Harrison Squared

by Daryl Gregory

  “Really,” I said. She looked at least forty.

  “… Pennsylvania.”

  She signed the note, and pressed down so hard that the tip of the pencil snapped and went flying. “Give this to good ol’ Coach,” she said bitterly. “Put it right in his big … fat…”

  Her eyelids drooped. Then she slumped forward in slow motion until her head came to a stop against the desk. Her eyes closed.

  I backed out of the room and then pulled the door shut as quietly as I could. In the waiting room I looked at the note. In faint, loopy handwriting she’d written, “I love you. I love you. I love you. Yours, body and soul, Mandi.” She’d drawn a heart over that last “i.”

  * * *

  It took me a long time to get back to a part of the school I recognized. I hadn’t wanted to go through the kitchen, so I’d taken Door #3, which led to a long, doorless hallway identical to all of Dunnsmouth Secondary’s hallways except for an orange stripe painted down the middle. The outer loop, I supposed. I started walking, and ten minutes later the corridor ended with an abrupt turn—and I was in the atrium, standing opposite the cafeteria. Somehow I’d gotten to the other side of the main hallway.

  The change gong sounded a moment later. Too late for PE, then. And thank goodness; my note was useless. I stood by the wall as the atrium filled with students, and finally I saw Garfield, the bat-eared boy, then a few other juniors I recognized, and then Lydia, wet hair gleaming in the weird light. I fell into step beside her. For some reason it amused me to keep bothering her.

  We turned down a corridor that I was surprised to recognize. “Hey, the library,” I said.

  “Nobody goes in the library,” Lydia said.

  “Why not? It’s not so bad.”

  She looked at me. “You really went inside?”

  “Yesterday. What’s the big deal?”

  She harrumphed. I’d never heard anyone under sixty harrumph before.

  The next class was taught by the weird little man in the baggy suit that I’d seen next to Montooth during Voluntary. Up close he was even weirder. His eyes were so far apart that they seemed to be looking in two directions at once, like a hammerhead shark. He stood in the corner of the room, hands behind his back, watching the students with a disturbing sense of eagerness as they took their seats. Before I could find a seat he nodded at me, and I had no choice but to walk over to him.

  “Welcome to World History,” the teacher said. “I’m Mr. Waughm. I am also vice principal of Dunnsmouth Secondary. Go Threshers.”

  “My name’s—”

  “Oh,” he said. “I know.” A smile worked its way onto his face like a worm caught aboveground after a rainstorm. “Take a book from the stack by the window, Mr. Harrison. We’re taking a test today, so you can use the time to do a little catch-up reading, eh? Hmm? Yes?”

  “Uh, yes,” I said. “What chapter are you on?”

  “The one on Vlad the Third.” He pointed at a desk at the back of the room. “That should do for now, yes? Hmm?”

  The book was very heavy and bound in what looked like actual leather. The title was The Subjugation and Domination of Various Peoples and Lands: A Guide to Effective Government.

  Okay then. I took my seat. The test was evidently an essay test; Mr. Waughm handed out question sheets, and the students went to work in their spiral notebooks.

  I opened the book and found the chapter about Vlad III, otherwise known as Vlad the Impaler, otherwise known as Dracula’s role model. Bram Stoker had based his vampire on this fifteenth-century warlord, who liked to keep the peace by—spoiler alert—impaling his enemies on large wooden stakes.

  I glanced over at Lydia. She was reading the first problem but hadn’t written anything yet. She clutched the pencil in her left hand, while the fingers of her right hand made a rolling motion, trilling that ol’ invisible piano. Then her fingers stopped. She started to write an answer; then her fingers started moving again.

  I looked over my shoulder at the rest of the class. At least four other people were also doing the finger-tapping thing. Not constantly. Like Lydia, they started and stopped, like musicians trading off solos.

  About twenty minutes into class, the door opened. It was Principal Montooth, and behind him the round form of Miss Pearl. Mr. Waughm hurried over to them, and then Montooth and Waughm went into the hallway. Miss Pearl waddled over to Waughm’s desk, studied the chair, and finally sat down.

  Thirty seconds later, Mr. Waughm came back in and announced, “Class, I have something to attend to.” He looked at me, then quickly looked away. “Everyone except Mr. Harrison, turn in your tests to Miss Pearl when you’re finished. As for homework—” He glanced toward the doorway where Montooth was waiting for him. “Nothing tonight.” The door closed.

  “Stop gawking and get to work,” Miss Pearl said.

  No one, however, was gawking. They went back to the essay without a word. Their fingers, however, were fluttering and flicking, like the ghost typists.

  The hand-wiggling continued all through World History and continued in Practical Skills class. While Mrs. Velloc sat at her desk, the students seemed to be working hard on their knots—except their fingers were moving way too much.

  Finally, it clicked.

  When we walked out of class, heading for lunch, I whispered to Lydia, “I know what you guys are doing.”

  Her eyelids lowered to half-mast.

  “The signing,” I said. I waggled my fingers.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “That’s what I don’t know—what you’re talking about. Are you gossiping? Telling jokes? Talking about me?”

  “Don’t flatter yourself,” she said.

  “You have to teach me,” I said. “Just a few words. What’s the sign for ‘I’m so bored I could scream’?”

  We entered the cafeteria. Lydia looked around to make sure no one was listening. “I’ll meet you over there,” she said, and gestured toward a lunch table. Then she picked up a tray and joined the serving line.

  I walked toward the table, where Garfield and Flora sat with three other kids, one a tall boy with a forehead like an anvil and long black hair that fell to his collar. Flora saw me coming, pursed those red lips, and then set those fingers to moving. Captain Forehead looked my way. Two fingers of one hand tapped the table, twice.

  I sat down at an empty spot at the table. They said nothing. “Lydia said I should sit here,” I said.

  They seemed to accept that, and went back to their own meals, bowls of that gray liquid I’d seen the lunch ladies stirring. I was glad I’d packed my own lunch, and set out the peanut butter and jelly sandwich I’d made this morning, as well as a bag of trail mix. It was the best I could do with the remains of the road supplies. Mom and I really needed to get to a grocery store.

  The others at the table looked like they were ignoring me, and I tried to look like I was ignoring them, but I was watching their fingers tap, flick, cross, and uncross. I didn’t know what the individual movements meant, but I could follow the flow of conversation. The talk was rippling across the table. All the while, their expressions never changed.

  Lydia arrived at the table. She did something with one finger, and the rest of the students picked up their trays and left without a word. She sat down opposite me.

  “Wow,” I said. “What did you say?”

  “You’re never going to learn fingercant,” Lydia said. “We’ve been doing it since kindergarten, and you’re an outsider.”

  “Fingercant. Cool. What’s being an outsider got to do with it?”

  “You’ll be leaving Dunnsmouth before you ever learn.”

  “I’m good with languages,” I said. “Give me a try. Por favor.”

  She rolled her eyes. On Lydia, this was a major muscle movement.

  “This is ‘be quiet,’” she said. She twitched the pinky of her right hand, twice. “This is ‘the teacher’s watching.’” She bent the knuckle of her index finger, then pointed it strai
ght.

  “Okay, right.” I practiced it: pinky twitch, pinky twitch, index bend, point.

  Lydia said, “You just said, ‘punch me in the back of the head.’”

  “I did?”

  Lydia blinked, very slowly.

  “Oh,” I said. “You know, it’s very hard to tell when you’re joking.”

  She stared at me.

  “You are joking, right?”

  “Don’t use it in class,” Lydia said. “You’re too obvious. If you get caught, Montooth will punish you. But more important…” She stood and picked up her tray. She hadn’t touched the stew. “You’ll ruin it for all of us.”

  “Wait, you have to tell me more!”

  I wanted to know what language they were speaking during Voluntary. What those symbols carved above the pool locker rooms meant. And I really wanted to know what everybody was saying literally behind my back.

  Lydia walked away carrying her tray. And then I noticed the fingers of her right hand moving: pinky, pinky, index bend … point.

  I looked around. Mrs. Velloc stood by one gray wall, staring at me.

  * * *

  I walked downhill to the rental place, my backpack ten pounds heavier than it was this morning because of three huge textbooks: one on government from world history class; one from English class called Catastrophes of New England: 1650 to 1875; and a much-used book from my last class of the day, Non-Euclidean Geometry. The class was taught by Mr. Gint, a pale, balding man who barely looked at us. The entire class period he sat at his desk with a protractor and pencil, drawing pictures and muttering to himself. The students took worksheets from a stack and did them silently at their desks, and most of them—including Lydia—turned in the sheets before they left. But the questions didn’t make any sense to me. At home they still didn’t. The first one was:

  A fortress of solid granite, two thousand feet square, has four perfectly straight walls rising perpendicular to the level ground. You are alone. The others have abandoned you. The walls are infinitely high. Where do the tops of the walls touch? Show your work.

  But walls perpendicular to flat ground would never touch. Certainly not infinite walls—whether you were alone or not. All the questions were like that, involving unlikely shapes and logical inconsistencies. I finally decided to treat the worksheet as a series of trick questions, explaining why each case was impossible. An hour later, I had finished with homework, and Mom still wasn’t home.

  As night fell I tried not to think about the lurker from last night. I made supper for myself. I rearranged our books on the few shelves in the living room—ignoring the spot where the Newton and Leeb collection would have gone. I stared at my useless phone. No service. My mood started to turn ugly again, but I shook myself out of it. Sometimes you have to just act normal to make the world be normal.

  So, like a normal person, I turned off some of the lights in the house, and then—like a sane, nonparanoid person—I went to bed. I don’t remember if I dreamed. But when I awoke it was morning, and sunlight was streaming through my window, and the police were knocking at the front door.

  5

  He went like one that hath been stunn’d,

  And is of sense forlorn:

  A sadder and a wiser man

  He rose the morrow morn.

  Your mother’s been in an accident, they said. Later, I couldn’t remember which cop had first broken the news, Detective Lieutenant Hammersmith or Chief Bode of the Dunnsmouth Police. Hammersmith was the squat black man with the glasses who said he’d come down from the Uxton State Police Detective Unit. Whenever he talked, or tried to lead the discussion, Bode, a white, chubby, red-faced man, would try to cut him off.

  Their questions overlapped and kept me confused. When was the last time I saw my mother? Had she talked to me during the day? And the topper: Did she know how to swim?

  I had only one question of my own. “Is she dead?”

  Hammersmith and Bode exchanged a look.

  Hammersmith grimaced. “The Coast Guard is running a search pattern with helicopters, and local fishermen are helping out,” he said. “The important thing is not to lose faith.”

  Bode said, “Missing is not dead.”

  I sat on the couch, folded over like I’d been gut-punched. They tried to tell me what had happened, but I was having trouble processing the information, and I had to ask them to repeat it. Sometime last night, about seven p.m., the owner of the boat Mom had chartered, a fisherman named Hal Jonsson, sent out a distress call and said they were taking on water. He gave their position as about fifteen miles from shore. After that, the radio went silent. By the time the Coast Guard got to the last known location of Jonsson’s boat, there was nothing there but flotsam.

  “They found some life preservers, a plastic cooler, some equipment,” Hammersmith said. “Just the things that would float. Some of it was stenciled with the boat’s name.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “What happened? Was there a storm?”

  “No storm,” Hammersmith said. “No bad weather, really.”

  “So what happened? They hit a reef?”

  “We don’t know, son,” Bode said. “But we’re working on it.” He shouldered his way in front of Hammersmith, and when he squatted in front of me his knees cracked loudly. He was bald except for a narrow fringe of dark hair that gripped the back of his head like a horseshoe. “In the meantime, tell us who we can contact for you. Where’s your father?”

  “Are you kidding me?” I said. My voice was louder than I intended. I wiped at my nose.

  “Is there a reason you don’t want us to contact your father?” Hammersmith asked.

  They had no idea. Didn’t they have records on these kinds of things? “My father died in a boating accident thirteen years ago,” I said. “I mean, he went missing.”

  And there it was. My old friend rage. My right leg throbbed.

  They waited for me to calm down. I waited for me to calm down.

  “So…,” Bode said eventually. “How about other relatives. Anyone you can stay with?”

  My relatives were all distant, either emotionally, geographically, or both. On my mom’s side there were thousands of cousins, but they were all in Brazil and I’d never met them. On my dad’s side were his father and his sister. Mom never got along with them, especially Selena—Aunt Sel—who was so much the polar opposite of my mother that Mom called her “Antipode.” More scientist humor.

  I supposed that left only my grandfather. I opened the plastic trunk that contained my mother’s research materials. I found the blue spiral notebook that served as her address book and flipped through it until I found Grandpa’s entry. “Harrison Harrison the Third,” I told them. “He lives in Oregon, but he’s not been well. I don’t think he can travel.”

  “We’ll give him a call,” Hammersmith, holding out his hand.

  Bode stepped up and took the address book. “Yes, we will.”

  They started asking me questions about my mom’s schedule, what she was doing out on the water, and then what, exactly, she was researching.

  The rage I’d felt gradually slipped away—or I slipped away from it. The longer I talked the farther I moved out of my body. I watched it move, and listened to the strange noises it made, but I was somewhere else, somewhere out over the water.

  * * *

  Detective Hammersmith shook my hand with forced cheer and said he’d let me know as soon as they knew anything. Then Chief Bode drove me in his squad car up the hill, past the school. It seemed crazy that the students inside were going about their business as if nothing had happened.

  The Dunnsmouth police station was one of the few brick buildings in town. Bode showed me to a small conference room, looked around, then brought me a stack of old issues of Rod and Gun Magazine. I stared at the pile without opening one.

  A half hour or so later, Bode returned with a burly, round-faced white woman. “This is Mrs. Llewellyn,” Bode said. “She’s from the Department of Children and F
amilies, up in Uxton.”

  “Call me Marjorie,” she said in a thick New England accent. Her name came out “MAH-jree”—two syllables. “If you were a year older you’d be on your own, but since you’re sixteen—well, that puts you under the ‘children’ part of my job.” As for what, exactly, that job was in my case, she said she was here to answer my questions and generally help out until a parent or guardian could take over.

  “Is there anything you need right now?” she asked. “Have you had breakfast yet?”

  “I’m not hungry,” I said.

  “How about something to drink?”

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “Well I’m starving. Walk me to the vending machine?”

  Bode opened the door for us. “I’ll leave you two to it.”

  Marjorie walked me down a hallway. “That’s a pissa about your mother. You holdin’ up?”

  “I’m fine,” I said. Then realized how stupid that sounded. Who would be fine in a situation like this? “I’m worried,” I said.

  “Course you are.” She led me into what looked like the cops’ break room. There was no one else there. From one machine she purchased a package of little chocolate donuts, and from the other a couple of cans of soda. Perfect components to assemble a sugar bomb. She handed one of the bottles to me without asking me if I wanted it. “My cousin got pulled out of the drink a couple years ago,” she said. “Freezing water. Should have been dead. But they found him, resuscitated him, and now he’s back to being a pain in the ass.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” I said. “Give me false hope.”

  “This is regular, standard-issue hope,” she said. “Your mom’s an ocean scientist right? Out on the water a lot? So she’s experienced.”

  We sat at one of the round Formica tables. “She’s a marine biologist,” I said. “She was putting out research buoys that take sonar pictures and upload them to NOAA satellites whenever they hear something really big.”

  “Noah?”