Chapter 11

 

“How the hell am I supposed to sit through a bunch of lectures after that?” I asked Pauli, having briefed him on my morning session with Oggie.

He rolled his eyes. “All we did is sit around a big bowl of Skittles and talk about snakes while a giant python slithered its way around my feet. Aida-Wedo is intent on convincing me that snakes are cute and cuddly creatures… misunderstood.”

“Skittles for breakfast?” I asked, trying to focus on the more pleasant aspect of his morning experience.

Pauli shrugged. “Taste the rainbow, honey.”

“I don’t remember the last time I had Skittles.”

“The first few nibbles are delicious, don’t get me wrong, so long as you’re eating one at a time and you limit yourself to the reds and purples.” Pauli raised one hand as if to emphasize the importance of his seemingly trivial point. “But then I get impatient and start shoveling them in by the handful. At that point, it’s like a fruity explosion in my mouth…”

“Can’t eat just one?”

“Honey, my appetite is insatiable… especially when it comes to things fruity.”

“We’re still talking about Skittles, right?” I asked.

“Yes, I’m addicted to Skittles, too!” Pauli said, pinching his side. “But I can almost feel the love handles growing from my side with every bite. It’s disgusting!”

I shook my head. “You have like three grams of fat on your whole body. I’m sure you’ll be fine.”

“That’s always how it starts,” Pauli said, sighing. “One skittle… next thing you know I’ll be the size of a walrus.”

“You’d make a fabulous walrus,” I said, grinning.

“Flab-ulous, honey. At least in my college I’d have extra rolls to keep my snakes warm at night.”

“That’s the most disgusting image I’ve ever pictured in my mind.”

“What can I say, except, you’re welcome?” Pauli sang, doing his best impression of a Tiki god.

The door to our classroom swung open, and Nico came busting through, clearly frustrated. Sauron followed closely behind. Ellie was already in the room, sitting in the front row, her pen in hand, ready to scribble down whatever our teacher might tell us. Philosophy of the Arts… Ellie looked nervously over her shoulder as Pauli and I, sitting in the back row, bullshitted about our morning experiences. It was like she wanted to interject something but was too shy to let whatever was on her mind fly.

When Nico came in, though, any pretense of her being anything more than a wallflower went out the window.

Nico and Sauron selected seats in the middle of the room. In truth, if every class here had only five students, it was a bit odd that a classroom would have so many seats to choose from.

“She’s a fraud,” Nico said to Sauron. “Not half as powerful as he would have been.”

Sauron just shrugged. “Your college has presided over each of the last three years’ classes. She can’t be that bad.”

“You don’t have any idea,” Nico said. “Half the morning was spent talking about how dead people are people, too… I mean, I thought half the point of raising zombies was so that they could be your slaves, do whatever the fuck you want them to do. What is this aspect good for if I can’t even do that?”

I rolled my eyes. “Well, would you want someone raising your corpse postmortem and forcing you to be their slave?” I asked.

Nico turned toward me, staring at me as if death itself filled his eyes. Given his aspect, it probably did. “Who are you to speak? Aren’t you a Mulledy?”

“What of it?” I asked, feigning ignorance over the relevance of his question.

“Your family ran the harshest plantation in New Orleans, everyone knows it.”

“I’m not my ancestors. You don’t know me at all.”

“It’s in your blood,” Nico said, looking me up and down. “And based on your appearance, you’re still benefiting from great-great-granddaddy’s wealth. The money he made on the back of people like me. Face it, you don’t belong here.”

Anger bubbled up inside of me. I wanted to rip his face off. I was chosen to be here… and no one hated my family’s past more than I did.

Let it go…

When I get angry enough that Isabelle can feel it, you know it’s intense. She can’t read my mind, but she can certainly feel the heat rising to the top of my head when I get pissed.

I turned and coughed twice over my right shoulder.

“The cold never bothered me, anyway,” I said, grinning. I couldn’t help but follow up Isabelle’s comment with an obvious Frozen reference… in spite of the fact that I was well aware no one else in the room would get it. After Pauli had effectively serenaded me with a Disney song already, I was primed to follow suit.

Nico looked confused. “What a weirdo,” he said, nudging Sauron, who obediently chuckled as though she were obliged to conform to Nico’s dick-headedness.

“The past is in the past… let it go,” I blurted out, trying to make some sense of my comment by quoting more of the Disney number.

Nico turned around, daggers in his eyes. “Let go of your trust fund, and I’ll see what I can do.”

Pauli put his hand on my arm. “Just ignore him, he’s not worth it.”

I nodded. Though a part of me was irked by the truth of what Nico said. Was I benefiting from my ancestors’ wealth? Money they’d accrued through slavery? I mean, not technically. Most of that money was lost a century ago during the Great Depression. Still, my grandfather had benefited from the family name and went to medical school… used his money earned as a surgeon to invest in tech. That’s where most of the family’s wealth came from today. Still, I’d never really thought about it that way. If my family hadn’t owned the plantation, would my grandfather have ever been in the position… I mean, it isn’t like he didn’t work his way through medical school and make a smart decision on his own. Suddenly I felt pangs of empathy for Nico. I didn’t know his background, I didn’t know why he was so bitter. I suppose there’s no excuse for acting like a dick. At the same time, I didn’t feel guilty about being a Mulledy. You can’t control what you’re born into. And I’d had my share of sorrows in life, too. No trust fund could compensate for the loss of my parents… the loss of my childhood.

Pauli is right, Isabelle said. He isn’t worth it. We don’t have to be victims, you know. Because we choose not to be.

I couldn’t reply to Isabelle audibly. Instead, I grabbed a pen and jotted down my thoughts.

“You don’t blame me? For what my family did to you?” I wrote.

I don’t even blame them…

“But you would be justified if you did,” I wrote.

If I did that, I’d still be a slave to my anger, to my resentment. They’d still own me.

“But you’re still not free. Trapped in my head.”

You might see it that way. Everyone has limitations. And liberties. It’s our choice which ones we allow to define us. Look at Vilokan. You can see the handiwork of creative people all around, in the buildings, in the art on these school walls. Doesn’t look like the work of slaves.

“But they were. Food doesn’t grow down here. They still depended on their masters and worked the plantations.”

Sounds more like a people who found a way to be free, in spite of it all.

I quickly turned the page in my spiral notebook as the door swung open. A stout middle-aged man burst through the door, huffing and puffing as though he’d just ran a marathon. “I am Hougan Asogwe Jim,” the man said, the curls of his black-and-gray mustache fluttering around his lips. He wrote the name “Jim” on the chalkboard, as if any of us would have difficulty with the spelling of his name. If he’d spelled the other part—Asogwe—it might have been helpful. “Welcome to Philosophy of the Arts. If you learn nothing else as aspiring Hougans and Mambos, then learn this: the primary goal and activity of Voodoo is to serve the Loa. In turn, they will grant you health, protection, and favor.”

I rolled my eyes and immediately flipped open my notebook and took pen to paper: “What did you just tell me, again, about these people not being slaves?”