Drawn

  “Point to Parnell.”

  I leaned over to Damon and whispered, “Six.”

  Erik, Lucas and Kim brought us up three more points to twenty-one, then Northgate’s score totaled twenty.

  “Name the current prime minister of the United Kingdom.”

  “Margaret Thatcher.” Damon whispered, “Six.”

  “Which inert gas is typically responsible for decompression sickness, also known as the bends, in scuba divers?”

  I beat Damon to the buzzer. “Nitrogen.” I smiled and whispered, “Seven.”

  He frowned.

  Thank you, Adam.

  “This geometric shape has three sides of equal length.”

  At least five people around the table buzzed in. I couldn’t tell who hit it first, but the judge chose Damon. I wished he picked Lucas.

  “An equilateral triangle.” Seven for Damon.

  “This word describes the rate at which the velocity of a body changes over time.”

  Northgate buzzed. “Speed.”

  “That is incorrect. Does Parnell have a response?”

  Damon took it. “Acceleration.” He turned and smiled at me. “Eight.”

  I couldn’t buzz in on any of the next five questions and started to panic. Northgate edged around us.

  “This Dutch graphic artist is best known for his explorations of impossible constructions, infinity, architecture and tessellations.”

  I almost shouted, “Eight!” for the answer. Deep breath. “Escher. M.C. Escher.”

  Damon and I tied. Northgate had twenty-eight to our twenty-seven.

  “This novella, by Antoine de St. Exupéry, chronicles the adventures of a space-traveler who lands in the Sahara desert.”

  Kim beat me to the buzzer.

  Argh! I could’ve gone around Damon.

  “The Little Prince.”

  If Damon or I could get the next two questions, we’d win the match as well as our side bet. Let them be art questions.

  “Fifty to eighty percent of a person’s body weight is comprised of this liquid.”

  Easy! I buzzed in, and so did everyone else at the table.

  The five judges leaned in to confer. Then the one who read the questions leaned back to the microphone. “We do not concur about which player rang in first, so we will select a different question.”

  We all sank down in our seats.

  “To which of the biological kingdoms do trees belong?”

  Mia smacked her buzzer. “Plants. Plantae.”

  Damon and I looked at each other. Neither of us could get to ten points now.

  “Nine?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “The chemical formula H2O describes what common substance?”

  Damon hit his buzzer, but not before Northgate did.

  “Water.”

  “That is correct. The match is now tied at twenty-nine points.”

  We all shifted in our seats and moved our hands closer to the buzzers. One more point. Let me get it. I want to beat Northgate. I want to beat Damon.

  “Give the Roman numeral equivalent of the current year.”

  Erik hit his buzzer. “CM.” He paused.

  “You have five seconds.”

  “CMLXXXII.”

  “I’m sorry, that is incorrect.”

  Erik threw his head back and groaned.

  “Does Northgate have a response?”

  A girl on the other side of the table tapped her buzzer. “MCMLXXXII.”

  “That is correct. Northgate Middle School wins the match, thirty points to twenty-nine points.”

  * * * * *

  The last match of the morning pit Winger against Prairie Heights, but Hirsch whispered to us that both teams played a lame duck game. Northgate already racked up 88 points and we had 79. Winger could only get to 76 if they won the match, and Prairie Heights to 78, so the afternoon round would be us against Northgate again. Fortunately, it didn’t matter how many points a school had coming into the championship; whoever got to thirty points first took the state.

  No one paid much attention to the match, and quite a few people left early for lunch.

  Hirsch made us stay to the end. “Sportsmanship,” he said. But as soon as Winger scored the last point of the game we jumped up and headed to the cafeteria. We didn’t have enough money left to go to the upstairs restaurant again, so I braced myself for another horrible plunge into a sea of hungry bodies. But most of the schools from yesterday had already left. Lines around the food stations stood only three or four people deep.

  “Drink soda,” Hirsch told us. “No diet or caffeine-free drinks, either. You can crash into comas on the drive home.”

  Hirsch and Mrs. Teele sat at a booth with several other adults, while the six of us ate around a circular table with attached benches.

  “Is our wager still on?” Damon asked me and took one of my fries.

  Lucas propped his elbows on the table and narrowed his eyes. “What wager?”

  “Julie and I bet on which one of us could get ten points in the last game.”

  “We both got to eight.” I couldn’t eat another bite, so I pushed the rest of my fries over to Damon.

  “What’s the prize?” Erik asked.

  Damon grinned at me and leaned back. “If I win I get to take her around the track on the dirt bike.”

  “Fun!” Mia cried. “You should do that anyway.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’ve seen him on the track. I like life.”

  “What if Juliet wins?” Lucas asked.

  “She gets to try and dunk me.”

  Lucas shook his head at me. “You’re not big enough to dunk a guy.”

  Kim grinned at me. “Women have ways.”

  “And there’s no way either of you is taking ten points,” Erik said.

  “They got close last time.” Kim dipped her last chicken nugget into mustard sauce. “I’m behind Juliet.”

  “No way,” Lucas argued.

  “Why don’t we all get in on it?” Erik suggested. “Guys versus girls?”

  “To what?” Mia asked.

  “Sixteen? That’s half the points plus one.”

  Kim pulled a lip gloss out of her bag and traced her mouth. “What do we win?”

  “Losers shave their heads?” Lucas said.

  “No way!” Mia shook her head and frowned.

  “Dinner and a movie?” Kim offered.

  “Boring.” Lucas slurped the rest of his soda.

  “Slavery,” Damon said.

  I turned in my seat. “What?”

  “The losers have to serve the winners as their personal slaves this week at school. Kim and Lucas, Erik and Mia, you and me.”

  “That sounds a little weird,” Mia said.

  “Doing what?” Erik asked.

  “Carrying our books, bringing our lunches, saying, ‘Yes, your highness’ and ‘No, your majesty’.”

  Kim nodded. “Hilarious.”

  “I’m not doing anything humiliating,” I told Damon.

  “You must think you’re going to lose.”

  We girls looked at each other.

  “I’ll do it,” Kim said.

  Mia shrugged. “Whatever.”

  “Then it’s on,” Erik announced. “Tomorrow you’ll be our slaves.”

  “Huh-uh,” Kim shook her head. “You’ll be ours.”

  I excused myself to go refill my soda. The line at the drinks wound around the cashier’s station, and it took a couple of minutes to get to the front of it. By the time I got back to the table all the trash had disappeared and Damon scribbled rules for slaves and masters on a notepad.

  “Hope it’s okay, I got my stuff from yesterday out of your bag,” he said, as he folded a piece of silvery-gray gum into his mouth. “I took a piece of your gum, too. I didn’t think you’d mind.”

  I gasped.

  He chewed a few times, then stopped writing and looked up. He swallowed once. Twice. Then he chewed some more.

  Kitty’s gum. My g
um.

  Damon stared at me, kind of like Drew did that night at the midway.

  “Man. What kind is this? It’s really good.”

  Oh, Damon. You don’t know the half of it.

  CHAPTER 28

  I didn’t know if the gum would help Damon win or not, but I couldn’t take the risk. If it put me at a disadvantage he’d win our bet and help the guys win against the girls. As we hurried back to the auditorium for the championship match I unwrapped a piece and jammed it against my tongue. I stuffed the wrapper into my pants pocket.

  Sweet, creamy tingles flooded my mouth.

  Ask and it shall be given to you.

  I chewed and wished I hadn’t wasted four dollars on lunch.

  Seek and you shall find.

  Each swallow heightened my sense of awareness of everything around me, and connected me to something, some powerful cosmic force.

  Knock and the door shall be opened to you.

  We sat down in our row and waited to be called to the stage.

  “Twelve minutes,” I said.

  Damon nodded.

  Then I checked my watch. One-eighteen. How did I know that already?

  You know how you knew that.

  My heart knocked like a bass drum. With each stroke the blood pumped and ebbed, pumped and ebbed, and it surged through my taut veins like cold fire.

  “Is this real?” I asked.

  As real as I am.

  Damon turned to me, his eyes both bright and dark, like the deep of a full-mooned twilight. He reached for my hand, but I put it in my lap and shook my head. My nervous system already buzzed on overload.

  He reached up and pushed a stray strand of hair behind my ear. When his hand grazed my skin I saw things, images, like photos tossed around me on a wild wind. The picture his mother took, the one I sketched, flitted by, and I reached out to catch it, but Damon took his hand away and the vision disintegrated.

  Our eyes met, and my stomach shuddered at the sudden anger in his. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  His jaw tightened. “What did Drew do to you?”

  Oh, please don’t show him stuff like that, I begged. “Nothing.”

  “Did he hurt you?”

  The truth will set you free.

  “No,” I said. “He just tried to kiss me.”

  Damon’s pupils dilated till only wisps of indigo circled the black.

  I shook my head. “But I didn’t let him.”

  Then an image materialized in my head. My money in Drew’s hand. The hand which held my wrist so gently, like a spider’s delicate web, just a moment before. Humiliation burned my cheeks and forehead again.

  “I promise.” I reached toward Damon’s forearm. “I’ve never kissed anybody.”

  When I touched him, the whole scene at the midway ripped out of my mind, like a movie reel spun off its track. The pictures flew one after another out of my memory and onto the back of a transparent screen that Damon saw from the opposite side.

  Make it stop! I didn’t want to relive this, didn’t want Damon to see it.

  You did nothing wrong.

  Tears blurred my eyes again. I shouldn’t have been alone with Drew.

  You weren’t.

  I pulled my hand away, but Damon grabbed it.

  “Don’t!”

  But he held it and I looked beyond him, toward the door that led away from the stage. The movie played out and the film frames dropped to the floor.

  “How am I seeing all this?” he asked, not really to me. “Did that really happen?”

  “You shouldn’t have taken that gum.”

  I felt a tap on my back and I turned around. Mia handed me several pieces of chocolate wrapped in silver foil. “For good luck. Share them.”

  When her hand touched mine, I gasped at what I saw. Mia took my barrette? Nonnie’s barrette?

  “What?” she asked.

  I pinched my eyes shut and shook my head.

  “It’s the championship, baby!” Mia said. “We win this, we go to nationals in January.”

  I passed pieces of chocolate to Erik and Damon. Damon took the gum out of his mouth and held it in his hand while he ate the candy. He shook his head like you erase an Etch-a-Sketch.

  Why does Damon even like me?

  Gentle laughter echoed inside me. Because you are a masterpiece, and he is no fool.

  I pulled out the gum. The serene sense of wider consciousness fizzled away, along with the alarming visions, and crowd-noise assaulted my ears. I unwrapped the chocolate and let it melt on my tongue.

  “Would the Northgate Middle School and Parnell Junior High School teams please come to the stage and take their seats?” the announcer’s voice boomed.

  Damon swallowed his chocolate and put the gum back in his mouth, so I did the same.

  Oh, God. I hope this isn’t cheating.

  Peace settled over me, as though a fuzzy blanket fell on my head and shoulders, then drifted down to cover the rest of me. I am available to everyone equally, Julie. I’ve given you nothing more than I offer anyone else.

  I glanced up at the ceiling. I’m pretty sure Damon and I are the only ones at the table chewing magic gum.

  * * * * *

  The judge announced the match and the audience cheered. I tried to see the crowd, but the TV camera lights blinded me and I turned away.

  Damon and I looked at each other.

  His grin melted and his eyebrows pushed together the vertical crease between them. “You’re scared again.”

  “We’re on TV.”

  “Ride the dragon. Let it happen.”

  “And the gum,” I chewed the inside of my lip and looked for the right words. “Does something.”

  His dimple disappeared. “Where’d you get it?”

  “My pen pal.”

  He looked one way, then the other. “Do you think it’s laced?”

  “Laced?”

  “Drugged,” he mouthed.

  Drugs? I shook my head.

  “Then what?”

  “I don’t know. But it makes me hear things. And see things.”

  “Yeah,” he nodded, “I’m getting that too.” He took it out of his mouth and looked at it. “You’re sure it’s clean?”

  “She’s in eighth grade. She’s an honor student.”

  “So was I.”

  Damon did drugs? Damon? I could believe that about Adam, but not Damon.

  I wanted to ask, but the words stuck like cold, lead balls in the hollow of my throat. So I put my hand on his forearm again.

  A wall, stacked with white bricks in silvery-gray mortar, shimmered in front of me.

  If you want to know, ask him yourself.

  “May the best school win,” the official announced and tore open the manila envelope that held the questions for the championship.

  Damon shrugged. “Too late now, if it is.”

  “What drug would let you see into my head? My past?”

  He nodded. “Good point.” Then he flicked me lightly on the nose. “May the best man win.”

  I glared at him. “Best woman.”

  “Feisty as ever.”

  The head official cleared his throat. “Once known as the Boulder Dam, this structure was completed in 1936 and impounds Lake Mead in Nevada.”

  A picture of it popped into my head before the official even finished the question, along with a five-line caption and the page number from my seventh-grade social studies textbook. I hit my buzzer and shouted, “The Hoover Dam, controversially named for President Herbert Hoover.”

  “A complete and correct answer, Juliet. Point to Parnell.” The scoreboard on the screen behind the officials flipped from zero to one.

  Erik looked at me like I’d sprouted giant antennae out the top of my head.

  “In Roman mythology, Neptune was the king of what realm?”

  Damon hit the buzzer on “Neptune”. “The sea. And his Greek name is Poseidon.” He smiled sideways at me.

  The judge tipped his head to the sid
e. “Another expansive response from Parnell. The Amazon river is the second longest in the world. Name the first.”

  Clear as still water, I remembered a news segment from a few years ago when the Nile flooded its banks and washed out several villages. The anchorwoman’s silver heart pin glinted like a sputtering sparkler against her navy lapel. I took the point.

  But when I didn’t know an answer, I didn’t know it. Only vacant darkness swirled across my inner sight.

  Northgate scored. Damon scored again. Erik got a point, and so did Kim and Mia. Northgate scored several. Then Lucas took two. Then Damon got one. Finally I took another one. Then Northgate came back and took some.

  I checked the board, as well as the tally I kept on my fingers under the table. We had Northgate by two points, eleven to nine. Three for Damon, three for me. Our team’s girls held five while the boys had six.

  My toes tapped as fast as my shins and calves would let them.

  Don’t ever make a bet you can’t bear to lose.

  “A dodecahedron has how many facets?”

  “Twelve,” Mia answered.

  “The equation ‘E=mc2’ is also known as the theory of what?”

  “Relativity.”

  I stomped my foot as Damon racked up another point.

  Then Northgate took control and brought their score up to eighteen.

  “This artistic technique is described by the Japanese words for ‘fold and ‘paper’.”

  Every example of origami I’d ever seen, from the first cootie-catcher I ever made to the Hiroshima construction upstairs, flew in front of my eyes like a river of colored lanterns, and I scored the point.

  Isn’t there something you want to ask…

  “Achieving statehood in 1912, this state is the 48th addition to the United States of America, and the last to join the union of the 48 contiguous states.”

  Damon, Kim and a girl from Northgate all buzzed in.

  “Kim,” the judge selected.

  “Arizona.”

  My tongue clicked against the roof of my mouth as I inwardly cheered.

  …about your prophetic drawings?

  “The Latin phrase non sequitur means what?”

  I watched my father throw his hands in the air and accuse Mom of cyclical reasoning and non sequitur logic. I saw the entry in the unabridged dictionary Nonnie gave me for Christmas that year.

  “It doesn’t follow.” Point for me, point for the girls, point for Parnell. Damon and I tied with five; boys and girls each had nine; we matched Northgate at eighteen.

  You wonder about the prophecies.

  “I’m a little busy here,” I muttered.

  “This process is used by plants to convert energy from the sun into chemical energy.”

  Words have power.