Alyzon Whitestarr

  It took me less than a minute to learn that there was a Shaletown Elementary and a Shaletown High School in Shale-town, but no private school with Shale in the name. In fact, there was no private school in Shaletown at all, so far as I could tell. I was pretty disappointed, but I wrote down the number for Shaletown High just in case.

  Da came back in. “That is an interesting man, but he has some pretty strange ideas about what it means to be a creator of anything.”

  “Probably because he’s not,” I said.

  Da looked surprised. “That’s true. I suppose his ideas are quite legitimate, from the point of view of a manager.”

  “Except he’s not that either. He just—”

  “Takes an interest,” Da said. He was smiling, but he still had a furrow between his brows as if something Aaron Rayc had said had gotten under his skin. He washed some dishes absently. “I guess we’re lucky that he takes an interest, since it turns out the gig with Urban Dingo was his doing. He said he had heard ‘Song for Aya’ and it had impressed him enough to recommend me. He doesn’t realize that the band is as much a part of the creation of that song as I am. But I’m a bit puzzled about where he would have heard it after all this time, since it’s never been recorded.”

  “Someone made a pirate recording, maybe. Da, what do you know about Dita?” I asked.

  He slanted me a look of amusement. “I should think all there is to know about Dita Rayc is pretty obvious.”

  I nodded. “But what does she do? Is she a model? Because she looked sort of familiar to me.”

  He shrugged. “She shops. Her words,” he added dryly. Da threw the tea towel aside and went out, saying he had a new student arriving any minute.

  I finished drying the dishes and was wiping down the table when the student arrived. I showed him the path to the shed-studio and went back to the kitchen just as Mum came in with her hair all wrapped up in a towel. She was dressed in her painting clothes, but Luke was dressed for bed in his flannel bunny suit. Mum gave me a vague fond smile and set about making a fresh pot of green tea to take up to her studio, Luke tucked into her hip gurgling sleepily.

  I wished I could have talked to her about Serenity, but Mum had never been the one we talked to about our problems. She was always too preoccupied by whatever it was that kept her painting. Mesmerized by her muse, Mirandah said. Mostly I didn’t mind. I was even kind of proud to have such an unusual and talented mother. But just occasionally, I wished she was more normal.

  Mum drifted out carrying tray and baby with effortless grace, her expression one of dreamy absorption. I had the feeling that if Rayc and his wife were there, she wouldn’t even have noticed them.

  * * *

  The next afternoon Gilly and I were paired up in science, sorting bones and trying to see how they connected.

  “Are these real?” Gilly wondered.

  “I hope not,” I said.

  “I don’t mind if they are,” Gilly went on. “I just like knowing what is real and what’s not real.”

  I couldn’t help making some stupid reference to the horror movies, which led her to do the same, and we were quietly laughing when Mr. Stravin’s voice snapped across the room like a whip crack.

  “Miss Rountree, I assume you have made some astounding discovery,” he said icily. “Perhaps you would inform the rest of the class of your amazing breakthrough.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Stravin,” Gilly muttered.

  * * *

  “Crusty old grump,” I said when we were dismissed for lunch.

  “He’s not really,” Gilly said. “It’s just that he cares about science, and it must be frustrating for him to be here teaching kids who don’t pay attention.”

  “But you do pay attention,” I protested.

  “That’s why he was mad, don’t you see? He trusts me to take science seriously and he feels I let him down.”

  I looked at her in wonder. “Gilly, you ought to have a halo. Do you mind if we sit in the library study room for lunch?”

  “What else?” she asked. “I know you’re not an outdoor person.”

  I told her that I was only an indoor person when there were wild animals outside. I had meant it as a lame kind of joke, but she looked serious. “So who’s the beast we’re hiding from? Harlen?” I stared at her, and she said, “It’s funny, when he was leaving on the bus yesterday after he’d talked to you, I saw him looking out the window and watching you go into the school. He looked … I don’t know. Like a cat watching a mouse. Not the way a guy in love ought to look. You should tell him you’re not interested.”

  “I don’t want to make him mad.”

  “You’re scared of him,” Gilly said in disbelief. I shrugged, wishing I had said nothing. Gilly went on slowly, “I suppose you feel there’s something wrong about Harlen just the same way you sensed that Sylvia Yarrow was angry at herself?”

  I said a bit defiantly, “Don’t you ever get feelings about people?”

  Gilly was quiet for a bit. Then she said, “I found out something about Sylvia that might explain why she’s so angry.”

  “What?” I asked curiously.

  “Her father had an affair, and Sylvia discovered them together. She told her mother and there was this big fight and her parents split up. Then her mother had a nervous breakdown, so Sylvia has to live with her father and his new girlfriend.”

  “How horrible,” I said. “No wonder she smells of anger.”

  “Smells of anger?”

  “I mean … I mean, she seems so angry.”

  Gilly gave me a funny look, and I cursed my carelessness. I liked Gilly and trusted her, but I didn’t want her to change the way she acted toward me. Wasn’t that the whole reason I had decided to keep my extended senses secret? To distract her, I told her about bumping into Harrison, and before I knew it I had also told her about Serenity and my feeling that there was something wrong with her. Too late, I realized that I had brought us full circle back to my mysterious ability to feel things about people. But fortunately, Gilly was concentrating on the subject. Like Harrison, she took my concern more seriously than I expected. I told her half-shyly that he had offered to follow Serenity to see what she did on Monday night.

  “It seems kind of extreme. But if Harrison thinks it’s a good idea …,” she said doubtfully.

  “I hardly know him, but I trust him,” I said.

  “It’s because he has integrity,” Gilly answered. “It’s the same with Sarry and Raoul. Whenever I have any kind of moral dilemma, I try to think what they would do. Sarry with her offbeat way of seeing life, Raoul with his honesty, and Harrison with his intelligence.”

  Integrity. I thought what a beautiful word it was; but people didn’t use it much anymore. Yet it fitted all of them—Gilly as much as the other three. “They’re lucky to have you, too,” I said stoutly.

  Gilly hugged me.

  “Am I interrupting anything?” Harlen was standing in the doorway smiling, and I suddenly realized how much I disliked his perfect, ever-present smile.

  “I was just congratulating Alyzon on doing so well on her tests,” Gilly said too brightly.

  “Well, she’s a smart girl,” Harlen said. “Why shouldn’t she do well?”

  “Exactly what I was saying,” Gilly said.

  “So why don’t you make like the west wind and blow?”

  “Oh, I’d love to, Harlen, but we’re supposed to help Mr. Stravin with setting up an experiment,” Gilly said. “We should be there now, because he wants it ready for when his next class begins.”

  Harlen’s smile did not falter. “All right, I’ll be waiting at the front gate for you after school, Alyzon.” We watched him walk back across the library through the windows of the study room.

  “Hell on wheels,” Gilly said when he had gone out of sight. She looked at me and her face changed. “You’re shaking, Alyzon.”

  I couldn’t help it. I started to cry. Gilly made a soundless exclamation and gathered me into her arms. “Don’t wor
ry,” she said. “I’ll figure something out.”

  Harlen’s charming smile did not slip when he saw Gilly glued to my side as we came out of the school gates. “What are you two, Siamese twins?” he asked lightly.

  “I know it’s a pain,” Gilly said in a friendly dithery voice. “I’m really sorry to be a gooseberry like this, Harlen, but Alyzon’s coming home to my place for dinner tonight. You left so fast at lunchtime that we didn’t have a chance to say. I’ll just read my book over here while you two talk. Don’t mind me.”

  She sat on the front fence and opened a book and pretended to read.

  Harlen stepped closer, still smiling, and took hold of my arm. His fingers dug through the cloth, seeming sharper than fingers ought to feel. Like claws, some crazy bit of me thought.

  “So when are we going out?” he asked.

  “I … it depends on …”

  “On what? Your baby brother? Your father? Her?” He nodded toward Gilly. “Do you have a mind of your own, Alyzon?”

  “I … Of course I do,” I said indignantly. “I just don’t get why you’re so angry.”

  For a moment Harlen’s smile vanished, and I realized with a shock that I had never seen him without it. He looked younger and oddly vacant. Then he was smiling again. “I guess I’m frustrated. You say you’d like to go out, but somehow it never happens. How about us setting a date for a real date?”

  Be careful, my danger sense whispered, and I remembered Mrs. Barker telling me it would be better not to humiliate Harlen. There was nothing to do but nod.

  “So when?” Harlen asked with just a flick of mockery.

  “I … could meet you on Saturday afternoon,” I said, reasoning that I could arrange something afterward to keep the meeting short.

  “Where?” Harlen asked swiftly.

  “The coffee shop in Eastland Mall? The Quick Brown Fox. One o’clock?” Harlen nodded easily and let go of my arm. As he walked away, he glanced over at Gilly, and maybe it was my imagination, but I thought I saw triumph in his eyes.

  “See?” Gilly said when he was out of earshot. She looked so pleased I didn’t have the heart to tell her I had been forced to agree to a date. Gilly hooked her arm through mine. “Come on. My grandmother will be wondering where we are.”

  “What?”

  She grinned. “I figured it better have the ring of truth when I told Harlen you were coming home with me, so I called my grandmother. You can OK it with your parents from there. You said they were pretty easygoing.”

  So I went to Gilly’s place for dinner. We were driven there in an expensive, sober black car by a chauffeur called Samuel.

  “It’s very short notice,” her grandmother said. After we arrived, Gilly had brought me to where the old woman had been sitting and reading in a large, beautifully furnished drawing room right inside the front door. Her smile had more politeness than warmth. “We are only having a tuna casserole and salad, and Gilly mentioned you’re a vegetarian.”

  “Salad will be fine,” I said, encouraged by the fact that, despite her unfriendly manner, the old woman smelled of ripe blackberries and rosemary.

  Gilly was no less stiff than her grandmother, and it took some time and some subtle smelling and watching to figure out that she believed her grandmother kept her only because of a sense of duty. For her part, Mrs. Rountree thought Gilly resented being abandoned to the care of an old woman. It surprised me that two such smart people could have got one another so terribly wrong.

  When we went upstairs to do our homework before dinner, I saw that the house was enormous and perfectly ordered, room after room filled with beautifully polished antique furniture. What stopped it from looking like a house in a magazine were the worn but gorgeous rugs on the timber floors, and all sorts of unusual things set about in every room: a strange little saddle chair, statues that looked African, beautiful old tapestries, ceramic bowls, and enormous but dented pewter jugs. There were also paintings, most of them abstracts, which surprised me, hanging amid family portraits. Gilly whispered with a grimace that the subjects of the portraits were Rountrees and that explained their sour faces.

  As we came up the stairs, Gilly pointed out a picture of her mother and father on the day they had married. They were definitely Beautiful People, and I wondered why Gilly’s father had left. I thought of my own family, rich in love and poor in money, and knew where I’d rather be.

  Still, wealth definitely had its compensations. Gilly’s room had an en suite bathroom and a walk-in wardrobe that was so full it was like a dress shop. There were also shelves of toys and ornaments from around the world. Gilly said bluntly that it was all consolation from her globe-trotting mother. She showed me a pile of fancy clothes still in wrappers and said her mother had bought them on her last trip to Paris.

  “They’re a size too small. I guess it’s been a while since she looked at me,” she added with bitter humor.

  “Your gran seems OK,” I said.

  “She does her duty.”

  “Are you sure that’s all it is?”

  Gilly didn’t answer. She was pulling out drawers full of CDs. I could see she was upset, and so I let her play me the music she liked and we spent an hour trying out dance steps. We finally turned on some softer music and did our homework. We had just finished and Gilly was beginning to expound her theory that Harlen was pursuing me precisely because I didn’t want him, when a maid came to tell us that the cook wanted us down for dinner. I couldn’t believe Gilly lived in a house where there was a maid and a cook and a chauffeur.

  “I didn’t think people had servants anymore,” I whispered as we followed the maid to the dining room.

  “My grandmother calls them her staff,” Gilly whispered back. “She says she’s old and rich and why shouldn’t she employ people to help her when there are so many desperate for work.”

  My da would have had a lot to say about people who had other people as servants, but there was a leafy smell that flowed between the old lady and all of her staff that seemed to indicate affection and mutual respect. Certainly nobody smelled of resentment or envy or even of irritation. It was a good lesson not to generalize principles.

  We sat at an ancient timber table long enough for us and all of the Rountree ancestors to eat with their elbows out. There was a red ceramic bowl in the center filled with flowers and tiny floating candles, the reflections of which gleamed softly on the water and on the old, very beautiful silver cutlery.

  “It looks lovely,” I said.

  Mrs. Rountree looked pleased. “I sometimes think I shouldn’t mind eating bread and water, as long as I was eating off nice china and there were flowers and candlelight.”

  The room had begun to fill up with real scents of flowers and candle wax, which perfectly blended with the old lady’s smells of rosemary, blackberries, and peaches. I noticed Gilly watching her grandmother with faint puzzlement and tried to gently will the old woman to go on talking, guessing that her granddaughter did not often see this side of her. I felt her desire to be closer to Gilly, but she had no idea how to go about it, and I reasoned that my willing her to talk was only helping her to do what she wanted anyway.

  “There are so many sad and ugly things in the world that I feel I must try to counterbalance them with whatever beauty I can produce,” she said. “Setting a pretty table in a world of pain might seem callous, given that people are starving and living in dreadful disease and poverty. But in trying to create islands of beauty and peace, I feel I am honoring the dreams of the world.”

  “That’s a good philosophy,” I said sincerely.

  Mrs. Rountree flushed a delicate pink. “We all have strengths and weaknesses, but we must do what we can with what we have to make the world a better place.”

  “My da says we have to live by our standards and beliefs no matter what other people do in the world or even to us. Otherwise we’re living by their standards,” I said.

  She smiled. “It is pleasing to hear the wisdom of a father being espoused
by his children. I think there are more and more people in the world who seem completely bereft of conscience or any idea of right or wrong.”

  “I think that’s because people are spending less time thinking about the things they do,” Gilly said. Her cheeks were pink, and her sea smell was very strong.

  Gilly’s grandmother sighed and said, “Everything moves faster and faster, and sometimes I feel just so exhausted with all the running here and there, buying this and that. I want things to slow down. I want there to be time to dawdle and time to dream and, especially, time to think.”

  Gilly sat forward excitedly. “Thinking is out of fashion,” she said. “No one bothers making up their own mind. They can let magazines and talk-show hosts do it for them.”

  Without warning, Gilly’s gran started to laugh.

  “What is it?” Gilly asked, sounding offended.

  “It’s you two, and me,” Mrs. Rountree said, giggling like a girl. “I sat around with my friends talking about saving the world when I was your age, and now here I am still at it. It seems I’ll never learn.”

  Gilly laughed, too, then she said, “Isn’t it better to spend your whole life trying to improve the world than to give up on it?”

  “Absolutely,” her gran said fervently. “To try when there is little hope is a beautiful kind of foolishness.” They smiled shyly at each other, and I thought how strange it was that in a matter of a few days, I had heard two separate conversations about changing the world. Maybe all over the world, people were having those sorts of thoughts and conversations.

  On my way home later I sat alone on the plush leather seat looking at the back of Samuel’s head and feeling good. Whatever walls stood between Gilly and her gran had been undermined by our unexpected dinner, and I was gratified to think I had played a part in bringing them together. Gilly admired integrity, and there was no doubt the old woman had it.

  I was beginning to nod off when the car pulled up to my house. Samuel insisted on walking me to the front door, claiming that it was at Mrs. Rountree’s request. “She’s an old-fashioned lady,” he said with a grin.