by Rin Chupeco
The girl gapes at him. Her friend nudges her away. “Just ignore him, Nat,” the girl whispers. “He’s weird.”
Nobody else bothers him for the rest of his classes. The boy prefers it this way.
There are thirty-two students in one of the elementary-school classrooms next door. Of these thirty-two, one giggles when she spots me.
“Is there something funny you would like to share with the class, Sandra?” The teacher does not sound happy.
“There’s a pretty girl at the back of the room, just standing there,” the girl objects, pointing straight at me. It is the other students’ turn to laugh.
“Don’t make up stories, Sandra. Pay attention,” the teacher says, and the girl obeys, though she cranes her head to look in my direction whenever the woman doesn’t see, still grinning at me.
Soon the teacher leaves, and the yellow-haired, eighteen-year-old girl from before takes her place. As part of the lesson, she wheels in a large cart.
“Mrs. Donahue’s still out on maternity leave, so it looks like you guys will be stuck with me for another week,” she says with a grin. “I promised last time we’ll be conducting our own experiments in static electricity, right?” The students sit up, interested.
The tattooed boy is done with his own classes for the day, and at that moment he is passing through the hallway, where he stops to watch his cousin at work. The young woman sees him and smiles, and the boy lifts a hand in greeting. She gestures at him to enter the classroom.
The little girl, Sandra, is the first to see the tattooed boy. The smile slowly slides off her face.
“This is my cousin, Tarquin Halloway. Say hi to Tarquin.” A chorus of “Hi, Tarquin’s” echoes around the classroom. “He’ll be assisting me in this experiment.” Tarquin shakes his head, waving his hands to show just how terrible he thinks the idea is. “Don’t be shy, Tarquin. Class, would you like Tarquin to help out today?”
Another choruses of yeses from the class, and a whimpered “no” from the girl called Sandra, whom no one hears.
The boy does not know which is worse: social activity, however brief, or turning his cousin down and losing face in a classroom full of ten-year-olds. In the end, he sighs and opts for the former.
The young teacher brings out several lightbulbs and dozens of combs. The boy places his backpack on her desk.
“I’ve wrapped all the bulbs in transparent tape because I know some of you are all thumbs—yes, Bradley, that means you.” More students laugh. “I don’t have enough lightbulbs for everyone, but I do have enough combs, so I’ll be dividing you all into groups of four.”
The students troop up to take the lightbulbs from the cart, until only one remains on the teacher’s table. The teacher’s assistant gives each student a plain silver comb. “Now, we’re going to need absolute darkness. Shut all the windows while I turn off the lights.”
This is done promptly, and from inside the dark there are whispers and giggles, until a flashlight switches on. The young teacher sets it at the edge of the table, light trained up at the ceiling. I begin to count. One bulb, two.
“This is the best part. Bend your head my way, Tark.” She picks up a comb and runs it briskly through Tarquin’s hair. The boy looks resigned to his fate. The students giggle again.
“You can rub the comb against your sweater or anything fuzzy if you’d like, but make sure to do it for as long as you can and let it charge up.” Some of the students copy her movements; others all but scrub their combs against their shirts, switching hands when the first one grows tired. Three, four.
“Ta-da!” the young woman says, and taps her comb against the lightbulb. There is a faint sputter, and inside the bulb, little lights begin to dance briefly at its center before winking out, like small handmade fireflies. Five, six.
There are several oohs and aahs, and more bulbs begin to spark and twitch around the room as students press their combs closer. Seven, eight.
Nine.
Nine
bulbs, all bearing strange little fireflies.
“That’s how normal electricity works, too, but to a much greater extent, of course. Otherwise, you’ll have to keep brushing your hair thousands of times just to watch a half-hour episode of your favorite show.”
No
nines.
Not-nine,
Nevernine.
The girl named Sandra eyes me strangely.
“Whenever you do things like comb through dry hair, or wear socks and shuffle your feet along a really fuzzy carpet, you generate what’s called static. Remember what we talked about last time, about electrons? One way to move electrons from one location to another is by—”
NO
NINES!
The teacher’s table rattles, like something has taken hold of its legs and is knocking them hard against the floor.
No nines
no nines never
nines NO
NINES NO
NINES
NO NINES!
The lightbulb on the young woman’s table ex
plodes
without warning.
At the same time, the flashlight trained on the ceiling catches on a face there, a woman hanging upside down. Tarquin jumps back, mouth open.
There are gasps and cries of surprise, of fear. Somebody switches on the lights.
It is the young woman. She stares down at the misshapen bulb on her table, the glass irrevocably and inexplicably crushed, the tape still wrapped around what remains of its shape.
Though the air is warm, the tattooed boy is white and shivering, trying to pull more of his shirt around himself. The glow around him grows marked, and the tattoos hiding underneath his clothes ripple. It is almost like a shadow is rising out from them, snaking past his chest and neck.
“How—how—” The young teacher stutters, then remembers the sea of inquiring faces before her. She checks the ruined bulb hastily and seems relieved that none of the glass has flown out of the tape. “This is why you mustn’t try this at home without any parental supervision,” the young woman finishes, but it is clear that she herself is distressed over what has happened, though she fights hard not to let it show.
The boy’s shivering has also passed. Color returns to his face, but he, too, is unnerved. The peculiar shadow seeking to fold itself around him has disappeared.
“Experiment’s over for now! Who can tell me what the difference is between a positively charged atom and a negatively charged one? Brian?”
The lessons continue until the bell rings again and the children file out of the classroom, eager to be off. “I want everyone to leave the room through the back door!” the young woman warns. “Just to be on the safe side, in case there’s glass on the floor that needs sweeping up!”
“I’m sorry,” she tells the boy after most of the students have left. “I have no idea how that happened.” The boy’s backpack has fallen off the table, some of its contents spilling out: one binder, three books, and two sharpened pencils. The young woman bends to pick them up.
“Oh, these are good, Tark!” She holds up the binder, now opened to pages of quick sketches and rough drawings: landscapes, animals, miscellaneous people.
The boy snatches it back. “Thanks,” he says, more embarrassed than angry. He stuffs it back into his bag. “I really gotta go, Callie. There’s a shrink waiting to see if I meet her minimum requirements of crazy.”
“Stop that,” the young woman says with a natural firmness that she often adopts with her charges. “You’re not crazy, so stop saying you are.”
The boy grins at her. Something unnatural lurks at the corner of his eyes, something not even he seems aware of. “Sometimes I wish I could believe that, Callie. But my own mother’s batshit crazy, and I’ve seen so much other strange crap in my life that there’s no doubt I’ll be following in her
footsteps soon enough.” He glances up at the ceiling again, but there is nobody there. “I don’t think your attempts at immersing me in the sanity of the general population’s hive-mind are going to work here, but thanks anyway.”
“Tark!” But the boy has already walked out of the room, a hand raised in farewell.
The young woman sighs, sinking into her chair. She picks up the broken bulb and turns it sideways. There is no doubt that the glass inside has been smashed, like a hammer has been violently taken to it. A shield of tape still holds some of the shards in place.
“What happened to you?” she whispers, her tone wondering. She lifts it to get a better view and sees her own slightly distorted image on the surface, tiny and unfocused.
As she watches, another reflection within the bulb moves beside her own.
She gasps, whirling around.
“Miss Starr?”
It is the girl called Sandra. The young teacher’s heart is pounding. “Sandra! You startled me…”
“She’s really sorry,” the child says sincerely.
“Who is?”
“The girl who broke the lightbulb. I know she’s sorry. It’s ’cause you brought nine a’ them. And she really, really doesn’t like the number nine.”
The young woman stares at her.
“I still like her better than the other lady, though.”
“The other lady?”
“The lady with the strange face. The one with Mister Tarquin. She scares me.”
She skips out, leaving the young woman staring after her, and on her face I can read her terror.
There is a crackling sound. Something is on the floor, trapped underneath a table leg. It is a piece of paper from the tattooed boy’s binder.
The young woman picks this up with shaking hands. Unlike the other detailed drawings the boy has drawn, this is a mass of uneven loops and spirals. It is a rough drawing of a lady in black wearing a pale white mask, one half-hidden by her long, dark hair.
CHAPTER FOUR
Black and White
The therapist is named Melinda Creswell. That is the name written on a small golden plaque on the door: Melinda J. Creswell and, underneath that, Psychotherapist. Past the door is a room with two armchairs, two footrests, one couch, and one long table filled with folders. Two windows look out onto the busy street below. There are three certificates framed on the wall and one leafy plant in the corner.
The tattooed boy walks in with an air of expecting to be pounced on and devoured. He stares at a large painting of a summer meadow like he believes a wild beast is lying in wait for him amid the painted weeds.
Melinda Creswell herself is smaller than the room implies. She has graying curly hair and a rosebud mouth, and she is pouring tea the wrong way into two small, unadorned cups. She uses no bamboo whisks or caddies, and so the steam rising from the resulting mixture is of unsatisfactory sweetness. Finally, she smiles at him. “Hello, Tarquin. How was school today?”
The boy says nothing. He slumps into one armchair, and the woman sits across from him in the other, offering a cup and a plate of small, round cookies that he halfheartedly accepts. I begin counting the books behind her, which fill numerous shelves spanning from one wall to the next.
“I’ve just had a talk with your father,” the therapist says, “and I understand you’ve been having difficulty adjusting to Applegate since moving here. Do you want to talk about it?”
The boy blows noisily into his cup and takes a small sip. Then he sets the tea to one side.
“All right. Let’s cut to the chase.”
“What do you mean?”
“My dad paid you money to get me sitting in this chair—probably overpaid you, too, since his solution to every problem is to throw money in its face until it chokes from taxes. I’m pretty sure you have all my vital statistics—height, weight, eye color, allergies, my favorite breakfast cereal. You know we’re from northern Maine, which is the coldest part of the United States except Alaska. There should be a government mandate preventing anyone other than yetis and hobbits from living in northern Maine, that’s how cold I think it is.
“And now we’re in Applegate, where the sun is actually doing its job but where the people are all so. Damn. Friendly. I can’t take two steps without someone asking how I’m doing, or what my name is, or why I’m wearing thick clothes in this kind of weather, as if they’re all required by the government to introduce themselves to everyone else like friendly, neighborhood child molesters.
“We’re here because Dad found a bigger and better-paying white-collar job—you’d think he was the only investment banker up north the way he carries on—and so we could be closer to my mother, who is clearly crazy and who has on occasion declared her undying love for her only son by nearly strangling me to death. So yes, I am thrilled at the prospect of putting myself within spitting distance for her to try again. And the absolutely mind-blowing conclusion you’ve reached is that I may be having ‘difficulty adjusting since moving to Applegate’? Really, Sherlock?”
The woman waits placidly until he is done with his spiel before speaking again. “Do you hate your mother, Tarquin?”
The boy looks back at her, and some of the anger leaves his face. “No. I’ve never hated her.”
“Are you afraid of what she might do to you?”
“Only because what she does appears to be catching.” A pause. “I killed someone, you know.”
The therapist sounds calm and unworried despite this admission. “Who did you kill?”
“Some boy at school.”
“Was he a friend?”
“Only if you’re the kind of masochist that enjoys being beaten up by ‘friends.’”
“I was told by your father that the police investigated what happened to you at your old school. They said there was no possible way that you were responsible for that.”
“Still my fault he’s dead.” The boy shifts. “I really don’t want to talk about it anymore.”
“That’s all right. I don’t want you talking about anything that makes you uncomfortable. How about telling me something about your relatives here in Applegate, instead?”
“You mean Callie? She’s great. She and Aunt Linda are the sanest and nicest people I know, which is another reason Dad decided to take the job and move here.”
“I’ve heard she works as a teaching assistant at Perry Hills Elementary.”
“It’s something you’d expect someone like Callie to do. Callie loves kids. At least three times a year they visit us in Maine, despite weather that can freeze your toes off, and she never complains. We’ve always been close, for two people who live several hundred miles away from each other. She’s like the big sister I never had. Callie’s always taken care of me, even back then.”
“How so?”
“She gets me out of trouble, for one thing.”
“And are you often in trouble?”
“Got a knack for it. When I was six, I decided to eat crayons—I wanted to see if it would, uh, come out the other end in different colors, and my repeated failures made me all the more determined—and she made me barf them all out every time I did, before I could get sick. Another time I nearly sliced off my thumb making dinner, and she got me to a hospital before I was done hyperventilating. Little things like that.” The boy smiles faintly at the memory. “I always joked that she was born old. She said it’s because one of us had to grow up, and it wasn’t likely to be me. I’d always been a stupid kid. Probably still am.”
The boy pauses again. The woman is quick to pick up on the sudden change in his manner.
“Have you asked her for help recently?”
“Not…not recently, no. I decided not to.”
“And why not?”
Again he hesitates. His eyes drift back to the painting. Ninety-eight, I count. Ninety-nine. One hundred.
>
“Because she won’t believe me.”
• • •
But the young woman has a strong capacity for belief.
“They’re kids, Callie,” her friend objects, a woman with short, black hair and a round face, nearly six years older. They are preparing to leave for the day, the school corridors empty of the students who swarmed out only hours before. “Of course they’re going to say they see dead people. Didn’t you watch the movie?”
The teenager is far from amused. “I’m serious, Jen. There’s something strange going on.”
“Sandra’s one of my students, too, remember? She’s always been a little spaced out. I don’t think she’s been weaned off imaginary friends yet. There’s one of those in every class.”
“No. I mean, yes, she’s a little unusual, but I meant Tarquin.”
“Your cousin, the Halloway boy? The one they say has all those tattoos on his arms? Poor kid. The one with the crazy mother? No offense,” she adds quickly, but Callie shakes her head.
“I’ve never met Aunt Yoko. Uncle Doug told me it wasn’t exactly abuse, but he didn’t explain how it wasn’t. It’s not something they like talking about, and Mom always felt we shouldn’t push.”
“He’d say that, of course. Kid’s got a hard enough life without having to advertise to the whole school that his ma’s got several screws loose in the brain department. Have you seen them? The tattoos? He’s always wearing those big shirts so I couldn’t get much of a look. Not that I blame him for wanting to hide them.”
“A few times, and always by accident. There are some small circles, right above his wrists, with very peculiar writing. I…I got chills just by looking at it. You know that cliché about the hairs standing up at the back of your neck? I feel that every time I see those tattoos, and I don’t even know why. I have a feeling there are more of them he isn’t showing.”
“Have you asked Mr. Halloway anything more about them?”
“Where would I even begin? ‘If you don’t mind my asking, Uncle Doug, I’d like to know exactly how many tattoos Aunt Yoko gave Tarquin during her mental breakdown. Oh, no reason, they just scare the bejesus out of me.’”
