Gran took her hand and she lifted him up with surprising strength. Also surprising was that Catalina’s hand didn’t feel like any girl’s hand that he’d ever known—not that he had much experience touching the hands of girls his age. Catalina’s hand was rough and callused. It felt to Gran like shaking his father’s hand.
“Try not to walk into any more walls, Granny,” she said, then turned, tied the shirt around her waist again, and walked off.
It goes without saying that after this incident, Catalina Catalan became very interesting to Gran. He thought about her throughout the rest of the school day. He thought about her during health class, as the teacher, a short, muscle-bound man named Mr. Cage, enumerated the ways students could get and transmit lice. He thought about her during science class, as Ms. Zywicki passed around a furry gray mass, enclosed in a clear plastic box, that she said was the scat of an Indonesian leopard. As fascinating as lice and feces were to Gran, they were crowded out by thoughts of Catalina Catalan.
The human mind is a passionate thing. It flings itself toward new things, new people, and it can quickly lose track of everything else. Thus Catalina overtook Gran’s mind. He thought about her dark eyes, her dark hair, her strength as she helped him up. But more than any of that he thought how strange and good it was to hear someone, another person his age, speak to him at all.
When school let out, Gran rushed outside. His plan was to install himself on the front steps, hoping to see Catalina on her way out. Beyond that, he had nothing in mind.
And so he stood like a stone as four hundred students passed around him like water, watching carefully for Catalina Catalan, who he was sure he could not miss.
But he did miss her.
When almost everyone had left the school and the human river had become a trickle, he turned around and saw Catalina Catalan in the distance. She’d somehow walked out the front door and had passed him without his noticing. And she was moving with incredible speed.
Gran, though, could not move with incredible speed. After the first few weeks of school, his workload had become so great that he had been bringing his books to and from school in a rollerbag. This was normally fine and good, but was not fine and good today, because the rollerbag slowed him down ridiculously, and Catalina was ridiculously quick.
She was ridiculously quick in part because she was not pulling a rollerbag. This allowed her to almost fly across the street and down the grassy hill beyond.
Still, Gran hurried down the steps, his rollerbag jerking and tumbling after him. He crossed the street and then stopped on the other side, looking down the hill.
He saw her, walking under the dappled light of a birch forest below. Her hair was black and had a high sheen to it, something like obsidian, and because she walked in a certain way, bouncing high on the balls of her feet, he could easily pick her out. Gran hurried down the grassy hill as she disappeared into the denser woods beyond.
Gran’s rollerbag was heavy and unwieldy, twisting and grinding as he ran, and he thought of leaving it somewhere so he could run quicker. But he knew that if he came home without it, or if he lost anything inside it, his parents would be devastated. Or his mother would be. She used this word sometimes when she was disappointed in him. “I’m devastated, Gran,” she would say, and he couldn’t bear it.
So he kept the rollerbag, and he wound through the trees, catching no sign of Catalina Catalan, until finally, when the trees opened up to reveal a narrow valley, he saw her. In fact, he saw her too clearly, and now that there were no trees to hide him, he knew if she turned around she would see him, unhidden. What would she think? She would wonder why the kid who walked into walls was now running after her, sweating and pulling a forty-pound rollerbag.
But she didn’t turn around. There was a wind swirling through the valley, and it was unlikely she could hear him. She was walking quickly, determinedly, and she seemed to have no worries about who might be following her.
The path she followed wound through the valley and then disappeared around a bend. When she, too, disappeared around this bend, he took off, covering as much ground as he could, as fast as he could.
When he came around the bend, there was no sign of Catalina Catalan. The path unspooled for a half mile at least, unobstructed. If she was still on the path, he would have seen her. In fact, there was open hillside all around. Not a tree in sight. Nothing, not even a gerbil, could hide there.
So where had she gone?
The next day, a Friday, Catalina Catalan wasn’t at school.
Between classes, Gran looked for her everywhere. She wasn’t in homeroom and she wasn’t in third period. She was nowhere. He knew it was normal enough to be absent one day, but Gran found his thoughts drifting to troubling places. What if something had happened to her in the valley the day before? He pored over a mental picture of a great condor swooping down, taking her away. How else could someone disappear the way she did?
During the lunch-and-recess period, forty minutes where the students ate their lunches as quickly as possible and fled the building for the school’s lawn and playground, Gran took his paper bag with him, intending to spend the time looking for Catalina. He wouldn’t miss the loud cafeteria, and he wouldn’t miss the game the boys played after eating. It was a strange game. About twenty of them would stand in a circle, and then would take turns running at each other. When the runner got close to the opposite edge of the circle, he would leap at whoever was standing there and try to kick them in the chest. Crucial to the game was that the standing boy couldn’t move. He had to take the kick straight on.
“All right!” the boys would yell after contact was made.
Maybe not, Gran had thought when he first saw the game in action. So every lunch-and-recess period, he’d found different things to do—most of them involving settling into the most out-of-the-way place he could so he could eat unnoticed.
Now, with Catalina missing, he had not just the motive to stay away from the playground, but a mission. So he explored parts of the school he’d never ventured to, in the irrational hope of finding her in some secret corner of the campus. Maybe, he thought, she’d changed classes, or changed grades? Maybe she’d been bumped up to junior high? She was smart, so couldn’t that be a possibility?
Gran brought his lunch with him as he went to the wing of the school where the arts classrooms were.
CLOSED said a sign on the door of the visual arts room.
FIN said the sign on the door of the theater arts room.
DISCONTINUED FOR NOW read the sign on the music room door. Beneath it, someone had taped one of the YES ON PROPOSITIONS P&S signs Gran had been seeing on his way to school.
At the end of the hall, a set of steps led to the basement. Gran tried every door, finding them all locked, until one doorknob turned. He pushed the door open and walked in tentatively.
“Hello?” he said.
Inside he found what seemed to be a storage space for just about everything the school wasn’t using at the moment. Desks were stacked six high, flanked by looming towers of wooden chairs. There were empty aquariums, papier-mâché buffalos, football helmets and orange traffic cones. There were track hurdles and unicycles and hockey sticks, and behind those, there were old computers and printers and podiums, and behind those, there was a mountain of enormous half-deflated balls Gran remembered from his old school. When inflated, they were huge, bigger than him. Earth balls, his phys ed teacher had called them.
Closer to the door, there was something like an office. Whoever managed this space worked here too. There was a cluttered desk, and all around it, at least a dozen rusted and mismatched file cabinets. They stood like a wall of skyscrapers across from an old leather couch strewn with books.
On the wall above the couch there were pictures of horses, and horse races, and medals, and ribbons. Whoever decorated the room, Gran thought, had a thing for horses.
“Do we have an appointment?” a man’s voice boomed from behind Gran. Gran had been so engrosse
d in the photos that he hadn’t heard the entrance of a man who now stood next to him.
“Sorry,” Gran said, and moved toward the door.
“Relax. I was kidding,” the man said. “Who sent you and what do they need?”
The man, who seemed to be grandparent age, was exceptionally small for a grown person. He was only a few inches taller than Gran, and didn’t seem to be much heavier. He had a faint accent, too, but Gran couldn’t place it.
“I’m not…No one sent me,” Gran managed to say. He was so ashamed of having snuck into the room uninvited that he wanted only to leave.
“Sit down,” the man said. “Usually it’s one of the gym teachers who sends kids down to get an extra ball or a hula hoop from me. You just wandered in, eh?”
“I was looking for someone. I didn’t mean to…”
“Really. Relax. It’s okay. You didn’t feel like standing in a circle, getting kicked?” He laughed inclusively, hoping Gran would join in, but Gran was still too nervous to find anything amusing.
“No problem. No problem,” the man said. He nodded at Gran’s lunch. “Eat if you want. I eat here, too. See?” He walked over to one of the filing cabinets, opened it, and removed an enormous submarine sandwich, easily as big as his head. He sat down on a metal chair facing Gran, unwrapped his sandwich and took an enormous bite. “Door was unlocked?” he asked with his mouth full.
Gran nodded, and thought about opening his lunch and eating, too. He was hungry, but still thought it would be easier just to leave.
“I usually lock the door,” the man said. With all the food in his mouth, it sounded like he was talking through a pillow. “You have a name?”
“Gran,” Gran said.
The man smiled. “Grande? I like that. That’s a strong name. It means ‘big’ en español. You know this?”
“No, it’s Gran…t.” Gran wasn’t sure why he added a t this time, but he did—though it was the quietest of t’s at the end, like a tiny tail at the end of a giant dog.
“Grant?” the man said. He repeated the name exactly as Gran had said it. There was something so respectful about the way he did this that Gran couldn’t correct him.
“It’s short for Granite. Like the rock,” Gran said.
The man took a long look at Gran, then took another crack at his sandwich and chewed contentedly. In the few minutes since he’d sat down, he managed to devour most of a foot-long ham and cheese.
“Well, Grant, I am El Duque,” he said, his mouth full again. “You know any Spanish? It means ‘the Duke.’ ” He pointed to a flag, red, blue and white, on the wall behind him that had the words The Duke and El Duque embroidered on it. “That was from my riding days. I was a jockey. You ever ride a horse?”
“Not a real one,” Gran said. “Maybe once on a merry-go-round.” He didn’t want this man to think he was still riding on merry-go-rounds, so he added, “When I was a kid.”
A thunderous laugh shook the room. It had come from the Duke. Though he was very small, his laugh was enormous. When he was finished, he took another bite of his sandwich and pointed the rest of it at Gran.
“When you were a kid. Right. So you just came in here to eat,” he said, and let out a quick grunt, as if he’d figured it all out and it made perfect sense.
There was a knock on the door.
“Yes?” the Duke said.
The door cracked open and a head appeared. It looked a lot like the head of Ms. Rhapsod, one of Gran’s teachers.
“No more desks,” the Duke said.
“But—” the head said. It sounded like Ms. Rhapsod, too.
“No desks,” the Duke said. “No bookshelves. No projection screens. No aquariums.”
“But where—?”
“Don’t know. Don’t care. No more room,” the Duke said.
The head disappeared.
The Duke turned back to Gran, smiled and rolled his eyes, as if he had to apologize to his guest for a noisy neighbor. “I usually just sit here and listen to music during lunch,” he said. “You like Cuban music?”
Gran wasn’t sure if he’d ever heard Cuban music. The Duke walked over to another file cabinet and opened a low drawer, revealing a small turntable. He turned a knob, which set the record spinning. He dropped the needle. The music was tinny and not very loud, but the Duke closed his eyes as if he were hearing the greatest band play his favorite song at full volume.
The Duke pointed at Gran. “Ah, I think you like it. I see your shoulders moving. Look at Grant go!”
Gran hadn’t realized his shoulders were moving at all, but he didn’t argue with the Duke. The music was catchy, and Gran deduced that maybe this is where the Duke had come from: Cuba. He had a faint recollection that they spoke Spanish in Cuba.
“Listen, listen,” the Duke said, pointing to the record player. His eyes closed, and his hand conducted in the air to a certain progression of notes and words he liked. When he opened his eyes, he smiled at Gran.
“You’re fun, Grant,” the Duke said. “You should come again sometime. Keep me company. I’ll bring more records I think you’ll like. Eat up, though. You only have ten minutes till the next period. I’ll play another song.”
The Duke went to the filing cabinet for a new record, and when he dropped the needle to the vinyl, Gran opened his lunch.
When Gran went to bed on Friday, his father was not home. On Saturday morning, he was on the couch.
“Drove all night,” he said. His hands, dirty again, were raised over his head, as if in surrender. The work he’d found that week, he said, was five hundred miles away. “Got home at four in the morning.”
Maisie climbed onto his chest and perched herself regally. “Meow,” she said, and began to groom herself as a cat would.
“You’re getting good at that,” Gran’s father noted.
Gran’s father barely moved all that day. He napped on the couch in the morning and afternoon, and in between, he sat up so he and Gran’s mother could pore over bills and murmur to each other, occasionally reshuffling the bills into a different order.
That night, from their bedroom there was more urgent whispering. A few loud words escaped.
On Sunday afternoon he was gone again.
On Monday, Catalina Catalan was back at school.
It had been four days since Gran had seen her, and when he spotted her across the school’s main hallway, at first he couldn’t quite believe it. He stood in the middle of the hall and stared. She was wearing what she usually wore, a T-shirt bearing the face of an older woman with glasses and her hair in a bun, and again a flannel shirt was tied around her waist. Its sleeves dangled around her jeans, worn over dirty brown boots.
The bell rang, telling them they had one minute left to get to class, but he didn’t move until she moved, until she’d walked the opposite way and slipped into her classroom. She hadn’t seen him. With a heavy sigh, he turned and made his way to his first class, math, taught by an impossibly tall man named Mr. Plain.
The next class they had together was third period, and he hoped that somehow he could conjure the courage to speak to her. He wanted to ask her where she’d gone on Thursday afternoon, how she’d disappeared. But when he entered the classroom, she wasn’t there. As the students filed in and the bell marking the beginning of class rang, she was nowhere to be found.
His seat was at the front, and as he thought about the implications of this, that she was again absent, he heard the back door of the classroom open. He turned and there she was. The teacher, Ms. Hamid, was not amused. Ms. Hamid was fond of purples and pinks in her clothing, but her attitude was not so flowery. She was stern and businesslike, and she set her words down carefully, each word clicking into place, as if she were assembling a puzzle made of glass.
“Miss Catalan,” Ms. Hamid said, “I assume you know that a yawning chasm of time had lapsed between when the bell rang and when you arrived.”
“Yes I do.”
“And I assume you know the procedure that ensues af
ter such a yawning chasm of time?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Then be on your way. Return with a yellow slip.”
And Catalina picked up her books and was gone.
Gran was vaguely aware that if a student was late for class, that student had to go to the office, get a yellow slip acknowledging his or her tardiness, and then return to the class. It all seemed strange, given that during all this, the offender missed another fifteen minutes of class time, but it was the way of the school.
The strange thing in this case, stranger than the yellow-slip procedure, was that Catalina Catalan did not return after fifteen minutes. She didn’t return at all.
When Gran got home that evening, just in time to help with dinner, he found his mother looking out the window and his sister Maisie pretending to be a cat.
“Meow,” she said to him.
His mother made no sound. This was the first time he could remember her not greeting him when he got home.
“Oh,” she said, finally.
Gran began setting the table.
“Just us three tonight,” his mother said. She explained that Gran’s father was now back in the town they were from, on the Atlantic coast. He had been offered a month-long job there.
“What kind of work?” Gran asked.
“The same kind he had before. Fixing trucks,” she said, but she seemed uncertain. Gran had the feeling that his mother did not have all the information she’d like to have.
“Something happened to the mailbox, too,” his mother said. Gran had noticed it on the way in; it was crooked now, as if someone had pulled it to one side.
“So why are we here?” Maisie asked, then meowed. “We came here for work but now he’s back there for work?”