“Are you serious?” I say, but he just stares at me before stomping off, slamming out through the cafeteria’s double doors with a grunt. The plastic pizza plate is still finishing its tightening spin on the floor at my feet, like a quarter does when it’s nearly done spinning on the tabletop. It’s one of Greg’s annoying habits: spinning nickels and quarters on the desk in front of his keyboard during even the tiniest moment of downtime.
Svetlana looks up at me, her mouth open a little, and then pulls in the bottom lip again. She can’t be real.
I’m waiting for her to speak. I’m waiting for her to explain how Fry can be real too, how a little late-night bike mishap could lead to cafeteria assault that I should rightfully have nothing to do with. My timeline has crossed with Svetlana’s—and with it Svvetlana’s—and they’re both magical, so it can’t be an accident. I’m beginning to think single-v Svetlana is the more magical of the two, no matter what spells the priestess masters.
Her lips part again, and she says, “I need a new fork.”
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
…………………………………………………………
CHAPTER 17
SVETLANA ALLEGHENY
Pretty sure I won’t be eating lunch with Lesh again. It’s not like people find it a thrilling prospect to be harassed by the stalking nemeses of girls they hardly know and have had lunch with by accident twice.
I’m not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, I hardly know him, either, and it’s not like he’s an obvious choice for a friend (or whatever). He’s younger than I am, and he dresses like a teenage funeral director. On the other hand … I don’t know. He’s gotten rid of Fry twice now. And he clearly liked my notebook—I don’t know the last time someone who wasn’t a Gaming Club member even got to see one of my notebooks.
I’m staggering numbly down the English hallway, and now and then I have to violently shrug my right shoulder to keep my tote bag on there. It’s too heavy, but when I remember why—five copies of my hand-drawn, meticulously articulated monster manual and one pristine copy of the green notebook (for the dungeon master’s eyes only), full of maps and monster notes and encounters—I smile. In less than three hours, I’ll be with the club, and I can forget about Fry’s insanity and Lesh’s dark eyelashes.
Dark eyelashes? Where did that come from?
I slip into Dr. Serrano’s poetry class and into my desk, and then find the anthology sandwiched between monster manuals and my DM’s screen. Among the spiral notebooks, one has a swirling drawing, all in blue ink, of a rough-wave ocean crashing against tall cliffs. Very Nordic. That’s my poetry notebook, the only academic notebook I have that doesn’t make me want to crawl back into bed.
I’m still flipping to the page marked on the board—it’s the poem we read last night, by Longfellow—when Serrano calls on Atticus Bernstein to give his thoughts on the reading.
Poor boy. With a name like Atticus, every word he utters ought to be inspired and wise, spoken with a voice that compels all within earshot to sit up and listen. I wonder how disappointed Atticus’s parents must be. Such a noble and lofty name full of great expectations, and they end up with a heavyset boy with a prominent brow and underdeveloped frontal lobe who says “um” a lot and scratches himself in the cafeteria.
His response is neither inspired nor wise. It is predictable and vapid. I’ll not bother transcribing it for you.
Dr. Serrano crosses his arms and leans one shoulder against the whiteboard. He smiles and nods and doesn’t say a word.
“Um … ,” says Atticus. “Dr. Serrano? Was I right?”
Serrano stands up straight and looks out over the sea of young and oblivious faces.
“Answer him, learners,” Dr. Serrano says. “Is he right?”
Eyes go down. Some people look around, to see who might dare speak up. Finally I take a deep breath and raise my hand. I love this poem, and I want Serrano to know it. He doesn’t look at me, though. He just points and says, “Go.”
“He is right,” I say, and the Cro-Magnon walking literary reference smiles. But then I go on: “Strictly speaking. But saying this poem is about life and death and everything is like saying—I don’t know—that Romeo and Juliet is a little love story.”
“Explain,” Dr. Serrano says. He sits at his desk and holds his hands like a steeple.
I sit up a little straighter and clear my throat. My ears are getting hot now, but I press on. “It’s a technical poem,” I say. “Longfellow got every word, every repetition, every sound, just exactly right.” My words begin to come faster—too fast—as I go on. I’m speaking and spinning out of control. Just let me stay awake. “You feel the draw and release of the current in your stomach as you read, because that’s the rhythm of the poem, and that’s what the alliteration of the piece makes you feel. You feel the waves move up and down, and the tide go in and come out. You feel the horses ready to run. You feel the earth itself breathe in and out. In and out. In and out.”
I try to catch my breath, to slow down a little, but I can’t. “Longfellow makes you feel the rhythm of life and death,” I add quickly, glancing at Atticus. The words tumble out of me, like dice from a cup. “We’re each of us the traveler. Those are our footprints in the sand. It’ll all be wiped away.”
Now my face is hot. I’m out of breath, and I know the class is watching me now, turning in their seats, so I drop my eyes and shrug—No big thing—but it’s no good, because I’ve just been short of breath, repeating “in and out, in and out.” I pick at the corner of my notebook, staring at the art on its cover—the drawing I’d made after reading and rereading this poem—and wish desperately I were there, tossing in those waves. A boy snickers, and my face gets even hotter, a little tingly. I don’t know if I can hold on.
“Anything else?” Serrano says, snapping me out of it, just enough, and finally looking at me.
“I kind of think that even if you didn’t understand English, just listening to this poem, you’d get it.” I can speak more slowly, but my voice is quiet now, barely a whisper. “You’d feel the tide rise and fall.”
Serrano is standing over my desk now, smiling down at me. “Good,” he says, very quietly. “Good.”
Then he bursts into life and in three long strides is back at the whiteboard on the longest wall of the classroom. “Svetlana has led us beautifully into why I chose this poem for your first reading assignment: it’s short.”
The class chuckles, and the tension—if it existed in the room outside of my own thundering chest—is broken. I glance out the window. The big maples that line Lexington Avenue are still green, but they’re thinking about turning. I can tell.
“But seriously,” Serrano says, grabbing a marker. “I want to talk about form now, and that is the heart of what Svetlana has shown us. Form isn’t just a vessel. It’s not a paper cup that we fill up with a poem, a liquid poem that would fill a glass vase or a gravy boat just as well. It’s a part of the poem itself.”
I pull my eyes back to watch him write, and I cross my ankles and prop up my chin with both fists.
A good afternoon puts me on air. I’m not walking anymore when the final bell rings and releases me into the normally stifling hallways of Central. I’m not prancing, skipping, sashaying, either. I’m floating. I’m like a windborne seed, up near the ceiling, curving mindlessly toward the English wing, toward room 3212. No one sees me, no one notices—no one would predict I’ll land in that linoleum room on that linoleum floor among those linoleum desks, and I’ll somehow take root and blossom.
Cheesy, I know. It’s the mood I’m in, and I suppose I’d better shake it, because a good DM can’t be cheesy and cheerful. She has to be ruthless, cold, and utterly certain in every choice, every calculated obstacle and predictable misstep the party will make. I am not their opponent, and I am not their ally. I am their god.
Cheery-and-cheesy mood shaken,
I step into 3212 and grin. I let my tote slide down my arm and catch the handles as they reach my hand. “Hi, Ms. Grimmish.” Classics, Latin, Shakespeare, Elizabethan Playwrights … if there’s an elective for those of us who were born in the wrong era—never mind the wrong year or decade—Ms. Grimmish teaches it.
She pulls off her glasses, lets them hang from the chain of fake pearls they live on, and clucks her tongue. Then she throws out her arms, like the big desk at the front of 3212 is actually center stage at the Globe Theatre. “She arrives!” She bellows it.
I turn as the chairs scrape at the back of the room, pushed back from the table, and Roan and Reggie stand up. Cole hardly shifts. He uncrosses his arms and grabs a pen to twirl. More oddly, he’s not sitting next to Reggie. He’s directly across from Roan, on a short side of the table, and Abraham is seated in the gaping canyon that separates Cole and Reggie.
Abraham leans back and makes a point of checking the clock behind Ms. Grimmish. “Did you get lost on the way here, Allegheny?” he says, folding his hands behind his head.
Roan hurries to join Reggie and Abraham on their long side of the table, facing the room, and mounts an empty seat on her knees. She leans eagerly across the table, her arms and fingers stretched as far and wide as they’ll go, like she’s a lion waking up with a grin. Her tangle of orange hair is her mane, and the freckles across her nose and mouth are the dried blood from her pre-doze kill and feast.
“Finally!” she says, and she drums the table with her fingers. “Let’s go, let’s go.”
“Am I that late?” I say, glancing at the clock. I’m not.
Reggie sits down and shakes his green velvet bag—his dice bag. “We’re excited.” Cole scoots his chair over, around the corner of the table to join the adventuring party—a slight little shuffle, void of enthusiasm, and I make a mental note to check with Roan later. Something’s off between Reggie and Cole, and that cannot be good.
I grab my seat facing them—a key aspect of dungeon mastering is the solitude of tremendous power—and dump the contents of my tote bag across the big table. Reggie and Abraham grab for the duplicates I’d made, Cole casually takes his, but Roan pauses and stares: there’s the mangled green notebook.
“Whoa,” she says, reaching for it, touching it like it’s a wounded eagle. “Svet, what happened?” She takes the cover between her thumb and first finger and lifts it, just a little, just gingerly. “Oh my gosh.”
I slide down in my seat. I nod and frown. I lean forward and take the wounded eagle from Roan’s careful fingers, and I flip through the warped pages, with an absent mind checking again for the few spots of unharmed ink therein. But it’s all for show. It’s all because these four—these misanthropic, misplaced, mismatched, mistreated four—will know how much this should upset me, and I don’t want them to know (not yet; maybe not ever) that I’ve already forgiven Lesh.
Lesh the miscreant, Lesh my lunch friend, Lesh, who sent Fry packing.
“The other night,” I say, “I fell off my bike.”
Blink. Blink.
“The other night,” I try again, “I hit a boy with my bike.”
“Oh my gosh, who?” “Was he hurt?”
“The other night,” I try one more time, “some drunk guy knocked my bike over and the green notebook landed in a puddle.”
“Should we kill him?” Roan says, leaning farther yet across the table.
“Ms. Garnet,” Ms. Grimmish bellows kindly from the front of the room. “Climb in the playground, if you please, not in my classroom.”
“Sorry, Ms. G,” she calls back, and settles down a bit. She still leans farther across the table than decorum typically allows. She’s an easy girl to forgive, though, and Ms. Grimmish is satisfied.
“Who was it?” Cole says. His voice is flat, disinterested. Bored.
“A sophomore,” I say, and then I follow it up with a lie that I should know better than to attempt: “I don’t know his name. It doesn’t matter. He’s a miscreant.”
“What’s he look like?” Abraham says. Now even he’s leaning forward, and this isn’t, so far, how I intended our first meeting of the year to go.
“Guys, forget it,” I say, and I shuffle some papers and start to unfold my screen. “I thought you were excited to start this campaign.”
“Fork the campaign,” says Abraham.
“Mr. Polsen!” says Ms. Grimmish. “Language!”
“Sorry!” he calls back, and then he says it again, super quiet: “Fork the campaign. I wanna know who this jerk is.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I say, and I grab the duplicate green folder and hold it up. “See? A perfect copy. It’s safe. The material is safe. Your campaign will move along brilliantly.”
He sags back. Reggie shrugs. Roan drums the table with both hands. “Agreed,” she says. “Let’s start.”
“Good,” I say. “Got your character sheets?”
And Cole stands up. For the first time, I notice he is without bag, without notebook, without anything.
“Guys, I’m quitting the club,” he says, and he looks at Reggie, who is not looking at him. “Sorry.”
He walks toward the door at the front and Ms. Grimmish hops up from her desk and puts out an arm to gently stop him. At the back of the room, we’re all straining to see and hear, but it’s just whispers and mumbles. He moves for the door again.
“Mr. Andersen,” Grimmish says louder, “if you leave, membership falls to four.”
“Oh, sugar,” says Abraham, sort of.
And the door opens, and Cole goes out, and for a moment we hear the after-hours murmur of liberated students moving through the halls or speaking to each other in their own club meetings before the door clicks closed again, bringing our sad silence back to us.
Lucky jerks. They all have five—probably way more than five—members. But now we have only four, which means we don’t get a faculty adviser. We don’t get room 3212. We don’t get extracurricular credit.
We get nothing. We get future meetings in the Garnets’ basement. And we all know better than to think we’ll find a fifth member, some random geek that heretofore we’d never uttered a word to, roaming the halls of Central with a secret affinity for role-playing. We’ve been down the road of recruitment before. It never ends well.
Roan lets her head fall forward onto the table and rolls it back and forth, her hair rolling with it. She’s set her little section of the table on fire.
Reggie’s eyebrows are way up, deflecting blame. We won’t talk about it now—there’s no point—but obviously he dumped Cole, and Cole therefore dumped us.
Abraham drops heavily into his chair and lets his head bang into the wall behind him. “We,” he says, “are forked.”
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
…………………………………………………………
CHAPTER 18
LESH TUNGSTEN
Greg is not my only friend. Our circle will probably change over the year—that happens, thank god—but for now it’s got a few other guys, and a few other girls. They’re generally not important, especially as I’m grounded for the rest of my life. Anyway, one of them is Fio, short for Fiorello. He’s the most obnoxious guy you’ve ever heard of, but it’s made him one of the most notorious (which is at least widely known, if not well liked) guys in the grade.
Greg’s hanging around my locker with Fio when I show up after the last bell. I’m not really in the mood for either of them, but if I have to walk home with Greg, I’ll bear it. He’s going that way anyway. Fio, however, is never interested in a casual walk. He’s got something ridiculous in mind.
Something about Fio: he leaves the fly of his jeans open all day, every day. Don’t ask him why, because he’ll just say, “It needs air,” and then stare at you. He’s challenging you, but you’ll never know if it’s to a fight or a make-out session. The point is he’s uncomfortable to be around.
&nbs
p; Still, I can’t help checking: today’s no different. His fly’s open to the extreme. He’s got some fabric from his underwear pulled out the toothy opening.
“Hey, Tung,” says Fio as I slap five with Greg to say hello. “We’re going to MOA with Cheese and Weiner.”
These are people. Both are seniors, both are deeply metal. I don’t even know Cheese’s real name. I do know they are the two biggest potheads at Central.
I shake my head and open my locker. “I’m grounded.” Who knows if I’d break the grounding? The fact is I don’t want to go anyway.
Fio laughs at that, and Greg says, “I told you.”
“Tung, bro,” Fio says, grinning, “your idiot parents aren’t home.”
I’m shuffling books in my locker. I let the insult slide, not because he frightens me, but because I don’t actually care. My parents are, occasionally, total idiots.
“How the hell do you know?” I ask instead of defending them.
“I know because your dad is never home,” he says, “because he’s always building garages. Am I right?”
I shrug, shoulder my backpack, and slam my locker.
“So your dad’s building a garage,” Fio goes on, and then he glances at Greg and finishes, “And your mom is probably pitching someone’s tent.”
Greg laughs it up. I just shake my head. “Whatever. Have fun.”
“You should come,” Greg tries. “You’ll be home by six.”
“No, you won’t,” Fio says. “You’ll be stoned by six. You’ll be getting head from Jelly by eight.”
Jelly is a person too—a female person, often seen in the company of Cheese and Weiner. I doubt very much she deserves the rep she has, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t look good in tight black jeans, and it doesn’t mean Fio’s not-so-vague prediction isn’t both appealing and positively terrifying. I’m glad my jeans are, as always, mad baggy.
“Can’t do it.” I turn my back on them and head toward the door.
Guy in Real Life Page 8
