Brimstone (3 page)

“Maggie?” I turned at the door, my hand resting on the jamb. “If you want, you can talk to your granny about the dream.” Despite the length of the kitchen between us, he spoke softly, in case Mom was awake. There are certain things that make Mom give this
sigh
, a sort of forced exhalation of see-what-I-have-to-put-up-with martyrdom. Granny Quinn’s “superstitions” rank somewhere between not eating breakfast and Dad’s insistence, every year, that there is nothing wrong with leaving the Christmas lights on the roof until Valentine’s Day, as long as you don’t turn them on.

“Thanks, Dad. But it’s no big deal. Probably just graduation anxiety. I mean, we’ve got eight bazillion seniors. That ceremony is bound to be hellishly long if nothing else.”

He smiled, I smiled, and then I turned to go. With all
that smiling, you’d think at least one of us would be reassured.

I climbed the stairs without my usual caffeinated zip. A few years ago Mom had been hinting about a new house, but Dad didn’t want to move. He has tenure at the university, and he can walk from home if he wants. All the shiny new subdivisions are all the way on the outskirts of town, near the state highway that leads to the big city. Plus they have no trees.

To compromise, my parents remodeled our raised ranch-style house so that it looked less like the Brady Bunch lived here. Among other things, they’d moved me upstairs into what used to be the game room, and my old room became Mom’s home office. I think the plan was to encourage me to stay home and go to school here. It isn’t that I don’t like Avalon. It’s a college town, with an idealized retro feel. We didn’t even have a Starbucks until a year ago. People love it or hate it here. I love it, but it’s not really on my road to the Pulitzer Prize.

In the meantime, I had a pretty nice setup: the whole loft for myself, with bedroom stuff on one side of the room, a study area on the other. The decorating scheme, though, was Early American Disaster Zone. I had to wade through the clothes on the floor. My computer equipment took up the entire desk and had started to spill onto the adjoining table. Every surface was covered with books, paper, binders, disks, and CDs.

But who had time to clean? Besides the Dance-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named, there were pep rallies and games, the
Big Spring Musical and end-of-the-year band concerts, field trips, service projects—not to mention term papers and final exams. School spirit is not my thing, but I was on both the school paper and the yearbook staff. The night before I’d taken pictures at the basketball game, then written an essay on
Julius Caesar
before going to bed to be tied in knots by my subconscious.

I was down to my last clean pair of underwear, but a search unearthed some jeans that didn’t yet stand up by themselves. At the back of the closet was a shirt from Aunt Joyce that I’d never worn because it was a little too Woodstock: kind of gauzy, with a tiny floral print, belled sleeves, and a square neck trimmed with thinly crocheted lace.

Any port in a storm, I groused. Then I felt guilty because of little Juanita in Guatemala; they could clothe her village with what lay unwashed on my floor.

Stress and guilt. The longer I was awake, the easier it was to believe that the nightmare was just that. I kept trying to put a rational face on things, even when my instincts said otherwise.

When I was little, I loved Granny Quinn’s tales of the fair folk, will-o’-the-wisps, and
bain sidhe
. My dreams seemed part of that at first, more fairy stories and make-believe. Nobody took them seriously, until one morning at breakfast I asked how long until Aunt Joyce had her baby. Mom told me not to be ridiculous. That afternoon, her sister called and said she was pregnant.

After that, Mom started getting a pinched expression when I talked about my dreams, even as Gran and Dad took
them as a matter of course. Then one night—was it eight years ago already?—I woke up screaming, babbling about glass and metal and blood, hysterical with fear. Mom was still quieting my tears when the phone rang.

No good news ever comes in the middle of the night. While Mom listened on the phone, I stood beside her in my Little Mermaid pajamas, and slipped my small hand into her icy one. Her face was a mask, but her eyes were snapshots of grief. Dad, awakened by the phone, stumbled out of their bedroom and froze at the sight of us.

“There was a terrible crash,” I told him, trying to be strong for Mom, trying to be grown up. “Nana and Pop are dead.”

He held her hand while she listened to the police officer on the line. She made the appropriate responses as tears coursed down her face. Then she hung up, and drew me in tight. Tight between them, like she was afraid I’d be lost to her, too. She clutched at us both and we held her up while she wept for her parents, gone in the swift, bloody instant that I’d seen in my dream.

I blinked, coming out of the dark room of memory into the morning light. I had been thoroughly immersed in the past. I guess that was what made last night’s dream so hard to dismiss. The rather vague nightmare had somehow stirred the pot of my psyche, and old, hibernating parts of me now creaked awake.

I looked around the room; my hands had been busy while my mind had been wandering, sorting laundry into reasonably contained heaps. Likewise, the flurry of paper
that had blanketed the carpet of the study area now sat in neat stacks on the desk. The books were either back on the shelves or waiting tidily by the computer. The lair that time forgot hadn’t been this neat since middle school.

Something glinted at me from the carpet, and I picked up the thin gold chain that held the crucifix Gran had given me at my first communion. I wondered why it wasn’t where I’d left it, but since I couldn’t remember where that was, I didn’t linger on the thought, or on why it seemed natural to drop it on top of the pile of clothes I was going to wear that day.

What a weird morning. My brain hurt from thinking so much while in a state of caffeine deprivation. I was headed toward the shower when my cell phone rang. I fished it out of my schoolbag, not entirely surprised to see Granny Quinn’s number on the caller ID.

“Hey, Gran. I was just thinking about you.”

“I know you were, dear.” Her voice was brighter than anyone’s had a right to be while the sun still moved upward. I could hear the background whirr of her treadmill, which explained her slight breathlessness. “That’s why I called.”

Why couldn’t I have inherited the chipper genes instead of the spooky ones?

y
ou wouldn’t think that a day could go downhill after dreaming you were on the roll call for Hell. But it did.

“Have you voted for the class song yet?” A student council drone shoved a half-sheet of paper in my face. Astrobright Orange is painful at any time of day, but at seven-thirty a.m. it was vomit inducing. Also, the only thing perky I want in front of me at that hour is a coffeemaker. Since the drive-thru line at Take-Your-Bucks had stretched to Canada, I was still severely caffeine deprived.

I voiced my preference in the life-and-death matter of Gwen versus Ashley by wadding up the ballot and throwing
it over my shoulder on the way to the Coke machine. “You don’t have to
litter
!” yelled Student Council Sally. “The recycle bin is right
over there
.”

My response to that was equally nonverbal.

“Maggie Quinn!”

I knew that tone. Mr. Halloran, the assistant principal, must have looked up the word
stentorian
in the dictionary on his first day at work, and practiced in the shower until he got the voice just right.

Busted, a scant twenty feet from the Coke machine. So close, and yet so far.

“Yes, Mr. Halloran?” I Goody Two-shoed. “May I help you?”

The administrator stood by the doors leading from the courtyard to the front hall. He was fairly tall, with a full head of suspiciously thick brown hair. He was the type of stocky that comes when gravity turns linebacker shoulders into a desk-job gut. I would lay down money that he’d been a Biff in high school. “I’d like to see you in my office.”

“Ooooooooo,” said the kids in the courtyard—either a taunt or the buzzing of their hive mind.

I followed the assistant principal inside, not quite meekly. Student Council Sally smirked as I went by.

I waved at the secretaries managing attendance and they waved back through the chaos. Halloran waited at his office door like a prison warden. I entered and stood until he closed the door and gestured for me to sit. The office windows made sure we were properly chaperoned by all the staff. Everything was correct and polite and did nothing to explain why my hair wanted to crawl off my head.

“So, Miss Quinn. I hear you were involved in a hazing incident yesterday.”

“Nobody hazed me yesterday, Mr. Halloran.”

“Don’t get smart with me, Quinn.”

This seemed like an odd thing for a school administrator to say, but since he was glaring down at me, hands on his hips, I kept my opinion to myself.

“I have a reliable report,” he continued, “that you were witness to some students bullying a classmate.”

By “reliable report,” I assumed he meant “rumor.” I still hadn’t had any caffeine, my head was feeling funny, and baiting the assistant principal could hold my interest only so long. “Then I don’t see why I’m here. If there was a witness to my alleged witnessing, then you don’t need me to tell you what happened.”

He settled on the corner of the desk in an aren’t-we-buddies way. “I understand you took some photos.”

Irritation jabbed me; I couldn’t imagine who had gone tattling to Halloran. Stanley? The Spanish Club? I guess I’d been overestimating the intelligence of the general populace. Blackmail has power only as long as it remains secret.

I considered Stanley, and his desire for revenge. But he’d been adamant that he didn’t need my help, so I didn’t think he would tell Halloran that I had pictures of his humiliation.

“I don’t know what photos you are talking about,” I lied. I was already on the list for Hell—what did one falsehood matter?

“The photos of the hazing incident,” he said, getting a little red in the face.

“I don’t have any photos of a hazing incident.” This was less of a lie. “Hazing” was making freshmen wear stupid hats. Pretending you were going to drop someone off a balcony was not “hazing.” It was “terrorizing.”

“Then you won’t mind if I look at your camera.”

I had to clamp my teeth on some choice words that would get me expelled. I was offended for the entire fourth estate. As a journalist, I wanted to tell him to get some sort of court order and then we’d talk. As a high school student still five weeks and three days from graduation, I knew there was nothing I could do to stop him.

Furiously mute, I dug into the backpack at my feet and handed over the camera. Halloran turned it over, his big thumbs pressing tiny buttons as he reviewed the pictures on the memory card. Pictures of the Spanish Club’s fund-raising table, with its rows of gum and candy, and last night’s basketball game, including a stellar shot of Eric Munoz nailing an NBA-worthy jump shot.

But no Biff, a.k.a. Brandon. No bug-eyed Jessica. No terror-stricken Stanley.

Halloran grunted with frustration, started to say something, then thrust the camera at me. “Get out of here, Quinn. And don’t be late for first period, because I’m not giving you a pass.”

I didn’t have to be told twice. Despite the big windows, the office felt claustrophobic. Maybe it was Halloran and his power trip. Maybe it was the wall behind his desk, filled with pictures of past sports triumphs—not the school’s, his own. The thought that this was what bullies grew into, minor tyrants who took jobs where they could relive their
glory days by continuing to terrorize students, made my head ache.

I felt immediately better when I left the office, as if the air were somehow cleaner. My granny might say something about the Quinn ability to sense things unseen, but more likely it was the evil power of Halloran’s aftershave.

The warning bell clanged directly over my head. I had five minutes to find a caffeine infusion before English, which was on the other side of the building from the nearest Coke machine. (I had them all plotted on a sort of mental MapQuest.) I could make it if I ran. But pairing my graceless jog with a hurriedly gulped-down soft drink seemed like a recipe for disaster.