The Apocalypse of Elena Mendoza

  “I’m not promising anything.”

  I used Mrs. Eaton’s office, assured she wouldn’t be back for a while, to talk privately with each person. The first, Elias Morales—whom I recognized from the baseball team—told me he was addicted to painkillers. He’d started taking them when he’d hurt his knee the year before, and now he couldn’t stop. I wasn’t even sure I could cure addiction, but I tried anyway. I placed my hand on his arm and closed my eyes. There were dark spots inside of him that felt like toothless, sucking mouths. I reached out and healed them, hoping they were the source of his addiction. It was the best I could do; the rest was up to him.

  The second was a girl who had been diagnosed with endometriosis. The teacher, Mr. Holden, who taught history and sociology, suffered from debilitating migraines. I healed them both.

  The third was Michael Graudin. We’d had a couple of classes together, but I couldn’t remember talking to him. He was the type of boy who flew under the radar. Not popular, but not a freak, either. I suspected after high school no one would even remember he’d been in our class. Michael was tall and lanky with hair that swooped back, smooth skin, a perfect roman nose, and bright white teeth. Cute in a Ken-doll kind of way.

  “What’s wrong with you?” I asked.

  “I’m gay,” he said. Michael’s voice was low and smooth.

  “What?”

  Michael folded his hands in front of him, but looked me straight in the eyes. He spoke slowly and deliberately. “I met a guy off this dating app and he didn’t know I was seventeen. We went out a couple of times. He told me he loved me and then he stopped answering my texts and taking my calls.”

  I slowly sat back down on the desk.

  “Did you catch something from him?” I asked. “An STD?”

  “No!”

  “Then what? Did he hurt you?”

  He shook his head violently. “Nothing like that. I want you to make me not gay anymore.”

  The enormity of what Michael asked took a moment to sink in. “Being gay isn’t a disease,” I said. “I’m bi, so I get that it can be difficult sometimes, but there’s nothing wrong with you.”

  Tears welled in his eyes and his knees started shaking so badly he had to sit down. “I love him,” he said. “And I don’t want to, and if I’m not gay then I won’t anymore.”

  “Michael, I—”

  “He was the first guy I ever . . . And he fucking threw me away without even telling me why.”

  I crossed the room and touched Michael’s hand. Not to heal him, just to let him know I was there. “I’m sorry for what you’re going through, but I can’t change who you are. I wouldn’t even if I could.”

  Michael scrubbed the tears away with the back of his hand. “Then can you change how I feel?”

  “Only time can do that.”

  “You’re the worst miracle worker ever.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

  We sat there for a few minutes. When Michael stood to leave, I said, “You’ll fall in love again.”

  “What if I don’t want to?”

  “That’s the miracle. Love happens whether you want it to or not.”

  Give me a break, Elena. Are you really dicking around healing addicts, headaches, and broken hearts when you should be finding a way to save the whole fucking world? I wish you’d been a boy. A boy would have gotten shit done already.

  I searched the room for the source of the voice, because I hadn’t brought Snippity Snap or Baby Cthulhu with me. I finally found a Lego Gandalf propped up beside Mrs. Eaton’s computer monitor, picked it up, and held it in front of my face. “No one asked you.”

  Javi poked his head in. “Everything all right in here?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Just talking to Lego Gandalf. He’s being rude.”

  I wouldn’t have to be if you’d do your fucking job.

  “I’m sending in Tori now,” Javi said. “But you need to hurry. Lunch is almost over.”

  I braced myself to deal with Tori Thrash. I was still pissed off at Freddie for what she’d said the night before, but I think she’d gotten one thing right. At some point I was going to have to heal people I disliked. My personal feelings for someone didn’t make them less worthy of my help.

  Tori walked in, shut the door, and leaned against it, staring at me with her long-lashed blue eyes like she was the queen of every room she entered. She had tanned skin, blond hair, and a toned body she’d clearly spent hours at the gym sculpting. I couldn’t deny she was beautiful, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t also ugly.

  “Is it genital warts?” I said.

  “Hey, Mary.”

  “My name’s—” I stopped myself and took a deep breath. “Give me one good reason I should help you with anything. Freddie says you’re a decent person, but I don’t see it.”

  Quit wasting time with this child. You’ve got more important things to concern yourself with.

  “Tell me something I don’t know,” I said.

  Tori smirked. “I’d heard you talked to yourself, but I didn’t know you talked to toys.”

  I looked at the Lego Gandalf I was holding and set him back on the desk. “I can’t fix you being a bitch, so unless you’ve got something else wrong with you, we’re done here.”

  “You’re not special, you know?” Tori said. “You might have fooled Freddie, but you’re nothing but a wannabe, and you’ll never amount to anything more.”

  “Great talk,” I said. “Later.”

  I crossed the room to the door, but Tori refused to move. “Bring back Ava,” she said. “It’s your fault she’s gone, so bring her back.”

  “I can’t,” I said.

  “Don’t give me that,” Tori said. “You made her disappear; you can make her reappear.”

  No you can’t. It doesn’t work that way. Tell her.

  “It doesn’t work that way,” I said.

  “Bullshit!” Tori’s cheeks flushed red. “If you don’t give her back to me, I swear I’ll tell everyone it’s your fault. I’ll tell the police.” Tears welled in her eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I really am. I can’t explain it, but Ava’s gone.”

  “She’s my best friend, Mary! I need her.”

  Tell her she’s gone to a better place. People eat that shit up.

  I almost felt sorry for Tori. And maybe Freddie had been right about her. It took a lot of guts to show up here and demand her best friend’s return.

  “Can I do it?”

  “Of course you can!” Tori said.

  But I wasn’t talking to her. I turned back to the desk and picked up Lego Gandalf. “Can I bring Ava back?”

  No, but maybe you should rapture this girl so I don’t have to listen to her whine anymore.

  “I thought I didn’t get to choose who vanished?”

  Forget I said that. Just get rid of her; I’m bored.

  I stuffed Lego Gandalf into my pocket and turned my attention back to Tori. “I don’t think I can help you,” I said. “I would if I could, but it’s not possible.”

  Tori wiped her tears away with the back of her hand, smearing her eyeliner. She squared her jaw and stood up straight. “You’re a fraud, Mary, and I’m going to expose you.” She opened the door and stormed into the chorus room as the bell rang.

  “Tori, wait!”

  Javi peeked in. “What’d you do to her?”

  “I stole her best friend,” I said. “And I’m pretty sure she’s going to find some way to make me pay for it.”

  THIRTY-NINE

  I DIDN’T KNOW if Javi’s theory regarding parallel worlds was true, but a universe didn’t exist where I wouldn’t answer the phone when Freddie called, regardless of what I’d said at the diner that night. And, as I’d predicted, she did call and suggested we see a movie at the luxury theater in Cloud Lake. If I’d been totally honest with myself in that moment, I would have realized that she could have offered to take me alligator wrestling in the Everglades and I would have found a way to jus
tify going, but instead I told myself I was only accepting her offer so that I could discuss my disastrous encounter with Tori and see if Freddie knew how much trouble I might really be in.

  Which is how we ended up wandering the strip mall before the movie to kill time, talking about the weather and the test in anatomy neither of us had studied for, and nothing of actual consequence. I pulled her into a quaint local bookstore where a frumpy hipster sat at a table off to the side, typing on an old-style mechanical typewriter of all things, and a young man with umber skin and a warm, inviting smile, stood behind the register helping a customer.

  “I’m sorry about how I acted the other night,” Freddie said. She was wearing tight jeans with a tear across the right thigh, and an oversized printed tank top. I couldn’t pinpoint whether it was her makeup or the way she’d styled her hair, but she seemed to glow. Like the light I’d seen when I’d healed her was so bright now that it was leaking out, her body no longer able to contain it. It was likely nothing more than a combination of wishful thinking and my overactive imagination, but I couldn’t help hoping I was the cause of her illumination.

  “Wow,” I said. “I thought I was going to have to tickle an apology out of you.”

  “Nope,” she said. “When I fuck up, I apologize. But maybe save that tickle plan for some other time.”

  Was she flirting with me? She was definitely flirting, right? I never knew how to tell. Franklin Rowan had stolen and eaten most of my lunch throughout seventh grade because he thought I was pretty, which I hadn’t known and had assumed he’d done because he thought I was a troll. He finally worked up the nerve to tell me how he felt on the last day of school, but by then his parents had already decided to move to Montana and I never saw him again after that. I’d come a long way since seventh grade, but I was still clueless when it came to boys and girls, and I didn’t want to interpret Freddie’s comment in a way she hadn’t intended. God, then I’d be just like Javi. But if I let it go unanswered, she might think I’d lost interest. Why was this so difficult?

  “I’ll do that,” was the less-than-amazing response I finally came up with. “And it’s okay.”

  “It’s not,” Freddie said. “I’m not.”

  “What do you mean?”

  We wandered through the stacks, ignoring the books. “Forget it,” she said. “What’s new with you?”

  I didn’t want to forget it, but the one thing I’d learned about Freddie—the real Freddie and not the imaginary version of her I’d been crushing on for years—was that the force of her obstinate desire not to do something was inversely proportional to how much someone else wanted her to do it. In other words, if I pushed her, it would probably shut her down completely, so I let it drop.

  “Well,” I said, “Javi pimped my healing abilities out to a teacher and some students, including Tori Thrash, who wanted me to bring Ava back from wherever the voices took her and then threatened me when I told her I couldn’t. Also, she cried. Does she do that often?”

  Freddie stopped in the middle of the biography section and grabbed my wrist. “Tori doesn’t cry,” she said. “I mean, in all the years I’ve known her, I’ve never seen her shed a single tear. Not even when she had to put down her dog two years ago, and Shortcake had been with the Thrashes since Tori was born.”

  “So I’m guessing I should take her threat seriously?”

  “I would.” Freddie let go of my arm, but I kind of wished she hadn’t.

  We kept walking. “I feel terrible,” I said. “It was one thing when I didn’t know the people who vanished—”

  “Or when it was someone who’d attempted to kill me?”

  “Exactly,” I said. “But Ava was a real person. These are real lives I’m wrecking.”

  “I told you that Tori is one of the most loyal friends I’d ever had. If you’d offered to rapture her in Ava’s place, she would have taken you up on it.”

  Freddie’s comment reminded me what Lego Gandalf had said about making Tori vanish, and I wondered if I could have done that. I still didn’t know the extent of what I was capable of, and the truth was that I was afraid to try. People disappeared when I healed and I had no idea what might happen if I performed another type of miracle. I could set the world on fire or kill everyone on the planet. But I couldn’t change that Ava was gone, and though it might sound callous, I had to put her out of my mind or the indecision would break me.

  “You never told me why you stopped hanging out with Tori,” I said.

  Freddie pulled a book off the shelf and flipped through the pages. It was a photo book full of pictures of a woman who’d posed for her death over and over. The pictures were macabre but playful and beautiful. “Have you ever heard of jamais vu?”

  “Not that I can recall.”

  “It’s the opposite of déjà vu,” she said. “The feeling of knowing you’ve experienced something before or should know it, but can’t. Have you ever written a word over and over so many times that it suddenly looks unfamiliar?”

  “My teacher in third grade used to make us write lines as punishment. Every time I had to do it, I’d end up staring at the words thinking they couldn’t be real. I knew they were, I knew I’d spelled them correctly, but they just looked—”

  “Alien,” Freddie finished. She returned the book she’d been flipping through to the shelf. “That’s how my life has felt since you healed me. There are pictures of me doing things I’m supposed to remember but can’t. Friends tell me stories that sound familiar but aren’t. Hell, even my friends all seem like those lines you wrote. Strange.”

  “And you think it’s my fault?”

  “Or David Combs’s fault.”

  Freddie and I wandered to one of the tables and sat. It was kind of hard to concentrate with the sound of the clicking keys behind us, but it was also kind of meditative. I imagined losing myself in the rhythmic tapping and letting the world fall away, but I needed to remain in the present with Freddie.

  “What was it like?” I asked. “Getting shot, I mean.”

  “It hurt.”

  “Oh, I see,” I said. “Someone’s being sassy? The tickle interrogation technique can be used to extract more than an apology.”

  “You keep acting like that’s a threat,” Freddie said. “But, fine. Getting shot was surreal. My body knew I’d been hit before my brain did. I was sitting there, watching you be all awkward and waiting for you to do that thing normal people do where they open their mouths and make words, and then I had a bullet in me. There wasn’t one part of me in more pain than another; it was like my marrow had been swapped out with molten lead.”

  “And when I healed you?”

  “That was weird too.” She chewed her thumbnail. “I thought I was hallucinating from blood loss or whatever, but you were there and you opened me up and found the thing inside of me that hurt and switched it off.”

  It was the first time anyone had described what it felt like to be healed. “When I heal someone, I close my eyes, but I can still see the person. And whatever’s wrong with them looks different, which is how I know what to fix.”

  “So you really don’t understand how it works?”

  I shook my head. “Not so much.”

  “That’s disappointing.” Freddie nudged my leg with her foot under the table. “Like learning Santa Claus isn’t real.”

  “He’s not?”

  Freddie laughed and smiled, and I think this was the longest we’d gone where she hadn’t cussed at me or cut me down.

  “When I first talked to you after the shooting, why’d you tell me I should have let you die?” I held my hands up in front of me. “I know you said you’re not suicidal, but why did you say it?”

  The laughter on Freddie’s face vanished so completely that I had to wonder if I’d imagined it in the first place. She cast her eyes at the table and redoubled her effort to gnaw her fingernail to the quick.

  “People who’re suicidal believe they want to die. They make a choice to actively end their li
ves, and they’re determined to do it. There are others who simply give up. Whatever happens, happens, even if it’s death.”

  I tried to wrap my brain around what Freddie was telling me, and I had a strong urge to call Freddie’s mother, whom I’d never spoken to before, to warn her that something was wrong with her daughter, but I wasn’t entirely certain what Freddie was getting at and I didn’t want to jump to conclusions.

  “It’s the same thing, though,” I said. “If I walk out into the street, see a car speeding toward me, and let it hit me because I can’t be bothered to get out of the way, it’s the same thing as walking in front of the car on purpose.”

  Freddie shook her head. “Do you believe pacifists are suicidal?”

  “Like Quakers?”

  “Sure,” Freddie said.

  “I guess not.” I felt like Freddie was luring me into a trap, but I wasn’t sure how to avoid it.

  “If someone hits a pacifist, they roll with it. They don’t hit back; they turn the other cheek.”

  “There’s no way anyone hits you without you punching them back,” I said. “And if you’re trying to claim pacifism is the same thing as giving up on life, you’re doing a terrible job.”

  “How so?”

  Freddie was trying to tell me something important, I thought, so I chose my words carefully. “A pacifist might not physically fight back against someone threatening to kill them, but that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t attempt to talk them out of it. It doesn’t mean they don’t care if they die.”

  “Fine,” Freddie said. “But then it’s no different from the way you keep healing people even though you’re not sure the voices are being honest with you. No matter what you say, you’re not doing it because you want to, but because it’s easy.”

  “There’s nothing easy about it,” I said, “and how did this become about me?”

  “Do you perform miracles because you want to? Look what you did to Tori. To Ava’s parents and David Combs’s parents. You did that, but did you do it by choice or because of inertia?”

  “The voices said—”

  “Answer the question, Elena.”