people weren’t buying his act. But to Wendy, it was obvious what was really going on. John was lonely. Maybe he needed an older brother. He wanted to be someone else — to prove to everyone that he was big and important and deserved respect. And if this was the way he chose to get it, then . . . fine . . . She couldn’t be his older brother, but maybe she could look the other way.

Tomorrow, on her date with Connor, she would ask him to invite John to something low-key. Maybe they could play soccer together. That would help. Wendy had been quietly dating Connor Wirth since early July, but she hadn’t said anything to her family — even though Connor had introduced her as his girlfriend to his three best friends, even though he had called every day for a month.
Why take the risk?
she thought.
Who knows what will happen once school starts?
Wendy was a pragmatic girl. She knew that boys her age were fickle and couldn’t be trusted. And who knew if Connor would suddenly forget all his fawning speeches when he was faced with his shallow, social-climbing friends and their judgmental attitudes? Maybe he would pretend she didn’t even exist.

Just then, her cell rang with Connor’s ringtone. OK, so she had given him his own ringtone. It wasn’t even that good a song . . . hardly a commitment. OK, fine, it was her favorite song, but only from this summer.

“Hey, Connor,” she said, and immediately began forgetting about John. “What’s up?”

“Wanna come over?” Connor said, then added, “My mom’s back from Biarritz.”

“You want me to meet your mom?” said Wendy, elated and wondering why she ever doubted Connor.

“Oh . . .” Connor said, and starting to mumble, “um . . . she’s not here
now
.”

“Right.” Wendy could feel herself turning red. “I mean —”

“I just meant that she brought the cheese I told you about . . . made it through customs and everything,” said Connor. “We can watch movies and eat it all before she gets home.”

Normally, Wendy would be mortified by such a humiliating mistake. But Connor seemed to rebound quickly enough, going on and on about the cheese (a bit too long, actually, so he was obviously nervous), probably trying to make her feel better with his own awkwardness. “OK,” she said, and reached for her purse. “I’ll be there in thirty.”

A week before the start of the new school year, on yet another “family breakfast” morning, which Professor Darling insisted they do all through the summer, Wendy stood two feet behind her father and watched him cook eggs. He was burning the undersides, and the whites were still runny on top. When he turned to make toast, she lowered the heat, stirred the eggs, and added more butter.