MEGAN. TIME TO TALK TO LAUREN.
Megan realized her mouth was hanging open and shut it, then took a quick glance at Angie and the boys. In return she was hit with a secondary shock as she saw their demeanor—wary, even borderline hostile. Evan stood straighter than he’d been standing up to this point, with his shoulders thrown back, and Angie and Ryan both stood behind him, peering around either side of him at Lauren, as if she were a Beast in a failing cage and they were ready to flee at any moment while Evan stood and fought to protect them.
The distrust, the borderline hate on their faces as they looked at Lauren contributed at least as much to Megan’s feelings of wrong-footedness as Lauren’s uncharacteristic grip slip or the unlikelihood of Beth and Kay also dropping their coffee at the same time or the mysterious looming It, subject of the bet.
Wishing she had more time to figure all this out, Megan turned her eyes back to Lauren as Lauren got close enough to legibly say, “Oh Megan! It’s so good to see you! If this wretched summer hadn’t gotten this one last lick in on me before school could officially start, we could catch up! But this is a total nightmare—I know you’ll understand if I run off.” She slipped her phone into her backbag as she spoke. Lauren wore a perfectly appropriate expression of constrained delight at Megan’s presence mixed with distress over her mishap and the damage to her dress. Her hair, with its protective constellations of enchanted silver and diamonds, was, of course, still perfect.
“Laurie,” Megan said, “What the everliving shit was that?”
Fantastic, the panic that showed in Lauren’s eyes. Megan had never seen her anything less than totally self-assured. “I’m only human, Megan,” Lauren said. “I was just so excited to see you, and you—you look so good, I just… my grip loosened, that’s all. I’m only human.”
“Laurie,” Megan said, trying to keep her tone reasonable and not let the previous half hour or so provoke her into using a harsh tone with one of her closest friends, who’d after all maybe just ruined one of her favorite dresses. “Beth and Kay dropped their coffee too. At the same time you all saw me. And my friends. I’ve never seen you drop anything.”
Lauren’s eyes got a little wider, the whites around her twilight irises a little more visible, despite her otherwise perfectly appropriate expression. “Megan, please! This dress was so expensive and my coffee was so iced, I don’t know why Beth and Katie dropped theirs but I really need to go, I’m so uncomfortable, and if I’m fast enough I could maybe potentially save this dress but I can’t cast a cantrip on it while I’m wearing it, you understand.”
Before Megan could say more, Lauren turned her frightened eyes to Evan, and Angie and Ryan behind him, and said, “I’m so sorry that I can’t stay for proper introductions, but I hope you’ve had an exceedingly fine summer and perhaps we will get a chance to um, to speak some later, once we’ve had a chance to get, to get things all sorted?” It was a stiffer, more uncomfortable sentence than anything Megan’d ever heard emerge from Lauren’s mouth. Megan could not think of any time she’d heard Lauren actually say, “um.”
“Mmmm-hmmm,” Angie and the boys all responded, all but in unison, in a tone of clear, withering skepticism. Lauren paled.
Megan had to consider that again. Lauren visibly paled—not easy to note in her dark golden brown skin without a dramatic change.
Lauren glanced over her shoulder and, again before Megan could marshall her thoughts and say something, said, “Please Megan, Nisha and Katier seem to have escaped tragedy, won’t you please catch up with them while I get myself fixed up? Please?” Nisha and Katier exchanged a quick, apprehensive glance.
Without meaning to, Megan flared her nostrils in frustration, and said, “Yeah, Laurie, go clean up, get changed. I hope you can salvage the dress.” She paused for a moment, then said, “We will talk later.”
“Ah-heh! Of—of course we will!” Lauren said. “Why wouldn’t we? You’re one of my dearest friends! I’ll be back before the bell if I can.” With that she turned. But, despite the remarkably bad response to her previous overture, Lauren being Lauren, she clearly couldn’t resist pausing and, at Ryan, saying, “A spit take might have been funny. This,” and she just gestured at her dress, “Is not.”
Ryan leaned slightly further out from behind Evan and gave Lauren a grin that managed to be both exceedingly pleasant and still hostile at the same time. “Oh,” he said. “I find humor is largely a matter of one’s perspective, don’t you think? Try looking at the situation from our point of view!”
Lauren looked surprised for a moment, before closing her eyes a moment and nodding. “Hard to argue with that, I suppose,” she responded, which in its own way was nearly as weird as the rest of her behavior. She then all but fled past Katier and Nisha and into the Vocational building.
Katier bounced toward Megan the moment Lauren passed her, but not before Megan saw Nisha all but glaring at Angie and the boys. What? Why? Because of their responses to Lauren?
“Meeegan!” Katier cried before Megan could give anymore than that fractured thought to the matter. “We miiissed you!” she said as she threw her arms wide, and despite the circumstances Megan smiled and spread her arms in turn, so Katier threw her arms around Megan.
Notably, Katier wasn’t nearly a decimeter shorter than Megan. “You grew!” Megan whispered. At this point Katier had to be at least fifteen decimeters, if not a centimeter or two more.[1] Not much shorter than Ryan, probably.
[1] Megan’d grown, like, a centimeter, if that. Her mom was sixteen point two decimeters and had been so at fourteen years old, and her dad was only seventeen, so Megan doubted she’d be getting much taller than her current sixteen.
“I grew!” Katier murmured back in a tone both happy and deeply tense. In soft tones, not whispering and not carrying, she went on, “Megan, whatever is going on, I’m here for you, girl.” They pulled back and looked at each other with their hands on each other’s upper arms for a moment, Katier blinking golden eyes accented with sparkling copper eyeshadow at Megan. “Hey, oh, um. Gee, no… no eye makeup?” Katie asked, “That’s a, uh, different choice for you?”
Megan tried as cheerful a smile as possible as she replied. “Well, not a choice so much, I just had to wipe it off because I messed it up crying after leaving the house, and I haven’t had a chance to reapply, you know?”
Katier’s eyes flicked over Megan’s shoulder, getting decidedly unfriendly, and even from several feet away Megan could see Nisha’s jaw clench, and more words spilled from Megan’s mouth before she could even really think about them: “I mean, it was foolish of me to even bother with it in the first place, like I wouldn’t end up crying trying to apologize to my childhood best friends for not talking to them for three years, you know? I should have figured.”
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“Wait,” Katier a heartbeat before Nisha said, “What?” The words ‘childhood best friends’ wiped every trace of hostility off both girls’ faces, leaving behind confusion and shock
“But even then,” Megan said, the words still coming and getting faster and louder despite herself, “I might have managed okay, except there is some… thing going on—” and Katier was starting to back away, “Or that has happened, or I don’t even know what, which Angie refuses to tell me about because it’s too upsetting for her. But that apparently everyone else knows about, judging by the way everyone and their mother is watching us—that’s seriously Noburu Gomez’s mother over there staring at us, along with like half of our Asphodel class! Something that made Lauren, Kay, and BETH all drop their coffee at the exact same moment they saw me with my old friends, who also were Kay and Beth’s old friends! Nisha, Katie, what the FUCK is going on?!”
“Eh-heh,” Katier whimpered from where she’d backed up to stand next to Nisha, whom she now glanced at. Underneath her brown skin, Nisha’s face seemed to be utterly drained of blood, the expression on her face as she stared at Megan not unlike that she’d worn when Aliyah’d broken up with her the day before Asphodel Middle School’s Star Solstice dance the previous winter. “Ah, uh,” Katier continued, and hooked a thumb at her chest. “Also, check it! Not a padded bra! Finally not a ten-year-old boy over here!”
“Katie,” Megan said, the word coming out quiet because she felt like she’d been drained of all energy and emotion by her outburst, “That’s exciting and we can celebrate later, but we’ve talked about using good news as a distraction from things you don’t want to talk about, and that’s just a little off-topic from the question I just asked, which I want an answer to now, please.”
“Aaaa gods, I’m sorry Megan!” Katier said, scrunching her eyes closed in embarrassment. “I was just excited and you’re my only friend who still didn’t know so I was totally expecting that we’d be talking about it and all our expanded dating pools and how fun this year was gonna be but then you showed up with—” She’d opened her eyes and looked at Megan’s face. Then she glanced with even greater panic at the still, silent Nisha. “Eh-heh? Nish? Um,” she said, her tone matching her expression, and not unlike Megan getting louder as she continued to talk, “Nish? You wanna say something?”
“I don’t—you don’t? They didn’t tell? You arrived with them but you don’t know—?” Nisha stammered, as uncharacteristic for her as for Lauren.
“Huh, weird!” Katier said, her voice a little louder, before Megan could say anything. “Why wouldn’t they have told her?” Her pitch and volume continued to rise. “It’s almost as weird as why they put up with it for three years! If only SOMEONE had commented on that at some point! If only SOMEONE had suggested from the very beginning that hey, maybe we should ask someone else, literally any other person involved besides Kay!” At this point there was a distinct edge of hysteria to Katier’s words.
“Or even not a person involved!” she continued. “Just someone else from the same grade school they all went to, with the name I don’t remember! If only maybe someone had suggested that Mercy Seerson calling Lauren a bitch[1] at Ardath’s birthday party last year over this might be a good reason to stop and come clean! Or if someone had suggested that, in light of Brandon turning out to be an absolute toilet snake this summer, maybe his support for the plan was more about hurting people than helping Megan and Beth!”
[1] Both gender specific insults and insults comparing someone to an animal are not used casually in the Fredonic Union—they are extraordinarily rude and offensive. Calling a man a cur or a woman a bitch is a good way to get challenged to a duel. “Dog” is a still pretty dang insulting gender-neutral term that is far more common, though not as insulting as “rat.”
“We didn’t disagree with you this summer, Katie,” Nisha managed to say, her voice faint, her gaze now past Megan, presumably at Angie and the boys, an increasingly horrified expression on her face.
“You didn’t exactly agree either,” Katier retorted.
“Katie, we were a little distracted by Lauren’s boy problems, and Megan wasn’t here to come clean to anyway,” Nisha said.
“Beth was! And they probably were!” Katie pointed past Megan. “Maybe if we’d reached out to them and apologized we wouldn’t be having this discussion while Megan stares at us the closest to angry I’ve ever seen her and the entire freshfolk class watches!”
“Nisha,” Megan said, and her voice wasn’t very loud but both Nisha and Katier locked their eyes back on Megan. “You have three sentences max to explain to me what the shit you’re all talking about—what you puking did to my old friends behind my back—or I’m never talking to you again.”
Megan wouldn’t have guessed it was possible for someone with Nisha’s skin tone to get any paler than she’d already gotten, but now she did. “Megan, please, I—” she started, but her voice caught in her throat. Perhaps at the look in Megan’s eyes.
“I am not joking Nisha, don’t you even try and say anything but what the shit’s going on,” Megan said.
Nisha’s mouth hung open for a long moment. Then, in a tremendously careful manner, like one might use while talking to a troll which had just threatened to eat one’s head if one didn’t have a good explanation for why one set the troll’s bridge on fire, Nisha said, “Megan, do you remember that time in eighth grade, at that tourney meet, when you asked if the term—”
Megan realized that she knew. That she’d figured It out, if not what exactly it meant, some time before. That she’d suppressed it from her consciousness using the same skill at denial she’d cultivated to get through the last three years in light of the terrible central truth of the matter, the impetus for all of this.
That was this: Virginia Cadell, Light Bearer, Evan’s older sister, was dead, slain on the hunt by one of the terrible Beasts Below. Megan had loved Virginia like the older sister she didn’t have, had loved her more than her own parents, loved her more than Angie or Evan, more than anyone, and certainly more than she’d ever loved herself. After Virginia’s death, Megan hadn’t been able to stand the sight of Angie, or Ryan, or most of all Evan, because they were living reminders that Virginia was gone. And by the time she thought she’d be able to handle seeing them again, she somehow never managed to, and concluded they were avoiding her, that they no longer wanted anything to do with her.
And now this. Angie had been right. It would have overwhelmed, would have utterly crushed Megan to have faced It earlier than now. But now she was here, and Lauren and the other ladies reeked of guilt, and Megan found herself feeling more anger than sorrow for what felt like the first time she could remember. Anger at herself, and Lauren and Nisha and Katier and Kay and anyone else who’d kept this from her, this second terrible truth to go with the first.
“Nisha,” Megan said through her teeth—Megan did not believe she’d ever actually spoken through her teeth before. “Are you about to tell me that my oldest friends are called the Asphodel Exiles when people gossip about them at other middle schools, and that you and Lauren lied to my face about it a year and a half ago?”