Shadows

  Mom asked me how my first day went and I told her about the algebra book. Unfortunately that reminded her to ask if I’d accepted the place at Runyon yet—sent the paperwork back, she said, although most of it you can do slightly after the last minute on the webnet. No, I said.

  “Why?” she asked, clearly surprised.

  “I’m not sure I can afford it,” I mumbled.

  “Of course you can!” she said. “We’ve been through all this. Tennel & Zeet agreed last spring to underwrite a student loan for you. And you can live at home—” She stopped. I didn’t say anything.

  The silence turned loud and harsh, like a silverbug zapper. I went on brushing Mongo for about another minute while my ears rang and my skin blistered and then said, “I need a shower before Jill picks me up,” and fled. I heard Val come in the kitchen door as I ran upstairs, and I could hear Mom’s voice, really quiet so I couldn’t hear what she was saying, as I locked myself in the bathroom.

  Okay, this was not going to ruin the first night of my senior year. (Life with Val: saying “this is not going to ruin . . .” a lot.) Especially because by tomorrow we’d start having homework (and my life as a pack animal began) and I had to keep my grades up in case I was going to Runyon. If a good fairy zoomed in from Neverworld and gave me a fortune. A small fortune would do—I was okay to spend the rest of my life working off my college loan. But the end of September was only two weeks away and if I said “yes” I had to send them a (nonrefundable) check too.

  So I bounced downstairs like the only thing on my mind was how much pizza I could eat (I burned a lot of calories working at the shelter) and there were Mom and Val holding hands at the kitchen table. Mom was staring at the table but Val looked up and our eyes met. I was even braced for the explosion of shadows up the wall behind him. This wall had photos and stuff so it wasn’t like it was blank, but it turned black with them. If you believed in hell, which I’d never thought I did, it was like looking into hell—like one of those horrible old etchings of people getting eaten by demons—I was sure if I blinked a couple of times it would all come into focus. . . . I ran for the front door. Mongo was on my heels, half-hoping he could come with me and half-worried about whatever was worrying me. “You stay here,” I said breathlessly, hoping that Val’s demons wouldn’t suddenly start eating dogs. “I’ll see you later,” and I closed the door as gently as I could. I hadn’t said good-bye.

  Jill wasn’t here yet so I started walking down the road. I was shaking with adrenaline and—it might have been rage. How dare he destroy our family? How dare he turn my mother against her own daughter? How dare he . . . be whatever he was? Whatever monster he was?

  Keisha and Lindsay were already in the back seat, or I might have blurted out the whole thing to Jill. I hadn’t told her about that last day I took a message out to the shed. I didn’t want to hear what she’d say. She would want to give me advice because she was my friend, and whatever she said would be the wrong thing. I also knew she still thought there was something wrong with Arnie, and it didn’t feel at all electric that there was some kind of bad stepdad virus going around.

  Jill’s always been good at picking up mood, but she’d been almost creepily sensitive lately, so when she asked me what was going on I told her about the gigantic algebra book and how carrying the stupid thing was going to label me “loser.”

  Jill laughed. “I think it looks kind of cool. Math as art. Most textbooks are dead boring.” Keisha and Lindsay—who were both taking trig, which had a normal, boring textbook—joined in with flipping Maggie’s switches. I had trouble not hitting flashpoint. But I could go to P&P and act like a normal teenager beginning her senior year of high school or I could go home. No choice.

  But I guess I did go into P&P with kind of an attitude. Just like Jill knew there was something up with me when I got in the car, she knew I hadn’t been telling the truth that it was the algebra book. (Well, it was yanking my wiring: who wants to be wearing a big loser sign their senior year? But she was right it wasn’t the most important thing.) Keisha and Lindsay had gone on ahead while Jill was still trying to get whatever it was out of me as we went through the door and I was being about as friendly as a bucket of battery acid till she said, “Oh, Magdag, don’t be such a bugsucker,” and she said it in one of those little quiet spaces that happen somewhere like a crowded restaurant, especially when you don’t want them to. I know there’s often a brief pause to stop and look when someone comes through the door, but it doesn’t usually stretch past the first few tables, which may be having their breadsticks shot across the room by the draft, and it doesn’t usually last more than two syllables unless whoever is coming in is a movie star or something, and we don’t get movie stars in Station.

  But—thanks a lot, fate—this time it was like everyone had shut up to hear someone call her best friend a bugsucker. The other weird thing was that the lights sort of flared and flickered for just a second, just enough to notice—which at least should have distracted everyone I might know from “Magdag.” I used to punch Jill out for calling me that when we were six. I didn’t think I’d get away with it at seventeen. I was still biting on “Val is not going to wreck my senior year of high school” like Jonesie on that burglar’s leg (that’s how he ended up back at the shelter, the family he’d protected decided they were scared of him, can you believe it?), and now Jill had called me Magdag in public. So I put my shoulders back and glared like the flickering lights were deference to my greatness. (Or that I was Jonesie and the restaurant was full of burglars.) I’m not usually the don’t-mess-with-me type. In fact, I’m never the don’t-mess-with-me type.

  One of the people who looked up when the lights blinked was a boy delivering a pizza to one of the tables beside the aisle we were swaggering down. He straightened up at the commotion and I was sure I saw him flinch when Jill said “Magdag.” So I was planning on giving him my very best death glare when he finished turning around, since he was clearly turning to get a look at us.

  I always thought that “my heart turned over” was just a phrase. Also, Jill and Laura both find boys cute really easily. I don’t. (Okay, I’m not entirely interested only in their minds.) But this one . . .

  He was tall, but not a skinny phone pole like Takahiro. He had shoulders and arms—oh wow, those arms—his P&P T-shirt and apron were too baggy to guess what the rest of him looked like, but I guessed anyway. I saw the tight little butt before he turned around. I was pretty sure that my death glare had been neutralized by a nice curve of thigh through the apron as he finished turning toward us. And then he smiled. At me. At me.

  My heart turned over.

  He had long curly black hair tied back in a ponytail and gigantic chocolate-brown eyes—dark chocolate, not that feeble milk stuff. Heavy black brows, but artistically arched, and long eyelashes—long like you figure there’s probably a breeze if you’re standing near him. I wished I was standing nearer. Dramatic cheekbones, straight nose, full lips, wide mouth (smiling at me), golden-brown skin somewhere between fourteen carat and caramel. If it weren’t for the long square jaw and the gorgeous neck (the neck was obviously part of the package with the shoulders and arms) he might have been too pretty.

  He wasn’t too pretty. Trust me. He was not too pretty. Oh, did I mention the dimple? He had a dimple in one cheek. Oh. Gods. Oh. Gods.

  “Oh, gods,” breathed Jill next to me, like an echo of my thoughts. “Mags, he’s staring straight at you. Get his phone number.”

  I hoped I wasn’t drooling. “Uh,” I said. We were nearly on top of him. “Uh, hi,” I said. It was pretty much the hardest thing I’d ever done in my life that I tried to keep going. But it was just too tacky to stop. He must be used to having nearly every female who’s ever seen him asking for his phone number. And a lot of the guys too.

  I was trying to remember how to smile. I’d managed to turn the death glare off but I’d kind of stalled at that point.

&
nbsp; “Hi,” he said back. To me. Still staring into my eyes. Still smiling. He’d smiled a little less while he said “hi” and then turned it back on again full blast, so the dimple showed.

  “Mags,” hissed Jill, clutching at my elbow, dragging me to a stop. I probably didn’t struggle all that hard.

  “Uh,” I said again. “I—er—I haven’t seen you here before.” And then felt myself turn purple. That was almost as bad as asking for his phone number.

  “I have been here only a few days,” he said. He had a slight accent, but I had no idea where it was from. Well, I had pretty much no idea about anything with him staring at me like that. “Now I am glad I came to this town,” he said, still staring at me.

  My jaw really did drop. I’m sorry, but it did. I’m not ugly or anything, or stupid (at least not usually, about things other than math and science and taking tests), but this guy . . . guys like this don’t stare at girls like me.

  “Her name’s Maggie,” said Jill. “Usually she talks,” and gave my elbow a shake. “When’s your break? Come join us. If you want.”

  “I would like that,” he said. “Thank you.” He flicked a little piece of his smile at Jill and then refocused on me. “I will see you later.”

  “Oh—great,” I said (I think that’s what I said), and then Jill was dragging me again, forward this time, toward our table.

  Wolf whistles greeted us. Keisha and Lindsay had been sitting down while I was having my little encounter with Mr. To Die For, and one of the other waiters was putting down a pitcher of beer and some more glasses. “Hey, give her a beer,” said Laura, only half-annoyed that Mr. TDF had noticed me, not her. She was pretty tight with Ryan, and Ryan was a good guy.

  “Anybody get his name?” said Jill, who was apparently my agent for the evening.

  “Casimir,” said Zach. “Is that weird or what?”

  “Not everyone is from No Town, Nowhere,” said Jill. “I think it’s a nice name. Casimir. Yeah.” She grinned at me.

  • • •

  There was a lot about that evening I didn’t take in very well. I was completely dazzled by Casimir, of course, but that wasn’t all of it. It was like the lights that had flickered when we came through the door went on flickering in my brain somehow. As if something was turning itself on and off. As if my wireboard was being rerouted or something. I didn’t like it.

  But then again it might just have been Casimir. He was enough to make anyone short out a few circuits. He did join us during his break—Jill saw him coming and nearly shoved Hadar off his chair to make space for Casimir to sit down next to me. He’d taken the apron off but the P&P T-shirt underneath was still hopelessly long and baggy. He’d brought a cup of coffee with him, so I got to say something else totally lame: “Oh, I can’t buy you a cup of coffee then.”

  He looked faintly puzzled—maybe he was having second thoughts about me: I wouldn’t have blamed him—and then the smile (and the dimple) broke out again. “No, I have my coffee, thank you,” and I think he was going to say something else—like maybe I could buy him a coffee some other night or even that he’d buy me something some other night? Maybe it was just my brain going zot. ZZZZ. Zingo. But Jason interrupted and said, “So, where are you from? You don’t sound like you’re from around here.”

  “No,” said Casimir. “I learnt my English in England.”

  “That’s not an English accent,” said Jason, and I thought, what’s he so pissed off about? Jason’s really good-looking if you like them blond and stuck on themselves, but he’s never thought I was worth more than “hi,” and it’s supposed to be girls who get rats’-assy about looks.

  Casimir said that he’d been born in Ukovia and his parents were Ukovian and he had spent most of his childhood there, but then he had been sent to boarding school in England and only came home for holidays. He said some stuff about how different Ukovia and England were and then Jason interrupted again and said, “Are you here to go to school?”

  I hadn’t been paying much attention to what Casimir was saying, although the sound of his voice was making me feel all petted and velvety. He was sitting close enough—there were nine of us wedged around a table for six—that I could feel his body heat. When he moved his arm or his knee, it would brush mine (that made my brain turn on and off). I was trying to think of a way to say “Back off, Jason,” without getting in his face about it. But I heard Casimir saying “Runyon” and I snapped back to attention.

  “I accepted a place at Runyon,” he said, “because it has perhaps the best physics of the worlds department of any school in Newworld.”

  “The physics of the worlds?” said Jason in a disbelieving voice, and a little silence fell.

  My heart sank. Only loopheads wanted to know any more about physwiz than that silverbugs should be popped and where to find your local Watchguard. Senior year you have a bunch of required seminars in stuff the government says you have to know something about: history of magic, why they gene-chop you, what they think they know about cobeys, like that. They’re all short—none of them lasts more than two weeks—and from everything I’ve heard they don’t actually teach you anything, but it goes on your Watchguard record that you’ve been cranked through the informed-citizen education machine. Most of it’s just stuff like all of school is stuff (although I was a little interested in what they were going to tell us about gene-chopping), but physwiz freaked a lot of people. Every year there was a petition from some of the parents that it’s an inappropriate subject for high school kids and should be removed from the syllabus. Since these were usually the same parents who had meltdowns when a book their kid checked out of the school library had the word “vagina” or “dickhead” in it, the petitions were mostly ignored. But physwiz creeped out a lot of relatively sane people too.

  I knew Runyon had an important physwiz department. But it was its own little territory and anybody who didn’t have to go there didn’t. When I had the campus tour last year our guide reluctantly waved a hand at a path through some trees and said vaguely, oh, physwiz is down there, and then flipped back into guide mode and started talking about advisers and food. I guess I knew, but it was the sort of thing you didn’t want to know, that Runyon’s physwiz department was a big deal, really more of a brain bureau with students.

  The cutest boy in the known universe is a loophead. Well, that might help to explain why he seemed to like me.

  “Oh, wow,” said Jill, not willing to let my unexpected conquest go without a struggle. “Um. Are there, you know, jobs in physwiz—the physics of the worlds?”

  Other than being disappeared by a brain bureau, I added silently.

  “I want to study history,” Jill went on, “but my mom keeps telling me I need to get a degree in something that’ll let me pay back my student loan.”

  “I hope there are jobs,” said Casimir, “because it is what I want to study. But there is a trust, the Nowak Trust, to bring students here, and to send some of your students to Oldworld, to study the physics of the worlds. I was offered a much better scholarship to come here than if I stayed home. And if there are no jobs, well”—and he made a short, graceful gesture that wasn’t from around here either, but it meant that (momentarily) his shoulder pressed against mine—“this is a nice place to work. And the coffee is good.”

  Everybody but Jason laughed, and then Casimir’s break was over and he left. I tried not to be too obvious about watching those shoulders and that butt walking away, but when I surreptitiously glanced around the table almost everyone else was watching too. Then our pizzas arrived, fortunately for me, because everybody got busy eating and forgot to give me a hard time.

  When it was time to go—school-night curfews for another whole year, joy—Lindsay and Keisha were getting a ride home with someone else, so it was just Jill and me. We were all leaving when Jill suddenly said, “Oh, where is my—um?” and went back. She made a big show of looking around
her chair and under the table, and then she glanced at the door, but Laura, Ryan, and Ashley were waiting for us. “No, you go on,” she said, and flapped her hands at them. “I’m sure I’ll find it in a minute.”

  Laura looked at me and grinned. “I’m sure you will,” she said, and all three of them left. Jill was sitting down and digging through her purse with a scowl on her face, but as soon as the door swung shut behind them she was on her feet again. “I’m going to go get the car,” she said to me, slowly and carefully, like maybe I didn’t speak her language. “You can wait here. I will pick you up in a few minutes. You have a few minutes.”

  “Jill, I’ll walk to the car with you,” I said, exasperated. “I’m not going to ask for his phone number!”

  “Tell him that,” she said, and darted past. I turned around and there was Casimir walking toward us, looking slightly uncertain. “See you!” Jill sang out to Casimir, and kept going. He had a little piece of paper in his hand. “I—your friend—” he said.