Tub dropped his body onto the edge of his bed. He prodded with a toe at the chicken wire and lawn gnomes. Bits of cat fur hung in the air. His lips moved silently as he calculated the deaths. It added up to one big problem with Grandma; he’d have to come up with a hell of an excuse, and I didn’t have time to help.
“Sorry, Tub,” I said. “I didn’t mean to—”
“Just get out, Mr. Trollhunter.” He sunk his face into his hands. “Grandma wakes up early on Mondays.”
Jack stood at the far edge of the living room, staring through his goggles at the altar above our electric fireplace. He panned slowly across his own school photos, examined his milk carton portrait, and lingered over a shot of him and his brother with their arms wrapped around each other in a sandbox. I watched from the dark hallway outside my room, afraid to interrupt.
Blinky sidled up alongside me, the heat of his slime warming my cold skin. Together he and I had cleared out my closet so that he would be able to crouch within it during the day, covered with a sheet from the linen closet. He was concerned about the imminent dawn, yet took a moment to speak of Jack.
“Tact, courtesy, patience,” Blinky said softly. “These qualities are as foreign to your uncle now as were our troll ways during his first season underground. Even the scantest of aboveground scents, like those of blossoming flowers or baking bread, odors which I understand are comforts to your kind, reduce poor Jack to trembling. Why do you think he wears his mask, even here?”
“He could come back,” I said. “We could adopt him or something.”
“Would you adopt a wild animal and expect anything else than to be bit? Jack has become a creature of rock, mud, cave, and sewage, far more at home within our glorious squalor than in your rudely lit land of sharp corners and stultifying sterility. You have read the human fable of Never Never Land? So is the troll world to Jack. The accomplishments so treasured by humans are rituals of which Jack shall never partake. There will be no school graduations. There will be no first kiss. There will be no driving a car. There will be no family. Being denied this has created within Jack a great rage; that is no secret to anyone who has seen the business end of his blade. However, it is a useful rage. He would not be the warrior he is without it. He knows this and has accepted it. A tragedy, to be sure, but a necessary one.”
Blinky left my side to tuck himself within the safe confines of the closet.
In my bedroom I kicked off my shoes and ripped my arms from my hoodie. I felt something in the pocket and withdrew a crumpled piece of paper. It was the flyer of the missing little girl with purple glasses. I looked at it for a while, thinking of the changelings, the rust trolls, and all the other beasts amassing for invasion.
I returned to the living room. Sunlight was beginning to leak through the cracks of the fortress, making it obvious that Jack was no longer there. I felt a flash of concern before noticing Dad’s bedroom door was ajar. Then I felt even greater concern, hurried over, and inserted my head.
Jack was standing over the bed, looking down in a posture of heartbroken wonderment at the wrinkled old man, once upon a time a little boy called “Jimbo.” He reached out with a tentative hand to stroke his brother’s face, but stopped when he remembered that his fingers were covered with sharp tacks. Jack’s goggles fogged over.
Dad’s body made a somnambulant jerk. Something quivered in his throat.
Jack had no problem grabbing me with those sharp gloves.
“The schmoof,” he said. “You won’t want to see this part.”
Together we stood in the living room watching a peach glow paint the walls and ceilings. It was Monday morning. That meant work for Dad, school for me. School—how could I face those bland hallways and ignorant faces knowing what I knew now? It seemed a century ago when Tub and I had been trash-compacted in lockers, fallen from gymnasium ropes, and rolled around in a parking lot to evade the bouncing ball of Steve Jorgensen-Warner.
“There’s an attic,” I said. “Dad hardly ever uses it. You could hide there.”
“No.”
“Or maybe the garage? We’d just have to cover you up with—”
Dad yawned from his room.
Jack looked at Dad’s door with more fear than he showed when facing a troll battalion.
“I’ll be back at midnight,” he said.
“You can’t go back to your cave. The rust trolls—”
“I’m a boy.” He said it like he was trying to convince himself of the fact. “I’m not going to turn to stone. Just give me some of your clothes and I’ll wander around town. Sit on a park bench. Like a kid. Just like a regular kid.”
“Fine,” I said. “But this isn’t 1969. Adults see a thirteen-year-old kid by himself, they may ask questions or call the—”
“I can take care of myself.” He snapped his gloved fingers. “Clothes. Now.”
Pinkton was all over me about neglecting my homework. Homework? I tried to recall the meaning of the word as she stood at my desk and ranted while the rest of the class crunched the numbers on the board. She warned me again about the big test on Friday and how my fate hung in the balance. I looked penitent but it was an act my body remembered from past conflicts. My eyes were looking past Pinkton at the rest of the classroom.
There were two empty desks.
It meant nothing. I knew that. A bug was going around. Wasn’t there always a bug? Between classes I focused on the festival decorations to avoid noticing banks of lockers that may or may not have the right number of students opening them. There was a single empty desk in biology. Nothing strange about that. Two people were absent from American lit. Hardly unusual. I considered talking to Tub before gym class to get a second opinion, but he dressed with atypical speed. He didn’t just look angry, he looked exhausted. That stiff black hair he pulled from his braces and brushed off his clothes was familiar.
Later I called out to Tub in the hall but was drowned out by a throng of cheerleaders shilling for Steve Smackers. Principal Cole had purchased a warehouse full of these cheap noisemakers two years before to offset a deficit in the sports budget (plans for that new jumbotron might have had something to do with it). Constructed from hard foam and painted in Saint B. red and white, each set was made up of two paddles that made a deafening noise when slapped together. They were beyond irritating, and local football fans took to them like monkeys to poop. With Steve’s rise as a star, they had been dubbed “Steve Smackers”—pretty savvy marketing for pieces of crap that went for fifteen bucks a pop.
It was almost by accident that I found myself at play practice after school. I had meant to rush home to check on Blinky when my eyes fell upon a series of Shakespeare on the Fifty-Yard Line posters that led me to the auditorium, the only place unplagued by Steve Smackers. Mrs. Leach was holding court before the gaggle of actors, carrying on about what an insane tradition this was, and how no one could expect halfway decent Shakespeare with only a week of rehearsal. The kids all stared at her in alarm—what, exactly, had they signed up for?—until she wore herself out, clapped her hands, and said that we’d begin with act 1, scene 1, though we’d skip the intro, since both our Sampson and Gregory were absent.
Nobody but me found that ominous.
The first big event was the duel between Benvolio and Tybalt. Benvolio, played by a flamboyant theater guy named Jasper, and Tybalt, played by a heavy-metal kid named Frank, made for pretty believable foes until the fencing foils were drawn. Jasper, having been in a dozen productions, improvised each thrust and parry with comical exaggeration, while Frank, in his first role, whipped his foil around like he was swatting flies, losing it more than once in the front row of seats.
Mrs. Leach shouted instructions to make the fight simpler, shorter, and less hazardous for the audience. Still, Benvolio and Tybalt continued to lose control of their foils and land on their asses, and each time they fell our over-eager Lord Capulet shouted his big line: “What noise is this? Give me my long-sword, ho!”
Kids were snickering
. Mrs. Leach was in despair. Both fighters were bruised and winded. Something had to be done.
Licking cool-ranch flavoring from her fingers and swigging from a can of grape soda, Claire traipsed out between the duelists. She was a vision of Juliet seen through a steam-punk lens, clad in black flight pants rolled up to midshin that exposed six inches of skin before her combat boots took over. Her herringbone pea coat was unbuttoned, revealing brown suspenders that dangled from her hips. Bracelets made of multicolored electrical cable gathered at her wrists, and dual ponytails intertwined to slap at her back like the supply hoses of an oxygen mask. Her round cheeks were bunched into one of her mirthful smirks.
For the first time that day, I did not think of trolls.
“Your weapon, gentle Benvolio,” she said, holding out her hand.
Jasper shrugged and turned over his foil. Claire bounced it in her palm, testing its weight.
“Sufficient.”
The blade whirled through the air in a figure eight, then another. Her ponytails danced.
“Adequate.”
Her boots hopped to their rubber toes and she scuttled forward and back, the foil whirling through the air like a lasso, above her head, at her sides, as low as the floor.
“Tolerable.”
Claire extended her weapon and playfully tapped the foil held between Frank’s hands. He gulped and extended it as far from his body as he could. That was when all sense of reality went flying out the window and Claire Fontaine became a warrior goddess. With her blade whistling, she struck Frank’s weapon from six different angles, each of them executed with an extravagant form that would look good even from the cheap seats. Between blows, she called out bits of advice.
“Circular attacks! Easier to follow the action!”
Frank grimaced and held to his sword for dear life.
“Footwork! Three steps, Benvolio! Three steps, Tybalt!”
Jasper watched her feet, making frantic mental notes.
“Act! This is a play! Recoil from the blows, gents!”
I was as slack-jawed as the rest. She choreographed a routine right then and there, and made it so believable and comprehensible that the whole cast was dying for a go at it. At last she disarmed Frank with a twist of her wrist. His foil went clattering to the stage, and Claire lowered her own. She exhaled upward, blowing loosened strands of hair from her sweaty forehead. She saluted Frank with her can of soda and took a drink. Not a drop had been spilled. Everyone was hushed until Lord Capulet remembered his favorite line.
“What noise is this? Give me my long-sword, ho!”
The applause thundered, from me louder than anyone. The gleam in Mrs. Leach’s eye betrayed a rogue hope that she might just pull this off. The noise died out until a single clapping sound continued from somewhere in the auditorium aisle. We all turned to look, shading our eyes from the stage lights. The clapping had a remarkable consistency, as if it might continue in that manner until it drove you mad. In fact, it wasn’t clapping at all.
“Marvelous.” Steve Jorgensen-Warner kept bouncing his ball. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Claire blushed and pointed the toes of her boots together as if self-conscious about her exposed calves.
“Lessons,” she said. “Mum and Da had me in fencing for six years.”
“I’m so glad they did,” Steve said. “It’s just magnificent.”
The drama dorks were breathless, caught off guard by this intrusion of flirting into their after-school geekery. Only Mrs. Leach frowned. She didn’t trust a sportsman infiltrating her hallowed sanctuary.
“Can we help you, Mr. Jorgensen-Warner?”
Steve flashed his movie-star grin. With feet trained on the court and field, he took the stage steps in three agile jumps, the ball smacking upon each step. Thespians, not the most coordinated bunch, murmured in appreciation. Claire’s eyes were on the star athlete the whole time.
“There’s a bit of an emergency with my grades.” Steve faked an abashed smile. “Coach said there’s a point system I can use to boost my average so I can play on Friday. Geez, everybody is counting on me to play. The whole town, seems like. Anyway, Coach gave me three options.”
He took the ball under his arm and removed a folded piece of paper from his back pocket. Mrs. Leach took it, flapped it like a fan until it opened, and read it aloud.
“A: Trigonometry Contest. B: Build a Solar Panel Science Project. C: Theater Understudy.”
“Coach said it was like being on the bench. I swear I won’t get in the way. I just want to help out however I can.”
Rarely in life does one get to witness such expertise in disarming a hostile adult. Few teachers at Saint B. could rival Mrs. Leach in day-to-day bitterness, and yet she melted right there before our disbelieving eyes. She folded the note and put it in her pocket. What, was it going into her personal scrapbook?
“Of course, Steve, we’d be happy to have you. It never hurts to have understudies. Your timing is perfect, actually. We have to get our Romeo into costuming. Jim, lend Steve your script for the balcony scene while we get you fitted.”
So went the cruel twist of fate that led to Steve Jorgensen-Warner exchanging romantic verse with Claire Fontaine, high up in the balcony set, while I stood in a side room wiggling into a blouse, a pair of tights, and a peplum skirt as two student costumers pinched me in places I would have preferred to go unpinched and sighed about how they’d need to find some heels to offset my shortness. Was I good at walking in heels? They wanted to know. I nodded—sure, sure, anything to speed through this debacle.
From the stage I could hear the interplay of Claire and Steve’s sweet nothings. Claire, of course, staggered everyone with her tranquility and poignancy. Infinitely more surprising was Steve, who bashed through speeches the same way he bashed through defensive lines. His reading exuded utter confidence, the quality most lacking in high school actors. Even his mispronunciations were forceful—it was his way or the highway, and everyone loved it.
“Very nice,” Mrs. Leach said. “How do you have this memorized already?”
“No big deal,” Steve replied. “Comes from memorizing sports plays, I guess.”
“Well, it’s very impressive. Keep going.”
This was getting out of hand. I had to get in there, and fast, before Steve stole the part right from under me. The laces on my heels were only halfway tied before I stumbled out beneath the bewildering glare of the stage lights.
“I’m ready!” I announced.
Giggles erupted from all sides. I kept charging across the stage even as I began to suspect that my purple skirt and silver tights didn’t cast me in the best light when compared with Steve Jorgensen-Warner, who looked rather rakish in blue jeans and a shirt—definitively not a blouse—opened to the third button. He dribbled the ball casually with his left hand.
“Let’s just have Steve finish,” Mrs. Leach said.
Something was wrong with my feet. I couldn’t stop my momentum.
“No, it’s okay,” I said. “I got this, I’m ready to—”
My high-heeled ankles flopped to the side and I rammed into Benvolio and Tybalt, both of whom lost their foils; seconds later my right elbow socked the ear of Friar John and my flailing left hand grabbed one of Lady Montague’s breasts. By the time she screamed, I was careening out of control. Steve, watching me in bemusement, and Claire, looking down at me from the parapet, were but blurry impressions before I went headfirst into the balcony set.
You wouldn’t think a human head could punch through plywood, but that’s what happened. The base of the set spun halfway around and I heard a board crack. In seconds the entire thing was groaning and folding shut like a suitcase. I pushed against the plywood, unplugging myself from the collapsing wood just in time to see the set pitch toward the orchestra pit.
Like someone caught in a burning building, Claire kicked through the railing of her balcony and leapt for the safety of the stage. I think in that moment we all imagined her beautiful
body being hopelessly mangled. But Steve stood there as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening. He adjusted his body to catch her as he had caught endless types of passes in his career, and she swung around in his grip like a ballroom dancer, her arms naturally clasped behind his neck.
There was a final smash as the balcony crumpled to lumber and scattered across the pit.
Everyone stood silent, blinking and panting.
Mrs. Leach knocked a fist to her chest as if beating back cardiac arrest.
Claire looked up at Steve, eyes wide and thankful.
Steve grinned.
My heart sunk.
He was still bouncing the ball with his left hand.
“What noise is this?” Lord Capulet said. “Give me my long-sword, ho!”
Claire laughed the only way she knew how. Steve, understandably surprised by her volume, held her more tightly. Relieved guffaws tore through the assembled cast and crew, and they hung upon each other, delighted survivors of an event soon to go down in Saint B. Theater Department lore.
Roughly twelve years later, from the feel of it, rehearsal ended. I told myself that my foibles had been for the best: trollhunters had no time for school, much less extracurriculars. I told myself to forget about it, go home, hunt trolls, come back the next day, and tell Mrs. Leach first thing that I was quitting.
Removing a pair of tights was a new challenge for me, and by the time I returned to the auditorium I was the only one left. I slipped through the side exit and, once outside, watched Steve suit up and jog across the football field beneath the dead black rectangle of the jumbotron, while the practicing pom-pom squad clacked their Steve Smackers in appreciation. It left me numb. Steve was everything and he had everything. Not only was I no one, but I had no one—not Claire, not Tub, not Dad. The only path forward was to give myself fully to the night.