Deviant (8 page)

Letters began appearing on the screen. It was a text.

trn yr back frm t tchrs & othr kds go t fir tree nr t fence!

Danny understood. Turn your back from the other kids and the teachers. He walked to what he hoped was a fir tree near the perimeter fence.

More text:

gd. hi im tom tony sz yr cool u cn txt me bk using t keys, kp yr bk trnd frm tchrs & othr kids, kp an eye out, blue bttn is snd.

Danny knew what to do. He had texted frequently on his mobile phone, but this was a little more difficult, especially with the stupid gloves on.

this place is crzy, tom, he keyed
, and hit the blue button.

Tom smiled at him.

u don knw t hlf of it kid
, Tom texted.

They spent the entire break secretly texting each other. Danny had the feeling that Tom was texting other kids, too, perhaps letting them share in the conversation. He didn't mind. He'd been in enough schools to know that there were few secrets. He supposed it was like being on a ship; very soon, everybody knew everything about everybody else. The quicker the illusion of privacy got broken, the better.

Tony, however, did not appear to join in the conversation, because she was playing some kind of elaborate skipping game with a group of girls.

Danny told Tom he was an only child from Las Vegas and his name was really Lopez. Danny learned that Tom was also an only child, from Colorado Springs. Tom's dad was a lawyer but also a reservist in the Judge Advocate General's Office who'd recently been called up and sent to Afghanistan, which Danny thought was bad-ass.

As break was coming to an end, the kids began lining up at the edge of the playground in their classes. 9A, 9B, 8A, 8B, 7A, 7B.

When recess was finally over, a teacher gently blew a whistle and everyone went quietly back to class.

It was history after lunch, and Danny and the rest of the kids spent the time memorizing the names of sixteenth-century explorers.

At the end of the day, they picked up
Oliver Twist
where
they'd left off, and finally at three thirty sharp, Miss Benson said, “Thank you, children. Don't forget to read pages sixty through eighty for homework. We will be having our usual pop quiz tomorrow. Get home safe, be respectful to your parents, and I will see you here on Tuesday.”

Danny threw his stuff into his bag and was about to run out of the class, but of course there was a system for that, too. The children left in rows, starting from the window. Sitting in front of Miss Benson's desk, he was one of the last to leave and both Tony and Tom had gone before him.

He hugged the right-hand wall and followed the mass of pupils to the entrance. As he walked through the big wooden double exit door, he—like almost every kid there—exhaled.

There were school buses for kids who lived in Manitou Springs and Colorado Springs but not for the local students. His mom had offered to meet him, but Danny had figured out the geography of Cobalt pretty quickly. There were only half a dozen streets in the whole town, and it was a short walk home. He pulled the stupid gloves off his hands and shoved them in his pockets and then loosened his tie and top button.

Left, he thought, up the hill, and then the first right at the—

“Hi,” Tony said.

Hearing a voice after all that quiet startled him.

Nonplussed, he turned and then smiled at her. “Hi,” he
replied. “That pager thing that Tom gave me was pretty awesome—”

Tony shook her head and said in a whisper, “Let's not discuss that here. We can talk on the way.”

To avoid the big bend on Alameda they took a shortcut back across the school playground, but this was a move that apparently had been anticipated. Before they could reach the gate at the far side of the basketball court a tall boy with a long face, light brown hair, and a mouth full of big tombstone teeth grabbed Danny by the arm and began dragging him to a school building. The boy had a tan line across his face where his baseball cap had stopped, and he looked uncomfortably like one of those zebras that just stare at you in the San Diego Zoo. “This way,” the boy said.

“What do you think you're doing?” Danny cried, but the boy had gigantic fingers and a powerful grip.

Danny knew he was outgunned. He was a little small for his age, and this kid was massive. He pulled down with his wrists and tried to kick him, but it didn't do any good.

“Leave him alone, Todd!” Tony protested.

Todd ignored her.

Danny let himself be led. He had been in this precise situation before, and it held few terrors for him now.

Waiting around the back of the building were three more kids. A girl from 9A with red hair in pigtails, very pale skin, and a rodentlike cast to her face, and two snarky-looking boys from 9B (his own class). One had green eyes
and Flight of the Conchords specs and black hair combed rigidly across his forehead in an old-fashioned kind of way. Not a nice face—the face of a farter who always blames it on the kid sitting next to him. The other boy was tall with blond hair and dark brown eyes.

“So you're in trouble already,” the boy with the glasses said.

“Stop it, Hector. Leave him alone!” Tony said.

“You keep out of this!” the redheaded girl muttered.

Danny got one arm free from Todd and tried to free the other by pulling down hard.

“Hold his arms, Todd,” the second boy from 9B said, and Todd grabbed Danny's wrists in one of his big paws and pinned them behind his back.

“What are you doing, man?” Danny yelled. “Don't touch me!”

The second boy searched in Danny's pockets and came out with a couple of bucks, a pen, a set of keys, and the text-messaging pager that Tom had given him. The boy threw the money and the pen on the ground and put the pager in his pocket. He turned to Tony. “Now we can read whatever you send. So your little lame-ass group of losers better watch its step!”

“Charlie, leave him alone. Hector, tell Charlie to give him that back,” Tony attempted.

Hector looked a little embarrassed. “You can't really take his stuff, Charlie,” he said.

“I'll take whatever I want,” Charlie said.

“He'll take whatever he wants,” the girl echoed in a high-pitched, mocking voice.

“You better watch out, Rebecca!” Tony said, her face red with fury.

Tony stared at Rebecca, Danny struggled against Todd, and Todd stared into space like a character in a TV show whose lines were finished.

“What is going on here?”

A deep, furious voice.

Everyone turned. One of the teachers was looking at them. Danny opened his mouth to speak, then checked himself, remembering that he was still on school grounds.

“What is going on here?!” the teacher demanded again.

None of the other kids felt that they could speak either.

“You can talk!” the teacher said. He was an older man with a red beard and a crumpled checked suit.

“Sir, we're not allowed to talk to you; that would be triangulating,” Rebecca said.

The teacher looked furious. “You! Let him go,” he said to Todd.

Todd released Danny's arms.

“Now, you. What's your name?” the teacher asked Danny.

“Danny Lopez,” Danny said. “I'm new.”

“What's going on here, Danny?” the teacher asked.

“Nothing. We were playing,” Danny muttered.

“Yeah, we were just playing,” Rebecca said in that
annoying singsong voice that would have gotten her a slap in the face if she'd been at Grover Cleveland.

“Come on, Danny, let's go,” Tony said, and led him away from the others.

They exited through the rear gate, and when they were clear of the school and halfway up Alameda she stopped and looked at him.

“Are you OK?” she asked.

Danny kept walking and she ran to catch up. “Are you OK?” she asked again.

“I'm fine.”

“Don't worry about those guys. Hector and Charlie think they're tough, but they're not.”

“Hector and Charlie are the ones from our class?”

“Yeah. Todd's from 8B and Rebecca's from 8A. Tom's been keeping an eye on them, don't worry … we're on top of it. We think there's about a dozen of them altogether. They've got a secret club. It's so lame. We think Charlie's running it.”

“Charlie's the blond one?”

“Yeah. He thinks he's so handsome. I guess he is, in a cartoony kind of way, like Fred from
Scooby-Doo
or something.”

“They're in a secret club?”

“Yeah, can you imagine? Lame City. You can see them on the playground acting all dorky. They have their own sign language.
Sign language
… I mean, like, how sad can you get? We're miles ahead of them.”

“How many are in
your
secret group?” Danny said, with a slight mocking edge to his voice.

“Not as many as them, but we're more exclusive. There's me and Tom, and Olivia Quintera and Cooper Reid and you, and I think Carol Brennan left. She and Tom fell out or something. I don't know about her.”

“But haven't I screwed it up for you guys now? Now they've got the pager; they'll be able to read
your
texts. Your whole communication system is ruined.”

Tony laughed. “No, they won't be able to do anything. I'll call Tom tonight and he'll sync a different encryption system and when they try to read our texts tomorrow they'll just get junk. Might even be funny to watch them.”

Tony smiled and gave him a little punch on the shoulder.

She wanted Danny to laugh, but he didn't feel like laughing. This was all a bit much for him to take in—secret societies with different ways of communicating, bullies, reading programs, silence, scripts, gloves, and all this on his first day. His head was pounding and he felt humiliated. He'd been roughed up in front of two girls.

He blinked hard. Oh no. He actually felt like he was going to cry.

All he wanted to do was get away. From school, from Tony, from Colorado.

She was talking. Her lips were moving, but the drumming in his head was so loud he didn't hear what she was saying.

He rubbed his eyes, took a deep breath. This was not the time to ride the pity pony. He couldn't run away—they both
took the same route home—he had to keep it together until he got to the house. Then he could go to his room, close the door …

Tony continued with her explanation of whatever it was she was explaining. “There's only six of us, and we're all in 9B. We don't have anyone in grade eight or seven, but their club is mostly grades seven and eight. Olivia thinks—”

“Who's Olivia?”

“She was sitting behind you.”

“I didn't notice her. I was afraid to look back.”

Tony laughed, and her laugh made him feel a little better. “Oh, you can look back. Miss Benson—her name's Laura, by the way—she only pretends to follow along in the book; she's really reading a magazine behind her desk. Usually
People
.”

“So who was that big red-shirt guy?”

“Oh, don't worry about him. He's OK. His dad's a janitor at the MFC.”

“What's that?”

“Metropolitan Faith Cathedral. It's the big church around here. My parents go there too. Actually, I go there with them. Lots of people do. My dad's an elder. Don't worry about it. Don't worry about any of it.”

“What about those other kids?”

“Hector's OK, really. Don't stress about him. Not as smart as Tom. He's OK. But Charlie … He thinks he's made of awesome. He's from South Carolina or somewhere originally. Transferred here from Citadel Prep last term. By
the way, if you want to get on his nerves, ask him what his dad does.”

“What does his dad do?”

Tony grinned. “He runs the
Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman
tours of Colorado Springs. Drives people around in the bus.”

“Dr. what?”

“It was a show from the nineties. They filmed in L.A., I guess, but it takes place here, so a lot of tourists come out for it. Especially from Japan. It's kind of embarrassing, really, because there's nothing to see. You know?”

They turned right on Manitou Road. The houses thinned out there and the sidewalk became narrow. Pinecones and needles crunched under their feet.

“We used to go out. Charlie and me. Not anymore. I'm so over him,” Tony said, and continued to disprove this by talking about Charlie until Manitou Road bent to the left and the houses began again.

“Hey, what's that?” Tony asked.

There was a work crew up ahead. Tony was looking at them in fascination, and as she did so Danny examined her. Her neck had a little mole on it just beneath her chin and her eyes had a strange aquamarine tinge to the irises. She caught him looking. He coughed. “So what are you saying? There's several secret clubs or something?”

“Oh yeah, about four or five. Most of them are stupid, but the SSU is pretty serious. Tom thinks—”

“Danny! Danny, over here!”

“There's someone calling you,” Tony said.

It was Walt. He was standing next to a gang of six men in orange overalls, each of whom had a chain running between his ankles. The men were being watched by a prison guard in a cowboy hat who was holding a pump-action shotgun across his body and blowing bubblegum bubbles.

“Danny, over here!” Walt called again. Bob was with him, operating some kind of earth-pounding machine. Bob was also wearing a pair of orange overalls. He turned the machine off when he saw Danny.

“You better go over,” Tony said.

“You go home … I'll talk to you later,” Danny muttered quickly.

“No, I'd like to meet your dad,” Tony said breezily.

“No, just go home, please,” Danny insisted, but Tony was having none of it. She walked across the road, and Danny reluctantly followed.

Walt introduced himself, Bob, and the members of his work crew. The guard with the shotgun didn't seem to care that all the men had downed their tools to chat.