The Apprentices (6 page)

Back at the apartment, she ate scrambled eggs on toast with Raffaello, then went to East High again. She would go crazy sitting alone all day, electrified by the knowledge that at this rate, she might have full crystallization by Friday. If she could make fresh water, it wouldn’t matter where she was enrolled in high school or what she was going to tell her parents. She needed to write them her weekly letter soon so they wouldn’t worry, but she couldn’t bring herself to pretend that everything was normal and fine. She wished she could contact Jin Lo and tell her that she’d re-created the solution without the Pharmacopoeia’s help.

Fingers were snapping in front of her face, and one of Raffaello’s friends was grinning at her, a blond boy with a crew cut. “You here?” he asked.

“You were in some kind of trance,” a girl with pin curls said.

“Maybe it’s dangerous to wake her up,” another boy said. “Same as sleepwalking.”

“Sorry,” Janie said. “I guess I drifted off.”

“She’s got a lot on her mind,” Raffaello said. He reached out and tousled her hair.

Janie looked sharply at Raffaello to see what that hair tousling meant, but he had already turned away from her and moved on to another conversation. He had seemed to make the gesture without much thought, as one might pat a friendly dog on the head. So maybe that was all it was. She
had become the family pet: the sleepy girl who did the dishes and kept the accounts and tagged along during the day.

Thursday morning, Janie hurried up to the science building again. Her tiredness disappeared when she saw that the crystals were larger than ever, the test water less salty. She was going to make her deadline. The water was drinkable at this point. There was still the hint of salt, but it was almost undetectable.

She wrote down her measurements and made what she was sure would be the final adjustment to the solution. Then she ran back across Kingsley Street for breakfast at the apartment.

It was hard to keep her voice down, with Bruno and Giovanna still asleep. What she really wanted to do was dance around the living room and shout “I’VE DONE IT!” Instead, she resorted to kicking her legs in the air and grinning like an idiot, and Raffaello watched her with a baffled smile. He slid an egg on toast onto her plate.

“I wish I could tell Jin—my old chemistry teacher,” Janie said.

“Why can’t you? You’ve got your tip money. Send a telegram.”

Janie reminded herself to be careful, in her excitement, not to tell Raffaello things she wasn’t supposed to tell. “I’m not sure where she is,” she said. “I think she got a new job somewhere.”

“You could write to your old school, and ask them to forward a letter.”

“Sure.” She was distracted for a moment by the tangled lie: Jin Lo had never been at her school. Then she broke into a happy smile. “Raffaello, I did it!”

He grinned back. “I knew you would.”

“I wasn’t sure.” She took a bite of toast.

“Yes, you were. Finish your breakfast, or we’ll be late.”

She sat happily munching the crunchy toast and the soft, salty egg, thinking about how delicious salt was in small quantities, and how important the ability to remove it was. The vast oceans of the world could be drinkable.

She sailed through the day at East High, chatting with Raffaello’s friends at lunch, joking about who was going to try out for the school play, a production of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

“I’d want to be the guy with the donkey head,” Raffaello said.

“They aren’t going to cover those curls with a donkey head,” a girl said. “They’d make you one of the lovers, Demetrius or Lysander.”

Raffaello made a face. “What kind of dumb names are those?”

“This from a boy named
Raffaello
?” the girl asked.

“I can’t be in a play anyway,” he said. “Some of us have responsibilities, you know.”

He sounded like he was bragging, and the girl laughed at him, but Janie heard a tinge of regret in his voice.

That night in the restaurant when the dishes were done, Giovanna closed out the till, and Raffaello stacked bread baskets. One of the cooks made Janie a bowl of linguine pesto. She ventured, “They’re doing a play at school.”

“Sixty, sixty-five, seventy,”
Giovanna said, under her breath.

Janie took a bite of creamy green pasta and waited for Giovanna to finish counting, then said, “I think Raffaello would be great in it.”

“Raffaello can’t be in a play. He has a job.”

“It’s only for a few months.”

Raffaello watched their conversation from across the kitchen, pretending not to listen. The rest of the kitchen staff was cautiously interested in anyone taking on Giovanna for any reason.

“It will make him a better waiter than being a busboy will,” Janie said.

“Oh?” Giovanna said, accepting the challenge. “Why?”

“Because you have to memorize lines, and speak clearly, and perform. Those are all things waiters have to do well.”

“He can practice being a waiter by being a
waiter,
” Giovanna said. “In fact, Raffaello, you should start. No more busboy.”

This was going the wrong way. “But if he gets one of the romantic leads, people will see him and talk about him,” Janie said quickly. “Girls will want their parents to bring them to the restaurant where he works.”

“And if he’s only the boy who holds the spear?”

“Then he’ll get the lead in the next play. And people will come here to see him.”

Giovanna shook her head, looking down at her neat piles of cash. “We have many customers now.”

“You wouldn’t be happy with more?”

“We have better ways to make the advertisement.”

“You can do those, too. Put an ad in the play’s program. All I’m saying is that Raffaello is underused here, clearing dishes. You should get him onstage where more people can see how charming he is.”

Giovanna gazed across the kitchen at her nephew, sizing him up as an undeveloped asset. “You want to be in this play?” she asked him.

He nodded nervously, which made his curls bounce around his temples.

“Speak up, child!” she commanded. “They don’t hear you in the back of the theater like this!”

* * *

In the morning, Janie splashed water on her face and dashed up to Grayson, hoping that Mr. Willingham had remembered, one last time, to leave the chemistry door unlocked for her. The knob turned in her hand. She sent the headmaster a silent
thank you
across the campus, expecting the largest crystal yet on the thread in the tank at the back of the room. Then she stopped, staring.

There was no crystal.

There was no tank.

There was no apparatus.

Her salt, her beakers, her condensation-collecting tubes, the roll of thread, the carefully capped bottles—the whole thing was gone.

Janie closed her eyes for a few seconds, thinking she was hallucinating with tiredness, and opened them again. Nothing had changed. The back counter was still empty. She walked slowly toward it, feeling her feet touch the hard floor, so she knew she wasn’t dreaming. The room was quiet and she could hear her own pulse in her ears.

She was awake, and this was real.

The countertop was black stone, and there was a shiny, clean rectangle where the tank had stood. She touched the stone. There wasn’t a lot of dust, but there was enough to show that something had been there. There were a few white spots where salt water had dripped and dried. There was another circle of faint dust where her titrating apparatus had stood. But everything else was gone.

J
anie marched into the headmaster’s office, past the secretary, who looked up and started to say something. Janie ignored her and threw open Mr. Willingham’s heavy wooden door.

“Where’s my equipment?” she demanded.

Mr. Willingham, smoking his pipe, looked up at her mildly. “I beg your pardon?”

“It’s not there! Everything’s gone! That whole heavy tank!”

“What tank?”

“
My
tank, for my experiment! You saw it, in the chemistry classroom!”

“This tank was your personal property?”

Janie exhaled in exasperation. “No,” she said. “But it’s not about the tank. It’s about my experiment. It’s gone!”

“So you’re saying there’s been a theft of school chemistry
equipment?” Mr. Willingham asked. “That’s a very serious matter.”

She tried to calm herself down. “You know exactly what I’m talking about, and I want to know where it is.”

Mr. Willingham set his pipe down carefully, put his elbows on the desk, and interlaced his plump white hands. He rested his nose on his knuckles as if he were thinking. Then he raised his head again. “Here is what I know,” he said. “I know that you are no longer a student of this institution. A door was left unlocked at your request, and now you tell me that the school’s valuable chemistry equipment has gone missing.”

“It’s not valuable in it
self,
” Janie said. “It’s a glass tank and some beakers and tubes. What’s valuable is what I’d
done
with it.”

“I see. Well, I think you’ll find in our bylaws that all work done under the guidance of Grayson Academy belongs to the institution.”

“So you took it?”

“No,” he said. “I’m merely pointing out the fallacy of your claim to ownership.”

“But I wasn’t acting under anyone’s guidance! It was my own experiment, done on my own time!”

“On the school’s equipment and using its resources.”

“The beakers and the tank?” Janie said. “That’s ridiculous! I bought the other things—the thread and a carton of salt.”

“So let us be clear,” he said. “You are here to report the theft of some thread and a carton of salt?”

Janie wanted to scream with frustration. “Why would you
want
it?” she asked, stamping her foot. “I don’t understand!”

And then suddenly she did understand. A cold flush of adrenaline spread through her body. “Wait,” she said. She could barely breathe. “Mr. Magnusson. He said he’d be the first customer. He said he could use it in the islands.”

“Did he?” Mr. Willingham asked mildly.

“You gave my experiment to him!”

“Why don’t you just begin again?”

“I
can’t.
It’s taken months to get to this point. You told him I was close, and then he took it away. Or you took it and gave it to him.”

“I do not broker the dabblings of children.”

“It wasn’t a
dabbling.
” Her voice was low and unfamiliar, and frightened her. “It was valuable property and you knew it.”

“I am the headmaster of a large and busy school, Miss Scott,” he said. “Try as I might, I cannot keep abreast of the individual projects of each student in our care.”

“But you knew about
mine.
”

“I knew that you would like me to leave the chemistry door unlocked for one week, ending today. I know nothing more. You’re lucky I’m not holding you liable for the loss of the equipment. In fact, I might call the police.” He reached for the telephone on his desk.

Janie’s mind was still tumbling over the events of the week. “Did you kick me out in the first place so he could take it?” she asked. “Mr. Magnusson never lets an opportunity go by, does he? He even gave me the week to perfect it.”

The headmaster held the telephone receiver to his ear. “You’re beginning to seem paranoid to me, Miss Scott.
Perhaps it’s not the police I should call. Perhaps we should arrange a psychiatric evaluation.” He started to dial.

Janie backed toward the door. If she wasn’t careful, she was going to end up in a padded cell. Carted off to the loony bin. Who had said that? Tadpole Porter. But he wasn’t part of the conspiracy. Or was he? She had to get out of here. She started to say something about her aunt in Concord, anything to make Mr. Willingham think that an adult was looking out for her, when she bumped into someone behind her and whirled around.

But it wasn’t an orderly carrying a straitjacket. It was just the headmaster’s fluffy-haired secretary, looking concerned. “Is everything all right?” she asked.

Janie darted around her and out the door, through the reception area, and into the hall. She made her way outside the building and stood on the steps, gulping air. She felt as if she hadn’t really breathed the whole time she was in the office. The air outside was cold and clear, untainted by Mr. Willingham’s noxious pipe smoke and his lies.

She wanted to crumple right there on the steps. But she had to move forward. Raffaello and his family had been kind to her, but they couldn’t help her with this. She needed to find the only people who could help her fight back.

R
affaello was waiting for Janie on the sidewalk outside Bruno’s restaurant. “We’re late for school,” he said. “Where have you been? It’s the auditions today!”

“Sorry,” she said. “I’m not feeling well. I don’t think I can go.”

Raffaello hesitated, puzzled. “You could be Hermia. Or Helena.”

“I can’t audition,” Janie said. “They’d find out I’m not really enrolled at the school.”

Raffaello’s face fell.

“Go on,” she said. “Go try out for the play.”