“That good,” Bert said. His blue eyes closed briefly, then he gave a short cough—the kind he used to stave off an upcoming longer fit for a few moments—behind one fist. When the older man drew a breath, Kevin could hear it wheezing into his lungs. Ouch. “Once those folks at the museum find out what a treasure you are, they’ll be falling all over everything to get a slice of your time. You’ll see.” Another cough, this one a little stronger, and above the plain button-down shirt and tweed jacket that the former mathematics professor still wore every weekday, his face began to redden.
“I really have to go,” Kevin said hastily. He loved his dad but he hated to see him cough like that, couldn’t stand the helpless feeling he got as the old man’s body spasmed and seemed determined to spit out pieces of his lungs.
His mom stepped forward and straightened Kevin’s collar where the backpack had smashed it, then gave him a quick kiss on the cheek. “You go on then,” she said. “Have a good time, and good luck with the museum people.”
“Sure,” Kevin said. “Thanks.” He turned and pushed open the door, then hesitated and looked back into the kitchen. His mom was patting his dad gently on the back, trying, in her own way, to somehow soothe him. “Dad, don’t forget your medicine.”
His dad looked up and it pained Kevin to see the gratefulness on his face. Was he really so bad that his own parents had to be thankful he cared about them? Scowling, he hurried outside and strode down the walkway, hearing the slam of the door behind him and remembering too late that he shouldn’t have let it go like that. But his mom would forgive him; she’d always said that was the curse of an intelligent mind— the absorption of so much heavy-duty stuff left no room for the trivial details of everyday life.
Trivial details—those were the things that were getting to him the most these days. For instance, look at the weather here. Lots of people would think it was nice— warm and sunny most of the year, and the air had a dryness to it that had really helped his dad’s breathing. In the winter, you barely needed a coat, especially if you were from somewhere frigid like Chicago. And snow? Be serious. The sky wouldn’t dare do something so outrageous.
But where were the winter sports, the ice-skating or even the everyday, no-equipment kind, like pelting your friends with snowballs and building a blocky, ridiculously proportioned T. Rex out of the snow in your front yard? And there was nothing like a season of good old-fashioned blizzards to harden up those back, shoulder and arm muscles à la that most versatile of tools, Ye Shovel. If you wanted to ice-skate in Sunnydale you had to go to an inside rink—was it even open any season other than winter? Kevin was used to neighborhood parks where the Chicago Park District would come around and flood the playgrounds with water, letting each layer freeze until thick, city-sized ponds were formed, the kind that never cracked and drowned some poor shmuck because of an unexpected thaw. Back home a kid’s biggest fear was doing the high-dive on a curve and smacking the edge of one of the benches along the side, not something that was really up there on the odds scale.
Everything here in Sunnydale was . . . well, it was perfect. Manicured lawns, well-kept sidewalks, Spanish-style buildings all stuccoed and bright, like a department store catalog. And while it was true that he hadn’t seen the “bad” part of town, c’mon—in a place this small, just how bad could that be? The entire town of Sunnydale would fit inside a few parts of Chicago into which no one who wanted to see the next day would venture—even in broad daylight. Sunnydale just didn’t seem very deep to him, like the whole thing was a box covered in glitzy wrapping that held nothing at all interesting below that bright, ribbon-encircled surface. Surely there had to be more to this place than palm trees, desert-toned paint, and sunshine.
At school, it was the same thing: fresh-faced students with tanned and healthy-looking bodies streamed endlessly through the halls of Sunnydale High. Hardly anyone was even interestingly Goth. This was California, for crying out loud—wasn’t it supposed to be the land of individuality? As far as Kevin could tell, there were only a couple of jocks who occasionally tried to act like bullies. To his experienced eye they were just no contest to the real thing. There was no excitement in this relatively small town. It was total American suburbia, Leave It to Beaver in the nineties. If they had problems, the kids here kept them well-hidden, and what could be troubling anyone here in the land of milk and honey anyway?
He knew that a big part of his difficulty was that he had come out here predisposed to dislike everything— the school, the climate, the people—and that was exactly what had happened. A negative attitude generally brought negative results, and Kevin was smart enough to know that. His resentment and feelings of being different, of just not wanting to be here, were hard to disguise, and so far most of the other students had made it a point to avoid him.
Kevin hurried to Mr. Regis’s classroom, vaguely wishing he could dump all the anger he’d built up into one of the trash cans along the way. He’d had a couple of pre-college psych classes at Lane Tech, and he’d learned that people did stupid things when they got bent out of shape about situations. Yeah, there was the obvious stuff, like the sickos who went to work armed and then blew away a half-dozen co-workers, or the mental cases who relieved their rage by beating on hapless spouses or elderly family members. But there was the not-so-obvious, too, the insidious kind of poor decisionmaking that could ruin a career or a relationship, or even a life, in the blink of an eye. Kevin didn’t think he was that bad yet, and he sure didn’t want to get there.
He swung around the corner into the room and saw that Mr. Regis, a short stocky man with a gray-flecked buzz cut, was already there and talking to someone he didn’t know. Was this Daniel Addison? A younger guy, maybe only three or four years older than Kevin himself, with curly dark hair and striking light blue eyes— the girls in class would probably sit here and drool over him the entire time. Disappointed, Kevin glanced at the clock. He’d thought getting here twenty minutes early might give him the edge he needed, but he should have expected the teacher to be setting up for the day already, especially since he’d lined up a guest speaker. Kevin knew he really should’ve zipped in an hour or more ago, but he hadn’t been sure if the doors to the school would be open; back home everything was locked up tight during off-hours.
Instead of going back out in the hall to wait with the rest of the cattle, Kevin grabbed a seat a couple of rows from the front, then pulled out a fresh notebook. If he couldn’t talk to Addison before class, he’d take all the notes he could and find out later, if possible, when was a good time for him to get over to the museum and—
“Kevin,” Mr. Regis said, startling him. “I’m glad you came in a bit early. Would you step up here, please?”
Kevin nodded, trying to appear nonchalant, and walked up to Regis’s desk. When he got there, Regis inclined his head toward the other young man, who was studying Kevin with interest. “I’d like you to meet Daniel Addison, the guest speaker from the Museum of Natural History I told the class about yesterday afternoon.” As Kevin and Daniel shook hands, Regis continued, surprising Kevin with his words. “Kevin comes from Lane Technical High School in Chicago, and he was also very involved with the paleontology studies at the University of Chicago. He’s just transferred here and I suspect he’s got a genuine desire to be involved with the museum.”
“Really,” Daniel said. “What did you do at the University?”
“Well, my father was a mathematics professor there for most of his life, so when I was interested in dinosaurs as a kid, he started introducing me around,” Kevin eagerly told him. “I knew all the members in the Paleontology Department and was pretty deep into studying the field. The last couple of years, they took me on a few of the summer digs.” He paused, not wanting to sound like he was bragging. “I learned a lot,” he added. “They’re really great people, unbelievably smart.”
Daniel nodded, then all three of them glanced at the door as several students barreled into the room and found seats, chattering an
d laughing. It would only get noisier from here on out. “I’d definitely like to talk about this some more with you,” he said to Kevin. “Do you have a free period next?”
The temptation to lie was immense, but Kevin didn’t dare. One small thing—a skipped class, for instance—could screw everything up. Sometimes the agenda was hidden, like finding out how responsible a student was by dangling a trap in front of him. He wasn’t so green he’d fall for that. “Not until one o’clock,” he admitted.
“Okay.” Daniel pulled out his wallet and took a card from it, then handed it to Kevin. “The rest of today is shot for me, but I’ll be at the museum until probably six or seven tomorrow night. Why don’t you come by after school and we’ll see what we can do to get you involved in the paleontology arena here in the exciting town of Sunnydale.” He smiled. “The scale is a little smaller, I’m afraid. But we still have our moments.”
Kevin took the card and grinned at both men. “Thanks. I’ll be there.” He went back to his seat as more kids filed into the classroom, but he barely heard the racket they made. He couldn’t believe it; he’d heard that the faculty in smaller towns could be close-knit and difficult for newcomers to break into, and he’d thought it would take more time, maybe a few donations to the museum accompanied by carefully worded cover letters from his parents. Kevin knew his parents were prepared to go that route because he’d heard them talking about it one night when they hadn’t realized he’d gotten up to scrounge around the kitchen for a late-hours snack. Still, he knew it would be better if he could pull it off himself, and it seemed that because Regis really had looked over Kevin’s student file, that he cared, Kevin might finally be on his way.
Awesome.
Willow could hardly keep her mind on what the guy from the Museum of Natural History was saying. Yadda yadda yadda—frankly, dinosaurs were more Oz’s field of interest than hers. And speaking of Oz . . . criminy! A manager for the band? Jeez, and he didn’t even seem excited while here she was, practically bouncing around on her seat like a Slinky at the top of a flight of stairs. How could he sit there so calmly and mull over dead dinosaurs at a time like this?
As if he could sense her thinking about him, Oz suddenly glanced at her and smiled slightly before refocusing on what their guest speaker was saying. Willow smiled back, then mentally smacked herself for not paying attention in class. If he could do it, so could she . . . b ut then, he was a guy and guys were like that about the strangest things. Unbelievable how they could simply tune out the rest of the world when the subject turned to dinosaurs or cars or guitars. On the other hand, there were a few who tuned out everything but girls, too, so maybe it all equaled out.
“Most people are familiar with dinosaurs such as Tyrannosaurus Rex, Stegosaurus, and Triceratops,” Daniel Addison was saying as he stood in front of the pull-down slide screen. The guy was definitely in the eye-candy category and Willow mentally shook her head at the way some of the other girls were focusing on him with exaggerated attentiveness. “Those are good examples of the ones that get mentioned a lot on television and incorrectly used in fiction, where the time periods in which they lived get swapped around for convenience. If we can get someone to lower the lights, I’d like to show you a few illustrations and give you an idea of what they were really like, outside of the make-believe realms of Jurassic Park and Dinotopia.”
Someone off to the side did as Addison asked while another student stood and lowered the shades on the windows, sending the classroom into a semi-darkness that Willow found reminiscent of places she’d have preferred not to associate with school. Up at the front Addison hit the button on the hand controller and the too-bright white of the screen was bathed in color as something huge and yellowish stretched across it from end to end. The thing Willow found herself staring at had a long neck and snout with a curved form to its mouth that made her think of crocodiles. Dinosaurs weren’t her thing—computers, thank you very much— but Addison’s next words made her realize that her initial impression hadn’t been far off the mark.
“This is a reconstruction of what Baryonyx, a kind of meat-eating dinosaur first discovered in an English clay pit in 1983, might have looked like immediately after it died. Note that in the structure of the jaw there’s a strong resemblance to modern-day crocodiles, not only in the length but in the number of teeth— sixtyfour, which is twice as many as in other meat-eating dinosaurs. While the paleontologists weren’t able to recover the entire skeleton, they did find about sixty percent of it, which enabled them to come up with this reconstruction. They also found the fossilized remains of a prehistoric fish in the area where the Baryonyx’s stomach would have been, confirming their theory that it was probably a fish-eater.”
Someone’s hand shot up and Addison paused before hitting the button to change the slide. “You have a question?”
“It doesn’t look so big and tough,” said one of the guys down front, a jock named Peter. “Like a good kick could take it down.” Various friends around the room hooted in support.
Addison smiled, and his good-looking face seemed to go slightly sinister in the shadowy space between the slide projector and screen. “I guess you could say the slide makes it look a little out of proportion. Baryonyx weighed two tons and stood somewhere between nine to thirteen feet tall.” His gaze went up to the ceiling. “That would make a big one taller than the ceiling in this room.”
Willow’s jaw dropped open in surprise as the rest of the class murmured and considered this, looking from the screen to the ceiling. She was so not into the entire dinosaur thing; anything that looked like a snake or a reptile was bad because, frankly, they generally ate small fuzzy animals and she just couldn’t find anything right about that. But thirteen feet tall? Sure, she’d read plenty of facts and figures: T. Rex, up to fifty feet long; brontosaurs, basically as big as a building; et cetera, et cetera. Despite all the artwork and movie special effects, and even the skeletons she’d seen in museums, nothing had ever brought it home to her as much as the color slide now visible at the front of the room. She didn’t know why—maybe it was the way it looked so lifelike, or rather, “deathlike,” the skin wrinkled and pulled along what could have truly been the muscle structure of a once living animal. The long, tooth-filled mouth was slightly open, showing short, sharp teeth and a moist-looking pink tongue. Even the glazed-over eyes, half-closed and sort of . . . squinty, looked way too real. Here in Sunnydale, almost anything could come to life—statues, mummies, dead bodies, you name it. Say, they didn’t have anything floating around in town that looked like that thing, did they?
“It’d make a cool model,” Oz said into her right ear. “A really big one. Of course, since we’re talking Cretaceous, it’d also be about a hundred and twenty million years old.”
Willow felt herself smile a bit as he leaned back again, and she forced herself to chill out. See, now could Oz have been any more perfect a boyfriend? Lean in, lend a little reassurance, lean out. Sometimes it was like they were psychic.
The slide machine clicked and a different image filled the hanging screen, but Willow was dealing now. She was All Right. “Now this one,” Addison continued, “is called Allosaurus. Not to be confused with Tyrannosaurus Rex, Allosaurus was smaller and no doubt faster, with teeth that have been found to be six inches in length.” Addison paused, then regarded the class. “If that doesn’t quite sink in, pull out a ruler and take a look at it.” He pointed back to the screen. “Note the fully functional front limbs where the infamous T. Rex of Jurassic Park had forelegs that were so small and slender that they were rendered nearly useless. As a side note about the Tyrannosaurus Rex, also contrary to what most people think, they were probably more prone to be carrion eaters than true hunters, which is not to say that a T. Rex wouldn’t have grabbed the opportunity to take down prey. When you’re talking about animals in this size range, however, moving around means burning massive amounts of energy. Not only did they likely have to consume huge quantities of flesh from already dead di
nosaurs, it’s also probable that they spent a lot of time lying around as opposed to rampaging through primeval forests.”
Oz sat back and contemplated this theory. He’d always assumed Tyrannosaurs had actively hunted, using their massive leg muscles to chase down prey on a regular basis. What Addison was saying made a lot more sense though; even lions, as small as they were compared to dinosaurs, spent a lot of time just lying around. Interesting life.
The new guy, Kevin Sanderson, was sitting one row up and a couple of seats to Oz’s right, and he seemed a little weirded out, overexcited for a class in the earth sciences. Right now, Kevin was nodding his agreement with Addison and scribbling hastily in a notebook that Oz could see was already crammed with writing. Still, if Kevin’s interest level in this was pretty high, then this Addison dude showing up here was probably the event of the week for him. Although he didn’t know any more about Sanderson than he knew about Addison, it was hard for Oz not to view this as a good thing; being the new face in a school where almost everyone had been around for a while could make it a real pain in the neck to make new friends. He thought he’d heard somewhere that Kevin had transferred in from Chicago, and Windy City to Sunnydale equaled major adjustment. If Kevin had an interest in dinosaurs and could hook up with dino-guy from the museum, that would be most excellent. Addison would be like a made-to-order mentor.
Oz glanced over at Willow again. Speaking of hooking up, he had to admit he was a little more jazzed about this band manager thing than he was letting on to her or the rest of their friends. He had more info than he’d shared, too, but what was the sense in getting everyone all high on the concept when he and Devon didn’t know if anything was going to happen?
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