The Apprentices

by Mailie Meloy

  Food arrived, carried by a teenage busboy, and Mr. Magnusson made a big production of making sure there was room for everything on the table. Then he kept up a steady stream of anecdotes, so there was no room for other conversation.

  Janie turned her attention to her plate of spaghetti. It was delicious, and she’d been hungrier than she knew. She concentrated on twirling the noodles on her fork and not splashing sauce onto her shirt.

  But then her reprieve was over. Mr. Magnusson asked, “How soon do you think you’ll be finished with your experiment?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. She meant to stop there, but he looked at her encouragingly, waiting. “It all depends on the recrystallization process,” she said, “and perfecting my seeding method.”

  Opal yawned in protest. “This is so boring I’m going to cry!”

  “Your capacity to be bored is the stuff of legend,” her father said.

  “I’m tired, too, Magnus,” his wife said quietly.

  “Raffaello!” Mr. Magnusson called to the busboy. “May I have the check? I must get these ladies home to bed.”

  They were gathered by helpful hands into their coats. Mr. Magnusson held open a vast black fur cloak for his tiny wife, ready to swallow her up. As she backed into the fur, the princess shot Janie the frightened rabbit look again, and this time Janie thought it contained either a plea or a warning—or both.

  * * *

  Janie walked back with Opal to their room in Carleton Hall. The wind had died down and wasn’t so cutting, especially now that Janie had a belly full of food. They were silent for a while, and Janie was trying to think what to say that wouldn’t embarrass them both, but Opal burst out first.

  “Why do you try to show me up with Daddy?” she asked.

  Janie was startled. “I don’t!”

  “He’s my father, you know.”

  “Of course he is.”

  “He’s not yours.”

  “I have my own father.”

  “When you act all smart with him, it makes him think I’m stupid.”

  “I wasn’t trying to act smart,” Janie said, though she kicked herself for not shutting up. “I just answered his questions.”

  “He said that all I can do with my life is marry someone rich!”

  He had said that. Janie couldn’t deny it. She thought of her own father, who had always been so supportive and encouraging—when he wasn’t teasing her and joking. Her parents had talked to her as if she were an adult, and played games with her as an equal, for as long as she could remember. She couldn’t imagine what it was like to have none of that confidence behind you. She said, “I think your dad was just making a joke.”

  “No,” Opal said, shaking her head. “He meant it.”

  “He said you’d do good things with the money,” Janie said. “It takes skill to be a good philanthropist.”

  “It’s not like being a scientist.”

  “So be a scientist, then,” Janie said, losing patience. “Show him he’s wrong.”

  “I’m failing math!”

  “Then let’s go over some problems. I’ll help you.”

  “Don’t you dare patronize me, Janie Scott!” Opal said.

  “I wasn’t!”

  Opal marched ahead, the heels of her expensive boots striking the pavement, and Janie followed helplessly.

  Their room in Carleton Hall was barely big enough for two narrow beds pushed against opposite walls, two desks, two dressers, and a single closet, but still Janie and Opal managed to get ready for bed without speaking. They stepped around each other with cold constraint. Janie wanted to bring up tomorrow’s math test, but she didn’t dare.

  In bed, she lay looking at the ceiling, listening to Opal toss back and forth on her pillow, just a few feet away. She tried to think of something to say to apologize, but could only imagine Opal shooting it down. Then Opal’s restless rolling stopped, and her breathing became steady.

  If she could sleep, then Janie could, too.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Test

  In the morning, Opal seemed to have forgiven Janie. She wasn’t exactly friendly as they dressed for the day, but she didn’t seem furious, either. Janie was grateful. She grabbed a sweet roll from the dining hall and unlocked the chemistry classroom to check on her experiment, so she wouldn’t have to sit with Opal at breakfast. She was hoping to see salt crystals on the thread.

  Her experiment was really an exercise in imitation. In London, she had gone with her parents to the National Gallery, where they had watched a young man set up an easel in front of a Rembrandt portrait. He was making a copy of the portrait, and Janie’s father had said it was a way of learning to paint, to re-create the brushstrokes of a great master. Janie felt that she was doing something like that with her experiment.

  On the boat to Nova Zembla, Jin Lo had shown her a glass vial of clear liquid. It was for emergencies, in case they became stranded without fresh water. When Jin Lo dipped a thread into the liquid and then dropped the same thread into a beaker of seawater, salt crystals began to form. It was like watching dissolution in reverse, as all the salt was drawn out of the water. Less than a minute later, there was a hard salt crystal attached to the thread, like rock candy. Jin Lo had removed the crystal, set it aside, and handed the beaker to Janie.

  “Drink,” she’d said.

  “It’s safe?” Janie had asked.

  “No, I poison you,” Jin Lo had said.

  Janie drank. The water was cold, silvery clear, and almost sweet, as if it had come from a mountain stream. At dinner that night, their friend Vili, the Hungarian count, had taken out a pocketknife and happily scraped some of the crystallized sea salt onto his food.

  In London, with her memories erased, Janie had found the vial of desalinizing liquid in the pocket of her peacoat. At first, she hadn’t remembered what it was. But she had set the vial aside. As she recovered her memories, she realized how important it could be. People all over the world needed clean water, and the oceans were endless. The instructions for removing the salt must be in the Pharmacopoeia, the apothecary’s ancient book, but Benjamin and his father had the Pharmacopoeia with them, wherever they were.

  So Janie’s experiment was to see if she could re-create the liquid without the Pharmacopoeia, by careful analysis of the vial’s contents. She thought she had figured out the components, but she hadn’t been able to repeat the crystallizing effect.

  When she arrived in the chemistry classroom with her books and her half-eaten sweet roll on Monday morning, there were still no crystals, and the water was as salty as ever. Discouraged, she ran to trigonometry before the first bell, sliding into her seat as Mr. Evensong passed out the test.

  Opal sat two seats over, and Janie wished they’d gone over some problems before they went to sleep. Opal was staring straight ahead, through her heavy glasses, nervously chewing her bottom lip. Janie wished Opal wasn’t so afraid. She got tangled up in her own fear and couldn’t see the problems clearly. Janie liked math: It was like a puzzle. The prospect of finding a definite, provable answer was reassuring, when other parts of her life had been muddled and confusing.

  “You may begin,” Mr. Evensong said.

  Janie turned the test over and considered the diagram and the first problem:

  1. Calculate the length of the side x, given that tan 0 = 0.4

  Her pencil started scratching on the page, and she worked the problem in a kind of trance.

  When she finished the test, she looked around, coming out of a world made of circles and angles and lines. Her classmates were still hunched over their test papers. The tip of Opal’s tongue stuck out of her mouth in concentration.

  By the clock over Mr. Evensong’s head, Janie had fifteen minutes of class time to go. Mr. Evensong was bent over his desk, grading homework. He was a slight, balding man in a frayed sweater who had endless patience for his students—especially the ones who struggled.

  Janie went over her test to make sure she had written the a
nswers correctly and shown all of her work, but that only took a few minutes. Then she reached under her desk and brought out the small red notebook in which she kept notes on her chemistry experiment. She hadn’t had time to record her observations from the morning, and she started writing her guesses about what had gone wrong. Too high a concentration? Not high enough? Temperature too high? Not high enough? Was the thread the wrong texture? She twirled the pencil between her fingers and wondered what else the trouble could be.

  When Mr. Evensong announced that the time was up, Janie tucked the red notebook away and turned in her test paper with everyone else. The bell rang, and she gathered her things. In the hall, she waited to see if Opal was coming—they usually walked to history class together—but Opal didn’t follow her out. She must be talking to Mr. Evensong about the test. Finally Janie couldn’t wait any longer without being late, so she walked on alone.

  Grayson was laid out like a college campus, with classrooms in separate buildings, and Janie stepped out onto the stone steps of the math and science building. She felt a tug on the end of her scarf and turned to see Tadpole Porter, his hands jammed in his pockets, whistling and looking innocently up at the sky. Tadpole’s name was really Thaddeus, but only teachers called him that. He was a round boy with glasses and thick, unruly brown hair, and he was the smartest boy in her history class. She wondered if having a lot of ideas stimulated hair growth—all that blood flow near the scalp.

  “That’s funny,” she said. “I thought I felt someone pull on my scarf. I must have imagined it.” She started walking again.

  “You know what happens when you start imagining things,” Tadpole said, falling into step beside her. “They cart you off to the loony bin.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “Imagining what?”

  “Your scarf being pulled,” he said.

  “What scarf? Now you’re imagining things.”

  Tadpole laughed. “Where’s your roommate?” he asked. “You always have protection on this walk.”

  Janie looked at him sideways—did Tadpole have a crush on Opal? “She stayed behind in math,” she said. “To talk to Mr. Evensong.”

  “Good,” he said. “I wouldn’t dare pull your scarf when she was there. I mean, not that I did, or ever would pull your scarf. But I really wouldn’t if Opal was around. She’s scary.”

  “She’s not,” Janie said. “Just kind of short-tempered.” Then she regretted saying something so honest about her roommate.

  “That’s what I mean!” Tadpole said. “She’d turn on you in a second.”

  They were already inside the building, and they joined the press into the classroom. Tadpole’s desk was in front of Janie’s.

  Mrs. McClellan, the history teacher, wore a long, straight purple skirt and a black sweater. Her streaked gray hair made her look wise and a little witchy. When the bell had rung again and everyone had settled down, Mrs. McClellan said, “Today we’re going to talk about Indochina.” She pulled a map of Asia down like a window shade over the chalkboard.

  All of Janie’s American history and social studies classes before Grayson had begun with the Pilgrims and the Declaration of Independence, and ended with the Civil War. Then the next year they started over again with the Pilgrims. It was as if history had stopped on the night John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln. But Mrs. McClellan was different. She liked to remind her students that history was happening right now, today. At the top of her chalkboard was a quotation from the philosopher Edmund Burke: Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it. Tadpole had raised his hand on the first day of class to point out that George Santayana had said almost the same thing, and Mrs. McClellan had replied that Edmund Burke said it first, and that maybe those who don’t know their great quotations are destined to repeat them. Tadpole was her best student, but they had been sparring ever since.

  “The war in Korea ended before any of you could be drafted to fight in it,” Mrs. McClellan said. “But Asia is still in tumult. There’s a good chance that the United States will be drawn in, now that the French have been defeated in Indochina. You’re sixteen now. Eighteen will come before you know it, and you’ll be eligible for the draft. So it will serve you to know something about the region.”

  “They won’t want me,” Tadpole said.

  There was general confirming laughter in the classroom. It was true that with his roundness and his glasses he didn’t seem very military. Janie wished Tadpole wouldn’t bring mockery on himself—but maybe it let him control the laughter. Her father was always joking, too, and she wondered what he had been like as a boy.

  “I wouldn’t be so sure, Thaddeus,” Mrs. McClellan said. “Intelligence is much more important in this nuclear age, and the military will need brains. You might be just the kind of draftee they’re looking for.”

  “Except that I’ll be in college,” Tadpole said.

  “Of course you will,” Mrs. McClellan said. “Because life always goes exactly as we plan it.” She turned to the map. “Now, these countries are Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.”

  Even as smart as he was, Tadpole couldn’t really imagine war, Janie thought. None of her classmates could imagine anything truly bad happening to them. All they remembered of the Second World War was the end: flag-waving and parades and the end of butter rationing. Their fathers had been too old for Korea. That was true for Janie, too, but she knew how the apothecary had suffered when his wife was killed in the London Blitz, and how Jin Lo’s family had been murdered during the Japanese invasion of China, and how Count Vili’s parents had been killed in Hungary. Janie herself had been present at the detonation of a hydrogen bomb. All of that sometimes made her feel out of place at Grayson. But she reminded herself that she was here to learn. She wrote Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos in her history notebook.

  “The French took control of the territories that are now Vietnam and Cambodia,” Mrs. McClellan was saying, “when they defeated China in the Sino-French war in 1885.”

  Janie wrote that down: Sino-French war ended 1885.

  The lecture went on and class was almost over when a girl with curly red hair came to the door and gave Mrs. McClellan a slip of paper. The teacher looked up, and her eyes landed on Janie. “Miss Scott,” she said. “You’re wanted in the headmaster’s office.”

  Janie had no experience with being summoned. Flustered, she gathered her books. The other students stared at her, and Tadpole gave her a questioning look. She wondered if something had happened to her parents, then tried to block out the thought. She left quickly, following the red-haired girl down the hall. “Do you know what this is about?” Janie asked her.

  “Nope,” the girl said. “But Mr. Evensong is there.”

  “Mr. Evensong the math teacher?”

  The girl shot her a look. “No, the other Mr. Evensong.”

  Janie had been in the headmaster’s office only once before, with her parents, for a brief meeting when she’d arrived at the school. Afterward, her father had joked about the unoriginal casting of Mr. Willingham, the headmaster. He looked exactly like you’d expect a headmaster to look. He was tall but not too tall, slightly portly, with a round belly. He was balding, wore tweedy three-piece suits, and smoked a pipe. Janie guessed the school had chosen him for these attributes—for his very unoriginality. It must be reassuring for parents to leave their children with a headmaster who was so perfectly headmasterish.

  Also in the office, as the girl had said, was Mr. Evensong, the math teacher, in his mustard-colored cardigan with the hole in the elbow. He sat stooped in a curved wooden chair in front of Mr. Willingham’s desk, and he turned to look at Janie as she walked in. There was something in his face she couldn’t identify.

  “Ah, Miss Scott,” Mr. Willingham said, rising.

  “Hello,” Janie said.

  “Mr. Evensong has brought me some disturbing news.”

  “Oh?” Janie looked to the teacher, who was still sitting. Could she have failed the math test
? But that wasn’t possible—she could do those problems in her sleep.

  “Please sit,” the headmaster said.

  Janie reluctantly took the other chair. She slid back an inch on the smooth, polished wood, but stayed near the edge, her books on her lap. Her stomach felt tight with nameless fear.

  “I know you’ve read Grayson Academy’s Honor Code,” Mr. Willingham said, “because I have your signed agreement here.” He lifted a piece of paper from a slim folder on his desk marked JANE SCOTT. She had a file, her own file; there it was.

  “Yes,” Janie said. “I’ve read it.”

  “So you know that the consequence of cheating is expulsion.”

  “Yes. But I still don’t understand.”

  Mr. Evensong must have been holding his breath in the chair next to her, because he let it go with a little explosion of exasperation. “I don’t understand!” he said. “You’re my best student, Miss Scott. I feel utterly betrayed!”

  Janie looked at him in surprise. “By what?”

  “By your cheating on the trigonometry test!”

  Janie stared at him. Then at Mr. Willingham. Then at Mr. Evensong again. “But I didn’t cheat!”

  Mr. Evensong, still full of righteous anger, said, “Ten minutes before the end of the exam time, you took notes from beneath your desk and used them to fill in the answers on the test.”

  Janie nearly laughed with relief. “Oh, that!” she said. “That was my chemistry notebook. I mean, the one I keep about my experiment.” She looked at the two men, expecting their faces to relax into understanding, but they didn’t. “I had gone to check on the experiment before class,” she went on. “I finished the test early, and there were still ten minutes left, so I got out my notebook to write down some hypotheses about my results.”

  Mr. Evensong still looked angry, and Mr. Willingham looked disappointed. “You got every single answer correct,” he said.