Scenes from the Secret History (The Secret History of the World) by F. Paul Wilson Page A

black jeans and a black T-shirt.  She had dark eyes and pale skin.  She’d gone a little heavier than usual on the eyeliner today.  She held a book in her right hand, her index finger poked between two pages.  She’d been letting her dark hair grow and today she’d parted it in the middle and braided it into a pair of pigtails.
    “Hey, Jack.  Come on up.”
    “Going for the Wednesday Addams look?” he said as he took the steps two at a time.
    “Well, it’s the weekend and I’m full of woe.”
    He followed her into her room, christened the “Bat Cave” by her brother.  With all the shades drawn, a dark purple bedspread, gargoyles peering down from her bookshelves, and a creepy Bauhaus poster on the wall, it lived up to the name.
    “About anything in particular?”
    “The usual – everything.” She belly flopped onto the bed and opened her book. 
    “What’s so interesting?”
    “Just got it from the library. All about pre-Sumerian civilizations.  What’s up?”
    Jack pulled the photo from his pocket and held it up.  “I found this in your garbage can.”
    She glanced up with a smile. “Are you Dumpster diving now?”  Then her gaze fixed on the wrinkled photo.  “Isn’t that…?”
    “Yeah.  Never thought you’d toss it out.”
    She was up in a flash grabbing it from him.
    “I didn’t.”  Her expression turned furious.  “They have no right!”
    As she started for her door Jack blocked her way. She had a wild look in her eyes.  Jack had seen that look a few times before when she’d lost it, and she seemed ready to lose it now.
    “Easy, Weezy.  Could you maybe wait on this?  You’re going to put me smack dab in the middle of the fight.”
    For a second he thought she might hit him.  He didn’t know what he’d do if she tried.  He was relieved when the look faded.
    “Because you found it?”
    He nodded.  He didn’t want to become a player in the ongoing tug of war between Weezy and her parents – mostly her father – who wanted her to be what they called a “normal girl” and what she called a “bow head.” 
    “You know,” she said, her voice thickening as she stalked about her room, “if they’re so unhappy with me, why don’t they just send me off to boarding school or something so they don’t have to look at me?”
    Jack didn’t like that idea one bit.  Who would he hang with?  He tried to lighten the moment by clutching his hands over his heart and giving her his best approximation of a lost-puppy look.
    “But-but-but wouldn’t you miss meeee?”
    It didn’t work.  She was off to the races.  She’d always been hard to stop once she got rolling, but almost impossible since the disappearance of the pyramid.  She’d gotten a little scary lately.
    “I’m going to be fifteen next week!  I’ve got a brain, why don’t they want me to use it?  They have no right to throw out my stuff!”  She stopped her pacing.  “Maybe I should pull a Marcie Kurek!  That’d show ’em!”
    Marcie Kurek was a runaway who’d been a soph at the high school last year.  She lived in Shamong.  One night she said she was going out to visit a friend and never showed up.  No one had seen her since. 
    Weezy turned and threw the photo on the floor. 
    Jack knew she tended to leave her stuff all over the house, a perfect invitation for her folks to dump the things they didn’t approve of, especially anything that referred to what she called the Secret History of the World.
    The Secret History was her passion – her conviction that accepted history was a collection of lies carefully constructed and arranged to hide what was really going on in the world, and conceal the hidden agenda and identities of those pulling the strings.  Ancient secret societies manipulating events throughout the ages…
    People – especially her family – tended to roll their eyes once she got started on it.  Jack too, though not as quickly as he used to.  He’d seen and heard things