Later that morning at school, he confronted Jennifer Scales. The discussion went badly, measured any one of a number of ways—how much they irritated each other, how nasty the insults got when he accused her of spoiling the Quadrivium’s plans, how much blood seeped from his nose after she hit him and stormed away.
Just wait, he thought to himself as he wiped his upper lip and watched her lovely figure disappear into the crowd of astonished onlookers. Wait.
They did not see each other again until history class with Mr. Pohl—the only class they shared. Mr. Pohl was a bear of a man over six feet six and two hundred fifty pounds, with cocoa skin peeking out from under an ugly brown-and-orange plaid suit. Bushy black hair stood out from his head in a corona, and his beard rivaled Paul Bunyon’s. His bass echoed off the concrete walls.
“—Civil War, but slavery was only one of the factors, and a minor one at that. In fact, some Northerners had no problem at all with slavery—”
From his seat in the back row, Skip glanced idly around the classroom. He found, to his amused disdain, that it was increasingly easy to tell who was a beaststalker child and who was not. The true telltale sign is that ridiculous, arrogant smirk. Only Jennifer Scales didn’t seem to be wearing it right now; Skip assumed she was lost in indulgent self-pity. She stared at Mr. Pohl’s cracked, russet leather shoes.
“—reluctant to take such a step, as he knew it would rip the country in two. So he was faced with the question: Is peaceful deliberation or war the more effective path? Put another way: How far do you go to keep people together who don’t want to be together?”
“They needed to stay together,” a dirty blonde piped up from third row center. Beaststalker. Beyond the physical clues, beaststalker children were always the first to show off their loud opinions. “I mean, our country wouldn’t be what it is today if we had split up.”
“Lincoln should have let them go,” a bulky boy with red hair argued. Beaststalker. “States down there have always been more trouble than they’re worth.” From his tone, Skip could tell he didn’t believe a word he was saying. He wanted to argue, to let girls know he was in the room, to hear the sound of his own voice.
“Those states contain lots of earnest, hardworking people,” Mr. Pohl pointed out.
“Who owned slaves!” This new voice was more earnest than the first. Not a beaststalker, Skip guessed. Another human seeking their protection, from thugs like me and Mr. Slider and Aunt Tavia. A young ram seeking a shepherd’s shelter from the wolves. “They sold and tortured and killed people. Lincoln should have let them go, and good riddance.”
“That’s your bold solution?” The girl who had started this conversation flipped her greasy hair back with a grimace. “Separate and leave the slaves in the South to rot?”
“Kristen’s right,” another dirty blonde spoke up. Another sheep, Skip determined. “Lincoln was right to insist on unity. Even if it meant going to war to get them in line.”
“But lots of people in the North didn’t care about slavery,” a third dirty blonde pointed out. She flexed her arms as she leaned forward and appealed directly to Mr. Pohl. Beaststalker. “They didn’t want to force the issue.”
“True,” Mr. Pohl interjected. “Many Northerners felt Lincoln was going too far in combating slavery. It wasn’t until South Carolina and other states defied the Union, seceded, and formed their own country, that they supported the use of force to keep the country whole.”
“So they began killing their Southern neighbors,” concluded the earnest chap, “to convince their Southern neighbors we were all better off together. That makes no sense.”
“Some people will do anything for the sake of unity,” the third blonde piped up.
“Over two hundred thousand were killed in action,” the boy offered.
“Across both sides, yes.” Mr. Pohl was obviously impressed that a student had bothered to learn a relevant historical fact. So was Skip. Definitely not a beaststalker! “Not including the hundreds of thousands who died from wounds sustained on the battlefield or similar causes, and the half-million or so soldiers wounded.”
This jarred Skip to speak up. “You’re suggesting we would have been better off not fighting? That’s stupid.”
Mr. Pohl’s brows lifted, letting Skip know the fine line he was walking. “Stupid? Why?”
Skip mocked his classmates. “Let them go! We don’t want to hurt anyone!” The bile rose in his throat, and his cheeks flushed as he watched each student face him with expressions ranging from wonder to anger. “That’s so damn naïve. Let them go? Stay separate? Avoid the hurt?” He straightened up and turned so that he met every single one of their faces, one at a time, ending with Jennifer. She met his stare with tired gray eyes of her own.
“How long do you think it would have taken for a war to start anyway?!”
At lunch, he sat alone, as far away from Jennifer as he could manage. The cafeteria was not quite large enough to accommodate him. Through the small clusters of beaststalkers and other social cliques, he could make out her platinum bob next to Susan Elmsmith’s tight black curls and Eddie Blacktooth’s limp brown mop.
How it must suit her, he fumed into his pulled pork sandwich, to surround herself with the weak. People she can control.
Jennifer said something that made the other two laugh out loud.
Skip couldn’t think of a single thing today that could possibly be funny. The Quadrivium’s failure? Not funny. The fact he’d lost his best chance to see his mother again? Also not funny. The fact that he now saw Jennifer Scales as the raging bitch that she was?
Cathartic, but not funny.
Smart enough to see how toxic this swirl of anger and resentment was, he still had no desire to pull himself out of it. Aside from giving Eddie a good beating a few days ago, he had never really had the chance to let out the bitterness of what had happened in Villahermosa. Beating on Eddie had felt good. Why should it be bad, to feel good like that? Shouldn’t he seek more opportunities like that, for his own mental health? Sure, he didn’t have to beat on Eddie every time. Maybe there were other annoying prigs he could work into the rotation.
Maybe the Jarkmands. And the Scaleses. And Mayor Seabright. And—
“This seat taken?”
The feather-soft voice broke his spiteful train of thought. He looked up and caught his breath. A slender girl hovered nearby. Her straight dark hair was softly streaked with magenta highlights, her chocolate eyes sparkled, and her gorgeous dark complexion relaxed in greeting.
He took a breath to tell her to bug off, and instead found himself kicking out the chair opposite him. “Have a seat.”
“Thanks.” She set her tray down. “I don’t know many of the other kids here. I’m new—”
“Skip.” He held out his hand.
“Andi.” The name was familiar to him—had Edmund Slider mentioned it?—and then she took his hand. Her touch was electrifying, and Skip immediately knew something about her.
“You’re werachnid.”
Her mouth curved warmly. “So are you. In fact, aren’t you Dianna Wilson’s son?”
His own smile shattered, and his blood chilled. “So what about it?”
“I knew her, for a while.” The girl began to eat, as though she hadn’t just dropped a bomb on him. “In the other universe. She sort of helped raise me.”
Swallowing hard, Skip found his appetite rapidly decreasing as this newcomer ate more and more. She was Quadrivium. How can that be? She’s a kid. “So in this universe, you—”
“Never existed. Until this morning.” Her lips slurped up a slice of canned peach, and her thumb jerked behind her. “Thanks to your ex-girlfriend over there. Jennifer . . . Scales, right?”
“Right.”
“I like her.”
“I don’t.”
Andi shrugged. “Whatever. She saved your ass like you wouldn’t believe.”
Skip didn’t want to hear this. “So is it true—the sorcery worked, but then Jennifer
screwed it up, so my mother changed it all back?”
“Close enough. Jennifer had help.”
Skip pushed his tray away. “Who would possibly have wanted to help her?”
Andi turned and squinted at the table where Jennifer Scales sat. “Who’s that boy sitting next to her, with the brown—”
“Eddie Blacktooth. You’re telling me he was around? And he had the guts to help her?”
“Yeah. Though this version of him wouldn’t remember any of it.”
“Huh. What about the girl—Susan Elmsmith?”
She thought and then shook her head. “Never saw her before today. No, it was mainly Eddie, and a woman Jennifer called her mother—”
Skip clenched his fist. Dr. Georges-Scales? How did she—
“—and Jennifer’s sister, Evangelina.”
This brought Skip to his feet. He leaned over the table until his clenched teeth were inches from her face. “Are you fucking kidding me?! Evangelina’s dead!”
“She didn’t look dead, from where I stood. Jennifer found her.”
“So, what, Jennifer got Evangelina to fight her own mom? My mom?”
“They didn’t fight. I mean, there was a fight, but at the end, your mother ended it. She was happy to see Evangelina. She said she kind of set up things so the two of them would meet. Once that happened, Dianna agreed with Jennifer to unravel the sorcery. Only the three of them would have survived the reversal. Well. And me.” Her smile was apologetic.
He sat back down, trying desperately to keep his tears at bay. The sounds of the cafeteria dulled. The words of his mother through the hallway portrait haunted him: My child. Francis, my child. Of course, he had thought she meant him—but she hadn’t. His mother had used him. So that she could have the other child, and then leave him behind again. This is so unfair.
“Look, I’m not trying to upset you. I thought you’d want to know your mother’s okay, and your sister’s okay, and I’ll bet they have a plan to—”
“They have a plan?!”
His tone stopped her short. “Um. Yeah. I’d guess so.”
“A plan.” He wiped his forehead and began to laugh. Hey, I guess something can be funny today, after all. “A fucking plan. For my mother to reunite with me. You think so?”
Andi scanned the cafeteria. Skip’s hysteria would attract notice soon. He didn’t care.
“Let me tell you about a bunch of other plans I’ve heard about,” he said. “First, there was the plan my mother hatched, to find my half-sister and abandon me to an ass of a father. It was just for a while. Then she’d come back. Leaving me worked super. What didn’t work out so great was the return.
“Then my father had a plan to rule the world, which worked for as long as I could lie. That didn’t pan out either, so now I’m out two parents.
“Then there was another plan—stop me if you’ve heard this one—where four arachnids conspired to change the universe. Once again, my help was required, so I betrayed my girlfriend and helped wipe out the world, all so I could see my mom again.” He held his hands up and pivoted in his chair, taking in the scene around them. “Beautifully done! I mean, it worked out great for you guys. My mom reunited with the child she always wanted, and you got a whole new universe to play around in, and . . . let’s see, did anyone else get their way? Oh yeah—Jennifer Scales. She got her family and friends back. Me? I got screwed.”
Suddenly hungry again, he tore into the last few bites of his pulled pork sandwich.
She watched him. His rant had not scared her, or angered her, or pushed her away. Instead, he could feel—
Such sadness.
He scrambled back to his feet again. “Stay the hell out of my head!”
Alarmed, she stood with him. “I wasn’t trying to—”
He saw that a few of the nearby students had begun to notice this conversation. He simultaneously hated to be seen like this, and disdained whatever they might think of him.
“Stay away from me,” he ordered her. “I hate you, and I hate my mom. Almost as much as I hate”—he jabbed a finger at Jennifer Scales, who was still oblivious—“her!”
It was a couple of hours later in study hall, where he was drawing something with large, scythelike claws in his sketchbook, when he heard her voice again.
“Dear Diary, I hate them all. Teachers, students, janitors, lunch ladies, bus drivers. Though I really, really like the toy prize I got in my cereal box this morning.”
Scowling, Skip looked up to see Andi smiling down at him.
“P.S.,” she added, “that new girl’s been bothering me again.”
“Get lost.”
Ignoring the suggestion, she made herself comfortable at the desk behind him, taking out a black lacquered bento box and sliding it open. The study hall teacher either did not notice, or did not care, that she had food in the classroom.
“Nice drawing,” she offered as the scent of soy sauce floated forth. “Praying mantis?”
“A real mantis only has six legs. This mantis has eight.”
Behind him, he could hear two chopsticks rubbing against each other. “So, not real.”
“Not yet.”
She didn’t answer right away, and he congratulated himself on the mystery he had woven around himself . . .
“So you must be proud of the way you weave mystery around yourself. Is that how you keep other people from getting close?”
“No. I keep people from getting close by telling them to fuck off and leave me alone.”
“It bothers you, I know, that I can see through your childish, masculine crap with zero trouble.” She paused, then added, “Are childish and masculine redundant?”
“Right up there with feminine and treacherous.”
That actually made her giggle, and he heard the slurping sound of soba noodles as they slipped into her mouth. She had a nice mouth, if he remembered correctly—thin, firm lips, with a violet shade of lipstick. Where does she get lipstick from, anyway? he wondered. Come to think of it, where does she live?
“Your mom wasn’t treacherous, you know.”
Skip slapped his notebook shut, stuffed his pencil in his back pocket, stood. “And now the conversation’s over.” He stomped away, waving off the study hall teacher’s inquiry.
“I was going to offer you some flan!” she called after him.
He couldn’t help it; he turned, yelled, “Flan’s Spanish, not Japanese, you half-wit!” and resumed his affronted exit.
“This is disgusting.”
Skip stopped short. He’d ducked into the boys’ room after third period the next day, only to find this girl Andi inspecting the urinals. She was divinely dressed in tan capris and a sky-blue sweater. Cashmere, if he guessed right from the way it held her—
“What are you doing in here?”
“You needn’t yell. I knew what a girls’ room looked like. I wanted to see how the other half lived. Your mother and I didn’t cover that in my curriculum, back in the other—”
“Get out of here.” He stepped forward, his need to urinate completely forgotten, and seized her by the lower arm.
“Ouch!” She jerked away.
“If you’re not going to leave, I will.”
“Skip, wait. Oh, come on! I’m trying to reach out to—geez, could you stay long enough to tell me what those little cakes are in the urinals?!”
It was later the same day, while actually thinking about her, when he saw Andi again.
Talking to her.
He marched up to them, and Jennifer saw him coming first. She wavered between a smile and a worried frown. Without a word, he grabbed Andi’s arm . . .
“Ouch!”
. . . and hauled her away. He didn’t let go until they were in the courtyard behind the school, more or less deserted at this hour.
“What are you telling Jennifer about me? You’re prying into my mind, and stalking me, and telling her all about it! She’s a lying cow and you—”
WHACK!
He thou
ght at first she’d fallen down, but that was wrong. He’d fallen down.
She hit me so hard, I’m literally on my ass. “Buh,” he managed.
“Don’t grab me, don’t drag me, and I know more about Jennifer Scales than you think.”
His voice returned. “I think I swallowed half of my teeth, here . . .”
“You’ll grow them back, like a shark.” She was rubbing her lower arm where he had grabbed her.
“Look, I—um, do you mind if I get up? It smells like gravel and cigarettes down here.”
“What do I care?”
Carefully, he climbed to his feet. In her agitation, Andi was searching her small backpack and finally extracted a wedge of Brie cheese and an orange. She bit right through the rind, chewed twice, and then stood up straight and threw the orange at Skip.
“Ow! Easy! I need that eye.”
“You’ve got seven more.” She spat the rind out and, calming, focused on the Brie. “Jennifer’s the reason I’m here, in case you’ve forgotten. More likely, you don’t care. But you should, Skip. You should care a lot. I can like Jennifer Scales and still be a good friend to you.”
“I don’t see how.”
She took another bite of cheese, and then shrugged. “Okay. Your loss.”
As she walked back into the school building, he felt something tug at his heart.
Don’t let it slip away.
This time, he couldn’t bring himself to move.
He watched her for days. She attended classes, walked down hallways, ate lunches, and scratched the backs of her pretty thighs in study hall. Her dark hair always seemed to frame a willing smile—at the teachers, at the other students, at her strange and eclectic snacks, at everyone and everything but him.
One day, he trailed her from a distance as she walked and walked and walked and walked, from neighborhood to neighborhood, without pausing. He gave up after a while, figuring she was taking in this new world, and some exercise.
Or maybe she knows I’m following her, and she’s screwing with me.
Seraph of Sorrow Page 22
