Brimstone Read online

  She had a theory that term papers were a sort of “get out of teaching free” card. From the start of the assignment to its end, anytime the teacher wanted to dodge lecturing, she could give us class time to work on our papers and expect us to be grateful.

  Personally, I was grateful for any day I didn’t have to listen to Ms. Vincent regurgitate the textbook analysis of literature and expect us to parrot it back without alteration.

  “Hey, Lisa.” I doodled on my paper to make it look like I was working. “Have you ever heard of a student dying, maybe here on campus?”

  She opened an eye and gave me a monocular glare. “You’re not referring to that thing we were talking about last night that we are not going to talk about at school ever, are you?”

  “No. Well, not really.”

  She sighed, then thought about it. “I think there was some kid who killed himself about twenty years ago.”

  “In the gym?”

  “In the band hall.”

  That was not particularly helpful. Then I remembered that geography didn’t seem to be a real issue here.

  “Are you going to the play tonight?” I asked, changing the subject.

  She laid her head on her folded arms. “I wasn’t. But if there’s a chance Gerard Butler might show up in a tux and a half-mask, I’m there.”

  “Dude. Me too.”

  Naturally, since I’d lost the research time that morning, my second opportunity—journalism class—was taken up by a lecture. In lab I discovered that while our high school might have four decades of archived newspapers, the index only went back one and a half.

  “Curses!” I half-slammed the drawer closed. “Foiled again.”

  “What’s the problem?” asked Mr. Allison.

  I blushed slightly, having been caught in a temper tantrum. “What happened to the index before the nineties?”

  “It was lost when they moved the journalism lab up here. They started again with the current year, and no one has ever had the time to replace the old one. There’s not that much call for old football scores and homecoming courts.”

  “I guess not.” I drummed my fingers on the metal cabinet.

  Mr. Allison came around his desk. “Something I can help you with?”

  “Maybe. I’m looking for record of any student who may have died here on campus.”

  “That’s grim.”

  “It’s for a research paper.” I was getting too good at lying. “Someone mentioned there was a kid who killed himself, maybe in the Band Hall?”

  “Oh yes. That was a shame.” He shook his head sadly. “I was in school here at the time.” He opened a file drawer and came out with a microfiche spool marked 1981–85. “Look through the spring of 1984.”

  “Thanks.” I went over to the projector. I wondered if someday, when all the archives in the world were stored on computer, microfilm projectors would be extinct. Even now, it’s a dying art. Like calligraphy and Morse code, and about that efficient, too.

  “Only one week until prom!” I’d barely set foot in the courtyard when a neon green paper fluttered before my face. “Have you voted for your Royal … Oh. It’s you.” My friend from Student Council snatched back the ballot. “I don’t have enough of these for you to wad up and throw on the floor.”

  “We’re outside,” I said, very reasonably, considering the neon green was hammering spikes into my eyes, which were aching from an hour reading little bitty backlit type. “There is no floor.”

  “Whatever. You can’t have a ballot.” She tucked the stack protectively against her chest.

  “Are you taking away my constitutional right to vote for a King and Queen?” I raised my voice in outrage.

  “Well …” She wavered as people around us turned to stare.

  “I demand the right to choose my own representation of all that is wrong with adolescent social hierarchy.”

  “Right on!” said a voice near me.

  “You cannot deny me a voice in the senseless aggrandizement of those already entitled by wealth and privilege!” Encouraged by cheers and laughter, I leapt up on a bench and orated with a fervor worthy of Patrick Henry. “No! I tell you, popular is not enough! They must be royalty.”

  A roar went up from the crowd. I grabbed a painfully green ballot and raised it in my fist.

  “For we hold these truths to be self-evident! That there is no greater embodiment of the American Way than the choosing of a leader based on their physical beauty and mediocre intelligence.”

  Cheers and whistles filled the courtyard. The Spanish Club shouted “¡Olé! Viva mediocridad!” from the breezeway. A Biff-like voice called out “Freak,” and then, over it all, the stentorian shout of the assistant principal.

  “Margaret Quinn! In my office, right now!”

  And that was how I ended up in detention for inciting a riot. I hoped that Syracuse wouldn’t revoke my acceptance without giving me a chance to explain.

  I didn’t mind spending lunch in detention, but I wish Halloran had seen fit to extend it through P.E. I would much rather have been studying chemistry than enduring the last day of swimming.

  But there I was, dragging on my swimsuit and stuffing my clothes into my locker. Jessica Prime passed behind me. “You are such a freak, Quinn.”

  “Thank you.”

  “It’s not a compliment, dumb ass.”

  Jess Minor followed, adding “Yeah, freak” as she walked by. The Jessicas seemed to have buried the hatchet. The upshot was, as Prime turned this way and that in front of the mirror, Minor was there to lavish attention on her, and the wannabes were once again pushed to the fringes of the queen’s court.

  Busy squeezing my fifty-pound backpack into the undersized locker, I rolled my eyes. I didn’t understand this constant need for reassurance. Jessica Prime had a beauty pageant figure. Her cleavage was suspiciously full, but she was not, in any way, shape, or form, fat.

  Coach Milner called time and we rushed out to the pool, all except Prime, who must have broken a nail or something. I finished the preswim shower, then realized I’d forgotten my goggles.

  “Hurry up,” snapped the coach. “And tell Prentice to get a move on, too.”

  I dashed to the locker room as fast as was prudent on the wet tile. My goggles lay on a bench, but I saw no sign of Jessica. Then I heard someone retching in one of the stalls. I thought about calling out or going for help, but before I could do either, the toilet flushed, and Jessica Prime came out.

  She was startled to see me, but almost instantly had her sneer in place. “What are you looking at, freak?”

  The queen didn’t look any more interested in sympathy than I was, so I pretended I hadn’t heard anything. “Nothing. I just came for my goggles.”

  With a dismissive snort she brushed past me, and my nose twitched at an all too familiar smell. Sudden fear cramped my stomach as my eyes followed her perfect, blond form. She passed the mirror, but my gaze hung there as a black shadow slipped across the surface of the glass, like oily smoke.

  13

  i had called Justin as soon as school was out and asked him to meet me at Froth and Java, the coffee bar by the university. He listened to me blather about Jessica Prime and the shadow, and calmly tried to restore my logic processes. “Back up a minute. Is this the first time you’ve seen the shadow around her? Did you smell the odor?”

  I wrapped my hands around a tall mug of tea with extra sugar and nodded. “The air was thick with it in the stall where she’d been.”

  His fingers drummed on his own cup of coffee. “Have you ever gotten the sense that she was …” Trailing off, he looked embarrassed to complete the sentence. I wasn’t.

  “Evil? Most every day since I met her.”

  “Does she have a reason to hurt Karen?”

  “Evil doesn’t need a reason. She didn’t need a reason to show my picture to the whole world, either.” Okay, it was just her friends. But what was a little exaggeration when there was a point to be made.

  Justin
pulled his notebook closer and read what he had written. “But what about this other girl? The one in the play. I thought they were friends.”

  I was disgruntled at this flaw in my theory. “Jess Minor is her friend, too, but she’s been telling everyone Jess’s designer clothes are cheap knockoffs.”

  “True.” The pen tapped. “It’s also possible she’s not doing anything intentionally. Poltergeists are said to attach themselves to adolescents and cause mischief around them.”

  “Putting someone in the hospital is more than mischief.”

  “Don’t split hairs. I’m talking about the unintentional part. And …” He paused delicately. “You can’t have missed the signs that your nemesis may be in trouble herself.”

  My expression solidified into a mask of I don’t give a damn. “Yeah, I noticed.”

  He shrugged. “I’m just saying.”

  “So you said it. Move along.”

  Justin gave me a studying look, a real frog under the microscope stare, but with disapproval. I sipped my tea and looked around the room, anywhere but at him.

  Froth and Java was furnished with cast-off chairs and comfy couches, usually packed with college students who came to study or just hang out. I pretended I was enormously interested in the group to our left—and absolutely refused to show any sympathy for Jessica Prime, no matter how long Justin stared at me.

  Finally he sighed in defeat. “Did you ask your chemistry teacher about the test on your jeans?”

  “He gave them to someone named Dr. Smyth at the university. She’ll get to it when she can.”

  “What about the suicide you mentioned?”

  I sighed, quoting the article I’d found. “A disenfranchised student, driven to a desperate act because he felt outcast. Hanged himself in the Band Hall.”

  “Tragic.” The true sorrow in his voice made me finally look at him again. We exchanged a glance, feeling for that poor bastard, and all the others who couldn’t see any other escape from their pain.

  “Yeah.” I dropped my gaze and shrugged. “I guess that’s why I went a little bit nuts at lunch.”

  Justin tilted his head curiously. “What happened at lunch?”

  “I led an insurrection.” After that, I had to tell him the whole story. By the time I finished, he was holding his sides laughing as people at neighboring tables stared. I was laughing pretty hard, too, and God, it felt really good.

  “That’s great. The First Mediocrity Rebellion.” He tried to catch his breath. “I’m sorry you got detention.”

  I shrugged. “It’ll be forgotten by Monday. Viva la revolución.”

  “Will you get in trouble with your parents?”

  “Oh, Dad will laugh. Mom will be furious. Kinda the status quo around my house.” I smiled sheepishly, and he grinned back. My cheeks grew warm for no good reason, except that he was handsome and smart and I’d never had a college guy smile at me that way before. Let’s face it. Stanley Dozer was the best date prospect I’ve had … maybe ever.

  “So what should I do now?” I asked. The question covered a lot of ground.

  Justin closed his notebook. “To be on the safe side, don’t make Jessica Prime angry. We can keep checking out the ghost angle, but—”

  “I don’t think it’s a ghost.”

  He shook his head. “Neither do I. I’ll do some research into other kinds of spirits. Luckily I have some resources.”

  I wished I had something else to say to keep him there. Right then, we could be any two students, studying something as normal as sociology or statistics. He handled this strangeness so academically, so reasonably, that it made me feel as if this wasn’t all so strange and things were going to be just fine. “Justin?”

  “Yeah?” He paused in collecting his stuff.

  “Do you think this thing is like a vampire? Not with the blood sucking, but the part where it can’t come into your house unless you invite it.”

  He gave the question his full consideration. “The boundaries of property figure strongly in a lot of traditions. Thresholds and holy ground and running water all mark territorial borders. It may not even be able to leave the school.”

  “I think it can.” I squirmed as he gave me that patient, no-arguments look, waiting for me to explain. “You know that residue I found on the diving board? The supernatural snail trail? It was all over my window this morning.”

  Justin sat back in surprise. “On your window?”

  “Yeah.”

  He seemed to be thinking very hard, weighing options one against the other, discarding them as quickly as they came to him. “I think you should stay with your grandmother tonight.”

  “And leave my parents there if it comes back? Or worse, draw it over to Gran’s house? No way.”

  “Yes, but …”

  Hands flat on the table, I leaned forward. “See, this is why I didn’t want to tell you. I knew you’d flip out.”

  “I’m not flipping out. I’m just worried for you.”

  “What you said about boundaries feels right. The spooge was all on the outside of the glass. I think it might be able to visit, but it can’t enter.”

  “Maggie.” Justin covered my hands with his. “You are a clairvoyant. A seer, to use your granny’s word.” I tried to pull my hands away, but he held fast. “I know you want to deny it, but hear me out. We don’t know what this thing is, but I’ll bet anything it wouldn’t have to physically reach you to do harm.”

  I yanked my hands hard from his grasp. “Look. If I admit that I have this”—I gritted my teeth and finally said it aloud—“Sight. I can’t just walk away because things aren’t all fluffy bunnies and unicorns. Now that I See, I cannot just do nothing. It doesn’t work that way.”

  Justin clenched his fists for a moment, then deliberately relaxed. “All right.” He took a deep breath. “You’re right. But at least let’s set up some kind of protection.”

  “You mean like horseshoes and holy water?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Okay.” I hid my relief. My brave words would go a lot farther if I had an Early Phantom Warning System. “Come over at six. I’ll work you in between getting yelled at by my parents and going to the Big Spring Musical. It’ll be loads of fun.”

  I had seriously underestimated my mother. Not her anger at my getting detention, but her verbosity on the subject. We had gotten through “What were you thinking?” and “Better sense than that,” and moved on to “Follow you for the rest of your life.” She was just bringing Dad into it with “She’s your daughter” when the doorbell rang.

  Saved by the … well, you know. I jumped off the sofa like I had springs on my butt. “I’ll get it!”

  “Sit!” barked Mom.

  I sat. Dad went to answer the door, but he raised a fist in solidarity as he passed behind Mom. She snapped without turning around, “I saw that, Michael Quinn!”

  Boy, for someone who disavowed belief in the supernatural, Mom could be darned spooky.

  With the interruption, she jumped to the closer. “I am seriously disappointed in you, young lady.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “It is ridiculous for you to be making waves this late in the school year. You graduate in a month.”

  “I know.”

  “So if you could save mocking the establishment for a time when your class standing will not be affected, I would deeply appreciate that.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  My complacency took the wind out of her sails. She floundered for a moment, then said in a calm voice, “All right, then. You’re only grounded for the weekend.”

  “Grounded! You can’t!” How was I supposed to fight the forces of evil if I was grounded?

  “I can. You live under this roof, and you don’t turn eighteen for two months—”

  “Fifty-two days, Mom!”

  “And you’re still in school.”

  Dad cleared his throat in the hallway. “Maggie, Justin is here.”

  I saw him behind D
ad, staring at the ceiling and pretending he was deaf. Mom looked questioningly at me.

  “We’re working on a project together. For school.” I figured I wasn’t really lying—keeping the campus safe from ghostly things counted.

  “On a Friday night?”

  “Mom!” I stretched the word to three syllables and jerked my head to where Justin lurked in Dad’s shadow. She looked the young man up and down—nice frame, broad shoulders, trustworthy face.

  “Oh.” It would have been funny under other circumstances. She wanted to be the strict disciplinarian, but she was clearly pleased—and surprised—that I had handsome company on a Friday night. Finally, she gave in. “As long as you don’t go anywhere.”

  I jumped up. “We’ll be up in my study.” She looked as if she might protest, but I didn’t give her a chance, gesturing Justin into the room and introducing him to Mom.

  “Good evening, Mrs. Quinn.” He extended his hand and she put hers out automatically, looking pleased at the formality. “You have a lovely home.”

  She smiled, finally relaxing. His air of good-natured steadiness had that effect on people. “Thank you, Justin. Maggie, you have enough sodas?”

  “We’re good, Mom. Thanks.” I motioned for my guest to follow me up the stairs.

  “Your mom seems nice,” said Justin as we reached the landing and my study area.

  “She is. A little tightly wound sometimes, but Dad balances her out.” That summed them up pretty well, actually. Mom was conventional and rational. Dad was more like Gran—intuitive and spiritual. And there I was, smack in the middle.

  Justin carried a heavy backpack with him; he set it on the hand-me-down loveseat as he looked around the loft. “This is twice the size of my dorm room.”

  “Yeah. I’ve got a pretty good thing going.” I casually dropped last night’s Coke cans in the trash. The desk had reverted to its wilderness state pretty quickly, but the rest still looked vaguely civilized.

  “Which window was it?” he asked, getting down to business.

  I led him to the bedroom half of the room and pulled back the curtain. There was enough daylight to see the dark, greasy film on the center of the three windows that covered the east wall. My skin prickled as he opened the window and ran his finger through the soot. Rubbing forefinger and thumb together, he gave a tentative sniff.