“Yeah, see. That’s what I meant when I said I need you to keep that a complete and total secret. Besides, I’m not supposed to use my power unless Dad tells me to or it’s like a life-or-death thing.”
“This is a life-or-death thing,” he says. “I spend twenty hours a day cooped up with a bunch of poker-playing, cigar-chomping, overweight old men who curse at each other in Italian. I need this.” His eyes are saucers now, the big bad wolf eyeing the little girl who just walked through the door. “Come on. They like us. They keep looking this way.”
I chance another peek. The two girls are casting furtive glances in our direction. It could be flirting. Or maybe they think we are stalkers and are calculating how close we have to get before they call 911. After all, I can pass for boy-next-door, but Zach . . . not so much. I brush Zach’s hand off my arm, which is a little dangerous; he’s funny about being touched, ever since his cat jumped on him in the middle of the night and had to be buried the next day.
“All right.” I sigh. “What do you want me to say?”
“You know. ‘Hi. I’m Mike. This is my friend Zach. You think he’s hot and want to make him your new boyfriend.’ Or something.”
I groan, long and loud so that my displeasure is noted. But the truth is, I want to go over there too. “No promises,” I say, and he punches me playfully on the shoulder. We walk over, Zach leading the way. The two girls exchange meaningful looks, and I wonder if there isn’t some website I can go to that would help me break the code. I’m sure there is an app for it, but Dad won’t let me have a cell phone.
“Hey,” Zach says, running one hand a little too obvious-casual along his new green stripe.
“Hey,” the blond girl with the tritone nail polish and the exposed belly button says. She is dressed in clothes that cling to her and show off her bony shoulders and flat stomach, clothes with labels I don’t recognize, which probably means they come from stores you won’t find around here. A north sider, probably. I see she has glitter on her lips and on her eyelids. The other girl hasn’t looked up yet. A couple of really awkward seconds pass before I realize that “Hey” is as far as Zach is going to get.
“Do you mind if we sit here?” I ask, pointing to the two empty seats at the table. It’s a question, not a command. I’m not about to use my power, despite Zach’s pleading glances. The blonde looks at her friend and shrugs. Then the other girl—the one with walnut hair cut pixie short and dimples like quotation marks, the one dressed in a tight black T-shirt and cardigan—finally looks up at us as she moves to the other side of the table. I look away. I’m secretly relieved when Zach goes for the now-empty seat beside the glittery one in the miniskirt.
“I’m Zach,” he says.
“Becky,” the blonde says.
“This is my friend, Mikey.”
“Michael,” I say, shaking Becky’s hand. The other girl sips her Coke. She’s a straw chewer, you can tell; her cheeks pucker with the effort of sucking through the collapsed opening, causing her dimples to vanish. Zach says something I don’t quite catch, but Becky laughs, so I’m guessing he doesn’t need my help anymore. I move around the table and sit down.
I’m suddenly more nervous than the time my father put a lead vest and protective goggles on me, saying, “You might feel a little jolt.”
The girl finishes her sip, then holds out a hand cold and wet with condensation. “I’m Viola,” she says. She smiles again, and whatever I was thinking of saying next vanishes. I rack my brain for something clever to replace it.
“Viola,” I repeat. “Like from Shakespeare?” Dad makes me read him, too. The comedies and the tragedies. I remember Viola being a cross-dressing hero in one of them.
“Like from the orchestra,” she says.
“Oh, right. Of course.”
“My mother plays in one. My sister’s name is Cello.”
“You’re kidding, right? Is your brother’s name Timpani?”
“Trombone, actually. But we just call him Bone.”
I laugh. She doesn’t. So I stop. “You were kidding, right?” She’s still not laughing. I figure somehow I’ve blown it already, and I start to blame my father for teaching me way too much about physics and nineteenth-century literature and absolute jack about talking to girls. Then, finally, her smile reappears.
“Of course I’m kidding.” She rolls her eyes. “I don’t have a brother. Or a sister. But my mother does play in the orchestra.” She takes another sip. Her bangs fall into her eyes, and she leans over and sweeps them away. I try not to look at them—the eyes, that is. Lead us not into temptation. I try instead to focus on the buttons of her cardigan, realize that might be misinterpreted, and give up and stare at the table.
“So is it Michael or just Mike? Or do you have, like, some cool nickname or something?”
Henchmen have streets names. I’m something else.
“Michael’s good,” I say.
“Got any brothers or sisters, Michael?”
I look back up, suddenly wondering what I was thinking even sitting here, talking to this total stranger. This totally gorgeous total stranger who has instantly struck up a conversation, as if we’d known each other for years. This totally, captivatingly gorgeous stranger whose ears, I’ve just noticed, are a little on the pointy side, just a shade elfish, studded with sapphires and curved like conch shells. What do I say? Do I make something up? The problem with making stuff up is that you have to remember it later.
“Actually I’m an only child, orphaned from birth and eventually adopted by a mad scientist who builds top-secret gadgets in our basement.” It comes out too fast for me to stop it. I smile my that-was-the-punchline smile. She gives me a strange look, arching one thin eyebrow.
“That is so fascinating,” she says, playing along. “So is he your sidekick or something?” She points to Zach, who is already whispering something in Becky’s ear. The other girl pushes him away, playfully, I hope. I don’t want her to accidentally get pricked.
“Sidekicks are for wusses,” I answer. “Zach and I just hang around the same circles.”
The girl named Viola nods and smiles a coy smile. A smile with something else on its mind. “And you two just wander the mall on a summer day, looking for a couple of girls to tell your stories to?”
“Actually I’m just trying to get out of doing more homework,” I say. I lean back in the chair. This is me trying to be charming—at least without using my power. I’m pretty sure I’m overdoing it. She takes another long slurp of soda. It’s mostly ice left, but she doesn’t seem to mind the obnoxious noises she makes.
“Maybe somebody forgot to tell you. It’s June. School’s officially closed for the summer.”
“Not for me. I’m homeschooled.”
“By your dad, the evil scientist?”
“I never said he was evil,” I say. “Just mad.”
“Mad like crazy.”
“More like enthusiastic.”
“Homework in June,” she whispers. “Sucks to be you. Want a breadstick?” She holds up the last one from her plate. She has already taken a bite out of it.
“No thanks,” I say, wondering what kind of girl offers half-eaten food to a boy she’s only just met. She shrugs.
“So what does your dad do?” I ask her.
“He hunts down people trying to take over the world and puts them in jail.”
“Really?”
“No, not really,” she says, thrusting the breadstick in a tub of congealed cheese dip, where it stands at attention. “You are gullible. I guess you don’t get to talk to girls very much, if you are a homeschooled orphan with no sisters and an enthusiastic father.”
“Does it show?”
“Only a little,” Viola says. “I mean, we’ve been sitting here talking for, like, three minutes and you haven’t looked me in the eyes yet.” She kind of drops her head to get my attention, and I can’t help it. I’m sucked in. I look. Amber with flecks of brown. Honey dusted with cinnamon. I know I shouldn’t say an
ything, but I can’t help myself.
“They’re remarkable,” I whisper, then watch, horrified, as her pupils blow open.
“They are, aren’t they?” she replies mechanically, and I can tell by the way she says it that she never really thought so until now. Until I said something.
My cheeks flush, and I look down at the table again, breaking the spell. That was a mistake. I should have just kept my mouth shut. She shakes her head a little. Across the table I see Becky’s hand move to her phone. I wonder what Zach has said or done to bring their conversation to an end so soon. Wonder what I can say next that might give me chance to talk to this girl who is not afraid to share her half-eaten breadstick with me even though we only just met, but all I can come up with is “So—do you hang out here a lot?”
As soon as I say it, I regret it. An entire spring getting schooled in the Romantic poets of England, and that’s the best I can do?
“No. Never,” she says, jangling the ice cubes in her cup again. “This was a total fluke.”
“Like a stroke of good luck?”
“Like a chance occurrence,” she amends. She and Becky exchange another predetermined signal from the codebook. I look at Zach, who gives a what-did-I-do? shrug.
“So we should be going, I guess,” Becky says.
Viola stands up, and I stand with her. We are less than three feet away from each other. I try to find any excuse to touch her, just a graze, a shoulder, an elbow, anything. Instead, I just stand there.
“Right. So I promised my Aunt Clarinet we’d be home early,” Viola says with mock exasperation, rolling her eyes at me.
“That’s funny,” I say. “Tell Cousin Oboe I said hi.”
And finally she laughs. And it’s musical, like an arpeggio. “I will,” she says.
I meet her eyes once more, just for a sec, determined not to say anything this time. Then she brushes those bangs aside again before turning away.
“It was nice meeting you,” Becky says, trailing after and turning to wave.
Zach and I sit at their abandoned table and watch them whisper and giggle their way down the corridor. I wait and wait and wait for her to look back, just once, like they always do in the movies, but she never does.
Suddenly a pizza crust sails in my direction, splattering sauce on my shirt, a stain to match the one on my pants. “What the heck!”
“Where was the voodoo, dude? The whole Jedi mind thing?” Zach scoffs.
“You seemed to be doing fine without it,” I say.
“Sure. Until she told me about her boyfriend,” he replies morosely. Then he smiles. Or sneers. “Got his name, though. We could hunt him down and convince him to dump her.”
I shake my head, watching the girls get swallowed by the crowd. “Convincing some guy I don’t know to dump some girl you just met so that you can have a shot with her? Now that sounds like a worthwhile use of my power.”
“Who said anything about using your power?”
Zach raises an eyebrow, and a row of thorns about an inch long springs from his forehead, then just as quickly retreats. I look around to see if anyone has noticed.
“Let’s go to the Kernel Cart,” I say, hoping that somewhere along the way I might run into her again. Viola. Whose mother plays in the orchestra and whose father does not put people in jail. By then, hopefully, I will have thought of something else clever to say, and this time, when she laughs, she’ll put her hand on my arm for a couple of seconds, like they also do in the movies. Zach gets up, but before we leave the table, I pull the abandoned breadstick from its quagmire of congealed cheese and take a bite.
“Oh . . . that’s totally gross, dude,” Zach says. “You don’t even know that girl.”
It is a little gross. I know it. But I’m a sucker for symbolic gestures; I grew up taking communion, after all. And part of me thinks that maybe I do know her, just a little. Like maybe it isn’t just a fluke. And that maybe, if I look hard enough, I will find her again.
I don’t. See her, that is. Like the heroes that once protected New Liberty, she has disappeared. That doesn’t stop Zach from teasing me about her. He’s only two years older than me, but he has already had three girlfriends—though the moment they get to the kissing part, things get prickly and he gets dumped.
“You talked to her for all of three minutes.”
He’s right, of course. But that doesn’t keep me from glancing in every store window.
Once the giant bag of caramel corn is finished—paid for by Zach and mostly consumed by me, as most things are between us—we leave the mall and the promise of meeting even more girls and head south, back toward our side of town, veering a little to fill my father’s order. Though it’s out of Zach’s way, he says he wants to come with me to the Techno Tree—the electronic supply store that my dad spends most of his not-so-hard-earned cash at. The owner of the store—a skinny, high-strung Indian named Aziz—is a contributing member of the Romano Family Urban Renewal and Resources Fund. In other words, he pays for people like Zach to check up on him every now and then and make sure he’s safe from roving hooligans and competing criminal elements.
“You don’t think he’s got one of those night-vision infrared implants, do you?” Zach asks as we shuffle along the broken sidewalk, kicking beer cans and pausing now and then to read the new graffiti, marks for lesser gangs, the ones content with pushing drugs and popping tires. The cars parked along the street transition from Suburbans to beaters the farther we get from the mall. You can tell you’ve crossed back over when all the Starbucks disappear and the yellow caution tape comes out.
“Or maybe I’ll get some kind of laser hidden in an ink pen or something,” he adds.
“He’s not James Bond,” I remind him. Aziz doesn’t sell weapons, though he could sell you everything you needed to make one of your own. As we walk, I point to the various symbols painted on the stone and ask Zach to interpret them for me, but he doesn’t even know most of them. “Small-timers,” he says. “Most of ’em just kids with crap parents and too much time on their hands.”
We stop just outside the store and wait for the one customer in there to leave before going in. I know I’m just picking up a circuit board, nothing illegal or even suspicious, but it’s still best to have the place to ourselves. Aziz is standing by the cash register, dressed as usual in a sweater and slacks, his graying hair pulled back into a ponytail, peering at us through his half-moon glasses like a shaman.
He doesn’t look happy to see us. Normally he greets me with a smile. He and my father are kindred spirits of a sort; they have known each other for years, before I was adopted. They have even worked on a few projects together. When I come in alone, Aziz usually offers me tea, but Zach’s presence changes the dynamic. Aziz circles around behind us and locks the door, flipping the sign in the window from OPEN to CLOSED. He has nothing to worry about, of course. The cops don’t mess with Aziz. Tony pays most of them not to.
The shop looks the same as always. Aisles of wooden shelves stocked with every kind of gadget, gizmo, and electrical whichamajigger you could imagine. Transistors and resistors. Batteries of every size and shape. Servos and motors, fuses and gears. Photoreceptors and motherboards. My father sometimes comes and spends hours wandering the aisles, the cogs in his own overstuffed head meshing together.
“Misters Madison and Morn,” Aziz calls out. “What can I do for you gentlemen?”
I say hello and show him my father’s Post-it with the circuit board’s model number on it. He moves his head from shoulder to shoulder, which I’ve learned means either “no problem at all” or “could stand to be spicier.”
“How is your father? I haven’t seen him in a few weeks,” Aziz says, consulting a catalog behind his counter.
“Keeping busy,” I say. Zach squeaks at me and makes his little rat face, but I ignore him.
“And Mr. Romano? I trust he is doing well?” Aziz inquires, coolly cordial.
“Actually,” Zach says, suddenly very serious, pu
tting his hands behind his back, “that’s what I’ve come to speak to you about.”
Aziz quickly loses his polite smile and grips the counter. I shake my head, but the store owner can’t take his eyes off Zach, who is moving toward him, chest puffed like a gorilla. “It seems your account is overdue, Mr. Aziz, and Mr. Romano sent me to give you a reminder. . . .” Zach curls his fingers into a fist, and a dozen three-inch spikes shoot out around the knuckles, so it suddenly looks like some kind of wicked sea urchin swallowed his hand.
“But I paid for this month,” Aziz starts to mumble, backing away from the counter. I figure that’s far enough.
“Stop being a jerk,” I say, kicking at Zach’s heels. The spikes get sucked back in. Zach laughs and puts his hands up in surrender.
“Just messin’ with ya,” he says. “The boss is fine. Thanks for asking.”
Aziz looks at both of us, back and forth, back and forth, and then lets himself smile weakly. “You had me going there for a minute,” he says, swallowing hard, and I kind of hope Zach will apologize, but I know it won’t happen. For Zach, power is that look in Aziz’s eyes—the one that still hasn’t gone away. Aziz glances over at me once more, frowns, and then escapes into the back storeroom to find my father’s part.
“That wasn’t funny,” I snap.
“It was a little funny,” Zach says, but he doesn’t push it. Instead he starts wandering the aisles, touching everything. I glance around the room. I know that this stuff should interest me. That it should speak to me on some intrinsic, geeky, inspirational level. That I should see in this giant collection of parts a vast creative universe waiting to be tinkered with, soldered together, transformed. I think of the look my father gets every time he comes in here. But whatever he has, I don’t have it yet. I lean back against the counter, and my eyes fall on a little black box with three buttons on it, sitting on a top shelf, pushed back as far as it will go. Probably a security device. An alarm or a motion detector, maybe. My father could cram anything into one of those cubes.
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