Texas Hold 'Em

by George R. R. Martin

  Cold shock washed through LoriAnne. Adesina reached past her and pressed the button to close the doors.

  “Oh. Sorry,” LoriAnne mumbled, feeling as if she was apologizing for way more than the button.

  Adesina’s antennae twitched. “It’s cool.”

  Great. She’d managed to exchange four whole words with a joker. And she only had a few more seconds before they reached the lobby. “Y’all headed to breakfast?” she blurted.

  Adesina nodded. “Yup.”

  Awkward silence fell.

  The instant the doors opened at the lobby, the businessman shouldered his way out and escaped. The joker with wheels muttered under his breath as he exited with the others.

  LoriAnne cast a frustrated look after the jokers then sighed and followed them at a we’re-not-together distance. A handful of the lobby mosquitoes drifted toward her, but she gently told them to stay back—all but one whom she allowed to settle behind her ear. A cloud of skeeters around her head would draw unwanted attention, but having the two tucked in her hair helped ease her general anxiety.

  It didn’t help that the jokers were walking—or rolling—at a normal, casual pace while LoriAnne itched to double-time it through the lobby and to the restaurant. But if she barged past, they might think she was trying to get away from them like Mr. Businessman.

  Or maybe they’d just think you’re in a hurry, LoriAnne chided herself. Yet she continued to amble a short distance behind them. It sucked to be yet another minute late, but that was better than coming across as a jerk.

  Near the reception desk, an older yellow-haired lady watched Adesina and the others pass by then shuddered and leaned toward her husband. “The Purity Baptist Church folks are whackdoodles,” she said, then lifted her chin toward the group of jokers. “But those creatures should not be allowed near children—” She broke off with a yelp and frantically waved away the cluster of mosquitoes that had oh-so-inexplicably targeted her, then struggled to sneeze out one that flew up her nose.

  Adesina glanced back at the lady, and LoriAnne hurried to call the skeeters off. She didn’t figure Adesina would guess that she was controlling the skeeters, but best not to take chances. And best to stop before the stupid lady killed them all.

  Besides, LoriAnne knew that her dad wouldn’t be real happy with her using the skeeters that way. After the Bobby Tripp incident a few years back, he’d grounded her for a month and delivered a long lecture that boiled down to: “Don’t get dumb. Bobby’s a useless piece of crap, and I can’t say I blame you for siccing your skeeters on him after he got drunk and ran over your cat. But if you’d done killed him or hurt him worse than a few hundred bites, there’d be no end of trouble for the both of us. Y’gotta think hard ’bout what you’re doing, and remember that there’s a consequence for every little thing.” That was also when he told her she needed to keep quiet about her little knack, at least until she was a lot older. “People can be real stupid,” he said, and left it at that.

  Then again, her dad didn’t have a lot of patience with haters. There was every chance he’d be totally fine with her shooting a skeeter up the nose of that witch.

  The four jokers veered off toward a sitting area to join two other Jokertown players—a dark-haired girl with tentacles in place of hands, and a bald boy with odd, pastel-hued skin. Now LoriAnne could hurry without any neurotic silliness holding her back.

  Yet she couldn’t help but give the group of jokers a wistful look as she speed-walked past. The one big problem with pretending to be a nat was that she had a zillion questions about wild cards and no one to answer them. There was only so much she could learn by watching American Hero and reading articles and interviews—and LoriAnne wasn’t stupid enough to believe any of it was a hundred percent accurate. She wondered about the little things like, did she really need to eat spinach and broccoli to keep her skills sharp like her dad claimed? And the occasional bigger thing such as, was she an ace or a deuce? Or something in between? Yeah, she could call mosquitoes from a thousand feet away and then temporarily clone them hundreds of times over to make a swarm, but she couldn’t see or hear through her bugs the way Jonathan Hive could, and her cloned skeeters needed to be within sight for her to control them. Plus, there’d only been a handful of challenges on American Hero where she figured a mosquito whisperer would’ve been useful, and surely that was the best test of all?

  Of course it didn’t really matter whether she was an ace or a deuce, especially since it was a secret. Right?

  Sure. Didn’t matter at all. Uh-huh.

  Her Louisiana skeeter returned to sing by her ear, and she relaxed.

  At the restaurant, LoriAnne spied Cassie’s bright red hair where she sat reading a book at a round table in the corner. Beside her, Mr. Sloane sipped coffee and made notes on sheet music. Bass player Greg slouched across from him, swiping his fingers across his phone screen.

  “I’m so sorry,” LoriAnne gasped as she slid into an empty seat. “I set an alarm, but I guess I forgot to actually turn it on. I don’t ever set one at home ’cause my dad’s alarm always wakes me up, but today I didn’t have—”

  “Relax, LoriAnne,” Mr. Sloane said with a kind smile. “We haven’t even ordered yet. And we don’t need to leave for the Tobin Center until seven thirty.”

  Greg glanced up through a lock of black hair. “Yeah, Howard was still pooping when I left the room.” He grinned. “I think the barbecue from yesterday is fighting its way out.”

  LoriAnne made a face. “Ew?”

  “You had another minute before I called you,” Cassie said with a wink as she turned a page in her book. She was a senior and took all AP or honors classes, got kickass grades, did all sorts of volunteer work, and was pretty much the kind of girl that grown-ups wanted their own teens to hang out with. Plus, she was actually a really nice person.

  LoriAnne didn’t hang out with Cassie, but that was because LoriAnne was only a freshman, lived out in the boonies, and didn’t have a whole lot in common with her except for the jazz band.

  The “freshman living in the boonies” thing was a big part of why LoriAnne didn’t have a rocking social life. That and the fact that she wasn’t exactly a knockout. “Coltish” was how one of her teachers had once described her. “Tall and skinny and flat-chested” was how LoriAnne described herself, though she still held out hope for the appearance of boobs bigger than AA. She was one of the youngest kids in her class and wouldn’t turn fifteen for another three weeks. Surely that meant she had a bit more growing to do in the right places? Not height, though, for the love of God. Five feet eight was more than enough.

  Howard finally showed up, toting his alto sax case. The waitress came to take their orders, and as soon as she left, Greg elbowed LoriAnne.

  “Did you see this?” He shoved his phone at her. “Just popped up on Miss Bambi’s Facebook.”

  “Ugh. What are you reading her stuff for?” But LoriAnne peered at the screen anyway. It showed a blurry night photo of a hooded man, his face shadowed. He held a beat-up Martin D-28 guitar, and a case lay open at his feet. A big red caption at the top proclaimed, Joker Warning!! At the bottom it read, “Parents and band directors beware! White-skinned freak a k a TheFeels spotted lurking in the vicinity. Keep our children safe!!!”

  “Why shouldn’t I read it?” Greg pulled the phone back and typed something in. “It’s harmless, and there’s loads of juicy comments. People are cray-cray funny.”

  She made a frustrated noise in the back of her throat. Bambi Coldwater was the lady who’d started the nastiness with the lawsuits. “Why can’t she just leave people alone? So what if he’s a joker? The guy makes kickass music.”

  Greg rolled his eyes and turned away, still smirking at comments. So much for not engaging in any ugliness.

  TheFeels was the oh-so-mysterious musician who’d put out close to fifty amaaaaazing YouTube videos. Guitar mostly, but he could play anything. The comment trolls labeled him a joker since he never showed his face and becau
se his hands looked white as paper. Plus, no nat could ever play that good. If TheFeels really was in the area … holy cats! It would totally rock if she could track him down this week. Hearing him play live would be the icing on the cake. In heaven. With ice cream on the side. Not to mention, maybe she could warn him to watch his back. After all, she wouldn’t put it past dear Bambi to sic a few good ol’ boys on him.

  What sucked was that jokers like TheFeels and the ones in the lobby didn’t have a choice about whether or not to live publicly as a wild card. It wasn’t really fair that she could keep her skeeter knack a secret. On the other hand, those protesters out front were a prime example of Real Stupid, so maybe it was okay to keep it secret if you could?

  The food arrived, and LoriAnne forced herself to eat, even though her stomach was a knot of tension. This wasn’t her first competition—she’d been in two others since she started playing with the band—but this was the biggest by about a million percent.

  After they finished eating, Mr. Sloane checked his watch. “All right, Folsom Funkalicious Four. Time to head out. Last chance to make sure you haven’t forgotten anything.” He eyed Greg. “Where’s your tie?”

  “In my bass case,” Greg announced proudly.

  A small sigh escaped Mr. Sloane. “And where’s your bass case?”

  Greg dropped his eyes to the floor by his chair then smacked his forehead. “On the bed!” He pushed up and dashed off.

  Mr. Sloane let out a longer sigh. “I’ll go get the car.”

  The Secret Life of Rubberband

  Part 3

  SHARON OBERHOFFER SET THREE alarms every morning so she’d be sure to wake up before her fourth. With most teachers at Xavier Desmond High School, students obeyed a fifteen-minute rule—if the teacher was fifteen minutes late to class, class was canceled. If Sharon Oberhoffer was one minute late, they sent a search party.

  So when Robin was five minutes late to the sixth-floor common room where the students gathered Wednesday morning before leaving for the Tobin Center, he expected a certain level of cold shoulder. He hadn’t expected full piping conniptions and a barrage of sign.

  “Sharon.” He stepped back, raised hands, and stuttered out, in ASL.

  Her eyes narrowed, and she mimed slapping him upside the head, which was fair. Her dime-sized pursed lips tightened into a furious dot.

  “I’m so sorry. What’s the problem?”

 

  He scanned the kids in the room, and bit his lip to keep from swearing. “Okay. Who here’s rooming with Antonia?”

  Marissa and Adesina raised their hands.

  “When was the last time you saw her?”

  “Breakfast.” “Breakfast.” “She said she was going down to the pool. Took her swimsuit.”

  “Okay. Great. Thank you. Sharon, do you mind if I …?”

 

  “I can be fast.”

  He sprinted down the hall, considered the elevator, took the stairs instead. He vaulted over a railing and stretched. Arms attenuating, he swung to thread through the gap between the stairs until he reached the pool level and let go. His arms recoiled to their normal size with a gross wet thwack. After ten years of practice, that still stung.

  The pool was, of course, empty except for a globular gentleman with a thick full-body coat of hair, swimming laps. Robin’s “Excuse me” echoed back to him without impinging on the swimmer’s consciousness. Robin tried again, with as little effect. Then he poked the fellow in the shoulder from ten feet away, which prompted a certain amount of flailing and splashing that eventually subsided into an angry glare. “Excuse me,” he tried again. “I’m so sorry. One of my students is missing—a girl wearing gloves, she came down here to swim, I think …”

  “Oh, her,” the fat man said in a tone of voice that made Robin consider violence, however briefly. “She left. Out that door.”

  Out that door led to the gym, which was locked, but wouldn’t accept Robin’s key for some reason. He made his arm long and thin, pinched it between door and jamb, and opened the door from the inside, to find a shocked janitor.

  “So sorry,” he said. “Guidance counselor. One of our students is missing. Gloves, sort of glowery expression?”

  She’d entered wearing a towel, sat on the weight bench for ten minutes staring at nothing, then asked if the hotel restaurant was still serving breakfast, and left.

  “Gracias,” and Robin was off again.

  The waiter at the hotel restaurant held an unpaid check and was very upset about it. She’d tried to charge the meal to her room, but their room didn’t allow for charged meals, so she’d said she would head right up to the room and get her wallet, and never came back. “Here,” Robin said, “bill it to mine,” and hoped his would accept charges. Then he ran out, and back up to the sixth floor, past Sharon, who whistled, pointing to her watch. He knocked on 603, the room number she’d given the waiter. “Antonia. Are you in there?”

  He heard footsteps.

  “Everyone’s waiting.”

  The footsteps stopped.

  “We need to leave now, or we’ll lose rehearsal time. But if there’s something wrong—”

  The door jerked open from within. The chain stopped it. “It’s not my fault,” Antonia said, “they didn’t check the room again.”

  She’d waited until the others assembled before sneaking back in, but he wasn’t here to win an argument with a fifteen-year-old. He tried: “Are you sick? I can tell Ms. Oberhoffer. They can do without a drummer for one practice.”

  She glanced away. Closed the door. He was about to knock again when it opened. “I’m fine,” Antonia said, as if someone had asked her how she’d slept the night before her execution. “Let’s go.”

  “Do you want to—”

  She shouldered her backpack and stalked past him into the hall. “I said I’m fine.”

  When kids at Xavier Desmond High School came to Robin for advice, he started with questions. He asked about their classes, their lives, their families, their problems. He rarely offered answers, but when pressed, his tended to revolve around a consistent theme. Find your path and follow it—find work that gives you strength, that helps the world and its people, figure out how to do that work happily, and in peace. Life’s full of people and systems who want to tell you who you should be, what you should do. Don’t listen. Or at least, don’t listen naively.

  The advice went double for kids whose cards had turned, leaving them with scales, tentacles, wheels for feet, or superpowers. Jokertown students had to be more careful than the rest. Just because you had a chameleon’s skin didn’t mean you had to live like one. Just because you had super-strength didn’t mean you had to go out punching people for Freedom and Justice. Just because your body was as elastic as good rubber didn’t mean you had to be some sort of stretchy crime fighter for example. Some people became guidance counselors.

  The downside of this advice, of course, was that sometimes you ended up doing something you were bad at.

  Robin sat outside the practice hall, failing to review his paperwork, and instead reviewing his students through the glass doors.

  They played—music, basically. The rhythm didn’t thrill, but he had to consider the circumstances—twenty or so hours cramped in a bus, until they reached the one place in the country with crappier weather than New York. If Robin were in their shoes, his spirits would be squashed enough without having to march through a nat protest. Hell, most of the kids were jokers—Robin at least knew, when he shouldered past people who hated him, that they wouldn’t know they hated him unless he showed his card, and they couldn’t hurt him unless they tried very hard. The world offered no such comfort to Jacobson, or to Marissa, or, for that matter …

  Antonia played the drums as if she were taking a math test. And she didn’t like math.

  He had seen her play before. He
visited extracurriculars every few weeks, on rotation—if you knew a kid only between the hours of eight and three you might see her exhausted slump between first and second period and miss her fire on the basketball court, miss his pride when he buzzed in for quiz bowl, miss the ferocity of their forensics. Antonia hadn’t beat out ten other potential drummers for the Jokertown Mob by accident.

  But she wouldn’t have beaten them today. He’d hoped lunch, or the master class sessions, would have bucked up her spirits, but here they were, afternoon group rehearsal, and still, listless.

  Something was wrong. You couldn’t press kids—you could ask, you could tell them you were there if they needed you, you could keep them out of trouble, but the more pressure you gave, the more you became part of the problem. Politicians, papers, talk show hosts, they all talked about teaching like an industrial process, like kids were unstamped metal and good instruction could mold or melt them into this shape or that. All metaphors were wrong, but that was more wrong than most. Kids were seeds that transformed as they grew. And as they grew, how did you know if you were doing right? Maybe without your touch they would have grown stronger, truer—or withered. And even when you knew they were suffering, how could you help? Robin could count on one hand the number of adults of his acquaintance familiar enough with their own minds to know when they felt upset, let alone to know why. And teenagers?

  The band shifted into a tricky passage. Antonia’s brow furrowed as Jacobson tossed her the solo. Maybe people screwed themselves up worse as they got older, and if Antonia wanted him to know what was wrong, he would.

  She hit the cymbals late. He couldn’t hear the difference, but he saw it in her frown.

  His pocket buzzed.

  He read through the lines of dead pixels on the screen—acid bath, again—GHST ALRT CM @ 1CE.

  Jan’s number.

  The kids had just finished their first break. Another hour and a half before they’d wrap up for the afternoon. Plenty of time to run to the Gunter, hunt a ghost, and get back before anyone noticed he was gone.