“He knows he’s seeing a Starr in the making,” I said slyly.
“I don’t know about a star,” Da said, “but the manager of the Green Room rang today and asked us if we’d like to play there regularly for a while.”
“How regularly?” I asked.
His smile became wry. “You’re a sharp one, Aly Cat. Once a fortnight, in fact. But it’s better than nothing. It’s straight pay rather than a cut of the door, and we can sell discs. Plus, it will save us from the phone bill that just arrived.” For a moment ammonia tinged the coffee-grounds smell. “I just wish we had the money to do a proper recording and get the discs printed professionally, but that won’t happen without the backing of a company. The ones we have look homemade, and that puts people off.”
I was startled, because Da usually said that it was better to do your own discs rather than have them made by recording companies who only wanted to turn music into a product. But even as I opened my mouth to say that, Luke gave a sloppy blurt and we laughed again.
“You know Jesse’s writing?” Da asked after we had rolled around with Luke for a while.
I nodded.
Da shook his head. “It’s funny that you told him to write, and then he goes ahead and does it as if it was the answer he had never figured out. He won’t talk about what he’s writing, though.”
“I think it’s better not to talk about things that you’re going to write, because then you start thinking how other people will feel about them and that changes how you think,” I said.
Da looked impressed. “That’s pretty profound stuff.”
“It’s just how I feel when I have to write something for Mrs. Barker,” I said diffidently. “I just want to do it. I don’t want to talk about doing it.”
“You may be right,” Da said thoughtfully. “What I love about improvised music is that you don’t talk about it at all. It just evolves, and it’s a purely musical evolution. It’s like jamming, but on a more serious and exploratory level.” He nodded. “OK, I’ll take your advice and leave Jesse to talk to the white page. I think you did a seriously good thing suggesting it. I’ve never seen him like this.”
Luke trilled with excitement as they went out.
* * *
Saturday morning I got up late and fooled around bathing Luke before I had to get ready and head off for school. I was trying to feel like a martyr for having to go in on the weekend, but it was a beautiful, crisp day, and it felt good to be out in it. I felt pretty well prepared for anything the tests could throw at me, and it was actually kind of nice to have something important to do on a weekend instead of just killing time. Plus, I was looking forward to the movies with Gilly afterward.
I went through the park, trying fruitlessly to send scent messages to birds and squirrels, and ended up coming through to the front of the school just as Mrs. Barker pulled up. I summoned up the screen as I came over to her car.
“You’re early,” she said, smiling as she got out. “The proctor won’t be here for another half hour.”
“It’s nice to be out,” I said, relieved that she was not annoyed at me for being inattentive in class the previous day.
“It’s certainly a beautiful day.” She rummaged for her keys and unlocked the front door of the school. I followed her down the corridor to the staff room, and hovered outside it.
“Come on in, Alyzon,” she called. “It’s not an official school day, so I think we can dispense with the usual formalities. Do you drink tea or coffee?”
“Coffee, if there’s any milk,” I said. I didn’t drink it often, but it seemed to go with sitting in the staff room.
“We even have a milk frother,” Mrs. Barker said, bustling about and making coffee with the same cheerful competence she always showed in the classroom. Instead of her usual knit suit, she was wearing black boots under expensive-looking jeans and a loose cotton jumper that slid off one shoulder and matched her scarlet lipstick. Her hair was out, too, instead of being tied back, and it made her look younger and more glamorous.
“What are you thinking?” she asked.
“You look different,” I said. “Younger … more …”
“More?”
“I don’t know. Just more,” I said.
She laughed, and I could smell something like wisteria as she shook her head. “You were always an original, Alyzon.”
I could see the warmth in her eyes and realized that the wisteria smell was connected to her liking for me, because she had also given it off in the hallway when she had told me about the tests.
“Now what are you thinking?” Mrs. Barker asked.
“You ask a lot of questions,” I countered.
She smiled. “I do. I guess I became a teacher because I like asking questions.”
“Questions?” I said. “I thought teachers were about having all the answers.”
“Only bad teachers,” Mrs. Barker said easily. “Good teachers are about asking questions and provoking them in students.” She hesitated, and then she said, “Alyzon, I hope it won’t upset you if I say this, but … you’ve been very different since your accident.”
My heart lurched into a jerky trot.
“Your work in class has always been solid and occasionally very bright,” she continued. “But now there is something new in the things you turn in. A quality that … well, I’m not the only teacher to wonder at it. I can even tell you that initially some of my colleagues thought maybe your parents were doing your work for you.”
“Your colleagues?”
She understood what I meant. “Not me. The thoughts, though startling, still felt like your own. Also, I know that you and your father are not the sort of people to operate that way. But the suggestion didn’t hold water anyway, because the same quality was apparent in work completed during class.”
I don’t know how I looked, but Mrs. Barker frowned at whatever she saw in my face. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you. I really only wondered if you were aware of it.”
“I … I see things differently …,” I began. Then I stopped, because part of me was tempted to tell her the truth.
“That’s exactly it,” Mrs. Barker said, seeming not to notice that I had cut myself off. “It’s as if you are seeing things from some deeper perspective. I don’t mind telling you that I have seldom had so much pleasure in reading a student’s work.”
The proctor arrived then, to my relief and maybe to Mrs. Barker’s as well, because she jumped up at once and introduced us, then she made him coffee, too.
* * *
It was after five when we came outside. Night was starting to close in, but the light was really beautiful, all pink and gold and purple. I felt tired but contented.
“How do you think you did?” Mrs. Barker asked after the proctor had driven off. We were standing by her car, and she pressed her key to unlock the doors.
“I think …,” I began, and then stopped because she was looking past me with a strange expression on her face. At the same time her lovely bread smell was overlaid with the unpleasantness of spoiled milk. I started to turn to see what had caught her attention, but she grabbed me by the arm and almost pushed me toward her car. Luckily I was wearing a sweater, so she didn’t touch my skin.
“Get in, Alyzon. I’ll drive you home.” Her tone was so urgent that I obeyed, and a moment later we were pulling away from the curb. “Please don’t look back,” she said quickly, as I was about to do just that. It wasn’t until she turned into the next street that the sour-milk smell faded.
“Mrs. Barker?” I ventured.
She bit her lip and gave me a sideways glance that was, of all things, slightly embarrassed. She turned her eyes back to the road and hitched a quick breath. “Harlen Sanderson was on the other side of the street.” I felt as if she had thrown cold water into my face, but she didn’t see my reaction. “Did you arrange to meet after the tests?” she asked.
“No,” I said, trying to make myself look calm despite the pounding of my heart.
&
nbsp; Again that quick, searching sideways look. Maybe I wasn’t controlling my expression as well as I thought, because she said with obvious surprise, “You don’t like him.”
I opened my mouth to say that I did like him, but realized it was no longer true. The old Alyzon who had hero-worshipped Harlen from afar for months, who had longed for him to notice her, had been supplanted by the new Alyzon, who could smell something terrible in him, and who wanted only to have him go back to not knowing she existed.
“I … I don’t like him being interested in me,” I finally said.
“I see.” A long pause. “Do you think he was waiting for you just now?”
I swallowed. “Maybe someone told him about the tests. Don’t you like him?”
“I don’t think that is an appropriate question for me to answer,” Mrs. Barker said stiffly, but she must have realized how silly that sounded after she had just asked me the same question, because she then said awkwardly, “I noticed Harlen speaking to you after class the other day and … well, frankly, I wondered if you were ready for that.”
“He wants me to partner with him for our field trip,” I said, to see how she would react.
“Did you refuse?” The sour-milk smell was suddenly very strong.
I shook my head.
She nodded approvingly. “It’s best if you don’t humiliate Harlen. I can easily introduce some other format for the trip. Or I might even cancel it altogether, given that the weather is unreliable.” Her face was now composed and teacherly. “As for missing him just now, you will be able to say quite honestly that you didn’t see him.”
She was trying hard to make our conversation seem normal, but it wasn’t. I desperately wanted to ask why the sight of him had made her drive us away in such a panic, because it reminded me all too vividly of my own flight two days before. But she had resumed her teacher persona, and I sensed that any attempt to dig would only make her more tight-lipped.
* * *
When we reached the outskirts of town, I asked her to let me out by the bus stop.
“I’ll drive you home,” she said firmly. I wondered if she thought that I meant to sneak back and meet up with Harlen.
“I have to meet Gilly at the movies,” I told her.
Mrs. Barker pulled the car up by the bus stop and I got out. I didn’t know what to say, so I just thanked her and said I would see her in school. She smiled warmly, seeming to have wiped all that had happened from her mind.
After she had driven away, I waited ages for the bus. I thought over everything that had happened, feeling more and more uneasy and confused about Harlen. Mrs. Barker’s negative reaction to him had been too strong to dismiss as her subconscious reaction to Harlen’s smell. Which meant she must know something about him, and whatever it was made her dislike him and want to keep me away from him. Maybe he had done something wrong, and Mrs. Barker had heard about it. But there was not the slightest rumor about him. Certainly not among the kids, and teachers seemed to like him as universally as students. That meant whatever Mrs. Barker knew must have happened outside of school.
Something else struck me. Rumor said Harlen had gone to a private school before, but wealthy parents did not switch their beloved son from a private school to a public school without some compelling reason. Was it possible that whatever he had done was so bad that he had been expelled, and no other private school would accept him?
Although if only Mrs. Barker knew, it might be something she had learned privately. A relative or friend might have told her something. She wouldn’t break a confidence and she wouldn’t gossip, but she might keep an eye on Harlen and warn someone off if he seemed to take an interest.
The bus came trundling along, and I was glad to be distracted from the uneasy mystery of Harlen Sanderson.
“I thought you’d changed your mind,” Gilly said when I came up to her outside the Valhalla. She was sipping muddy-looking tea from a foam cup.
“It took longer than I expected,” I said.
“You’ve missed Attack of the Killer Tomatoes,” Gilly said severely.
“Oh heck and damn,” I said.
She laughed. “Come on. Let me introduce you to my friends.”
The friends turned out to be a handsome older guy of about twenty-four in a wheelchair whose name was Raoul; a super-thin, haunted-looking girl with short spiky hair named Sarry, whose clothes were too ragged to be anything but a fashion statement; and a gray-eyed guy named Harrison with glasses and floppy, longish blond hair.
“After Harrison Ford, can ye believe it?” he asked glumly. He only had a slight Scottish accent, but I liked the way it made his words sound. “Parents are the pits. Why couldnae they call me Leopold after Leopold Bloom, or Pushkin, or something with literary dignity.”
“Pushkin isn’t a name with dignity. It’s a cat’s name,” Sarry objected.
“Cats have a lot more dignity than some humans,” Harrison said.
Sarry stuck out a pierced tongue, then grinned at me. “We’d call him Harry, but then we’d be Harry and Sarry, like some sort of terrible comedy team.”
I laughed, liking them all enough to move to a thinner section of my protective screen. Sarry gave off the mingled odors of peppermint and popcorn with a strong, slightly unsettling under-scent of camphor. Her body language told me that she was a lot more nervous and wound up than she pretended to be, and I guessed that the camphor expressed that. Harrison was almost exactly my height and a year younger than me, with a clever, gloomy Woody Allen wit that made him seem older. It was his smell that struck me most, because it was the lovely scent of cedar wood and also pine needles and lavender—all smells I really loved—and of course the pine-needle scent reminded me of Da. Raoul was so madly in love with Gilly that his scents of really good olive oil and lemon and some sort of polish were all mixed up with her sea smell. I had only to look into Gilly’s face to see she felt the same, but oddly, they didn’t show their attraction to each other. I wondered why Gilly didn’t just let Raoul know she liked him. I couldn’t believe it was the wheelchair, but it was none of my business, so I filed the question away and drank some tea, which really did taste of soap.
“I told you,” Gilly said, watching me.
I grimaced. “I thought you were exaggerating for effect.”
We went in to watch Creature from the Black Lagoon, and I nearly laughed myself sick at the man in his black wet suit with badly glued-on rubber protrusions, running around as the Creature. The gentle silly innocence of that old movie was the perfect antidote to the strange and alarming things that had crept into my life lately. Especially when they were accompanied by Harrison’s hilarious whispered asides, which seemed all the funnier because of his accent. My cheeks and stomach hurt from laughing long before the movie was over, and Gilly kept whispering at me not to encourage him. She was sitting at the end of the row, beside Raoul. Sarry was on the other side of Harrison, her eyes glued to the screen like a kid. She actually screamed a couple of times, which cracked up the audience, although she was too mesmerized to notice.
I listened to the others spar between movies, hearing in their ease with one another the length and strength of their friendship. I wondered where Gilly had met them all, because they each seemed so different and I was certain none of them were from our school. There was something vaguely familiar about Harrison, though, but I couldn’t think where I might have seen him.
Everything my new senses told me about them made me like them more, and I found myself wishing I had such a group of friends. It occurred to me only when Harrison elbowed me hard for not listening to him that they were warming to me as easily as I was to them.
At the end of the night, we all came outside groaning and stretching and complaining about our eyes.
“Never again,” Gilly groaned. “Five movies is too many.”
“You say that every time,” Raoul teased her.
“How about a pizza?” Sarry asked. “I have some coupons.”
“The last bus I
can get home leaves in ten minutes,” I said regretfully.
“Me too,” Harrison said.
It turned out that we used the same bus line. Harrison said that he sometimes came to visit someone out my way, which explained why he seemed familiar. I must have seen him on the bus.
Raoul, Sarry, and Gilly waited at the stop with us. “To protect you from sundry creatures of the night,” Sarry said, and they waved us off with mimed histrionics before heading off the other way.
Besides us, there was only a couple on the bus, locked in a tight clinch. Harrison rolled his eyes at them and headed for the backseat.
“That was so great,” I said, sitting beside him and feeling suddenly shy.
Harrison began talking about the movies we had seen in amazing detail, revealing an almost encyclopedic knowledge of moviemaking, and pretty soon I stopped feeling awkward. I always liked listening to people who were passionate about something. It turned out that he had an old super-eight film camera and was planning to be a director when he grew up. I asked why he didn’t have a digital camera, but he shook his head dismissively. He told me that he was going to apply for film school as soon as he was old enough. It turned out that he was actually in his final year at some magnet school—two years ahead of me.
When he asked about me, I told him about Da’s love of movies, thinking how they would like each other. I was telling him about the wildly successful gig with Urban Dingo when the bus came to his stop. I turned to wave as it pulled away. Harrison was standing under the streetlight, and his pale hair glowed white in the night, but I couldn’t see his expression because his face was shadowed.
As I got off the bus, I thought over the evening, relishing it. I hadn’t had so much fun in a long time, and never with people outside my own family. The bus pulled away, dragged after its glaring headlights, and it became very dark, because the light in the bus shelter was smashed. Pulling my coat straight under the straps of my backpack, I looked up at the sky. There was what Da called a fingernail moon showing, and there was one bright star beside it. Or maybe it was a planet.