Desdemona by Tag Cavello (read e books online free .txt) 📖

Me and Dukey were playing.”

“Silly. But just to make sure you don’t fall again, think you can take the basket downstairs for me?”

“Sure, Mom.”

His father heard nothing of this exchange. He was still cooing and petting and kissing Dukey. Dante put the spilled clothes back into the basket while his parents took Dukey to the kitchen to show him his toys. He carried the basket down to the basement. Sounds of a squeaky toy soon followed, along with a thousand or so happy yips and barks.

“You go get your ball!” His dad’s voice. Laughter from his mom. “Go on! Go on!”

I don’t get this, Dante thought. Who are you people and what have you done with my parents?

Deciding that it didn’t really matter, he ran up the steps to play with Dukey.

He didn’t get what was going on with his mom and dad, but he thought he could get to like it just fine. Just fine indeed.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: I Think A Man Should Be Strong…

Whenever it seemed like things were fine came the flash and the tremble from a distant storm line.

 

Dante received a D on his book report from Mr. Wolfe. It surprised him, not because the report wasn’t especially bad (it was), but because Mr. Wolfe, normally mild and highly forgiving of his students, had scratched a nasty criticism across the top of Dante’s title page:

BORING!

Dante looked up from his desk. Mr. Wolfe sat before a blank chalkboard, scribbling in a grade book. His face looked set. Expressionless. Down to business. His desk, Dante noticed, seemed a bit off, a bit strange. A brown, half-eaten apple lay on its side. Untidily stacked papers drooped over the waste-basket like melting ice.

Stacey was Dante’s seatmate in English. Now he turned to her and asked: “Is he okay?”

She looked at him. “Who?”

“Mr. Wolfe. He’s acting a little off lately.”

“Oh! Oh, yes.” Her eye went to the English teacher, who still wasn’t addressing the class, though the bell had sounded five minutes ago. “You haven’t been told? Word’s going around the halls.”

“No,” Dante said. “What’s wrong?”

Mr. Wolfe’s head snapped up. “Are you people talking?” he demanded bitterly to know.

No one answered.

“All right then,” he went on, “if you can manage to stay shut up for a few more minutes we’ll begin.”

Dante gaped in astonishment. He turned to Stacey and saw that she was doing the same thing.

“Wow,” she whispered. “It’s worse than I thought.”

“What’s going on?” Dante whispered back, cupping a hand round his mouth.

“It’s his wife,” Sunny’s friend replied. “She left him over Christmas. They’re getting a divorce.”

Mr. Wolfe scowled again. His eyes were red, as if he hadn’t slept in a week. He warned the class that if he heard one more word—just one more—he would keep everyone behind this afternoon for detention. How did that sound? Did it sound good? Because he meant it. Oh yes. Anyone who thought otherwise was welcome to test him.

No one did.

∞

At lunch Sunny kissed him and told him to eat his green peas. She smoothed the wrinkles on his shirt, brushed a lock of hair from his eyes. She didn’t seem to know about his encounter with Hadria over the holidays—or if she did, then her cousin had been telling the absolute truth, and this was how Sunny wanted things to be.

Not that Dante would ever dare speak to her about that night at the Hotel Consorcia. Rather, he paid extra close attention to her mannerisms throughout January, in case she let a clue slip that his secret was not really a secret at all. Dante didn’t think it was.

But if her mannerisms were the same today, her attire certainly wasn’t. Perhaps as a means of countering the dreary skies and bitter cold that had crushed the region’s false summer like a sudden illness, she’d come to school in bright colors. A yellow blouse floated on her chest; a stonewashed denim skirt clung to her pelvis. Pink ear-rings swung from her lobes as she listened to the other girls. What those girls were saying marked another slightly unusual difference for this particular lunch hour. Their chatter, which normally consisted of clothes, music, and TV shows, had taken a turn into more serious territory.

A dark-skinned girl named Rajani was telling the table how she’d just lost her grandmother. It had happened at church, she said with eyes wet, up near Port Clinton. A heart attack. Total collapse in the pews. A ambulance was called. Priests and nuns had tried to assist her in the meantime, which only seemed to make matters worse. She’d wailed, Rajani said, pushing her lunch away as a lost cause. She’d begged them to get away and leave her alone.

“Maybe she was afraid of being read Last Rites,” Dante said. “I’ve read about that. Church-goers not wanting to see priests when they’re sick.”

“My grandmother didn’t go to church,” Rajani said. “Ever.”

Dante blinked.

“Somebody took her,” the other went on to explain. “Somebody pulled her in. Then she died.”

Now Dante felt a hand on his knee. It was Sunny’s.

“Who took her?” she asked Rajani. “Do you know?”

Rajani shook her head.

“Can you find out?”

The head shake became a weak nod. “Maybe.”

“Do it. Then I’ll have my dad handle the rest. Speaking of which”—she smiled at Dante—“that little business trip of his I told you about? It’s happening on my birthday. March fifteenth.”

“Wow,” Dante said. “And you’ll be alone in the house?”

“No. My dad says I’m not allowed to be alone.”

“Okay—“

“You’re going to be there, Mister.” Sunny’s green eyes sparkled. “Right?”

The entourage began to giggle mischievously. Even Rajani looked better. Holding court as the queen bee, Sunny gave everyone a nod. Her hand found Dante’s under the table, slipped inside. It was soft and dainty, the nails sharp. Dangerous yet delicate. Dante stroked her fingers. He gave them a light, careful squeeze.

“So it should be interesting,” Sunny said to the table, as if all of the girls were going to be there on March fifteenth. “But between now and then we have some business to take care of.”

The girls leaned forward. None of them were smiling now. Their eyes were wide and unblinking. Plates were pushed aside, straws bent down. Rajani had wiped her tears.

“As everyone already knows,” Sunny began, lowering her voice, “we have a plan of pain set in motion for the little Girl Scout known as Maris Dubois.” She shot Dante a look after saying this last.

“Is that what her surname is?” Dante asked innocently.

“In order for the plan to work,” she continued, “we had to involve someone else. A boy named Shaya Blum. He usually eats lunch right down there.” She indicated an empty seat clear down by the lunch counter. “He seems to be absent today, but who cares as long as he doesn’t die on us.”

The girls all tittered. Dante felt along Sunny’s fingers, investigating the sharpness of her nails. Were they volatile at the moment? Did they still wish to cut him over that whole fiasco about remembering Maris’ last name? It seemed not. Indeed, her hand felt more like a sleeping kitten. Relaxed and content.

As for the rest of her…

“Quiet, please,” she ordered.

Everyone shut up.

“Good. Now what we’re going to do is humiliate Maris in front of the whole school. Destroy her popularity. I figured the best way to do that is to go political. So I made Dante write a mock love letter. Or rather a poem. The poem is addressed to Maris and looks like it comes from Shaya. Again, all of you know this already; this is just for review. Questions so far?”

Stacey’s hand went up. “How will you make the handwriting look like Shaya’s?” she asked.

“I think I’ve pretty much nailed that,” Sunny told the group. “I’ve been practicing with some stolen samples. In fact I stole one of his notebooks. His handwriting is crap. I had to use my right hand to make the letters stagger all over the page.”

More laughter from the girls. This time Dante joined in. “Remember I offered to do the copying,” he reminded. “You adamantly refused.”

“I adamantly refused,” Sunny repeated. “I didn’t want you to feel like you were doing everything.”

“Not at all.”

“Anyway,” she went on, “it should be convincing enough for Maris. Have any of you ladies ever gotten a love poem?”

They looked at each other. To judge by their clueless expressions, Dante guessed none of them even knew what a love poem was.

“Me either,” Sunny said, with a hint of accusation.

Dante blushed. “Oh God, you’re right—“

At that moment a fat fly, the biggest he had ever seen, fell onto Sunny’s plate and began to squirm for life in the pasta sauce. Sunny gave it a scowl. She did not look appalled or even the tiniest bit grossed-out. Rather, Dante thought, she wanted to smash the creature with her fist.

But she didn’t smash it. Her eyes went back to the group. “When you get a love letter you don’t go analyzing the handwriting,” she said. “Assuming of course the boy is brave enough already to put his name on it. And lucky us, Shaya has guts he never knew about.”

“But how will we expose it to the whole school?” Stacey blurted, then slapped a hand over her mouth. “I’m sorry!” she said into her palm.

Sunny looked at her steadily. “Don’t worry about it. It’s a fair question. It was also the biggest challenge of this whole sting. I was stuck on it for a long time.”

“Was?” Dante asked.

“That’s right,” she said, smiling theatrically. “Because it’s solved. It took me a long time because I tried too hard. I made the whole problem bigger than it actually was.” Sunny leaned forward, gesturing for everyone else to do the same. Her green eyes were as the gecko of gold day dust, disport with predatory gleam. Her grin was the grin of a shadowed gargoyle high above a rainy street.

“I’m going to have a hundred copies made,” her tongue slithered. “Then we—all of us—are going to hang them up in the halls.”

“Wow!” Stacey said. She sounded too full of delight this time to care about mindful ordinance.

Sunny kept talking. “Put them on lockers. Put them on chalkboards and bathroom mirrors. In library books. Stairwells. Tack them to bulletin boards. Put one on Mr. Hogan’s butt if you think it’ll help.”

“Ew,” Rajani grimaced.

“Just make certain they’re seen. By a lot of people. The more the manier.”

“Merrier,” Dante said.

“Exactly. Does everyone understand?”

The girls all nodded. Dante put a hand on Sunny’s knee and squeezed.

“You will each get a measured amount of copies,” she went on gravely. “Don’t lose them. And don’t hide any back. I shall know if you do.”

Her voice was cold as dirt thrown over a grave. The girls all nodded again, but this time nodding didn’t cut it.

“Everyone say: Yes, Sunny, I understand. Right now.”

To which the girls immediately complied. Sunny looked at Dante. She didn’t expect him to comply; rather, she was asking for his approval. He gave it.

“Very good,” he said to the girls. “Wait for your copies to come. Sunny and I will take care of them.” He looked at Sunny. “How does Valentine’s Day sound for activation of our devious little plot?”

“It sounds good, Sir,” Sunny replied, before again addressing the table: “Everyone hear that? Valentine’s Day. Let me hear a yes, Dante and Sunny this time.”

“Yes, Dante and Sunny,” the girls responded, almost robotically.

“Then we’re finished for now. At ease, ladies.”

There came a high, musical sound—the breeze of winter through black thorns—as several pairs of female lungs let out a breath. Then, as if on cue, the lunch bell rang, and everyone adjourned.

∞

At the end of the day Dante went to Sunny’s locker. Not that it was a long trip—only straight across the hall from his own—but he met her there often to carry her bag and walk her outside.

Today Sunny’s locker was closed. She’d either already been here or hadn’t arrived yet. It didn’t alarm him at first. She’d told him earlier that her