Charlaine Harris - An Apple for the Creature

I was horribly conscious of how I must look—the purple sweater now streaked with congealing stew, my hair sticky, my face a mess.

“I don’t really look like this,” I said. “Some bullies jammed my face into my plate.”

“I heard you caused a disturbance in the cafeteria.” Her voice was low, smooth and commanding.

“I caused? Listen, I was sitting there, minding my own business.”

“I hear you’ve been nothing but trouble since you arrived, unprepared, this morning. We don’t tolerate troublemakers here.”

“Then expel me. I’m not staying anyway. And if you really want to know, this isn’t the real me. I’m not even a high school student any longer. I’m grown-up and successful and I look great and you’re just in my hallucination, so I don’t really care what you say.”

“So you never really looked the way you do now?” She leaned forward as if she was interested.

“Well, yes, I guess I did. When I first went to high school I was overweight and a dork and clueless about clothes and I had no friends. And people picked on me, just like here.”

“You were desperately unhappy.”

“Yes.”

“So much so that you were thinking of taking your own life.”

“Yes. How did you know that?”

“But you decided not to.”

“I made a friend. And she took me under her wing. She rescued me.”

“Tell me about this good friend of yours.”

She leaned forward, smiling encouragingly, seeming to give the impression that she was on my side, a pal.

I found myself smiling, too, at the memory. “Her name was Sally Ann. She was Chinese American—really attractive and petite—and spunky. She wasn’t afraid of anyone. You should have seen the quick answers she came up with to the bullies and jocks. She could wipe the floor with them.”

“A bad girl, then?”

“No, not bad. Stretched the rules a bit. Taught me how to sneak out of class undetected, how to write my own excuse notes. That kind of thing. Oh, and taught me how to smoke. But nothing too terrible. It was just that my whole world changed when she took me under her wing. She told me she could make me popular like her and it was true. By the time she left, I was in with the popular kids and I never looked back.”

“A good friend indeed.”

“Yes, but . . .” My smile faded. “She left suddenly and she never said good-bye. So all my life I wondered what happened to her . . . whether she got pregnant or into some other kind of trouble? She had a bad home life, she told me, so I wondered if there was something with her parents that forced the family to leave or made her run away.” I paused, a clear image of Sally Ann coming into my brain. She was laughing as we climbed up the hill behind my house together, her black hair blowing out in the wind. Not a care in the world. And the next Monday she hadn’t shown up for school. “If only she had contacted me, I’d have wanted to help her,” I finished.

“Tell me about the time she made you the offer to help you become popular,” Ms. Fer said.

Suddenly I could see it clearly, almost as if a movie were playing inside my head. She is sleeping over at my house and she says, “You know, you could be really pretty and you’re smart. All you need is a little help. I could lend you some clothes that are too big for me, and help you diet and teach you how to act cool like me. In no time at all I guarantee you’d be popular.”

“Are you serious?” I ask.

“Trust me. It will be a cinch.”

“I’d do anything,” I say.

She laughs. “You mean you’d sell me your soul and your firstborn child?”

I’m laughing, too. “And anything else you’d like. Willingly.”

She takes a piece of paper. “We have to do this formally,” she says and she sticks a pin into my finger. “Ow,” I say as a drop of blood falls onto the paper. “Go on, sign your name,” she says, and I do it. Then she signs hers.

I look up and realize that Ms. Fer has been watching the same scene unfold. “And what happened after that?”

“You know,” I said, “it all happened like she said. She came to my house with these fabulous clothes and I lost weight and I really did become popular. Next year I made the cheerleading squad and then student council, and I was homecoming princess. I never looked back. I wished many times that she could have seen me and I could have thanked her.”

“So you went from strength to strength,” Ms. Fer said quietly. “Straight A’s in college, Harvard Law School and then you got a reputation as a dynamite lawyer who would stop at nothing to win a case, not even if it meant ruining lives, wrecking companies and homes.”

“I wouldn’t put it that way,” I said, frowning. “I like to win, that’s for sure. I was being paid to win cases.”

“What about Bradley versus that steel company? What about the Emerson case?”

My frown deepened. “They were unfortunate, but those people were in a downward spiral anyway.” Then I looked up. “How do you know about them? Have you been following my career?”

“Oh, I know everything about you, my dear,” she said. “Remember that piece of paper you signed? I happen to have it here.” She handed it to me. “I, Amy Weinstein, hereby give my soul and my firstborn child to my friend Sally Ann in return for learning how to become gorgeous and successful and popular.” There was my signature, written in dark brown dried blood, and under it, Accepted. S.A. TAN .

I looked up in horror. “It says Satan.” I could hardly get the words out. “Are you trying to tell me that she—that she was the devil in disguise?”

“What do you think?” Ms. Fer asked evenly. There was the hint of a smile on her face.

Anger welled up inside me.

“She tricked me. That was terrible. She got me to sign my soul away through trickery.”

Ms. Fer shook her head. “You said you would have done anything and at that moment you would have given anything to her, even your soul.”

“But I was a stupid kid. That’s totally unfair.”

“Whoever said that Satan had to play by the rules?” she said. “And Satan doesn’t have to have horns and a red face. He has to appear in a form that humans find seductive, otherwise he’d have few converts. You needed a best friend—a spunky, pretty best friend.”

I stared at her, openmouthed, as something else occurred to me. “My firstborn child,” I whispered. “Joshua. He was born perfect. Nothing wrong with him. And then a few hours later he suddenly stopped breathing for no reason. The doctors said something about underdeveloped lungs, but you should have heard him cry when he was born. He had a loud, perfect cry.”

“Yes, he did, didn’t he,” she said. “I did hear his cry. A lovely little fellow. I actually had a glimmer of remorse about taking him. But a contract is a contract, as you yourself said many times in court.”

For the first time I saw her name plaque on her desk. Ms. Lucy Fer.

“Am I in hell?” The words came out as a whisper.

“What do you think?”

“Either I’m still in a coma after that accident and this is a horribly real hallucination or . . .”

“You’re not in a coma any longer,” she said. “You never woke up. You slipped away and I was waiting for you.”

“But that’s not fair,” I said. “I can’t be in hell. Hell is for bad people—criminals, murderers.”

“You’re a murderer.”

“I am not.”

“The auto accident that sent you to us. You plowed into a van carrying a family. A mother and her three children. One of them was a baby of three months old. The van caught fire. They were all trapped inside and died a most horrible death.”

“But it was an accident. You said so yourself. I didn’t want to kill anybody.”