Dusssie (6 page)

I couldn't manage it the next day because Mom stayed home to take me to the shrink.

I heard her on the phone, telling somebody she couldn't make it to her shift at the food pantry and could they please fill in for her?

Huh. My mother did volunteer work? I guess she'd mentioned stuff like that before, helping at the homeless shelter or raising money for animal rescue, but I hadn't paid much attention. Everybody knew celebrities did charity work to look good, and I had thought she really was a sculptor, a famous one.

Whatever, because what she really is, is a gorgon. And even if she spent all day feeding homeless people, it wouldn't change that. I kept reminding myself of this, because watching her drift around the apartment with her “be strong” look on her face as she polished the glass tables and silver chrome picture frames—just for something to do—I felt scared that I might start trusting her again. I still had feelings for her in my heart, I really wanted—

But I had to remember: She was the one who had gotten me into this mess.

I made sure to keep that in mind pretty much all day. In the apartment. In the taxi. At the doctor's office.

After seeing the shrink I headed into DeLucia's Deli with my funky-colored fake fur hat on, to get me and Mom some paella with extra yellow rice and a couple of eclairs. They make the best eclairs. Anyway, the reason I mention it is that, right inside DeLucia's, at one of the cafe tables, sat the little old man from the library.

New York City being NYC, I'd assumed I'd never see him again. But there he was. Just my luck, he probably lived in my neighborhood. I noticed him right away, like,
ow
. But he didn't see me, because he was bent over his plate eating his cream of broccoli soup.

I wanted to back out the door. I'd been so rude to the old guy, I wanted to run away. Then I remembered how bad I'd felt that day, and it kind of surprised me to realize I felt way better now—maybe because my period was almost over, or because of the hats? I don't know. Anyway, feeling better kept me from ducking out the door. Instead, I walked over to him.

“Um, sir,” I managed to say.

He looked up and smiled like I was his best friend.

“Um, I want to apologize,” I blundered on. “I mean, I'm sorry I was such a—” I stopped myself from saying the word that came to mind. He might not appreciate it. “I'm sorry I was, um, so rude the other day—”

“That's all right. We all have those days.” He had the greatest voice, correct yet breezy bright. “Sit down, sit down!” He gestured to the other chair at his table.

Why not? I sat.

“Anybody could see you were having a bad day,” he said, laying his soup spoon aside. “Don't give it another thought. Did you finish your report on snakes?”

That hurt, because I missed going to school, or at least I missed seeing my friends, especially Keisha and Stephe. I mean, they were still phoning, and sending me text messages and e-mails and stuff, but what was I supposed to tell them? Hey, c'mon over; send pictures of the new me with your cell phone; I'll bead your hair and you can French braid my snakes?

So all of a sudden I was by myself almost all the time. I didn't even like to IM anymore. Being grounded drives me crazy, but this was even worse, because I was basically grounding myself. Now that I knew I was only half-human, I didn't think I could ever come out of exile. I just had too many secrets. The only ones who knew the truth were the Sisterhood, including Aunt Stheno and Mom, and I didn't want to talk with them—especially Mom—because they were freaks and they were sooo annoying and I didn't want to be like them. But I needed somebody to talk with so bad that here I was chatting with a bony old guy in a deli.

Letting him assume I had been working on a report, I nodded, and to be polite I asked, “Are you taking the herp, uh, herpes—”

“Herpetology. Study of snakes.”

I nodded like sure, I knew that. “Are you taking it?”

“Herpetology class? Yes, I am. It just started this morning. Fascinating.” He sat up almost straight, beaming. “The professor gave us some cultural background. Did you know that almost all ancient peoples worshipped snakes?”

My snakes must have picked up the words from my head. I felt crawlies under my hat, and in my head someone said,
yesss!

“They almost all had a myth of the world serpent,” the old guy went on. “A giant serpent coiled around the world with his tail in his mouth. The rainbow was a sky-serpent drinking from the ocean. The mother goddesses wore serpents. Even to the classical Greeks, the serpent was a symbol of wisdom and healing …”

My snakes were hissing all sunny yellow,
Sssky ssserpent, yesss! Goddesss Demeter, healing, wisssdom, yesss!

Next they'd be bobbing around under my hat.

“Um, I gotta go,” I said, starting to get up.

The old man lifted a skinny hand to stop me. “Am I boring you? We'll talk about something else. I am curious, why are you here at this hour? Did you not have school today?”

“I don't go to school anymore,” I said.

“You
don't
? An intelligent young lady like you?”

“I have a medical excuse.” This was true, or it would be in a few days. Talking to the psychiatrist, I had told him quite truthfully that I heard voices in my mind coming from the snakes that were growing out of my head instead of hair. He had asked me to take off my hat and show him the snakes. I had told him I couldn't because that would kill him. Well, the Greek mythology stuff I'd found on the Internet said a gorgon was so ugly that just looking at one would turn a man to stone. Really made
me
feel good. Although actually, Troy hadn't turned to stone just from looking at my snakes. He'd still been okay till I, you know, glared at him. If looks could kill and all that. But I felt pretty annoyed at the therapist, so I wasn't taking any chances. I had to make sure that it never happened again. Never.

So after I'd told him about the snakes and the voices, et cetera, the doctor had said I definitely needed a medical excuse from school and also a referral to a shrink specializing in adolescents. On the way home, Mom had said we'd worry about that later. One crisis at a time.

“Medical excuse?” The old man leaned closer over the deli table, giving me such a kind look that I'm sure he thought I had leukemia. I mean, he thought I had lost all my hair from chemo and that was why I wore a big hat all the time. “I'm sorry,” he told me, real nice, nothing sloppy about it. “By the way, my name is Cyril Ford. Call me Cy. Rhymes with Hi.” He extended his knobby old hand toward me, and I shook it. His hand felt light and dry, like driftwood. “And you are?” he asked.

“Dusie,” I told him. “Dusie Gorgon.”

“Dusie,” he said, his pale eyes going thoughtful, like he was focusing on the name. “Dusie, and you
are
a doozy, aren't you? Nice to meet you, Dusie.” He shook my hand again, then picked up his soup spoon. “May I treat you to some small token of friendship? A slice of apple pie?”

“Um, no thanks. I gotta go order paella for Mom and me.” But I felt myself smiling at him as I got up to leave.

Sitting cross-legged on my bed so I wouldn't have to hold the big dictionary, I looked up some words.
Gracile
meant “slender and graceful.”
Cloaca
was the vent in the posterior end of a snake through which musk and feces were emitted.
Ophiophagous
meant “eating snakes.”

King snakes. Ophiophagous.

King snakes ate other snakes.

I grabbed
The Encyclopedia of Snakes
and looked up king snake just to be sure. Yeppers. King snakes even ate rattlesnakes.

Wow. Gotta respect king snakes.

Then I started to get an idea.

See … if I didn't cut the snakes off my head myself, like, if they just sort of fell victim to natural predation, maybe they wouldn't grow back twice as big, right? Maybe they wouldn't grow back at all.

Of course, if I'd really thought about it, I would have realized that then I'd be left with four king snakes, or at least with one top-dog, gladiator, all-victorious, totally egotistic king snake. And when you've got snakes growing out of your head, just cutting down on numbers is not really an improvement. With snakes for hair, one snake is as bad as twenty-seven.

But I didn't get a chance to really think about it, because the snakes snagged the idea right out of my mind, and all the garter snakes and ribbon snakes and corn snakes and stuff started to thrash and whimper.

I'm ssscared,
whined one of them, might have been the yellow-bellied racer.

Somebody else cried,
Danger! Danger in the head.

Ssslither! Flee!

Russstle tailsss!

No tailsss!

can't flee
!

Panic, panic, dark brown musky-smelling panic, and at the same time the bigger snakes, like, the racers, whipped into a different sort of hissy fit. The indigo snake darted her body right down in front of my face. I saw all her underside scales like treads on a bulldozer for an instant before she bent like a pretzel and glared into my eyes. She startled me so bad, nose to nose with me, that I didn't even put up a hand to bat her away.

She hissed,
Shame on you!
as she swelled and flattened her neck like a cobra imitation, then struck.

It was like a tiny fist had hit the tip of my nose, except this fist had teeth and it bit me.

I yelled, “Ow!” staring cross-eyed down my own schnoz. There she hung, thrashing like a pit bull with the fleshy part of my nose in her mouth, hissing through her flattened nostrils, while at the same time twenty-some voices clamored inside my head
.

Go Indigo!
(black racer.)

you show her! No nonsssenssse!
(pine woods snake?)

We're all on thisss head together! Yesss! We didn't asssk to be on her ssstupid head! It'sss not like we want to be here! All sssqueezed, no freedom—Can't even ssslide in the grass—never a tasste of a grub—No matesss—And now she wants the king sssnakesss to eat usss? Bite her! Let'sss all bite her!
(Impossible to identify; too many all at once.)

Also, I heard my mother's voice calling from the living room, “Dusie? Are you okay?”

And amid all the ruckus I heard the regal, bored query of the scarlet king snake:
What'sss in it for me
?

“White mice from the pet shop,” I replied, surprised to find myself hoping savagely that they would stick in her gut and kill her.

I heard that!
Her red, black, and yellow head flashed down and struck my cheek.

I screamed, lunged off the bed, ran to the kitchen, and yanked open the freezer compartment of the refrigerator. I stuck my head in there.

Hey!
complained twenty-seven snakes.

My mother exclaimed, “Dusie, what in the world?” I heard her drop her magazine and follow me into the kitchen, but I kept my head in the freezer.

I told my snakes grimly, “Listen up, all of you creeps, or I will freeze you into Popsicles.” I knew they couldn't hear me, I knew they just picked up the thoughts from my mind, but I couldn't seem to help talking aloud to them. Especially now. Between my teeth I told them, “First of all, none of you are to bite me. Ever. Never again.”

The milk snake said,
Let go of her, Indigo
. Already they sounded more sluggish. And the indigo snake did let go of me, coiling in on herself, still hissing.

“You promise me that,” I continued, “and I promise I will drop the idea of siccing the king snakes on you.”

We promissse!
said various voices, mostly garter snakes.

I said, “I want the biters to promise.”

Behind me, Mom was saying, “Dusie, you're dripping blood on the Healthy Choice dinners!”

I ignored her except to stick my head deeper into the freezer. The scarlet king snake said frostily,
I ssspeak for all of usss. We promissse
.

Good enough. I got my head out of there and reached for a paper towel to swab my nose. Mom had gone out of the room. I heard her rummaging in the bathroom, looking for Band-Aids, probably.

I stood there with the paper towel soaking up quite a lot of blood from my nose, and I felt coldly furious. “I am going to get rid of you,” I told my snakes. I had promised not to set the king snakes against the others, and I wouldn't. It wasn't a good idea anyhow. But there had to be another way.

Go ahead
, said the scarlet king snake, and all the others gave a hissy titter
, sss-sss-sss
. They didn't act like I was scaring them. Not at all. They seemed completely sure I couldn't do it.

Or maybe they knew something I didn't.

SIX

Tuesday morning I watched from the apartment window as Mom waited for her bus—she was going to a Humane Society committee meeting, I think. Anyway, the minute the bus drove away with her in it, I pulled on my blue crushed-velvet hat, ignoring a number of hissy complaints from my head, and headed out. I had some money, thanks to a guilt gift from Aunt Stheno because she hadn't sent me the hats, so I treated myself to a taxi. I told the driver, “NYU Medical Center.”

I still thought maybe I could do something …

“Troy Lindquist,” I told the woman at the visitor's information desk
.

Troy Lindquissst
. The scarlet king snake mimicked me.

“He is not allowed any visitors,” said the receptionist.

I had figured it would be like that. I mean, everybody on the TV news was still speculating hysterically about mutant viruses and bioterrorism and whether there was going to be an epidemic of partial petrifications. I'd seen some people on the street wearing surgical masks to cover their mouths and noses.

I just nodded at the woman behind the desk. “I have a delivery for him.” I'd bought roses, the sweetest-smelling kind I could find, from one of the vendors outside.