“Thank you, sir,” Brendon said. As he was watching the man in front of him, he thought how incredibly old he must be to have actually been a principal here when his mother was a student.
“I think we’ll put you in Ms. Arnold’s room,” Mr. Manzi said. “That’s a good, solid fourth-grade class. Your mother says this will be your first experience in public school. I hope you’ll come to me if you have any problems.”
“Thank you, sir,” Brendon said. He was watching the red-haired boy. The boy was standing very still, and he was wiggling one of his ears. Just one. The right one. Every time Mr. Manzi spoke, the boy’s ear would move up and down in time to the words.
“Greg Russo is headed for Ms. Arnold’s room now,” Mr. Manzi continued. He turned to the boy, whose ear immediately stopped moving. “Greg, I want you to take Brendon with you and show him where the classroom is. And as for you, I don’t want to see you in here again for misconduct. We are not going to go through another year like last year. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir,” the boy said in exactly the same tone as Brendon. He smiled politely, exactly as Brendon had, except that he wasn’t able to make a dimple in his cheek.
“I’m going to have to give a full report of this to your father,” Mr. Manzi said sternly. “Amy’s dress will have to be paid for. I hope your father finds some way for you to work off the cost of replacing it.”
“Thank you, sir,” Greg said. “Can I go now, sir?”
“You may,” Mr. Manzi said. “It was nice meeting you, Brendon. Give my best to your mother. I hope you like it here at Palmelo Elementary.”
“Thank you, sir,” Brendon said, making his voice just like Greg’s voice trying to sound like Brendon’s voice. He even tried to wiggle his ear, but nothing happened. Doing that was more difficult than it appeared.
Once out in the hall, Greg’s politeness fell off him like an unwanted jacket.
“Brenda,” he said. “What kind of name is that—Brenda? It’s a girl’s name. Are you a girl?”
“The name’s Brendon,” Brendon corrected him. “It’s an Irish name. I’m named after my dad, Richard Brendon Garrett. I’m definitely not a girl. Are you crazy or something?”
“Well, you’ve got a girl’s name,” Greg said. “And you look like a girl, so pretty and sweet with fluffy hair and dimples. Gosh, Brenda, I bet you are a girl and just don’t know it. I bet your parents wanted a boy, so they started putting boys’ clothes on you the day you were born and they always told you that you were a boy, so now you even believe it yourself.”
“You really are crazy!” The thought was such a horrible one that Brendon was all but speechless.
“It happens to people all the time,” Greg said. “There’s a name for it—trans—trans—oh, I forget—it’s trans-something-or-other. My dad’s a psychiatrist. He knows all about things like that.”
“For a psychiatrist, he’s sure got a crazy son,” Brendon said hotly. “You try calling me Brenda one more time and I’ll dig out all those freckles of yours with a spoon and make you eat them. Then you’ll be sick and vomit all over the hall.”
It was a fantastic reply, and Greg nodded, looking impressed. Then he said, “Brenda.”
“What did you call me?” Brendon asked hopefully.
His hands at his sides were already made into fists and were starting to itch with eagerness. He saw Greg glance at them and watched his eyes brighten with the same anticipation.
Automatically they both looked up and down the hall. The door to the office was closed and the crowd of students had diminished, although there were still a number of people wandering up and down looking for room numbers.
“Brenda,” Greg said. “Sweet little girly Brenda. Did your mommy come with you, Brenda? Don’t tell me she let her little darling come to school all by herself?”
“Okay, that’s it,” Brendon said, and he punched. It was a tentative punch, a thumping kind of blow such as he might have given Nancy. It landed on Greg’s chest with a plopping sound.
“You even fight like a girl!” said Greg, and he threw his own fist out. It came crashing into Brendon with the speed and power of a bullet. The force of it sent him reeling backward against the wall.
He leaned there for a moment, gasping for breath, and then the glory of it hit him. This was really, honestly going to be a fight!
With a shout he threw himself onto the red-haired boy, both fists flailing. He was hardly conscious of the blows that came back on him, so intent was he upon the ones he himself was delivering. He felt Greg’s fist strike against his cheekbone, and he brought his own knuckles hard into something soft. He heard his opponent gasp, and then he felt a knee come hard into his stomach. He doubled over, and as he went down he grabbed for Greg’s knees and brought him down, too.
Twisting and punching and kicking, they rolled across the floor.
“Boys! Boys! Stop this immediately!” a woman’s voice was crying to them.
Somewhere other voices were shouting. Somebody said, “Run get the principal, quick, before they kill each other!”
Brendon felt a sharp pain as Greg’s fist hit his nose, and he threw himself over, twisting with all his strength to get on top. He saw Greg’s ear in front of his face and wondered if it would be fair to bite. Then he thought of Nancy—that was the kind of fighting she would do—so he let the ear go by and punched Greg’s ribs with his elbow instead.
“Greg! Brendon! Break it up this minute!” Another voice rang out close behind them. A man’s voice.
A hand gripped Brendon’s collar, and he felt himself being lifted upward. He managed to land one final blow as Greg slid out from beneath him, and he felt an answering kick on his shins.
A pretty brown-haired woman was dragging Greg to his feet. Brendon could see that her face was streaked with tears.
“I don’t know what happened!” she wailed. “It’s terrible, just terrible! Mr. Manzi, look at them! I heard the commotion right outside my door, and I opened it, and there they were, trying to kill each other!”
“It’s all right, Ms. Arnold. I don’t think either of them is badly hurt.” Mr. Manzi turned Brendon around so that he could look at him. “Will you two boys tell me what this is all about? You just met each other in my office five minutes ago. What could you find to fight about in that short a time?”
“I don’t know, sir,” Greg said. He looked terrible. His shirt was torn half off his shoulder, and his lip was bleeding, and there was a black bruise all around his left eye.
“You don’t know? Of course you know!” Mr. Manzi turned to Brendon. “What happened, Brendon? I’m sure you weren’t the one to start this.”
“I don’t know, sir,” Brendon said. He reached up and touched his nose to see if it might be broken. There was blood coming out of it, but the bone seemed to be all right.
“I’m very disappointed in you, Brendon.” Mr. Manzi sounded bewildered. “I can’t believe Liz Burke’s son would act like this. As for you, Greg, you got your warning this morning. This is going to mean real punishment. An hour after school every day for a week.”
“Yes, sir,” Greg said. “Thank you, sir. Can we go into Ms. Arnold’s room now, sir?”
“You mean, they’re both going to be in my room?” Ms. Arnold’s face turned pale. “But, Mr. Manzi, what will I do if they’re at each other like this every day? Shouldn’t we separate them, just for the sake of safety?”
Greg grinned at Brendon. The eye with the bruise around it was half closed now.
“You don’t have to worry about Bren and me, Ms. Arnold,” he said. “Bren and me were just letting off some steam. Actually, we’re friends.”
Brendon grinned back. The grin hurt on both sides at the place where his mouth was attached to his face.
“I want to be in Ms. Arnold’s room,” he said. He felt amazing. He felt better than amazing.
As he and Greg followed Ms. Arnold into the room, he tried again to wiggle his right ear.
The schoo
l decided to place Kirby and Nancy into different classes, even though they were taking all the same subjects. The woman in the office told them it would be “less distracting” if they were separated.
“I hope we at least get the same homework assignments,” Kirby said. “Then we can each do half of them. That will give me a lot more time for practice.”
Nancy could not restrain a sigh of exasperation. Dancing was all that Kirby could talk or think about. Ever since she had started her lessons at the Vilar Dance Studio, she seemed to have stepped into another world. She rose in the morning an hour early in order to do her exercises before breakfast, and she rushed out of the building after school without even stopping at her locker so she could catch a bus to the dance studio.
At home she talked about “the girls in class,” but it was her ballet class she meant, not her classes at school. To Nancy it sometimes seemed that in less than a month’s time she had lost not only a father but a sister as well.
School may not have been important to Kirby, but it was very important to Nancy. She was a good student and spent time on her studies. Her mother had been an excellent tutor, and her vast background of travel plus her natural love of reading had given her a far better fund of knowledge than that of most of her classmates. She did her assignments quickly and easily and knew in her own mind that she probably could have skipped a grade if it hadn’t meant passing up Kirby, which would have been unthinkable.
Still, with all her ability as a student, Nancy found herself completely lost in the swirl of student life. She had never known many other young people, and now suddenly she found herself thrust in a group that, although they were her same age, looked a great deal older. The boys stood a head taller than she, and the girls were beginning to fill out into feminine curves and all wore makeup. Beside them, Nancy felt like a stick.
“Well, you must have skipped a few grades,” a teacher named Ms. Green had said to her the first day, regarding her with doubt. “Are you taking all your classes at the high school, dear?”
“I didn’t skip any grades,” Nancy said, flushing scarlet. “I’m a freshman.”
Every face in the room turned to inspect her curiously, and she felt like shrinking into a ball and rolling beneath the desk.
After class, the boy who sat behind her gave her hair a tug as he followed her down the aisle.
“You’d better be nice to old Green Bag,” he said teasingly, “or she’ll send you back to kindergarten.”
Nancy didn’t even bother to glance at him. The tone of his voice reminded her of Brendon’s.
“Get your filthy hand out of my hair,” she hissed back in her most irritated-sister voice.
The boy never bothered to speak to her again. In fact, as the weeks went by, Nancy found that very few students made an effort to stop and talk to her. A few of the girls called “Hi” in the hallways, and there was one plump girl in her English class who always wanted to borrow paper. Aside from this, she felt as though she were invisible to everybody. They ran in cliques, since many of them had known one another since kindergarten, and they seemed to look straight through her without seeing her at all.
At lunch periods, she and Kirby sat together. This wasn’t very satisfactory because most of the time Kirby’s mind was a million miles away. Kirby could have had dozens of friends if she had wanted them. There was something about her soft prettiness and the dreamy look of her eyes that had the boys jostling and shoving one another in order to stand next to her in the cafeteria line. But Kirby did not seem to notice or to think about popularity one way or another. She carried her tray from the serving counter without looking to right or left and sat with a little smile on her lips, mentally rehearsing the steps of the latest dance routine while she ate a dainty lunch of cottage cheese and tuna.
Bored with no one to talk to, Nancy took up her old habit of reaching with her mind to the places beyond her. She could always find her mother; that was never any problem. Elizabeth had taken a job at the Palmelo Library, and when Nancy closed her eyes and stared at the inside of her lids, she could see her there, helping people at the desk or stacking books on the shelves.
Their mother’s decision to immediately go to work had come as a great surprise.
“I always used to dream about being a librarian someday,” she told them one night at dinner. “I didn’t go to college, so that was impossible. But now, believe it or not, there’s an opening for an assistant in the children’s room of the library, and it doesn’t require a college degree. Can you imagine having your very first job at my age?!”
“I think it’s cool,” Kirby said. “But won’t you be kind of bored working in the children’s room? Wouldn’t it be more fun in the research section or something like that?”
“Heavens, no,” Elizabeth said. “Facts are your father’s area, not mine. I’d love to handle the books for children. I’m an expert on all the old fairy tales. I adored them when I was little, and in the children’s room I’ll get to hold a regular story hour for preschoolers. Imagine being the one to give them their first introduction to fantasy and magic!”
“Magic!” Brendon exclaimed in disgust. “That’s baby stuff. There isn’t any such thing.”
“Isn’t there?” Elizabeth looked thoughtful. “I wonder. My mother was a highly educated person, but she believed in magic. She used to tell me there were people, some very special people in this world, blessed with the gift. I used to think—” She paused.
“What?” Nancy asked her.
“It sounds silly, I know—but I used to believe that my own mother might be one of those people. She had a way of knowing things—things that people never told her. It seemed sometimes as though she could almost make things happen. Did I ever tell you that she knew about Brendon?”
“About me?” Brendon was intrigued despite himself. “How could she know anything about me? I wasn’t born until after she died.”
“That’s what was so strange,” Elizabeth said. “Your grandmother told me once that she was going to have a grandson. She said he would be very much like his father, except he would have something his father didn’t have. A special gift. And I can’t even remember what it was. She was so old then, and so ill, that she often rambled when she talked. I didn’t always listen closely.”
“I wish she’d been right,” Brendon said ruefully. “I wish she’d given me a talent for flying. Then I could hang in the air over people’s heads and drop things on them.”
“That’s a stupid thing to want,” Nancy said. “Listen to him, Mom! Ever since he started hanging out with that Russo kid he’s been saying these violent things. I bet he means it, too. He would drop things—rocks and bricks!”
“And water bombs,” Brendon said happily. “Greg knows how to make these cool water bombs. He fills them with ink. He’s great with ink.”
“See, Mom!” Nancy squealed. “Can’t you do something about him?”
“He’s only teasing, dear,” Elizabeth said gently. “Boys always tease. Haven’t you figured that out yet?” She never was willing to admit that Brendon was a delinquent.
So now in the daytime, Elizabeth could be found behind a desk at the public library—and at the elementary school, Nancy could sometimes see Brendon, thumping through the halls, poking people. She didn’t spend much time looking at Brendon.
Many times she tried to reach out to her father, but she was never able to find him. That one time she had succeeded, but since then he seemed to have drawn further and further away.
He e-mailed them fairly often—long, interesting letters telling of the places he was seeing and the things he was doing. He was photographing a war—“a tiny war,” he wrote, “between little unimportant territories, but it’s not unimportant to the people who are getting shot. They suffer just as much as if it were a large war with all kinds of great decisions at stake.”
“Do you think he misses us?” Nancy asked one night.
“I don’t know, dear,” her mother answered. “He’s
so involved, I doubt that he has time right now to miss anyone. But I do know that he loves you.”
Do you miss him? Nancy wanted to ask, but she did not do so. Something in her mother’s eyes stopped her.
The day of Ms. Green’s social studies test, Nancy had been trying to reach her father. Kirby was late getting to the lunchroom, and Nancy sat by herself at the end of one of the tables, chewing her sandwich and reaching out with her mind. She peeked at her mother, who was checking out books to a friend of hers, and even looked in on Brendon, who was doing arithmetic in long, sloppy columns and chewing gum. Kirby rushed up at last, dumping her books onto the table.
“A pop quiz!” she said. “I just hate that woman! I didn’t even have time last night to read the chapter!”
“You had time for your practicing,” Nancy said. “You bounced around the bedroom for an hour and a half.”
“Well, sure,” Kirby conceded. “That’s different. That’s important.” She collapsed onto the bench and pulled out a carrot stick. “They weren’t very hard questions. I just hadn’t read the stuff. You shouldn’t have any trouble with them.”
“I never do with social studies,” Nancy said. “But Ms. Green makes me nervous. She hasn’t liked me from day one.” She turned to look at Kirby and saw that she was already thinking about her dancing. They finished lunch in silence.
It was no surprise, of course, to walk into social studies class after the bell rang and find the pop quiz there waiting for her.
“Unexpected tests are one of the few ways to discover how well a class is keeping up in a subject,” Ms. Green informed them. “I put you on your honor not to divulge the questions to any of your friends in the classes that come later.”
Nancy opened her notebook and fished in her book bag for a pen. There was nothing frightening to her about a quiz in geography, no matter how much of a surprise it was. The unit they were studying was about Europe, and the European continent was as familiar to her as her own backyard. She had read the unit chapter by chapter during the first week of school, simply for pleasure. Now she straightened in her seat, waiting for the first question.