“Jaguar skin,” I said, hoping A.B. would at least twitch. Naturally, he didn’t. “That’s what the boxes looked like. Did you notice anything else about it?”
“No, That was it.”
“Okay, let’s go back into the library. Since this is your vision, let it be a week earlier. You haven’t yet alienated anyone here. Find a scribe— any scribe— and find a way to ask what city you’re in and what year it is.”
I let them sit with it. And I sat with it. But somehow the answer didn’t come. Images did— amazing images— but they didn’t narrow it down.
Since I didn’t have any information at all, this was like saying, “Who am I going to marry?” Somehow, the psyche doesn’t seem able to just pluck words out of some great cosmic database. It doesn’t deal in words. If you said, “Am I going to marry Mike or Frank?” and you knew what Mike and Frank looked like, one of them might light up. But you can’t just give it an abstract problem. It’s got to have symbols to work with.
“Anybody get anything?” I asked.
“Incredible stuff,” Julia said. “All these weird painted buildings and thousands of people in huge courtyards… but you know what? Not a single street sign.”
“I saw a soccer game,” Cooper said. “Only it wasn’t really soccer, it just looked like it.”
I nodded “The Mayans had a ball game. Who else?”
Everyone, it seemed, had noticed the screaming lack of decent signage in the Late Classic Period— if that was even when it was. We didn’t find out the date, either.
“Why don’t we try it a different way?” said Sonya. “Why don’t we ask what path to take to get there?”
“Okay, great.” And so we did that. My path led to a gorgeous sandy beach, but that was all I could get.
“I see a man,” Sonya said. “One of those Spanish dudes— you know, with the helmets. Conquistadors.”
“Cortes?” I was excited. “Could it be Cortes?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Just a Spanish dude.”
“I’m seeing a woman,” Carlos said. “She’s speaking Spanish, but all broken up. And then she’s saying something else, kind of in gibberish. She looks… I don’t know, I think she’s black. And she looks kind of period… but I don’t know what period.”
“Oh. My. God. That’s got to be Dona Marina. A translator for Cortes, not Mayan at all. She was a Jamaican shipwrecked in the Yucatan.
“And the beach must be Cozumel. I think we’re getting different pieces of a picture. And I think what it means is, we have to go to Cozumel and ask the only known person who can translate the question!”
“Very fine, Soldier! Excellent work,” A.B. said, or so I thought. But he never said anything like that.
“Would you mind repeating that?” I said.
“I said that was very nearly half-decent, girleen.” He jumped off the table and curled up on the floor.
When we had eaten our power bars and come out of the trance, I said shyly, “Did anyone notice what we did this time? We talked the problem through while in trance. What do you think of that?”
“Means we gettin’ good,” said Sonya. “I see a big difference since you late-breakin’ musketeers joined up. Psychic powers increasin’. Too bad Kara’s missin’ out.”
Kara. Right.
“Ask A.B. what he thinks,” Carlos said.
“I already did. He said it was stellar work. ‘Absolutely top drawer,’ I believe, were his exact words.” I was taking a helluva chance, but no steel-cable tail rose up to contradict me.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN—RECESS!
I woke up the next day with a snarl of spaghetti where my brain should have been. So much to do! I glanced at Kara’s bed, which was still empty, and as big a mess as usual. Kara never made her bed. You don’t get points for that and she seemed to be on some kind of negative campaign not to get points.
Okay, there was Kara. There was Cooper’s curse. And Haley’s curse. Right. And school. Making the clowns happy. Then there was the time travel thing. No question about it, I was going to Cozumel.
I want my mama! The words echoed in my brain, I didn’t really think them. That was just what you were supposed to think in these situations. No sense whatsoever wanting my mama, I was never going to get her. When I needed a parent, I better be content with my dad. But the thing was, I had an overwhelming need for a kind parental presence; it had been nibbling at me for days. In fact, it was the reason I’d asked A.B. to teach me invisibility. I wanted to see Abuela.
I don’t know why; maybe I needed to reassure myself that she was really okay. Or maybe, deep down, I wanted the thing moms usually provide but mine didn’t— the sense that all’s right with the world, everything’ll be all right no matter how bad it seems. And the feeling kept ratcheting up. This morning, the need to see her was like a craving for chocolate. I couldn’t really think about anything else.
Okay, then. How was I getting off this campus? I was going to have to do it undetected, and the only way to do that was to be invisible. Work with available materials, A.B. always said. So what did I have?
For openers, I contemplated metaphor. Everything depended on how you looked at something. People thought A.B. was a pathetic stray cat but he’d wasted two guys a few weeks ago. He was the vampire they were shaking in their boots about. He was the werewolf mothers warned their kids about. He looked exactly like himself, but he was still invisible.
I mean, not to the naked eye. You just couldn’t see who he really was.
So if I were going to be invisible, maybe I could… what? I thought about it. Could I sneak out with the cleaning staff? Get a mop and bucket, focus like a maniac, and just go?
Uh-uh. Because I couldn’t be in two places at once. They’d miss me if I wasn’t at school.
So what I had to do if I wanted to get out of there, even for a little while, just to see if I could, was look like something I wasn’t. And I had a really great idea. The perfect metaphor.
I wasn’t about to try it till I had a witness, though. I didn’t know what A.B. was doing, but I knew he’d turn up sooner or later.
So I did my little assignment (as opposed to the Big One). I tried to hack my way through the jungle Stephen Hawking called a book.
At first the only words I could even understand were “the” and “and”. So I skipped to the chapter on “Wormholes and Time Travel.” In it, I found a couple of sentences I could sort of, more or less, just barely work out. This one, for instance: “The laws of science do not distinguish between the past and the future.”
Good. Maybe that was all I needed to know. So if the laws of science didn’t recognize a difference, maybe there wasn’t one. But it seemed to be something Hawking was mentioning only in passing. He did seem to think that at some time in the future it ought to be possible to build a time machine, but that didn’t help— A.B. wasn’t using one. Hawking said if you could warp space-time, you might be able to create something called a wormhole. That didn’t help either, but it did explain that phrase they’re always using in movies— “warp speed.” So that’s what it was.
The best thing about the chapter was when Hawking said, okay maybe it was possible, but if so, then why hadn’t anybody come back from the future to tell us how to do it? He really had a point there.
“I assure you, my dear Soldier,” said the Jag-voice, “that some day a time machine will be built.”
As usual, he plopped onto my library table and hunkered there like a vast, peach-colored loaf of bread. He was in Cat Position Four, Chicken Kitty, with his feet tucked under him like he was laying an egg.
“Well, if isn’t A.B. Where have you been?”
“Giving you ‘space’, as they say in your world. You used it well, I hope.”
I gestured. “Well, I read the book.”
“I see. Well done, my little human. Well done. And understood it, I suppose.”
“Not exactly. But Hawking raises a very good point about the future.”
“And w
hat do you think the answer is? Why hasn’t someone come to explain how time travel is done?” Evidently he didn’t expect an answer. “Simple,” he continued “What do you think Planet Guardians are for? For one thing, to guard against such a travesty. Don’t you simply adore the way Hawking talks about ‘the laws of science’? So brave; so very, very brave. And so thoroughly clueless, as your generation puts it.”
He was so smug.
“Not that there aren’t ‘laws of science.’ Insofar as humans understand them. But the Laws of the Universe supersede and override them. Science is just a crude human way to try to understand things. Not to be confused with the situation as it actually is.”
“Why’d you make me read the freakin’ book then? The answer isn’t even in it.”
“The answer is quite in the Horatio category.”
“That’s something from Shakespeare, right? Can you refresh my recollection?”
“ ‘There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio’.”
“Oh, yeah. I think I’ve heard that one. So I give up, Sandy Claws— how do you time-travel?”
“All right, listen up. You have to take a thought loop.”
“Terrific! You just take a thought loop.”
“Indeed. Every moment in time is connected to every other moment in time by a simple loop, called a thought loop because it can be traversed at the speed of thought. Time travel is elementary once you know how to attach to the correct thought loop. Unfortunately, at this juncture, only Planet Guardians have access to them. However— and here’s the crucial part— if a human is touching any part of the Guardian’s body when he time-travels, she can hitch a ride.”
“Uh—” I had questions, but I didn’t get to ask them.
“The difficulty,” the mad scientist continued, “is that each loop is connected to one place only. Make sense?”
Yep. That part did. “So if we went back to 1492 on the thought loop we’re standing on, we’d still be right here looking at that those hills out there— not at sea with Columbus. Is that it?”
“Precise-a-mento, Traveler! You’ve been promoted again, did you notice? You’re really doing splendidly.”
“Thanks, Kittycurls. I can’t tell you what that means to me.”
“By God, I wish I could sigh. Sarcasm in teenagers didn’t really begin until about fifty years ago— are you aware of that?”
“Great new invention. Must remember to patent it. So here’s the question— how do we get from here to wherever we’re going?”
“Ah, yes. The same way we got to Santa Barbara— bumpily. You see, here’s where cosmic strands come in. You do recall those from Hawking?”
“Strings, not strands. Some kind of rubber band thing.”
“I suppose that’ll do. Strands are similar. Once in the thought loop, we can get a cosmic strand to anywhere— provided we know where to grab it— that will permit a detour. However, it rather shakes up the kidneys.”
“Rawther.” I couldn’t resist mocking him.
But did he care? Moving right along, he said, “I trust you’ve figured out how to be invisible.”
It was like he could read my mind. Which he was probably doing. “I figured out how to get off campus, but it doesn’t involve eye of newt. What would you say to hair of cat?”
“I should say it’s a readily available material— should the Alpha Beast decide to be generous.”
I told him my idea.
“Not a bad start, Traveler,” he said. “Inventive, yet obvious.” He actually stopped his incessant grooming to think about it. He touched my arm with his paw, in that gesture he said was a nod. “Yes. I very much like it. What do you plan to do once you’re off campus?”
“I’d like to go see Abuela.”
“Ah. That I approve of. Take the hair.” He wrinkled his fat face like a kid eating fish eggs. “And make it snappy. The Alpha Beast is not a pet.”
He let me stroke him till a handful of fluff brushed off in my hand, and for a second it really was like having a pet, a great furry love ball, like Curly. But I forgot he’d hear me think that. He snorted, disgusted, and ran for his life.
Me, I ran for a bathroom, but not for the usual reason. First I took out one of my contacts, and then I proceeded to put a spell on it. Maybe it wasn’t the most professional spell in the world, but if the Beast had any kind of point at all, I could at least load it up with that thing he called “energy”.
See, the Mayans used what’s called “sympathetic magic”, and I figured I could convert that idea to the Twenty-First Century. In Mayan times, a rain spell was pretty easy— they just emptied pots of water onto a fire, probably, I figured, chanting something while they did it.
I might not be David Copperfield, but I could sure make a contact lens disappear, which could be a metaphor for me disappearing, and eyes not seeing, both at once. I dropped the lens in water and made up a rhyme telling it what to do:
“Eye within Eye,
Listen— hear now!
Where you go, go I
I now take the clear vow.
As you are transparent,
I’m not now apparent.
As we move through the town,
Our profiles stay down.
As you are not seen,
I’m no longer a teen—
I now become
The Queen of Unseen!”
Honestly. The things I go through for a little freedom.
I took the lens out of the cup, palmed it, and left. I was walking quietly and minding my own business when Rachel, the Level Four with the sappy lavender aura, came barreling toward the bathroom and smacked right into me. And I was walking down the middle of the hall, in plain view. No excuse for it. “Oww, dammit” I blurted. “Watch where you’re…”
I stopped in mid-sentence, realizing I’d just sworn. If she reported me, I’d get two consequences, and I was seven-eighths of the way to Level Three. A seriously bad break.
But she didn’t register any of it. She was looking at me like I’d grown a tail. “Reeno? Where’d you come from? I didn’t even see you.”
“Oh. Sorry,” I said. “You’re not hurt, are you?” Sweet as a chocolate churro. I could afford to be. Maybe I was going to get away with my little outburst.
And more to the point, I seemed to be invisible.
Now, people who don’t believe in magic— like me, half an hour earlier— might think it happened because Rachel was in her own little dream world. And maybe it did. But it sure gave me an idea how the thing could work. Which gave me confidence; which may be what makes the world go ’round.
I slipped the contact into my pocket and made a big point of rubbing my eye in Spanish class. In about a nanosecond, my eye was totally red, angry, inflamed, and tearing like mad, due to being full of Beast fuzz. It was totally killing me! If A.B. was kind of a Beast of Beasts, maybe it followed that he had fur like a sasquatch. It felt like somebody was scrubbing my eyeball with a Brillo pad.
I watched alarm spread, like a coat of sunscreen, from one side of the teacher’s face to the other. “Senorita Reeno! What’s wrong with your eye?” She sounded panicked.
Trying not to pass out from the pain, I said, “My eye? I don’t know, it’s been hurting lately— I thought I was getting a little infection, but I didn’t want to say anything.”
“Oh, pobrecita! Don’t worry, we have very good doctors here.”
For a moment, I did worry— I thought she meant we had doctors on campus, but all was well. Apparently what she meant was, in the past certain boarding school princesses had whined about small town doctors. Can you imagine? I mean, when you’re in someone else’s town you can at least be polite.
Here’s the beauty of going off campus— you have to have an escort, but you don’t have to wear your uniform. That’s nine-tenths of invisibility right there.
When I went back to change, The Beast was sitting on my bed.
“What, pray tell, is a Sasquatc
h?”
“It’s a mythical beast like you, only Californian. Bigfoot’s another name for it. By the way, my eye’s on fire.”
A lot he cared. “Don’t forget to take your contact with you— the one with the charm on it.” He leapt to the floor and minced away.
But good thing he reminded me. I took the contact out of my khaki pocket and wrapped it in a fold of my T-shirt, my real, uncollared, non-uniform T-shirt that I hadn’t even had on since I took it off on the first day of Bad Girl School. Reeno rules! I thought as I strode out to Hal’s office to meet my escort. I felt powerful. I felt like myself for the first time since Dad brought me here.
“Forget powerful. Start feeling invisible,” said the Jag-voice. The Beast was lolling in the hall in Cat Position Six, Jabba the Cat.
“Go chase a squirrel, kitten-witten.”
But I hunched a little bit and kind of shuffled to the office, slipping in like a little ghost. I was probably there a full two minutes before Hal looked up from his paperwork. “Ah, Reeno— didn’t see you come in.”
“That’s okay. I’m kind of invisible today.” Hey, fake it till you make it. Who knew? It might work.
“That eye looks bad, honey. Rachel’s going to take you to Dr. Alvarez. Here she comes now.”
I’d lucked out. Rachel had recently made Level Five, so I guess they wanted to give her a little responsibility. She and I weren’t exactly best friends, but one thing I knew about her— she was susceptible to my “glamour.”
She didn’t even talk to me on the taxi ride to the doctor’s. Just like I was— you know— invisible.
I had a plan, once we got there. I figured Dr. Alvarez would call me in, leaving Rachel in the waiting room, and then he’d let me out through a different door from the one I entered. I’d still fetch up in the waiting room, but since I was invisible, I’d be able to sneak out without Rachel knowing, go see Abuela, then slide back in and claim I’d just come out of the inner sanctum. That is, if I decided to come back at all.
Bad Girl School Page 14