Shadows (9 page)

I knew Runyon had an important physwiz department. But it was its own little territory and anybody who didn’t have to go there didn’t. When I had the campus tour last year our guide reluctantly waved a hand at a path through some trees and said vaguely, oh, physwiz is down there, and then flipped back into guide mode and started talking about advisers and food. I guess I knew, but it was the sort of thing you didn’t want to know, that Runyon’s physwiz department was a big deal, really more of a brain bureau with students.

The cutest boy in the known universe is a loophead. Well, that might help to explain why he seemed to like me.

“Oh, wow,” said Jill, not willing to let my unexpected conquest go without a struggle. “Um. Are there, you know, jobs in physwiz—the physics of the worlds?”

Other than being disappeared by a brain bureau, I added silently.

“I want to study history,” Jill went on, “but my mom keeps telling me I need to get a degree in something that’ll let me pay back my student loan.”

“I hope there are jobs,” said Casimir, “because it is what I want to study. But there is a trust, the Nowak Trust, to bring students here, and to send some of your students to Oldworld, to study the physics of the worlds. I was offered a much better scholarship to come here than if I stayed home. And if there are no jobs, well”—and he made a short, graceful gesture that wasn’t from around here either, but it meant that (momentarily) his shoulder pressed against mine—“this is a nice place to work. And the coffee is good.”

Everybody but Jason laughed, and then Casimir’s break was over and he left. I tried not to be too obvious about watching those shoulders and that butt walking away, but when I surreptitiously glanced around the table almost everyone else was watching too. Then our pizzas arrived, fortunately for me, because everybody got busy eating and forgot to give me a hard time.

When it was time to go—school-night curfews for another whole year, joy—Lindsay and Keisha were getting a ride home with someone else, so it was just Jill and me. We were all leaving when Jill suddenly said, “Oh, where is my—um?” and went back. She made a big show of looking around her chair and under the table, and then she glanced at the door, but Laura, Ryan, and Ashley were waiting for us. “No, you go on,” she said, and flapped her hands at them. “I’m sure I’ll find it in a minute.”

Laura looked at me and grinned. “I’m sure you will,” she said, and all three of them left. Jill was sitting down and digging through her purse with a scowl on her face, but as soon as the door swung shut behind them she was on her feet again. “I’m going to
go get the car,
” she said to me, slowly and carefully, like maybe I didn’t speak her language. “You can
wait here.
I will pick you up in a few minutes. You have a
few minutes.
”

“Jill, I’ll walk to the car with you,” I said, exasperated. “I’m not going to ask for his phone number!”

“Tell him that,” she said, and darted past. I turned around and there was Casimir walking toward us, looking slightly uncertain. “See you!” Jill sang out to Casimir, and kept going. He had a little piece of paper in his hand. “I—your friend—” he said.

“Jill thinks she’s being tactful,” I said, not sure whether to die of embarrassment or stare into his big brown eyes as a way not to stare at the piece of paper in his hand.

He held it out to me. “I was hoping if I gave you my phone number you would give me yours,” he said, and turned the smile on again. “It is a large enough piece of paper that if you tear off the bottom, you could write yours on it.”

Our hands met as he gave me the paper. So many connections exploded I could feel the smoke coming out of my ears. I could barely write, or remember my phone number—I had to sort of mutter it over to myself so the rhythm would remind me. I could have pulled out my pocket phone, put his number on it, and sent mine to his, but where’s the romance in that? Besides, my hands were shaking so badly I’d probably have pressed the wrong buttons and sent my number to Joe’s Live Bait House, which is a major local landmark on the edge of the barrens, but I didn’t want Joe asking me out for a cup of coffee. It was my pocket number I gave Casimir, of course. I didn’t want Mom or Ran or—worst—Val to answer the ground phone with Casimir on the other end. Supposing he did call, which still seemed to me about as likely as that I’d decide to go to Runyon after all to study physwiz. (It might even be worth living at home, if Casimir was my TA next year.) When I gave him my little piece of paper I could see that at least half the restaurant was watching. Some of the women were really old. He probably did this six times a night every night with different girls. I wasn’t going to think about that.

“Talk to you soon,” I said, and fled.

CHAPTER 4

JILL WAS STILL PUNCHING THE AIR WHEN SHE dropped me off. I went up to the front door smiling—and then noticed that the light was still on in the living room.
Shimatta.
And toxic pond slime. Margaret Alastrina, I said to myself, pull the circuit breaker. It’s not even eleven yet (quite. It better not be, or I’m in big trouble). They’re just watching television or something.

As Mongo hit me going at full escape-earth’s-atmosphere velocity—
oof
—my mother appeared at the end of the front hall. Her eyes were red-rimmed.
Yabai.
Crap zone. I’d forgotten about our conversation earlier. Casimir was suddenly a figment of my imagination. This was reality.

“Hi sweetie,” she said. “Good evening?”

“Yeah. Except for the school-tomorrow part,” I said, petting the ecstatic Mongo (he
had
to have kangaroo blood, the way he could leap around on his hind legs), and hesitated. If it had just been Mom, I might have told her about Casimir. But I knew she wasn’t alone. Val was in the living room.

I had a moment to think, oh, come on, I don’t
know
that, I’m just guessing, they’ve been married less than two months, of course they’ve been smooching on the sofa after Ran went to bed. But I did know. I could feel him there as clearly as if I heard him cough. Or maybe it was his shadows I was picking up.

“I was about to make hot chocolate,” said my mother. “Can I make you some?”

It was a peace offering. I knew it was a peace offering. I didn’t want hot chocolate—well, no, I
always
want hot chocolate, but I didn’t want to drink it with Val, and I
did
want to go to bed and think about Casimir.
Why couldn’t they just leave me alone.
I could feel my head start to throb and I wanted to scream and throw things. But I hadn’t had a tantrum in about fifteen years and this probably wasn’t a good time to recharge that old skill.

I felt thirty years old. No, forty.

“Sure,” I said. “That would be great.”

Mom turned to go into the kitchen and I braced myself to join Val in the living room. I could do this. It was okay. Five minutes for Mom to make the hot chocolate. Two minutes to drink it—all right, five. Then I had to walk Mongo. It was a school night. I really did have to go to bed soon.

Where I was standing, about halfway down the front hall (next to the dining room that used to be a garage and the blank wall where the quilt should be), you can see the back of the sofa that faces the TV. You can’t see anyone sitting on it unless they tip their head back or hang an arm over it or something. I couldn’t see Val. He might be sitting in the big chair. Mom might have been sitting on his lap before I came in. It was a good chair for that. Jill used to sit in Eddie’s lap in that chair while Takahiro and I folded little paper things, sitting on the floor next to the coffee table. Eddie used to say things like, Hey, that’s amazing, what you guys can do with paper, that’s a . . . potato chip! I can tell! And that’s . . . Mr. Grass-ass’ ass! Wow!

Eddie always was a broken tool. But he didn’t have shadows.

As I was standing there in the hallway taking deep breaths and telling myself I only had to stay ten minutes, this
shadow
appeared over the back of the sofa—this long narrow
snaky
shadow—except it was too fat to be a snake, and it had this jagged outline like feathers or spiky plates or something—it drizzled along the top edge of the back a little ways, waggling back and forth, leaving a trail, or something, dark and shiny as a beetle’s back except
as long as your arm.
It looked like maybe it was trying to catch my attention, but I was bent over and holding onto Mongo like a drowning person hanging onto a piece of broken boat. Disappointed, I guess, when it reached the end of the sofa, it slithered or unrolled or something down the front, and then
oozed
across the seat and fell or dripped to the floor. . . .

I’d had it. I’d
had it.

I could have done one of two things. I could have screamed, run back out the front door and never come back. I could have become the Phantom of the Shelter, only coming out at night to clean kennels. Or I could get so furious I forgot to be frightened, thinking this
monster,
this
magic user,
living in
my
house, married to
my
mom—and run forward, straight
at
the snake-shadow thing, and screamed at
Val.

I chose the second.

“What the gods’ holy engines is it with you?” I shouted. “I’m
sick
of your stupid horrible shadows crawling around! What
are
they! What are
you
? What are you
doing
out there in the shed?
What are you? What are you doing here?
”

He had started to get up—he was sitting in the big chair—when I came in. It was one of those weird things he did, he stood up when Mom or me or Jill or any woman came into the room. But he kind of froze halfway when I started screaming at him.

There was a crash from the kitchen and Mom appeared in the archway looking like the end of the world, only madder.
“Margaret Alastrina, what do you—”

Val finished standing up and said, “Elaine, it is all right.”

Mom said furiously, “It is
not
all right that she should—”

But Val shook his head and held up his hand. Both hands. And then spread them out. I knew what he meant but it made him more alien. No one in Newworld did stuff like that, any more than Newworld guys stood up when women came in the room. “Maggie—Margaret—will you please tell me what you see?”

I turned my head to look at the sofa. The shadows were gone, of course. There weren’t any on the wall behind Val either. They probably didn’t like being yelled at. (Mongo had followed me and was pressed up against the backs of my legs. He knew I wasn’t yelling at
him.
) “There’s nothing there! And now you’re going to say that teenage girls are sometimes
like this,
and it’s okay, I’m just
crazy,
and then my mother won’t hate me any more, she’ll just have me locked up!” It had been kind of a stressful day. I burst into tears.

I’d’ve stopped if I could—I
hated
crying in front of Val—but I couldn’t stop. I put my hands over my mouth and made hysterical gagging noises. I saw Val make a move toward me, and then stop before I ran away. Then Mom had her hands—not too gently—on my shoulders, and she pushed me sideways and down, till I sat on the sofa. Probably where the shadow snake had been crawling. I cried harder. My senior year had started, I’d met the most beautiful boy in the world, he
liked
me, then he turned out to be a physwiz loophead—and not quite two months ago my mother had married a hairy freak with a shadow zoo.

I bit down on my hand and poked my fingers in my eyes till I could finally stop crying. By then I also had most of a medium-large dog in my lap, licking my elbows and trying to get at my face and whining. Mongo wasn’t allowed on the furniture.

When I opened my sticky eyes there was a box of tissues on the coffee table. Since I could hear banging and clattering noises from the kitchen—some of them sounded like something broken being swept up—I assumed it was Val who’d put the box there. Would one of his shadows bite me if I took a tissue? I’d been passing him the salt or the salad for the last seven months, but then I’d never admitted I could see his—friends either. They might not like being seen. Or maybe by admitting I could see them I’d
catch
them, like a monster virus. I was now shivering. I wrapped my arms around Mongo. Mongo liked this. His tail started thumping against my leg.

I leaned around Mongo and took a tissue. I didn’t see any shadows. I took several more tissues, blew my nose so hard I nearly started crying again, and tried to dry my face off. This wasn’t easy because Mongo was now trying to help. I petted him, putting off looking at Val, and watched Mongo’s black and white hairs drifting away and attaching themselves to Mom’s pale-gold-and-sage-green sofa cushions.