The Suburban Strange (8 page)

Celia went to her bureau, where her treasured stack of discs from Regine and Brenden sat next to her CD player. She chose one and put it on. In a moment Gene Loves Jezebel’s “Desire” began to play, and Celia looked at herself in the mirror.

What do I do?
She moved her feet back and forth and felt awkward. She waved her arms around but felt foolish.
This is not going to be easy.

Celia closed her eyes and tried to imagine a time when she would feel completely at home at Diaboliques. When she, too, would stand and speak with the Rosary as though posing for a portrait. She would hear a song she liked and step out onto the dance floor. Celia felt her hips moving smoothly from side to side, and her hand rose, sweeping back and forth in front of her.

She opened her eyes and found herself in the mirror, looking like a flamingo caught in a bog. She laughed in horror and returned to her desk to open her sketchbook and draw.

4. SOME GIRLS WANDER BY MISTAKE

T
HAT WEEKEND CELIA FOUND
a job at a small bookstore in a cluster of shops on a charming street about a mile from her house. She could walk there when the weather was nice. She wasn’t sure why the owner hired her, though. Celia had confessed she wasn’t very well read, but the woman had laughed and said she couldn’t imagine how Celia would be, at her age. “I have the opposite problem.” She smiled. “I’ve read everything, and now I’m down to the dregs.” She held up a book. “
The Correspondence of Edwin and Morcar, Earls of Mercia and Northumbria
. It’s the driest thing I’ve ever read. What I wouldn’t give to be blown away by Faulkner for the first time, all over again.” Celia nodded, wishing she knew who Faulkner was.

Regine had advised Celia to say she was available on Saturdays only after one o’clock so she wouldn’t have to get up too early after Diaboliques. When Celia’s mother learned Regine was the impetus behind her employment, Mrs. Balaustine admitted Regine permanently into her good graces and extended Celia’s Friday curfew to two a.m. “I’m probably crazy, but I’m glad you’re making friends,” her mother told her.

“Me too,” Celia said. “I think I’d like to paint my bedroom.”

“We just painted it last year!”

“I know, but I didn’t pick the color! You did!”

“I just thought you liked your old room, and it matches your comforter! I suppose it’s all not dark enough for you, now?” her mother teased. “All right, we’ll do it again. How about this weekend?”

On a whim, Celia dug out their Polaroid camera and took a picture of her room before the transformation began. Changing her clothes, making friends at Suburban, and now redecorating her room, Celia had a profound sense of leaving a part of her life behind—not by chance, but deliberately. It was a new feeling, like shedding her skin, revealing a new self. She wasn’t entirely sure who her new self was yet. She wondered if that was something she would create, or discover, or maybe a little of both.

Changing her room was a daunting prospect because Celia had a better sense of what she didn’t want it to be—pink, ruffled, childish—than what she did. But she felt strongly she must figure it out herself, rather than ask for suggestions from Regine or any of the others. She wanted her room to be a reflection of herself, not of how they saw her or how they might want her to be.

Her closet was quite sparse already—Regine had seen to that. Celia filled a few boxes with the trinkets and toys that cluttered her shelves and banished them to the attic. Only her sketchbooks were allowed to stay, lined up on one shelf. She evicted the overstuffed chair in which she never sat and a rag rug whose best years had passed. Her mother helped her paint the walls a warm gray color, not too light and not too dark. They went out and found a set of charcoal bedding, and when she had remade the bed, Celia looked around, a little shocked. She was pleased because the room felt chic, in part just because it looked new and different. It also looked like a place in which the new person she thought she was becoming would feel at home. At the same time, the smell of paint lingered. Every sound seemed to echo now, and the empty walls stared back at her expectantly, as if to ask,
Who are you?
That night she sat looking around her Spartan new room, wondering what to put in it. She vowed she would choose carefully; anything that came in really had to deserve to be there. She compared her surroundings to the photograph of her room in its prior incarnation, tucked into the frame of the mirror over her dresser. Outside her window the moon was about half full. Celia thought that was appropriate.

BY THE SECOND WEEK OF SCHOOL
Celia had settled into the rhythms of Suburban. Her classes were challenging but manageable, and she went into each day anticipating the times she would spend with various members of the Rosary. Now and then something would pull her anxiety back up—being called on to speak in class, finding herself in the midst of a group of cheerleaders in the hall—but there was no doubt things were going much better than they had last year.

At lunchtime that Wednesday, Celia rounded the corner into the short hallway that led past the teachers’ lounge and into one end of the cafeteria, on her way to meet the Rosary. Her path was blocked by a group of students in a huddle, studying something on the floor by the wall. A pair of legs extended into the middle of the hall, and as Celia drew near she glimpsed a girl lying there, her head and shoulders slumped against the base of the wall. She looked exhausted.

Another girl stood up from where she had been squatting next to the victim. “She said it’s never happened before,” this girl told the others.

“That doesn’t mean she’s not epileptic,” another girl chimed in. “My dad’s a doctor. Epilepsy can start at any time.”

“It’s such a shame. Tomorrow’s her birthday.”

Then the nurse arrived and shooed the onlookers away to get to the girl on the floor.

Celia wondered again if Suburban was cursed. None of these things by themselves—the bee sting, the girl passing out, the epileptic seizure—would be more than a tragic interruption to a day. But when she considered them together, it was hard not to connect them, even if there was no way the health problems of three different girls could be related.

Celia moved on. As she entered the cafeteria she crossed paths with Skip, the jock she seemed to see everywhere. Today he was wearing an orange and gray striped polo. Their eyes met for a moment, and Celia had to admit his face was kind. But she couldn’t ignore a pattern: Skip had been close by each time these bad things had happened.

5. STRANGEWAYS, HERE WE COME

S
UBURBAN HIGH SCHOOL WAS
surrounded by a grove of maples, and gingko trees flanked its walls. Celia began to track the leaves’ progress from emerald to golden orange as the autumn unfolded. She had stopped at a favorite window in the front stairwell to look over a cluster of them on Friday morning when a bus pulled up on the other side of the golden trees. The kids streamed out, but several of them waited by the bus door. Then Mariette got off, and Celia was dismayed to witness the taunting the other kids heaped on her lab partner. Mariette hunched her shoulders over the books in her arms and hurried past them. In the slanted morning sun, her shadow lunged across the pavement, and it flickered like a weak candle flame, as though Mariette were turning invisible briefly. Celia blinked and Mariette passed into the building below her. When Celia looked up at the trees again, some of the lowest leaves had turned from gold to crimson, as though a droplet of blood were diffusing into a bowl of apricot juice.

AT LUNCH CELIA LOOKED AROUND
at Regine, Liz, Ivo, and Brenden. Though she felt more comfortable with them, still she rarely initiated conversation, being content to be included whenever they saw fit. Now she summoned her courage and said, "Do you think there's anything strange going on at school?" They looked blankly at her, and she half wished she had kept quiet. But she had to try to explain herself now. "Girls are getting hurt — having accidents, or some kind of health problem."

"Like a curse?" The way Liz said it, it was clear she was not inclined to give the idea much credence. "I guess I'm not that superstitious."

“I’m not either,” Celia quickly agreed. “Or I wouldn’t be . . . but I think there’s something strange about my chemistry lab partner, too.”

Regine took over as the voice of skepticism. “Like what?”

“I don’t know . . . She’s really nice, but she does some things that are hard to explain. She doesn’t measure anything when we do our experiments, but everything turns out perfectly. And this morning I saw her coming in from the bus, and I swear her shadow was flickering.”

“You think she’s what, a witch, and she’s putting curses on other girls?” Ivo asked. Celia couldn’t tell if he was mocking her, but she thought it was likely.

“A witch? Do people believe in witches anymore?” Brenden asked.

“Well, they still make movies about them,” Liz replied. She turned back to Celia. “Seriously, you think she’s a witch?”

“I don’t know. Some boys were being mean to her, and the leaves on the tree above her changed color.”

“Are you sure? I mean, that’s wild,” Liz said.

“I’m pretty sure.”

“It would be pretty crazy to make that up,” Ivo said. “So you’re wondering if the injuries aren’t accidents at all, but something more sinister. What does this girl look like?”

“She’s kind of plain—actually, she’s over there,” Celia said, spotting Mariette across the cafeteria, “with the reddish blond hair and the pink sweater.”

The four of them watched Mariette put her books down at a table, and her notebook fell to the floor. She gathered it up, and then sat down to tie the frayed lace on her weather-beaten Converse. Her frazzled hair went in every direction, including over her face, and she pushed out her lower lip to blow the curls away. Celia saw Mariette through her friends’ eyes and knew they weren’t going to be impressed with her.

“Well, if she’s a—we’re going with witch, are we?—then she doesn’t seem to be doing anything to help herself,” Brenden said. “I’m sorry, but wouldn’t she use her powers to look a little more put-together? She just looks kind of a mess.”

They turned back to the table. “Yeah, I’m crazy,” Celia said, suddenly wishing she never had brought this scrutiny to Mariette.

“If she’s a good chem partner, no problem there,” Regine said. “Isn’t Mr. Sumeletso insanely hard?”

“Not really. We got an A on our first experiment,” Celia told her.

“See, Regine, it’s just you,” Ivo said.

“That’s not true! I got the highest grade on
our
first lab, and it was a C-plus!”

“Hey, do you want to do an illustration for the school paper?” Liz asked Celia. “The next issue is in two weeks, and I was going to run a photo of the school that features the new wing, but a drawing might be a nice touch.”

“Sure,” Celia said, relieved that the subject of Mariette had been dropped.

“What are you doing this weekend?” Regine asked her.

“I don’t know. I need to spend some time on my room. I painted it gray, and it looks so much better than when you saw it. But I cleared a lot of stuff out, and it’s kind of empty.”

“That’s cool. What do you have in mind?”

“I’m taking my time with it. It just didn’t feel like me, you know? I want to make sure it feels right when I’m finished with it.”

“There’s this great field in sociology called symbolic anthropology—it’s the study of how the objects you select to surround yourself express who you are. Your room is like a self-portrait,” Regine said.

“That’s what I was thinking,” Celia said.

“Did you ever watch those John Hughes films, like
Pretty in Pink
and
Some Kind of Wonderful
?” Regine continued. “I love them for so many reasons, but the characters’ bedrooms are brilliant. You look at them and you just know so much about who these people are, before the story even starts. The guy who’s the artist in
Some Kind
of Wonderful
? I bet you’d love his room. We should watch those movies. I’ve seen them so many times. I’d bet Brenden and Marco would be up for it, too. We had a
Sixteen Candles
party once.”

“What did you call it—symbolic anthropology? Is that taught in a high school class?”

“No. I strive to be a person ‘on whom nothing is lost,’ ”
Regine said proudly. “That’s a Henry James quote. I think all of us try to live by those words. The world is so big, and the more I learn, the more I’m sure I don’t know anything at all. Don’t you want to know more?”

“Sure I do,” Celia said. “I just feel like every conversation I have with any of you, I hear about something completely new.”

“Well, I hope we never make you feel like we’re talking down to you,” Regine said. “None of us is ever going to say to you, ‘I am older than you and must know better.’ You’re smart, and you shouldn’t be ashamed of being smart, or embarrassed to learn something new. We all do, all the time. A few years ago we were right where you are, or worse. And you know I’ve already learned things from you. I’m sure we all will.”

“Don’t hold your breath.” Celia smiled.

“Maybe I will.” Regine smiled back. “Are you ready for Diaboliques tonight?”

“I’ve been looking forward to it all week!”

That night Celia felt all the same things she had felt the week before, even though this time she knew what would happen: the cinematic drive, Rufus, the mazelike ascent past the grumpy girl, the walk through the darkened mezzanine and finally into Patrick’s room.

“Are you going to dance?” Marco asked soon after they arrived.

“I need to practice more,” Celia told him. She had attempted it several times over the course of the week, but earlier that evening, even wearing her mother’s black skirt and a charcoal blouse Liz had lent her, none of the movements Celia tried in the mirror satisfied her. “Do you dance around in your bedroom? I mean, did you when you were starting out?”