H2O

by Virginia Bergin

  Darius erupted from the car.

  “TURN THE LIGHTS OFF!” he whisper-squealed.

  He’d put his rubber gloves on; he yanked open the passenger door, picked the GBK up (and Darling and the water gun because the GBK had tight hold on them both) and dashed into the tunnel with her.

  “People’ll be able to see us for miles around!” he said, killing the lights.

  “So?” I said, but I didn’t put them back on. “I’m gonna get my stuff.”

  “I’ll get it,” said Darius.

  Yeah, right. He dashed out and then came back in with the food and the drink and ONE random bag of MY things: makeup, when what I really wanted was a change of clothes.

  “Don’t!” said Darius, grabbing me by the arm to stop me from going back to the car.

  Nerd Boy actually manhandled ME. I looked up at him with a snarl; his glasses had misted up.

  “Please, Ruby. It’s not safe.”

  The GBK rustled. He let go of my arm.

  “OK,” I said quietly. “OK.”

  It didn’t rain ten seconds later, so it’s not like Darius Spratt saved my life or anything…but it did rain. Such a soft and gentle rain you wouldn’t even have heard it, probably, if you’d been inside a house, but in the polytunnel you could hear it: the tiniest pitter-patter. That would have been a lovely sound if it weren’t for…well, you know: what was in it. The Spratt’s whole-wheat survival kit also contained (cheap) flashlights, and we got paranoid for a while, checking and rechecking the roof; it didn’t seem like it leaked anywhere, but it was so freaky, having just this thin skin of plastic between us and it. In the beams of the flashlights, you could see the tiniest slight shadows of rain, blurry through the plastic. Bloblets pooling with other bloblets, sliding sneakily down the sides of the tunnel, looking for a way in. The darker it got, the harder it was not to get spooked just thinking about it. It didn’t help that there were weird crackly noises inside the tunnel; the GBK was following Darius around like a little rustly ghost.

  “Can she take that stuff off now?” I asked him.

  “Do you want to take it off now?” he asked her.

  The GBK just stood there.

  “Maybe if you take yours off first?” I suggested to Darius.

  Honestly, I half expected him to have his school uniform on under the waterproof gear. It might have been better than what he was wearing. (Red corduroy trousers and a Star Wars sweatshirt that would have looked cool and retro—on someone else.) Next time we went anywhere near some kind of clothing stores, I was gonna have to force him to sort that look out—but the priority would be locating some deodorant: Darius Spratt stank. I caught a severe waft of it and—

  WHOA! It was TOO weird! Hadn’t Lee read an article about exactly this kind of thing to me? How you could take some boy who was HOT—really, totally undeniably HOT to look at—and a boy who was NOT HOT—really, totally undeniably NOT HOT to look at—and you could waft their sweat under the nose of a blindfolded girl and ask her to pick which one she liked, and it was scientifically proven that there is some crazy animaly sweat thing that meant if the girl couldn’t SEE the boy the sweat came off, she wouldn’t necessarily choose the hot boy. Her nose could actually force her to choose…

  WHOA!

  I forced myself to get a grip.

  “You stink,” I told Darius Spratt.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Personal grooming hasn’t exactly been a priority.”

  “Well, maybe it should have been,” I pointed out, because I was pretty sure that personal grooming comment had to be some kind of sneaky dig at me.

  He peeled off his sweatshirt and offered it to the kid. His arms weren’t feeble; they were wiry. He was wiry and gangly—but luckily there was no danger WHATSOEVER that I would have another random freaky animaly attraction attack because he was wearing a tank top. Like, really! And not some kind of a cool T-shirt tank top, but an underwear tank top, the kind your mother makes you wear when you’re about FIVE.

  It did the trick, though. The GBK sidled up to Darius, apparently immune to the hideous smell. I’d seen already how they’d worked out this communication thing, this little private language where Darius would say stuff and the GBK would move in a certain way, and Darius would interpret that…and he seemed always to get it right—though as the GBK didn’t speak, it’d be hard to say for sure.

  “OK,” said Darius, like the kid had spoken. He cut (with his whole-wheat multifunction penknife) and tore the plastic off her.

  In a weird way, I wished he hadn’t. For as long as you couldn’t see that silent kid, she was just a thing. What was under the plastic…it broke my heart.

  Tearstains on her cheeks. I’d imagined a mini female Darius Spratt, but she was beautiful. A solemn-faced, sad kid. An Asian kid, maybe Indian? And beautiful, so beautiful. A skinny kid in leggings and a sun dress, with a mop-top of matted curls, a little bow on a clip half buried in them. Her face—it was studded with tiny scars, tiny scabby scratches.

  “I think she was in a car crash,” said Darius.

  The car. My driving. She must have been terrified.

  The kid shuffled closer to him.

  “There was glass, little slivers of it, in her hair,” he said, “but I think we got it all out.”

  Really? It didn’t look like her hair had been brushed for a week.

  The kid was looking up at Darius. Seemed like maybe she was older than I thought too—not six or seven, but eight or maybe even nine? Maybe. Maybe not. She scratched at her face, little fingers scab hunting.

  “Don’t,” I said. “You’ll get scars.”

  She wouldn’t look at me. (But she did stop scratching.)

  “I think she’s a little bit scared of you,” said Darius.

  Huh?! Kids LOVED me.

  “I mean, you sort of shout a lot,” he said.

  I felt so terrible I could have burst into tears on the spot…and that kid, she’d wet herself. You could see it on her leggings.

  “She needs a change of clothes,” I said.

  I heard my own voice… It sounded dead and cold—when what was in my heart so wasn’t. What was in my heart, it was red and hot and alive, and it hurt so bad for that little kid.

  “We don’t have anything,” said Darius.

  I took off my hoodie for her—the kid shied away. I nudged Darius, who offered his sweatshirt.

  The kid just stood there…then she kind of wriggled a tiny bit, frowning.

  Aaaah! I got it! So, old enough to not want to be seen in the nude? How old were kids when they started to care that? Dan was twelve now, and he still didn’t seem to care sometimes…but he was a boy, and my brother and a show-off (when he felt like it). So when had I started worrying about things like that?

  Darius seemed sort of awkward himself; he folded his lanky arms in front of his lanky chest.

  “Turn around,” I said to him.

  We turned away to give the kid some privacy.

  “Tell her it’s OK,” I said. “We won’t look.”

  “Get changed,” he told the kid.

  Out of the corner of my eye, when she had done, I saw her nudge him and hand him her clothes. I took them off him and hung them from the table with plant pots to hold them down.

  I turned around. You could see the kid didn’t like that one bit, me touching her stuff.

  “It’s OK,” I said. “We’ll get them nice and dry…”

  The kid in the Star Wars sweatshirt looked away from me. Not like I wasn’t there…like she didn’t want me to be there.

  OW. And Darling seemed to prefer her to me? Yeah. Nicer to have someone quiet who pets you and gives you treats than a shouty ogre who drags you around all over the place and has thrown you into the back of the car. But I could win that kid over… Like I said, kids LOVE me. I could be great with them…when I wanted to be�
�� So, I saw a massive roll of that stuff they cover plants with—fleece, it’s called, like my mom puts on her most delicate, precious plants in winter. Right. I ripped off massive armfuls of the stuff.

  “I’m gonna make you a nest,” I told her.

  She edged up against Darius. It was going to be hard work, but I WAS going to win her over. I chattered on—quietly—to the kid while I assembled a nest, telling her all about my brother Dan and how he could sleep anywhere because he always built himself a little nest just like Fluffysnuggles—who was safe in his bed and fast asleep already (I added quickly, because really I’d totally forgotten about him and had left him in the car). I told her how maybe we could build a little nest for Darling too, thinking that was bound to get her interested. It didn’t, but I went ahead and made one anyway, chattering on about how maybe Darling would like a bedtime story and shall we tell her one and which one shall we tell her? I even put pretty pots of flowers around the nests.

  NOTHING. The kid still wouldn’t look at me; the kid still wouldn’t say a word.

  “So maybe Darius would like a story too?” I said.

  “Hn,” said Darius.

  I eyeballed him viciously, and he came and sat down next to the nest. I sat down too, trying to ignore the waft of stink now that his pits were fully exposed.

  (WHOA—NO, NO, NO—WHOA. NO. NO WAY. NO. If Leonie was still alive and if cell phones still worked, I would have texted her immediately to tell her the freaky animaly sweat thing was true—or not. The horrific, sinister enchantment of the Spratt’s pits had to fall into the category of things that were TOO weird and TOO disgusting to tell to anyone, even your best friend.)

  “It’s bedtime,” he told her.

  She got into the nest and put Darling down in hers. Whitby tried to muscle in on the whole snugly bed thing, but I pulled him back, and he flumped down on the floor next to me. At least someone liked me.

  I chose Rumpelstiltskin. I don’t know why, because I could hardly remember it, so I kind of made it up a little. The miller’s daughter became a princess and nothing too horrible happened to anyone—including Rumpelstiltskin, who said he was sorry and got taken on as a nanny because although he had seemed horrible to begin with and shouted a lot, he was actually really REALLY nice and very VERY good with children.

  When I got to the end, I had a total Ruby genius moment.

  “Well, now, I wonder what your name is?” I said.

  I reeled off the name of every Asian girl I knew, then any old name at all: crazy names, pretty names, boys’ names, pets’ names, i.e., the kind of thing that would have any other kid in stitches—or at least force them to squeal out, “No! I’m not Malcolm!” or whatever. Even Darius joined in a little, starting with “Thingy?” and “Whatsit?” and then throwing in weird names that sounded pretty much like the sort of fantasy-hero characters Dan gibbered on about: “Are you Thorgarella, daughter of Kriksor?” That kind of thing.

  Finally…

  “You know what?” I said. “Until we know your name, I think we should just call you…”

  “Rumpelstiltskin,” muttered Darius.

  I slapped him—then smiled sweetly to make it look playful, because the kid was there.

  “Princess,” I said.

  I was pretty sure it couldn’t have been her name, but I saw her little nose twitch and the tiniest of tiny nearly-a-smile smiles flicker on her lips.

  “Night, night, Princess and Darling,” I said and blew them both kisses.

  “Go to sleep,” instructed Darius.

  The kid tucked herself up in the fleece; Darling—the traitor—nestled in with her.

  If this all sounds kind of sweet to you, it really wasn’t.

  I felt awful. Really, really awful. That kid…that kid being like that, not being able to speak… In a weird kind of way, it got to me as bad as anything I’d seen—and it made me wonder what she’d seen and what had happened to her, because I sort of had the feeling that she could speak, but that whatever had happened was so hideous it had turned her mute. And…you know what else? It made me think of Simon, of all those years he’d spent trying to be sweet to me and me giving him back nothing but a snarl, not wanting to have anything to do with him. I’d had—what?—not even an hour of that from a kid I didn’t even know, and I felt useless and frustrated and exhausted. And very, very sad.

  So I couldn’t leave it at that, could I? I insisted we sing. Darius said he didn’t want to do that. The kid—obviously—didn’t say anything, but you could tell she didn’t want to either. So I sang.

  Did I say already? I can’t sing.

  As soon as I’d got the first warbling word out, I knew I’d made yet another horrible mistake. Not because of the not being able to sing, but because the song was the song my mom sang to me when I was little, the one she wouldn’t sing that night when she sat outside the door. “Dream A Little Dream Of Me.” It was the song her mom had sung to her when she was little, that’s what she always said. (My mom, she used to change the “me” to “Ruby.” And like the whole thing with the fairies at the holy well, it took years before I realized the truth: the song wasn’t actually about me.)

  Every lovely, pretty thing in it felt wrong:

  There were no stars. (YOU COULDN’T EVEN SEE THE STARS BECAUSE IT WAS CLOUDY AND IT WAS RAINING KILLER RAIN.)

  There was no breeze. (THERE WAS JUST KILLER RAIN WHISPERING, “I WANT TO KILL YOU.”)

  There was no birdsong. (BECAUSE THE BIRDS WERE TOO BUSY PECKING OUT HUMAN EYEBALLS.)

  The next part is supposed to be really sweet, about how you’ll dream of the people you love. It doesn’t say anything about “EVEN THOUGH THEY’RE PROBABLY DEAD.” I couldn’t go on. Not because I was worried the kid would dream about me (or that Darius Spratt would), but because I got all choked silent. I wanted my mom.

  Genius, Ruby. You really are a genius.

  The killer rain applauded me, drumming down harder on that thin plastic roof. Now everyone definitely for sure felt like crap; you could just tell. The kid had shut her eyes. She’d shut them like all kids shut them when they’re just pretending to be asleep, like: go away. A lonely little tear squeezed out between her eyelashes.

  Me and Darius, we divided up the rest of the fleece and wrapped ourselves in it (SEPARATELY). It wasn’t cold, not really, but the fleece was comforting. There was this kind of awkward few seconds about where we were going to sleep—well, there was for me—but Darius just cleared himself a space among the flowerpots and laid down on one of the long table things, so I cleared myself a space on the table on the other side of the walkway. I made a little wall of plants so I wouldn’t actually have to look at him, but I felt like I really wanted to talk, to talk like I’d talk to Leonie or how I did with my mom sometimes, before Henry was born. To just pour my heart out…but no words would come. We lay in the silence.

  “It’s a shame it’s not a zombie attack, isn’t it?” said Darius after a while.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You know, because if it was zombies—or vampires—we’d sort of know what to do, wouldn’t we? Well, I would.”

  “I would too,” I said.

  He was right. We would have known exactly what to do. If only it was that simple.

  “Or even aliens,” said Darius after a while. “Then we’d just have to locate the mother ship and destroy it. Although I suppose the bacterium is an alien. A very small one.”

  “They don’t know it’s that space-bug thing,” I said. “Not for sure.”

  “Yeah they do,” said Darius.

  Rain fell steadily on the roof, millions of little wiggly micro-murderers sliding down the plastic.

  “Still, I suppose you’ve got to look on the bright side,” said the Spratt.

  “What…bright…side?”

  The only—THE ONLY—thing I could think of was…that phone bill under my b
ed? That premium rate rip-off line I called? I am NEVER going to get into trouble for it. Somehow, it didn’t exactly seem like a bright side.

  “No more school,” said Darius.

  “No exams!” I said. Now that was good. First time that had occurred to me. Every cloud’s got a silver lining. Ha ha ha ha ha.

  “I didn’t mean that. I was looking forward to them,” said Darius Spratt.

  DO YOU SEE? DO YOU SEE WHAT KIND OF A FREAK I WAS STUCK WITH? I sat up so I could get a better look at it too, the Darius freak, but it was too dark to make out anything more than the rough shape of it.

  “You’re kidding me, right?” I spoke at the shape.

  “No. I’ve worked hard for two years for those exams. I was going to do civil engineering in college.”

  “Wow,” I said and lay back down. “Great. That’s just great.” I didn’t actually know what civil engineering was, but honestly…

  “See, that’s what I mean about school,” said Darius Spratt.

  “Huh?”

  “It’s full of people like you, isn’t it? Clueless bullies.”

  “What?!”

  “Well, you’re more of a snob,” he said and yawned. He ACTUALLY yawned.

  “Excuse me?! I’m not a snob!”

  “Yeah you are. You and your friends. You’re, like, sooo super-cool, aren’t you? Urh. That Caspar kid—he thinks he’s James Dean or something.”

  I didn’t know who James Dean was either, but I did not like the sound of that. I sat back up to glower at the shadowy blob of the freak in the darkness.

  “My friends are all dead, Darius Spratt. So’s my mom. So’s my stepdad. So’s my little baby brother. So is…my boyfriend, Caspar.” I’d never called him that, “my boyfriend.” I’d never had the chance to. I caught my breath. “Probably.”

  “Yeah, everyone’s dead,” he mumbled sleepily.

  He rolled over and fell asleep…or at least I think he did, but he could have just been doing some more advanced version of the pretending-to-be-asleep thing.