by PAMELA DEAN
“Thank you for the double star,” said Becky.
“Can I see?”
“Not yet, it needs to compost a little. Maybe next week.”
When Rosemary came up to say Becky’s mother was there, Gentian found Orion and settled on Alpha Orionis, Betelgeuse, whose name amused her inordinately. It was said to be a corruption of the Arabic for “the armpit of the Giant.” It was a fine deep orange, and if she got bored with it, the stars of Orion’s belt and Rigel were close by for distraction.
She did not get bored. She was still looking at Betelgeuse when the telephone rang. She had put it into her lap, much to the annoyance of Maria Mitchell, and she answered it without taking her eyes from the star.
“Well?” said Becky.
“All systems go.”
“Well, I guess really it’s a relief.”
“It’s a mystery to me, but thanks.”
Gentian stayed up stargazing until her eyes burned and ached and she could not keep them open. When she awoke clearly at eight the next morning, she was glad to be bleary: the day was gray and featureless and settled-looking. It was also warmer, but that was no consolation.
At least Steph had promised to unveil her Plan today at lunch. Gentian was mildly intrigued and mildly worried about it, and just as pleased not to be kept in suspense any longer.
Neither Erin nor Alma could afford even fast food this week, and nobody else could afford to treat them. They had all been Christmas shopping. So they pounced on a table for four in a corner of the school cafeteria, plunked down their brown bags, and snagged a fifth chair from the hallway.
Everybody looked expectantly at Steph, who was wearing a yellow ribbon in her hair and a loose yellow dress with a snowflake print. She said simply, “I want us to take over this year’s Shakespeare production.”
“Oh, well, that’s easy,” said Erin. “What, maybe four or five assassinations and a bit of brainwashing ought to do it.”
“They’re doing Twelfth Night, ’’ said Steph, “and all the seniors want to work on Caitlin’s adaptation of The Giver. So I think we all have a chance.”
“Only if we can act,” said Becky.
“You,” said Steph, “can be Maria. Alma can be Olivia. Gentian can be Antonio. Erin can be Viola.”
They gazed at her, except for Gentian, who looked at Becky. Gentian had not been able to finish Twelfth Night, but the notes and the remarks of her teacher had made it clear that Maria was a plum of a part; she thought up half the plot and was funny besides. Becky caught her eye and made a shrugging motion, as if Mrs. Clancy had complimented the one weak line in a poem of hers.
“I bet they just had a plenitude of black duchesses in Elizabethan England,” said Alma.
“It’s not set in—” said Steph.
“About as many as they had striking clocks in Rome,” said Erin. “That wouldn’t bother Shakespeare a bit. But Steph, has it occurred to you that however good a boy I make, I can’t do the part unless I’m a twin separated at birth and you find the other one fast?”
“Just undergo meiosis,” said Steph.
“Mitosis,” said Erin, impatiently.
“Whatever.”
“Steph,” said Erin, “if I said Lancastrian and you said Yorkist and I said Whatever, you would never let me forget it.”
“Yes, all right, I’m sorry,” said Steph. “You can walk home with me this afternoon and pound it all into my head, though I doubt it’s half as complicated as the Wars of the Roses. But right now I have a plan.”
“Who are you going to play?” said Alma.
“Malvolio,” said Steph.
They all gazed at her. Gentian did try to catch Becky’s eye, but Becky was looking at Steph judiciously, as she had looked at the telescope.
“Go on,” said Erin. “Davy Boyajian’s had that one sewn up since the day he was born.”
“Davy Boyajian,” said Steph, “is playing the lead in his own original play.”
“Tyler Keough—”
“Is going out for wrestling out of pique at not getting the lead in Fiorello.”
“Huh,” said Alma. “Maybe. Now, about Olivia.”
“Olivia must have a nice voice,” said Steph, “because Orsino loves music.”
“It’s not like having a black Portia, Alma,” said Erin. “Nobody goes on and on and on about Olivia’s golden hair.”
“I’ve never even seen a blond Olivia,” said Steph.
Since Steph’s parents were Anglophiles who had been taking her to London for the theater every winter since she was ten, nobody could point out, as they might have had Gentian rashly made the same statement, how few Olivias of any sort she had as a sample.
“I did forget Shakespeare is so anachronistic,” said Alma.
“How could you?” said Erin. “How could you ever forget Ms. Guitierre’s telling us that the court of Henry V still spoke French, so that the whole English lesson with Katharine had absolutely no basis in fact? I thought Steph was going to die, and I didn’t feel terribly good myself.”
Alma shrugged. “I never could stand Hal,” she said. “How dared he treat Falstaff like that?”
Steph opened her mouth. “Don’t start,” said Erin.
“All right,” said Steph. “So I’ll see you all at auditions on Tuesday.”
Erin opened her lunch sack and removed a series of Tupperware containers. Becky took a bite of her hamburger. Alma stirred her spoon around in the cafeteria’s version of chow mein and looked morose. Gentian, aware of Steph’s eyes on her, abstracted her tuna-salad sandwich from the welter of apples and celery sticks and little packets of raisins her father always dumped into her lunch, and took a bite.
Steph put a spoon into her own container of strawberry yogurt and began eating tidily, like a cat.
After lunch Gentian went to the library and sat down on a pile of cushions with a copy of Twelfth Night. It was easier going than it had been; maybe all that Julius Caesar was good for something after all. It seemed to Gentian that Antonio had a very hard time of it. He rescued Sebastian from drowning, kept him company, gave him money, and ventured into a place where he was liable to be arrested for past offenses just to make sure Sebastian was all right. In return for these generosities, he encountered Sebastian’s twin sister Viola dressed as a boy, mistook her for Sebastian, and thought as a result that Sebastian was refusing to let him have his own money back or even to acknowledge that they were acquainted. He was, in consequence of having appealed to Viola, in fact arrested. He seemed to be very fond of Sebastian indeed, but at the end Viola went off with Orsino and Olivia with Sebastian and Maria with Sir Toby, while Antonio, who had behaved nobly throughout, was left by himself. It was true that Malvolio suffered far more, but Malvolio was a bonehead.
Gentian wondered why Steph wanted to play him. The other parts Steph had assigned made sense to her, except possibly her own. She thought she might be better off playing Sebastian, since she was the nearest match for Erin they had available.
On Thursday it was sunny and warm, for December. There was not, as the astronomy books liked to put it, good seeing for planets, but Gentian had a pleasant time with Orion and went to bed early.
On Friday, the tenth of December, she got up an hour and a half before the sun. She had not slept very well, even with the electric blanket. It was extremely cold again, and she had turned the heat off when she went to bed rather than get up and do it later. She didn’t like having her head under the covers, so her nose was cold and her breath had made frosty condensation on her pillow. Besides all that, Maria Mitchell, who also disliked having her head under the covers, had a tendency to wrap herself around Gentian’s neck and growl if disturbed.
Gentian put several sweaters and a wool jacket on over her sweats, and crammed several pairs of socks and a set of down slippers onto her feet. She found her gloves, with fingers for this weather, and went to see how the sky was.
It was glorious. The southeastern sky, where today’s spectacle was, was j
ust beginning to curdle with faint light, but Jupiter and Spica glared out of it, abashing the crescent moon. Gentian named the larger stars of Libra: Zubeneschamali and Zubenelgenubi, rolling the syllables off her tongue with a relish that made Maria Mitchell come trotting up, in case she should have said something interesting. Gentian had a look at Jupiter through the telescope, but there was not, again, good seeing: the image wavered, wobbled, reformed, steadied just long enough for one to get one’s bearings, and then broke up again, as if it were being seen underwater. Which, of course, effectually it was; that was the effect of Earth’s atmosphere.
“Yes, I do think the moon,” said Gentian to Maria Mitchell.
She went on looking at Jupiter for some time anyway; one was supposed to train oneself to ignore the irregularities and see what was there, and her Sky Watcher’s Handbook said that observing the features of Jupiter was an area in which amateurs could still make a very considerable contribution. She had not yet concentrated on the tricky, delicate, finicky, boring routine of recording transits of various features, and she ought to get to that soon. Jupiter looked very roiled and spotty today, unless that was all the effect of the interference. She couldn’t find the Great Red Spot, but the North Tropical and North Temperate zones were striped with belts that broke slowly up into spots and then flattened out again. She watched Jupiter’s rapid rotation carry these halfway across its disk, and was late for school.
Becky collared her indignantly during second hour, when Gentian was in the library deciding which banned book to take home, as part of her program to remember to read more.
“Thanks for leaving me to Steph at assembly!” Becky said. She was pink and breathless and very solid-looking. Gentian decided not to point out that her socks and her belt were both purple.
“I’m sorry,” said Gentian. “I didn’t mean to. I was looking at Jupiter and then I had to make sure the room was heating up right so I could leave Murr in it, and then I had to take a bath, because I forgot three nights in a row.”
“Well, obviously, she tried to talk me out of this seance.”
“Where was Erin?”
“Being lectured by Alma.”
“We’re still doing it, aren’t we?”
“Yes,” said Becky grimly, “and Steph’s going to pray for us.”
“Well, they say it works for cancer patients.”
“Gentian, you are callous.”
“I am not. I’m sorry she’s upset. She’ll feel better when nothing awful happens.” She was not all that sorry Steph was upset, but she was sorry for being flippant about cancer patients.
“She thinks something awful happened last time.”
“Look. Alma is upset about something we can do something about, and Steph is upset about something we can’t do anything about.”
“We never used to have these kinds of problems,” said Becky.
“Puberty,” said Gentian.
Becky groaned.
She brought Becky and Erin home with her, fed them macaroni and cheese, and settled them down at the coffee table in the living room with the original ouija board and a planchette her mother had taken from the buffet in the dining room and handed to her when she saw the wreck of the old one. “There are bits of hundreds of old games in there,” she told Gentian. “Your father won’t throw anything away.”
“I guess that’s where Rosemary gets it from,” said Gentian. They had chosen this Friday because Rosemary was off with the Girl Scouts practicing, in the park, such staples of winter camping as building a fire in the snow, and Junie was at Sarah’s. Her parents meekly agreed to sit in the television room as they had before, though her father did ask if they had to have the TV on.
“All right,” said Gentian, feeling foolish, “shut your eyes, clear your minds, think sensible thoughts.”
They set their fingertips lightly to the planchette. The wind tapped a branch against the big front window and made the porch swing creak a little. Her father laughed quietly in the other room. Pounce found a ping-pong ball and chased it under the dining-room radiator. Gentian realized that they had not spared anybody to write down whatever the planchette might spell. She raised an eyebrow at Erin, and mimed writing with her free hand. Erin looked blank, then pulled a pencil and her assignment notebook out of her pocket and laid them on the table. She put her left hand on the planchette and took the pencil in her right.
They settled back down. Gentian had trouble keeping her mind clear. Jupiter drifted in, and the perfidies of Mark Antony, and Dominic’s ambiguous givings-out, and Steph in her bloomer costume and Alma bouncing Tiggerlike and Erin looking so much at home in Jane Goodall’s guise, and Becky walking about in a tattered poem that talked about anguish.
The wind rose a little. The planchette began to move. That prickling, pressing, crowded sensation that Gentian had had on Halloween was not there. The big warm room, crowded with lamps and bookcases and armchairs and small sofas, felt suddenly vast, black, and empty, like the space between the galaxies. Things burned in it, but coldly. The planchette jerked on, faster and faster. She could hear Erin and Becky breathing, and the little scratch of Erin’s pencil. She found herself tensing for the moment when the planchette broke.
The planchette glided to a halt and sat there.
They lifted their hands from it, rubbed their wrists and fingers, and looked at one another. “Did it make any sense?” asked Gentian.
“About as much as the last one,” said Erin. “No rhyme this time, though—sorry, Becky. Here. Pauses supplied by the management. Hyracoid mind hoard icy mind. Man hid icy rod. Yon arc did him. Cardioid hymn.”
“Cardioid him?” said Becky. “An esoteric curse?”
“H-Y-M-N.”
“Oh.”
Gentian got up, squeezing past three pot plants her mother had brought in for the winter to the nice wooden lectern with the unabridged dictionary on it, and opened the book. “Hydracoid?”
“No D. Hyracoid.”
“There’s a D on the end.”
“Yes.”
“Hyracoid. Resembling a hyrax. That’s a lot of help. Oh, here. Hyrax. A genus of small rabbit-like quadrupeds, containing the DAMAN, cony, or rock-rabbit of Syria, an Abyssinian species or subspecies, and the Cape Hyrax or rock-badger of South Africa.”
“And cardioid?”
Gentian looked. “I think it’s a mathematical term—yes, here: ‘heart-shaped, or, Math., a curve something like a heart in shape. ’”
“You could publish it in Tesseract and hold a contest to decide what it means,” said Erin.
“It’s very promising,” said Becky. “Too compressed, maybe.”
“Do you think it will persuade Alma?” said Gentian.
“It should,” said Erin. “It’s a lot like the last one, just a bit less poetic.”
“Well, assuming it will,” said Becky, lying flat on her back on the hearth rug and putting her feet, in their striped socks, on the edge of the coffee table, “we just have to get Steph to forgive us.”
“Forgiveness is her metier,” said Erin. “What she’ll do is mope.”
Since Gentian was still standing by the dictionary, she stealthily looked up “metier.” A trade or profession. Erin was sharp.
“Let’s play Dictionary, since we’ve got it,” said Becky.
“Are there enough of us?”
“Ask your parents and there will be.”
“Should we call Steph first and say we have not been borne off to the netherworld by large fanged thingies?” said Gentian.
“I will call Steph myself and phrase it in a less insensitive way,” said Erin, and stomped into the kitchen.
Gentian said to Becky, “That’s twice she’s called me callous or something like it. Am I?”
“No,” said Becky. “Extremely downright and sometimes oblivious.”
“Oh.”
“After all, you’re the one who remembered that Steph would be fretting and should be relieved.”
“More to the point, re
ally,” said Gentian, pleased and herself relieved, “should somebody call Alma?”
“Steph is at her place,” said Becky.
Erin came back in and said, “Be careful not to trip and fall downstairs; Steph has stopped praying for us—has stopped continually doing it, that is—so divine protection may suddenly have been removed.”
“Now who’s insensitive?” demanded Gentian.
“Sorry. I can’t stand the tone of voice she talks about prayer in. Oh, and before I forget, Gen, she says do you want to go finish up your Christmas shopping next week?”
Gentian groaned and clutched her head theatrically; but their last expedition had reminded her that Steph was very good to go shopping with, having an extensive knowledge of little stores full of odd things and a great talent for suggesting good presents. It would help mend fences, too.
“I wish one of us were Jewish,” said Gentian. “Or Wiccan. Or Roman,” she added, thinking of Julius Caesar and the footrace at the Lupercalia. “I like to think I’m going Saturnalia shopping, but since I’m an atheist Steph goes on calling it Christmas. If I had a religion to offend she wouldn’t, but I don’t, so she does.”
Becky sat up, looking incredulous, and threw a pretzel at her.
“We aren’t as ecumenical as we might be,” said Erin, laughing.
Chapter 15
On Saturday after Erin and Becky had gone home, full of pancakes and camaraderie, Gentian called Steph and arranged to go shopping with her on Wednesday after school. Then she called Alma and arranged to go ice skating with her the next day. Having discharged her share of what Becky had been known to call Insectile Obligations, she wondered what to do with herself until the sun set and she could look at Saturn. Saturn would leave the evening sky near the end of February and would not be readily visible as a morning star until almost May.
It occurred to her that it was now after Thanksgiving, and that Juniper had supposedly had another date with The Light Prince on the same day Erin and Gentian went to the Planetarium and met Dominic afterwards.
She went into her father’s office, moved Pounce from her father’s chair to the cushion on the radiator specially provided for cats, and called the BBS. Her password was still good. Maybe I’m getting addicted to this, she thought. A very few minutes spent with the romance echo disabused her of this notion.