Chapter Five
12 days before Beltaine Dark Moon
"Damnit, Mom, he was in my altar again!" I'd woken to find the cabinet hanging open and my chair pushed up near it. Incense and crystals scattered on the floor. My precious glass goblet, on the highest shelf, had been thankfully out of his reach.
"You sure it wasn't the cat?"
"Odin's smart but he can't open a hook-and-eye latch." I'd installed that a few months ago when Arrie started his nocturnal pawings through my stuff.
"Anything broken?"
"No." I could hear the sulk in my voice, feel it in the clench of my shoulders and the tight set of my mouth. "But it could have been."
"Willa, I'm sorry but I don't have time for this. I've got to make the train." Mom glanced at the clock and dumped cereal into a few bowls. "Arrie! Carley!" she yelled up the stairs. "Breakfast. Now!"
As usual the two mornings a week that Mom had to go to the city were a scramble to get out the door.
She bundled us against a gloomy morning drizzle, sent us toward the bus and sped off in her ancient mini station wagon to catch the train.
Refusing to hold the little culprit's hand, I marched down to the bus stop ahead of them. Carley could take that duty.
The bus was packed this morning. The driver explained that one of the other bus drivers was out sick, so he was picking up for both routes.
Instead of the usual route, the bus driver headed up Main St., which was clogged with morning traffic. A lot of the people in town worked over the river in Poughkeepsie, and others were en route to the college.
Great! I was going to be late to homeroom, no doubt.
"That's where we used to live," Carley said, pointing out the window and doing her best to entertain the little monster. "Before you were born."
"That one?"
"No that one," she said, pointing toward a crumbling parking lot and the shabby two-story buildings that ringed it.
We were in front of the (truly crappy) apartments we'd rented when we first moved to town. Our bus was stuck at the light.
That apartment was also the site of one of the most gross and horrific moments of my life.
I was twelve, close on thirteen, and as part of my New Womanhood ceremony, Mom had gifted me with my first pair of contact lenses a couple months before.
At the time, Mom and I were both using a heat-system to sterilize our contact lenses. Our eye doctor was paranoid about some kind of bacteria that chemical disinfection wouldn't kill. Sometimes the lens cases developed cracks and when you used the sterilizer, the liquid would leak out, baking a lens to the frame, and meaning hours of dousing and soaking the lens so that you could pry it free.
I got up that Saturday morning and stumbled into the kitchen. Last night the college students in the next apartment had their stereo going till around 3am. Carley's and my bedroom was right up against theirs through tissue thin walls. The landlord had spared no expense on this dump. The finest under-code sheetrock and constantly breaking plumbing.
Trudging over to the stove I put on the kettle, pulled out a teabag, then looked in the cabinet for a mug. Not a single one.
The sink, as usual was piled high with dirty dishes. "It's Kurt's job to do these," I moaned to Odin. Odin didn't look impressed. Nobody in the house was impressed with the way Kurt did dishes...or didn't do them, rather. But he didn't like to cook, so he had to have some household chore, right?
I glanced into the sink. The water was barely an inch from the rim, and a cloudy gray in color. A rainbow of oil slick was floating on top, and there were clots of a mouldy cream-like substance forming islands here and there. I could see a mug, submerged just below the surface. I'd have to stick my fingers into the filthy water to reach the handle.
The kettle whistled and I went to shut it off. On the counter on the far side of the kitchen, I noticed a pair of mugs right near the contact lens sterilizer. We didn't keep it in the bathroom because there was no bathroom counter, just a sink stuck to the wall.
The mugs were half full of what seemed to be water. I dumped their contents in the sink and rinsed them off, then made my tea.
"Any hot water left?" Mom said, coming into the kitchen, a little while later.
I nodded.
She reached for the other clean mug, "You're still on for that camping trip right?"
"Yeah. Bearclaw's Mom is picking me up at 9:30."
Mom fished a teabag out of the box and stuck it in her mug. Then she did a double-take, looked over at the counter where the sterilizer lived. "Where...where'd you get this mug."
"Over there," I waved in that direction.
"Oh holy Mother," she said. "What happened to the liquid in them?"
"I poured it in the sink," I said with a shrug.
"Oh gods, I can't believe it!"
"What's wrong?"
"Oh my gods! I'm so sorry!"
"What, Mom?"
She went to look into the sink. Her hands tracing helpless circles in the air. "Last night...I...my lens case had a crack in it again. So your lenses were finished boiling and I didn't have anything else to put yours in. So I..."
I could feel my stomach lurch.
"I put them in those two mugs," she finished."
"Oh, wow." I joined her at the sink. We both stared down into the murky slime. "What do we do now?"
"Find them, I guess." She dug through the cabinets and found a tea strainer, a ladle and a gallon pickle jar. We spent three hours fishing through the filthy gross water; straining it through the tea strainer to try to locate my lenses. Miraculously we found them. For a while, I was fantasizing that maybe one of my lenses had stuck to the side of my mug and I'd swallowed it...cannibalized it in my tea.
A few things happened soon after. First Kurt left us. Then Mom found out she was pregnant with Arrie. Soon after that, we moved to the house we lived in now. It was a shabby colonial-style farmhouse on the north end of town. We rented, rather than owned, but we had a small backyard garden and I had my own bedroom for the first time since Carley had been born. And no loud college kids on the other side of the wall.
Meanwhile we switched to chemical disinfection for our lenses--to heck with the bacteria-phobic eye doctor--so we'd never have that problem again.
As the school bus pulled away from the apartment complex, I gave a shudder. Most people who wear glasses are probably paranoid enough about their vision. Contact lens wearers even more so, since there's so much that can go wrong. A ripped lens can scar your cornea. I even had one optometrist tell me that if you wear your lenses for too long, your eye tissue will grow through the permeable spaces of your lens and when you take them off you rip eye tissue. After that incident, I was probably more paranoid even than most.
We finally made it to the Elementary School. I was definitely going to be late if I got off with the kids like I usually do, saw them to their schoolrooms and walked the fifteen minutes to the high school. "Make sure you walk him to his classroom," I told Carley, as I passed her lunchbox to her and scowled in Arrie's general direction. "And--what was that?" For a moment it was like the world went blurry and cold. It felt like...magick of some sort. I blinked and things went back to normal. I waved at them and sent them off. It wasn't until the bus pulled up in front of the high school that I realized Carley had left her plastic-wrapped posterboard of bird wings on her seat. No time to bring it to her now.
I checked my schedule. No free time till lunch. It'd have to wait till then. The darn thing was too big to fit in my locker, so I asked Mrs. Frazier in the Attendance Office to hold it for me.
The morning passed pretty uneventfully. Other than Mary Sallenski swooning over Niall, the geometry sub, as well as a guy who was subbing for the Spanish teacher (who seemed to have caught Vasily's cold). And she and Sheryl being their usual snide selves.
Today I had English right before lunch. Bria was unusually quiet today, reading yesterday's assignment papers and glancing at her watch every few minutes, so we were pretty m
uch left to our own devices. I sat by myself and wrote snippy character sketches about my classmates to cheer myself up. I don't have a lot of friends at school. Not since Bearclaw moved. There's a couple kids who I eat lunch with if the weather's bad. We don't have much in common except the fact that they're as unpopular as I am. We used to play chess during lunch until we got bored of it, and we hadn't found another game to replace it yet.
The bell rang for lunch and I was about to head towards my usual semi-decent-weather lunch spot underneath Windcatcher's branches when I remembered Carley's Show-and-Tell project.
With a sigh, I headed back to the Attendance Office and then took off towards the Elementary School. The sun had come out and the drizzle ended, but the wind had picked up, and the posterboard wanted to dance and flutter like a kite. The wind yanked at the plastic wrap we'd covered it with and tore that away, but I couldn't catch the plastic in time. I hate littering. I would have to come back for that later. It was all I could do to hang onto the thing as I crossed the football field and made my way over the old stone wall and down the rutted, grassy embankment that separated our campus from the Elementary School play yard.
I headed towards the tangle of kids playing soccer at the far end. No doubt that's where I'd find Carley. Just as I spotted her green and white sweatshirt I noticed movement beneath the trees at the edge of the yard.
I would have probably passed the man under the trees off as one of the teachers, but something--an odd tingling at the base of my neck that I'd learned to recognize as a warning signal--made me look again. The longish, ragged cut of his hair was familiar.
Joth. He lurked under the tree, watching the kids playing soccer. He hadn't noticed me yet.
Nerves jangling alarm, I circled back up the side of the embankment and around the wooded edge of trees behind him. What was that weirdo doing here? With luck I could get to Carley before he saw me.
The wind picked up further, tugging at Carley's project. The feathers on the posterboard fluffed in the breeze as if they wanted to pull loose of their pins and take to the air, and I struggled to hold it non-feather-side to the wind. As I fought with the posterboard I glanced away from the trees, and when I looked up again, Joth was gone.
"Carley!" I called, feeling panic kick in. She looked up just as she was running towards the ball to kick it. The ball sped towards her, and she tripped, her foot sliding along the top of the ball as she made a spectacular tumble into the muddy grass. Still hanging onto the sail-like posterboard I ran towards her.
Suddenly Joth was alongside her, grabbing her by the arm and yanking her to her feet. "Carley! Run!" I could barely hear his whisper as it wafted on the breeze.
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