The Gemini Effect

by Scott Jarol

  “Can she see me?”

  “I said she’s a ghost, not you’re a ghost. Of course she can see you. That’s silly.”

  Zeke studied her. The whole idea that the strange girl could think she controlled her visibility seemed a little ridiculous. But in some ways, she could have passed for an actual ghost. She wore a cloak-like coat pieced together from satin remnants, a veil of tatters draped around her. Her flat black hair seemed to blot the light right out of the air. Her pale skin looked translucent behind the thick coils of her scarf that veiled the lower half of her face. In the anemic light of the flickering alcohol lanterns she looked like a faded black-and-white photograph. The only color on her was the green of her eyes.

  “What about grownups?” he asked Nate.

  “They don’t seem to notice her, so I guess she must be invisible to them.”

  Zeke wondered how long she could keep that blank expression on her face. She crossed her legs and smoothed her coat as if posing for a portrait, but showing no hint of anger, joy, or disappointment.

  “Why hasn’t Bruder started class?” he whispered to Nate.

  “He has to wait until Cynthia gets here with the assignments.”

  “Cynthia?”

  Nate signaled him to be quiet and stiffened, face forward, lips shut tight.

  The other students also sat silently, hands folded. Zeke noticed Mr. Bruder watching him with raised eyebrows as if daring him to speak again.

  Looking worried, Nate raised his hand and waited for Mr. Bruder’s nod before speaking quietly to Zeke again. “This is silent time. We start each day by thinking about how to keep as quiet as possible.”

  Mr. Bruder appeared ready to speak when the door flew open and Cynthia swept in. “Good morning, everyone!”

  Virgil trailed behind her, handing out papers to the students.

  Zeke couldn’t believe his eyes. How could Cynthia possibly have anything to do with the Aggies? She was the reason some of them were here. That should have been enough for her.

  “First of all,” she said, “I just want to welcome Zeke to our class.”

  She clapped until the others joined her. When the applause died away, which didn’t take long, she continued. “I’m sure you’ll make Zeke feel welcome. I know he’ll fit right in.”

  She took a seat on the tall stool Mr. Bruder brought up behind her from the front of the room and scanned the faces of all fifteen students. “I’m just so super proud of you. We’re making excellent progress together.” She smiled first at the class and then at Mr. Bruder as if sharing acknowledgment of the students.

  “Now,” she said with a sigh, as if waking from a blissful daydream, “I hope you’re ready for your next assignments.”

  Zeke glanced at Nate, who was already flipping through the stapled pages.

  “That’s a good one,” said Nate, his finger on one of the equations. Apparently, for Nate, math was a fun game.

  One of the other students raised his hand. Even from behind Zeke easily recognized Chuck, who at fourteen was the oldest student in Ag Sci and several inches taller than most of the other students, especially Nate.

  “Chuck, yes!” She tilted her head and smiled. “Oh, it’s so super exciting to see you back at school. Let’s welcome Chuck back.”

  The students clapped.

  “We’re so proud to see you’ve kept up with all your work.”

  “He had chicken pox,” Nate whispered. “I hate chicken pox.”

  Nate scratched his legs through his pants, and Zeke scooted a few inches away.

  “I don’t have them now,” Nate said, “but thinking about it makes me itchy.”

  Chuck didn’t respond to Cynthia’s welcome but instead continued with his question. “I was just wondering, how will we know when we’ve got good enough grades to go back to school?”

  “Chuck, I’m a little surprised by that question,” she said. “You never left school. This is all part of your education. And just think of the extra learning opportunities you have here.” She wrote a note in her mini-notebook, and then cradled it and her gloved hands in her lap. “Still, I know, it’s easy to become impatient. Don’t worry. Mr. Bruder gets updates from Principal Fairchild every week. He’ll know when each of you has earned high enough grades to return to classroom studies.”

  She glanced at Mr. Bruder, who now stood near her in front of the class. He nodded in agreement, expressionless.

  Cynthia brightened. “Oh, I know! Each time it happens, we’ll have a little party to celebrate the good news. That will be super fun.”

  Zeke scanned the faces of the other students. They seemed to believe what she was saying.

  “Now,” she continued, “Virgil has handed out your next assignments. These are due in two hours, so please work hard. And don’t forget, neatness counts.”

  She stood up and straightened her long white coat. Three students raised their hands.

  “Yes, Dahlia, do you have a question?”

  “I didn’t get my assignment today.”

  “Me neither,” said one of the other two.

  “Oh, yes. Will those who didn’t receive an assignment please stand?”

  The three students, one girl and two boys, rose.

  Cynthia stopped smiling. She looked sullen. “I’m afraid I have some bad news.”

  The three standing students glanced at one another like deer startled by a howling wolf. Zeke wondered what Cynthia’s meddling fingers could be knitting.

  “As you know, this is a special program under the direct supervision of Principal Fairchild and our own Mr. Bruder. I hope you’ll understand that I’m just the messenger, and I really wish I could change things.”

  One by one, she looked into their eyes sympathetically before continuing.

  “Recently, your test results have declined. In fact, I have them right here.” She opened her little notebook to a page bookmarked with a pink ribbon. “Dahlia, on your last test, you scored only twenty-three percent. Sam, you earned seventeen percent, and Gregory, I’m afraid you answered only four questions correctly.”

  She pursed her lips in a sympathetic frown.

  “But that’s impossible,” said Dahlia. “I knew all the answers and—”

  “I’m super sorry, Dahlia. Principal Fairchild has decided you must leave the Second Chance program. Principal Fairchild, poor thing, is so sad. When she gave me her instructions, she could hardly speak. It’s your lack of commitment. We all know you can do it. That’s why it’s so sad that you’ve chosen to neglect your studies.”

  Cynthia slipped off her white glove and pretended to wipe a tear from her eye, careful not to smudge her mascara.

  “The good news is that you all get to continue your studies in Agricultural Sciences. You get to stay with your friends, and you’ll still have great jobs when you finish school.” She smiled. “It must be so much fun to work outside in the crisp air. And you get to be with animals—no math, no history. In some ways, I envy you.”

  The three students took their seats, tears in their eyes. Dahlia leaned on Chuck, and he held her hand.

  “Bad habits are a little like the sniffles. They can spread from person to person,” Cynthia said. “I—we—I mean, Principal Fairchild and Mr. Bruder have noticed others are slipping a teensy bit, too. I think you know who you are, so I won’t say anything more. Let’s all work a little harder. We can all make Principal Fairchild proud.”

  Zeke wrinkled his brow in disbelief as Cynthia handed Mr. Bruder a thick envelope. So this is how things were really done. When Mr. Bruder started to tear the envelope open, she shook her head sharply, and he folded it over and stuffed it into his coat pocket. With her arms pinned tightly to her sides to avoid contact with anything or anyone, Cynthia walked back to the door, which Virgil held wide for her.

  “What about Zeke?” asked Nate. “He doesn’t have an assignment either.”

  Zeke glared at him.

  “Oh, I almost forgot,” said Cynthia. “Thank you, Nate, for re
minding me. Principal Fairchild has made a new rule. There will now be a waiting period before new Agricultural Sciences students can join the Second Chance program.”

  “Waiting period?” asked Nate. “We didn’t have to wait.”

  “Yes, as I said, it’s a new rule. One year.”

  Zeke toed the dirt floor. It didn’t matter much to him either way, but the news seemed to upset Nate. He just wished Nate would stop calling so much attention to him. Everyone in the school knew it was best to not be noticed by Mr. Bruder.

  “That doesn’t seem fair,” said Nate.

  “Just think about how hard you’ve worked over the past year,” said Cynthia. “Don’t you think it’s more fair for everyone to have the same learning opportunity?”

  Nate looked at Zeke and dropped his gaze to the floor, as if it were somehow his fault.

  “I want to thank all of you so, so very much. It’s super exciting to be your ombudsman.” As she stepped outside, she called back over one shoulder, “Remember what Principal Fairchild always says: ‘Good work is complete work.’”

  The door slammed behind them, and the Aggies could clearly hear her snapping at Virgil on the other side: “Get this filth off my boots!” Everyone looked studiously at their own work.

  Zeke scooted closer to Nate. “Has anyone ever gotten back into school?”

  “Not yet,” said Nate. “But some of us are probably getting close.”

  Nate leafed through his test. “It’s just calculus.”

  He laid the paper on the bench beside him, smoothed it with the side of his hand, and leaned forward to tap the shoulder of the girl sitting directly in front of him. “I bet I can finish before you.”

  She accepted by starting to fill in her answer sheet.

  “Hey, I don’t have a pencil yet!” Nate said. He dug through his coat and pulled out a pencil stump and a lump of crumbly eraser.

  He glanced at Zeke, apparently embarrassed that he might need to erase. “I don’t usually make too many mistakes, but it’s good to be prepared, you know, just in case.”

  Zeke leaned in as if trying to get a closer look at Nate’s paper and asked under his breath, “Bruder teaches calculus?”

  “There’s not much math in Ag Sciences, mostly weighing and counting things. But most of us already know calculus, and some of the others are really good at writing and stuff.”

  Zeke wasn’t sure which was weirder, that the Aggies knew calculus or that Bruder didn’t seem to have anything to say about their work. It looked like Cynthia was running the class.

  When everyone had finished their assignments, Mr. Bruder pointed silently at Margaux, directing her to collect them. Zeke watched her sort the papers by subject. She went to the back of the room and knelt down at one of the benches to tap and square up the edges of the stack. As she stood up, Zeke saw her swap the pile for another stack tucked inside her baggy coat. She had her eye mainly on Bruder, so she didn’t notice him watching her. Zeke quickly turned his attention to Nate before she could see him looking in her direction.

  “How was it for you?” he asked Nate.

  “Same as always. Piece of cake.”

  “How much is she charging you?”

  “Charging? You mean money? She’s not charging us. Why would she charge us to take tests?”

  “Just wondering how much it costs to be in the Second Chance program.”

  “It’s totally free. We just need to work hard. If we do good work, we can leave the Ag Sci program and go back to regular classes like math and science and stuff. I like science. Well, mostly physics, because biology and chemistry are too smelly.”

  Something didn’t add up. The Aggies had no regular classes, but Bruder and Cynthia had them taking tests in every subject. And why was a kid like Nate shoveling dirt?

  Mr. Bruder kicked up his boots and dropped his heels with a bang on the table that served as his desk. Zeke jerked backward and nearly tipped his bench, Nate, and two other students. Mr. Bruder opened a tattered fishing magazine and began issuing orders without looking up

  “Time to do some real work. Kapaloos,” mispronouncing Zeke’s last name, “we’ll start you off with something easy. You’ll clean the barn.”

  “Mr. Bruder,” Nate said, “I think it’s pronounced Ka-pop-oo-loss.”

  “And your new buddy Nate, will show you what to do.”

  Nate scrunched up his face in disgust. “Maybe we could clean up the school first?”

  “The janitor can change lightbulbs,” snapped Mr. Bruder. “Clean the barn.”

  The rest of the students began lining up as two of the younger ones handed out shovels, picks, and hand spades. Zeke slipped into line and self-consciously accepted a spade. One by one, they collected their tools and filed outside to begin digging up summer turnips and beets from under the snow and crusty frozen dirt.

  Nate pointed at Zeke’s eight-inch hand spade. “You’re gonna need a bigger shovel.”

  From the pile of long-handled tools, Zeke selected a shovel shaped for scooping up large loads.

  “Me too?” Nate asked Mr. Bruder. Again without looking up from his magazine, Mr. Bruder grunted.

  Nate picked out a push shovel with no scoop, just a wide, flat blade. Then he took a greasy rag from a box, ripped it into four pieces, and held out two to Zeke.

  “Like this,” he said, stuffing a wadded up ball of stained cloth into each nostril. The loose ends hung over his lips.

  “No, thanks,” said Zeke. “I’ll just hold my breath if I have to.”

  “Okay, but it’s really smelly. I’ll keep these, just in case.” He pocketed the extra pieces.

  Nate laid his shovel in a wheelbarrow, and Zeke followed him to the barn. He walked up the dusty center aisle between two rows of cows chewing alfalfa, showing no interest in either of the boys. Nate stopped in front of the first wide brown Guernsey cow and scratched behind her ears, as if petting a giant dog.

  “This doesn’t look so bad,” said Zeke.

  “They’re kind of nice on this end, but that’s the wrong side. Over here.”

  Nate disappeared around the back of the stalls. When Zeke rounded the corner, it was like running into a solid wall of stench. He held his breath as long as he could, waving his hand until Nate handed him the cloth swatches.

  A muddy mixture of cow urine and manure covered the floor. Nate set the edge of his push shovel and then plowed a straight path through the muck, which piled up in front of the blade, a rolling mound like the bow wave of a ship. At the end of the row, Nate called back to Zeke, “Hurry up. You have to scoop it before it spreads out again.”

  Sludge oozed in around Zeke’s shovel. When he yanked the scoop straight up and it broke free from the suction, the whole mess nearly flew straight at Nate. The smell of the freshly turned manure penetrated right through their plugged noses. Zeke’s eyes watered. They clamped their lips tight as if trying to prevent the thick smell from coating their tongues.

  Zeke held the load as far from himself as his shovel’s handle would allow without losing his balance. Nate pointed to the wheelbarrow.

  Once he’d transferred a full load to the point of nearly spilling over, Nate used hand signals to direct Zeke to roll it out of the barn. Zeke gripped the wheelbarrow’s two handles and balanced it on its wobbly front wheel. The whole thing nearly tipped a couple of times as he bumped over cracks in the floor and dropped into potholes in the trampled dirt outside the barn. Nate ran ahead, partly to stay upwind but also to lead Zeke to the compost heap.

  Zeke stopped at the bottom and lifted the wheelbarrows to dump the load.

  “Wait! Not here,” said Nate. “It goes up there.”

  He pointed to the summit of the steaming twenty-foot mound.

  “How am I supposed to get it up there?”

  “It’s easier to pull.”

  Zeke tried to hold the front rim of the wheelbarrow and pull it up the hill. His boots started sinking into the pile.

  “Not like that.” Nate tu
rned the wheelbarrow around and stood between the handles, facing backward. He picked up the handles and towed the wheelbarrow up the mound behind him like a donkey pulling a cart.

  “You’re pretty good at that. Maybe you should do it.”

  “Now you try it,” said Nate, not falling for Zeke’s fake flattery.

  Zeke took Nate’s place. The heat generated by the decomposing waste kept it from freezing hard enough to form a solid path for the heavy wheelbarrow. The wheel slid more than it rolled. Whenever it got stuck, Nate held his breath and pushed from behind.

  The pile smelled less than Zeke had expected. When the breeze shifted, blowing the odor from the fresh load of manure away from him, the surrounding mound smelled faintly sweet and musky. Most of the waste, mixed with leftover plant stalks from the fields, had composted to become fertile soil.

  As he reached the top of the mound, Zeke spotted something moving across the fields. It was Doc. He was pushing a trash bin to the recycling dump, a junk lot where the Aggies dismantled old machines and furniture to collect screws, nails, hinges, springs, and other useful hardware. He must have the QuARC!

  Zeke was sure Doc would unload the QuARC there for him to recover once everyone else had gone home. He was about to wave happily when he realized Doc wasn’t dropping anything in the lot.

  “You have to lift the handles and dump it out,” said Nate.

  “Yeah,” said Zeke absentmindedly, his attention now focused on Doc. “Dump it.”

  Late afternoon cloud shadows checkered the fields and school grounds. From his distant vantage point, with the sun in his eyes and Doc in shade, Zeke could hardly see what Doc was doing. Maybe he could sneak away without Bruder noticing his absence.

  “I think you’re supposed to dump it,” repeated Nate. “Mr. Bruder wants you to learn how.”

  Zeke paid no attention to Nate.

  Doc was loading something into a rickety, homemade trailer hitched to his three-wheeled cycle. He took one last look around, tossing some things aside, mounted the cycle, and cranked it. As he rolled away along the rutted path, a low ray of sunlight glinted copper-colored off the QuARC.

  That was it. He couldn’t risk waiting any longer.