After Mohini, more Aiedeo came to teach me. They were kind and nurturing like the TV moms on my favorite sitcoms. Except that none of them was actually my mother.
I grew up hearing stories about ancestors who could multiply themselves and assist in wars between gods and demons, so the idea that my dead mother would come see me wasn’t so unbelievable. Especially because another of Ananya’s rules was that there could be only one Aiedeo per generation, and both my mother and grandmother (who had died before I was even born) were gone. There was no living Aiedeo to teach me. Which meant that Mohini and all my teachers were dead. So why couldn’t Laya train me herself?
About six months into my lessons, I gained the courage to ask my most recent new teacher, Bhanu, when my mother was coming. The weird thing with the Aiedeo was even back in the days when they were nice to me, I always got the sense that I wasn’t supposed to ask a lot of questions. Bhanu explained that Laya was an elite Aiedeo and was needed for their most dangerous missions. She’d come to teach me only if I proved that I was good enough.
I’d grown up with a dad who was pretty much work-obsessed and rarely had time for me, so I was already used to proving my worth to get a parent’s attention. I knew what I had to do if I wanted to see my mother—I needed to be the best.
I ramped up my training and slowly started to become really good. The warrior stuff was never easy and I struggled the most with that part. I’m not a natural athlete, so all that running, jumping, and fighting were not my jam. But I pushed my body as hard as I could.
Where I excelled was with the supernatural stuff. Once I learned how to focus my mind and harness my power, I found that I could do so much cool shit. Move objects, read people’s thoughts; I even teleported myself to Dairy Queen a few times.
For a while, I loved being an Aiedeo. These were my ancestors and the Aiedeo was my legacy. It made me feel connected to something so much greater than myself. I’d train hard almost every night but I still had more than enough energy for school, maybe because what drove me, deep down inside, was the belief that all of this would eventually lead me to my mother.
Then, around the time that I entered seventh grade, everything changed. My Aiedeo teachers stopped being nurturing TV moms and became more like ball-breaking bitches. The shamas weren’t just getting harder, they were getting downright scary. And it seemed that the more I gave the Aiedeo, the more they wanted from me.
I felt like they were sucking all the life out of me but I was relentless because of Laya. Although I was secretly afraid the Aiedeo would eventually break me. And they did.
I don’t even remember what really happened back then, but I still feel such a wave of rage when I think about it. It was shortly after my thirteenth birthday when the Aiedeo threw me out of a moving car. Maybe it was part of a shama, but WTF kind of test ends with the test taker almost dying?
Miraculously, I survived, but I broke both my legs. To make matters worse, this happened on the rare occasion my father was actually in town. The moment he saw me lying there in the hospital bed, Naresh regressed back to his days as a military interrogator and started grilling me. I’d gotten good at hiding the Aiedeo stuff but I was pretty doped up on pain meds and I’m not sure what I told him. Besides, what could I really say? Whether I was pushed out or jumped out of that car, I was clearly in a dangerous place in my life. Dede tried to step in and help me but Dad didn’t want to listen to anything either of us had to say. He and the hospital psychiatrist were convinced I’d tried to kill myself, so I was put on a twenty-four-hour suicide watch.
It didn’t matter how often I told my father and the shrink that I hadn’t tried to commit suicide; nothing I said was very effective because, honestly, I was effed any way I spun it. If I told Naresh about the Aiedeo, surely he’d lock me up in a mental institution for good. So I just kept quiet.
Dede practically lived in my hospital room and my best friend, Meryl, brought my homework assignments and loads of Little Debbie brownies every day. We’d never kept any secrets from each other. She knew everything about the Aiedeo and always believed me no matter how crazy it all sounded.
Naresh told everyone that I was in a car accident, which I guess was kind of true. To his relief, people seemed to buy it. I think he wanted to believe it too. Meryl heard that Collette, who had an aunt that worked in the psych ward, was telling people that I’d been placed under suicide watch, but Meryl shut down Collette hard by threatening to start a rumor that she’d seen Collette making out with her cousin at the Sweethearts Dance.
The car “accident” was the first time the two parts of me—regular Violet, who was just like everyone else, and Super Violet, the secret Aiedeo—collided. I’d entered junior high the year before and I was convinced that the sole purpose of it wasn’t education but so that some students could find out what made other adolescents vulnerable and then socially eviscerate them for it. Amber Baker had become a laughingstock when kids found out she’d been taking magic lessons, the kind where you pull a rabbit out of a hat. Imagine what would have happened to me if they’d discovered that I thought my dead relatives were teaching me how to shape-shift.
The consequences of being an Aiedeo were becoming too dangerous in both my inner life and my outer life. But I held on because of my mother.
A few of my Aiedeo teachers visited me in the hospital but I pretended to be asleep and let Dede deal with them. Laya never came. I laid there in bed with a totally busted mind, body, and soul wondering what more I could do to make my mother want me. Then one day about three weeks into my recovery, it all kind of clicked together. I was never going to be good enough for Laya to return.
There was this gaping hole that had been ripped open inside of me when Laya died. I’d thought having a mother again would mend it, but now I let it fill with all the fury and hate I had for the Aiedeo.
Those bitches had lied. They knew Laya was never coming. I was done.
I’d earned a few powers already but I was still in training and a good four years away from becoming a full-on Aiedeo. In theory, maybe the fact that I was an Aiedeo Lite would have allowed me to walk away. But from what I’d learned about my dead relatives, they did everything on their terms. What I had to do was force them to abandon me.
The night after I’d finally gotten both my casts off, I woke up to Mohini sitting on my bed just like she’d done on my very first lesson. She tried to speak to me but I was too fed up to listen. I knew what I had to do if I wanted to end this for good. My legs were still too weak for me to fight but my mind was working just fine. In fact, the forced rest had re-energized me. But this time my energy wasn’t focused on joining the Aiedeo; it was turned against them.
I sat straight up in bed and let my rage fuel me. Mohini had taught me telekinesis and now I turned it back on her. I pelted her with my hairbrush, hair straightener, and blow dryer. The angrier I got, the stronger I became, and I hurled all my books at her. Then it looked like there was a cyclone in my room as everything I owned swirled around until I catapulted it into Mohini with all the force I could muster. I didn’t know why she didn’t fight back harder but I didn’t care. I just kept on hurling things at her until she finally left.
After Mohini, more Aiedeo showed up each night, and I did the same thing. Everything that they had taught me, I turned on them. After all, I’d reasoned, if I was just going to use my powers against them, the Aiedeo had no choice but to take my powers away, right? And what good was a powerless Aiedeo?