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vulnerable pelvis.

Dark Trick
    T he next day, just a few days after Emily’s death, we learned that my English teacher’s husband had died. He’d been diagnosed with a brain tumor, and she’d been missing more and more school, her face sagging farther with grief every day. I had been able to smell his death on her, and I was only waiting for the substitute to arrive. But, even with my sharpened senses, I could not detect who it was going to be. Perhaps my senses were failing me, as they had continually since Emily had been gone.
    He walked in wearing a black cotton button-downshirt, black jeans and heavy black shoes. He had a goatee, and his hair was cropped close. There were tiny marks on his earlobes where they had been pierced. On his wrist was a heavy silver watch.
    1920. 2007. It didn’t matter. The face was the same.
    “I’m Mr. Eliot,” he said. “As in T. S. I assume you know who that is?”
    He smirked at us. His dark eyes absorbed all the light from the window behind me.
    “I know you’ve all had to deal with Mrs. Harter’s situation. It isn’t easy to have to watch that every day. Sometimes it’s as if you can smell the death on someone.”
    A few people snickered.
    Mr. Eliot stepped closer. He seemed to grow in size as we watched.
    “Not funny. I’d think you could appreciate that kind of loss, after what just happened to your classmate.”
    There was an uncomfortable silence. Mr. Eliot began to roam around the room like an uncaged panther. The students stiffened in their chairs as he passed them.
    “But that doesn’t mean I’m going to cut you any slack,” he snarled. “I’m going to expect a lot out of you. English literature is not about your friends blogging so-called poems on MySpace or even Death Cab for Cutie quotes under their names. Now. T. S. Eliot?” He glanced affectedly at the attendance sheet and then at me. “Charlotte?”
    The classroom seemed to darken, as if a cloud had blocked the sun.
    I could feel the old, familiar tightening in my throat. The numb tingling in my fingers and toes. The shortness of breath. He’d told me that was how he’d felt when he’d made me. He’d wanted so badly to keep going, to drain me entirely, but he held himself back, offered me his own bleeding wrist. He said this as if it were a sacrifice he’d made for me, asif I were not the sacrifice.
    But I am strong, I told myself. I am wiser now. I have the ability to make others just as he made me. Then I ran the tip of my thumb along the quick-torn nail. It had only grown back a little. Everything had been changing inside and around me since Emily’s death. What was happening? Why had William Eliot returned now, after all this time? I made myself speak, but my voice sounded strangled.
    “September 26, 1888, to January 4, 1965. Expatriate. Author of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” The Waste Land, The Hollow Men, Ash Wednesday and others. Won the Nobel Prize in 1948.”
    I did my best to appear bored. I even rolled my eyes. He smiled at me.
    “I see someone has been listening. You seem wise beyond your years, Miss Emerson. Are you really just seventeen?”
    I had the strangest sensation of blood rising to my cheeks, as it had when I was still a girl. But I could nolonger blush. At least I hadn’t been able to for years.
    I got up and walked out of the room. That was when I realized that my armpits were damp; sweat had soaked through my white blouse.
    We do not perspire.
     
    As I ran down the corridor, my Prada bootheels clicking, all I could think of was reclining in that Venetian gondola as the sun set, turning the water red. I was eating slices of watermelon, the spongy flesh disintegrating in my mouth. My dress spread out around me in the boat. The buildings were peeling like sunburned flesh. My heart beat a dull dirge in my chest.
    “The fallen angels choose only the most beautiful humans to be their fledglings, their disciples,” he told me. His cold hands with the silver