by Lia London
“Yeah, she really drains his brain. They’re so in love, y’know.” In classic Hadley manner, he leaned on his elbows and began a ridiculous interview. “So, Claudio, do you find girls make you stupid?”
I had to hide my face in Amity’s back to muffle my laughter. When we got out to the hall, I said, “Okay, I promise I’ll never be even remotely jealous of Clorenzo again.”
“Claudio.”
“But I like Clorenzo better. It sounds like a sore throat remedy.”
“Yes, it does,” she agreed. “But let’s not call him that to his face?”
“Deal.”
“Max and Kameko already know, by the way.”
“Oh? So what are we doing?”
“Let’s go try to catch Flinckey. It’s been a while.”
“Won’t Flinckey be at lunch, too?”
“It’s worth a shot. Plus, I couldn’t stay next to Claudio too much longer. His cologne almost knocked me out,” said Amity.
A wheezing laugh took over my body, and I was still shaking a little by the time we got the main office.
“Is he all right?” asked the secretary, actually looking up from her monitor for once.
Amity explained that we’d seen something funny, and I did my best to keep my laughter below the decibel limits. Others in the area raised eyebrows or grinned curiously, but we made it to Flinckey’s office and—by some miracle—found her eating a bowl of microwave chow mien at her desk. “You’re here!” I gasped, releasing the last of my mirth.
Miss Flinckey glanced up without moving so she wouldn’t spill her spoonful. “Yes, and so are you!” she smiled.
“Miss Flinckey!” Amity sidled past me in the doorway and carefully hugged the old woman from behind.
Miss Flinckey gave up on eating and set her bowl down. “Well, it’s good to see you, too! Did you kids need something?”
Amity flopped down in the hard plastic chair beside Flinckey’s desk, and I stayed leaning in the door sill. “Nah, we just wanted to check in on you. How’s it going?”
Flinckey’s face warmed up, and again I saw glimpses of the beauty she must have been forty years ago. “I’m all right. I hear you two are on the new Unity Team.”
“We have to get used to the adult world of meetings, meetings, meetings,” said Amity cheerfully.
“Yes,” said Miss Flinckey, keeping her eyes fixed on Amity. “The adult world has so many intriguing adventures, doesn’t it?”
Were they speaking in code? I wondered.
“Is there a party I’m missing?” Mr. Whittle tapped my shoulder and I shifted to let him enter.
“Oh no, Ron. Nothing exciting like that,” said Miss Flinckey.
“We’re talking about how fun it is to have meetings,” I said.
Mr. Whittle pointed at Amity and I with one finger each. “I will see you fine folks seventh period on the third floor!”
“We’ll be there,” said Amity.
The bell rang. “Ooops, time to go!” said Mr. Whittle, and he sped into his office.
“Remember, kids,” said Miss Flinckey thoughtfully. “It’s what happens between the meetings that matters most, for good or bad. Meetings are just for show.”
“Uh, thanks,” I said.
Amity and I walked out. “She’s a wise old woman,” said Amity fondly. Her head tilted to one side in thought. “Hmm. She’s right you know.”
“About shows? I’m sure Clorenzo will put on a good one. It ought to be fun.”
She punched my arm playfully. “Just keep working on the real unity plan in between meetings.”
“Oh.” I affected my best Clorenzo accent and opened the door for her. “I shall extend my very best efforts to be productive in the interim until I may again gaze upon your—”
She punched me a little harder, and we parted ways, both smirking all the way to our lockers.
Chapter Twenty-Four: Unity Team
Max and I left study hall and headed up to the third floor only to find Claudio and Kameko coming back down.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“There seems to be an architectural anomaly in this part of the building. We are—”
Amity and Elizabeth appeared in the stairwell and stopped. “What are you all waiting for?” asked Amity. “Let’s get this show on the road.” She winked at me and took the steps two at a time.
Clorenzo reached after her. “Wait! Amity—”
She and Elizabeth continued up, chatting about something to do with history, and when they stepped out onto the invisible hallway, Clorenzo actually squealed and Kameko blanched even paler.
“Oh,” I said, smiling. “The floor. Right. C’mon, guys.”
They followed me up to the landing and we could see Amity and Elizabeth seemingly floating in midair outside the assigned room. Max grabbed my arm. “Did Amity get flying magic from you?”
“Uh, yeah.” I grinned, pulling him forward. “You, too, Max. You’re my bud. I love you, man!” Max wrestled free and then stood as if on a giant surfboard, with his arms out for balance. “This is so awesome! Is it like a force field or something?”
Clorenzo kept the noises at bay this time, but his face showed terror. “Welcome to Magian High!” I said, spreading my arms wide. I stomped on the invisible floor with one foot and started our school pep rally yell. Kameko tested the floor with her toe and then skittered across quickly to enter the room where the girls had gone. Max and I turned and followed her. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Clorenzo doing his best to swagger while testing the footing of each step as he went. It looked like some funky dance, and I had to duck through the door and stifle a laugh.
Rolls of colored poster paper lined one wall, and a shelf full of paints and markers filled another. Cramped in the remaining space, a long well-used work table stood with only three chairs around it. Mr. Whittle entered the room backwards, coaxing Clorenzo. “You won’t fall, Claudio. I’m so sorry I forgot to explain…” Clorenzo took a firm step into the room, and relief bloomed on his face.
I couldn’t resist. “I thought tall guys weren’t afraid of heights.” The silent stare that he gave me was my day’s reward. He couldn’t think of anything to say!
Mr. Whittle insisted that the girls take the seats, while the guys stood all chivalrous against the wall. The light above flickered like one of the tube bulbs had caught a cold. Not a very auspicious location for a Unity Team that was going to change the school culture.
“So,” said Mr. Whittle, rubbing his hands together. “Did you all get your assignment done?”
I flashed a goofy look at Elizabeth who scowled at me as much as her good nature would allow. Kameko, on the other hand, raised her hand tentatively.
“Yes, representative from Corporal District?” said Mr. Whittle with mock formality.
She gave a thin smile and spoke quietly. “Um, we came up with ours. It’s that Corporals try to develop our whole selves, not…um…” She looked at Amity and scrunched her nose a little. “Um, and not just our brains.”
“Bravo!” said Mr. Whittle. “If we had to put that in one word?”
“Well-rounded?” suggested Max.
“Terrific. Corporals are well-rounded. Good to know.” He punched the air. I couldn’t help noticing that he seemed to be mimicking a lot of Mr. Blakely’s mannerisms, except they felt a little stiff coming from Whittle. I guess he caught me staring because he pointed to me next. “Mages?”
I tossed a thumb in Elizabeth’s direction. “She’s our spokesman.”
Elizabeth sat up straight and tucked her hair behind her ears. “I think that we decided on something like, Mages are creative.”
“We did?” I asked.
“Well, I did. Kincaid didn’t really help much.”
Mr. Whittle looked at me questioningly. “You didn’t understand the assignment?”
“I didn’t really understand the point of the assignment,” I said.
“Ah,” said Mr. Whittle, stuffing his hands in his pocket
s. “Well, let’s say that we’re trying to determine perspectives, the way we see ourselves and others. Step one is to figure out how we see ourselves. Step two is to figure out how we view others. Step three is to fix any errors in those perceptions.”
“So our next homework assignment is going to be to talk about what we think of the other groups?” guessed Amity.
“Exactly,” said Mr. Whittle. “Spoken like a true Wiser.”
“Do we really need to spend a lot of time on this, sir?” I asked. “Couldn’t we get on with planning some kind of actual event to draw us all together?”
Mr. Whittle looked at me without expression for a whole beat before he snapped back into his Blakely bounce. “That’s what we’re prepping for. I’ll want each pair to make a presentation at an upcoming Assembly. You’ll start by recognizing how your group is perceived by others, and then share instead what you really are. Maybe this shouldn’t be done by the two from each school. Could each couple maybe run a survey amongst their own kind—?”
“Not a ‘couple’!” said Amity, her eyes wide and her hands waving the word away. “Don’t call us a couple, please.”
“‘Own kind’?” asked Kameko. “What does that mean?” Her sudden boldness sounded defensive, and it got everyone’s attention. “We’re all just teenagers,” she said. “I started as a Wiser and moved to Corporal because I was more interested in the athletic department than math and science. Now I’m at Magian High. But in all three schools, I was still me. I’m not a ‘kind’.” Her voice had grown louder with each sentence, and when she finished, Amity, Elizabeth, Max and I all stared in open-mouthed appreciation.
Mr. Whittle stumbled over an apology.
“If we need a president of this club or something, I vote Kameko,” said Max.
“I second that motion,” said Clorenzo, moving closer to her and flashing a broad smile. Kameko almost got some color in her face before looking back down at her shoes. She knocked her knees together with nervous energy.
Amity and Elizabeth were clearly torn between wanting to support Kameko and wanting to maintain control of the unity movement. “Did we want a president of this club?” asked Amity. “Can’t we be a unified voice to set an example for the whole school? Y’know, how to work together?”
We all looked at Mr. Whittle who chewed the insides of his cheeks and shrugged. “Hey, this is your thing. Your club. You tell me.”
We all kind of stared at each other, not knowing how to respond.
“I have an idea,” said Mr. Whittle. He tore a small piece off the end of one of the rolls of paper, and then ripped that into six little pieces. Grabbing a marker, he said, “I’ll write each of your names on a piece of paper, and we’ll draw one randomly to be the president, knowing that you all have to work together either way. That person will act as a spokesman to the student body. Is that all right?” We continued with the blank looks. Mr. Whittle folded each paper up, cupped them in his hands to shake them up, and then looked around for something to put them in. He gave up and stuffed them all in his suit pocket. He shook the jacket once more for good measure, closed his eyes, and pulled out a piece of paper.
“Claudio Lorenzo!” he announced happily.
And it pretty much went downhill from there.
Clorenzo and Whittle were addicted to Talking Points, mostly because they liked to sound important, I think. The rest of us sat glassy-eyed through weeks and weeks of these meetings, and then intentionally failed to complete our “assignments”, which always seemed designed to keep the Unity Team as divided as the school. The rest of us suspected that Clorenzo wasn’t thinking so much about school unity as he was coming up with excuses to work one-on-one with Amity. Flinckey’s counsel that the real work had to happen between meetings proved gold. All of us, except Clorenzo, had at least one class with another member of the Unity Team, so we passed messages along, and worked on recruiting people to the cause, even if Whittle didn’t feel we were ready to launch the official school-wide club yet.
Chapter Twenty-Five: The Gel Ball Game
On the last Friday in October, a bunch of us got together at Binney’s for the biggest Gel Ball game of the century, and Max got the brilliant idea that we let ourselves get plastered with the Gel (no smocks) and then leave for the park with regular squirt guns and re-use the Gel. He figured the Mages with Water magic could extract the goo and re-form it into new ammo where we could play running through the trees and playground equipment, no Flash Jumping allowed. We were all having such a good time that we didn’t do the math to figure out that we only had three Mages with Water magic: Curry, Hadley and Elizabeth.
“Three teams, then,” said Max. “One goo-master Mage per team.”
“And one Corporal runner per team,” I added. “No fair if Max, Rikki and Kameko are all on the same team. No one will ever hit them.”
“Okay, but we need to divide up the strategists, too,” said Kameko. “Amity can not be with Lindsey.”
I laughed, looking around at the crowd. We’d added Jason and Noah from chemistry and four other Mages from P.E., including one of the Dirt Hole guys. Elizabeth and Rikki had also grabbed a few more Corporal girls, sophomores, who were a little ditsy, but nice and very accepting of everyone. Amity and Lindsey had even gotten two Wiser guys to join in the game, a stretch for them because it didn’t involve anything in the binary code. Once I got past their sun-deprived, weakling appearances, they turned out to be pretty cool. Despite the fact that their IQs were probably double mine, they seemed to look up to Max, Hadley and me.
Leaning in to Amity, I whispered, “You know what? This is the biggest group of friends I’ve ever had. This is really—”
I stopped myself, eyes and mouth both big. “Hey guys! This is it! A giant Gel Ball game with mixed teams! We could set up obstacles in the gym and have some play while others watch from the stands, and then rotate in—a big activity to promote school unity.”
“Unity through war,” said Lindsey out of the side of her mouth in her typical manner, but she actually nodded. “It could be fun. We won’t be able to re-use the Gel, though, without magic.”
“Actually,” said one of the Wiser guys, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose with a finger. “I’ve been studying some polymers in an online college chemistry course, and I think I could come up with something that would work for Nomers, too. More like a colored putty, but…”
“Brilliant!” cheered Hadley. “Then Kincaid can play, too.”
Elizabeth slapped his shoulder and a few people laughed in a friendly way. My lack of Gel-Ball skills had become more legendary than the myth about my blowing Jack and the Punkers down the street, and ironically, it seemed to help my image rather than hurt it.
“If we’re gonna play, we should get on with it,” said Curry. “The park closes at sunset.”
We took a few minutes and divided up the teams as evenly as possible, and then spread out to three home bases. I went with Curry, Rikki, Jason, a Mage from P.E., a sophomore Corporal girl named Ashley, and the polymer Wiser guy. Our home base included the merry-go-round, and we all piled onto it to discuss strategies. The polymer guy sketched out a map in the dusty surface of the merry-go-round. Huddled around, we listened and squinted and plotted.
“They’re coming,” hissed the Corporal girl.
We turned around to see about ten hands blazing towards us. “What the—” None of the teams had enough Mages to generate that much fire, which could only mean—
“Punkers!” screamed Rikki, as a bunch of Fire Balls flew down and hit the middle of the merry-go-round. Before we could all scramble off, Jack and his buddies swooped over and began spinning the merry-go-round really fast. All of us clung to the bars to keep from being thrown. Sparks from the Fire Balls spread and scorched my hands before dying out for lack of fuel. Curry, on my right, let go of the bars and flew up to confront them. Amidst the whirring and the screaming, I heard the sound of hand-to-hand combat, and the merry-go-round slowed down in jolts a
s hands grabbed the bars to stop its spinning.
Max, Jason, Noah and the Dirt Hole Mage from P.E. were sitting on the Punkers, keeping them face down on the ground with their hands where they couldn’t do anything. None of the Punkers were strong enough to fly away with somebody on his back.
The air suddenly brightened with red and blue flashing lights, and a patrol car pulled up to the curb on the street nearest where we were. The sirens whirred twice, like a warning, and then two cops got out. A bunch of the kids went over to tell the police what had happened.
Curry came up behind me, grabbing my arm. “Jack got away.”
I swore. “Of course he leaves his guys to get caught.”
“Don’t worry about that,” said Curry. “We got witnesses, but you better get out of here. You can’t afford any more police publicity right now. Go! Fly!” He shoved me in the opposite direction of the police cars. When I hesitated, he growled, “Don’t be a hero right now, Kincaid. Go home!”
Still unsure, I flew up into the tree, but the cops were peering up into the branches of the trees closest to them, so I sped away towards home, hoping everyone would be okay.
***
“Curry’s my new hero.”
I looked down at the cell phone to make sure I really knew who had called. Yep. Amity. “Really?” I asked, trying not to sound skeptical.
“He got in the Punkers’ faces before the cops got to them and totally burned Jack.”
“Wait, I thought Jack escaped. Curry burned—”
“With words, silly. Crazy coming from stone-face Curry, but he let them see what a loser Jack was for abandoning them to take the rap and how they’d better learn to walk the line or they’d end up in entry-level welding jobs after they got out of jail.”
“He said that?”
“Yes! And by the time the cops got over to them—Max and Noah kept holding them down—so cool!—they were ready to confess. They told the cops everything, including about Jack.”
“Was it Sheldon?”