Earth/Sky (Earth/Sky Trilogy)

by Macaulay C. Hunter

  Savannah grimaced at me. “This is their only talent, so be kind.”

  “Hi, I’m London,” said the other girl after giving me an appraisal. She shook her head at the boys and smoothed back her long strawberry blonde hair. “That’s Nash Darby and his burping buddies, Easton Mitchell and Diego Holland.” She pointed to the redhead and black-haired boy in turn.

  “The Burping Buddies!” Nash enthused. “Our band has a name. You want to be our manager, Adriel? Hey, Adriel!”

  “Just a second, please,” said the last boy, deep in his backpack and almost out of view beneath the table.

  “The back of the head is Adriel Graystone,” London said. “So, you’re from Los Angeles? This place must be a real come down for you.”

  It seemed rude to agree, even if it was true. “What do you guys do for fun around here?”

  Savannah gestured to the burping buddies. “Pathetic, I know. So, do you know any celebrities from living down there?”

  I smiled, feeling more confident now. People loved to hate celebrities, but one had to be careful when talking about them or be mistaken for jealous. “Yeah. You can’t live in Los Angeles and not run into celebrities here and there. See the movie Ever and Beyond?”

  “I’ve seen that!” squealed Savannah.

  “The diner scene was shot in my hometown,” I said. She looked impressed.

  “Dude, what are you looking for in there?” Easton asked the back of Adriel’s head.

  “But do you know any celebrities?” London persisted.

  “I went shopping once with Justine Tellemer.”

  They all looked stunned. Justine Tellemer had been a big name in the teen scene for a long time, having headlined all three Zombie Blast movies. She’d partied herself right into a rehab over the summer. Boys wanted to date her, girls wanted to be her, and she’d brought in purses with her assistant to a Malibu consignment store while Downy and I were in there shopping not that long ago. It wasn’t exactly going shopping with her, but it wasn’t exactly a lie either. Pissed that the clerk wasn’t offering as much as she wanted for the purses, Justine had lifted one high and asked me what I’d be willing to pay for it. Stunned to be in her presence, I blurted whatever the price tag was. That bumped up what the clerk was offering, and Justine perused the rack across from me before leaving. Downy and I squealed the whole drive home and wondered how bad a superstar’s finances had to be for her to be taking purses to a consignment store. All of those millions were going to drugs.

  “So what was she like?” Savannah said in awe as Adriel turned around and set down a handful of raisins and a crushed box on the table. Then he looked up and paled to see me, like I hadn’t been what he was expecting to see there. Forcing out a smile, he covered up whatever had startled him.

  I lost my track of thought momentarily. Handsome did not describe this boy, not even a little. Blue eyes and dark blond hair brightened his extraordinarily lovely face. There was a slight lilt to his full lips, as if he found something about me amusing. It wasn’t unkind but a gentle humor, and beyond it, there was sadness. I couldn’t explain what it was that made me think of melancholy, yet I felt it hanging there between us with everyone else unaware.

  Breaking away from his gaze, I answered Savannah’s question about what Justine was like. “You almost don’t recognize stars when they’re not on the red carpet. They look so different. She’s still really pretty, but she has awful hair in real life. It’s been so chemically abused that it’s lanky and broken off. Those are wigs she wears in movies.”

  “I hear she’s an awful diva on set,” London said.

  “She’s kind of mean to her assistant,” I agreed. The poor girl had been holding a dozen bags and Justine still waited to have the door opened for her when they left.

  “And this, at long last, is Adriel of the Crushed Raisin Box Clan,” Nash said without belching. “Adriel, this is Jessa Bright.” My last name, however, he burped.

  “We met,” Adriel said.

  “I don’t think so,” I said. I would have remembered this boy from my morning classes! That wasn’t a face it was possible to forget.

  “In the orchestra room,” Adriel explained.

  Dear God, I wanted the floor to rip open and swallow me whole! I looked away from him hastily and willed myself not to blush. If only I could rewind time, find those locked restrooms and decide to go to the office. I’d fixed my underwear right in front of the most attractive boy I’d ever seen. I waited in misery for him to tell everyone the details.

  “Whatever were you doing in the orchestra room, Jessa?” London asked. “It’s only taught in the afternoons. Do you play something?”

  “It was a mistake,” Adriel said as I tensed. “She was looking for the office, and I had sneaked in there looking for a piece of music the orchestra played last year.”

  “I don’t play anything,” I said. Was he not going to say anything about our embarrassing encounter? Maybe this whole year wouldn’t be an utter disaster with me as the joke of the school. “Just a few piano lessons when I was little.” I’d been terrible, plunking along with no sense of rhythm and forgetting my piece at the recital in front of thirty people. My parents let me stop after a lengthy tantrum on the floor of the living room.

  “My mom still won’t let me quit the flute,” moaned Savannah, and the conversation moved on to other topics. Adriel lifted his backpack to his lap and sorted through his belongings to remove the raisins squashed on them. The burping buddies serenaded us, and after the song punctuated at its close by Nash lifting a cheek and farting, the girls stood as one to move to another table. I followed them.

  “Kindergarten might be shooting too high,” I said when we resettled.

  “You’re disgusting, Nash! And so are you, Diego and Easton!” London yelled.

  “Please don’t leave me with them,” Adriel pleaded, and the bell rang. Nash bowed with one last fart and headed off with Diego and Easton going after him. Offering one last apology for them, Savannah caught up with London and the two merged into the crowd gushing out of the cafeteria to the classrooms.

  I put on my backpack. It bunched up the scarf so I took both off to fix them. Adriel dropped the textbooks into his backpack and tossed the raisins to a trashcan. “It’s just first day excitement. They won’t be so wild tomorrow.”

  “That was pretty bad,” I said. Some of the guys at Bellangame High hadn’t been all that mature, but their behavior was still a far cry from burping and farting through our lunch period.

  “And you didn’t need to embellish,” Adriel added.

  “Excuse me?” I asked.

  “About shopping with Justine Tellemer. London and Savannah are good people, a little shallow, but they’re not out to get anyone. So you didn’t have to stretch the truth. They would have been happy with what did happen.”

  “I wasn’t lying!” I exclaimed. He couldn’t know anyway.

  “I didn’t say you were lying.” Zipping up his backpack, Adriel put it over his shoulder. “But you didn’t shop with her, like you two are friends. That was your implication. I think it was more to the truth that you were in the same place at the same time.” He smiled and picked up one last raisin from the table. Without returning the smile and not trusting what might come flying out of my mouth as a retort, I stormed off to computers. That he’d seen through my tale was unnerving, and that he made mention of it was downright rude. The story hadn’t been hurting anyone.

  What was I down to? Two hundred and sixty-eight days? Feeling like I was standing before Mount Everest, or perhaps a guillotine, I went into the classroom and chose a computer. It was still two minutes to the bell so I went online. Very little of the Internet was accessible through the firewall, and it was deadly slow. Someone hissed at me and pointed to the classroom rules printed on the board. Students were only allowed to go on the Internet with a signed permission slip from a parent or guardian, and also at designated times set by the teacher. I clicked off.

  Ms. Crane ca
me in as the bell sounded. The syllabus was dismaying: typing for speed, spreadsheet and database skills, real basics like learning the difference between hardware and software. These were all things I’d done in junior high. This class was going to be a waste of time. The assignment for the class period was proper hand positions on the keyboard when I could type sixty words a minute with one correction.

  Rapidly peeling off streams of lad and lass, I finished before everyone else. Since I couldn’t go online, I looked around my computer and out the window. One more class and school ended. I could change in the restroom, given they weren’t locked up the instant the bell rang, and wait for campus to empty. No one needed to see me riding home in my sweats.

  In the distance, a familiar figure loped by with clippers. It was Zakia Cooper. My first thought was still Jaden. The actual Jaden had been so kind, even though I must have painted an awful picture as a sniffling, straggly-haired lost child. He’d talked to me the whole way home, although I couldn’t remember what we had talked about. It was too easy to get turned around in all of those curving streets, but he’d known the way. Bellangame was on the square, every side road leading back to a main one, which made it impossible to stay off course for long.

  Walking to the bursting planters outside another building, Zakia got to work hacking them back. He was at ease with the work, his movements steady and sure. Piling up the clipped vines in one spot, he moved from planter to planter and tamed them. Each planter he inspected from every angle, and whatever he saw on some resulted in him making an X of red tape on the side. One of the planters selected for an X had a missing piece, so soil was spilled over the concrete.

  “Cute, isn’t he?” whispered the redheaded girl to my right. She was wearing old-fashioned glasses, but they fit her elfin face well.

  “Yeah,” I agreed. Zakia was adorable. I loved the loose curls of his hair.

  “They never stick around, the Cooper boys. Too bad, because they’re so hot. Can you imagine them all together?” She returned to pecking out lines of lad and lass with her index fingers. “It’s Kitts, by the way. I’m a junior.” The teacher bent down between us to check our progress and correct Kitts’ hand positions.

  “That’s a funny name,” I blurted to Kitts when Ms. Crane walked away.

  “Is Jessa short for Jessica?” Kitts asked.

  “No.” I realized how rude I was being. “I’m sorry. I’ve just never heard the name Kitts before. It’s pretty.”

  She grinned, moving her hands off the proper position to return to hunt-and-peck with her index fingers. “It’s a nickname for Katherine. My parents called me Kitts as a baby and it stuck. You like weird names? There’s a boy in the freshman class named Bandit Jones and a sophomore named Leland. A sophomore girl. And there are so many Sages and Willows at this school that we could stock a nursery. Hippie families.”

  Nodding to Zakia, I said, “His name is different, too.”

  “God, he’s hot,” Kitts muttered, blowing air through her lips while glancing out to him in appreciation. “I work at the florist downtown so I’m sick to death of flowers, but if he sent me some? Mmm.”

  Zakia worked through the whole period, not even stopping to wipe off his forehead, and at the bell he vanished around the corner. I said goodbye to Kitts and hiked to my creative writing class. There hadn’t been a lot of choice for electives at Spooner High, and I didn’t want to take auto shop or art history. No one was going to thank me either for plunking on the piano in orchestra. Checking my schedule, I saw with dismay that the teacher was Mr. Rogers once more.

  The classroom had four rows of tables for two, going six deep back to the far wall. I selected the one farthest away from the front, and by the window. Directly outside was a little grove of shaggy grass and shaggier planters. Students filtered in and claimed tables while I looked out and thought of an unbroken sweep of ocean. If only Dad had won three tickets! It was worth missing a year of school to sit on a deck chair and work on my tan while I floated around the world.

  The bell rattled through the air. Mr. Rogers started just like he had in trigonometry, handing out the syllabus one by one so he could shake hands. Maybe I could switch to auto shop. But thinking of grease on my clothes changed my mind. At least in here I’d stay clean, if not healthy, from shaking a hand that must have shaken a hundred others over the course of the school day. Slowly, ever so slowly, he made his way around the room, and he’d just reached the top of my row when the door opened.

  I winced to see Adriel Graystone come in with a note. He passed it to Mr. Rogers and said, “Sorry to be late. Mrs. Collins needed someone to bring in boxes from her car.”

  “No problem.” Mr. Rogers shook his hand warmly and passed him a syllabus. Scanning the room, he said, “Ah, there’s one last open seat back there with Jessa Bright!”

  Great. I edged closer to the window and looked away. He dropped his backpack on the table and sat down in the second chair. I focused on the botanical mess on the other side of the glass. This school was such a disaster area. I bet it was marijuana growing in the planters, whatever those plants looked like. Mixed in among the vines was trash.

  I imagined myself on the deck of the ship, a cold soda by my chair, the sun beating down, not a care in the world. At every port, people could choose if they wanted to go down for some local sightseeing of museums or monuments, or stay on board and soak in the rays. I was going to stay on board, here in this perfection.

  “Well, hello again, Jessa!” Mr. Rogers said, extending his hand over the table. I shook it for the second time that day. “Why don’t you tell the class a little about yourself?”

  “Still from Los Angeles,” I said ruefully, biting back the comment still stealing your water. He smiled, waiting for more, and I smiled back without giving any.

  Lamely, he said, “Concrete jungle. It’s hot down there.”

  “Yes, it is,” I agreed. The syllabus landed on the table and he returned to the front of the room to read it out loud.

  Clapping his hands together once it was done, he said, “The hallmark of creativity is experience! Not only having your own, but listening to others’ experiences and imagining yourself in their shoes. Why don’t you talk to your seatmate about an experience you recently had? Five minutes.”

  I groaned inwardly. It was the last thing I wanted to do. Picking up the syllabus to look it over, I spotted a raisin stuck to the bottom of Adriel’s binder. Still angry and embarrassed about the orchestra room, I blurted, “Were there explosives in the box?”

  “You’d think so,” Adriel answered amiably, like there was nothing mean in my tone. He picked the raisin off and set it on the far corner of the table since the trashcan was out of reach. “It must have fallen out of my lunch bag when I put it in my backpack this morning. Just when I think I’ve found the last one, I find another squashed somewhere else. What a mess.” He chuckled, and against my will, my anger ebbed. Sitting so closely to him, I saw threads of gold woven through his dark blond hair. “So that’s an experience for you to imagine, going through the first day of school with raisins falling off your things. Falling off everything, and all day long.”

  “I don’t think that beats mine, finding every restroom locked and desperately needing a place to change.” I sighed. “I really did think I was alone.”

  “The teacher’s office in there has a terrible motion sensor light that flicks off every fifteen seconds. I was waving at it like mad, but it wasn’t sensing me.” Looking me straight in the eyes, he said earnestly, “Don’t be upset. All I saw was your back.”

  That wasn’t as bad as what he could have seen. I relaxed and prayed that he was telling the truth. “Can I ask you something? What’s with all the handshaking in this school? It’s been three teachers and the secretary today.”

  “It’s supposed to facilitate trust,” Adriel explained.

  “It’s going to give me swine flu,” I said.

  Mr. Rogers cleared his throat. “So, why doesn’t everyone take o
ut a piece of paper and a pen? Write down your seatmate’s experience as you imagine you would feel in their shoes. This will be good practice for future characters in the short stories you’ll be writing for my class. Then we’ll read them out loud.”

  “Please don’t,” I whispered in mortification.

  “You really aren’t very trusting of people, are you?” Adriel said.

  “Of course I’m not trusting! I grew up in L.A.!” I exclaimed. “Have you ever been there?”

  “Sure, many times.”

  “You don’t leave your doors unlocked, you don’t think that just shaking someone’s hand makes them trustworthy, and you don’t assume some guy won’t take the opportunity to embarrass you in front of the whole school!” It was hard to keep my voice to the same level as the dull roar of chatter about the room. I looked at Adriel in frustration, and he looked back through his lovely blue eyes with only sympathy. The melancholy I’d sensed before was still there, and though he looked eighteen, I felt for a moment like I was in the presence of someone far older. To calm down, I took out a blank piece of paper and wrote my name on it.

  “You must feel like a fish out of water here,” Adriel said at last.

  “Yeah,” I muttered. “I know how to live down south. But not here.”

  “Why are you here? Your parents’ jobs?”

  “No. My parents won a cruise, one of the very best ones in existence. And they work so hard to support our family.” Hearing it made me cringe, but nothing would bring it back. The state of our personal finances was a topic I kept to myself, since my friends were all from such better-off families. “They were going to turn it down, but I wouldn’t let them. I couldn’t. It’s one of those golden chances, you know? The ones you take or lose forever, and regret forever, too. I couldn’t stand for them to regret it, or for me to be one of the reasons standing in the way. So now I’m here for the year, and they’re off seeing the world.”

  Pens scratched over papers. People mumbled back and forth with details of their experiences to help flesh out their seatmate’s story. Adriel wrote his name on the top of his paper and said, “That was a beautiful thing you did.”