He lingered after class and then went up to Mr. Williams’s desk. “Yes?” the teacher said, once again not looking at him.
“I just wondered, why do you ask me those questions? You never ask anyone else.”
“You’re right, I wouldn’t ask anyone else. Bruno, I need to remind you of something: I am here to teach you. And it became clear to me almost immediately that you are not learning anything in my class, because you already know what we’re covering. If you don’t learn anything, I am failing in my mission, don’t you think?”
Give me a break. “I thought you’d be happy I know what you’re teaching.”
“That would be nice for you, wouldn’t it? Then you’d have fifty minutes to space out every day. That doesn’t work for me. Tomorrow I will receive from you two pages sharing with me some things about the Pacific Rim that you don’t know right now. That means you have to come up with information I can believe you don’t already have in that atlas in your brain.”
“What? That’s not fair,” Bruno said weakly.
“I am well aware of that. Don’t be late for your next class.”
5
theft, and wandering around lost
FOR A WHILE BRUNO became so focused on his map drawing, he was almost able to forget the reason he had started the project. It was as though someone had realized that too much had been revealed to Bruno too quickly, and he needed a respite. One chilly morning near the end of September, Sylvio and Bruno pulled up in front of Regine’s house, but instead of getting into her own car, she came over to theirs. Sylvio rolled his window down. “Celia’s sick today. I never get to ride with you, so I thought maybe I’d join you this morning?”
“Sure,” Sylvio said, clearly pleased by the idea.
Regine walked around to the passenger side and tapped on Bruno’s window. When he rolled it down she said, “Would you mind if I sat in front?” There was an uncomfortable moment; then he shrugged and got out.
In the back seat Bruno tried to ignore their conversation, but they seemed to have forgotten he was there anyway. “Homecoming is a little dull. I went with Ivo last year. But I’d like to go with you, if you want.”
“Sure,” Sylvio said. “Do we dress . . .”
“Like Diaboliques? Absolutely. That’s the whole point. Part of the fun of going to school dances is to point out to everyone how tiresome it is when no one has an original thought and everyone shares one brain. Plus, it’s a good excuse for just the two of us to do something.”
“Sounds great.”
They arrived at Marco’s house and he came out, looked confused for a moment, and walked to Sylvio’s car. Regine was still talking. “Brenden and Marco were the power couple of the Rosary last year. I think someone has to take over that responsibility this year.”
Marco got into the back seat next to Bruno. When Sylvio pulled out into the road, Marco looked over at Bruno and mouthed, Did she make you get in the back? Bruno nodded, and Marco rolled his eyes.
Bruno leaned over and Marco met him halfway. “She made him this little book of collages, with pictures and song lyrics,” Bruno said under his breath.
“Of course she did,” Marco whispered back.
In the front seat Regine was chatting away to Sylvio about their homecoming plans, and after a moment Marco said quietly to Bruno, “Before, we would have been making a list on some kind of music topic.”
“They’re in love,” Bruno said.
“Sure, sure.” Marco rolled his eyes. “What’s your favorite song?”
Bruno tried to come up with something, but his thoughts kept returning to Celia’s song that he couldn’t identify. “I’m not sure if I have one. What’s yours?”
“It is hard, isn’t it? I love all the aggressive stuff—Screaming Blue Messiahs, Belfegore, the Blackouts—but my top song choice always seems to be something more delicate. Lately it’s been ‘Under the Ivy’ by Kate Bush. It’s short and simple, and it’s not nearly as well known as her bigger songs, but I just love it.”
“I haven’t really listened to her.”
“I’ll make you a mix of her best stuff. She’s amazing. Oh, I do like this song, though.” Marco nodded at the front seat when “Other Voices” started playing on the stereo.
“The Cure is Silver’s favorite band,” Bruno said. “He plays them almost every morning.”
They listened to the song and Regine and Sylvio’s conversation, and Bruno wished he could ride with Marco every day.
THAT MORNING BRUNO’S GYM class played volleyball and Van was on the other team. He spent the class glowering at Bruno through the net and trying to spike the ball in his direction. It was clear he had put a target on Bruno, and his friends knew it, too. After gym, Van followed Bruno to his next class, and when Bruno ducked into a bathroom in hopes of evading him, Van came in after him. They stood there, the row of sinks on one side of them, the stall doors on the other side.
Van punched him so quickly that Bruno only saw the senior’s arm retracting, leaving Bruno staggering back with a burning pressure in his chest. Van advanced on him, a hard, gleeful look in his eyes, and Bruno retreated to the window. Then Van stopped and looked around. “Is someone crying in here?”
They stood still and listened. In one of the stalls someone caught his breath, but Bruno had heard it, too.
“Who’s in there?” Van barked. No answer. “How many sissies are there in this bathroom?”
It might have been simply the presence of a witness, or perhaps it was the crying, but Van seemed to lose his motivation. He looked at Bruno and said, “This isn’t over. I will damage you wherever and whenever I feel like it, for as long as I feel like it.” He walked out.
Bruno took a moment to let his heartbeat slow down, and in the meantime the crying resumed in the stall. “Are you okay?” He knocked on the door, which wasn’t latched. When no one answered, Bruno pushed it open.
Wedged into the corner, a boy looked back at him, his eyes flooded, his face red.
“What happened?”
The guy said nothing for a moment, then managed, “Nothing. I just need to be alone.” He was a little embarrassed, but he seemed too crushed to really care.
“Are you sure? Are you sick?”
The guy shook his head. “I don’t even know why . . . I just . . . don’t know why I’m here.”
“In the bathroom?”
The guy shook his head again. “Anywhere. What . . . what’s the point of being here? What good does it do?”
“Do you really feel that way?” The deadened look in the guy’s eyes made Bruno uncomfortable. “Well, you can’t just stay in there. Do you want me to go get someone for you to talk to?”
“Would you?”
“You’ll stay here?” Bruno asked, and the guy nodded. “Okay, I’ll be right back.”
He left the bathroom and sprinted down to the nurse’s office. The nurse looked at him suspiciously, but he accompanied Bruno back to the bathroom and enticed the boy out of the stall. The nurse thanked Bruno and told him to go to class as he put his arm around the boy’s shoulders and escorted him out of the bathroom.
MARCO GOT UP FROM his stool when Bruno arrived at the home ec room. “Here you are. I think it turned out really well.” He pulled a charcoal-gray jacket out of a garment bag and held it up behind Bruno so he could slip his arms inside. “It works best if it’s buttoned.” Marco watched him close it up. “What do you think?”
“It looks great! I can’t believe you made this!”
Marco popped the wide collar so it wrapped around the nape of Bruno’s neck. “With a turtleneck that’ll look pretty cool.”
“I really like it. Thank you very much!”
“You’re welcome!”
“Can I ask you something?” Marco nodded. “What do you think about . . . I don’t know . . . Do you believe in ghosts?”
“You mean Mariette? It is kind of strange that people aren’t more freaked out, isn’t it. I think it’s because of the whole curse th
ing last year; there’s just something about this place that makes stuff like that easier to believe. Compared to the way girls were getting hurt last year, the thing with Mariette’s ghost and the cheating boyfriend is pretty mild. Did you hear she struck again?”
“No. What happened?”
“She gave a note with a place and date to a junior guy. Or at least, he says she did; he lost the note, or it disappeared, or there never was a note in the first place. Anyway, he caught his girlfriend making out with some guy from another school at the mall or something. They’d been going out for two years.”
“Wow,” Bruno said. “Why would Mariette do that?”
“I don’t know. I don’t remember her being mischievous or spiteful when she was alive. She seemed really nice, kind of all over the place, but always had a smile on her face. It would be just as easy to ask why people are cheating on their boyfriends and girlfriends, you know,” Marco said.
“True.” Bruno thought of the guy in the bathroom that morning and wondered whether it was the same guy.
“Either way, I hope Mariette cuts it out. It’s starting to feel like last year, when everyone just waited to see who got hurt next.”
One of the girls from the class came by. “Hey, Marco, is this your new boyfriend?” She was pleasant, but there was a gossipy undertone to her voice.
“No, I still have the old one,” Marco told her. “Bruno is up for grabs.”
The girl walked away, and Marco turned back to Bruno. “That’s probably going to happen again if you keep hanging out with me. You okay with that?”
“I don’t care,” Bruno said. “I like hanging out with you.”
“It might hurt your chances of getting a date. Then again, it might help you with some girls.” Marco chuckled.
“I don’t think I’ll be getting a date anytime soon,” Bruno said.
“You’re still torqued for Celia, aren’t you? That’s not going to do you any good,” Marco said. “I’m sorry to say it.”
“That’s okay. I’m fine with things the way they are.” They were silent a moment. “You’re driving up to Metropolitan tonight?”
“I am! Brenden said Ivo is clearing out of the room for the weekend, so we’ll have it to ourselves. I can’t wait!” Marco bugged his eyes out at Bruno, who laughed.
“Have a great time. I’m sure they’ll miss you at Diaboliques tonight.”
“They’ll be fine. You know, you should go with them. I think you’d like it.”
“I’m waiting for Silver to ask me. I don’t want to crash his party.”
“Oh, it’s not up to him. When I get back, you’re going.”
ON MONDAY, THE GHOST of Mariette struck again. Or at least, all the indications were that she had. By midday the story went around school that the German teacher had been seen crying to the trigonometry teacher outside the faculty lounge, and she had been overhead saying she had left her husband. A few students swore she had arrived late to class on Friday with a puzzled expression and a small piece of paper folded in her hand.
Then a senior boy caught his girlfriend cheating on him by stopping by her house at the appointed time on Mariette’s note. The ghostliness of the notes—they always disappeared before the recipient could show anyone else—only made it easier to believe in the ghostliness of the source. In a matter of days there seemed to be no other topic of conversation at school.
“I think it’s good,” Sylvio said. “Everyone is going to think twice about cheating now.”
“If this weren’t a high school, I’d say you were right.” Marco replied. “Teenagers are genetically wired to try to get away with as much as we can, even though we know perfectly well we’re likely to get caught sooner or later.”
“But what about how depressed it’s making everyone?” Regine complained. “This morning a girl in my class just lost it. The teacher had to take her down to the nurse.”
“Had she gotten a note from Mariette? Did all the depressed people get notes? Someone told me they didn’t know why they were sad. It’s not like they’re distraught because they caught someone cheating on them,” Marco said.
“So is that another thing, then?” Celia asked in a tired voice. “Last year it was the birthday curse, and now Mariette’s kiss notes and the curse of the ‘great depression’?”
Marco looked at her sympathetically. “I don’t know, but it’s all very strange, and last year no one ever really figured out what to do about it. It finally just stopped. Some people said it stopped because Mariette . . .”
“Are we going to have half the school wandering around under a black cloud because Mariette broke them up, or for no reason at all? That would be horrible.”
“Why don’t you ask Mariette? If she’d tell anyone, it would be you.”
“I still haven’t seen her. And who knows if she’d tell me anything. She sounds like a different person.”
BRUNO NEVER WOULD HAVE guessed his first semester of high school would mess with his head so much. The real world was getting crowded out by another, stranger one, and while he could no longer pretend it didn’t exist, he did his best to avoid it. Only one enjoyable thing had come out of the whole strange tangle of mysteries: drawing his plan of the school. He labored over the details—the spacing of windows, the direction each door swung—and he was impressed with his own work. But there had been no revelations; nothing had been out of place. If there was supposed to have been an epiphany, none had come. He remembered the paper clips whizzing around Lois’s head—she had made it sound as though he’d gain the power to do something like that.
After Spanish class, Bruno went down the stairwell in the Chancellor Wing, en route to the cafeteria to meet Celia for lunch. He was going to take his shortcut across the side lawn, which had been adopted by plenty of other students, wearing a path in the grass. But before he exited the stairwell he looked at the stairs that led to the basement. He never had gone down there. He assumed the basement contained the usual mechanical rooms, perhaps the janitor’s office. He left the stream of students and continued down the stairs.
The air grew warmer and drier as he descended, and at the bottom of the stairs Bruno’s assumptions were confirmed: Double doors with small windows led to a dimly lit room with large metal boxes whose function he couldn’t discern. A sign read KEEP OUT–NO ACCESS. Bruno sighed and turned to retrace his steps.
In the darkness under the stairs he was surprised to see another set of stairs rising behind the ones he had just descended. He walked around to where they began and could see up half a flight to a landing and a wall, lit by indirect daylight from above, just like the other set of stairs. He could hear the voices of students filtering down from somewhere above. Bruno went up these new stairs.
At the ground level the stairwell continued upward. Students were coming down from the upper floors and spilling out into a hallway. Bruno followed them and realized he was in the new wing, with the cafeteria just down the hall. As students brushed past him he was sure he looked completely lost.
“Hey, Bruno!” It was Celia. “Where are you coming from?”
“Spanish,” he said before he had time to think.
“But you just came out of there.” Celia pointed behind him, and Bruno actually turned around to look at the stairwell. “Wouldn’t you take the shortcut across the back lawn from the Chancellor Wing?” The door from the back lawn was on the other end of the hall.
“Not today,” he said.
“Then how did you wind up in that stairwell? You didn’t . . . There’s something you’re not telling me,” Celia said.
“No, there isn’t.” Bruno squirmed under Celia’s stare, the one she had trained on him only a few times before—the one that felt like a scalpel and a healing balm at the same time.
She was silent for a moment. “Let’s go have lunch.” They got food and went to their usual table, where a few students were eating. “I’m really sorry, but we need this table,” Celia told them. “Would you mind?” Bruno thought
there was no way her request would be honored, but the kids got up and left, and he and Celia sat down. She looked at him. “Okay. I’m going to tell you something. Maybe if I go first, you’ll be willing to go second.” She collected her thoughts. “So you know about Mariette, my friend who died last year. The one everyone thinks is haunting the science wing.”
“I do,” Bruno said.
“Well, nobody else knows this, and I need you to promise you will never tell anyone. But Mariette had . . . powers. She could do things that were, I don’t know, supernatural. When we did chemistry experiments, she didn’t need to measure anything. She could tell how much of each substance was required, just by looking. She could bring dying flowers back to life by touching them. She could draw frost crystals on windows with the tip of her finger. All of her powers had to do with nature.”
“Like, a witch?”
“No. Well, throughout history they’ve been called witches, but she, and others like her, are really called the Kind. The Kind only use their powers for good things. The ones who use their powers for evil are called the Unkind. So here’s another part of the story no one else knows: Mariette died because the chemistry teacher here last year was Unkind, and all year he kept trying to kill fifteen-year-old girls on the day before their birthday, in order to gain more Unkind power. That’s why everyone thought there was a curse. Mariette knew something was wrong, and she spent the whole year protecting all of us, but we couldn’t figure out who it was until it was too late, and he got her. He never even realized he had killed one of his own.”
So all of the secrets Lois had told him—Celia knew them, too? “The Kind and the Unkind?” he asked blankly.
“The way I understand it, they’re two sides of the same coin. Good and bad, dark and light. So you know why I’m telling you this, don’t you?”
“I think so.” She stared at him expectantly, but Bruno labored to form a coherent question. “Are you one of the Kind?”
Pull Down the Night (The Suburban Strange) Page 8
