Seely hid the handkerchief under one of the miniature four-posters beds in her dollhouse. She didn’t think Daddy would take it away from her, but she wasn’t sure. He had always said she had an overactive imagination, something she’d inherited from Mama. He might think keeping the handkerchief was morbid.
Seely did know how to spell “morbid”. Mama had taught her that word.
She trudged into the brown box of the high school, past the snickers and mouth-farts of the popular kids who congregated in the lobby, and climbed a flight of stairs to her locker near the science lab. Today her locker door had been decorated with the legend DIE UGLY BITCH in permanent Magic Marker. It stood out against the earlier scrawls that had been half-heartedly scoured away by the custodial staff. Seely never tried to clean any of it off. Let them see what they’ve done, she thought, as if she were Jackie Kennedy in a pillbox hat and pink suit spattered with the President’s blood. She smirked at her own pretentiousness. They would see what they’d done, but none of them would care. By the absolute decree of high school law, she was an ugly bitch, as well as a fucking slag, a Goth wore, and all the other things that had appeared on her locket at one time or another. They had only to write it and it was so.
Mrs. Amaya, the chemistry teacher, came out of the lab just as Seely finished collection her books and slammed her locker shut. The teacher glanced at the words on the gray metal, then at Seely’s face. Seely looked away.
“Drusilla, you know that’s not true, don’t you? You’re a very pretty girl. If you let your hair grow in natural and wiped some of that black stuff off your face, you could be as pretty as any girls in school.”
“What if I don’t want to?”
“Excuse me?”
“What if I don’t care whether I’m pretty, Mrs. Amaya? What if I think there are more important things than trying to be the prettiest girl in the school?”
The teacher’s lips tightened like the top of a drawstring evening bag whose strings had just been yanked to their full length. Her eyes swept over Seely’s hair, jewelry, clothing. “Well, for not caring, you certainly seem to spend enough…time on your appearance.” She turned on her sensible heel and went clicking off down the hall. Teachers might try to be sympathetic, but they hated it when you actually scored a point off them.
Paul Kinder in her Spanish class wasn’t really a friend. Seely didn’t have any friends at this school. He was just another outcast, one who didn’t seem to take as much comfort from music or books as Seely did. Since he was a boy, the popular kids made things much worse for him; he always seemed to have a black eye or a cut lip or a set of bruises shaped like some football player’s meaty knuckles. Seely thought Paul might be gay, even if he hadn’t yet admitted it to himself. Her belief was based on nothing definite, just a kind of radar she’d picked up living in San Francisco. Her friends there had called it “gaydar”.
She stepped over his enormous bookbag and took the desk behind him. “Hi, Paul.”
“Hey, Seely.”
There was a silence, but she could tell he was getting ready to say something else. Here it came: “Uh, listen, I was wondering if you might want to see a movie this weekend.”
Oh, God. So much for her gaydar. Well, of course it was always possible that he was trying to coax himself into heterosexuality, but she didn’t want to be part of anyone’s experiment. And even if wasn’t an experiment, she just couldn’t stomach the idea: Paul’s skin looked as if it had been basted with chicken fat, and his braces obviously discouraged him from brushing his teeth as often as he needed to. Was she that shallow? Yes, she decided, at least in this case she was.
“I’m sorry, Paul, I can’t. I have…a boyfriend back in California.”
“But you moved here two years ago. You think he’s waiting for you, you’re kidding yourself, Seely.”
Okay, forget trying to let him down easy with a white lie. “Sorry, the answer’s still no.”
Paul didn’t say anything else to her during the class. When the teacher distributed papers to be passed back along the rows, he slung them over his shoulder without looking at her, so that half of them landed on the floor.
“Fuck off, Paul,” she muttered as she bent to pick them up.
She couldn’t concentrate on the lesson. Even when the student body president translated “partido de fútbol” as “football party” for approximately the millionth time—and what the hell did he think a “football party” was, anyway?—it failed to irk her. As soon as the bell rang, she was out of the room without looking at Paul.
The incident worked her nerves all day. He obviously hadn’t expected her to turn him down. Maybe he thought their dual pariah status obliged her to go out with him. Well, then, fuck him. Fuck him and the whole stupid school. She wished she could snap her fingers and make it disappear in a blossom of righteous fire. She didn’t even care if she went with it.
The next morning was much the same: Laurel’s knock on her bedroom door, the Cure in the CD player, Mama’s handkerchief in her pocket. DIE UGLY BITCH hadn’t yet been erased from her locker door, but no new abuse had joined it. She’d been half-worried that Paul might write something, but apparently he wasn’t that crazy.
Just crazy enough to want to go out with me, she thought, and felt a twinge of sadness that was not quite guilt.
The cafeteria at lunchtime smelled like a place where vegetables went to die. Between the stench and the little clots of kids sitting at their holy segregated tables, it was as close as Seely ever hoped to come to Hell. Usually she skipped lunch altogether. Today, thought, she felt a little nauseous and hoped a carton of chocolate milk might settle her stomach. She waited in line to pay for it, ignoring lame barbs like What’s a’matter, you on a diet? Reaching past Mama’s handkerchief to scoop a handful of change out of her pocket.
She had almost reached the cash register when she heard the screams and turned.
Paul Kinder stood before the cafeteria’s double doors, blocking them. His bookbag lay at his feet, limp and crumpled. It took Seely several seconds to recognize the object in his hand: a gun, black and insectile, something that looked capable of squeezing off many rounds in a very short time. Mrs. Amaya was on cafeteria duty today; the screams were coming from her. Everyone else in the room had fallen silent, staring at Paul, waiting for him to do something, Incredibly, some of the boys were smirking. Poor nasty Paul Kinder had brought a gun to school. It was incomprehensible.
She was still trying to comprehend it when he shot Mrs. Amaya in the face.
As the teacher fell, blood bursting from her head and pooling on the grimy floor, other people started screaming. Paul glanced toward a table of cheerleaders who were making a lot of noise, then swung the muzzle of his gun toward them and sent a burst of fire into the center of the group. One of the girl toppled backward in her chair; one fell forward onto the floor, her long blonde hair gone suddenly red. The others scrambled under the table, as kids around the cafeteria had begun to do.
Seely stayed where she was, standing alone near the serving line. She felt a strange, detached sense of elation. Paul was throwing his whole life away for these kids, even though he could never get them all. But watching those cheerleaders scramble and die, standing calmly in the center of the other kid’s terror—it was so satisfying.
She never thought Paul might shoot her until he did.
The bullet punched through her midsection and slammed her back against the wall. There was no pain, just a sudden airlessness, as if she had stepped into a vacuum. She looked at Paul curiously. His face was sweaty, blank. Had he done this because of her—because she had turned him down? She didn’t think so, wasn’t even sure he knew who she was any more. He stared at her for a second longer, then turned toward a boy who was running for the door and shot him in the back.
The boy flew up and out of his sneakers, made a graceful arc in the air, and came down near Mrs. Amaya. The two pools of blood mingled and formed a river that flowed toward Seely. The current grew
strong, forming a wide stream upon whose bank Seely teetered, wondering if she should just let herself fall in. A pure white horse’s head rose out of the stream and spoke to her. “Alas, young queen, how ill you fare. If this your mother knew, her heart would break in two.”
Seely reached into her pocket and touched Mama’s handkerchief. It was soaked, the three drops of blood lost in a sea of her own. She closed her eyes and saw hundreds of white splashes in a steel-colored sky. No, they were geese. Necks stretched out, wings spread wide, geese flying away.
Somewhere in her midsection, a deep red pain had begun to gnaw. If she let go, she could join the geese. Maybe they were going west, to California.
Seely spread her wings and flew.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Billy Martin (born Melissa Ann Brite; New Orleans May 25, 1967), known professionally as Poppy Z. Brite, is an American author best known for writing gothic and horror novels and short stories. Some of Martin’s better known novels include Lost Souls (1992), Drawing Blood (1993), and the controversial serial killer novel Exquisite Corpse (1996); he has also released the short fiction collections Wormwood (originally published as Swamp Foetus; 1993), Are You Loathsome Tonight? (also published as Self-Made Man; 1998), Wrong Things (with Caitlin R. Kiernan; 2001), and The Devil You Know (2003). His “Calcutta: Lord of Nerves” was selected to represent the year 1992 in the story anthology The Century’s Best Horror Fiction.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Martin moved away from horror fiction and gothic themes while still writing about gay characters. The critically acclaimed Liquor novels—Liquor (2004), Prime (2005), and Soul Kitchen (2006)—are dark comedies set in the New Orleans restaurant world. The Value of X (2002) depicts the beginning of the careers of the protagonists of the Liquor series—Gary “G-Man” Stubbs and John “Rickey” Rickey.
Film & TV Adaptations: “The Sixth Sentinel” (filmed as “The Dream Sentinel”), episode 209 of The Hunger (anthology series), Showtime. First aired September 10, 1999.
His works have been translated into German, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, Greek, Finnish, and Portuguese. Independent Legions Publishing translated into Italian, for the first time, his story “Calcutta Lord of Nerves” (“Calcutta, Signora delle Impudenze,” I Sogni del Diavolo, 2015) and “Self-Made Man” (“Risvegli,” Danze Eretiche – Volume 1, 2015).
Independent Legions Publishing published his retrospective story collection Selected Stories (February, 2016) and the novella The Crystal Empire (May, 2016).
Available (in English)
POPPY Z. BRITE – SELECTED STORIES
by Poppy Z. Brite
Story Collection
eBook Edition
Available from February 2016
THE CRYSTAL EMPIRE - NOVELLA
by Poppy Z. Brite
Novella - eBook Edition
Available from May 2016
THE HITCHHIKING EFFECT
by Gene O’Neill
Retrospective Collection
eBook Edition
Available from February 2016
SONGS FOR THE LOST
by Alexander Zelenyj
eBook Edition
Available from April 2016
THE USHERS
by Edward Lee
eBook Edition
Pre-orderable on Amazon
Coming out in May 2016
Forthcoming (in English)
THE BEAUTY OF DEATH
Anthology edited by Alessandro Manzetti
Stories by: Peter Straub, Ramsey Campbell, Poppy Z. Brite, John Skipp, Edward Lee,
Rena Mason, Gene O’Neill, Maria Alexander, Tim Waggoner, Lisa Morton,
and many others.
eBook Edition
Coming out in June 2016
Publications in Italian Language:
www.independentlegions.com/pubblicazioni.html
Web Site/English Version:
http://www.independentlegions.com/english-version.html
Independent Legions Publishing di Alessandro Manzetti
Via Castelbianco, 8 - 00168 Roma (Italy)
www.independentlegions.com
www.facebook.com/independentlegions
Table of Contents
Cover
colophon
Used Stories
Introduction
Toxic WWastrels
Homewrecker
Essence of Rose
Nailed
The Goose Girl
About the Author
Catalogue
Next Issues
Poppy Z. Brite, Used Stories
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