When someone called for him, it was never good. Especially on a Sunday afternoon. Sure enough, I heard him argue, then gradually back down and reluctantly say, “OK, I’ll be downtown shortly.” This was followed by a weary look toward the first command unit. Her face sank as we heard the nap-skipping spawn squeal from her bedroom.
“But Clark and I were going to have a chance to talk,” she said urgently.
“Sorry,” the male commander said as he gathered up some papers. “It’s an emergency.”
“Another one?”
He gave both of us an apologetic look. “I’m really, really sorry,” he said. Then he grabbed his coat and ran out the door.
She sighed and looked over at me. “Well, Clark, we’ll just make the best of it. Give me a minute to get Gwen ready.”
Forty-five minutes later, the spawn was changed, fed, cleaned, led into the car, given a sniff test, removed from the car, changed again, cleaned again and led back into the car. I was ready to call it a day, but the commander had a look of grim determination on her face. I knew better than to cross her.
As we drove down to the Forest Park Crossing Mall, she attempted to engage in conversation. It went something like this:
COMMANDER: “So, I never really heard how your ride went yesterday. I mean, before the accident. Did you see anyone you knew at the rec center?”
ME (swallowing): “Well I—”
SPAWN: “SCREEEEEEE!”
COMMANDER: “Gwen, hush! Sorry, Clark, it’s as if she knows when I’m trying to—”
SPAWN: “Mah mah mah mah mah mah SCREEEEEEE-EEEEEEEEE!”
ME: “It’s OK, I’m sort of used to it now.”
COMMANDER: “Maybe she’ll settle down once she’s in her stroller.”
Once in her stroller, she did settle down. For about the amount of time it took to get from the car to the mall’s interior, where we were confronted with a terrifying sight. Not terrifying to me—I had nothing against the Easter Bunny, who was being led by two bunny-elf assistants to greet a throng of happy children. But the toddler had a different viewpoint.
“Mah! Mah! MAH! . . .
SCRREEEEEEE! SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! . . .
URRRRRRRRPPPPPPPP.”
The urp was whatever green thing she had eaten for lunch coming back for a repeat appearance. Apparently, regurgitation in moments of panic was a family tradition.
The commander looked down at the flailing mix of chewed food and squirming terror. Her voice dropped into its lowest register. “Clark, I’m gonna need time.” She reached into her purse, grabbed some cash and handed it to me. “Go find a game store or something. I’ll meet you at the food court in, I don’t know, half an hour?”
I probably should have said thanks to the toddler. But I didn’t want to get that close. So I took the money and walked off.
I was tempted by the prospect of a new video game, but I had seen something potentially more engaging as we had circled the parking lot on the way in. I walked the length of the mall and exited the far side, near the movie theater. Across the parking lot, clinging to the periphery of the main mall like a barnacle, was a thin, rectangular building of glass and tan bricks that appeared to be several decades older than the rest of the development.
It held only three businesses. Two were defunct, or purveyors of FOR LEASE posters. But in between them, I had spied a hand-painted sign that read:
SOUND ’N’ VISION
BOOKS AND MUSIC
USED, BOUGHT AND SOLD
I checked my watch and trotted across the broken pavement, around the black puddles of snowmelt that were rainbow-streaked with motor-oil drippings, and past the single vehicle parked in front of the shop: a small pickup with a rear window plastered in stickers referencing a dozen bands I had not heard of.
As I placed my hand on the cold aluminum handle of the glass door, I paused to admire the window display—a stack of paperbacks and a fading homemade poster that said CELEBRATE BANNED BOOKS WEEK.
I pulled on the door and stepped inside.
The store was a jumble of shelves, each marked with a wooden sign that I suspect someone’s grandfather had cut with a jigsaw an eon ago: FICTION/LITERATURE. HISTORY/BIOGRAPHY. CHILDREN’S. And then I spied tall, magnificent stacks marked FANTASY and SCIENCE FICTION/ETC.
If I had seen enough spare floor space to unroll a sleeping bag, I might have asked to move in on the spot.
Off to my right, a bearded man sat behind a glass case, carefully sorting a stack of vinyl discs that were even older than my parents. He nodded in my direction. Behind him, I could see a room jammed with record bins that filled what used to be one of the adjacent storefronts. But I, of course, made straight for SCIENCE FICTION/ETC.
As I strolled, I ran my finger lightly along the spines of coarse hardcovers missing their jackets; squat paperbacks, titles marred by the vertical lines that indicated a well-read copy; and the occasional oddity such as the battered box that held a game called [smudged] Fleet Battles.
So many familiar names on that deliciously long aisle. So many yet to explore. The row ended at V, right in the middle of Vonnegut. I rounded the corner, eager to see what other surprises might await—
—and nearly plowed into Stephanie Spring.
OVERLOAD
OVERLOAD
DOES NOT COMPUTE
I had postulated that maybe on the weekends, girls like Stephanie wore old T-shirts, didn’t comb their hair, allowed themselves to look . . . human. But Stephanie apparently was superhuman. She had on a perfect black sweater, her hair was tied back perfectly, and she looked—
“Oh wow. Hi, Clark,” she said, wide-eyed.
—perfect.
“Stephanie?” I asked, as if she were some ghostly projection from another dimension. Because clearly, this had to be Alternate Stephanie, the one from the universe where I was cool and handsome and she was a girl who would hang out in used bookstores.
She smiled, meekly, as she took out her fancy earbuds. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”
“Uh, I think I could say the same.” Which might have been the truest statement I had ever spoken.
We stood there, frozen. With great effort, I strung together enough words to form a sentence:
“Do you, uh, come here a lot?” I did not say it was a particularly good sentence.
Her eyes grew wider. “Oh no. Not at all. Usually. Really. You?”
“My first time,” I said.
She nodded and bit her lower lip.
“Seems nice enough,” I said, looking around. I noticed that the ceiling tiles had a bunch of blotchy brown stains.
“It has its charms,” she said, inspecting a bit of worn carpet.
“I sort of left my mom back at the mall,” I said, gesturing with my thumb, desperately trying to think of something we might have in common.
“Really?” she said. This somehow got her attention. “I had to sneak away from mine, too.”
“Sneak away?”
“Yeah,” she said. “She thinks I’m shoe shopping.”
“She’d rather have you trying on shoes than reading books?” I was so dumbfounded that I forgot to be flustered.
“Well, no. Well, sort of,” Stephanie said. “She does like shoes. And dressing me up. I mean—shopping for me. We have a mother-daughter dinner at church tonight. She’s looking for an outfit to coordinate with mine right now.” She winced. “But she’s not opposed to books, you know? It’s just certain kinds of books.”
“Like what?” I asked.
She looked at me as if deciding whether to elaborate. Finally, she said, “Let’s just say she thinks that any book with a dragon on the cover was probably written by Satan himself.”
“Ah,” I said.
She looked the aisle up and down wistfully.
I set aside the shock of hearing Stephanie imply that she was a fellow admirer of great literature, because I was still thinking about how horrible it would be to love a book and be kept from it.
“You know she’s wrong, right?”
She took her eyes off the books and met my gaze.
“Yeah, well, I’m not the one who’s going to say that to Mrs. Cindy Spring,” she said bitterly. “But it’s fun to imagine.”
I shook my head. “You have it tough, I guess.”
“Oh, it’s not so bad.” She shrugged. Her face said otherwise.
I thought about how lost I would be without my books.
“Maybe she’d approve of something postapocalyptic? You don’t find a lot of dragons in atomic rubble.” I scanned the shelf and pulled out a familiar title that happened to star a teenage girl. It showed a mushroom cloud on the cover, but the girl was modestly clad in a radiation suit. “Here,” I said, handing it over. “This one’s a favorite of mine.”
Her face brightened. “Oh, I love this. I’ve checked it out from the library, like, three times.”
“So your mom’s OK with that?”
“No. She has no clue.”
“So it’s a secret between you and . . . the Kaitlins, then?”
Stephanie smiled grimly. She looked down at the book, then gently slid it back in place on the shelf, letting a perfectly manicured pink fingernail stroke the spine as she let it go.
“Kaitlin, Kaitlyn and Katelyn and I have been friends since preschool, and our moms have been friends even longer,” she said. “We share a lot of things. But when it comes to books, or music that’s not just some stupid boy band of the moment, I’m sort of on my own. Well, my dad helps me with my audio gear.”
“Audio gear?”
“Yeah. I’d been asking him about some of his equipment, and he’d been showing me with some of his old records how—” She stopped suddenly. “Anyway. It’s sort of a thing I do. For him, mostly. But the Kaitlins—no, I couldn’t talk to them about this.”
“Why?”
She gave me an incredulous look. “Clark, there are some things you just can’t share if you want to—”
And then her phone buzzed. She glanced at it to see who was calling. “My mom’s about to come looking for me,” she said. “I have to go.”
“See you at school, then,” I said, as she turned away. “And, um, if you need help with any books, you know, just ask. I have connections.”
She laughed, a bit sadly. “Thanks. See you around.”
As she headed toward the door, the clerk hailed her, “Hey, that Bowie rerelease you were asking about—the 180-gram blue vinyl version? It should be in Tuesday. Should I set one aside?”
“Yes, please,” she said. She turned back to me, slightly panicked, and added, “For my dad!” And then, much more softly, she asked, “Clark? You won’t tell anyone you saw me here, right?”
Before I could respond, she glanced at her phone, spun away, and was gone.
9.03.02
I pondered our encounter once I was back in the minivan, where the spawn had fallen asleep and the commander had a defeated, sunken-eyed look as she drove in silence.
I thought about what it would be like to be friends with Stephanie. We seemed to have a lot in common—books and an admiration for her general appearance, just for starters. And I thought about what that friendship might mean for my present situation. After all, a supportive word from her could probably end most of my troubles. She had that kind of power over classmates. Boys and girls alike.
And then I thought, What would the cost be? Would being friends with her mean I would have to give up my own books?
What if I started hanging out with her, and the Kaitlins started to make fun of Ricki? Would I have to just stand by and let that happen? Could I?
No, I thought. I couldn’t.
As I stared out the window and watched the split-level ranch homes roll past, I found myself thinking about solar systems. And gravity. The bigger the star, the heavier its pull. But every star orbits something too—another star, or the bright cluster of them at the core of a galaxy, which might have, at its heart, a black hole.
Maybe it was better to be an insignificant space fleck way out in some gravitational dead zone.
Nobody can see us, true.
But at least we can read what we want.
EXPEDITION LOG
ENTRY 10.01.01
At school on Monday, I didn’t expect Stephanie to have time to chat with me.
And the way she avoided eye contact when I tried to say hi in the halls made it clear she did not.
If I’d had time, I might have been worried about her. But I had my own problems to deal with.
Ricki thought that Ms. Beacon might be out to get me. In my head, I knew that Ricki would not report false information. In my heart, I knew I could trust Ms. Beacon. How to resolve this?
I got my answer in the ARC.
After Ricki and I exchanged nods and I set my Cosmos backpack down, I walked toward Ms. Beacon’s doorway and stood while she wrote at her desk. I wasn’t sure what I was going to say, so I just scanned for clues.
I saw a shelf full of binders with dates and acronyms on them—references to budgets and book purchases. I saw wire baskets, filled with paper and envelopes, marked MAIL TO OFFICE and MAIL FROM OFFICE. I saw a file cabinet with labels such as SCHOOL BOARD MINUTES and PARENTAL CHALLENGES. I saw a framed photo of a smiling Ms. Beacon standing atop a mountain with another smiling woman, both of them sunburned and clearly pleased with themselves. A figurine of a football player, number seven, from the local franchise.
And then, on her desk, I saw a large brown envelope. DISCIPLINARY TRIBUNAL, it said. CONFIDENTIAL.
So Ricki had been right!
“Can I help you, Mr. Sherman?” Ms. Beacon asked.
“Uh,” I said, “did you need any help shelving today? Because I’m, uh, mostly caught up on my homework.”
“And I’m mostly caught up on my shelving today. You may read, Mr. Sherman.”
“Uh, sure.” I pretended to just notice the envelope on her desk. “Hey! Disciplinary Tribunal? What’s that? I sure hope I’m not involved!” I forced a smile that I hoped conveyed a zany, carefree, I’m-not-actually-trying-to-find-out-what’s-in-that-envelope attitude.
She put down her pen. She stared at me. Intensely. Which made me extremely uncomfortable.
“Mr. Sherman, I sit on the school’s Disciplinary Tribunal. Do you know what that is?”
My silence indicated I did not.
“You should read your student handbook. The Disciplinary Tribunal is made up of the principal, a counselor and a senior faculty member, which is me. We review student infractions and recommend severe disciplinary action for students whose behavior warrants it.”
It sounded intimidating. “Like . . . like a military tribunal? Or a court martial?”
“I suppose that is what Principal Denton had in mind when he invented it. When we vote on a course of action, the majority rules, so Principal Denton needs one other tribunal member to endorse his recommendations for him to get his way.”
I thought about how every adult at Festus—except Ms. Beacon—acted whenever Denton was around. “I guess he gets his way a lot, huh.”
Ms. Beacon put on her glasses again so she could stare over the rims. “Mr. Sherman, have you done anything to warrant the attention of the tribunal?”
My stomach squirmed some more. “Uh, I don’t really think so, Ms. Beacon.”
“Good. Neither do I. Beyond that, I cannot discuss tribunal matters or voting records with students. The rules regarding our proceedings are arcane and rigorously enforced.” She gazed at me evenly. “I will say this, however: I managed to get myself on the tribunal only because no other teacher would volunteer—and there is often not much I can do for those whom Denton sets his sights on.
“So Mr. Sherman, I will emphasize to you: Be extremely careful.”
I nodded and backed out under her stern gaze.
Ricki’s eyes followed me as I made my way to my table. I sat down, pulled a book out of my backpack and, while I was setting the backpack on the floor, flashed her a
n “OK” sign.
I figured that a little bit of attitude could only help. But I still had a lot of questions.
After school I took a roundabout route to the bridge, made sure nobody could see me and ducked inside the drain pipe. Les was waiting with his flashlight. He’d received the coded message I’d left in his locker.
“I can’t stay long,” he said. “What’s the emergency?”
“What do you know about the Disciplinary Tribunal?” I asked.
“It’s a bureaucratic thing for when they’re planning to expel someone. The principal, the counselor and a teacher. Denton’s in charge of it.”
“You sound like an expert.”
“You forget who my family is.”
“Oh. Yeah.” I guess he would be an expert.
“Ty has been up for discipline more times than I can remember,” he said bitterly. “He was regularly getting slapped with detentions in elementary school. But at Festus, he’s always managed to get off with a scolding. Time after time.”
I imagined what this must have been like for Les. “That could make a guy crazy, I suppose.”
He picked at a glob of dried candle wax that had spilled onto one of the milk crates, rolled it around in his fingers, then flicked it away. “In the beginning, no. When my mom and I first moved in with his family, he just confused me. I mean, he was supposed to be a brother, right? But he was angry from the start. Angry at my mom. Angry at me. And I guess I was the one he could take it out on.
“But I still tried to make it function. And if I had ever seen even one moment where he acted decent, or even halfway human, if he’d ever attempted to apologize, even once, maybe we could have worked something out. But he would never let his guard down that much with me. It’s like he wanted to see how far he could take things before his dad would pay attention to anything besides baseball and the velocity of his fastball. And he never found that limit.
“And then he started homing in on my friends and making life hell for them too. That was when I just about . . .” His voice trailed off, and he stared down the long, cold pipe that led to the park.
“Anyhow, then I found the Sanctuary. And I started using the wormhole network. To avoid him. It’s a lot easier—on everyone.” He flicked away another ball of wax.
Revenge of the Star Survivors Page 14