by Leito, Chad
Cindy the bear grunted some more, then fell down on all fours and padded out the room. She exited through a wide door in the back of the cafeteria, and the food was once again being served to Fishies. The man in the white suit with the black gums had taken Cindy’s place and was flopping chicken breasts onto plates for the Fishies.
Out of the corner of his eye Asa noticed Charlotte, far forward in line, making eye contact with Asa to communicate something. She turned around and was served a chicken breast.
When Asa got to the front of the line, and held his plate out for the man with black gums to serve him, he did his best to stop his hands from shaking. The man with black gums had been scooping up chicken breasts from the front row of foods and serving them, but for Asa, he took one from the back of the pan. The man placed the meat on Asa’s plate and smiled at him—“Enjoy,” he said. The smile was huge, it was almost like the snarl he had given Asa earlier that day.
Asa nodded, muttered—“thank you,” and went on down the line.
By the time Asa had been served by every polar bear, his plate was full of butter laced turnips, green beans with bits of bacon in them, and a large, warm, sugar cookie. He tried not to think of the man with the black gums as he led he and Teddy over to a couple of seats directly across from Charlotte and her friend with red hair. Asa did a quick glance around the cafeteria and could not spot Stridor. In the corner, already eating, were McCoy and Conway, talking quietly together. Asa had not seen Conway since he stormed away on the train station.
Where do I know him from?
The question came to his mind, but he tried not to dwell on this, either. Tomorrow would start one week of no talking, and he wanted to make a good impression on Charlotte before this time started.
“Looks like Conway and McCoy aren’t very hungry,” Asa joked as he and Teddy slumped down into two of the high backed chairs.
Charlotte turned her head and looked back to see that each of the chaperone had what would be three servings for a normal person, piled high onto their plate. “It appears that way,” she joked back.
Asa smiled as he cut into his first bite of chicken breast. He was happy. He was in a bad situation, sure, but he liked these people. And, after dinner, he would go safely to bed. He did not know what the morning held for him, but for now, he felt that he was safe.
He put the bite of chicken breast into his mouth and chewed. It tasted wonderful—the chicken was well cooked, while still maintaining an ample amount of moisture and tenderness. The herbs and salts mixed deliciously in his mouth.
He swallowed, and wasn’t keen enough to notice that his mouth was going numb. He began to cut into another bite.
“This is my friend, Sam,” Charlotte said, indicating the girl with red hair. She smiled and showed her braces to them.
“Nice to meet you, Sam,” Teddy began. Then, he spoke to the whole group—“You’ve got to feel sorry for Cindy, don’t you?” Teddy asked. “I mean, a polar bear isn’t meant to use its hands like that.”
“What do you want it to use?” Charlotte asked. “It’s mouth?”
“That would be more natural, wouldn’t it?” Teddy asked.
Asa swallowed his second bite of chicken. The room spun violently in his vision for one second and he jerked his eyes further open. Everything went back to normal.
“Yes,” Asa replied. “That would be more natural, but wouldn’t it almost seem to key in?”
He was smiling and took another bite of his chicken.
“What do you mean?” Sam asked.
“Asa, are you alright?” Charlotte asked. “You don’t look well.”
Asa looked at Charlotte’s plate. She hadn’t touched her food. Beyond Charlotte’s curly, dark hair, the man with the black gums was standing in the back of the cafeteria, leaning against one of the pillars. He was watching Asa, waiting to see what would happen. A slight smirk was creeping among his thin lips.
Asa stopped cutting into his chicken. He didn’t feel well. He opened his mouth, “Habaloo chacknos. Greeney,” he said.
They looked at him with concerned expressions.
Asa felt something running down the front of his face. He reached his hand up, wiped his mouth, pulled it back, and examined it. His fingers were covered in red, hot blood.
“Your nose, Asa!” Charlotte hollered.
Asa tried to breathe in, but found that his throat had swollen shut. He stood up, panicked, and again, the room around him shook violently. This time, the sensation was more extreme and he fell onto his back, smacking his head against the hard purple floor.
He heard Charlotte scream for someone to help.
His left arm hurt an insane amount, and when he turned his head to examine it, he saw that it was turning a bright shade of red. He sat up and saw that Conway and McCoy were racing over to him. His vision began to tunnel, the world around him darkening. He wanted to scream, but found that his throat was still swollen shut. The last thing that he saw was the man with black gums, leaning against the white pillar. He was smiling now, looking right at Asa.
He poisoned me. I’m dying.
Those were Asa’s last thoughts, and then everything went dark.
10
Silent Lessons
Asa was running and there were flashing red and blue lights following behind him. A motor roared beneath heavy metal. Asa looked back to see Harold Kensing, his face pecked clean of flesh and dripping blood, smiling at Asa as he steered the cop car.
Asa’s legs raced along the cement at an amazing pace, but when he looked back, he saw that the cop car was still gaining on him. Crows swarmed above, blocking out the sky in a moving, bobbing array of black wings so that Asa didn’t know if it were day or night. Everything was either a flicking red or blue from the rotating lights of the cop car.
“Help!” Asa cried at the birds. “Stop him!”
The caws were deafening. The crows did not answer him.
“Please!”
Still, no answer.
The sound of the motor grew louder until the vehicle was directly behind him, inches from his feet that were kicking at the ground so hard, desperate to escape alive.
Then, the engine stopped roaring, and made a slurping sound.
The crows overhead grew quiet.
The car behind Asa continued to emit a slurping sound from beneath the hood.
Asa woke up. He was sweating and in a white bed with blankets pulled up to his neck. There were candles around him, and drawn curtains hung all around him like walls so that the area he lay in was like a small room. There was a soft, beeping sound, and Asa’s mind felt foggy.
Where am I?
He couldn’t remember.
He heard the slurping sound again, and then someone crying. Asa moved his left arm up and felt that someone was holding his hand. The grip was firm and reassuring.
Mama?
Asa tilted his head to the side and saw the shadowed, candle lit face of the man who had tied him to weight plates and dropped him to the bottom of a lake only one day before.
“What’s g…” Asa began.
“SHHHHH!” Conway said. He dropped Asa’s hand and his face hardened. He held a cola in his left hand and had been slurping on it before Asa woke up. “Don’t talk, remember what they told you in the Assembly? Fishies who talk the first week get kicked out of here. I don’t want to see you killed.”
Killed? They kill us if we get kicked out? Asa wanted to ask the question, but instead, he just shook his head.
Conway stared coldly at him. Asa noticed drying tears under Conway’s puffy eyes.
Has he been crying? He looks so composed. I did hear a sob, though.
“Don’t shake your head, either. They weren’t joking when they said no communication for the first seven days. Seriously, none. Don’t nod. Not even slightly. I shouldn’t be able to tell what you’re thinking. You’re eyes are so expressive; you’re going to have to watch it. Try not to smile or frown. Nothing. Show me the blandest look that you c
an.” Asa did. “Good. Keep your face for the next week like that and you’ll be fine.”
The candlelight flickered and Conway sat and stared at Asa’s face for a moment. Asa felt uncomfortable, but did his best not to show how he felt. He surveyed the room.
Next to the chair that Conway sat in was a small, rolling table. Atop it was an empty package of M&Ms, three Snickers wrappers, an empty, foot long Pixie stick, a wadded up bag of chips, and a pile of crushed cola cans. Asa thought that the amount of sugar would have put a normal person in a coma.
There were beeping machines behind Asa, monitoring his heart rate, rate of breathing, his oxygen saturation and his blood pressure. An IV was inserted into his arm, and clear liquid was being dripped into his veins.
Asa felt incredibly thirsty, and wanted to ask for some water, but thought better of it. His head was throbbing with his pulse. His throat was sore. He sniffed and noticed that clear oxygen tubes had been stuffed down his nose. He had heartburn. There was a dull cramping in his lower back. Most notably, though, Asa felt an enormous sense of fatigue. He guessed that he could sleep another twelve hours. He was just beginning to close his eyes as Conway spoke.
“I’ll go get the nurse. You need to go to class.” Conway stood up and disappeared behind the curtain.
Class? I can’t go to a class! I feel awful!
Asa had a feeling that these people wouldn’t care.
While he was alone, Asa began to survey what happened. He smiled and relaxed in his bed. He thought about his entire relationship with the people with black gums, and was glad that it was all over. He would never have to see them again.
At first, Asa recalled, he felt helpless. He remembered McCoy warning Asa about bringing up his encounter with Harold Kensing. Asa felt more helpless when the vampire snarled at him on the street, and he was too afraid to warn anyone. He knew that the people with black gums wanted to kill him, but he had to keep it to himself. Now, he was relieved. It couldn’t have ended any better. The man in the serving line had, no doubt about it, poisoned the chicken breast that he had served Asa. The Academy would now be aware of the problem and work to fix it. Simple.
Now all I have to worry about is surviving this place.
Missus Ida, the nurse, pulled back the curtain and popped her head in to look at Asa; she was smiling wide, showing her dead teeth, and her eyes looked the size of pool balls with the way her glasses magnified them. She entered, her two tiger tails wagging behind her. Today, they each had a bow tied around the end of them.
She sat down beside Asa. “How are you feeling?”
Asa didn’t answer.
“Right, I’m sorry. You’re not supposed to talk. I talk enough for two people, most of the time anyways!” She guffawed, slapped her knee, and then gripped the bed railing and composed herself at a startling rate. “Okay, so I’ll tell you what happened. It appears as though you ate something that did not agree with you. Perhaps you were allergic to one of the ingredients—there’s no way to know.”
Despite Asa’s attempt to not show expression, his jaw dropped. No way to know? He poisoned me! The man in the white suit with the black gum who tortured Harold Kensing did it! He fed me the chicken, that’s all that I ate, and then he just leaned against that pillar and stared at me! How can you not know?”
“Believe it or not,” Missus Ida added, “someone may have even poisoned you.” She misunderstood Asa’s jaw-dropped expression and said—“I know, shocking, right?
“But anyway, you’re doing fine. No permanent damage, luckily. Your potassium level dropped a dangerous amount, and you almost died. You’re going to feel awful for the next day or so—expect to be exhausted. I wish that you could lay off school, but what you will learn hear is so important. I talked to Hubert Boistly about maybe letting you have a few days off, and he said ‘absolutely not. Part of the process is that they need to learn to expect the unexpected.’ So, I’m sorry about that. Let me unhook you.”
She stood up, and her right tail took the tubes out of Asa’s nose while her hands removed the IV, blood pressure cuff, and heart rate monitor. “There you go,” she said. She began to walk out of the room. “Get up at your own pace, and follow the red line. You’re first class will be in the assembly hall.” She turned back to Asa, took a white bag out of her pocket, and tossed it to him. “Those are some pills in case you’re uncomfortable. And if you need any more, you just come back to me and ask me. I’ll give you any drugs that you need. Too-da-loo!” She wiggled her fingers at him, and then left. Her tails were the last things to exit the curtained room.
Asa sat up in bed. His head and back throbbed in protest. Suddenly and unexpectedly, he felt nauseated. He leaned over and threw up into a bedside trashcan. When he was done, he lay back down and thought that any class would be fruitless in his condition—it would be impossible for him to learn while he felt so badly.
Curious, he opened up the bag. Inside were six pill bottles, all filled to the brim: Norco, Dilluadid, Morphine, Oxycontin, Hydrocodone, and Melatonin.
Isn’t this illegal? I could overdose! I could die from polypharmacy!
Asa shrugged and remembered that they had taken him to the middle of a lake, chained him to iron plates, and dropped him into the water without his permission. He figured that giving away some prescription pills to a minor was probably not a moral dilemma to them.
Asa vomited again before standing. He pushed the blankets off of him, planted his feet on the ground, and stood on shaking knees. His face had a thin layer of sweat covering and he found that the front of his shirt was crusty with dried blood from when his nose started gushing in the cafeteria.
Asa pushed back the curtains to find that he was in a long hallway of hospital beds. He walked to the end and found a bathroom along a wall.
He entered, rested his palms on the white sink top, and looked at himself. His hair still had bits of dirt and mud in it from the lakebed. His face was pale. He had no idea what time it was. His eyes were red. And that dull pain on his shoulder blades was not subsiding. He wondered what it could be. It was not a typical backache. It felt as though someone was trying to pull his shoulder blades out of his skin.
Asa gulped water greedily from the bathroom sink, and then found his way out of the hallway that he was in. He discovered that he was in a back portion of Missus Ida’s Nurses station. He stumbled his way to the shag carpet waiting room, and exited through the beaded entryway.
“Asa!”
He turned, saw Conway standing behind him, holding a piece of folded, thick cloth. “You’ll need this for class.”
He tossed it up, and Asa caught it with the hand he wasn’t using to hold the drugs. He placed the white bag down and examined what Conway had thrown to him. It was black, with both cloth and rubber components. The fabric made a cylinder, and Asa saw that the 6:30AM shown on the front in white font that seemed to be stitched in to the fabric. But, as he watched, the 0 on the fabric broke up without assistance, and began to move so that the stitch on the fabric now said 6:31AM.
Asa examined the wristband on Conway’s forearm, and saw that it was the same as the one he had.
“Look,” Conway said, taking his off of his arm. “Twist the rubber dial on the back, and it will open up.” Conway demonstrated, and his armband opened at one end so that it was flat, instead of a cylinder for an arm to be placed in.
Asa found the rubber dial in his fingers, and turned it 180 degrees. He gasped held the armband close to his face to get a better look. After he turned the dial, a straight line of fabric unwound itself, all on its own. Asa watched as the threads moved and snaked and untangled themselves from one another until his armband was now a flat square.
Conway smiled. “It’s pretty incredible stuff. Don’t ask me what all it does: Number one, because you’re not supposed to be talking, and number two, because I don’t know. I’ve had one of these for years and I’m still learning things that it can do.
“Now that your device is flat, put each of
your thumbs on one of the black rubber bands that goes around your wrist while your device is on your arm. Good. Now, slide them forward.”
Asa did, and he felt the device stiffen in his hands until it was as straight as a board. Then, as he watched, the rubber and fabric throughout the device contorted and moved, and laced together in a whistling fast pace, individual threads bobbing and weaving as if being pulled by an invisible needle. The end product was phenomenal; he could not see how he was even looking at the same item.
In Asa’s hands sat a small computer. At the bottom was a series of rubber keys made from the same rubber that had, just a few moments ago, been two arm bands and a dial on the back of the device. On each of the keys was thin, white stitchings that labeled the button.
The screen of the laptop wasn’t typical; it wasn’t backlit, and the script was all white fabric sowed into the black. There were two options on the initial screen: Library, and Note Taker.
“The only problem with it is that you can’t see in the dark. When you type something, it just stitches itself into the fabric. It’s a great machine, though. There’s no mouse, but you can touch the screen. Whenever you want to change it back into an armband, just hit the power button.”
From around a corner came two raccoons driving one of their small red cars at thirty miles per hour, cleaning supplies being thrown around in a barrel tied to the back. They took the corner hard with screeching wheels that left ten-foot long tread marks on the tile floor. As the car approached, Conway waved at Asa. “I’ll take this ride. See you later.”
As the car sped by, Conway jumped onto the roof, crouched down like a baseball catcher. The car bobbled with his weight for a moment, and then stabilized, moving a little slower. The raccoon that was driving turned the wheel and the car disappeared behind another corner, screeching as it went.
Asa pressed the power button on the laptop, and watched as the fabric stitched itself back into its original shape. He pulled the armband on, picked up his bag of pills, began to amble down the hallway, following the red line in the floor, and the small arrows drawn in the line every ten yards that pointed the appropriate way. Normally, the walk would have taken ten minutes, but it took Asa twenty atop his wobbly legs.