Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Two

Twenty-One

Twenty

Nineteen

Eighteen

Seventeen

Sixteen

Alright, so Bane had seen my scar. That kind of information on his part I could deal with. He didn’t know where it had come from, so that was fine. I could deal. Yet, it became apparent from that moment forward that I would have to employ more caution than I had before.

If I had made this casual statement to your average person, they would have said, “But how could you be more careful? You already barely talk to the guy!” Believe me, it’s possible.

Fifteen

My mind was made up—I was never having children. There was only one hour from the time I had arrived until the time I’d put Natalie and Lindsay to bed—they had regretfully informed me that their bedtime was eight, under the watchful eye of their brother—and they had already tired me out.

First, we’d had to put Natalie’s cookies in the oven, something she couldn’t do herself. Then, Lindsay had needed a bath, which was weird. Natalie told me that Lindsay could wash herself, and that I just had to be in the room, in case… Well, I wasn’t exactly sure in case of what. But I had to be there.

Fourteen

In the end, it turned out to be Katy who took me to the Morrison household at quarter to seven. She was surprised when I sat in the front seat—Bane had made this habit from me. It probably wasn’t good to let this boy start to dictate my habits, but what was I to do, really? It wasn’t like he was controlling my life.

“So,” Katy asked me as we crawled (it was raining, folks, and Katy was a safe driver) the main road, “are you and this guy… involved?” This surprised me. For one, Katy knew me better than anyone, and because of that (two) she should know that I don’t get “…involved” with people.

Thirteen

Sometimes I think not speaking is a real challenge. The key here was to get Aunt Maureen to ask me what I was doing tonight, so that she didn’t think I had a date or some other such nonsense when I went back to Bane’s. Also, I had to find a way back to Bane’s, period. But I wasn’t going to give up and just ask for it—that was cheating.

I was up to my elbows in ground hamburger, helping Uncle Mack with his special meatball recipe, while Aunt Mo made cupcakes behind us. This is the epitome of healthy behavior, in case you were wondering. Particularly since Uncle Mack kept trying to lick the spoon from the cupcake batter. Well, at least both things were yet to be cooked, right?

Twelve

One thousand thirteen, one thousand fourteen, one thousand fifteen…

We had been working for nearly five hours. Since the count of one, I’d been sitting with my head in my hands and eyes closed. Bane had yet to notice; he was too engrossed in re-checking the grammatical mistakes in some freshman’s prose. I’d been playing this little game with myself all afternoon, to see just how long it would take my editor to notice this each time. Over one thousand was record breaking.

One thousand twenty-two, one thousand twenty-three, one thousand twenty-four…

Eleven

And so it started. As things turned out, Bane had come to us from the Literary Magazine of the Nazi Regime—you had to go through an audition of sorts to get in and there was no general staff. Every submission was decided upon by the editor-in-chief, with occasional assistance from literary and art editors.

It took me a while to drill into him that we did, on occasion, have fun with Memorandum. Once he understood this (for a while he seemed to think I was playing a joke on him) he took it up with great vigor, although there was a tense moment at the first meeting when someone called out, upon Bane’s introducing himself, “Who the hell are you? Where’s Deirdre?”

Ten

Out of force of habit, I climbed into the backseat. Bane looked at me oddly. “What are you doing?” Why was it still so hot in the car? Actually, I think it was hotter. I was positively sweltering. If I was an egg, I’d be crisping around the edges.

“Sitting,” replied I, oh so intelligently. Weren’t cars supposed to have air conditioning? And Bane’s car seemed relatively nice, not that I knew anything about cars. It wasn’t fancy looking, but it wasn’t a Junker, either. So why, pray tell, was it so hot in here?

Bane ran a hand through his hair. Good move, smart man. Now your hair is just sticking up all over the place. It looks pretty silly, not going to lie. “Can you sit up here? I’ll feel like you’re grading me or something if you sit back there.” That was one of the dumbest things I’d ever heard. I always sat in the backseat.

Nine

By the time I had spotted Bane, lounging against the brick wall of the school, right where he’d said he’d be, I had made my decision. Never mind that it had taken me the entire afternoon to make up my mind—it was all very easy and rational when I thought about it logically. I genuinely cared about Memorandum. Bane genuinely wanted it to succeed, and even improve. Bane had charge of the magazine, yet could not work it without my help. Therefore, I had to work with him. It was perhaps not the happiest conclusion I’d ever reached, but it made an unpleasant sort of sense.

So I would try. I wasn’t promising anything, but I would try. Maybe we could start things off with a simple, makeshift sign language. Or we could pass notes. Or send emails. Really, it was the whole idea of talking that I wasn’t too happy about. I hadn’t really talked in—well, I’m not sure exactly how long. Three or four years, maybe? It was just easier to not talk, I’d learned.

Eight

The odds of my beating Bane to the cafeteria were nearly nil, considering we were coming from the same place. I had on my side the fact that I knew this school like the back of my hand, and Bane had only been haunting it for one day. He had on his side the fact that—the constant thorn in my cousin’s side—I walked slowly. And besides, I’d had to go to my locker. I wasn’t going to beat him there.

And, because I wasn’t going to beat him there, which meant that I would have to go sit with him, I was going to be made to look like his subordinate. Even though I technically was his subordinate, I didn’t want him to have that idea fixed in his head.

Seven

The next day was better, even though I did have to turn off the alarm myself. Aunt Mo didn’t make pancakes, so I didn’t have to eat, so Katy didn’t get mad at me for being so slow, because I was outside first. Which meant I had time to prepare myself for the noise, which meant that it wasn’t such a shock (I was getting used to it already), which made my day better.

Of course, I also didn’t have the hopeful anticipation of becoming editor-in-chief, but that meant that I didn’t have the disappointment of finding my hopes to be in vain. And by this point, everyone was starting to feel the exhaustion of summer, so the exuberance level was down a notch or two. Besides, it was really hot—a point of irritation for me, causing my apparel to be an open button-down over a t-shirt, both black per my usual—and nobody really wanted to move or talk or, really, be in school.

Six

“Oh, there you are, Deirdre,” smiled Aunt Maureen the moment I walked through the door. “How was school? Did you stay after for Memorandum? What job do you have this year, love?” It remains a mystery to me how Aunt Mo always knows what’s happening in my life. I seriously suspect she might be clairvoyant. Because I know that I don’t tell her, and I don’t know who else could.

I put my bag down on one of the kitchen chairs, nearly sighing in relief. One of the worst things about having a messenger bag is that the weight isn’t evenly distributed, and it cuts into your shoulder when you’re carrying heavy things. It is a sacrifice I make, though, because I really do like my bag. “Production manager,” I answered my aunt, deciding that the one answer was enough. It established that I was at Memorandum, and was a direct impact on how my day had gone, and how it would go for the rest of the year.

Five

The school in the state of near deserted was how l liked it best. It wasn’t creepy, like an empty school would have been, and it wasn’t as crowded as during the day. If not for all the residual stress from classes, it would be almost peaceful.

Residual stress was what I was feeling as I strolled back to Ms. Moreno’s classroom after school. So far, my experience with Psychology was exactly one day old, but I could already tell I was going to hate it. I hadn’t elected to be in Psychology, even though it was technically my elective. It just fit my schedule. Actually, they’d (they being the Powers That Be, aka Guidance) originally wanted me to take Child Development, but I’d refused. I don’t think I’m mistaken in saying that no parent wants me near their child. Not that I’m irresponsible, or anything.

Four

School was noisy. Having spent the last three months in a stockroom by myself had gotten me adjusted to silence. After that, coming back into an environment that contained nearly three thousand adolescents, aged fourteen to eighteen, was like being woken up in the monkey pit of the zoo. In fact, a zoo was a good description for the whole thing.

Surely these people had seen their friends at some point during the summer, hadn’t they? One would think, judging from the shrieks of, “You look so tan!” and “Omigod, I missed you so much!” that they hadn’t. But, unless the world was playing a giant trick on me, friends did things like hang out and see each other over the summer months. This kind of noise simply wasn’t necessary.

Three

Needless to say, I did eventually get out of bed, despite my deepest desire to simply not. Sleeping was peaceful and painless, two adjectives that weren’t easily applied to school. My sole motivation for wakefulness was that the sooner I got this early morning routine established, the sooner it was that I would feel only a dull ache of exhaustion, instead of a sharp pain.

When I made my way down the stairs some twenty minutes later, dressed with my hair and teeth brushed, my Aunt Mo had pancakes waiting. Somehow I’d managed to forget that my aunt shared her daughter’s opinion on the first day of school. I sank into my customary kitchen chair, across from my Uncle Mack who was sullenly reading the newspaper. Perhaps it was because he and I were related by blood—Uncle Mack being my mother’s older brother—that Uncle Mack shared my utter disdain for anything and everything that happened before the sun was up.

Two

Beep! Beep! Beep!

I responded to the angry call of the alarm clock by pulling the blanket over my head. On the other side of the room, Katy jumped from her bed with great energy, for the first and last time this year. For every day from now until mid-June, with the possible exclusion of graduation day, I would be the one to face the harsh green light that spelled out my sentence: 6:00.

My duties were relieved from my shoulders, however, on this, the first day of school, in deference to Katy’s excitement. Me, I didn’t see what was so interesting about it. The first day of school was just like any other day, except you had to stress over what unpleasant surprises teachers would throw at you for the next one hundred and eighty days. And, sure, studying gave me something to do with my over-abundance of time, but it still wasn’t exciting. Certainly it wasn’t grounds for leaping out of bed.

One

I was eight years old the first time my mother told me the story of Deirdre of the Sorrows. This is one of my most vivid memories of my childhood, curled up with my mom on our run-down old couch, my piping little-girl voice asking, “Mama, what does Deirdre mean?”

My mother then commenced telling me of the first Deirdre, who was predicted at birth to grow up into the most beautiful woman in her land, and was promised to the king because of this. At first, this idea delighted me—me, a princess! Then the myth continued, speaking of how Deirdre fell in love with not the king, but one of the king’s soldiers, Naosie. Deirdre and Naosie fled the country, so as to escape the wrath of the king at having his bride stolen. Again, this appealed even to my small self; it was so romantic, running away for the sake of love. I could appreciate it then.