by Kerstin Gier
“With you in a minute.” I put the phone to my ear. Mia. I could hardly make out her voice.
“Didn’t you get my text?”
“Giy aaat? Yes, but what’s it supposed to mean?”
“Get out!” snapped Mia. “It says get out! I was typing blind. They know. So get out!”
However, it was too late for that. Florence was already on her feet, standing in front of me with her arms folded. “Is it true?” she asked.
“Er.” Slowly, I lowered the phone. Where was I supposed to get out to, and why?
“Liv.” Henry was the only one whose face looked friendly. And sympathetic.
“This is what Secrecy posted seven minutes ago.” Emily had brought out her smartphone and was reading from it. “PS—I’ve just found out who have Mr. Snuggles on their consciences. Liv and Mia Silver. Obviously it was a childish act of revenge on Grayson and Florence’s grandmother because they don’t like her. So a cultural feature of our part of town that took decades to grow has been the victim of their silly prank.”
Secrecy. She couldn’t know—it was impossible! I felt weak at the knees.
“Is it true?” Florence repeated quietly, but all the same, everyone in the room seemed to hear her.
And they were all staring at me, every last one of them. “Because if so, I’m never going to sit at the same table as you, ever again.” With a last, infinitely scornful look, she ran past me and out of the cafeteria. Emily and Callum followed close on her heels.
Grayson also got to his feet. The expression on his face hurt me almost physically. He looked so incredibly disappointed.
“Grayson…,” I began, without knowing exactly what I was going to say. The one thing I really wanted was for none of this to be really happening. Why couldn’t it simply be a dream?
“I must go—I have to set up my experiment before chemistry,” said Grayson, avoiding my eyes. “See you later. Then maybe you can explain what you two thought you were doing.”
Henry drew me down on the chair beside his and held my hand very tightly. “It’s not so bad, honestly,” he assured me. “Have some salad?”
11
AT LEAST THERE was one good thing about this whole ghastly business: I found that I could now turn myself into a perfect jaguar without a hitch. I looked so deceptively real that even Senator Tod showed proper respect when we unexpectedly met and faced each other.
In human form, I’d certainly have screeched with fright to see him suddenly coming around the corner like that. And then I’d probably have run away, like last time. But my jaguar self instinctively crouched, the hairs rose on the back of my jaguar neck, and I bared my sharp canine teeth.
That seemed to impress Senator Tod. He slowly took two steps backward, murmuring, “Take it easy, nice kitty, take it easy.”
Aha! So he could speak in a perfectly normal way if he wanted to. At close quarters, he didn’t look nearly as menacing as from a distance—the face beneath that slouch hat seemed to be perfectly human. It wasn’t a skull or a zombie face crawling with maggots, as I’d secretly feared, just an ordinary man’s face, the kind that you might see on any street: rather round, a strong nose, lower lip slightly fuller than his upper lip, and pale-blue eyes, although there was a glint in them that I couldn’t quite place, and it scared me. Apart from that glint, however, he had seemed quite harmless.
A deep growl emerged from my throat. No way was I a nice kitty! This was my corridor, and I was feeling like a really nasty kitty today. I’d not had a particularly good week.
“Okay,” he said, taking another step back. “Then I’ll come back another time.” Only when there was plenty of space between us did he turn and disappear around the next corner.
I hissed after him. Then I strolled back to Henry’s door, sat on the doorstep, and devoted all my attention to licking my paw. My own door was right opposite, but I didn’t feel in the least like going back there, never mind how tired I might be.
I was being tormented by dreadful nightmares every night—nightmares in which Mr. Snuggles was alive and sobbing bitterly, or I myself put out roots and mutated into a bush, whereupon Mrs. Spencer, Florence, and Grayson all worked me over with a pair of scissors. Out here in the corridor, it was so much more peaceful than in my own dreams. And I had any amount of time to practice shape-changing.
With an elegant movement, I coiled the jaguar tail around my feet. Guilty feelings, shame, and rage were obviously just the thing to help with concentration, or my concentration, at least. The jaguar was one of my easiest tricks now, like the barn owl, and today I’d even managed to turn into a breath of air. Before that, I’d hovered invisibly along the corridors for some time, feeling pleased with myself. Past Mom’s door (MATTHEWS’S MOONSHINE ANTIQUARIAN BOOKS—OPEN FROM MIDNIGHT TO DAWN) and Mia’s door, which I recognized because at the moment it was guarded by a waist-high version of Fuzzy-Wuzzy. Fuzzy-Wuzzy was Mia’s ancient cuddly toy, a floppy-eared rabbit that she had loved to bits when she was a little girl. He looked that way, too, with his nibbled ears, only one eye (the other had been left behind in Hyderabad, India), and wearing faded dungarees that had once been yellow. Unfortunately he wasn’t at all cute blown up to his present size, but rather scary. The giant Fuzzy-Wuzzy was sitting outside a wooden door painted violet blue and, oddly, was holding a fox’s tail in one paw, maybe to frighten visitors off. I looked at him hard, wondering at the same time how come I could see all this when I was just a breath of air, and of course a breath of air doesn’t have eyes. I should have left that out (the wondering, I mean), because, oops, suddenly my sense of gravity was back and I dropped to the floor with a bump. Never mind, I knew now that I could do it, and I felt proud of that. When Henry came along, I’d show him right away.
Where was he this time? Hopefully no one was keeping him from sleeping again. In his family, his was always the first name to be shouted when they had a problem. And unfortunately they always seemed to have a problem just when Henry and I were embarking on a serious conversation. I stretched and began sharpening my claws on his doorpost. When Spot did that, someone always jumped up to let him out.
Henry had been a great comfort to me this week. To be honest, he was my only comfort. All the others were treating Mia and me like a couple of lepers, me even more than Mia because according to Mom and Lottie I was “the elder and more sensible sister and ought never to have allowed it.” Mia said she’d have done it, anyway, even without me, and I was inclined to believe her. All the same, of course Mom and Lottie were right.
At school, all the fuss about the topiary peacock had died down a bit by now, but Mia and I were still getting nasty looks or remarks from total strangers usually keen to tell a moving story about how they’d known Mr. Snuggles all their lives. Fortunately Secrecy had changed the subject in her blog by now, and Henry assured me that grass would soon grow over the whole thing again.
For the others, maybe, but not for Florence.
She was refusing to sit at the same table as me, just as she’d said she would, and had ostentatiously picked a place at the other end of the cafeteria. Of course Emily had moved with her, and I couldn’t say that really bothered me—on the contrary, it was good to have her leaving me in peace for once. The only trouble was that it meant Grayson didn’t sit with us either.
In view of the new developments, Persephone wasn’t sure whether going around with me would be bad for her own popularity, so at first Henry and I had our table all to ourselves at lunchtime, but on Wednesday we were joined by a couple of boys from Henry’s basketball team.
And Arthur.
“Who’d have thought it—our Liv a professional killer? A paid-up member of the front-garden Mafia,” he said, giving me a broad smile. “If you ask me, the general importance of clipped box is overestimated in this country. Why don’t we sit down?” (That was a rhetorical question, since he was already sitting down.) “We’re having a spot of trouble with a magnolia at home. Someone ought to teach it a lesson.”
Although I didn’t for a moment forget that he was the enemy general, the cunning, unscrupulous Arthur, I was kind of grateful for this gesture. Even Henry, who had no problem about sitting alone with an outcast like me, seemed glad of the company. I was sure he hadn’t forgotten all the lies his former best friend had told, not to mention that nasty business in the mausoleum, but when he grinned at Arthur now, I knew he felt, like me, that this was nice of Arthur. We couldn’t be friends again, but at least we’d settled on a kind of truce.
The other two boys, Gabriel and Eric, couldn’t have cared less what I’d done. They didn’t know Mr. Snuggles, they weren’t interested in plants, and they thought Secrecy’s blog was silly, girly stuff, so they never read it. I liked them both. On principle, Persephone adored all boys on the basketball team, so she joined our table again. (And for half an hour, she entirely forgot Jasper, far away in France.) To be honest, lunch was more fun now than it used to be with Florence and Emily.
It was only Grayson I missed. Not just at lunchtime. I missed our little conversations beside the coffee machine in the morning, or when we were arguing over who got the bathroom first in the evening. He was avoiding me and said only the bare essentials, if that, when we met. Instead he looked at me sadly, as if he couldn’t put his feelings into words.
It was worst at home—where of course Florence also avoided sitting at the same table as Mia and me. She left the room without a word as soon as one of us came in. Mom, Ernest, and Lottie sighed when that happened, but they were full of understanding for Florence’s feelings, whereas they didn’t show any sympathy at all for the reasons behind our butchery in the Boker’s front garden.
We’d tried hard to justify ourselves by listing all the horrible things the Boker had done, the unforgivable remarks she’d made, and, yes, they agreed that now and then she hadn’t behaved too well, but they always ended up asking why poor innocent Mr. Snuggles had to pay for it. The crazy thing was that by now I myself didn’t understand how we could have done it.
Mia did not feel the same. She still thought the whole thing would have been really cool if we hadn’t been caught. And that brought us to the heart of the matter: Where the hell did Secrecy get her information? Mia and I hadn’t even had time to tell anyone—and there it was in her blog already.
No one but Henry had known. But we’d had that conversation in my dream, where no one else could have been eavesdropping. Or could they? Maybe someone had slipped through the doorway with Henry disguised as a breath of air? Or an amoeba?
Of course it had occurred to me that Henry himself might have been the security leak, but I had suppressed the thought quickly—if I couldn’t trust even Henry, then who could I trust? No, he wouldn’t do a thing like that to me. At the very most, he might have passed on the information without knowing it would reach Secrecy. When I tackled him about it, for once he hadn’t been amused but rather annoyed. And then he’d sworn that he had not told anyone about it, even by mistake.
I believed him.
Lost in thought, I scratched my ear with my hind leg. Of course I believed him, I loved him! Without Henry, the last week would have been unbearable. Mom’s deeply disappointed glances (“I thought you two realized how important this relationship is to me”), Lottie’s horror (“This isn’t like you girls at all—you normally wouldn’t hurt a fly!”), Grayson’s bafflement (“I just don’t understand why you did it!”), Florence’s contempt (no words for it), and Ernest’s efforts to blame it all on adolescence (“You’re still children. Only the other day I read that when the brain is developing during puberty, short circuits are preprogrammed”)—well, all that hit me much harder than I liked. If I could have turned time back by sacrificing a part of my body, I’d have done it like a shot.
When I told Mia so, she looked at me, shocked. “Are you serious? You’d give a toe for it never to have happened?”
I nodded. “Or a kidney. Or an ear.”
“You’re crazy,” said Mia. “We wanted to pay the Boker back, and we did. If it hadn’t been for stupid Secrecy, we’d feel like heroes now—and the hell with that silly bird. I’m going to crack down on Secrecy. Sooner or later she’ll give herself away, and then I’ll nab her.”
So far, unfortunately, that didn’t look likely—at least, Secrecy didn’t live in Elms Walk, as I had been assuming. In fact, not a single student from Frognal Academy lived in Mrs. Spencer’s neighborhood. We’d checked all the addresses.
As if all that wasn’t punishment enough, Mom insisted that we must apologize to Mrs. Spencer and offer her financial compensation.
It was not a nice moment when we stood in front of her murmuring, “We’re very sorry,” with Mom’s stern eye on us. I was only glad that Florence and Grayson weren’t there—I’d probably have died of shame. The Boker refused to accept our apology, but she didn’t turn down the financial compensation. Of course, she said, the value of Mr. Snuggles had been incalculably high, and sad to say our savings wouldn’t bring him back, but she thought it essential to take our money. That way we’d learn that our malicious actions had consequences. In fact, the loss hit us hard: for the first time we’d saved up nearly enough for a really good smartphone—and now of course we could forget about that.
And as for the educational effects, they were limited to extending our English vocabulary with a few new terms like insubordination and collateral damage (both out of the Boker’s lecture on the depravity of young people today).
“If there’s one thing I’m proud of, it’s my tendency to insubordination,” announced Mia as we set off for home. As for me, I felt like a living case of collateral damage.
But don’t they say that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger? Or as Mr. Wu used to put it, “When water has been poured away, you can’t bring it back.” In other words, what happened had happened, and life went on.
You just had to think of the positive aspects: not only had I expanded my vocabulary, I was really good at shape-changing now. With the Boker’s face in my mind’s eye, I could easily concentrate on turning from a jaguar into a small barn owl. And from a barn owl into Spot, the Spencers’ fat cat. A moment of concentration, and I looked like Buttercup. Now I was a beckoning Japanese cat. A bottle of fizzy drink. A dragonfly with shimmering wings. Back to the jaguar again. A breath of air. Myself in a Catwoman costume. Great!
“Not bad!” said Henry’s voice behind me, and I spun around. He had come out of his door unnoticed during my little performance, or at least so I supposed. “You’re really getting good!”
“I know!” I said cheerfully, snapping my fingers and changing the Catwoman costume for jeans and a T-shirt. “Senator Tod ran away from me just now. What shall we do next? I fancy a bit of roller-skating.” Another snap of my fingers, and Henry and I had Rollerblades on our feet. I turned a high-spirited pirouette.
“You’re in a good mood.” When Henry laughed, little lines formed around his eyes. “No acute attacks of guilt and self-hatred?”
“Nope. I’ve taken Mr. Wu’s advice: never mind how hard the times are, he always says, carry a green branch in your heart and a songbird will settle on it.”
“Wow—where on earth does Mr. Wu get all these hoary old sayings from?” Henry reached for my hand, and we skated down the corridor together. That was one of the things I liked about him—he was always ready to fall in with my feelings, and he asked no questions. “So Senator Tod came back, did he?”
“Yes, from over there,” I said, pointing to the place beyond Mom’s door where a corridor branched off sideways.
“Was he talking in riddles again?” Henry whirled me around in a curve. I laughed. This was really fun.
“Not really. He called me a nice kitty and said he’d be back in a…” I fell silent, because at that very moment, there was a loud bang, and a man in a tropical helmet and a safari outfit came around the corner, with a gun under each arm and three huge knives in his belt. I had to look twice, but yes, it was Senator Tod in another disguise. We came to
a halt right in front of him, and he threw back his head and laughed his crazy laughter.
“Shall we change shape?” I whispered to Henry, who was staring, fascinated, at Senator Tod. “I can’t see him shooting a dragonfly successfully. Or a fruit fly.”
But Senator Tod didn’t seem to be about to use his guns. “I set out to hunt leopards, and now I have a couple of teenagers on skates in my sights,” he said.
Jaguars, for heaven’s sake! Why did people always get them mixed up?
“I know you two,” Senator Tod went on. “You ran away from me not so long ago—and I know your names. Henry Grant and Liv Silver.”
My cheerful mood was gone. I didn’t quite like a man whose name meant “death” knowing my name.
“Almost right,” said Henry, raising his eyebrows arrogantly. It was all very well for him to talk; after all, the Senator had given him the wrong surname. Jasper’s surname, to be precise. “And you are…?”
“Him again,” said someone behind us. It was Arthur—I hadn’t noticed that we were skating past his showy metal door with the words CARPE NOCTEM engraved on it. Although it didn’t look quite so showy now. It had definitely shrunk.
“Arthur Hamilton,” stated the big game hunter. “The boy who looks like an angel but has a heart of stone.”
“So you two have met before?” I was feeling a bit better when Arthur came and stood beside us, because the Senator knew his name too.
“Yes, this character’s been wandering around acting strangely for some time.” Arthur pushed a lock of fair hair back from his forehead. “Although he hasn’t introduced himself to me yet.”
“Then let me do it—this is Senator Tod,” I said, and Henry added, “Tod Nord, as in North.”
“North as in south?” asked Arthur.
Senator Tod nodded.
“And is that your only name?” asked Henry, although the obvious question, of course, would have been How do you know our names? Or What do you want from us?