The Apocalypse of Elena Mendoza

  You just do it. If you don’t, Winifred Petrine will die. Ticktock, Elena.

  It was ludicrous. The voice from the sirens expected me to magically heal a gunshot wound? I had no idea where to even begin. But the voice was right. Freddie had lost so much blood. Too much. If I couldn’t stop the bleeding soon, she wouldn’t survive.

  A shadow fell over me. Over us. I didn’t need to look up to know who it was.

  “Are you going to shoot me?” My voice trembled, but my hands remained steady against the wound in Freddie’s stomach. I looked over my shoulder at the boy. He appeared even younger than I’d first thought. His cheeks were dusted with downy hair, freckles dotted his nose, and he had this dimple in his chin. I’d expected to find nothing in his eyes. A cold, inhuman vacancy. Instead they were red-rimmed and broken. They were hurting. He was hurting.

  The boy pointed the gun at me. I’d never seen a real one up close. It resembled the toys my little brother was constantly begging Mama to buy him. “Hi, Elena,” he said.

  He knew my name. I tried to recall ever meeting him, but I would have sworn I hadn’t. “I don’t—”

  “Was your mom really a virgin when you were born?” The gun twitched.

  “Yes,” I whispered.

  “Did God make you?” he asked. “Do you think he’d intervene if I shot you?”

  “I don’t believe in God.” Kneeling on the patio of a Starbucks while the girl I had a crush on was dying and a strange boy was pointing a gun at me was the wrong place to start a theological debate, but the words had spilled out before I could stop them.

  The boy blinked mechanically, like he was a computer processing what I’d said instead of an actual human being. “I don’t think I do either.” He pointed at Freddie with the gun. “She’s bleeding to death.”

  “Because you shot her.”

  Come on, Elena! Heal her! Heal her now!

  I choked off my fear, reaching inside for every ounce of courage I possessed to look the boy in the eye and speak without my voice quivering. “I’m going to try to help her now. If you’re planning on killing me, I’d appreciate it if you’d wait until I finish.”

  The boy chuckled. With a gun pointed at me and Freddie dying, he had the nerve to laugh. “My mom would have liked you.”

  It was such an unusual thing to say that I nearly faltered. But then Freddie groaned, drawing my attention back to her. If the boy was going to shoot me, I couldn’t stop him, but maybe I had the power to save Freddie.

  Since the siren hadn’t told me how I was supposed to heal Freddie, I closed my eyes and hoped for the best.

  I felt like I’d been plunged into an isolation tank. No sight or sound or touch or taste or smell. But there was something else. A sense of Freddie where there’d been nothing before. I reached out to her and I wasn’t alone in the dark anymore. She was there with me. Her body was traced in lines of impossible colors of liquid fire. And in her stomach was a gaping hole. A density that was sucking in the outlines of her body, devouring her quickly dimming light. Instinctively, I understood that the black hole was the gunshot wound. All I had to do was reach out and heal it. The darkness in Freddie’s stomach evaporated and the light of her body flared so bright I thought it might blind me.

  Freddie gasped. She screamed. I opened my eyes and lifted my blood-covered hands. It was real. I’d done it. I yanked back Freddie’s shirt, which still sported the bullet hole, and found no wound. Nothing but smooth, flawless, blood-covered skin.

  “How did you—” the boy began. He never finished. A bright, narrow beam of light streaked from the sky to envelop him. It was molten gold and it reached from the heavens to the ground in a straight line. It was beautiful and awful, and then I blinked and it was gone. I blinked and the boy was gone. The gun fell where he, only a second earlier, had stood, prepared to shoot me.

  But Winifred Petrine was alive. She’d seen me and she’d smiled and I’d healed her, and she was going to live.

  TWO

  MY MOTHER NAMED me Elena after a character in her favorite book; Maria, as a dig at her own mother’s religious beliefs; and Mendoza because, even though my grandmother hadn’t tried to stop him, it had been my grandfather’s decision to kick Mama out of the house when they’d found out she was pregnant, and not keeping his last name was my mother’s way of telling him that he exerted no power over her anymore.

  Despite the stories floating around on the Internet, I wasn’t born in a barn or at the beach at sunrise. I wasn’t born in a hospital, either—which is one of the few things the stories usually get right. I actually entered the world bloody and squalling in the parking lot of a 7-Eleven. My mother’s water broke while she was standing in line to purchase a blue raspberry slushie and a pack of Camels. It’s pretty easy to crap on my mother for smoking while she was pregnant, but she was sixteen, homeless, and not exactly known for making awesome life choices. Also, she hadn’t asked the Holy Spirit to knock her up and ruin her life.

  The same way I hadn’t asked to be born of a virgin.

  So the whole “virgin birth” thing. I get that it’s difficult to accept. No one believed my mother at first either. They called her a liar. Her parents, the paramedics who picked us up from the parking lot of the 7-Eleven, the social workers who occasionally popped by to check on her for the first couple of years of my life. Most thought my mother was too scared to admit who the father was. Some thought she might have even been raped, but my mother continued insisting she was a virgin.

  Some mothers in Pakistan give birth in an isolated building called a Bashleni, which men don’t enter for fear of “polluting” themselves, and which only other women who are menstruating enter to assist the mother during birth. And the Wolof people of Mauritania believe that saliva retains the power of words, so when a baby is born, the women spit on its face and the men spit in its ears in order to bless it. No one spit on me, but they may as well have spit on my mother, and it wasn’t to bless her. In the early days of my life, strangers called her a whore, a slut, a liar. Later some of those same idiots would call her holy and sainted, but I never forgot what they’d first named her.

  My story, and my mother’s, attracted the attention of Dr. Willard Milner, who eventually proved that I was, in fact, the product of parthenogenesis. It’s a process that occurs in some insects where an offspring is born from an unfertilized egg—though, in humans, the process had never produced a viable child.

  Until me.

  Parthenogenesis is derived from the Greek words “parthenos,” which means “virgin,” and “genesis,” which means “creation.”

  The truth is that parthenogenesis isn’t unheard of in humans, though two rare events are required to occur for it to take place. The first is that an unfertilized egg needs to detect a spike in cellular calcium, which is usually provided by the attacking sperm, in order for it to begin to behave as if it’s been fertilized. Then the process of meiosis, during which the egg loses half of its genetic material, needs to be interrupted.

  Both of these things actually occur in the eggs of one out of every couple thousand women. The problem is that without the sperm to provide specific genetic instructions, the parthenogenetic embryo grows tumorlike and quickly dies. For the embryo to develop into a healthy child, a pair of the mother’s genes needs to be eliminated.

  It’s theoretically possible but practically improbable. Outside of a lab, anyway.

  In 2004, scientists in Japan successfully manipulated a mouse’s genes to cause an unfertilized egg to develop parthenogenetically into a viable and healthy baby mouse, and in 2016, scientists at the University of Bath successfully bred mice using a parthenogenetically created embryo that they later added sperm cells to, proving that it wasn’t necessary to start conception with an egg and sperm.

  I, however, was not created in a lab.

  Depending on who you ask, I am either a miracle from God or a statistical aberration. According to Dr. Milner, my mother was not the first to claim her child was the pr
oduct of a virgin birth, but she was the first to have that claim tested, tested again, and verified.

  There was initially some outrage from religious groups over the claims that I was the product of a virgin birth, and I was a scientific oddity for a while, but eventually, especially after I didn’t grow horns by my second birthday, I drifted into obscurity. I became a footnote in scientific journals and on rarely visited Wikipedia pages. My mother chose not to hide the nature of my miracle birth from me, but we rarely discussed it. When asked about my father, I usually said he didn’t exist, which was literally the truth, though most assumed I meant he was a deadbeat or in prison. For sixteen years I lived a normal life—I went to school, took care of my little brother and sister, hung out with my best friend, Fadil, and complained about my ex-boyfriend, Javi—but due to the unique circumstances of my birth, I’d spent most of my normal life waiting for the chance to do something extraordinary. And the voices—which I was pretty certain were not a symptom of an undiagnosed mental illness—had only reinforced my belief that I was destined for more, though they hadn’t given me any hints as to what “more” might entail.

  The healing and the light from the sky? Yeah. Those were new.

  THREE

  DEPUTY AKERS STOOD in front of me with her hands on her hips, staring with this bewildered expression, like I’d handed her a Rubik’s Cube with all the stickers peeled off and had ordered her to solve it in ten seconds or less. She was kind of hot for an older woman, though her ponytail was tragic.

  “Walk me through it again, if you would, Ms. Mendoza.”

  I sat on the curb, as far from the spot where Freddie had been shot as possible, and took a deep breath. Fadil glanced at me from where he was giving a statement to a different police officer. We hadn’t had time before the police and paramedics had arrived to decide whether we were going to tell the truth. Kyle had rushed out from inside, along with twenty kids from my school, to gawk and ask what had happened. I hadn’t had the chance to speak to Freddie, either, because the paramedics who rolled up had taken her immediately to the hospital, even though they couldn’t find an injury. I wondered what she was going to tell the police when they got around to questioning her.

  “I was on a ten-minute break. I walked to that table to talk to Freddie—”

  Deputy Akers broke in. “That would be Winifred Petrine?”

  I nodded. “Some boy I swear I don’t know bumped into me, asked me if I was Elena Mendoza, and then shot Freddie.”

  “And your claim is that you healed this gunshot wound?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you ever healed anyone before?”

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  Akers bit her lip in a way that might have been cute if this weren’t the third time I’d gone over my story. “Are you sure that Ms. Petrine was actually shot?”

  I held up my hands, still tacky with Freddie’s blood, and pointed toward the quickly drying stain on the cement. The police had cordoned off the area, and Kyle had closed the store. “That’s not menstrual blood on the ground, Deputy.”

  “Uh . . .” Akers cleared her throat. “Could the shooter have injured himself? Is that possible?”

  This was getting me nowhere. “Right,” I said. “He walked up to us, shot himself, and then vanished in a beam of light.”

  “About that,” Deputy Akers said. “Now, you claim that after you healed Ms. Petrine, the shooter disappeared? If your friend was injured, you would have been under a great deal of stress. Is it possible he simply ran away?”

  “Sure, whatever. Maybe he ran away after he hurt himself and splattered his blood all over me, Freddie, and the ground.”

  “There’s no need to get defensive. I’m simply trying to understand what happened here.” Akers paused. “Can you recall what the shooter looked like? Would you be willing to sit with one of our sketch artists and provide a description of the attacker?”

  The boy’s face was burned into my memory. But before I answered, a white van with a picture of a smiling cocker spaniel under the words MOBILE GROOM WAGGIN’ tore into the parking lot and screeched to a halt at the edge of the police line. My mother practically fell out of the driver’s seat and ran toward me, pushing past cops and onlookers and reporters.

  “Mija!” She was still wearing her khaki shorts and Groom Waggin’ T-shirt. I stood as she reached me and let her pull me into a hug that threatened to squeeze the breath from me. “Are you hurt? What happened?”

  I diplomatically detached myself from my mother. Genetically we were identical, but she had better hair and legs than me and at the moment she reeked of wet dog. “I’m fine,” I said. “I’m not hurt.”

  Mama caught sight of Fadil and said, “Is it Fadil? They told me someone was shot, but they wouldn’t tell me who. Where are his parents?”

  “Fadil’s fine too. His mom’s in surgery at the outpatient clinic, and they’re still trying to get ahold of his dad.”

  Everyone reacts differently to extreme situations. Freddie’s shooting had been my first, and apparently I reacted by turning into a sarcastic robot. I felt flat and emotionless. Like everything had happened to some other version of me and the event was a movie I’d watched, instead of my life. Fadil got angry. I’d had to calm him down when the police had first arrived because he was shouting at one of the officers for not immediately trying to find the boy who’d shot Freddie. My mother, on the other hand, took control. It wouldn’t have mattered who she was speaking to—the police, a doctor, the president of the United States—she would have ordered them around, and the funny thing was that most people did what she said without question.

  “Have these children been looked at by the paramedics yet?” Mama asked Deputy Akers like she had finally realized someone else existed other than me and Fadil.

  The deputy started to shake her head. “No, but—”

  “No more questions,” my mother said. “For either of them.” She turned toward Fadil. “Come here, Fadil.”

  “I assume you’re Elena’s mother?” Akers asked.

  “Yes, and I’m taking these two to the hospital like you should have done.” My mother’s voice whip-snapped in the air between her and the deputy.

  “Well, they’re not hurt, and we still have a few more questions—”

  “Call your father, Fadil,” Mama said. “Tell him I’m taking you and Elena to the emergency room to be checked out. He can meet us there.”

  “Mrs. Mendoza—”

  “Ms.” Mama said. “Do you have their information? Elena, did you give her my phone number?”

  “I did, Mama.”

  Deputy Akers’s shoulders fell as she nodded. She knew she’d lost. “If I could just—”

  “You can just call and arrange to ask your questions after they’ve been examined by a medical professional. And you had best hope neither are hurt or you’ll be hearing from my lawyer.”

  It was difficult not to laugh, because there was no way we could afford a lawyer. Hell, an emergency room visit was going to stress Mama out, even with our insurance.

  Akers held up her hands and backed away. “You’re free to go.” She caught my eye specifically. “I’ll call you to arrange for that sketch artist, all right? We’ll have a better chance of finding the boy who did this that way.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  Mama took my hand and Fadil’s and pulled us toward the Groom Waggin’ van. It wasn’t until we were all inside—me and Fadil squeezed together in the front passenger seat—that Mama began to cry.

  “I’m fine, Mama. It’s okay. I’m not hurt. Neither of us is hurt.” I kept my hands out of sight to hide the blood.

  Fat tears rolled down my mother’s cheeks and snot dripped down her upper lip. “I kept thinking you were dead. The whole drive here I thought you were dead and I didn’t know what I’d do if you’d died.”

  “I’m not dead, Mama.”

  “Neither am I,” Fadil added, which made Mama laugh.

  “I’m glad you?
??re not hurt either, Fadil.” She wiped her nose with the back of her hand and turned the key in the ignition.

  A wild yelp from the back of the van caused me to turn around. A wet, wide-eyed Yorkie stood in the tub, panting so hard I thought it would pass out.

  “Mama?” I said. “There’s a dog back there.”

  Her eyes flew open. “Lily!” Mama grabbed her phone out of the cup holder and handed it to me. “Gloria’s number is in there. Call her and tell her what happened. We’ll drop Lily off on the way to the hospital.”

  “You left in the middle of a grooming without giving the dog back?” Fadil said.

  “When it comes to you kids, I’d run through hot broken glass to reach you.” Mama put the van in reverse. “Now climb in back and give Lily a treat to shut her up, and wash the blood off your hands while you’re there.”

  FOUR

  IT TOOK OVER four hours in the emergency room for a frazzled doctor to declare me healthy, uninjured, and fit to go home.

  Mr. Himsi had shown up shortly after we’d arrived at the hospital, and by then Fadil and I were both over having to explain that we weren’t hurt and nothing was wrong with us. I’ll admit it gave me the warm fuzzies to see my mother and Fadil’s dad so messed up thinking we might be hurt, if only because it reinforced how much they cared. Not that I’d doubted it. Soon after Mr. Himsi showed up, Fadil was moved to his own little examination room and I lost track of him.

  Mama didn’t speak as we drove back to the store, where she dropped off the Groom Waggin’ and got her car. The little gray Corolla had over two hundred thousand miles on it, but it kept on chugging, which was a good thing seeing as I doubted we could afford to replace it. It also happened to be the same car Mama was driving the day I was born. There was a stain on the front seat that she used to joke was from her water breaking. I was pretty sure it wasn’t.

  We started home, but after a mile, Mama pulled into the parking lot of a Publix, parked the car, and turned to me. “Tell me what happened.”