The Apocalypse of Elena Mendoza

  I’d been dreading this. Explaining everything to the police had been one thing. Cops were suspicious by nature. Even if the boy who’d shot Freddie had still been there and Freddie had died, they would have questioned every detail of my story. But this was my mother. She was predisposed to believe me, especially given the unusual nature of my conception, but I was terrified she wouldn’t.

  I opted to tell her the truth. Most of it, anyway. I left out the part where the siren had told me to heal Freddie, because the last time I’d told her an inanimate object had spoken to me she’d said it was adorable that I had such a vivid imagination. When I finished, I waited for her to say something.

  “Mama?”

  She held up her hand. “Give me a minute, Elena. This is a lot.”

  “Understatement of the century,” I mumbled. Even as I’d told her the story, I realized how ridiculous it sounded. While Freddie lay bleeding on the pavement, it had been easy to do what the voice from the creepy siren told me. And then the police arrived and I hadn’t had time to think through all that had happened. But now? I’m not sure I would have believed the story if someone else had told it, and I was the so-called Miracle Girl who’d been born of a virgin.

  “Have you ever done anything like this before?” Mama asked.

  “No.”

  “And you’re sure this boy who shot your friend didn’t run away?”

  She was starting to sound like Deputy Akers. “A beam of light shot from the sky and took him. What else could it have been?”

  “A hallucination,” she said. “Stress can play tricks on your mind.”

  “I didn’t hallucinate, Mama!”

  My mother bowed her head. “Okay, mi hija. Calm down.”

  “Why did this happen?” I asked. “Why did some boy I’ve never met shoot a girl I hardly know? How was I able to heal her? Where did the boy go?” The wall I’d been hiding behind finally cracked and tears welled in my eyes. “I had her blood on my hands. She was dying!”

  Mama pulled me across the seat to her and I cried into her shoulder. “It’s over now. You’re safe. Fadil’s safe. Everyone’s safe.”

  “The boy might still be out there.”

  “Then the police will find him.”

  I felt stupid crying on my mother. I was sixteen, not six. Eventually, I returned to my own seat and grabbed a wad of napkins from the glove box to blow my nose on.

  “You don’t remember what it was like after you were born.”

  I couldn’t help laughing. “Obviously,” I said. “I was a baby.”

  “No one believed that I was a virgin. Not even my own parents. After Dr. Milner proved I was telling the truth, most still thought I was a liar. But it was the believers who wrote the most terrible things about us.” She turned to face me again. “You’re a miracle, Elena. My miracle, and I don’t want you to forget that, but whatever you did, I don’t think you should do it again.”

  The thought of healing anyone else hadn’t even crossed my mind. But as soon as my mother mentioned it, the implications loomed over me. “Why not?”

  “You never complain, but I know school is difficult for you. Even though I’ve done my best to make people forget that you were the Miracle Baby, your birth still follows you around.”

  Another understatement. It had started in middle school when Jess Maldonado found an article about me. The others were curious at first, but then the name-calling started. Mary was their favorite.

  “I don’t want that for you,” Mama went on. “I want you to have a normal life.”

  “There were kids from my school there,” I said. “They saw what happened.” I wondered if any had recorded it on their phones. If there was video proof, the police would have to believe me.

  Mama shrugged. “Then tell them they saw wrong. Tell them you don’t know what happened. And then keep your head down until it passes.”

  I hadn’t been sure how my mother was going to react, but this was not what I’d expected. If healing Freddie hadn’t been a one-time thing, how could I pretend I couldn’t perform miracles? How was I supposed to continue marching through life ignoring those who were in pain when I could possibly help?

  I didn’t expect I was going to find any answers sitting in my mother’s car in a Publix parking lot.

  “If that’s what you think is best,” I said.

  “Good.” Mama brushed my hair off the side of my face. “And let’s not tell Sean or the kids, either, okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Okay.”

  But it wasn’t okay; I just didn’t know it yet.

  FIVE

  I DIDN’T HAVE to keep the shooting a secret from Mama’s husband, Sean, or my little brother and sister, Sofie and Conor, because they saw it on the news that night.

  LOCAL GIRL ALLEGEDLY SHOT OUTSIDE OF STARBUCKS. EMPLOYEE CLAIMS TO HAVE HEALED HER.

  That was only one of the headlines. The others were less charitable. None of the news stations appeared to have any video of the shooting, and I thought my name was going to stay out of it until I sat huddled on the couch with Mama that night and watched Kyle giving an interview about how one of his baristas had performed a miracle and that the shooter had been lifted to heaven in a beam of light. He gave them my full name. I was definitely quitting my job.

  My phone started blowing up after that. Mostly reporters looking to interview me, some jerks who thought it was funny to breathe heavily into the phone, and one weirdo who kept trying to order two large pineapple pizzas. I didn’t know how they’d gotten my number, but I eventually shut my phone off.

  Mama took Sean aside and explained the situation to him, and he spent the rest of the evening giving me side-eye, and she’d told Sofie and Conor not to bother me even though they were bursting with questions.

  Deputy Akers called Mama’s phone around eight p.m., and when I got on she told me that the gun found at the scene was registered to Dan and Sue Combs, who had a son named David who was missing, and did I know David Combs? I didn’t, but I Googled and found a picture of him. He was definitely the boy who’d shot Freddie. Akers asked me if I was absolutely positive I’d never seen Combs at school or anywhere else, and after I told her I was certain, she said it wouldn’t be necessary for me to provide a sketch after all.

  Mama said I didn’t have to go to school the next day, and she sent Conor and Sofie to bed early. Then she went to her job as a night stock clerk at Walmart because she couldn’t afford to call out, especially not after seeing the bill we’d racked up at the emergency room. Sean went out drinking, leaving me alone.

  I hopped on the computer to look up David Combs, but there was virtually nothing to find. He had a Snowflake page he hadn’t updated in months, and searching for his name brought up few other hits. He was practically a ghost.

  There was plenty about me, though. Stories on reddit and Twitter. Never read the comments. It’s good advice that I didn’t take. They were predictably horrible. According to trolls hiding behind anonymity on the Internet I was either a liar so desperate for attention that I’d created this entire hoax to get my name on the news, or I was some kind of freak with alien powers who should be taken into custody and dissected for science.

  I wasn’t a liar, but I couldn’t prove that without trying to heal someone else. And I wasn’t entirely sure I could do it again or what other powers I might have. I’d hoped the voices would tell me more, but they’d been quiet since Starbucks. That wasn’t new, though. The voices were fickle. Sometimes they’d speak to me nonstop for days, and then I wouldn’t hear from them for weeks, not even if I called to them.

  I tried to sleep but all I did was toss and turn on the couch, so I went outside to walk around. Even without the sun, it was sticky and hot, the humidity so oppressive that I felt like I was breathing through a wet strip of cloth. I considered calling Fadil, but I was scared to turn my phone back on. Besides, his parents were probably fawning all over him and wouldn’t let him out of their sight for a while.

  I sat on the
curb and pulled my knees to my chest. As I sat, Lucifurr, a cat that roamed the neighborhood, limped toward me. He was a beautiful Maine Coon with intelligent eyes who’d belonged to a renter and then been abandoned when they’d moved out. He’d earned his name the first time I’d tried to pet him and he’d clawed my arm.

  “Hey, Luce.” I held out my hand and waited for the cat to limp over to me. Mrs. Haimovitch often left food out for the cat so that he didn’t starve, and though he had been on his own for a while, he hadn’t turned feral. He’d had a bad back leg for as long as I’d known him, and Mrs. Haimovitch had told me that she’d learned from Lucifurr’s owner that he’d hurt it during a run-in with a car.

  Lucifurr swished his tail back and forth and finally crossed the remaining distance, rubbed his head against my hand, and flopped down beside me.

  “I don’t suppose the voices would talk through you, would they?”

  The cat didn’t answer, though I hadn’t expected he would. The more distance that separated me from the shooting, the more doubt began to creep into my mind. Maybe I hadn’t healed Freddie at all. Maybe David Combs hadn’t disappeared in a beam of light. Maybe I was still standing behind the espresso machine at Starbucks and the events of the last few hours were an elaborate delusion created out of sheer boredom.

  Except, I knew it was no delusion. Freddie’s blood had stained my hands. It had been real, and it had been Freddie’s. I couldn’t explain how I’d healed her, but I knew I had. The question remained: Could I do it again?

  Lucifurr purred and squirmed onto his back. He was such a slut for attention.

  A thought occurred to me. The voices might not be speaking to me at the moment, and I couldn’t explain what had happened to David Combs after he’d shot Freddie, but I could test whether healing Freddie had been a one-time deal. I just wasn’t sure I should.

  “You okay with this?” I asked. “I’m pretty sure it won’t hurt.” Lucifurr didn’t appear to care so long as I didn’t stop rubbing his tummy.

  I closed my eyes the way I’d done with Freddie. The cat’s lines of energy spread out before me, bright and electric. They were different from Freddie’s, maybe because Lucifurr was a cat instead of a person, but where his back leg was seemed encased in concrete. The currents of light were hidden behind a slab of darkness. I reached out and shattered the block and watched as the cat’s energy brightened in his bad leg.

  Lucifurr leapt up, startled, his hackles raised. He stared at me like I’d shocked him.

  “Did it work?”

  I waited, and then finally the cat took off across the parking lot into the bushes. And he did it without limping.

  “Well, that answers that,” I said to myself. I possessed the power to heal with a touch. I didn’t know why, how it was possible, or what it meant, but I really was the Miracle Girl.

  SIX

  SOFIE STIRRED HER maple brown sugar instant oatmeal, but didn’t eat it, while Conor ignored his breakfast completely as he raced through the homework he’d “forgotten” to finish. Sofie had her father’s red hair and pale freckled skin, while Conor was tawny with brown eyes like me and Mama. Sometimes it was difficult to believe we were all related.

  “Come on, Sofie. Hurry up and eat or you’ll miss the bus.” I stood at the sink washing yesterday’s dishes. Mama was still at work, and Sean’s snores trumpeted from the bedroom, loud even through the closed door.

  “I don’t want to go today,” she said.

  “Can I stay home too?” Conor asked immediately after.

  “No one is staying home,” I said.

  “You’re staying home,” Conor countered.

  I gave him my “today is not the day to screw with me” frown. “Someone tried to shoot me yesterday. When someone tries to shoot you, we’ll talk.” I pointed toward the bathroom. “Go brush your teeth.”

  Conor groaned but pushed his chair back and trudged into the bathroom. “You feeling okay?” I asked Sofie when we were alone.

  Sofie wore her emotions openly, though I didn’t know whom she’d inherited that from. Sean buried his anger at the bottom of a six-pack, and Mama was a master at pretending everything was fine even when her world was a flaming garbage fire. But Sofie rarely lied and was incapable of hiding her feelings, which I loved even though it would make her a target for unscrupulous jerks.

  “Gwen Bettany called me a liar.”

  “What for?”

  Sofie twisted her hair around her finger. “I told her how you didn’t have a daddy and she said everyone has a daddy, even Andrew Smitt-Reyes who has two mommys.”

  I dried my hands on a towel, crouched beside Sofie, and rested my arms on the edge of the table. “Have I ever lied to you?”

  “I don’t guess so,” she said.

  “Sometimes things don’t make sense,” I said. “So people replace the truth with an explanation they can understand.”

  Sofie’s green eyes filled with concern and skepticism. “Did you really heal that girl we saw on TV last night?”

  “I did.”

  “But everyone’s gonna call you a liar, aren’t they?”

  I brushed Sofie’s cheek. “Even if I stood on TV and healed a hundred people at once, there’d still be some who’d call me a liar.”

  Sofie pursed her lips thoughtfully. “Like how Mr. Randall says there’s nothing wrong with the planet even though the ice in the north pole is melting?”

  I nodded. “Exactly. Sometimes a person can believe a thing so hard that not even beating them over the head with facts will change their mind.”

  “But what do I do?” Sofie asked. “It’s not fair for people to say you’re a liar when you’re not.”

  “You know the truth. I know the truth. Conor and Mama know the truth. You’re the only ones who matter to me.” I motioned toward her room with my chin. “Go get dressed for school, and if Gwen calls you a liar today, ignore her. If that doesn’t work, tell her I can make her hair fall out.”

  Sofie hugged me and ran off to get dressed. I ate a few bites of her now-cold oatmeal and then washed the bowl. Twenty minutes later, after the chaos of making sure Sofie had brushed her hair and Conor hadn’t forgotten his homework, and after they’d left to catch the bus to school, I stood alone in the bedroom we shared, though most nights I slept on the couch.

  Usually Fadil picked me up before Sofie and Conor left, but since I was skipping school, I was determined to take advantage of the peace and quiet to take a shower without someone banging on the door. I washed my hair and face and used every last drop of hot water in the tank.

  I was grateful Mama had let me stay home from school. I’d barely slept the night before because I’d kept imagining my classmates welcoming me as the hero who’d dragged one of their own back from the vicious jaws of death, their personal high school miracle worker who healed the sick while somehow managing to maintain a decent GPA. The more likely scenario was that my peers would whisper behind my back, mock me to my face, and generally stare at me between classes like I was an animal in a cage who might fling hot feces at them without provocation.

  Growing up, Mama had treated me as though my birth and conception were anything but miraculous. My being the only human ever scientifically proven to have been conceived parthenogenetically hadn’t stopped her from announcing to the stock boy, cashier, bagger, and cart attendant at Target that she was buying me my first ever box of pads because I’d finally become a woman when I was twelve, or from telling every boyfriend and girlfriend I’d ever had that I farted in my sleep, which is not true and she’d better stop telling people that. It also hadn’t stopped me from wondering if I might actually be special or from dreaming that my miraculous birth meant I had a destiny that would one day be revealed. I longed to fit in, to discover whether I was playing a lead role in the grand cosmic drama or merely a bit part with no lines. My miraculous birth and the voices had, for years, fueled my convictions that I had a purpose—that I would lead a significant life—and all I’d wanted was for som
eone to notice me.

  People were definitely going to notice me now, but probably not for the reasons I wanted them to.

  I ran into Sean when I walked out of the bathroom, still wrapped in my towel. “Excuse me,” I said, and tried to brush past him. He grabbed my arm.

  “Where you going?” The toxic cloud of his morning breath—a putrid combination of cigarette smoke and cheap beer—rolled out of his mouth.

  “To my room to get dressed.”

  “I hope you’re not planning on hanging around the house all day.”

  “Afraid I’ll interrupt all the ball scratching and pretend job hunting you’ve got planned?”

  “Don’t be like that.”

  Sean stood six foot three, wiry and thin with tufts of red hair on his chest and shoulders. He had a mean mouth persistently set in a grimace, and meaner words depending on how much he’d had to drink and whether or not my mother was around.

  “Let go of my arm.” We locked eyes, and I refused to blink first. If you subscribed to the belief that everyone has at least a little good in them, then Sean Malloy had squirted what little he’d had into my mother to produce Sofie and Conor, and nothing remained in him now but impotent rage.

  After a moment, Sean released me and I walked to my room.

  “I don’t believe you healed that girl, no matter what Natalia says,” he said to my back. “But others might.”

  “So?”

  “There are folks dumb and desperate enough who’d pay.”

  I slowly turned around to face him again, and I sure as hell wasn’t smiling. “You want me to charge for miracles?”

  Sean shrugged. “You’ll get your fifteen minutes of fame out of this. We might as well make some money off it.”

  “There’s no ‘we,’ ” I said. “And for the record, you’re disgusting.” I stormed into my room and slammed the door behind me.

  SEVEN

  TURNING ON MY phone was a terrible idea. My messages were a hot mess of reporters asking for interviews and strangers begging me to heal them. I deleted them. I added “change phone number” to the top of my mental to-do list, texted Fadil to pick me up and rescue me from having to spend the day with Sean, and shut my phone off again.