This Isn't What It Looks Like (8 page)

To the trainer and anyone else around, it must have looked very odd—the beagles circling for no apparent reason, pawing at
the air. Her invisibility
had protected her until now; Cass didn’t want to press her luck. Desperate, she tried to shoo the dogs away from her—a difficult
task to perform without making any noise.

Fortunately, the trainer was able to coax them away with a few treats he happened to be carrying in his satchel.

Unfortunately, by the time all the dogs had been rounded up, the procession had disappeared and the gate was clanging shut.
Cass had missed her chance to get into the palace.

Trying not to be discouraged, she started walking the perimeter of the royal residence.

Where would she find the Jester? Did he have regular work hours or did he come and go as he pleased? (She imagined being a
jester was something like being a stand-up comedian, but more mobile—like being a walking comedian.) She remembered a red-and-white-striped
tent. Did he pitch his tent on royal grounds or did he hide it out in the woods somewhere?

Being invisible, she figured it wouldn’t be too much of a risk to climb through an open window, but it was chilly out, and
every window she saw was shut. She was, however, able to look inside a few
windows where curtains were not drawn, and she saw some of the palace rooms. Cass knew that some people, like her antiques-collecting
grandfathers, would have given their right arms to see the furnishings inside, but to her, all the rooms looked the same:
filled with uncomfortable-looking chairs and gold-framed paintings that were either dark and scary or silly and heaven-ish.
Nowhere did she see a wiry man wearing a three-pointed hat with bells.

After turning a corner, she noticed a stairwell on the side of the building. Walking down the short flight of steps, she found
a small iron door—the first door she’d come across since the front entrance. She tried the handle. It was locked.

As she turned away, the door opened, nearly pushing her to the ground.

“Ow!” she exclaimed, the sound obscured by the clanging of chains.

Recovering from the blow, Cass turned to see a uniformed soldier dragging a small creature out the door—a monkey, Cass assumed
at first glance.

A scowling man in a dark cloak presided from the doorway. “Let him sleep in the kennels. If he will not speak, he is no better
than a dog!”

The cloaked man spit on the creature’s back and then slammed the door before Cass could slip inside.

Dismayed, she looked down at the whimpering creature at her feet.

“Come on, you heard your master,” said the soldier, tugging on his collar. “It’s the kennels for you.”

The creature had exceptionally large eyes, and to Cass’s shock she found they were staring directly at her. He could see her!
But the greater shock was that she knew those eyes very well….

“Mr. Cabbage Face!” she cried out before thinking better of it.

The creature looked at her oddly, as if he didn’t quite understand.

But she was certain of it: although he was even shorter (if that was possible) than when she’d last seen him, and although
there were fewer folds in his leathery skin, the creature in front of her was none other than a younger incarnation of her
long-lost old friend, the homunculus. She would recognize him anywhere, she thought: the huge hands (for grabbing fistfuls
of meat), the huge nose (for sniffing out roasts and sweets), the little torso with the big belly (for filling with meal after
meal). The homunculus was literally one of a kind. The reason he could see her, she suspected, was that he was not entirely
mortal.

The soldier drew his sword. “Who’s there?”

How awful to see her friend in chains! How was
she going to free him? That was all she could think of.

Cass put her finger to her lips. The homunculus nodded slightly. He wouldn’t give her away.

Shrugging his shoulders, the soldier sheathed his sword. “Guess it’s that blasted ringing in my ears again….”

He gave the homunculus a tug. “Let’s go, dog.”

The homunculus grunted in complaint but started shuffling after him, chancing only a quick backward glance at Cass.

What is the homunculus doing at the palace? she wondered, silently following. And why is he being dragged to the kennels?

Then she remembered “The Legend of Cabbage Face.”

In the story, the homunculus’s creator, Lord Pharaoh, brings the homunculus to an audience with the King. When the homunculus
won’t perform on command, Lord Pharaoh grows angry and punishes him by sending him outside to sleep in the mud with the hogs.

Was it possible she was witnessing in real life the events she’d previously only read about?

In that case, Cass realized with a chill, the cloaked man she saw in the doorway must have been
the dreaded Lord Pharaoh—the brilliant but evil alchemist who was not only the father of the homunculus but also the founder
of the Midnight Sun!
^*

As for the hogs, the writer of the story had obviously gotten that part wrong.

Not
hogs
, she thought.

Dogs.
^**

I
t was lunchtime, and Max-Ernest was still preoccupied with his bizarre encounter with Mrs. Johnson in her Renaissance Faire
costume. What a powerful magnet that must have been to float like that, he thought. He had to admit Pietro was right. To someone
who didn’t know about magnetism, it would look like magic.

Automatically, he headed for his regular lunch spot: the Nuts Table.

Only as he was sitting down at his usual seat did he become aware that he was about to commit that capital schoolyard crime:
having lunch alone.

He stared at the empty seats around him: Cass’s directly across the table and Yo-Yoji’s to his right. For years he hadn’t
thought twice about eating by himself. But now that he’d experienced the pleasure of having friends to eat with, lunch didn’t
seem like lunch without them.

What to do?

He wasn’t very hungry, and in any case he hadn’t taken a lunch with him to school that day. (In past years, he’d always had
two lunches: one packed by his mother, one by his father. Lately, neither parent seemed to remember he might sometimes need
to eat.) The only thing he had with him as far as food goes was a single chocolate bar—and that had to last
until he got home. Besides, it had been in his pants pocket and was almost certainly melted. He needed to put it someplace
cool and let it harden again.

Should he get up? He would look pretty silly, considering he’d just sat down. Besides, he had nowhere to go. At least not
until after school.

He glanced down at the blue plastic surface of the Nuts Table as if his instructions might be written on it; and in fact there
was plenty of graffiti etched into the plastic, but nothing helpful (or even repeatable).

Max-Ernest, it is fair to say, was at a loss.

I’m lonely, he thought with a sense of discovery.

I feel bad.

In an odd way, that felt good.

Usually, being bad at feelings, Max-Ernest didn’t
feel bad
, he
felt badly
(the same way he threw badly, although Yo-Yoji had helped a little with that). But today, you could say, he was feeling bad
well.
That is not to say he was feeling well, exactly, but rather that he was doing a good job of feeling bad.

He was so pleased with this formulation that he almost repeated it aloud, but—sadly—there was no one to hear it.

The two other kids at the Nuts Table, Daniel-not-Danielle and Glob, didn’t count. For one thing, they were sitting at the
far end of the table and he
would have had to shout. For another, they hadn’t so much as said hello to him. (Then again, Max-Ernest hadn’t said hello,
either. Hello wasn’t really done at the Nuts Table.)

Daniel-not-Danielle was a soft-spoken caramel-skinned boy with exceptionally long dreadlocks that he refused to cut, despite
the fact that they were always covering his face. Although he would have preferred to call himself by his given name, Daniel,
he’d had to correct the pronunciation so many times that the correction itself became his name.

Glob was a pimply and very pale-skinned boy who was even lower on the school pecking order but who enjoyed an inordinate degree
of power in the “convenience food” industry. His junk food–reviewing website—The Glob Blog—was read by thousands of fast-food
fans, and his opinions, it was said, could make or break a product in its first week.

Max-Ernest knew them as he knew everyone at the Nuts Table, but he didn’t
know
know them. That is, he wasn’t friends with them. On the other hand, he wasn’t enemies with them, either.
^*

As an experiment, Max-Ernest moved several seats closer to the two boys in question. They didn’t welcome him, nor did they
protest.

He took this as a positive sign.

“I thought he was an aristocrat, like a lord or a count or something—from England,” Daniel-not-Danielle was saying in a voice
just barely above a whisper. “But then I heard he was an ex-convict who just got out of juvenile hall because of DNA evidence!”

At first, hearing the words
lord
and
count
, Max-Ernest assumed they were talking about what everyone at school was talking about: the Renaissance Faire. But as he listened
in on Glob and Daniel-not-Danielle, he realized their topic was something else altogether: apparently, their school had been
graced with the presence of an important new luminary.

“He’s neither. He’s a child actor,” said Glob, munching on a new, experimental variety of lime-green, spearmint-flavored,
breath-freshening popcorn. (Food companies were always sending Glob free samples of the latest Exploding Cherry-Bomb Bubble
Gum and Nacho-Cheese Extreme Potato Chips in the hopes of a favorable mention on his website.) “He’s on hiatus.”

Daniel-not-Danielle looked distressed. “He hates us? But he doesn’t even know us.”

“No, idiot,
hiatus
. He’s on hiatus. It’s what they call summer vacation when you’re on a TV show. Except when my blog goes on the food channel,
we won’t really have a summer vacation because cable is on a different schedule.” He pulled a half-eaten popcorn kernel out
of his mouth and inspected it. “These things are totally disgusting, but you kind of want to keep eating them—it’s weird.”

“Oh,” said Daniel-not-Danielle. “Well, either way, he’s definitely a genius. They say he’s fluent in twelve languages. Like
even Belgian.”

“That’s impossible,” said Max-Ernest, cutting in. He was finding himself increasingly resentful of this brilliant new student.

“Why? Because it’s more languages than you speak?” Glob asked. (His sarcasm was a little less sharp than it might have been,
owing to his mouth being full of green popcorn.)

“No. Because there’s no such thing as Belgian.”

“Is so. What about Belgian waffles?”

“What about them? Waffles don’t speak any languages at all, last time I checked. The point is, in Belgium they speak French
and also Flemish, which is actually a kind of Dutch. How ’bout that?”

“Whatever,” said Daniel-not-Danielle. “So maybe he speaks Flemish.”

“Yeah, and don’t dis Belgian waffles,” said Glob. “Medieval Days Restaurant gave me, like, a hundred bucks’ worth of coupons
to try theirs. Now they’re gonna sponsor my blog during Ren-Faire. And this time they’re paying cash!”

Max-Ernest turned away. He felt like a jerk. Why was he bothering to talk to them? And why had he gotten so worked up about
this aristocrat or actor or whatever-he-was new kid? He was supposed to be focused on saving Cass and saving Cass alone.

Suddenly, Max-Ernest missed her intensely. If a moment ago he was feeling an ache, this was more like a searing pain. With
Cass he could argue about Belgium for hours and not feel like a jerk. She might laugh at him for obsessing about the differences
between, say, Flemish Dutch and Dutch Dutch, but whenever she laughed
at
him she was always laughing
with
him at the same time. If that made any sense.

“Wait—that’s him!” said Glob.

“He’s not coming to the Nuts Table, is he? Now
that’s
impossible,” said Daniel-not-Danielle.

Glob and Daniel-not-Danielle were openly staring at a boy who was walking—no, sauntering—toward them. Even at a distance,
there was no mistaking him for anybody else at school. Instead of jeans and a T-shirt, he wore a striped suit and a
bowtie, and instead of a backpack, he carried a briefcase, giving the impression of a dapper businessman rather than a middle-school
student. Sunlight illuminated his golden curls and created bright sparkles in the large glass lens that covered his left eye.

“It’s not impossible. Anybody can sit here,” said Max-Ernest stubbornly, although he knew what Daniel-not-Danielle meant.
“Besides, it’s always possible he’s really allergic to nuts,” he added.
^*

“What’s that over his eye? Is it a magnifying glass or something? Maybe we can use it to light a fire,” said Glob excitedly.