Undertow Page 3

  “Okay, hand over the cell phones,” Irish Tommy says.

  “Not cool!” Shadow cries.

  My father looks just as surprised as me. “What if there’s an emergency?”

  “Don’t worry about emergencies. We’ve got SWAT teams in every hallway, officers stationed in the bathrooms, and cameras in every class,” Tommy says. “What you need to worry about is some wacko firing a gun through a window because one of these kids called him and told him which room has a fish head in it. No phones.”

  My father’s arm tenses. He hates how casually people use that ugly term. If he was allowed, he’d rip Tommy’s head off. But he’s not allowed.

  Bex reaches into her pocket and hands hers to my dad. “You keep it. No peeking.”

  Shadow’s next. It’s like he’s handing over one of his kidneys. “People should be able to see what happens in there. This is history,” he grumbles.

  I set mine into my father’s hand while trying to make it seem like it’s no big deal, but it is a very, very big deal. There are pictures on it I don’t want him to see, pictures from when I was not trying to disappear into the background. They’re ancient but not something I want my daddy to see. Please don’t look through the text messages. Oh, man! Don’t look in the Gabriel folder! My imagination is hyperventilating into a paper bag.

  Satisfied, Irish Tommy jams his radio against his ear so he can hear over the din. “Get ready! You’re going in as soon as they get her off the steps.”

  “Who?” Bex says.

  He points along the barricades and up the stairs to the front door. A middle-aged woman in a blue business suit is blocking the doors and flashing her porcelain veneers to the crowd. You can’t call her smile pretty. It’s a little too saccharine and uncomfortable, like she has to stay focused on its corners to keep it in place. She has crazy eyes, too, the kind where you can see white all around the irises, but the crowd doesn’t seem to mind. They love Governor Pauline Bachman. Most seventeen-year-olds wouldn’t recognize a politician, but I know this one well. My folks have spent endless nervous hours watching her self-declared war against the Alpha. She’s a proud thorn in the Alpha’s side, pushing for laws that deny them medical care (which they’ve never asked for), and blocking efforts to put them in permanent housing (which they would never take). Some of her ideas fall squarely into the evil-and-creepy category, like implanting tracking devices into their bodies, shipping them to Guantánamo Bay, and forcing them to undergo sterilization. Before the president ordered our school system to open its doors to the Alpha, she was crusading for an electrified wall to keep them away from us. Lots of people write her off as a kook. They say her ideas are just theatrics to appease her base of frightened voters and keep the money rolling into her campaign. They call her a clown. I say she’s dangerous. Everywhere this clown goes, she brings her own circus.

  She lifts her trademark red-white-and-blue megaphone to her mouth and releases a feedback whine over the crowd.

  “The National Guard, Homeland Security, FEMA, local police, and even the president of the United States have asked me to step aside. They want me to go away. They don’t want to know what the good people of the state of New York have to say about this debacle. They don’t want to hear that this misguided plan is putting your children in harm’s way! Well, folks, that’s why I brought a megaphone!”

  The crowd’s roar rattles my head.

  “Our schools are not the places to run social experiments. I have no problem with educating their . . . I guess you can call them children, but that should be done in their own schools, not ones paid for by hardworking, red-blooded American taxpayers! No, sir! Over my dead body!

  “I will block these doors, and not one of them will step foot inside, and I will not move until they drag me away. Hell, no, I won’t go!”

  The crowd adopts her chant and it shakes the air.

  “All right,” Irish Tommy shouts at us. “Let’s go!”

  “What about her?” my father cries as he points to Bachman.

  “GO! GO!”

  My father grabs my hand and starts up the path.

  “No, Leonard,” Tommy shouts. “Just the kids.”

  “That’s not what I was told at the precinct!”

  “Things are evolving, Leonard. You can’t go in!”

  My father looks pained. “Be safe!”

  “I will.” I hope it’s a promise I can keep.

  “I’ll keep her out of trouble, Big Guy,” Bex says. She grabs my hand and then Shadow’s, and the three of us sprint through the barricades, past the ugly faces and their ugly signs.

  Once we hit the top step, Bachman leaps in front of us. She grabs my arm and turns my hands over to study my palms and the skin between my fingers, then my neck. She’s putting on a show for the crowd, and I’m too stunned to protest.

  “She’s one of us,” Bachman cheers. “You don’t have to go in there with them, honey.”

  And then I hear the thrum. The governor hears it too, and she whips her head around, scanning for its source, but it’s everywhere, a buzzing that grows and grows, and all we can do is watch and wait. Bachman stammers, but words fail her. Like us, she’s trapped inside a pregnant pause in history.

  When the noise is on top of us, I see a group of soldiers, cops, and FBI agents rushing toward us. They push the crowd aside to make room for another group that marches behind them—the Alpha. It’s impossible to call them men. Men are not hulking, copper-skinned towers of muscle. Men do not charge down a street with spears raised and ready. They do not wear armor made from enormous shells and bones, monstrous lobster claws, and teeth. They do not use oysters the size of truck tires as shields. They do not chant in an ancient language in which every word sounds aggressive and hostile. They do not stretch their mouths as far as they can and bellow to the clouds, growl and threaten the sky like they are challenging the sun itself. These are not men.

  The protestors have never seen anything like this. They fall back, tumbling to the ground, and shriek when the next group emerges. The newest additions to Hylan High’s student body have arrived.

  Many have scales.

  Others have jagged rows of teeth, and mouths like open wounds.

  One of them is a teenaged mountain of power, a slightly smaller version of one of the giant warriors who led the way. He has sunken eyes and tiny spikes on his neck, shoulders, and forearms.

  A girl with ghostly, gelatinous skin and eyes as big and black as plums steps serenely forward. If you look closely enough, you can see the blood coursing through her deep purple veins. Even closer and you can see the hint of bones.

  Another boy is no taller than an eight-year-old and has a head like a gourd planted atop a thin, tottering body. He’s a skeleton shrink-wrapped in gray skin, with long fingers and black nails. His eyes are enormous chunks of coal, and his nose is nothing more than two wet slits.

  The last three look almost human. One is a delicate beauty, slender and tall with tight red curls that cascade over her shoulders and bounce lightly at the base of her spine. Pink and blue scales freckle her throat, her shoulders, and the inside of her arms. She looks terrified.

  The other two look as if they’ve never been afraid of anything in their lives. They’re golden gods, tall and strong with sculpted limbs. The female is close to my height and age, with cropped hair and a body that clearly skipped the awkward phase. Her face is a case study in symmetry, favored by dizzying cheekbones and bright, full lips, but it’s also unsettling, sharp, and serious. It’s not so much a face as it is a weapon, as deadly as the spears of the titans who guard her. The boy—well, he’s beautiful and troubling all at the same time. His face is strong and fierce but marred with bruises. Murky green highlights border a purple contusion on his right cheek. Yet who can focus on it when his eyes are so hypnotic? They’re violent whirlpools of green and blue, but just when I think I could get pulled into them, I notice his damaged forearms. They’re criss-crossed with scars like a Jackson Pollock painting, y
et they pale in comparison to something way more gruesome. Starting at his wrists and going all the way up to his elbow is a jagged red gash in which sharp black blades sink in and out in an agitated rhythm. Their edges are serrated, like an old lumberjack’s saw, and each time they pop out, there is a sickening sucking sound, a Shhhtttiiikkkk! I’m unsure if he’s an angel or a monster.

  Bachman lifts her megaphone. “Not one more step!” she shrieks.

  And just like that, the world starts spinning again. A cop pushes past us and leaps up the stairs to put the governor in handcuffs. They tighten around her wrists with a click-click-click-click-click-click-click. Then he and another policeman take her by the arms and lead her down the stairs, through the barricades, and into a nearby squad car. As they put her into the back seat, Bachman turns and flashes the crowd a serpentine grin. It lights a fuse that snakes through the mob, crackling and popping as it goes, and with a jarring bang the crowd pushes forward, led by a gang of thugs in bright-red shirts. They toss trash cans into the mob. They smash bottles and tip over a cop car. They are the Coney Island Nine, the Niners for short, and they won’t be satisfied with anything less than a full-scale riot. The police leap into action, bringing batons down on their heads. A melee erupts. Boots grind fingers into the asphalt. Agonized cries rise above the din. There is blood and hate everywhere I look.

  “Filthy animals! Go back to where you came from,” the Niners shriek as they hurl dead catfish at us. One slams into the wall next to me, leaving a sticky stain of scales and loose eyeballs. Another one crashes into my face and knocks my sunglasses off, leaving me stunned and blind. Someone shoves me through the front doors, and I stagger into the school alone, tripping over my own feet and falling hard on the marble floor. My hip screams like it’s on fire, but I have no time to recover. I’m in the midst of a stampede of fear and feet. A shoe comes down on my pinky finger, and I cry out but keep crawling, scampering through the mob with my senses failing. Eventually I find a wall and press myself against it, hoping I’m out of the way. I use my shirt to wipe the gunk out of my eyes, only to find all six of the Alpha kids standing over me. The tall boy with the bruises and the blades locks his eyes on me. They narrow with disdain and suspicion, his gaze falling on me like a fist. I am filth to him, a creepy-crawly he discovered under a rock. But then his eyes soften. There’s recognition there, but that can’t be possible. It was three years ago, and the beach was crazy that morning—but still, there’s something in his face that says he remembers me.

  I remember him, too.

  Chapter Four

  People talk about Coney Island’s pre-Alpha days like they were magical, like we all lived in the Disneyland of Brooklyn. They forget our “Disneyland” was really a garishly painted slum in a crumbling neighborhood with rampant crime, a busy sex trade, a methadone clinic, and a school system in the toilet. Sure, the Alpha didn’t help. They turned the place into a police state. But it’s not like we were all out in the streets singing “Kumbaya” the day before.

  There’s also this idea that the Alpha caused all the weird racism and xenophobia, too, but whatever. This part of town was always a hotbed of racial sludge, and the various groups never played nice. The Chinese hated the Japanese, and the Jamaicans hated the Koreans, and the Mexicans hated the African Americans, and the Russians hated the Orthodox Jews, and the white people hated all of them. And sometimes, on very hot days, someone got stabbed because of the flag on his car. If America is a melting pot, Coney Island is the overcooked crusty stuff on the bottom of the pan.

  It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that our memories of the place are a little distorted. Back when I had time for books, I read a poem that described memories as being like clay—malleable and squishy and easily molded into whatever you needed. Over time, people sculpt their miserable experiences into something more aesthetically pleasing, stretching the interesting moments and kneading the uncomfortable facts. What they end up with is no longer a memory but a story, and the two rarely resemble one another. The story of the Alpha’s arrival is just as sculpted. Some still call it an invasion, an act of war, even a sign of the end of days. I can’t say that my story is any less convoluted, but I was there when it happened. I saw it firsthand, not on television and not on some Internet site. And I think my version has more merit than most, because I know something that most people do not: the Alpha actually arrived the night before the world went crazy.

  It was the first night of the summer break between my eighth and ninth grade year, the night when the wild things ran loose. That’s what Bex used to call us, and that night was our Wild Rumpus, only a lot less innocent than in that children’s book. We drank. We hooked up. We launched bottle rockets into the sky, motored down streets, assaulting the neighborhood with bone-rattling bass lines. Anyone who disapproved could go to hell.

  I ran with Bex and Shadow, the centers of my known universe even back then, and we had twenty kids following our every step. We crashed parties and chugged beers in parking lots, and I flirted with boy after boy after boy. Anything we missed was reported to us in texts, tiny bite-size dispatches from the front lines of stupidity. Someone threw up on a cop, so-and-so made out with so-and-so, and this person got into a fight with that person. By midnight we had hundreds of texts, each a blossoming legend of teenage debauchery we knew we’d talk about for years to come. I remember that a sophmore named Jessie Combs woke up under the boardwalk spooning a hobo. Jessie was a wild thing.

  I drank up the hot June night, endless spectacle, and noise until my brain rebelled and a migraine showed up around midnight to spoil my fun.

  “Bad head?” Bex asked when I sat down on a vacant stoop.

  “Bad head.” The steady pounding had started hours earlier, but I’d shoved it down and hoped it would wither from lack of attention. Unfortunately this headache had a tenacious rhythm that grew and grew.

  “C’mon, we’ll take you home,” Shadow said.

  The hangers-on groaned with complaints. Bex and Shadow should have been pissed at me too; after all, I had ruined lots of good times with my “condition,” but Bex turned on the others, firing off insults and demanding their allegiance to me. Bex = besty.

  “Drop me at the beach,” I said.

  “Will she be there?” Bex asked.

  I nodded. She was always there.

  Bex grabbed one hand, Shadow the other, and we ran toward Surf Avenue, dodging the livery cabs that sped past at all hours of the night and zigzagging through the pervy drunks who milled in and out of the seedy bars. At the old wooden boardwalk ramp near the Wonder Wheel, we ignored the Park Closed sign and rushed to greet the Atlantic Ocean. I took in a greedy breath of salty air and anticipated the relief. The beach would fix everything.

  As I predicted, we found my mother sitting cross-legged on the sand, her flip-flops tossed nearby and her hair tied back with a band. She was a beautiful Buddha, hypnotically gorgeous with olive skin, full lips, and eyes both blue and smoky. Her body, like mine, was tall, long-legged, and hippy like a belly dancer’s, but she didn’t have an ounce of the insecurities that plagued me. She loved her body and it showed. Another’s perceived flaw was her dazzling asset, and thus she was the cause of much rubbernecking in our neighborhood. People fell in love with her at first sight. Even her walk, a danceable jig that made small children giggle, transcended goofy into oddly seductive.

  “Can you sign for this package?” Shadow asked.

  My mother frowned. “Your father would have a contraption if he knew you were out this late,” she said.

  “It’s a conniption, Mom,” I said.

  The group chuckled.

  “I’m always messing up words,” she apologized. “Migraine?”

  I nodded. “Probably an F3.”

  “Oh. Well, sit down.”

  My mom looked to Bex. “Can you all get home safely?”

  “We could if that was where we were going,” Bex replied with a wink. She pulled her phone from her pocket and sorted thr
ough texts, stopping on one that produced a mischievous grin. “There’s a party at Samuel Lir’s house. His parents are in the city at a play. You game?”

  “I am,” Shadow said dutifully.

  “Don’t wreck his house!” my mother called after them. “His dad is a friend!”

  Bex blew me a kiss. “Feel better.”

  Shadow reached into his pocket and waved his phone. “We’ll post pics.”

  When they were gone, I plopped down next to my mother and leaned back, allowing the water’s roar to blow through my hair. The sky was clear, the ocean an inky black canvas brush-stroked with yellow moonlight.

  “I’m ready,” I said as I crossed my legs and pressed my hands together in Anjali Mudra.

  “You are not ready.” She rolled her shoulders and then her neck. “You have to be here to practice.”

  “I’m here.”

  “You are not here.”

  I growled. Sometimes her Zen was intolerable, especially when my need for relief was so urgent, but she was the expert and there was no arguing with her. At the time she taught meditation and yoga classes on the beach and had dozens of clients, some of whom traveled all the way from the Upper East Side, an hour-and-a-half subway ride, to take her fifty-minute class. She knew her way around the om, so I surrendered to her wisdom and clamped my eyes shut. I inhaled deeply and followed her instructions, imagining the air flowing into my limbs, my diaphragm, and my pelvis. I directed it into my belly and guided it down my legs and into my toes until my breath and body were one and the same. Soon I felt a tap on my shoulder.

  “Now you’re here.”

  And I was. We got on our hands and knees and pressed the tops of our feet into the damp sand. I eased into the child’s pose and, oh man, that felt good. To this day yoga on the beach is the best medicine for my migraines, better than teas or aspirin or acupuncture. Even better than the Novocain injections I got when I knocked my front teeth out the day I fell off my bike on the Marine Parkway Bridge. Each new pose—the downward dog, the mountain, the pigeon—sent me to the creamy vanilla bliss of a quiet mind. Om kicked the crap out of my migraines every time. I miss om.