Brimstone Read online

  “Did he really call you a bitch?” I nodded and she made an annoyed sound. “That’s gratitude for you.”

  “The fragile male ego makes no exceptions for nerds, I guess.” Finished copying the page, I slumped back down until the next installment, and rubbed the bruise on my arm. “You think he might climb the clock tower with an assault weapon one day?”

  “Dozer? He’s in the Chess Club, for crying out loud.” She chewed the end of her pen. “Besides, we don’t have a clock tower.”

  “You know what I mean.” No one really talked about Columbine High School anymore, but when I was in middle school we had three drills: fire, tornado, and one that involved locking the doors and huddling together as far away from the windows as possible. They told us this was an “extreme-weather drill,” for when there wasn’t time to move to safety. But it didn’t take a genius to figure out that nobody locked a door against a tornado.

  “I’ll make you a deal,” Lisa mumbled around the pen in her mouth. “If Dozer comes to school in a black trench coat, we’ll ditch the rest of the day.”

  “We can take my Jeep.”

  Wells changed the transparency again, and we had to shut up because the plastic was yellowed to the point where deciphering the print took all our concentration.

  “There’s no coffee.” At five-thirty the next morning I stood in our kitchen in my pajamas and ratty old bathrobe and stared at the coffeemaker stupidly. “Why is there no coffee?”

  My father continued to eat his cereal, showing not nearly enough concern for this crisis. “Write it on the grocery list.” He gestured with his spoon to the scrap of paper that was stuck to the fridge with a Disneyland magnet. “Your mom is going to the store this afternoon.”

  “I don’t need coffee in the afternoon. I need it now.” I was whining, but I didn’t care. I needed caffeine.

  “Have some tea.”

  Grumbling, I opened the fridge. There was no Coke, either. This day was shot to Hell already. I scuffed my bunny slippers to the breakfast table and sat, head in hands, moaning piteously until he noticed my misery.

  “What’s the matter, Magpie? You’re up early.”

  “I had a nightmare.” I laid my cheek on the table. “I couldn’t go back to sleep, so I figured I’d get up.”

  “You’re not nervous about your exams, are you?”

  “No.” True, I was a little swamped at the moment. But the nightmare that rattled me wasn’t a brain dream, where my anxieties ran around in my skull like ADD gerbils. It was what, when I was little, I used to call “gut dreams,” after the “gut instincts” I still sometimes get. Those flashes were easier to filter than the dreams they sparked, because my defenses were down while I slept.

  This nightmare was little more than disjointed images, but I’d awoken in a sweat, certain that something was very wrong somewhere. I had stumbled downstairs to try and chase the shadows away, but without my usual morning stimulant, the unease simply would not fade.

  “Is Mom all right?” I asked.

  Dad set down his spoon; his bowl was empty except for three Cheerios clinging together like tiny lifesavers in an ocean of milk. “She’s delicately snoring away.” He paused, then gave me a verbal nudge. “Did you dream about your mom?”

  “No. It was really vague.” I frowned, doubting myself. “Probably just random stuff.”

  “Tell me. Maybe you’ll feel better.”

  Eyes fixed on those three little oat rings, I let my thoughts drift back to the dream, which always worked better than trying to purposefully remember details.

  “I was somewhere really hot,” I began haltingly. “As hot as that blast of air when you open the oven door. There was fire, and really foul-smelling smoke.” My brows knotted. “Or maybe I only thought there were flames, because of the heat and the smoke. It was more the impression of fire, of trying to leash a force of nature.”

  He nodded. I saw the motion in the corner of my eye as I let my mind float with the Cheerios. “And smoke?”

  “All around me, burning my eyes and my throat. The smell was horrible, like a Dumpster on a hot day. Rotten eggs, spoiled meat, and something like gunpowder.” The images played before my unfocused eyes and I went on describing them in a droning voice. “In the center, the smoke thickened. Not solid, but with substance. Viscous, maybe.”

  I wasn’t sure that was the right word. I remembered the toy slime I’d had as a kid, and the way the goo would slide through your hands, and squish through your fingers. The stuff also made a comical farting noise when you pushed it into the jar, but there was nothing funny about the formed yet formless darkness in my dream.

  “What else happened?” Dad leaned on his elbows, eyes alive with an academic interest.

  “A voice was calling out a list of names. Gibberish or another language, but definitely a roll call of some kind. I knew they were names of people. And I knew which name was mine.”

  The images slipped away now, faster and faster the more I tried to grasp them. Then Dad bumped the bowl; the Cheerio rings broke apart, and with them my concentration. I breathed deep, and scrubbed my hands over my face.

  “That’s all I remember.” My fingers speared through my thick mop of hair, worsening a raging case of bedhead. Dad watched me carefully, and I dredged up a sheepish sort of smile. “The whole thing doesn’t sound that scary when I say it aloud.”

  He rose, gathering his breakfast dishes, and gave my shoulder an encouraging squeeze. “Isn’t that the point?”

  “I guess.” I rubbed a little crust of sleep from my eye and asked, as casually as I could, “What do you suppose the dream means?”

  “I don’t know, Magpie. What do you think?”

  “I think it means I’m going to Hell.”

  His dishes clattered in the sink. “What in God’s name makes you say that?”

  “Come on, Dad. Fire? Brimstone? And that roll call, like Gabriel, only on the crispy end of things.” I did feel better voicing the fear. Things lose a lot of power once you name them. “I’m probably going to Hell for telling Stanley I wouldn’t go to the prom with him.”

  “Professor Dozer’s son?” Dad taught history in the same department where Stanley’s mom taught anthropology.

  “Yeah. He asked me yesterday.”

  “Heh.”

  That was the support I got from my loving parent. “Heh.” I also noticed that he didn’t deny I might be Hellbound. I was so glad we’d had this little heart-to-heart.

  I got up and shuffled toward the hall. “I’m going upstairs to get dressed. I’ll grab some coffee on the way to school.”

  “You need to eat some breakfast.”

  “Yes, Mom.”

  “Maggie?” I turned at the door, my hand resting on the jamb. “If you want, you can talk to your granny about the dream.” Despite the length of the kitchen between us, he spoke softly, in case Mom was awake. There are certain things that make Mom give this sigh, a sort of forced exhalation of see-what-I-have-to-put-up-with martyrdom. Granny Quinn’s “superstitions” rank somewhere between not eating breakfast and Dad’s insistence, every year, that there is nothing wrong with leaving the Christmas lights on the roof until Valentine’s Day, as long as you don’t turn them on.

  “Thanks, Dad. But it’s no big deal. Probably just graduation anxiety. I mean, we’ve got eight bazillion seniors. That ceremony is bound to be hellishly long if nothing else.”

  He smiled, I smiled, and then I turned to go. With all that smiling, you’d think at least one of us would be reassured.

  I climbed the stairs without my usual caffeinated zip. A few years ago Mom had been hinting about a new house, but Dad didn’t want to move. He has tenure at the university, and he can walk from home if he wants. All the shiny new subdivisions are all the way on the outskirts of town, near the state highway that leads to the big city. Plus they have no trees.

  To compromise, my parents remodeled our raised ranch-style house so that it looked less like the Brady Bunch lived here. Amo
ng other things, they’d moved me upstairs into what used to be the game room, and my old room became Mom’s home office. I think the plan was to encourage me to stay home and go to school here. It isn’t that I don’t like Avalon. It’s a college town, with an idealized retro feel. We didn’t even have a Starbucks until a year ago. People love it or hate it here. I love it, but it’s not really on my road to the Pulitzer Prize.

  In the meantime, I had a pretty nice setup: the whole loft for myself, with bedroom stuff on one side of the room, a study area on the other. The decorating scheme, though, was Early American Disaster Zone. I had to wade through the clothes on the floor. My computer equipment took up the entire desk and had started to spill onto the adjoining table. Every surface was covered with books, paper, binders, disks, and CDs.

  But who had time to clean? Besides the Dance-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named, there were pep rallies and games, the Big Spring Musical and end-of-the-year band concerts, field trips, service projects—not to mention term papers and final exams. School spirit is not my thing, but I was on both the school paper and the yearbook staff. The night before I’d taken pictures at the basketball game, then written an essay on Julius Caesar before going to bed to be tied in knots by my subconscious.

  I was down to my last clean pair of underwear, but a search unearthed some jeans that didn’t yet stand up by themselves. At the back of the closet was a shirt from Aunt Joyce that I’d never worn because it was a little too Woodstock: kind of gauzy, with a tiny floral print, belled sleeves, and a square neck trimmed with thinly crocheted lace.

  Any port in a storm, I groused. Then I felt guilty because of little Juanita in Guatemala; they could clothe her village with what lay unwashed on my floor.

  Stress and guilt. The longer I was awake, the easier it was to believe that the nightmare was just that. I kept trying to put a rational face on things, even when my instincts said otherwise.

  When I was little, I loved Granny Quinn’s tales of the fair folk, will-o’-the-wisps, and bain sidhe. My dreams seemed part of that at first, more fairy stories and make-believe. Nobody took them seriously, until one morning at breakfast I asked how long until Aunt Joyce had her baby. Mom told me not to be ridiculous. That afternoon, her sister called and said she was pregnant.

  After that, Mom started getting a pinched expression when I talked about my dreams, even as Gran and Dad took them as a matter of course. Then one night—was it eight years ago already?—I woke up screaming, babbling about glass and metal and blood, hysterical with fear. Mom was still quieting my tears when the phone rang.

  No good news ever comes in the middle of the night. While Mom listened on the phone, I stood beside her in my Little Mermaid pajamas, and slipped my small hand into her icy one. Her face was a mask, but her eyes were snapshots of grief. Dad, awakened by the phone, stumbled out of their bedroom and froze at the sight of us.

  “There was a terrible crash,” I told him, trying to be strong for Mom, trying to be grown up. “Nana and Pop are dead.”

  He held her hand while she listened to the police officer on the line. She made the appropriate responses as tears coursed down her face. Then she hung up, and drew me in tight. Tight between them, like she was afraid I’d be lost to her, too. She clutched at us both and we held her up while she wept for her parents, gone in the swift, bloody instant that I’d seen in my dream.

  I blinked, coming out of the dark room of memory into the morning light. I had been thoroughly immersed in the past. I guess that was what made last night’s dream so hard to dismiss. The rather vague nightmare had somehow stirred the pot of my psyche, and old, hibernating parts of me now creaked awake.

  I looked around the room; my hands had been busy while my mind had been wandering, sorting laundry into reasonably contained heaps. Likewise, the flurry of paper that had blanketed the carpet of the study area now sat in neat stacks on the desk. The books were either back on the shelves or waiting tidily by the computer. The lair that time forgot hadn’t been this neat since middle school.

  Something glinted at me from the carpet, and I picked up the thin gold chain that held the crucifix Gran had given me at my first communion. I wondered why it wasn’t where I’d left it, but since I couldn’t remember where that was, I didn’t linger on the thought, or on why it seemed natural to drop it on top of the pile of clothes I was going to wear that day.

  What a weird morning. My brain hurt from thinking so much while in a state of caffeine deprivation. I was headed toward the shower when my cell phone rang. I fished it out of my schoolbag, not entirely surprised to see Granny Quinn’s number on the caller ID.

  “Hey, Gran. I was just thinking about you.”

  “I know you were, dear.” Her voice was brighter than anyone’s had a right to be while the sun still moved upward. I could hear the background whirr of her treadmill, which explained her slight breathlessness. “That’s why I called.”

  Why couldn’t I have inherited the chipper genes instead of the spooky ones?

  3

  you wouldn’t think that a day could go downhill after dreaming you were on the roll call for Hell. But it did.

  “Have you voted for the class song yet?” A student council drone shoved a half-sheet of paper in my face. Astrobright Orange is painful at any time of day, but at seven-thirty a.m. it was vomit inducing. Also, the only thing perky I want in front of me at that hour is a coffeemaker. Since the drive-thru line at Take-Your-Bucks had stretched to Canada, I was still severely caffeine deprived.

  I voiced my preference in the life-and-death matter of Gwen versus Ashley by wadding up the ballot and throwing it over my shoulder on the way to the Coke machine. “You don’t have to litter!” yelled Student Council Sally. “The recycle bin is right over there.”

  My response to that was equally nonverbal.

  “Maggie Quinn!”

  I knew that tone. Mr. Halloran, the assistant principal, must have looked up the word stentorian in the dictionary on his first day at work, and practiced in the shower until he got the voice just right.

  Busted, a scant twenty feet from the Coke machine. So close, and yet so far.

  “Yes, Mr. Halloran?” I Goody Two-shoed. “May I help you?”

  The administrator stood by the doors leading from the courtyard to the front hall. He was fairly tall, with a full head of suspiciously thick brown hair. He was the type of stocky that comes when gravity turns linebacker shoulders into a desk-job gut. I would lay down money that he’d been a Biff in high school. “I’d like to see you in my office.”

  “Ooooooooo,” said the kids in the courtyard—either a taunt or the buzzing of their hive mind.

  I followed the assistant principal inside, not quite meekly. Student Council Sally smirked as I went by.

  I waved at the secretaries managing attendance and they waved back through the chaos. Halloran waited at his office door like a prison warden. I entered and stood until he closed the door and gestured for me to sit. The office windows made sure we were properly chaperoned by all the staff. Everything was correct and polite and did nothing to explain why my hair wanted to crawl off my head.

  “So, Miss Quinn. I hear you were involved in a hazing incident yesterday.”

  “Nobody hazed me yesterday, Mr. Halloran.”

  “Don’t get smart with me, Quinn.”

  This seemed like an odd thing for a school administrator to say, but since he was glaring down at me, hands on his hips, I kept my opinion to myself.

  “I have a reliable report,” he continued, “that you were witness to some students bullying a classmate.”

  By “reliable report,” I assumed he meant “rumor.” I still hadn’t had any caffeine, my head was feeling funny, and baiting the assistant principal could hold my interest only so long. “Then I don’t see why I’m here. If there was a witness to my alleged witnessing, then you don’t need me to tell you what happened.”

  He settled on the corner of the desk in an aren’t-we-buddies way. “I understand you
took some photos.”

  Irritation jabbed me; I couldn’t imagine who had gone tattling to Halloran. Stanley? The Spanish Club? I guess I’d been overestimating the intelligence of the general populace. Blackmail has power only as long as it remains secret.

  I considered Stanley, and his desire for revenge. But he’d been adamant that he didn’t need my help, so I didn’t think he would tell Halloran that I had pictures of his humiliation.

  “I don’t know what photos you are talking about,” I lied. I was already on the list for Hell—what did one falsehood matter?

  “The photos of the hazing incident,” he said, getting a little red in the face.

  “I don’t have any photos of a hazing incident.” This was less of a lie. “Hazing” was making freshmen wear stupid hats. Pretending you were going to drop someone off a balcony was not “hazing.” It was “terrorizing.”

  “Then you won’t mind if I look at your camera.”

  I had to clamp my teeth on some choice words that would get me expelled. I was offended for the entire fourth estate. As a journalist, I wanted to tell him to get some sort of court order and then we’d talk. As a high school student still five weeks and three days from graduation, I knew there was nothing I could do to stop him.

  Furiously mute, I dug into the backpack at my feet and handed over the camera. Halloran turned it over, his big thumbs pressing tiny buttons as he reviewed the pictures on the memory card. Pictures of the Spanish Club’s fund-raising table, with its rows of gum and candy, and last night’s basketball game, including a stellar shot of Eric Munoz nailing an NBA-worthy jump shot.

  But no Biff, a.k.a. Brandon. No bug-eyed Jessica. No terror-stricken Stanley.

  Halloran grunted with frustration, started to say something, then thrust the camera at me. “Get out of here, Quinn. And don’t be late for first period, because I’m not giving you a pass.”

  I didn’t have to be told twice. Despite the big windows, the office felt claustrophobic. Maybe it was Halloran and his power trip. Maybe it was the wall behind his desk, filled with pictures of past sports triumphs—not the school’s, his own. The thought that this was what bullies grew into, minor tyrants who took jobs where they could relive their glory days by continuing to terrorize students, made my head ache.