Persephone (Into Shadow, #2)

by Lev Grossman

The bus was thick with resignation, like a prison bus. Some kids slept. Others—the boys mostly—seemed to actually be stimulated by the atmosphere of despair; they ran feral, like being on a school bus meant they were in international waters. A kid named Evan Standard grabbed my bag and then made a big show of handing it back to me. Evan was notorious for having been accused—but never convicted!—of stealing embalmed dead rats from the bio lab.

He made a V with his fingers and stuck his tongue through it. “I’m sorry, Evan,” I said. “But I’m not going to lick your vagina.” That was literally my only human interaction till I got to school, where I was joined at my locker by my friend, Lindsay.

After he disappeared, my mom worked more and talked less. She kind of iced over, and I guess I did too. For some people bad things happening brings them together. We were the other kind of people.

If you saw me, you might think, Maybe she’s not just a weird loner! Maybe she collects exotic seashells or rebuilds old pocket watches so that they run backward or draws blueprints of impossible imaginary cathedrals or something! She’s a foot soldier in the war on bland conformity, marching to the beat of her own drum, et cetera, et cetera. But you’d be 100 percent wrong. I was just about as close to nobody as you could get. Nothing to see here. Move along. It was like I’d become a ghost without having to go through the messy intermediate step of actually dying.

For the record no one had ever offered me even a single drug. Or any sex for that matter.

I took all that stuff and put it in what I thought of as a mental disposal facility. I could picture it quite vividly: it was gray and metal and industrial looking, roughly riveted together, with the words CONTENTS UNDER PRESSURE stenciled on it in red. It was a toxic emotional waste storage site. Its capacity was infinite.

I didn’t care. I just wanted to be somebody else, I didn’t care who. Sometimes I felt like I couldn’t breathe, like I was drowning in myself.

“Here comes Lexington High School’s seven-foot center, Persephone Cockburn!” Yes, I know. When I turn eighteen, I’m going to set a land-speed record for changing my last name by deed poll.

Honestly I could not have explained why I cared so much, but it was like someone had stuck a blunt sword right through my chest and was prying my ribs apart and crushing my heart. Even this, even this I could not have. But of course I couldn’t. I couldn’t believe I’d been so stupid. I couldn’t believe I’d thought I could pass for an actual person. More than anything at that moment I wished my father were here, just sitting there watching cartoons with me. Being with him was the last time I could remember when it took no actual effort for me to believe that I was a real person.

I tilted my face up to the ceiling, like a soft cool rain was falling on it. I closed my eyes. The palms of my hands felt suddenly radiant with heat. I felt like I was Anne of Green Gables, and I was at long last going to shank Gilbert Blythe’s punk ass and leave him for dead. I felt like somewhere inside me that gray industrial canister with CONTENTS UNDER PRESSURE stenciled on it was tearing open, rivets popping like gunshots.

You’d think I would have been just bursting with questions at this point, that I would have been grabbing everybody by their lapels and shaking them with my little fists till they told me what the fuck was going on around here. But I wasn’t in a mood to ask questions. I didn’t want to hear the answers.

There was so much you didn’t get to choose. The hard way was going to be very hard. It would be a long, long time before I felt safe and warm again. But I would be free, and I would be myself. Show me those fucking pomegranate seeds, I thought. Come on. I’ll eat every last one of them. The last line of the poem came back to me—Mr. Jenner never had a chance to read it, but I remembered it anyway: Thus, though we cannot make our sun Stand still, yet we will make him run.