by PAMELA DEAN
She quit reading and looked at the list of messages to see what threads Juniper was involved in. Juniper had three presences: herself, Juniper Meriweather; an older girl called Crystal Gold whom Gentian found even more insufferable than Juniper herself; and the fifteen-year-old boy she had made up for her school project, who was called Jason Breedlove, pronounced, as Jason reminded everybody repeatedly, more like “breadloaf.”
Gentian could tell at once which subject headers Juniper had written herself. Wanted: Jane Fairfax. Television tuned to a dead channel. Are You Just Drawn That Way? Keep those cards and letters. Anything Except Star Trek. Ride in Triumph Through Persepolis. And, exasperatedly, You Keep Using That Word. When she wasn’t talking to her family, Juniper could be interesting.
She was also involved, sometimes extensively, in threads named Fear Rules, Beam me up Snotty, Is their anybody there, and Hot Dud sees you.
Gentian knew Juniper’s own on-line personality, of course, of old, and was also wearily familiar with Crystal, who made occasional appearances when Juniper was vying with Rosemary for the bathroom they were supposed to share. But Gentian had not logged on since Jason made his appearance.
Her first conclusion was that with the addition of Jason to the cast, Juniper no longer needed to talk to anybody except herself. Her second was that Jason sounded much more like the Juniper her sisters knew than did either of the other two. Her third, as she leaned back fascinated from a long furious exchange of messages in which Crystal berated Jason for being a sexist, Jason defended himself coolly, and several other girls came eagerly to Jason’s defense, was that Jason was Juniper with the unreasonableness left out, but he was still a jerk. How odd of Juniper to think boys were more reasonable than girls.
Jason’s opinions were idiotic, of course; Juniper had apparently just inverted the sensible half of her own dearly held maxims to create his philosophy, if you could call it that. But he wasn’t impetuous, fanatical, insistent, involved—you could almost say he wasn’t interested in his own opinions, except that somebody who wasn’t would not in fact argue them, even so coolly.
Paging idly through a discussion of several Disney movies, some bands she had never heard of and never planned to, and a couple of British television shows she had similar intentions about, Gentian found the word she was looking for. “There’s no need to be shrill,” Jason said to a massed opposition composed of Crystal, Juniper, Hot Dud—who just might be what her father referred to as a conscious comedian, rather than an illiterate silly-boy—and the only other participant with a female name who agreed with them that Jason was being a sexist. That was what Jason wasn’t, all right. Shrill. And by not being shrill, he had put the rest of them into a position where they could hardly be anything else.
Gentian leaned back in the chair, regarding Juniper’s calendar, which was still on its June page, a photograph of the bluebells in Kew Gardens.
“Wow,” she said.
Did Juniper know what she was doing, or was she just stumbling around? And would anybody else in this odd group, this improbable medium, catch on, or would they either nod sagely or throw metaphorical rocks, depending on whether they agreed with Jason or not? She was tempted to post a message of her own, just to make things clearer. Good grief, if she had met Juniper this way and were not by experience with Juniper or someone like her so put off by histrionics, she might even like Juniper. She would certainly like her better than Jason.
But why? she thought, drumming her thumb on the wrist-rest. He acts scientific, doesn’t he? He’s detached? No. Or well, yes, he acts scientific but he isn’t in fact scientific; he has the attitude but not the essence. He gives detachment a bad name.
She bit off one corner of her thumbnail, and sighed. Steph would notice that on Monday and give her a lecture. Maybe it would be entertaining to tell her that one of Gentian’s criteria for a boyfriend was that he like bitten nails. That might shut her up. Which was more than you could say for Jason: Gentian couldn’t think of anything that might shut him up. I wonder if anybody could really get that way, she thought, having those awful opinions and yet not being involved with them, not taking things personally; I wonder if that makes sense. Nobody else has noticed that it might not, but they’re only kids.
She looked at her watch. There was plenty of time yet. The echo she had looked at first was theoretically for the discussion and, she supposed, promulgation of teen romance. There was another one for “teen culture,” or something like that. She selected it from the menu and looked at the list of messages.
Juniper was posting there under her own name, as was somebody called Peter Pan, who was Juniper’s early try at a male alias. People seemed to be able to spell their subject headers better in this group. Gentian took a look at it. Junie was, of course, in the middle of an argument.
Her chief opponent appeared to be somebody whose handle was The Light Prince. They had a prolonged fight going about George MacDonald, especially the Curdie books. Since Gentian had found At the Back of the North Wind so cloying that she refused even to look at anything else its author had written, she could not make much of the discussion. Juniper got considerably more heated than The Light Prince did.
About ten messages along, Juniper’s alias had joined in. Gentian thought that if calling herself Peter Pan and pretending to be a twelve-year-old boy had so little effect on Junie’s basic personality, she might as well not bother. Surely anybody could tell they were the same person? When they used not only the same arguments but the same kinds of sentences?
It was true that Juniper could spell and Peter Pan couldn’t. Gentian had to admire her sister. Peter Pan had trouble with double consonants—he never knew where they belonged and where they didn’t. He had a bit of trouble with double vowels, too. But was that really enough to throw people off the track?
Apparently it was. Not only that, but Peter’s misspelled arguments got more credit than Junie’s correct ones. Peter Pan had written, “It’s dumb to sugest that taking the fantasy ellements out of At the Back of the North Wind would make it beter. You wouldn’t have a storry at all if you did that. You’d have a borring morral treetise.”
Juniper had written, as herself, “It’s foolish to suggest taking the fantastical elements out of a fantasy. It’s like saying Romeo and Juliet would be better without the romance or Hamlet without the ghost. You wouldn’t have any story at all—just a sermon.”
To Juniper, The Light Prince had written, “But surely the definition of a fantasy is that you can’t take the fantastical elements out without the story’s falling apart. But AT THE BACK OF THE NORTH WIND would still have the same story if it were not a fantasy.”
That was bad enough, but somebody else called Mutant Boy had agreed cordially, if semi-literately, with Peter and then spent three incoherent, unparagraphed, unpunctuated screens yelling at Juniper for being an intellectual snob and a show-off because she had mentioned Shakespeare.
No wonder Junie was so bad-tempered, thought Gentian, her fingers twitching over the keyboard. Of course, Junie had been bad-tempered long before there was a computer in the house. But still, this was enough to make anybody wild.
“Besides,” she said aloud to Mutant Boy’s tagline, “if you were so all-fired anti-intellectual and modern, you moron, you wouldn’t be reading George MacDonald in the first place. You wouldn’t be reading anything. Little creep.”
She read on, past several incoherent messages, and one ill-spelled but possibly insightful discussion of Curdie’s godmother and the ways in which she differed from similar figures in folk tales, until she arrived at an argument between Peter Pan and Juniper.
Juniper had written, “Has anybody read Patrice Kindi’s Owl in Love? I think it’s brilliant.” Mutant Boy had merely inquired nastily if Juniper ever went to the movies or watched television. Gentian, knowing her sister’s addiction to no fewer than four television shows despite her parents’ rules about how much television could be watched in a given week, was momentarily puzzled unti
l she saw a follow-up message from Peter Pan, recommending the shows Juniper already watched as “stuff even an intellectual like you might like.”
Gentian thought this highly uncharacteristic of Peter Pan, who was at least as intellectual as Juniper even if he used somewhat shorter words and couldn’t spell all of them. But the conference as a whole seemed to applaud this remark. The Light Prince was one of the few who did not. He—if it was he, thought Gentian; what else, after all, was Juniper trying to point out? — began a lengthy discussion of what exactly constituted being an intellectual, and concluded that Juniper was not one.
Gentian was delighted and wanted to see how Juniper had taken this insult to the core of her identity, but she had reached the end of the messages. Juniper had not yet responded. It would be a beauty when she did.
She still had half an hour before Becky’s arrival, and everything had been ready for hours. She tapped her fingers on the edge of the keyboard. She was still sorely tempted to swat Mutant Boy, and she also wanted to take up the definition of “intellectual” with The Light Prince. That would take most of her half hour. She backed herself out of the layers of menu, provided herself with an alias, and came back in as Betony. At least the jokes would be different, assuming anybody even realized it was a plant or bothered to look it up.
It was only after she had saved the messages and logged off that she realized who would recognize her middle name.
“Genny,” said Rosemary, putting her head around the door, “Becky’s here. What are you doing on the computer?”
“Looking at the U’s library catalog,” said Gentian. She got up. Well, Juniper would just have to lump it. It wasn’t her own personal discussion area.
As she shut the door of Juniper’s room behind her, it occurred to her that she had never looked in Juniper’s diary to find out who it was from the chat echo that she was going out with. It couldn’t be anybody whose messages she had seen. It must be someone who lurked and then sent Juniper private mail.
Becky was wearing a long emerald-green wrap skirt with a long royal-blue tunic belted over it by means of a bright red scarf in a pattern of yellow and purple flowers. She had on red sneakers, but they were a different red. She was carrying a small overnight case and a huge shopping bag overflowing with books, notebooks, compact disks, and tapes. Gentian’s mother said neither of them ever ventured into the other’s house without enough supplies for a month-long stay. In fact, for such a stay, either of them would almost immediately have run out of underwear, but never come close to running out of entertainment.
“What in the world were you doing on the computer?” she demanded, toiling up the attic stairs after Gentian.
“Well, in default of the telescope—”
“Uh-huh.” Becky dropped her bag of books heavily into the basket chair and shut Gentian’s door behind them.
“I was checking up on Junie’s project, and I got so mad at somebody I decided to leave a message. He said Junie wasn’t an intellectual.”
“I suppose the Pope’s not Catholic, either,” said Becky, bending to greet Maria Mitchell, who had materialized from the direction of the closet.
“When I have time to print the message I’ll show it to you.”
“What’s that other person’s definition of an intellectual?”
“He kept talking about Wittgenstein. He thinks an intellectual is exactly the same as a philosopher, only untrained.”
“Wittgenstein?”
“No, this kid. The Light Prince,” said Gentian, curling her lip and watching Becky roll her eyes briefly ceilingward. “I mean,” said Gentian, “Wittgenstein might think that too; I don’t know. But The Light Prince definitely thinks that.”
“Even so,” said Becky, sitting down on the bed, “why doesn’t Junie qualify?”
“Because she watches television and prefers fiction to nonfiction.”
“I should think it wouldn’t depend on what she did, it would depend on—on the spirit in which she did it.”
“Well, that makes sense. But The Light Prince says that Wittgenstein only dined in the Great Hall at Cambridge once, because he found the conversation dull, so therefore Junie’s not an intellectual.” Gentian shrugged. “You know, not one person said anything about how silly it is to compare the Great Hall at Cambridge with watching television.”
“Cambridge?” said Becky. “When?”
“I don’t know. I never heard of him before.”
Becky got up and made for her bag of books, whence she extracted the battered biographical dictionary. “C. S. Lewis was at Cambridge,” she said, paging through rapidly. “I think it would be hilarious if he missed out on talking to Lewis. No, wait, he died in 1951 and I don’t think Lewis went to Cambridge till later.” She paged through again. “No, he didn’t—not until 1954. Oh, well. Maybe there really wasn’t anybody decent to talk to.” “Maybe they didn’t want to have philosophical discussions at dinnertime,” said Gentian. “I wouldn’t.”
“Just goes to show you’re not an intellectual,” said Becky. Gentian threw a pillow at her. Becky put the dictionary away and came back and sat on the bed again. Maria Mitchell went over and sniffed at the pillow, delicately, with the tips of her whiskers, as if it might suddenly fly off again.
“Gen,” said Becky, “do you think this person might be defending Junie?”
“What?”
“Well, you said she was accused of being an intellectual, as if those morons in the chat group thought it was an insult. So if he’s giving reasons why she isn’t one, he’s defending her.”
“Huh,” said Gentian.
“If it is a he,” added Becky.
“Whether it is or not,” said Gentian, “it won’t do whoever any good with Junie. Junie thinks she’s an intellectual and the rest of them are just that, morons, and she’s not going to agree with him. Besides, they won’t like her no matter what anybody says, because they are morons.”
“You don’t like her either,” said Becky.
“She doesn’t treat them the way she treats her family,” said Gentian. “At least, part of her doesn’t. If I didn’t know who she was I’d like her a lot. But they think all her good traits are bad ones.”
“Maybe they’re nicer in person,” said Becky, “the way Junie is nastier.”
“I wouldn’t hold my breath,” said Gentian.
“I shouldn’t have used the word ‘moron, ’” said Becky. “People can’t help being stupid, they can only help being stupider than they need to be.”
“These people are much stupider than anybody needs to be.”
“Well,” said Becky, stretching, “feed me something, and then let’s have a look at this telescope.”
They sat on the bed and ate sandwiches—the table setting was for the midnight feast, not incidental snacking—and then Becky went up the cherry steps and stood leaning on the carved railing of the platform, looking speculative.
“I know you’re a scientist,” she said, “but really, on reflection, I’d say it was bewitched.” She looked thoughtful, as she did when replaying something she had just said, and grinned. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to make a pun.”
“What does bewitched mean?”
“Well, lots of things, depending on your belief system.”
“My belief system is rational.”
“Yes, I know,” said Becky, as if Gentian had said, “I have allergies.” She sat down on Gentian’s stool. “Is the dome open? Okay.” She adjusted the stool to her height and fitted her face to the eyepiece. “All right,” she said after a moment. “Maybe we can be rational about this. We’ll call it the observer effect. Come and tell me what you see when you look into it.”
“It’s a telescope, not a crystal ball,” said Gentian, irritably; but she did as she was told. Becky stood behind her, exuding a slight smell of sandalwood. She must have been borrowing her mother’s soap again.
The rain-drenched evening sky rewarded her gaze. “Great,” said Gentian. “I can see the sky,
and it’s cloudy.”
“It was perfectly clear earlier,” said Becky.
Gentian turned the stool around. Becky was looking at her watch. Gentian handed her the pad and pen she kept by the telescope, and Becky wrote down the time.
“All right,” she said. “I’m going to leave the room, and you look again.”
She did, and Gentian did. “Sky,” said Gentian.
Becky put her head around the door. I’ll go right down into the basement, all right?” she said.
“Sure,” said Gentian over her shoulder. “Should I come get you?”
“No, just keep looking through the telescope.”
Gentian did so, listening to Becky’s sneakers thud down the stairs, and the snick of the door shutting at the entrance to the second floor, and the drip of the rain, and Maria Mitchell washing herself, and the small occasional tick of the bedside lamp heating up and expanding its metal shade. The sky was a uniform flat gray, dyed slightly rosy by city light. Her back began to hurt, because the stool and telescope were adjusted for Becky, who was shorter.
The stairway door opened and Becky came up the stairs and into the room and shut the bedroom door behind her.
“Well?”
“Sky.”
“Huh. All right, we’ll try it again when I go home tomorrow. I wish we had walkie-talkies or something.”
“Alma’s brothers had some, if they haven’t broken them already.”
Becky sat down on the bed, pried off each sneaker with the other foot, not bothering to untie them, and tucked her feet up. Her socks were the same red as her sneakers.
“Your socks match your shoes,” said Gentian.