by Douglas Rees
Mr. Horvath stood up. So did Dad. So did I. Mr. Horvath shook Dad's hand again, opened the door to his office, and said, "Ms. Prentiss, have we Master Cody's schedule of classes?"
"Right here, Mr. Horvath," she said.
There was a little white card on her desk, printed in gold. The whole thing was printed, even my name.
ELLIOT, Cody
First Period Homeroom 7:45-8:00 Kovacs Second Period Mathematics 8:05-9:00 Mach Third Period English 9:05-10:00 Shadwell Fourth Period Social Studies 10:05-11:00 Gibbon
Fifth Period Gymnasium 11:05-12:00 Lucakcs
Sixth Period Dinner 12:05-1:00
Seventh Period Science 1:05-2:00 Vukovitch
Free Period 2:05-2:30
Water Polo 2:35-3:30 Underskinker
"What exactly is free period?" I asked.
"It's time at the end of the day to visit your teachers and ask for help with anything you perhaps didn't understand in the lesson," Ms. Prentiss said. "Or to visit the library. Or even to visit your friends in the student union."
"The student union?" I said.
"It's that large square building between the dormitories," Mr. Horvath said.
"What kind of public school has dormitories, Mr. Horvath?" Dad asked.
"One with a worldwide reputation, Mr. Elliot," Mr. Horvath said. "One that attracts students from many countries."
"And the taxpayers support this?"
"I am happy to say that the citizens of this community have voted us whatever we have asked for, for generations," Mr. Horvath said. "Usually by margins approaching ninety-nine percent."
Dad looked at me and I knew what he was thinking. I was thinking it, too.
What kind of school is this?
"Now, Mr. Elliot, if you are satisfied, please sign your son's schedule of classes," Mr. Horvath said.
Dad took out his pen, but he didn't sign.
"We still haven't visited OLPH," he said.
"Dad, sign," I said.
Water polo had to be better than perpetual homework. Besides, I wouldn't be on the team that long.
Dad signed. As he left, he mumbled, "Call me."
I knew from his tone that he meant "Call me if anything too weird happens," and I felt warm toward him in a way I hadn't for months.
HOW TO MAKE THE
WATER POLO TEAM WITHOUT
EVEN TRYING
When Dad WaS gone, Mr. Horvath turned to me.
"Master Cody, I want you to know how pleased I am that you have decided to enroll here. Please feel free to visit me any time you are confused or uncertain about the practices of our school. I am sure you will find some of them odd at first, and I want you to be comfortable here."
"Thanks," I said.
Then he called, "Charon," and the giant timber wolf slinked over.
"As this is your first day, I will assign Charon to show you to your classes," he said. "Don't worry. He knows his way around this school better than I do."
Then he said something to Charon in another language. The wolf walked over to the office door and looked back over his shoulder at me.
I followed him down the hall, trying to keep as far away as I could. That wasn't very far, though. Every time I got more than a few feet behind him, Charon would stop and wait till I caught up.
So in a couple of minutes I was at the door of my math class. I turned the handle—the doors had gold-colored handles, not knobs—and went in with Charon right behind me.
In a way, Mr. Mach's math class looked like a regular classroom. In another way, it looked like no classroom I'd ever seen. There were blackboards, windows, chairs, and desks, just like any classroom you've ever been in. But the blackboards were real slate—stone so dark the chalk marks on it almost glistened. The chairs were armchairs; the desks were real desks, with drawers and glass on top and individual lights. The students needed them. The glass in the windows was tinted so dark that it was almost like trying to look through a fourth wall.
Of course, everyone turned around when I came in. There were only twelve kids in the whole class, and they almost all looked alike. They were tall and pale with straight black hair and dark eyes. Hardly anybody seemed average sized like me.
I did notice one kid, brown-haired with glasses, who seemed real short. His name was Justin Warrener. I knew that because he had a name plate on his desk. Every kid did.
"Come in, Elliot," Mr. Mach said. "You'll find your desk over there by the window. Put your things in the cloakroom and join us. We were just discussing some of the remarkable mathematical properties of the Aeolian scale."
By now, I was almost not surprised that he already knew my name.
Mr. Mach was a tall, heavy guy with bushy black hair and a beard that looked like it wanted to wander off on its own. He had great eyes, really friendly-looking. He was holding a violin in his hand.
While I took off my hat and coat and put them away in the cloakroom—which was a real room, with individual coat hangers and places to sit—and yeah, my name was already on one of the closet doors—I heard him draw the bow across the strings and make a long, pure note.
"That's B, of course," Mr. Mach said. "But just think about this: If I place my finger so, and make the same stroke with the bow, it becomes A. What's changed? It's still the same instrument, the same man playing it. What's different?"
"The rate of vibration?" I heard a girl's voice ask.
"Exactly," Mr. Mach said. "The vibration rate, which is the rate of the quavers in the string itself. We can number these, divide them into halves and quarters—they're infinitely divisible, in fact—and compute the mathematical profile of any given note."
I took my seat as quietly as I could. Charon sat beside me with his ears cocked forward like he was really paying attention. I noticed that his head was on a level with mine.
"Let me restate my main point for Elliot's benefit," Mr. Mach said. "I am demonstrating to the class why it is that music was—properly—regarded as a branch of mathematics by our ancestors. Music is math you can hear."
"Gotcha," I said.
A couple of kids giggled, and Charon gave me a disgusted look.
While Mr. Mach talked, I quietly checked out my desk. When I pulled open the top drawer, I found a math book, a notebook, pens, pencils, protractor, ruler, calculator—everything laid out and waiting. There were even extra batteries for the calculator. If I had wanted to learn anything, this would have been the place to do it.
I didn't, but with Charon sitting next to me, I thought I'd better look like I was interested. I pulled out the notebook and a pen and wrote, Music is math you can hear. Then I sat trying to look as though I knew what Mr. Mach and the rest of the class were talking about.
At the end, Mr. Mach said, "Your homework for Friday is to select any composition by Mozart. Assign numeric values to the parts of the composition and, using fractions, not decimals, demonstrate how they interrelate mathematically."
Friday? This was Wednesday. These kids were going to turn in homework like that in two days? The only thing I knew about Mozart was that they made a movie about him. I'd seen it with my parents. He wrote some music and he died.
Then I heard a deep, soft gonging sound roll through the hallway. The other kids got up and filed out quietly.
I hung back and waited till the last of them were gone.
"Mr. Mach," I said. "Just so you know, there's no way I can do that assignment. Where I was in school before, we were doing algebra."
He smiled and looked at me with those great eyes.
"You can try. When you've tried, you'll know more than you do now. Don't worry about it." He clapped me on the shoulder. "Nice to have you in my class."
So I went out. I reminded myself that I really wanted to flunk anyway, as long as I could do it without getting sent to good old Perpetual. It looked like I wasn't going to have any trouble.
The hall was full of kids, but it was weirdly quiet. Hardly anyone talked. If they did, it was in whispers. Nobody shoved, n
obody ran. They just headed for their next classes down that beautiful hallway, through those silent doors.
Charon took me to a room across the hall. I checked my schedule. English. Shadwell.
As I went in, a broad man with a huge bald head bounced across the room to me and grabbed my hand.
"Elliot! Glad to meet you, boy. Have a seat over there by Antonescu. Check your desk. I think you'll find everything in order, though. Any relation to T. S. Eliot, by the way? No, I suppose not. I see you spell it differently. Still, a great poet, eh? Despair, despair, but beauty, too. 'I should have been a pair of ragged claws/Scuttling across the floors of silent seas/ Great stuff. And Pound. My God, Pound. Have you read the Cantos yet?"
He sort of pushed me down into my seat.
"Now, just briefly, let me explain what's expected of you this year. We're all writing something. A play, a novel, a volume of poems, perhaps an epic. I'm very fond of epics myself. Written seventeen of them so far. Dedicate them to my wife. She loves that. Always bakes me a
lasagna whenever I finish one. Must have you over some night to feast. But enough about that. The main point is, you can write whatever you choose, but it must be finished work, and of a suitable length. Say, three hundred pages on average for the novel or epic, full-length plays, that sort of thing. Tell you what, though, since you're coming in at the middle of the year, I'll let you get away with rewriting some of your early work. What is it that you write, exactly?"
"Nothing," I mumbled.
"Nonfiction?" Mr. Shadwell bellowed. "Why not? History, biography, that sort of thing. Rather you didn't try to fob me off with a scientific treatise, though. Not my strong suit. Still, if you offer me something on plate tectonics, or radio astronomy, or Triassic paleontology, I should be able to pick my way through it."
"No, I said, 'Nothing,'" I said.
"Ah," said Shadwell. "Water polo, I take it?"
I nodded and held out my schedule.
"Never mind. Forget I said anything," Shadwell said, handing it back.
There was another deep gonging sound.
"Time for class," Mr. Shadwell said. "Good talking with you, Elliot."
He turned away and I heard him mutter, "Water polo. Why didn't they say so?" Then he sort of pranced to the head of the class and over to a podium with a huge bound pile of paper on it. The pile was as thick as three phone books.
"There are certain principles of Anglo-Saxon prosody that I consider to be absolutely critical for those of you engaged in writing poetry," Mr. Shadwell said. "And they
are of value to any writer. I find them to be well embodied in my latest completed work, Quetzal, which, as you know, traces the course of Mexican history from the erection of Teotihuacan around 150 a.d. to the revolution of 1910. Therefore, I will proceed to read a portion of it to you, illustrating the points I wish to make as I go."
He opened the thing to the middle and started to read.
I didn't know what it was about. I caught something about a battle, and that sounded interesting, but I couldn't figure out who was doing what to who, and then the fighting stopped and everybody started suffering. I gave up even trying to listen, though it was hard not to because he bellowed.
Charon didn't seem as interested as he'd been in Mr. Mach's class, either. He turned his back on Mr. Shadwell and curled up with his tail wrapped over his nose. I was pretty sure he was sleeping.
I looked in my desk. It was a lot like the one in Mr. Mach's class. There was a big book, Some Glories of English Literature, Collected by Norman Percival Shadwell, and a notebook and pens. The difference was that every drawer of this desk was filled with paper, and there were five drawers.
And these kids were all writing what? I'd never written anything longer than a birthday card without being forced.
I looked around the room. The other kids all looked like they were listening. Geez, they were serious. I saw the little brown-haired guy from math class taking notes like mad. Then I looked at the desk beside me.
"Sit next to Antonescu," Mr. Shadwell had said. Well, Antonescu's first name was Ileana, and she was beautiful. She had pale skin and long black hair, like most of the people at Vlad Dracul, but she was short and delicate. Her eyes were almost as yellow as Charon's. When she moved, it was like a bird flying, even if it was just folding her fingers around her pen.
Was she Hamilton Antonescu's daughter? This could be good. If our dads worked together, and her dad had already helped get me in here, maybe she'd want to be my girlfriend. I could use one.
So I passed her a note.
Hi. I'm Cody Elliot. I'll bet you're Hamilton Antonescu's daughter, right? My dad works with your dad.
I slid it over to the corner of her desk when Mr. Shad-well dipped his head down to get a start on an extra-good bellow, but she didn't notice. It just sat there while she looked at him with her chin resting on her folded hands.
Every time he stopped reading to holler something about how important this passage was to Anglo-Saxon prosody, and how well what he'd written showed it, she'd pick up her pen and write a few words, then put it down and turn her beautiful eyes back to him.
Then class was over. Ileana stood up and started to walk away. For the first time, she noticed the note. She read it, gave me a funny look, and walked off with it tucked in her purse.
That was the first time I realized that so far, no kid had talked to me. And no kid did, not in social studies, where Mr. Gibbon, who looked like one—a gibbon, I mean—talked for fifty-five solid minutes about the salt
trade in early Carolingian Europe, and for homework assigned us to bring salted food to class. Not in gym, which at least seemed like a normal class with jumping jacks and running and a coach who kept screaming at us.
Then it was time for dinner—not lunch—and Charon and I went with all the other kids toward the student union.
When I walked in, I saw ... a palace. I'd never been in a palace before, but I knew I was in one now. Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Snow White must all have ended up in some place like this.
Tapestries and carved wood covered the walls. The ceilings were painted with scenes that looked as though they probably came out of one of Mr. Shadwell's epics, and there were huge pieces of gilded furniture, suits of armor, and statues everywhere.
And that was only the lobby.
Everyone went to the left, into a dining hall—no, a banquet hall—and sat. There were tables for four with place cards and red tablecloths and black plates and cups and shining silver.
Charon led me to a place with my name on it. Then he went back toward the kitchen. I saw one of the waiters—there were waiters in white jackets—call the chef out of the kitchen. The chef bent over and Charon licked him. The chef laughed, and in another minute Charon was eating a pile of meat the size of a steer off a silver platter.
As soon as we were all sitting down, the waiters wheeled out carts loaded with covered dishes. They glided over to the tables, put the food in front of us,
whipped the covers off the plates, and gave us little bows.
"Bon appetit," the one at my table whispered.
The food was stuff I'd never seen, eaten, or heard about. Little slices of meat, bits of cheese. Vegetables that looked like they'd been imported from Mars. But, I had to admit, everything tasted great. Maybe they had a secret sauce.
I was sitting with Ileana, Justin Warrener, and a big kid named Brian Blatt. He had real short hair and lots of acne.
"You the new guy?" he said to me.
At last, somebody talking to me.
"Yeah," I said.
"You on the water polo team?"
"I guess," I said. "I told Horvath I'd try out."
"Hell," said Brian Blatt, and put his face down near his plate and started to suck his food up his nose—okay, I'm exaggerating that part. But that was all he said.
As soon as he'd finished licking his plate and stealing all the rolls from the basket in the center of the table—all right, he didn't lic
k his plate, but he did steal the rolls— he got up and shuffled out the door.
Some other guys sitting together at a table in the corner got up at the same time.
"Hey, dudes, wait up," Brian hollered.
They hollered back, " 'S'up, dude?" and "Whuzzit?"
At last, normal conversation. But they went out together and the dining hall was quiet again. The loudest sound was the silverware clinking over the soft hum of the other kids' talk.
Ileana put down her fork.
"I beg your pardon," she said.
"Huh?" I replied.
"You placed a piece of paper on my desk today," she said. "Will you kindly explain why you did that?"
She had some kind of accent, just barely there. Her words were very precise.
"It was just... a note," I said.
"I see. And is this behavior common among students at other schools?" she asked.
"Everybody does it," I said.
"I see. Thank you," Ileana said, and started eating her dessert. It was some kind of food nearly like ice cream, but better.
"So are you Hamilton Antonescu's daughter?" I asked.
"Yes," she replied.
"I'm Cody Elliot," I said. "My dad works with your dad."
"So you said in your note," she said.
And that was that.
After a few minutes, the other kid, Justin, spoke up.
"I've been told other schools are noisy places. Everyone talking all the time. Is that true?" he asked.
"Yeah," I said.
"Then why do you pass notes?" he asked.
" 'Cause you don't want anyone else to know what you're saying," I said. "Notes are private."
Justin shook his head. "Doesn't make much sense. Do the teachers make you pass the notes?"
"No," I said. "We're not supposed to do it."
"Makes even less sense," he said.
"Doesn't anybody ever pass notes here?" I asked.
"What for?" Justin asked.
"Well, like I said, so you can tell somebody something you don't want anybody else to know," I said.
"Such as?" Justin asked.
"Well, anything," I said. I wasn't going to tell him you pass notes to girls to get them to pass notes to you. If he couldn't figure that out, it wasn't my job to explain it to him.
