Persephone Underground Read online

  But the real reason I shake like a leaf on a tree 24/7 is probably because I got kidnapped back in June – held hostage by Hayden’s grandma, Mami Wata. All of the Furrs were in on it – the old voodoo queen, my principal and her husband, Lucas.

  They kept me prisoner in Mami Wata’s house on the Boulevard of Champions all summer long. And they did in in plain sight of my mother with their voodoo. They brainwashed Mom into thinking everything was A-okay THE ENTIRE TIME I LIVED THERE.

  I guess that’s an easy enough thing to pull on someone who works as hard as Mom does. No way is she home in our apartment right now, and no way is she coming home until the wee hours. She will probably be one of the nurses, wheeling kids down to the morgue tonight. The thought endears her to me, but it's my teacher Demi I call on my cell phone, while trapped in the supply closet. Demi who I text over and over. I am especially worried about Demi because, like Marc, she is a teacher at Bad Ass Academy and I wonder if one of Hayden's bullets found their way into her yet.

  She doesn't answer. I can tell from the silence and the roar of a siren getting closer that the shooter fled. The police and ambulances are on their way to pick up the pieces.

  No way am I opening this supply closet and stepping over a bunch of dead bodies.

  So, I climbed up on a media cart, reaching down to grab the one chair in here. I used it to break the little oblong window over the bookcase. It took several tries but I finally broke through, careful to shield my face from falling pieces. I already have an old scar on my cheek, where Mom’s empty wine bottle from all those years ago shattered, and a piece lodged in my forehead in the accident – hurting my brain, making me prone to daydreaming and outlandish fantasies.

  The window opened out onto the school football field, and I ran across it toward the apartment Mom and I share. Home is only a mile or so from Bad Ass Academy. I wanted to be alone and figure out what to do next.

  s

  Chapter

  3

  The summer before the shooting

  The crazy merry-go-round in my brain has decided to go backwards and stop on summer. I met Hayden at The Pomegranate, a nightclub in downtown Ft. Lauderdale. Roughly two weeks into my summer vacation, I was there about a job. I missed the first interview, and even though I had zero good excuses as to why, Miz Furr said the powers that be at The Pomegranate still wanted to talk.

  I drove alone to the interview in my next to new car, a 17th birthday present from Mom. She did okay as a nurse – good enough to buy me an orange Volkswagen beetle that was like arriving everywhere by pumpkin. She said my grades were just too good not to have something extra special this year. Then, in a flash, she was off to the hospital.

  When she works late or I study all night, we both pretend it bothers us, but the truth is we like being apart. She pulls double shifts to beat guilt, and I study to overcome a huge learning curve. I’m not saying I’m retarded. I’m definitely not! Honestly, I outgrew a lot of the issues that come with “dyscalculia” – what doctors and teachers claim I have…I mean had. I think of my disability in the past tense now. I’m just another ordinary high school senior with abysmal SAT scores.

  See, a dumb person would never have sad that. I really should have been studying for my SATs the day I met Hayden. But there I was, 15 minutes early, debating on whether I should announce myself to my potential employers.

  I chose my best, but by no means favorite, dress. Mom called it “the flowery little number”: a white dress patterned in green roses, and not my gothic style at all. I prefer red and black gowns in crushed velvet – a crimson choker at my neck that makes it seem like my head might topple off. I think that’s cool.

  This dress was cut similarly to the one Marilyn Monroe wore when her skirt blew up and exposed her underwear. The neckline dipped low, and it tied around my neck. I wore an onyx jewel on a chain because I thought it accentuated my black eyes. And because I really, really wanted the job, a pushup bra.

  I may be skinny, but I’m not flat chested – counterintuitive, but I’ll take it.

  My hair, however, was in a conservative style that day. It was waist length and black as pitch, and I liked it up when the temperature climbed to 90 degrees. With my hair in a bun, I could impress them with my speed in case they asked me to do anything – like bus a table or whip up a drink. I was underage of course, but maybe their bartenders would look the other way. And of course, I’d talk myself up as a decent cook because I took culinary classes at my school, and even placed first in a grilled cheese competition last year.

  How could they possibly turn me down? I’ve done some waitressing, and even though my mom hasn’t touched a drop of alcohol since prison, I love to mix myself a fancy drink now and then. I keep little airplane bottles of booze in a shoebox under my bed, and can proudly say they’ve never gotten me drunk. I’m lucky not to be the additive type.

  Besides using the bottle caps on root beer to drive into my arms until they bleed, I just don’t have an addictive personality, and my work ethic is pretty good for a kid. Today, I wore a chunky bracelet that doesn’t slide around. It hides where I last tried to hurt myself when I need it to.

  I really need this job! I hope they’ll hire me!

  I think of Miz Furr – how she called my mom when I was a no show last week and said she understood “these things happen” and not to worry about me working in a bar. I wouldn’t be serving alcohol anyway. The job was to involve a lot of housekeeping and behind the scenes work for her mother, who needed a companion.

  I got on the phone at one point and said that sounded good to me. It was just one of a handful of interactions I’d had with Miz Furr in nearly 4 years at Bad Ass Academy.

  This is how we met…

  Miz Furr popped into culinary club one day and followed her nose to my cooking station.

  “That smells good,” was all she said. Then she left a business card for The Pomegranate on the counter. It had a graphic of the fruit on it, sliced open. The “seeds” inside were caricatures of people who perform at the night club: comedians, musicians and psychics.

  I thought I’d never hear about it again until I overheard other students talking. Some girls hanging up Yearbook posters just before school let out mentioned The Pomegranate. I had stopped in the hall to help them hang a banner, and in a blast of watermelon scented bubble gum, they gossiped about the help wanted sign on the nightclub’s door. A lot of kids from the school hung out in downtown Lauderdale and had seen it.

  Everyone knew the nightclub was owned by Miz Furr’s weird ass husband, Lucas. They thought maybe she got her crankiness from him. If so, she took damn good notes! Word had it, Miz Furr was the most feared school administrator in the county. She had a reputation for swooping in our favorite teachers, walkie-talkie at her hip, and giving them such poor evaluations they eventually quit or got fired. We heard her husband ran the nightclub in much the same way. I knew his name was Lucas because I’d glimpse his name in the news now and then. He threw fundraisers for Republican politicians, and was also a gun nut according to what I’d read.

  Anyway, the girls I talked to about the hostess job had spoken to Principal Furr about it, just like I had – only they turned her down. They said she had behaved like a recruiter, and was “creeping them out”. By their account, Miz Furr had practically begged them to come by and meet her son, who did all The Pomegranate’s hiring. His name was Hayden, age 22. Apparently, he wasn’t doing the whole college thing.

  I nodded as they ran over all the stuff I already knew because I’d been given the same sales pitch.

  “I feel like she was trying to set me up with him,” admitted a student named Daphne.

  Daphne lied to Miz Furr and said she was going away all summer and not getting a job. She confided to me this was a hard decision – that she had stalked Hayden’s profile on social media and liked what she saw, but something about his good looks just couldn’t erase the bad vibes.

  I told Daphne I knew what she meant – that eve
ry time I pictured Miz Furr’s face, it was stern and serious as a heart attack. When Daphne said she obviously didn’t want to work somewhere infamous for kidnappings, I pretended to agree, even though what I thought was very much on the side of the devil.

  I’ll work anywhere for the right amount of money. I can’t let fear get in the way of opportunity. Mom showed me how fragile human life can be – how you can be alive one minute and in a twisted car wreck the next. No matter how I’m meant to go, maybe I ought to just die and get it over with. Accept this summer job. Stop hangin’ on so tight.

  Daphne and those other girls in the hall at Bad Ass Academy, however, were different from me. They were terrified of Miz Furr and her husband’s nightclub. They wanted nothing to do with Miz Furr’s hot son, either. They described Hayden as a lanky boy, probably over six feet, very muscular and with the tanned, dark eyed look of a Native American Indian. He even wore his hair long.

  “His face is gorgeous!” they had crowed, yet in the same breath: “but there’s something kind of evil about it too – a meanness in his eyes.”

  “Like mother, like son!” we had all laughed as we finished tacking up the posters. We looked around after we said it to make sure Miz Furr hadn’t heard.

  The day of my interview, it almost felt like the principal was watching me. Yet I was miles away from Bad Ass on this cloudless blue day, with 10 weeks of summer vacation ahead of me. I needed to snap out of the heebie jeebies. There was nothing to be scared of. If I managed to land this job, I wouldn’t need a scholarship for college.

  Two minutes to interview time, I finally got out of my car and walked inside the empty nightclub. It was before noon, so of course no one was around. The decorating inside was all nautical – with big conk shells and sailing vessel antiques. Starfish that looked like they’d been plucked from a coral reef as recently as 5 minutes ago leaned on every shelf. I felt like a mermaid in there – so much so, the hustle and bustle just outside The Pomegranate’s doors faded away, until all that existed for me was this aquarium of a gigantic room.

  Maybe this is the way everyone feels in the nicest part of town – like the outside world no longer matters.

  The nightclub sat on the edge of a canal in the shopping district, Las Olas. Its large windows opened up to a view of tourists shopping and boating down the canals. They rode in gondolas, the kind of boat you can pay to ride in Venice.

  Pictures of Miz Furr’s husband hung on the wall – mostly of him with his arm looped around the shoulders of a politician. I follow politics, actually. My mom and all my friends call me a news junkie. I shivered at photos of Lucas Furr with the slimiest politicians in America. He was a light skinned black man with a crooked little mustache. He reminded me of Gomez from the Addams Family.

  I moved on in my tour, past the nightclub’s grand piano and stage, with its microphone adjusted for the super tall comedians they must have assumed would show up for amateur night.

  The bar was huge – maybe a thousand different sized bottles of liquor in different colors lining its multi-tiered shelves. The red and blue bottles of booze sparkled in the sunlight, and drew my attention to a poster on the wall advertising their signature drink: a pomegranate martini.

  They ran a killer business. That I could see. I wandered over to a bar stool, sat down and screamed in surprise when I heard my name.

  “Persephone, I presume?” It was an older woman’s voice. I swiveled around in my chair and saw Mami Wata, Hayden’s grandma. She was dressed like you’d expect a fortune teller to be – her hair (if she had any) swept up in a yellow turban. She wore a Mumu to match. Her dress was as dowdy as mine was sexy. If she was going to be the one conducting the interview, I immediately regretted my wardrobe choice.

  “Yes, that’s me,” I told her, getting off the stool and frowning at its red leather surface because I’d left a sweat stain. “But you can call me Seph. I’m here about the interview?”

  I always frame my speech in questions when I’m nervous. It’s an annoying tick I have.

  “Come here and sit with me while you wait,” the old woman said in a soothing Caribbean accent that wrapped around me like an island breeze. “My grandson, Hayden will be the one to decide, and he should be here any minute.”

  The one to decide. The grandmother made it sound so ominous, but she put me at ease chatting about how her daughter, Robin Furr, was principal of Bad Ass Academy and sent only “the best students” in for interviews.

  “C’mon, I don’t bite,” Mami Wata said. She looked just like Miz Furr, but a softer version. I remembered then, where Miz Furr was from because the kids all talked about it last hurricane season, when her vacation home on Hummingbird Highway in Belize City got wiped out. The Furr family came from a part of the world where giant, stone temples built by Aztecs lorded over the tropical scenery.

  I went over to Mami Wata’s table, where her tarot deck and a cup of tea rested. It smelled strongly of ginger. I preferred to stare into her tea leaves, and not her face. She was one of those people you absolutely could not estimate the age of. Was she 60 or 35? Her face was unwrinkled, but she seemed – even sitting down – stooped and old.

  An African American woman of light coloring, maybe she sometimes passed for white. Some of her features were Caucasian. She had a small nose, and her eyes were green; they were mesmerizing. I stared right into them and started babbling about my mother – how she had given me a car, and I still didn’t love her.

  “Yes, yes, my child,” she cooed, “you’ll do nicely for Hayden. He will love you the way you have been looking to be loved; the way you think you need to be.”

  She pushed the cup of tea at me and urged me to take a sip. I gulped from it greedily, suddenly very thirsty. Then I have a distinct memory of Mami Wata snapping her fingers and the loudness of it making me turn toward The Pomegranate’s entrance.

  In walked in the best looking man I had ever seen. Sure I hadn’t lived long enough to evaluate all that many men, but this guy would have impressed the worldliest among us. He knocked the wind out of little old me.

  Hayden Furr stood as tall and graceful as a tree; his hair as long as mine and yet entirely masculine. It reminded me of a horse’s tail. He wore a sleeveless deer skin vest, in which his biceps were impossible to look away from. Don’t get me wrong. His muscles didn’t bulge like a pro wrestler or anything like that, but they were big enough to pull off wearing arm jewelry made of silver and topaz. The snake-like arm band dug into his tanned skin. His arms were corded with veins. His dimples showed when he smiled at me, said my name.

  “Grandma, is this the girl you dreamed about?” he asked Mami Wata.

  The old woman told him that, yes, I was indeed the girl from her dream – the girl who should work for the Furr family. It was explained to me that Mami Wata offered psychic readings at The Pomegranate, and had recently done one for Hayden. She told him that I, Persephone Gonzales, was the love of his life and destined to marry him.

  Hayden seemed to approve of his grandmother’s matchmaking. He sat down at the table with us and took my trembling hand. He kissed it, then turned it slowly over in his own. Shock waves ran up my arm. When his brown eyes drank me in, I tried to see the meanness the girl from my high school had seen, but I couldn’t divine anything more than how much he wanted me, too.

  Even drugged, I had to laugh at myself. I knew this was a cliché straight out of a yellow-backed romance novel. Hell, Hayden looked like the men on those cheesy book covers, but it’s how I felt at the moment. Frankly, I think the tea I was stupid enough to drink, put me in this trance.

  I listened to Hayden and Mami Wata laugh and talk quietly as though I wasn’t there. She asked me to do something, and I got up like a robot and walked over to the bar; eventually, their voices started to sound like crashing waves.

  I had to lean against the bar because I felt dizzy, and I giggled as I do when I get nervous. I started making a bunch of goofy, random associations. I was in Las Olas, which translated
into “The Waves”, and Hayden was asking me in a strange new ocean language to make him a drink.

  I obliged. This was, however odd, the test that proved whether or not I could work as a hostess here. I felt like I was up on a shelf, watching myself do things. I began opening cabinets and drawers behind the bar, assembling my ingredients and 3 martini glasses that sparkled in the summer light. The smell of a pomegranate fruit was pungent as I sliced into it. It was hard to pin down on the counter top. I had always recoiled at the sight of pomegranate – such an ugly fruit, with all those hundreds of seeds inside that stained your hands like you’d just committed murder.

  They looked like red bath beads – vaguely sexual. I saw six seeds glistening on the bar’s stainless steel surface and picked up each one delicately, placing seeds first on my tongue, and then letting their juiciness yield to my back teeth.

  I drained the pomegranate juice into the glasses and deftly made them into sweet martinis. I brought Hayden and Mami Wata a cocktail, and watched as they toasted me; part in horror and part in triumph. I felt like I was an unwitting bride or something. Like I had just agreed to marry this smoking hot guy, and there was no turning back.

  “She’s too young to be a bartender, even if she does mix a mean drink. According to mom, she also cooks,” Hayden told his grandmother.

  Then Hayden said something I’ll never forget – that no amount of voodoo could wipe from my memory.

  “She’s different from the others. Her scars run deeper. I like that. Can we give Persephone a choice in all this? I mean, look at how hard she’s resisting your magic,” Hayden winked.

  My brain fought hard, it was true. I tried to be more present at this table – stop behaving like a robot that was shutting down, slurring words, being dragged against my will into this strange new family.