The Temptation Of Demetrio Vigil Part 26

Soon enough, the doorbell rang, and there they were, our dates, fresh out of the limo Thomas's parents had rented for the occasion. Joel, Kelsey's date, got him a discount from his cousin's car service company. Because the event was formal, they'd all worn the tuxedos that males tended to wear for such things. They looked cool, excited, cute, and happy. Logan looked good. I couldn't deny it. He always did. He'd worn a pink c.u.mmerbund and bow tie to match my sash, and had a single white rose for me. We stood on the front porch and tolerated a round of photographs at the hands of Victoria's mother, all the while feeling the b.u.mping ba.s.s coming from the heart of the limo as the driver blasted a heavy, throbbing hip-hop rap song and waited for us. There was something sort of tragic to me now about the scene, a bunch of rich prep school kids, headed to the limo daddy rented, listening to thug music, the guys trying to pimp-walk. It was all such a sorry approximation of everything that was real, sincere, and even painful about Demetrio.

Demetrio.

I tried desperately to push the idea of him from my mind. I missed him with a purple pain the sliced through the very center of me, but there was nothing I could do about it. I didn't want to see him, not like it had been, and he knew this, and he was staying away. I knew that he just wanted me to get on with my life. I was trying.

The back of the limo was lit up with blue neon, and there was a TV on, with music videos playing. They didn't match the songs that blared, but it didn't matter. The whole scene was surreal, and, to the girl I had been one short month before, probably somewhat fun. I was the walking wounded, but I had enough self-control to be able to pull myself out of the self-pitying missing of Demetrio in order to appreciate the situation. There were two Marias inside of me now, the one I had been, and the one I'd become when he touched me. I hadn't lost my former self completely, and I still enjoyed the moment - if not for my own sake then for the sake of the friends I loved.

I sat next to Logan on the long seat. He put his arm around me, territorially, and tried to kiss me. I didn't move. I didn't want to.

"Don't start this again," he warned me, whispering in my ear and biting my neck. "You know what your mom will think."

I kissed him, and tried to enjoy it. I was so confused, and lost.

The limo stopped at a fancy trendy restaurant near downtown, called the Slate Street Grill, and we went inside. Thomas's dad, a successful trial attorney, had already paid in advance for our dinner, and we were escorted like prized guests of honor to a reserved table. All of the adults in the place watched us walk across the room. At the time I thought they admired how adult and sophisticated we looked, but as I've gotten older I have decided that they probably watched us more in a nostalgic and sweetly patronizing way that, had we realized it, would have only served to make us feel even more like kids. They remembered what it had been like - except that none of them, or few of them, probably remembered what it was like to be me, torn between two worlds, that of the living and that of the dead. I tried not to think about Demetrio, but everything reminded me of him. The candles. The mood lighting. The way the waiter walked. A few times, I saw sparkles of light in corners, in my peripheral vision, and thought it was him. I'd gasp to myself in those moments, and my heart raced.

"You okay?" Logan asked, as he held my chair for me to sit down.

"Huh? Yeah. Why?" I'd been looking at the twinkling of light on a woman's winegla.s.s and wondering if it were Demetrio somehow.

"You seem distracted," he said suspiciously.

"I'm fine." I realized I needed to do a better job of acting like I was having a good time, so I poured the happy-face on thick.

He smiled at me, and took his own seat. We ordered fancy things, like caviar and crusted salmon, the kinds of things we thought, then, that adults like us might eat. We drank sparkling cider from champagne flutes, and Thomas even got up to give a heartfelt toast expressing his love for all of us, as his best friends, and especially his love for Victoria. We had chocolate cake for dessert.

After dinner we returned to the limo and took a ride back to Coronado Prep. The gym was decorated beautifully for the event, as only happens, I would imagine, at very expensive private schools - with ice sculptures, and curtains draped over the walls, pooling romantically upon the floor. The tables had candles flickering in the centers, and again I was haunted by his memory, and thought I felt him. It was all very elegant and gorgeous. I wanted to enjoy it more than I did. I couldn't focus. All I could think about was him. Him. Demetrio.

We all took a table, and then Logan showed us something he had in the inside pocket of his suit jacket. It was a flask of whiskey. Everyone's eyes lit up, even Kelsey's. She was trying to pretend she liked Logan, too, because she loved me so much. I adored her for this effort she made. I normally wouldn't have approved of something like drinking at a school dance, but given how much pain I was in, and how much I hated being with Logan, and seeing how none of us would be driving ourselves home later, I didn't protest. This was when the other two boys showed their own flasks, in their own jacket pockets, and everyone sort of laughed secretively. We couldn't let the chaperones see the stuff, or we would have been thrown out of not just the dance, but more than likely the entire school. It wasn't like we were the kinds of kids who drank all the time, or ever. Once wouldn't kill us. Or so I thought then.

"C'mon," said Victoria, eyeing a side door that led out to a dark part of the campus. "Let's get some fresh air. G.o.d knows you need it, Maria."

We were up then, all six of us, and walking as casually as we could toward the door while all around us our cla.s.smates danced and talked and partied to the loud, excellent music being spun by the DJ. Thomas was the first one out the door. Soon, we were all huddled near a dumpster, taking sips of the horrible-tasting, bitter liquid, directly from the flask. I needed it. That's what I told myself. I needed to forget. I needed to loosen up. I wanted to have a good time and stop sulking.

It was like liquid fire going down, and I coughed and grew red in the face. Yet and still, when the flask came around a second time, I partook of more. And a third, and a fourth. Pretty soon, I didn't mind the burn so much, and everything seemed sort of fuzzy and faraway, and silly and fun and perfectly manageable. Victoria watched me closely, and didn't drink as much as I did.

"Be careful," she said, as we were somehow walking back toward the gym. I didn't remember getting up or moving, but here I was anyway. "I know you're feeling pretty good right now, Maria, but whatever you do, don't talk about him. They won't understand. Got that?"

"Yeah," I said.

We went back through the front door, as the side door we'd used to exit locked itself automatically once you were out. We were all chewing mint gum now. I couldn't remember exactly how I'd gotten it, or who'd given it to me, but I did know that my mouth was wintergreen fresh. The thought made me laugh. Kelsey and Victoria took me by the elbow and led me past the parents at the front door, both of my friends, I think, less drunk than I was.

"Act naturally," said Victoria. "Don't breathe on them, dragon breath."

This made me giggle. That was bad. I turned my head away from the chaperones, and walked into the darkness, where a moody rap anthem was blaring. I felt the ba.s.s beat upon my sternum. The preps were out on the floor, getting down in their own special way. I watched for a while, and felt sort of sickened by the way my cla.s.smates tried to imitate a reggaeton video, dirty dancing. Something very sad about it. We were cruel, Kelsey, Victoria and I, joking and laughing about the rotten dancing we saw going on. The other kids? They couldn't all be us, now could they?

Meanwhile, the guys we were with had grown in confidence exponentially with the addition of alcohol. Something unmistakably hungry and manlike came over them now, all the boyish tentativeness gone from their eyes and bodies, testosterone boiling in their veins. That's what I liked so much about Demetrio, I realized: confidence. Add confidence to a boy, and he became a man.

At this point, I spotted some of the other girls from the dance team, and I remembered that we had agreed that we'd meet up here and perform a number from our repertoire. Before I knew it, I was being whisked away from my friends, around the room, gathering others from the troupe like a magnet with metal shavings, and then there we were at the DJ booth, requesting the song, and then there we were, taking over the dance floor, as the song b.u.mped on, and in formation, doing our thing. I was loose, and free, and my body newly awakened in ways it never had been. I shook, shimmied, moved, lived, breathed, and was. I felt alive, and this was melancholy, wonderful, horrible, and in spite of the pain, my dancing was better. I was better. I felt stronger.

Delectation.

I finally understood what he'd meant about the pain of unrequited love being different from other kinds of pain.

My pain hadn't killed me. It hadn't destroyed me. It had made the colors brighter, even if they hurt my head; it had made the songs more dimensional, even if my body moved to them completely alone; it had made everything somehow more than it had been before. I was more for having loved him, even though I felt like less without him. I smiled with this understanding, and looked up, toward the end of our routine, feeling energized and cared for by The Maker, like everything was going to be alright, even if I never saw Demetrio again.

It was at that moment exactly that I saw him, shimmering in a flash of light, materializing out of the ether in a darkened corner of the gym, hidden from view by his ghostliness, flashing visible for just one small second, before flickering away again.

He was here.

And though I initially thought he was watching me as I shook up the dance floor, the next flash of light he gave me showed him to be watching someone else, who was watching me like a tiger.

Logan.

I stopped dancing, in the middle of the routine, so spooked was I by the apparition of Demetrio at my Winter Ball, staring down my date. Kelsey saw me, and caught me before I literally fell to the floor. She held me up.

"Keep going, Maria, don't stop."

"He's here," I told her, breathless.

"Who?"

It must have been the alcohol that made me stop dancing, and tell Kelsey the truth about Demetrio, there, in the middle of the dance. "He actually is a ghost, Kelsey. I'm not supposed to tell you, but you need to know."

She looked doubtful. "Someone's had a little too much to drink."

"No, it's true! You have to believe me." I felt sick. Dizzy.

"It's okay," she said, though her eyes widened with fear. "Just dance. We'll deal with it later."

I shook myself out of my fear, and looked at the other girls to get my place. I continued, I soldiered on. My eyes kept straying to the corner where I'd seen him, but he was gone. I danced like my life depended on it, tears coming, laughter coming, so many emotions welling up within me at once. I saw Logan watching me with a predatory look that I'd credited to the alcohol. Demetrio didn't like that look. How could he be jealous? He'd told me there was no such thing for his kind, and yet I saw it all over his face.

Demetrio had told me at the cafe that he was capable of doing everything human beings did.

Everything? I'd asked him.

Everything, he'd said.

Even, I thought as the dance came to a stop, lying.

The crowd clapped wildly for us when we finished, and the DJ immediately began to play another song. We stayed on the floor, and Kelsey and Victoria and the guys joined us. I tried to look normal, but my eyes kept roaming the room, trying to see him. I felt dizzy suddenly, and sick.

"What's wrong?" asked Logan.

"I don't feel well," I told him.

"Let's get you some air," he suggested.

"You look green," said Kelsey. "Doesn't she look green?"

"She looks green," Logan agreed.

I was afraid I was going to throw up on them.

"Let's get her out of here," said Logan, and the next thing I knew, he and Kelsey were leading me outside, through the front door, telling the chaperones I had a bit of stomach flu and needed air. It was all sort of a blur, but soon I was out on school grounds, with Kelsey rubbing my shoulders and Logan watching me with a cold, hard look on his face that I did not recognize as anything I'd ever seen on him before.

"Why are you looking at me like that?" I asked him, shivering under his mean gaze.

He laughed cruelly.

Kelsey gripped my hand now, hard, because she saw the same sinister look that I did on him.

"I think we should get back inside," she said.

"No, I think the party's just getting started, ladies," said Logan, as he snapped his fingers. All around us, shadowy figures emerged now from the trees, three of them that I could see, dark, quiet and stealthy as ninjas. They wore the same red robes I'd seen at the pond with Dr. Bergant.

I turned to run the other way, but there were more of them behind us. About ten in all.

"Oh my G.o.d. What is this?" asked Kelsey, fear in her eyes and voice.

"Girls, I'd like you to meet my friends."

"You?" I asked Logan, horrified.

The shadows rushed us then, soundlessly, surrounded us, and I could see that they were people, or spirits, in dark robes with hoods. They picked me and Kelsey up from the ground, and began to carry us off, kicking and struggling, to the wild part of the campus, the running and hiking fields, which was completely dark at this time of night. I started to scream, but Logan clamped his cold fist like a stone over my mouth.

"I wouldn't do that if I were you," he said with a bit of a snarl. It was so out of character for the boy I'd thought he was that I was stunned silent.

Kelsey began to scream now, and in spite of his warnings for her to stop, she didn't. She kept shrieking and calling for help. Logan handled the situation by taking what appeared to be a handkerchief from his pocket and holding it over her nose and mouth as she struggled. I watched in horror as she appeared to suffocate, and pa.s.sed out, her arms and legs splaying limply in every direction.

"No!" I screamed. This wasn't happening! It couldn't be happening. And yet it was. And now we were being herded toward a black Cadillac Escalade that was parked along one of the hiking trails, and shoved inside.

Logan was on top of me then, binding my wrists and ankles with rope and duct tape. He tied Kelsey up in the same way even though she wasn't conscious. The hooded figures helped. One of them held a cloth like the one Logan had used on Kelsey, and brought it toward me, placing it over my nose and mouth. As I breathed in the noxious poison it contained, I caught the edge of his face in a sc.r.a.p of light from the streetlamps on Academy Boulevard. He had beautiful green eyes.

They were familiar to me.

I tried to remember where I'd seen them before. The world was growing fuzzier, and further away, quieter, more echoing and vague, and it took me a moment, but I remembered. I'd seen these eyes in the face of a young boy, in Demetrio's memory. It was his half-brother. Hilario.

"No," I tried to say, but my voice was gone.

Then the men disappeared, and I was fading, fading, and the doors were closing, and the car was starting, and I didn't know where Logan was taking us, but I knew it wasn't going to be good.

When I regained consciousness, I was still tied up, and my wrists and ankles hurt badly. I found myself in a half-dark room, on a stained, lumpy mattress, and at first I was panicked because my mind went to the worst possible place it could go. I prayed then. I wasn't used to praying. But at that moment, I prayed that nothing horrible had happened to me, that I hadn't been violated as my first experience as a woman.

My dress and stockings seemed to still be in tact, though, and I took comfort in the fact that I had no pain anywhere but at the ends of my extremities. And my head. My head pounded as though my brain were swelling in pulsating rhythm, growing larger and more filled with fluid with every heartbeat. My mouth was dry, but there was nothing in it. I could move my lips, my tongue, I could breathe. I was on my side, with my hands behind my back. My shoulders ached from the awkward position. My neck, too. So maybe I was wrong in my initial a.s.sessment of my physical state. As I came to, little by little, I began to realize that every part of me ached a bit.

I struggled to get myself into a sitting position, and turned my head this way and that, searching for Kelsey. All I saw was a very small, very dingy room, with a bed and a dresser and chair that appeared to be falling apart. There was a smell of mildew and stale cigarette smoke, and a single naked bulb dangled from a frayed cord in the ceiling above me. The only light in the room came from a streetlight outside, the dim and slightly orange kind you often found in rural places. There were curtains on the windows, but they were open. My pulse raced, and all I could think about was getting out of here. How could I do it? I opened my mouth to cry out, but thought better of it. What if the only people - or things - who would be here to hear my cry were bad? What if my scream brought nothing but Logan, and more poison? I clamped my jaw shut, and began to look for something, anything. Something sharp, maybe, to cut the binds. This is when I noticed the man standing in the shadows near the closed door. He blended in, tall and lean, dressed all in black, but his green eyes shone in the dark, and they were watching me. I saw a red ember just below them. It grew brighter for a moment, then dimmed again. Someone was in the room with me, and he was smoking.

I backed instinctively away from the figure, toward the flimsy plywood headboard of the bed. This only caused whomever it was to laugh to themselves. I recognized that voice, that low smooth tenor, that unsympathetic guffaw.

"Good morning, sunshine." He stepped out of the shadows and into the pale glow from outside. The light made his skin glow with a red hue, and I saw that he wore only pants. No shirt. He had gold chains around his neck, and the jeans were so loose and belted so low around his hips that a good portion of his boxer shorts showed. He had bandana around his head, knotted the way gang members did it, and a limp to his stride that was completely and utterly genuine.

"Hilario?" I asked.

"How sweet," he said, sucking the ember bright orange again. In the light from the end of the cigarette I could see his eyes crinkle in a smile - but it was a smile without a hint of kindness. "You know my name. That's nice, baby."

"Don't call me baby," I spat.

This excited him, and he chuckled some more, walking slowly back and forth at the foot of the bed, looking at me with eyes that seemed to have a supernatural yellow glow to them.

"Why not, baby? Don't you like it? I felt something when you touched me in the car, didn't you feel it?"

"I didn't touch you. You touched me."

"That is true," he said. "But you know you felt something. Demetrio thinks it's his, doesn't he baby, that feeling? He thinks he's ent.i.tled to it, just like he was ent.i.tled to everything else I ever wanted. Especially our father. I never knew him, but he did. He never came to see me, but he loved Demetrio."

"What are you going to do to me?" I asked him.

He came close now, and touched my hair, my cheek. It felt dangerous, thrilling. I had been scared a few times in my life before then, but never terrified.

"What am I going to do to you," he repeated thoughtfully. "Now there's a good question, baby."

"Don't."

He sighed deeply and sat next to me on the bed. At this range, I had a very good sense of how he looked, and again was struck by how beautiful he was, from a purely aesthetic point of view. Looking at him was something like looking at a lion close up at the zoo. You recognized the majestic beauty of the thing, but you also realized it could easily slice you in two and eat your for breakfast. I remembered the child he had been once, how he'd once had it in him to protect Demetrio, rather than destroy him.

"He showed me, the day your father broke your leg," I told him.

"What?" He grew very intrigued at this, but also visibly angered, though he tried to conceal that fact through a horrifyingly cruel smile. "Who did?"

"Your brother. He took me to your house the night it happened, he let me see the memory, and I saw how you protected him. You weren't always like this. You don't have to be like this. That's why he hasn't let them get rid of you yet, you know that? Because he carries that memory around with him, and it makes him hopeful for you."

I saw a flicker of emotion in his eyes, but I could not tell what it was. It might have been regret, but it was more like amus.e.m.e.nt.

"Demetrio was always too soft for his own good," he said.

I realized I was trembling in every muscle, dying to be out of here.

"What did you do to Kelsey?" I asked.

"Your little blonde friend?" he asked.

"Where is she?"

"She's hot. But not as hot as you."