Flannery Read online

  So I have to miss class, but I can’t go home without getting that voice recorder. My appointment with my “marketing expert” is tomorrow night and there’s a sign the size of a billboard outside the principal’s office saying that Fridays are equipment-inventory days and no materials will be given out for loan on those days.

  Since it is Thursday, it’s now or never.

  The secretary is reading a fat novel with a hologram on the cover. There’s a picture of a beautiful girl with flowing blonde hair and a white nightdress in a meadow full of flowers.

  The secretary is deeply engrossed. She licks her finger and turns the pages slowly.

  There’s a little silver bell and a note taped onto the desk beside it.

  Ring the bell, the note says.

  I put out my hand and smack the little knob. It makes a vibrating ting.

  The secretary lifts her eyes from her book very slowly. Her eyes are commanding. They’re dark brown, or maybe even black.

  She tilts her book against her chest and the hologram of the innocent fairy girl in the meadow changes so that the girl now has eyes with vertical black slits like a snake and her teeth have turned into fangs, dripping blood, and her white nightdress is now red — soaked with blood, I guess — and the flowers have turned into bats.

  I came to borrow a voice recorder, I say.

  Flannery Malone, the secretary says. Aren’t you supposed to be on your way to Healthy Living?

  She very slowly clomps one wedged shoe onto the floor, then the other. She stands up and puts her hands flat on the desk. Even with the heels, the secretary is shorter than me.

  For my Entrepreneurship project, I stammer. We have to interview an expert in the field of sales and promotion.

  What are you doing for your unit? the secretary asks.

  A love potion, I say.

  Of course, she says. And what makes you think you’re allowed to borrow this equipment?

  Mr. Payne said I could?

  Is Mr. Payne in charge of technical equipment?

  I don’t know, I say.

  He is not, says the secretary. I am in charge of technical equipment.

  Well, could I borrow a voice recorder please?

  I am on my lunch break, the secretary says. She carefully lifts a triangle of tuna sandwich off a nest of tinfoil sitting on the counter, her long red nails sinking into the white Wonder Bread. Then she takes a bite. Just so I understand.

  A crumb of tuna drops into her cleavage. She glances down and wiggles every part of her body and flaps the bottom of her blouse and I guess she must have shaken it free because then she clomps over to the table with several digital recorders piled on top. And comes back to hand me one.

  I drop the little recorder into my knapsack and the secretary pushes a button built into the desk. The buzzer rings out through the whole school.

  Now go to your Healthy Living class, she says.

  I touch the back of my hand to my forehead and flutter my eyes.

  What are you doing? the secretary says. Get to class. Go. Shoo. She flicks her hand at me.

  It’s just I feel slightly …

  Slightly what, she says. She takes a step backwards.

  Warm, I say. It’s probably nothing. The secretary pulls her sandwich toward her.

  I mean, I’m sure it’s not contagious, I say. Not the bird flu. Or H1N1 or Ebola or part of a pandemic or anything. Just, warm. And dizzy. I feel suddenly very …

  Suddenly very what?

  Funny, I say. I feel funny. It’s probably nothing.

  I touch my throat.

  And my throat feels funny, I say.

  Do you want to sit down? she says. Over there? She points to chairs on the far side of the room.

  I cough, just an ahem. A slight ahem, ahem. Then I cough a little harder. A hack. I let loose with a hack-hack-hack. I let my face get red, I let my eyes bulge a little. I force my eyes to water. I double over in a coughing fit.

  It’s cough. Probably cough. Not cough. Contagious, I say.

  Okay, go home, Leave. Out, the secretary says. She tosses the rest of her sandwich in the garbage.

  Get, she says. Evacuate the premises.

  Well, maybe I will just sit out my next class, I say. Healthy Living. I’ll just, you know. Recover in the library. I’m sure I’ll be fine after that.

  Radio silence from Tyrone, so it looks like I am going to have to do Part B of our Entrepreneurship project on my own. Which really means, of course, that Amber has to do it with me. At least it was always that way before Gary. Besides, I’m helping her with the costumes for her project so I figure she owes me.

  Amber, what are you doing tomorrow night?

  Going to Gary’s basketball game.

  Because I have to go interview my expert …

  No way, Flan. Forget it.

  I don’t think it’ll take very long. What you could do is, when the game starts, you could be there in the stands cheering Gary on.

  Oh, thanks a lot. Thanks, Flannery. Phew, I was afraid you wouldn’t permit it.

  You can wave or blow kisses or whatever.

  I do not blow kisses, Flannery.

  Once the game has started, you sneak out.

  Gary will kill me.

  Gary won’t even know you missed the game. You’ll be back before it’s over, waving your pompoms or whatever.

  This explains how Amber and I have ended up with an appointment to see a Wiccan fortune-teller tonight.

  The Wiccan was Miranda’s idea. She says that a love potion falls under the business category of “Occult Services” and we need a person well versed in the practice of harnessing magical energy.

  A Wiccan, I say.

  A who?

  A practitioner of Wicca, Am.

  Of what, Flan?

  A form of witchcraft with feminist leanings, Amber.

  Oh, that’s a relief, she says. For a second I thought it was just an ordinary witch who submits to the patriarchy all the time.

  Gods and goddesses, equal power.

  Awesome.

  It was, though. I’d done a pile of research and narrowed down the number of practicing Wiccans in town — surprisingly large! — to a choice of two.

  There is an intriguing-sounding witch near the Avalon Mall, The Amazing Gloria, but in the end I decided on a woman named Ms. Rideout. Ms. Rideout, according to her law firm’s website, is also a lawyer specializing in personal injury.

  Which makes it sound like she’d be really good at punching you in the eye, or that she takes your injury really personally. What Ms. Rideout actually specializes in, her website explains, is getting compensation for people who are injured in car accidents or who slip and fall or otherwise hurt themselves on ice or sidewalk cracks or poorly marked or unprotected construction sites.

  The clincher in Ms. Rideout’s favor, though, was that her house is just a ten-minute walk from our school.

  Amber could definitely make it back before the end of the game, I figured. Especially if we took the shortcut down Water Street.

  So, here I am waiting for her by the back door of the gym on the coldest October evening in history with hundreds of cigarette butts at my feet. I can hear the muffled roar of the crowd inside. The basketball thumping on the floor like the heartbeat of an ogre. An ogre with an arrhythmic heart murmur. The boys’ feet hammer the floor, chasing after the ball.

  Amber said I couldn’t wait inside. If Gary saw me with her, he’d know something was up. Gary has decided, apparently, that he doesn’t like Amber hanging out with me.

  Just as I’m beginning to think she isn’t coming, the door creaks open and here she is with half a hotdog hanging out of her mouth, talking, chewing and dripping mustard. She strides past me out onto Bonaventure Avenue.

  Hurry up, Flannery, she says.

  What took you so long?

  Gary got a foul, so he had to sit on the bench and he kept looking over at me the whole time so I couldn’t leave. I couldn’t even text or he’d ask l
ater who I was texting. Of course, you don’t even have a phone. Anyway, he tripped this guy on the other team. I mean, obviously, it was a mistake — his foot accidently stuck out in front of the guy. But the ref is totally prejudiced against Gary because he’s such a strong player and keeps getting all the baskets.

  That’s when I feel a snowflake on my cheek. I look up and snow is spiraling down from the heavens.

  Hey, first snowfall of the year, I say. No response. I can barely keep up with her. Maybe if I said the snowflakes looked like Gary’s big white-pudding face, she’d be interested. But that gives me a better idea.

  Big fluffy flakes, like duckling down, I say.

  Last year for an English assignment we had to think up a hundred similes and metaphors about winter. We turned it into a competition, seeing how many we could each come up with on our walks home from school. The duckling one was Amber’s.

  And it works — sort of. Amber doesn’t say anything, but she does slow down a little and gives me a sort of smirk-smile. I take it as encouragement.

  We are trudging through the fallen leaves like the voyageurs of yore, I say, except we are sans canoe.

  Amber is a sucker for when I speak French.

  It’s the kind of cold that gets the hair on your arms standing up at attention, like an army raising their bayonets when the commander yells hup, I say.

  Just as I’m saying hup, a transport truck roars past and I see the orange dice doing the Highland fling below the rearview mirror and the truck’s back tire hits a frigid puddle and a splash flies up all over Amber’s sneakers.

  She sucks in a big breath and shuts her eyes as if she’s been slapped.

  I brace myself for her anger. What will Gary say when he notices her sneakers are soaked? He’ll know she left the gym! But instead, miraculously, there’s the Amber grin. Ear to freaking ear.

  My sneakers are so wet I could wring out half of the Atlantic Ocean from each one, she says.

  They are as wet as seedless watermelons, I say.

  And my feet are cold. My feet are each a tub of ice cream so frozen it bends the spoon, Amber says. Wait, where are we going?

  Shortcut, I say. Come on. But Amber stops suddenly and I bang into her.

  That’s the bar I told you about, she says. That’s the Wild Irish Rose. I told you I didn’t want to come on this stupid interview with you, Flannery. Look at it. That’s the bar.

  Come on, Amber, I say again. Let’s get out of here.

  But she stands for a moment with her hands buried in her pockets, her head tilted back looking up at the sky.

  It’s really coming down, she says.

  The snowflakes are big and soft and tattered, like my exam notes on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, torn up and tossed in the air on the first day of Christmas holidays, I say. She ignores me.

  Or, wait, they are pot-smoking ballerinas, I try again. Ballerinas with white tulle skirts and pointy-toed little slippers with rhinestones on the toes, giggling their little heads off, drifting away from the ballet company to do their own private Swan Lake.

  Flannery, please stop, Amber says. Just stop, okay? She’s staring at the Wild Irish Rose.

  At that moment a very drunk man in a leather bomber jacket saunters out of the bar. He takes a wool hat out of his pocket and puts it on his bald head and continues up the road toward Subway.

  It’s almost funny now, she says. It sure as hell wasn’t funny then.

  I know exactly what story is unreeling itself in Amber’s head. She first told me about it one Christmas holiday when we were both twelve and I was sleeping over at her house.

  She’s thinking about another Christmas, when she was only eight. Amber was listening to the audiobook of A Christmas Carol on her iPod in the back seat of her mom’s car. Which happened to be parked in pretty much this very spot.

  She was just getting to the part about the Ghost of Christmas Future, when a swaying man, whiskered and with wet purplish lips, pitched forward from the sidewalk and slapped his hands against the car window. He’d probably dived toward the window to stop himself from falling flat on his face, but then he tried to see into the dark car, as if looking for something to steal. His skin was the color of pea soup.

  So she screamed and then he screamed and he reared back into the darkness.

  He must have slipped on some ice, or just from the fright of seeing her little pale face and her big blue terrified eyes surfacing from the dark interior of the car. His arms started windmilling, his feet flying up and landing him on his ass in the snow bank.

  Once he was back up he stumbled over to her window again. Probably he was just trying to calm her down. But Amber was so scared she could hardly move. She realized one of the back-seat doors wasn’t locked and he’d gone around to that side, trying to get in. At the very last millisecond she flung herself across the seat and pressed down the lock just as he was flicking the door handle.

  Locking the car might have been the wrong thing to do, she realized, because the guy became furious. Like he hadn’t just tried to see if there was anything to steal in her mom’s car. He was smashed. He didn’t know what he was doing. But he recognized Amber and he started yelling.

  Your mother thinks she’s something special. She thinks she’s better than the rest of us. Let me tell you something, kid, there’s nothing special about Cindy Mackey. She’s as common as dirt.

  That’s a simile Amber is not likely to forget.

  And that’s when Amber’s mom came out of the bar. She started swinging her purse. She walloped him on the back and again on the shoulders and on top of his head and there was eight-year-old Amber in the back of the car watching it all, convinced that her mother and this stranger were about to kill each other.

  We were parked next to that concrete planter, she says now. She points at a planter containing a single skinny tree trunk no bigger than my wrist, and with just one amazing withered black leaf covered by the freshly fallen snow. A leaf hanging on like a frightened kid.

  Like a kid who will, after her mother’s drinking incident, have a social worker take her out of class and interview her about her mom. How much does your mom drink, you can tell me, what about your dad, are you wetting the bed, do you have nightmares, I’m here to help, are you afraid, has anyone ever hit you or hurt you, do your mom and dad fight a lot, and let me see your fingernails, and have you ever been left alone, and what do you have for breakfast, and the teacher says you are very tired in class. Do you sleep at night? What time do you go to bed?

  The cops pulled Amber’s mom over a block from their driveway that night. Amber had to watch her mother get out of the car and get into the cop car and she honestly thought she’d never see her mom again.

  When Amber got home it turned out Sean had made his special meatloaf with oranges and brown sugar which I have had several times and I can tell you, it is disgusting, but he got the recipe from Canadian Living and he’s so proud of it he makes it all the time and no one has ever told him how awful it is.

  The look on Dad’s face when we came in with the officers, Amber says now. He kept saying, There’s some nice meatloaf, Amber. Go sit at the table. And he’s running back and forth with that stupid apron on, spooning out my meatloaf and rushing back out to the front porch to see if the cops are going to take Mom off to jail and rushing back into the kitchen to get me the ketchup.

  I toy with providing a few metaphors for that meatloaf but then think I’d better keep my mouth shut.

  Have you ever seen your mother collapse, Flannery? Amber asks. When you’re eight, you think she has died. I mean, she just sort of collapsed in the hallway. Just the whites of her eyes showing. And she stank of that very bar over there. She stank of letting everybody down.

  Your mom’s been sober for ages, I say quietly.

  Six months, she says. Six months and two days tomorrow.

  Maybe this fortune-telling Wiccan lawyer will predict a happy future for us, Am, I say. I take her hand and drag her away from the Wild Iri
sh Rose.

  Look, the snowflakes are getting lighter now, I tell her. Now each snowflake is like a single square of biodegradable toilet paper, crumpled in its own unique way.

  Or they are like snowflakes, Amber says. They are just exactly like snowflakes that speed up and spin out of control in the backdraft of each passing car, like snowflakes in a backdraft, and not like anything else.

  14

  Once people see how talented Gary is, Amber is saying. I sort of wish he’d hang out with me a bit more, but he has to spend all his time practicing with the band. He’s writing another song for me. It’s about when we first got together. It’s really romantic.

  She sings a little bit. Apparently Gary is trying to rhyme Amber and ember, and the ember turns to a flame and he stakes his claim.

  His claim?

  Yeah, like he claims me as his true love. His heart would break, so he makes a stake.

  What are you, a gold mine?

  Stop being so literal, Flan. It’s sounds really good with the band behind him, she says. But I do miss the way it was before, when he asked me over every other day.

  She stops for a moment to consult the Google map on her phone, and when she looks up, for a second we are looking into each other’s eyes.

  Maybe I’ll buy some of your love potion after all, she says. She smirks ironically as soon as she says it, but I don’t think she has a drop of real irony in her whole body.

  The smirk is lopsided. Don’t try to pull one over on me, Amber’s smirk says. I know a few things. I’ve been around.

  That’s the smirk.

  It’s like she can’t let anybody see how sincere she is, because none of Gary’s friends particularly like sincere. They like suave and simpering gossip, they’re all lipgloss and platform sneakers, and lately there have been rumors of MDMA and coke.

  And then here comes hopelessly healthy Amber, all shoulders and puffy-eyed from her swimming goggles, her always-wet pale blonde hair turning green at the tips from chlorine, the lopsided smirk ready whenever her true self starts to show through.

  Maybe you should get this witch or Wiccan or whatever you call her to put a spell on it, she says. On your potion. She’s still smirking but her eyes are bright. Imagine if it actually worked?