The Golden Thread

  She hiked up a hip on the corner of her dresser and bonked her heel against the bottom drawer, making a hollow rhythm. Her expression dared me to pursue this.

  So naturally I did.

  “If Joel hadn’t been there, you wouldn’t have pitched in and joined us?”

  “Are you kidding? I wasn’t about to give that honky creep anything but a kick in her big, square butt.” Bump, bump, went her heel. “Let me put it this way, Valentine: being chased through the woods by an evil person with a pack of dogs just doesn’t have the same historical resonance for you that it does for some other people.”

  That brought me up short. I’ll never forget how we deer would falter and just stand there, gasping and shaking, while the dogs seethed around barking and howling but not attacking, just waiting for Bosanka to catch up. Then we’d spot her, running through the woods as strongly and steadily as a cantering horse.

  She didn’t even speed up when she saw us. She’d just stop and whistle the dogs back to her, before siccing them on us again, making her “fun” last longer by giving us that little time to rest before racing away from her again, a bunch of terrified deer fleeing from the First Hunter or whatever she called herself.

  I still sometimes heard those dogs barking, and her whistling them up, in my dreams, and woke up in a cold sweat. I hadn’t thought about how extra horrible that chase must have been for Barb.

  Well, now I did.

  We sat without saying anything for a while.

  Then I said, “Do you think we did the wrong thing, helping her?”

  “No,” Barb said, but she was angry. “I know blackness from darkness even if she couldn’t tell the difference. And I’d sure rather have her living under the ocean than out on the land where I have to live! And plus, from what the sea people said they’ve all learned some serious lessons that she missed out on, so maybe they’ll teach her to know better too. It’s better that you all helped her go dolphin.”

  “But,” I said. My calves were cramped from sitting cross-legged so I unfolded my legs, being careful not to mess up the prints laid out all over the bedspread.

  Barb shrugged. “But, I wasn’t about to join in.”

  “Okay,” I said, “I get it.”

  “Think so?” she shot back. “I don’t.”

  “So maybe not,” I said. “And if I ever do write this story, I’ll put you in saying exactly what you just told me, okay?”

  “Valentine, you don’t need my okay,” she said. “It’s not like I’m your mother or something. Just do what you’re gonna do, and don’t bother me any more about it.” Thump, thump, but not so hard. She was not going to give herself a bone bruise and not be able to play basketball next week, over beastly Bosanka Lonatz.

  She hopped down from the dresser and came over to study the prints again.

  She said, “So how am I going to tell Rodney about my PSAT score? He thinks those tests are all fixed in favor of white kids, so he’s gonna say I must have cheated or something.”

  “They are fixed,” I said, “in favor of mechanical-minded brains, that’s what Lennie says. But some people jump right over these stupid categories so that our natural brilliance shines through.”

  “Your marks weren’t so bad either,” she said. “Anyhow, writers don’t have to be brilliant. Look at what gets published! And my mom reads it all.”

  “Barb,” I said, “can I have one of these shots? I’d like to hang it up in my room.”

  The picture of the Big One, which you wouldn’t even be able to identify as a whale if you hadn’t been there, kept drawing my eye. I could almost taste the salt on my mouth and feel the vibration of sea-voices in the air.

  “Sure, I’ll make you a print,” Barb said, glancing at it. “Nice, isn’t it?” She selected another one. “I was thinking of making one of these for Lennie.”

  “Not that one!” I yelped. “It makes me look like an idiot!”

  “Let’s see what Lennie says, all right? And maybe this one, for Joel.” She pointed at the silhouette of Joel playing the violin, looking very Byronically handsome and romantic.

  Barb said very casually, “So what do you hear from Joel, anyhow?”

  I think she likes him. I know I like him. There may be trouble ahead. Nobody ever tells you how much you have to work to keep your friendships. But I’d rather have trouble and have my best friend than not have my best friend.

  As for Joel, he’s trouble no matter what. That’s just how he is.

  I went to a concert with him last weekend. A friend from his school played a Chop at Carnegie Recital Hall. Afterward Joel left his friend to her breathless relatives and took me to this newly opened version of the old Russian Tea Room, where we had delicious little pancakes served by a snooty waiter in a silk shirt.

  A lady wearing a fur jacket stopped by just as we were served coffee. She hovered, excusing herself at length for banging Joel’s shoulder in passing, gushing and smiling all over him and asking if she hadn’t seen him playing recently with a hot new chamber group in Boston.

  He admitted that she might have, and she invited him to her table—oh, me too, of course.

  “Thank you,” Joel said, before I could think of an appropriately devastating response. “I really appreciate the invitation, but I’m afraid my fiancée here breaks out in weeping pustules when she has to sit with people wearing animal skins.”

  The lady bared her teeth, murmured graciously, and swooped away trilling at people she either knew or pretended to know at another table.

  I said, “Jeez, Joel. Why not just ‘no thanks’?”

  He flashed me a wicked grin. “You mean you won’t be my fiancée when I need one around?”

  “I mean,” I said, “that you are definitely not a very nice person sometimes. Lennie is a lot nicer person than you are, basically.”

  He reared back, affronted. “I’m glad you appreciate the sainted Lennie,” he said, then hunched over his water glass and muttered contritely down at it, “Hell, you’re right. I have my moments, but I do have my other moments, too. The point is, even if I did manage to be a nice person all the time, what chance would I have against the sainted Lennie, to whom it comes naturally?”

  “If you want a chance, work on it a little,” I said. “Lennie’s just a person, and who knows who he’s busy swimming with down there in Hawaii, anyway? Lots of girls, if Hawaiian girls have any sense. You don’t have to measure up to Mother Teresa, you know. A little dependable decency and good manners would do fine.”

  Instead of laughing, he twirled his glass slowly, staring morosely at the wet little circles the base made on the tablecloth.

  “Hey, don’t go all broody on me,” I said. “Did your group do a public concert in Boston, like Mrs. La Fur just said?”

  He nodded.

  “Without letting me know?” I was hurt.

  “I was afraid it might be bad,” he said in a low voice. “I hardly told anybody.”

  Another guy in a silk shirt wandered by playing gypsy music on a violin. Joel rolled his eyes but did not perform any outrages. He was Being Good.

  “So how was it?” I said. “Your recital?”

  “Not too had.” He smiled a little smile to himself, avoiding looking at me. “It went pretty well, actually.”

  “You mean your hands are better?”

  “My hands are fine.” No more grin. “I think Paavo did it, and you know what? I’m not sure it was worth it.” He meant, I think, having his hands cured at the cost of Paavo being really, finally gone.

  This was not something I thought we should talk about in a restaurant, or possibly anywhere at all, for an unforeseeable number of years. I had to make a heroic effort to keep from getting all weepy about Paavo and Gran. Our losses had not been light.

  Joel read my expression. Now he looked shiny-eyed himself.

  “Sorry,” he muttered, and he sailed right on to something else. “So how are they taking it at school? The Disappearing Foreign Student from Bosnia, I mean.”
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  “Handkerchief, please,” I said. He passed his over. I blew my nose. “Mrs. Denby is utterly baffled, and I haven’t been exactly helpful, but what can I tell her? She keeps looking at me as if I have personally contributed to the deteriorating image of the Thomas Jefferson School, where Beth Stowers got pregnant and Bosanka Lonatz not only disappeared but never lived at the address in the records or knew any of the people whose names she gave them at the office.”

  “So you’re under suspicion?” Joel said. “Oh-oh.”

  I shrugged. “What can they do to me? There’s no corpus delicti, and if there were, they wouldn’t recognize it.”

  He tied knots in his napkin to make it look like a rabbit. “She should have been turned into a killer whale at least,” he said. “A dolphin—it’s too playful, you know? Too popular. There is no justice.”

  “Well, Joel, you already knew that,” I said. I sipped my coffee. The whipped cream on top was great.

  Joel made Twilight Zone deetle-deetle noises, turned the napkin-rabbit, and lo, it was actually a whale: the ears had become upraised flukes. “Ta-da!” he said grandly. “My alternative career in magic, demonstrated before your very eyes.”

  “Not bad,” I said.

  “Not bad, not great,” he said, giving his handiwork a critical look. “Not nothing, when you think of what Bosanka might have had up her sleeve. I think she really was ready to take over the world, mainly because she despised us all and couldn’t wait to whip us into shape. What can you expect from somebody who comes from a world of tyrannical ‘highborns’ and hunting down cowering under-creatures for fun. Ugh. I wonder what kind of music they had in her world, before they trashed the place? Nothing but drums and horns, I’ll bet, played loud.”

  “We only knew her worst side,” I reminded him, thinking of what Gran had said. “Her scared side, remember?”

  “And barely survived it,” he countered. “Are you suggesting that we should have gotten to know her better?”

  “Well, it might have helped,” I said stubbornly. “That’s what Lennie said, and I think he understood her better than the rest of us did, being a foreigner himself once.”

  The Russian fiddler was coming back our way. Joel looked less tolerant than before.

  I said, “Wouldn’t it be funny if Lennie ran into Bosanka in her new shape someplace down there in the Pacific?”

  “Oh, Lennie,” Joel said crankily. “Mr. Saint Francis of Assisi! Come on, let’s get out of here before I do something unforgivable to that so-called musician.”

  We walked on Fifty-seventh Street, arm in arm, in the cold evening.

  He said, “I didn’t play Paavo’s violin at the Boston concert, if that’s what you’re wondering. I haven’t touched it since that night. Look, can I bring it over to your place and leave it with you for a while? Just until I feel—until I know more. Or something. Would that be okay?”

  He sounded almost shy, and for a second I couldn’t answer. I mean, it was as if Barb were to hand over her camera and her whole darkroom setup to me for safekeeping, which may not sound like a lot, but believe me it is. You don’t run into that kind of trust from another person every day.

  “Hey, Joel,” I finally said. “Sure. Any time.”

  “Do you have any idea,” he said, checking me in time to keep me from colliding with a mad cyclist, “what comes next? When we start in at Sorcery Hall, I mean? Or how, exactly?”

  “You know as much as I do, Joel,” I said. “Barb and I were talking about that the other day. She says the unpredictability is exciting, but that’s Barb for you.”

  “She must lead a quiet life,” Joel said drily, “to need that kind of excitement. She should be living in the seventeenth century or whatever—Bold Barb the Pirate, that would suit her.”

  “Joel?” I said as we turned down Fifth Avenue. “Do you like Barb?”

  “She’s your best friend, isn’t she? Of course I like her.”

  “No, do you really like her?”

  “What I really like,” he said stiffly, “is not getting into this kind of conversation. Lay off, will you?”

  “Touchy, touchy,” I said, regressing rapidly (as I said, I was not yet perfect).

  We walked with some space between us for a while. Some night skaters, headphoned, padded, and costumed in lycra with big bright stripes and swirls, came whizzing quietly down Fifth on roller skates, taking the freedom of the wide, smooth pavement where the after-dark traffic was practically nil. They spun down the middle of the avenue like a whirlwind of fantastic ghosts. One very skinny person in a tutu and a bright red wig was a guy in drag, I was sure.

  Watching them wreathe away ahead of us, my thoughts flew free. I thought of the necromancer’s phantom ice skaters, and the dust devil of invisibility that Paavo had made so I could go down into an abandoned subway station on Broadway, into the kraken’s lair. I remembered his quick sketch of a circle in a cupful of water that had raised a vision, and Bosanka’s pebble-waves on the paving at the band shell in the park.

  Circles of power, sorcerous reels, magical conga lines were everywhere and never-ending, a dance of dark and light marvels, if you knew how to look.

  Joel grabbed my hand and squeezed it. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” he said. The skaters were gone. “Bosanka’s lines of pinecones and twigs, for instance?”

  “Among other things,” I said.

  “Val,” he said, “I don’t know if I would have come to Castle Lake at noon that day if Bosanka’s power lines hadn’t pulled me there. I might have chickened out, or just stayed away out of—well, I was ticked off with you. I might have gone right back to Boston.”

  “No way!” I said. “You knew something was brewing. You wouldn’t have missed being in the middle of it this time, you told me so yourself, don’t you remember? ‘Not this time,’ you said. I believed you, even if you didn’t.”

  He looked gratifyingly abashed by my penetrating and perhaps over-flattering character analysis.

  The skaters erupted again from a side street in a hush of plastic wheels. A black guy in skintights, black and white spiraling in wide swirls down his trunk and legs like some human-shaped orca, swept smoothly past me. They all poured away again, out of the path of a thin straggle of headlights following the traffic signals downtown.

  Joel said, “Val. How can you be so right so much of the time and still be so—so—I mean, a regular decent person? How do you keep your balance?”

  I said, “Who says I keep my balance?”

  “You do it a lot better than I do,” he said. “I’m really not as nice as Lennie. Listen, you won’t just dump me, will you?”

  I thought about that. I thought about Lennie, and about Barb, too, not to mention the person Joel played chamber music with when he wasn’t in class playing it—Lisa Walker, her name came back to me. Finally I said cautiously, “If you’ll try to keep a little space open for me, I’ll try to keep some for you.”

  “I’m not sure I like the sound of that,” he said. “But what the hell, it’s a deal.”

  “Then you can start by coming to my birthday party next week,” I said. “I’m going to be fifteen.”

  “Fifteen!” he exclaimed. “Ye gods, I better get moving—you’re catching up!”

  “Girls mature faster,” I said, “everybody knows that. I’ve always been way ahead of you.”

  “Wait a minute,” he said. “Next week? For God’s sake, and you’re just telling me now? I have two exams to get ready for, and I’m doing a special performance with Lisa and the others that I have to practice for—”

  “Hey, this is my party we’re talking about,” I said, “not your schedule.”

  “You don’t understand,” he said, but I interrupted.

  “Listen, Joel, just because you have ‘those moments’ that doesn’t mean I have to stand for them! Lighten up, okay? It’s just a party, and whether you can come or not, it’s not the end of the world.” This was not entirely true, of course. I felt myself winding
up to be very upset if he didn’t come.

  “Where do you get off suggesting that your party isn’t important to me?” he said in an offended tone. “All I’m doing is reviewing the obstacles so I can figure out a way to get to your party even if it kills me and ruins my career.”

  And so on. We wrangled enjoyably all the way down to Greenwich Village, where we were meeting Barb (and this photographer she’d met) at a coffee house, to hang out and hear some music.

  As we walked I caught Joel watching me out of the corner of his eye, just as I slyly glanced at him. He is really beautiful, and it’s a pity he knows it. It’s amazing what you can see in a person when you remember what you trust, instead of letting yourself get distracted by all the hoops people put each other through more out of habit than anything else.

  I wonder what Paavo and Gran were like, when they first got together.

  I wouldn’t be surprised if they argued a lot.

  More Young Adult Titles

  by Suzy McKee Charnas

  The Sorcery Hall Series

  Book 1: The Bronze King

  Book 2: The Silver Glove

  Book 3: The Golden Thread

  This is the story of Valentine Marsh, a New York kid faced with the call of an impossible destiny; of her divided family, her enemies both home-grown and far-flung, and her awed and unlikely fellow-adventurers who, with Val in the lead, battle their way to the lofty gates of Sorcery Hall.

  The Kingdom of Kevin Malone

  Amy, brooding on a family crisis, retreats to Central Park—from the frying pan straight into the fire! Out of her past swoops her old arch-enemy Kevin Malone, the neighborhood punk who used to bully her. Kevin’s feverish imagination has transformed Central Park into the Fayre Farre. Here, among castles, elves, monsters, battles and prophecies, Kevin is a Prince and a legendary champion. He’s also still a self-centered jerk, and he’s lost control of his magnificent creation. Will Amy risk her life to help Kevin, or just leave him to sort out his own mess? And either way, where will that leave her?