Weave a Circle Round

by Kari Maaren

  “They may be,” said Mel. “Remember the marble?”

  Freddy narrowed her eyes. “What marble?”

  “The marble. The one that rolled uphill.”

  Freddy did remember the marble, uneasily. She had been trying not to. “Some trick.”

  “I don’t think it was.” Mel ran a hand through her mousy hair. “Look. You know how I feel about Sherlock Holmes.”

  “You will love him passionately forever,” said Freddy.

  “Yes, and there’s this thing he says: ‘when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’”

  “Okay,” said Freddy, “so?”

  “So I don’t think we can eliminate the impossible this time. What happened with the marble wasn’t possible.”

  “It was just a tiny little thing,” protested Freddy.

  “So’s this.” Mel bent down and picked up a pinecone. As Freddy watched, Mel straightened, held the pinecone out in front of her, and dropped it.

  “Yeah,” said Freddy, “it fell. So what?”

  Mel said, “What if it had risen instead? That would have been a violation of a fundamental physical law.”

  “Sure.”

  “So basically the same thing happened with the marble.”

  They stood there, staring at the pinecone. A crow cawed in the tree above them.

  “We have to eliminate the impossible,” said Freddy finally.

  “I would love to,” said Mel. “I feel disloyal to Mr. Holmes. But maybe deduction can’t solve everything.”

  Freddy saw the front door open. “Josiah’s coming back out.”

  “Bad timing.” Mel jerked her thumb towards Roland, who was just crossing from the park.

  The boys reached them at almost exactly the same time. “Leave us alone,” said Roland to Josiah. “Or I’ll make you.”

  “Oh, do go ahead and make me.” Josiah flung out his arms. “I’m running out of visible bruises.”

  Roland glared at Freddy and Mel. “Go home.”

  “We were just standing here,” said Freddy. “Is that a crime now?”

  “Boys are so violent all the time,” said Mel.

  “You’re supposed to be a genius,” snarled Roland. “Use your stupid head and go home.”

  “My stupid genius head is happy here,” said Mel, signing industriously all the while.

  Freddy crossed her arms. “Explain properly or leave us alone.”

  “No,” said Roland, almost choking out the word.

  “Are you going to continue this all day,” inquired someone from directly above them, “or do I have to come down there and egg you on?”

  Everyone but Roland looked up. “Cuerva Lachance,” said Josiah in exasperation.

  She was perched in the branches of the tree, none of which were low enough for any of them to reach. As Freddy watched, she peered down at them from under her hat and said, “Yes? May I help you?”

  “How’d you get up there?” said Mel.

  “I’m not sure.” Cuerva Lachance tilted her head thoughtfully. “There may have been physics involved.”

  “You were just in the house,” said Freddy.

  She beamed at them. “Was I?”

  “Ignore everything she says and does,” said Josiah.

  Roland had caught up with events by now. “What a good idea,” he said. “We’re going home.”

  “You won’t be able to ignore me properly from there,” said Cuerva Lachance.

  “Stay away from us,” Roland flung up into the tree. “Stay away from them. I don’t know what you want, but I know you’re here to watch us. If you don’t leave us alone, I’ll … something. I don’t know! Just don’t.”

  He took Freddy and Mel by a shoulder each and shoved them away from the house on Grosvenor Street. Maybe because he would have needed at least one hand free to unlatch the gate, he pushed them all the way down the street and around the corner and into the front yard. Freddy was thinking almost too hard to notice. The marble. Pinecone … defying the law of gravity. Cuerva Lachance in the tree? Who else is living in the house? Something happened to Roland over there. Can Josiah be in two places at once? It was like watching Roland signing and not wanting to know what he meant. She kept trying to force her brain away from all the impossible things, but it always crept back.

  Just before they rounded the corner, Freddy heard Cuerva Lachance call, “We’ll be seeing you soon!” She and Mel looked at each other, then away. Neither told Roland what she had heard.

  6

  “September twenty-seventh,” said Mel.

  Freddy, poised to leave for school, looked at her. “What?”

  “Today is September twenty-seventh,” said Mel, hanging nearly upside down over the bannister. “Cuerva Lachance mentioned the date. Something is supposedly happening today.”

  Freddy had forgotten. Lately, she had forgotten most things besides how angry she was at Roland. “We don’t know what.”

  “I’m going to keep my eyeballs peeled,” Mel told her, “but not right now, since there’s a math test I have to ace first.”

  Shrugging, Freddy opened the door. Roland was standing on the porch, doing his thundercloud act.

  When Roland had trailed her to school on Friday, Freddy had thought it was just because he’d got up late and coincidentally set off at the same time she had. It was annoying, but they did live in the same house. When he’d followed her home on the same day, she’d begun to suspect something, and when he’d cancelled his RPG on Sunday so he could keep track of her every move, she’d known: he was tagging after her to prevent her from talking to Josiah. She had been choked silent by the anger again. What the hell was his problem? He was watching Mel as well, but when Mel’s friends Clara and Jonathan had come over and the three of them had started devising ways to drop an egg from the school roof without breaking it, Roland had shifted his attention entirely to Freddy. If he’d liked her, she could almost have forgiven him, but he so clearly didn’t that she’d spent the weekend getting more and more impotently furious with him. It didn’t help that he was doing his usual neat/messy thing as he followed her around, tidying up everywhere he went but also causing things to sag and fall over and get mixed together hopelessly. There was no distraction from him. Mum and Jordan were out, and Mel and her friends were busy.

  On Monday, he’d followed her to school again. He’d sat next to her in math class. He’d followed her home. She’d tried to slip away before he was out of his afternoon social studies class, but he’d found her anyway. All evening, he had watched her.

  Josiah had noticed. He was rolling his eyes a lot in Roland’s presence. At one point on Monday, he’d approached Freddy in the hallway, looked both ways in an exaggerated fashion, and whispered so loudly that everybody within twenty feet of him had stopped to listen, “I would ask you what we’re doing today in science, but I’m afraid of the fiery glower of doom.” Then he’d stalked away, making little circles around his right ear with his index finger. Freddy had seen Rochelle staring and gone off to hide in a bathroom stall for a bit.

  So to find Roland waiting for her on the porch this morning was pretty close to being the last straw. Fleetingly, she thought, If Mum weren’t gone again, I would tell her about this, but that was beside the point, wasn’t it? She jammed a hand into her pocket, wrapped it around her key, briefly wished she had some mysterious lock to try it in, and pushed past Roland. She heard him fall in behind her as she crossed the yard.

  It all became even more fun when Josiah joined them. “Oh, hello,” he said. “Will you look at this? I walk to school the same way you do, plus at the same time. You’d think I would be sensitive to Mr. Growly’s feelings and arrange things otherwise, but no.”

  “Who’s a duckling now?” said Freddy, though she wasn’t unhappy to see him. Listening to Josiah abuse the world was better than just feeling Roland hate her silently.

  Roland dealt with it by pretending Josiah wasn’t there. Freddy did not
ice, however, that he kept arranging to walk between them. Her anger at him ratcheted up another notch.

  She should have known from its beginning that the day would keep getting steadily worse. Rochelle and Cathy were out in front of the school, surrounded by boys, when Freddy turned up with Roland and Josiah. She thought she heard at least one “Oh my God!” from Cathy. Keith managed to bump into both Josiah and Roland as they moved towards the doors. Then, generously, he punched Freddy’s backpack, sending her staggering into the side of the school. She had to stand for quite a while with her hand wrapped around the key. I’m not under the radar any more, I don’t think. When did that happen?

  Mr. Dillon’s class would have given her a chance to shrink into a corner and disappear for a bit, but this was one of her PE days. It was still volleyball this week. Freddy hated volleyball. She cringed every time someone spiked the ball over the net at her. The other kids groaned when she was assigned to their team. Today, one of the teams ended up with both her and Josiah, and Michelle, who was five foot seven and athletic, complained loudly to Mr. Lim.

  “You know,” said Josiah to her as they watched their teammate abusing them, “I’m pretty good at volleyball.”

  “Maybe if you played it properly instead of trying to sabotage every game,” said Freddy sadly. She might as well talk to him. The damage had already been done.

  The class took on the texture of a nightmare. Keith was on her team. Every time the rotation put her in front of him, she squirmed. She could feel him watching her. But when he finally knocked her down, she wasn’t expecting it; he was supposed to be all the way across the court. All she remembered afterwards was seeing the ball coming straight for her head and, instead of bringing her hands up to meet it, ducking. She thought there had been a squeal from Michelle. Then she had been thumped off her feet, backwards into the wall.

  There were flashing lights dancing all around the gym. Somewhere, someone was saying, “Sorry, Mr. Lim … I didn’t see her! She’s so teeny.” Someone else barked, “Will you shut up laughing? There’s something wrong with Freddy.” She thought Josiah was there behind the dancing lights, and perhaps Chin and Jane. She blinked, trying to clear her vision. The room was coming more into focus, and the voices were starting to make sense again.

  “Just hang on, Freddy. The nurse is on her way,” said Mr. Lim.

  Freddy shook her head. “I’m okay.”

  But she ended up in the nurse’s office anyway. The nurse flicked a light into and out of her eyes and made her track a finger as she moved it briskly back and forth in front of Freddy’s face. “I think you’ve escaped a concussion this time,” she said, “but if you feel sleepy or dizzy, come back here right away, understand?” She gave Freddy a plastic bag with lumps of ice in it and told her to hold it against the bump on the back of her head. Then she made Freddy take a painkiller and sent her to science class. Freddy’s head was throbbing sickly as she slipped onto her stool.

  For the first time since she had met him, Josiah looked worried. “Are you okay?” he whispered. “I should have rem—I should have known Keith was going to do that.”

  Freddy nodded as gently as she could. Something about what Josiah had just said didn’t seem quite right, but she felt too ill to think about it much.

  Science passed in a blur, and the bell rang for lunch. She thought Josiah must have been feeling genuinely bad about what had happened to her, as instead of stalking off on his own and going to raise havoc somewhere during the lunch break, he walked to her locker with her, then to the cafeteria. Freddy wondered afterwards whether she would have let him if she hadn’t been distracted by the thudding in her head. She didn’t think she would have sat at his table, which was where he steered her. She wasn’t really sure what she was doing in the cafeteria; she didn’t feel well enough to eat.

  Freddy laid her head down on the table as Josiah went off to get his lunch. When she raised it again, Roland was there, glaring. “You’re crazy.”

  She stared at him through the thudding.

  “Are you doing it just because I told you not to?” demanded Roland. “Because that’s so stupid of you.”

  “Am I doing what?” Freddy knew she was mad at Roland, but she wasn’t sure why just now. She was starting to wonder if that nurse had really understood what she was doing.

  “Eating lunch with him,” said Roland, nodding at Josiah, who was just returning to the table.

  “Oh, give her a break, Growly,” said Josiah. “She hit her head on the wall in gym class. Torture her when her headache’s gone, which, from the looks of it, won’t be for a week or so.”

  Roland’s expression changed a bit. Freddy saw the contempt shift away, replaced by grudging concern. After a pause, he said, “Are you okay?”

  All the pariahs at this school are asking me that, thought Freddy. “I think so.”

  “I could take you home,” he said, grimacing.

  “How happy you sound,” she said. “No. I don’t have band today, so I should be all right as long as no one screams in my ear.”

  “Fine,” said Roland, but he stopped nagging her about Josiah. He did eat lunch with the two of them, though. Freddy could feel what a bad idea this was. All sorts of invisible lines were being crossed. She even saw Todd and Marcus, over in the section of the cafeteria frequented by the Deaf kids, watching Roland in what looked like surprise. Rochelle was here, too. Freddy thought Rochelle was biding her time.

  The day should really have got better after that. It shouldn’t have been possible for things to worsen after she had been thrown into a wall and planted at the weird table during lunch. But it seemed to be turning into what Mel called a Murphy’s day: a day on which whatever could go wrong not only did go wrong but went wrong in descending levels of horror.

  She, Roland, and Josiah arrived at math class together. It was a coincidence, as they had separated after lunch, but word had got around. The class’s hostility wasn’t aimed only at Josiah this time. When Ms. Liu asked Roland to work out a problem on the whiteboard, Jumbo Jim said loudly, “Do us some impossible math!” and almost everybody laughed. Cathy was practically in hysterics. Freddy couldn’t see what was so funny. Roland, in the meantime, had been facing away from the class and hadn’t even noticed the laughter. “Settle down,” said Ms. Liu ineffectually. Someone threw a balled-up piece of paper at Roland; another landed on Freddy’s desk. Cathy, still laughing, leaned over towards Freddy and said in her usual piercing voice, “Your stepbrother is a spaz, isn’t he?” Freddy could only blink at her in incomprehension. Roland hadn’t done anything weird at all.

  It was as if the whole school had caught some kind of airborne malevolence. Freddy was bombarded with balls of paper all through the class. So were Josiah and Roland, but most of them seemed to be aimed at Freddy. Drama should have been a relief, and Freddy thought it would be, right up until the moment Mr. Singh said, “All right, guys, we’re still working on improv today. We’re going to play a game called ‘Freeze.’ Freddy and Josiah, why don’t you come start us off?”

  She would have wondered how on earth he had come to pick the two of them, but it was a Murphy’s day, so he couldn’t have picked anybody else. Freddy felt the class’s focus narrow, become more pure. When Mr. Singh called for a location and a situation, Freddy wasn’t surprised when someone sang out immediately, “A romantic dinner at a restaurant.”

  “Perfect!” said Mr. Singh, ignoring the snickers.

  “Freeze” involved two people acting out a scene. Eventually, someone would call, “Freeze,” and replace one of the actors, then continue with a different situation. Freddy had played the game last year; it could be fun. It wasn’t going to be fun today. Trying to ignore her pounding head, Freddy began to saw at an imaginary steak. “My,” she said stiffly, “how romantic this is.”

  Josiah took his cue from her, not quite in the way she had expected. “Indeed,” he said, his voice completely without tone. “How happy I am that we, two sentient robots, are enjoying th
is meal of circuit boards and fibre in each other’s presence. We are very much in love.”

  “I concur,” said Freddy. “We are teaching each other about emotion. Oh, joy. Oh, bliss.”

  “Kiss her,” said someone from near the back of the group, and the others laughed. Freddy wasn’t expecting a “freeze” any time soon.

  “There is a thing called kissing of which I have heard,” said Josiah. “I was thinking of trying it with you. However, I feel there is no need. We can express our feelings for each other in a much more useful way.”

  “Do tell me about this more useful way,” said Freddy.

  “We can kill all the humans,” said Josiah. “Let us start with the other people in this restaurant.”

  He stood up, cradling an imaginary machine gun, and began to mow down the members of the class. Oh well, thought Freddy. Everything had gone terrible, anyway. “I have grenades,” she announced, and lobbed one directly at the teacher.

  * * *

  Ten minutes later, as the two of them sat on plastic chairs outside the vice principal’s office, Freddy wished her ice hadn’t all melted hours ago. The thumping in her head had reached epic proportions.

  “Do you think that was enough for a suspension?” asked Josiah. “I’ve been angling for a suspension since the first day of school.”

  “I think we shouldn’t have pretended to kill the entire class,” said Freddy, but she was finding it hard to care.

  The vice principal, Mr. Daniels, gave them a lecture on appropriate behaviour. Freddy wasn’t listening. At some point, the lecture stopped, and the nurse was called into the office. There were more flicking lights. “She’s still tracking okay,” said the nurse. “I think she’d better go home. Will your mum be able to come pick you up, honey?”

  Freddy heard herself grate out a laugh. She couldn’t remember the last time her mum had arrived home from work before she had gone to bed.