Meeting (5 page)

“
Shtru
,” she said, which meant
okay
. Part of her training was learning Kerlinqua.

She leaned forward to peer past Benjamin at Gwenda. Gwenda was wearing a red skirt with straw-yellow petticoats that made it stand out. It was hemmed with lace. She had on a pale yellow shirt and wore a dark green webwork jacket over it. She waved one finger at Maya and smiled, shaking her charm bracelet.

“All right, people, settle down. Answer when I call your name,” said Mr. Ferrell from up front.

Maya got out her sketchbook and a couple of soft lead pencils. Mr. Ferrell called her name, Andersen, almost first, so she could focus on drawing while he went down the rest of the list. She sketched the row of chairs in front of her, adding the people sitting in them after she’d gotten good outlines of the furniture.

She was concentrating on getting just the right shine in Helen’s red-blonde hair when Benjamin hissed at her. She glanced at him, and he nodded toward her sketch pad, where another of her pencils was moving across her drawing, flowing in faint shadows below the chairs in the picture.

Maya cocked her
head and watched Rimi add to her drawing. Would Maya have drawn those same shadows? She wasn’t sure. Teamwork shifted the focus of the picture. Maybe that made it better. Rimi was skilled, with a wonderful flow of line and evenness of pressure that made her shadows look sculpted. Maya hadn’t seen Rimi draw before.

Maya wanted Rimi to draw a picture from scratch. Rimi had a lot of strange senses Maya didn’t even have names for. Maya could borrow Rimi’s sight (how
did
Rimi see?) and taste (yuck!) and sometimes even smell (the world was full of things that smelled awful when you got close to them!). They hadn’t shared other senses yet. Obviously Rimi saw shadows, but what about the rest of it?

Benjamin hissed again, and Maya grabbed Rimi’s pencil, then looked up. A girl a couple of rows in front of them had turned and was staring back at her. It was Sibyl Katsaros, a slender dark-haired girl with glasses that magnified her gray-green eyes. She was wearing a green dress, when most of the girls in the room wore jeans, and she had a golden scarf wrapped around her neck.

Maya smiled and shrugged. She hadn’t spoken with Sibyl in school yet. Gwenda had warned Maya when Maya first sat with the Janus House kids that being with them would kill her chance at a normal social life, but Maya figured the benefits outweighed the risks.

Sibyl lowered her eyebrows and the corners of her mouth into a ferocious frown and faced forward again.

“So is she the enemy now?” Maya whispered to Benjamin.

“She moved here around the same time you did,” Benjamin whispered back. “Rowan thinks there’s something strange about her. But also, you’re not supposed to act up in public.”

“It wasn’t me,” Maya said.

Benjamin lifted one eyebrow. Maya hated that. She couldn’t do it, and she really wanted to. “It might not be you,” he whispered, “but it’s your responsibility.”

“You’re such a jerk sometimes,” Maya said.

Benjamin flinched.

“Well, so am I,” Maya said. “Like right now. Don’t go all Rowan on me.”

“Sorry,” Benjamin whispered. He looked away. Then he turned back. “She’s been watching us since she moved here. I feel like we need to be careful around her. You don’t know our history yet. We’ve had break-ins before.”

“Break-ins?” Maya repeated.

“People who break into our lives, find out stuff they shouldn’t, and want to do something bad with that knowledge. All through our history, which stretches back pretty far, we’ve had break-ins. Once in a while it works out. Sometimes security takes action that’s too drastic, and we have to leave and start over somewhere else. We do it if we have to, but we’d much rather not. It’s a lot of work! Trust me when I tell you, everything works better when we keep our secrets secret.”

“Okay, I get it,” Maya muttered.
Rimi?

She felt a sort of stretch through her connection to Rimi, as though her shadow were taffy being dragged out between two fists.
I want to play.

I understand,
Maya thought.
We’ll go to the woods after school. No, we have to go for training. Well, you can play at Janus House.

Rimi did a mental shimmy, her equivalent of a shrug with prejudice.
They’re scared of me there
.

Really?
Maya hadn’t noticed anybody at Janus House running in fear. Usually she felt so overwhelmed with that jangling feeling of my-whole-world-is-upside-down in the presence of people who used magic on a regular basis that she never noticed if they were scared of her.
I wonder what we can do to—

Tall, blond, long-haired Travis Finnegan edged into class and made his way to his usual seat to her right. He wasn’t being loud about it, but it was hard to ignore the biggest kid in the class, and the only one on his feet. “Third tardy this week,” Mr. Ferrell said, marking his attendance sheet. “That’s detention, Travis.”

Travis groaned. “I can’t do detention,” he muttered. “What about my training?” Travis was training at Janus House, too, only he was training as a human helper. He didn’t go to singing class or principles of magic.

“Why were you late?” Maya whispered.

“Oma needed extra help in the bathroom this morning after Dad left. That keeps happening. The day care woman, Ms. Ringo, she gets there just before I leave, and Oma needs help sooner than that.”

Maya touched his hand. His grandmother had been hurt in the car crash that killed his grandfather a little more than a year ago, and since that time, Travis and his father had lived with Travis’s grandmother. Travis was an important part of his grandmother’s care team. Some things were more important than school. Which was why Travis had flunked seventh grade last year.

Travis smiled tiredly, got his social studies textbook out of his pack, and opened it to a historic map of the United States. “Harrison’s going to give us another quiz disguised as a game today, isn’t he?” Travis said.

“That’s the rumor,” said Maya.

I could find out,
Rimi thought.

How
? asked Maya.

I could stretch.
Rimi flexed, which Maya felt more than saw, and then a faint, faint shadow raced across the floor, one end still anchored under Maya’s feet, the other zipping up the aisle between desks and under the door, with no one else noticing.

Maya felt Rimi’s stretch the same way she sometimes tasted what Rimi tasted; she sensed the scuffed surface of the hallway linoleum as Rimi stretched and stretched, an almost invisible finger of self, to dive under the door in the social studies classroom where Mr. Harrison was talking to his homeroom class. Rimi felt the vibration of voices in the air above, but didn’t shape herself into the kind of surface that could decode the sounds; hearing was a sense she employed often, but not always. The shadow arrowed across the floor and climbed up the teacher’s desk’s leg, then slid across the top of the desk to the stack of papers under Mr. Harrison’s hand.

Mr. Harrison was focused on his attendance sheet, vibrating the air with his voice. Maya wasn’t sure how she knew what he was doing or where he was focused; they weren’t looking with eyes as Maya understood them.

Rimi’s edge of self spread across the surfaces of the papers under Mr. Harrison’s hands and the attendance sheet. Maya felt the flicker of something printing against Rimi’s surface, then another flicker of confused impressions as Rimi shifted to another page, then another. Rimi’s shadow self could slip from page to page without lifting a corner.

Moments later the shadow withdrew as swiftly and silently as it had gone out, snapping back to its central core under Maya’s feet.

“What did we learn?” Maya muttered.

Wait
, Rimi thought. A growling in Maya’s stomach echoed some inner processing Rimi was doing, and then Maya was seeing what the pages looked like, including the quiz Mr. Harrison had written for today’s class, along with his lecture notes, a couple of visuals he was going to use with the day’s lectures, and a letter to his girlfriend in Hawaii.

“Oh, no,” she
said. “No, Rimi.”

“What’s she doing now?” Benjamin asked.

Maya swallowed and closed her eyes. She could still see the pages on the insides of her eyelids. “Make them go away,” she said, but she couldn’t help skimming.

Rimi whisked the images away. Maya rubbed her eyes. The usual explosion of purple stars splashed the darkness inside her eyelids, and she let out a breath she hadn’t known she was holding.

We can know
, Rimi thought.

But we shouldn’t
, Maya thought.

Benjamin poked her. “What?” he asked.

Maya opened her eyes and glanced at him. She was supposed to tell him, or one of the Janus House kids, everything that happened between her and Rimi. Gwenda and Benjamin were the ones she trusted most, but she knew they answered to a lot of other people in the house, some of whom she didn’t trust.

Rimi was a
sissimi
, a species alien to Earth. Janus House people ran into species alien to Earth every day in the course of running their portal. Still, they hadn’t had much experience with
sissimi
.

Sissimi
could bond with any known species, and their bonds were different with every match.

Maya and Rimi were closer to each other than family—Rimi called their bond Second Family, First Family being Maya’s parents and siblings (because they were Maya’s family first), and Third Family being the Janus House folk who had adopted Maya and Rimi after Rimi hatched.

Rimi and Maya were part of each other, and Maya figured they might need to keep some of their own secrets.

On the other hand, dangerous secrets needed to be shared. Janus House people could help with things no one in Maya’s own family would understand. She could get into trouble she couldn’t even anticipate....

Benjamin nudged her again. “Maya? Are you all right?”

“Yeah,” she said, and then the bell rang and they rose to go to their next class. “Tell you later.”

Outside the classroom, Maya and Travis headed one direction, and Benjamin and Gwenda another.

Travis walked down the corridor in a fog, and kids moved out of his way. Maya had never seen him hurt anyone, but people seemed to respect or fear him. He was a good buddy to have in a crowded hallway.

They crossed the yard between buildings and made it to Ms. Caras’s language arts just before second bell. It was one of the classes Travis and Maya had without any Janus House kids in it, and they sat toward the front in this one, though still next to each other.

It was Maya’s first year at Hoover, and she was still finding her way. She looked around at the other students. They’d all done essays about their summers during the first week of Ms. Caras’s class, so she knew a little about them. Helen, the one who used her cell phone as a watch, sat to Maya’s left. Maya thought she might make a good friend. Even though Maya now had Rimi, Travis, Benjamin, Gwenda, and a host of other people living in Janus House as friends, she could use someone normal.

Helen returned her glance and half a smile.

“Do you know what you’re going to be for Halloween?” Maya whispered to her.

Helen frowned. “My mom says I’m too old.”

“Harsh.”

During the pumpkin carving the day before, Mom and Dad had asked Candra if she was going to trick-or-treat this year, and Candra had said, “Nobody I know at school is doing it. They say if you’re old enough to drive, you’re too old to trick-or-treat. I wish I could go, though.”

“You could escort Maya and Peter,” Mom said.

“Oh,
Mom
,” Peter moaned.

“Think of it as doing your big sister a favor,” Mom told Peter. “She wants to go, and you’re giving her a good reason.”

“I think I should stay home and hand out the candy this year,” Candra had said. She stabbed the knife into her pumpkin’s mouth-line.

“Tell us how you really feel,” said Dad, half teasing.

They had finished carving with Candra still not sure what she was going to do on Halloween.

Maya was going trick-or-treating no matter what Candra did. She wasn’t sure what costume to wear yet, though. It had been a very confusing year; she didn’t know what secret self she wanted to manifest this year.

What am I going as?
Rimi asked.

Maya sat back, startled. She hadn’t even thought about Rimi and Halloween.
Maybe I should go as you
, she thought.

“What are you going as?” Helen whispered to Maya.

“I’m kind of vague on the details, but I just got an idea. If you
could
go, what would you be?”

“Last year I was a robot,” muttered Helen. “I loved making that costume! And I could make a much better one this year.”

Ms. Caras rapped on her desk with a yardstick. Today she was wearing her green cat’s-eye glasses and a green dress with white dots, and she had her dark curls tied up but not completely subdued at the back of her neck.

“Okay, kids,” she said. “This week we’re going to write ghost stories! I want you to think about and practice generating suspense, so we’ll start with a few exercises about that today, and I’ll give you a list of vocabulary words to include in your story. Keep in mind that you’re going to put together a ghost story by the end of this week. The first thing you need to figure out is who’s dead and why they would come back to haunt someone, and the second thing is who’s going to run into your ghost and why?”

Ghosts
, thought Maya. Gwenda had talked about the wall between the worlds being thin on Halloween.

Ghosts
, Rimi said.
I want to know more about ghosts.