“Oh, yes,” said her mother. “The cat will need supplies.”
And pretty soon the Mielswetzskis had not only a cat, but two ceramic cat dishes, a bag of premium kitten food, one scratching post, some clumping litter, a litter box with a hood, assorted balls and accoutrements, three toy mice, two boxes of catnip, and one sorely needed soft-bristled brush.
“What are you going to call her?” asked her father, putting the bags in the car.
“At least until she’s claimed,” said her mother, getting into the front seat.
“Bartholomew,” said Charlotte.
It just came out of her mouth—“Bartholomew”—but maybe that, too, was fate. Because Bartholomew is an excellent name for a cat, even if the cat is a girl cat and Bartholomew is a boy’s name. Because cats need names, even if you are going to pretend the cat is temporary (when you know it is not). Because you can shorten it to Mew, which is really the most fabulous nickname for a cat ever. And because Bartholomew was currently curled up fast asleep on Charlotte’s lap.
“Once upon a time there was a cat with no home,” Charlotte whispered to Mew. “And there was a girl with a home but no cat. But then the cat found the girl, and the girl took the cat to her home, and then they moved to Prague together and opened a coffee shop and lived happily ever after.”
But Bartholomew was not the only surprise in store for Charlotte that day. At dinner that night—take-out Chinese food from the restaurant next to the pet store—Mrs. Mielswetzski suddenly slapped her forehead.
“Oh!” she said, looking at her husband.
“Oh!” said Mr. Mielswetzski, looking at his wife.
“We completely forgot.”
“In all the excitement!”
“We have news.”
“Good news!”
“At least we hope you think it’s good news,” said Mrs. Mielswetzski.
“I’m sure she will,” said Mr. Mielswetzski.
“Well, you never know.”
“Oh, she’ll be thrilled!”
Charlotte waited. It often took her parents some time to get to the point. Sometimes she thought that they were actually one person who had been divided into male and female parts by a mad scientist. Anyway, she was in no hurry; her parents’ idea of good news did not quite match her own—it tended to involve an outing to History Days or a bout of family therapy. Besides, no news could possibly be better than the news currently curled up on the bench right next to her. Charlotte let her hand rest on Mew’s softly breathing belly.
“Well,” said Mrs. Mielswetzski, “I’ve been talking to Uncle John….”
Charlotte perked up. Uncle John and Aunt Suzanne lived in London with their son, Zachary, who was Charlotte’s age. The Millers had all come over one summer when Charlotte was six—Charlotte had vague memories of kicking around a soccer ball with her cousin, who kept insisting on calling it a football, and at the time she had thought he was very, very stupid. In the last couple of years Charlotte had repeatedly tried to convince her parents to go to London to visit them—not that she was desperate to visit family she barely remembered, but she was quite interested in going to England. The Mielswetzskis kept saying they might go sometime, when the time was right, maybe next year, maybe for Christmas. Charlotte almost had them convinced this summer, but then Aunt Suzanne’s mother died, and Charlotte’s mother and father said it wouldn’t be right. Charlotte wanted to go to London so badly—life certainly couldn’t be so banal in London. She had thought maybe she could even spend a year there sometime, and then she would “try harder” and “meet new people” and “have a better attitude.” Someday she was going to live there and take photography lessons; her mother said she’d send her to photography lessons right where they were. That totally missed the point. London sounded like the coolest place in the world—though, let’s face it, anything for Charlotte would have been better than where she was.
“Well,” Charlotte’s mother smiled, “Uncle John is going to be transferred back here in the winter! They’re going to live right near us. The whole family.”
Charlotte tried to mask her disappointment. So much for her glamorous new life abroad. She scratched Mew’s ears comfortingly.
“But that’s not all,” her mother said. “Uncle John and Aunt Suzanne didn’t want Zachary to have to start at a new school in the winter. So…” She held out her hands expansively. “Your cousin is going to come live with us. Isn’t that great?”
Charlotte blinked. Great wasn’t quite the word. Bad wasn’t the word either, by any means. It was neither great nor bad, it was entirely without greatness or badness. It was neutral. It simply was. Like school lunch or piano lessons, her cousin’s impending arrival seemed to be just a fact of life, one more ordinary thing in what had been—until just that afternoon—an exasperatingly ordinary life.
But Charlotte tried to be enthusiastic for the sake of her mother, and her father smiled at her and said, “See? I knew she’d be delighted.” And her mother beamed and said, “Oh, honey. It will be like you have a brother!” And Charlotte smiled and did not say a word, not a word; everything she had to say was expressed by her hand on her kitten’s gently humming back.
So all was well in the Mielswetzski house. Charlotte was happy, for the first time in months, and her parents were happy too. They believed everything that they had said to their daughter about Uncle John’s transfer and about the reasons for Zachary’s sudden move. They had no reason not to; the story certainly made sense. But the fact is, Uncle John had not quite been honest with his sister. He was going to be transferred in the winter, yes, and the whole family would be moving, yes. But he did not mention that he had actually requested the transfer and that winter was the soonest he could get it. He did not mention that the whole reason for the transfer was to move his son away, as soon as possible, and the fact that he was being abruptly taken out of his school and shipped off to America had nothing to do with his education. So Mr. and Mrs. Mielswetzski could not be blamed at all—the liar here was Uncle John. But you must not be too hard on him. He was desperate.
CHAPTER 2
Mr. Metos
CHARLOTTE WAS ONE MONTH INTO THE SCHOOL YEAR at Hartnett Preparatory School, and thus far the year had proved to be just like all the other years, except more so. Eight of the girls in her class, whose names all began with A, had left for the summer as brunettes and had come back as blondes. They paraded through the hallways like an eerie airhead cult, and just as their hair had lightened, they seemed to have faded a little—they had lost form, character, color, as if their very atoms had spread out and could barely be distinguished from the walls around them. Charlotte wondered if they had all fallen victim to some elaborate brainwashing scheme. She didn’t know whether to feel proud that she had escaped that fate or insulted that the brainwasher didn’t want her.
But the girls’ transformation was far overshadowed by that of identical twins Lewis and Larry Larson, who had gone to fat camp and come back shadows of their former selves. The change had thrown all of the rest of the boys into a strange predicament—since Lewis and Larry had once been tremendously fat, the other boys had, in their banal way, believed the twins should be teased, but since Lewis and Larry were no longer fat, the boys could find nothing to tease them about. This quandary had thrown the eighth-grade males into a state of dull disquiet as they pondered the nebulous nature of the universe.
So the girls had faded and the boys were in a state of constant melancholic unease, and thus there spread a pall over the entire eighth grade.
All the teachers noticed it. Nobody shouted out the answers in class anymore, nobody even raised his hand. Attempts at discussion resulted in vast silences; lectures were greeted with glassy-eyed stares. The most vibrant and popular students seemed to be living inside a gigantic ball of existential goo.
One by one the teachers changed their approach. Even the most mild mannered of them became fierce and confrontational, sending an unrelenting barrage of questions into the
classroom, picking out defenseless students and daring them not to answer.
Charlotte found it all extremely annoying. She had been able to get through her school years without attracting attention either way thus far. She, as a practice, raised her hand in class once a week—enough so the teachers didn’t get suspicious that she wasn’t doing the work, but not so much that they might actually expect anything of her. It was a delicate balance.
Charlotte did a good portion of her schoolwork usually, whatever was required to keep her out of trouble, which was all she really cared about. Last night, of course, Charlotte hadn’t done a lick of work because of all the kitten-related excitement. There’d been so much to do! She’d had to call her friend Maddy and take pictures to send to Caitlin (which would probably arrive next summer), and then she’d had to watch the kitten as she played with some invisible something that went darting all around the living room, and then she’d had to provide a lap for Mew to snooze on once all that darting around was done. It was a lot of responsibility and did not leave time for doing algebra equations or reading about the causes of World War I. So Charlotte simply approached her teachers and told them the truth.
“Mr. Crapf,” she told her math teacher, “I didn’t do the homework last night. My mom sprained her ankle and we took her to the emergency room and it took forever, and by the time we got home, it was really late and I had to help Mom.”
“Your poor mother!” said Mr. Crapf. “Is she all right?”
“Yeah. She’s elevating it. It should be much better in a few days.”
“Well, tell her to feel better. You can make up the assignment when you have time.”
“Oh, of course! Thanks a lot!”
As for history, Ms. Bristol-Lee had taken to giving them pop quizzes, which seemed awfully un-American to Charlotte. So Charlotte turned the quiz over and wrote a long letter to Ms. Bristol-Lee about how her parents were fighting and it was a really hard time for her right now and she just wasn’t able to focus on her reading, but she was trying, she was trying really hard, and she was seeing a counselor to help her through this difficult time, but reading about world war was more than she could take right now.
Okay, so not the truth, exactly. To Charlotte, truth was a flexible instrument, one that could readily be shaped to fit her needs. Charlotte may not have been, in her own estimation, good for much else, but she could talk her way out of any situation. It was a useful skill in a world that was constantly expecting more out of you than you wanted to give. And usually a good story was so much more interesting than the truth.
As for her classmates, Charlotte had been cutting an even wider swath around them than usual this year. Charlotte did not think much of existential angst or artificial hair color. She would certainly never alter her own hair; Charlotte was not one of those redheaded heroines who bemoaned her fiery locks. She had no desire to fake blond highlights or, as her mother’s stylist had suggested, tone down her color with some nutmeg shades. If you were to ask Charlotte for one adjective with which to describe herself, she would say, “Redhead.” And that was that.
She was a redhead, and she did not truck with teasing boys or tinting girls. She and her friends could not be bothered with social structure; they had their own pursuits—Caitlin (when she was still there) had her music, Maddy had her straight A’s, and Charlotte had her hair.
In a week Charlotte would also have a cousin from England, which would be interesting. Zachary was black, too, and that would confuse everyone for a while, as Charlotte was not. (“Is he adopted?” people would always ask when they saw pictures. No, silly. Her uncle had married a black woman, see?) And perhaps a new arrival with a British accent would give the blond girls something to focus their attention on, and maybe then their molecules would inch back together and they might be slightly less boring.
Or so Charlotte was thinking while sitting through English class at the end of the school day. English had once been Charlotte’s favorite subject (back when she had such a thing); she read quickly, actually liked learning vocabulary words, and had a peculiar fondness for rules of grammar and usage. It made a good defense against teasing—when Chris Shapiro would tell her that when you had red hair, it meant you were part mutant, she would simply tell him his modifier was dangling and would stalk away, leaving him looking quite bewildered. Plus she just loved stories. They were always full of strange and interesting worlds, so far away from the one she lived in. Charlotte could not help but feel that the great tragedy of her life was that it would make an absolutely terrible story. What, then, was the point? Once upon a time there was a girl named Charlotte. The end. She had to make the rest of the stuff up to make the story any good.
Anyway, her English teacher, Mrs. Dinglish, had retired. Charlotte had raised her hand many times a week for Mrs. Dinglish. Her replacement was Mr. Metos, and Charlotte couldn’t help but think there was something funny about him. He was the tallest man she’d ever seen; she came up to about his belly button (not that that said much—Charlotte was still waiting for her growth spurt, and she was beginning to think it would never come). And he was really pale and thin, paler than Charlotte even, with hair so black it was blue. He always had the shades drawn in class, and she never saw him eat anything in the cafeteria. Charlotte thought he was probably a vampire—while she’d never actually seen anyone who drank blood, she was sure if she had, that person would certainly have looked like Mr. Metos. Charlotte took to covering her neck with her hands so he wouldn’t get any ideas.
Mr. Metos certainly took to the new teaching style with the glee of an unabashed bloodsucker, and most of the students found that during his classes their general torpor was mixed with an overriding feeling of terror.
But, for the time being, Charlotte could relax a little bit; they were doing a unit on Greek myths, and Charlotte was rather knowledgeable about that subject. She hadn’t had to do the readings all week. She loved Greek myths; they were all such good stories. When she was young, she had had a big atlas-size book of them that she read again and again. She would lay the book flat on the ground and trace over the illustrations with her fingers. She could still see the pictures when she closed her eyes—of poor vain Arachne, who was turned into a spider by Athena, crawling across the tapestry that had offended the goddess; of foolish Pandora, who opened the box that let all the world’s evils out; of Perseus flying away triumphantly with the Gorgon’s head. The only ones she hadn’t liked were the pictures from the stories about the underworld—grim Hades opening up the earth and dragging beautiful Persephone down to the shadows; the endless, dark landscape of the underworld, dotted with drooping trees; the dour king and reluctant queen standing like grieving stone in the cold, colorless cave of a lair, with their three-headed dog, Cerberus, grimacing awfully (with one of his heads, anyway).
The underworld, appropriately enough, was the topic of the day’s class. Charlotte thought Mr. Metos looked like he would know a lot about it. Too bad there were no vampires in Greek mythology, at least as far as she knew.
“The underworld,” he said, “is ruled by Zeus’s brother Hades. When the Olympians began to reign, Zeus, Hades, and Poseidon divided up the world. Zeus became the lord of the sky; Poseidon, the water; and Hades got the realm of the dead, which is sometimes called Hades as well. No one knows where the underworld is—some say it’s over the edge of the world, others say it lies just beneath us and there are secret entrances everywhere. Now, what do we know about the underworld?” Mr. Metos’s eyes soared about the room for a moment, then quickly alighted on prey—in this case, the unfortunate Brad. Mr. Metos stared at him, waiting.
“Brad?” he prompted. “What do we know about Hades?”
“Um…it’s hot,” said Brad meekly.
Wrong, thought Charlotte.
“Wrong,” said Mr. Metos. “Hades is nothing like the hell we know and love. So when someone says something is hotter than Hades, that’s really not saying much. This gets to my next question. Who goes to Hades?…Eli
zabeth?”
Elizabeth—a natural blonde—was one of those students who had gotten by her entire school career without ever saying a word, so this year whenever she was called on, she turned a most curious shade of magenta. “Ummm,” she whispered, “bad people?”
Wrong, thought Charlotte.
“Wrong,” said Mr. Metos. “Everyone goes to the underworld after death. In Greek mythology there is no heaven or hell. Everyone goes to the same place. Once there, great heroes are led to the Elysian fields, great villains are doomed to various kinds of torment. But most of us just sort of hang out in the world of the shadows. What happens when you die, does anyone know? Enid?”
“You go to heaven!” squeaked Enid.
Charlotte rolled her eyes.
“I mean in Greek mythology, Enid,” said Mr. Metos drily. “Do you know?”
Enid knit her eyebrows together uncomprehendingly and shook her head.
“When you die, the messenger god Hermes leads your spirit into the underworld. There the ferryman, Charon, takes you across into the world of the dead—if you can pay. The Greeks always buried their dead with a coin under their tongue. If you don’t have a coin, you have to find the paupers’ entrance into Hades. Once you’re taken across, you’re never to return.”
And so he went on, talking of King Hades himself and of the underworld, while Charlotte’s mind drifted a little, floating around in space until it ended up somewhere very near her kitten, where it stayed for some time.
“Charlotte?” Mr. Metos’s voice cut through her reverie. Charlotte jumped.
“Huh?”
“Ms. Mielswetzski,” he said languidly, “do you know how Queen Persephone came to live in the underworld?”
Charlotte closed her eyes and opened them again. She took a deep breath. She did know, and she would be able to tell the whole class if only Mr. Metos would stop looking at her. “Hades, um, kidnapped Persephone from Earth,” she said quietly. “He opened up the ground and just took her.”