What do the ancient Greeks and Modern Teens have in common? More than you'd think.
Bella Muselik, daughter of Satan, needed a fire lit under her to move faster than a slug.
“Come on Bella! I wanna get home before it starts raining.”
It was cold. My lips cracked in the dry desert air. Soon I was sure they would bleed and blister and fester into cold sores on my lips. Then, on top of my recent humiliation, I’d have to go to school looking like a leper. I’d just gotten my first pair of glasses and now my soft, fuzzy world had sharp edges, even the clouds had teeth, jagged grey teeth chopping into the icy sky. Rain, when it fell, would be cruel.
Bella ignored me. She was too busy plotting her revenge. Soon all the cheerleaders at Pinbold Jr. High would break out in zits the size of watermelons as their hair fell out in clumps and, even through they’d grovel at her feet, crying out for mercy, she’d ignore them.
“You got cut cause you just stood there like a dummy! But I remembered all my lines. It’s just not fair!”
“That’s really nice for you - to tell me how bad I was. Don’t you think I know I was pathetic? You don’t have to tell me.”
“Mother says it’s always best to tell the truth, even if it hurts.”
“She meant if it hurts you. Not someone else. Besides, you don’t have to tell people a truth they already know. That’s just mean.”
“Sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me.”
I hated that stupid phrase; it’s right up there with finders keepers, losers weepers. Of course words hurt. Words can hurt worse than stones. But it was no use arguing with Bella; she was a bulldog with a stick when it came to arguing. I hated walking to school with her but she was the only girl my age in the neighborhood. All the rest of the kids were boys, goofy boys who rode around on unicycles thinking they were so cool. Unicycles, for crying out loud. And I couldn’t walk to school alone. That would be like admitting you had no friends. Walking to school with anyone, even Bella Muselik, was better that walking to school alone.
“You know, it doesn’t really matter if you did your routine perfectly. You didn’t smile at all. You're supposed to smile all the time. Remember what they said: cheerleaders have to be bouncy and perky.” I wanted to tell her the truth, that on stage she looked about as graceful as Bertha the elephant, growling out V-V-Victory as though pissed beyond belief. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. I was a wimp.
“Bouncy and perky! That’s so stupid. You can’t smile when you’re upside down now, can you? That’s just stupid. Those lesbo teachers will be sorry. I’ll put a curse on them just like I did on Miss Buford. You remember what happened to her father don’t you? He died!”
“Yeah, I’m sure it was your stupid curse that did him in. He was an old guy. He probably had a heart attack.”
“He died right after I cursed her!”
See, there was no use arguing with Bella. If people dared cross her — like our French teacher — the consequences were dire. End of the story.
“Alright, alright. Your curse killed him. Now will you just get a move on?” We’d reached the point in Slasher park where the path bends through a gully of untended shrubs (mostly dead). For a minute or two we would be hidden from view, just a minute or two but that’s all it had taken for some poor girl to be slashed to her death, thus giving the park its nickname. “They never caught the guy, you know. I heard he killed another girl, this time down by the river, and this time — he cut off her head!”
She got my point. We didn’t stop running until we’d reached the edge of the park.
“My legs hurt, like hell! I can’t breathe. I think I’m going to have a heart attack.”
“Holy Cow, you can’t have a heart attack if you’re only thirteen!”
Facing the park was a row of old Victorians, each with a square patch of untended crabgrass in front and a gravel driveway from the street to a detached garage. Most, save the one on the corner, had been converted into student housing for the near-by university and thus were beaten down and shabby, cars parked on the grass, mattresses on the front porches, empty beer cans stacked in the windows. The house on the corner had kept a bit of its dignity as was evidenced by the lacy curtains and rocking chairs on the front porch. The second floor was where the gypsy lived. He was a boy our age who’d come to school for about a week, only to be teased and bullied because he talked strange, walked strange, acted strange. Now he watched as we came and went from school. He tried to hide his face behind the curtains but I could always make out his eyes. They were the kind of eyes that made you just want to cry for no reason, large chocolatey eyes with long dark eyelashes. Gypsy eyes. Our home room teacher said gypsies came to town thinking they could scam one of the casinos (that’s what gypsies did, she claimed, scammed people) and then, after losing everything, they left their children behind for the state of Nevada to take care. The moral was, you can’t scam the casinos and get away with it. Of course it was well known (even by us kids) that the casinos rig the games all they want, luring in tourists with lies about winning, robbing them blind and then… well I guess the broken families are just expected to disappear. Like disposable paper plates.
Bella had her own theory as to why the gypsy never returned to school. She claimed he’d been slaughtered and his body parts hidden in the freezer by the evil people who were supposed to take of him, his evil foster parents. It was his ghost, she said who watched us from the window. The ghost of the murdered, slaughtered child, staring out at the living.
“There he is,” she whispered, as the curtains fluttered. “I can’t wait to be dead so I can haunt people.”
“He’s not a ghost, stupid.”
“I know — let’s go back on Halloween and trick or treat his house.”
“That is the most ridiculous idea I’ve ever heard of. We’re too old to trick or treat. ”
“Come on Riley. Don’t be such a scaredy cat. It’s haunted, I tell you. I’ve never seen any real people in there. Only the gypsy.”
“You think he lives with dead people?”
“No stupid. I think he’s dead.”
Bella was always trying to convince me to go along with one of her stupid ideas, and the shame of it was, I usually did. And then someone at school would find out and have a good laugh. Muselik talked you into doing...what? No one understood just how hard it was to say no to Bella Muselik.
Thankfully we were on the final stretch home, passing small brick bungalows whose concrete porches were decorated with carved pumpkins, cotton spider webs and the occasional cutout of Dracula. The trees lining the cracked sidewalk looked very much like sturdy trolls as I kicked my way through the piles of dead leaves, noting the infinite shades of pink and orange and red in their often translucent skin. Yes, even though I’d humiliated myself in front of the whole damn school and then had to listen to Bella rant and rave about murdering cheerleaders, it was Halloween. Time to wear a mask and wander the streets after dark, a surprise behind each door, Mars bars, popcorn balls, Hershey’s Kisses. Who doesn’t love Halloween?
We lived across the street from each other on the outskirts of town. Her house sat in one of Reno’s oldest neighborhoods. Square blocks on which had been built square brick houses whose residents were either Basque or Italian emigrants. They chatted on their front porches in the evenings and handed out homemade caramel apples and buttery-sweet popcorn balls at Halloween. Many of them, like Bella’s father, had installed chain-link fences around their back yards to protect their gardens and fruit trees from the marauding, pre-teen vandals who, having no taste for vegetables, were just after “loot” to store beneath their beds, trophies proving their bravery in the face of old men rumored to have shotguns.
My house was in a new development of ranch-style tract homes, built on land carved from an old cattle ranch. The houses in this neighborhood were distinguishable only by slight differences in landscaping and trim paint and thus attracted a menagerie of younger professionals: college professors, accountants, and casino pit bosses with no patience for fruit trees or vegetable gardens. Stay at home moms, then the norm, met for coffee each morning, primarily to size up each other’s children and gossip. On the weekends the adults gathered together (even if they didn’t like each other) for all-night cocktail parties which often precluded church activities Sunday morning. On Halloween the residents of the newer subdivision gave out hermetically sealed, store bought candy.
My father architected and built our house on the highest plot of land in the newer subdivision, thus we had a view of Mt. Rose, duly brought to the attention of visitors by a wall of windows facing west. The futuristic kitchen — the highlight of which was a giant copper fan — sat smack dab in the middle of the house, the children’s rooms faced the street, the master bedroom sat in the back. A basement ran the length of the house; a basement with casement windows, a stone fireplace, a tiny toilet room, and a huge industrial shower built under the stairwell.
My father loved wood. Redwood to be precise. Thus the dining room and living room upstairs (the two rooms with a view) had rough hewn redwood panels, as did the master bedroom but when it came time to do the floors, he got cheap. They were a patchwork of parquet, carpet and linoleum. All the other houses on the block had straight driveways leading to an attached garage. We had a circular driveway and carport.
As soon as we got to my house I waved Bella off, but it didn’t take. It rarely did. She hated to go home. Even though she was an only child and spoiled beyond belief, she never wanted to go home. Her parents were old. The house was cramped and always smelt of something cooking, generally a chunk of lamb in an oily broth. It was quiet. Not much happened; they had few friends.
“Hey I have an idea,” she began. “Let’s ask the Ouija Board… ”
I cut her off. I knew what she wanted. It was the same thing every night. “No, we can’t do it tonight.”
“Why?”
“Because Nell has finals.”
“So what?”
“We can’t bother her. Besides I have homework.”
“Oh, of course we can. Nell doesn’t mind — she likes me. I have special powers just like her!”
“No!”
Alas the word “No” meant absolutely nothing to Bella Muselik, having dismissed it with so little consequence her whole life. She followed me up the driveway, across the concrete porch and to the front door where my little sister Lizzie stood waiting for us with hands on her hips.
Ah Lizzie. What can I say about an eight-year-old whose hobbies included collecting urine specimens from the little boys in the neighborhood and staging Barbie and Ken orgies in the living room. Troubled? Worrisome? Those words would have applied. But to my mother, Lizzie was brilliant and sensitive; utterly unlike her older sister. Me.
She greeted us thusly. “You’re both in so much trouble!”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because Grandma Sauer died and you weren’t here to take care of me. Nell has to study.”
“I told her about cheerleading tryouts. Besides who cares about Grandma Sauer?”
“I’m gonna tell mother you said that!”
“Isn’t Grandma Sauer Mr. Gerlach’s mother?” Bella asked.
“I guess so.”
“I hate the Gerlachs.”
“Well, duh. You hate all the neighbors!”
“You’re in trouble too, Ding Dong Bell. Your mom’s been calling you for hours and hours and hours!”
“Shut up, Piglet,” She pushed Lizzie out of the way and let herself into our house. Having no younger siblings to abuse, she took great pleasure in abusing mine. “Let’s go get the Ouija Board!”