SONS of DON

by Brenda L. Harper

  Maybe that was part of the reason she had overslept. She read until well after midnight.

  She was quickly engrossed in the story again when a shadow fell over the pages.

  “You do know that school hasn’t officially started yet, don’t you?”

  Gwen glanced up and instantly felt a sense of familiarity. He was tall, nearly as tall as Cei, with reddish blond hair that fell onto his forehead, forcing him to jerk his head to see her clearly. Under that rogue lock of hair were the most intense green eyes Gwen had ever seen. A perfect emerald green, much clearer than any color she had ever seen. His jaw was wide, his nose a little flat at the top. And full lips that pulled the focus downward, made dirty thoughts slip through a young girl’s mind.

  For the second time in four days, Gwen had to remind herself that boys were not part of the plan.

  “Reading is relaxing. You should try it sometime.”

  The boy flicked his nail against the top of the book. “I save this kind of intense reading for school assignments.”

  “Then you’re missing out.”

  “What’s it about?”

  He snatched the book out of Gwen’s hand before she could stop him, flipping through the pages almost as though he expected something to fall out. Gwen stood, but she didn’t try to get the book back. She knew that would only encourage a bully like him.

  “Do you get your kicks from torturing newbies, Morgan?”

  The boy turned, a slow smile thinning those thick lips just a little. “Cei. Why didn’t I realize that you’d already sought this one out?” He glanced at Gwen as though appraising a farm animal. “A piece of meat like this one? How could you pass it up?”

  “She’s my foster sister,” Cei said, snatching the book from the boy’s hands with one, quick movement that even Gwen hadn’t seen coming. “And she’s new here. So don’t scare her away before Mr. Lewis can.”

  The boy—Morgan—laughed, the light dancing in his eyes as he focused on Gwen once more. “Watch out for this one,” he said, leaning close to her as though trying to offer a secret. “He’s something of a Casanova.”

  “Is that right?”

  “He’s dated just about every eligible girl in this school, including the majority of last year’s senior class.”

  Gwen glanced over at Cei. He didn’t seem to be aware of the conversation going on about him. He was focused on gathering Gwen’s things, shoving the book back into her backpack.

  “And I suppose that you’re as celibate as a monk.”

  Morgan stepped back as though offended by what she’d said. “Such sarcasm. What did I do to deserve that?”

  “You didn’t have to do anything, Morgan,” Cei said as he took hold of Gwen under her arm and turned her toward the front doors. “She’s smart enough to see through your games.”

  “You didn’t have to do that,” Gwen said, pulling away from Cei as soon as they were inside the building. “I can take care of myself. I’ve done it for a long time.”

  “Yeah, well, there’s a difference between have to, and want to.” He held her backpack out to her on the tip of his fingers. “You should learn it.”

  He walked away, the sight just as delicious now as it had been the first time she saw it. And then the sight disappeared as someone knocked into her, nearly knocking her off of her feet.

  “Don’t just stand there,” a female voice hissed in her ear.

  Gwen turned and found a pretty blonde staring at her.

  Another Melanie.

  The two could have been twins, except this one had clearly had a nose job. No one could possibly be born with such a perfect nose.

  “Excuse me,” Gwen said as she started to skirt around the girl, intending to head toward the auditorium where the students had been told to pick up their schedules.

  “Cei’s off limits,” the girl said. “Just so you know.”

  “Don’t worry,” Gwen said over her shoulder as she kept walking, “not interested.”

  The auditorium was crowded, but there wasn’t the same chaos that there often was in public high schools. The students waited patiently, some of them with books in their hands. Gwen saw biographies, political theory, battle histories, science tomes, and a few fictional selections that were from the dustier parts of the library, classics like Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Shakespeare. She held a hand up to her face to hide the smile that slipped out despite attempts to keep it in.

  This was her place, her world. Her people.

  It was going to happen. She was finally going to find a place where she belonged.

  Chapter 5

  Homeroom was more like the craziness of a public high school, what with everyone sharing their schedules and catching up on what they had done over the summer break. The teacher had to scream to get everyone to settle down long enough for him to take roll.

  English was…amazing. Gwen was so excited when the teacher handed out copies of Dante’s “Divine Comedy” for the first six weeks assignment. The last book she’d studied for school was My Darling, My Hamburger…not exactly a literary prize.

  Math had always been Gwen’s downfall, but the calculus teacher seemed approachable, which would be important if she needed tutoring.

  Then there was history.

  Gwen walked into the classroom after getting turned around three times—despite the map in her hand—and found Cei and Morgan already seated. So far she’d been pretty lucky. There was no one she knew, and no one who knew her, in any of her other classes. Cei barely looked up when she walked in, but Morgan stood and made a dramatic gesture over the empty desk next to him. And—just Gwen’s luck—that happened to be the only empty desk in the already packed room.

  She settled in her seat, pulling a notebook out of her backpack before she stowed it carefully under her seat.

  “Always prepared, aren’t you?” Morgan leaned close to ask.

  “That’s how you get into a good college.”

  Morgan groaned. “Why would I want to go to college? Four years of this is more than enough, thank you.”

  “Then why are going to a school like this?”

  Morgan shrugged. “My father insisted.”

  Gwen took a second look at Morgan, noting his designer jeans and screen print tee. His clothes screamed money. Daddy must not have cared that his precious child was taking up a spot that some other, more worthy, child could have taken.

  It was people like Morgan that had barred Gwen from this school for the last three years.

  “Must be tough, having a parent that cares.”

  Morgan opened his mouth to respond, something witty, no doubt, but the teacher walked in at that moment.

  “Mr. Cecil, close that mouth before you start catching flies.”

  The room erupted with laughter. The teacher, a middle-aged woman with a unique fashion sense—she was wearing black slacks with an oversized purple sweater and a green scarf despite the ninety degree weather outside—dropped a binder on the lectern that was situated in front of the students and slipped on a pair of reading glasses that looked as though they’d been manufactured sometime around the time of Benjamin Franklin’s famous round spectacles.

  “Nice to see so many familiar faces,” she said, “as well as a few new ones.” She ran her finger down the long list of names that must have been stuck inside the binder, pausing at one name in particular. “Miss Reese, will you please raise your hand?”

  A hot blush touched Gwen’s cheeks as she stuck her hand in the air and felt all the kids around her turning to stare. The teacher, however, seemed pleased to make her acquaintance, for whatever reason.

  “”Do you prefer Gwenydd or Gwen?” she asked.

  “Gwen.”

  “Gwen…” Morgan whispered beside her. “What a grown up name.”

  “Mr. Cecil,” the teacher said again, the tone of her voice forcing Morgan to sit up straighter.

  “Sorry, Ms. Dru.”

  Ms. Dru studied Gwen for a long moment before her eyes dropped back
down to her list and she called the names. Morgan remained quiet during most of the rest of the class, not even making a sound when the other students groaned as Ms. Dru announced the subjects they would be studying this year. The only thing that didn’t get a groan was when Ms. Dru promised that they would begin their studies with a look at the Druids, a religious group that existed in medieval Ireland, Wales, and parts of Britain.

  “They were witches, right, Ms. Dru?” a girl in the back of the room asked.

  Ms. Dru shook her head, as though disappointed that a student in her class would be such a narrow thinker. “No. They were labeled witches by the Romans and other civilizations who had not seen their style of worship until they invaded their lands. The Druids were actually peaceful people who worshipped nature over the various gods the Romans and Greeks worshipped.”

  “Pagans,” someone else said.

  Ms. Dru tilted her head slightly. “By a strict definition, one could consider the Druids pagans.”

  “They don’t believe in one God.”

  “Neither did the Romans or the Greeks.”

  “Then they were pagans, too.”

  “Not necessarily.” Ms. Dru stepped around the lectern, her glasses between her thumb and finger, swinging from their precarious perch. “A pagan is someone who worships something different from the acceptable. At the height of their civilization, polytheism—a religion that believed in more than one god—was the acceptable religion. So Romans and Greeks were the norm, not the exception.”

  Ms. Dru leaned back against the front of her desk just in front of Gwen. She even focused on Gwen, giving the impression that she was talking just to her. “The Romans saw the Druids as unusual because they did not worship their gods. They didn’t, in fact, really worship gods, per se. They worshipped the wind and the rain, rivers and lakes, animals and plants and anything else that nature had provided to them as a people. And they were a highly secretive group, passing down stories and teachings through word of mouth rather than writing anything down, giving the impression of some sort of secret society.”

  “Like the Mormons.”

  Someone laughed, but immediately stopped when Ms. Dru shot a disapproving look toward that part of the room.

  “Religion can be a very secretive, close knit society. And, yes, some modern religions are still rather secretive. But there is a difference between secrecy and misunderstanding.”

  “It would be more interesting to study the Romans,” a boy at the back of the room said. “Their gods are fascinating, what with all the battles and the internal struggles.”

  “And the demigods,” someone else said.

  “What’s a demigod?” a girl behind Gwen asked.

  “The child of a god and a human,” Gwen said, blushing when Ms. Dru nodded approval at her.

  “Exactly.” Ms. Dru stood up and moved back toward the white board that stretched over the front wall of the room. “There are gods associated with the Druids,” she announced, picking up a dry erase marker and writing the word ‘Don’ on one side of the board and the word ‘Llyr’ on the other side.

  “Two gods, one a goddess who practiced light magic, the other a god who practiced dark magic. The two gods lived in peaceful existence for quite a while, never getting in each other’s way, keeping the world balanced with their separate magic. And then their children,” she wrote on the board again, adding ‘Gwydion’ under Don’s name and ‘Bran’ under Llyr’s, “picked a fight with each other, reportedly over the theft of a few dogs. It led to the Battle of the Tress, a battle in which Gwydion used his light magic to enchant the trees into joining the fight.”

  “Trees?” Morgan asked. “How can trees fight a battle?”

  “You’d be surprised how powerful nature can be, Mr. Cecil,” Ms. Dru said without turning. She wrote another word on the board: Bodeuwedd. But before she could explain what the word meant, the bell rang.

  “Sorry, kids, I know you were just dying to hear more of the story,” she said, laughter in her voice as the students rushed out of the classroom around her.

  But there was something about that word that seemed to call out to Gwen. She stayed in her seat, staring at it through the wave of humanity that was streaming toward the door, the letters almost glowing in a strange sense as she studied them. The black ink of the dry erase marker seemed to have turned into something else, a river of tar, maybe. She was almost convinced that if she touched it in that moment, it would be thick and viscous, instead a thin layer of color that could be easily wiped away.

  “You should probably be on your way, Miss Reese,” Ms. Dru said.

  Gwen pulled her eyes away from the board and was instantly aware that all the other students had left the room. She quickly grabbed her bag and shoved her notebook back into it before rushing toward the door.

  “I hope you like it here at DuineEirimiuil,” Ms. Dru said to her departing back.

  Gwen didn’t know what to say, so she just kept walking.

  Morgan was waiting for her outside the door.

  “You have a buddy for lunch?”

  Gwen glanced at him. “What would I need a buddy for?”

  “Almost everyone leaves campus for lunch. If you don’t have a buddy with a car, you’ll end up eating alone in the cafeteria, and only nerds do that.”

  “There must be quite a crowd at this school, then.”

  Morgan shook his head. “This place is just like any public school, the vocabulary used to make fun of people is just a little better.”

  “Good to know.”

  “I have a car,” Morgan said, moving around Gwen as she tried to make her way down the hallway toward her next class—physics. “You’re welcome to go out with me and my friend, Rhein.”

  “Rain?”

  “Not spelled that way, but yeah. Rhein Evans. We’ve been friends since like kindergarten.”

  “I don’t think so,” Gwen said as she spotted the doorway to her next class. “I’m more of a loner. I like reading while I eat.”

  “You can read in a restaurant just as well as you can here.”

  Gwen just shook her head. “See you around, Morgan.”

  She heard him groan as he walked off. It almost made her smile. Almost.

  Chapter 6

  Gwen made it through the first day of school without too many more disruptions. She didn’t have any more classes with Morgan, but Cei showed up in her French and technology classes, which actually proved to be helpful because they were the last two classes of the day, so she didn’t have to fumble around after school trying to find him or Theresa’s minivan.

  Not that Cei talked to her. In fact, he didn’t seem to notice her following him as he slowly left the building, waving to friends as he went. He had a lot of friends. Gwen felt almost invisible as she followed him through the halls.

  Theresa smiled as they climbed into her minivan where it waited at the curb. “Have a good day?” she asked to no one in particular.

  “Same old, same old,” Cei said from the front seat.

  “What about you?” Theresa asked as she began guiding the van into traffic, taking the risk of glancing in the rearview mirror at Gwen. “Do you think you’ll like it there?”

  Gwen shrugged. “The classes were pretty much what I expected.”

  “That’s good.” Theresa slowed the van behind the line of traffic waiting to turn onto the city street. “What about the kids? Make any friends yet?”

  “Not really.”

  “Gwen isn’t really the social type.”

  Theresa’s eyebrows rose—Gwen could see them in the rearview mirror as she again glanced into it to study Gwen’s face. “No man is an island, entire of itself.”

  “John Donne,” Gwen said, recognizing the quote immediately.

  “Yes. A very true statement. You should try to make a few friends.”

  Gwen didn’t respond, not sure there was any reason to. Theresa probably knew as well as she her reasons for not wanting to seek out friendships. And she li
kely had little to back up her arguments except for centuries old quotes. She could quote John Donne until she was blue in the face—it wouldn’t change the reality of Gwen’s situation.

  As though to underscore that reality, Gwen was a little surprised—though, why that should be she wasn’t sure—to see Paul’s car sitting at the curb outside Theresa’s house as they drove up.

  Paul Forrester, her overworked, over-stressed social worker stepped out of his car as the minivan came to a stop in the driveway. He slipped his sunglasses off as he leaned back against the passenger side of the car and watched as first Theresa, then Cei climbed out of the van.

  “How are you, Paul?” Theresa asked, walking over to him as Gwen took her time organizing her backpack.

  “I’m good,” he said, a little crinkle appearing beside his celery green eyes as he squinted in the sunlight. “Busy, as usual.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I had three new cases cross my desk in the course of two days. You’d think with summer coming to an end, things would slow down, but not so far.”

  “It’s a shame,” Theresa said, turning slightly toward the front of the house, her thoughts clearly on the children who currently lived there, “the things people do to their kids.”