“Hallmark movies aren’t just at Christmas anymore,” said Ryan, trying to sound ironically informative.
“You sound like a boy in love,” said Bizzy.
“I’ve sounded like that since about six minutes after we met,” said Ryan.
“What took you so long?”
“That’s how long it took for me to realize that you’re actually smarter than me.”
She squeezed his hand. “I know that was hard for you to say.”
“Saying it would be easy, except that it’s true.”
“You stepped in front of a car for me,” said Bizzy softly.
He had nothing to say to that. So he said something stupid. “After putting a bee in my mouth, what’s a car?”
“Bigger,” said Bizzy.
“No stinger,” said Ryan. And then, because he really was too emotional to stay on this subject, he said, “If you want the new weird-face to really be weird. You know, ugly. Make it asymmetrical.”
She didn’t say anything.
“Not a complete half-and-half—glamor one side, weird on the other.”
“That would be way too memorable,” she said.
“Just one thing. Or two.”
“I practiced symmetry,” she said.
“I wiggle only one ear,” said Ryan. “It can be done.”
“That’s actually a good idea,” she said. “Most people aren’t symmetrical.”
“That’s part of what works with glamor-face,” said Ryan. “It really is perfectly symmetrical.”
“More mirror time,” said Bizzy. “It’s a good thing I’m not actually narcissistic.”
16
All day, Ryan kept getting impatient with all the rituals of high school. Changing classes, walking the halls, stopping at his locker. Why am I doing this? What does it matter?
He knew all the standard reasons. So he could get fine grades and get into a good school, though as far as Ryan could see, most adults said “good school” when they meant “university that you can brag about having attended.” Ryan had once read that any university with a decent library will get you the education you want, as long as you take initiative and apply yourself. He recognized his own laziness in the idea of “getting through” school—which is what he was doing with high school. Get a diploma. Have a high grade point average so you can get into a “good school.” Ace the SAT and the ACT. But all that really mattered was getting through and moving on to something real.
None of it was real. Mr. Hardesty tried to be real, tried to get his students to conceive of history as something substantial, a lens through which the world could be viewed. But it wasn’t a lens, it wasn’t polished, it couldn’t be focused. When it came to things like that, Ryan was on his own. Everybody was on their own, but almost nobody understood that. They all thought they were “getting an education.” It was like they were all being taught one set of dance moves, a single piece of choreography. If they worked hard and really got it down, would they be dancers? Absolutely not. Knowing one dance doesn’t mean you know how to dance. All these high school students, including him, weren’t becoming “educated.” They were being trained. For what? To perform tasks that only had meaning when they were performed at school. We are learning the dance of public secondary education. Unless we become high school teachers, God forbid, we will never have to perform that dance again, or even think about it.
Such thoughts roiled through Ryan’s mind, but he knew he had thought them before, without feeling any anxiety about it. I’m marking time, yes, he had told himself for a couple of years now, but so is everyone else. As Dad says, it’s just a way of keeping adolescents out of the labor pool precisely when minds and muscles are at their most creative and flexible, so that kids don’t get into the workforce until they’re more nearly untrainable and unadaptable.
But Dad was an eccentric. Nobody else thought like him.
Except me, thought Ryan. I think like him, and not just because he talks like that. Other kids tune out their father or mother or both, and learn to think only what their teachers or siblings or peers think. Everybody joins into somebody’s collective opinion. Except Dad. And if I join in with his collective opinion, it’s not like it provides me with ready answers. It just provides me with difficult questions and leaves me to make up my own mind.
Somewhere just before lunch, as Ryan tuned out the drone of the chemistry teacher talking about molecular bonds—a subject Ryan had mastered in seventh grade—it finally dawned on him: The only worthwhile education he had ever received was the training he had from his skeptical, irreverent, sarcastic, earnest, reliable father.
What was that education? Question everything, but keep your word. Doubt everything, but never give others a reason to doubt you.
It all came together at lunch, when Ryan said to Bizzy, “Do you think you could come with me to my dad’s job site right after school?”
Bizzy cocked her head. “What’s the agenda?”
“Well,” said Ryan, “I could say that I want my girlfriend to know my dad, but that’s not the reason.”
“You want your dad to know your girlfriend?”
“I don’t need his approval to know how I feel and what I want,” said Ryan. “It’s this: My dad is the wisest person I know. When he gives me advice, so far it’s always worked. At least, whenever I was smart enough to follow it.”
“And you want advice about . . .”
Ryan gave her a trying-to-be-patient-with-an-idiot look. “Stepping in front of a car was an impulse from my micropower. Walking up to the driver with no idea what to say to him, that was my clueless self coming into play. I think we need some kind of plan, some kind of best-case scenario we could be working toward, instead of reacting to threats all the time.”
Bizzy nodded.
“I don’t think he’d know what we should do,” said Ryan, “because I don’t think he even knows about micropowers. I haven’t told him, and Mom has no idea, so she hasn’t told him. He’ll be hearing it all for the first time.”
“You haven’t told your mom?”
Ryan thought about that for a second. “Instinct,” he said. “Dianne and I don’t tell Mom stuff that will make her crazy.”
“And what stuff is that?”
“Anything that matters,” said Ryan.
“Come on,” said Bizzy.
“You’re right. What we don’t tell her is anything that will make her think we’re accusing her of something, or anything that will make her feel like she’s not in control of everything about our lives.”
“So . . . you don’t tell her anything that matters,” said Bizzy.
“She doesn’t know about my micropower.”
“How would that make her crazy?” asked Bizzy.
“She’d try to take control of it. She’d try to get me to demonstrate it. She’d try to set up situations to trigger it.”
“Like Indefensible did,” said Bizzy.
“Except her schemes would be pathetic and would never work. Defense’s did. When my mom’s attempts failed, she’d accuse me of deliberately not using my micropower because I despise her. Or something.”
“You sound angry with your mother,” said Bizzy.
“I don’t think I am, though,” said Ryan. “I’m just used to her and tired of what happens when one of us triggers her, so . . . Dianne and I both use avoidance as our make-life-at-home-livable strategy.”
“You’ll tell your dad,” said Bizzy, “because your mom would believe it and make everything crazy, but your dad won’t believe it and so he’ll be helpful.”
“Unless you’ve got a micropower yourself,” said Ryan, “it’s pretty hard to believe.”
“Maybe he has one,” said Bizzy.
“If he does, he isn’t talking about it.”
“Add in my mother’s ability to curse people, then to
p it with the Slovenian witch hunters. That’s kind of a lot for a rational person to absorb,” said Bizzy.
“My dad is a rational person,” said Ryan. “But he’ll ask questions, maybe even questions neither of us had thought about. You know? I think it’s worth a trip. I’ll go alone if you can’t get permission from your mom, or if you don’t have the time. But I’d really like to have you there.”
“Because you want him to meet me.”
“Because he won’t believe that I could ever have a girlfriend like you unless he sees for himself.”
“I can believe that,” said Bizzy. “Nobody else here at school can believe it, either.”
“Especially not Defense,” said Ryan. “And no, I’m not going to kiss you right here after we both just got through eating school lunch. Especially not when I’d have to lean over a table and probably knock something over or get food on my shirt, and then somebody might look at me and say, ‘Clumsy of you.’”
“Got it,” said Bizzy. “You’re afraid I’d do those things and you were taking it on yourself to spare my feelings.”
“Sweet of you to pretend to think that’s possible,” said Ryan.
It took two bus rides, but by now Ryan and Bizzy both had their youth passes for the bus system, so being broke was no barrier. Right now Dad was doing a remodel on a fast-food place, which had cars going through the drive-through while the dining room was still under construction. That meant a working kitchen with a lot of plastic barriers up to keep construction dust from getting into the food.
“This doesn’t seem like a good place for an after-school snack,” said Dad.
“Not here for the food,” said Ryan. “Someplace private and quiet?”
Dad led them out to his camper in the parking lot, behind a bunch of cones. “Sorry to interrupt you at work,” said Ryan. “Without, you know, checking first.”
“It’s fine,” said Dad. “You’ve never brought anyone with you before, so I’m guessing this meeting matters.”
Ryan indicated for Bizzy to sit at Dad’s worktable, which she did, as smoothly as Ryan expected. Ryan, not so smooth, pulled out a stool and sat, much lower, across from Dad.
“Dad, this is Bojana. She goes by Bizzy. With a ‘Y.’ She lives in the new half of our house.”
“Bizzy Horvat, right?” asked Dad, offering a hand. “I met you at the lease signing.”
“Yes, sir,” said Bizzy.
“She’s also my girlfriend, Dad,” said Ryan.
He had never said that sentence to his father before. He wasn’t sure whether his father would say something supposedly witty that ridiculed Ryan somehow, or would instead be gracious and supportive.
“I didn’t know Ryan moved in circles where such a thing would be possible,” said Dad.
What, Ryan wanted to say. You thought I was gay?
But he didn’t actually say that. It was what he would have said if Bizzy hadn’t been sitting there. It was what he was going to say if Father teased him later.
“Mr. Burke,” said Bizzy, “the social circle that brought Ryan and me together was the back deck you installed on our side of the house. Ryan sits on the bottom step and says smart and funny things, and I sit on the deck and try to keep up. And because we’re both saturated with adolescent hormones, and the moon is often out, it was inevitable that we would fall in love.”
Dad laughed out loud. “Okay, Ryan, I like her.”
“Dad, I did want you to meet her, and her to meet you, but Bizzy and I have a real problem, a serious one, because we are both micropotents.”
“A term needing definition,” said Dad.
Ryan proceeded to define micropowers and tell about GRUT and Dr. Withunga and Aaron Withunga. He told the story of the bees, and then the story of stopping Errol from killing Defense. He did not tell about Jannis healing both Defense and Errol. He did not tell about Bizzy’s power. Because that one was far more convincing when you saw it than when you told about it.
So when Ryan’s stories were done, and Dad asked some questions about Dr. Withunga and then sat there nodding thoughtfully, Bizzy said, “I think you need to see my micropower.”
He looked at her.
When nothing happened, he looked at Ryan.
“Keep looking at her,” Ryan said.
Dad looked at her again. And then his chair toppled backward against the wall behind him. Then the chair slid out from under him, jamming one leg into Ryan’s shin across from him.
Ryan jumped up, dealing with his own pain while trying to help his dad get back on his feet. Ryan picked up his father’s chair, set it in place, and even got Dad to sit back down—but through it all, Dad couldn’t keep his eyes off Bizzy’s face.
“Maybe you should relax a little,” Ryan said.
“Not possible,” said Dad.
“I meant Bizzy.” Ryan watched as Bizzy relaxed all the things she did to make glamor-face.
“And you can just do that,” said Dad. “Whenever you want?”
“She rarely wants to,” said Ryan. “It kind of stops traffic. Nobody’s seen that face at school, for instance, except maybe just glimpses.”
“I couldn’t help thinking, the yearbook staff is going to want pictures of you on every single page,” said Dad.
“I’m hoping for no pictures of me at all,” said Bizzy.
“What matters here, Dad, now that you’ve actually seen a micropower in action, the reason we came here, is that Bizzy isn’t the only one in her family with a micropower.”
And Bizzy told him about her mother’s “clumsy” curse. And her “you’re so pretty” curse that only worked on Bizzy.
“She actually does that to you?” asked Dad.
“When I really annoy her,” said Bizzy.
“Who would do that to their own . . .” His voice trailed off. Ryan didn’t know why, but Dad’s eyes teared up a little. They got a little shiny.
“In Slovenia,” said Bizzy, “if you can mutter a curse and then bad things happen to the person you cursed, there are people who take note. People who hunt for witches.”
“Burn them at the stake?” asked Dad.
“They don’t care how they kill you. Belief in witches is different in Slovenia. At least among the lovece.”
“Loveks,” said Ryan. “Hunters. Witch hunters.”
Then Ryan told about his conversation with the watcher in the RAV4 that morning.
“Do you believe him?” Dad asked.
“He was talking in a monotone,” said Ryan. “He was looking straight forward through the windshield, not at me. He has a Slovenian accent, way stronger than Mrs. Horvat’s. So I don’t know whether I would have any ability to detect a deceptive pattern. I think it’s possible that he means no harm, because, you know, he’s done no harm. He might have been watching out for Bizzy like he said, driving back and forth. Or he might have been setting up the conversation we had, and it’s a lie designed to get him inside the Horvats’ house without getting himself a clumsy-curse.”
Dad immediately started asking new questions. “Does anybody else in the GRUT group have some micropower that might protect you?”
Ryan shrugged. “We don’t know a lot of the powers. The guy who knows where all the spiders are, that’s not much help.”
“But Flower Girl—Dahlia?” suggested Bizzy.
Ryan nodded, then explained to Dad. “Dahlia can make people yawn. She sometimes goes with the police. Even people crazy on drugs can’t put up much of a fight or run away very fast if they’re constantly yawning.”
“So that’s good,” said Dad. “She doesn’t have to say anything? No audible curse?”
“When she does it, people don’t have any idea why they’re yawning,” said Ryan. “She’s done it to me, even though she knows Dr. Withunga forbids using our micropowers against each other.”
“Dahlia’s a yawning rectum,” said Bizzy. It sounded so pretty when she said it.
“But she’d help,” said Ryan. “She helps. So that’s a good idea.”
“I think she secretly has a crush on Ryan,” said Bizzy.
“In all my life,” said Ryan, “only one person has ever had a crush on me.”
Bizzy looked at him in surprise. “Who?”
Dad laughed again.
“So the real question is, Bizzy, would your mom let one of these supposed protector guys into her house? Like Mr. RAV4?”
“Maybe if he passed through a Transportation Safety Administration gate first, to make sure he wasn’t armed,” said Bizzy.
“I think that if Mrs. Horvat knew that we could disable anybody who tried anything, she might. I mean, she lets me walk Bizzy to and from school, because she knows that I only barely kept myself from killing Errol Dell. So she knew I could protect Bizzy.”
Dad shook his head. “Not from a sniper bullet.”
“Her feeling was,” said Bizzy, “that sniper bullets could have ended the story back in Slovenia or anytime at all here in the United States. She was more afraid of kidnapping. A hostage situation.”
“Why did you come to me?” asked Dad. “You know I’m not former military or anything.”
“He says you’re very wise,” said Bizzy. “He says you ask good questions.”
Ryan was glad, because her saying that meant he didn’t have to, which would have embarrassed Dad.
“It sounds as if your mother is betting her life on this decision,” said Dad.
“She believes she is,” said Bizzy. “I don’t have any evidence to contradict her belief.”
“And I don’t know anything,” said Ryan.
“You know what your GRUT group can do.”
“But I don’t want to put the people of GRUT into a position of danger. I mean, what if they come in, guns blazing, and all we’ve got is yawning and belly-button detection?”
“And you,” said Dad, “doing whatever it takes to keep Bizzy safe.”
“Maybe what it takes to keep Bizzy safe,” said Ryan, “is not to let this Slovenian clown troupe anywhere near the Horvats’ house.”
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