Inferno Read online

  INFERNO

  INFERNO

  Robin Stevenson

  Text copyright © 2009 Robin Stevenson

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Stevenson, Robin H. (Robin Hjørdis), 1968-

  Inferno / written by Robin Stevenson.

  ISBN 978-1-55469-077-0

  I. Title.

  PS8637.T487I57 2009 jC813’.6 C2008-907661-3

  First published in the United States, 2009

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2008942002

  Summary: Dante is disillusioned with school and wishes she was able to be open about her sexuality, but her new friends make life even more difficult.

  Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  Design by Teresa Bubela

  Cover artwork by Getty Images

  Author photo by David Lowes

  ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS

  PO BOX 5626, STN. B

  VICTORIA, BC CANADA

  V8R 6S4

  ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS

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  www.orcabook.com

  Printed and bound in Canada.

  Printed on 100% PCW recycled paper.

  12 11 10 09 • 4 3 2 1

  To my family

  ONE

  The sun is barely up, but the sky is already blue and cloudless. The cool morning air fills my lungs and I focus on the feeling of my feet hitting the ground, my muscles stretching, my heart beating. Running is the one thing that keeps me from going completely crazy, but today it’s not working as well as it usually does. My brain isn’t switching off. I run down street after street, past the green lawns, the matching beige houses, the triple garages, the SUVS.

  We lived in a big city until just over a year ago. We had a cool apartment in the heart of downtown, and I rode the subway everywhere. There was the massive library, six stories high with glass skylights everywhere, a park where I used to run along miles of tree-lined paths, and all kinds of funky used bookstores and antique shops and cafés. Then Dad got transferred halfway across the country—he does something incomprehensible that involves software and a lot of acronyms—and now here we are. The burbs. The nearest city, the one we’re technically a suburb of, is a depressing concrete sprawl. Not that it matters. With no subway, no busses—unless you walk practically to the highway and wait forever—and no driver’s license, it’s not like I can go anywhere.

  I was almost fifteen when we moved, and it hasn’t exactly been a smooth transition. At my old school, all my teachers loved me. At my new school? Not so much. Apparently what was seen as “independent thinking” back in the city is called “attitude” here. Last year would have been hell if it wasn’t for Beth. She was in my homeroom, and we started to talk because we’d see each other out running all the time. Pretty soon, we were spending every spare minute together. I floated through the rest of grade ten without bothering to get to know anyone else. Then in June, Beth and her family moved away, and I was back to being alone. This summer has been one long sharp ache.

  I slow down as I run past the high school. Glen Ridge Secondary School. GRSS. It’s a squat, gray, two-level building, as new and as ugly as everything else around here. Since last year, someone has planted a row of trees along the edge of the field. They’re spindly little things. None come up past my shoulder. Granted, I’m five foot eleven, but still. The trees just look kind of sad. Anyway, summer holidays are over. By lunchtime today, everyone will be butting out their cigarettes on the skinny trunks.

  I glance at my watch. Less than three hours until I’m back inside.

  When I get home I head straight to the bathroom and take a long shower, as hot as I can stand, with a blast of cold at the end. I dry myself off quickly and wrap myself in a towel. Mom’s left one of her magazines on the counter, and I flip it open and start reading while I brush my teeth. I always have to read something: If the magazine wasn’t here, I’d be reading the list of ingredients on the toothpaste tube or the directions on Dad’s jar of athlete’s foot powder.

  Top Ten Tips for Looking Younger the article reads. I snort. Like I want to look younger than sixteen. But I keep reading anyway. Tip 1: Laugh lines, frown lines... their very names give them away. Every time you wrinkle your forehead or crinkle your eyes, those little lines get one step closer to being a permanent part of your face. The good news? By keeping a serene countenance, you can avoid the aging effects of excessive facial expressions.

  I toss the magazine aside. Unbelievable. I can’t believe my mom reads this crap. Oh wait—yes, I can. It’s probably half the reason she’s always nagging me about my appearance.

  I wipe clean a patch of the steam-fogged mirror, and my blurred reflection scowls back at me. My dark hair falls to my shoulders in a wet shaggy mess. Maybe Mom’s right: It’s time for a new look. I rummage in the drawer until I find a pair of scissors; then I hold up one hank of hair and cut. Then another and another, until I’m standing in a drift of fallen hair and all that’s left on my head is maybe half an inch of thick dark fuzz. Even half-wet, it’s already sticking straight up.

  This haircut, combined with my sixteenth birthday present, should guarantee an interesting first day of school.

  I turned sixteen at the beginning of July. Beth had been gone for two weeks, and it was just beginning to sink in that she had truly, completely and permanently disappeared from my life. I couldn’t stand it. Everything hurt, and I felt like crawling out of my skin.

  I didn’t feel like celebrating, but Mom lives for special occasions. She insisted on doing the whole sweet-sixteen thing—a big pink cake, sixteen candles, all that. It pretty much broke her heart when I flatly refused to invite anyone from school. In the end, Mom and Dad and I sat around eating the cake by ourselves. Dad kept giving me sympathetic glances from across the table, and I kept cramming more cake into my mouth so that I wouldn’t have to talk. Happy birthday to me.

  Mom’s always trying to create these perfect teenage moments and give me the life that she always wanted. Whether or not it’s what I want doesn’t seem to matter.

  Anyway, I’d only wanted one thing for my birthday and that was to change my name. I’d wanted to change it since I was a kid, but it wasn’t until this year that my parents had finally agreed. Probably just as well, really. If they’d agreed when I was six, I’d be called Rufus, after our old neighbor’s basset hound.

  Mom had cried a little when she gave me the green light. “Emily’s such a pretty, gentle name,” she said. “It’s so feminine.”

  I feel bad for my mother, in a way. She’d have been such a great mom for a different kid. Not that she’s a bad mom for me, but I know it hurts her that I don’t want the same things she wants. I’ve got to give her credit though: Even though it’s a lost cause, she never gives up hope that I’ll improve. Her outlook is relentlessly positive.

  She may not understand me, but it’s not like I understand her either. Despite all her fussing and the crap magazines she reads, she isn’t someone you can just dismiss. Underneath it all, she’s actually pretty smart. Sometimes I think she’s stuck in some retro-fifties time warp, trying to be this perfect wife and mother, when really she should
have been, I don’t know...a cosmetic surgeon, maybe. Or a talk-show host or an interior designer. In her own way, she’s ambitious. It’s just that her ambitions all seem to involve me. I figure she needs more to manage than just my life and her kindergarten class.

  Anyway, it’s official. I am Dante E. Griffin. I kept Emily as a middle name, just to make Mom feel better. I needn’t have bothered. She always calls me Emily anyway.

  TWO

  I pull on my favorite jeans and a navy hoodie and head downstairs with some trepidation. The trepidation, it turns out, is justified. My mother takes one look at my hair, and her face collapses. I can see her making this tremendous effort not to cry, twisting her mouth and wrinkling her forehead in a way that her magazine would definitely frown upon. If magazines could frown, and if frowning didn’t cause wrinkles.

  “Well,” she says at last. “Emily. What have you done?”

  “Isn’t that fairly obvious?”

  “But what were you thinking?”

  I have no idea what I was thinking. “It was getting in my face,” I say. “Driving me nuts.”

  I can see the muscles jump in her throat as she swallows.

  “I’ve read that short hair is coming back in style this winter,” she says at last.

  Like I said—relentlessly positive. I stick a couple of slices of bread in the toaster and look up as Dad walks in. “Morning.”

  He raises one eyebrow and lowers it again. “You look different. Did you do something to your hair?”

  “You could say that,” Mom mutters.

  I just grin at him. He grins back. “Well, you look terrific. Very striking.”

  Mom shakes her head like we’re both completely hopeless and refills her mug from the carafe of coffee on the kitchen island. She doesn’t eat breakfast. Actually, she doesn’t eat much at all unless you count lettuce and cottage cheese. Mom was very overweight when she was a kid, like over two hundred pounds. I think that’s why she’s so hung up on appearances: She knows how unkind people can be. She’s destroyed all the photos of herself as a child, which is possibly one of the saddest things I’ve ever heard, and she’s terrified of getting fat again. When I pointed out once that she was kid a long time ago, she got all offended because she thought I was saying she was old.

  I pop my toast out of the toaster, spread a thick layer of apricot jam on it and pour myself a glass of milk. Dad slowly pours shredded wheat squares into a bowl, picks out all the broken ones and spoons sugar on top. Mom adds some skim milk to her coffee. Then we all sit down in our show-home kitchen, surrounded by brand-new stainless-steel appliances and cherry-wood cabinets, and eat our various versions of breakfast in silence.

  My old school was small and had a strong arts focus. I’d liked it there. Everyone was pretty friendly and the teachers were really passionate about their subjects. There were some cliques, I guess, but nothing rigid. You could move between groups pretty easily. The city had tried to close the school a couple of years ago and bus us all to a bigger school, but everyone got organized and protested, and in the end our school stayed open. I was starting grade nine at the time, and I was so relieved that I could stay.

  Then Dad got transferred, and I had to leave anyway.

  Glen Ridge Secondary School couldn’t be more different. It’s big and sterile and unfriendly, and the teachers all seem to be holding on for the day they can collect their pensions. And the kids...well. My first day here, I felt like I’d accidentally wandered onto a movie set. There they were, all the groups you see in teen flicks: the jocks, the cheerleaders, the brains, the Goths, the stoners, the skaters, the nerds. It was as if some casting director had hired them all and the costume department had dressed them for their parts. Not subtle.

  I don’t really fit anywhere. I’m a runner, but I hate team sports. I’m smart, but I don’t care that much about my grades. I like some of the stoner kids, but I’m not into drugs. The cheerleaders remind me of my mother.

  I don’t know how I’m going to deal with school now that Beth’s gone. I have a feeling I’ll be spending a lot of time alone.

  The day begins with double bad news. I pick up my schedule from the office and discover that Mr. Lawson, the English teacher who hated me in grade ten, is now teaching grade eleven English. We get to spend another year together. And to make it even worse, I have him for homeroom. The thought of me and Mr. Lawson beginning every day together depresses me.

  The stupid thing is that I should like English. I love reading. I’m crazy for books. But that’s half the problem, right there. Mr. Lawson can take a book I love and analyze it until it’s as dead as the dissected rats in the biology lab.

  He’s a book-wrecker. I hate that.

  I’m heading down the second-floor hallway to his classroom when someone steps right in front of me.

  I step to one side. “Excuse me,” I say, kind of sarcastically. I’ve never seen her before. And I’d have noticed her: Her hair is so fair it’s almost white, and she’s ghost pale. Plus there’s something odd about her face. I stare for a moment before I realize what it is: She has no eyebrows. She’s not punk or Goth or anything; she’s wearing no makeup at all and she’s dressed in ordinary faded jeans and a sweater, which makes the eyebrow thing even odder and more unexpected. Even with eyebrows though, she wouldn’t quite blend in. I can’t put my finger on it, but she’s definitely not your usual GRSS student.

  She gives me this weird, no-eyebrow smile and hands me a piece of paper.

  I shove it in my pocket like I couldn’t care less what it’s about, and I keep walking until I get around the corner. Then I pull it out and smooth the creases. It’s neon pink, with big bold letters in all caps, and it says: WOOF, WOOF. YOU ARE NOT A DOG. WHY ARE YOU GOING TO OBEDIENCE SCHOOL?

  I’m not sure whether to be insulted or amused.

  THREE

  Mr. Lawson doesn’t look particularly pleased to see me. He gives me a cool nod when I walk in. “Emily,” he says.

  “Actually, I changed my name this summer,” I tell him. “Legally. It’s Dante now.”

  He gives a little snort, and my stomach starts to hurt.

  Other kids drift in and take their seats. A couple of them nod at me; one asks how my summer was; most of them stare at my hair for a few seconds and then ignore me. One asks me, all phony innocence, where Beth is. Pretending to be friendly. It’s not like I don’t know about the rumors. I doodle an elaborate picture of Geryon, the monster of fraud, on the front cover of my binder. He’s one of the creatures from Dante’s Inferno, which is possibly my favorite book of all time. I draw Geryon scaled and hairy and give him a long serpent’s tail with a venomous forked tip. Then I sit and wait for class to begin.

  Mr. Lawson seems very pleased with himself. We are going to be doing a novel study, he tells us, and he’s giving us three books to choose from. It’s like he’s doing us a huge favor: he is Giving Us A Choice. Granted, there aren’t a lot of choices at GRSS, but still. Hardy, Dickens or Steinbeck. Three books by three dead white men. Three books I’d already read, or at least started to read. I have trouble conjuring up the expected gratitude.

  When everyone puts up their hands to say which book they want, I just sit there and say nothing.

  Mr. Lawson folds his arms across his chest. “What seems to be the problem, Emily?”

  This is how he talks. Not What’s up? or What’s wrong? or even What’s the problem? No. What seems to be the problem? Like without even asking, he can somehow tell it doesn’t even qualify as a real problem. It only seems to be one.

  On top of that, he’s got my name wrong.

  “It’s Dante,” I remind him. “Not Emily.”

  “Right,” he says. He kind of drags it out—riiiiight. Long, slow and dripping with sarcasm: He’s totally mocking me in front of the whole class. “So...Dante...what seems to be the problem?”

  “I’ve already read those books,” I say. “Can I pick something else? Um, please?”

  He raises his eyebrows. “
You’ve read all three? Even the Steinbeck? Somehow I doubt that.”

  I don’t say anything. It’s hard to know what to say really. Last year, conversations with Mr. Lawson usually ended with me getting sent to the office.

  “Well?” Lawson says. His eyebrows are twitching and hovering in the vicinity of his receding hairline.

  “Well what?”

  “Well...Dante...which book are you going to read?”

  I shrug. “Well...Mr. Lawson...I guess if I’m re-reading something, I’ll take the Thomas Hardy. Tess of the D’Urbervilles.” I’d read it last spring, before Beth left and before I got all obsessed with Dante Alighieri. “At least it has some exciting moments. Dead babies and murder and a hanging, you know?”

  I guess that’s a bit of a spoiler, but I want Lawson to know I’ve really read it. A couple of kids snicker. Lawson gives me a narrow-eyed look but drops the topic. He rattles on about the assignment, but I can’t concentrate. I feel like throwing something through the window and running from the room. Running as far away as possible. I don’t know how I’ll be able to stand a whole year of this.

  Less than ten minutes later he calls me Emily again. I know he’s got a lot of names to remember, but give me a break. Last year, two teachers at our school changed their names: Miss Creston became Mrs. Hicks, and Ms. Barkley became Ms. Johnson. Personally, I think it’s weird that some women still change their names when they get married—like, aren’t we kind of beyond that whole deal? But the point is, I bet Mr. Lawson remembers their new names.

  “It’s Dante,” I say again. “Not Emily.”

  Mr. Lawson leans back against his desk.

  “Riiiiight.” He smoothes his mustache. He does that all the time. It’s one of those perfectly trimmed, TV-cop mustaches. He puts his hands in his pockets and sighs. “I suppose you’re going to tell me you’ve read Dante’s Inferno too.”

  Actually, I’ve read quite a lot of the Divine Comedy. The Inferno is the best part. I skipped over most of Purgatorio and a fair bit of Paradiso. Let’s face it, hell is more interesting than heaven. It’s kind of heavy reading, but I guess you’d expect that from a seven-hundred-year-old epic poem. It took me half the summer, and that was with the help of Cliff ‘s Notes. But Lawson’s not going to believe me anyway, so I just shrug.