Texting the Underworld

DIAL BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS

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Copyright © 2013 by Ellen Booraem

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Booraem, Ellen.

Texting the underworld / Ellen Booraem.

p. cm.

Summary: Conor O'Neill faces his cowardice and visits the underworld to bargain with the Lady who can prevent the imminent death of a family member, but first Ashling, the banshee who brought the news, wants to visit his middle school.

ISBN 978-1-101-59335-6

[1. Supernatural—Fiction. 2. Banshees—Fiction. 3. Death—Fiction. 4. Future life—Fiction. 5. Middle schools—Fiction. 6. Schools—Fiction. 7. Humorous stories.] I. Title.

PZ7.B646145Tex 2013 [Fic]—dc23 2012032488

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

For Shelly Perron,
Goddess of Logic and Language

Death stalked the spider, pre-algebra book in hand.

The spider was slightly bigger than a pencil eraser and definitely wasn't poisonous, this being 36A Crumlin Street, South Boston, Massachusetts. But it skittered and it scuttled all over the ceiling—if Conor didn't squash it now, who knew where it would be after supper.

He thought about getting his sister to kill it. But Glennie would call him a wimp and would tell all her ten-year-old friends at school. And they'd tell their older brothers and sisters who went to Conor's middle school. There would be sniggering, maybe even a new nickname, and he hadn't quite lived down the old one.

Which was “Pixie,” by the way. Who nicknames their baby boy “Pixie,” for cripes' sake? Brian and Moira O'Neill, 36A Crumlin Street, that's who.

The spider was over his bed, preparing to drop itself and hide in Conor's actual, personal sheets. He weighed the book in his hand—three-quarters of a pound, easy. It would squish twenty spiders that size. But what if he missed? He pictured the vibration shaking the spider onto his face or, worse, down his neck.

Standing on the bed, weapon at the ready, he imagined himself high in the mountains, Conor the Bold versus the Invader from Planet Arachnid, humanity's fate on the line.

If only it
were
a humanoid invader. That would be something resembling a person, and people weren't scary.

Not like spiders or snakes. Or heights.

Or depths.

The world was a lethal and unpredictable place. He felt this in his bones, in spite of the twelve totally uneventful years that had been his life so far.

The bedroom door slammed open. “Supper,” Glennie said, then saw that her brother was standing on his bed with his pre-algebra book. One side of her mouth curled up in a half smirk, hot pink with her mother's lipstick. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing.”

She stepped closer. “Oooo, a big scary spider. Want me to get it?”

“Shut up.”

“Wimp. Javier's here, if you care.” She left. The spider scuttled away to the corner, where Conor would have to clear off his desk to get at it.

Defeated, he headed for the stairs.

Grump was coming in from 36B, the other half of the house. “Hey, kiddo,” Grump caroled as they headed into the kitchen together. “How's the Land of Shanaya?”

Conor's hand-drawn maps—some of real places, some not—took up fourteen extra-large spiral-bound notebooks. Grump loved the troll-infested Land of Shanaya, partly because its existence annoyed and baffled Conor's dad, but also because it was proof that Conor had what Grump called “the O'Neill Spark.” Which went with the O'Neill Blue Eyes. And the O'Neill Black Hair, at least on Conor, his father, and Grump before he went bald.

“Shanaya's good, thanks, Grump.” With his grandfather standing there—big, beaming, confident, glasses perched on the bulbous end of his nose—Conor felt braver about the spider hovering over his desk. It was, after all, roughly the size of a pencil eraser. He took his place at the kitchen table with head held high.

His dad shook his head about Shanaya but would never criticize him in front of a guest, even if it was only Javier. Everybody said Brian O'Neill would be elected to City Council within five years. Tact and relentless cheer were his campaign strategies.

“How about them Red Sox, Pop?” said Dad, no doubt choosing the most un-Shanaya-esque topic he could think of.

“Bums.” Grump tucked his napkin into his belt.

“It's only April. They lose early, they win late,” Dad said.

“Baloney,” Grump said. “I'm telling you—”

But then Grump shut up tight and listened as a car alarm went off on the other side of town, faint but with that echoing, anguished-yeti quality so common in the Irish neighborhoods of Southie.

The sound made Conor shudder. His dad frowned but said nothing. Everyone stayed quiet until the noise faded.

“What does it take to turn off a car alarm?” Dad's tone was fiercer than you'd expect from a tactful, cheerful person.

“That,” Grump said, “was no car alarm.”

Dad dished up the green beans and canned corned beef hash. “How was school today, kids?”

Grump stuck to the topic of yeti-like noises. “Burt Kavanagh thinks he had a screech owl outside his house Saturday.”

Glennie eyed her hash and made a beautifully accurate retching sound, violating the house rule on disgusting noises at the table. In the name of her mother—out at nursing school, and therefore present only in spirit—she was banished to the front hall for ten minutes by the kitchen clock.

Conor took a bite of hash and commenced to chew it fifteen times, a house rule that everybody ignored except him. His mother said digesting unchewed food was the chief cause of flatulence in the American male. Conor didn't think chewing made him fart any less often, but a rule was a rule.

“Of course,” Grump continued majestically, “that was not a screech owl.”

“So, Javier,” Dad said, “what badge you working on in Adventure Boys right now?”

“That was a banshee,” Grump said. “Kavanagh's uncle died in his soup Saturday night. He lived right next door to Kavanagh.”

“I'm going to die in my hash,” Glennie's disembodied voice contributed from the hall.

Javier, who normally would have been eating something home cooked and spicier two streets away, smiled into his green beans. His parents and two older brothers had gone to the airport to greet a visiting cousin from San Juan. Javier had stayed behind to do homework. The reward for his virtue was eating canned hash with Conor.

Also listening to Glennie, which Conor could have told him was no reward. But Javier didn't have a younger sister. He thought Glennie was a barrel of laughs with fluffy blond hair.

In reality, Glennie was a soul-sucking demon warrior.

Conor reached chew fifteen and swallowed. “How'd Mr. Kavanagh's uncle die in his soup?”

His father sighed.

“Heart attack,” Grump said through a mouthful of unchewed hash, in direct violation of house rules. “Suppertime. Fell over with his face in the shinbone stew.”

“Cripes,” Dad said.

“Cool,” said the spectral voice from the hall.

“Tell us about banshees,” Javier said, even though he'd certainly heard Grump talk about them before.

“There's no such thing,” Dad said. “I heard a cool fact today. Did you know—”

“A banshee,” Grump said, “is an ancestral spirit, often a girl who dies too soon and then she comes back and keens when somebody in her family's about to bite the big enchilada.” Grump liked to use Spanish terminology when Javier was around, to show he was okay with the neighborhood not being all Irish anymore.

“Enchiladas aren't Puerto Rican,” said Javier, who hardly ever spoke Spanish outside the home. “They're Mexican.”

“Ain't Irish,” Grump said. “But that's perfectly fine.”

“Keening is Irish mega-weeping,” said the spectral voice. “Like if you had to eat hash all the time.”

“Glennie, get in here and eat your supper,” Dad said. “And wipe that lipstick off your mouth.” He gave Grump a change-the-subject-or-else look.

Which Grump ignored. “Only the very oldest Irish families have banshees. The O'Neills, naturally, but also the Kavanaghs. And Conor's mum's family, the O'Briens.”

“Grump has a birthmark shaped like the map of Ireland on the back of his leg,” Glennie told Javier, taking her place at the table.

“I know. Purple, with a red spot for Dublin.”

“Everybody thinks they're so cool if they've heard a banshee.” Dad forked a green bean as if he were killing it. “Then it turns out to be a screech owl or a car alarm.”

“Funny how the Irish seem to attract screech owls and car alarms,” Grump said. “Especially Irish hospitals and nursing homes, anyplace people kick the bucket.”

Javier was frozen, fork suspended halfway to his mouth.

“Javier-silence,” Glennie announced. That was their term for when Javier was processing data.

Javier reached a preliminary thesis. “Doesn't anyone ever
see
a banshee? Then they'd know if it was an owl or not.”

“They maybe saw one before the keening started, but they didn't know it,” Grump said. “Some of the tales say a banshee looks like a regular girl. But then the Death draws nigh”—you could always tell when Grump was quoting from folklore—“and the banshee assumes her true form, the wraith, a wispy ghost in the form of an old hag. No one who sees the banshee's wraith lives to tell about it.”

“They
die
?” Javier said. “Just because they
saw
it?”

“Oh,
cripes
.” Dad slammed down his fork.

“Yup,” Grump said, proud that his ancestral tales were so gruesome. “Drop dead, right on the spot. And that's not even the death the banshee came for originally—she gets that, too. There's stories of whole neighborhoods keeling over, and all because of one little—”

“That's enough,” Dad said.

“I'm satisfying the boy's curiosity. He's on a quest for knowledge.”

“It's dumb and it's garbage, and I'm sick of hearing it.”

“It's your heritage and you should respect it.”

“I respect my heritage. Garbage is garbage.”

Grump furrowed his brow and drew a debater's deep breath. But he never got a word out, because Brian O'Neill, future councillor, was too fast for him. “A-a-anyways,” Dad said. “How about them Bruins?”

They had fruit for dessert—house rules had banned sugar ever since Conor's mom had studied nutrition in nursing school. To her children's regret, house rules saw nothing wrong with canned hash.

After supper, Conor hustled Javier to his room for homework. Someone like Javier was handy to have around when you did pre-algebra—particularly if you needed help faking a sudden inability to determine the speed of Train A in relation to Train B. The right answer required brains, but a believable wrong answer? That took real talent.

“I don't get it,” Javier said. “Why do you want to blow pre-algebra? I thought you wanted to get into Latin School.”

“
Dad
wants me to get into Latin School.” That was all Conor was prepared to say.

Javier narrowed his eyes. “Are you just trying to stay in Southie? You gotta leave sometime.”

“You didn't go to math and science school when you got in.”

“My mom decided I'm old enough to commute now,” Javier said. “If I even get in again.”

“You'll get in. They're not nuts.”

If you kept your grades up and did okay on the entrance tests, the city would send you to an “exam school”: the ancient Boston Latin School or another college-prep academy. Not one of them was in South Boston—also known as Southie, the familiar grid of narrow streets between Fort Point Channel and Boston Harbor. Nor had Conor located any of them in
Comprehensive Maps of Greater Boston
,
although he had to admit he hadn't tried all that hard to find them.

Conor didn't believe in going places that weren't obvious on maps.

“Why you worrying about it now, anyways?” Javier persisted. “The tests aren't 'til fall.”

Conor blew air out his nose. Javier was so dumb about some things. “Right. So I'm supposed to be a math genius now and then totally flunk the exam next fall?”

“Don't worry,” Javier said. “You're not a math genius.”

Which was true. If Conor was going to blow an entrance exam, algebra was the clear choice.

Here's what Mrs. Namja posted in her math classroom when they started word problems:

1. Understand the problem.
   
2. Translate the problem into an equation.
   
3. Solve the equation.
   
4. Double-check your answer.
   

Well, Conor's problem was staying out of Latin School. Which translated into blowing an exam. For now, the solution was screwing up just enough homework to maintain credibility without ending up in summer school.

Truth to tell, the whole idea made him breathe funny, even though he kept telling himself he wasn't breaking any rules doing this.
You can't get caught,
he told himself.
It's foolproof.
To make himself feel better, he filled out his complete name and grade and the date on his algebra worksheet, which nobody else ever did because it was too much work and also uncool.

The bedroom door crashed open. “I'm doing homework in here with you,” Glennie said.

“No, you're not,” Conor said.

“I can sit right here on the floor.” Glennie flopped herself down in Conor's Boston Celtics beanbag chair. “I just have to read.”

“Where's Javier going to sit?”

“Right here.” Javier heaved his backpack up on the bed. Conor almost said “Watch out for the spider,” then thought better of it. The spider was nowhere to be seen, although he did plan to strip his bed and shake out the sheets before he went to sleep.