“Stop it!” Zanna choked, her face smashed against the dirty tiles of the cafeteria. She squirmed, but Eddie twisted her arm a bit more, and pain bloomed all the way from her elbow to her chest.
“What do you need all these notebooks for?” one of the boys asked. He had her mathematics notebook between his meaty hands and tore it in two with a hoot of wild laughter.
“Oh ho ho, what’s this?” another one said. He had found the puzzle book Pops had given her that morning.
Zanna’s body went cold. “That’s mine!” she said.
“What’s a girl like you doing with this?” the boy asked, roughly flipping through the pages. “You like puzzles or something?”
She tried to push herself off the ground, but Eddie gave her wrist another twist and shoved her down again. Where was Mr. Oddenben? Didn’t he see what was going on?
“You’re going to hurt your head with these,” the boy with her puzzle book said. “But we’ll take care of it.” He gripped it with both hands.
She fought to catch a breath. “No!”
The sound of her puzzle book being torn in two filled her ears. It drowned out the cafeteria and Eddie’s laughter and her own furious heart. Just that horrible, screaming sound of paper.
Blind rage filled her, and she threw her head back, hearing the satisfying crack as she butted Eddie square in the nose. His grip loosened, and she pushed hard, enough to get free and lunge at the boy who had torn her puzzle book in half. She sank her teeth into his neck, and a nasty metallic taste filled her mouth, like she had taken a bite out of a rusty iron pipe. Beneath her fists, the boy let out a string of curses, and then an arm wrapped around her, a huge and strong arm that lifted her out of the melee.
The fat Mr. Oddenben had picked her up around her waist like she was a picnic basket. “Back to lunch,” he said to the boys. Then, to Zanna, “You are coming with me.”
“What?” Zanna said. Eddie clapped his hands over his nose, and the other boy held his neck where she had bitten him. “They started it! Just look at my backpack!”
“You can explain yourself to the principal,” Mr. Oddenben said. He carried her out of the cafeteria and through the hallways, only depositing her on her feet when they had reached the door to the administrative offices. Inside, a scrawny secretary was filing her nails behind the desk and looked up with a bored expression.
“Ms. Mayfield has been causing trouble in the cafeteria,” Mr. Oddenben said by way of explanation, a firm hand on Zanna’s shoulder. “Is Principal Thatch in?”
The secretary waved to the office behind her. “Go in.”
Principal Thatch was even fatter than Mr. Oddenben and must have spent the entire morning wedging himself behind his tiny and cluttered desk. He set aside his lunch—a greasy egg salad sandwich—and knitted his fingers together when they entered.
“Fighting in the cafeteria,” Mr. Oddenben said, directing Zanna to take the chair in front of the desk.
“Thank you,” Principal Thatch said. “I’ll handle this.”
Mr. Oddenben nodded and shut the door behind him.
“They started it,” Zanna said. Her voice was raw, and her mouth still tasted of rusty metal. “Eddie and the others. They tore up my books.”
Principal Thatch, however, didn’t seem to hear her. He picked up his sandwich again and bit into it, chasing a blob of mayonnaise that was trying to escape into his cuff. His tongue was the color of an earthworm. “Do you not like our school, Ms. Mayfield?”
She crossed her arms. “In all honesty, it’s pretty terrible.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
She doubted Principal Thatch was sorry for anything except not being able to eat his lunch in peace. “Your teachers don’t know the first thing they’re talking about,” she said. “Mr. Oddenben thinks the world is flat.”
“Mr. Oddenben is a highly distinguished scholar, and we are lucky to have him,” Principal Thatch said. “But he is not the reason why you are here. We expect our students at St. Pommeroy’s to act with a certain decorum. When they do not, it reflects poorly on both them and the school.”
“They tore up my books!” Zanna said, grabbing the edge of Principal Thatch’s desk. “What was I supposed to do?”
A fat glob of egg salad fell on his desk, and Principal Thatch wiped it up with a finger. “This is your first day, isn’t it?” he said, putting his finger in his mouth and sucking. “We have a certain way of doing things here at St. Pommeroy’s. In time, you will understand.”
Zanna sank back into her chair. She wouldn’t allow herself to cry. Not here, in front of this sloppy mess of a principal. “You’re not even listening to me,” she said.
Principal Thatch considered something. “There is another option.” He opened one of the drawers of his desk and took out a piece of paper, laying it before Zanna. Like her acceptance letter, it was printed on graph paper with the same triangular school crest stamped at the top. “Sign this, and you will decline your enrollment at St. Pommeroy’s. We shall be sad to see you go, but we realize that our radical approach to education is not for everyone.”
He handed her a pen. The contract was simple enough—a place at the top for Zanna to write in her name, a paragraph officially declining her enrollment, and a line at the bottom for her signature. She frowned at it.
“I want to learn,” she said. “I really do.”
“Then begin with learning how we do things here,” Principal Thatch said, “or return to your public schooling.”
Zanna looked down at the contract. She had dreamed of this school ever since the acceptance letter had arrived. A place where she could really stretch her mind. On its website, it had looked like a wondrous secluded place of learning, with fountains and dense hedges and libraries stacked two, three stories tall. But seeing it now—its dirty building, its incompetent teachers, its bullying students—was like a bucket of cold water. With a dark and heavy heart, she picked up the pen. At least at J. Clemons Public High they didn’t try to tell you two plus two was five.
Then the entire school flickered.
It was quick, like an old lightbulb sputtering before it died completely. And at first, Zanna thought it was just that. One more thing in this school that was falling apart. But then it happened again, and she saw it was no simple flicker of the lights. In that infinitesimal moment, it was as if the entire office—Principal Thatch included—had been dipped in bright silver paint.
“Did you—” she began.
St. Pommeroy’s began to crumple. Everything—the walls, the desk, even Principal Thatch, who was frozen mid-bite—deflated like someone was letting the air out of a balloon. First, the details went. The clutter on his desk and the sandwich in his hand melted into silvery goo. The rolls of fat around his neck all ran together. Then she couldn’t see where Principal Thatch ended and the desk began. Zanna jumped up as what had been her chair turned into a pool of silver metal that was sucked away down an unseen drain. The walls of the principal’s office melted away and then the rest of St. Pommeroy’s, leaving her alone and quiet on a dirty field of scrub grass, with no signs that there had ever been a school there.
From the sky, the contract to leave St. Pommeroy’s floated down and landed at Zanna’s feet. It was the only thing left besides the pen she was still holding in a fearsome death grip. Where a whole private school had stood moments ago, Zanna only saw gopher holes, a pile of dented soda cans, and a very bored-looking man. He tucked something away in a pocket of his heavy black overcoat and adjusted his old-timey bowler hat.
“Well,” he said in a flat, deadpanned voice. “That explains that.”
Chapter Two
Zanna found herself unable to say anything. She rubbed at her eyes and shook her head so hard her bonnet nearly came loose. It was a dream. She was in bed, waiting for the alarm to go off so she could go to school. Real school. A school that
didn’t turn into aluminum foil and disappear . . .
When she opened her eyes, she was still standing on the barren field. The strange man had walked over to the pile of soda cans and knelt down. From his pocket, he took out a pair of elegant leather gloves, put them on, and began to rummage through the cans.
She tried her voice. “Hello?”
“Hello.” It sounded like an unfamiliar word to him. He didn’t look up as he said it, still intent on the soda cans.
Zanna took a step closer. “Um,” she said, “did you see—”
“A school,” the man finished for her. He made a small sound of discovery and straightened, something bright and silver in his hand. It was a quarter, Zanna saw before he tucked it away in one of his pockets. “Yes. A decent fabrication. Certainly decent enough to fool you.” He looked down at Zanna, as if noticing her for the first time. “You are Zanna Mayfield, are you not?”
“I am,” she managed to get out.
“Wonderful,” he said in a voice that seemed better suited to discussing which shade of gray he should paint his living room. With a flick of his hand, one of the soda cans suddenly lifted from the pile as if it had been jerked up by a string. It melted and separated into eight solid silver balls, each no bigger than a marble, that hovered before the man for a moment before they all went zooming skyward in different directions. “I have told the others that they can cease their search,” he said. “And I believe this is yours.”
A wire-thin tendril of metal coiled out of his pocket and picked up her backpack by its straps. Zanna said nothing as the wire stretched out and deposited it at her feet. A moment later, a silver falcon whizzed down from the sky and landed on the man’s shoulder. Despite her confusion, Zanna had to stifle a giggle. The falcon—if she could really call it that—looked like it had been sculpted by a second-grader. The wings were different sizes and stuck out of its neck. Its beak was squashed, and its eyes pointed in different directions.
The unfortunate-looking bird whispered something in the man’s ear, and he nodded. “I will take you back to your house,” he said as the bird turned back into a soda can and fell to the ground. “It’s too late to show you St. Pommeroy’s today. You’ll just have to catch up tomorrow.”
“St. Pommeroy’s?” Zanna asked. She could still ask only the simplest of questions and look around dumbly, expecting the school to pop back into existence as quickly as it had disappeared.
“Yes,” the man said. He was doing something with the soda cans again, stretching and flattening and transforming them into a pair of car seats. “You’re smart enough to figure out that this wasn’t actually St. Pommeroy’s, aren’t you?”
Maybe it was the condescension in his voice. Or maybe it was that she had been staring at the empty lot long enough to realize that this wasn’t a dream and she had really seen an entire school—students and teachers included—turn into a pile of discarded soda cans. Either way, Zanna’s head cleared at once. “Who are you? Tell me what’s going on.”
The man nodded slightly and tipped his bowler hat, though he kept the same lifeless expression on his face. “I am Dr. Hubert Mumble, dean of St. Pommeroy’s School for Gifted Children, and you, Zanna Mayfield, have experienced an elaborate metallurgical illusion.”
“Metallurgical?”
“As distinguished from a simple optical illusion. Far more complex. Though both are several years above your study.” He gestured to the two car seats that he had formed out of the soda cans. “If you wish, I will explain more on the way home.”
Zanna didn’t move. She only stared at the car seat floating a foot off the ground. Was he suggesting that she sit on that?
Dr. Mumble seemed to understand her discomfort. With a wave of his hand, a car appeared around the seats. It was a bland sedan with gray paint and not a single redeeming feature, as if someone had averaged all the existing cars together to make the most neutral, nondescript model possible.
“Is that more comfortable?” he asked, opening the door to the backseat.
It was, but Zanna still didn’t move. “How’d you do that?”
“This is an optical illusion,” Dr. Mumble said. “Please, I cannot wait forever.”
It made no sense, but Zanna began to fit some of the pieces together. The St. Pommeroy’s she had spent her morning in had been fake. An illusion, Dr. Mumble had called it. He was from the real school—even though he seemed far more fake than her fake school had been.
“Why should I trust you?” Zanna asked. “You could be an illusion, as well.”
Dr. Mumble sighed and gestured. In a flurry of silver, Principal Thatch’s office reassembled itself around her, though this time the walls and doorway led out onto the barren field, like it was part of a movie set without lights or cameras or other actors. Principal Thatch was just as she had left him, with his mouth clamped firmly around a bite of egg salad sandwich. He wasn’t even breathing.
“Smell him,” Dr. Mumble said, with a small nod of his head toward Principal Thatch.
“What?”
“Smell him,” the dean repeated, as if it were the most normal request possible.
Zanna scowled, but the look on Dr. Mumble’s face was so serious that she leaned over the desk and gave Principal Thatch an experimental sniff. Then she tried again, this time longer.
“I don’t smell anything,” she said.
“Precisely,” Dr. Mumble said. “A real person is the combination of a thousand different scents picked up over the years. Not just what aftershave or perfume they prefer, but decisions made over the course of a lifetime. If they smoked as a teenager. If they have lost someone dear to them. If they have known hard labor. An illusion is simply light bent into a shape. It smells like nothing.”
With another gesture too quick and small for Zanna to discern, Dr. Mumble made Principal Thatch and his office disappear and tucked his hands behind his back. Zanna stared at him for a moment before she realized what he wanted her to do. “You want—”
“If you wish to know I am not an illusion, then yes,” Dr. Mumble said. “There are other ways, but all of them are far above your level of schooling. This is sufficient for now.”
The idea of being invited to smell someone she had just met sat uneasily in her stomach, but after everything she had seen today, Zanna wasn’t just going to take his word for it. She crept closer, as if Dr. Mumble was a wild animal she was sneaking up on, and took a deep sniff.
The first thing she smelled was his wool overcoat, which was a little damp and cold. Then came polished leather; a sharp, biting scent like ammonia; and books—musty, hidden books placed away on dark shelves. She sniffed again without even realizing it. He smelled of crisp soap and black earth, the kind overturned in a good garden, and something salty like beads of sweat, except it was sweeter and colder. Tears.
“Well?” he said, not even raising an eyebrow at Zanna, who had gone in for a third sniff. She jumped back a little, frightened by how close she had gotten, and smoothed out her skirt with nervous hands.
“I suppose you’re real,” she said.
“Excellent,” Dr. Mumble said in a voice without an ounce of excellence to it. He gestured to the car again. “If you are ready now.”
Zanna weighed her options and figured that the way things were going, getting into illusionary cars with strange deans was about on par for today. She bent to collect her backpack and saw that Dr. Mumble had dropped it right on top of the contract Principal Thatch had tried to make her sign. Zanna glanced back at the dean, who had turned away momentarily to look at the sky, and quickly snatched up the contract, shoving it into her backpack along with the pen she was still holding on to. For some reason, she felt that she had to be sneaky about it. If Dr. Mumble saw, he might put it in his coat pocket like that quarter he had found. And there was nothing Zanna hated more than trying to solve a puzzle when half the pieces were lost.
“Ready.” She picked up her backpack and climbed into the car. Dr. Mumble sat in the driver’s seat, but as they pulled away from the lot, she saw that he didn’t even have his hands on the wheel.
They rode in silence. Zanna poked at the car around her, not believing that it had been a couple of old soda cans not that long ago. The seat felt and looked plush and leathery, her finger sinking in an inch deep. When she poked at the door, however, her finger went right through.
“The car is an optical illusion,” Dr. Mumble explained without looking behind him. “The seat is metallurgical. Otherwise, you would fall out of this vehicle.”
She poked it again, amazed. “How’d you do that?”
“I will have to leave the particulars to your teachers,” Dr. Mumble said. “But as we have a little bit of time together, I may as well explain the basics. That way, you are not completely left behind tomorrow.”
He cleared his throat and wiped his mouth with a handkerchief, and when he spoke again, there was a faint hint of emotion to his words, somewhere far beneath his cold shell.
“Every once in a while, a child is born with a great sense of curiosity and an eagerness to learn. They quickly outgrow whatever traditional schooling methods they are surrounded with and require more specialized teaching to suit their abilities. You, Zanna Mayfield, are one of those children.”
“My abilities?” The way he had phrased it sounded like it was more than just how she could multiply large numbers in her head.
“Yes. Your abilities to manipulate the laws of the universe. What you have seen today is only the beginning. With hard work and earnest study, you may acquire nothing short of mastery over space and time.”
Her mouth dropped. It was so casual, as if Dr. Mumble had told her she could acquire nothing short of a dozen eggs and a loaf of bread at the supermarket. The man certainly didn’t look like he had just offered her phenomenal cosmic powers. He wasn’t even looking at her.
The Zanna Function Page 2