The Apprentices

by Mailie Meloy

  Giovanna threw some sheets and a blanket over the couch to make a bed. Janie said good night and thanked them all, brushed her teeth in the small bathroom, and fell into an exhausted sleep.

  CHAPTER 5

  A Reprieve

  When Janie woke, it took some time for her to recognize the room: the couch she’d slept on, the floral curtains with early morning light coming through. She couldn’t remember her dreams, but they nagged at her as if they were important. She closed her eyes and tried to fall asleep again, but it was hopeless.

  The apartment was quiet, the others still asleep. Janie reflexively wondered if she was late for class, then remembered that she didn’t have class anymore. But she still had her key to the chemistry classroom. She got up and dressed silently, folded her blanket and sheets on the couch, and let herself out of the apartment.

  She crossed Kingsley Street where it divided the town from the Grayson campus. The sun still wasn’t up, and the sky was a dark gray blue. Squirrels darted up the trees. A few of the boys from crew were running back from morning rowing practice on the river, flushed in their jerseys, with halos of steam rising up around their heads. They grinned at Janie with the euphoria of being healthy and sweaty and awake so early, and she tried to smile in return. The science building was unlocked and the hallway was empty. She let herself into the dark chemistry classroom with her key.

  The lab seemed cold and forbidding now that she wasn’t supposed to be there. She didn’t want to turn on a light and draw attention. Familiar objects cast spooky shadows in the dimness, and the usual chemical smells seemed sinister. She wished Pip and Benjamin were here. Everything had been easier when her friends were with her. She hadn’t been afraid to sneak into a school chemistry lab, or into a military bunker. She hadn’t even been afraid to stow away on a boat to Nova Zembla. But Pip was in London, and Benjamin was somewhere, trying to slow down the world’s ability to destroy itself. It was hard to fault him for that, but the result was that Janie was alone, and she was afraid.

  She made her way along the lab tables to the back of the room where her experiment was set up. Mr. Kase, the chemistry teacher, was from Kentucky, and he’d joked that her apparatus looked like a distillery, and she must be making homemade corn whiskey. She supposed it did look like that. There were glass bottles and pipes and tubes, all arrayed in a three-dimensional maze, and there was a medium-sized water tank, like an aquarium. She was relieved to see that the apparatus hadn’t been moved. Maybe everyone would just forget it was there until she had the information she needed. They would never notice the small adjustments she made each morning, and they wouldn’t know how to move it or what to do with the pieces. It seemed like a long shot, but it was all she had.

  She checked the saline levels in the tank, and they were lower than her last reading. The test thread was suspended from a ruler across the top of the tank. She pulled the thread out and it had a few salt crystals attached to it, sparkling like rough diamonds—more crystals than she’d ever had before. She felt a glow of excitement, and weighed the crystals on a small scale. She was so absorbed that she didn’t notice the door opening at the other end of the room, or hear the footsteps behind her.

  “Miss Scott,” a voice said.

  The warm glow winked out, like a snuffed candle. She turned and saw the portly headmaster, frowning in his three-piece suit. “Mr. Willingham.”

  “I thought I had made myself clear,” he said. “You were to leave campus at once.”

  “I did leave,” she said. “But I had to check on my experiment.”

  “How did you get in?”

  She decided to make a stab at lying. “The room was open?”

  “I’ll take that key,” Mr. Willingham said, holding out his hand.

  Janie took the key out of her pocket and handed it over, careful not to touch his palm.

  “Thank you,” he said, with exaggerated formality.

  “I’m so close to finishing,” she said. “The saline levels are lower than ever. I just wanted a little more time.”

  Mr. Willingham’s eyebrows rose. “Clearly this experiment is important to you, Miss Scott. And I support the spirit of inquiry, of course. But you are no longer a student here. How much time do you need?”

  “I was thinking before that I needed a month,” Janie said, the words tumbling out. “But this morning, I think—well, I don’t know for sure, and I don’t want to jinx it, but I might only need a week.”

  “I see.”

  “If I could just come in the morning before class,” she said. “That’s what I’ve been doing all term. I wouldn’t disturb anything, or anyone.”

  Mr. Willingham frowned. “How would you get here from Concord?”

  Concord! She’d forgotten about Concord. “My aunt can give me a ride,” she said. “It’s on her way to work.”

  “Work? Where?”

  “At…the hospital,” she said. Her father liked to quote Mark Twain: If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything. So much for that.

  “She’s a nurse?” Mr. Willingham asked.

  “A doctor.” Janie instantly cursed herself. Why a doctor? The headmaster was going to be curious about the lady doctor at the hospital.

  The thready eyebrows shot up again. “Oh? What is her area of practice?”

  “Um, she works with kids.” That seemed plausible.

  “A pediatrician.”

  “Yes. I can’t believe I forgot that word!”

  Mr. Willingham sighed, as if this pointless conversation had gone on long enough. “It’s highly irregular to have students on our campus who are not enrolled,” he said. “I’ll give you until the end of the week.”

  Janie couldn’t believe her luck. It was only Tuesday. “Really?”

  “I can arrange to have the classroom door open by seven thirty each morning. Will that do?”

  “Yes! Thank you!”

  “Are you finished for today?”

  “Almost.”

  “See that you’re out by the time our actual students arrive.” Mr. Willingham turned on his heel and left the room.

  Janie hurried to write down the weight of the salt that had crystallized, and to adjust the solution and hang a new thread. One last week of research time! She was giddy with hope. It might just be enough.

  CHAPTER 6

  Success

  Raffaello invited Janie to go to East High with him, and at first she said no. She couldn’t enroll without her parents’ help. And why would she go to school when she didn’t have to? But then she imagined the empty day stretching out ahead of her while she sat on the flowered couch and stared at the wall or made conversation with Giovanna, and she changed her mind. She was used to going to class every day. And she was curious about the big public school.

  “Won’t the teachers question me?” she asked.

  “Not for long,” Raffaello said. “You’ll see.”

  The school was a loud, busy, crowded place, compared to Grayson. Raffaello led Janie to a tiny, silver-haired English teacher in a blue dress, and said, “Mrs. Lloyd, this is Janie Scott. She’s a new student but she’s not on the roll sheets yet.”

  “When are they sending new roll sheets?” Mrs. Lloyd asked.

  “The office doesn’t know yet,” Raffaello said. “Soon.”

  The teacher sighed. “See if you can find her a desk.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  Janie sat with Raffaello and his friends, who did nothing but talk to each other. In the next class, Raffaello gave the same explanation about the roll sheets to a young math teacher in a suit, and added, “You can ask Mrs. Lloyd.”

  The teacher nodded and pointed to an empty desk, and Janie had infiltrated East High—it was as easy as that.

  Raffaello was popular, with his quick smile and his easy manner, and there were girls among his friends as well as boys. Their rough, relentless teasing of each other reminded Janie of her almost-forgotten days at Hollywood High, but not of Grayson or St. Beden
’s. She felt as if the kids were speaking a language she’d once known but had forgotten. When it was time for Raffaello to go to work, she slipped out of the school with him, relieved.

  At the restaurant, Giovanna wanted Janie’s help with the wholesale food accounts. Janie combed through them as well as she could, until the dishes started to pile up and she put on an apron. At the end of the night, she closed out the till and divided the tips. Her share was eleven dollars this time. Then she climbed upstairs and fell into bed on the couch, more exhausted than she had ever been in her life.

  Wednesday morning, she woke early and ran up to Grayson, afraid that the chemistry classroom wouldn’t be unlocked. She only had three days left. But Mr. Willingham was true to his word, and the knob turned. The salt crystals on the thread were twice the size of the ones the day before, and the saline levels in the water even lower—she was getting closer! She did her measurements, adjusted the solution, treated a new thread and lowered it into the salt water, then slipped out before the first students came in.

  Back at the apartment, she ate scrambled eggs on toast with Raffaello, then went to East High again. She would go crazy sitting alone all day, electrified by the knowledge that at this rate, she might have full crystallization by Friday. If she could make fresh water, it wouldn’t matter where she was enrolled in high school or what she was going to tell her parents. She needed to write them her weekly letter soon so they wouldn’t worry, but she couldn’t bring herself to pretend that everything was normal and fine. She wished she could contact Jin Lo and tell her that she’d re-created the solution without the Pharmacopoeia’s help.

  Fingers were snapping in front of her face, and one of Raffaello’s friends was grinning at her, a blond boy with a crew cut. “You here?” he asked.

  “You were in some kind of trance,” a girl with pin curls said.

  “Maybe it’s dangerous to wake her up,” another boy said. “Same as sleepwalking.”

  “Sorry,” Janie said. “I guess I drifted off.”

  “She’s got a lot on her mind,” Raffaello said. He reached out and tousled her hair.

  Janie looked sharply at Raffaello to see what that hair tousling meant, but he had already turned away from her and moved on to another conversation. He had seemed to make the gesture without much thought, as one might pat a friendly dog on the head. So maybe that was all it was. She had become the family pet: the sleepy girl who did the dishes and kept the accounts and tagged along during the day.

  Thursday morning, Janie hurried up to the science building again. Her tiredness disappeared when she saw that the crystals were larger than ever, the test water less salty. She was going to make her deadline. The water was drinkable at this point. There was still the hint of salt, but it was almost undetectable.

  She wrote down her measurements and made what she was sure would be the final adjustment to the solution. Then she ran back across Kingsley Street for breakfast at the apartment.

  It was hard to keep her voice down, with Bruno and Giovanna still asleep. What she really wanted to do was dance around the living room and shout “I’VE DONE IT!” Instead, she resorted to kicking her legs in the air and grinning like an idiot, and Raffaello watched her with a baffled smile. He slid an egg on toast onto her plate.

  “I wish I could tell Jin—my old chemistry teacher,” Janie said.

  “Why can’t you? You’ve got your tip money. Send a telegram.”

  Janie reminded herself to be careful, in her excitement, not to tell Raffaello things she wasn’t supposed to tell. “I’m not sure where she is,” she said. “I think she got a new job somewhere.”

  “You could write to your old school, and ask them to forward a letter.”

  “Sure.” She was distracted for a moment by the tangled lie: Jin Lo had never been at her school. Then she broke into a happy smile. “Raffaello, I did it!”

  He grinned back. “I knew you would.”

  “I wasn’t sure.” She took a bite of toast.

  “Yes, you were. Finish your breakfast, or we’ll be late.”

  She sat happily munching the crunchy toast and the soft, salty egg, thinking about how delicious salt was in small quantities, and how important the ability to remove it was. The vast oceans of the world could be drinkable.

  She sailed through the day at East High, chatting with Raffaello’s friends at lunch, joking about who was going to try out for the school play, a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

  “I’d want to be the guy with the donkey head,” Raffaello said.

  “They aren’t going to cover those curls with a donkey head,” a girl said. “They’d make you one of the lovers, Demetrius or Lysander.”

  Raffaello made a face. “What kind of dumb names are those?”

  “This from a boy named Raffaello?” the girl asked.

  “I can’t be in a play anyway,” he said. “Some of us have responsibilities, you know.”

  He sounded like he was bragging, and the girl laughed at him, but Janie heard a tinge of regret in his voice.

  That night in the restaurant when the dishes were done, Giovanna closed out the till, and Raffaello stacked bread baskets. One of the cooks made Janie a bowl of linguine pesto. She ventured, “They’re doing a play at school.”

  “Sixty, sixty-five, seventy,” Giovanna said, under her breath.

  Janie took a bite of creamy green pasta and waited for Giovanna to finish counting, then said, “I think Raffaello would be great in it.”

  “Raffaello can’t be in a play. He has a job.”

  “It’s only for a few months.”

  Raffaello watched their conversation from across the kitchen, pretending not to listen. The rest of the kitchen staff was cautiously interested in anyone taking on Giovanna for any reason.

  “It will make him a better waiter than being a busboy will,” Janie said.

  “Oh?” Giovanna said, accepting the challenge. “Why?”

  “Because you have to memorize lines, and speak clearly, and perform. Those are all things waiters have to do well.”

  “He can practice being a waiter by being a waiter,” Giovanna said. “In fact, Raffaello, you should start. No more busboy.”

  This was going the wrong way. “But if he gets one of the romantic leads, people will see him and talk about him,” Janie said quickly. “Girls will want their parents to bring them to the restaurant where he works.”

  “And if he’s only the boy who holds the spear?”

  “Then he’ll get the lead in the next play. And people will come here to see him.”

  Giovanna shook her head, looking down at her neat piles of cash. “We have many customers now.”

  “You wouldn’t be happy with more?”

  “We have better ways to make the advertisement.”

  “You can do those, too. Put an ad in the play’s program. All I’m saying is that Raffaello is underused here, clearing dishes. You should get him onstage where more people can see how charming he is.”

  Giovanna gazed across the kitchen at her nephew, sizing him up as an undeveloped asset. “You want to be in this play?” she asked him.

  He nodded nervously, which made his curls bounce around his temples.

  “Speak up, child!” she commanded. “They don’t hear you in the back of the theater like this!”

  * * *

  In the morning, Janie splashed water on her face and dashed up to Grayson, hoping that Mr. Willingham had remembered, one last time, to leave the chemistry door unlocked for her. The knob turned in her hand. She sent the headmaster a silent thank you across the campus, expecting the largest crystal yet on the thread in the tank at the back of the room. Then she stopped, staring.

  There was no crystal.

  There was no tank.

  There was no apparatus.

  Her salt, her beakers, her condensation-collecting tubes, the roll of thread, the carefully capped bottles—the whole thing was gone.

  Janie closed her eyes for a few second
s, thinking she was hallucinating with tiredness, and opened them again. Nothing had changed. The back counter was still empty. She walked slowly toward it, feeling her feet touch the hard floor, so she knew she wasn’t dreaming. The room was quiet and she could hear her own pulse in her ears.

  She was awake, and this was real.

  The countertop was black stone, and there was a shiny, clean rectangle where the tank had stood. She touched the stone. There wasn’t a lot of dust, but there was enough to show that something had been there. There were a few white spots where salt water had dripped and dried. There was another circle of faint dust where her titrating apparatus had stood. But everything else was gone.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Headmaster

  Janie marched into the headmaster’s office, past the secretary, who looked up and started to say something. Janie ignored her and threw open Mr. Willingham’s heavy wooden door.

  “Where’s my equipment?” she demanded.

  Mr. Willingham, smoking his pipe, looked up at her mildly. “I beg your pardon?”

  “It’s not there! Everything’s gone! That whole heavy tank!”

  “What tank?”

  “My tank, for my experiment! You saw it, in the chemistry classroom!”

  “This tank was your personal property?”

  Janie exhaled in exasperation. “No,” she said. “But it’s not about the tank. It’s about my experiment. It’s gone!”

  “So you’re saying there’s been a theft of school chemistry equipment?” Mr. Willingham asked. “That’s a very serious matter.”

  She tried to calm herself down. “You know exactly what I’m talking about, and I want to know where it is.”

  Mr. Willingham set his pipe down carefully, put his elbows on the desk, and interlaced his plump white hands. He rested his nose on his knuckles as if he were thinking. Then he raised his head again. “Here is what I know,” he said. “I know that you are no longer a student of this institution. A door was left unlocked at your request, and now you tell me that the school’s valuable chemistry equipment has gone missing.”