“That brings us to a point.”  Toph rested his forearms against the podium at the head of the room.  “I understand some of you have discussed the possibility of electing a mayor, but you’re not sure the entire town will accept this.  Well, why not start smaller?”  He nodded towards the history teacher.  “Why not appoint a principal over the school who has the best interest of the children at heart, who wants to see change and wants to see the school actually improve, and who has the authority to hire and fire people if they don’t agree to his vision?”

More murmurs from the crowd, while the history teacher almost glowed with excitement.

“You’ll have to back him up,” Toph warned.  “As in, if he makes a judgment call, you need to accept it.  You need to acknowledge his authority when it comes to how the school runs.  Maybe run a reelection in a couple years, after he’s had time to make changes and you see how things go, but you can’t just remove him the first time you disagree with him.”

 Toph let them talk amongst themselves for a bit before clearing his throat and getting their attention.  “You are here tonight because you want peace and you want it to last.  Well, I’ve told you how.  In the long run, you need to let the past rest and be willing to work together, even if it takes decades to truly come to that point.  But this is a first step.  This helps ensure that your kids get a better education and are safe on school grounds.  This helps ensure that school is neutral and that your kids will start to learn alongside their counterparts.  And yes, that means your kids might start making friends with hydras and kapras regardless of what they are, and you need to let them.  If you truly support peace, remember – these kids that your own kid is befriending aren’t to blame for the past any more than your own child is.  They’re part of a new generation that can be taught better than the past, that this feud may be your history but it is not the future.”

People had looked startled at the idea of friends from the “other” side, but they quickly seemed to agree with Toph’s points.

I finally felt like I should probably chime in.  “People can definitely be friends with the other side.  Many of you know about the last person who died in this feud – Mark, a hydra.”  I had spotted Mark’s dad amongst the crowd earlier, and he jerked a bit when I mentioned Mark.  “Mark was my soulmate,” I told him – and the entire crowd, to the predictable astonishment from them.  “But we couldn’t meet in public or talk in public.  We would sneak out into the woods at night just so we could hang out and make plans for the future and stuff.  The fact is, we were soulmates and weren’t even allowed to publically be friends, but we were friends.  And I daresay we could easily have been friends with others if that invisible line wasn’t there.”

Gia looked like she wanted to verbally agree, but I wasn’t done.

“I have a suggestion – and this is as someone who lost a soulmate and only just got to visit his grave, not as the person whose mother cast the curse on this town.”  They all looked at me, intently.

I hadn’t discussed this with Toph or Gia, but I had been turning it over in my mind ever since visiting Mark’s grave.

“As has been pointed out, we’ve all lost people in this feud.  I lost my grandfather and my soulmate.  Others have lost mothers and fathers and children and cousins and friends.  We’ve all lost some.”  I took a deep breath.  “I think we should make a memorial to everyone who died in this fight, kapra and hydra.”

Thankfully, they looked more intrigued than opposed, so I went on.  “We want to see peace, but forgiveness might be hard, especially for those who killed people important to us.”  I deliberately didn’t look at the back of the room where Marilyn was still lurking in the shadows, though I was tempted to.  “But maybe a memorial to all those people – acknowledging the loss on both sides – is an important step.  A way to honor them and remember their loss but also to acknowledge the losses the other side has faced, too.  A way to grieve together for everyone we’ve lost, hydra or kapra.”  Or dragon.  My mother wasn’t really a victim of this feud, but I had lost time with her because of it.  Still, this wasn’t about me.  This was about trying to help the town find a way to move forward despite the past.

“I think that’s a great idea.”  Toph gave me a reassuring smile.  “So what if we let your new school principal handle holding money for this?  He hangs onto the funds while for the next month or two, you all donate what you can.  Meanwhile, he appoints one person from each side of town to represent them, and those people are in charge of deciding what the memorial looks like and where it’ll be placed.  Obviously a central location, easy for both sides to access, but as far as specifics – by the lake, in the woods, etc. – you’ll need to narrow that down.  Or maybe you’ll opt for a memorial that’s simple, maybe a tree even, that can grow and show strength over time, and maybe you won’t need the money, but maybe you can keep it to fund flowers or other things to plant around it, and the upkeep for them, or even a community garden if you want.  Whatever you want, really, but the point is that it is a joint project from both sides of town and you can all appreciate the result.  Maybe it can be something that you all participate in making and in the upkeep.”

The history teacher didn’t look daunted by this, thankfully, while Gia was practically shaking in her seat with ideas – and she wasn’t the only one.  I thought he’d probably have plenty of volunteers to help with the project.

After all, changing up the school didn’t affect most town residents that much.  It changed life for students, of course, but not the adults.  The memorial, however, was something the adults could be involved in that would hopefully help them start to heal.  They could remember the ones they lost but maybe the memorial would also remind them that the other side had lost people, too, and together they could keep the memorial clean and in good repair, for once building something together.

Despite the rough start, I had hope again.  The people of this town were willing to change – many of them, anyway – and while it might be small steps, they were still taking those steps.  It would likely take several decades more for the town to truly be able to move past the feud, but this was a good start.

Now, though, to deal with the other parts of the town – the die-hards who didn’t want the feud to end.  I might have helped my family start to see the light, but I wasn’t sure it would work with others.  Maybe the information I provided about the feud origins would affect them, too, but at the end of the day, I thought I probably needed to talk to the one person I didn’t want to talk to.

Marilyn.  It was time to talk to Marilyn and see what was really going on with her and those who believed like her.  I’d rather talk to Bill, to be honest, but I doubted he would be as willing to consider talking to me or possibly even listening, since he viewed me as more “the other side” than Marilyn would, even if Marilyn had no love for me, either.

It was not a conversation I was looking forward to.

~~~~~

I had no idea where to find Marilyn, and when I asked, Gia, Jorge, and Manuel had no ideas, either.  They knew that she appeared at random, sometimes with Abigail, to argue with Bill or other hydras, but unless she was at her house, they didn’t know where she’d be.

I thought about going to her house, but the one thing I did remember from younger Marilyn which still seemed to be true was that she didn’t seem to spend much time there.  I wasn’t sure if she didn’t get along with her parents or she just didn’t like the old, almost haunted-looking house, but I was pretty confident it was not the first place I’d find her.

So, where then?  I considered just flying over the town to try to spot her, but I wasn’t sure I could recognize her easily from above, so walking around seemed smarter.

I was on my own today because Toph was busy giving ideas to the history teacher – aka the new school principal – about how to restructure things at the school, but I wasn’t worried about safety and I didn’t think he would be able to help much with Marilyn anyway.  This felt like a conversation that needed to happen with just the two of us – whether it was because she was my personal enemy thanks to her being the one to kill Mark or because I was the one who called her out and ended her “rule” in a sense, I wasn’t sure, but I was somehow confident that this was a conversation between just the two of us.

I stood at the edge of the lake, thinking, and then reconsidered, my eyes focusing in on the lake and narrowing a bit, thinking about what Manuel had said about hiding in the lake instead of going to school.

There was one downside of not being a kapra.  I couldn’t actually turn into a kapra and go down into the lake to look for her, and I didn’t entirely want to just hang out at the edge of the lake waiting to see if she really was down in the lake.  So what was the alternative?  Just wandering around town and asking about her, probably?

I sighed a bit, not thrilled with that prospect but also not really seeing another good option.  So I headed out and started stopping in at some of the shops, trying to see if anyone knew where Marilyn was.

“Marilyn?”  A kapra woman who was busy ironing clothes at the laundry snorted as she efficiently got through shirts faster than I thought was possible.  It was kind of awe-inspiring.  “She got super moody after the curse.  Screamed at people, tried to fight almost everyone, our side included.  She alienated even her followers and then she just kind of got quiet.  I guess she figured out things weren’t changing soon but didn’t know what to do.”

“She shows up for stuff still.”  Another woman rested on one of the washing machines, looking thoughtful.  “She shows up at stuff but kind of avoids people mostly.  Now, she does still stand up for us, like if Bill starts dragging around his posse.  His band of hoodlums has gotten bigger over the past few years and he runs around like a giant bully, and I will give it to her – she doesn’t seem intimidated by them, even when outnumbered.  She’s gotten good at the verbal dress-downs on him, and man, do they work.”  She chuckled darkly.  “She got one of his followers to run home crying over something she said.  Bill had started trying to come over to this side of town to intimidate us, but he gave up when he realized Marilyn’s words were just as sharp as her magic.  So we can thank her for that.”

“I suppose,” the first woman agreed reluctantly, “but she doesn’t limit it to him.  If anyone asks her to support the peace, for instance, she lashes out at them.  Anyone asks her to do anything that isn’t her being the traditional pride leader and she’s about willing to throw a temper tantrum.  I’d appreciate her defending us from Bill and his ilk if she wasn’t just as bad as him towards us.  She nearly made poor Jorge shut his store down when she got mad about him trying to help the hydra store out when their delivery got damaged and they were out of food for a bit.  I mean, she was ruthless.  Called him a traitor and all that.  This was maybe a year and a half, two years after the start of the curse, and she did it in front of a bunch of people.”  The woman shook her head.  “He was shaking after that confrontation and his wife told me he’d actually considered just closing up shop because it was too hard with the feud first, and then even kapras attacking him.  He stuck it out, but he still won’t deal with Marilyn if she comes into the store.  He’ll walk out on her.  It’s not like he leaves his employees to deal with her alone, exactly – he stays just beyond the door so they can call him for help – but even if he’s the only one there, he won’t serve her.”

The other woman, who’d offered some defense for Marilyn, sighed and shook her head.  “Ah, he’s not the only one.  I heard she reamed out the nurses when they started collaborating with the hydras.”

The first woman jerked a bit, her eyes widening.  “Is that why Annette retired early?  She wouldn’t say, but I was confused about it.  She hadn’t planned to retire for a while yet and she’d seemed kind of excited about working with the hydras.  Her retirement didn’t really fit with that.”

“Yep, it seems Marilyn threatened her to the point of making her fear for her housing.  Marilyn’s parents own her place, you know, and she’s kind of trapped with that – can’t really do too much against her landlords or she risks being homeless.”  The woman sighed.  “Sometimes I think it would have done Marilyn some good to get out of town and not be where her family holds so much power.  But she never left for college like the others.  I suppose she couldn’t,” she allowed, “since she had to defend us against the hydras.”

This was actually interesting info, though I wasn’t sure what to do with it, but it also wasn’t helping me locate Marilyn.