VIOLET EYES

by Nicole Luiken

  “Hell,” I said, careful to whisper, careful to keep my head turned in such a way that my lips couldn’t be read, “We’re not living in a movie set; we’re living in a museum.”

  “That was my hypothesis, too.” Mike pretended to smell my hair.

  It would have to be a very realistic museum, a reenactment of history, with all the players but us in on it and trained to use the right slang and act like people living in 1987.

  I fed Mike a section of orange from my lunch. “We need proof.”

  If Mike and I were right, in addition to fines for talking about anything from the future, there must also be a stricture against bringing in anything technologically advanced or with a clear date on it.

  But of course some people had probably cheated.

  I remembered Wendy cramming some kind of candy bar in her mouth when I visited her unexpectedly, eating the evidence and stuffing the wrapper in her jeans pocket.

  Maryanne’s parents were gadget lovers and sure to have brought something with them. Wendy’s dad might have a couple of books with a later copyright date stuffed in among his five-hundred-some collection. But, after some discussion, Mike and I decided Coach was our best bet.

  “Remember how upset he was when you beat him at singles and told him we couldn’t be all that good if we had so much trouble beating someone his age?” Mike asked.

  My lips twitched. I had said, “No offense, Coach,” but of course he had taken offense. “I’m a former O”—he’d stopped and corrected himself—“a former champion, not some old man off the street! Not many people alive can beat me.”

  “He started to say Olympic champion,’ I’m sure of it,” Mike said.

  “Which means that somewhere he has an Olympic medal,” I finished for Mike. “Coach couldn’t bear to leave that behind. And medals have dates on them.”

  So during the fifteen minutes between school being let out for the day and the time when our bus was to leave, Mike dragged Coach Hrudey off with him to check the bus tires, which he swore were too low, while I zipped into Coach’s office for a little burglary.

  Coach could have hidden his medal at home of course, but the last time I’d been in his office to watch videotapes of Mike and me playing badminton something in his display case had struck me as odd.

  The case wasn’t locked, and I slid back the glass door easily. Inside were two badminton rackets and a birdie, a couple of badminton trophies, undated, and a football.

  It might have seemed normal to any of the censors that a phys ed teacher would own a football, but I’d never heard Coach mention any sport except badminton. He lived and breathed it. He never knew when the Edmonton Eskimos won or lost, and he never talked about baseball or basketball.

  I picked up the football and quickly ran my fingers over the lacings. I tugged open the small zipper I found and reached inside. My fingers scissored closed around a small packet. Through the paper I could feel something circular.

  My heart was beating painfully fast and I was convinced that Coach, or somebody else, would come by any second and catch me in the act, so I shoved the package in my pocket without opening it up. I quickly zipped the football back up, replaced it in the display case, closed the glass door, and went out to the bus.

  One of the tires was low and was being pumped up while Coach stood over the driver, fuming. Attempt number four to keep us in Chinchaga had been foiled.

  Mike looked a question at me, and I nodded, but I didn’t dare take out the package with so many people around.

  Twenty minutes later we were on board and the bus was under way. Mike and I sat together in the backseat. In addition to Mike, me, and Coach Hrudey, there was another mixed doubles team, Kyle and Amy, two men’s singles players, and one women’s singles entrant.

  Spirits were high, and Mike and I had to wait through “Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer” before things finally got quiet enough, and dim enough, to examine the package.

  As quietly as possible, I unwrapped the paper in my pocket, then pulled the medal out, being careful not to let any of the striped ribbon show. I held it cupped in my two hands letting in just enough light so we could read it. It was gold, as I had expected. “Men’s Singles, Badminton,” it said, “2089.”.

  “A hundred years from now,” I whispered. Even though I had suspected, it was terrible to have it confirmed. A shaft of ice went up my spine.

  Mike was shaking his head. “More than a hundred,” he whispered back. “Coach was probably in his twenties when he won, and he must be close to forty now.”

  One hundred ten to one hundred twenty years in the future. My hand began to shake. I almost dropped the medal. Mike pocketed it quickly and pressed my head against his shoulder. “I know,” he said. “I know.”

  One hundred twenty years ago, in 1867, Canada had just become a country. The United States had recently fought a civil war with cavalry and cannons instead of atomic bombs and napalm. I’d been on a school trip once to Fort Edmonton with its log cabins and railroad and blacksmith shop. The other kids had rolled their eyes and laughed. “Not another one,” they’d said. Another museum, they’d meant.

  The world I’d grown up in was as obsolete as that blacksmith shop.

  What had the scientists done to us?

  I stopped feeling bad about borrowing Coach’s medal. He had lied to me. Everyone I had ever met had lied to me on a fundamental level.

  I wanted to scream and shout and accuse.

  I didn’t speak for close to an hour, bottling up the rage. I stared out the window at the forests and fields and thought about my enemies, the scientists who had done this to Mike and me. They had done very personal damage to my life, but if I passed them on the street I wouldn’t know who they were, except for Uncle Albert and Aunt Patty. I hated Uncle Albert and Aunt Patty more because they were the only faces I had to attach to my enemies than because of anything they did, although they had done enough.

  Fat Uncle Albert with his Trojan Horse gifts: telescopes, chemistry sets, chessboards. I remembered him roping me into a game of chess with him at Christmastime when I was ten. “Chess is the game of kings,” he’d told me. “A game of strategy. Come on, play with me. I’ll let you win.”

  The words had been like a red flag before a bull. I took up the challenge: not to beat him fair and square, as Uncle Albert had obviously intended for me to do, but to lose. He tried to let me win, exposing his king and queen, but I forced him into positions where he had to take my men, and I lost. Then I pouted. “I don’t like this game. You said you were going to let me win.”

  He’d been so angry afterward that he could barely speak.

  Aunt Patty hadn’t set traps. Aunt Patty had imbued every act with hidden meaning. If I played with Lego it was, “What are you building?” “Why do you use all the red pieces first and then the yellow?” “Why does your house have so many windows? Are you afraid of being trapped in case of fire?” She’d been so sure she was onto something, I’d wanted to punch her.

  I wasn’t a bug to be dissected.

  The memories made me dig my nails into my palms, and I stared blindly out the bus window. Through the trees I caught occasional glimpses of a lake. We were getting close to Three Hills, where the tournament was being held, a town of about five thousand that Mike and I had both lived in earlier. A museum town.

  We didn’t hit town until dark. In all the moving my family had done, I had yet to enter a town in full daylight. Either it was dark or I’d inexplicably fallen asleep en route.

  Once at the hotel, Coach ordered us all to bed. I was assigned to share a room with Amy and her mother, who had come along as a chaperon.

  Amy’s mother snored, but that wasn’t why I couldn’t sleep. Every time I closed my eyes I saw the gold medal again: 2089.

  Silently I got up and stole through the moonlight to stand by the mirror in my Mickey Mouse nightshirt. I pressed my cheek against the cool, silvered glass and traced designs with my finger. I hate you, I wrote on my reflection. Hate y
ou, hate you, hate you.

  CHAPTER 8

  WE MET THE COMPETITION at breakfast the next day.

  The hotel staff had put on a buffet in the banquet room for the tournament players. Mike and I had barely sat down after loading up our plates, when a boy and girl approached.

  “May we join you?” The girl didn’t wait for an answer, smoothly sitting down. “I’m Leona Cole, and this is my brother, Vincent. We play doubles for Three Hills. How about you?”

  “Doubles for Chinchaga. I’m Mike, and this is Angel.” Mike sounded friendly, but his gaze was cool.

  So this was the competition.

  Leona struck me as the leader of the two. I wondered if she and Vincent were twins. They resembled each other only slightly. Leona had a fox face while Vincent’s was square. Her brown hair was drawn back in a cute ponytail, and she looked immaculate and at ease in tennis whites. She had dark striking eyebrows that winged upward like Mr. Spock’s and a sharp, pointy chin.

  “Angel Eastland and Michael Valiant? I recognize your names from some of the trophies,” Leona said.

  The mention of trophies and the hidden resentment in her tone made me look up sharply. Her eyes were violet.

  My gaze snapped over to Vincent. He smiled at me deliberately. His eyes were violet, too.

  I kicked Mike’s ankle under the table to see if he’d noticed. He nudged me back. He had.

  The Coles’ reason for joining us soon became clear. They were there to psych us out. Leona managed to point out in casual conversation that, although they were younger than Mike and me, this was their second time at Zones, while it was our first. She jumped up at the end of the meal. “Excuse me, I have to say hello to Oliver and Jasmine. Oliver’s hilarious—he had me in stitches at Zones last year.”

  Vincent excused himself and followed, his heavy-lidded gaze lingering on me for a moment. Flirting.

  “Well, well,” I said under my breath. With so many voices talking at once I didn’t feel in danger of being overheard. “Did you catch that? Leona and Vincent.”

  “Leonardo da Vinci,” Mike said at once.

  I nodded. “Yes. And we must be Michelangelo. Michael and Angel.”

  Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were both well-known Renaissance figures. Renaissance meant “rebirth,” I remembered.

  Renaissance must have been a code word. I wondered how many other teenage survivors of the Orphanage fire there were running around with matched names. Was there a Nicola and a Mac, for Niccolò Machiavelli? A Mona and a Lisa?

  And Leona and Vincent obviously had the same idea we did: win Zones, go on to Provincials in Lethbridge, and escape.

  Only one pair could win. I was determined that it would be us. Leona and Vincent would just have to wait until next year.

  Mike and I had come prepared to play hard to win, and the caliber of the opponents we faced that day was something of a letdown. Most were mediocre. Only a few came up to the level of Kyle and Amy. After annihilating our first two opponents we relaxed enough to have a little fun.

  When I became involved in a volley, taking ten shots in a row, Mike threw up his arms and appealed to the crowd about the unfairness of it all. He wandered off to the side of the court and tied his shoe, then took a drink of water, while I was forced to run to all corners of the court to keep the birdie in play. The crowd loved it, and I eventually “persuaded” Mike to help me play again.

  Afterward Coach Hrudey frowned at us but didn’t scold. His attention was focused on the match Leona and Vincent were playing. “They’re your competition,” he said.

  I was not surprised.

  “Individually they’re very good, but they don’t play well as a team. Their coach should enter them in singles play, not mixed doubles,” Coach gave his professional opinion. He harrumphed. “But then I’ve never heard of their coach before. I’d swear he doesn’t know one end of the racket from the other.”

  There were no playoffs, except in case of a tie. The team with the best record after round-robin play took home a trophy.

  Through some “coincidence,” Mike and I were scheduled to play Leona and Vincent last on Sunday morning. On Saturday night both our teams had perfect records.

  Coach didn’t want to let Mike and me go to the dance that night in the gym, but the two of us wore him down. All the nets had been taken down and cleared away, though no one had gone so far as to put up streamers. A live band called the Kinetic Yankees provided the music. They were dressed almost exactly like the Bon Jovi posters Wendy had hung on her wall, but they played a selection of pop rock mixed in with some old Beatles tunes.

  They weren’t bad, but they were trying too hard. All that hair flinging looked rehearsed.

  It struck me again, like a bullet in the back. Of course it was rehearsed. They were playing music that was over one hundred years old—classic rock.

  I looked more closely at the other kids dancing. How giggly and enthusiastic they were, like people at a Halloween party admiring everyone else’s innovative costumes.

  The walls began to close in on me, trapping me. I felt smothered in smoke, a prisoner of the Orphanage fire again.

  “Guess who’s heading our way,” Mike said softly. “Ready to divide and conquer?” He got up and asked Leona to dance as she approached. They moved onto the dance floor before I could protest that it looked to me as if Leona and Vincent were doing the conquering.

  Vincent sat down beside me. “Up for the match tomorrow? I saw you and Mike play this afternoon. You looked good.”

  “Thanks. Our coach is a slave driver.”

  He laughed, but the sound rang false, as if the last thing he really felt like doing was laughing. “All coaches must be alike. Ours carries a whip.”

  I decided to try some psyching out of my own. “Yeah, just because Coach Hrudey won a championship way back when, he thinks his method is the only way.”

  Vincent didn’t respond as I had expected him to. Instead of bragging about how many championships his own coach had won, he leaned forward, his face intense. “Is there an Erin Reinders living in Chinchaga?”

  I blinked. “Not that I know of.”

  “She’s very petite,” Vincent said. “She has black hair and blue eyes. She—” Vincent suddenly shut up.

  I looked over my shoulder and saw Mike and Leona walking toward our table, laughing. I felt a spurt of jealousy but controlled it. Mike was doing the same thing as I: gathering information.

  “Mike,” I said, “do you know an Erin Reinders? Vincent’s looking for her.”

  Mike shook his head. “Sorry, no.”

  Leona looked daggers at Vincent. Whoever Erin Reinders was, Leona didn’t want her anywhere near her brother. “If Erin wanted you to know where she was, she would have left you her bleeding address,” she said sharply.

  Vincent looked sullen, not abashed.

  “I know a Heather Reinders,” I lied. “If you like I could ask her if she knows an Erin—”

  “Angel,” Leona interrupted, her voice as sweet as syrup, “your skirt is ripped. You should go sew it up.”

  “Thanks,” I said through clenched teeth. But when I looked at the hem in the washroom it was fine.

  My hands stilled. Sew it up. And hadn’t Leona said something earlier about being kept in stitches? Sewing. Stitches. I felt again the impact of the sewing machine against my shin, the wild cartwheel down the stairs. Did she know about the sewing machine? But how could she? She and Vincent were prisoners, just as Mike and I were.

  Weren’t they?

  I mentioned my speculations to Mike during another one of our whisper-and-kisses conversations.

  Mike disagreed. “She’s just trying to bug you. The stitches comment was a coincidence.”

  “So did you learn much while you were dancing?”

  He shrugged. “Just that they’ve been living here for three years. Leona had a few questions of her own.”

  “Like what?”

  “She asked about you, actually. How long
I had known you, that sort of thing.”

  “Do you think we should tell them?” I asked. “About 2089?”

  “No.”

  Mike’s swift answer troubled me because I felt the same way. “In the Orphanage the doctors encouraged us to compete against one another,” I reminded him. “That’s part of why it took us so long to get together. Do we really want to keep doing what the doctors want us to?”

  Mike took more time to answer the second time, but still shook his head. “We don’t know the Coles well enough to trust them. Besides, they may already know.”

  “They’re very quick,” I agreed.

  Mike kissed my nose. “But not as quick as we are.”

  I wasn’t quite so sure the next morning. Leona seemed plenty quick to me as she drove the shuttlecock toward my face. My return shot wasn’t high enough, and the birdie got stuck in the net. Since it had been their serve they got the point, putting them in the lead, 3-1.

  The crowd cheered. Leona and Vincent were the home favorites, but the constant roar made me feel grim.

  Mike’s backhand won us the serve back. After that, service kept switching without anyone making a point. The crowds roar grew. Two other matches were in progress, but the crowd focused solely on us. They booed when I finally smashed one down the center to score a point.

  The center turned out to be Leona and Vincent’s weak spot. Coach was right: they played side by side like individual singles players not used to sharing a court, whereas Mike and I had grown almost into a single unit under Coach’s drilling. We could play side by side, front and back, or rotation as we pleased. Usually in mixed doubles the girl played front and the guy in back. Mike and I could play either way.

  We pulled ahead 7-5.

  Each point was hotly contested, averaging around forty shots in a single rally. The sweat rolled off our bodies. Leona’s face showed her true aggressiveness, teeth bared, eyes glaring. She and Vincent pushed themselves to the limit, stretching to reach those impossible shots and sometimes doing it. They drove the score back up to 12-11, in their favor.