The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume 6 Read online

I watched. I’m always watching. Who doesn’t like to watch? It feels like being God, seeing everything happen far away, and you could stop it if you wanted, but then you couldn’t watch anymore.

  A storm started rumbling up across the meadows, spattering their kisses with autumn rain.

  Suddenly everyone cared about who was going to make the Devil’s Court this year. Even me. The mall was cleared out of formal sparkle-and-slit dresses by August, and somehow they just couldn’t get any more in, like we were an island mysteriously sundered from the land of sequins and sweetheart necklines. Most of us were just going to have to go with one of our mom’s prom dresses, though you can be damn sure we’d be ripping off that poofy shoulder chiffon and taking up the hems as far as we could. Jenny Kilroy (drama club, Young Businesswomen’s Association) had done all the costumes for The Music Man in junior year, and for $50 she’d take that cherry cupcake dress and turn it into an apocalyptic punkslut wedding gown, but girlfriend worked slow. Whoever took the Homecoming crown had about a 60/40 chance of being up there in something they’d worn to their grandmother’s funeral.

  The smart money was on Sarah Jane for the win. She was already pregnant by then, and Jessica too, but I don’t think even they knew it yet. Bellies still flat as a plains state, cotton candy lipstick as perfect as a Rembrandt. Nobody got morning sickness, nobody’s feet swelled. Sarah shone in the center of her ring of girls like a pink diamond in a nouveaux riche ring. 4.0, equestrian club, head cheerleader, softball pitcher, jazz choir lead soprano, played Juliet in both freshman and senior years, even joined the chess club. She didn’t care about chess, but it looked good on her applications and she turned out to be terrifyingly good at it—first place at the spring speed chess invitational in Freemont, even seven months along. You couldn’t even hate Sarah. You could see her whole perfect life rolling on ahead of her like a yellow brick road but you knew she’d include you, if you wanted. If you stuck around this town like she meant to, and let her rule it like she aimed to.

  Jessica and Ashley flanked her down every hall and every parade—a girl like Sarah just naturally grows girls like Jessica and Ashley to be her adjutants, her bridesmaids, the baby’s breath to make her rose look redder. All three of them knew the score and all three of them made sure nothing would ever change, like Macbeth’s witches, if they wore daisy-print coats and their mothers’ Chanel and tearproof mascara and only foretold their own love, continuing forever and the world moving aside to let it pass. So that was the obvious lineup—Queen Sarah and her Viziers. Of course there were three slots, so I figured Jenny Kilroy would slide in on account of her charitable work to keep us all in the shimmer.

  And then Friday morning arrived, the dawn before the dance and a week before the showdown game with Bobby Zhao and his Cowboys. Coyote howled up 7 am and we woke up and opened our closets and there they hung—a hundred perfect dresses. Whatever we might have chosen after hours of turning on the rack of the mall with nothing in our size or our color or modest enough for daddy or bare enough for us, well, it was hanging in our closets with a corsage on the hip. Coyote took us all to Homecoming that year. And there in my room hung something that glittered and threw prisms on the wall, something the color of the ripest pumpkin you ever saw, something cut so low and slit so high it invited the world to love me best. I put it on and my head filled up with champagne like I’d already been sipping flutes for an hour, as if silk could make skin drunk. I slid the corsage on my wrist—cornflowers, and tiny green ears not yet open.

  Coyote danced with all the girls and when the music sped up he threw back his head and howled and we all howled with him. When it slowed down he draped himself all over some lonesome thing who never thought she had a chance. The rest of us threw out our arms and danced with what our hands caught—Jessica spent half the night with mathletes kissing her neck and teaching her mnemonics. Everything was dizzy; everything spun. The music came from everywhere at once and the floor shook with our stomping. We were so strong that night, we were full of the year and no one drank the punch because no one needed it, we just moved with Coyote and Coyote moved, too. I flung out my arms and spun away from David Horowitz (pep squad, 100-meter dash), my corn-bound hand finding a new body to carry me into the next song. Guitar strings plinked in some other, distant world beyond the gymnasium and I opened my eyes to see Sarah Jane in my arms, her dress a perfect, icy white spill of froth and jewels, her eyes made up black and severe, to contrast, her lips a generous rose-colored smile. She smelled like musk and honeysuckle. She smelled like Coyote. I danced with her and she put her head on my breast; I felt her waist in my grasp, the slight weight of her, the chess queen, the queen of horses and jazz and grade point averages and pyramids and backflips, Juliet twice, thrice, a hundred times over. She ran her hand idly up and down my back just as if I were a boy. My vision blurred and the Christmas lights hanging everywhere swam into a soup of Devil red and Devil gold. The queen of the softball team lifted her sunny blonde head and kissed me. Her mouth tasted like cherry gum and whiskey. She put her hands in my hair to show me she meant it, and I pulled her in tight—but the song ended and she pulled away, looking surprised and confused, her lipstick dulled, her bright brown eyes wounded, like a deer with sudden shot in her side. She ran to Jessica and Ashley and the three of them to Coyote, hands over their stomachs as though something fluttered there, something as yet unknown and unnamed.

  The principal got up to call out the Devil’s Court. My man was shaken by all the heavy grinding and spinning and howling that had become the senior class, but he got out his index cards all the same. He adjusted his striped tie and tapped the mic, just like every principal has ever done. And he said a name. And it was mine. A roar picked up around me and hands were shoving me forward and I didn’t understand, it was Sarah Jane, it would always be Sarah Jane. But I stood there while Mr. Whitmore, the football coach, put a crown on my head, and I looked out into the throng. Coyote stood there in his tuxedo, the bowtie all undone like a brief black river around his neck, and he winked at me with his flashing hound-eye, and the principal called three more names and they were Jessica and Ashley and Sarah Jane. They stood around me like three fates and Mr. Whitmore put little spangly tiaras on their heads and they looked at me like I had caught a pass in the end-zone, Hail Mary and three seconds left on the clock. I stared back and their tiaras were suddenly rings of wheat and appleblossoms and big, heavy oranges like suns, and I could see in their eyes mine wasn’t rhinestones any more than it was ice cream. I lifted it down off my head and held it out like a thing alive: a crown of corn, not the Iowa yellow stuff but blue and black, primal corn from before the sun thought fit to rise, with tufts of silver fur sprouting from their tips, and all knotted together with crow feathers and marigolds.

  And then it was pink rhinestones in my hands again, and blue zirconium on my Princesses’ heads, and the Devil’s Court took its place, and if you have to ask who was King, you haven’t been listening.

  After that, the game skipped by like a movie of itself. Bobby just couldn’t keep that ball in his hands. You could see it on his face, how the ball had betrayed him, gone over to a bad boy with a leather jacket and no truck at all. You could see him re-sorting colleges in his head. It just about broke your heart. But we won 24-7, and Coyote led Bobby Zhao off the field with a sorry-buddy and a one-game-don’t-mean-a-thing, and before I drove off to the afterparty I saw them under the bleachers, foreheads pressed together, each clutching at the other’s skin like they wanted to climb inside, and they were beautiful like that, down there underneath the world, their helmets lying at their feet like old crowns.

  Nothing could stop us then. The Westbrook Ravens, the Bella Vista Possums, the Ashland Gators. Line them up and watch them fall. It wasn’t even a question.

  I suppose we learned trig, or Melville, or earth science. I suppose we took exams. I suppose we had parents, too, but I’ll be damned if any of that seemed to make the tiniest impression on any one of us that year. We lived in a
n unbreakable bubble where nothing mattered. We lived in a snowglobe, only the sun was always shining and we were always winning and yeah, you could get grounded for faceplanting your biology midterm or pulled over for speeding or worse for snorting whatever green fairy dust Coyote found for you, but nothing really happened. You came down to the lake like always the next night. After the Ravens game, Greg Knight (running back #46) and Johnny Thompson (cornerback #22) crashed their cars into each other after drinking half a sip of something Coyote whipped up in an acorn cap, yelling chicken out the window the whole time like it was 1950 and some girl would be waving her handkerchief at the finish line. But instead there was a squeal of engine humping up on engine and the dead crunch of the front ends smacking together and the long blare of Greg’s face leaning on his horn.

  But even then, they just got up and walked away, arm in arm and Coyote suddenly between them, oh-my-godding and let’s-do-that-againing. The next day their Camrys pulled up to the parking lot like it was no big deal. Nothing could touch us.

  All eyes were on the Thunderbirds.

  Now, the Thunderbirds didn’t have a Bobby Zhao. No star player to come back and play celebrity alumnus in ten years with a Super Bowl ring on his finger. A Thunderbirds was part of a machine, a part that could be swapped out for a hot new freshman no problem, no resentment. They moved as one, thought as one, they were a flock, always pointed in the same direction. That was how they’d won six state championships; that was how they’d sent three quarterbacks to the NFL in the last decade. There was no one to hate—just a single massive Thunderbird darkening our little sky.

  Coyote’s girls began to show by Christmas.

  Sarah Jane, whatever the crown might have said at Homecoming, was queen of the unwed mothers, too. Her belly swelled just slightly bigger than the others—but then none of them got very big. None of them slowed down. Sarah Jane was turning a flip-into somersault off the pyramid in her sixth month with no trouble. They would all lay around the sidelines together painting their stomachs (Devil red and Devil gold) and trying on names for size. No point in getting angry; no point in fighting for position. The tribe was the tribe and the tribe was all of us and a tribe has to look after its young. The defensive line had a whole rotating system for bringing them chocolate milk in the middle of the night.

  They were strong and tan and lean and I had even money on them all giving birth to puppies.

  I didn’t get pregnant. But then, I wouldn’t. I told him, and he listened. Rabbit and Coyote, they do each other favors, when they can.

  A plan hatched itself steal their mascot. An old fashioned sort of thing, like playing chicken with cars. Coyote plays it old school. Into Springfield High in the middle of the night, out with Marmalade, a stuffed, motheaten African Grey parrot from some old biology teacher’s collection that a bright soul had long ago decided could stand in for a Thunderbird.

  We drove out to Springfield, two hours and change, me and Coyote and Jimmy Moser and Mike Halloran and Josh Vick and Sarah Jane and Jessica and Ashley, all crammed into my truck, front and back. Coyote put something with a beat on the radio and slugged back some off-brand crap that probably turned to Scotland’s peaty finest when it hit his tongue. Jimmy was trying to talk Ashley into making out with him in the back while the night wind whipped through their hair and fireflies flashed by, even though it was January. Ashley didn’t mind too much, even less when everyone wanted to touch her stomach and feel the baby move. She blushed like a primrose and even her belly button went pink.

  Nobody’s very quiet when sneaking into a gym. Your feet squeak on the basketball court and everyone giggles like a joke got told even when none did and we had Coyote’s hissing drink up drink up and squeezing my hand like he can’t hold the excitement in. We saw Marmalade center court on a parade float, all ready to ship over to the big designated-neutral-ground stadium for halftime. Big yellow and white crepe flowers drooped everywhere, around the shore of a bright blue construction paper sea. Marmalade’s green wings spread out majestically, and in his talons he held a huge orange papier-mâché ball ringed with aluminum foil rays dipped in gold glitter. Thunderbird made this world, and Thunderbird gets to rule it.

  Coyote got this look on his face and the moment I saw it I knew I wouldn’t let him get there first. I took off running, my sneakers screeching, everyone hollering Bunny! after me and Coyote scrappling up behind me, closing the distance, racing to the sun. I’m faster, I’m always faster. Sometimes he gets it and sometimes I get it but it’s nothing we haven’t done before and this time it’s mine.

  And I leapt onto the float without disturbing the paper sea and reached up, straining, and finally just going for it. I’m a tall girl, see how high I jump. The sun came down in my arms, still warm from the gym lights and the after-hours HVAC. The Thunderbird came with it, all red cheeks and Crayola green wingspan and I looked down to see Coyote grinning up at me. He’d let me take it, if I wanted it. He’d let me wear it like a crown. But after a second of enjoying its weight, the deliciousness of its theft, I passed it down to him. It was his year. He’d earned it.

  We drove home through the January stars with the sun in the bed of my truck and three pregnant girls touching it with one hand each, holding it down, holding it still, holding it together.

  On game day we stabbed it with the Devil’s pitchfork and paraded our float around the stadium like conquering heroes. Like cowboys. Marmalade looked vaguely sad. By then Coyote was cleaning off blood in the locker room, getting ready for the second half, shaken, no girls around him and no steroid needles blossoming up from his friendly palm like a bouquet of peonies.

  The first half of the championship game hit us like a boulder falling from the sky. The Thunderbirds didn’t play for flash, but for short, sharp gains and an inexorable progression toward the end-zone. They didn’t cheer when they scored. They nodded to their coach and regrouped. They caught the flawless, seraphic passes Coyote fired off; they engulfed him when he tried to run as he’d always done. Our stands started out raucous and screaming and jumping up and down, cheering on our visibly pregnant cheerleading squad despite horrified protests from the Springfield side. Don’t you listen, Sarah Jane baby! Yelled Mr. Bollard. You look perfect! And she did, fists in the air, ponytail swinging.

  Halftime stood 14-7 Thunderbirds.

  I slipped into the locker room—by that time the place had become Devil central, girls and boys and players and cheerleaders and second chair marching band kids who weren’t needed til post-game all piled in together. Some of them giving pep talks which I did not listen to, some of them bandaging knees, some of them—well. Doing what always needs doing when Coyote’s around. Rome never saw a party like a Devil locker room.

  I walked right over to my boy and the blood vanished from his face just as soon as he saw me.

  “Don’t you try to look pretty for me,” I said.

  “Aw, Bunny, but you always look so nice for me.”

  I sat in his lap. He tucked his fingers between my thighs—where I clamped them, safe and still. “What’s going on out there?”

  Coyote drank his water down. “Don’t you worry, Bunny Rabbit. It has to go like this, or they won’t feel like they really won. Ain’t no good game since the first game that didn’t look lost at half time. It’s how the story goes. Can’t hold a game without it. The old fire just won’t come. If I just let that old Bird lose like it has to, well, everyone would get happy after, but they’d think it was pre-destined all along, no work went into it. You gotta make the story for them, so that when the game is done they’ll just...” Coyote smiled and his teeth gleamed. “Well, they’ll lose their minds I won it so good.”

  Coyote kissed me and bit my lip with those gleaming teeth. Blood came up and in our mouths it turned to fire. We drank it down and he ran out on that field, Devil red and Devil gold, and he ran like if he kept running he could escape the last thousand years. He ran like the field was his country. He ran like his bride was on the other end of al
l that grass and I guess she was. I guess we all were. Coyote gave the cherry to Justin Oster, who caught this pass that looked for all the world like the ball might have made it all the way to the Pacific if nobody stood in its way. But Justin did, and he caught it tight and perfect and the stadium shook with Devil pride.

  34-14. Rings all around, as if they’d all married the state herself.

  That night, we had a big bonfire down by the lake. Neutral ground was barely 45 minutes out of town, and no one got home tired and ready to sleep a good night and rise to a work ethic in the morning.

  I remember we used to say down-by-the-lake like it was a city, like it was an address. I guess it was, the way all those cars would gather like crows, pick-ups and Camaros and Jeeps, noses pointing in, a metal wall against the world. The willows snapped their green whips at the moon and the flames licked up Devil red and Devil gold. We built the night without thinking about it, without telling anyone it was going to happen, without making plans. Everyone knew to be there; no one was late.

  Get any group of high school kids together and you pretty much have the building blocks of civilization. The Eagle Scout boys made an architecturally perfect bonfire. 4-H-ers threw in grub, chips and burgers and dogs and Twix and Starburst. The drama kids came bearing tunes, their tooth-white iPods stuffed into speaker cradles like black mouths. The rich kids brought booze from a dozen walnut cabinets—and Coyote taught them how to spot the good stuff. Meat and fire and music and liquor—that’s all it’s ever been. Sarah Jane started dancing up to the flames with a bottle of 100 year old cognac in her hand, holding by the neck, moving her hips, her gorgeously round belly, her long corn-colored hair brushing faces as she spun by, the smell of her expensive and hot. Jessica and Ashley ran up to her and the three of them swayed and sang and stamped, their arms slung low around each other, their heads pressed together like three graces. Sarah Jane poured her daddy’s cognac over Ashley’s breasts and caught the golden stuff spilling off in her sparkly pink mouth and Ashley laughed so high and sweet and that was it—everyone started dancing and howling and jumping and Coyote was there in the middle of it all, arching his back and keeping the beat, slapping his big thighs, throwing the game ball from boy to girl to boy to girl, like it was magic, like it was just ours, the sun of our world arcing from hand to hand to hand.