Alyzon Whitestarr

by Isobelle Carmody

  I heard a movement in the shadows of the bus shelter, and my pulse began to race.

  “Who’s there?” I said, looking into the darkness. I willed myself to see better, but before my vision could extend fully, I smelled burning hair. My danger sense screamed at me to run, and I obeyed, taking off like a rabbit toward home. When I reached the gate and looked back along the street, there was no one in sight.

  “Idiot,” I scolded, thinking I had probably smelled a rat’s contemplation of the night’s hunt. I pressed my hand to my chest to feel the hammering of my heart.

  Just the same, I was glad to find Da and Tich in the kitchen listening to a recording of their latest jam session. I put the kettle on and sat down and let their music wash the fear out of me. When the water boiled, I filled the coffee and teapots for the others, set out milk and sugar, mugs and spoons, then made myself a milky hot chocolate. But I had barely drunk half before I was yawning my head off. I went upstairs. It was late, but the light under Jesse’s door and the muffled clack of the old typewriter keys meant he was still working. He must have put something under the typewriter to dampen the sound. I went to my own room, undressed, and fell into bed.

  * * *

  Sunday morning I woke to Luke screaming.

  I sat bolt upright, heart pounding like a voodoo drum. Serenity was sitting up, too, an expression of fright and alarm on her pale face. We were both in the process of scrambling out of bed when Da yelled that everything was OK.

  “Luke just bumped his head,” he shouted.

  “Jesus,” Serenity said, sinking back. “I nearly had a heart attack.”

  I relaxed, too, struck by how like her old self Serenity seemed. She even smelled strongly of violets. As she rolled over, hauling the blankets up around her neck, I wondered if all of my vague, dark thoughts about her transformation were silly and melodramatic. People didn’t turn themselves into something else except in movies like The Fly.

  I got up and went to shower, telling myself that Serenity was probably just going through some sort of stage. That was what teenagers were supposed to do, weren’t we?

  That night I went to the school play because Gilly was in the orchestra. Da came, too, saying parents ought to support the school their kids attended. Mirandah decided at the last minute to go as well because Ricki was busy. The play turned out to be lame in parts, especially when Romeo kept forgetting his lines, but there were a couple of kids who were really good; Juliet was fantastic. She was big and plain, but she had this great voice and when she said the lines you felt as if she really meant them. I surreptitiously wiped away some tears when she said her last lines and died.

  “The lead girl was very talented,” Da said on the drive home. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we see her onstage in a few years.”

  “Talent is only part of it,” Mirandah said, with that authority she always seemed to give herself. “You have to have guts and luck.”

  Da gave her a wry look and said mildly, “Talent may only be part of it. So is the heart only a little bit of your body, but without it the rest doesn’t work.”

  I loved that about Da, the way he could gently demolish an argument without getting mad or mean.

  But Mirandah shrugged. “Whatever. Juliet’s name is Ann Humber and she’s planning to be a nurse.”

  “Well, maybe she’ll have a talent for nursing, too,” Da murmured. Mirandah, who has the attention span of a newt, was already channel surfing to find a station playing a song she liked.

  Once in bed, I lay thinking about Romeo and Juliet and how sad their story was. Not because they die, but because no matter how many times you see the story or read it, they always die. The directors could change this or that angle or dress the lovers in anything or nothing, but they could never change the dying because it was the whole point of the play. The inevitability of the deaths was what seemed sad to me. The idea that you could be trapped in a web of events whose outcome could not be changed.

  But maybe to Romeo and Juliet, it wouldn’t feel as if they were trapped because they would only live their lives once.

  * * *

  I was anxious on the bus ride to school the next morning because I had English first period. I had managed not to think about Harlen much the day before, but now all the strangeness of Mrs. Barker’s reaction washed over me again.

  “You OK?” Gilly asked, after the homeroom teacher had gone out.

  I didn’t answer, because Harlen had entered the room. His eyes sought me out immediately, and my heart sank as he started toward me. I braced myself for his awful smell, but before he got close enough, Mrs. Barker arrived and told him briskly to sit down.

  He made a graceful bow to her that had the other girls in the class sighing and giggling. Mrs. Barker smiled, too, but knowing how she really felt about Harlen let me see that it was a perfunctory smile that did not reach her eyes. She told him again to sit down, and then she began handing out papers. She had gotten around half the room before she told us that there had been some problem in gaining permissions for the field trip, so it would be postponed.

  I didn’t look at her when she put a paper down on my desk, because I felt strangely embarrassed by our secret complicity. The paper was a list of questions about a book we had been reading, and when it had been completely distributed, Mrs. Barker went back to the front of the class and said, “Understanding a question is part of what is required of you in tests and exams. It is not just a cattle prod to make you spill what you know on the page. Understanding a question requires you to listen to it before you listen to yourself. If you listen well, you will find that a good bit of the answer is coded into the question.”

  Explaining this took up most of the period. Then we read through the questions and took some notes on how we might answer them.

  When the bell rang, I packed up quickly, but before I could leave the room, I heard Mrs. Barker call out to Harlen. I didn’t dare look back, but my neck crawled as I escaped.

  Math was next, and I forgot everything in the lovely intricacy of fractals and prime numbers. I was still being careful not to show how I felt or answer questions too enthusiastically, but I noticed the teacher looking at me in puzzlement from time to time.

  At lunchtime, Gilly said she would skip eating because she needed to do some research for an art theory assignment. I went with her to the library and started looking for information for a history assignment about codes of ethics, like the Hippocratic oath and the Declaration of Independence. My idea was to research the samurai and see if they had a code, but I was disappointed not to find anything useful.

  In the end, Gilly didn’t get much of her assignment done either, because I spent half the time whispering to her corny lines from the horror movies we had seen and stifling laughter.

  Eventually the librarian told me to quiet down or leave. Gilly whispered that she would stick with me even if I was a bad influence, because everyone knew it was when you split up that the monster got you.

  * * *

  After school, I decided to try the city library to see if they had anything about samurai. I knew I could get a lift home with Serenity when Da came to pick her up, because she always went on Mondays.

  There was the usual collection of types on board the city-bound bus. I kept my screen up but overheard two men discussing an article in the newspaper about a man who had jumped off an overpass to land in the middle of rush-hour traffic.

  “That’s seven this year so far, and that’s only the ones that get reported. My brother is in bridge maintenance and he said they have about one jumper a week,” one of them said. “All from the bridge. Like they wanted everyone to know about them dying.”

  “Makes you wonder,” the other said, and they fell silent.

  Makes you wonder what? I thought.

  * * *

  There weren’t any books about samurai in the city library, and I was frustrated enough to ask one of the librarians. He said I should try searching under Bushido, which was the name for the wa
rrior code in feudal Japan.

  “The samurai were just one rank among the warriors, and not even the highest,” he explained.

  Sure enough, there were eleven books listed. Probably there were a whole bunch in the school library as well. I wrote down the reference numbers and went to get the four with the most interesting titles. There was no sign of Serenity yet.

  I sat down and turned my attention to the books. In feudal Japan, the book explained, warriors including samurai were collectively known as bushi and were men of valor and dignity, governed by a special code called Bushido.

  Men, I thought in feminist disgust. Maybe women don’t have codes because they don’t need them. Then I laughed at myself for getting mad at history.

  I read on. There was a lot about Japanese classes and various wars in which the bushi had figured, which I skimmed. Then I came to a bit specifically about Bushido.

  Also called “the warriors’ way,” it said, Bushido was a system of guidelines and traditions that concerned justice, courage, benevolence, politeness, truthfulness, honor, loyalty, and self-control.

  Justice, or rightness, the book went on, was supposed to be the most important rule of Bushido, which counseled its adherents to loathe crooked and underhanded dealings. Every decision had to be based on what was right or wrong, and you had to be able to do what was right without wavering, even if it meant you would be injured or die doing it. No amount of physical strength or training or learning could make you a true bushi if you didn’t care about what was right.

  Warriors were also supposed to have courage, but I was surprised to read that courage was only valued if you were doing something that was right. I stopped to think about that one, because everyone felt that they were in the right when it came to arguments. I could think of a million cases where one person’s right was another person’s wrong.

  For instance, a person being robbed might feel they were right to wound or even kill the robber, but what if the robber was starving and the victim was rich? You could even argue that in such a case, neither of them was wrong, and that the blame belonged to the society that let one person be rich while another was hungry. Maybe it was a matter of degrees of wrongness, too, because the robber would know they were wrong, but might feel it would be a greater wrong to let their family starve. And the rich person might think it was terrible to have so much when other people were starving.

  Of course, in the case of Japanese warriors, they were part of a rigidly hierarchical society and were sworn to obey the shogun they were bound to, so individual conscience didn’t count as much as loyalty to one’s master. But how would a warrior of honor feel if his master decided he wanted to murder the shogun next door and steal his wife? Was it enough to be honorable in serving your shogun with courage, even if that shogun was dishonorable? Or if his intentions were bad, and you died helping him courageously, would it be said that you had died a dog’s death, the death of a person in pursuit of dishonorable goals?

  My head was starting to ache a bit, so I stretched and looked around. There was still no sign of Serenity.

  I went back to reading.

  Bushido required warriors to have nerves of steel, the book said. They must show nothing of their feelings on their face. Children were trained from a very early age by being taken to places like graveyards or execution grounds, where they must not show their fear no matter how terrified they felt. If they failed, they were beaten, and in the worst cases, expelled from training. Warriors were also supposed to show benevolence, which was regarded as a feminine counter balance to the masculine traits of rightness and stern justice. Benevolence, the book said, included love, affection for others, sympathy, and nobility of feeling.

  I made a face at the idea of women being loving and sympathetic while men had to be just and right. But it certainly made sense that all of that toughness should be watered down with a bit of kindness and compassion.

  The book went on to talk about warriors having to be polite, which seemed an odd thing to worry about when the main aim of a warrior was to chop the head off his enemy. But I read on to learn that Japanese warriors were supposed to be polite not because of how it looked, but because politeness meant that you were in harmony with yourself and your environment. Warriors would actually chide one another for being short-tempered, because it showed that you were out of harmony.

  Finally the book said that if a bushi broke any part of the code, he was dishonored. If he was badly dishonored, he had to commit seppuku, which was ritual suicide. I read a description of seppuku with fascinated horror. The dishonored warrior entered the temple and bowed to the witnesses, then he walked slowly to a raised platform in front of the altar. He sat with a kaishaku, who was a servant or another warrior, crouching on his left side. An official would come forward with a stand upon which rested the short seppuku sword. The warrior would reverently raise it to his forehead with both hands and bow again to the officials. He would then take down the top of his clothes, tucking his sleeves neatly behind his knees, and stab himself deeply below the waist on his left side. He would slowly pull the blade across to the right side and upward. By law, in order to restore honor, he must show no facial expression while he was doing this, nor when he pulled the sword out and leaned forward to stretch out his neck, whereupon the kaishaku would stand up and cut off his head with one swift stroke.

  I shuddered and closed the book, thinking that my ideas of honor and courage were very different from those of the bushi.

  I got up to return the books to their places, then I looked around for Serenity; I didn’t find her, which meant this must be the one time she had broken her slavish ritual. Just my luck. There were some phone booths at the side of the library, so I stepped outside. It was cold enough that my breath came out in frosty plumes.

  Then I saw Serenity standing on the footpath, under a streetlight. As if she felt me staring at her, she turned. When she saw it was me, her expression darkened. “Have you been following me?” she snapped.

  “Of course not,” I said indignantly. “I came to do some research. Where were you, anyway? I didn’t see you inside.”

  “I was in there,” Serenity said defiantly. She turned back to the street, and right at that moment, Da pulled up.

  “I didn’t realize you came here together,” he said cheerfully as we got in. I left it to Serenity to tell him we had come separately, but she said nothing.

  Da asked what we had been studying, and again Serenity said nothing, so I told him what I could remember about Bushido. Da said he didn’t see how killing yourself could fix your honor.

  “Do you think anyone still commits seppuku?” I asked him.

  “I think most people would find less painful ways of dying,” Da said.

  I thought I heard Serenity mutter something, but when I turned around, her face was blank and she was staring out the window.

  * * *

  Mirandah was cooking, and the house smelled deliciously of Swiss cheese-and-vegetable frittata. I was hungry enough for two servings, but I noticed that Serenity ate only when Da was looking at her. The rest of the time she fiddled with her food, trying to rearrange it to make it look as if she had eaten more than she had. I wondered suddenly if she could have an eating disorder.

  She went to our room after dinner, saying she had a headache. I didn’t want to go up and have her glowering resentfully at me, or lying there in the dark grimly pretending to sleep, so I stayed to help Mirandah dry the dishes. Three teaspoons in, the phone rang and she threw the tea towel down and went to answer it. I thought it would be Ricki like usual, but she got an odd look on her face and turned to hold out the receiver to me.

  “It’s Harlen Sanderson for you, Alyzon,” she said coyly.

  I managed to contain my reaction, but the effort made me feel slightly sick.

  “Harlen?” I spoke pleasantly into the phone.

  “Hi, Alyzon,” Harlen said, his voice sounding deeper and older on the phone. “I didn’t get a chance to talk to yo
u today. You want to come out for a while now?”

  My heart pounded as I tried to think how to answer.

  “Alyzon?”

  “Uh … sorry, Harlen, I can hardly hear you. We must have a bad connection.”

  “Is this better?” he said loudly. “I said, do you want to come out for a while? I’m in your part of town, at the mall.”

  How does he know where my part of town is? I wondered uneasily. But I only said, “I wouldn’t be allowed tonight. I have to look after my baby brother.”

  There was a long pause, then Harlen said in a friendly voice, “Some other time, then? I guess I should meet your parents first.”

  “Yeah,” I said, trying to sound enthusiastic. “I’d better get off now. My sister is waiting for a call.”

  “OK, we’ll talk tomorrow,” Harlen said. When I put the receiver down, I saw that my hands were shaking.

  “What’s the matter, Aly?” Da asked.

  “I … I don’t know. Maybe I got up too fast.”

  “That’s no surprise, considering who was on the phone,” Mirandah said. “I can’t believe you just played hard to get with Harlen Sanderson!”

  Da asked me, “Who is Harlen Sanderson?”

  “Only the school pinup,” Mirandah said drolly “What’s your secret, daaarling?” she demanded in Rhona’s voice, pretending to poke a mike in my face.

  “My underarm deodorant,” I said so seriously that it took them a minute to realize I had made a joke. Then they laughed. I was glad to have put them off, but inside I was still quaking.

  * * *

  That night I dreamed that I was inside a samurai warrior who was preparing for seppuku. I was trying my hardest to stop him, because I would die if he died. I couldn’t make his body obey me, and when he lifted the sword point, I felt a sense of helpless terror. Then the warrior glanced sideways, and I was aghast to see Harlen sitting beside us as kaishaku.

  “I know what is inside you,” Harlen whispered.

  The shock woke me.