Duplex

by Orson Scott Card

  Now it had slightly tatty rental furniture, and Mrs. Horvat and Bizzy were having a very quiet standoff. “Why should I have told you?” asked Bizzy—her voice quiet and reasonable sounding, but her stance and expression pretty much what they would have been if she had been screaming.

  “We already discussed this,” said Mrs. Horvat.

  “No, Mother, we never discussed anything,” said Bizzy.

  “Watch how you talk to me,” said Mrs. Horvat.

  Bizzy noticed Ryan. “I’m ready to go, Ryan. I don’t think it’ll matter if we’re a couple of minutes late.”

  “You’re not attending that meeting this afternoon, Bojana,” said Mrs. Horvat.

  “Probably not,” said Bizzy, “but it’s not your call.”

  “It’s not his call, either,” said Mrs. Horvat.

  “Correct, Mother,” said Bizzy. “It’s up to me.”

  “Why do you waste your time on this norček?”

  Bizzy hesitated a moment, glanced at Ryan, and said, “He saved me from a bee.” She started walking toward Ryan.

  “You look so pretty today, Bojana,” said her mother.

  Instantly Ryan saw Bizzy slip into her beauty mode. It stabbed him to the heart, to see her looking so breathtakingly gorgeous while still being herself, still able to show the full range of human expression, including her absolute fury at her mother.

  Bizzy stood still. “Mother,” she said, keeping her voice level. “I already showed him this face. He already knows.”

  “But does everyone else at school? Are you ready to go out in public this way?”

  A beat. Two beats.

  Mrs. Horvat began to talk again exactly as Bizzy said, “Yes. Let’s go, Ryan.”

  “Don’t do it!” said Mrs. Horvat.

  “Maybe they can help me learn how to control it,” said Bizzy. “Maybe they can help me learn how to keep you from controlling me.”

  Bizzy took Ryan’s hand and pulled him out the front door.

  Jake followed them out onto the porch. “Stupid move, Ryan Burke!”

  Ryan hurled back at him, “Like I have any choice about what’s going on here!”

  “Do you have a baseball cap?” asked Bizzy as she dragged him quickly to the street and then along the sidewalk toward the school.

  “Because I like having jocks grab hats off my head and stomp on them because I’m not worthy to wear clothing that is associated with an actual sport,” said Ryan.

  “A beekeeper’s veil, then,” said Bizzy.

  “You know that I don’t actually keep bees,” said Ryan.

  “How am I going to make it through the day looking like this?” demanded Bizzy.

  “You mean, wearing the face that every girl believes or at least hopes her makeup is going to give her?” said Ryan.

  “It’ll ruin me at school, you know it will.”

  “Just change faces again. Go back. Like you did before.”

  “When my mother triggers me, it takes hours before I can make it go away.”

  “Are you saying she has some kind of magical power over you?”

  “All mothers do,” said Bizzy. “She just makes it obvious. She does it on purpose.”

  “By saying that you look pretty?”

  “Exactly that way.”

  A car pulled up beside them. Mrs. Horvat was driving. “Get in!” she shouted through the open passenger-side window.

  “Go away, witch!” Bizzy answered, but not loudly. Not shouting. Just . . . intense.

  “You’re still a minor child,” said Mrs. Horvat.

  “Why not persecute Jake for a while?” asked Bizzy. “Why do you let him do whatever he wants?”

  “Because nobody’s trying to kill Jake. Because Jake isn’t special.”

  To Ryan, this seemed like a sad inversion of favorite-child syndrome. Was Jake a victim here? Or was his unspecialness a blessing for him?

  “You know what I can do,” said Mrs. Horvat.

  Bizzy let go of Ryan’s hand, took one step toward the car, then dropped her backpack off her shoulder, sprinted to the chain-link fence beside the sidewalk, and vaulted over it into the stand of poplars that made a visual barrier shielding the neighborhood from prying eyes.

  Bizzy was already over the fence and beyond the trees when Mrs. Horvat began to shout, “You can’t do that, Bojana, because you’re so . . .”

  The last word wasn’t said, though clearly Mrs. Horvat had been building up to some clincher. Instead she looked at Ryan. “Pick up her backpack, norček, and put it in the car.”

  “I don’t speak Slovenian,” said Ryan, “but I’m pretty sure ‘norček’ means something between ‘ass-face’ and ‘idiot.’”

  “It means ‘ass-faced idiot,’” said Mrs. Horvat.

  Ryan, who had already picked up the backpack, dropped it back onto the sidewalk. He turned and walked away. He could hear Mrs. Horvat call after him, “You dropped the backpack, norček! You are so . . .”

  But again Mrs. Horvat didn’t finish the sentence.

  You are so . . . You look so pretty . . . A formula. When she said it to Bizzy, Bizzy’s face did indeed go pretty, if that was even a good word for how she looked. So what word was she going to say to Ryan just now? Or to Bizzy when she jumped the fence?

  The car pulled up beside him. “Please listen to me,” said Mrs. Horvat.

  “So you can curse me, too?” asked Ryan. “I’m not afraid that you have the power to make me pretty, so I’m figuring you’ve got something much worse to lay on me.”

  “Looking the way she does right now,” said Mrs. Horvat, “she’s in danger. Surely you know that, yes? There are people in the world who would try to take that girl, with that face. So do your job, Ryan Burke. Go after her and keep her safe.”

  “Okay,” said Ryan. “I’ll get her backpack.”

  Mrs. Horvat screeched something about the backpack that seemed to have the f-word in it. Was it possible that Slovenian had the same word?

  Not a good time for linguistic inquiry. Ryan scrambled up and over the fence—not as gracefully as Bizzy had, but efficiently enough. He dodged through the poplars and saw Bizzy striding down one of the streets in the gated development. He had to catch her before her face could dazzle the security guy who patrolled the neighborhood. He would never get that image out of his mind, poor man.

  Bizzy let Ryan catch her before they got to the gate. Ryan stepped on ahead to be sure Mrs. Horvat wasn’t waiting just outside. She wasn’t. Of course, the sentry in the gatehouse watched them approach. He called out, “I didn’t sign you in, and you don’t live here!”

  “Sorry!” called Ryan.

  “Get over here!”

  “We are minor children!” Ryan called back. “You have no right to detain us. We’re going to be late to school! I will claim you made me drop my pants while you did a cavity search!”

  By now they were beyond the gate. Clearly the guy wasn’t going to follow them. Nor was he phoning anybody.

  Maybe he had caught a glimpse of Bizzy’s face, even though she was looking away from him. Maybe he was lying unconscious in his booth, suffering a concussion and a migraine—not from seeing Bizzy, but from having to look away again.

  “You do look pretty good,” said Ryan. “Just in case you were wondering whether it had worn off yet.”

  “I know how long it takes after Mother curses me,” said Bizzy. “I’m trying to think of a way to stay in the library. Or the bathroom.”

  “Here’s my idea. Go to the library. Or go to the bathroom. Can’t stay there till you actually arrive there.”

  “You don’t keep a ski mask in your locker, do you?” asked Bizzy.

  “Nobody would look at you with a ski mask on,” said Ryan.

  “I don’t care if they look,” said Bizzy. “I just care what they se
e.”

  “People always look at you, Bojana,” said Ryan.

  “Bizzy,” she said angrily.

  “Bizzy, your drop-dead-gorgeous face is always leaking out no matter what you do. People look and they think they see that face, and they look again and no, just a regular pretty girl, but then, like the twinkle of a star, a glimpse of that face again.”

  “I know how it works,” said Bizzy.

  “Does Jake ever see that face?”

  “I don’t know what Jake sees,” said Bizzy. “He’s never bothered me about it.”

  “And what was your mother almost going to curse you with after you hopped the fence?”

  “She didn’t say it?” asked Bizzy.

  “Almost said the same curse to me,” said Ryan. “But she didn’t even finish cursing the norček. Unless ‘norček’ is the curse.”

  “Norček is just what she calls any boy or man who falls in love with me.”

  “I didn’t fall in love with you because of that face.”

  “I know,” she said. “That face would have caused you to never come near me. But Mother doesn’t understand that.”

  “Because she doesn’t know me,” said Ryan.

  “Nobody knows anybody,” said Bizzy.

  “Your mother apparently knows you well enough to force you to wear your glamor,” said Ryan.

  They were still outside the school, and other late kids were rushing inside, but instead of joining them, Bizzy stood in front of Ryan, holding his face between her hands, forcing him to look her right in the eye. “My mother is a witch. Or, in more scientific terms, her micropower is one that would have gotten her burned as a witch in 1680. Because if she mutters a certain formula under her breath, things go wrong for that person for a few days.”

  “What kind of thing goes wrong?”

  “They drop things. Like heavy tools on bare feet. Or the baby they’re carrying. Or the file folder they absolutely have to get to the boss’s desk right now. Or they trip over things, or trip over nothing, and fall flat on their face. Or they walk into a glass wall thinking it’s an open door.”

  “Tripping and glass-banging can be dangerous,” said Ryan.

  “They are. She says not, but I think she’s probably caused people to have fatal accidents.”

  “What’s the formula she mutters under her breath?” asked Ryan.

  “It’s like what she said to me.”

  “‘You’re so pretty’?”

  “Only it’s, ‘You’re so clumsy.’ Said with all the pity and understanding in the world. Not really a curse at all, just an observation. But it makes them clumsy for a few days. Really clumsy at first, and fading till it’s finally gone.”

  Yeah, that would have gotten her burnt during any village witch trial. Mutter mutter, and then somebody drops their baby into the stewpot and it drowns or boils.

  “I assume she doesn’t curse people very often.”

  “What if somebody heard her yell at me that I was clumsy while I was climbing that fence? What if I fell and broke a leg? She doesn’t want to rile up the natives, get them suspicious.”

  “Nobody believes in witches anymore,” said Ryan.

  “Of course nobody believes in witches, until they watch one curse somebody,” said Bizzy.

  “‘You’re so pretty’ doesn’t sound like much of a curse,” said Ryan. And then he thought of something. “What if somebody else says it? Does it trigger you?”

  “They say it all the time,” said Bizzy. “Has no effect on me. Only when Mom does it.”

  “And if I say, ‘Wow, you look ordinary today, Bizzy,’ that doesn’t help you get out of the spell, either?”

  “I think your power is bee extraction,” said Bizzy.

  “Pretty limited, really. Because, for one thing, it requires a bee.”

  “How am I going to get to the library?”

  “First, we go inside the building,” said Ryan.

  “And some hall monitor nabs us for—”

  “We’re not that late yet,” said Ryan. “The monitors are all in homeroom and if they saw you they’d just stare at you anyway.”

  “I don’t want them to see me.”

  “Be like a New Yorker,” said Ryan. “Just stare straight ahead. Make no eye contact.”

  “That doesn’t work,” said Bizzy.

  “It works better than not doing it, because it’s your direct gaze that puts the last nail in the coffin.”

  “So that’s your whole plan?”

  “And if anybody starts heading toward us,” said Ryan, “you plant a long, fervent kiss on my amazing face and keep it there till we get yelled at for public displays of affection. Then you use your hands to cover your face in shame and walk away.”

  “You’re not amazing, Ryan, but I wouldn’t be ashamed to kiss you.”

  “You have to act ashamed of getting caught kissing a guy who’s in the running for valedictorian. Like normal girls would.”

  “Okay, I can do that,” said Bizzy.

  To Ryan’s disappointment, it only took one kiss to get them to the library. And even that kiss was kind of a false alarm, because the person didn’t actually approach them. Worse yet, Ryan felt like he had wasted their first kiss on what amounted to camouflage. Their first kiss should have been one that she meant, not just a pose to keep somebody from seeing her face.

  Ryan led Bizzy to one of the carrels that long experimentation had proved were not in line of sight from the desk librarian and were almost always overlooked by people browsing the stacks.

  “Somebody’s going to ask me why I’m not in class,” said Bizzy.

  “I’m going to take care of that,” said Ryan. “You’ll be left alone.”

  He walked away from her and took a roundabout way to the main desk. He leaned over it and spoke to the librarian. “You know the girl I brought in with me?” he said.

  “New girl,” said the librarian. “The pretty one.”

  “Bizzy Horvat,” said Ryan. “Look, she has all the same classes as me. I’m going to tell her all the assignments and let her read my class notes. But right now she’s in no condition to go to class.”

  “If she’s sick, she belongs with the nurse, not in the library.”

  “She isn’t sick. But her mom and her had a nasty fight before she left for school. Some really ugly, hurtful things were said.”

  “If every kid who has a fight with her mother—”

  “I agree,” said Ryan. “But this was a really vicious, hurtful fight. You have no idea. And Bizzy is fragile.”

  Ryan could see the librarian’s eyes glazing over.

  “You seem to believe that the problems of pretty girls aren’t actually real,” said Ryan.

  As he had expected, he hit the nail right on the head. The librarian looked startled and defensive.

  “But being pretty doesn’t make her immune to her mother saying things that make her ashamed to go out in public.”

  “She really told you that?”

  “No,” said Ryan. “I saw it. I saw her mother say something that made Bizzy change completely. It was a wreck of a girl I helped make it here today. I told her she could hide in the library until she was ready to face other people.”

  “Why would you say that?”

  “Because she’s going to get the lecture notes of the best student in the junior class,” said Ryan, “and because I know for a fact that you have never narked on a student who hid out in the library crying.”

  “She’s crying?”

  “I don’t know,” said Ryan. “My guess is, not. My guess is that she’s such a total introvert that if you try to go comfort her she’ll run right out of the library and back out of the school and then where will she go? What will happen to her? Books are her safe haven, at home and here at school. Please let her hide in the b
ooks for a while, knowing that she won’t lose a day of school.”

  “They’ll look for her when she’s reported absent.”

  “Let me take that up with Hardesty. Mr. Hardesty. Okay?”

  “Why do I let students walk all over me?”

  That’s between you and your therapist, Ryan did not say. The words that actually came out of his mouth were, “Because you’re a good person.” He would have said her name if he could remember what it was. But he didn’t dare look at the nameplate on the desk. Should have done that when he first walked up.

  “Good person, pushover,” she said, waggling her hand as if to show there was no difference.

  “Good person,” said Ryan, as if it were the answer to a serious question. “But now I need to get to class.”

  “Yes, you do,” said the librarian. Mrs. Medena, said her nameplate.

  “Thanks for looking after my friend, Mrs. Medena,” he said.

  “You’re welcome for being such a doormat,” said Mrs. Medena.

  “She and her mother are too close, Mrs. Medena,” said Ryan. “And a thousand miles apart. They know how to hurt each other. But Bizzy needs her mother to figure out how to love her.”

  Mrs. Medena’s eyes teared up a little.

  “Get to class, you rotten little con man,” she said.

  Ryan didn’t stick around to argue. Because despite her joking tone, she had nailed what he was, and if he stayed any longer she’d get ticked off enough to go confront Bizzy.

  Ryan made it to class before attendance was reported at ten after. He took just a moment to con Hardesty into not reporting Bizzy absent. “If the nurse sends her home,” whispered Ryan, “then she’ll report her absence. And either way, I’ll be sharing my notes with her.”

  “That’s no compensation for not being in class.”

  Ryan grinned. “Come on, Mr. Hardesty, you know my notes are better than yours.”

  “You’re a sphincter, de Burg,” said Hardesty. But he didn’t mark Bizzy absent. So Mrs. Horvat would not be phoned, would not have an excuse to come down to the school and raise a stink about her missing daughter.

  I’m fooling good people by playing on their kindness and compassion, thought Ryan. I’m using their virtues against them.