She seemed supernaturally comfortable. Which made me slightly nervous. I was not quite sure I wanted a roommate in my ARC.
Her thin eyebrows arched, as if she were waiting for me to say something.
“Uh, I’m Clark,” I said.
“Clark? That’s not a name one hears a lot these days,” she said.
Before I could sigh and explain, she added, “Are you named for the explorer by any chance?”
It was my turn to arch my eyebrows.
“You know, Lewis and . . . ?” she asked.
My jaw dropped a bit.
“If you’re not familiar with them, I can recommend a couple of books. I did a report last year. Actually, it was more on Sacagawea. Clark was clever enough, but it’s kind of funny to think that he and Lewis would have been lost without a fourteen-year-old girl to guide them, isn’t it?”
I eventually blinked, then looked around for hidden cameras. Maybe I was being set up for—
“Or is your name more of a Superman thing? Either way, my compliments to your parents.”
Many seconds later, when I had remembered to breathe again, I began to work on my response.
One part of my brain told me, “She’s awesome. This should be fun.”
But another part said, “Every time you have attempted social interaction on this rock, some kind of bruising has followed.” I rubbed my arm, reminding myself how much of that bruising was literal.
I could not take on another battlefront right now. So I diverted all power to my deflector shields.
“The rules,” I said, pressing my palms against my forehead and focusing on Ms. Beacon’s command to teach her the library rules. Problem was, I did not actually recall having been taught any rules.
Ms. Wah seemed slightly amused at my obvious frustration. Which irritated me even more. Who was she to come into my ARC, sit at one of my tables and force me to be sociable? I’d show her.
“You’ve been in a library before, right?” I asked. “Good. If you stay out of my way, I’ll stay out of yours.” And I turned to walk away.
“My name is Ricki,” she said to my back, her voice now bright and cold as an icicle. I looked over my shoulder and saw that her chin was thrust forward, and her eyes had turned dark and angry. “It’s a pleasure to meet you. Thank you for the kind welcome. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some reading to do.” And she walked away. Not as poised this time; her hands were balled up into fists, and she had a determined, bouncy stride.
The synapses in my brain fired as fast as they could to dial up some kind of retort, but all circuits were busy. Was I supposed to just let her go after she had spoken to me like that? A moment ago, that was exactly what I thought I had wanted. It was a big room; we had plenty of space to avoid one another.
But there was something in her voice . . . where had I heard that kind of sarcasm before? That kind of off-putting remark that sounds like a weapon, but is really a shield?
Oh yeah. I heard that voice in my own head. All the time.
I wished I could get a do-over on that exchange.
I watched as she made her way to her table, pulled her chair out, sat down and picked up that book she’d been reading.
It was green. I squinted. Something about that shade . . .
I gasped. Surely I was not seeing things clearly.
I started walking toward her.
I confirmed the initial visual scan even before I could make out the title. I knew that book’s jacket well: the spaceship flying out of the exploding sun; the shadow of a marauding Vexon looming behind them; Steele and Maxim standing, side by side, ready to solve whatever problems came their way with a blast from a hand laser or a palm thrust and a shrill, “K’HAHHHHHHH!”
She was reading Star Survivors: The Novel.
I calculated the odds against seeing someone willing to make a public display of awareness of Star Survivors at less than 36,480 to 1, a number I came up with by estimating that I had crossed paths with the 912 students in this school five days a week for close to two months now and had not seen anyone willing to acknowledge their interest in public, until today.
I had so much to ask her. Where had she been? Were there others like her? Did she know the self-destruct sequence from Episode 17? 5-4A-1C? That is always the test of a true fan. Maybe we could—
“Mr. Sherman?” Ms. Beacon’s stern voice halted me.
“Yes, Ms. Beacon?” my voice cracked. Did Ricki just snicker?
“Your five minutes are up. Find your way back to your table.”
“Yes, Ms. Beacon. I just need to—”
“I will not have this period turn into a social hour, Mr. Sherman. Is that clear?”
“Yes, Ms. Beacon.”
I knew better than to break a Beacon edict. But I kept standing, hoping to catch Ricki’s eye. She finally looked up from the book just long enough for her to see me touch the two fingers of my right hand to my heart, and then raise my arm and point them toward the stars.
She beheld me as a curiosity. I could not tell whether she was confused, amused, bemused or even acknowledging me at all.
I returned to my seat and stared at the pages of the novel I had with me, but I didn’t get a lot of reading done for the rest of that very, very long hour.
6.01.02
As soon as the bell rang, I went straight to Ricki, my head full of questions.
I suppose a smarter star explorer would have learned from his experiences with Stephanie Spring that he had no business approaching females, but to be honest, I was so thrilled at the prospect of having someone of my kind to talk to that I forgot all of my fears.
So, of course, communicating is one thing she does not want to do.
I dashed to her table before she had even put her books away. “Can we talk?” I asked, breathlessly.
She glared coldly. “No.”
“What?” I almost cried. Then I remembered how I had behaved at the beginning of the hour. “I can explain—”
“Don’t bother,” she said.
“Why?”
“It’s complicated,” she said. Then she gave a saccharine smile, pivoted and walked away in her bouncy gait.
What is it with this place?
But I was not going to let things with Ricki die that easily. First off, I was desperate. Second, what else did I have to obsess about? Well, saving my skin. But Les’s secret passages had me feeling safe enough. Which made solving the Ricki riddle my new primary mission.
My first theory was that she was disinclined to talk because of Ms. Beacon’s presence. So I resolved to find her during lunch. But even though I almost ran to the cafeteria the next day, she was nowhere to be found.
Next I thought I might try to find her after school. Then I envisioned how this might transpire: Me, loitering around the building at the end of the day. Ty, Jerry and Bubba approaching. Me doing the introductions: “Guys, meet Ricki. She’s like me, but a girl. Ricki, you can start running; I’ll stay here and slow everyone down by letting them beat me until my internal organs are oozing down the gutter.”
I decided to skip straight to Plan C.
Plan C was to communicate by writing. This would be tricky. The phrasing of the message had to be exact, and the method of delivery would be a challenge.
I had no contact information for her, so I would have to create it old-media style, with pen and paper. Which made me nervous, given the number of times my personal papers ended up spinning across the floor between classes after a helpful nudge from Ty, Jerry or Bubba. I could just see my note being picked up off the floor and read aloud. The mere thought made me want to be vaporized.
So after dinner, I hunkered down at my communications center in my private bunker to choose my words.
An hour later I was still composing. No actual words were being printed, but I had done a thorough examination of the wall in front of me, of the tooth marks on my pen, and of the various ways a piece of paper could be aligned on a desk.
After another hal
f hour of this, I decided to keep it simple.
R,
Why can’t we talk?
Sincerely,
C
Which, I thought, was rather elegant in its functional simplicity, a real Bell X-1 of a missive that was quick, potent, powerful and certain to break barriers.
I folded it in half, slipped it in a notebook and stuck it in my Cosmos backpack.
The next day, I hugged every shadow on every wall to make extra sure I was not intercepted with my payload. I snuck past the hall monitor through the wormhole network to make sure I was the first one in the ARC after lunch. And I left the note at Ricki’s usual spot.
I sat at my table across the room and waited.
She came in, ignored me as usual, took her seat, opened the note as if she had been expecting it, whipped out a pen, wrote something, set the pen down, pulled out her book, began to read.
The anguish of the subsequent wait is beyond my frail powers to describe. But when the bell finally rang for dismissal, she calmly rose, handed me the note with a smile and disappeared into the halls.
I kept my cool for maybe three seconds. Then I hurriedly unfolded the message.
It’s complicated.
Cheers!
She also drew a smiley face.
I ran to the hall to try to track her, and on the way I nearly ran right over Les, who was coming in as I was going out.
I started to talk to him, saw the angry look reminding me that hailing frequencies were NOT open, rolled my eyes and stormed off.
The thought that this planet is just one giant asylum crossed my mind.
When I sat down in science class, something on my seat crinkled. I reached into the back pocket of my jeans and pulled out a piece of graph paper I didn’t recall putting there.
Saturday
1100 hours
Usual coordinates
Les’s handwriting was familiar. I thought: he might never steal a base properly, but he has excellent prospects as a pickpocket.
6.02.01
When I arrived in the Sanctuary, eager to get his thoughts on Ricki, Les was sitting in one of the old camp chairs and dressed in a yellow baseball uniform that was slightly too large for him.
I made the mistake of joking about how he was obviously getting ready for a day of joyful bonding activity with his dad.
“STEP-dad,” he said, in a voice so cold that you’d have to measure it on the Kelvin scale.
“Sorry,” I said. “I guess . . . I mean . . .” I should have known it was a touchy subject.
“Don’t confuse the half-evolved primate my mom married with my dad,” he said. “My dad would NOT have me in a baseball uniform. My dad would NOT be making me waste a weekend day doing batting practice.”
I was suddenly fearful of being exiled.
“I’m sorry, Les. I just didn’t know anything about . . . your dad.”
Les held his breath for a moment, then exhaled and stared off down the pipe, looking at the light in the far distance.
“He was a musician,” he said. “Or at least, he worked in a music store. He fixed amps. Did stuff with sound boards. I think. Mom once said it was painful to talk about him. So I don’t bring him up.”
He walked over to a shelf and picked up one of those gold-foil cassette tapes I had seen. “Which means I don’t know much about him, actually. Except that he liked music.” He held the tape up, examined it for a moment, then set it back down. “And he had a sense of humor. It was his idea to name me after a guitar.”
“Your dad had a guitar named Les?”
Les turned around so I could see his look of disgust. “Les Paul. He played a Gibson Les Paul.”
“Ah,” I said.
Long silence.
“What happened?” I finally asked.
“Car crash, coming home late from a concert,” he said matter-of-factly. “I was three years old. I remember the funeral. Not much else. There were lots of guys with beards. I can’t even remember what his face looked like, actually, except from old pictures.”
He set the tape down. “But I remember when my stepdad arrived. Ben. Ben and his boys. I was in third grade. Have you seen The Lion King?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, imagine that after Mufasa died, Simba had been sent to be raised by Scar and the hyenas. That’s pretty much my story.”
I pondered this for a moment. I envisioned the howls of delight and the small tufts of yellow fur flying. It was not pretty.
“So they all live with you? Still?”
He looked down and drew a circle in the dust with his right shoe. “The older ones have moved out. There’s just . . . no, not really, I don’t see much of them. I wish I saw less. It’s one of the reasons I need a hiding place, to get away from Ben and his frakking baseballs.”
This was starting to feel like really heavy stuff, the kind of thing they would discuss on the Fortitude over a glass of blue liquid poured from an old perfume bottle.
“Have you ever asked him if you could, you know, just quit baseball?”
He snorted.
“What about your mom?”
“You don’t know these people. Well . . .” He looked sideways, then back at me. “Put it this way. I remember how sad my mom was when I was little. And lonely, without my dad. And how happy she was at first when she met Ben. I could see that he made her feel secure. We both missed that.”
He drew a breath. “I learned early on that she just wanted us to blend in with his family. Which meant we did things Ben’s way.
“It wasn’t so bad, the first couple of years. He was focused on his own sons then. Left me alone. Well, not entirely alone. There was some forced bonding over baseball. He’d put me on teams and try to coach me. Tell me stories of playing baseball at junior college. Or he’d drag me to Coors Field, buy me a hot dog and then spend most of the time flagging down the beer guy.
“But Ben got angrier over time. I don’t know why. It comes out when he watches me play. A lot.”
I pictured Les out at the diamond, stepdad yelling at him, mom wincing as he awkwardly stands at the plate, outfielders coming in and taunting, opposing parents laughing, then clapping as “Strike three!” is called against him.
“I’ll bet they play a lot of baseball in hell,” I said.
Les nodded grimly in agreement. “I wish it were a problem just at the baseball games. Or that I was the only one he took his anger out on.”
I tried to imagine what he meant.
“Does he . . . ?”
“Yeah. Sometimes. It’s a good idea to not be around after he’s had his third beer. Especially if the Cubs are losing. Or if . . . I don’t know. Whenever one of us says the wrong thing at the wrong time. . . .”
We were silent for a bit, staring at the candles, smelling the sweet aroma of molten crayon. I thought of being a little kid, back in grade school, when the biggest problem I faced was that the tip on the black crayon wore out faster than all the others, which made it hard to get the details on the Millennium Falcon correct. Watching those crayons go up in smoke made me feel . . . old. Maybe overwhelmed.
“I’m sorry, Les.”
He went back to arranging some of his electronics gear. “It’s OK,” he said. “It’s not like I can’t handle it on my own. It’s like a math problem. They’ve thrown all these variables at me. I just sort of try to find ways to balance myself on the other end. You know—on the left is a wicked stepdad and a gang of thugs. On the right is me. x = survival. To solve for x, I spend a lot of time in out-of-the-way places looking at wiring diagrams.”
I had thought I was good at math, but Les was doing advanced calculations that I could barely fathom.
“Yeah, well, Les, you know, count on me if I can help. I mean, by the transitive property, I think your problems are mine now.”
That made him smile. “Thanks,” he said. “I guess yours are mine too.”
“Hey, I’ve got something maybe easier to solve that you can help with,” I said,
eager to get to a problem that seemed workable.
“Yeah?”
“There’s this girl in my Independent Study hour,” I said. “Her name is Ricki Wah. Do you know her?”
Les shook his head. “If you have any questions that involve the word girl, the answer involving me is ‘no idea.’ ”
“Yeah, well, this is something different. She won’t speak to me—well, that hardly makes her unique. But she reads. Star Survivors novels.” I described her appearance, her fondness for floral prints, her walk, her hair.
“I have a high level of confidence that I would know of such a girl,” he said. “Are you sure she’s not a hologram?”
“Pretty sure.”
He just shook his head. “Did you already look her up in the school directory?”
“School directory?”
“They print one out for the teachers. It lists all the students, their parents, their phone numbers. If you could find one, you could maybe call her or something.”
Call her? Well, that was a novel idea. I’d tried talking in person, and sending notes, and pondered mental telepathy; a phone directory had not entered my mind.
“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll look into that.”
“Just don’t get ideas and call me,” he said, his face suddenly tense. “Remember, we have to keep out of sight.”
I sighed. “Yeah. I understand.”
I didn’t.
He lifted his cap. I thought it was some kind of parting gesture, but he surprised me by pulling out a folded piece of paper.
“This is for you,” he said.
I accepted the paper gingerly, blew off some hair and flecks of—I don’t really want to know—and found that he had charted out the entire neighborhood on graph paper. Festus was at the center. My house was marked with an x. The streets were neatly labeled in black ink, but strange dotted lines paralleled them, sometimes abruptly crossing the streets, eventually connecting back to my house, or the school, or our bunker. He had taken time to note several trees, a few hedgerows and the unnamed streets on the far limits of the subdivision, where new houses were being put in. Seemingly random numbers and red letters were scattered across the map.
“It’s great,” I said. I turned it around and around, trying to decipher it. “You really put some time into this.”
Revenge of the Star Survivors Page 8