In the moment I paused to listen to the voice, I missed the buzzer. Damon and Mia rang in, but Northgate got the point for photosynthesis.
Okay, I asked, why can I draw the future sometimes, but not other times?
“Semantics refers to the study of what?”
“Words.” A girl from Northgate took the point.
What was different about my drawings that happened and the ones that didn’t?
“This rod connects the center of a wheel to its outer edge.”
Kim buzzed. “Spoke.”
Where does the power come from?
“This Greek word refers to reason, creativity and specifically, in theology, the Word of God.”
I saw Damon’s bike key nestled in the palm of my hand. WORD LOGOS.
My buzzer lit. “Logos.”
I got the point, but then I remembered: the key really read WORLD LOCKS. I’d won one by a mistake.
Not a mistake.
I shook my head. But that’s not what it said.
That’s what it said to you.
Keys don’t talk, I argued.
Even the stones will cry out.
“The Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo are housed in this famous museum and art gallery in Paris, France.”
Easy! “The Louvre.”
“In mathematics and physics, this term describes a quantity which possesses both direction and magnitude.”
Erik, Lucas and Damon all hit their buzzers, but the judges chose Damon. “A vector.”
Now we had Northgate by two, and with seven points of my own I still had one over Damon.
For all its talk about my prophetic artwork questions, the voice in my head didn’t seem in a hurry with any answers.
Thanks for nothing.
“History, literature and cultural information passed between generations without the use of a writing system is known as what?”
Northgate buzzed in. “Oral tradition.”
“In theater, this is a speech presented by a single character to express his or her thoughts aloud.”
“Monologue,” Kim answered.
“This muscular hydrostat allows for the manipulation of food as well as the production of human vocal expression.”
Mia took it. “The tongue.”
The girls now had fourteen, six whole points over the boys. We’re going to win this!
Then Northgate took over and scored several. We soon got it back again, but via Damon.
“How many zeroes are in the standard form of ten to the power of eight?”
Without hesitation Damon buzzed and answered, “Eight.”
“The second most abundant element in the universe, this noble gas has the atomic number two.”
Damon got “Helium,” too.
“Seven points, baby,” Damon whispered.
If Damon took three more questions, he’d have ten. Let me get the point!
Do you want answers, or do you want to win?
Duh. If I have the answers, then I’ll win.
I already gave you the answer you asked for.
“This device measures wind speed.”
I don’t know! Desperation gnawed at my chest and I bit back a primal scream.
“An anemometer.”
Northgate got the next two questions, about seismology and mollusks, then a question about the Strait of Malacca stumped everyone.
“On what island does the Statue of Liberty of the United States reside?”
Northgate buzzed. “Ellis Island.”
Wrong. I buzzed in before the judges even called it incorrect. “Liberty Island.”
“The highest mountain peak on earth stands 29,029 feet above sea level. What is its name?”
Erik tried, but Northgate got it first. “Mt. Everest.”
Two more points. Me, not Damon.
“This describes a musical scale with twelve pitches, each pitch a semitone above or below the next.”
Lucas and Kim both buzzed, but Northgate got it first. “Chromatic scale.”
“A fish’s dorsal fin resides on its back. What is the proper term for its tail fin?”
No one buzzed for several seconds, though two kids on Northgate’s team hovered their hands over their buttons. Then one hit it. “The ventral fin.”
“I’m sorry, that is incorrect. Does Parnell have an answer?”
Damon arched his fingers over his buzzer and took a deep breath. Then he tapped it. “The caudal fin?”
“Point to Parnell.”
We all cheered a little, but that put Damon at eight points. He only needed one more point to win, and both Parnell and the girls’ side needed just two more.
“What does the acronym SCUBA stand for?”
Oh, come on!
Damon beat one of the Northgate kids to the buzzer. “Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus.” Then he turned and smiled at me, all teeth and dimple. He held up ten fingers, then closed both hands around imaginary motorcycle handles and bounced his eyebrows up and down.
“The score is Parnell Junior High School, twenty-nine points; Northgate Middle School, twenty-four points. Are all the contestants ready for the next question?”
I’d lost, but the girls could still win. We just needed one more point to beat the boys and take the game.
We looked back and forth at each other. Lucas winked and pointed at me.
Northgate didn’t even matter anymore.
“Ferdinand von Zeppelin is best known for what invention?”
A boy across the table hit his buzzer. “The Zeppelin, or dirigible airship.”
“Claustrophobia is an intense fear of confined places. What does a person with arachnophobia fear?”
Mia hit her buzzer, but the judge gave it to Northgate. “Spiders.”
Maybe Northgate mattered after all.
Please. One more point. I closed my eyes and willed my brain to remember everything it had ever learned or seen.
“This is the lowest portion of earth’s atmosphere, containing ninety-nine percent of its water vapor and aerosols.”
Mia and Erik both hit their buzzers, as well as one of the Northgate team.
The judges looked at each other. The one in the center, who read the questions, covered the microphone with his hand and the three of them put their heads together.
“Me. Me. It was me,” Erik whispered.
The judges nodded. “Northgate takes the question.”
The boy across the table smiled with his lips pressed tightly together and sat straight up in his chair. “The stratosphere.”
“I’m sorry, that is not correct. Parnell?”
Erik and Mia hit their buzzers again, but Mia got it first. “The troposphere.”
“That is correct, and with thirty points Parnell Junior High wins the state championship.”
The audience cheered. We leaped out of our seats, jumped up and down, high-fived each other.
Damon lifted me off my feet in a hug that made me dizzy. “Did you hear it?”
I laughed as he put me back down. “Hear what?”
“The answer.” He held my shoulders and leaned down close to my face. “About your drawings. What makes them come true.”
I shook my head. “What?”
“Words, Julie. You were right. It’s the words.”
CHAPTER 29
Hirsch danced into homeroom on Monday, index fingers pointed at the ceiling as his hips did this weird twisty thing. He sang, “We are the champions,” until we all begged him to stop.
“May I present half of the team that brought Parnell Junior High the state Academic Olympics championship? Stand up and take a bow, Erik Athaca, Juliet Brynn and Damon Sheppard!”
People clapped, but no one cared as much about it as Hirsch did. Except maybe the three of us, of course.
Nationals in January. A three-day weekend in Chicago. With my boyfriend.
My insides did their own little happy-dance.
“Congratulations, you guys,” Tori said.
“Shut up, Tor
i!” Bethany scowled at her.
“You shut up.” Tori turned toward the front and opened her algebra book.
Oh my gosh. Tori just handed in her resignation from the popular girls’ club. Why in the world would she do that?
She’s had enough.
Nuh-uh, I thought. That voice was just me.
This afternoon I’d call Kitty and find out what she knew about the gum. Maybe she got it from a fortune-teller, or something. That’d be cool.
No, it wouldn’t.
After class Damon walked me to my locker. “You’ve got gym fourth hour, right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “What about you?”
“Study hall.” He reached for my books. “I’m supposed to be your slave, remember?”
“Did you see Erik this morning? He carried Mia around till Mr. Holden made him put her down.”
Damon laughed. “No way!”
“I think Erik likes being a slave more than Mia likes having one.”
I closed my locker and we headed toward the cafeteria.
“What’s up with her, anyway?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Like, she was really quiet and serious. Now she’s kind of,” he shook his head when he couldn’t find the word he wanted.
“Wigged out?”
“Yeah.”
I nodded. “She’s always been a little shy. Awkward. But yeah, it’s like she wants to be someone totally different now. One minute she’s all Cosmo, and the next she’s serious and brainy again. I wish she’d just be herself.”
“Maybe she doesn’t know who that is.”
“I think she just wants to do the opposite of whatever her mom wants.”
We turned the corner into the cafeteria and walked toward my table. Erik already had his English homework open, and Drew used his forearm as a pillow.
Damon scowled at Drew.
“Let it go, please,” I whispered.
Damon looked down at me and his jaw muscle twitched.
“I mean it. It’s not worth it.” I shook off the memory of the midway. “It wasn’t anything.”
“It was something,” Damon argued. “If nothing else, he knew I liked you.”
A sweet, bubbly heat burst out of the soles of my feet and fanned up over my whole body. The top of my head burst into flame as the rest of me melted like candle wax. “You better go before the bell.”
He glared at Drew one more time, then dropped my books on the table, hard. Drew jumped and gave Damon a dirty look.
Damon scowled back at him, then turned to me. “I have gym right before you, so I’ll meet you outside the locker rooms between third and fourth hour, okay? There’s something I want to show you before you have art.”
Drew never opened his eyes again during study hall, and that disappointed me because I wanted to turn my calm, cool laugh on him. But I had a lot of stuff to catch up on after the weekend away, so I worked pretty hard for those fifty minutes.
When the bell rang I tore out my page of sentence diagrams and got them onto Mr. Tollin’s desk two minutes later.
“Thank you, Miss Brynn,” he said in a deep, very creepy voice.
He sat behind his desk and smoothed down the blunt ends of a fat, black mustache. A white scarf twisted around his neck, and dust mottled his black suit and high, fat lapels.
“Who are you supposed to be?” I asked.
He tapped his fingertips together. “Mine is a telltale heart.”
Jimmy passed behind me and dropped his sentences on the pile. “It’s Edgar Allan Poe.”
“In the flesh,” Mr. Tollin bowed his head. “Have a seat, Annabelle Lee.”
I sat down at my desk just as Amica walked in.
“Love the costume, Mr. Tollin.”
“Mr. Poe.”
“Whatever,” Amica popped her gum and slid into the seat in front of me. She twisted around and put her elbows on my desk. “So.”
I leaned forward on my elbows. “What?”
“I heard you killed at the Academic Olympics.”
“I did okay.” What I wouldn’t give for her hair. “I heard you made head cheerleader.”
She shrugged and popped her gum again. “We got a VCR this weekend.”
“That’s cool.” She is so lucky. She gets everything.
“I’m having a few people over on Friday for pizza and a movie. Wanna come?”
I hadn’t been to Amica’s house in almost two years. Two months ago I’d have died, and maybe even murdered, to get back in with her. “Why?”
She looked at me like I’d asked why ice is cold, or rain is wet. “’Cause we’re friends, Juliet.”
We hadn’t been friends in a long time.
“Bethany’s coming. Erik.” She took her gum out and stuck it on the bottom of her chair. “Drew.”
Did she know about the midway? “What about Tori?”
“She can’t make it.”
A vague sense of foreboding spread outward from the small of my back and crept with cold fingers up my ribs and over my shoulders. The gray sculpture of the dying soldier, Uncle Will, appeared in my vision in front of Amica.
“Maybe.”
A ray of light bounced off her necklace and into my eye.
“Hey. You got your diamond back.”
She grabbed the gold chain and swung the pendant back and forth. “Isn’t it pretty? Daddy got me a new one. It’s even bigger than that crappy little one I used to have.”
“Pupils,” Mr. Tollin’s Poe stilled the room. “Take up your satchels and accompany me to a place of shadows and shades, death and despair.” And he walked out.
We grabbed our stuff and followed him into the hall. He led us out the front door, down the steps, across the school yard and the road, and through the church’s fence into the graveyard.
* * * * *
Iron-gray clouds, thick and heavy with a cold mist that whispered onto our heads and shoulders, hung like damp wool blankets in the October sky. The hillside’s stone slabs jutted up at odd angles and intervals, and the sheltering trees stretched their bare, crooked limbs toward each other over piles of damp leaves and withered brown grass. An old cluster of faded carnations drooped over a gravestone, and their pulpy stems released the bitter smell of mold into the air.
Mr. Tollin raised an open book in one hand and cleared his throat.
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore —
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
As he read The Raven in his deep, eerie Poe voice, I leaned against the trunk of a leafless elm and hugged my bag. The gravestones around me abbreviated entire lifetimes into fewer words than I had already used that day.
Sarah Meeks; Beloved Wife and Mother; 1874-1922.
Edward Josiah Hinton; August 1, 1832 - August 2, 1832.
Blanche Alma Carver Norwood; Passed into Glory in Childbirth; Jun. 5, 1769 - Nov. 28, 1787.
No infant with the last name Norwood had a stone nearby, so Blanche’s child must have survived. But without a mother. How many years did her baby live until they laid it under a gravestone, too?
And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain
Thrilled me — filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;
I wondered where Damon’s mother was buried.
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before;
A stillness entered into me, as though in this one place in all the world nothing moved or changed or affected me. My ears echoed with the hollow hopes and lost dreams of all these people’s forgotten lives. And somewhere in the sky, shrouded behind the clouds, the sun moved, with no sound or meaning, from one horizon to the other.
Let me see, then, what thereat is, and this mys
tery explore —
Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore; —
‘Tis the wind and nothing more!
A chasing after the wind.
Two cars passed each other on the road, one eastbound and the other west. I didn’t know either driver, where he came from or why she needed to go somewhere. I envied them the freedom to drive away, to go wherever they wanted.
Caleb Andrew Warren; May God Forgive; March 12, 1799 - April 8, 1884.
Beulah Esther Llewellyn; Place Me Like a Seal Over Your Heart … For Love Is As Strong As Death; July 2, 1869 - October 8, 1888.
Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,
It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels named Lenore—
Michael James Collier; Cherished Son and Betrothed; Mar. 30, 1862 - Feb. 9, 1883.
I shivered. Sooner or later, death takes everyone.
As Mr. Tollin finished the last lines of the poem, the cold mist broke into a pelting rain. He closed the book and tucked it in his jacket, then told us to run for the school. By the time we dashed through the front doors our clothes clung to us and we dripped all over the glossy floor.
“To the gym!” Mr. Tollin waved us down the hall. “We’ll get towels from Coach Sweeney.”
Our shoes squeaked, we shivered and complained, and a couple of the boys ran and tried to hydroplane. But even with all the noise we made, a commotion in the gym out-clamored us.
“Fight! Fight! Fight!” came the rhythmic chants of an excited mob of kids.
Mr. Tollin struggled to get to the front of our group, but we broke through the gym doors first.
Sweeney barked names as she pulled kids out of a tight-closed circle. “Move it back, people!” she snarled as she forced an opening into the wall of bodies.
Two boys struggled on the floor, locked in a twist of fists and muscle.
“Let him go, Mr. Sheppard!” Sweeney ordered, and she reached down to grab Damon by his gym shirt. When she jerked up, the fabric tore away from both arms and across the back.
All the kids cheered and whooped. And Damon didn’t let go of Drew.
“Say it,” Damon demanded.
I pushed past several kids that blocked my way and got in behind Sweeney.
Drew screeched, kind of like a little girl, when Damon’s forearm pressed harder against his throat. “Nothing happened! I was just joking!”
Damon let go and sat back. Drew scuttled backwards like a crab and cursed as he wiped his nose with the back of his wrist.
“Mr. Sheppard! Mr. Barony! To the office. Now!” Sweeney grabbed Damon by his upper arm and hoisted him off the floor.