He sounded very shaky, though.
Lennie kicked a glowing briquette into a puddle, where it sizzled out. He looked at me, his eyes huge. “Something happened, all right.”
Tamsin uncoiled from her crouch and struck a pose. “Sure something happened!” she said. “I told you it would—we made a comet! We are the Comet Committee, and the New Year will be better because of us.”
I was impressed—not by Tamsin, who didn’t know what she was talking about, but by whatever it was we had done. But I didn’t know what it was or what it meant, and I needed to get away by myself to think about it. I felt jumpy and strange.
I said, “Listen, I’m going to take off now. I’m completely frazzled.”
Lennie said he would come down with me, but I just told him good night and happy new year and I ran on down the stairs. I avoided the Andersons’ apartment so I wouldn’t have Lennie’s parents fussing about putting me in a cab. What I needed was to walk, to clear my head. It was only a few blocks, and after that weird energy flight and explosion I had just lived through, well, what could happen?
What happened was that somebody loomed at me right outside Lennie’s building. Joel. Once past the initial heart-stopping effect, I yelled, “What are you doing lurking like that?”
“You think I was going to leave it to that bowelbrain to see you home safe on New Year’s Eve?” he said. “I notice he’s not down here with you.”
“Bowelbrain!” I said. “Is that what they teach you in that music school—creative slander?”
This was not what I had intended to say, so I grabbed a breath and started over. “You should have stayed, Joel. Something incredible happened.”
“What?” he said. “You made a star, right? You all held hands and chanted a mantra, and on the count of ten the cotton plugs popped out of Lennie’s ears and took off into the stratosphere on their own, laughing maniacal little alien laughs?”
Well, that did it. Any idea I had had of telling Joel about the success—if that was what it had been—of the Comet Committee was wiped out by a surge of pure fury. Joel and I walked the few blocks to my house very fast, having a not very pleasant conversation.
“Joel, why are you acting like such a dork?”
“Your friends are the dorks. I’m just trying to rescue you from their babyish company.”
“Lennie is not babyish!”
“Lennie is a jerk.”
“Lennie is my oldest friend, almost.”
“I hope your newer friends are a better class of people.”
“You’ll never know. I’ll never let you near any friends of mine again, not after tonight.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Val!” he stormed. “What do you expect? You don’t belong on a rooftop on New Year’s Eve with that bunch of flakes!”
“A fat lot you know! I don’t belong with anybody, as a matter of fact, except someone like my Gran, who has real stuff to teach me! So just shut up, Joel, or let me walk the rest of the way home by myself. And if I get mugged it’ll be your fault.”
“Oh, sure, everything is my fault,” Joel said.
“You embarrassed me,” I said, “in front of my friends.”
“Why should you be embarrassed?” he asked the night at large, making a full-scale drama right there on the street. “You behaved perfectly. I’m the one who messed up, right? I hope I haven’t spoiled things between you and wonderful Lennie.”
We stomped past three people strolling arm and arm and singing “Auld Lang Syne” softly together. Then we were at my building, thank goodness.
“Joel,” I said, “don’t come around here after months of nothing, and then not bother to phone me when you said you would, and then throw some kind of tantrum because I want to spend a little time with a real friend of mine on New Year’s Eve!”
“Sor-ree,” he said. “I sure was in the way there, wasn’t I? And now you’ve missed your New Year’s Eve kiss, you and your real friend.”
He grabbed my arm and more or less banged our mouths together in a very angry thing meant as a kiss, I guess.
He said breathlessly, “Don’t say I didn’t try to make it up to you.”
And he flung away, with his scarf ends whipping after him.
I thought, That’s that, I’ll never see him again; and I’ll never get to tell him about what had happened with the Comet Committee, either, which sure felt to me like magic starting up again. He would be left out, and it served him right.
And I couldn’t tell if I was glad or miserable about it.
3
Leftover Hash
THERE WAS NO SIGN OF CHANGE in my Gran.
I had to force myself to visit the ICU to see her. I hated the quiet, I hated the strained, nervous people tiptoeing around with their flowers and their frightened eyes, and I hated the beds with the curtains drawn around them so you couldn’t see but you could still hear.
I also hated that Gran had to lie naked under a sheet. I suppose that made it easier for the staff to take care of her, but my Gran was an old-fashioned, modest sort of person.
That was how I thought of her, anyway.
I guess the only good thing about being out of it, with tubes taped up your nose and a transparent plastic tent over you, is that you don’t know that you’re laid out there like a package of steak at the meat counter.
Not that the people weren’t nice. The nurses really seemed to know what they were doing, which was stuff I knew I could never do and keep my cool. I had to admire them.
“Hi, Gran,” I said, leaning close and talking quietly so as not to bother anybody else. I knew she couldn’t hear me, but somehow it helped just to talk to her. “Listen, something really weird happened on New Year’s, and it’s got me sort of jangled up.”
Jangled up and with nobody to talk to about it. I had broached the subject with Lennie twice since that night, but he just got quieter and quieter as I talked, meaning he was uncomfortable with the whole subject, so I stopped. And I was still too mad at Joel to try talking to him.
Barb, my best friend, who actually knew about my family gift from being involved in my last experience with it, wasn’t around. She was visiting her aunt in Barbados for the holidays.
What had happened, anyway?
Something big, something full of fear and delight, and I couldn’t figure it out at all. Maybe that girl I hadn’t recognized at the party had been right, and we shouldn’t have messed around with some sort of half-baked magical ritual (maybe, if that’s what it had been—I mean, how could I tell?) in the first place.
If I’d been hoping for enlightenment from Gran, I was doomed to disappointment. When the nurse came around to do something with Gran’s I.V., I left, carrying away with me the same anxious misery I came in with.
This anxiety about Gran was like a fog of numbness flickering with hot red sheets and streaks of hurt and fear. It filled my mind when I couldn’t find anything to distract me. And most distractions that worked didn’t work for long. Even the whole Comet Committee mystery sank down into a dark place at the back of my mind.
On Monday I went back to school with everybody else, hoping the week ahead would provide some distractions. And there was Bosanka Lonatz.
Funny name, right? Well, she was no joke.
I talked with my friend Megan in homeroom while our teacher, Mrs. Corelli, tried to get enough order to introduce this new student. Megan indulged me while I gabbled nonsense about Michael Scott, the senior I had a crush on and who didn’t know I existed, the way these things usually work.
Megan’s span of attention was not exceptional. She interrupted me as usual: “Wow, look at that new kid! A real heartbreaker.”
Mrs. Corelli was yodeling along about Bosanka—Bosanka? That was a name?
She was from Bosnia, one of the countries made out of the dismemberment of the old Yugoslavia, and we should all extend to her the heartfelt hospitality and sympathy of our wonderful country with its ultra-superior way of life. Mrs. Corelli was a sort of Rambo c
lone, except she had less bosom and she could talk. And talk and talk.
Bosanka stood up to face the class. We all stared at her with a kind of awestruck fascination. This girl was something else; something like an atomic tank.
She was square, with broad shoulders and hips, and blond hair chopped off shoulder-length like Prince Valiant’s. She stood firmly on both feet, as immovable as a double-parked delivery truck in a narrow street, looking slowly around the room while Mrs. Corelli reminded us all of the trials of the formerly communist countries of Eastern Europe, where dictatorship had disintegrated into civil wars and ethnic cleansing (a truly disgusting phrase, when you think about it, for a horrible idea).
Bosanka’s eyes were pale as the Hudson in midwinter and not very big, in a moon face with high, rounded cheekbones. She had a mouth like a pinched-in flower bud, and she carried her wide chin high and thrust forward like the edge of a shield. No makeup, which seemed appropriate: might as well put lipstick on Mount Rushmore!
She wore a pleated skirt, zip-up boots, and a baggy gray sweater with a high collar that didn’t quite hide her neck. And that was some neck. Solid is a kindly word for it.
“Bosanka,” Mrs. Corelli said, “would you like to say a few words to your new classmates?” I’m sure she hoped for a stirring political statement about how wonderful it was to be in the good old USA.
Bosanka opened her pink lips and uttered two words: “Good morning.” She had an accent that was actually about 75% attitude.
“Jeez.” Megan groaned softly. “Where’s her tractor? Nobody could look like that and not be a Worker-Hero of the Socialist Republic of Thing-a-ma-stan!”
Bosanka didn’t look like any kind of worker to me, though “heroic” was not so farfetched, as in “the statue was built on a heroic scale.”
More words, four of them, followed: “Who is—Balentena March?”
Everybody looked at me, some grinning, some making sympathetic or horrified faces.
“I’m Valentine Marsh,” I said. Why was I nervous? Because this strange person had gotten hold of my name, for some reason.
What reason?
Bosanka’s mouth smiled. Her eyes did not sparkle with good humor, however. They bored into me like twin ice picks.
She said, “The assistant says you are my student host.” She turned to Mrs. Corelli. “I sit with Balentena March.”
I had completely forgotten about signing up for the Foreign Guest program (something I’d done in a moment of lunacy after Gran’s stroke).
“Of course you’ll sit with Valentine, Bosanka,” Mrs. Corelli said. “Megan, you come up here and take this empty chair.”
“Oh, no,” Megan said under her breath. Out loud she said, “Couldn’t we all move down one, starting with Jennifer?”
Jennifer Tieck, who sat on my other side and was one of the world’s laziest living human beings, drawled, “Why? You move. I like it where I am.”
Bosanka walked toward us. For a human tank, she was quick on her feet. She was also menacing, a ridiculous idea, but Megan felt it, too. Seeing Bosanka bearing down on us, she scooped up her stuff and vacated the chair.
The new girl plunked herself down next to me. She had no books, none of the load of paper and junk we all lugged around; no purse or book bag, even. No wonder she looked—well, entirely different from every other girl in the class.
She didn’t say anything and she didn’t look at me again. She surveyed the room as if from a distance while the usual morning stuff went by: Ruth Wasserman announced a planned demonstration against nuclear power; Margie Acton made a plea for articles for the next issue of the school paper. Margie had beat me out as editor this term, and she had no time for being friends anymore. Not with me, anyway.
The bell rang and we all got up to go to first period classes. Standing, Bosanka was actually an inch or two shorter than I was, like most of the kids in my grade. I wasn’t sure that this made any difference at all.
“Well, that’s it for now,” I said. “If we have the same lunch hour, I’ll show you the ropes in the lunchroom and we’ll sit together, okay? Meantime, let’s see your program card. I’ll point you in the right direction.”
“I have the same program to you,” she said.
“Are you sure? Let’s see your card, we’ll check it.” How could she just walk in here from Darkest Bosnia and take the same courses I had, electives and all?
“The same,” she said, with a shrug of her broad shoulders. “The assistant said it.”
Which meant that I would have Bosanka next to me every minute of the day, that day and every day, until the end of term. This was more than I had bargained for.
It also started out as a very peculiar experience. Bosanka had nothing to say in any of our classes, and none of the teachers called on her, almost as if she were some kind of school inspector or visiting bigwig instead of just another student.
At lunch break she disappeared into the girls’ room. I spotted my best friend Barb Wilson in the food line.
I instantly dismissed Bosanka Lonatz from my head and finessed my way into the line behind Barb, eagerly turning over in my head the best way to tell her about the Comet Committee. She knew a lot about my workouts with the family talent in the near past, but we had not talked much about magic lately.
Barb had gotten passionately interested in becoming a prizewinning photojournalist, and these days she spent all her free time taking pictures or holed up in her makeshift darkroom at home. Sometimes this made her hard to talk to.
I said, “Hey, Barb, come sit with me—I’ve got something to tell you!”
She gave me a cool look and said, “Oh, really? But you got your special European guest to look after—where she at? I wouldn’t dream of intruding,”
Where she at? Barb only talked that way to me when she was fooling around or ticked off. She did not have an air of fooling around today.
“Why wouldn’t you?” I said warily.
“Well, I guess you didn’t notice, but you wouldn’t,” Barb said, giving me her dangerous, sleepy-eyed look.
“Okay,” I said, “I’ll bite. Didn’t notice what?”
“Mean to say you di’n’t hear?” she said, in that singing drawl that meant she was really steamed. “She got her locker changed this morning. Out from between two black kee-ids and up to the third floor section in a corner that just happens to be all white.”
“Oh, come on, Barb,” I said. “How can you be sure that’s the reason she moved?”
“Speaking of moving,” said a kid behind me, “the rest of the line is up there at the meat loaf already.”
We moved along, passing the meat loaf in our turn with decently averted eyes.
I said, “Look, if race was the reason Bosanka wanted to change lockers, school administration wouldn’t have let her.”
But I felt embarrassed and annoyed defending Bosanka. How could I be sure she wasn’t a racist, anyway? What did I know about Bosnians? Only that they’d had years of warfare over who was a Serb, or a Croat, or something in between, which was also a religious war between Muslims and Christians, like in the Twelfth Century or something. This was confusing and definitely not reassuring: it didn’t seem to have much to do with skin color, but it also didn’t suggest a generally tolerant habit of mind, either.
Barb said, “Who knows what she tole them for a reason? I can tell you what she tole Sandy Mason when Sandy accidentally bumped into her this morning at those mixed lockers, but I think it’s too raw for you.”
Oh, boy. Not that I was totally sympathetic. Sandy Mason was a bully who had made my life horrible every day for a whole term of seventh grade.
“Look, Barb,” I began, but she cut me off.
“Some other time,” she said. “I like to be a little picky about my company at lunch. This food is bad enough.”
And off she sailed. It looked as if Barb and I wouldn’t be talking about magic or pictures or anything else for a while. I felt frustrated and tee’d off. There was
no point in trying to tell Bosanka about being part of some amateur magic on New Year’s that had attracted a response from somewhere—something that had pounced among us like a supergalactic wildcat, scattering us all over the roof, but something that had not been heard from since.
Bosanka, ever eager to please, arrived and cut into the line in front of me. We discussed the food, which seemed to be entirely unfamiliar to my foreign guest. She got spaghetti, garlic bread, Jell-O, and lemonade, and joined me at a table by the wall.
Did they really not have spaghetti in Bosnia?
I tried to make conversation. I could have been more tactful, I admit, though frankly tact would have been lost on Bosanka.
“How long are you staying?” I inquired.
She said calmly, “Until I find my people.”
“Your people?” I said. “You mean your parents? Didn’t they come here with you?”
She didn’t answer, just chewed.
I tried again. “Aren’t your folks here in New York?”
She thought about that for a second. “Here,” she said, “but not with. So, I must find them.”
The idea of Bosanka living in some kind of foster home arrangement, and going to a new school full of new people speaking a new language, made me feel more sympathetic. “I guess there are, uh, agencies to help out?”
“No,” she said. “Just you.”
“What?” I said. “Wait a minute, Bosanka. What do you think a student host is supposed to do?”
“Want that?” she said, pointing.
I shook my head, and she took my dessert and finished it off without another word, from either of us.
I didn’t know what to say next. “Just you”—what did that mean? I tried to think of a friendly way to ask, but maybe because I wasn’t really sure that I wanted to know the answer, nothing came to mind.
It was a relief when the bell rang: time for math, yagh. Somehow Bosanka vanished right after that class (if it had been me, I would have disappeared before math).
When classes were finally over, I decided to go see the assistant principal. Mrs. Denby was small and energetic and it was commonly believed that the whole school would fall apart without her. A lot of us (and, my mom said, a lot of the parents, too) thought she should be principal instead of Plastic-Man Rudd.