Defense squinted his eyes. “Is that some kind of reverse psychology to get me to walk slower than you so you lose the bet by arriving first?”
“Is it working?”
“Suck rocks, mon ami,” said Defense as he took off at an Olympic fast-walking pace.
Ryan let him take a long lead. It just didn’t feel right to try to compete with Defense right now. Besides, Ryan wasn’t sure that the things he said to Defense were actually true. And the part he wasn’t sure about was whether Ryan had already cut off the friendship. It might not have been a conscious decision—no, it definitely wasn’t—but he still didn’t feel anything like the closeness and easiness he had felt with Defense up until the time Defense rejected all of Ryan’s pleas and provoked Errol Dell.
Maybe if Ryan had given him the same ultimatum in the first place . . . But no. Today’s ultimatum had come after Defense’s ploy worked, exposing the fact that Ryan’s micropower was not just about bees. Defense had already proved his point, had carried the day, had won the battle. The ultimatum was closing the barn door after all the rats had run out, or whatever the saying was. After all the cows were gone. But nobody kept cows in a barn. Except milk cows.
Get control of your thoughts, Ryan told himself. Images of milking machines plugged into udders aren’t helpful right now.
But what would be helpful?
As Defense had said, the only person Ryan was protecting now was Bizzy. But protecting her from what, exactly? Yes, someone had been stalking her, but it was Aaron Withunga, and GRUT posed no threat to Bizzy or, really, anybody.
Of course, Ryan would also protect Mother, and he had already proved that he had sufficient love for Dianne to save her from a bee sting, or at least flick it off and call the EMTs. It was hard to imagine what Ryan might ever need to save Father from, but if there was something, he knew that he would do it. But his list of beloved people was kind of small.
Could his list have people grafted on? Ryan had no particular feelings toward Mrs. Horvat, except for a general dread of getting on her bad side. But because Bizzy loved her, did that mean that Ryan’s micropower would kick in to protect Mrs. Horvat? If Mom fell in love with some post-Dad clown and, like, married him, would Ryan have to defend the interloper as if he himself didn’t want the guy dead? Because if Mom brought some other man into the house, Ryan would definitely hate him with a fiery rage.
And if Dad supposedly preferred another family to Mom and Dianne and Ryan, where was that family? It wasn’t the Horvats, and Ryan couldn’t think who the other family might be. If they existed and Dad loved them, though, would Ryan’s micropower also be triggered to protect them?
If there was no other family that Dad was seeing or supporting or whatever, then what did Mother’s mutterings about them mean? Why would she talk about a family that Dad loved better than them? There was no reason for her to lie, was there? Her resentment and grief and anger seemed real enough. There was nothing calculated about it as far as Ryan could tell, back when the rift between Mom and Dad first came into view.
How do married people who loved each other so much they moved in together—how do they get so angry that they completely reject the life they built? How could Dad stand to cut their house in half?
Of course, having seen much of the process of framing in the new walls, Ryan knew that the houses weren’t as separate as they seemed. For instance, Dad had cut a little storage closet into the walls framing the base of the stairs. Once when Ryan was alone in the house, he opened that door and crept in with a flashlight. He saw that Dad had not put wallboard between the old stairs and the framework underpinning the new stairs on the other side. They weren’t exactly parallel—the new stairs started closer to the front door—but it was still possible to slither from the space under the Burkes’ stairway into the space under the Horvats’ stairs.
Dad hadn’t installed a nice hinged door on the Horvats’ side, but there was a removable panel, and the Horvats had put a couple of empty suitcases and some boxes into the space. Not so much that Ryan couldn’t have popped that panel open and gotten into the Horvats’ house any time he wanted.
But he wasn’t a burglar or a stalker or a peeping tom. He didn’t need to see anything on the Horvats’ side, because if he walked into the Horvats’ kitchen, it would only make him sad that it wasn’t Dad’s book-lined office anymore.
And if the Horvats found him skulking around in their house, he would probably lose their friendship and any access to Bizzy. Also, when they told Dad, he would come back and completely seal off any points of passage between the houses.
It occurred to Ryan that the fact that Father hadn’t walled off the two understairs closets from each other meant that Dad trusted him. Because he must have known that Ryan would notice the omission and that Ryan would know that he could get from one side of the duplex to the other. But he also knew that Ryan would not take advantage of the opening.
Bizzy was on the other side of the walls of the house. The permeable, vincible walls.
Stop thinking of it as a military problem with an easy solution, Ryan told himself when he lay awake at night, imagining Bizzy lying in her own bed. Or getting ready for bed. That was not a useful thing for him to think about. Better to think of her on the back deck, looking down at where he perched on the bottom steps. That was their relationship, their friendship, their love story. That was probably all it would ever be.
When Mother and Dianne watched the Rebel Wilson movie Isn’t It Romantic, the part that really got to Ryan was the way she thought Adam DeVine was always staring at the sexy billboard outside the window, until, near the end, he finally made her sit in his chair and see that a reflection made that billboard invisible. Instead, he had been gazing all the time at her reflection.
Would there ever be a moment when Ryan could make Bizzy see how he saw her?
But of course she already knew, and not just because Ryan had told her more than once. Bizzy had spent her life being admired, from afar and otherwise. She probably learned how to beat suitors back with a stick before she was six. The beginning of that was learning how to turn glamor-face on and off.
The fact that she had never used glamor-face on Ryan until her mother forced her—what did that mean? That she didn’t want Ryan to be attracted to her? Or that she didn’t want Ryan to be attracted to glamor-face, and she valued his friendship because it wasn’t based on that?
Did she value him because he was permanently in the “friend zone,” as the romantic comedies called it? Would it wreck everything if he tried to move into a different kind of relationship? Or did the fact that she had actually held his hand for three seconds that one time mean that they were already moving that way?
And nobody forced her to kiss him in order to hide her face on the way to the library that day. She had made it a pretty convincing kiss. Lips parted. Some movement. It sure felt like an actual kiss, regardless of the motive. Did that mean he wasn’t trapped forever in the friend zone? Or did it mean that an occasional insincere but convincing kiss was part of what the friend zone meant to Bizzy?
Naturally, all this was occupying his mind whenever Hardesty called on him in class. It was Hardesty’s micropower, if he had one, to know which students had completely spaced out and weren’t listening in class. And ever since Bizzy moved in, Ryan had pretty much always been spaced out in class. But Hardesty didn’t pick on him very often—probably because Ryan was so good at pretending to know what Hardesty had been talking about, and also because he had a knack for getting Hardesty off on tangents, so that he didn’t finish whatever the day’s lesson was supposed to cover. Better not to call on Ryan. Better to let him brood about the girl next door.
The girl next door! Could Ryan be any more of a cliche?
At lunch, Ryan saw that Bizzy was sitting by herself. So was Defense, and they weren’t near each other.
Today, Ryan chose Bizzy, partly because
he was still pissed off at Defense—though he also knew that if he wanted to keep Defense as a friend, he needed to make sure Defense didn’t feel as if Ryan had already cut him off.
As he sat down across from Bizzy, he said, “I got distracted and was thinking about other stuff. When did goose-face wear off?”
“It wore off?” she said.
Ryan gave her a twisted smile.
“I got distracted, too,” said Bizzy. “The glamor already wore off before you began your mixed martial arts event. That’s why I could be there to see it.”
Somebody walked along behind Ryan and he felt a fist thump against his back. The anonymous male person commented on his dorsal sphincter.
“I see your fan club won’t leave you alone at lunch,” said Bizzy. “Lots of football fans in school think it would have been better for Defense to have died than to lose the inimitable foot of Errol Dell.”
“Defense was back in school today,” said Ryan.
“Seems impossible.”
“Yet true,” said Ryan. “Maybe Errol Dell will have a remarkably fast recovery, too.”
Bizzy gazed at him. “You know something.”
“As I plan to prove on the SATs,” he said. “Or maybe I should take the GED and just test my way out of high school now.”
“They won’t let you,” said Bizzy. “Because the school system gets its funding based on the number of students attending every day.”
“But by leaving,” said Ryan, “I’d relieve the overcrowding problem.”
“But by leaving,” said Bizzy, “you’d lower the cumulative grade point average of Vasco da Gama High School.”
“But by leaving,” said Ryan, “I’d ease up the pressure on the curve and make everybody else look better.”
“You are a philanthropist at heart,” said Bizzy.
“At this moment, I’m only a philogynist,” said Ryan. Then they fell into some meaningless banter on Greek words that Ryan didn’t know, and ended up with Bizzy accusing him of thinking he was somehow like Shakespeare. They were just making foolish chat, and Ryan gave up on it.
“Lunch today tastes like it was made from feet,” said Ryan.
“Made by feet,” said Bizzy. “Why didn’t you sit with Defense? He looks sad, and I don’t.”
“I didn’t choose my lunch companion by their need, but by my own.”
“Ah,” said Bizzy. “And what do you need from me?”
“Dr. Withunga is assembling a GRUT meeting after school today. Are you in or out of the play?”
“Out,” said Bizzy, looking annoyed. “Did someone tell you that I was still in it?”
“Defense.”
“Because he’s an idiot,” said Bizzy. “You’ve known him all these years without discovering that?”
“Sorry,” said Ryan. “He said it back when I thought he had a brain.”
“When I told you I was quitting the play, I quit the play. I do what I say I’ll do.”
“Knowing that, I ask you: Will you come to GRUT after school this afternoon?”
Bizzy cocked her head. “Mother says I never should again. Too dangerous.”
“Nobody there has the power to hurt you. Some have the power to help.”
“She’s not saying it’s dangerous for me,” said Bizzy.
“For who, then?”
“For all the rest of you. For the micropotents. The micropots. Whatever you call yourselves.”
“Why would we be in danger from having you show up?” asked Ryan.
“She would have to explain why,” said Bizzy, “because it only makes sense while she’s talking.”
“I can’t just walk up to your mom and ask her a question like that,” said Ryan.
“You’re not scared of my drop-dead glamorous self, but you’re still scared of my timid mouse of a mother?”
“Sorry, I thought we were talking about Mrs. Horvat, the next-door dragon lady.”
“My scared-of-everything, always-hiding mother,” said Bizzy. “My mother who fled Slovenia and lives here in the United States as if she’s in witness relocation. My mother who sees a stalker in everyone who looks at me.”
“She’s protective,” said Ryan. “I can understand that.”
“It’s not me she’s protecting,” said Bizzy, with a wry smile. “I mean, yes, she does look out for me. But she’s afraid of the people who are after her.”
Ryan tried to make sense of that. “Is there a Slovenian mafia? I didn’t know Slovenia was big enough to have organized crime.”
“Charlottesville is large enough to have organized crime,” said Bizzy. “It just isn’t organized enough. Really, I’ll talk to her. I’ll tell her that if you’re going to protect me, you ought to have some idea of what you’re up against.”
“Will she tell me?”
“I think she probably will,” said Bizzy. “But will you believe it? Will it even make sense?”
“Let’s find out,” said Ryan.
“I’ll be at GRUT this afternoon,” said Bizzy. “But only if you tell me how Defense healed up so fast.”
There was a sudden increase of chatter in the room, and then somebody started clapping, and pretty soon a lot of people were clapping. Ryan turned to look. Bizzy was already in a position to see.
People near the north entrance to the cafeteria were standing—some of them on chairs and tables—and applauding.
And then Ryan saw why. Errol Dell had walked into the cafeteria. Wearing no bandages, no neck brace, showing no sign of any injury. He’d had an emergency tracheotomy right there in the grass in back of the school, and Jannis had apparently healed that injury right down to the root. Her healing power was a lot more than skin deep.
“Well,” said Ryan, turning back to Bizzy, “I guess Errol will still be kicking in the game this Friday.”
“So both Defense and Errol got completely healed incredibly fast,” said Bizzy.
“Miracles of modern medicine,” said Ryan.
“What’s miraculous is that neither of them thought of staying home and milking their injuries for as many days off as possible,” said Bizzy.
“Defense is an idiot, somebody once told me,” said Ryan, “and Errol has to show people that he’s fit to play on Friday.”
“You’re sticking with ‘miracles of modern medicine’?” asked Bizzy. “You’re not going to tell me how they healed so fast? Because those were massive injuries. I’m betting this is somebody’s micropower at work.”
Ryan could feel himself blushing. He almost never blushed, but Father had told him long ago that it was his sure “tell” when he was lying. “Never play poker, kid,” Father told him then. “You can’t bluff for crap.”
“And you’re about to lie to me,” said Bizzy. So she already knew that about him. Even though he didn’t remember when he lied to her before.
“No,” said Ryan. “I’m about to not tell you anything, because of a promise that I made.”
“A promise not to tell anybody? Or not to tell me?”
“Anybody,” said Ryan.
“And in this case that includes me?” asked Bizzy.
“Ordinarily it wouldn’t,” said Ryan. “I’d rather tell you everything I know about everything. You know I don’t keep anything private. But this isn’t my secret. I’ve already told you too much because I promised not to say that there even was a secret.”
“Thanks for telling me more than you meant to,” said Bizzy.
“I always do,” said Ryan.
“Yeah,” said Bizzy. “That’s one of the things I like about you.”
“The fact that you can see right through me?”
“The fact that you don’t have a lying heart.”
13
The GRUT meeting started a little late because Dr. Withunga and Jannis weren’t there, and neither
Mitch nor Dahlia knew when they might arrive. Ryan wondered if Jannis and Dr. Withunga were doing rounds, like a regular doctor—did Jannis have patients that she worked with? Did they just drop in on hospital trauma units and see which patients might benefit from a little therapeutic stroking?
But with a micropower like Jannis’s, where would she draw the line? Did she confine herself to healing people inside Albemarle County? Along US 29 from Danville to Gainesville? Did she go up to DC, where there were way more traumas than in any Virginia hospital? Or was that too much for her?
What would it be like to feel so useful? To know that wherever you went, you were needed?
To not have to wait for someone you loved to get into some kind of scrape that needed the help of a really violent guy. Or a guy who would put a bee in his mouth.
No point in comparing micropowers. That video of Ryan jabbing his knuckles into Errol’s neck—it looked as if he was flying like Superman. Of course, he wasn’t, but it was pretty spectacular all the same. So Ryan knew that it was stupid of him to denigrate his own micropower for no other reason than that it was his own.
It didn’t heal people, it just hurt them.
No, he protected Bizzy from the bee, and he possibly saved Dianne’s life. His power wasn’t nothing. He absolutely did save Defense’s worthless hide. So . . . not as cool as Jannis, because she never had to hurt anybody. But way cooler than, like, knowing where the spiders were.
Well, maybe not. Knowing about spiders was also really useful. In order to avoid them. To keep from walking into random invisible spider webs while taking a path through the woods.
And then the door opened, and it wasn’t Dr. Withunga and Jannis. It was Bizzy, and following her into the room was Mrs. Horvat herself.
Mrs. Horvat looked around as if she was searching for a clean place to sit. It was all clean—school custodians did their job. But Mrs. Horvat clearly had disdain for everything and everybody in the room.
Maybe not disdain. Just a total lack of interest. She must have seen Ryan, but she didn’t show a flicker of recognition.
Duplex Page 15
