The Silver Moon Elm (14 page)

“Yeah. Crazy world. So how was your class?”

He grinned. “Advanced geometrical applications. Really cool stuff. What Mr. Slider teaches sophomores here is tougher than what I was doing with him in independent study! I also found out something about next year’s classes.”

This blew all thoughts of Andi and the blonde out of her mind. She stopped dead in the hallway and faced him. “Next year’s classes?”

“Yeah, for juniors. Seniors do it, too. They follow this special curriculum called the quadrivium—just four classes, double-length, no study hall, short lunch. Really intense. Arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. That’s it.”

Jennifer didn’t care. She stared at Skip. “Next year’s classes?”

Finally, he caught on. He swallowed hard. “Oh, hey, Jennifer, I’m not saying we’ll be here next year. I’m just giving you the scoop on what I learned—”

“Yes, it’s all very fascinating.” She started walking again, faster this time so he couldn’t see her start to cry. “Thank you for your superduper rundown of how I’ll be spending the next few years of my miserable life here at Murderous Freak Show High!”

She raced into the cafeteria with eyes so wet she couldn’t really tell who was around her. Holding her books with one hand, she wiped one side of her face well enough to see Andi again as the girl dropped her book bag off at a table next to the blonde’s stuff. The two of them got into line. Jennifer dropped her own books on the seat next to Andi’s, and got behind them.

Getting a better look at the blonde, Jennifer got the sense she had seen this young woman before. But not here. Where?

The girl looked like a Valkyrie with blue eyes and a large, square jaw. Jennifer didn’t think her attractive, but she certainly had lots of presence. Heck, her sheer size demanded attention.

She got a messy pulled-pork sandwich plopped onto her tray, and she warily chose a steamed vegetable. The blonde ahead of her laughed again, a dull sound with a cruel edge. I know that laugh. It’s a bully’s laugh. It’s—

Her jaw dropped in recognition. No way. It can’t be.

“Hey, Bobbie!” The voice from behind Jennifer made her turn. It was Abigail Whittier, looking exactly as she had before with beautiful coffee skin and a slightly bored look gracing her elegant features. “Whatcha doin’ after school?”

Bobbie Jarkmand—for this was Bob Jarkmand, Jennifer saw to her horror—turned and gave a noncommittal shrug. “Dunno.”

Bob is a Bobbie here! As weird as this was to swallow, the evidence was obvious. The girl was a hulk. And she hadn’t seen Bob Jarkmand yet today, so the position was open, so to speak. Somewhere along the line, Jennifer supposed, a Y chromosome didn’t get where it was supposed to—a different ancestor or a different chemical reaction because of a strange environment, who knew?

She paid for her lunch and darted for the table, just in time to hear Andi and Bobbie wonder aloud who had dropped their books next to Andi’s chair.

“They’re mine,” she explained with a slight apology on her lips. She sat down before they could protest. “I hope you guys don’t mind. I’m kinda new around here.”

Andi plainly had not expected such a direct approach and began to stammer. Bobbie looked Jennifer up and down and decided to ignore her. When the other three girls—Abigail, Anne, and Amy—came in a cluster and sat down around them, they all gave Jennifer suspicious looks.

Finally, as they began to eat, Jennifer introduced herself. She held her hand out to Andi. “I’m Jennifer.”

The girl tried to shrink away from the hand, but when it didn’t go away she relented and shook it limply. “Andi. This is Bobbie, and Amy, and Abigail, and Anne.”

“Hey, guys.” The best she got out of any of them was a nod. She wondered where Amanda Sera was. “Listen, I don’t want to tick any of you off. If you want me to leave—”

“Naw, stick around,” Bobbie said, just as Amy and Abigail both said, “Yeah, buzz off.”

It took Jennifer just a moment of noting everyone’s reaction around the table to determine who the leader was here. “Thanks, Bobbie.”

She didn’t do much talking after that, just watched and listened. A glance around the cafeteria confirmed that Amanda Sera was absent…Not in this universe, she guessed. Just like Mom and every other beaststalker. Some are gone, some are completely different—like Bobbie here.

Abigail and Bobbie did the most chatting, with Anne asking the leading questions (“Omigod, so then what did you do?”) and Amy chiming in with the occasional snide remark. Andi spent most of her time staring at her pulled-pork sandwich, which never had more than three bites taken out of it.

After twenty minutes of observing this group dynamic, Jennifer ventured a comment. “That was a beautiful song you sang in music today,” she told Andi.

Andi didn’t look up. “Thanks,” she muttered.

“How long have you been playing that instrument?”

When Andi didn’t answer, Bobbie filled in. “Something I’ve learned about Andi. It’s hard to get information out of her. Wherever she came from, it was a dark place.”

Still is, Jennifer bet herself. She watched Andi twist her sleeves and poke superficially at her green beans.

“How about you?” Bobbie continued. “You play anything?”

“I’m not good with music,” Jennifer admitted. “When it comes to art, I do more drawing than anything else.”

“That’s cool. What do you draw?”

“Just about anything.” The vague response got her blank stares. Heck, a little white lie couldn’t hurt. “The more legs the better!”

That got Bobbie grinning, and the other girls played along. “Sounds cool. Think you could draw me sometime?”

So she’s a werachnid. Terrific. Jennifer couldn’t think of anything she’d rather do less than have this girl pose with mandibles and thorax on display, but she had chosen this road. “Sure. Anytime. All I need is charcoal and paper.”

“Cool. Hey, Anne, you gonna eat that?” And like that, Bobbie had dismissed the topic and pulled the group’s attention to her next interest.

That was fine with Jennifer, who turned her attention back to Andi. The girl didn’t give another opening for conversation, but she rewarded Jennifer with a faint smile when she got up and left.

Baby steps, Jennifer reminded herself as she followed the girl up and out of the cafeteria. Baby steps.

CHAPTER 7
Tuesday Afternoon

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Not so bad, she congratulated herself as she walked out of the cafeteria. The rush of students around her looked increasingly normal. Even if beaststalkers had never made it to this Pinegrove, there were still plenty of familiar faces. The part of her that wanted to scream and start tearing things down was steadily relaxing—there was no imminent danger here. Andi seemed like an eventual recruit, and there were doubtless more.

Maybe Skip’s right, she allowed. Working through the next day or two is the best way to learn how to change things back. We’ll think things through better if we take our time. Lessee, chemistry now, right?

She checked her schedule and saw indeed:

Chemistry, Sloane, Rm. 265.

Room 265 was just a few doors away. Even before she entered the room, she could see the familiar periodic table on the far wall. Just like the one at old Winoka High, it was frayed at the edges and bore the mysterious, small, random brown stains of a schoolroom decoration that had simply been up for too long.

She was pleased to see Andi here, and it was even agreeable to see Bobbie come in a few seconds after the bell rang. The others on the A-List weren’t around, which Jennifer felt was a good thing. Recruitment was best done one or two at a time.

All she had to do was peel Andi away from Bobbie a bit. The girl was clearly miserable in that group. Who wouldn’t be, in any universe?

“Class, class!” the teacher, who Jennifer presumed was Ms. Sloane, called out with a mixture of tolerance and impatience. The young, petite redhead in a perky flowered dress and green-painted fingernails cleared her throat and picked up a weathered yardstick as several of the boys in the back of the room began to guffaw at something only they found amusing. Tapping the stick on the blackboard, she cleared her throat. “If we could start, please. Today’s lesson is important.

“In fact,” she continued while twirling the stick in her hand, “it is the key to everything else you’ll learn this year in chemistry—and what many of you will learn about medicine after that. After all, chemistry may not be on the quadrivium curriculum—but it does contain an essential link between life and death.”

There’s that quadrivium word again. Jennifer didn’t dwell on this, though, because Ms. Sloan had picked up a piece of chalk with her empty hand and was writing a single word on the blackboard in large script with gentle loops. This word, Jennifer knew just fine:

POISON

Ms. Sloane put down the chalk and turned back to the class. “Can someone please tell me what poison is?”

The chill of insecure apathy settled over the room. What is poison? Jennifer asked herself, scanning the empty faces around her. That’s easy. Isn’t it?

“Ms. … Scales, right?” Ms. Sloane cocked her head. “What do you think? What is poison?”

She shrugged. “Poison’s something your body can’t handle. You know, the kind of stuff that kills you.”

“Kills me?” The yardstick twitched.

“I…uh…I…”

“The truth is,” Ms. Sloane continued as she addressed the entire class again, “anything can be poisonous, if taken properly. Or improperly. Who can tell me about Paracelsus?”

Andi’s slender hand floated up. “Paracelsus was a physician who lived over 500 years ago. He came up with a fundamental rule of toxicology.”

“And that rule is?”

“The only difference between a poison and a cure is the dose.”

Jennifer raised her eyebrows. Plainly, Andi’s shyness did not extend to class participation. So Bobbie keeps her around for her smarts, she guessed. Andi’s the thinker. Lots of queen bees keep one around to do their homework for them. The idea of this wretched girl, chained to this warped universe and bartering her brains and talent for some small measure of acceptance, made Jennifer want to spit nails.

“Correct,” Ms. Sloane told Andi. “There are actually people”—and the teacher began writing on the chalkboard again—“who have died from overdosing on essential nutrients.”

Underneath “poison,” Jennifer watched three more lines appear:

GLUCOSE (C
₆
H
₁₂
O
₆
)

VITAMIN A (C
₂₀
H
₃₀
O)

WATER (H
₂
O)

“Anyone who has ever suffered from diabetes can attest to the consequences of an imbalance of sugars in the blood,” Ms. Sloane announced while walking past the first few rows of students. “It is an irony, one of many in nature. Glucose, the most abundant organic molecule on the planet, a building block of life…can kill.

“So can vitamin A, or any other vitamin for that matter. Taken normally, in doses of 700 to 900 micrograms per day, vitamin A keeps you healthy and staves off multiple eye disorders. But taken in doses of more than 3,000 micrograms per day for long enough, it can damage the liver or cause birth defects.”

“What about water?” Bobbie asked from the back of the classroom, looking as slow and skeptical as she—he?—ever had back at Jennifer’s own Winoka High. “There’s no way anyone has died from drinking too much water!”

“You could drown in it,” a boy near the back of the class suggested.

Andi shook her head. “Suffocation isn’t the same as toxicity.”

“Correct again,” Ms. Sloane agreed with a hint of admiration. Now at the back of the class, she rubbed the end of her yardstick with a long, green fingernail. “When someone drinks too much pure water, the body loses salts like sodium chloride and potassium chloride. Salts, of course, are vital to our existence. People have actually died this way, though very rarely.”

“Too much of a good thing,” Jennifer muttered.

Ms. Sloane heard her and pointed smartly with the stick. “That’s right. Too much of a good thing. Can anyone tell me what homeostasis means?”

One of the larger boys toward the back grinned and started whispering to another. He stopped as Ms. Sloane brought down her yardstick upon his desk, splintering it and snapping the entire class to attention.

“Mr. Turnbull,” she snarled. “Do you find something amusing in my question?”

The boy slunk down in his chair and shook his head.

Ms. Sloane, not ready to let the issue drop, bent over so her rust-colored lips were next to his reddening ear. “Perhaps you can help me with something, Mr. Turnbull. Despite my youthful looks, I have been teaching chemistry for many years. I notice, every autumn, that when the day comes when I introduce the term homeostasis”—her lips massaged the vowels slowly and tenderly, making the boy sink farther into his chair—“there is always at least one boy who needs to remark on the word. Can you imagine why that might be, Mr. Turnbull?”

“Intellectual curiosity?” he croaked.

The splintered end of the yardstick rose until it was just under his nose. “Doubtful. Let me suggest, Mr. Turnbull, that you keep your jocular remarks to yourself.”

“Okay.”

“Thank you.” Ms. Sloane’s tone softened as she brought the yardstick up to her own face and picked thoughtfully at the broken end. “So. Who can tell me what this word means?”

Again, Andi’s slender hand rose alone.

“Yes?”

“Homeostasis is the state of equilibrium within a living organism. A homeostatic system is stable.”

“Correct again. Well done. When someone takes too much of a substance internally—be it a neurotoxin or vitamin A—it throws equilibrium off. A homeostatic system will use negative feedback—a reaction to reverse the imbalance. If you’ve heard the phrase for every action, an equal and opposite reaction, you have a sense of what a homeostatic system tries to do.

“If the dose of toxin is small enough, a homeostatic system will find a way to get back to normal. If the dose is too large, the system will collapse—an organ will fail, for example, and death may result.