In Memoriam Page 5

  “That’s basically how I feel, too,” Shar says. “And I’m afraid of myself.”

  “Why?” I ask.

  “There was so much violence yesterday, you know? I’m afraid I’m going to lose it and attack someone.”

  “I get it,” I say. “I was bickering with my parents earlier and for a second I was tempted to give them a thousand volts.”

  “We all feel like shit,” Jim says. “And none of us want to hurt anyone else. Can we all agree on that?”

  “Yes,” January is quick to say. We all end up saying yeah or some variation of that.

  “Why do you feel like crap?” Lia asks Jim.

  He takes a deep breath and holds it in for a few seconds before he exhales and answers. “Because Kat, Robert and Marco were killed. And because all those demons were probably good people who just wound up getting possessed.”

  “Fuck, I hadn’t even thought about the demons like that,” Shar says. “Now I feel even worse.”

  “Sorry,” Jim says. “I just figured everyone thought of that.”

  “I did,” January says. “But it’s not like we had any opportunities to do exorcisms.”

  “True, that,” Lia says. “Either they died or we would’ve.”

  My thoughts exactly. “I agree. Absolument. It was like the shooting – we just did what we had to do.”

  January nods her head yes a few times. “We should be thankful that the Lord and Lady and the other Gods and Goddesses let us triumph and not beat ourselves up about it. That’s not what they’d want us to do.”

  “I wonder if we’re going to hell,” Shar says. And she’s dead serious.

  “No,” I say. “Of course not.” Witches don’t believe in the devil, so why should we believe in hell?

  “Do you really think there’s no devil? I mean, obviously there must be a hell or something like it. Those demons had to come from somewhere.”

  “The way Hannashurie explained it to me, there’s a dark place they come from and go to,” January says.

  “Sounds like hell to me,” Shar says.

  “She didn’t refer to it as hell, but you definitely have a point,” January says.

  Shar’s face is beat red now. “So, if there’s that dark place and demons are real, how can there be no devil?”

  January shrugs. “Hannashurie said there was no devil. And if there was, he wouldn’t torture the demons. He’d reward them.”

  “I never thought of that,” Pete says. “Good point.”

  I don’t want to argue with Shar, who sounds like she wants to be punished, but I have to say something. “It makes sense to me, too. Because, seriously, why would the most evil being in existence punish others for doing evil? Plus, Hannshurie is a Goddess and would’ve told January if the devil existed. And you know witchcraft is real and witches believe there’s no devil.”

  “Maybe she lied to her,” Shar suggests, arms crossed, giving me the evil eye.

  “Why would she lie about that?” January asks, raising her voice. “It seems like you’re looking for reasons to feel guilty. Do you want to be punished?”

  Shar’s eyebrows cinch. “No. Well, maybe. I don’t know.”

  “So, Em, what kind of new spells do we have in the Book of Shadows?” Lia asks.

  “I only flipped through it and read some of the titles. I remember psychic daggers... Charmed gloves... Fire bombs. There’s even a spell that lets two people switch bodies.”

  “Very cool,” Jim says in the excited way he spoke about giving Pete magick.

  “I can’t wait to read them,” Lia says. Whether she’s being sarcastic or not is your guess as well as mine.

  Juliana comes out of her room and says hi and asks if January or Jim could try to work their magick and make her brutal headache go away. Jim says he’ll do it and tries and it works, making me so proud of him. Juliana is so happy she says we can all have a glass de vin (wine). Except for Jim and Pete because they’re driving.

  All of us want red wine and Juliana tries to explain the differences between the different types but I start thinking about poor Priscilla and Krystal and wind up tuning her out. Then Jim nudges me with his elbow and I snap out of it and say that I’ll have the same.

  While those of us who aren’t driving enjoy the wine, we talk about how much it sucks that we have to go back to school tomorrow. We’ve missed so much school, having been out since the shooting, that I fear they’ll end up making us stay back. At least we’re not going back to Noah’s Catholic. I don’t think I could ever step foot in that building again. My PTSD wouldn’t let me.

  Shar’s eyes are all lit up. “At least Greenmont High School is a public school and we can wear whatever we want and don’t have to take stupid religion classes.”

  “Cheers to that,” Jim says and raises his glass.

  Everyone else raises their glasses and says cheers. Then everyone looks happy. Or almost happy. As happy as we can be under the circumstances. Perhaps now would be a good time to bring up Krystal and Priscilla again. “So, what do you guys think? Can we go visit Krystal and Priscilla?”

  “I already told you I’m with you,” Jim says, putting his arm around me and giving me a quick kiss on the cheek.

  Juliana asks what we’re talking about and I tell her. After a little back and forth she agrees that it would be a nice gesture. Then nobody else says anything for a moment. They’re all looking at each other, like they want someone else to decide for them.

  “Please,” I say, feeling a bit peeved and disappointed.

  “I’ll go,” January suddenly says, sounding upbeat.

  “Count me in then,” Pete says. He doesn’t look thrilled about it, but at least he’s in.

  Lia and Shar look at each other. Both nod at the exact same second then they say, “We’re in.”

  I smile and burp. “Excuse me. And thank you.”

  Juliana lets us have a second glass de vin but I take two sips of mine and put it down just in time to fall asleep with my head on Jim’s shoulder. I wake up ten minutes later and he’s relieved because he’s had to pee since a few minutes after I fell asleep and he just sat there letting me sleep, knowing how exhausted I am. I don’t recall any dreams, much less nightmares, which is wicked awesome.

  Jim and I leave at 7:30 and as soon as I get home I lie down on my bed and fall asleep with my clothes and sneakers on.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  EMMA

  I don’t wake up until 6:25 in the morning. Just five minutes before Felix the House-clock would’ve started to meow at me, but I shut him off so he won’t. Usually, I feel tired when I wake up this early, but since I was already in a deep sleep by eight last night I feel well-rested and vibrant. Autrement, well, I’m a bundle of nerves. I can’t help but think about those Facebook memes, how some people think we’re heroes and others think we’re murderers. The meme with bullet holes on our foreheads is especially disturbing. It all is, though. I mean, I don’t consider myself a hero or a villain. It’s so unfair. It also sucks that it’s a couple of months into the school year and everyone already knows everybody else and they’re sure to notice us newbies. Besides, the story of the shooting made international headlines so I suppose you could say we’re celebrities. I guess that’s why everyone has an opinion about us when we haven’t even met them.

  Fortunately, I’ll be with Lia, Shar, January, Pete and Jim, as I’ll have to refer to Tim at school. So, I won’t have to worry about making new friends. Besides, it looks like I have to make friends with Krystal and Priscilla, who I’ve managed to convince my friends to visit with me tonight.

  I take my meds, which normally include 1mg of Ativan, but I don’t want to take that one yet because I want it to last me the whole school day and if I take it now it’d wear off by fifth period. It just makes more sense to take it just before I leave for school. It kicks in quickly so if I do that then it should start working just before we get there. I might even take a second one to make the day a little less stressful, this being my
first day at a new school and all. I kind of wish my girls and I could just cast a glamour spell to make everyone inclined to like us, but what if it makes some people hate us, too? What if the whole fiasco with Ken and Troy and company could’ve been avoided if we’d never done that glamour spell our first day at Noah’s Catholic? I have a feeling it still would’ve happened, since they were homophobic bigots before we ever cast the spell, but still. What if the spell made them hate us more than they otherwise would have? Actually, fuck that, our mistake was when we made Ken and Troy impotent and tried to blackmail them into leaving us alone by threatening to never give them their boners back. Revealing ourselves to be witches when we already knew they were zealots was just plain stupid. If only I could go back in time and change things. But even with all this magick in our lives, which I never would’ve thought possible six months ago, I still doubt that time travel exists. I’ve certainly never seen a spell for it.

  Getting back to my meds, I have one of those small pill containers on my key chain with a few Ativan and a couple of Depakote in it. I’m supposed to take 2mg of Ativan – twice my normal dose – and 500mg of Depakote immediately if I feel a seizure aura. But I don’t know if I’d do that because I wouldn’t want the meds to prevent me from having my premonitions. But the one constant I always get is that freezing cold sensation, the ice bucket being poured over my head feeling. It’s like brain freeze from ice cream times twenty. Believe me when I say that the ice bucket challenge couldn’t be any worse. Aside from freezing, I might start to feel shaky, or lights will start giving me a headache, or my vision might get blurred. Any or all of these other things could happen before my seizures. Trouble is, they usually don’t happen until right before the seizure – like a minute before at most – so there isn’t usually time to take extra doses of things anyway. Besides, my seizures aren’t so bad now that I take Ativan and Depakote every morning and night. In any case, I’ll have the extra Ativan if I feel a panique attaque coming on, too. It usually doesn’t prevent one if you wait to take it when you feel one coming on already, but it’s still worth taking in those situations because it makes it subside a lot quicker. In my case, that could mean having a second heart attack or not.

  Yes, I’m 16 and I’ve already had a heart attack. And it was severe enough to cause permanent damage to my heart. Even my cardiologist father had to level with me and admit that much. Luckily, Jim has shown himself to be a powerful healer and he was able to fix it. But knowing I gave myself a heart attack once makes me that much more afraid I’ll have one again when I have panic attacks now. Especially since I usually think I’m having a heart attack when I have a panic attack; experiencing heart attack symptoms is what makes me panic.

  I don’t know what I’m going to wear today. I guess I’ll wear the shirt my father bought me when he took me to see The Killers at Mohegan Sun Casino in Connecticut last year. (Dad always buys me a shirt when he takes me to concerts. Hopefully, people will ask if I saw them and that’ll be a nice ice breaker.) Think I’ll wear it with my tight black jeans. The shirt is black, too, so I’ll match. Some people might mistakenly think I’m a goth, but I’m going to give myself blue smokey eyes so hopefully they’ll prevent people from drawing that conclusion. Before I get dressed and do my make up I have to get myself in the shower and I have just turned the water on accordingly. While it warms up, I take off the clothes I slept in. I always feel so gross after sleeping in my clothes that I wore the previous day. It doesn’t happen often, but last night wasn’t the first time I’ve dozed off still dressed. [Who the hell doesn’t once in a while?]

  The water is nice and chaud – French for hot – so I step into the shower and grab my pink sea salt organic soap and lather up. As I’m rinsing off a few minutes later the fluorescent bathroom ceiling light starts to give me a headache and blinds my eyes and I also feel frozen in spite of the hot water so I’m about to have a premonition and wouldn’t have time to take emergency meds if I wanted to. I lean against the shower and lower myself into a seated position and...

  I’m somewhere else. At school. It has to be Greenmont High, as the few people in the hall are dressed in regular clothes, not uniforms like we had to wear at Noah’s Catholic. Strangely, I look down and see that I’m standing here. In the clothes I was planning to wear to school. Of course, I’ve seen myself in premonitions before, sure, but not like this. I’ve never observed a premonition from inside one before. It’s like I’m standing inside a cinema about to watch a movie. Usually, you just see the movie, not yourself watching it.

  “Emma,” a familiar voice says to the right of me. I turn and see Lia there with Shar to her right.

  “Hey,” I say. “Wait – you’re here watching a premonition with me?”

  “Looks that way,” Lia says.

  “Since when can we see and talk to each other during premonitions?” Shar wonders aloud.

  “Since now, apparently. Maybe it’s because we acquired all that extra magick?”

  Lia crosses her arms in front of her. “Must be. But what are we supposed to be having a premonition about?”

  Just then we see ourselves come walking around the corner down at the opposite end of the hall. Some preppy-looking girl is showing us around. She’s probably the sort of popular girl Lia, Shar and I have always dubbed Socialites. “This is the English and foreign languages section of the school,” she says to us. “Are you taking any foreign languages?”

  “French,” the three of us say at once.

  “We’ll probably be in the same class then. This is the junior and senior French classroom,” she says and points.

  “I’m failing to see the point of this,” the Lia standing next to me says.

  “Maybe we’re just supposed to see that it’s a regular, uneventful school day?” the Shar standing to her right ponders aloud.

  As our guide leads us further down the hall – closer to where we’re watching this from – I see a few guys nearby using their lockers and start to hear people’s conversations even though I’m not making any special effort to.

  “They’re hotter in real life,” Guy One says as we walk past them on the opposite side of the hall.

  “They don’t seem so bad,” Guy Two says.

  “Is the one in black still single since her boyfriend was killed?” Guy Three asks.

  “No, I think I saw her with a guy before school,” Guy One says.

  “Too bad. She’s smokin’ hot,” Guy Three says, scratching his head.

  It’s basically more of the same. Then two other guys come out of a classroom closer to where the three of us are watching. Let’s call them Guy Four and Guy Five.

  “That party happening this weekend?” Guy Four asks Five.

  “Yeah, for sure,” Five says. Then our host leads us past them.

  Guy Four fixates on her but turns his head slightly towards Guy Five and quietly says, “Good – I can’t wait to rape Melinda’s ass.”

  And then Lia, Shar and I turn around and look at him and his head explodes. Literally! There’s smoke and there are flames and his head is gone, brains and blood splattered all over the lockers, us, etc. He’s still standing, though!

  Poor Melinda is trembling and pale, leaning against the lockers so she doesn’t collapse.

  The versions of Lia, Shar and I watching this turn to each other, exchanging shrugs, as students start screaming and the guy’s headless body takes a few more steps before collapsing.

  “Did you do that?” I ask the Lia and Shar watching this with me, but they look as shocked than I am. They don’t get to respond, however, because the premonition ends.

  I open my eyes and find myself staring at the bathroom ceiling. I’m lying in the shower with a bathrobe placed over with me like a blanket and a towel behind my head like a pillow. I sit up and shudder as I find my father sitting on the toilet, a phone in his hand and a worried expression accentuating his wrinkles.

  “Em, you OK?” he asks.

  “Um, my head hurts,” I say, rubbi
ng it. I’m reminded of when I just recently woke up in Great Grandmother Ruth’s bathtub. I’m tempted to look Heaven-ward and scream, why does this keep happening to me? Of course, my great grandmother seeing me in my underwear is one thing and my father seeing me naked is a totally different, horrifying thing.

  “You had a seizure,” he says. “A serious one. I heard you banging around, so I broke down the door.”

  I realize I was drooling and wipe my mouth with a towel. Feels like I bit the right side of my tongue and the inside of my mouth beside it. “So, you put the bathrobe over me?”

  “I had to do something,” he says, looking about as uncomfortable as I feel.

  “What time is it?” I ask, sitting up with the robe covering me still.

  “Seven twenty.”

  “I have to get dressed for school!” I say, hurrying to my feet as quickly as I can while holding the robe over my boobs and pubes.

  “You should probably stay home,” he says.

  My words pour out fast. “No way! Lia, Shar and I are in this together. Now please get out so I can put my robe on and go get dressed.”

  “OK, OK,” he says, standing up. “Just make sure you take your emergency meds.”

  I nod. And I will take them. I can’t afford another seizure like this today. Don’t want to wind up in a coma. [And that was one premonition too many already today.]

  He hurries out of the bathroom, shutting the door, which no longer has a knob, behind him.

  I put my robe on then I head into my room and put my clothes on as quickly as I can. I look at one of the clocks I inherited from Great Grandmother Ruth and see that I still have a few minutes. I sit down in front of my mirror and put some make up on. I don’t have enough time for smokey eyes, but I still put some blue eye shadow and black mascara on, along with my light pink lipstick, which compliments my lips nicely. You can barely even tell I’m wearing it.

  Now, I take a couple Ativan and Depakote out of the bottles and take them with my remaining water. As usual, it feels like the Depakote gets stuck in the back of my throat. They’re big, pink horse pills.