An Apple for the Creature

celestial court to which I could appeal, and when they heard how she had tricked me, they’d judge in my favor. I had never lost an important case in my life and I wasn’t about to lose this most important one!

I strode out now.

“Hey, watch it,” one kid said as I bumped into him.

“You watch it yourself,” I answered. A plan was already forming in my head. First step was to get out of these awful, ugly clothes. I’d go into the locker room and help myself to some better items while everyone was at PE. Supplement those from the lost and found. Find myself a locker to hide the stuff away, in case I found myself dressed like this tomorrow. Oh, and steal a hairbrush, too. Surely everything was fair game in hell?

And then? I’d have to work quickly while my mind was still razor sharp. There must be other students like me, sentenced unjustly, tricked into being here. I’d find them and motivate them. We’d form a movement. It would grow until the whole school was behind me. And we’d take over the school, and I’d represent each of them in the celestial court and we’d win.

You’re going down, Ms. Fer, I vowed to myself. I found the library and pushed open the door. I had some planning to do, and some studying. If I had to take those tests again tomorrow, I planned to ace them. I’d be prepared.

I’d already stolen two number-two pencils, properly sharpened, from Ms. Fer’s desk.

Callie Meet Happy AMBER BENSON

Amber Benson is an actor, filmmaker, novelist, and amateur occultist who sings in the shower. Best known for her work as Tara Maclay on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, she is the author of the Calliope Reaper-Jones series for Ace Books and the middle-grade ghost story Among the Ghosts. She is also the codirector (with Adam Busch) of the feature film Drones. She can be stalked on her blog—amberbensonwrotethis.blogspot.com—and on Twitter and Facebook.

Calliope Reaper-Jones felt like an idiot.

No, that wasn’t right. Idiot was too vague a term.

Calliope Reaper-Jones felt like . . . a dunce. Yes, that was more apropos.

A dunce. The kind that sat in the back corner of the classroom with her face to the wall, a large conical cap affixed firmly to her head, trying not to cry as all the other kids pointed fingers and laughed uproariously at her.

It was an odd feeling, one Callie hadn’t encountered in more than a dozen years primarily because it was a sensation uniquely specific to the elementary school experience, something about the amazing cruelness of small children and the amazing ability of adults to look the other way.

“Miss Reaper-Jones?”

The use of her name, out loud and in front of the whole class, made Callie jump. Eyes refocusing, she returned her attention to the problem at hand, pressing the mute button on her (really distracting) internal monologue so she could concentrate.

“I, um, well—” she stammered, feeling the imaginary dunce cap settling farther down the crown of her head.

“Yes, Miss Reaper-Jones? Spit it out.”

The blood rushed to her cheeks in a florid burst.

“I didn’t really, uh, do the reading you assigned.”

Silence from the peanut gallery.

If the proverbial pin had dropped, you would’ve heard the sound of it bouncing on the linoleum, twice, before rolling underneath one of the classroom’s desks where it would’ve stayed, unmolested, until some random day in the faraway future when a janitor came to sweep it away.

Surveying the crowd and trying not to let their hostile stares sting, Callie decided there was actually nothing peanut-y about the assortment of oddities and misfits who had somehow, over the course of their service to Death, Inc., never learned to call up a wormhole and were, thusly, stuck in the same Remedial Wormhole Calling class as Callie.

How to describe her peers?

Angry was a good descriptive word. Annoyed was another. Peeved could also be added to the list. The group fell short of the index-finger- pointing (and elementary school laughter) Callie’s brain had conjured up earlier . . . but just barely.

“I don’t understand your inability to do your homework, Miss Reaper-Jones,” the teacher said, shaking her head.

A tall, shaggy-haired Asian woman with a beaked nose and fleshy jowls that fluttered like gills whenever she spoke, Mrs. Gunwhale—as she’d asked the class to call her—was partial to bruise-colored, diaphanous muumuus that made her bloated appendages appear larger and rounder than they actually were.

“You’re a grown woman—and one in a leadership position, no less,” Mrs. Gunwhale continued, the frown she wore speaking volumes about the hostility she’d engendered toward Callie, a student she’d decidedly labeled “indolent.”

While Mrs. Gunwhale may have been sorely mistaken about most things, she wasn’t wrong about the many leadership responsibilities Callie had to shoulder in order to run Death. Since her dad had been murdered and she’d inherited the presidency of Death, Inc.—who’d have thunk Death would be run like a corporation—Callie’s world had done a one-eighty. There wasn’t time in her rigorous schedule for indolence these days. Overseeing Death, Inc., and being the de facto “Not So Grim Reaper” was running her ragged, keeping her so damn busy she was having a hard time focusing on anything that wasn’t directly work-related.

Like homework.

“Well, that’s why I didn’t do it,” Callie said, aware that the whine in her voice would make her no friends. “There was a Death board meeting and then I had to go to Hell, talk to Cerberus—”

“Everyone here is a commuter student.” Mrs. Gunwhale breathed. “They all hold full-time jobs and, yet, they still find time to do their homework.”

“That’s right,” a girlish falsetto chimed in from the front row.

Callie glared at the owner of the voice, a wispy woman with a halo of bright orange, dandruff-laden hair, and found herself wishing she could use her Death powers to give the woman—the teacher’s pet, of course—a little kick in the direction of an early grave.

Stop that right now, Callie thought as she mentally scolded herself for thinking such horrible thoughts. Bad, bad, bad, bad Death!

Part of the responsibility of possessing special powers—like the power of bestowing life and death—was learning to be judicious about how you applied them. You weren’t supposed to just lay waste to every Tom, Dick, or Harry (or teacher’s pet) that got on your nerves. You were supposed to be wise like King Solomon and split the baby in half—

She paused, realizing she’d gotten the stupid analogy wrong.

“Cutting the baby in half is never the intended outcome—” Callie mumbled to herself.

“Miss Reaper-Jones, stop mumbling. I’m trying to have a pertinent conversation with you!”

“Pertinent?”

“Yes, pertinent,” Mrs. Gunwhale said, enunciating every word. “Pertinent as to whether you continue in my class or not.”

Where there was once silence, now came a snicker from the aforementioned peanut gallery. Callie turned her head, trying to catch the culprit in the act, but only encountered a wall of stony faces, their slack jaws and dead eyes as bland as the faux wood-grain paneling that decorated the four walls of the modular classroom. The class was meeting in a “temporary” trailer that normally housed a second-grade class in a Jamaica, Queens, elementary school (it’d been on-site since 2001, so the “temporary” part was a joke), but at night it was leased out—for an