The Atomic Weight of Secrets or The Arrival of the Mysterious Men in Black (10 page)

And also there, in that room, were two children around Jasper’s age.

At a desk, looking over a set of blueprints and comparing them to sketches in a notebook, was a girl the likes of whom Jasper had never before seen. The moment he saw her, he understood fully how beauty could take your breath away. He had seen portraits and photographs of beautiful women and girls, but never in his life had he seen one in real life. The girl had warm skin that looked not as if the sun had darkened it, but as if the sun had entered it. Her hair, almost a dark red with wisps of gold, was long, down below her waist, plaited into one thick braid.

As Jasper approached, the girl looked up from what she was doing. Her eyes were the greenest green, but at the same time, the goldest gold. Jasper reached out his hand automatically and tried to speak.

“I... me... I... my—”

The beautiful girl did not take his hand. Instead, she opened up that beautiful mouth of hers and, in a sultry voice that carried with it an essence of an Indian accent, she said, “Are you an idiot? What is this? Are there more of them? And this one doesn’t even know how to talk.”

Stung by her bite, Jasper was stunned and shaken. He looked down at his hand as if it was a traitor.

“I can speak,” he said, his voice squeaking. “My name is Jasper, and Lucy there is my sister.”

“Well, you should know your ruddy name,
Jasper,”
she said, pointing to a folded paper on one of the five desks. It said “JASPER.” “You’ve got some help now, so you can practice saying it. Now don’t disturb me.”

“Faye,” Miss Brett said, Lucy still at her side, “I told you that all the classmates were arriving today. Why don’t you go fetch the lovely biscuits we made this morning?” There was no scolding in her voice.

Her face lighting up, Faye ran across the classroom, opened the door on the far side of the room, and rushed through it.

“Faye arrived this morning,” Miss Brett said, “as did Wallace.”

The small boy sat at a desk on the far side of the room. He was writing in a small notebook.

“Hello,” Jasper said as he approached the desk, cautiously. Did this one bite, too?

“Hello,” the boy responded shyly. He extended a hand, as Jasper had done to Faye.

“I’m Jasper,” said Jasper, taking the hand gladly. “How long have you been here?”

“I arrived about an hour—no, two hours ago,” Wallace said, taking a look at the clock on the wall of the classroom.

“I helped Miss Brett make these, as I was the first to arrive,” said Faye, returning to the room with a tray of biscuits.

Jasper grabbed a biscuit and took a bite. “These are delicious,
Faye,” he said, smiling at her.

Faye looked up, then blushed. “Well, I... well, don’t eat them all.” To Jasper’s disappointment, the sulk seemed to take over Faye once again, so he walked back over to Wallace, who had returned to his seat after taking a biscuit.

“Are there only five students?” Jasper saw there were only five desks and, so far, four children. Wallace’s desk was dead center, Jasper and Faye in front, and Lucy and someone named “NOAH” in back.

“He should be coming, too. Today, like the rest of us,” said Wallace. “That’s what Miss Brett said.”

“Does Miss Brett run the school? Is she the headmistress?” Jasper asked, finishing his biscuit.

“Well, I suppose,” Wallace said. “She lives here in the farmhouse, as will we, I imagine. She seems very pleasant to me. She’s certainly the nicest teacher I’ve ever come across. Well, except my mother.”

“Your mother is a teacher?”

“Um, well... she taught me. But Miss Brett seems very capable. She really is very, very nice. So far, this is all I’ve been able to conclude. Anything else would be guesswork.” Wallace looked up at Jasper through his thick glasses.

Jasper smiled and felt that, for the first time, he was speaking to a child who would have no interest in torturing him, no desire in hurting Lucy, and no reason to resent either of them for their intelligence. He looked at what Wallace was writing. It seemed to be an equation of sorts.

“Would you like to see my calculations on this chemical variant?” said Wallace. “I think I’ve worked out a kink in the
design of this polymer. I’m trying to complete it and test it before... well, I only have a few weeks. Would you like to see?” Jasper leaned over as Wallace began to explain.

Lucy was still having trouble looking at anything but Miss Brett.

“Well, come on, Lucy, let’s bring your bag into your room, and then I’ll show you the kitchen,” Miss Brett said.

“Can I sleep with you, Miss Brett?” asked Lucy. “I’m very cozy, or so I’ve heard.”

“I’m sure you are,” Miss Brett said, trying to keep her smile from turning into a laugh. “But you’ll be sharing the big bed with Faye. Her bags are already in the room.”

After Miss Brett led Lucy to the white room, where Lucy placed her bag on the bed, she took Lucy by the hand and led her into the kitchen.

“Do you like butter biscuits?” said Miss Brett. “We have a batch about to come out of the oven, and we’ll need to put another batch in. I like to butter the top of each biscuit before I put them in to bake. Did your mother ever make butter biscuits?”

“Make them? You mean in the laboratory?” Lucy said, confused. “Butter biscuits sound like something lovely to eat. I thought they were something to eat.”

“Yes, they are, sweet angel,” Miss Brett said. “I meant did your mother ever bake them... in the kitchen... in an oven?”

“No, Mummy doesn’t know what an oven is,” Lucy said. “Hortensia the cook did everything in the kitchen.”

“I see,” Miss Brett said, smiling. “You’ll learn all about kitchens while you’re with me. Then you can teach your mother when...”

But Miss Brett did not know when.

“Everyone keeps saying ‘when,’” said Lucy. “I suppose that is much better than ‘if,’ and if it was ‘if,’ I would be so sad I would be crying, but I’m not crying, Miss Brett, because I am a big girl and I would only cry if the ‘if’ was bigger than the ‘when’ and the ‘when’ went away and there was only an ‘if’ and I thought Mummy and Daddy were gone forever and I... I... I...”

Lucy began to cry, and Miss Brett folded her into her arms and sat with her until the sobs eased into a tiny snoring noise. Then she picked up Lucy and brought her to the bedroom she had selected for her own. As she placed the little girl on the bed, she decided to wait until Lucy awoke to make another batch of biscuits. Miss Brett returned to the classroom, where she worried she might be needed to prevent Faye from biting the head off any of the new arrivals. She made sure to leave the door open between the kitchen and the classroom. The biscuits already in the oven needed only a few more minutes.

“Look, Miss Brett,” Wallace said, pointing through the window at the dirt road on the far side of the field. “A black carriage is approaching. Do you think it’s Noah?”

“I do believe it is, Wallace,” she said, wiping her hands on her apron. “Let’s greet our new classmate.”

Miss Brett stepped outside as the carriage pulled up. A lanky boy carrying a violin case stepped out of the carriage. Miss Brett
escorted him into the classroom. He got as far as the door before Jasper and Wallace appeared to show him in.

Leaving them to their greetings, Miss Brett moved toward the kitchen. She had to take the biscuits out of the oven and she wanted to check on Lucy, but then she glanced over at Faye, who was writing in her notebook, ignoring the others gathering at the door.

Miss Brett walked over to Faye and placed her hand on Faye’s shoulder. “Faye? Come join us, won’t you?”

“You don’t need me over there. You’ve got the others.” Faye’s face felt hot, but she refused to look up at Miss Brett.

“But I won’t have you,” Miss Brett said gently.

“It’s already too crowded,” grumbled Faye. She didn’t look up—she couldn’t. In a few short hours, Faye had lost her place as the one and only.

“Want to help me with the biscuits?” Miss Brett said.

Faye shook her head, and Miss Brett walked away. Faye snapped her pencil in half, then bent under her desk to retrieve the fallen piece. She wanted nothing more than to run and run and run all the way home, back to the world she knew, back to her perfect home and perfect garden and perfect life.

F
AYE’S
A
BSOLUTELY
P
ERFECT
L
IFE

OR

LITTLE MARMELO FINDS AN OVEN

F
aye may have spoken in an Indian-tinged upper-class English accent, but she was only half-Indian by birth—the other half was American. She had lived her whole life in India, had traveled through most of it, and spoke many of India’s twenty-some languages. Her Hindi, as well as her Tamil, Bengali, Urdu, Marathi, and Punjabi, was flawless, like everything else about her—as perfect as she imagined her life to be.

Faye’s father, Rajesh Vigyanveta, was born in New Delhi, but went to college in America. It was there that he met Faye’s mother, Gwendolyn. Gwendolyn was from America—Ohio, originally. While Faye’s father, on leave from Cambridge, was becoming a star at Harvard, Gwendolyn studied at the Annex, the new college, where women could study using Harvard University facilities. Since Harvard instructors taught there, study groups were formed, and Faye’s parents fell in love over a pile of textbooks. By the time they left so her father could finish his studies at Cambridge, they were famous.