Desdemona, Tag Cavello [classic literature list TXT] 📗

There was nobody and nothing else to see.

“If this happens again,” the principal told him ten minutes later, “I’ll have to issue a demerit.”

“But sir, it never opens when—“

“Stop it, Dante. No more tricks.” Here the principal smiled to show they could still be friends. “Okay?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How did that dent get in the door?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

The locker behaved itself on Friday. Over the weekend Dante went to see the Indians with his dad. It was the team’s penultimate year at old Municipal Stadium. From a pair of box seats behind home plate, they watched the Indians beat the Mariners 5-4. Dante bought a hot dog in the fifth inning. A woman vendor with red hair and green eyes sold it to him. Then Carlos Baerga came to bat. With the count at 3-2, Dante heard a voice from many rows off call his name. He turned—and there stood the vendor at the mouth of an exit tunnel. Her hair blew in a wind that wasn’t there, her teeth shined. And even though the tunnel was dark, her green eyes blazed like the Great Lakes sun.

∞

His locker door got stuck again on Monday. Rather than further distress the school principal about it, Dante decided to go straight to lunch. This was a mistake, though not one he could blame on the locker. The hot weather made sleeping difficult, and he had not been able to crawl out of bed soon enough this morning to brown bag a lunch. Now he faced a long line in the cafeteria listening to nerds talk about computer games.

And there they were: a sweaty row of bespectacled kids standing like section eight soldiers along the east wall. Short kids with bad skin and weird hair, grinning, batting titles like Super Mario Kart and Wolfenstein 3D back and forth. Dante listened to them without much interest, though some reminded him of Timothy, the boy he’d met in this very line last year, and who had not returned from Christmas break.

He spotted Sunny eating with a group of girls and hoped to get a seat decent enough to see her legs under the table.

“What are ya eatin’ today, kid?” a fat kitchen woman asked, knocking him from his reverie.

Dante went with the usual slop: coleslaw, greasy chicken, stale peas. Two minutes later he was sitting directly across from Sunny. The view it gave suggested intervention on a divine scale. She wore a red skirt with a black belt. Her bare legs were crossed. Dante could see the freckles on her knees. He tried to take a bite of coleslaw and missed, splatting it on his shirt.

At that moment Sunny stopped talking to her friends. She looked directly at Dante. A smile tugged the corner of her razor-blade lips. He was about to feign ignorance—to pretend to clean the coleslaw—when he saw the girl’s legs come uncrossed and part just slightly enough to give a brief, innocent glance of black underpants. What little appetite Dante had for food immediately died a disgraceful death. His eyes dropped to his plate. When they found the courage to look at Sunny again, he saw that her attention had gone back to her friends as if nothing at all were unusual.

Calling himself two hundred kinds of idiot, he stood up. With luck there would be just enough time to clean his shirt before classes started again. Except he didn’t want to use the main bathroom next to the cafeteria—there would surely be too many kids in there who would laugh and call him coleslaw boy or slaw shirt for the rest of the year. No need for that, thank you very much.

He checked to see if any teachers were looking, then snuck away from the cafeteria. A short hallway led to another longer, much darker corridor. At the far end lay the girls’ detention room. Trying to look casual, Dante proceeded towards it. With every step the light became dimmer. Painted walls surrendered their cheerfulness, bleeding into beige and brown. NMS’s worst behaved girls—Sunny included—spent a great deal of their time down here. While on detention they were forbidden to leave the wing, even to use the restroom. So of course this wing had a restroom of its own. It stood at the very end of the hall, where the shadows were darkest, and a dead-end trophy case—empty—hung from cobwebbed masonry like a looted coffin.

Dante’s footsteps slowed as he approached it. For some reason he felt it necessary to observe silence. The darkness perhaps commanded it. He looked left into an empty room with chairs put on desks. No girls were on time-out today. There wasn’t even a teacher nearby pretending to work. Only Dante haunted the hall. To the right was a pitch-black passageway. Here was where he needed to go. It led to the bathroom, where there were sinks for washing. Feeling around for a light switch, Dante stepped inside. But it was hard to see. Every light in the wing had been turned off, as if the school had decided to abandon it for demolition. Suddenly Dante imagined a huge explosion, and the black face of a wrecking ball crashing through the concrete. His death would be quick but severe. A screaming chaos.

You’re being stupid again, he thought.

Yes, but…

The face of the wrecking ball would be blank but angry somehow. Determined. And oh, the deafening sound it would make.

His fingers found the switch, clicked it. A weak fluorescent bulb reluctantly came to life. It didn’t take long for Dante to wish it had stayed dead. Rather than push away his demons, it brought them closer. A long mirror that barely looked real hovered in the gloom. It showed him toilet stalls with crooked doors he did not have the courage to open. A row of sinks with rusty pipes. Strange graffiti.

He went to the sinks. There was no soap. He splashed some cold water on his shirt, then tore a towel from a broken dispenser. The stain persisted though. Even in the dark he could see it. His face was a different matter. Here the mirror seemed reluctant to give a clear picture. Subtly, as if old, deft fingers had mistaken his face for a lump of clay, his reflection kept changing. Here came a sickly old man with one foot in the grave, his eyes like sinkholes. Now a boy with hypertrichosis appeared, staring through hair thick as a dog’s. The boy seemed to want out of the mirror. He seemed at any moment ready to change places with Dante.

“Bloody Mary,” Dante said.

An old, grade-school memory flooded his mind. The girls at Pleasant Elementary used to tell stories about a witch who lived in one of the bathroom mirrors. To see her you first had to be alone with the lights off. Then you stood in front of the glass and chanted Bloody Mary five times.

“Bloody Mary,” he said again.

On the fifth chant, the witch would appear…and you would disappear. Or so the story went. Fourth grade girls in 1989 loved to tell it. One girl, Cloris Fanning, was even said to have dared the challenge, and died.

“Bloody Mary.”

The boy in the mirror looked back. He was no longer hairy. Just a boy. Just Dante Torn, twelve years old, a kid in the seventh grade.

“Bloody Mary.”

The bathroom light flickered. Something—a cockroach maybe—made a noise in one of the stalls. A cockroach, yes. Or perhaps the snicker of an old, old woman.

Dante closed his eyes. “Bloody Mary.”

And when he opened them, a girl stood in the mirror. Her eyes were glowing and her face dripped with blood. “BOO!” she screamed.

It was enough to make Dante scream back. Then he nearly fainted against the sinks. The cold tiles turned to ice beneath his feet. He slipped, seizing wildly for something to break his fall. His hand hit the mirror and broke a chip from it.

Now the girl began to laugh. And laugh, and laugh, and laugh some more. The music of her insanity filled the bathroom, getting louder with every step she took towards Dante. Now he noticed her hair—wild tufts of it sticking every which way. And her eyes, which shined like bullets left over from a murder.

And now her face. Of course he could now see her face. She was so close—only one step away, in fact. And still laughing.

At last Dante began to laugh too. “You got me good,” he said. “Sincerely.”

“Yeah!” the girl managed. It seemed she would never get herself under control.

Not that it mattered any more to Dante. He kept right on laughing with her, and had a teacher not finally heard them and arrived to investigate, he and Sunny Desdemona might have gone on laughing through every end of lunch school bell in the known universe.


CHAPTER FOUR: Nascosto Villagio

A man tells a story of how he began, of places he knew from which he ran.

 

Horatio Donati smiled over a cup of recently quaffed cappuccino. “That,” he said, “does not sound like plotting. It sounds more like plodding.”

Dante had to agree. It was the Sunday after the bathroom scare, and while pretending to go for a morning bike ride down West Main, he’d chanced upon the old opera singer drying the last of that summer’s tomatoes on his doorstep. Immediately Dante found himself being invited back to 114’s tired living room—as he’d hoped he would—for cappuccino, and the coleslaw story had spun out like yarn from the spool of a March kite.

“But you did meet her,” the singer went on, “so all is well.” His brow went up. “Or is it?”

Dante raised a pair of crossed fingers. “So far so good. She didn’t seem too upset about my walking her back to class anyway.”

“Was that the first time you’ve escorted a girl?”

“Yes.”

Donati’s smile grew warmer. “Exquisite, yes? Alterando il cuore. Meaning, it changes the heart. There’s nothing like walking a pretty girl to a safe place.”

Dante thought of the way Sunny had walked after telling a slick lie to the teacher who’d caught them in the bathroom. Pleased and energetic were the clicking sounds of her boots on the tiles. Insatiable was the bounce of her hair, burning red enough to drive back the dark. At the end of the hall Dante held the door for her. The scent of perfume adorned her wake, wild-blossoms on midnight winds, soprano gasps into pink desperate lungs. No, there had been nothing like escorting Sunny in the whole world.

“And what will happen now?” Donati wanted to know. “What comes next for the romance of Dante and Sunny?”

“It isn’t a romance just yet,” Dante said, blushing. “I just walked her back to class.”

“That is fine, so long as you don’t rest on it for too long. Chi dorme non piglia pesci. Or rather, cosa c’`e da guadagnare senza rischi?”

Dante did not respond. He didn’t need to. The opera singer’s Italian was lost on him; the gentle glow in his tone was not. Nevertheless, Donati went on to tell a story about the village where he’d been born and raised. It stood in the southeastern area of Sicily. The locals called it Nascosto Villagio—or, the hidden village, as it was very small, its spires sheltered behind a series of picturesque hills.

“Imagine a flower,” Donati said, “picked on some long ago windy morning, and pressed by a lover within a tome of ancient poetry. That is Nascosto Villagio, or how I remember it. Such a pretty, pretty place. Its little cobblestone streets smelled of bread and brewed coffee. Happy children ran home from school with neighbor’s puppies nipping their heels. Cool Ionian breezes ruffled the loveliest shop awnings you’ve ever seen embroidered. All the buildings were close-knit. Cozy. One day my mother sent me to the market to buy tomatoes. We lived on a street that sloped to a fountain circle. The fountain was long broken, cracked in many places around its once fine bowl, but on this day, as my young boy’s body