“… gave me something to give your sister,” Harlen was saying.
I had no idea what he was talking about. “You want me to give something to Mirandah?” I hazarded, throwing him a quick look, then zipping up the bag.
“The other sister,” Harlen said. He took out a generic-looking CD in a clear blank case and held it out. I all but snatched it and thrust it into my pocket. Then I shut my locker and babbled something about Mrs. Barker wanting to see me right away.
I made for the staff room, stopping at the bathroom first to rinse my mouth out with water. Even so, it still felt like my tongue and throat were coated in the slimy reek that had emanated from Harlen. It was only then that it struck me that he had smelled even worse than Dr. Austin at the hospital. But how on earth could handsome, charming Harlen Sanderson, whom I had yearned after for a year, smell so bad?
I was so rattled that it took all of my self-control to act normal when a teacher finally condescended to answer the staff room door. I guess I didn’t quite succeed, because when Mrs. Barker came out, she gave me a searching look.
“I didn’t mean you had to see me the second you got the note, Alyzon,” she said. “You ought to have gone straight home today. You look pale.”
I stammered that I was fine, but she ushered me to a bench outside the staff room and sat beside me, giving off the yeasty bread smell of her essence. It seemed so wholesome after what I had smelled in the hallway.
“The reason I wanted to speak to you was to tell you that you’ve missed a couple of important tests,” Mrs. Barker said. “I can’t rerun them for you because they’re through the Department of Education, but I can request makeup tests. The only thing is that you’ll need to take them outside of school hours. You could come in one day on a weekend and do both at once. How does that strike you?”
I didn’t answer straightaway, because she had patted my arm. When her skin touched mine, I felt how much she liked me; not just as a student, but as a person. I was startled because, while Mrs. Barker was my favorite teacher, I had never imagined she felt so warmly toward me. Certainly it didn’t show in her expression. But now I suspected that if she wasn’t a teacher and I a student, we might have been close friends.
“What is it, Alyzon?” she asked gently.
“It’s … uh, I’m fine.” I didn’t dare look at her until I had managed to start counting again.
She said with a frown in her voice, “Another alternative is that I could ask for an averaging of your previous tests.”
“No … no, I want to do the tests,” I told her firmly, looking into her face but reciting the nine times table to myself so her attention would not overwhelm me. “But I’ll need a bit of time to prepare.”
She looked pleased. “Of course. It will take a week or so to set it up anyway.” She looked me over. “Are you sure you’re OK? Your father said you were still suffering some reactions to your accident.”
I smiled to think of Da preparing the way for me and felt better. “I think it’s just getting used to being around so many people. I ought to be used to it, with my family.”
“You have a pretty special family,” Mrs. Barker said warmly. She might have said more, but another teacher stuck her head round the staff room door and said there was a call.
* * *
I had intended to phone Da to pick me up so I could avoid the crowded home bus, but coming out of the school, I decided that what I really needed was some space to think about what had happened with Harlen Sanderson. I set off to walk along the bus route, knowing I could hail the next bus if I needed to.
The yellow afternoon light made the walls of houses and buildings look like biscuits saturated in honey, and there was a slight, sweet-scented breeze. I breathed it in and told myself that it was impossible Harlen Sanderson had smelled like that—meaning, I must have been wrong to think smells were only associated with feelings and emotions or people’s essences. Perhaps other things gave off smells, too. Maybe Harlen had been thinking of a really awful sight. Or he might even be sick and that was what I had smelled. I tried to focus better on what had happened by the lockers, but I was frustrated by my inability to think clearly about my changed senses. I just didn’t seem to have the words to describe my impressions.
It was like this book Da had read us one winter, called 1984, about a future where the authorities were trying to control everything. One of their methods was to cut words out of the language. This was very clever, because without the words people found they couldn’t think about the things those words had expressed. The word for love was taken out, and people stopped being able to love. The book was saying that the most basic things were hard or impossible to do without the words to express them.
I felt I wouldn’t be able to think properly about what had happened to me until I could find words to think with. At the simplest level I could see, hear, smell, taste, and touch a lot better than other people. But smell and touch had gone far beyond what those words usually meant. If I had to describe it to someone, I would say it was as if you’d always had really bad eyesight, only you didn’t know it. Everything would be unfocused and blurred, but you’d think that was how it was meant to be. Then one day someone handed you glasses that gave you twenty-twenty vision. For the first time you’d see what people looked like. You’d see their expressions and you’d realize there were a whole lot of things people said in body language, rather than in words, which you hadn’t seen. So you would understand people and what they were about much better than before. It wasn’t like you had suddenly become wise, but only that understanding people better was a natural consequence of seeing better. The world itself would be more clear and precise, and therefore more complex, but you would be able to handle it because seeing better would mean that you could respond better and more accurately. It would tire you to begin with, seeing so much more than before. But after a while you’d get used to it.
That’s what I told myself.
Da and the others had been on the verge of panicking when I walked in so late. I felt pretty bad because I hadn’t thought that they would be concerned, and I should have.
I told them I was going to walk home every night for a while, that I needed the exercise, and they accepted it, although Da reminded me to call if I got tired. I could tolerate the morning bus rides, I had decided, because I could get in a corner seat before the bus filled up and stare out the window the whole time, then get off after everyone else. But the night bus would kill me, with all those jostling kids bumping up against me. Especially after being around people all day at school.
The walk also allowed me to experience inanimate things with my enhanced senses. One night I caught sight of a leaf waving in the wind, and another night it was a patch of ivy growing up the side of a building. Both times I had been able to indulge my senses as I had done with the risotto, without anyone noticing me standing transfixed by such a small thing. Of course, there were no small things now; that was the point. It was like everything had an immense story to tell, and suddenly I was listening.
It didn’t only happen when I was alone, though. Midweek, I got a stone out of my shoe in class. As I looked at it, I began to feel I was understanding the stoneness of the stone. It was incredibly alien but also wonderful and somehow thrilling. Then I realized that the teacher was shouting at me for not paying attention. She had started out mildly, Gilly told me later, but I had acted like I was deaf, and she had got mad because she thought I was mocking her. Teachers hate to be mocked. Some of them are so paranoid you have to make sure not to do anything they might think is mockery.
The weird thing was that on some level I had been paying attention. Walking home that night, I realized that I could vividly recall anything that happened since the accident. As far as classes went, I could remember anything that had been said, any passage that had been read, any question that had been discussed, just by thinking about it. The trouble was that remembering an event in this way took almost as long as the event itself—it was
like reliving it from start to finish.
I had been really nervous about bumping into Harlen after what had happened the first day by the lockers, but at the same time I wanted to see him again just to prove to myself that I’d been mistaken. I couldn’t believe I had to have some sort of meltdown the one time he had spoken to me and shown an interest. I hoped that Harlen had put my peculiar behavior down to nervousness, because, nice as he was, he had to be aware of how he affected girls. Especially mousy girls like me.
But I didn’t see him the whole week, even in class, and by Friday I thought he must be sick and that sickness really could be the reason for the awful smell. He had always been away a fair bit, and although rumor said his rich parents traveled a lot and took him along, hiring tutors to keep him up with his schoolwork, it might be that he was having some sort of ongoing treatment. When he didn’t come to school my whole second week back, I was even more certain I was right.
I had given Serenity the CD, telling her Harlen had passed it on. She had taken it without surprise, but when I asked who it was from, she told me to mind my own business. So much for sibling communication.
Friday of my second week back, I had gym. The school had advised against it the first week, but I had said I was fine when the school nurse asked, so I was given permission. I knew that was a mistake, though, when Coach Ekbert announced that we were playing a game of tag.
After twenty minutes of being tagged by other students and having their emotions and weird images hammer me whenever they touched bare skin, I felt as battered and bruised as if the whole class had run over me in combat boots. Each time someone bumped me, I had to clench my teeth to stop from crying out. I could not even protect myself from their direct attention, because it was almost impossible to count in my head with Coach Ekbert shouting out our individual numbers as he yelled instructions or admonishments.
In the end I said I had a terrible headache and asked if I could go to the nurse’s office. Coach Ekbert was famous for refusing to accept kids’ excuses to cut his classes. He had told us at the start of the year that more kids tried to get out of gym than out of math or science, and that students would cut his class At Their Own Risk. He glared at me suspiciously for a long minute, as if I might suddenly break down and confess that it was all a hoax. Then suddenly Gilly said, “Sir, she was just in a coma.”
He didn’t look at her, but he waved me away. I stumbled gladly to the nurse’s office and palmed the aspirin she gave me, feeling guilty about her candy-scented concern. Just before the lunch bell rang, I slipped out and went to the library. I couldn’t face the thought of the halls and school yard seething with lunchtime crowds.
I meant to do some catching up, but I couldn’t keep my mind on my books. I kept thinking about the failure of my plan to come up with a dictionary of smell. I had discovered that different people gave off different scents even when in similar situations. I wondered if I had been wrong to assume that all people feeling sadness, for example, would give off the same smell. Maybe every single person had their own unique and individual set of scent responses. It made sense, because no two people reacted in exactly the same way to a situation. Wouldn’t one person’s happiness be different from another person’s? The only correlation I had noticed was that good or innocuous scents appeared to be given off by people feeling positive emotions or thinking good thoughts, while bad scents were given off by people with negative thoughts or feelings. But I couldn’t figure out if this also worked with people’s essence scents. It seemed too simplistic to imagine that good people would smell good, while bad people smelled bad. A lot of scents couldn’t even be categorized as good or bad because it was all so subjective. Some people liked the smell of cigarette smoke or hot tar.
Despite not being able to come up with anything like the dictionary I’d planned, my extended senses were helping me to understand people more than I could have imagined possible. Every minute that passed, I saw and felt and smelled and heard details that showed me how amazingly rare it was for people to actually say what they meant. Words were like bubbles on top of the water; the truth was a shifting current beneath the surface, powerful and silent. No wonder the world was in such a mess, because even if you didn’t count the people who were actively deceptive, it must be almost impossible for anyone to really agree on anything, what with everyone hiding what they felt and trying to guess what the other person was hiding. Add in different motivations and cultural backgrounds and religions, and it was a miracle that we hadn’t all murdered one another eons back.
I might have been depressed by all that, except that the better I got at reading scents, the better I was able to pierce the evasions and pretenses, and my understanding of the people around me deepened.
For instance, there was Jezabel Aster, who was always kidding around. I was drawn to her now, because, like Gilly, her essence scent was delicious: a mixture of fresh straw and hot honey. And the second I started paying attention to her, I noticed all sorts of things—like she knew the answer to just about anything any teacher asked, although she hardly ever volunteered it and her grades were average. It didn’t take me long to figure out that she was super bright. Of course, my insight didn’t help to explain why she would want to keep her cleverness secret.
Then there was Nathan Wealls. I had thought of him as a complete Neanderthal because he was always messing around and driving the teachers crazy with his antics. But the sweet bath-soap smell he gave off made me look at him more closely, and I soon saw that he was as soft and gentle as a baby underneath. That was why he let himself be persuaded to make trouble. Anyone who was nice to him could get him to do anything. Yelling at him was exactly the wrong way for teachers to make him behave, because he hated being yelled at, so he messed around all the more, trying to make them laugh. There was nothing I could do, because no teacher would listen to me, even if I could explain how I knew what I did about Nathan. Besides, I wasn’t sure it was my business.
My thoughts shifted to numbers, and my growing ability to use them as a screen. The more difficult the mental calculations, the more dense the screen, but it was hard to regulate. It might be possible to build a permanent screen, which I could summon up at any moment. My idea was that the screen would have sections of varying complexity, and that would enable me to use whichever bit of the screen was appropriate, depending on what I had to block. I meant to work out a series of complex calculations and memorize them, then attach some simpler calculations. Sort of like how you learned lines for a play or the way you created a quilt.
Most aggravating were the things I could perceive that were far harder to pin down than smells. For example, the whispers I would hear in the air—sometimes soft and sometimes loud, but never clearly. I hadn’t the slightest idea what they meant, but I would hear them just as often when no one was around as when I was with other people, and I had the feeling they were like a sort of imprint on the air left behind by people living and speaking in that space. Then there was a distortion that happened to the air around certain people. I could see it as a vague shifting and shimmering, which was visible only because of what was behind it, like the air over a desert.
Despite my frustrations, the one thing I was now sure about was that I didn’t want my senses to go back to normal. Whenever I imagined waking up one morning and finding I was my old self, I remembered a film I saw about a man who had been virtually a vegetable his whole life until a doctor found a way to rouse him using some sort of experimental drug. The guy woke up and was like a child to start with, but he ended up being really brilliant—a genius and also a really good person. The tragedy of the film was that the effect of the drug didn’t last, and so he started to regress—and, worst of all, he realized it was going to happen.
It wouldn’t be that extreme for me to revert to normal, but even so, I wasn’t sure how I could bear it. It would be like living in a world with all the lights switched off, and having them suddenly switched on, then off again. You would be used to the dark, but un
like before, you’d know how things looked with the lights on, so you’d be forever longing to see clearly.
* * *
The third week back at school went pretty much the same as the first two except that between classes I spent a lot of time with Gilly Rountree. Harlen was still away, and I was beginning to wonder if he would ever come back. It was awful to imagine there might be something really wrong with him, but when I asked around, there was only the old rumor about him traveling with his parents.
I went to classes, listened and took notes, read and joined in, always being careful not to draw too much attention to myself. I walked home every night and slept a lot. Whenever I had a quiet hour, I created another piece in my number screen. At home I studied, cooked, and played with Luke. But by the end of the third week, everything was overshadowed by our excitement about Da’s looming gig with Urban Dingo.
There were actually going to be two gigs: one on Friday and another on Saturday. Both were already completely sold out. Da and the band were rehearsing in the shed every day, and then they would spend half the night arguing in incomprehensible musical shorthand about the set list. Excitement spread out from them like a whirlpool, and we were all caught up in it.
Mirandah, Jesse, Serenity, and I were going to go to the Friday show. I had got enough of my number screen built that I felt confident I could cope with anyone talking to me. But the gig would still be a test, because it would be packed and I still hadn’t found a way to protect myself from physical contact.
It was not knowing how I would handle myself at the gig that stopped me mentioning it to Gilly. That and a secret fear that Losing the Rope would bomb. I was ashamed of having so little faith in them, especially since the gigs the band had done till now had always been great. But this was a whole different league, because Urban Dingo had just hit it big. Never in my wildest imaginings had I thought of Da’s band being mentioned in the same breath as a top-ten mainstream band.