Dusssie Read online

  Dusssie

  Nancy Springer

  To Jean Naggar

  ONE

  Color me stupid, but I was thirteen before I understood why my mother always wore a turban. I thought it was just part of her artistic weirdness. I had no clue until my own hair turned into snakes.

  Naturally this happened the morning after I got my first period, which could have waited another thirteen years in my opinion. It so did not enhance my mood, what with having to get up in the middle of the night and change the sheets and everything, plus cramps, plus Mom being totally sentimental and annoying, congratulating me on “becoming a woman.” I barely got back to sleep before the alarm went off, and right away I started worrying about what to wear to school. See, there was this boy I liked, and everything depended on how I looked. Not that I looked like much anyway: average height, average weight (fat), average face, brown hair and brown eyes, nose in the middle, and then on top of being totally not gorgeous, I started worrying whether boys could tell when you got your period, and I felt all swollen—even fatter than usual. I did not need anymore stress as I lurched into the bathroom with my eyes barely open.

  I was so sleepy I didn’t notice the crawly feeling in my scalp at first. But then I heard a hissing noise. And I caught a bleary glimpse of myself in the mirror.

  I woke up fast, screaming, “Mom!”

  She came running into the bathroom in her black silk sleep turban and jammies, took a look at me, and said, “Oh.” Just like that, like she’d been hoping it wouldn’t happen, but now it had, so we would just have to deal with it; Mom is all about being able to handle whatever happens without complaining. “Oh, honey, I’m sorry.” Not even surprised, which was pretty bizarre, considering that I had a head full of snakes.

  “Mom, do something!” I mean, I’m a city girl. I’d never even seen a snake except in a zoo or on TV. Totally freaked, I hopped around flapping my arms, wanting to rip the snakes off my head but afraid to touch them.

  “Now, Dusie, calm down.” But there was a shadowy look in Mom’s eyes as she leaned over me. “Let me see. Garden snakes, black snakes, corn snakes—oh, no, is that a coral snake?” Leaning closer, she peered at my head as if inspecting me for dandruff. “No, thank goodness, it’s just a king snake. I don’t see any poisonous species.”

  Weirder and weirder. Like, my mom knew how to tell snakes apart? Since when?

  “And I must say,” she added in a different, softer tone, as if she were critiquing somebody’s abstract canvas, “the colors are quite striking. Jade green, jet black, ruby, topaz, in—what a daring combination of stripes and rings. The juxtaposition—”

  I stood there stunned. I mean, up till then it hadn’t been a problem that Mom was all about being an Artist, with a capital A. Famous even, because she had a sculpture in the lobby of the Whitney, a life-size stone man with an expression nobody could understand—yearning, quizzical, tragic, amused? A masterpiece, anyway, kind of the Mona Lisa of sculpture.

  So my mother, Euryale Gorgon, was a celebrity, always going to parties and getting in People magazine. They loved her because she wore lots of extreme clothes. Mom’s taste and mine couldn’t be more different.

  Especially now. Mom was saying,“—sophisticated, Dusie. So individualistic, so unique! So original! They make quite a dramatic statement—”

  “I don’t want to make a statement!” I shrieked. Then I burst out crying.

  “Dusie …” Mom put her arms around me, stroking my back with her strong hands. “Honey, please don’t get so upset.”

  I sagged against her. Always, up until then, whenever Mom hugged me, I’d felt sure everything was going to be all right.

  “It’s not the end of the world,” she murmured, patting my back. “You’ll find ways to cope. Trust me.”

  Cope?

  Like, for how long?

  What if my friends found out?

  Cope? Was that the best Mom could do?

  Her hug was a lie. I yanked myself away from her, bawling even harder. The snakes thrashed and coiled. I could feel their movements through my scalp right into my skull, their bones connected to my bone. I screamed again.

  Mom turned stern. “Dusie, stop it.”

  And somebody else said, “Dusssie, ssstop it.” A hissy voice, not Mom’s, sounded right inside my head. Or, not a voice, exactly, and it didn’t really speak, just kind of goosed my mind. I can’t explain, but there it was. Sarcastic: Ssstop it, Ssstupid.

  My scream spun into a screech.

  Mom ordered, “Dusie, stop! It’s no use having a hissy fit.”

  A hissy fit was exactly what the snakes were throwing, moshing on my head and hissing like mad cats, giving me the worst bad hair day in recorded history. I howled, “I can’t go to school like this! Mom, you’ve got to do something! I just want to die!” Overnight I had become, absolutely, no contest, the ugliest girl in school. Make that the ugliest girl in the country. Make that the ugliest girl in the world.

  Mom sighed. I’d never seen her look sadder, yet her voice stayed situation-normal, like the toilet had clogged or the elevators had broken down again. “All right, Dusie. You can stay home from school today. Now, wash your face and get yourself under control. I think it’s time we had a little talk.”

  It took me till mid-afternoon to calm down enough to halfway listen and start asking questions. Like, “Mom, why didn’t you tell me this stuff before?”

  Sitting in the apartment window, Mom just stared down at Greene Street like she needed to really study the fire escapes and pigeons and the Chinese umbrella vendor on the corner. Daylight came in gray through the February rain, and for the first time I noticed the lines on Mom’s face—a beautiful face, to me, anyway. Grecian nose, jutting cheekbones, cleft chin. To anybody who was into bland blonde cover girls, Mom probably looked ugly, but to me, she was the rock-solid, most perfect person in the world, like a goddess—

  Whoa. She was a goddess, kind of. I’d just found out she was immortal. Several thousand years old. Those were lines of time on her face.

  Her voice low, she said, “I thought—the snakes—I was hoping it wouldn’t happen to you, too.”

  Silence, except for taxicabs and delivery vans beeping below. Slumping on the sofa, I closed my eyes.

  Mom said, “Your father was mortal. You’re half-human.”

  Half-human? And here I’d been going around thinking I was, you know, normal. Like, okay, my best friend Stephe was half-Hungarian and my other best friend Keisha was half-black, but half-human? Nobody went around being only half-human.

  What if somebody found out about me?

  Oh, God, it was too much to think about all at once.

  Mom was saying, “You are a lot like your father. So I hoped maybe …” Her voice trailed off.

  She was the one who had mentioned my father! Maybe, now that the secrets were coming out …? Keeping my voice soft, I gave it a try. “Who was my father?”

  But no go. She just shook her head and said, “He was very brave.”

  That was Mom’s highest praise, brave—she was sooo all about being a strong person. It was also her standard answer whenever I asked about my father. We’d been through this many times before, although considering what I now knew, I was beginning to understand why I had no father. Before, I had been clueless. Mom’s name hadn’t meant a thing to me. I mean, who knows what a gorgon is anymore? Mom hadn’t told me until today that under the turban her hair was vipers, under the polish her fingernails were bronze, under the caps her teeth were fangs. She hadn’t told me that she’d had wings surgically removed by a doctor who could be blackmailed to keep quiet. She had told me, years ago, that she’d named me after her dead sister, but she hadn’t told me that Dusie was a nickname—short for Medusa.

  “Could y
ou eat something now?” Mom asked.

  “No.” Eat? Was she totally crazy? Couldn’t she see there were snakes on my head? Quiet snakes now, but I could feel their weight, I could feel them lazily coiling, I could feel their slithery length against my neck and temples, and I could just barely stand it.

  “Mom,” I begged, “can’t we cut them off?”

  Like dark, distant echoes deep inside my mind, the voices that were not voices spoke to each other:

  She’sss kind of ssstupid, said one.

  But sssweet, came a gentler reply.

  Sssweet? She hatesss usss.

  Shaking her head, looking tired, Mom was saying, “I’ve tried that myself, honey. I’ve tried cutting them off, burning them off, freezing them off, eating them off with acid, like warts … but they just grow back again. Instantly. Longer and thicker.”

  “But there has to be a way—”

  “There’s not, honey. I’ve tried everything.”

  I jumped up with a wail, and my snakes started squirming and hissing as I yelled, “Why?”

  “Because they’re the curse of Athena, sweetie. They’re a fate. They’re our fate. And that’s the way fate is.”

  “I hate fate!” My eyes stung, but I didn’t have any tears left.

  “You learn to make the best of it,” Mom said, her tone as gray as the rainy New York City day.

  Right. Sure.

  “Troubles make us strong.” Mom sounded dead, but then she looked at me and I saw her force herself to lighten up. “I’ve started thinking of my serpents as pets,” she said, smiling all bright and shiny like a steak knife. “I named one of them after Athena, actually. Then there are Hera and Demeter and—”

  “Mom, stop it.”

  I said this even before a small, snide voice inside my head remarked, Ssstupid namesss.

  Goddesss namesss, another one agreed.

  Goddesssessss she hatesss.

  She hatesss usss, too.

  Just then Mom stood to face me. With her bravest smile she said, “Would you like to see them, honey?” She lifted her hands toward her turban.

  “No! You’re disgusting!” Snakes flailing, I jumped up, ran for my room, and slammed the door.

  After school Keisha phoned to ask why I’d been absent from school, but I couldn’t talk. I knew I’d cry if I tried to talk, so Mom took the call on my cell phone and told Keisha I was sick. Same with Stephe, which is pronounced “Steve” even though she’s a girl. Katie called, too. And the other Catie, the one with a C. And Hunter, who by the way is half Australian. Mom told them all I was sick. So they started text-messaging me GWS—get well soon?—and gon 2 DLA 2 bad U cant.

  Yeah. Too bad.

  I felt so cruddy I didn’t text back. I slumped around thinking about how my friends were going to DLA, Dance Lights and Action, without me, and I would not have thought it was possible for things to get any worse, but of course they did. By evening, the chatter in my head sounded like tourists at Rockefeller Center. My snakes had stopped being shy and were getting acquainted. I wanted to watch TV or a movie, anything to forget about being a reptile sanctuary, but all I could hear was snake yada yada.

  Hope thisss half-human hatchling will eat sssomething sssoon.

  I’m hungry, too. what I wouldn’t give for a nice fat field moussse.

  Uncomfortable being crowded like thisss. I’m not the sssort to hisss in a pit, myself.

  They bear live young.

  How awful. Why can’t they lay eggsss like …

  … or a tasty ssshrew. Or even a hamssster. Any rodent …

  Yada yada yada, hiss hiss hiss. Up until then I had kind of forgotten about hearing slithery voices in my mind. I mean, when a person has snakes on her head, a little strangeness in the head doesn’t make much of an impression. At first I’d thought it was my imagination.

  But it wasn’t. I was hearing snake voices. Or not voices, exactly, but snake thoughts. Somehow their brains were hooked into my brain—well, no wonder, since their spines were sprouting out of my skull—and since I think in English, I was hearing them that way. In words, but majorly weirded. Once I started to pay attention, it scared me, it was so—so not me. Not even human. Like there were smells to the thoughts: moss, frog, earthworm, leaf loam, musk. And the smells were tastes, but the tastes had colors. Greenish, brownish, scarlet, flickering forked-tongue black. It was way strange.

  … jussst a common colubrid, of no dissstinction …

  … hungry …

  … sssalamandersss under the ssstones by the ssstream.

  … golden ssstripesss…

  I’m a black raser, not a blacksssnake.

  … russstle my tail in the dry grasss and ssstrike …

  … baby pigeon crushed in my coilsss …

  Blah blah blah, yada yada yada, hiss hiss hiss. I couldn’t stand it. I screamed, “Shut up!”

  In the sudden silence the TV sounded very loud. Paying bills at her glass-and-chrome desk in the corner—Mom decorated the way she dressed, artsy and extreme—she jumped in her corkscrew chair, swiveling to stare at me.

  No need to vibrate usss, someone in my mind declared peevishly.

  Mom said, “Dusie, just turn it off if—”

  “Not the tube. The stupid snakes.”

  A coldly regal voice said in my mind, We prefer to be addresssed as ssserpentsss.

  “I would prefer if you would shut up!”

  I heard a hissy murmur from the crowd, and the regal one said, Be polite. We bite.

  Ooooh, I just wanted to kill them. All of them. My fists clenched, and my mouth opened to tell them off, but I saw Mom peering at me. “Dusie?”

  “They’re talking at me inside my head, Mom!”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Right away I knew I had made a mistake. I mean, I was assuming her snakes did the same, but from the expression on her face, nuh-uh. And there are some things you shouldn’t let your mom find out. Like, I don’t know, if you got a tattoo on your butt, that might be one. Or if you’re hearing what should have been your hair yakking inside your mind.

  “You’re hearing voices?” Mom exclaimed.

  I mumbled, “It’s just the stupid snakes.”

  Ssserpentsss somebody on my head objected. I ignored them.

  In a too-sweet voice Mom was saying, “But, Dusie, honey, snakes don’t talk.”

  “I know that.”

  “But you’re hearing voices in your mind?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Mom, forget it, okay? I’ll handle it.”

  “But sweetie, if you’re having, um, a mental episode, it might be due to, um, a chemical imbalance due to, ah, hormones. I’d better make you an appointment to see—”

  “Mom, no!” As if things weren’t miserable enough.

  “To see a specialist.”

  “Mom, I’m fine!” Well, as fine as anybody could be with snakes for hair.

  “That’s for the doctor to decide, Dusie.”

  Oh. Just. Great. But I felt too worn out to put up a good fight.

  sssee what happenss when you fusss? said my most unfavorite voice. They were such—such creeps. I hated them. I wanted to smack somebody, but I was too tired. All I could do was wrap a very big, very thick towel around my head and go to bed.

  TWO

  In the morning, I made Mom get up before dawn. There I was, miserable and wide awake, so why should I let her sleep? I’d been trying to think what to do, and what I’d come up with was to make her cover my snakes all over with facial mud so they would look like dreadlocks—okay, really disgusting dreads, not soft like Keisha’s, but at least maybe I could go to school? Not that I loved school so much, but at that point I really needed to at least pretend I was normal, not half-human and definitely not a junior Medusa. I guess I was being stupid, not facing the facts, but I felt like everything would be okay if I could just act like it was. Go do everyday things. Be with my friends.

  I still hadn’t eaten, I hadn’t been able to sleep much, and I felt like a z
ombie. My snakes acted like they were hibernating. “If you stay calm, so will they,” Mom said, slathering mud on them like it was something she did every day.

  “Mom, I know.” Like I needed her telling me stuff at six o’clock in the morning?

  “How would you know?”

  “I’m not stupid!”

  Mom didn’t like being vertical at six A.M. any more than I did. “You know so much, you do this yourself from now on,” she grumbled, slapping mud onto my head.

  “No way.”

  “Yes way.”

  “I’m not touching them.”

  “Yes, you are. I’m not doing it for you after today. Wear my turbans if you’re so squeamish.”

  “Ew!” Not her turbans, never my mother’s turbans. I tied my biggest do-rag over my dreads, looked in the mirror, and felt an urge to flush myself down the toilet. I didn’t even bother with makeup; what was the use? I just gulped down a bowl of Frosted Flakes, stuffed Kotex and some spare mud into my backpack, then left.

  I felt so ugly I took the subway, and I hated every woman on there with hair, even the greasy-headed bag ladies. I felt so low I wanted to stay underground, but I got off at my stop. Seeing homeless people huddled on the platform didn’t make me feel any better. I climbed the stairs, ducked into a narrow back street nobody used, and tried to sneak toward my middle school.

  I never made it.

  Before I got halfway there a male voice said, “Hey, cool hair.”

  I turned, and oh, God, it was the boy I liked, the tall one with eyes the color of tarnished silver, walking up to stand beside me. My heart started pounding, and I felt crawlies on my scalp, oh no, snakes starting to rouse. I had to calm down fast. Right now. It wasn’t like I could ever have a boyfriend anyway, not with a head full of snakes. Forget flirting, forget dating. Forget soft kisses. Forget all those dreams of true love.

  Calm. Had to be calm. I managed to act bored and say, “Oh, hi, Troy.”

  “Oh, hi, Dusie,” he mimicked. “Aren’t you somebody. New hairdo go to your head?” He grinned, teasing, and suddenly his hand shot out to yank my hair.