The Apprentices (5 page)

By the end of the evening, every muscle in her body was sore, her fingers were pruned and red, and she never wanted to see Italian food again. But then someone put a bowl of tomato soup on the counter in front of her and it looked delicious. So she sat on a stool and ate, leaning on her elbows. She was too tired to care about manners.

Her mouth was full and her eyes were nearly closed when a woman came in through the back door. She was tall and buxom, in a long coat, and she had snow in her pinned-up hair. Janie had just had time to register that it was snowing, and she still had nowhere to sleep, when the woman demanded,
“Dov’è la ragazza?”

The kitchen went silent. Even Bruno, that imposing figure, looked afraid. Janie froze and tried to swallow.

The woman zeroed in on Janie, slinging her coat over her powerful forearm, and put her hands on her hips. “You have a name?” She had a stronger Italian accent than Bruno’s.

Janie managed to say, “Janie Scott.”

“This is my aunt Giovanna,” Raffaello said. “She lives with us.”

Giovanna ignored him. “Where your parents?” she asked Janie.

“Michigan.”

“Mitchigan?”

“It’s a state. West of here.”

“Mitchigan,”
the woman said skeptically. “You Grayson?”

“Not anymore.”

“Why no?”

“They kicked me out.”

“Why?”

“They said I cheated.”

“You cheat?”

“Never.”

Giovanna made a doubtful face. “Everybody cheat some-time.”

“I didn’t. It was a math test. I’m really good at math.”

“Oh, yes?” Giovanna said. She hung her coat on a hook, strode out of the kitchen into the restaurant, and returned with a stack of white slips, a long roll of adding machine paper, and the tray of money from the till. “This is tonight,” she said. “Always it comes out wrong.”

Janie felt the weight of the woman’s eyes on her. Everyone else was watching, too. She pushed her soup bowl away, wiped her hands on a napkin, and pulled the stack of slips closer. Then she studied the numbers on the roll of paper. She looked up. “Do you have a pencil?”

Giovanna snapped her fingers. One of the waiters ran to her with a pencil, and she handed it over.

Janie, her fingers stinging from the hot plates, began to go through the slips, balancing out the night’s take against the
register. Everyone else went back to work. A few times Janie had to stop and puzzle out a mistake. Eventually she got to the end, but the amount still didn’t balance with what was in the till. She rubbed her eyes, went back again, and found the error.

When she was finished, Janie pushed the totals to Giovanna, who looked them over. Then she told Janie what percentage of the evening’s tips went to each of the employees—every waiter and busboy—and asked her to divvy them up.

“You didn’t include the dishwasher,” Raffaello said.

“We don’t have dishwasher,” Giovanna said.

“We do now,” Raffaello insisted.

“It’s okay,” Janie said. “It was my first night.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Raffaello said.

Giovanna frowned. “Hmph,” she said.

“And she needs to stay with us tonight,” Raffaello said.

“Absolutely no!”

Janie was too weary even to be disappointed. It was too cold to sleep outside in the snow, but she went blank when she thought about other possibilities. Could she go knock on the door of the infirmary? She thought she could sleep right here on this stool, she was so tired.

“She doesn’t have anywhere else to go,” Raffaello said.

“This is my fault?” Giovanna asked.

“She did a good job tonight. Two good jobs.”

“I am no hotel!”

“Per favore, Zia Giovanna.”

The woman folded her arms over her formidable chest. Then she threw her hands up in the air. “Okay!” she said. “Fine!”

Janie, blushing furiously, nodded her thanks and set about dividing the tips. She wound up with an astonishing nine dollars in cash and checked her math, but it was correct. The money felt hot in her pocket as they left the restaurant, Bruno locking up after them.

Raffaello lived with his father and his aunt in the apartment over the restaurant, and Janie followed them upstairs. She wanted to ask what had happened to Raffaello’s mother, but she was too tired. The living room was worn and cozy even in the dark, with gauzy flowered curtains over the windows.

Giovanna threw some sheets and a blanket over the couch to make a bed. Janie said good night and thanked them all, brushed her teeth in the small bathroom, and fell into an exhausted sleep.

W
hen Janie woke, it took some time for her to recognize the room: the couch she’d slept on, the floral curtains with early morning light coming through. She couldn’t remember her dreams, but they nagged at her as if they were important. She closed her eyes and tried to fall asleep again, but it was hopeless.

The apartment was quiet, the others still asleep. Janie reflexively wondered if she was late for class, then remembered that she didn’t have class anymore. But she still had her key to the chemistry classroom. She got up and dressed silently, folded her blanket and sheets on the couch, and let herself out of the apartment.

She crossed Kingsley Street where it divided the town from the Grayson campus. The sun still wasn’t up, and the sky was a dark gray blue. Squirrels darted up the trees. A few of the boys from crew were running back from morning rowing practice on the river, flushed in their jerseys, with halos of steam rising up around their heads. They grinned at Janie with the euphoria of being healthy and sweaty and awake so
early, and she tried to smile in return. The science building was unlocked and the hallway was empty. She let herself into the dark chemistry classroom with her key.

The lab seemed cold and forbidding now that she wasn’t supposed to be there. She didn’t want to turn on a light and draw attention. Familiar objects cast spooky shadows in the dimness, and the usual chemical smells seemed sinister. She wished Pip and Benjamin were here. Everything had been easier when her friends were with her. She hadn’t been afraid to sneak into a school chemistry lab, or into a military bunker. She hadn’t even been afraid to stow away on a boat to Nova Zembla. But Pip was in London, and Benjamin was
somewhere,
trying to slow down the world’s ability to destroy itself. It was hard to fault him for that, but the result was that Janie was alone, and she was afraid.

She made her way along the lab tables to the back of the room where her experiment was set up. Mr. Kase, the chemistry teacher, was from Kentucky, and he’d joked that her apparatus looked like a distillery, and she must be making homemade corn whiskey. She supposed it did look like that. There were glass bottles and pipes and tubes, all arrayed in a three-dimensional maze, and there was a medium-sized water tank, like an aquarium. She was relieved to see that the apparatus hadn’t been moved. Maybe everyone would just forget it was there until she had the information she needed. They would never notice the small adjustments she made each morning, and they wouldn’t know how to move it or what to do with the pieces. It seemed like a long shot, but it was all she had.

“I was thinking before that I needed a month,” Janie said, the words tumbling out. “But this morning, I think—well, I don’t know for sure, and I don’t want to jinx it, but I might only need a week.”

“I see.”

“If I could just come in the morning before class,” she said. “That’s what I’ve been doing all term. I wouldn’t disturb anything, or anyone.”

Mr. Willingham frowned. “How would you get here from Concord?”

Concord! She’d forgotten about Concord. “My aunt can give me a ride,” she said. “It’s on her way to work.”

“Work? Where?”

“At…the hospital,” she said. Her father liked to quote Mark Twain:
If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.
So much for that.

“She’s a nurse?” Mr. Willingham asked.

“A doctor.” Janie instantly cursed herself. Why a
doctor
? The headmaster was going to be curious about the lady doctor at the hospital.

The thready eyebrows shot up again. “Oh? What is her area of practice?”

“Um, she works with kids.” That seemed plausible.

“A pediatrician.”

“Yes. I can’t believe I forgot that word!”

Mr. Willingham sighed, as if this pointless conversation had gone on long enough. “It’s highly irregular to have
students on our campus who are not enrolled,” he said. “I’ll give you until the end of the week.”

Janie couldn’t believe her luck. It was only Tuesday. “Really?”

“I can arrange to have the classroom door open by seven thirty each morning. Will that do?”

“Yes! Thank you!”

“Are you finished for today?”

“Almost.”

“See that you’re out by the time our
actual
students arrive.” Mr. Willingham turned on his heel and left the room.

Janie hurried to write down the weight of the salt that had crystallized, and to adjust the solution and hang a new thread. One last week of research time! She was giddy with hope. It might just be enough.

R
affaello invited Janie to go to East High with him, and at first she said no. She couldn’t enroll without her parents’ help. And why would she go to school when she didn’t have to? But then she imagined the empty day stretching out ahead of her while she sat on the flowered couch and stared at the wall or made conversation with Giovanna, and she changed her mind. She was used to going to class every day. And she was curious about the big public school.

“Won’t the teachers question me?” she asked.

“Not for long,” Raffaello said. “You’ll see.”

The school was a loud, busy, crowded place, compared to Grayson. Raffaello led Janie to a tiny, silver-haired English teacher in a blue dress, and said, “Mrs. Lloyd, this is Janie Scott. She’s a new student but she’s not on the roll sheets yet.”

“When are they sending new roll sheets?” Mrs. Lloyd asked.

“The office doesn’t know yet,” Raffaello said. “Soon.”

The teacher sighed. “See if you can find her a desk.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

Janie sat with Raffaello and his friends, who did nothing but talk to each other. In the next class, Raffaello gave the same explanation about the roll sheets to a young math teacher in a suit, and added, “You can ask Mrs. Lloyd.”

The teacher nodded and pointed to an empty desk, and Janie had infiltrated East High—it was as easy as that.

Raffaello was popular, with his quick smile and his easy manner, and there were girls among his friends as well as boys. Their rough, relentless teasing of each other reminded Janie of her almost-forgotten days at Hollywood High, but not of Grayson or St. Beden’s. She felt as if the kids were speaking a language she’d once known but had forgotten. When it was time for Raffaello to go to work, she slipped out of the school with him, relieved.

At the restaurant, Giovanna wanted Janie’s help with the wholesale food accounts. Janie combed through them as well as she could, until the dishes started to pile up and she put on an apron. At the end of the night, she closed out the till and divided the tips. Her share was eleven dollars this time. Then she climbed upstairs and fell into bed on the couch, more exhausted than she had ever been in her life.

Wednesday morning, she woke early and ran up to Grayson, afraid that the chemistry classroom wouldn’t be unlocked. She only had three days left. But Mr. Willingham was true to his word, and the knob turned. The salt crystals on the thread were twice the size of the ones the day before, and the saline levels in the water even lower—she was getting closer! She
did her measurements, adjusted the solution, treated a new thread and lowered it into the salt water, then slipped out before the first students came in.