Code Name Cassandra

by Meg Cabot

  But an actual flute? Shane had been the one making that gorgeous—no, not just gorgeous—magnificent music on my instrument of choice? Shane? My Shane?

  Professor Le Blanc was shaking his head. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said to Shane. “Most of the greatest flutists in the world have been men. And with talent like yours, young man, you might one day be amongst them—”

  “Not if I get recruited by the Bears,” Shane pointed out.

  “Well,” Professor Le Blanc said, looking a little taken aback. “Er, maybe not then …”

  “Is my lesson over?” Shane demanded, craning his neck to get a look at the professor’s face.

  “Er,” Professor Le Blanc said. “Yes, actually, it is.”

  “Good,” Shane said, tucking his flute case beneath his arm. “Then I’m outta here.”

  And with that, he stalked away.

  Professor Le Blanc and I stared after him for a minute or two. Then the instructor seemed to shake himself, and, holding open the door to the practice room for me, said with forced jocularity, “Well, now, let’s see what you can do, then, Jessica. Why don’t you play something for me?” Professor Le Blanc went to the piano that stood in one corner of the walk-in-closet-sized room, sat down on the bench, and picked up a Palm Pilot. “Anything you like,” he said, punching the buttons of the Palm Pilot. “I like to assess my pupil’s skill level before I begin teaching.”

  I opened my flute case and began assembling my instrument, but my mind wasn’t on what I was doing. I just couldn’t get what I’d heard out of my head. It didn’t make sense. It didn’t make sense that Shane could play like that. It just didn’t seem possible. The kid had played beautifully, movingly, as if he’d been swept away by the notes, each one of which had rung out with angelic—almost aching—purity. The same Shane who had stuck an entire hamburger in his mouth at lunch—I’d sat there and watched him do it—bun and all, then swallowed it, practically whole, just because Arthur had dared him to. That same Shane. That Shane could play like that.

  And he didn’t even care. He’d wanted to go to football camp.

  He’d been lying. He cared. No one could play like that and not care. No one.

  I put my own flute to my lips, and began to play. Nothing special. Green Day. “Time of Our Lives.” I jazzed it up a little, since it’s a relatively simple little song. But all I could think about was Shane. There had to be depths, wells of untapped emotion in that boy, to make him capable of producing such music.

  And all he wanted to do was play football.

  Professor Le Blanc looked up from his Palm Pilot at some point during my recital. When I was through, he said, “Play something else, please.”

  I launched into an old standby. “Fascinating Rhythm.” Always a crowd-pleaser. At least it pleased my dad, when I was practicing at home. I usually played it at double time, to get it over with. I did so now.

  The question was, how could a kid who could play like that be such a total and complete pain in the butt? I mean, how was it possible that the person who’d played such hauntingly beautiful music, and the person who this morning had told Lionel he’d dipped his toothbrush in the toilet—after, of course, Lionel had started using it—be one and the same individual?

  Professor Le Blanc was rooting through his briefcase, which he’d left on top of the piano.

  “Here,” he said. “Now this.” He dropped a book of sheet music onto the stand in front of my chair.

  Brahms. Symphony Number 1. What was he trying to do, put me to sleep? It was an insult. We’d played that my freshman year, for God’s sake. My fingers flew over the key holes. Open, of course. My instrument was practically an antique, handed down from some obscure member of the Mastriani clan who’d gotten it under questionable circumstances. Yeah, okay, so my flute was probably hot.

  The thing I couldn’t figure out was what was God—and I’m not saying I’m so all-fired sure there is one, but for argument’s sake, let’s say there is—thinking, giving a kid like Shane talent like that? Seriously. Why had he been given this incredible gift of music, when clearly, he’d have been happier tearing down a field with a ball in his arms?

  I tell you, if that’s not proof there is a God, and that he or she has one heck of a wacked-out sense of humor, I don’t know what is.

  “Stop.” Professor Le Blanc took the Brahms away and put another music book in front of me.

  Beethoven. Symphony Number 3.

  I don’t know how long I sat there looking at it. Maybe a full minute before I was able to rouse myself from my Shane-induced stupor and go, “Um, Professor? Yeah, look, I don’t know this piece.”

  Professor Le Blanc was still sitting on the piano bench, his arms folded across his chest. He had put away the Palm Pilot, and was now watching me intently. The fact that he was, in fact, a bit of a hottie, did not make this any pleasanter than it sounds. He looked a little like a hawk, one of those hawks you see all the time, wheeling in tighter and tighter circles above something in a cornfield, making you wonder what the stupid bird is looking at down there. Is it a field mouse, or the decomposing body of a coed?

  Professor Le Blanc said, enunciating carefully, “I know you don’t know this piece, Jess. I want to see if you can play it.”

  I just stared at it.

  “Well,” I said after a while. “I probably could. If you would maybe just hum my part first?”

  He didn’t look surprised by my request. He shook his head so that his kind of longish, curly brown hair—definitely longer than mine, anyway—swung around.

  “No,” he said. “I do not hum. Begin, please.”

  I squirmed uncomfortably in my seat. “It’s just,” I explained, “usually, back home, my orchestra teacher, he kind of hums the whole thing out for us first, and I really—”

  “Aha!”

  Professor Le Blanc yelled so loud, I almost dropped my flute. He pointed a long, accusing finger at me.

  ”You,” he said, in tones of mingled triumph and horror, “cannot read music.”

  I felt my own ears turning as pink as Karen Sue’s had out in the atrium. Only not just pink. Red. My ears were burning. My face was burning. It was air-conditioned enough in that practice room that you practically needed a winter parka, but me, I was on fire.

  “That isn’t true,” I said, trying to appear casual. Yeah, real easy to do with a face that was turning fire-engine red. “That note right there, for instance.” I pointed at the music. “That’s an eighth note. And over here, that’s a whole note.”

  “But what note,” Professor Le Blanc demanded, “is it?”

  My shoulders slumped. I was so busted.

  “Look,” I said. “I don’t need to read music. I just have to hear the piece once, and I—”

  “—and you know how to play it. Yes, yes, I know. I know all about you people. You I-hear-it-once-and-I-know-it people.” He shook his head disgustedly at me. “Does Dr. Alistair know about this?”

  I felt my feet beginning to sweat inside my Pumas, that’s how freaked out he had me.

  “No,” I said. “You aren’t going to tell him, are you?”

  “Not going to tell him?” Professor Le Blanc leaped up from the piano bench. “Not going to tell Dr. Alistair that one of his counselors is musically illiterate?”

  He bellowed the last word. Anyone passing outside the door could have heard. I went, in a small voice, “Please, Professor Le Blanc. Don’t turn me in. I’ll learn to read this piece. I promise.”

  “I do not want you to learn to read this piece.” Professor Le Blanc was on his feet now, and pacing the length of the practice room. Which, only being about six feet by six feet, wasn’t very far. “You should be able to read all pieces. How can you be so lazy? Simply because you can hear a piece once and then play it, you use this as an excuse never to learn to read music? You ought to be ashamed. You ought to be sent back to where you came from and made to work there at the IG of A as a sack girl.”

  I licked my lips. I cou
ldn’t help it. My mouth had gone completely dry.

  “Um, Professor?” I said.

  He was still pacing and breathing kind of hard. In school, they made us read this book about this guy named Heathcliff who liked this loser chick named Cathy, who didn’t like him back, and I swear to God, Professor Le Blanc kind of reminded me of old Heathcliff, the way he was huffing and puffing about something that really boiled down to nothing.

  ”What?” he yelled at me.

  I swallowed. “It’s bag girl.” When he only gazed at me uncomprehendingly, I said, “You said I’d have to work as a sack girl. But it’s called a bag girl.”

  Professor Le Blanc pointed toward the door. “Out,” he roared.

  I was shocked. The whole thing was totally unfair. In the movies, when somebody finds out the other person can’t read, they’re always filled with all this compassion and try to help the poor guy. Like Jane Fonda helped Robert De Niro when she found out he couldn’t read in this really boring movie my mom made me watch with her once. I couldn’t believe Professor Le Blanc was being so unfeeling. My case, if you thought about it, was really quite tragic.

  I figured I’d make a play for his heartstrings … if he had any, which I doubted.

  “Professor,” I said. “Look. I know I deserve to get thrown out of here and all, but really, that’s partly why I took this gig. I mean, I completely realize my inability to read music is hampering my growth as an artist, and I was really hoping this was my big chance to, you know, rectify that.”

  I totally did not believe he would go for this crap, but to my never-ending relief, he did. I don’t know why. Maybe it was because I was trembling. Not because I was nervous or anything. I was, but not that much. I mean, it wasn’t like the steam table held that much horror for me. It was just because it was about thirty degrees in there.

  But I guess Professor Le Blanc thought I was suitably cowed or whatever, since he finally said he wouldn’t turn me in to Dr. Alistair. Although he wasn’t very gracious about it, I must say. He told me that, since his class schedule was completely filled, he didn’t have the time to teach me to read music and prepare my piece for the concert at the end of the summer. I was like, fine, I don’t want to be in the stupid concert anyway, but he got all offended, because the concert’s supposed to be, you know, what all of us are working toward for the six weeks we’re here.

  Finally, we agreed I’d meet him three times a week at seven A.M.—yes, that would be seven in the morning—so he could teach me what I needed to know. I tried to point out that seven A.M. was the Polar Bear swim, which also happened to be the only time I could realistically bathe, but he so didn’t care.

  God. Musicians. So temperamental.

  While I was sitting there back in Birch Tree Cottage, thinking about how close I’d been to getting fired, and talking about Paul Huck, I looked out at all the kids in front of me and wondered how many of them were going to grow up to be Professor Le Blancs. Probably all of them. And that saddened me. Because it seemed like they were never even going to get the chance to be anything else, if they only got two hours of free time a day to play.

  Except Shane, of course. Shane, the only one of the kids at Camp Wawasee for Gifted Child Musicians who probably could make a living as a musician one day if he wanted to, clearly didn’t. Want to, I mean. He wanted to be a football player.

  And you know, I could sort of relate to that. I knew what a pain it was to have a gift you’d never, ever asked for.

  “—so Paul Huck got jobs around the neighborhood,” I went on, “mowing lawns and doing people’s yardwork in the summer, and chopping firewood in the winter. And pretty much nobody noticed him, but when they did, they thought he was, you know, a pretty nice guy. Not a whole lot upstairs, though.”

  I glanced at Scott and Dave. They were sitting on the windowsill. In a few minutes, I would give the signal, and one of them would sneak into the kitchen to say his line.

  “But there was actually a lot going on upstairs in Paul Huck’s head,” I said. “Because Paul Huck, while he was in people’s yards, digging up their tree stumps or whatever, he was watching them. And the person he liked to watch most of all was a girl named Claire Lippman, who, every day during the summer, liked to climb out onto her porch roof and sunbathe in this little bitty bikini.”

  It was kind of disturbing the way real people crept into my made-up stories. In my dad’s version, the girl was named Debbie. But Claire, who’d be a senior at Ernie Pyle this year, just seemed to fit somehow.

  “Paul fell for Claire,” I went on. “And Paul fell hard. He thought about Claire while he ate breakfast every morning. He thought about Claire while he was riding his tractor mower every afternoon. He thought about Claire when he was eating his dinner at night. He thought about Claire while he was lying in bed after a long day’s work. Paul Huck thought about Claire Lippman all the time.

  “But.” I looked out at all the little faces turned toward me. “Claire Lippman didn’t think about Paul Huck at breakfast. She didn’t think about him while she was sunning herself on her porch roof every afternoon. She didn’t think about him while she ate her dinner, and she certainly never thought about him before she fell asleep at night. Claire Lippman never thought about Paul Huck at all, because she barely even knew Paul Huck existed. To Claire, Paul was just the handyman who knocked squirrels’ nests out of her chimney every spring, and who scooped the dead opossums out of this decorative little well she had in her backyard. And that was it.”

  I could feel the crowd getting restless. It was time to start getting to the gore.

  Eventually, I told them, Paul got desperate. He knew if he was ever going to win Claire’s heart, he had to act. So one spring day when he was cleaning out Claire’s gutters, he got an idea. He decided he was going to tell Claire how he felt.

  “Just as this occurred to Paul, Claire appeared in the window right where he was cleaning out the gutter. This seemed to Paul like the perfect time to say what he was going to say. But just as he was about to tap on the window, Claire started taking her clothes off.” This caused some tittering that I ignored. “See, the room she was in was the bathroom, and she was getting ready to take a shower. She didn’t notice Paul there in the window … at first. And Paul, well, he didn’t know what to do. He had never seen a naked woman before, let alone the love of his life, Claire. So he just froze there on the ladder, totally incapable of moving.

  “So when Claire happened to glance at the window, just as she was about to get in the shower, and saw Paul there, she was so startled, she let out a scream so loud, it almost made Paul fall off the ladder he was on.

  “But Claire didn’t stop with one scream. She was so startled, she kept right on screaming. People outside heard the screaming, and they looked up, and they saw Paul Huck looking through Claire Lipp-man’s bathroom window, and, well, they didn’t know he was there to clean the gutters. He had always been a weird guy, who lived at home with his parents even though he was in his twenties, and who talked like a nine-year-old. Maybe he’d flipped out or something. So they started yelling, too, and Paul was so scared, with all the yelling and everything going on, he jumped down from the ladder and ran for all he was worth.

  “Paul didn’t know what he’d done, but he figured it had to be pretty bad, if it had made so many people mad at him. All he knew was that, whatever it was he’d done, it was probably bad enough that someone had called the police, and if the police came, they’d put him in jail. So Paul didn’t go home, because he figured that’d be the first place people would look for him. Instead, he ran to the outskirts of town, where there was this cave. Everyone was scared to go into this cave, because bats and stuff lived in there. But Paul was more afraid of the police than he was of bats, so he ducked into that cave, and he stayed there, all the way until it got dark.

  “Now, once Claire got over being startled, she realized what had happened, and she felt pretty bad about it. But she didn’t want to admit to anyone that it had been h
er mistake—that she’d asked Paul to clean her gutters, and that’s what he’d been doing on that ladder. Because then she’d look like a big idiot. So she kept that information to herself, and let everyone think Paul was a Peeping Tom.”

  I went on to describe how Paul, scared for his life, stayed in that cave. He stayed there all night, and all the next day, and the next night, too. I explained how by then, Paul’s parents were really worried. They had called the police to help them look, but that just made things worse, because one time Paul came out of the cave, to see if people were still looking for him, and he saw a sheriff’s cruiser go by. That just drove him deeper back into the cave, where when he was thirsty, he drank cave water.

  “But there was no food in the cave,” I said. “And Paul couldn’t come out to buy any, because he might get caught. Eventually, he got so hungry, well, he just lost his mind. He saw a bat, and he grabbed it, ripped its head off, and ate it raw.”

  This elicited some groans of disgust.

  And that, I told the boys, was the beginning of Paul’s descent into madness. Very soon, he was living on nothing but cave water and bat meat. He lost all this weight, and started growing this long, matted beard. He couldn’t wash his hair because he didn’t have any shampoo, so it started getting all filled with twigs and dirt. His clothes became tattered and hung off him like rags. But still, he wouldn’t come out of the cave, because he couldn’t face the shame of whatever it was he’d done to Claire.

  Time went by. Winter came. Soon Paul ran out of bats to eat. He had no choice but to leave the cave at night, and root through people’s garbage for old chicken bones and rotten milk, so he wouldn’t starve. Sometimes, little children would wake up in the night and see him, and they’d tell their parents the next morning about the strange, long-haired man they’d seen in the backyard, and their parents would say, “Stop telling lies.”

  But the children knew what they’d seen.

  More time went by. One night, Paul Huck was going through someone’s garbage when he came across a newspaper. Newspapers didn’t interest Paul much, on account of his not being able to read. But this one had a picture on it. He squinted at the picture in the moonlight and realized it was a picture of his old love, Claire Lippman. He didn’t need to know how to read in order to figure out why Claire’s picture was in the paper. In the photo, she was dressed in a wedding gown and veil. Claire Lippman had gotten married.