“I—one of my friends was brought in here,” Zanna said as the cat looked her up and down. “Cedwick Hemmington. We were in the Laboratory—”
“He’s quite the popular one, isn’t he?” Mrs. Turnbuckle said without waiting for an answer. “Yes, a small Splutter. He’s going to be just fine. I’ll tell him you stopped by. He’ll be glad to know he’s got such wonderful friends.”
“I was actually hoping to talk to him,” Zanna said. The cat stretched its head out toward her, but she couldn’t tell if it was looking for a pet or getting closer to bite her. She shrank back a bit. “I have to tell him something.”
“Ah,” Mrs. Turnbuckle said, a bit of a smile appearing on her red lips. “Well, he’s already got a visitor. But I’ll ask. What’s your name, dear?”
“Zanna. Zanna Mayfield.”
At the snap of the nurse’s fingers, a marble rose up from behind her desk, just like Zanna had seen Mr. Tinders do. But instead of just zipping it off, the nurse turned the smooth metal ball into a silver kitten and sent it scurrying off into the cottage with a wave of her hand. When it returned, it scampered up the woman’s arm and nuzzled at her ear, whispering Cedwick’s reply. Her face brightened. “He said it’s okay. Go through that door and down the hallway. Room 7.”
“Thank you,” Zanna said.
She found the room and knocked softly on the door before entering. Cedwick sat up among the plush pillows of his bed, having thrown back the covers. His ear was bandaged with a wrap of gauze that went under his chin and around his head. A small table with his lunch on it stood over his lap, but it didn’t look like he had eaten much. His eyes were wet and red.
There were two other people in the room with him, and Zanna jumped a bit in surprise. Even though Mrs. Turnbuckle had plainly said that Cedwick already had visitors, the fact hadn’t quite registered with her. Sitting at his bedside were Owin and Lord Hemmington.
“Why, hello!” Owin said, getting up to offer her his seat. “Come to see my little brother?”
Zanna froze in the doorway. “Sorry, I . . . I didn’t know—”
“No, you’re not interrupting anything,” Owin said. He glanced over at his father, who seemed more interested in the small ghostly thing on his shoulder than anything else in the room. It must have been a Particle with a message of some sort, for he wore the astute expression of someone listening very intently, even though Zanna heard nothing. “I think we were actually leaving soon.”
Lord Hemmington straightened, dismissing the tissue of shimmering metal with a brief nod, and noticed Zanna for the first time. “Ah, Ms. Mayfield. Good to see you.”
“Hello,” she said. Then, on a bold impulse, she asked, “Any news?”
Lord Hemmington had been conferring with Owin, but at Zanna’s question, he turned back. “It is a small Splutter. Cedwick will heal.”
“I meant about the woman who tried to stop me from coming to St. Pommeroy’s,” she said.
“Ah, your would-be kidnapper,” Lord Hemmington said with a harrumph in his throat. “No news. No doubt she knows that you are under our protection now. We continue to monitor the situation. You are safe.”
Before she could catch another bold impulse and tell him that it seemed more like the Primers had lost track of the mysterious woman, Owin and his father moved toward the door. “We must be off now. Look after him, won’t you?” Owin said in a soft voice as they headed out. He nodded back toward Cedwick. “I’m glad my brother’s got such good friends.”
Lord Hemmington gave her a small bow. “Good day.”
The door closed behind him.
“Well?”
Cedwick and Zanna were alone now. He pushed around bits of his lunch, still not eating and not looking up at her. “Let’s get this over with.”
There had been a reason she had come here, but at the moment, she couldn’t remember why. Instead, she slowly crossed to the chair Owin had vacated and sat down. “Are you feeling okay?”
“Fine.”
She licked her lips. “Nobody moved the graphite block. After you left, that is. Nobody could.”
“We weren’t supposed to be able to,” Cedwick grunted. He nodded toward the door. “That’s what they came down here to say. That everyone fails the first attempt at a real object. It’s supposed to be one of Dr. Trout’s lessons.”
“A lesson in what?”
“Failing. Being useless.”
“That’s a terrible lesson.”
“It’s to keep our heads from getting too big.” Cedwick speared a macaroni with his fork. “You take a kid and tell him he can break the laws of math and physics, and it makes him think he can do anything.”
“You almost had it,” Zanna tried. “I mean, at least you moved part of it. That’s better than anyone else did. Better than me.”
Cedwick’s face grew dark. “Don’t give me your pity. You’ve been waiting for this since the day we met. You don’t think I noticed?”
“Noticed what?” This wasn’t what she had come here for at all. The whole thing was slipping from her fingers.
His mouth twisted into a snarl. “How you’ve been after me since the very first day. Just waiting for me to screw things up and have a good laugh at that useless Hemmington brother—”
All at once she remembered why she had come here in the first place, and it made her break out in bitter laughter. “Is that what you think? That I came down here to gloat? I was going to invite you to my holiday party, but you can just forget it now!”
“Oh, because that would have been absolutely lovely,” Cedwick snapped. “Stuck in a house with prissy Nora Elmsley, that barbaric American, and an Italian girl who doesn’t say more than two words? I think I’d rather Splutter my ear again.”
“Fine!” Zanna jumped to her feet. “I hope you do! I hope you Splutter your—” insults had never been her strong point—“your dumb face!”
She spun on her heel and marched out. Mrs. Turnbuckle waved cheerily at her, but Zanna was so angry she didn’t even respond.
In Self, she threw her backpack down with a bang, interrupting Libby’s continuing tirade about how she needed two more seconds to master the graphite cube. But before any of the girls could ask Zanna what was wrong, Dr. Trout called for silence.
As the professor started the lecture, Zanna caught Beatrice watching her with a worried expression. She sunk a bit lower, wishing she was a year older. In a year, none of this would matter. She would have her Iron and her specialization, and everyone would know how to manipulate real objects, and everything with the mysterious woman would have been figured out, and her father would understand who she really was.
A theoretical rectangle landed at her elbow. With a glance up at Dr. Trout—whose attention was on the other side of the classroom—Zanna touched the rectangle and unfolded it into a note.
What’s wrong?
Against her better judgment, she looked up again and caught Beatrice’s eye. The girl made a meaningful glance at the note and then back to Zanna, urging her to reply. Zanna shook her head. She couldn’t put it into writing.
“Ms. Mayfield?”
Zanna snapped up. Beatrice’s theoretical note vanished immediately. She coughed, hoping that her voice didn’t convey the guilt she felt. “Dr. Trout?”
“You do not know what I asked,” Dr. Trout said. Her bat tapped meaningfully against her open palm. “You have not been listening.”
Zanna’s skin grew hot beneath her blouse. “No,” she said. The little she knew about Dr. Trout told her it would be better to be straight and confess right away. “I’m sorry.”
Dr. Trout paused, making the apology hang in the classroom so everyone could take it in. After what felt like an eternity, she spoke. “We are considering the events of the morning. What are your thoughts on failure?”
“I almost had it,” she said before she had
even considered her words. “They didn’t give me enough time.”
A couple of the students mumbled in agreement. It seemed as if she wasn’t the only one to almost fully grasp the graphite block’s functions.
“You knew how much time you had,” Dr. Trout said. “It was the same as everyone else. And you failed to move the cube within that time frame. That, Ms. Mayfield, is a failure.”
“Only because time ran out,” Zanna grumbled.
The old woman cocked her head a bit, as if she had just noticed something about Zanna that had escaped her attention so far. “Time will always run out.”
The tone in her voice made Zanna’s mouth curl into a snarl. On a better day, she might have shrugged it off, but it was not a good day, not by a long stretch. “The whole thing was set up to be impossible. You wanted us to fail.”
At that, a little ripple ran through the class, and Zanna feared that she had gone too far. She had certainly never talked back to a teacher like that in public school. But before Dr. Trout could say anything, Cedwick came in through the privacy illusion. He had taken off the wrap of gauze around his head, but he kept a wad of it pressed against his burst ear.
“Mr. Hemmington,” Dr. Trout said as he sank into a seat in the back row. Evidently, Zanna’s accusation wasn’t even worth answering. “I am pleased to see you. I hope you can still hear me with that ear.”
Cedwick nodded.
“We are discussing our experiences from this morning.” She looked pointedly at Zanna. “Our failures. What are your thoughts?”
It took a long moment for Cedwick to respond—so long that Zanna wondered if he had been lying about being able to hear out of his ear. “I think it’s about what I expected,” he finally said.
“You have Spluttered your ear,” Dr. Trout deadpanned. “Do you mean to tell me that is what you expected this morning?”
“No, I expected to fail it,” Cedwick said. “You set it up so we would, after all.”
Another ripple, louder than the first, and Dr. Trout cut it down with a single, authoritative shout. “Silence!”
A frown worked over Dr. Trout’s face. How she was able to do that when her face was already in a perpetual frown, Zanna didn’t know. “Since it appears that both of you would rather make excuses than study your Self, perhaps this will be more helpful. I want each of you to write a short paper describing the other. If you cannot be truthful with yourself, perhaps you will be better with someone else.”
“What?” Zanna and Cedwick said, almost in unison.
“Yes. And then you will exchange your papers after the Christmas break,” Dr. Trout said. There might have even been a little smile in her stone-block face at having thought of such a devilish assignment. “Begin with a discussion of how the other reacts to failure.”
Zanna wanted to protest, but Dr. Trout had moved on with the lecture, and nothing would change her mind. Instead, Zanna hunched down glumly. The prospect of having her Christmas break taken up with writing a paper about Cedwick just piled on to the rest of her dark thoughts. Thankfully, Dr. Trout didn’t call on her for the rest of class, having tortured her enough for one day. When the bell rang, Zanna barely had time to collect her backpack before the girls were around her.
“Sheesh, calm down,” she muttered, packing her books. “I’m not going to run away or anything.”
“I can’t believe her,” Libby said, sniping her remark at Dr. Trout’s back as the professor swept out of the classroom. “You call her out on rigging the test, and she makes you write a paper on Cedwick for it! That’s got to be against the rules or something.”
“It’s perfectly within the rules,” Nora said.
“It’s still evil,” Libby shot back.
“I didn’t really figure out anything about the test. Cedwick told me,” Zanna said. Then she realized what she had implied, and she stopped shoving books into her backpack. “I mean . . .”
Libby’s face split in a grin. “I knew it.”
“Not like that,” Zanna said. “I wanted to make sure he was okay. He was bleeding.”
“You could have just asked me,” Nora said. “I know all about Splutters. They’re painful, but you’re not going to die unless you try to pull apart a black hole or something equally massive.”
“What happened?” Beatrice asked Zanna in a soft voice.
Her arms felt mysteriously weak, and Zanna groaned a little as she lifted her backpack. “Nothing happened. I felt sorry for him, that’s all. And I . . . I invited him to the party.”
“You did what?” Nora gasped. “Without asking me first?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Zanna grumbled before Nora could work herself into an anxious tizzy. “He said no.” Now that she had some distance on the episode, it seemed entirely pointless. “I don’t care. If he wants to be alone and miserable, I’m not going to stop him.”
“You should put that in your paper,” Libby joked. “Cedwick Hemmington: alone and miserable.”
“Don’t remind me,” Zanna grumbled. She didn’t know what was worse about the assignment—having to write a paper about Cedwick or the idea that he was writing one about her.
Nora started going on about her plan for the party, and Zanna let her ramble, too exhausted to raise a fuss. Her anger had faded away, but something else had come in to replace it, something empty and anxious and far, far harder to name.
Chapter Eleven
The decorations were all Nora’s doing. She had brought a collection of old party supplies from her storage and insisted on putting them up. “Ninety-six percent of successful parties have decorations,” she said, handing a pack of balloons to Libby.
“Grey balloons don’t count,” Libby said, picking up one of the deflated balloons with a disgusted look on her face.
“They’re not going to stay that way,” Nora said. “See?”
She fished a color wheel out of the bag and spun it. As she did, the balloons cycled through the entire spectrum, settling on a bright canary yellow. “There. Here’s the helium pump. I need thirty-two.”
She gave Libby a small hand-powered pump. “Hang on,” Libby said. She gave the handle a few experimental pumps. “Does this thing make helium? Like, out of the air?”
“Of course,” Nora nodded. “Thirty-two, if you could.” She looked over at Zanna, who had been given the task of taping up a banner reading WELCOME HOME! in colorful bubbly handwriting. “It’s crooked!” she shouted.
Zanna leaned back a little. “It looks fine to me.”
“It is not fine,” Nora chided. “Raise that side up a bit.”
Zanna sighed and complied. Like everything else in her life these days, the party had snuck up on her. Between concerns about her Iron, her specialization, the lack of any news from the Primers on the woman who had broken into her bedroom, and now a report on Cedwick, Zanna had all but forgotten about it until the first weekend of Christmas break, when the girls showed up with their bags packed for a sleepover. Now she was standing on a kitchen chair, hanging a sign for a father she hadn’t seen for almost seven months—or truly talked to for her entire life. The girls were doing their best to keep her entertained and distracted, but one of the downsides of having a mind like hers was that consciously ignoring things never worked. Even as she made minute adjustments to the banner until Nora was satisfied, Zanna could not shake a looming dread of what the afternoon might hold.
“Zanna, can you check on them in the kitchen?” Nora asked, noticing that she was staring blankly into the distance.
“Oh,” Zanna said, climbing down from the chair. “Okay.”
Beatrice was helping Pops decorate cupcakes in the kitchen. All of the girls had taken an instant liking to her grandfather, but he and Beatrice got along especially well. As Zanna entered, she heard the small girl chatting away in soft, flowery Italian, and her grandfather replying in what he remembered, mi
xing in English where his memory failed.
“Supervising over there?” Pops said when he noticed Zanna in the doorway. “Come make yourself useful.”
Zanna put her chair down next to Beatrice, taking one of the iced cupcakes and dipping a hand into the bowl of sprinkles. “How’s the decorating going?” Beatrice asked in English.
“Depends on who you ask,” Zanna said. “Did you know that proper decorations are one of the top-five critical elements for successful parties?” She turned to Pops. “You’re not going to recognize your house when Nora gets through with it.”
“Bah,” he said, shaking his head. “This old place could do with a bit of color, I think.”
“It’s more than ‘a bit,’ ” Zanna said. “You should take a look.”
“In time,” Pops said, putting a finished cupcake on a nearby plate and picking up a new one. He glanced at the clock. “Which we’ve got plenty of. No need to rush things.”
Zanna looked up at the clock, as well. Her father’s plane was supposed to touch down at noon, and it would be another hour or so until he was out of the airport. They still had two, maybe two and a half hours.
Nora came into the kitchen and headed for the sink. “I believe we can say the hallway is finished,” she said. She scrubbed her hands thoroughly, with far more soap and water than Zanna would have thought necessary. “Decorations are on schedule. How are you all doing in here?”
“Good,” Beatrice said. She set a perfect cupcake on the plate, and a pang of jealousy shot through Zanna. Beatrice had somehow carved the icing into smooth waves and dollops, with sprinkles evenly distributed all around. Zanna’s looked like she had loaded the sprinkles into a shotgun.
Nora finished her ritualistic handwashing and grabbed a towel. “Keep it up. Proper refreshments are the most critical element to a successful party.”
“Quite the taskmaster, that one,” Pops said after Nora had gone back to the living room.
“She means well,” Beatrice said, spreading a fresh smear of icing on a cupcake.
The Zanna Function Page 13
