White Coat A, galvanized by the sight of the girl at work, casts his notebook to the ground. He looks ready to jump the citadel wall to observe her close up, but settles for leaning as far over the railing as gravity will allow.
The rain splatters down around her. The thunder growls explosively overhead, and the girl goes to work.
She heads to the southeast corner of the citadel and sets the basket down next to a pile of fruit that has fallen from 171
the tree. There she finds a stone with a sharp edge, and with the verve of a serial killer, she stabs the stone into one of the plumlike fruits. Nectar spurts up onto her face, and she wipes it clear with her hand. Several strikes later, the fruit splits in two, right through the core. From the basket she produces two worms and mashes them into the open pulp. She plants a half-live worm, still writhing, on top of the fruit as if she were placing an angel atop a Christmas tree.
She moves from tree to tree, repeating the process at each of the four corners of the garden. Once she completes the task, she returns to the trough and washes her face in the water basin.
Then she sits down in the dirt.
She waits.
Eventually the jungle storm that had come in with a roar exits with a whimper. Light peeks out from behind the clouds, and with it returns the squawking of the macaws.
The first bird must be a hungry one. A little brown thrush drops down from the canopy above. Twenty more thrushes quickly follow suit and cascade from their perches down into the four corners of the garden. Some peck at the soil itself, but most of the birds take the bait and gorge themselves on the delicious buffet the girl has left out for them.
She doesn’t have to wait long for results. The feeding frenzy has barely begun when, from the southeast corner, 172
their echoes a harsh squawk. It is the overeager thrush that came to dinner first. It flaps its wings, attempting to take flight, only to crash beak-first into the ground. Its body shudders violently before it rolls onto its back. Its legs twitch and its talons curl for the final time.
This ritual repeats in the northeast and southwest corners of the garden as well, a cacophony of birds dying violently in the wake of their last, poisonous meal, as the venom from the fruit seeps into their nervous systems.
The girl wanders unhurriedly over to the northwest corner. The birds are feasting hungrily on their fruit-and-worm cocktails, but when she gets close enough, the remaining thrushes explode up into air, vanishing into the dusk light with heavy bellies.
Three days’ worth of hunger overcomes the girl, and she lunges for one of the fruits at the base of the tree.
She sinks her teeth voraciously into the supple skin, and nectar bursts over her cheeks. Within seconds it’s only a core. She dives for the next fruit and rips into it.
The two scientists watch with bated interest. She’s done it.
Halfway through her third fruit, the girl’s chewing slows and eventually stops altogether. Her eyes glisten and she holds the fruit out away from her body.
She crumples to the ground clutching her stomach.
Her tortured screams echo up into the trees. The fruit tumbles across the dirt before coming to rest against the concrete of the citadel wall.
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You catch only snippets of what the scientists, who have exploded into full-blown panic, are saying above.
White Coat A: “. . . the venom . . . not this tree!”
White Coat B: “. . . get the antivenin . . . not much time until . . .”
White Coat A: “. . . down there. Stay with her until I get back!”
White Coat A vanishes from the railing. White Coat B adjusts his glasses and stares down at the ground, contemplating whether the fall will injure him. White Coat A shouts something in the background, and White Coat B
mouths “Screw it” and climbs over the railing so that he’s dangling from the other side. He drops the remaining fifteen feet to the ground, but lands wrong on his ankle. He curses with pain, but still frantically hobbles with a limp over to the Northwest corner.
He limps to a halt. The earth beneath the tree where the girl had been rolling in pain a minute earlier is now empty, but the dirt shows signs of fresh struggle. White Coat B, perplexed, gazes 360 degrees around the empty courtyard before walking over to the half-eaten fruit that fell from her hand. He picks it up and studies it. He brings it closer to his face, raises it to his nose, inhales its sweet aroma. . . .
The fronds of the tree overhead rustle. White Coat B
has time only to look up and watch the girl, like a feral beast, nose-dive out of the tree, her eyes wild and her fingers extended. He collapses to the ground under her 174
weight. Before he can toss her off him, her hand pulls back and her clawed fingers come slashing across his throat like a pendulum. Red blood splatters against the previously clean whitewashed citadel wall. His feet shudder, but before he can even try to scream through his devastated throat, his eyes roll back into his head and he’s gone.
The girl examines the blood covering her hand, innocently, curiously. She holds it up so that it eclipses the emerging dusk moon. The crimson around the end of her hand glistens faintly like a corona. On a whim she brings her hand up to her face and smears the blood beneath each of her eyes.
She lowers her hand, the curtain coming down, and behind it stands White Coat A. He has a syringe in his hand, but when he sees his colleague’s blood painted on the girl’s face, he drops it, needle down into the soil so that it stands upright.
“Wait—,” White Coat A starts to say, lifting his hands.
The little girl lunges.
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PART II: PANTHEON
CHAIN GANG
Sunda
y
Ashline emerged out of the nightmare right into one of the worst migraines of her life.
It was like a pitchfork right through the back of her skull, the tines slicing neatly through the gray matter. As she tried to open her eyes, one of them lingered closed.
Swirling around in the pain was a mosaic of colors from her dream. The emerald of the jungle canopy. The fresh mortar of the prison walls. The linen white of the lab coats. The crimson stains afterward. All etched together in one grisly stained-glass window that refused to fade even on this side of consciousness.
She could almost feel the heat rising from her forehead before she even put the back of her hand to her skin, which was hot to the touch. Maybe she’d contracted malaria from her jungle dream. Her temples throbbed with each stroke of her pulse. So loud, in fact, that it almost sounded like someone was pounding on the . . .
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Knock, knock, knock.
Ashline massaged her face roughly with the palm of her hand, a futile attempt to rub the sleep from her eyes.
Pound, pound.
“Enough,” Ashline mumbled. She grudgingly slipped out from between her sheets, trudged across the room, and opened the door.
Bobby Jones looked like a wet badger. He was dressed head to toe in his soccer gear, from the mud-stained knee-high socks right up to the stupid shamrock headband that he superstitiously wore to every game and practice
. . . and never washed. She blamed the headband for at least 50 percent of the offensive boys’ locker room odor that washed over her as soon as she opened the door.
How much of the water that had soaked his number thirteen jersey was the morning drizzle, and how much was sweat? Ash didn’t want to venture a guess.
When he didn’t say anything, Ash could think to say only, “You smell like a used towel.”
“Came right from practice.” He ran an anxious hand through his tousled hair. “Didn’t have time to splash on any of that Polo cologne you like.”
Ash wrinkled her nose. “You’d have to fill a hot tub with cologne to improve the lovely fragrance you’re exud-ing right now.”
“Would you get into the hot tub with me?” Bobby flashed a wicked grin.
Ash took an exaggerated step back into
her room.
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“And thanks for coming, Bobby.” She started to push the door closed.
“Wait—” His hand shot out to hold it open, his fingers dangerously close to being crushed in the door.
He was really at the mercy of Ashline, who with a sharp kick could have made the whole thing look like an accident. Did he really need the use of both hands in soccer anyway?
“Bobby, what is your malfunction?” Ash threw the door open so that it slammed against the inside wall. “Is there an apology in here somewhere? Did you come with some plea to reunite? Or did you just want to have the last word?”
“Listen, I left in the middle of practice to come here.”
He put his hand on the door frame and leaned in. “Right in the middle. I literally was about to throw the ball in bounds, but then I dropped it and just started running to get here. Everybody must have thought I’d gone crazy, or really had to take a shit.”
“Great image.”
“I messed up,” he said, and before Ashline could protest, he brushed past her into the room. He gestured wildly as he continued. “I mean really messed up, and it’s messing me up. My whole schedule. My stomach feels all tight, I can’t sleep, and I look like a raccoon when I wake up. If I keep playing like shit out there on the field, pretty soon coach’ll kick me to second string.”
“You want me back so that you don’t get demoted to 181
JV?” Ashline laughed dryly. “You sure know how to make a girl feel special.”
He waved his hands frantically, like he wanted to expunge his poor choice of words with a pencil eraser.
“Forget the soccer stuff. I just miss you. It’s been like hell this past week.”
“Weekend,” Ash corrected him. “Half weekend.”
“See!” he shouted. “I can’t even keep time straight anymore.”
Ashline glanced self-consciously out the door as two sophomores walked by, eyeing first her and then, with no small amount of envy, Bobby Jones. “Keep your voice down,” Ash whispered. “This isn’t a tailgate.”
Something sparked in Bobby’s eyes. He was staring down into the wastebasket next to him and nodding furiously. “I know what I can do to make this right,” he said.
As Ashline watched, caught somewhere between wanting to throw him out of the room and her own morbid curiosity for what he had in mind, Bobby reached into the wastebasket, pulled something out, and then handed it to Ashline.
Ashline turned the broken alarm clock over in her hands, touching the long crack in the plastic casing.
“Wow, and it isn’t even my birthday.”
Bobby didn’t laugh. Instead he positioned himself in the doorway, exactly where he’d been standing the night of their breakup. “There’s only one way to remedy this,”
he said. “You’ve got to hit me with the alarm clock.”
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Ashline gawked at him without blinking. When she was younger, Eve promised her that she would one day drive the boys crazy. . . . She had no idea that she’d meant it literally. “Did you take a soccer ball to the head at practice?” she asked.
“Come on.” He made a “come hither” motion with his hand. “You have to finish what we started the other night. Channel all your rage into that little clock and hit me with it. After some of the shit that I did and said, I’m sure I deserve it.”
“Maybe,” Ash replied, tossing the alarm clock from hand to hand. “But the alarm clock doesn’t.”
“I’m not leaving until you do it.” He glanced at the indentation in the door frame and grimaced, but before he could change his mind, he closed his eyes tightly and set his feet. “Avoid my face if you can. But don’t hold back.” He gritted his teeth.
In that minute, while he awaited his punishment with his face all scrunched up as if he were constipated, Ash recognized what she’d been seeing these last two months whenever she looked at Bobby Jones, when she kissed him, when he slipped his arm around her waist as they walked across the quad. She’d been with Rich Lesley all this time, again, replacing him with somebody who had all the same qualities that had made Rich so exciting and infuriating and irresistible and vile. Only, Bobby, for all his flaws, had at least some glimmer of a soul beneath the camouflage of immaturity.
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As the image of Rich’s face melted away, revealing Bobby’s underneath, she walked over to her bed and set the alarm clock gently down onto her mattress. “You ready, Bobby?”
He clenched his fists. The muscles in his forearms tensed. “Do it.”
Ashline grabbed one of the two decorative pillows she kept on her otherwise minimalist bed. And then, with a windup that would have made a professional softball player envious, she lobbed the pillow right at Bobby.
Direct hit. It struck his eager face. Ash tried not to enjoy it too much as he released a girlish shriek and staggered back into the doorway. His arms thrashed in front of his face at first, clawing at the pillow as if it were a rabid bat. But his nerve receptors soon reminded him that he had not in fact been hit by a four-pound alarm clock, and his spastic floundering ceased. He held out the pillow at arm’s length.
Ash couldn’t help it. She started to laugh.
As the color slowly trickled back into Bobby’s ashen face, he joined her with relieved laughter. “We cool?” he asked. Then he added with some hesitation, “Can we . .
. fix this?”
“Yeah, Bobby, we’re cool.” She paused. “But there’s nothing left to fix.”
“Come on,” he pleaded. “What if we gave it time?
What if we went back to being just friends?”
“That would require that we were ‘just friends’ in 184
the first place—and I’m pretty sure we hopscotched right over that step,” she reminded him.
“You must still feel something here.” He thumped his hand over his heart with passion, but his voice was growing quieter and more defeated by the second. “You don’t date someone for two months if there’s nothing there.”
Ash took a moment to gather her thoughts so that what she said next wouldn’t come out sounding like an it’s-not-you-it’s-me speech. “Bobby, believe me when I say that, even after dating you for two months, it didn’t occur to me until now that you might actually be one of the most romantic guys I’ve ever met, in your own special way. If we gave it time to work out all the kinks, I’m sure you’d make a great boyfriend.” Ashline smiled gently at him. “But I think maybe I needed to date you to realize that I don’t need to date anyone.”
“Just to be clear,” Bobby said, “that was you referring to me as just anyone?”
“You’re going to make a great somebody for somebody else,” she said, then bit her lip. “Shit, that sounded like it came from a really bad greeting card.”
His lips twitched as if he wanted to smile back, but it was clear she’d just taken a dinner fork to his ballooned ego. “Well, at least I took a shot at the goal,” he said. “I better head back to practice. I imagine I’ll be doing laps for my little stunt.”
“At least it’s still raining?” she said unhelpfully.
He walked out the door but stopped before he’d made 185
it too far down the hallway. “I hope you’ll take this as a compliment. . . . You seem different today.”
“Probably my hair,” Ashline replied. “It’s a few mil-limeters longer than the last time you saw it.”
He leaned in and hugged her, lingering and gentle, with a wistful longing she’d never sensed from him when they were actually together.
“Good-bye, Ash,” he said.
Ash sighed after he left, feeling somehow even more exhausted than she had when she’d crawled into bed the night before. She climbed back under the covers and closed her eyes.
Just in time for more knocking on the door.
“I hate everybody,” Ash mumbled into her pillow and hauled herself back out of bed. She opened the door.
The laughter explosively vomited out of h
er.
There, in jumpsuits so orange that they could probably be seen from space, stood Ade, Lily, Rolfe, and Raja.
“I’m sorry,” Ashline said. “Did you just walk off the set of some twisted eighties music video, or was there a Blackwood fashion show earlier this morning?”
Rolfe snorted. “Not quite as funny when you’re actually wearing one.”
“Speaking of which . . .” Raja thrust a jumpsuit on a coat-hanger into Ashline’s hands. “Here you go. It’s a medium. Hopefully it’s not too small.” She turned and marched off down the hall. Ade and Rolfe giggled and followed her out.
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“Well, I hope you got your jumpsuit in stretch-fit,”
Ash yelled down the hall too late, knowing full well they’d already made it to the stairwell. She added, “To cover your huge ass.”
“Classy,” said Lily, but she was laughing too.
“Classy? I’m about to dress up like a tangerine and pick up garbage.” Ash shrugged and unzipped the jumpsuit. “But screw it. Gotta be better than homework, right?”
It was only once they were outside waiting for their park ranger escort to arrive that Ashline began to appreciate the full sinister brilliance of the job the headmistress had sentenced them to. The real punishment wasn’t cleaning the forest floor for a few hours on a clammy, overcast Sunday. No, their true punishment began as soon as they set foot onto the Blackwood quad wearing bright orange jumpsuits. The headmistress had planned for their escort to pick them up at twelve thirty, exactly the time when most students, foggy from a late Saturday night, stumbled out of bed and headed to Sunday
“morning” brunch.
What the students got instead when they exited the dormitories was a far better start to their Sunday than syrup and French toast: a five-student chain gang, waiting for a ride into the forest.
Everyone had something to say as they walked past.
“Did you guys get cast in a Tropicana commercial?”
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“What’s the matter, the other crayons wouldn’t let you play?”
“Yo, it’s the Fruit of the Loom!”
“That,” Ade said when he heard the last one, “made absolutely no sense.”