Chapter Twelve
After a practice where I dropped every pass, failed to mark an opponent, and succeeded in staining my knees green with grass, I did something I never do. I took a shower in the girls’ locker room. Something about bathing in a space that requires you to wear shoes wasn’t right, so I usually avoided it like the plague. Unfortunately, there wasn’t time to swing by my house, shower, change, and get to the Moonlight. There was also the off chance my mother would be home, and I had no desire for a face-to-face conversation.
On the way to the Moonlight, I called Mom on her cell and explained that I was having dinner out and would be home afterwards. Mom didn’t miss the deliberate omission of my dinner companion’s name.
“With whom are you eating?” she asked as though it were an innocent question.
Here came the make or break point. I had two options: I could lie, say Devon and pray Mom believed me; or tell the truth, say Kaydon and risk interrogation. Figuring I would need to lie for the meeting with Mr. Wentworth the following evening, I decided not to press my luck today and went with option one. Now the question was: How much do I divulge?
“Endora Lee,” my mother said sternly.
Great, I’d waited too long. Her interest was piqued. “This boy I met at Elizabeth’s after the Mt. St. Mary’s game.” Half-truth.
“What is his name?”
Bring on the twenty questions.
“Kaydon Stevens. He is a senior at St. Paul’s. He is eighteen.” I knew the drill.
“May I have his phone number in case I need to get in touch with you and you do not answer your cell?” Mom phrased it like it was a question and I had an option. I knew better, though. If I wanted to go, she had to have the number.
I rattled off ten digits that I was ashamed to have memorized. Mom repeated the numbers back to me for confirmation.
“Where are you meeting this boy? Is he coming to pick you up? I would prefer he did not since I am at work,” she said.
There was a myriad of reasons why I didn’t want to tell her where we were having dinner, the least of which was that the Moonlight’s normal clientele favored leather over silk blends and two-wheeled modes of transportation over the more conventional four-wheeled ones. The Moonlight Diner was dad’s place. Telling my mother about it felt like a betrayal. Maybe it was stupid, but I couldn’t help it.
“We’re meeting at the diner.” Another half-truth. The Moonlight was a diner. But when I said “the diner,” I knew mom would think Plum Crazy since she knew Devon and I went there all the time. Mr. Wentworth was right. I was becoming my mother’s daughter. Nobody was better than Evelyn Andrews at laying just enough cards on the table to let her opponent think he knew her hand.
“What time will you be home?” Mom followed up.
“Um, by nine,” I told her. I didn’t exactly have a curfew, but nine o’clock was likely the latest she’d agree to, given that it was a school night. Particularly since I’d be out with someone she had never met.
“That will be fine. Before your next date I would like to meet this boy, though,” she replied.
I almost told her it wasn’t a date, but decided it was better to let her think that it was. Her suspicion meter would go berserk otherwise.
“You got it,” I said. Outright lie. If I hung out with Kaydon again, he would definitely not be meeting my mother beforehand.
My mother’s third degree had taken nearly the entire drive to the Moonlight. I was thankful for the distraction. It had prevented me spending the entire twenty-five minutes panicking over the talk with Kaydon. Instead, I frantically tried to cram twenty-five minutes of worrying into five.
On the one hand, I was eager to learn whatever Kaydon knew about our condition. On the other, I doubted the pizza sauce stain on the hem of my white sweater would impress him. I still hadn’t decided whether to tell him about what had happened in Greek mythology. The further removed from the situation I became, the more ridiculous I felt for thinking I’d met a Greek god in my dreams.
Kaydon’s black Jeep was parked in front of the Moonlight when I pulled into the lot. Even without the St. Paul’s School for Boys sticker, I would have known it was his. The five other vehicles in the lot were all made in a Harley-Davidson plant, and preppy Kaydon didn’t really strike me as the hog-riding type.
“Endora Lee,” Mr. Haverty greeted me, holding the door open. “Nice to see you back so soon. Your friend is already here.”
I stopped short, my mouth hanging open. First the smiley pancakes and now knowing I was meeting Kaydon? Did Mr. Haverty have visions of the future, too?
The grandfatherly man laughed softly. “Don’t look so surprised. Very few of my patrons are teenagers. It doesn’t take a genius to add two plus two and get four.”
I relaxed, feeling more than a little silly. Maybe paranoia ran in our family or was contagious, because I was channeling my mother.
“He is sitting in the corner.” Mr. Haverty pointed to a booth in the back of the square room, away from the rest of the customers.
“Thanks,” I said and slowly made my way to the far corner of the diner.
The lighting in the diner was dim, but I had no trouble making out Kaydon’s lean form. He kept running his hands through his chestnut hair, causing the curls to loosen and fall in waves to frame his face. A glass of ice water sat in front of him, and three times before I reached the table he picked it up and fished out an ice cube to chew on. Kaydon turned when I was still several paces away as if sensing my approach. He smiled and his green eyes seemed to brighten the entire room.
I slid into the booth across from him.
“Hey,” he said softly. “I wasn’t sure you’d come.”
“I wouldn’t have missed this for the world,” I replied, then realized how that sounded. Heat rushed to my cheeks. Who had cheesy lines now? “I mean, I do really want to finish our conversation from the other night. You know when I freaked out and practically threw a chair at you? Which I am sorry for, by the way. It’s just that not a lot of people know about… well, you know. But I shouldn’t have assumed the worst of you. Well, it’s not really you who I thought was playing a joke on me. Jamieson is underhanded and we have this whole rivalry thing.”
Kaydon let me ramble. His smile became more amused the more rope I used to hang myself.
Thankfully, Mr. Haverty appeared before I could ask Kaydon how he felt about Canada or warn him of the dangers of being left-handed, which I was pretty sure he was since he’d started twirling his drink straw through the fingers of his left hand. The diner owner sat a glass of water in front of me and offered us menus.
“Just holler when you’ve decided what you’d like to eat,” he told us, then moved back towards the counter with surprising speed for a man I estimated to be in his seventies.
I opened my menu and pretended to study the options while I searched for something halfway intelligent to say. Nothing came to mind. Kaydon remained annoyingly quiet.
“What are you going to get?” I asked to cover the awkward silence.
“Turkey Reuben,” Kaydon said decisively, still not glancing up from his menu.
“If you already know, why are you reading the menu?” I asked, then cringed. That sounded so accusatory and plain rude.
Kaydon laughed. “Because it’s making you uncomfortable. You are the most high-strung person I have ever met. Relax, Endora. I am not going to hurt you.” Kaydon seemed to think about that for minute. “At least not on purpose,” he amended.
I rubbed my cheek, remembering the painful jolt of electricity. The red mark had long since faded, but I could recall the current running through my body like it had only just happened.
“Don’t worry. I won’t try and touch you,” Kaydon said.
The innocent promise was a stab of disappointment to my heart. The pang of unease I always experienced in his presence was dwarfed by my mounting attraction to him. Kaydon was like a magnet, drawing me in farther the closer I came.
Instead of responding, I caught Mr. Haverty’s attention and waved him over. Kaydon and I ordered our dinners – a turkey Reuben for him and grilled cheese with tomato for me.
After Mr. Haverty left, the silence returned. Kaydon continued to fiddle with his straw, and I busied my hands by tearing my napkin to shreds.
“So, you were sixteen when it happened?” I said. I never won the silent game as a child.
Kaydon swallowed thickly and turned his head to stare out the window. “Yeah. I was on a family vacation in the Bahamas. We were snorkeling and I wandered away from the group. I dove down to take some pictures of marine plants on the ocean floor. There was a gap between two boulders and I could see something glowing inside. I thought it might be an electric eel or something cool like that. I poked my arm between the rocks to try and take a picture. It got stuck.” Kaydon rubbed his left arm and shuddered, reliving the horrifying ordeal. “I started to panic.” The last words were quiet, haunted.
“You don’t have to tell me the rest,” I said, reaching for his hand on instinct. The moment before I touched his fingers, I pulled back.
“Yeah, I guess you know the rest, huh?”
“Oh, I didn’t drown,” I said quickly, my hand flying to my throat.
Kaydon turned to face me head-on. He arched his eyebrows questioningly. “How did it happen for you?” he asked softly.
“I don’t remember. I was just a baby. I didn’t even know I’d died at birth until I was eight and kept having nightmares about being strangled,” I admitted.
Kaydon looked confused. “A baby?” he repeated slowly.
“Umbilical cord wrapped around my neck,” I confirmed.
“No.” Kaydon shook his head. “That’s not right. Minos said you have to be at least sixteen to sign the contract.”
“Contract?”
“The Egrgoroi contract,” Kaydon replied in a tone that suggested he thought me dense.
“What are you talking about? Who is Minos? What is an Egrgoroi?” The word sounded vaguely familiar, but I didn’t know what it meant. And I had no clue who or what Minos was.
“What happened after you died?” Kaydon demanded, ignoring my questions. “Where did you go? What did you see?” His voice was low but urgent. The intensity unnerved me.
“I told you, I don’t remember anything. I didn’t go anywhere or see anything.”
Kaydon’s green eyes weighed me. Then his focus turned inward.
“What is going on, Kaydon? I’m freaking out here. You nearly electrocute me when we meet. You somehow know my name before I tell you. You offer up some explanation about us meeting in your dreams. Then, you somehow know that I died and came back - something even my closest friends don’t know, by the way. And now you want to know what happened in the two minutes I was dead. You obviously know way more about this, so why don’t you tell me what I saw?” I sat back in the booth, short of breath from my rant.
“Tell me something first,” Kaydon said.
“Fine. What?” I shot back.
“You have the dreams, right? You do see future events in your dreams?” The way Kaydon’s hands gripped the edge of the table told me that a lot hinged on my answer. If the anxious expression he wore was any indication, the space-time continuum might be disrupted if I didn’t say yes.
“I do,” I admitted. “Nothing serious, though. Mostly it’s stupid stuff, like conversations with my friends and lacrosse plays.” I decided to keep the whole Hermes subject to myself for a little longer.
Kaydon visibly relaxed. “You just turned eighteen. The visions are usually mundane in the beginning. Kind of like test runs to make sure the messages get through.”
The summer after I turned six, my father went on sabbatical to Ireland and brought Mom and me along for the trip. Dad’s research assistant, Angus, continually referred to his hound as “thick” and complained that his girlfriend was “acting the maggot.” One evening he arrived at our house for dinner soaking wet and told my family that it was “lashing real good” outside and he’d been “sucking diesel” the entire three-block walk. The individual words were all English, but they didn’t form a sentence that I understood. The conversation with Kaydon reminded me a lot of that experience.
Mr. Haverty arrived with our food, startling us both. Maybe the tension surrounding the table was palpable to him too because he didn’t say anything when he set our plates before us. And he left without comment.
I picked up a French fry and nibbled on the end. I had no appetite. Kaydon dug into his Reuben without hesitation. Nothing, not even death, could dampen a teenage boy’s hunger.
“Okay, so you have the dreams. You have the electrical problems. And you have crossed over and been sent back,” Kaydon said after he’d wolfed down half of his sandwich. It sounded more like he was talking to himself than me.
“What do you mean by crossed over and sent back? I died and the doctors revived me,” I said.
Kaydon sighed and set the remaining half of his sandwich on the plate. “You crossed the waters that separate the living from the dead,” he said.
Again, I thought he was speaking English, but it might as well have been Swahili. I shook my head to indicate I had no clue what he was talking about. The weird turn of the conversation heightened my anxiety, but I found it oddly fascinating as well. I felt like Kaydon was about to deliver a lecture on the afterworld.
“To come back as an Egrgoroi you must have crossed over and stood before the Panel of Three,” Kaydon explained. “Only they have the power to judge whether you deserve a second chance.”
Maybe a biblical lecture, I thought. The term Egrgoroi didn’t sound biblical, though. What did I know? Most of my church-going experience was fictitious.
“Any of this ring a bell?” Kaydon asked in response to my perplexed expression, no doubt. “The Judgment? The ferryman? The beaches of the recently departed?”
My hand paused with a French fry midway to my mouth. “Ferryman?” I repeated weakly.
“Yeah, Hermes. He escorts you to the Panel of Three.”