Destiny
The Soul-Shifting Adventures of a James Dean Rebel Girl

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Chapter One
Katie and Jamie

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Everyone wants to be special. Especially when you're young. So everyone does something cool to make themselves special, even though they're all doing the same things which you would think would make them not special at all. Makes them all the same. You'd think.

I told my Homeroom teacher that when she gave us the lecture about taking the time now that we're in high school to learn who we are and develop a sense of individuality.

She wrote me up for "defiance."

I'm not really special. I'm the same as every other seventeen-year-old girl in the world. Wishing I had a different life because all the important things going on are being shoved on us but the people doing the shoving don't want to hear what we have to say. Wanting to be a princess or win the Nobel Prize or set fire to the school and watch it burn. Wanting to die, either because this world's too big and too hard on the shoulders and it's about to get dropped on its butt or because life is just so freaking boring stuck in the teen trap that the afterlife has got to be better than this.

Now I'm getting on the school bus, wondering what I'm doing. The problem I have with my routine of getting on the bus and going to school is that the only reason I'm doing it is that not doing it is illegal. Yeah, I'm seventeen and old enough to drop out if I really wanted to but I still live at home and the parental powers that be say I gotta be enrolled. Enrolling but not attending is illegal. So I'm stuck getting on this big, disgusting bus the color of stale orange juice with no radio, no AC, and no heater or seat belts – I anxiously await my imminent death by horrendous traffic accident – because the law said I had to.

Somehow there seemed like some bad thing about that. I mean, yeah, dropping out is a bad idea and dropouts make statistically less money but let's be honest here – I may not be special, but I got some good stuff up my sleeve. And no, I don't mean sports, or being an actress or a singer or whatever. I mean other, better things. Things I've already made money off of. Things that help out when I don't make money off the other things.

For example, I have my various fashion lines that I sell around Homecoming, Winter Formal, Spirit Week, and Prom to the kids at my school. I'm cheaper than most stores because I can throw stuff together with less than a full day of work and only fifteen or twenty bucks worth of fabric.

Also for example, I got Jamie.

His name's not really Jamie. It's James. But I don't go for calling him Jimmy – he's twenty-four, not four – and he's too big to be a Jim. Jims are thin and wiry, like beef jerky. My dad says twenty-four is way too old for me, but my mom says as long as we're not having sex she's fine with it. Jamie's not my boyfriend, so there's no problems there.

Jamie takes care of me.

Right now, we're sitting on the bus together behind the driver. It's the safest place to be. Supposedly, behind the bus driver is for losers and nerds and squares and whatever. In the three years I've been sitting there, though, I've never had gum in my hair or anything like that. No paper balls or bottle caps or spit wads – nothing. Jamie told me to sit there after someone snipped off my three-foot braid my Freshman year. He also cut my hair for me after that to fix the crap cut I got from my hair's arch-nemesis. Turned me into a redheaded flapper girl from the twenties, sans dress.

"You're hot in a black sweater," I told Jamie.

He fiddled with a match. He was hankering for a cigarette, but he was trying to pass for a fifth-year senior. I think. Maybe a sixth-year. I don't know how he pulled it off. Anyway, but he couldn't smoke on the bus because it's district (school district) property.

"Your hair would go great with a black sweater," he told me. He loved my hair, I dunno why. If I hadn't lost weight the summer after eighth grade – weight I wanted to keep – my face would've died underneath the wave-curl weight of the flapper cut.

Black sweaters were Jamie's thing. One of his things. Blue jeans and black sweaters. And not the skinny, tight sweaters that you wear with berets and black shades. Those are for the jazz cats and the snappy-beat poets in black. That's not Jamie. He wears XXL black turtlenecks big enough that the two of us could fit inside them, two peas in a pod.

Two rebels in a sweater.

Bus rides are generally quiet. I'm too tired to talk. His brains are busy thinking about whether or not we're gonna go hang out after school. It's always a debate because if he takes me anywhere we always stay out till midnight and I never do my homework which Jamie hates. He says I'm too smart to blow my grades just so we can watch Xanadu and Dirty Dancing. He doesn't really enforce that too hard though. The guy should stop tempting me. Once we stayed up until dawn watching all the Tchaikovsky ballets – Romeo and Juliet, Swan Lake, the Nutcracker, Sleeping Beauty – while pigging out on shrimp-orange chicken chow-mein from the dollar store, lime jello, and cokes poured into crystal wedding glasses.

Jamie's a genius. He has the coolest stuff.

School's nothing special. Like everyone in it it, it tries to stand out and it fails miserably. What makes any school special is not the facilities or the funding or the friends or the fucking test scores. God, I hate test scores. Seems like that's all anyone in education cares about is standardized testing and the scores you get on them. Assholes.

There's a girl who's in all my classes – Rachel. She has a magazine on-line called E-Rave Wave Acid Splash. One of the smartest girls I've ever met in my life. Her test scores suck. She has something called "test anxiety" or something. She's in danger of missing out on graduation, which she cares about even though E-Rave is one of the top zines on the web, because her test scores suck ass.

Like I said – education people are assholes.

What makes a school special is two things – the teachers and the library. It tells you something when your school library has books like the Chocolate War, Annie On My Mind, and Flowers in the Attic. Yay for corrupt teachers, school-endorsed homophobia, and consensual sibling incest! It's actually cool when things like that happen, when libraries have awesome books like that, as long as the schools fess up to it.

If they don't, they're hypocrites. They should acknowledge the fact that they think we're smart enough to read stuff like A Clockwork Orange without going totally bat shit loco. Our school apparently doesn't have that particular issue, but then again, Rachel Dale was suspended for writing homo-erotica even though they had Clockwork in the library. I don't get it, but whatever.

I skate through math, not because it's easy but because I've done this twice before. I'm in trig – again. Fifth semester in a row. My teacher, Miss White, looks like the baby angel Gloria from Touched By An Angel – shoulder-length brown hair, square glasses, blue eyes, round face that's almost too cute to be natural except for the tiny flaws like crow's feet and crooked teeth. I like her. The only exceptional thing about my trig class is that there's this Freshman kid in that class (a senior class, mind you!) who took algebra for high school credit in summer school before eighth grade, geometry in eighth grade, and algebra II the summer before high school. He's nice enough, I suppose, but I never talk to him because he makes me feel stupid.

Jamie says I shouldn't let my own insecurities deprive other kids of my awesome charm. Whatever. Nicotine has fried his brain.

My favorite classes are smack in the middle of the day – creative writing, where I write Block and Myers-style poetry; choir, of the Broadway chorus line variety; and Graphic Design, which I joined because my sister made some of the most rocking posters in that class. I wanted to do the same thing. I was working on a collage piece about Jamie. I took millions of pictures of him – he's my best friend, after all – all the time I'd just click-click-click capture him in silver. Now I was putting the pictures together to make a rainbow bridge into my life, a silver stairway invitation to see the boy – a man, really, I suppose – who lived in a 3-bedroom townhouse apartment and worked at a hole-in-the-wall bar and grill that served waffles and fried chicken on the same plate with red Kool-aid, the same guy who looked like a movie star from the fifties (or a fifties-era musical like Grease, in his slick leather jacket and tight black jeans with his gorgeous red hotrod from the Golden Days of car creation) or a beat poet/folk singer whose heart burned like napalm and sang about the Jack of Hearts.

That's what I was working on right now.

I had government and English with Jamie, but we didn't talk because he wanted me to pay attention in class. Sometimes I try to pass him notes or something, whisper to him, but he never listens or picks up the notes so I usually don't bother.

English is not my favorite class but it is one of the best classes in my school and my teacher is my favorite teacher. I got the best teacher – Mr. Noahs. He could rock your socks even though he was like, thirty-five. He would recommend books to me – I was still trying to find a copy of On the Road at the public library (school library didn't have it, jerks) which had been mentioned in another book he'd loaned to me. He was the only adult I knew (besides Jamie, who doesn't count) who knew what the Smoothie Song was and who'd come up with it – Google it, you can find it under Nickel Creek. He knew all the words to Mr. Tambourine Man and Werewolves of London. He didn't make fun of me for liking Care Bears or studying vampires – he even recorded the ZZ Top video for the song Break Away for me, which has a vampire motif – and I was the only person in his class that had higher than a 95 percent.

Government, on the other hand, sucks. My teacher – my friend Heather's dad – is a schmuck who can't control his daughter (which he didn't really need to do but kept trying it anyway) or his classrooms (which he definitely needed to). I'd flunked first semester because these three girls – Vanetia, Brittany, and Jersey – would end up dead if I had to keep listening to them call me racist for stating a statistic so I ditched before I did them permanent damage. The absent limit is eleven days. I missed twenty. Pulled a B- but they flunked me anyway.

Jamie said it was my own damn fault but I still thought it was stupid. I think that he thought so too, though he didn't want me to know it, because he rented a bunch of Tim Burton films the day I found out and let me spend the night at his place and get sick off of Pull-N-Peel Twizzlers. We had all the best films – Batman Returns, with that epic psycho scene of Michelle Pfeiffer turning into a deranged Catwoman after being shoved out of a gazillion story window; Coraline, with Neil Gaiman, a top-notch author of the awesome and bizarre paired with a top-notch director of the awesome and bizarre; 9, which I hadn't seen before then, with the post-apocalyptic sentient rag dolls; Alice in Wonderland, way better than Disney's crap cartoon; Corpse Bride, which Burton wrote for his true love, Helena Bonham Carter (wrote a movie just for her, jeez!); and the Nightmare Before Christmas, with the rock-tastic Pumpkin King who reminded me so much of Jamie.

My best friend wrapped me up in a quilt made of fake Japanese and Indian silk and we watched movies and counted the seconds to see how long it took licorice to dissolve in spit.

I managed to make it through government – last class of the day, thank God – by thinking about that night and imagining what crazy shenanigans we were gonna get up to tonight.

We were getting ready to get on the bus after government and the end of school when Ms. Otis-Lee, the vice principal of my school that sucked so badly it has to remain nameless or the government will blow it up with an atomic missile, walked up to me. If I'd been a cat, I would've hissed and spit at her. Instead I watched her little pig eyes like marbles rolling in lard. I shuddered as they alighted on my face. Jamie touched my shoulder.

"Kate," Otis-Lee said. Her clothes stank of Febreeze. I wanted to hit her. It's like having an axe-murderer call you by your first name after they chop up your only baby.

"Yeah?" Gotta be civil. Damn it.

"I need to talk to you in my office." Ha!

"School's over. My bus is gonna leave."

"Your parents can come pick you up," she replied, and my back was up. She wanted to be hostile, fine. I heard a weird noise behind me, a strangled choking cough noise, and realized Jamie was making this fake siren noise underneath the cough, like in the Girl Can't Help It. But he was coughing so Otis-Lee wouldn't hear it. I tried not to smile.

"Um," I say, "no they can't. They're working," I inform her acidly.

My dad's a greeter at a grocery store, but he also writes humorous fantasy books on the side. He doesn't make as much money as my mom, though. She works from home – a versatile writer of everything from cheap romance novels to how-to guides on throwing out your veggies when your vegan parents go psycho on you to books of Block-style poetry about nuclear winter and gang violence (she wrote Orpheus and Dice: A Legend with Reincarnation, Homosexuality, Incest, and Really Inconvenient Questions, as well as Shattered: A Morose, Morbid, Macabre, Pre & Postmortem Modern Teen Fairytale) – but it would be an extreme inconvenience to her if she had to come all the way down here. It took her at least an hour to get back into "the flow" and she was running close on a deadline. I didn't want her to get screwed over by this flunky of a corrupt school system.

"Monday, then, Kate. We need to talk about some stuff."

"Yeah, okay, whatever."

Hell. What could she possibly want? Was this SEP related? Jeez, I hoped not. My SEP – Senior Exit Project – had been two years in the clearing. I'd picked it out as a sophomore. I wanted to be a writer, like my mom. Writing stuff to change the world. But how do you do twenty hours of shadowing on that? Watch your mentor type on her computer while you munch on popcorn? And it wasn't supposed to be a family member who mentored you, but my mom was the only person who lived in our state who wrote what I wanted to write. It had taken all of my Junior year to get her okay-ed as my mentor. Were they gonna slam it down into the dirt now?

Or was it something else?

I'm not special. I said that all ready. Or is it already? Whichever. I'm not some James Dean rebel girl like Natalie Wood (who had to prove she was a delinquent before they'd let her in the film). I'm not Baby from Dirty Dancing, ready to take on the whole world and kick some injustice in the ass, all while wearing a pretty dress and silver heels and dancing the night away with Patrick Swayze. That's not me. I'm just plain old Kate Martin, seventeen and crazy, like that girl in Fahrenheit 451, except I think she was sixteen.

I'm just me.

I'm not a victim, either, lost and lonely on the edge of the adult wilderness, not sure of where I belong, with the school administration taking cheap shots at me because I'm the odd duck and my parents refuse to be my champions. But I've been suspended twice in three years for things that weren't my fault. Not fighting, either. Nothing dangerous – no bombs or vandalism or anything. Other things. Stupid things. This was while my mother was out of town on writing conferences and stuff, or never would have happened.

So I was a little leery of Otis-Lee and anything she wanted to talk about.

The thing (well, one thing) that always confused me was why adults thought it was so crazy that other adults – certain individuals, not the whole group – could be out to get a kid. I mean the personal vendetta kind of thing. See, adults can have malicious and vengeful thoughts about other adults, and kids can be after other kids like white on rice. But two demographics fully capable of yearning to kill members of that same group are incapable of crossing age barriers?

What? How? Why?

Does that make sense to you because it sure as hell doesn't to me?

I brought it up to Jamie on the bus. He put his arm around me. Somehow, no matter what he does, he always ends up smelling like oranges, cigarette smoke, and Old Spice with a tiny hint of mint from his toothpaste. His breath is like temple incense. It's weird. But I like it. It's a good combination, like butter and strawberry jam on waffles.

"You worry too much," he says.

"They're gonna suspend me again, I can feel it in my teeth," I said.

"That's a cavity," he informed me, smiling. There was a laugh in his voice. When he does that, he sounds like Frank Sinatra when he's singing "Witchcraft." Only then. No other song of his has that sweet, laughing... lilt. "Don't worry," he adds, "if you get in trouble, you can stay at my place."

Hmmm. Movie marathons, Chinese noodles on Domino's pizza, readings of Francesca Lia Block and that one guy who wrote "La Belle Dame Sans Merci." That idea had it's points.

"Okay."

What would I do without Jamie?

Sometimes I get scared thinking about how big of a role Jamie plays in my life. I mean, what if he died or something? What would I do? I don't know how I'd handle something like that.

I've got a friend, Lori O'Neil – her brother Danny is eye candy from another planet – who says I worry more than a conspiracy theorist and a hypochondriac combined. But certain things that pop into your brain at night when you're trying to sleep – like toxic green bubbles of poison – they need to be addressed. At least a little bit. What would I do – what could I do – if something happened to Jamie? I mean, I'm not the girl with seven swan brothers or Gerda from the Snow Queen. I can't make shirts out of nettles or travel through the four seasons in search of my true love. I didn't have ravens for brothers, and even if I did, I wasn't about to go hacking off my fingers to use as keys for anyone.

Life isn't a fairy tale.

So... what?

Whatever. Jamie can tell I'm freaking. He pulls me in so I can lay my head on his shoulder. The sweater's around his waist now because of the heat, so my face is only separated from his warm skin by the white t-shirt that has a few old grease stains on the front. His entire torso moves when he breathes.

When I talk about Jamie at home – he's never met my parents – my dad says it sounds like I have a crush on him. I don't. I know what a crush is. It hurts like hell. This is different. I love Jamie, but not like that. It bothers me that people think you have to be romantically inclined just because you love someone totally and completely.

"What are we gonna do now?" I ask when we get off the bus.

"I don't know," he shrugs.

"Where's Washington Square?" I ask this to see what he'll say. It's so random, I'm hoping to catch him off-guard.

"Not in this state."

In the thirteen years I've known Jamie, that's one of the only questions that aren't about his past or his family that I've asked more than once that he won't answer. At least that I can think of off the top of my head.

A gust of wind blows my hair in my mouth. Dust pings and tinks off of my glasses lenses, blinding me. I flinch away from them instinctively. I duck my face against Jamie's chest.

He's like stone.

I look up, surprised. He didn't even put his arms around me. That's weird. Goosebumps poke through my suddenly cold skin. Overhead, thunder rumbles. The look on Jamie's face would've scared Marilyn Manson. I thought my heart would crack my sternum into little white bits. Jamie's eyebrows were drawn down into a tight V over his eyes, which were darkened from their usual smoky blue to a dark color I couldn't name. His nose twitched like a rabbit's. Was he smelling something? What?

In my mind, the Jaws music starts to play. I shivered.

"What's wrong?" I asked. My head was full of push pins. Panic was turning my lungs to rocks. I had never seen Jamie look this way. It was a mix of fear and total pissed-off-ness.

"You need to go home."

His voice bit into my neck. The short hairs sliding across my nape prickled with static nervousness. In all the years we'd been chilling with each other, there'd never been a time where he'd sent me home when I really, really wanted to be with him. His place, with him, was the only really safe, stress-free place I had to go.

"Why?" I ask.

"Go, Kate."

"Jamie-"

"Now!"

And he turned, shoving his hands into the back pockets of his black Levis, and walked off. I watched him go, feeling my heart sinking into the toes of my brother Benji's borrowed combat boots. What had I done wrong? Why was he walking away? I didn't understand. And why wasn't I running after him? Why couldn't I?

I sucked in a breath. It stung like salt in a scrape. My eyes hurt with wet, red pain and my heart thumped in my feet, against my arches. The wind howled. A fat raindrop leapt from the sky to punch me in the nose. I jumped in shock. I don't think I've ever felt so alone in my life.

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Author's Note: this is a modern retelling of several myths and fairy tales including Sleeping Beauty, East of the Sun and West of the Moon, Hades and Persephone, Orpheus and Eurydice, and the Glass Mountain. I am trying to see if I can get it published. What do you guys think?