Like I said: home.
But for all my affection for the place, I had not been totally opposed to the idea of adventure being thrust upon me. Life on the home planet was not entirely . . . stimulating. Maybe I felt a bit like an alien among my classmates. They had known me a long time, and most of them usually left me alone with my books, which was nice. But that meant nobody ever really wanted to talk with me about my books, either. A few people even went out of their way to mock me about them.
I had a couple of friends, sure. When I was little, I’d get invited to birthday parties, although that had sort of tapered off in recent years, as almost everyone I knew got attached to some kind of sports team, and that was not exactly my crowd. Of late, maybe I had not exactly had a crowd.
Maybe what I mean is, it’s possible everybody there had been counting down the days to my departure as eagerly as I had.
I knew that fitting in at a new place might take time—at least a couple of hours. But amid my fears I had also thought, How bad could it really be?
1.01.03
I pressed my fingertips against the cold, swollen flesh on the side of my face. I winced. I could have used some more time with that ice pack.
I distracted myself by surveying Counselor Blethins’s office. It was a small space, just across from the nurse’s quarters, with pea-green walls and a poster showing a kitten dangling from a tree limb. HANG IN THERE! the poster read. Somehow, this was supposed to encourage me.
It is a bad sign when a civilization’s chief form of encouragement comes from the torture of fluffy animals.
“Welcome to Festus, Sherman! Sorry that we weren’t ready for you,” said Counselor Blethins as she dashed in, dropped some papers on her desk and plopped into her chair. She was younger and more spry than Nurse McDowdy, but then I suppose most life forms that were not, say, Galapagos turtles or giant redwoods would be. She had mousy brown hair and a pointy nose and a nervous way of looking around that reminded me of the pet gerbils I once kept.
“My name is Clark,” I said, pointing to a folder that held my “academic records,” which was upside-down in front of her, atop a pile of similar folders, and wire baskets with still more folders. “Clark Sherman. Sherman is my last name.”
“Oh yes, sorry.” She laughed. It was a high-pitched, nervous sound. “Clark. That’s kind of an old-fashioned . . . well, I mean, I haven’t met many Clarks here.”
“Yeah, my dad, um, liked the explorer.”
She looked puzzled, so I added, “You know, Lewis and . . . ?”
“Oh yes. Of course. Well, that should be easy for me to remember. Which would be nice. There are just so many students, and so much paperwork to shuffle, that sometimes I think I should just give everyone a number so I can keep track of who’s who.”
She looked me in the eye for the first time and let out a little gasp of horror at the bruise on my cheek, then glanced at the nurse’s office, then back at me, and then apparently realized what she’d just said. “Oh! I didn’t mean to suggest that you should be a number. . . . I mean, your name is rather . . .” Her voice trailed off, and she pointed her gerbil nose into my folder.
She read with intensity. Probably awed, I thought. My course of studies back home had been the most rigorous and sophisticated offered. And, I might add, my marks had always been of the highest order. Perhaps she was questioning whether I even needed to be here. Perhaps I would soon be discharged and left to my own devices. Perhaps—
“This is so odd. Our computer has you down as a zero!”
Perhaps things were about to get even worse.
“A zero?” I asked.
Counselor Gerbil-face blushed again. “Well, not you personally, Sherman.” She started to correct herself, stammered and looked back down. “No, I mean your credits. Our district’s computer talked to your old district’s computer, and it’s as if you haven’t completed any work at all!”
I stared at her while she typed something onto a keyboard so old that many of the letters had worn off. She stared at her screen.
“Hmmm. Well, hmmm,” she said. “If you’ll excuse me, I just need to clarify something with the principal.”
As any galactic traveler knows, hmmm is a universal warning that something unpleasant is about to be announced. While she stepped out of the room, I held my breath and hoped I was wrong.
It didn’t take long to be let down.
“Well, Clark.” She smiled with an excess of sweetness as she returned. “I’m afraid this is going to take some time to sort out. In the meantime, I need to enroll you today. But only certain courses are available at the zero level. So . . . well, it—it may not be what you’re used to.”
The worried look on her face told me I was not going to like what was about to happen. “Are you, uh, sure we need to do this today, then?” I offered. “Because I could, you know, come back when the computer has—”
“Oh no!” she said. “No, really, we should do this today. I have to. Principal Denton thinks you . . .” She paused for a very long second, during which I swear she looked like she wanted to wrap her tail around her face and bury herself deep in a pile of cedar shavings in the corner of her cage. “Principal Denton has made it very clear that enrollment paperwork needs to be completed as quickly as possible. And really, around here, what Principal Denton says, well, it pretty much has to happen.”
She looked sideways, cleared her throat, took a deep breath and pressed a button. Her printer groaned and screeched and a piece of paper came out. She cleared her throat again and handed the printout to me.
“Now, later today I’ll be contacting your old district to see if we can’t clear up some of the confusion. But in the meantime, I’ve enrolled you in the best courses available.”
I read the printout.
I looked up at her.
“Um, I don’t see any of the electives I asked for.”
She sniffled. “Yes, well, all the things you were interested in—Latin class, computer lab—were either full or unavailable to, um, zeros.”
I looked down at the schedule again and then back up.
“You have me in something called Independent Study.”
“That was the one elective that was open. You’ll just, ah, be spending that time in the ARC. There’s plenty to read there.”
Which didn’t sound so bad. “What does the little number next to some of the classes mean?”
The counselor shifted in her chair as if she were sitting on something hard and lumpy. “Um, that’s just the course level you’re enrolled in. Level one courses.”
“And that means, like, advanced?”
“In this case, it means more like remedial.”
I shot her a laser death stare. I screamed, “You have GOT to be kidding me! Here I am, a highly intelligent life form from another world, and you have me in REMEDIAL classes?”
But something in the dry atmosphere made the words catch in my throat, and what came out was, “Ummm . . . remedial classes?”
She squirmed again. “That’s right.”
“But you know I was, like, in advanced classes and all, you know?”
She laughed that nervous laugh. “Yes, well, like I said, I’m sure we’ll be able to work it out soon!”
I stared at the paper in my hands. I stared a long, long time, not quite believing what I saw. And then I raised my eyes, slowly.
“You put me in PE twice.”
Silence.
“I didn’t sign up for PE at all.”
There was no laugh this time. Just the resigned voice of a person bound to do her duty, no matter how much of my life she had to sacrifice to do it.
“Yes, well, we do require a certain number of physical education credits to graduate. And as I said, no other electives were available to you. So I enrolled you in Physical Education in the morning and Athletics in the afternoon. It’s for people interested in trying out for sports teams. Everyone likes playing sports, right?”
She looked at me, realized
I would be considered a ninety-eight-pound weakling only if I managed to gain a few pounds, and cleared her throat.
I stared at her. These aren’t the classes I’m looking for, I thought, pinching my thumb and forefinger together. I can go about my business.
No effect. The Force apparently had the day off.
“It won’t be so bad,” she assured me. “I’ll be working on updating things right away. I have the form right here. . . .” She looked left, and right, and under three other folders, and on top of her computer, and under her keyboard, and then found it still in my folder, which somehow had already slipped beneath the pile of papers on her desk. “And as soon as I get the paperwork cleared up, we’ll find a way to adjust, if necessary. In the meantime, why don’t we just get you on over to the gym and let you start making your first Festus friends?”
Friends I could have used.
I did not expect to find any in the gym.
1.01.04
We left the office and entered the heart of the compound. As we walked, Counselor Blethins kept her head down, and I kept looking for emergency exits.
I did get a good overview of the place. It was basically a pair of extremely long, parallel hallways that were linked by a couple of shorter bisecting hallways. If you were looking down on it from orbit, it might seem like a giant H with two lines across the middle. The office was on the lower-right part of the H, like a boot, and the gym was at the top-left part, like a large rectangular execution chamber.
Just a thought.
The halls were lined with metallic lockers sunk into cinderblock walls that were decorated with posters that read WOLF PRIDE in the school colors of silver, black and blue. I thought the sign was the work of a particularly inept biology teacher—it’s lions that move in a pride, right?—before I realized it was a reference to the school mascot. Breaking up the rows of lockers were doors with thin, rectangular windows laced with wire. Through them I could glimpse either classrooms or holding cells. It was hard to tell which.
Too soon, we were facing a pair of swinging doors. I thought of a medical drama I once watched where someone was always being bashed through such doors on a stretcher, often right before they died.
Counselor Blethins pushed the doors open, and we walked in. I smelled sweat and floor wax, and saw an assemblage of young males who had been engaged in an activity involving a rubberized ball. They stopped. And stared. At me. It occurred to me that this must be what a womp rat feels like right before it gets bull’s-eyed by a squadron of T-16s.
Counselor Blethins walked me up to the sector’s regional warlord. He was a tallish humanoid, with a blue cap on his head, a rectangle of facial hair on his upper lip and a whistle resting on the slight paunch at his midsection.
“Coach Chambers?” asked Counselor Blethins, sounding unsure.
He answered with eyebrows raised, as if he were annoyed. Then his eyes scanned me and his nose crinkled a bit, as if something distasteful had just crawled into the back of his throat.
“Keep moving, everyone,” he barked at the immobilized players, who seemed to be anticipating some kind of showdown.
He put on a smile that reminded me of the man who sold my father our last car. “What can I do ya for, counselor?”
“Coach Chambers, this is Sherman Clark.” She looked at the folder, then over at me. “Sorry, this is Clark Sherman. He’s new. And he’s going to be in your class.”
“Clark, eh? That’s a name you don’t hear very often anymore. Kind of old-timey, isn’t it?”
As I started to explain that my dad was a fan of the explorer, the coach got a faraway look in his eyes. It was as if he were staring through me. No, it was as if he were staring at something behind me. I turned to look.
He’d been staring at a ball that was flying toward the back of my head. It smacked into the side of my turning face. Right where the ice pack had been.
“GAHHHHHHHHH!” I said.
Coach Chambers blew his whistle. “Who threw that?” he called.
There was a moment of silence. Everyone in the room turned toward a tall, thin-lipped person whose face, even through my one working eye, looked regrettably familiar.
“Sorry, Coach,” Reptile Boy said. “I should of caught that. I was just distracted by the appearance of Miss Blethins and her daughter.”
The class laughed. The counselor blushed. The corners of the coach’s mouth twitched. He didn’t think that was funny, did he?
“Hunter,” he said to Reptile Boy. “Watch it.” He turned his head and coughed. It sounded a little bit like laughter.
The counselor looked unsure as to what should happen next. She started to walk toward me, as if to offer aid, but balked. She looked up at the coach. “Perhaps, Coach Chambers, you could take a moment to assign someone who would be able to help guide—”
“Blethins,” said the coach, in a tone that was partly derisive, partly dismissive, and just a touch malevolent, “you can go. He’s on my turf now. We’ll take care of him.”
He made a little flicking motion with his fingers. Some of the class laughed.
The counselor looked at him, and over at me, then bowed her head as she thrust a map of the school at me and walked out.
The coach sized me up for about two seconds, grunted, “Get a uniform by tomorrow or be ready to run laps,” and told me to sit in the bleachers.
I looked at my chronometer. I was 33 minutes into the mission. If my gear had included a self-destruct button, I might have broken my finger pressing it.
1.01.05
For the rest of the day, I was directed to and from a series of exhibit spaces. The signs on the doors read, ENTER AND GAWK AT THE BLACK-EYED ALIEN FREAK. That’s how I felt, at least, as I was introduced to each class. And at the end of it all, I had to go back to the gym. It was like the least appealing time warp ever.
Coach Chambers again parked me in the bleachers. As he divided the class into scrimmage squads, I noticed another kid in the stands. He had made his way to a high row, far behind where I sat, and had avoided being chosen for any teams. I was ready to climb up and ask how he had managed that, but when I looked his way again, he had disappeared.
Before I could figure out how, I heard squealing.
Some other sort of uniformed group had occupied a space at the other end of the gym. The uniforms were blue, and the persons wearing them were engaged in ritualized chanting.
A stray ball bounced toward their zone, and one of the uniforms caught it. The uniform, it turns out, was wrapped around a girl. She took a few steps toward the basketball chaos before she returned the ball with a gracefully executed underhand volleyball serve.
Wow, I thought. Life forms like that could make this planet a lot more hospitable.
She had skin that made me think of a commercial for tanning oil, the kind that smells like coconut pie. She had hair that made me think of the cover of a fashion magazine. And she looked back at me with a curious smile that made me think—Wait. A smile? Is she smiling at me? Why, yes, I think she is indeed—
THWACK.
A wildly errant basketball hit the side of my head.
“Hunter!” Chambers yelled.
“Sorry, Coach. It just slipped out of my hands.”
When I could focus again, she was gone.
And it was clear that my explore-and-establish-contact mission had transformed into something entirely different.
My new objective: survival.
1.01.06
When the final bell rang, there was nothing I wanted more than to flee the premises. Well, almost nothing: I urgently needed to find a way out of my double-PE predicament. So I ran back to the office, where I hoped to ask Counselor Blethins about fixing my schedule. Fast.
I got lost twice on the way, but I arrived just as she was packing up her things.
“Oh, hello, Sherman. Is everything OK?” she asked weakly.
“Uh, no, actually,” I started to say. But then her face fell, as she stared at someone, or somethi
ng, that had walked into her office right behind me.
Her lower lip trembled slightly. A voice as deep as space and cold as Pluto spoke.
“Ms. Blethins?”
“Yes, Principal Denton?”
“Is this the new student Coach Chambers called us about?”
“Yes, Principal Denton.” “In my office, please.”
My stomach lurched as if a thousand middle school voices had cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.
She nodded at me in a way that said, You’d better follow, or we’ll both regret it.
I turned and found myself walking behind a large human-oid. His stiff movements reminded me of a stormtrooper, one who had let himself go just a bit. His suit was brown, and his hair was shoe-polish black, styled in stiff, tiny, orderly curls—so orderly that they might have been stapled into place. I thought—cyborg? He did move somewhat mechanically as he led me to his office.
We entered. He turned and gestured at me to close the door. I took a seat in a hard black chair that faced his desk. He stood, looking at a folder. He surely could hear my racing pulse and shallow breathing, if not the trembling of my very DNA.
“I heard about your little run-ins today, Sherman.”
Oh, thank goodness. He was actually here to help!
“Well, yeah, there were a few, I guess,” I said, relieved. “In the gym—”
“Yes, Coach Chambers told me all about what he saw in you. And I can see for myself,” he said, lifting a folder off his desk, “what a record you have.”
To me, that could only mean he had my actual permanent record, the one that showed my exemplary scores on several state tests, or my second-place finish in the Pack 85 Pinewood Derby, or the science fair project where I made a battery out of a—
Then he dropped the folder, and as it slapped against his desk, he almost, but not quite, sneered: “How does one manage to get to eighth grade with virtually no credits?”
Revenge of the Star Survivors Page 2