Persephone Underground Read online

  A boy in a wetsuit paddled by and asked if he could help.

  “Miss,” he said, apparently confused over what I was doing and whom I had lost, “that life guard over there wants us out. He’s screaming at us to get out because of high tide.”

  He extended his hand to me with none of the slow-motion drama I’d seen from Hayden earlier. He aimed to get us out of the water, and fast. I savored the feel of his dripping, big hand. Apparently, drowning was not in the cards today.

  We both made our way back to the beach – the safe, sandy part, where families I hadn’t noticed before were packing up their folding chairs and coolers. The life guard had come down from his high tower and was whistling at the few other stubborn swimmers to get out of the water.

  If these people had been out here the whole time, and I didn’t see them…what did that mean? Could hallucinating erase things? Was Ronnie sucked down into some kind of Bermuda Triangle – had we temporarily entered a different dimension only Hayden and I could see before she disappeared?

  I decided I had nothing to lose by asking the kid in the wetsuit, who’d helped me to the shore, if he saw a drowning woman fitting Ronnie’s description.

  “My friend and I were swimming, and now I can’t find her,” I panicked.

  The kid seemed mystified, and said he hadn’t seen anybody but me out there. I found my shoes right where I had left them before Ronnie and I waded in. From what I recalled, she’d taken hers, so of course her shoes weren’t there.

  The life guard watched me scramble about in attempt to collect myself, hands on his hips.

  “Honey, you need to lay off the drugs,” he said. “I’ve had my eye on you since you got here. You got into that water alone. Your friend left you walking on the beach a while ago.”

  I tore off before he could lecture me on the dangers of Calypso lemonade. I ran as fast as I could to Ronnie’s bungalow. Her front door was yawning open when I got there. I pounded up the old, creaky steps of her historic little dollhouse.

  I looked frantically left and right, desperate to see my friend. Her bedroom, where the giant antique mirror hung, was sealed off – but from under the door, I saw flickering red – not flames so much as demonic light. I tried the handle and burnt the hell out of my hand.

  I wept from the crazy pain, sure the flesh had been seared off, yet was relieved when the door gave and creaked open on its vintage hinges. Ronnie sat on the foot of her bed, naked with her long dark hair flowing down her back. She stared into the mirror in front of her bathed in its strange light show – that was where the red light was coming from – the mirror.

  I jumped on her bed and tried to pull her back, concerned that maybe heat from the light would burn her skin as well. Instead of cast back our reflections, Hayden filled the mirror and he was crying, weeping.

  He was not the tall Indian from the beach; it was the awkward boy I loved in there, beseeching us from a magic mirror to love him in spite of what he was and where he came from.

  Apparently he knew. He had been informed of Miz Furr and Lucas’s terrible secret.

  I gathered my courage and pretended I was fire proof; I marched straight up to the mirror and confronted my lover. This was the version that I loved. The version Ronnie preferred was out on Delray Beach, pulling girls down into the deep in his ridiculous seaweed skirt.

  “Hayden, it’s me, Seph. Can you see me?”

  The flickering stopped, and it was just Hayden, looking at me from inside the mirror. He reached out through its glass and tried to touch me, draw me in, but our hands were like brass rings on a carousel and somehow never met up. The room was spinning, but not so much that I couldn’t see.

  “My parents are brother and sister,” Hayden announced, putting a gun to his head.

  Ronnie, still in bed, was on all fours, reaching an arm out to Hayden and shouting for him not to pull the trigger. The bedroom filled with the sounds of Fury’s barking and the deep dark voices of Lucas Furr and Mmai Wata, joining our chorus of pleas not to harm himself.

  “Don’t, oh please don’t,” we all screamed.

  I stood by the mirror, gripping the side of Ronnie’s vanity table for dear life. Her makeup, bedside books and papers blew around the room as though caught in a category 4 hurricane. Ronnie levitated about four feet above her bed covers. We heard a deafening single gunshot. The antique mirror shattered in its frame, pieces of the glass lodging in my arms as I covered my face, trying to protect myself

  Everything swirling violently around the room crashed back down again, succumbing to gravity and the quick exit of the blackest magic we had ever witnessed. We were left with only the sounds of crickets outside and waning light. The sun had sunk into the horizon and it was dark now.

  Ronnie was no longer catatonic, running over to me and holding my tear streaked face in her hands.

  “Are you okay, Seph?”

  I was not okay. I was bleeding a little from the cuts on my arms, but I was okay.

  “Hayden is dead!” I cried, looking down at my own blood droplets and what they spelled on the surface of my friend’s vanity table.

  YOU WILL PAY.

  Chapter

  23

  When that glass shattered and revealed – in all its crushed and glittering brokenness – that my sweet Hayden was gone, a part of me died too. The effects of the drugged lemonade wore off on Ronnie and me both. I helped her sweep up $100,000 worth of mirror into a trash bag.

  “I wouldn’t have time to sell it back to the antique shop anyway,” Ronnie tearfully mused. “I have to get out of here, before Lucas or Mami Wata come for me.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “Forgive me, if I can’t tell you. I love you –feel as close to you as I do my own sister, but if I tell you those witches will just find a way to divine info out of you. I have a plan,” Ronnie sniffed.

  “I understand,” was all I could muster. I watched her pace for a few minutes and then wordlessly got up – my own mind racing on what I, the real culprit, was going to do. There was school tomorrow. Obviously, Miz Furr would not be there. I imagined she’d be taking bereavement for her dead son.

  Ronnie grabbed a suitcase out of the closet and began haphazardly throwing in clothes. I wandered out of her bungalow without even saying goodbye. It was probably wrong to drive home in this state, but I had no choice, really. There was simply too much bad energy to linger any longer. I felt it around me as heavy as if I’d been wearing a fur coat.

  Mami Wata’s voodoo – as tactical as the damn Combat! game – ensured she could pinpoint my exact location if I didn’t keep on movin’. I kept my eye out for animals that could be them – she or Lucas shapeshifting into things that might harm me, stop me from returning home to my mother.

  The way I calmed myself enough to get home in one piece was reasoning that perhaps nothing bad had come of Hayden at all. Maybe Ronnie and I hallucinated his suicide. I hesitantly reached for my phone, lying in the passenger seat – thinking that if I called her and urged her to take a moment to center herself – maybe she wouldn’t be so drastic and make good on her plan to leave town.

  I had a feeling she was on her way to the Palm Beach airport with a one-way ticket out of dodge. I also had quite another sharp feeling – nausea. I pulled to the side of the road and threw up. I kept thinking of my clam shell mirror back home – how if I had the courage to pry it open with my shaking fingers, I could perhaps communicate with Mami Wata and learn the extent of the damage. Was Hayden really dead? Was the option still there, to join him in the Underworld?

  Mom was waiting for me down in the apartment complex parking lot when I arrived home. She was still in her hospital scrubs, with mascara tracks on her face.

  “Sweetie, I just got the most awful news about Hayden.”

  I ran past her, mumbling that I already knew and was going to be sick again. She followed me up to our Sugar plum unit and waited outside the bathroom, listening to me make good on my threat. I took the compact mirror o
ut of the little bathroom vanity closet, where I had hidden it behind a blister pack of Pepcid AC.

  “You shouldn’t be alone right now, Persephone. Come out and let me make you some tea?” Mom offered.

  I had to laugh at that. Could I trust such an invitation? Maybe Mom wasn’t Mom at all, but Mami Wata shapeshifting, ready to provide a lethal dose of sweet retribution in a coffee mug.

  “No thanks,” I answered back shakily. “I’m not going to kill myself too…if that’s what you’re worried about. I only knew Hayden one summer. It’s not like we were all that close.”

  Only that last part was a lie.

  “I’m so sick, Mom. I need to just sit by the toilet a few more minutes. You can go ahead and make the tea, though.”

  Mom set off to make my favorite peppermint tea, and said it would be good for me to have some hydration before it was ready.

  “Grab that cup in there and drink water, Persephone,” she urged. Her nurse-like suggestion helped me relax. It really was my mom out there – not the stinky mermaid voodoo queen that drove Hayden to his death.

  Or maybe I should be mad at Ronnie. I was still walking back from the beach when she told him whatever it is she told him to make him want to kill himself. I’d never have another chance to ask her exactly what she said to him, other than spilling that icky little can of beans about his parents being twins.

  Ronnie was long gone by now.

  When I came out, Mom had two steaming cups ready and ushered me over to the couch.

  “Did Mami Wata call you and tell you?” I asked. “About Hayden?”

  “No, your friends Demi and Marc did. They’re extremely connected to the Furr family, it seems.”

  “I wonder if there will be school tomorrow. Hayden was my principal’s son,” I reminded mom.

  “That had crossed your teachers’ minds,” Mom said of The Springers, “but no, apparently the world goes on – for your high school anyway.”

  We finished our tea and talked about everything but boyfriends and suicide until the absurd little cuckoo clock mom kept near the kitchen whistled 4.

  “Did you want to talk more about…it?” Mom asked, glancing nervously at the time.

  I just shook my head.

  “I have to go to work,” she sighed.

  She slayed me with this, but I kept it a secret. Why in God’s name wasn’t she going to call off work and stay right here with me? I desperately wished, she’d not only let me stay home from school, but bring me a bowl of tomato soup, a grilled cheese sandwich and ginger ale for good measure.

  I watched her pack her satchel and throw on the lanyard all the nurses wore.

  “Seph, you don’t have to go to school today if you don’t want,” she said before she left me.

  I wanted to plead with my mother to stay, but all I said was:

  “I know, Mom. Bye.”

  For the rest of my life, I would regret not getting up off the couch to hug her. It would be the last time I would ever get to embrace my mother in a normal way.

  Chapter

  24

  Just hours before the shooting

  Surreal to think, “here I am, sitting in school” when the unthinkable has happened. My principal has lost her son. I have lost a husband. Mami Wata has lost her link to the Underworld and a chance to resurface into a brand new life, the three of us a family.

  I should have skipped school and spent the day working on the courage to show up on the Boulevard of Champions with a card – or at the very least pry open the magic clamshell and talk to Mami Wata about Hayden’s funeral.

  But I did neither. I just reported to school, taking in the grim morning announcements that asked every student at Bad Ass Academy for a moment of silence.

  “Please keep Miz Furr and her family in your thoughts and prayers. The principal’s son died expectantly last night,” the intercom squawked.

  It seemed funny in a way. I know Hayden would have laughed at such serious news being conveyed, as though through the intercom at a McDonald’s. The reception was a bit crackly, and my classmates began talking all kinds of smack about Hayden before we stood for the Pledge of Allegiance.

  “I heard he shot himself in the head,” one girl whispered to her friend.

  At lunch, I heard another kid say that it was easy to get a hold of a gun at the Furr residence – that Miz Furr’s husband kept an arsenal down under some crazy old lady’s tree.

  “The Principal’s husband loves his 2nd amendment rights more than he loves her,” a pair of friends concluded over the cafeteria’s gross food.

  As I shuffled back from lunch, and into Mr. Springer’s class, it began to slowly dawn on me that perhaps his father, Lucas would exercise his 2nd amendment rights on me. It wouldn’t be his style to do it himself. He’d hire some goons, but he’d do it, certainly. He’d kill me anyway he could, as he more than likely held me responsible for Hayden’s suicide.

  When it was finally time for Marc’s class to start, I popped my head into Demi’s classroom – hoping to say hi. No luck. Her students were waiting for her to get back from the bathroom I guess.

  Marc Springer stood at his door as he always did, greeting students as they drifted in. He looked so pensive today. He hadn’t known Hayden at all – in fact I’m not sure they ever met, but he did know my proxy to the whole terrible situation. I wondered if this meant, he and Demi would never have me over to dinner again.

  By the middle of class, my panic level rose to an agonizing crescendo. Without saying a word, Marc gave me “the look” – the one that said, “yes, Seph, you may go to the supply closet now and have your little freak out.

  The door clicked shut behind me, and I was free to choose a book to read in there. If I weren’t equal parts heart broken and freaked out over Hayden, I might have read one of those books. I would have picked Edith Hamilton’s Greek mythology and sat down wearily. Let the writing on those pages whisk me away to a land of she-beasts with heads full of live, writhing snakes – sea monsters and giants with a single, giant eye on their foreheads.

  It was no match for what Hayden had shown me in the Underworld. When the shooter barged in, I was busy rehearsing what I would say into my clam shell mirror when I finally got a hold of Mami Wata.

  The first blood curdling scream came from the girl sitting closest to the door. That was the last sound she made, in a staccato of explosive gunfire. Others began coughing from the smoke the big rifle produced.

  Male and female voices pleaded, No, no and don’t kill me, The shooter heeded none of it – not even Marc’s plea to spare his life. Maybe especially not Marc.

  “Bet you wish you had a gun now, don’t you, you scared little bitch,” the shooter sneered at my anti-gun teacher.

  And from that, I finally knew who had just murdered my whole class in cold blood. It was Lucas Furr. Tears ran down my face, burning and hot, remembering the debate he and the Springers had at the dinner party a few weeks ago.

  Hayden’s father objected to the idea of cry baby liberals taking his guns away. He hated gun control so much that even talking about it seemed like a threat – a slippery slope to cleaning out his arsenal – surrendering control to an increasingly communist government.

  Oh how Lucas Furr had complained about his taxes at that dinner – about the fights he and Miz Furr had about “loser teachers” indoctrinating their students into “bone headed” thinking about the way politics in America ought to work.

  I remembered now, the way Lucas’s lips set into a thin and impatient line when Marc and Demi both challenged him with, “but you and your wife are minorities, who weren’t born in the United States. You come from Belize. How can you feel this way about immigration?”

  Now, slumped over in a bloody lump, Marc couldn’t challenge Lucas on anything. He pumped a new round into my dead teacher and laughed. I assumed he found it funny – how easy it had been to do this much murdering, unchallenged.

  No one entered our classroom to take this devil down. Ever
yone outside Mr. Springer’s classroom had fled the scene in abject fear. As soon as Lucas left, muttering about how he would eventually find me, I broke loose from the closet by shattering its one, small window. I ran back to my apartment.

  My stomach dropped like a hot rock when I saw Mom’s car parked at home. She was supposed to be at work. I needed her to be at work. I climbed the stairs to our dwelling. Nothing was amiss as far as sound. It was quiet out in the corridor, and quite when I stepped inside. No one had turned the lights on. I stepped briefly out on our balcony to check if there was any strange activity on the green acre of grass it faced. The AR-15 lay propped up against the balcony railing.

  I gasped, my stomach sinking yet again as I caught sight of a black dog running through the field. It had to be Fury – and where there was Fury, there was Lucas. I went to the bathroom where I kept the clam shell mirror from Mami Wata, knowing I wanted to claw it open and ask it questions. But now was not the time; I had to focus on finding my mother. I shoved the mini-magic mirror into my back pocket.

  I went all over the house, calling for Mom, flicking on the lights. Our bedroom doors were both shut, and I caught the faintest whiff of copper pennies coming from her room. I burst into it, weeping, knowing what I would see.

  Mom had been shot in the stomach, an exit wound the size of a golf ball in her torso – sticky with blood. There were fresh rivulets pouring out of her. I had entered this grisly scene mere seconds before she succumbed to her injuries.

  I got on the floor, cradling her head in my lap and repeating the same word over and over: “no, no, no!”

  “A man, a man shot me. I think it was your school shooter,” mom managed to blurt out – the one I heard about on the news…why I rushed home.”

  Blood was coming out of her mouth. She’d taught me a lot about first aid and I knew making a tourniquet to stop the bleeding was pointless. She wasn’t going to make it. We both knew that.