Chapter 3

It was a miserable pair of weeks before Winter Break. I couldn't piss off one high school girl and not get ganged on by her friends. Bailey seemed okay with me ignoring her for a couple of days after I did my thing again, but on the third day all hell started vibrating. She said hello to me in the hallway. It took me by surprise and without meaning to I kept walking. Once you do it one time, it's easier to keep doing it and at some point on the fourth day Bailey gave up. She didn't give up the right to be pissed though or to have her friends be pissed for her. Those friends included Janet meaning I had to deal with nights at home with the Steps.

Of course, it was for nothing! Reggie, being a high school idiot, held it against me anyway. It was just words but the other jocks joined in. The cheerleaders and popular girls settled for mean looks directed at me. They would have pushed it further, causing an escalation on the boys' side, but Bailey didn't share why she was pissed at me. Even I got that Bailey's anger had a little bit of 'Boy that I like is not paying attention to me' vibe, which is probably why Reggie took the initiative and escalated the bullying.

I had never been so happy to see the first day of Winter Break.

I couldn't believe it. How the fuck did I get assigned to a cabin by myself? There is being the high school nobody and then there is people whose job it is to make sure you stay out of trouble leaving a teenage male to his own devices. Technically speaking, with Bailey's no-details-disclosed public dispute with me, I no longer qualified as a nobody. Looking around the cabin, I decided not to go find the Retreat coordinator. If they were going to give me my own cabin, then fuck it! I tossed my stuff on the cot and checked out the wood stove to make sure my ass wasn't going to freeze at night.

Our school had a very generous endowment to be spent in bullying prevention and trying to make high school not so high-schoolish for losers. I heard the donator had a rough time at our school. She married money and spread the wealth. My opinion--she wanted to torture jocks, cheerleaders, and popular kids for what her classmates did to her. I couldn't see any other reason someone would give money for something as ridiculous as a Leadership Retreat. Some bright banana thought it a fantastic idea to take the 'leaders' of the student body and the most miserable representatives of the huddled masses to the snow-covered, tree-filled boonies for some trust and role reversal exercises. Clearly, I was on to something with the rich woman using the present set of elites as a proxy for her own torturers. It didn't work out the way adults thought it would. Of course! The high school quarterback can get some of his own back when you yell at him for five minutes that he's a loser and wimp. He might not do it at the Retreat, but adults can't watch us twenty-four seven in the real world.

Personally I didn't think I belonged at the Retreat. I had a thoroughly realistic view of what it meant to be a nobody in high school, abso-fucking-lutely nothing. Not a single jock in the HISTORY of our school made it to the pros; not a single cheerleader went on to be in a Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader Calendar or a Playboy Centerfold; not a single popular kid made it to the halls of the U.S. Senate. I didn't see the world in that way because I was special or intelligent or any other bullshit. Someone got into a car while they were fuck-ass drunk, crossed a double yellow line, and killed my mom. I've been in the chair when the cop says, 'I have some bad news'. Life already happened to me! High school was passing the time before they called me an adult. If I went through it unnoticed, it put me on the winning side of the coin toss.

On the other hand, the Retreat got me away from the Steps for a long weekend. It let them be a 'real' family and I didn't have to watch.

It took all of one trust exercise for the idea of my own cabin to start sparkling as long as nobody found out about it, especially Reggie. The trust exercise was the falling into somebody's arms Beast. Surprisingly, only the losers got dropped. God forbid, one of us let a jock's perfect fanny hit the ground.

(To be fair, most of the jocks were okay in that they lived in one world and the rest of us lived in another. Adults do it too, although there it's about the rich and everybody else. The thing is, a few bad apples does ruin the bunch when they literally taste like shit. More of the cheerleaders could be classified as bitches, but loser males, like me, want them and can't have them. It causes a bias, so fucking sue every horny teenage guy who never got his hands under a cheer skirt.)

The first night in my cabin, I had to consider the possibility that the Retreat coordinators were phoning it in as badly as the kids. Nobody had even come to check on me!

The door opened and Bailey stepped inside the cabin. On television, sometimes they show a really smart person looking at a puzzle and through the wizardry of special effects the person's mind makes the puzzle whole. I had one of those of those moments when I saw Bailey. It finally made sense!

"How did you do it?" I asked her.

She put a bag by my cot before smiling at me. "I have my witchy ways."

"Seriously."

"You can have witchy ways but not me?"

"Bailey, I don't have witchy ... can we not say that again? Ever! I had some backwoods medical training from some women who, looking back, didn't have all their marbles in the same brain sac."

"I talked to Maggie's grandmother." Bailey reached into the bag and pulled out some candles. Walking around the room, she lit and set them on the floor. "Maggie talked to her really, but I was there. The old woman is proud! You know what I mean? Like she's been through shit but washed herself off and kept walking through life. She was a good healer before the arthritis got her. You're better. A lot better!"

"You don't know anything about this stuff, Bailey," I said.

"Not my words," Bailey replied, setting a pair of candles on a shelf. "You know what it takes for woman who has been failed by most men in her life to admit a teenage boy is better than she ever was."

Bailey pulled a jar out of the bag and gave it to me. "Orange, right?"

Removing the stopper, I smelled the contents before pouring a couple of drops on my hand. I rubbed the oil into my palm, high quality and from the scent a custom item.

"I ordered it," she told me. "Does it smell right?"

"Bailey..." I stared at her and shook my head. "This is a bad idea."

"You're from the same country as Maggie's family," she said. "Her grandmother told us a legend about their witch doctors. Like every three or four generations, there's a boy who is trained by females in all the healing disciplines. The boy can teach other witch doctors, but not everything because the truth is he's born knowing things the women don't."

Despite myself, her story was interesting. It could have been the way she kept pulling up the shirt to expose her belly.

"Maggie's grandmother said she never lied to her patients about what she could do." Bailey stared at me intensely. "But she's heard if it doesn't kill you right away a boy like that can perform miracles. You're one of them, aren't you?"

I raised my hand in a WTF gesture.

"You knew what is wrong by touching me," she said. "Not evil spirits invading my body, you knew it was my neck and back. You also knew about my breasts before my doctor did."

I shrugged.

"Mateo, maybe the neck and back thing I could buy, but my mom died of breast cancer," she said. "My tests came back positive. Doctor Yeh is amazed I caught it so early."

"You're too young," I said.

"Evil." Her hands balled into tight fists. "It really is the best word."

The last thing I would have ever wanted was to have that in common with her.

"My mom was killed by a drunk driver," I told her. "I think it sealed the deal for my stepdad and me being strangers to each other. He tried help me make sense of it, but it doesn't! You die of old age, and I get it because life isn't forever. When there's no reason for it..."

We stood in silence for a couple minutes.

"You're the one Janet owed," I said.

"Yes," she told me with a smile. "Some of it was selfish, Mateo. Janet and I were friends in grammar school, I made it clear to the people who start the crap that whether we hung out or not I remembered braiding our hair together to pretend we were Siamese twins."

"You're joking," I said laughing.

"Oh no," she replied. "Pretty sick, huh?"

"Your idea?"

She nodded. I laughed the hardest I had in a years.

"I'm going to die like my mom, aren't I?" she asked me. I looked at the orange scented oil jar in my hand.

"Bailey, I don't know anything about what Magdalena's grandmother told you."

"Everybody but you calls her Maggie."

"I'd be offended if you called me Matt or Matthew," I said. "My mom gave me a name. I'm sure Magdalena's mother thought about it too."

"She doesn't mind--Maggie, I mean."

I shrugged, "I can help you."

Bailey bit her lower lip, "You have to know that's impossible but you say it like it's nothing."

"You came to me."

"And Susan, Jennifer, Janet, pretty much every one except Maggie thinks I'm crazy."

"My mom only let me work with kids," I told her. She stared at me with her eyes growing wider and wider. "I know things and I can't explain how I know them. That part of what Magdalena's grandmother told you is very true. I know I can help you."

"She said you would," she said, "but I'd have to be naked."

I smiled. "Yes, Bailey, you would have to be naked. Skin to skin contact. What you have is rarely just in one place. I'm also going to break up the focal point, which will send it out to your entire body. What happened with your neck and back is that one area got stronger working to weaken another area. What I do is about everything, you can't afford not to attack evil everywhere."

"It wasn't about everything before."

"An injury isn't disease. If I'd given you the whole treatment you'd..."

"You cheated me!" she interrupted.

"I could have finished the job instead of letting your body do it over a couple of days."

"This is the weirdest conversation I've ever had," she said sitting down on the cot. "I don't believe you can help. Not really, you know what I mean?"

"It's not voodoo, Bailey," I said.