“He’s a kid!”
Air Force crossed his arms. “He’s old enough to try to make something of himself. That’s up to him, not to you. At the risk of stepping out of line, maybe you should try telling him you’re proud of him instead of telling him he’s made a mistake. Ma’am.”
Val buried her face in her hands. The horn/tooth on top of her costume’s head flopped forward. She was sure the video was being uploaded even now. She knew she shouldn’t have baited them, but could she at least have waited for a day when she wouldn’t look like a total fool? Maybe she could blame the costume, say she’d overheated and gotten testy. Maybe someone would buy that.
Lunch period ended and the lobby emptied. The recruiters packed their materials and left without saying another word to her. The bell rang. Val knew she had a class waiting for her in the gym, but she didn’t move.
“Val?”
She looked up. Nick Horton stood at her table. “What are you doing, Val?”
The fishbowl of dollars she’d raised before her outburst sat between them on the table. She pointed at it. “Fundraising.”
He didn’t look amused. “I had two students tell me you were having a breakdown, and I think you’re late for class.”
“I should get moving, then.” She turned and walked toward the gym with as much dignity as she could muster in her narwhal costume with the floppy horn and tail-shoes. When she’d turned the corner, she stopped to remove the costume. If she was lucky, that was the end of the matter.
It wasn’t. A note flashed on her whiteboard halfway through the last period, asking her to stop in the principal’s office. Her stomach dropped. Now she knew what her students felt like when they got busted for skipping. She changed into street clothes as slowly as she could get away with and walked with dragging feet toward the offices.
There was a crowd. Not only Nick, but the principal, Ann Kim, and Val’s own department head, Thomas Healy. Nobody smiled when she entered and took the empty seat.
“What the hell, Val?” Tom was the first to speak.
“I’m sorry. I—I had a bad day.”
“A bad day is forgetting your gym shoes. You had a meltdown in front of students.”
Nick jerked his thumb at Mrs. Kim’s computer. “On video.”
Val sank in her chair. “How bad is it?”
“You should know.” Tom cocked his head. “You were there.”
“I was there, but I’m not sure what I said. I know I probably didn’t represent very well.”
Mrs. Kim’s tight-lipped smile didn’t reach her eyes. “It sounds like you’re under a lot of stress at home.”
“My son . . .” Val said, stating the obvious. They all nodded in varying degrees of sympathy.
“I told you the recruiters were off-limits,” Nick reminded her. “I told you to let them do their job.”
“I know, but David is getting deployed, and I guess I got angry.”
Tom frowned. “You can’t get angry.” He should know, Val thought. He of the purple-faced lectures.
“We have a situation, Val,” said Mrs. Kim. “If any parents see the video, we’re not going to be able to protect you.”
“Protect me?”
“Keep you. Anyway, maybe it’ll blow over. In the meantime, it’s the weekend. Why don’t you take two weeks off and we’ll bring in a substitute? Get yourself together. You can give your lesson plans to the sub.”
“What about coaching? We have meets coming up.”
“You have an assistant coach, right?”
Foolish to think she was necessary, or that she’d done enough for the school that they’d protect her in a moment of weakness. Or maybe that was unfair, and this was the best protection they could give to keep from firing her. Val nodded, numb.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
SOPHIE
“Okay, y’all, Listen up! We have a new student with us today.”
Sophie’s class never got new students. If anything, their numbers dwindled month by month, as kids got Pilots and left the non-Pilot classes. She lowered her pen and paid attention. Everybody did the same; only natural to size up the new person. They were tall, which Sophie definitely wasn’t, and Black, like most of her school, with short, intricate braids that pulled their hair back tightly from their face.
Competition? Friend? Foe? It came to those options in most classrooms Sophie had been in, at least in the school-at-large. In this classroom, there was a little bit more camaraderie than in most. That was how it felt to Sophie, anyway.
Ms. Colcetti glanced down at a piece of paper. “This is—”
“—I’m going to interrupt you, ma’am, because there’s a chance whatever it says on that paper is wrong. My name is Gabe Clary. Pronouns he/him.”
Ms. Colcetti nodded and crossed something out on her paper. “Got it. Gabe.”
Gabe surveyed the class in a way that suggested he was used to attention and bored with it, then chose an empty chair toward the middle and sat without checking if that wrecked the seating plan.
What kind of kid interrupted the teacher, and didn’t wait for her to tell him where to sit, then pulled out a notebook and started drawing without acknowledging anybody? Even Ms. Colcetti was at a loss, staring at Gabe as if she was still trying to figure out what had just happened. Sophie was going to have to meet this person.
* * *
• • •
She got her chance later that afternoon, when they were paired in science lab.
Gabe groaned when he saw what they were doing. “The how to drop an egg from a height without breaking it experiment? I did that years ago.”
Sophie felt a need to defend Mrs. Rodriguez. Mrs. Rodriguez was definitely her favorite teacher, and science was probably her favorite class, even if she did better in English. Science affected her every day: David and Julie’s Pilots, her own medications. “She wouldn’t be teaching it if it wasn’t on the test for our grade. It must be important.”
“If they’re only teaching it because it’s on a test, how do we know it’s going to apply to anything else we ever do in our lives? We learn math so we can pay our bills and figure out which box of cereal is the better deal. We learn computers and robotics because that’s the future. Why do we learn how to drop an egg without breaking it? It wouldn’t even make sense if we were all studying to be farmers.”
“I think, um, you need math for computers and robots, too, and this teaches us how to problem solve and maybe engineer things. There must be a reason if Mrs. Rodriguez says we should.” Sophie crossed her arms and then looked more closely at Gabe. “Are you messing with me?”
Gabe’s bored expression twisted into a smile. “Maybe. I think I like you. You’ve got spunk, kid.”
The expression sounded archaic, like something in one of the old movies Sophie’s moms watched sometimes, so she tried not to take it as an insult. “I’m not a kid. We’re in the same grade.”
“Ah, but I’ve been in this grade before.”
“Me, too. Well, not this one, but I had to stay back a year when I was little. When I couldn’t remember anything.”
“We should both be revered as elder statesmen, then. Statespeople. Why isn’t this whole class overwhelmed by our cool?”
Sophie looked around. “Because this whole class is full of people who don’t care about cliques or age or anything. We’re here trying not to get left behind any farther than we already are.”
“You don’t seem very behind.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t have a Pilot, so I can’t keep up in the regular class where they’re doing six things at once.”
“Maybe it shouldn’t be your responsibility to be keeping up with those freaks.”
“Those freaks are ninety percent of the school. How come you don’t have a Pilot?”
Gabe shrugged. “I didn’t want one. I’m smart
enough already.”
The only other person Sophie had ever met who didn’t want one was her mother Val. Everyone else who didn’t have one had something else going on in their brain to prevent it. “It doesn’t make you smarter. It makes you use your brain better.”
“Are you arguing for it? I don’t see a pretty blue light by your ear.”
“I can’t have one. Seizures. But I’m okay with not having a Pilot.”
“Good. We don’t need ’em.” Gabe contemplated the egg like Hamlet eyeing Yorick’s skull. “So how do we keep this from breaking?”
* * *
• • •
Gabe caught Sophie as she stepped onto the school bus.
“I’m going home with Sophie,” he said to the bus monitor.
The bus monitor, Mr. Knight, looked skeptical. “I’ve never seen you before.”
“I have a note.” Gabe waved a piece of crumpled paper in Mr. Knight’s face. He read it and looked at Gabe for a second, then typed something onto his list and waved them both on.
“These are not the droids you’re looking for,” said Sophie, twitching her fingers.
“Huh?”
“Never mind. How did you do that?”
Gabe smiled. “Like I said. I had a note.”
“You only met me today.”
“And I wrote the note after I met you. I started here today; how would they know my dad’s handwriting? The secret to adult handwriting is that it’s messy. The harder it is to read, the more they believe you.”
Sophie couldn’t do her sit-on-the-corner ritual, but that was okay. She didn’t need it today; bringing a new friend home was way cooler than hanging around outside.
Mom sat at the dining room table and glanced up when they came in. As usual when she worked from home, she had an array of tablets and phones and papers in front of her. Her expression brightened. “Hey, Soph! Who’s your friend?”
“This is Gabe. He/him pronouns. Gabe, this is my mom.”
Mom smiled. “Call me Julie. Or Mrs. Geller. Whichever you’re more comfortable with. She/her.”
“Nice to meet you.” Gabe returned the smile.
“We love meeting Sophie’s friends,” Mom said. Sophie sent mental commands at her mother not to say something like We meet so few of them or We didn’t know she had any or Sophie never brings anyone home.
“Do you kids want a snack?”
Sophie did, but she waited for Gabe to say.
“That would be great, thank you, ma’am.”
Sophie let out her breath; she knew better than to let someone else make that decision. She needed to eat when she got hungry. It kept the monsters at bay.
The next concern was whether Mom would attempt to make something and accidentally poison them both, but she just jerked her thumb at the kitchen. “Have at it, kids.”
Sophie scanned the shelves. A box of cookies everyone in the family knew was stale, but nobody bothered to throw out. A Tupperware of Val’s home-dried kale chips, too risky.
“Apples and peanut butter, or cereal?”
“Apples and peanut butter,” Gabe said.
Sophie celebrated inwardly that her options hadn’t been mocked or dismissed, and celebrated again that even though Julie had probably heard Gabe’s selection, she didn’t come in to oversee Sophie with the knife in case she had a seizure while cutting. They ate in the kitchen.
“Your mom has a Pilot, huh?” Gabe whispered around an apple slice.
Sophie thought that was obvious, so she shrugged.
“Do both of your parents have them?”
“Nah,” said Sophie. “My other mom doesn’t believe in them.”
“Oh, weird. Do they fight about it?”
Sophie considered. “No. Maybe right at the beginning? No point in fighting about it now. What about your parents?”
“It’s only my dad. He doesn’t believe in them, either. He hates them.”
“Yeah, my ma, too.”
“No, I mean really hates them.”
Sophie couldn’t see the distinction between “hates” and “really hates,” so she took another bite of apple.
“Have you ever been to a protest?” Gabe asked.
Sophie shook her head, and Gabe sat straighter like it was a teachable moment. Every time he did that it made Sophie feel like a kid. Protest what?
Gabe answered as if she’d asked aloud. “You’ll love it! I’ve been to a million with my dad. We have to take you! You’ll fit in perfectly.”
Sophie knew better than to say she’d never fit in anywhere. She was afraid to say anything in this brave new world of friends, cool friends, friends at her house, friend who hadn’t yet been scared away. She reached for another piece of apple.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
VAL
“Why haven’t you been running?” Julie asked.
A reasonable question, but Val chose not to treat it as such. She shrugged and returned to her lesson plan. If she was taking a forced vacation, the school would at least get the best lesson plans they had ever seen. Perfect lesson plans. The kind that made a substitute compliment you to the principal. The kind that made it harder to get rid of such a team player.
Julie persisted. “Seriously. I can’t remember the last time you ran.”
“I don’t feel like it.”
“Love, when you don’t run you get cranky. As demonstrated.”
Val should have answered. Instead, she went into the kitchen and rummaged in the fridge for something to chop. Chopping was better than running. She needed something that took concentration without thinking. She closed the fridge and reached for the sweet potatoes. Perfect.
She dropped the potatoes in the sink and turned on the water, then grabbed the vegetable brush and began scrubbing dirt away. Behind her, Julie came into the room and pulled out a chair, scraping it on the floor to announce her presence. Val started hacking bad spots from the first potato. A slice down one side gave it a flat surface to rest on. Chop. Fluid strokes with a sharp knife, the point never leaving the cutting board as she fed potato to blade.
Julie sighed loudly, and when no response came from Val, she spoke. “What is going on with you? I don’t think I did anything to deserve the silent treatment.”
“I’m not giving you the silent treatment. I’m cutting potatoes. Maybe if I had a Pilot I would’ve heard you come in.”
“Bull. You heard me.”
“Okay, I did, but I don’t want to talk. Is that allowed?”
“Nope. Not if you’re not running and you’re turning your back on me. Not allowed. You can tell me why you’re upset, or you can prove you’re not upset, but you can’t hang out in between.”
Val glared at her, then lowered the knife. How had she gotten so much dirt under her fingernails when she’d used a scrub brush? She picked at them. Anything could become a mindful task if you concentrated hard enough. She turned on the tap and mindfully washed her hands, like a surgeon. Julie was gone when she finished; if she’d had a Pilot she would have known how long ago her wife had left the room.
It was wrong to take it out on Julie. She should explain. This was too important to hide, but she was embarrassed. She thought she knew what Julie would say, and Julie would be right, and she didn’t want to hear it.
* * *
• • •
The next day, Val woke at her usual time, as she had every day during her suspension. She made lunches for all three of them, like usual. She dropped Sophie off at school, and as usual, watched until the doors had closed behind the girl. That was as far as she could protect her. After that, Sophie was in the school’s hands; in the hands of people she trusted, to some extent, to recognize if there was a problem.
Those same people also missed the problems they were creating by dividing Piloted and un-Piloted students, so how could she expe
ct them to recognize and respond well to Sophie’s seizures? No, she was being stupid. Piloted teachers probably had a better chance of noticing; they could keep tabs on all the students at once.
Maybe she was obsolete. Maybe teaching had moved on, and she was behind the times. At least they still needed her to coach, if nothing else. A Pilot couldn’t help someone run faster or fix bad body mechanics; that was her job. Except right now it wasn’t.
Right now she wasn’t supposed to go to school. Instead, she drove on past storefronts and houses and then to the place where the spaces between storefronts and houses widened. She pulled into the dirt lot at the entrance to the state park. Julie was right that she needed to run, wrong about when. She was running because she didn’t know what else to do with the time.
She walked down the hill into the park. When she reached the riverside trail she stretched against a tree, and then she ran. This time, everything followed her, as it had for every run during her suspension. No escape when you brought your problem on yourself.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
JULIE
When Julie was twelve years old, she realized an important thing about her family: everyone was lying. It was only the three of them, her parents and her. She thought it had always been that way, until the day she found the shoebox. The one filled with photos of an infant boy so small he was held in one gloved hand, wires and tubes snaking everywhere around his tiny body. There were no labels, no names, no dates. It could easily have been someone else’s child, but then there would have been no reason for the photos to be in a shoebox in her mother’s closet, and there wouldn’t have been a tiny knit blanket in the box, and she wouldn’t have recognized her father’s favorite plaid shirt in one photo’s background.
She put the pictures back, replaced the blanket, closed the box, and never mentioned it again. She waited her entire life for her parents to mention she’d briefly had a brother, to take her to a cemetery, to tell her whether he’d been older or younger than her, to let her in on their secret. Nobody ever mentioned him. Sometimes she wondered if she’d imagined finding it, if she’d conjured the whole thing.
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