Revel (21 page)
“Not here,” Zuzu’s mother murmured as she adjusted a crystal barrette in Zuzu’s hair.
“You two are going to be the prettiest girls at Revel,” she said, smiling and giving her daughter’s shoulders a squeeze. “And the First Ones will smile on us and give their blessing on the fishing boats. It’s going to be a good year, I can just feel it. Why don’t you girls take your drinks upstairs? You could show Delia your dress.”
When Zuzu and I were alone in her room, I asked, “So what’s the big deal about Revel anyway?” I’d seen the preparations taking place in the village center. Strings of little white lights were being wrapped around anything standing, and green and blue starfish decorations hung in the windows of all the shops. “Gran goes all inscrutable about it every time I bring the subject up.”
Zuzu took a cardboard box down from the top shelf of her closet and set it on her bed. “Revel is the ceremony we have every year on the night of the summer solstice. This is the first year I’m eligible; you have to be sixteen.”
I hadn’t realized that Zuzu was actually younger than me. Maybe because she always seemed so confident, so sure of herself and her place here on the island.
“Reilly seemed kind of upset when you brought it up,” I said.
Zuzu rolled her eyes. “Reilly likes to pretend he’s my older, wiser brother or something. You wouldn’t know it by looking at him, but the guy’s kind of intense.” She opened the tissue-lined box and lifted out a tunic-style dress. It unfolded in a graceful cascade of silky white fabric. “They’re passed down from mother to daughter,” she said with pride.
“It’s beautiful.”
Zuzu raised a corner of the material to her cheek and smiled. Then she tossed a fall of mahogany hair over her shoulder and leaned toward me with a conspiratorial look, her green eyes gleaming. “So. The Revel. Every year, any unmarried girl over the age of sixteen from Trespass gets presented.”
I took a sip of my iced tea and sat on the edge of her bed. “You get presented? It sounds like a debutante ball or something.”
“For sex.”
I choked.
Zuzu slapped me on the back. “Watch the dress, Delia. Are you okay?”
“No. Not really,” I sputtered. “You’re … not kidding. You mean with them, the First Ones? That’s just wrong. It’s barbaric.”
“It’s an honor,” Zuzu declared, raising her chin.
“Oh, really. For who?”
She didn’t answer me, only folded her dress and, with a last reverent touch of the smooth fabric, put it back in the box. How could Zuzu treat this so casually? How could this whole community look the other way as this happened? Not even that, I realized. They seemed to encourage it.
It was obscene.
“Don’t worry. I don’t think they would choose you.”
“Good,” I exclaimed, and then sat back and reflected on this. “Why?” I demanded. “What’s wrong with me?”
“There’s nothing wrong with you,” said Zuzu in a reassuring tone that made me want to heave something at her. “I just mean being a stranger and everything.” She sighed. “I shouldn’t have said anything. I knew you wouldn’t understand. And now you’re upset.”
I was sick of people on this island telling me I wouldn’t understand. “I’m not upset,” I said, in what I thought was a pretty calm voice under the circumstances. “Why don’t you explain it to me.”
Zuzu folded her arms. “The First Ones need us to strengthen their bloodlines. It’s some kind of inbreeding thing. If there aren’t some human genes mixed in there somewhere, they end up having monsters for children. Every summer at Revel the young men of the clan can choose to visit with the girls of Trespass. It’s only for procreation. First Ones only choose one of their own kind as mates.”
“But why would you
want
to do this?”
“Because it’s important,” said Zuzu, her eyes shining. “For the good of all of us. And,” she added, after a moment’s hesitation, “if you get pregnant and deliver a healthy baby to the clan, well, you’re pretty much set for life. Anything you want. You live like a queen.”
“But I thought you and Reilly were together,” I said.
Zuzu smiled. “Really? Well, maybe someday, I think,” she said, her cheeks turning pink. “He’s incredibly smart, you know?” She shook her head. “But that doesn’t have anything to do with this. It’s separate. This is for the island; we have to remember that.”
I closed my eyes, trying to wrap my head around Zuzu’s twisted notions of community service. What had made me think I could ever fit in here?
And Jax.
Oh my God. I put my face in my hands as I remembered my words to him.
See you at Revel
? How would he interpret that little gem? Only one way.
Slutty much, Delia?
“I feel sick,” I whispered.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. I’m okay.”
Zuzu sat down beside me and ran her fingers over the nubby surface of her bedspread. “Just between you and me,” she said in a low voice, “I can’t wait to get out of here.”
“But I thought you never wanted to leave Trespass.”
Zuzu shook her head. “I don’t mean leave the island. I mean change. Get out of my mother’s house, this
smallness
.” She spread her fingers and tilted her head to regard the glittering blue polish on her nails. “To be someone important. If I’m chosen and I have a baby, I’ll be given a fine house and be taken care of for the rest of my life. Like Sophia Clark.”
“Sophia Clark,” I repeated. “You mean the crazy woman down at the beach.”
“She’s not crazy,” said Zuzu, looking irritated. “She’s just delicate. She was chosen at Revel six years ago. Afterward she … had a hard time.”
“With what?” I said, but my heart pounded fast and I felt light-headed.
Because I thought I already knew the answer.
“Giving the First Ones her baby,” said Zuzu, looking away.
C
onfronting Gran wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me?” I cried as soon as I walked into the kitchen. “My mother was chosen at Revel, wasn’t she? That’s when she got pregnant with me.”
Gran nodded, staring at me. She sat down, putting her hands on the table and lowering herself, as if she was suddenly weak. “Helen couldn’t stand the thought of giving you up,” she said in a dry half whisper. “That’s why she left when she discovered she was pregnant.”
Now I understood at last why my mother never wanted me to know about this place. Why, in her delirious state, she relived memories of Trespass. Though they were probably more like nightmares.
Don’t let them take the baby
.
“So my father was one of those
things
,” I choked out.
“A First One,” Gran said. “You’re the child of a demigod. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, Delia. If anything, it’s a gift.”
“And this awesome gift wasn’t something that, I don’t know, might be important to
tell
me about?”
“I
couldn’t
tell you,” Gran said. “Because I didn’t know for sure. It’s true your father was a First One. But Helen ran away while she was still pregnant with you. I figured if nothing”—she hesitated—“
unusual
had shown up in all this time, maybe it never would. You might never become like them.”
Like them
. The words made me tremble. I remembered Dona and her sharp little teeth. I didn’t want to be anything like her.
“Who was it?” I asked, touching my incisors cautiously.
Gran shook her head. “He’s gone, Delia. He was the leader of the clan when he and Helen … But he’s dead now.”
I wasn’t sure how I felt about that right now. But something else made sense as the unpleasant encounter with the First Ones in the sea caves came back to me. When Mikos had lifted my shirt, he’d been looking for signs that I was one of them. He’d been looking for gills.
“And what’s going to happen to me?” I asked. “There’s something that happens when I get into the water. I can sense it already. Am I going to turn into something disgusting? A monster? A freak?”
“Of course not,” said Gran sharply. She straightened up in her chair and her face took on that familiar stern, tough expression. “Stop that talk this instant. You can’t become something you aren’t already inside. And you’re no monster.”
“But something is definitely happening to me, Gran,” I said, pacing the small kitchen. “I don’t even know where I put my glasses. But I can see just fine without them. What’s that about? And I haven’t used my inhaler in more than a week.”
“I guess you don’t need ’em anymore,” said Gran matter-of-factly.
“Yes, I
do
,” I insisted, waving my arms at her. “I
need
those things. I’m a normal, nearsighted human being with exercise-induced asthma, okay?”
“Fine,” said Gran, throwing her own hands up as if trying to humor me.
Suddenly the feelings I’d experienced with Jax made me feel so angry. All that crazy, weak-kneed stuff. Maybe the First Ones exerted some kind of seductive mind control over human girls, luring them into the water.
He was probably laughing about it right now. In some sleazy underwater grotto bar, maybe. If they had such a thing.
That was it. I was going to stay away from the water and away from Jax.
“And this Revel thing,” I said, half to myself, “is
so
not happening.”
“But I think you’ll
have
to go, Delia,” Gran said, breaking into my inner rant. “You said yourself the First Ones told you to be there. Chances are nothing will happen. Only a few girls are chosen for the ceremony.”
“The sex, you mean.”
Gran pursed her lips and knitted her dark eyebrows. “Now, there’s no need to be crude about it.”
“It’s hard to put a classy spin on the whole virgin-sacrifice thing,” I retorted.
“No one is forced,” said Gran.
“No,” I said, thinking about Zuzu. She acted like Revel was some kind of magical prom, for God’s sake. “They’re just brainwashed into thinking that it’s for the greater good. And if they have a baby, wow, that’s like winning the lottery, isn’t it?” I was breathing hard now. I felt tired, spent and bitterly angry. “I’m not doing it.”
“You have to be there, Delia,” said Gran. “We all have to be there. If you’re not …”
“What?” I demanded. “They’ll punish me? I don’t care!”
“No,” said Gran calmly. “They’ll punish
all
of us.”
I
t turned out there were a lot of ways that the First Ones kept the islanders compliant with the tradition of Revel. Gran told me all of them in quiet, insistent detail.
They could ensure the success or complete failure of any net, trap or hook sent into the water to catch fish. They could blanket the island with chilling fog or wash away houses with titanic waves. They could have the Glaukos monsters sink every boat in the little harbor, taking away the livelihood of the fishermen and their only contact with the outside world. They could withhold all supplies of food and flood the gardens with salt water, essentially starving everyone.
Or they could be nice.
No wonder everyone went to their damn party.
It seemed I had no choice but to go to Revel. Didn’t mean
I had to be happy about it. I lay awake that night listening to the waves as I had on my first night on the island. If I’d known back on the dock in Portland about all this, would I have still come to Trespass?
I fidgeted. Turned. Sighed.
Yes.
Because of him
.
I groaned and pulled my pillow close to me, imagining his blue eyes, deep as midnight, his heated touch on my skin.
Hot tears spilled over my cheeks. I despised the fact that despite everything, I still yearned for that sensation of floating in the water, quiet and protected in Jax’s arms.
