A Dark Inheritance

by Chris D'Lacey

  “I need to talk.”

  A boy’s face appeared at a window. “That’s her,” I heard him chatter to his buddies. Already, the new French teacher was causing a stir. Chantelle walked over and closed a blind. “In here,” she said. “Quickly. Before someone sees.” She gestured to a small supply room. I followed her in, squeezing past a stack of reference books and Mr. Besson’s cycling gear. She put the light on and closed the door. “Be swift. Besson might return at any moment. What do you want to say?”

  I preferred you brunette? Maybe not. “There’s a problem with Freya. She’s dumped me for a guy called Ryan Garvey.”

  “Ah, young love,” she sighed, gathering her false hair into a ponytail. “Always so very complicated.”

  “It’s not funny, Chantelle.”

  “Ms. Perdot,” she reminded me.

  “I mean it. You saw how scared she was at the clinic. She’s avoiding me now. She won’t talk about Rafferty while she’s with Ryan. And there’s no way I’ll get her to the Nolans’ house.”

  “Then the answer is simple; you must win her back.”

  “How?” I threw out my arms and nearly knocked a tray of paper off a shelf.

  Before I could say another word, Chantelle had pressed a finger hard against my lips. “Ssssh. I thought I heard something.”

  Besson, talking to a kid. “Emily, do you know where Ms. Perdot has gone?”

  “No, sir,” said the girl.

  Chantelle leaned forward and whispered, “Garvey is the boy who was bleeding, yes?”

  I nodded.

  “Okay. I will deal with it.” She squeezed past me, switching off the light as she opened the door.

  “Ah, there you are,” said Besson. “I was worried we’d lost you.”

  “Oh … non,” I heard her say, acting surprised. She closed the door, shutting me in the dark. “Forgive me, Monsieur Besson, I was simply exploring.”

  “Shall I take you through the layout of the supply room?”

  My heart missed a beat. If he found me in here, we were both finished.

  “Later, perhaps. I would like to see the library, if I may?”

  “Of course. Of course. Please, after you.”

  Their voices faded into the distance.

  I gave it twenty seconds, then opened the door a crack. There was a girl in the room. She had her back to me, bent over a notebook, writing. I crept out and closed the supply room door, only to knock Mr. Besson’s chair. The girl turned. She was the young and studious type. I snatched up a book. “Came in for this. Didn’t want to disturb you. Homework assignment.”

  She glanced at the cover. “That’s a first-aid manual.”

  So it was. Drat. Think, Malone, think. “Yeah, I need to know … how to stop a nosebleed.”

  The girl gave me a look that said she could have told me, but why would she want to bother? “Make sure you bring it back or I’ll tell Mr. Besson you stole it.” She tossed her hair over her shoulder and returned to her writing.

  Teacher’s pet. Nice.

  I made my way quickly out of the room, leaving the first-aid manual on a shelf. I wouldn’t be needing that — unless I had to rough up Garvey some more.

  I had to wait until the final period of the day before I learned how Chantelle planned to “deal” with Ryan. I was back in Mr. Besson’s room, with the whole class, including Freya. Chantelle was teaching our French lesson while Mr. Besson looked on from the side of the room.

  After hearing our names and saying something to each of us in French, she said, “In a moment, I would like each of you to take ten minutes to write down as many French words or expressions you can think of that are commonly used in the English language. You might be surprised how many there are. Café, for instance — you are not allowed to use that for your list.”

  “Oh!” cried a couple of disappointed voices.

  Mr. Besson chuckled. “Come on. There are plenty more. I’ve thought of half a dozen while Ms. Perdot was speaking.”

  Of course you have, sir. Anything to impress the gorgeous new teacher.

  “I know one,” hissed a voice to my left.

  Annoyingly, despite our dustup, I was still the closest student to Garvey’s desk.

  He cupped a hand around his mouth. “Je t’aime,” he whispered. “It means ‘I love you.’”

  Clearly, losing some blood from his nose had not affected his “stupid” gene. It was a French phrase, yes, but not what you’d call “in common use.” “Yeah, well, I don’t love you,” I hissed back.

  He scowled and aimed a kick my way.

  “Garvey! Malone!”

  Oh, great. Now he’d done it. Besson had ears like un grand lapin. He stared at us over his folded arms. “Pay attention to Ms. Perdot or you’ll both be staying after school tonight.”

  “I was only telling Malone that I knew one,” griped Ryan.

  “Well, let’s hear it,” said Besson. “This ought to be good.”

  Yeah, really good. Ryan’s face had turned the color of a ripe tomato. Either he was about to confess his undying admiration for Mr. Besson or I would have to rescue the pair of us. Maybe I owed him, for that punch.

  “Au pair, sir,” I said. “Ryan thought of au pair.”

  Someone slammed down a pen. “Aww, I had that!”

  I looked across at Freya. She sighed and shook her head.

  Chantelle made her way down the room and perched on the corner of Ryan’s desk. “Very good,” she said to him, her voice like a warm summer breeze.

  “Thanks, ma’am,” he mumbled, barely flicking me a glance before fixing his gaze on Chantelle’s huge eyes.

  “I will look forward to seeing what else you come up with.”

  Lauren Shenton covered her mouth and snickered. “Ms. Perdot, Ryan’s useless at French.”

  “Apparently not,” said Chantelle. “And you are … Lauren, is that right?”

  Lauren nodded and chewed her lip, fearful now that she’d spoken out of turn. She was the class mouse, small and pretty with feathery blond hair. The rumor on the playground was that Lauren liked Ryan, despite the fact that she’d openly dissed him. Chantelle, I thought, had picked up on that.

  She looked at Ryan again with a smile that could have melted chocolate. “Well,” she said. “Lauren, it seems, has thrown down a challenge. Do you think you can do better than Lauren with your list?”

  A little bubble of air popped out of the center of Garvey’s lips.

  The class burst into embarrassed laughter, except Freya, I noticed, and Mr. Besson.

  “Oh, dear,” sighed Besson. “You seem to have mesmerized him, Ms. Perdot.”

  And maybe she had. It looked to me like Chantelle was glamouring Ryan. His gaze was pinned to her like a moth to a board. But what was she trying to make him do? And why had she put so much emphasis on Lauren’s name?

  It wasn’t long before we found out.

  Mr. Besson snapped his fingers and told us to get on with the exercise.

  I didn’t find it easy. After five minutes, I’d only gotten two: cliché and prairie (only because Mom had told me once it was French for area). But Ryan was scribbling away like he’d worked out the plot of a novel. There was no way he knew that many French words.

  And he didn’t.

  After ten minutes, Besson clapped his hands and told us to stop writing.

  Chantelle then asked who would like to read their list.

  A small forest of hands went up.

  After the teacher’s pets had had their turn, Chantelle turned to Ryan. She invited him to stand up and read his list. Ryan shook his head.

  “Come on,” said Besson, “we’re all agog.”

  Ryan shook his head again. He seemed to have emerged from a mild coma and broken out in a deep, deep panic. He folded his paper and tried to hide it in his bag.

  Mr. Besson wasn’t having that. He strolled across the room and snatched the list out of Ryan’s grasp. He read it in a flash. “Oh, for goodness’ sake!” he thundered, and r
ipped it into shreds.

  But not before Amy Cooper had risen from her seat and peeked over his shoulder. Her horrified gasp kind of said it all, but the details sped around the class like a sizzling, unstoppable gunpowder fuse. He’s written Lauren’s name, over and over!

  BOOM! Poor Ryan. He never stood a chance.

  The bell rang for the end of the lesson.

  First kid out the door was Freya, looking like she wanted to murder Lauren Shenton.

  Chantelle caught my eye as I made my way to the front. “À vous, Michael,” she whispered.

  For once, I didn’t need a translation. Chantelle had played her part.

  Now it was down to me to make up with Freya.

  I thought about it all night long. How do you regain the friendship of a girl who doesn’t trust you anymore — especially when you have no real recall of just how close you might have been? Even with Garvey out of the equation, there was little chance Freya would talk to me, let alone accept a mumbled apology. I needed a gesture. Something that would move her. Not flowers or chocolate. That would be lame. A teddy bear always made Josie soften, but given the mood Freya was in right now, she’d probably hang a teddy from the nearest tree. I couldn’t put a cuddly toy through that. What do you give an angry goth? It’s not the kind of question Google can help you with.

  The answer came to me during breakfast. I’d all but settled on the safe but dull idea of a card, when I had another strange memory flash, the first since leaving the UNICORNE clinic. I saw myself holding a crown of dragons. It was such a distinctive image that I dropped my spoon into my cereal bowl, splashing droplets of milk over Josie’s arm.

  “Oh, thanks!” She spooned half a Wheato back at me.

  A crown of dragons. Where had that come from? I picked the Wheato off my shirt and slowly ate it.

  “Michael? E-yuck.” Josie pushed the rest of her breakfast aside.

  “Will you help me with something? It has to be quick.”

  “I’m not washing your shirt, if that’s what you think.”

  “No, not the shirt. How do you make a paper chain?”

  “What?”

  “A paper chain. You know, like … Dad’s dragons.”

  Josie eyed me suspiciously. “Is this for Freya?”

  I urged her to keep her voice low. Mom had gone to put some stuff in the trash can, but the breakfast table wasn’t out of range. “Yes.”

  She mulled it over for a moment. “When do you want it?”

  Cue best cheesy grin. “Um, this morning?”

  She sighed and pushed herself away from the table. “How long?”

  I glanced at the clock. “You’ve got ten minutes.”

  “I meant how many dragons in the chain, doofus?”

  The trash can closed with a clatter. “I don’t know. Enough to say … ‘I miss you.’”

  Josie did a double take. “Look at you being all romantic.”

  Mom stepped into the kitchen. “Josie, if you’ve finished, go and brush your hair.”

  “You owe me,” Josie whispered, and shot upstairs.

  She made an amazing chain, out of some Christmas wrapping paper, the good kind that doesn’t go limp or tear. The snowflake design on it somehow added a touch of class. I counted twelve dragons when the chain opened out.

  Before leaving the house, I found an envelope and a small roll of tape. My idea was to put the dragons in the envelope, seal it, and stick it to Freya’s locker door, with no indication that the chain had come from me. But what if she thought Ryan Garvey had sent them? I couldn’t take that chance. So when I got to school, I slipped into an empty room, turned the dragons plain side up, and wrote my cell number on them. That used up ten in the chain. I put my initials on the last two dragons, along with a hopeful x.

  Then I sealed the envelope and waited.

  She was there, in three of my four lessons, but she didn’t ever look at me and she said precisely zilch.

  I checked the lockers at break. The envelope had gone. Even so, I started to doubt she’d seen it. What if someone had stolen it, thinking there might be money inside? Or what if Freya herself had simply flushed it down a toilet?

  Girls: such a nightmare.

  I consulted Chantelle. “Give her time,” she advised.

  I gave her till three fifteen p.m. I looked for her after school. No sign.

  In the car, Josie gave me a silent dressing-down. How could you possibly mess up? she mouthed.

  I buried my face in my hands.

  Josie was right. I really didn’t have much luck with girls.

  The call came at ten p.m. I was in bed by then, unable to sleep. I dived across the room and grabbed the phone. It had to be either Freya or Klimt.

  It was Freya.

  “I can’t sleep,” she said. She sounded pretty wired. I judged the mood right for once and let her speak. “She won’t let me rest. She never lets me rest. She fills my head with stuff I don’t know. Her stuff, things she wants me to remember. I don’t know who I am anymore. If I look into a mirror, it’s her I see. The girl in the paper, hurt and angry. She has blood in her hair. So much blood.”

  “Her name is Rafferty Nolan,” I said.

  Freya started to cry.

  “Trace is her dog. That’s why she comes to you. You’ve got Rafferty’s heart.”

  There was a clunk as if she’d dropped the phone, or maybe just fallen onto her side. Through her sobbing, she said, “How can you know that? How can you know her name? Even my dad doesn’t know who my donor was.”

  I chewed my lip. How much to tell her? Whatever it was, it had to be convincing. The kind of convincing that might stop a girl from stepping over a cliff.

  “I had a transplant, too.”

  Now I understood Klimt’s reasoning. A transplant operation was something few people would have experienced. No wonder he’d kept me on Freya’s case.

  “I don’t … remember things about my donor,” I said, “but Mom says I was different after the treatment.”

  “What was it? Your transplant?”

  “Bone marrow — for leukemia.”

  “Do you have to go for checkups?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Pills?”

  “No.”

  She started crying again. I guessed she went for lots of checkups, probably took a lot of medication, too. That would explain the days off from school. And the sickly skin. And the baggy eyes. The looking-after-her-father thing was probably just a story to keep the hounds at bay; the truth was, her dad was looking after her.

  “I still don’t understand,” she said. “How could you know who my donor was?”

  I took a deep breath. This was going to be difficult. One word out of place and I’d lose her forever. “I went to see Rafferty’s mother. Not about you, just to check on Trace. She told me … how Rafferty had died.” I heard Freya sniff, but what she was taking for a sympathy pause was really me wanting to skirt the question of how I knew Rafferty had carried a donor card. In the end, I just ignored it and said, “I kind of guessed you’d got Rafferty’s heart. When you freaked in the clinic, I knew for sure.”

  There was another pause, longer than the previous one. “Who else have you told?”

  “No one.”

  “Honest?”

  “Cross my h — Honest. I swear.”

  “What about the mother?”

  I shook my head. “I’ve only met Aileen Nolan once.”

  “But does she know?”

  “No. She’s just … sad, and confused about Trace.”

  A small volcano erupted in my right ear. Freya blowing her nose. “What did she tell you about how Rafferty died?”

  “She fell off her bike and hit her head on a rock. It was an accident. Why?”

  “There was a light,” said Freya.

  “What?” My hand seemed to freeze around the phone.

  “Just before she falls, she looks back — and there’s a light. I remember it, Michael. She makes me remember. Someone was fol
lowing her. It wasn’t an accident.”

  At last, I had something to report to Klimt. A light in the darkness before Rafferty fell. Headlights? I asked. What else could it be? Full on? Dipped? How many? What layout? Freya wasn’t certain. Rafferty only had a sense of it, she said. A sudden intense blossoming of light, as if beams had collided from different directions. Maybe a pale blue tint.

  At school the next day, I found Chantelle in the languages lab and told her. She nodded and said I’d done well. She warned me not to share this information with anyone, but we both knew my mission didn’t end there. In a sense, it was just beginning. If someone had been following Rafferty, we needed to know who, and we needed to know why, if only because that same person might have been the one who had driven into me.

  Chantelle said, “You have my number. I need to know where you are at all times now. Once you push a stick into a hornets’ nest, the wasps get frightened — and people get stung.”

  “Can’t you trace me?” I said.

  She looked at me over her fake glasses.

  “The unicorn,” I whispered, pointing at my feet. “Klimt said there was a tracking device under my skin.”

  She picked up some student notebooks and started arranging them in name order. “That would be for emergencies only.”

  That didn’t sound wholly convincing, as if she were holding something back, but when I tried to query it, she cut me off, saying, “A call or a text tells me where you’re going to be. Forewarned is forearmed, d’accord? Have you spoken to Freya this morning?”

  “No. She wasn’t at registration. I haven’t asked her yet, but I think she’ll go with me to the Nolans’ house now.”

  Chantelle gave a thoughtful nod. “Tell me when you have set something up. What about the journalist woman — have you spoken to her since the accident?”

  “No. I’ve been meaning to ask you about her. Did Klimt check her out?”

  “Check her out?” she repeated.

  “He said Candy wasn’t driving the car that hit me, but apart from you, she was the only person who knew I’d be on Berry Head that morning.”

  She put aside the handful of books she’d been stacking. “Are you suggesting that I ran you down?”