Darkest Fear

  Aly just waved her hand in front of her. “Tell you later. Oh, my gods.”

  James gave a tired smile and went inside. Still gigging, Aly pulled herself together.

  “Oh, my goodness,” she wheezed. “I can’t believe you! Chasing muggers. Good grief.”

  “You don’t understand,” I said stiffly, heading up the steps into the kitchen.

  “What don’t I understand?” Aly asked, following me inside. James had apparently already gone upstairs, because we had the kitchen to ourselves.

  “I changed without meaning to,” I said tensely. “Like last night. I can’t control when it happens. And I was terrified, because Dana wasn’t there with her juice and I thought I’d have to somehow get home without getting shot as an escaped zoo animal.”

  Aly’s brows came down soberly. “I see. That must have been really scary.”

  “It was terrifying.”

  “Terrifying,” she agreed. “But how did you change back this time?”

  “I don’t know,” I said in frustration. “I heard my manager moaning—he’d been knocked out and was coming to—and I thought, ‘I have to help him. I need human hands to help him.’ And then I was suddenly changing back.”

  “Okay.” Aly nodded. “Obviously we need to teach you the basics as soon as possible. You can learn how to not change, and you can learn how to change and change back. We can teach you.”

  I couldn’t believe that life itself was forcing me to learn this after I’d resisted it for so long. I didn’t say anything.

  “Now I’m glad I ran into you,” Aly said firmly. “Change your clothes, brush your hair, and come with me to the Fortress.”

  “Oh, no,” I said. “I don’t think so. Not tonight. I’m . . . shaken up. Plus, it’s a bar. I’m only eighteen.”

  “The Fortress is connected to a dance club next door where they don’t serve drinks,” said Aly. “Lots of underage kids go there.”

  I grabbed a bottle of cranberry juice from the fridge and poured myself a big glass. I needed time to process what was happening to me—what I was becoming. I really just wanted to go upstairs and go to bed. James was here, and I’d seen Tink’s SUV, Coco’s van, and Charlotte’s Mini Cooper. I wouldn’t be alone. But Aly had been so nice to me, and really wanted me to do this.

  “But of course people bring alcohol from the Fortress into the dance club,” I said.

  Aly shrugged. “Welcome to New Orleans. Come on, please come.”

  “Well, okay,” I said, and had to smile at Aly’s look of happiness.

  • • •

  The Fortress was on Ursulines Avenue in the French Quarter, a bit away from the strip clubs and tourist traps on Bourbon Street. We left the car in a pay-to-park lot and walked down the block. It was early September but still hot and muggy, of course—by the time we’d walked half a block, my clean bowling shirt was sticking to my back.

  Despite the fact that it was almost two in the morning, the streets were far from empty. Groups of gigging college girls, men wearing matching foam team-mascot hats, and even some families with little kids were filling the streets. Little kids in the French Quarter at two a.m.? What were they thinking?

  I heard the music when we were still half a block away. The neighbors must have loved that. A line of people was waiting outside behind a velvet rope. Aly confidently walked past them.

  “What did this used to be?” I asked her, gazing up at the big stucco building of the Fortress. It looked vaguely governmental.

  “An armory, where weapons were stored. Then I think it was an orphanage.”

  “Huh.”

  “Hey, Noah,” Aly said to the huge, forbidding bouncer at the arched doorway.

  His dark face split into a pleased grin. “Hey, Aly. How’s life treatin’ you?” He immediately unhooked the blue velvet rope, and we sailed through like celebrities. Behind us, the people waiting grumbled.

  “Good,” she said. “And you? We’re going into the Keep.”

  “Good enough,” said Noah. “Okay, you go on in, then.” He waved us through the thick, studded wooden door.

  “Thank you!” Aly said, and I echoed it, blinking to adjust to the darkness inside. We were in a dimly lit black-painted hallway. Two big arrows were painted on the wall—one said THE FORTRESS and the one opposite said THE KEEP. Really loud music boomed at me from each side. I’d never been to a place like this. There weren’t dance clubs in Sugar Beach, which was more of a quiet residential town instead of a hopping spring-break destination. I remembered Jennifer telling me about going to dance clubs in Israel. I wished she were here with me.

  The Keep hallway led to a cavernous space, painted black like the hall and crowded with people. Small pendant lights in different colors illuminated circles on the dance floor and tinted anyone who danced beneath them. Along one wall was a long bar with a black top and a shiny front made of corrugated metal. The mirrored wall behind the bar was lined with glass shelves holding all sorts of bottled sodas, and fancy neon signs advertising Coke and Barq’s Root Beer. While we waited for the bartender, I looked at the bottles and tried to decide what I wanted. Some had Japanese writing on them; some were from Italy or France or Mexico.

  “Aly!” The bartender was a pretty woman with long, wavy caramel-colored hair. She wore dangly earrings and a small diamond stud in her nose, and I was jealous. Haguari didn’t get piercings. Picture the effect when one changed.

  “Posey! This is Téo’s cousin, Vivi!”

  “Hi, Vivi,” Posey said, smiling. “What can I get you?”

  “A limoncello?” I said. I assumed it was non-alcoholic, since we were on the Keep side.

  Posey got me one still frosty with ice, and Aly ordered a Tamarind Charritos from Mexico.

  “Isn’t this great?” Aly said, sipping her drink.

  “Yeah,” I said, raising my voice to be heard. I watched the crowd for a few moments before I remembered what Aly and Matéo had said. Some of these people could be haguari. Right here in this room.

  I leaned closer and spoke into Aly’s ear. “Do you think there might be haguari here tonight?”

  “Of course. There already are.” She made a vague gesture at the whole room.

  “Now?” I scanned faces, but unsurprisingly, none of them had whiskers and fuzzy round ears.

  “Sure.”

  “Can you tell just by looking at them?” I asked.

  “Hardly ever just by sight from a distance,” she said. “I mean, I know a bunch of these people. Often you can tell if you get close to someone. Mostly a scent thing. Sometimes you can pick up on people’s energies that feel like yours.”

  “Really?”

  Aly nodded. “The more you know your own nature, the easier it is to see it in others. But a lot of it has to do with frequency, or practice. I’m not explaining this well.”

  “Frequency?” I drank my limoncello and felt way in over my head. The long day’s fatigue had come back with a vengeance, and the music was giving me a headache. My brain kept flashing on Rafael, lying on the ground in the parking lot. I had been so mad. . . .

  “Yes,” said Aly, speaking right into my ear to be heard. “Someone who changes back and forth a lot seems to be easier to recognize than someone who hardly ever changes. And the more one changes oneself, the easier it gets to recognize it in others.”

  “Wow.” There was so much I didn’t know.

  “Did you ask any of these people about Matéo’s parents?” I asked.

  Aly scanned the crowd. “I don’t think so. I think we mostly asked older people, and Donella and Patrick’s friends. Téo was right—I’m torn between wanting to spread the word as far as possible, and being afraid that that would tip someone off, make them target us.”

  “They’re already targeting us,” I reminded her.

  Frowning, she nodded.

  Just as I was about to suggest that we call it a night, Aly ran into some friends, so I met new people whose names I instantly forgot. Without meaning to, I starte
d having fun, and for the next hour Aly and I hung out, sometimes dancing with each other, sometimes with her friends. Despite being really tired and sweaty, I somehow felt more full of life or whatever you want to call it than I’d felt in . . . a long time. Maybe ever.

  “I need to get a skirt,” I said breathlessly when we took a break. “These shorts are hot.”

  “I’m telling you—dresses and skirts are the way to go,” said Aly, holding her dark curly hair off her neck. “We’ll go shopping.”

  Jennifer was the only person I went shopping with, usually. My mom and I had always ended up fighting, as I rejected everything she picked out, and she did the same to me. Once, when I’d insisted on shopping in the boys’ department, she’d stormed out of the store.

  I didn’t want to replace Jennifer, even though I liked Aly so much and she’d been great to me. No one could replace Jennifer, but it was just so easy to be around people I didn’t have to hide anything from.

  Around three a.m. Matéo got off work next door and came to find us.

  “Ladies!” he said, grabbing Aly and kissing her, then giving me a hug. He looked more spiffed up than he usually did—his dark red hair was tidy, he had shaved, and he was wearing a deep-blue button-down shirt.

  “Hi, baby,” said Aly, kissing him back. They kissed a lot. And hugged. They were very physical, just like my parents had been. Was it a haguari thing? A Hispanic thing? A young people’s thing? I’d never wanted to be like that with anyone. So among people I was a freak, and among haguari I was a freak. Excellent. I fit in nowhere.

  “You look tired, prima,” said Matéo, using the Portuguese word for “girl first cousin.” He took a drink from Aly’s soda.

  “I am, actually,” I said. “Been a long day.”

  Aly put her hand on Matéo’s chest. “Vivi needs to come with us to the river tomorrow. She really needs to learn some skills. She needs to see some haguari in action.”

  “Oh, no,” I said. What an awful idea. “That’s okay.”

  “Perfect.” Matéo nodded and pointed the bottle at me. “Let’s go home, sleep until noon, and hit the river. We’ll be back by four thirty so you can go to work.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said, but Matéo and Aly both ignored me and headed for the exit.

  Between now and tomorrow morning, I needed to think of a way to get out of it.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THEY BULLDOZED ME. WE GOT started earlier, well before noon. I got about six hours of sleep and felt like I had packed a whole lot of life into the last week. Not all of it good. A nice quiet day, some of it spent soaking in the tub in the hall bathroom, would have been just the ticket. But Matéo and Aly seemed to not hear me when I made lame excuses, and instead they put a knife in my hand so I could make sandwiches.

  I did not have a good feeling about this and glumly put my plain dark-green bikini on under shorts and a tank top. I didn’t want to see other haguari change. I definitely did not want to change again myself. All I needed was to learn how to not change, even under extreme circumstances. That didn’t seem to require being around a bunch of haguari.

  Coco and Charlotte, Dana, Tink, Suzanne, and even James were all going, and there would be others besides. A whole bunch of us freaks of nature, frolicking in the wild. Perfect.

  We carpooled, taking Aly’s Camry and Coco’s van, and drove for a good forty-five minutes—the last fifteen over a rutted dirt road. The thick pine woods around us were reminiscent of the Everglades, and my mouth went dry and my palms started to perspire.

  “Where in the world are we?” I asked.

  Aly looked back at me and grinned. “Mississippi. The Congala River. We’re almost there.”

  The rutted dirt road gave way to driving through brush. Thin branches noisily scraping the sides of the car made me flinch, and I expected us to plow right into a tree at any second.

  Then all of a sudden we were through the trees, the horrible scraping sounds stopped, and we rolled to a stop in a flat clearing. Several other cars were there—the other haguari. My heart went into my throat. I’d worked so hard not to have any part of this whole culture. Now I was surrounded, and they would be changing, possibly right in front of me. What would my parents think if they saw me now? I’d skipped family vacations to Brazil in order to avoid our kind. Now I was immersed. Would they be happy? Would they be frustrated that my cousin had succeeded where they had failed? I thought that they would probably be happy. Certainly more happy than I was, right now.

  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.