The Throne Read online

  Of the three of them, Meredith had decided years ago that Reb was the prettiest, though Reb would have scoffed loudly if anyone had suggested it. Most of the time, she acted as if femininity was a disease, keeping her hair so short it clung in auburn curls to her head, and habitually dressing in jeans and a loose shirt. Anything she carried—laptop, books, etc.—she pressed flat to her chest like a shield.

  “More ogle-eyes?” Meredith asked sympathetically.

  “Ooga-booga eyes,” replied Reb. “Booby Looby—nothing’s changed. One night before we left the lake, it got so bad I told Dad that I wanted a boob-reduction. Y’know what he said?” An exasperated whoosh of air followed, and then Reb moaned, “To wear them with pride.” Pitching her voice lower, she imitated her father. “‘The size of your breasts comes from my side of the family, Rebecca,’” she intoned philosophically. “‘From my mother, and her mother, and her mother. The Looby women are strong women, and strong women take up a lot of space.’”

  The girls lay silent, contemplating this snippet of parental wisdom. The pain in Reb’s voice had been obvious, a long, slow-cooking kind of pain—not the type that cut, healed, and was over and done with. “Take up a lot of space,” she repeated musingly, and Meredith knew without looking that Reb was lying with her chin dug into her collarbone, surveying her temporarily flattened chest.

  “He could be right, you know,” ventured Dean. “That’s actually a pretty good way of looking at it.”

  Reb groaned softly, then muttered, “Dads are boobless.”

  In the pause that followed, Meredith lay cautiously feeling her way through the moment. While she wasn’t a father, she was, technically speaking, almost boobless, which left her decidedly lacking with regard to the kind of experiences Reb was talking about. “Boobless, yeah,” she said finally, “but not brainless. Your dad is incredibly proud of you, Reb—anyone who’s ever been around the two of you knows that.”

  “I know,” sighed Reb. “I just think he doesn’t quite get it.”

  “It’s those guys staring at you who don’t get it,” Meredith said heatedly. “Someone must’ve ... I dunno ... oh, given them a brain reduction at birth. Like Seymour Molyneux. Remember what I told you at lunch about the drums in home form? Well, I ran into him again this afternoon.” Voice quickening, she told the other two about the hallway encounter.

  “Seymour Molyneux!” exclaimed Dean when she had finished. “Wasn’t he the black Santa at last year’s Christmas assembly?”

  “Oh yeah,” mumbled Meredith as the memory came back to her. It had been mid-December, and the entire school had been gathered in the auditorium. The Concert Band had just finished playing “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas,” when a black-garbed Santa and his entourage of black-leotarded elves had abruptly strode onto the stage, apparently sabotaging the proceedings. In a sly singsong voice, Santa had called up various teachers to receive gag gifts such as a Tweety Bird whistle or a Frankenstein mask. Even the school principal, Mr. Sabom, had been summoned into the footlights to be presented with a large rubber “spanking hand.” That Seymour had managed to pull this off while still in Grade 11 was ample testament to his ... well, presence, thought Meredith, unable to come up with a better word.

  “So he’s Big Man Jock,” Dean continued dismissively, but was cut off mid-sentence.

  “No,” said Reb, who had a number of big-man-jock cousins, several of whom had played on last year’s senior teams. “But he hangs around with them. He’s sort of like a mafia kingpin. Not drugs, exactly—he’s not into actual crime. Just Ruler of the Underworld, y’know? He runs things. You don’t mess with him.”

  “Great,” said Meredith, a sinkhole opening in her gut. “First day of Grade 10 and I’ve already messed with him twice.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Mere,” advised Dean. “He’s a crustacean brain. You can’t let someone like that tell you what to do.”

  “No,” agreed Meredith. “But it’s just weird, don’t you think? Why would sitting behind the drums be such a big deal to him? It’s a fun place to sit, sure, but ...”

  “That’s the way Lords of the Underworld think,” said Reb. “I want it, so it’s mine. Period.”

  The sinkhole in Meredith’s stomach expanded. “Does he really run things?” she asked uneasily. “Everything?”

  “Not everything,” said Reb. “I don’t know much about him, really. It’s just things I’ve heard my cousins say ... and the way they laughed after they said them. You know, like, ‘Don’t mess with the Mol.’ Or ‘Check that one out with the Mol.’ Things like that.”

  “Great,” Meredith said again, her unease growing. “No wonder he talked to me like that—as if I was some thing in his path that had gotten out of line and had to be straightened out.”

  “So don’t listen to him!” cried Dean. “The Mol! So what? He’s just ego-flexing. You want to sit behind the drums and you got there first—go ahead!”

  Meredith wanted to agree, to believe it was that cut and dried, but the silence coming from Reb was speaking volumes. Besides, she thought, there were so many unanswered questions. For instance, how was she, realistically speaking, supposed to handle tomorrow morning? What if she walked into home form to find Seymour had gotten there ahead of her and was seated behind the drums? Would it be worth kicking up a fuss? Why, in the end, was it so important to her to sit in that particular seat?

  “I’m not telling you not to sit there, Mere,” Reb said carefully, breaking into her thoughts. “But you know how it is. If you’ve got something and someone else wants it ... someone bigger than you ... well, things can get complicated. My guess is the Mol can hold a grudge—a complicated one. Is that something you want to deal with every home form period for the rest of the year?”

  “Yeah, but ...” Dean protested. “I mean ... well, this is the 21st century! She’s got her rights!”

  “I know what century it is, Mount Matsumoto,” snapped Reb, using a nickname the Matsumotos had bestowed upon their fiery daughter. For several breaths, an uncomfortable silence leaned in on the three beneath the tree.

  “Huh,” hedged Meredith, looking for a way to change the mood. “I’ll have to think about it some more. I mean—Kingpin of the Underworld, and all that.”

  “Not actual crime,” repeated Reb, her tone defensive.

  “Hey,” said Meredith, not sure how to connect, but wanting to. Reaching over, she patted Reb’s arm and added, “Actual friend.” Then, not wanting Dean to feel left out, she patted her arm, too. “Actual friend,” she repeated.

  Smiles were breaking out on both sides, chasing away the awkwardness. Suddenly, Meredith was filled with the urge to let loose—yell, holler, boom. “Beware, Polkton High!” she proclaimed, feeling her voice resonate in her almost-boobless chest. “This year, we three are going to take up a lot of space! Thus sayeth The Polk!”

  Beside her, Reb erupted into giggles. “Thus sayeth the Looby!” she shouted. “Beware, Polkton High! Beware the Looby boobs!”

  Dean let loose with a howl. “Thus sayeth Mount Matsumoto!” she bellowed fiercely. “This is the 21st century! We demand our rights!”

  Above them, the willow sighed agreeably, lulling them into complacency about the possibilities of the coming year. “Pocky is what we need,” murmured Dean. “Mom just bought a box. Anyone hungry?”

  “Pocky for me,” agreed Reb. “Pocky for you. If your brothers haven’t devoured them all already, that is.”

  Getting to their feet, they trooped inside to indulge.

  The apartment that Meredith shared with her Aunt Sancy sat above a small bakery at one end of a row of adjoined red-brick stores close to Polkton’s downtown core. Located in an older area of town, the entire block had been constructed in the 1920s, and the apartment’s external rear-entrance staircase, with the small closed-in porch at its peak, certainly looked like it—badly in need of demolition, or at least a new coat of paint. Inside, however, the place felt like home, with a small kitchen directly inside th
e door, and the rest of the rooms opening off the left side of a hall that extended to the building’s front end. Meredith had lived there since she was five, soon after her aunt had adopted her and upgraded to a two-bedroom apartment.

  “I loved you and all,” Aunt Sancy had told her several years ago, “but your quick puffy breathing drove me crazy at night. You had your own bed in that room we shared, but you somehow managed to puff right into my ear all night from way the heck across the room.”

  Aunt Sancy worked full-time as a mechanic for a trucking company. As a result, she and Meredith shared the cooking chores, and on the days Aunt Sancy made supper, it was Meredith’s responsibility to get home in time to put her aunt’s prefab casserole into the oven so it would be piping hot for 5:30 pm. At the moment, the two of them were seated at the kitchen table waiting for the oven timer to go off, Aunt Sancy snorting her way through the day’s edition of the Polkton Post while Meredith perused her Grade 9 yearbook.

  With yet another pronounced snort, Aunt Sancy set down the newspaper. Politics in any form always seemed to go straight up her nose. “So,” she said, taking a swig of iced tea. “How are the Philosophical Feet?”

  “The Philosophical Feet” was the nickname Ms. Matsumoto had given Dean, Reb, and Meredith last year after taking a snapshot of them communing under the willow tree with only their feet in view. Copies had, of course, been made, then distributed to Aunt Sancy and Reb’s parents, who were divorced.

  “Okay,” Meredith said vaguely. “The willow’s okay, too.”

  Her aunt nodded. A short, wiry woman, most people found it difficult to imagine her crawling around a semi’s insides. Meredith, however, had spent much of her childhood on the back of her aunt’s Harley, traveling to various racetracks. The sound of a revving engine was music to Aunt Sancy’s ears; she even had the Montreal Grand Prix’s logo tattooed onto her right bicep.

  “And your first day of Grade 10?” asked Aunt Sancy.

  Meredith shrugged. “So far, so good,” she said carelessly. “Don’t worry, Ms. Goonhilly—I attended every minute of every class.”

  Aunt Sancy’s last name was, unbelievably, Goonhilly. Next to Looby, it was the surname Meredith would have voted Most-Awful-To-Inherit. Several years ago, her aunt had explained that the lifetime of trials and tribulations the surname Goonhilly had caused her was the only reason she hadn’t had Meredith’s last name legally changed to her own during the adoption proceedings; ten years later, Meredith remained devoutly grateful.

  Aunt Sancy nodded again. “What’s with the yearbook?” she asked.

  “Just seeing how people changed over the summer,” said Meredith. In fact, she was busily scanning every page for mug shots of Seymour Molyneux, wanting to study him at length, get some kind of fix on him. So far, she had located several beaming images—one dead center in the Science Club’s annual photo, another off to the side of a slightly out-of-focus Student Council picture (Seymour had been Home Form 75’s class rep three years running), and a third, in which he was seated with a group of students who called themselves the Serene Knitter’s Fellowship. A quirky school club, they devoted themselves to the production of various handicrafts, and in this snapshot, Seymour appeared to be completely absorbed in crocheting an afghan. Most likely he was faking it, though, Meredith decided. It was hardly likely the Mol spent much time knitting cardigans and mitts. Probably he had been in the vicinity when the picture was being posed, and had been invited to join in as a joke. To his credit, it only added to his presence, which seemed to be everywhere.

  “Here,” she said, sliding the yearbook across the table and pointing to a fourth photo she had discovered—a candid in which Seymour was goofing off in a school hall with two other guys. “Give me your psychological assessment of the guys in this picture.”

  Pursing her lips, Aunt Sancy focused on the snapshot. “That guy,” she said sternly, tapping her finger on one of the grinning faces, “is psychotic. Stay away from him.”

  “What makes you say that?” asked Meredith, hiding a grin. Knowingly or unknowingly, Aunt Sancy had just nailed Neil Sabom, the only son of Polkton High’s principal.

  “Bulging cranium,” said her aunt, delicately patting her own forehead. “Obvious deformity of the brain. Not a good sign. Watch out for the guy.”

  “Okay,” promised Meredith, knowing her aunt was fooling around. “We won’t let him join the Feet.” Pointing to Seymour, she forced an offhanded note into her voice. “How does this guy strike you?” she asked.

  Aunt Sancy snorted. “Boggs blood,” she said tersely. “Stay away from him, too.”

  “But he’s a Molyneux,” protested Meredith, intent on keeping her aunt going for as long as possible.

  “There’s Boggs in him somewhere,” muttered Aunt Sancy, glaring at the picture, and Meredith realized that she was serious. “You can see it in the bones and the eyes. Same shaggy black hair, too. He’s a Boggs, all right.”

  “As in Boggs Street downtown?” asked Meredith, her interest quickening.

  “As in,” nodded Aunt Sancy, settling back in her chair. “That family goes back a long way in Polkton.”

  “So he’s from a founding father, too,” murmured Meredith, recalling the sarcasm in Seymour’s voice as he had said, “Progeny of a founding father and all.”

  “Not quite,” said Aunt Sancy. “The Boggs weren’t part of that group of scallywags. From what I recall, they moved here two or three decades after the city was founded. One of Polkton’s early mayors was a Boggs. On his retirement, he had one of the downtown street names changed to deify himself. The family’s always been big in the legal profession.”

  Her tone was scathing; Aunt Sancy never bothered to hide her contempt for what she usually called the “lethal profession,” even though Meredith’s father, James Polk, had just graduated from law school when he and her mother were killed in a car crash. Nor did Sancy Goonhilly attempt to conceal her dislike for James and his extended family. After Meredith’s parents’ deaths, there had been sporadic visits with her Polk grandparents, but in the face of Aunt Sancy’s obvious antagonism, these had been awkward. When, five years later, her Polk grandparents died in a yachting accident, Aunt Sancy’s relief had been palpable.

  “Huh,” said Meredith, studying the photograph. So, she mused, Seymour Molyneux was an undercover Boggs ... the Boggs bloodline that intersected directly with Polkton’s main downtown thoroughfare—named, of course, Polk Avenue, in honor of her own illustrious ancestor. Superstition would call that destiny—as in, destiny whether you liked it or not.

  Glancing up, she found her aunt observing her. “What’s with the guy?” asked Aunt Sancy. “Why the interest?”

  For a moment, Meredith teetered on the edge of telling or not telling—not because she didn’t want her aunt to know, but because she sometimes needed mental space to work out things on her own. But then, deciding Aunt Sancy’s perspective might prove helpful, Meredith launched into a detailed description of both run-ins with Seymour. When she had finished, she sat watching her aunt gaze thoughtfully out the kitchen window. Meredith knew from experience that any response she received wouldn’t come quickly; her aunt tended to go at everything as if it were a mechanical device, poking and prodding each aspect of a situation until she had all the parts fitted together and running smoothly.

  To Meredith’s surprise, however, even after several minutes her aunt remained quiet, with only the odd thought flickering across her forty-year-old face. Abruptly, the oven timer kicked in, and Aunt Sancy got up to shut it off.

  “So, what do you think?” asked Meredith, after the meal had been served and they had begun eating. “About Seymour and the drums, I mean.”

  “I’m still thinking,” her aunt said slowly. “What do you think?”

  Still thinking herself, Meredith poked at her steaming shepherd’s pie. “I don’t know exactly,” she admitted. “I know how I feel. I want to sit there and I don’t want to back down. But the fact is that sitting there
might not be that much fun. The guys who sit around the drums are all older than me, and I won’t be high on their social chit-chat list. And Sina and Kirstin—the kids I hung around with last year—are still sitting at the front of the room.” Briefly she hesitated, then added, “Besides, taking Seymour on ... he will be pissed, no question. It might not be worth the effort. In the end, it’s just a place to sit—not a big-deal issue like racism, y’know?”

  Eyes lowered, Aunt Sancy nodded. Silently, the two chewed, swallowed, and contemplated the Polk-Boggs connection.

  “Try this one on for size,” suggested Aunt Sancy, pouring herself another glass of iced tea. “Say you decide not to sit behind the drums. Now I want you to fast-forward ten years and pretend you’re looking back on that decision. How are you feeling about it now? How do you think it’s affected you—the way you think about yourself, the kinds of things you’ve chosen to take on since?”

  From across the table, her dark eyes pinned Meredith’s, direct and challenging. And in that moment Meredith saw it loud and clear, what her aunt was getting at—this decision wasn’t just about a seat in home form, it was about how she thought about things in general, how she thought about herself.

  “Yeah,” she said, breathing deeply, startled at the sensation of internal vastness that had opened up. “I want to sit there, I really do. It’s kind of scary, maybe even a little dumb, but ...”

  Aunt Sancy sat silently, waiting her niece out, watching her resolve swing back and forth. “But, yeah,” Meredith said again, more firmly this time. “It’s what I want to do.” A quick grin cut across her face and she added, “Well, what my butt wants to do.”

  Aunt Sancy grinned back. “Now you’re talking like a Goonhilly,” she quipped. “A Goonhilly always knows what her butt wants to do.”