Afterthought: A Sententia Short Story (The Sententia) (5 page)

We finally left for home that almost-night knowing that, whatever had or might happen, we had each other and we had tomorrow. Because of us, David had tomorrow too.

With the windows down and the radio off, we spent the rest of the drive connected in the quiet by our fingers, hearts, and with luck, our future.

That was not
a usual day.

The road felt heavy under my feet and I pushed to the six mile mark. It was a beautiful morning, crisp and clear—perfect running weather. I hated to waste it. I forced myself into an extra mile around campus and ran faster, trying to shake off what was holding me back.

There weren’t many things I couldn’t outrun, but anticipation was one of them.

I made a long loop, back around the track and the athletic center, before finishing with a sprint down the hill to the gates. My lungs burned as I sucked air in and out, doubled over with hands on my knees. As soon as I stopped moving, the t-shirt clinging to my back began to cool. My watch told me my time was good. Better than it felt. That was the key to running—to keep running when it wasn’t easy.

Campus was always empty this early in the morning, and I liked that. It was why I’d taught myself to get up before the sun. When else could I be alone out here? The Academy had been my front yard for my entire life. When the students were sleeping, it felt like home. Mine. I knew every pebble of every trail by feel and by heart.

If I turned around, at the crest of the hill I’d just run down, I would see the Administration house in the gap between the Common Hall and the Arts building. I knew that in the early morning light the siding would look gray instead of light purple. In the second floor office suite, the headmaster would be drinking tea from a hundred year old china cup with a rose pattern and chipped gilt and watching me out the window.

Dr. Stewart—
Constance
, I reminded myself. She wasn’t my headmaster anymore and she wasn’t, technically, my superior. Her visit to the store the day before had been so casual, I knew it was anything but. For one thing, she never visited the store. She was also never casual.

Cartwright, there’s a new student starting tomorrow.

That sentence was so much more than seven words. It was change. I sensed it. Whoever this student was, he was important. Not just important, but
important
. Somehow.

I didn’t much like change. I thought I’d had enough of it.

But change didn’t care what I thought.

A set of push-ups barely distracted me either. I hated them, but they were quick and effective. I tried to concentrate on form, on the exact placement of my hands beneath my shoulders, the alignment of my spine and my hips, to count the seconds between down and up. That helped a little. Today, the push-ups felt better than the run, though the shower felt best of all.

Without looking, I grabbed the top thing from the left-hand side of each drawer in my dresser and slipped them on before I went to rehang my towel across the hall. My aunt still folded and put away my clothes without my asking, for which I was grateful. I didn’t want to have to ask her because I didn’t want to have to explain. She probably knew anyway which was why she did it.

It wasn’t that I was too lazy to fold them myself. I wasn’t too lazy to do anything, and I did countless things I didn’t enjoy on a daily basis, by choice. Like push-ups, and drinking black coffee. The first was for convenience, the second for simplicity. And because I didn’t like milk. My aunt said what I
liked
was torturing myself.

But the clothes, that was different. It was the order. If I had to fold the clothes or even look at them in the dresser, I could tell you immediately if they were in the same order as the last laundry day, and the one before that, and probably every laundry day since I was fourteen and half years old.

It drove me crazy.

I didn’t want to care, but I couldn’t not see it. On my worst days, I thought it would be an even bigger gift to
give up
my Sententia abilities. What would I really be losing? One was a secret away from getting me killed and the other was slowly driving me insane. People always seemed to think the “photographic memory” was just the greatest. How easy it must make my life. Those people drove me fucking crazy too.

But if I was being honest, probably I’d be worse without it, even though with the infinite memory came the borderline OCD. More than borderline. If I was being honest. It was why I wore basically the same thing all the time—so I wouldn’t have to think about it or look at what I pulled out of the drawers. It was why I hated a mess and why every stack of books in my room, whatever was in it, was arranged in order by the last four digits of each ISBN. To everyone else, it looked random, which was the goal.

Change meant some kind of mess was coming.

And that was why I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

In the kitchen, I made breakfast while I continued to obsess. Uncle Jeff was gone, so I couldn’t talk while he listened, and Aunt Mel was already downstairs. She’d left a muffin for me though, so I ate that while I fixed eggs and toast, poured some juice. I sometimes wondered if my mother would have left muffins, or made my breakfast. My aunt probably would have told me, though I’d never ask her a question like that. When I’d gotten old enough, my dad and I had made breakfast together, but even back then Aunt Mel had always brought us muffins.

My mother, and what she would or would not have been like, was an old concern, its edges dulled by the accumulated years of my pulling it out and tucking it away, forever unsolved. It was far less shiny than the problem of the new student. What I couldn’t work out was
why
the secrecy. Why Constance Stewart’s presence and the hint dropping that she knew would do this to me, and that I had way too much pride to ask for more details about.

No one showed up at Northbrook or Webber by accident. Or by surprise. It was part of my job to make sure that didn’t happen. Sententia family trees grew in my memory and I tended and watered them with care. Aunt Mel was better at seeing the connections, but I knew all the names and dates. If I thought long enough, I could match all the relations. And that was the thing—there were no missing relations. Everyone I expected at Northbrook was already here.

But there would have been no reason for my involvement, or Dr. Stewart’s keen interest, unless the student was Sententia. Except if we didn’t know about him, he didn’t know about himself. So who was he?

To figure it out, I had to find him.

“
Or her
,”
Aunt Mel reminded me. “I don’t know why you’re so convinced it’s a him.”

Probably because I’d sworn off girls for the past year and I didn’t like to think about them. My aunt interrupted my thinking about them by asking, “What came in yesterday’s shipment?” while she turned another page in the newspaper she was skimming.

“Just books.”

She made a noncommittal sound and turned another page. I sipped coffee while I scanned a paper of my own. Owning a bookstore was good cover for all the national and international news we consumed like sustenance. Reading them in print like we did was borderline archaic, but it seemed natural in the old-fashioned atmosphere of Penrose Books. Plus both our gifts worked better with a page than a screen. Students didn’t really notice what we were doing—or some of them
knew
—and our regular customers thought our voracity for the printed page was charming.

I knew what my aunt’s question, and her ambivalent response, had meant. We weren’t expecting anything but books, but there wasn’t a schedule of Perceptum deliveries either. We hadn’t had one in a while, so it felt like time. The Historian job was a slow adventure. Rarely did we have a project with urgency, but the hunt was constant and unpredictable. I was born to do it. Also, I loved it.

Not all of us did. My father tolerated it and my aunt fell somewhere in between. It always amused me that Uncle Jeff had been the one to join the military when my aunt was the secret weapon they were missing. She was a natural code breaker. But she was also a Penrose. So she used her gift to uncover secrets of a different kind, searching for patterns in newspapers and beating in record time any game based on a Latin Square contained in their pages.

We weren’t the only Historians, but we were the first and oldest. The family blood came with pressure. Aunt Melinda and I were the only ones left. Realistically,
I
was the last. I knew it, and felt it, and was determined to live up to it.

I should have wanted to leave by now, go to college, get away. Everyone else did, at least as far as Brattleboro or Keene. Not that either was far, but they were different. Bigger. And I did want to go to college, somewhere good that would make Aunt Mel and Uncle Jeff, and Uncle Dan, proud. That would have made my dad proud. There were so many things I wanted to study—physics, history, political science—and no reason I had to choose.

Because my life was here. I was already living it. The only thing I’d ever wanted to do I was doing. I was good at it. What was wrong with knowing what you wanted at eighteen?

Nothing. Except my morning routine had done nothing to ease the feeling that something was about to go wrong.

And my biggest mystery yet was waiting somewhere on campus.

My biggest temptation
, and the biggest pain in my ass, was standing in front of me.

“Hey, Carter.”

“Hey, Alex.”

Alexis Morrow. God, she looked good, leaning over the counter in a thin, low cut sweater the color of pearls. A sip of water in the desert. It took more willpower than I had to focus on her eyes, so I avoided looking at her all together. The year of no dating, no
anything
but running and work, was wearing on me. Alexis, too, was wearing me down. She was gorgeous, abundantly willing, and it wasn’t that I didn’t like her. I just didn’t like her enough. I didn’t feel it, and anyway, I’d promised myself I wouldn’t. Also, she was sometimes too much a bitch.

But not right at that moment. Right then, without her friends around or anyone even paying attention to us, she was just Alex. Field hockey practice must have been canceled for the afternoon; it was the quietest time at the store, and not Alex’s usual. Maybe
this
was the thing that was about to go wrong, because for a fleeting moment, the idea of hooking up with her wasn’t feeling quite as wrong as I knew it was.

She idly ran a finger over some of the old marks in our ancient counter top. It had been in this exact spot since the store opened and, like a lot of things, was scarred by time. “Think you can help me find a book?”