Prophecy Girl (4 page)

Barrie Nolan was of average height, a bit shorter than Eva’s mom, and had sandy blond hair that he always parted to the left side. Eva didn’t know where she had gotten her black hair from and no one else knew either. She was quite unique in both sides of the family.

Eva smiled, rushing over to him. “Hey, dad.” She wrapped her arms around his broad chest, clasping her hands behind his back.

He held her close and kissed her cheek. “What’s this ‘dad’ business?” What happened to ‘daddy?’ You called me that just the other day.”   

Yesterday, on the phone, when he had wished her a “Happy Birthday,” she did call him “daddy.” But now she didn’t feel like a wounded child, reaching out for the comfort of a parent, pleading for them to understand. She had matured in just a day. She loved them dearly, but she was ready to leave them.

“I grew up,” she announced solemnly.

“Well, you’re still my baby,” he said, and gave her another kiss on her cheek.

She looked over at her mom and saw her crying, along with Kate. 

“She’ll be well cared for,” Mr. Quinn said, appearing out of nowhere it seemed.

Eva pulled away from her dad, and looked at the man who was about to take her away. Less formal than yesterday, he wore navy slacks, and a white polo shirt with a small green shamrock stitched on the upper right side. His black circle-framed glasses still enlarged his dark brown eyes. Instead of a gray cap, he wore a brown and orange patched one, shielding his bald spot from the rays of the sun. He still smelled like tobacco, and Eva assumed he smoked. It wasn’t a crime, but she was surprised that the headmaster of a school would do that.

“How soon can we visit?” her mom asked, standing next to her ex-husband, and Eva.

“Give her a few months to settle,” Mr. Quinn suggested. “Maybe around the holidays? Christmas?”

Both her parents nodded. “We can do that,” her dad added.

Eva noticed how lovingly her dad looked at her mom and she back at him. It made her wonder if, for the past year, they had fallen back in love. They had arrived in the same car—h r father’s white Ford Explorer. That was something, wasn’t it? The car that awaited Eva was a yellow taxi, and the driver, a stocky man with a shaved head, but a friendly smile, had opened the trunk door.

“We packed your bag,” her mom said, showing Eva a medium-sized brown leather bag in the trunk. “Just some clothes and shoes.”

“And this,” Kate added, handing over the hairbrush and lipstick.

Eva’s mom looked confused as she took it, but then placed Eva’s only possessions, besides her books, in the leather bag. “Mr. Quinn said everything else would be provided for,” her mom continued.

“And it will,” Mr. Quinn assured her with a smile.

Eva said a final goodbye to her parents and Kate. There were more tears, even from her dad, but finally everyone separated. Kate went back inside the hospital, still wiping tears from her eyes. Her parents drove away, smiling and waving to her from the car window. 

The taxi driver had already closed the trunk, and was now in the driver’s seat, ready to take them to the airport. Mr. Quinn held the back door open for Eva to enter, and she settled in behind the driver, with the headmaster next to her. 

As they left, she turned around in her seat, and took one final look at the hospital. For some strange reason, she was sad. She had never wanted to be there, but for a year it had been her home, and sometimes it wasn’t
that
bad. Kate was like the sister she never had. Bull was the gentle giant who entertained the residents with his guitar and songs of the old west. She would miss Isaac too, and hoped that like her, he would be accepted at a better place, maybe a place similar to where she was going.

She hoped that she was making the right move. She hoped Green Clover Academy was the answer to all her problems.  But she worried what it would be like, living with fifty other girls who cried all the time. It wasn’t her idea of relaxation, but at least she wouldn’t be ridiculed, or stared at, as if she were some unsolvable puzzle. And perhaps she’d meet a guy who didn’t care that she saw dead people.

Who knows? Anything seemed possible now.

4

So…There Really is a Curse

Eva feared that when she entered the airport, alarms would blare, and a loud warning would be issued: “ALERT! ALERT! CRAZY GIRL WHO SEES DEAD PEOPLE APPROACHING! HER TEARS ARE ACID!”

But no, that didn’t happen. She was sure the Miami-Dade International Airport had a no-fly list of people who had been committed, but apparently they didn’t get that memo, because soon her and Mr. Quinn were seated and buckled in a jumbo jet. Her travel bag was in the overhead compartment, and she wondered what kinds of clothes were inside, hoping they were the latest fashions—whatever that was these days.

“How are you feeling? All right?” he asked, sitting next to her.

Surprisingly, the plane was only half full, and they had several empty seats around them.

She nodded. “Good.”

He leaned over and whispered, “If a vision should come on, then I’ll do my best to help you through it.” He smiled. “We don’t want to get thrown off the plane now, do we?” he joked.

“Oh…yeah…right.” She hadn’t thought of her visions since the last one, the day before her birthday, only two days ago. “But I can’t help it. What if I have one and I can’t stop crying? What will they do?” 

She reached up and peeked above the seat in front of her at the flight attendant, a young man with a thin brown mustache, who seemed to be giving everyone a hard stare. Suddenly, the plane felt much narrower than it already was, and Eva sunk back against her seat, nervous. 

Mr. Quinn clutched her hand. “Don’t worry, Eva. If you see something, I’ll be right here. I’ll help you.”

She wasn’t convinced. “How?”

“If it does happen, I want you to hold back as many tears as you can, and talk about what you saw.”

“I’ve tried to talk about it before, but no one believed me.”

“If it happens, you’ll give me every detail, as if you’re reporting a sequence of events…dryly narrating a story…distancing yourself from the action, from the characters. You need to be aloof, hollow to get past it. You need not to feel.”

“How can you say that?” she asked, shaking her head. “I’ve seen…I’ve seen so much horror and death. I can’t…
distance
myself from their eyes, from their blood.”

“Compassion is a valued trait my dear, but with you, until you can control the intensity of these visions, your sorrow, you must learn to suppress your empathy.”

“It sounds so…cold.”

He nodded. “It does, but it’s the therapy you need, and what the other Banshees at your school are learning.”

There was that word again. 

“What are…
Banshees
? How am I one?”

He let go of her hand and sat back against his seat. “Now
that
is a long story.”

She smiled. “We have a long flight.”

“That we do. Well, it all started a long time ago, around the middle of the sixteenth century, in Ireland. There were two young girls named Muirgen and Aghamora. One day, they dared their friend, Laoise, to trail along the edge of a cliff. Just before Laoise made it to the end, she slipped, and fell to her death in the rocky waves below. Well, the sisters were scared out of their minds. Muirgen, the mischievous of the pair, decided to lie. They went back to Laoise’s mother, Saoirse, and told her that Laoise had walked along the cliff’s edge entirely on her own and fell. Well, as you can imagine, Saoirse was devastated, but what the sisters didn’t know was that she was a secret witch. 

“You see, Saoirse didn’t believe that her daughter would trail those cliffs. She had been warned it was too dangerous. So Saoirse concluded that the sisters had lied. She brought up her daughter’s dead body from the water and mixing Laoise’s blood with her own tears, Saoirse concocted a potion. The next day, she invited the sisters over for some pie and milk. Well, the milk wasn’t really milk—it was the potion. Muirgen and Aghamora drank it, and were from that point
cursed
, as well as their bloodline to be Banshees, witnessing visions of death and wailing in sorrow.

“We don’t know why, perhaps it has to do with the deterioration of the spell over time, but it can skip several generations, so your mother and probably her mother weren’t Banshees,” he added. “And it seems to develop at fourteen, the age Laoise died, but in your case, you were a
little
early. That’s…abnormal, but not anything to worry about.”

Eva couldn’t believe what she had just heard. One, she was abnormal…as if she didn’t already know that! And two, all of this seemed like a horror story, but true. 

And
she had been right all along.

“I’m cursed,” she declared softly.

He shook his head. “No.” Then he nodded. “Well, yes, but it’s not your fault.”

She threw up her hands. “So I’m going to suffer because two sisters lied hundreds of years ago?”
He nodded sympathetically. “Seems like that, but you can overcome it.”

“It’ll go away?” she asked, hopeful.

“No, but you can learn to control it. The visions…the sorrow…it’ll last until the last day of your life.”

She wanted to cry, but didn’t want to attract the attention of the male flight attendant, who was walking their way.

“So all the students are like me?”

“Just the girls. Only the girls are Banshees.”

“You said boys were there too. What are they?”  

She thought something must be wrong with them too, if they were schooled and housed with a bunch of girls who cried all the time from seeing dead people.

Mr. Quinn didn’t immediately answer. Instead he smiled at the overly-curious flight attendant, who was looking the headmaster and Eva up and down. He finally turned and went back to the front of the plane.

“Leprechauns,” Mr. Quinn said.

Eva burst out laughing. When the flight attendant snapped his neck around, she slapped a hand over her mouth.

When she regained her composure, she said, “Leprechauns! Is this some joke?!”

“You shouldn’t be laughing,” the headmaster said in a low, but stern voice. “You can see omens of death. A Leprechaun isn’t so farfetched.”

Eva’s grin disappeared. “Well, are they like…really short?”
He smiled, shaking his head. “No. Some are average height, and some are tall like me.” He looked around, especially at the flight attendant, who was now busy straightening his name tag. All the passengers were already asleep and no one paid them any attention. He turned back to her, smirking. “Watch this.”

Eva furrowed her brow, confused, but soon Mr. Quinn, the man who she was on an inescapable plane with, was slowly turning into some sort of dark mist. She watched as his facial features and the outline of his body faded away to an empty seat. Then the dark mist reappeared and he was back—solid, humanoid, patchy cap and all. 

Her mouth hung open, until she recovered, and asked, “You can become invisible?”

He smiled. “No, but that’d be neat,” he answered, adjusting his circle-framed glasses, and then his patchy cap. “Leprechauns like me—all male—can teleport. I transform into a black fog, vanishing as I was, and then I can travel. Earlier, I just stayed in my seat—disappearing, teleporting, and reappearing almost immediately—but a practiced Leprechaun can leave and go anywhere, returning in the exact spot from his departure, and any object he is in contact with, the clothes he wears for instance, teleports with him too.” He smiled. “Thank goodness!”

“How?”

He pointed his finger up in the air. “
That
is another long story.”

“I’m all ears,” she said eagerly.

Eva was now fascinated by Mr. Quinn and Leprechauns, who she had always imagined to be little ugly men, hoarding pots of gold at the end of rainbows. 

“Well, it all goes back to Saoirse, the secretive witch. She was widowed young, but Laoise wasn’t her only child. She had another by a man—a man she wasn’t married to, frowned upon in those days—named Cianan. He was known by two other names: the ‘Leper’ and ‘Con’—hence,
Leprechaun
. He was a warlock, known to have wandered around the earth for decades. It is said he returned to his home, a cavern deep in the mountains, a dwelling place for the supernatural, never to be seen again, but no one knows for sure.” He shrugged. “Anyway, after Cianan left her, she disguised the fact that she was pregnant—she was a witch after all—and nine months later gave birth to a boy who she named Cormac. 

“She knew what the other villagers would think: she, unmarried with a newborn son. So she hid the boy away from the world. Well, this was no ordinary boy. He had both the blood of his mother—a witch—and Cianan—a warlock. Well, when Cormac got older, he discovered that he had powers too. Whenever he would become nervous or upset, he would just disappear—”