I made sure I arrived so late the next morning that there was no chance of bumping into Harlen at the lockers, but when I saw my name on the notice board for litter cleanup duty, I nearly had a heart attack. I thought Harlen had written us in together. Then I saw it was Gilly’s name next to mine.
“Hope you don’t mind me nominating you as my partner,” she said when we met to collect our bins and spikes.
“Not at all. I’m proud to be the one you want to pick up moldy crusts with.”
She laughed. “I thought you might rather be with Harlen. He was looking for you at the bus stop this morning.”
I didn’t say anything for a while. Then I said, “He called my place last night. He asked me out, but I told him I couldn’t go.”
She stared at me sympathetically. “Did your da say you couldn’t?”
“I didn’t want to,” I told her.
Gilly thought I was joking, of course. “This is Harlen every-girl-in-school-has-a-crush-on-him Sanderson we’re talking about?”
“Yes,” I said fiercely and unhappily, and her amusement faded. “I just don’t get why he’s suddenly so interested in me.”
“I know why,” Gilly said kindly, and I stared at her. “Alyzon, you were always a nice person, but these days it’s like something in you is radiating this … energy that … oh, I can’t describe it. But I bet that’s why Harlen suddenly got so keen.” She took my expression as puzzlement and elaborated. “I mean, it’s like when you walk past a hot bread shop. You want to go in even if you’re not hungry.”
I managed to say lightly, “You’re telling me Harlen wants me because I smell like a bread roll?”
Gilly laughed.
“What are you witches cackling about?” Sylvia Yarrow asked, passing by.
“Witch is not the word for her,” Gilly said when Sylvia had gone out of hearing range.
“She’s angry because she’s hurting,” I said without thinking.
Gilly gave me a curious look. “How do you know?”
I shrugged, spiked a chip bag, and then told the truth. “I just feel it.”
“Yeah, well, what I feel is that she is a prime bitch.”
We picked up rubbish in silence for a while, following the line of the outer fence, and I thought over what Gilly had said about Harlen. Could it be that my extended senses were attracting him? Mrs. Barker had commented about the change in me and so had Mirandah, and even the creepy dream I had experienced the night before seemed to suggest Harlen was aware of the change.
“So, you liked Sarry and the others?” Gilly asked shyly.
I was glad to have my thoughts interrupted. “They’re great. Harrison was so funny.”
“He’s really smart,” Gilly said.
“I know. He said on the bus that he’s a senior, and he’s younger than me! How did you meet him?”
She shrugged. “I was doing some volunteer work, helping deliver meals to old people. That’s where I met Sarry, too.”
“And Raoul?” I asked.
“I was doing a computer programming class, and he was the tutor. We just hit it off so well that we kept in touch.”
“Then you introduced him to the others?”
She nodded. “We’re all movie buffs, and Harrison—”
“Wants to be a director. I know.” A vague plan solidified suddenly. “Gilly, would you like to come to my place for dinner one night this week? My dad or brother could pick you up and then bring you home after.”
“It’d have to be your dad, and he’d have to come in and meet my grandmother,” Gilly said dubiously.
I knew that she lived with her elderly grandmother whenever her mother was away on business trips, which was most of the time. I didn’t know anything about her father other than that he had left his wife and baby daughter and now lived in Paris. Gilly never mentioned him and rarely spoke of her mother. Most often she talked about her grandmother, but the old seaweed smell that infused her signature odor whenever she talked about the old woman told me the relationship was troubled.
Nevertheless, I was confident about Da’s ability to charm anybody and said so.
“It helps that he’s totally gorgeous,” Gilly said. I had introduced her to Da the night of the school play. “Why do you call him Da, anyway?” We reached the big blue Dumpster behind the cafeteria and emptied our bins into it.
“I guess it comes from him calling his own da that.” I wrinkled my nose at the smell, and reflected that there was a difference between “real” bad smells, such as the odorous reek of the garbage, and the rotting smell Harlen gave off, but I lacked the words to describe the difference.
“What night shall I say to my grandmother?” Gilly asked.
“You decide,” I said as we stacked our empty bins and washed our hands.
“How about Friday? I could stay later then.”
I laughed. “Done.”
* * *
The art teacher was out sick, so after lunch I had a free period in the computer lab to type a draft of the samurai assignment. Gilly was rehearsing with the school band, so I was solo. It wasn’t until the bell rang for the next class that I realized the boy sitting at the next computer was in Serenity’s homeroom. On impulse, I asked him if he knew her.
“Serenity?” the boy repeated blankly.
“You know,” one of the girls insisted. “She calls herself Sybl.”
“Oh, her.” The boy curled his lip.
“Do you know who she hangs around with?” I asked.
They all laughed. “Nobody here,” the boy said, and they went out.
I finished packing my own papers, wondering if he meant that Serenity hung around with someone outside school. I thought how she had turned up outside the library the night before, claiming to have been inside. Was it possible that she hadn’t been inside, but had been meeting someone elsewhere? But why be so secretive about it?
Coming out of the computer lab, I forgot Serenity immediately because Harlen was standing in the hall, filling it with his dreadful rotting stench. “Hiding from me, were you?”
I thought of him in my dream, saying, “I know what is inside you.”
Forcing myself to meet his eyes, I said disparagingly, “I suppose I have been hiding out a bit. It’s all this catching up I have to do because of being in the hospital. I’m really sick of it.”
“Poor baby,” Harlen crooned, his voice softening. He came a step nearer, and I fought to hide the shudder of horror that passed through me at the thought of him touching me. “You know, I came to school on Saturday to meet you after those tests,” he said softly.
“Oh, I didn’t see you,” I said, praying someone would interrupt us.
“I saw you go off in the car with Barking,” he said.
“She offered to drive me home. Don’t you like her?” I asked innocently, because it was suddenly clear that he didn’t.
“What’s to like?” Harlen asked lightly, but there was a definite edge to his voice.
“She’s a good teacher,” I managed to say.
“There’s more to life than school, Alyzon Whitestarr,” Harlen said. I fiercely resisted flinching when he reached out to run his fingers down a strand of hair that had escaped from my ponytail. “You are a little goody-goody, aren’t you?” He laughed softly. “But maybe you might like to be a little bit bad sometime with me.”
I clamped hard enough on my senses to gray the posters on the wall behind him, and suddenly the air was full of hissing whispers. I was terrified that Harlen would touch my cheek, but he just gave the strand of hair a sharp tug and then went away, saying he’d catch me later.
* * *
That night I told Da about asking Gilly to dinner, and he agreed to pick her up, although he joked about getting arrested for driving his beaten-up old van in the most exclusive part of town. His eyes flashed when I told him he also had to call Gilly’s grandmother. “There hasn’t been an elderly lady yet who could resist my undeniable charms,” he boasted.
“You seem cheerful,
” I laughed.
“Gig tomorrow at lunchtime,” he said. “A well-paying job at an upmarket charity function, courtesy of Aaron Rayc.”
“Aaron Rayc?” I echoed. “What’s he got to do with it?”
Da shrugged. “He’s connected to the charity. But Alyzon, I’ve been thinking about Jesse and how you suggested he write down his thoughts. Your mother said he came into the studio last night at about four in the morning and talked to her for two hours about his ideas. She didn’t understand a word he said, but he was in his room typing again today.” He looked at me thoughtfully. “You might just have created a monster.”
I felt a thrill of excitement. “Isn’t it great?”
Da grinned. “Now if you could take our poor mixed-up Serenity in hand.”
* * *
The next day was the interschool sports tournament, and I caught the morning bus, knowing that there would be no need to hide from Harlen because he would be competing at a school across town. Unfortunately, the athletes were just leaving for the competition when I got to school.
Just as I met up with Gilly, Harlen stepped between us, his foul stench swamping her gentle sea fragrance. “Beat it, babe,” he told her casually, and she melted away at once.
“Why did you do that?” I asked, annoyance at his dismissal of her overriding caution. He hadn’t even looked at Gilly.
“I wanted to talk to you before the bus goes.” Harlen leaned close. “Let’s get together tonight after school.”
“I can’t,” I said quickly. “I’m supposed to watch my baby brother again.”
“Can’t someone else take care of the brat? That fat brother of yours?”
His calling Luke a brat and Jesse fat would have angered me if I hadn’t been shocked that he knew so much about my family. I babbled something about Da being unhappy about us trying to avoid family responsibilities, then fell awkwardly silent.
“You’re too good, aren’t you,” Harlen said, and this time I heard a sharp spike of impatience in his voice. Then the bus started up and he had to get on board.
* * *
At lunchtime I decided to sit under one of the peppercorn trees growing around the courtyard. Maybe it was because Harlen was weighing so much on my mind that I noticed a kid I had seen hanging around him a lot when Harlen had first come to the school. He was sitting on a bench, watching some little kids play a game of soccer.
“Hi,” I said, going over to him, racking my brain for his name.
He nodded at me and went back to watching the game. I hesitated a moment, then sat down and unpacked my lunch. “How come you didn’t go to the tournament?”
He shot me a look that asked why I was asking, but because I was older he just said, “I’m not into sports.”
“You used to hang around with Harlen Sanderson, didn’t you? And he’s pretty sporty.” His name came to me then. Cole. I had shifted my number screen to a thinner segment and at the mention of Harlen his wet-dog smell thickened and became less pleasant. My heart beat faster, because the smell told me that, like Mrs. Barker, Cole did not like Harlen.
“That was last year,” Cole said.
“You don’t hang out with him anymore?” I let my eyes follow the ball as it sailed away from the toe of a little kid, as if I was hardly interested in his answer, but Cole sat very still, like a mouse hoping a cat would not see him. I felt a surge of impatience. I wanted to know what lay behind Harlen’s smell, and the fact that Cole had liked Harlen and now clearly no longer did made me certain he knew something to Harlen’s discredit. And maybe it was the same thing Mrs. Barker knew.
On impulse, I asked, “Do you know what school Harlen went to before he came here?” At the same time I pushed the question at him mentally, hoping a focused scent message would encourage him to talk.
“He went to a private school called Shale something,” Cole answered promptly in a jerky monotone. I was startled into looking directly at him and saw that his face had gone chalk-white. His eyes, turned to me, were dark and cowed. He looked, I realized with a sick jolt, completely intimidated.
But I hadn’t bullied him, I told myself. It was true that I had mentally urged him to tell me what I needed, but that didn’t qualify as bullying!
Did it?
My bewildered silence had given Cole time to collect himself. “Why are you asking me all these questions?” he demanded. “Did Harlen send you to test me? I told him I wouldn’t say anything, and I haven’t.”
I opened my mouth and shut it again, hardly able to believe what he had just said. My danger sense began to thrum and I realized too late that Cole was bound to tell Harlen I had been questioning him. Without even thinking about it, I stared at Cole and said, “You don’t need to mention this to Harlen, Cole. Just forget about it.” I thought the same thing as hard as I could, feeling sick at the way he paled even further.
Then he looked confused. “Sorry. Did you want something?”
Reeling from what I had done, I managed to stammer that I had only asked what time it was. Cole checked his watch, told me, then got up and walked away.
* * *
I sat there for another twenty minutes trying to understand how I could have willed Cole to talk about Harlen when he hadn’t wanted to—had promised not to—and then willed him to forget. I had wished people to do things dozens of times since the accident, and no one had given any sign of obeying me before now. The only thing I could think of was that there was something about Cole that had allowed me to dominate him. I calmed down a bit then, because this fitted my theory that my enhanced abilities had primitive origins. Animals were always dominating one another, sometimes by force, but more often by will. One animal seemed mostly to know if another had a stronger will and would just signal acceptance. It must be that Cole had acceded to me in the same way weaker animals did when challenged by a dominant animal.
I turned my mind to what Cole had said, and a chill ran down my spine as the significance hit me anew. He had promised Harlen to keep some secret, and I was suddenly sure that it was not only the same thing Mrs. Barker knew, but also the thing that made Harlen smell so dreadful. I would not get more out of Cole unless I was prepared to force him to speak. And I wasn’t, because even if I had not set out to bully him, that was what I had done. But maybe I didn’t need to question Cole further, now that he had told me that Harlen had gone to a private school with Shale in the name. The school had to be in or near Shaletown, which was only a couple of hours’ train ride up the coast. I could go there and question some of the kids Harlen’s age to see what they knew about him. I knew Shaletown pretty well, especially the bit around the Shaletown Detention Center, where refugees were sent while they waited to find out if they were allowed to stay in our country.
Just over a year ago, there had been a major political upheaval that had brought a stream of refugees to the detention center, and a furor had erupted because the government had insisted on sending all but a few of the refugees back to their war-torn country. There had been endless articles in the paper with some politicians talking about limited resources and quotas and terrorists, and other politicians talking about children and women and terror and compassion. Da had gone to the detention center with some other musicians to help protest and had ended up speaking with a refugee, a girl a year younger than me. Aya and Da had begun to correspond, and from those letters and later visits, he had learned that she had two tiny brothers, a mother, and a father, all in the detention center. They had left their country because her father had disagreed too openly with those in power. Da ended up writing to the newspapers and to politicians, like a lot of other people did, asking why innocent people should be kept in a prison for an unspecified time, after which they would probably be sent back to their own countries.
In her letters Aya had talked of her fears for herself and her family if they were refused permission to stay. The letters had been heartbreaking. Were still heartbreaking, for Da had kept them. Aya had talked a lot about her baby brothers, and y
ou could tell how much she loved them.
Da had taken Serenity and me with him sometimes when he visited, and we had both got to know the gentle, doe-eyed Aya.
It had been a terrible shock when we found that the government had refused Aya’s family permission to remain in our country. Da had done everything he could, but in the end, they had been sent back and Aya had never written again. We had no idea what had happened to her and her family, but there had been such awful stories at the time of the fate of refugees sent back. In the days when we had been trying to get the government to change its mind, I had felt as if something was winding tight in me, as one after another avenue proved useless. I had felt helpless and frightened, but Serenity had been utterly certain that something would happen to rescue them, even at the last minute.
It occurred to me that the whole Aya thing had been the last time I had really felt close to Serenity. I could remember vividly how shattered she had been when she finally realized what all the rest of us had figured out some time earlier: that there was no way to stop Aya and her family from being sent back.
She had been so angry at Da.
“You talk about doing the right thing! So do something!” she had screamed at him.
Of course, there had been nothing he could do that he had not already tried. Aside from writing letters, he had offered to sponsor the whole family and support them until they were on their feet. He had said this in an open letter in the newspaper. But hundreds of people had written making similar offers regarding other refugees. All to no avail. The government only reiterated its determination to take a tough stance, calling the desperate letters of refugees emotional blackmail.
Da had not reproached Serenity for her unfairness. I had been angry at her for so unjustly attacking him, but I had been even more confused that the government had simply dismissed our passionate opposition to its decision. How could it not listen when it was supposed to represent us?
Da told me sadly that there were a lot of voters who wanted the refugees sent back to their own countries. “They don’t want to imagine how it is for a refugee, because thinking about people who are poor or frightened makes them feel unhappy and guilty at how comfortable and safe their own lives are.”
Alyzon Whitestarr Page 12
