Furious (26 page)

He leans in and whispers: “I think … maybe … I love you.”

In my mind, I hear all the warnings.
Don’t trust him. Don’t lose your heart.
I feel him waiting for me to respond. I try to hold back, but I don’t want to. I take the leap and let go of any hesitancy, any distrust I ever had for him. “Me, too. I love you, Brendon.”

That’s when it happens. There’s an explosion, a brutal blast of white radiation that cuts through me like a knife entering my stomach and exiting through the small of my back. And a sound that pounds my eardrums. I swear that the sudden violence of it lifts me off the bed and drops me back down, battered.

The radiation is the overhead light snapping on.

The sound is laughter. Many voices. From the closet. From under the bed. Gnat. Bubonic. Pox. Rat Boy. All the Plagues. The Double Ds. So many hateful faces from the halls of Hunter High.

“Your tongue. My ear,” someone says in a falsetto.

Another fake girlish voice: “I love you, Brendon! Stick it to me, big boy. I want it all!”

My hands flail. I try to cover myself. Too late. A cell phone is aimed, a picture snapped. More laughing. More pictures.

On the side of my vision, a blur of movement, a morphing shape. Brendon.

“Way to go, bro,” someone congratulates him.

Do something!
I plead with him in my mind.
Hit someone! Defend me! Pay them back! Get revenge for this crime! Get even! Destroy them!

But he only hands me a sheet to wrap myself in. He is numb, dumb, useless.

I was warned. The ones who care about me told me to keep up my guard. It was a setup. How could I have been so stupid? I scream in Brendon’s face: “Liar!”

His look bounces quickly to his friends, then back at me. “No, Meg.”

“Yes!”

“Meg, I didn’t know.”

His words lie. His coal-dense eyes lie.

Who led me up the stairs? Who took me by the hand? Who is still not defending me? Case closed.

I curl into a fetal position, and while they continue to laugh and lie, I drain myself of trust. It pours out of me. Gone! Next to leave are understanding and forgiveness. When I’m empty of all that worthless stuff, I even let go of embarrassment. Who needs it? Who wants it? It all dies in a split second. And in the hard, empty place that’s left, something else is born in me.

Fury—pure, hot, and undiluted.

I uncurl from the fetal position.

I unwrap from the sheet.

I rise.

Standing on the mattress, I tilt my head to the ceiling and, like an animal with no compassion for my prey
,
I unleash a roar as naked as myself. It comes from deep in my belly and my past.

“Oh shit! She’s slutty
and
psycho. I’m outta here.” Pox pushes Gnat out the bedroom door. Others follow, nearly falling over each other, a few snickering nervously, more looking back with genuine worry.

In the chaos, Stephanie and Alix force themselves against the human tide into the room. I don’t know if they actually heard my scream or if they’ve come because I summoned them in a way they couldn’t ignore.

It’s only us and Brendon now, and he is still trying to apologize and defend himself.

Look how his lying mouth moves. Listen to the meaningless flow of consonants and vowels. I am immune to this backstabbing prince, deaf to anything that his deceitful lips can say.

He has no name.

Stephanie spreads her wings to block his exit. The jewelry around my neck opens its golden serpents’ mouths. I hear the hisses and smell the venom. I see the flicker of three tongues tracking their quarry.

I move in. We sing.

25

Fury cannot tell
its own story. If it could, it would not be what it is. It would be something less potent: a little anger that time can heal, or a grudge that an apology could resolve. With true fury, there is no stepping outside of one’s self to tell the tale; there is only stepping into more blind fury.

It is up to me to describe the scene that follows.

I was in the room below. I wore no special costume this night—just my usual black on black, a skirt and sweater—but I was the most disguised person at the party. While I waited, I unraveled the two tightly wound coils of hair at my ears. I held them firm at the neckline, and with a sharpened pair of gardening shears I lopped them off. They fell to the carpet like two dead animals. Gone! Good riddance to anything extraneous. The hair that was left on my head, I cut and hacked at.

Finally my satisfaction came. Above me, she howled with three times three to the thirty-third power of undiluted rage.

The others were so easily manipulated and played their roles so admirably. The chorus hid where I told them to hide. My target was captured by love and lust, as I knew he would be. These young princes are so predictable.

Megaera remained my only question mark. Would she soften? Had life twisted her precious psyche enough? When it came down to it, would she have the right vengeful stuff?

But isn’t this what they say about slow learners? They take their own sweet time, but when rage finally comes it is deep, profound, and unshakeable.

His perceived offense hit her smoldering pain like a splash of gasoline.

She called the others and they turned on him with the outrage of every loss in their lives.

She wanted to be swept away with feeling, and so she was. She lost control in the service of ultimate control.

They swarmed him like delirious, demented flies. He swatted. He begged for relief. He was innocent
this
time, but what prince doesn’t have regrets? They uncovered every slip of his toxic tongue, every crime.

What mortal man is not terrified,

gripped in fear and horror

To hear their sacred law.

Those girls, those Furies, did not smell the delicious stench that the hormones of their rage released from the maggot-loving plant.

They did not see the storm cloud building over the house. They did not see the ash in the snow globe falling on all the old trapped princes, plus this new one, snagged and helpless.

They opened the window and invited him to step through it.

“Jump,” they sang. “Here is your reprieve. Escape our misery. Jump and find peace.”

Leaping from the heights,

The hard, heavy downfall.

I walked to the window, heard that glorious rush of air, and it felt like a drug coursing through me. I saw his flailing limbs and his body hitting the clump of bushes.

I heard the screams of the so-called innocent bystanders. But nobody is innocent here, all are bound together by the guilt of everyone else.

FOURTH STASIMON,
THE BOOK OF FURIOUS

26

What happened?
What did we do?

I have no solid recollection. It was different from the other Fury times. We were
in
, but we did not seek out any particular incident, not even the memory of what just happened between Brendon and me. I was too far gone. We latched onto everything at once—a whirling mass of his regrets and guilty feelings. I saw splashes of old girlfriends hurt and lies told. Then, quickly, even those visions shut down. An intense wind of rage blew out any light in my mind, leaving me blind.

The sound of a window opening. The touch of a curtain blowing.

I remember ordering,
Jump.

And then I am back in the whiteness of Ambrosia’s bedroom. I have to shake my head to regain my vision. The world slowly comes back into view. The door is still closed. There’s no Brendon. Curtains are pulled apart. I hear screams rising from beneath the window. My stomach lurches from the stench of rotting meat.

What happened?

Quickly, I wrap the remnants of my costume around me. Alix, Stephanie, and I rush down the stairs, and by the time we get outside everyone has gathered under the window. I tremble from the first blast of cold on my half-naked body. The chaos of the scene that greets me matches the chaos in my mind. There’s yelling and crying, and my heart is pounding so hard I can hear the whooshing pulse in my ears. Girls dressed as mermaids and flappers hold on to each other and sob, mascara dripping down their cheeks. Devils, cowboys, and astronauts shout overlapping orders that contradict each other. “Elevate his head!” “No, don’t move him!” “Raise his feet!”

My body feels disjointed, as if the parts of it—legs, arms, tongue, toes, elbows, head—are strangers to each other and have traveled a long distance to meet up here for the first time. They are awkward, uncertain of how to act naturally with each other. I check around frantically.
How bad is it? What do people know? Do they suspect me? What about Brendon? Is he…?
I can’t let myself think the end of that thought.

Pox is shouting at 911 through his cell phone.

The Double Ds keep repeating, “Oh my God, oh my God.”

Their red-haired best friend whimpers into her phone, “Mom, pick me up. Now!”

Gnat to Bubonic: “Dude, we better get rid of any drugs.”

Off in the distance, an ambulance siren illustrates the Doppler effect that Mr. H explained in class. The sound shrieks at a higher and higher pitch as it gets closer.

I want to see.

I don’t want to see.

I can’t see.

Then: “I
need
to see him.”

Stephanie tries holding me back by grabbing on to my wrist, but I break free and inch my way through the crowd. My fingers pull at my hair as I weave between clusters of people. I push through four layers of costumes and finally stumble into the inner circle.

I can see him now. Brendon. He’s all alone in the center, spotlighted by a long beam of moonlight. His face is pressed against the bush he landed in, his curly hair falling over a neck that’s twisted in an unnatural position. I shudder. Only a few minutes ago I was running my fingers through that hair.

He was running his fingers through mine.

My gaze darts from detail to detail: the ruffled cuffs of his Prince shirt, the square of his muscled back, the way that back doesn’t rise and fall with an inhale and exhale. I can’t breathe, either. It’s like all the oxygen is being sucked out of my head. A buzzing fills my skull; my vision starts shutting down like the ring of darkness at the end of an old-fashioned movie. I’m going to faint.

I reach out to the person next to me. Alix! Thank goodness it’s her. I drape myself against her shoulders for support. Chunks of her silver makeup are gone; it looks like her skin is sliding off.

“Get a grip!” she orders from the corner of her mouth. “Don’t freak out.”

“Alix, what did we do?”

In a harsh whisper: “Exactly what he deserved.”

“He did … he shouldn’t have … I wanted him to—”

“Shhhh!”

“Alix! He’s not moving. I can’t believe we did—”

She pinches my upper arm hard. “Did? What are you talking about?” She widens her eyes dramatically, a signal that draws Stephanie through the crowd to my side. “Steph, do you know what Meg is talking about? Who did anything?”

Stephanie positions herself between me and Brendon, expanding her wings slightly to block my view of his body. The flowers have fallen out of her hair and the dreads look like thick hairballs coughed up by a prehistoric cat. I notice that two of her teeth are long and pointed. When did that happen? She could puncture a can with those fangs. Her voice comes out preachy, a vice-principal’s scold. “Meg, you had too much to drink.”

The explanation and reprimand are for the benefit of two guys who are eavesdropping on our argument. I see how they are looking at me. Word of what happened between Brendon and me has clearly spread. All those cell phone pictures have made the rounds. They know. I turn my head left and right and notice others glancing my way, some gawking, others whispering. Everyone must know. And not just about the sex. I don’t care about that anymore. Everyone must know
everything. This!
What we did to him.

Alix, hostile, turns to the group closest to us—“What the hell are you all staring at? Meg can’t hold her booze. She’s talking crazy”—and everyone quickly backs away.

Alix’s hair, too, has come undone, and there are stains—oil? blood?—down the front of her costume. She takes me by both shoulders, gives them a hard shake, leans in so only I can hear. “If anybody
did
anything, there would be fingerprints. Witnesses. There would be evidence. There is no evidence.”

“He jumped,” Stephanie hisses. “He must have felt guilty about what he did to you. No one touched him. No one saw anything. We left the room before any of this happened. Understand?”

There’s new commotion then—sirens, shouts, doors slamming—and I’m moved aside with the rest of the crowd as a team of paramedics forces us to step back and give them room to work. They hunch over Brendon’s motionless form and gently lower him to the ground. A stethoscope, tubes, and wires appear from bags like a series of magic tricks. A breathing tube is hauled over, but not used. I see a monitor turned on, stared at, and turned off.

And then all activity comes to a stop. The only sound is the metallic, deep-throated caw of a mockingbird overhead. The four paramedics sit on the ground, heads bowed, shoulder to shoulder, showing us the backs of their uniforms.

Get up,
I urge silently.
Tell me it isn’t true. Tell me everything is going to be all right.