I wished Pat had been alone. I really wanted to talk to her, talk with her, share my confused feelings about everything that was going on. Instead I spent the end of the evening up in my room, explaining matters to Marcus. At least he listened and didn’t give me a lot of snide comebacks.
Chapter 15
“HOW’S PAT?” MELINDA asked from the study. I lifted my muzzle out of a bowl of Cheerios and grinned; the phone rang.
“Aha,” I said. “Maybe that’s herself.”
“Hi,” said herself. “Can I bum a ride to school, please?”
“School? School? Oh - I recognise your voice. You’re Pat Llewellyn! Gee, Pat, don’t you realise what’s happened? You’ve been in a coma for twelve years. I don’t go to school any more. In fact, after I graduated from Yale I set up my own computer company and made a hundred million dollars before I was twenty-five. But I’ll tell you what - just for old times’ sake I’ll send one of the company chauffeurs over, and he’ll take you to school.”
“If it’s got to be a chauffeur, it better be a big Mercedes.”
“He’ll be there in ten minutes.”
“… You know, for a second you really had me going there.”
“Now you’re putting me on. See you soon.”
Melinda tilted back in her ergonomic chair so she could see me in the kitchen.
“You know something, Rick? You’re weird.”
* * *
Pat was waiting out on the footpath, her bookbag slung over one shoulder. She was leaning against her cane, and her breath made little puffs of white in the early morning sunshine.
“Hi, stranger.” I leaned over and kissed her as she got in. “Ohh, cold.”
“Ohh, hot. Hi.”
“How you feeling?”
“Tired, but I guess I’ll live.”
“Say that again after you see what Gibbs has been doing to us all week. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll have a relapse.”
“Sounds good. Hey, I missed you.”
“I missed you, too. This has been a hairy week.” I told her about Mr Borowitz and Mr Randall, which she thought was hysterical, but I didn’t tell her about the bug they’d planted behind Brunhilde’s bumper.
“Also,” I added in a bid for pity. “I’m getting the everflowing tar kicked out of me in practice.”
“No lifting, huh?”
“Just muscle power.”
“That’s awful,” she said with a grin. “Can I see your bruises?”
“Why should I cheer you up? It’s going to be a massacre tomorrow. I should call in and say you’ve infected me. Then Gibbs wouldn’t waste his time trying to get me to perform.”
“Or you could perform.”
“With Gassaway’s friends up in the stands, videotaping me? Forget it. I just want to sneak back into the underbrush.”
“Boy, what a sissy.”
“When are you going to learn the difference between sissy and paranoid?”
Just then I had a genuinely paranoid insight: maybe they’d put a microphone inside the car. What had we said? Anything incriminating? Pat had said something about lifting, something about performing. Would that be enough to give us away? I got goosebumps.
“Let’s drop the subject for now, huh?”
“Okay, boss.”
For the rest of the ride she was cheerful and relaxed, chatting about what she’d have to do to catch up with the Awkward Squad. I felt a little easier, knowing that she wasn’t going to give me a hard time and argue about anything.
We got to school, and my heart sank again. The whole place had been decked out with banners for tomorrow’s game: “Sink the Buccaneers”, “Saints Rule Ok”, all that great school spirit stuff. The walls were plastered with notices about a pep rally at lunchtime today. Terry High was going into its yearly end-of-season frenzy, and I could just imagine how popular I was going to be on Saturday morning after the Buccaneers martyred the Saints. With luck I’d be unconscious in an oxygen tent.
It was even getting to Gibbs, I think. He wasn’t happy to see that Eustis Bowson and Mason Reeves were absent - that put Mason deep in the dungpile, because he’d been scheduled to present his project. Angela was back, but not looking great, and she could hardly speak. Pablo and Ronnie went on playing chess as always, but for once Gibbs was annoyed with it and ordered them to quit and pay attention.
“But we always do pay attention, Mr Gibbs,” Pablo protested gently. It was true.
“Pay more,” Gibbs growled, and the morning was off to a lurching start. It went on like that, with Gibbs snapping at us while we sat there doing our brain-death imitation. After an hour or so, Angela raised her hand.
“Please, Mr Gibbs,” she whispered hoarsely, “may I be excused? I’m afraid I’m not as well as I thought I was.”
“Go talk to the nurse, Battenbury. If she thinks you should go home, you may. Otherwise, take it easy down there until lunch.”
I glanced worriedly at Pat. “How are you feeling?”
“Not that bad, anyway.”
We were down to just a handful of people, and we lost critical mass. Gibbs knew it, and put us to work on individual reading assignments for the rest of the morning.
At lunchtime, the central quad was a seething mass of crazy people. The band was blasting away with, of course, “When the Saints Go Marching In.” The cheerleaders and pompom girls were up on the sundial, a big circular tiled platform in the middle of the quad, goading everyone into mass hysteria. One of the male cheerleaders (I could never tell them apart - they were all blonde and clean-cut and smiled too much) was getting everyone to practice their wave, and with everyone sitting down and standing up in sequence around the quad, the effect was a little nauseating.
I would have just preferred staying in the lab for lunch, or even hanging out in the john with Jason Murphy and the Tricycle Rats, but of course I had to be at the rally. The cheerleader quit making everybody wave, and began to introduce the team, calling them up onto the sundial to stand in a self-conscious cluster. When he called my name, everybody screamed and clapped and whistled.
Feeling like a jerk, I stepped up on the sundial and waved, which only made things worse. The cheerleaders were right next to me, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying over the uproar. I looked around; Pat was where I’d left her, off at the edge of the quad where she wouldn’t be shoved and her cane wouldn’t get in anybody’s way. She grinned and blew me a kiss.
Over on the other side of the quad were Gibbs and Mr Gordon, each standing with his arms folded; I had the uncomfortable feeling that they were looking only at me. And not far away from them was Bobby Gassaway, with an expensive-looking Nikon 35mm, snapping pictures of the team. That surprised me; he’d never been much of a football fan, still less the kind of guy who takes pictures at pep rallies. Once again, paranoia explained it: the fink must be standing in for Mr Borowitz and Mr Randall. They would’ve attracted a lot of unwelcome attention on the school grounds during class time. I was tempted to do a quick lift while Gassaway was between exposures, and then let him explain to his air force friends why he hadn’t caught me doing it on film.
Instead, I just stood there and grinned like somebody with a fresh lobotomy, while the band played and cheerleaders did war dances and everybody had a good time except me.
Finally it was all over except for Mr Gordon’s speech. He struggled through the crowd, hopped up on the platform, and shook everybody’s hand. His red hair stood out in all directions from his freckled scalp.
“We’ve got a great team, people,” Mr Gordon shouted into a microphone while the loudspeakers sent echos around the quad. “Tomorrow night we’re going to show San Carlos how it’s done, and then we’re going to beat Calvaras and take the championship again. You know how we’re going to do it, people?”
“How?” everybody yelled on cue.
“We’ve got the coach,” Mr Gordon yelled, and the bass drummer thumped his drum for punctuation. “We’ve got the team.” Everybody
was chanting along now. “We’ve got the pep. We’ve got the steam.” Thumpety-thump, while everybody screamed and the cheerleaders bounced up and down in their little pleated skirts.
“And we’ve got Rick Stevenson!” Mr Gordon added, waving toward me. Over the uproar, he shouted, “Rick’s going to have an even better game than he did last week, right, Rick?”
I grinned some more and shrugged and wished I’d never decided to show off against Jason in that stupid basketball game.
Here is one good thing about having a morbid imagination: you can imagine so many horrible things that reality, no matter how bad it may be, is usually a pleasant surprise by comparison. That was how it was with the practice that afternoon.
Gibbs kept his promise to ease up on me. We did a lot of passing plays, and I mostly hung around and kept guys from sacking Wes. The crowd in the stands was pretty big, but I didn’t see Mr Borowitz or Mr Randall or even Gassaway. Once or twice, some kids tried to get a chant going - “We want Rick”, all that - but it didn’t work. People seemed happy just watching a good high-school ball team doing its thing.
After a while I did start carrying the ball, and it wasn’t as bad as I’d expected it would be. I was moving fairly fast, and my blockers kept pace with me, so I managed to gain some ground most of the time. Once, though, I got confused and Sean Quackenbush bashed into me so hard I lost my breath. Sitting there on the cold grass, trying to breathe, I remembered how Jason had looked after I’d slammed into him. It was almost worth it to know exactly how lousy he must have felt.
Apart from that, though, the practice was okay. I positively bounced into the locker room, thinking that maybe I was going to get through the game alive, and not cost us the game in the process. Nobody gave me any flak about being slow, and Gibbs looked positively cheerful. He could do both sides of the good cop-bad cop routine, and make you glad he’d run you silly. Now he was moving around the locker room, talking to guys in a quiet, personal way, as if each guy was the key element in his master plan, and we all glowed in the dark when he moved on.
Showered and cheerful, I walked out and found Pat waiting for me.
“Hi,” I said. “What are you reading?”
“One of Angela’s romances. In a dopey kind of way, it’s pretty good.”
“Angela is a bad influence on you.”
“Angela is a good person.”
“Hey, sure. I like her. It was just a remark, okay? Can I give you a lift home or anything?”
“How about Hillside Park?”
“Your wish is my command.”
It was a gorgeous evening, with the sun low in the sky and the western horizon dottted with clouds turning pink and black. Off to the east, the Sierras were white and gold and purple; in between, the whole valley stretched out below us, close enough to touch in the clear air. A jet lifted from Hotchkiss and howled off through the empty sky toward the north, its underside glinting in the sunset.
“You looked pretty good out there today,” Pat said as we walked along the edge of the bluff, right where we’d been that first day she’d come to school.
“I’m a shadow of my former self.” We turned away through a grove of pines to Duck Lake. It was really just a pond, but it did attract a lot of ducks. At this time of year most of them were transients from up north, some of them planning to head farther south and some staying put. They were cruising around the reeds and lily pads, looking for supper.
“You’re not going to lift in the game, huh?”
“I’m not lifting at all just now, like I told you. Too dangerous. How about you?”
“I’m being careful.”
“That’s what people say just before they get pregnant.”
She gave me a rap on the knee with her cane, but her heart wasn’t in it; I could still walk.
“I’m being careful, I said. But I think this is all a big drag, with you on the ground all the time.”
“Hey, I know. I know. But what else can I do, Pat? It’s just too dangerous with all these people watching me. I even talked to Gibbs about itᚓ”
“You told him?” she gasped.
“Of course not, you airhead. I told him I was working on a science-fiction story.”
“Ohh. Clever.”
“As a matter of fact, it was. But all he did was tell me to work out the story the way I thought it should go, and that’s what I’m doing.”
“Well, I think you’re really wrong, and it makes me mad. I still have to lug this stupid brace around, and walk really slow when I could just lift wherever I wanted to go. And millions of people like me could do the same, instead of rotting in wheelchairs or in crutches.”
“Pat, we’ve gone over all this before. For Pete’s sake, all I’m doing is buying time, trying to see where problems might turn up. We’ve only known about this for a few weeks, right? My gosh, they don’t even bring out a new brand of toothpaste that fast. They do tests. They look for trouble.”
“Trouble is just what you’re not looking for.”
“Aw, come on.”
“No, you come on. You’ve been twisting yourself into knots about this. You’re the guy who can’t stand secrets, and you’re sitting on the biggest one in the world. If it was Gassaway who could lift, and you got even a hint of it, you’d never quit until you learnt all about it.”
This was close enough to what Gibbs had said that it made me sore. I stopped short and turned to Pat. In the twilight, her face was just a pale blur.
“Look. Lifting are my discovery. If something goes wrong with it, it’s my fault. I’m responsible.”
“Your discovery. Does that mean it’s your property? Am I supposed to pay you a royalty every time I lift? Do you charge by the mile?”
She turned away from me, so quickly and fluidly that I knew she was lifting, and I felt a burst of envy. Then she glided away from me, toward the edge of the lake a few feet away.
“What are you doing?” I hissed. No one else was in sight, but I was taking no chances.
“Walking on water. Want to make something of it?”
And there she was, standing just on the surface of the lake and moving slowly out into the darkening lake.
“Pat, for heaven’s sake - please!”
The next thing I knew, I’d followed her, without even lifting, and I was in the lake up to my crotch.
It was cold. It was truly cold. I yelped and she turned and saw me grabbing for her ankle, trying to drag her down.
“You turkey!” Then she took my hand in hers and hoisted me out of the water and back onto the rail. I shuddered and started doing a little dance in my squelchy running shoes. “What’d you do that for?”
“What’d you do that for?” I snapped back. “Somebody could’ve seen you.”
“Boy, are you ever far, far gone. It’s almost pitch black already, nobody else is around anyway, and you’re trying to avoid attention by jumping in the lake and screaming and scaring all the ducks. Now you have to drive us home dripping wet.”
“It’s okay. I’ll just tell Melinda I accidentally fell in.”
“No, tell her you did it on purpose. Come on.”
We went back down the trail. It was farther to the parking lot than I’d remembered, and I was turning blue by the time we got there.
“Get out of those pants,” Pat ordered.
“Are you nuts?”
“You’re nut if you stay in them. Go on, it’s too dark to see anything anyway.”
Keeping Brunhilde between me and the nearest street light, I peeled my clammy jeans off and got a scuzzy blanket out of the back seat. Marcus used it when he went for rides with me, and it smelled of wet dog. Even so, it felt great to be wearing something warm and dry. I wrapped it around myself like a sarong, and slid behind the wheel. My feet were freezing in wet runners, but I figured we’d be home before frostbite set in,.
Pat got in beside me, still giggling, and I started the car, we pulled out of the car park, and just up the street I saw a sedan parked with its l
ights off. Brunhilde’s lights swept across it, and I recognised the two men inside.
“It’s Mr Borowitz and Mr Randall,” I said.
“The air force guys?”
“Yeah. Now doesn’t that show you something?” I demand. “This isn’t just some paranoid pipe dream. I’ve got real people following me.”
“I think it’s a riot.”
I growled and snarled all the way down the hill and past the school, watching the sedan’s headlights in my rear view mirror. It was all too weird: a clean-living high-school student, driving through a normal California city wearing a dog blanket while being followed by military spies, and the normal guy’s crazy girlfriend is about to wet her pants laughing.
“Don’t talk about anything sensitive,” I muttered through my chattering teeth as we slowed for a red light. “They may have put a microphone in the car.”
“Oh gee, I hope so!”
We halted at the intersection, and the sedan stopped right behind us. Pat glanced over her shoulder, and then suddenly got out of the car.
“Hey,” I croaked, and watched her limp back to the sedan. I rolled down the window to yell at her to come back, and heard her tell them:
“There’s a man in that car, and he doesn’t have any pants on.”
For one horrible moment I seriously thought about leaving her there. Then I decided she’d just lift after me, and that would be game over. Instead, I waited for her to come back. She climbed in and shut the door just as the light turned green.
“Oh - oh - you should’ve seen their faces, Rick! Oh, they looked just like you!” And she just about expired right there in my car.
“Don’t you dare tell Melinda,” I commanded her, but I’m not sure she could hear me over her own laughter.
Chapter 16
MELINDA THOUGHT it was funny, too. She didn’t even much care how I’d gotten wet; the sight of me in Marcus’s blanket threw her into a delighted hysterics. With all the dignity I could muster, I marched upstairs and changed into dry pants and shoes. Then I came downstairs to find hot chocolate waiting for me.
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