Persephone Underground Read online

  Family rumor had it, Mami Wata turned John into a dog for daring not to love her – for choosing Teresa over her.

  Honestly, I didn’t know if John Runningwolf was dead or alive, so I asked Hayden, who looked so much like his maternal grandfather, Miz Furr’s Dad.

  It’s all so confusing, I know. I even sketched a family tree at the back of my journal trying to keep up with the who’s who in this twisted family. Maybe it doesn’t matter since nothing feels real to me anymore.

  None of this loveliness in the park, talking about clouds with Hayden, is real – not the glasses of wine and basket overloaded with cheese and grapes; his ukulele that he strums for me, singing me love songs. I don’t even remember accepting the bouquet of red and white roses resting at my feet, while we make out on this blanket. It’s all fake, and we can be at leisure here for hours and hours, or days and days if we like.

  Time does not exist here.

  There’s a merry-go-round that spins so fast, you can exit the year 2019 and go hundreds of years forward or back if you like. But the coolest thing about this park – at least to a Florida girl like me – is that you can touch the merry-go-round’s metal surface without burning your hand. It feels like it’s about 68 degrees out here – cool enough to snuggle close to Hayden, and worry that I feel absolutely no heat coming off his body. I can’t detect a heartbeat or merest flutter of a pulse.

  He’s dead, but I pretend not to notice. I refuse to wrestle with what he is – a nasty half serpent like Mami Wata or just a friendly ghost. Whatever he is, I love and accept him completely and never want this moment to end. I know he can vanish forever if he does something to piss his family off. Maybe he can’t physically die, but he’d be dead to me if this family’s black magic made him disappear – and that would break the very real beating heart inside my skinny ribcage.

  My pounding heart knows what’s at stake. Today has been a game changer, and if he’s punished and disappeared for this wonderful day in the park, well…maybe it was worth it. What Hayden did on this sparkling July afternoon was trust enough to take me by the hand and lead me through the big mirror in his bedroom. It wasn’t so hard to climb inside. I poked it tentatively with my finger and the glass gave way like silver jelly, absorbing my hand, arm and eventually entire body as we stepped inside.

  Parting time and space with him was fun. Is it disappointing FUN is the first and only word to come to mind for such a mind bending experience? Hayden couldn’t stop smiling over the fact I had the ability to join him like this – without eating or drinking anything from Mami Wata first.

  They said I was the only girl they’d ever kidnapped, who could float between two worlds in the immortal way the Furrs did. I could smash through glass and rock barriers without a scratch, travel forward and back in time.

  One day, I let it slip –in front of my captors – that I went through a portal to visit Teresa Rose and her twins. I spied on them in their enchanted forest. Mami Wata LOST it!

  She dropped her colander full of home grown green beans, I had picked for her in the glare of the mid-morning sun earlier that day. She was so shocked and angry. We were snapping beans on her front porch when she found out – Hayden too.

  “You visited with my Teresa?” the old woman cried; I’d never seen anyone look so afraid, or, for that matter, violated.

  Hayden and I had talked about Mami Wata’s bisexuality before, and the kind of women she was attracted to. She definitely had a type. She liked sweet looking blonde women, and Teresa Rose fit the profile beautifully.

  “Well, I – I…,” I stammered, even though what I had done was harmless.

  I had walked through one of Mami Wata’s boudoir mirrors – the one big enough to see your entire body reflected back in the glass – and come through into Blue Jordan Forest, where Teresa Rose raised her children, Crystal and Ruby Rose alone, in a house kind of like this one – set far away from the hustle and bustle of this world, where you could hear trees sigh and bend in the breeze.

  I hadn’t talked to anyone. I only spied on them a few minutes. There was a man that looked like Hayden playing with the girls, and calling out for Teresa to join them. The way he said Teresa’s name made me sure he was in love with her.

  The twin girls – probably all of 4 years old – called the man, John Runningwolf. I stayed just long enough for Teresa to come out, and told Mami Wata as much.

  “I hid the whole time – behind a tree in that forest they live in. I just wanted to stay long enough to see Teresa. She’s so pretty in the pictures you have of her in your room, Mami Wata…and, well…I just wanted to see her in person, finally – and John Runningwolf too.”

  Mami Wata stood up and dusted off the one or two green beans clinging to her apron. She overturned a basket of them by her feet as she strode across the porch to slap me hard across the face. She gripped my arms, her long, yellow fingernails digging into me and warned me, her breath stinking of the special wine she made herself, that I was never to go through that mirror again.

  Hayden, who had been working on his own basket of beans on the porch steps raced to my side and defended me from his grandmother, rightfully accusing her of drinking too much Mama Juana wine.

  “Persephone can’t help it if she has the gift to uh….to travel like we do,” he said, carefully considering his words.

  Is that what we were doing, going in and out of mirrors that all lead to hell, eventually? Were we traveling?

  The old voodoo queen said that, yes, indeed I had the Furr’s gift for astral projection. She seemed to get a hold of herself and apologized for striking me, her eyes filling with tears.

  “I’m sorry I hit you, Persephone,” she said rather stiffly. “I just – I – I love Teresa so much. She doesn’t know yet, in the timelines I’ve been crisscrossing lately, that John Runningwolf and I had an affair – that we…have a daughter and a….a….together.”

  Mami Wata stopped talking, just bit her lip and refused to fill in the space after mentioning her daughter.

  The hesitant way Mami Wata talked about my principal, Miz Furr, seemed strange. As though she were leaving something out. When I looked over at Hayden, he seemed to be puzzling over it, too.

  But more than that, he was just mad. Hayden was outraged at what Mami Wata had just done to me, and trying to control his rage.

  “Don’t you ever lay a hand on Seph again,” he spat in the old woman’s general direction.

  The voodoo queen laughed. “Or you’ll what?” she taunted, sizing up his bean pole frame with her eyes.

  In reply to his grandmother, Hayden simply grabbed me by the hand and tore through the screen door, leading me back to his bedroom.

  “I’m taking you to my favorite place,” he said, his voice cracked in a low fever pitch of mystery and passion. He kissed me on the cheek before preparing to step through the mirror on his closet door.

  “Mami Wata doesn’t know about my park and my merry-go-round. Some of this magic is just for us,” he promised me, pulling me in.

  And then we had five more months of this kind of playtime, and loveliness and grandeur together – from July through December, we had it all…and then Hayden was disappeared and someone in his family came after me, just as I was promised they would.

  The Worst Day of my Life: Demons from Hell Come For Me as Promised

  2/2 Diary entries:

  Dear Diary,

  I wasn't sitting in my seat when bullets from a mad man’s gun pierced the glass, covering my history classroom with broken fragments. I listened from an insulated closet, where I had been holed up daydreaming about the love of my life – weeping over how I’d lost my best friend, Hayden, and wondering if voodoo could ever bring my husband back.

  I kept imagining what I would say to Mami Wata – how to plead for his return. Gunfire interrupted my pacing in there. I had been rehearsing my lines.

  At first, the sound was a welcome relief from missing Hayden. It split my ear drums open and hurt me as I used to t
ry to hurt myself. I had stopped cutting since Hayden and I fell in love. The loudness of people being murdered just outside this room brought me out of my own pain for just a minute – it was a fire cracker pop pop of an AR-15, the 4th of July instead of Christmas.

  Once you wrap your brain around the fact coldblooded murder is happening all around you, the first thing you think is who? Why?

  But I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to guess who was doing the shooting – man, woman, a demonic black dog…I couldn’t be sure. The people I suspected to be behind all this could shape shift and change their voices. It wouldn’t matter if I opened the door to see who (or what) it was or not.

  All, I knew was, the shooting was because of me. I, Persephone Gonzalez, had been made to pay this price, and the shooter was mowing down everyone who crossed his path in search of me. The sounds coming from his (her?) weapon of war made me imagine the gun Hayden owned. I'd seen it on one of our many dates, propped against the bunker wall where he lived with his deranged grandmother, a thing – not a human. The scaly entity known as Mami Wata.

  That’s right, Mami Wata is a voodoo queen and she has a gorgeous tail, but I’ll get into all of that later…

  It could be the old voodoo queen, shooting up this place. I had discovered all her secrets when I worked in her house. She was definitely capable of this. It could also be Miz Furr, who resented my short marriage to her son. In all likelihood, though, it was neither of them. It was Lucas Furr, Hayden’s dad, who I knew blamed me for everything.

  But maybe it wasn’t Lucas…my heart lurched for one, sick hopeful moment, that it was actually my sweet Hayden doing the shooting. This family’s death magic was so powerful, so obscene, anything was possible. I longed to have him back under any circumstance.

  The carnage continued. Screams, shattering noises, loud thuds on the floor.

  I covered my ears, too paralyzed with fear and disbelief to scream -- knowing if I did, the shooter would hear me and try the handle on the supply closet door. I retreat often to this closet, and it's where I had the amazing luck to be on the worst day of my life. I could meditate in here. I could forget who I was and what I came from, and how everything I touch eventually turns to shit.

  It was the last week before winter break, but long before that my teacher, Mr. Springer, struck a deal with me. Whenever my arms start tingling and panic makes breathing difficult, he allows me to sit in his supply closet with the door shut. I call Mr. Springer by his first name. He is Marc, and like a father to me. Or he was like a father to me.

  I hunker down. There is little I can do to avoid choking on smoke from spent bullet casings. It’s seeping in from under the door.

  This isn't really happening. It's just another day and I'm going to rejoin the class after I center myself – get off this godforsaken merry-go-round...

  Eyes squeezed shut, I try to envision a field of sunflowers. Instead, Hayden's grandmother, Mami Wata pops into my head. She is a small, stooped black woman who not only practices voodoo, but can treat any doorway as a portal to the seven seas. Her life practicing voodoo on the Boulevard of Champions is just one of many realities Mami Wata inhabits – when she feels like it, anyway.

  She would look around this supply closet and declare me safe as houses – perhaps promise to bring me back to life I weren’t. If Mami Wata were here, she'd steal everything she could carry. That old voodoo witch can do anything. She kidnaps people and dogs alike.

  You’re so stupid, Seph – to think that by just being quiet these undead voodoo freaks can’t guess exactly where you are – but I’m safe in this closet, aren’t I? Safe as houses, and besides that, I learned a thing or two being Mami Wata’s maid all summer. I can hypnotize people too; I can change my face when I feel like it, and I can open a portal into another world too, but fuck it all if there’s a crazy gunman out there and I can’t quite make the world leaping thing work for me today….

  I look fervently from one side of this 8 X 9 space to another. It makes sense the door locks behind you when you enter this huge closet. I am surrounded by AV equipment, an unwieldy laptop cart, and what seems like thousands of books. Marc let me in today because, having just lost Hayden, my heart was broken. I had been in here almost 10 minutes when the shooting rampage began, and I still couldn’t be 100 percent sure who was doing it. I mean, maybe it was presumptuous to think this senseless gun violence was about me at all.

  All kids today live with gun violence. I’d fought about the injustice of that with Hayden’s dad, Lucas, a zillion bitter times. He always said the same thing, more or less.

  Dead kids don’t trump my constitutional right to own a gun.

  I remembered how his eyes always narrowed into hateful slits when he told me that. I remember the times Mami Wata hadn’t drugged me, and I saw what was actually going on. How he was messing around with my teacher, Demi Springer – helping her cheat on Mr. Springer. My favorite teacher was probably dead by now – murdered in his own classroom if he hadn’t managed to run away.

  I calmed myself, picturing it: Marc running away through Bad Ass Academy’s football field and on to safety.

  Nope, I muttered over and over, crying into my fists, rocking back and forth on the freezing supply closet floor. It couldn’t be Lucas out there shooting. Maybe it was about a spurned female lover. Yep. It was a girl out there – a girl like me who had finally had enough of this pressure cooker thing called life.

  Eventually, I realized with a broken and angry heart, the shooter and I were the only two living people in this classroom.

  She – I became more and more convinced it was a she – remained in the room until I assumed she had exhausted her ammo. It got eerily quiet, but I did pick up on one injured person pleading for his life.

  The shooter stomped off in the direction of the sound. I cringed when his combat boots squeaked past because I could tell they were slippery with blood. There was another pop pop that silenced the dying man. It was my teacher, Mr. Springer. I realized as much with a crack through the heart.

  The murderer called him a faggot. The voice was masculine – a cross between Hayden’s voice and Lucas’s voice. They had always sounded alike to me.

  And so, I heard his last victim fall against the door, muttering "please". I didn’t open the door and pull him into my sanctuary, even if logically I knew this little room could hold a dozen of my friends and classmates. My teacher's death – I was later to learn he was shot four times – is probably on me. I never said as much to Marc's wife, Demi, my beautiful, ginger haired surrogate mom. She is so funny, Demi. She does stand-up comedy.

  There is nothing to laugh about now or ever again. Oh, Hayden! You warned me your family was pure evil.

  He said this would be "the price" if I broke my vow to join he and Mami Wata down in Hell. I'd seen what his sick family had done to all those other “missing” girls. I knew I was next, so I broke up with him. Hayden couldn’t handle it. And what came next was losing him. I thought his family would just forget me and kidnap somebody else. I thought because his mother was Principal here, there was no way anyone from the Furr family would dream of choosing my school as the landscape for such vengeance.

  "Seph," I heard him yell once more; this time in an agonized and defeated whimper. He seemed heartbroken he hadn’t killed me. Of course, I couldn't see anything beyond these walls, but I imagined him kicking over the dead body of a girl who looked like me -- to see if it was my bloody face and not Lisette Sanchez's. The student population here was mostly black students, Lisette and I representing the smaller fraction of Latinos.

  My name, as I said before, is Persephone Gonzales. I know. Weird. But at the end of the day, it's a lucky name. I was the only person out of 23 students and 1 teacher to walk out alive.

  I waited what seemed like days to leave that closet. But in timelines about the shooting I read later on, it is estimated I spent around 90 minutes in hiding. Eventually, I stopped thinking about Hayden because it only made my panic worse. Inst
ead, I did a lot of simple math problems in my head to pass the time. I thought about my life, and the irony of my goofy, Greek name. My mom and Dad came up with it right before he dumped her, returning to his work on the Royal Caribbean, pulling rabbits out of hats and sawing pretty women in half.

  I was born to a single mother, who watched him perform and got me from a one night stand…on a cruise to see ancient ruins in Mexico. It sounds like cheesy copy, written on a box of perfume.

  "Just call me Seph," I tell everyone even though the shortened version of my name rarely takes. I try never to get into a conversation about why my Mom chose the name Persephone. I’m just biding my time with her, trying not to get too close. I just wanna light out for college and reinvent myself as a motherless child.

  I’ll make lots of friends and none of them will ever know I’m a cutter and a foster kid.

  I used to joke with Hayden that I could accept the Alice In Wonderlandish weirdness of his home-life because being a foster child for so long taught me not to believe in anything real. Man, did he and his grandmother provide a fantasy! A shimmering, lovely underwater royal court to go and play princess in – and take my mind off how much I resented my life.

  Family drama like mine isn’t unusual at Bad Ass Academy. When I told my favorite teachers, Marc and Demi what I call it, they spit out their wine. I thought of all the times I’d been invited for dinner and sleepovers at their house and cried some more.

  I’m never coming over to your place for dinner again, am I, Demi? You were taking your chances anyway, adopting a student like me from Bad Ass.

  Many, many students here have a parent in prison, or a former/future jailbird for a mom or dad.

  This life makes me anxious, and I think I’m having a fresh new panic attack. Every night, lately, I am plagued by nightmares…

  I keep having dreams about visiting Allyson in the cemetery. I think I may have seen something on her birthday that can help explain this shooting, but I don’t remember exactly what. It slips through my fingers when I try to call it back.