Pluto's Gate

Fool

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The day I met the God of the Dead and learned I’d soon be joining him in hell the weather was really warm, with fluffy clouds in a cotton candy sky. Though, to be fair, I might as well have been told I’d win the lottery for all I knew, since my death sentence was spelled out in tarot cards.

Sunshine streamed in through the open window as I woke that day. The phone was ringing. It was Niall. “There’s a fair in the park,” he crooned. “I’ll pick you up in half an hour.”

I nudged Simon, who still snored softly on my father’s couch. I handed him a cup of coffee and told him to get dressed. He’d arrived the night before from White’s Falls, the town where we grew up, bearing messages from my mother Dee.

“You need to come home,” my best friend had leaned against my father’s front door and rolled his eyes. “Dee is driving me crazy.”

I was continually amazed at how much my mother hated God’s Country, as the tourists liked to call it, but she kept trying to stick it out there. She sucked at making friends, my mother, mostly because she didn’t know how to be nice. And then there’s the fact that she’s an honest-to-Goddess practicing witch–mostly involving a ton ofherbs, some naked dancing and a lot of muttered curses. Which is slightly worse, in a dinky little non-town like White’s Falls, than the fact that she’s a divorcee and her former husband is a rock star. My parents’ short marriage reads like one of those tales that end with the heroine being broiled to death on an iron floor or the prince freezing to death before he gets to his princess. Rex met my mother at a very young eighteen, when he was still just poised on

the brink of stardom. They were the Beautiful People who went to New York parties featuring leopards chained up like pretty dogs at the long end of a chain of diamonds. Their faces shone from the pages of newspapers and magazines. But once Rex got really famous he stopped coming home at night. And, like a dope, my mother kept thinking things would work out as she sat up all night in the old stuffed green chair, crying her eyes out and waiting for him.

Rex must have thought my mom would turn into one of the thousands of generic women who threw themselves at him as if he was Han Solo. My mom was more of a Princess Leia, though. And for such a sensitive, artistic guy I wonder how Rex could have

missed that one. So Rex and the press went one way and we went the other. My mother took us off to the Degobah System–a.k.a. White’s Falls–where we toiled and trained for an unseen destiny.

I was older now, almost twenty-one. The same age my mom was when she married my father–which was the other argument I used when I told her I was moving in with the Father Unit in Montreal.

That was six months ago. I had a job at the local café–my father scored it for me–and still no plans for school. My mother called only every other night to see if I was still alive. Simon had come to town–bonus. And I had a boyfriend.

Sort of.

**

Standing in front of the fortune-teller’s tent an hour later, though, just inches away from being told I was going to die, I wondered what the hell I was doing other than throwing good tip money away. I guess at heart I was still that geeky kid who really wanted to

believe in fairy tales and magic portals. I’d been the kid who’d stay up all night reading books about werewolves and princesses, and I was always disappointed if the heroes didn’t hook up at the end.

But I’d also come to learn that in real life, stories never ended well.

“Just go,” Simon nudged me. “You know you want to.”