Odin's Murder

“Did you?” Faye asks, turning her head to the side like a bird.

“I’m here, aren’t I?” His gaze drops to my boobs before he looks down to where he’s rubbing at a mark on the table with his fingernail. “So, what’s our topic?”

“We haven’t looked yet. We were waiting on you to get here. You know, trying not to be rude?” I want to goad him more, but he doesn’t look up. I toss the envelope to Faye. “Here.”

Faye pulls out the paper. She reads it twice, like she’s trying to make sense of a fortune cookie, and then says, tasting the words, “Compare and contrast the significance of crows in the mythology of several cultures.”

Julian leans over and snatches the paper. “What?”

“Crows. You know, Heckle and Jeckle and ‘Quoth the raven, ‘Nevermore?’” Her voice has an acid bite to it, at odds with her baby fawn eyes.

“I know what a crow is, thank you very much.” My brother’s eyes flick to mine. I look away, rubbing my arms, suddenly chilly. Julian clenches his fists. “Kind of a broad subject. We should narrow it down to a specific area, or something.”

Silence fills the little room, then Ethan clears his throat and says, “So, before we go any further, can we all share what we

’re good at? Like why we’re here in the first place? And who can do what? I take it we all have a skill set, besides walking on stilts?”

I ignore the comment, even though it’s a compliment, that he’s admitting to noticing my legs, because I’m too tense and also curious. I can’t imagine what exactly this guy is bringing to the table, besides brooding looks and a Rock of Gibraltar sized chip on his shoulder. I glance at my roommate and suggest, “Okay, Faye, why don’t you start?”

“I specialize in symbols,” she begins, her fingers at her neck, twisting in the chain that disappears into her sweater.

I tune her out, having already heard this, trying to figure out how much I should share. Julian is listening to Faye and taking notes, but the cogs turning in his brain, too. His eyes are down, and I can feel his question in his posture, the way he’s folding in on himself.

Do we tell them the truth? Are we ready to talk about it?

We’re already cheating, like we’ve been given a geography test about the town we grew up in, or a creative writing assignment when we’d spent our childhood spinning scary fairytales, told in secret twin language and pictures, rich with details of flight and feathers, seeing how far we could freak each other out, who would break into tears first, and the winner having to find a happy ending that neither truly believed.

“That’s cool,” Julian says to Faye. “That’ll give us a lot of interesting perspectives for sure—regardless of what direction we chose to take.”

“We can go a lot of different ways on this. Crows have significance in every culture. Ravens, too. They’re both symbols of power and change. And almost all religions see them in some role as messengers to the gods,” she says.

“It may be hard to narrow it down. We’ll have to do some research,” Julian says. He’s bluffing through fairly well, but I can see his nerves stretch thin with every blink of his eyes.

Who knew our secret would out itself at the Scholastic Honors Program? Certainly not our mother, frustrated with our murmurs and whispers and silence, sending us to separate rooms until we “learned to talk like normal children,” and later to summer school, because she didn’t know what else to do with us. Or more likely, me.

“What about you?” Faye asks my brother. “What do you do?”

“I read,” he says, eyes darting to me.

“He speed reads,” I help him out. “In eleven languages.”

“Twelve, actually,” he says. “I finally got my Czech to seventy-five percent retention last week.”

He’s fine. I smile with relief and turn to Ethan. His mouth is no longer swollen, but there’s a reddish-purple bruise over his lip. “And you? Who did you kill to get into this program?”

He laughs, but his smile is still sarcastic. “What, you don’t think I got here on my own talent and merit, just like everyone else?” He opens his bag, retrieves a medium sized album, and slides it across the table.

I open the plain black cover and gasp. Julian said he’d seen Ethan with a camera, but this is not what I’m expecting. The photograph is of a building, but the image is off center and although the structure and its arched doorway are the primary focus, what is most noticeable is a black star just over the wood frame. The coloring is more sepia than normal, giving the odd shaped shadow an unearthly feel.

“You took this?” I ask.

“Should I be flattered or insulted by your surprise?”

“They’re beautiful,” Faye says, her voice matter-of-fact.

I look down from his glare; she’s turned the page. Another building, verdigris and brick, a small plaque worn into nothingness, the bronze letters etched by evening light. I stare, wondering if I would have noticed such detail, to remember it so beautifully.

“It’s unusual to see a doubled heptagram in this architectural period,” my roommate says.