by C. A. Gray
Henry shot her a look of contempt and Brock said nothing, but Cole said, “Excellent!” and bounced into the kitchen.
“I’ve already eaten,” said Henry shortly. “I’ll be in my study tonight, and I do not wish to be disturbed.”
“Oh, no!” Mrs. Jefferson pouted. “You’re almost never home on a week night. Can’t you – “
“It’s a new account. I have to analyze the portfolio by tomorrow at 9.”
“But there’s always a new account –”
Brock took advantage of his father’s diverted attention and slipped off to the kitchen, stripping off his sweaty jersey and dropping it in the laundry room on the way. He could breathe easier when he and his father were not in the same room.
When Brock saw Cole, he couldn’t keep silent any longer. “‘You’d do well to take a page out of Peter Stewart’s book!’” he mimicked. “Like anybody would want to be like that freak.”
Cole didn’t reproach him; he just studied his brother’s expression as he ate. “How come you hate Pete so much?”
Brock glared at him for a moment and then looked away. “I don’t hate him,” he said sullenly, and then added with a spiteful edge, “He’s not important enough to hate.”
“But you make fun of him all the time. I don’t know why you have to do that. He’s my friend. And he’s actually really nice and funny and interesting once you get to know him –”
“I don’t want to get to know him, all right?” Brock snapped, and Cole looked taken aback. Then Brock sighed, which was the closest he ever came to apologizing. “Why can’t everybody just leave me alone?”
A few minutes later Mrs. Jefferson blustered into the room, her face blotched with color left over from a heated conversation that she evidently lost. She nevertheless smiled enthusiastically at Brock and asked, “So how was practice tonight, dear?”
“I thought it was fine, until Dad showed up and told me otherwise,” Brock muttered.
“Oh, pish posh. Your father only wants the best for you, dear. Don’t you know that you boys are his pride and joy?”
Brock looked at her incredulously and nearly retorted something sarcastic, but her guileless expression reproached him, and he hadn’t the heart. “Sure, Mum.”
In some sense, of course, his mother was right that he was his father’s pride and joy, but not in the unconditional manner in which she meant it. It would have been truer if she had said, “You are the object of all his expectations.” In a bizarre sense that Brock did not fully understand himself, that fact made him both worship and loathe his father at the same time.
Mrs. Jefferson took him at his word and smiled, obviously placated. Brock shoveled shepherd’s pie into his mouth without really tasting it and chased it with milk while his mother prattled in the background about some “he said-she said” drama from her day involving people he didn’t know and didn’t care about.
***
“Hi. Mind if I sit here?”
Peter looked up from his desk by the window in Mr. Richards’ class to see Lily looking down at him.
“Suit yourself.” Peter wasn’t overly eager to talk to her after their awkward conversation the day before, and especially not after his dad’s threat to tell her all about the Ancient Tongue.
“Are you still mad at me for not answering your questions yesterday?” Lily asked.
“Why didn’t you answer me?”
The rest of the students filtered in to the classroom, and Mr. Richards opened his briefcase to retrieve his notes for the day’s lesson. They didn’t have long to talk.
She paused for a moment, and then said, “Because I didn’t want to scare you away. At least not immediately.”
“So what you did instead was your attempt not to scare me away?”
Instead of answering, Lily asked baldly, “Do you think I’m insane?”
Peter blinked at her and weighed appropriate responses to that question. He finally settled on, “Possibly.”
“Well, I’m not!” Lily insisted, and tears sprung to her eyes. She tried to look away before Peter noticed, but she was too late. She whispered again earnestly, “I’m not!”
Peter was alarmed. “Okay, okay, sorry! Quit crying, will you? Why did you ask if you didn’t want to know?”
“I did want to know, that just isn’t what I wanted you to say,” Lily muttered, and brushed away her tears. Then she took a deep breath and changed the subject. “Tell me more about your dad.”
Peter felt his stomach turn over. The conversation was straying dangerously close to a subject he did not want to broach. “Why, what do you want to know about him?”
“Well,” Lily said carefully, “he seems very… unusual.”
Peter snorted. “You could say that.”
Lily raised her eyebrows.
Peter regarded her for a moment. “He’s a physicist at the university.” There, he thought. That was safe.
Lily looked confused, and then disappointed. “He’s a scientist?”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Well, nothing…” she said, but didn’t sound convinced. “It’s just that scientists usually think that the visible world is the only thing that’s real.”
“Not necessarily. Ever heard of dark matter?” Peter quipped, although he didn’t really expect her to get the joke.
Lily ignored him and persisted, “Your dad didn’t strike me as the scientist type.”
“He’s… not,” Peter admitted. “I mean, he is a scientist, but he’s definitely not what you’d call typical. He tends to approach the world from the standpoint that anything is possible… and I do mean anything.”
Lily seemed slightly encouraged by this. “Do you think so too?”
“I believe in facts that can be experimentally determined,” Peter said firmly.
“Ugh!” said Lily, tossing her brown ponytail over her shoulder in disgust. “You’re even thicker than I thought!”
Peter suppressed a smile. Now she’ll never come for dinner.
But Lily wouldn’t let the conversation drop. “How is that possible?” she demanded. “You have to know that there’s more to the world than just this.” She gestured around the room with one hand, and added accusingly, “How can you not know that?”
“I have no idea what you mean,” said Peter stubbornly.
“I don’t mean intellectually, or scientifically, or whatever. I mean here,” said Lily, making a fist and holding it to her gut. “In here, don’t you know that what you’re saying isn’t and can’t possibly be true – that not everything in the world can be explained by experiments?”
Peter was tempted to say he didn’t know what she was talking about, just so she’d shut up. But something about her passion kept him from doing it. “Well...”
Lily stared at him, holding her breath.
“In a way, I guess, but not really how you’re thinking,” Peter hedged. “I mean, it is true that nothing ever seems to change, but I don’t think that’s the way it’s supposed to be. We go to school, go home, do our homework, go to bed, wake up, and do it again the next day, until one day we go to work instead of school... but otherwise we repeat the same cycle all our lives. It just seems so…”
“Pointless?” Lily’s expression was eager to the point of embarrassment, and she leaned so far over the bar on her desk that it looked painful.
Peter nodded. “Exactly!” Before he knew what was happening, suddenly words tumbled out of his mouth like he was tripping over his own tongue. “It’s like… we’ve all missed something enormously important. It’s been staring us in the face all the time, but nobody knows what it is. So, even though we’ve all known about it ever since we were born, we pretend not to notice because we can’t identify it anyway, and it would drive us crazy if we tried. I’ve been pretending too, ever since I was seven years old…” Suddenly he caught himself and felt the heat rise to his face again. “I’m rambling.”
“Since you were seven?” Lily pressed, lowering her voic
e as the clamor in the classroom died down and Mr. Richards started drawing triangles on the blackboard. She continued in a whisper, “Why since you were seven?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Peter whispered back, kicking himself.
“No. Tell me!” she demanded.
Suddenly Mr. Richards stopped drawing on the blackboard and turned around, his eyes settling on Peter and Lily in the back of the classroom. He didn’t say anything, but he gave Peter a mildly reproachful look.
“I think we’re going to have to act like we’re listening for a bit,” Peter whispered, relieved to have an excuse to end the conversation.
Lily nodded and opened her notebook to an empty page, where she began to scribble down all the notes from the blackboard she’d ignored in the previous several minutes. The page began to curl with the force of her pencil, and the lead snapped three times.
About ten minutes later, when the rest of the class began to work in groups on the Pythagorean Theorem and it seemed safe to talk again, Lily persisted, “What happened when you were seven?”
Peter squirmed. “It’s nothing. It’s just that…” But her expression was so intense that he knew she wouldn’t give up until he gave her an answer. Well… what the heck, he thought. “My dad told me these stories when I was little, until I was seven years old. They were adventure stories, of knights and the Round Table and dragons and all that.”
“You mean like Arthurian legends?” Lily whispered.
“Yeah, but the stories seemed so… real. He told me they were real, too. It was almost like he’d been there. He talked about this world where people spoke and their words made things happen –”
“You mean like magic words?” she asked.
“No, not like magic.” Her complete credulity irritated him. Then he amended grudgingly, “Well, I guess a little like magic, but Dad called it the Ancient Tongue. Anyway, that’s not important. The point was that I felt like I belonged there, in a way that I’ve never belonged anywhere in all my life.”
“So why did your dad stop telling you the stories when you were seven?”
Peter looked away. “Because by then, I knew they were just fairy tales.”
“You didn’t believe anymore,” Lily finished. She sounded disappointed.
Peter shook his head with a faraway expression. “No. I didn’t believe.” After a long pause, he whispered impulsively, “My dad wants me to invite you for dinner tonight.” The second it was out of his mouth, he wished he could take it back.
“Why?” she whispered, surprised.
“He… says he wants to talk to you.” What did I say that for?
“Did he say what about?”
“Yeah,” Peter muttered evasively.
“Well, what did he say?” she demanded.
Suddenly an idea occurred to him. “Tell you what. You answer my question, and I’ll answer yours. When you said yesterday that neither Dad nor I had one, what were you referring to?” Peter asked, and folded his arms across his chest smugly.
She looked taken aback, but then muttered, “Fine.” Her eyes darted around the classroom as if she was gesturing at something. “Can you see them?”
Peter blinked. He thought he knew what she meant, but it took him a moment to believe it. “What?”
“The specters!” she hissed impatiently. “Can you see them?”
“You…” he stared at her, searching her face, but she was in earnest. “You’re serious?”
Lily pursed her lips and then whispered in a very controlled voice, “Do I look like I’m kidding?”
“No,” he admitted.
“No, I don’t look like I’m kidding, or no, you can’t see them?”
“Both. I mean, neither.” Peter was flustered. Now that she was saying it out loud, he found that he hadn’t actually expected this at all. “…But,” he searched her face, trying to gauge whether or not he should admit this before he finished reluctantly, “but my dad can.”
It took her a moment to absorb this. Something in her demeanor became almost timid as she asked, “But you believe in them, right?”
“Well…” Peter hesitated.
The bell rang, cutting off the rest of his sentence, and Lily’s face hardened as if a curtain had fallen across it. “Of course you don’t, what am I saying? You’re a science guy,” she snapped venomously. Then she grabbed her things and left the classroom before Peter could stop her.
***
When Lily arrived in Mr. Collins’ class, the lab benches were already set up. She went to the far right corner of the classroom where the other bench was occupied, so that Peter couldn’t join her. She realized too late that its occupant was Brock Jefferson.
“I’m saving that seat,” said Brock in disgust.
“Tough,” Lily snapped. “I’m taking it.”
“What are you, stalking me or something? I don’t date ugly girls, just so you know.”
Lily was so caught off guard that she actually laughed out loud. Her laugh was loud, and everyone in the room turned to stare at her. “Don’t flatter yourself! I don’t date puppets.” She thought for a minute and added, “In fact, I don’t date.” Peter walked in just then and she could feel his eyes on her, but she looked away coldly.
“There’s a shocker,” Brock muttered, but his face turned a deep shade of maroon. He looked around, as if to see who else might be listening, and hissed to Lily, “What do you mean ‘puppet,’ anyway?”
“I mean you’re controlled by that thing of yours,” she said matter-of-factly, gesturing at the specter that she knew he could not see.
Brock balked at her for a second. It looked like he was about to retort something scathing when Peter cleared his throat next to Lily and said in a low voice, “Can I say something?”
Before she could answer, Brock snapped, “No, Stewart, can’t you see we’re in the middle of a conversation here?”
Brock’s specter-woman hissed, Well, you shouldn’t be! Find a way to end the conversation, now!
“Oh, please,” Lily rolled her eyes at him. “If you want to leave, then leave. I’m not stopping you.”
Peter looked from Lily to Brock with a confused expression. “He didn’t say he wanted to leave.”
“No, but she did,” Lily gestured at the specter again with her thumb. “Oh, I forgot, you think I’m insane. Well, I’m not stopping you either, am I? Move along, then!” And she waved him off as if dismissing a servant.
Peter obeyed, looking even more perplexed than before.
She can’t tell you what to do! shrieked the specter to Brock. Don’t you dare get up and leave!
“Fine, suit yourself,” Lily shrugged.
Brock blinked at her, looking rather frightened. “Who are you?”
“Lily Portman,” said Lily without looking at him, tossing her curly ponytail over her shoulder haughtily.
Peter was still watching Lily and Brock, so he absently sat next to Tiffany Bristol, who said, “Oh, no, you don’t!”, and promptly got up and moved to another table in a huff.
***
Peter caught up with Lily after class, forgetting his usual shyness.
“All right. So what if I don’t think you’re completely mental?”
“I don’t care what you think,” said Lily coldly.
“Yes, you obviously do.”
“The entire universe does not revolve around you, Peter Stewart!” she retorted. Then she tried to lose him, but he caught up to her and fell into stride. It was difficult, though, because she moved so quickly. She headed to her locker, clutching her books protectively to her chest, barely managing to keep a grip on them. Peter reached toward the stack and tried to wrench them away from her with some vague idea of trying to make it up to her by being a gentleman, but he forgot to explain what he was doing, and Lily didn’t let go. The result was a brief tug-of-war, after which the entire stack toppled to the ground, and one particularly heavy spine landed on Lily’s foot.
“Ow!”
“Oh! Sorry…�
��
They both stooped to retrieve the stack, Lily still grimacing in pain, and on the way down their heads collided with a sickening crack.
“Sorry!” Peter repeated again, seeing stars and rubbing the top of his head. She glared at him, but he got what he wanted, which was eye contact. He continued the previous conversation. “I don’t think the universe revolves around me. I may be a lot of things, Lily, but arrogant isn’t one of them.” He laughed shortly and looked down at his skinny frame as he added, “I mean, what have I got to be arrogant about?”
That got her attention, and she seemed to soften a little.
Encouraged, he went on, “I’m just calling it like I see it. I thought you liked that quality, you seem to do it enough yourself.”
“That’s only because I don’t know how to do anything else.” She paused, and then added bluntly, “I just want to make sure you know that I don’t have a crush on you.”
Peter blinked at her. “Uh. Okay.”
“I mean with all this about how you know I care what you think – I just want that to be perfectly clear.”
“Fine,” Peter retorted. “I don’t have a crush on you either.”
“Good.”
Just then, Peter saw Celeste walk down the hallway, laughing melodiously and tossing her dark hair over her shoulder as she and Katie shared some private joke. Seizing on the opportunity to prove his point, Peter said, “Look, if you don’t believe me, see that girl?” Lily nodded and Peter lowered his voice as he confessed a bit defensively, “She’s the girl of my dreams.”
“Hmm,” Lily frowned and watched her walk away critically. “She has a serpent.”
Now it was Peter’s turn to be confused. “Sorry?”
“Her specter. It’s a serpent.” Peter was dumbfounded. “I don’t know how much your dad told you about the specters, but some people are so entangled with their creatures that you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins.” She gestured to Celeste with her head and made a face. “That girl is enmeshed.” Then she added, “I’m just saying you could do better, that’s all.”