Darkest Fear (19 page)

Then I had another thought: What if I recognized one of these people as the jaguar who attacked Tink a few nights ago? I made a mental plan not to be alone with any person I didn't know. Which left Matéo and Aly and our roommates. I would be the dork cousin sticking to them like glue. Fabulous.

“Everyone grab something,” Matéo said, getting out of the car.

I got the large beach blanket, but when I held it in my hands I felt sick. This was such a terrible idea. It was way too similar to the last day with my parents—the beach blanket, the picnic. But Matéo, Aly, Coco, and Charlotte were already heading down a slight hill to a stretch of sandy beach. I wanted to climb back in the car and cry, but was too embarrassed.

So I clenched my teeth and followed my cousin to the water.

There were seven other people there—three guys and four girls, all looking to be in their early twenties or possibly even late teens. To my relief, they were wearing bathing suits or cover-ups. I did not need nudity on top of this.

“Hey, everybody!” Aly yelled. “This is Téo's cousin, Vivi! Make her feel at home!”

Smiles and waves from everyone. I tried to look comfortable and cool.

I'd never been super popular in high school. I had friends and a little circle of people I hung out with and Jennifer, but I'd never cared enough about my appearance and had never bothered with whatever popular thing people were doing, so I was often on the outside, much more than Jennifer. No one hassled her for being gay, and she had a thousand friends and had been our class president in junior year. I'd been her campaign manager.

“Hey, Vivi?”

I looked up to see Matéo smiling at me.

“Spread out the blanket and we'll put our stuff on it,” he said. “Then we'll go for a swim.”

Trying not to seem like a total loser, I flapped the blanket out flat, then left my shorts and tank top on it and followed everyone down to the water. The river was about a hundred feet across, with thick woods lining the other side. This side had a small sand beach, but the other side was a sharp drop-off of about fifteen feet. If you were in those woods and not watching where you were going, you could step right off and fall into the river.

The chilly water felt incredible compared to the steamy, muggy air, and I sank in it up to my neck. Sugar Beach was about five minutes from the ocean, and I'd always loved the white-sugar sand of Florida beaches. This sand was tan, and the water was reddish and somewhat clear to about four feet. After that you couldn't see the bottom. Stretching out, I swam to the opposite shore and back. In seventh grade I'd been the starter on the swim team, loving the competition, loving beating my own best times. But after that summer I quit being on teams.

“Hi. I'm Mimi.” A slender girl with very short light-blond hair had swum up to where I was treading water in the deepest part of the river.

“Hi—I'm Vivi.”

“That's a pretty name. Where are you from?”

And so on. I made small talk and tried to be friendly, which I accomplished by pretending I was someone who'd had no tragedy in her life and was not a freak of nature. Then I remembered that everyone here was a freak of nature, and something inside me froze a little.

Several people seemed to be of Brazilian descent, though only one person had any kind of accent. Besides Mimi there was Elaine, who was from New York, and Flor and Estrela, who were twins originally from Minnesota. I recognized their names as being Portuguese—Flor meant “flower” and Estrela meant “star.” I didn't know if those were their real names or nicknames. One of the guys was called Tito, which was a typical nickname for a younger brother in a family. The other guys were Miguel and Danny, who was Elaine's brother. I picked up that Miguel was a new member of their gang—their conversations were of the getting-to-know-you type.

I was so glad that at least I knew everyone we had come with. For a while I sat by Charlotte, whose bright orange hair was covered by a white, wide-brimmed hat. She was wearing what she called her “sun burka,” which was a pink-and-white long-sleeved sunproof top and long pants. “I don't tan,” she told me. “I fry.”

Coco smiled at her and said, “I like fries,” and they exchanged a look that made me want to move out of the way.

Next to slim, dark Tito, Tink looked extra big, blond, and beefy. His side had almost healed already, I was glad to see. Miguel was a mélange—probably half white and half black. His features were African-American, but his eyes were green and his hair was dark blond. I decided that he should go be a model in New York—they would love him.

Being nice was exhausting, though (along with last night at the dance club) this was the most fun I'd had in months. Even Suzanne
seemed to loosen up, splashing water on James and then shrieking when he tried to dunk her. This was the first time I'd seen James when he didn't look dead tired. Usually he and Suzanne seemed like an odd couple, but today I saw how well they fit together when they weren't stressed and overworked.

After lunch I lay down on our blanket and shut my eyes, hoping to not have to talk to anyone for a while. These people were all fine; it was just still hard for me to socialize for more than about half an hour at a time. Matéo and Aly's friends were funny, bright, and interesting—the cream of the haguari crop, I imagined. None of them were stuck-up; none of them seemed odd or off. Obviously Matéo and Aly would have recognized the intruder from the other night. It couldn't be any of these people.

Besides my family in Brazil, I'd never been around so many haguari, especially ones my age. It was hard to believe. I tried to picture Jennifer here. I thought she would like them, would fit in. If she had no idea what they were.

The hot sun was making me drowsy, and I was just dozing off when I heard Mimi say, “The equinox is coming up soon.”

“I know,” said Aly, next to me. “I can't believe it's September already.”

“We should have a party,” said Matéo, and voices chorused, “Yes! You should! A party at your house!”

Aly laughed. “That would be fun. We'll do a service inside; then the party can be inside and outside.”

I lay very still on the blanket, trying to control my breathing.
I knew what Aly meant by “do a service.” My parents had held services in their house on the seven major haguari holy days throughout the year, to worship Tzechura and Tzechuro, the jaguar goddess and god. I had hated, hated, hated it. It had seemed like the final embarrassing symbol of their weirdness, and by the time I was fifteen, I had thrown so many fits about it that they finally let me quit participating. Deep inside I felt so disloyal to the Tzechuri, but I just wanted my parents to be normal, to go to a regular church on Sundays or a regular synagogue on Saturdays.

It kept getting thrown in my face, the haguari thing. It was still shocking to find out how widespread haguari were—I had known it wasn't only my parents and my relatives, but I hadn't experienced the reality of that. Even when we went to an actual temple of the Tzechuri in the little Brazilian town my tia Juliana lived in, it seemed like something only about my family. But there were lots of us—people I wasn't related to and would never know.

Here were all these otherwise normal young people—they were in college or had graduated, they had jobs or were getting grad degrees, they had families and siblings and other friends. It was a whole world of haguari that wasn't about me or my parents. Listening to them talk, it sounded as if their growing up had been so different from mine, with haguari friends, a wider community where everyone shared similar experiences, the same religion, the same genetic mutation. With just me and my family I'd felt so incredibly abnormal. So other.

“I'm about ready,” said Dana, standing up and brushing sand off her bottom.

“Me too,” Aly said, drinking the last of her diet soda.

I opened my eyes and sat up. “Ready for what?” I asked Aly softly.

“Time to change,” Aly said. “You ready for your first lesson?”

My heart sank. The big question: whether peer pressure and a fear of looking like an uncool prude would convince me to do what my parents hadn't been able to convince me to do in five long years.

Feeling like a complete wuss, I shook my head. “I just can't,” I whispered.

Aly stopped stowing things in the picnic basket. I was trying not to look at the others, who had gone to the edge of the woods and were slipping out of their bathing suits. As much as I would hate to go skinny-dipping with a bunch of people I'd just met, it would be easy-peasy compared to what they actually wanted me to do with them.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Miguel start the horribly identifiable hunching over. I shifted on the blanket so my back was to them. Behind me laughter changed to a deep rumble.

“Really?” Aly asked at last.

“You guys coming, babe?” Matéo asked from the top of the little hill.

“One sec,” she called back.

“I've never changed on purpose,” I reminded her. “It was awful
when I did it accidentally, last night and the night before. I have no idea how to change back. Maybe I can, maybe I can't. I hate it. It's scary. I can't control it.”

“That's why you need to learn,” Aly said.

“I can't. I know I have to, just so I know how to not ever change again, but I don't want to learn in front of all these people.”

“It's so weird that your parents didn't teach you,” Aly said.

I didn't want to talk about all their useless attempts.

“Look,” I said, “you go on with Matéo. I'll stay here and load up the car. Do you think you'll be back by like three thirty?”

“I don't want to leave you,” she said.

“I'm fine,” I insisted. “I'll load the car and take a nap in the backseat. Just remember that I have to be at work at five.”

I didn't watch Aly and Matéo change. Something in me still found it grotesque. I had no idea how I had changed the last two nights. I knew why—big emotion—but not how. It had hurt the very first time, and it had hurt the day my parents died. It had taken a lot longer. These last two times had been fast, and I'd hardly been aware of it. Was that what it was supposed to be like? Before I finished putting the blanket in the car trunk, Aly and Matéo were gone, running through the woods with their friends, a pack of jaguars.

What would happen if they came upon a person? Those kinds of questions freaked me out. I didn't know how they dealt with it.

I rolled down all the windows on Aly's car, grateful it was parked in the shade, at least. Opening the cooler, I took one more icy soda
and then lay down on the backseat, the seat indentations making my back arch uncomfortably.

I didn't know what to do. I didn't know who I was. Since I was thirteen, I'd formed my whole persona as opposite to my parents. Opposite to my mom. Somehow cutting out the haguara part of me had seemed okay then. Now, around all these haguari, I was only half a person. Trying to be opposite of Matéo and Aly seemed ludicrous—even scary. Without them, who did I have? Jennifer in New York. Who I couldn't even tell the truth to.

It was really, really hot, even in the shade. The fabric of the car seat smelled hot. The trees overhead were oppressive—stolid witnesses to my fears and uncertainties. I pressed the cold can against my forehead and started to cry.

AFTER THE CATACLYSMIC, SCREECHING HALT
of my life in May, I had entered a stasis where I had spent weeks wandering numbly around my parents' house. Then I'd found the picture of Donella, and my life had jolted forward again.

Now, as a sweltering New Orleans September went on, I felt my life stabilize, in a way. Matéo and Aly offered several more times to teach me how to change at will, and though I knew I needed to learn, I chickened out each time. Instead, to ensure that I wouldn't accidentally change, I tried to avoid any upsetting situation, which wasn't that hard. My days acquired a pattern, and it was becoming almost as familiar as the get up, go to school, go home, eat dinner, do homework pattern of my former life. Now it was sleep in, eat breakfast, hang out, go to work, come home, hang out some more, go to bed around two. Repeat. I was getting to know all my roommates more, including my cousin. More important, I felt . . . accepted. Even though I never changed with them. No one ever teased me about that, and I wondered if Matéo or Aly had told
them to lay off me. Although there was so much I apparently didn't know, because of my heritage and the little I had absorbed from my parents, I was still one of them.

And it felt really good. After refusing to belong to my own family, not really fitting in at school, not having a boyfriend—now I was one of a group. When they made inside jokes, I got them. When Coco and Aly spoke in Spanish, I understood most of it. Matéo and I found that our families had used a lot of the same idioms—one day he'd planned to make dinner and had food out, pots ready, and then decided he didn't want to bother. Without thinking, I'd said,
“Ajoelhou, tem que rezar,”
like my dad had always said to me. Basically it meant, “You're kneeling, so you're going to pray.” Kind of like “Finish what you started.” Matéo had laughed because his mom had said the same thing to him. He was my family.

About a week after the river picnic, Mrs. Peachtree called me. Back in August we had talked about things, because it looked like I wouldn't be back for a while. We had agreed that she would take any houseplant still alive from the house, and that once a week she would take any mail, drop it into a big manila envelope, and mail it to me. I kept the water and electricity turned on, but canceled the Internet and cable TV service. It would be easy enough to get it back once I returned home.

In return for all this, plus Mr. Peachtree cutting the lawn and making the house look lived in, I sent them a check every week. At first she hadn't wanted to accept it, but I'd pointed out that she and her husband were essentially acting as management agents. At the
start of September we'd gone to monthly checks, because I had no idea when I'd be back. Every so often Mrs. Peachtree and I would call each other to check in, so I wasn't really surprised when I saw her name on the caller ID of my cell phone.