We rush him into the back seat of Alix’s car, held down by me and Stephanie. Engine on. We tear out of the parking lot.
The blue sky directly over the stadium opens up and spits down hail the size of eyeballs.
32
“You lied,
Meg!
You broke our holy pinkie pact!”
“I
am
sorry! That’s the truth. I’m sorry for
this
!” I pound the cracked leather seat between us.
“Sorry for the foam padding that’s popping out?”
“I’m
sorry
we had to kidnap you, but you left us no other choice. That’s why it’s technically not a lie.”
Raymond shakes his head sadly. “Meg, you are paddling hard and breaking a sweat to keep afloat on that famous river in Egypt. Da Nile. Denial.”
“I get it, Raymond.”
Alix clicks on the radio, blasting KSRF, all surf music all the time,
where reverb is king.
She shouts over it: “You two shut the hell up. You’re driving me crazy.”
“Your BO is driving
me
crazy. All of you,” Raymond complains. “Can’t we open the window a crack? If I’m going to die a lonely, miserable death, I want my last inhale on earth to be fresh air, not this stench.”
“Nobody is going to die,” I insist.
“No, you’re just going to make me carsick and then banish me into a life of eternal agony.”
“We’re not. We’re just taking you on a little detour.”
Alix points the Volvo out of town along the straight, flat coast road. On a day like this—one that started sunny and warm but has suddenly given way to blustery wind and hail—there’s hardly any traffic along this stretch. I pop a stick of gum into my mouth. All we need to do is keep Raymond away from that rally. Without him, the band and color guard will give their normal, mediocre performance, and everyone in the stands will go home without hope. Our justice will prevail again.
On the radio, Dick Dale segues into Los Straitjackets, but that doesn’t keep Raymond quiet. “Denial,” he goes on. “An unconscious psychological mechanism that keeps a person from acknowledging painful realities, thoughts, and feelings. Meg, you’ve got it bad. You used to hate bullies. Who’s the bully now? All of you!”
Alix yells back over her shoulder. “Hey, Sergeant Pepper! For someone who’s completely under our mercy, you have a big mouth. I’m sick of hearing that yapping. Steph?”
Stephanie’s response is to take the blue sash from Raymond’s uniform. He catches on quickly to her plan and in desperation starts to hum his song. This only makes her look sad. “That’s all you got? Against us? No backup singers? No harmony? No brass section?”
She moves the ribbon toward his mouth. He manages to get in one more verbal jab—“What about your dreams, Stephanie? To make the world a better place? For whom? Ambrosia?”—but it’s no use. There’s a final whine of protest before the sash covers his mouth.
“Not too tight,” I urge her. Then to him: “It’s your fault, you know. You can’t blame us for this. You always need to get in the last word.”
That’s all anyone says for a while. Ambrosia has given Alix a map to a spot up the coast where she says we can hold Raymond in secret for the rest of the day. The plan is to meet her there. We pass the nine-mile marker. Through the fog I see the faint outline of the big ball of sun starting its plunge into the ocean. When we pass the fifteen-mile point out of town, the Volvo slows. On the left I notice a small turnoff, the sign of a parking lot for a hidden beach.
But instead of making a left toward the ocean, Alix makes a sharp right. We skid a little, then pull onto a narrow, unmarked, unpaved road.
“This is it.” Alix reaches under her seat, comes up with a flask, and takes a mouthful before handing it to me. “A present from Ambrosia to get us through a cold, long night.”
I drink. The thick, licorice flavor immediately sends warmth through my body.
Raymond flashes me a look. Is that terror in his eyes? Pleading? A warning? He looks down at his tied, useless hands. He shivers from the cold and from everything else. I take another drink and pass the flask to Stephanie.
The car climbs, bumping and weaving through thickening brush and dark lines of trees. We’re heading into the coastal mountain range that runs down California like a twisted spine, east where the sun has already set. We pass nothing, not a house, not a ranch, no telephone or electricity poles. It looks like a long, tree-lined driveway that would lead to the edge of outer space. I smell the change of our direction, the clear, fresh salt of the ocean giving way to the scent of redwoods. It’s so thick it lands on my tongue and tastes like spicy rain.
Alix turns on the headlights and wipers. She squints through the windshield, making sure she doesn’t lose the path under the tires. Dancing ghosts of fog usher us forward.
Raymond mumbles, and I know him well enough to translate. “He says he’s getting carsick. How much longer ’til we’re there—wherever
there
is?”
Alix squints through the fog and dark into the distance. “About ten.”
“Ten miles?” I ask. Raymond groans, and I feel the same way.
“No, ten seconds.”
She guides the car slightly to the right, and there must be a clearing that I can’t see because we don’t go tumbling down the face of a sheer cliff. When Alix cuts the engine, it rumbles in relief from the hard climb. The driver’s door opens. Alix’s voice is bright and eager. “Ambrosia said we’d need to hike from here.”
We all get out, and a light explodes, blinding me. When I blink through it, I see that Alix is wearing a headlamp. The light makes an arc as she scans the landscape and illuminates a forest path that’s narrow and hard to pick out. It looks like it was made by squirrels for squirrels.
“This way.” She takes the lead, followed by Stephanie, then Raymond, and me at the rear. For a long time we walk in silence, except for the snap and crunch of branches and leaves underfoot, and soon we start a steep climb. I sense the altitude in the pull on my quadriceps. We must be on the east side of the mountain range now, the drier part, almost desert, that’s walled off from the ocean and rain. The few trees at the top are blackened from a fire—leafless, twisted needles.
Stars blink in the cloudless sky. The fog hasn’t made its way here. We round another bend. The few spindly trees part like a curtain, and the moon—full and white—greets us.
Alix’s arms spread wide. She spins. “Check it out.”
Where we’ve landed, the top of the mountain, the whole expanse as far as I can see looks like close-up photos of the moon. Bare, rocky ridges and cliffs are stacked like giant Legos. Monolithic crags like sentries with misshapen spines stand guard over this weird place. Moonlight bounces off of them, and they glow like they’re lit from inside.
On nearly every rock and boulder, someone has left a sign that they’ve been here. There’s the usual stupid bathroom-type graffiti—
So-and-so loves So-and-so
—but there are also mysterious carvings and etchings, sculptures popping up like islands in this sea of stone.
I remove Raymond’s gag and free his hands. Where is he going to run? Whom can he yell for?
I hear a familiar voice then but can’t make out the words. It’s Ambrosia. She must have gotten here before us, even though there was no other car at the trailhead. At first her voice seems to be coming from behind me. Now from my left. Or is it below us? Raymond, too, is looking for the source. He points, and I track the line of his finger into the near distance.
The moon has been rising fast, but it jolts to a stop and trembles, suspended as if its beam is purposely set to spotlight the tallest sandstone monolith. Lounging comfortably in its top curve, there’s a silhouette sheathed in black, her legs crossed at the thighs, a shoe with a very spiky high heel dangling off of one foot. In the night air I smell Ambrosia’s perfume. Her head is completely shaved. She’s all angles and bone, a living skull. Her eyes, without lashes, don’t blink. The snake jewelry around her neck slithers and flicks its prey-seeking tongues. Her mouth is a twisted slash of red. She blows a kiss and it lands hard and wet on my lips.
That kiss, bitter like venom, does something terrible to Raymond. He collapses to one knee and holds his stomach like he’s been punched.
“Don’t!” I yell. “You said he wouldn’t be hurt. I promised him.” I extend a hand to help Raymond, but I’m stopped by a voice that I feel in my marrow.
“Awake, Megaera! Awake! I didn’t come this far to be defeated by some silly sentimentality like friendship.”
My hand goes numb. My heart goes hard.
Another voice coming from everywhere.
On another formation stands a figure in a helmet that sits low on her forehead. The wind plays with her long, blue gown, makes it billow and wave and then stand out straight as a sail.
Ms. Pallas, Hunter High’s toughest grader, the all-powerful color guard faculty sponsor, Pallas Athena, Minerva, goddess of civilization, wisdom, justice—and, when necessary, goddess of war.
“Why wasn’t I invited to this little party, Ambrosia?” she asks.
Pallas points her baton and nudges the moon forward so that the beam now slants across her face, catching a hint of the fire in the cold marble blue of her eyes. She aims the baton again. Below her, a scraggly piece of sagebrush bursts into flame.
33
“Fire?”
The word erupts
from Ambrosia’s mouth as a cruel laugh. “That’s all you’ve got? The burning-bush routine? Hasn’t that been done to death? I’m shivering.”
A spit from Pallas Athena and the fire goes out. A trail of smoke snakes into the air.
“What’s next up your sleeve?” Ambrosia mocks. “Threaten them with a failing grade?”
Despite their positions on the high crags, I can make out every expression as in a close-up: the taunting smirk on Ambrosia’s lips, the antagonism etched on Athena’s features. Their battle is playing out before me like a movie, but a movie where there’s no popcorn and I’m tied to the seat and the screen is huge and my eyelids are propped open and the sound is blasted high.
Ambrosia arches her back. “Of course I didn’t forget to invite you. I knew you’d follow if we dangled your little teacher’s pet. You need your devotees. I picked this setting especially and lured you here. A mountaintop should be familiar to you, give you a little advantage, even. Isn’t that considerate of me? But enough dilly-dallying. Enough of your getting in my way. It’s time to end this forever. Here, now.”
“No more calling them awake,” Athena orders.
“No more putting them to sleep.”
“You know it isn’t up to us anymore. We’ve picked our weapons in the human realm. They must battle it out.” Athena points her baton at Raymond, and from a heap on the ground he floats several inches into the air before being set upright on his feet.
Ambrosia in a snide huff: “Ah yes, Pallas’s little kiss-up. All devotion. The living, breathing representative of all that’s good and merciful in mankind.”
“I’m not—” Raymond tries to protest, but Athena silences him with a smack of her baton against the rock. It thunders. “But you are. You must be all that! I say it is so.”
“I won’t!”
“You will! Finish the job!”
Ambrosia turns her attention to us, her voice, in contrast, steady and cool. “Girls, are you taking it all in? I sense a rift between our enemies.” She wags her finger, a miniature windshield wiper in the air. “No falling asleep on the job, right?”
“Question!” I shout. “This weapon you’re talking about? If he’s all that’s good in mankind, we must be—”
Athena sets another bush on fire, just for the light show. “You are all that’s bad!”
I feel both confused and hurt. “But aren’t we the good ones? Righting wrongs? Punishing the guilty?”
Ambrosia laughs again, tinkling like shattering glass, the moonlight shining off of her eerie, hairless face. “I understand your confusion, Megaera. I despise this good-bad distinction. It misses the whole point and the subtlety of the situation. I prefer to think of you Furies as the living, breathing, wailing, reprimanding embodiment of all that’s natural in mankind. Tisiphone, for instance. What do you do best?”
Stephanie extends her right leg in front, dips forward in a dancer’s curtsy. “I punish the guilty. Especially if they hurt Mother. Mother Earth.”
“Exactly! And you never stop punishing! You must be right all the time. You never let anyone off the hook. Isn’t that the essence of human desire? To be judge, jury, and executioner of anyone who disagrees and gets in your way?”
“Off with their heads,” Stephanie says in a strangely mechanical way.
“How about you, my invincible Alecto?”
Alix is hanging off the side of a crag with only two fingers in a hole. She bends her elbow and, as if she weighs nothing, her entire body moves straight up like she’s in an elevator. “Anyone hurts a family member, I pay them back. You can count on it.” She jumps down, stands by Stephanie, and performs a deep formal bow. “At your service.”
“My precious powder keg of vengeance,” Ambrosia says with admiration. “History is made up of revenge. It’s the stuff of world wars, ethnic cleansing, neighborhood spats, and fights between former best friends. If it’s so commonplace, how can it be wrong or bad? It’s what
is
. This is mankind au naturel.”
Her attention turns to me. “And Megaera. So damaged and distrusting—”
“You’re not!” Raymond shouts.
“So bitter about your past and envious of what you have been denied.”
“Don’t listen to her!”
But I hear myself say simply, with acceptance, “I am all that.” One of my legs slides behind the other. My fingertips hold out the edges of a nonexistent skirt and my knees bend in a curtsy.
“
No!” Raymond shouts again.
I feel pressure in the small of my back, like a firm hand of wind that moves me away from him and ushers me to where I belong. With them. With the Furies. With my true self. With my others. If Stephanie is unforgiving, it’s because people are unforgiving. If Alix is cruel, it’s because human nature is cruel. If I am bitter and envious, so be it! Who made me that way?