Shadows

CHAPTER 3

SCHOOL STARTED SIX WEEKS AND THREE DAYS after the wedding—and nine days after the last message I took out to the shed. I never thought I’d be glad about the start of a school year but nobody was going to argue with me that I had to go to school and any break was better than endlessly trying to figure out where the line was I had to walk at home. All lines were obscured by shadows.

At least I had Mongo. He liked everybody, including Val, but I was always his first choice. I might have had Bella and Jonesie too but I thought Mom would probably notice if I tried to smuggle a wolfhound and a Staffie cross the size of an ice-cream van upstairs to my room as well as Mongo. (Not to mention the dog food. Bella didn’t actually eat all that much. Jonesie was an industrial-strength vacuum cleaner.)

The first day of school I stuffed my new paper notebooks and my old ’top in my knapsack and wished I was on my way to the shelter. I’d thought more than once this summer about trying to convince Clare to take me on full time and then I could not bother to finish high school, but I knew she’d tell me to come back when I had my first PhD and she’d be happy to hire me at minimum wage (she had about six PhDs in stuff like molecular biology, very useful for cleaning kennels), and that Mom would have kittens if I tried. No, pterodactyls. But if I lived at the shelter (there was a sort of staff apartment over Clare’s office: it was pretty awful, but I wouldn’t have to worry about keeping Mongo) it would solve brooding about living under the same roof as an illegal magic user bakemono—monster.

I knew that the stuff they teach you in school about magical hygiene and how all magicians are psychopaths is just grown-up nonsense like if you never kiss anyone you won’t get pregnant (you have to wonder about adults sometimes; it’s not the kissing that does it). But some of the deep Newworld distrust of magic must be for good reason or why did they go to so much trouble neutralizing the genes for magic in my grandmother’s day? How was I supposed to know which was the little bit that was true? I worried a lot about Mom. She was married to the bakemono.

I hadn’t been sleeping too well since that last message to the shed. I kept thinking that I should go to Watchguard and rat on Val. They’d probably throw him out of the country. But it’s not like we’d go back to the way we were before—Mom would be totally miserable and I’d be the bad guy. And the idea of ratting out another human being—even Val—felt totally kusatta. Slime mold behavior. Toxic slime mold behavior. Especially ratting him out to Watchguard. Our local watch guys were mostly really nice, but they still sent their reports on to the big military Overwatch, and then if it was important Overwatch sent it to the niddles, NIDL, the National Invasion Defense League, and somewhere along the chain of command the sense of humor went out and the guns and zappers and the armored transport vehicles that looked ready to take on a galactic strike force came in.

I have a little trouble with authority anyway but when the army comes to town you get out of the way and that yanks my wiring. I don’t like big ugly guys who think they’re better than you are because they’ve got a cobey badge on their hats. (Cobey units are the elite of the up-themselves division. Yaaaaaawn. My uncle Darnel isn’t so much up himself, but he’s still a kind of a jerk.) Some state-level Watchguard gizmohead comes to every school once every year to give the standard lecture on reporting silverbugs and doing anything that a member of a cobey unit tells you to do and doing it fast. The major we’d had every year since I’d been in high school was so delighted to be himself that he could hardly stop smiling and throwing his chest out at us and stroking his medals and ribbons and the stuff on his uniform while he talked. (Jill said it was because the medals weren’t his, he’d hired them for the day from Central Costume.) I couldn’t hand anyone over to these bugsuckers, not even Val. I admit when I saw Val across the dinner table I wavered. But I didn’t waver long enough to do him (and Mom) any harm.

But I was getting short of sleep. Takahiro had taught me to make kami guardians out of paper, and I’d folded so many the last nine days, or rather nights, when I couldn’t sleep that every time I turned around or Mongo wagged his tail a few blew off wherever they were and fell on the floor. I had them along both windowsills and over the door to the hall and the closet door, and I’d run strings through more of them so I could tack them up near the ceiling and around the lampshade and anywhere else I could think of. I’d got pretty sharp at folding kami. There were different kinds of protective kami: earth, wind, sun, moon—and critters. I of course totally specialized in critters.

The first kami Takahiro had ever showed me how to fold was a fox—kitsune—and I’d adapted it so I could have a dog too, although it might have been a wolf. (Eventually I redesigned it further and created a border collie.) There were lots of others: badgers, otters, sika deer, cranes, doves, koi, hares, dragons. It was soothing, folding something familiar, over and over and over, and my stupid brain would settle down and everything would slow down and focus on the piece of paper in my hands, till I became Hands Folding Paper. I’m not sure I didn’t fall asleep like that sometimes. I probably slept better sitting up folding than I did lying down in bed. And sometimes when it was like I’d woken up to find that I was still folding paper I’d find that I’d folded something I didn’t recognize. I began to recognize it, though, because it always seemed to be the same thing: long, sinuous, with a big spiky crest on its head and neck and plates or feathers or something both down its back and along its belly. Unless the jags underneath were legs. I might have worried more about the legs except that I always felt better when I’d folded one of these things; they gave off a funny mix of both peace and strength. I could never do one when I was thinking about it though. I had to be in that Hands Folding Paper space, turn off, and let it take over.

When I picked up my knapsack for the first day of school, it weighed too much, of course, and as I dragged it across my desk about a dozen little paper critters headed for the floor. I don’t like leaving kami on the floor—it’s not polite—so I bundled them up and stuffed them in one of those useless little pockets knapsacks always have and ran (joltingly) downstairs, thinking that maybe I could stop at Porter’s for more origami paper on my way to the shelter that afternoon. (Another of Arnie’s virtues is that he doesn’t mind kept-under-ruthless-control dogs in his store. He’s even been known to have dog biscuits under the cash terminal.) I could hear Jill’s (latest) car crunching on the gravel of our driveway as I chugged my coffee. Mongo had already guessed what his early walk and my unusual level of activity meant and was in tragic mode.

“Don’t eat anything I wouldn’t eat,” I said to him. Mom was in the shower and Val and Ran were still asleep. At least I didn’t have to say any complicated good-byes on the first morning of my senior year. I kind of felt that if Val had wished me a good year I’d have a bad one. No, wait, my knapsack was full of kami. They’d protect me. Maybe I should get a kami tattoo. Speaking of things that would give Mom pterodactyls.

If you’re asking me, school pretty much sucks. It wasn’t going to suck less because it was our last year, except that we could finally see the end of it. But a year was still a long time. And it wasn’t the end because we were supposed to go to college after. I wasn’t bright enough or didn’t take tests well enough (you choose) so I hadn’t been offered any scholarships that would have made it possible for me to go away to school. I’d been thinking I’d go to Runyon, which was near enough I could commute from home, and Dad had gone there, which didn’t mean they had to take me but it helped. I could just about do it by bus, but I was—had been—trying to rewire the board for enough graduation money that with the money I earned at the shelter I could buy some kind of car. Jill’s brothers would find me a cheap one that ran. But now . . . there was no way I was going to live another four years at home. With Val.

I also thought, what if someone else finds out he’s a magic user? (Gods’ holy engines. What if he’s a magician. No. Too gruesome to consider. Also supposedly the anti-cobey boxes wired in all over the landscape would pick up magic use of that level. Since there wasn’t supposed to be any serious magic or magicians in Newworld I’m not sure how they thought they knew this, or why it was supposed to be a good idea to waste the tech on something that didn’t exist.) But even if she didn’t have to hate her own daughter Mom would still be miserable if they took him away. And what if they decided Mom had been damaged or short-wired somehow? What about Ran and me? If we got put into care . . . I’d be eighteen next month. Maybe they’d let me be Ran’s guardian. Maybe Mongo would find a hundred gazillion dollars under a tree and I could bribe someone to leave Mom alone. Maybe they just wouldn’t find out.

Did Mom know? How could she not know? Was I supposed to tell her? What was I supposed to tell her? But she knew I hated Val—wouldn’t she think I was making stuff up to be a creepazoid? She obviously didn’t see the shadows and I didn’t suppose Val kept a jar of powdered dragon’s blood on his shelf (at least not with a label on it) or a spell book written on human skin or anything. (Could you tell human from any other vellum? And what did spells look like? If it was in Orzaskani it might look like a cookbook. Boiled Rival Magician. Manticore Liver Pâté.)

What had Val told her about what happened nine days ago? I had thought things around home this last week were a bit lower watt than they had been with all the newlywed la-la-la stuff going on, but maybe that was everybody trying to avoid me. I’d been trying to make this as easy as possible for the last six weeks and three days with the result that I was beginning to feel as if I might as well go live with strangers, because I was already.

“Chotto, Mags, lighten up,” said Jill. “This is our last year. All we have to do is not fail.” Jill had accepted a place with enough of a scholarship that she could afford to go. I didn’t want to get a job waiting tables—which paid better than the shelter: everything paid better than the shelter—and a horrible little studio apartment with cockroaches and two-hundred-year-old clanking radiators and a toilet that dripped all night and a No Pets rule so I’d be smuggling Mongo in under my coat, which would not be fun for either of us.

I had to let Runyon know what I was doing by the end of September. I didn’t know what I was doing.

“Easy for you to say, oni face,” I said. Oni are the bad spirits like kami are the good ones.

“Oni butt,” said Jill. “Your problem is that you won’t get off yours except for something with four legs and fur.”

Jill parked and we strolled toward the main entrance. Most of the other students were smiling and talking animatedly about the summer (some of them more convincingly than others). I heard a lot of people saying stuff about Longiron and Hyderabad and the silverbug mobs. There were a few faces reflecting the range from resignation to dread. I figured I fit into that group. Jill got me by the arm and hustled me, shouting at the people we knew: “Hey, Becky-Ashley-Ryan-Keisha-Dena-Zach-Hadar-Hanif-Jamie-Laura”—she faltered—“Eddie-Jason-Steph. How was your summer? How many silverbugs did you step on? Are you ready to torture Mr. Grass-ass this year?” Mr. Garcia was head of the history department and deserved to be tortured. Jill took Mr. Garcia personally because history was her favorite subject.

We’d seen all of them some time over the summer except Ashley, who’d been with her dad in Spain. “Hey,” she said to me. “I hear your mom’s remarried.”

I stiffened without meaning to—I was going to have to get used to this question—but before I thought of something to say, Ashley wrinkled her nose and said, “Sorry. That bad? I sympathize.” She didn’t like her stepdad either, but he was a super-plugged-in, rubber-soled type, a mechanical engineer who stopped people from building bridges that would fall down. And her dad was still alive, even if he was in Spain.

The first bell rang, and we moved toward the doors, the talkers doing the talking and the listeners doing the listening. I was a listener. Today Jill was talking as if she was going to get a prize if she said a million words before homeroom. Her chin was a little too far up and her hands were making gestures that were a little too large. I glanced at Eddie. He didn’t look bothered. He was talking to Genevra, who was new this year; she’d moved in during the summer, near Jill. Maybe he’d met her there. Genevra was listening with her tongue not quite hanging out. Eddie could be very charming. Dreeping jerk.

I trailed behind a little, thinking about what I was going to say the next time someone asked me about Val. Ashley and Keisha were yakking away beside me. I glanced up when someone passed close by my other side.

I had to look up a long way. I’m not short, but Takahiro is majorly tall. He’s also majorly quiet most of the time. He’d grown up in Japan but when his mom died he was shipped over here to live with his dad. The story was that he didn’t know any English when he arrived but his dad enrolled him here anyway and told him to figure it out. Thanks, Dad. Nobody I knew had ever met his dad—he never came to any of the school stuff parents were invited to—and they lived in a gigantic house on the far side of town almost nobody ever saw either. I’d been home with Taks a few times so I could vouch for the fact that it existed and was enormous—and was full of Farworld art and silence. The only other person who lived there was Kay, the housekeeper. I’d met Kay. Kay was one of these people who thought food was always the answer. The way Taks ate, she was probably right. But I’d never met his dad, who traveled a lot, buying stuff for museums and then telling them how to install it and take care of it (according to Taks).

I didn’t remember Takahiro’s first couple of years here very well myself—he arrived the same year my dad died, and it took me a while to start noticing the rest of the world again. By the time I was noticing, Takahiro was famous for (a) not talking (b) doing origami all the time, which helped with (a) and (c) getting the highest grades in his class for almost everything. Since this included papers in English you have to assume his English was fine, at least at home alone and quiet with his books and ’top and not in the middle of the playground or the cafeteria with everyone screaming.

But he still didn’t talk all that much, he still had a slight not-Newworld accent when he did, and he still tended to leave out words like the when he was upset about something because you don’t have the in Japanese. Although I may be the only person who’s figured this out, since Takahiro didn’t get excited or upset in any of the usual ways. I noticed it because the tended to disappear when he talked about his dad.

So I looked up till my neck cracked and it was Takahiro. “Oh, Taks,” I said, and, not knowing I was going to do this, threw my arms around him. He had spent the last couple of Augusts at this super-whizzy brainiac camp his dad had found to stow him away at so Kay could have a holiday. He was such a good student the school didn’t make a fuss about him getting back a day or two late, as he had last year, for the beginning of term. Since I hadn’t heard from him beyond the occasional text saying stuff like “meteor shower last night. Electric” or “Have scientifically proven oatmeal here made of bleached beetle carapaces” (I’d answered that one “Want my aunt to sue for you? She’s good at it”) I’d assumed he wasn’t back yet.

He patted my back gently and I let go before I embarrassed him any more. He didn’t hang out with Jill and me and our crowd of loose connections: he was a solid-state brainiac, and hung with other brainiacs. I nodded to Jeremy and Gianni, on Takahiro’s other side, who nodded back cautiously: I was pretty sure the only things they ever hugged were their ’tops. They were either pretending they hadn’t seen me do anything gruesome or were having a telepathic conversation about the atomic number of Venus. (Science: not my best feature.) Probably the second.

“Bad summer?” said Takahiro.

“Not the best,” I said. “They got married.”

“Ah,” said Takahiro. “Yeah. They were going to.”

“Yeah,” I said. “You?”

“Not the best,” he said, and smiled. “Some new origami though. I’ll show you.”

“Great,” I said. “Can—” But the second bell went, and we had to hurry.

There was a mob at the back of Mrs. Andover’s homeroom as we all fought to get into the last row. Jill and I lost and were in the middle row, but at least we were together. Takahiro sat in front of me in the second row, which instantly made my seat the best in the whole classroom. Even slouching (Taks was always slouching) he was taller than anyone else. Under the roar of conversation Jill said to me, “We’re going to P&P tonight, okay? Laura says there’s a seriously cute new guy making pizza.”

When a gang of us went to P&P, we went later, after the family-supper rush. I took the bus home because Jill was going to the café after school, changed into my grubbies, hooked up Mongo (who had been very good and I only found the last shreds of a paper towel on the kitchen floor, although it might have started as a roll of them) and shot off for the bus that would take us to the shelter. By the time school started the days were already getting inconveniently short. I gave a few of my friends a quick walk (with Mongo accompanying) and settled down to cleaning kennels. I had to turn the lights on to see what I was doing.

Then Mongo and I went home on the bus and I spent some time looking gloomily at my course outlines. My main claim to scholastic fame is that I read a lot. I always liked stories but it got kind of out of control after Dad died. I read The Count of Monte Cristo in sixth grade (good choice, although Haydée is a dead battery) and War and Peace in seventh (bad choice, what a bunch of losers). But this will only get you so far. The class I was dreading most was something they were calling Enhanced Algebra. This was camouflage for college-track students who needed another math credit but had barely scraped through Algebra I and Geometry. But they’d found a unique way to punish us for being stupid: the textbook was enormous. It was not going to fit in my knapsack. So not only was it going to be a total pain to haul back and forth to school every day, carrying it was going to be this great badge of dishonor: Here’s One of the Dumb Ones. Jill and Takahiro were taking calculus. At least I had friends who could drag me through Enhanced Algebra—as they’d already dragged me through Algebra I and Geometry. They weren’t going to help me carry the book though.

Mom asked me how my first day went and I told her about the algebra book. Unfortunately that reminded her to ask if I’d accepted the place at Runyon yet—sent the paperwork back, she said, although most of it you can do slightly after the last minute on the webnet. No, I said.

“Why?” she asked, clearly surprised.

“I’m not sure I can afford it,” I mumbled.

“Of course you can!” she said. “We’ve been through all this. Tennel & Zeet agreed last spring to underwrite a student loan for you. And you can live at home—” She stopped. I didn’t say anything.

The silence turned loud and harsh, like a silverbug zapper. I went on brushing Mongo for about another minute while my ears rang and my skin blistered and then said, “I need a shower before Jill picks me up,” and fled. I heard Val come in the kitchen door as I ran upstairs, and I could hear Mom’s voice, really quiet so I couldn’t hear what she was saying, as I locked myself in the bathroom.

Okay, this was not going to ruin the first night of my senior year. (Life with Val: saying “this is not going to ruin . . .” a lot.) Especially because by tomorrow we’d start having homework (and my life as a pack animal began) and I had to keep my grades up in case I was going to Runyon. If a good fairy zoomed in from Neverworld and gave me a fortune. A small fortune would do—I was okay to spend the rest of my life working off my college loan. But the end of September was only two weeks away and if I said “yes” I had to send them a (nonrefundable) check too.

So I bounced downstairs like the only thing on my mind was how much pizza I could eat (I burned a lot of calories working at the shelter) and there were Mom and Val holding hands at the kitchen table. Mom was staring at the table but Val looked up and our eyes met. I was even braced for the explosion of shadows up the wall behind him. This wall had photos and stuff so it wasn’t like it was blank, but it turned black with them. If you believed in hell, which I’d never thought I did, it was like looking into hell—like one of those horrible old etchings of people getting eaten by demons—I was sure if I blinked a couple of times it would all come into focus. . . . I ran for the front door. Mongo was on my heels, half-hoping he could come with me and half-worried about whatever was worrying me. “You stay here,” I said breathlessly, hoping that Val’s demons wouldn’t suddenly start eating dogs. “I’ll see you later,” and I closed the door as gently as I could. I hadn’t said good-bye.

Jill wasn’t here yet so I started walking down the road. I was shaking with adrenaline and—it might have been rage. How dare he destroy our family? How dare he turn my mother against her own daughter? How dare he . . . be whatever he was? Whatever monster he was?

Keisha and Lindsay were already in the back seat, or I might have blurted out the whole thing to Jill. I hadn’t told her about that last day I took a message out to the shed. I didn’t want to hear what she’d say. She would want to give me advice because she was my friend, and whatever she said would be the wrong thing. I also knew she still thought there was something wrong with Arnie, and it didn’t feel at all electric that there was some kind of bad stepdad virus going around.

Jill’s always been good at picking up mood, but she’d been almost creepily sensitive lately, so when she asked me what was going on I told her about the gigantic algebra book and how carrying the stupid thing was going to label me “loser.”

Jill laughed. “I think it looks kind of cool. Math as art. Most textbooks are dead boring.” Keisha and Lindsay—who were both taking trig, which had a normal, boring textbook—joined in with flipping Maggie’s switches. I had trouble not hitting flashpoint. But I could go to P&P and act like a normal teenager beginning her senior year of high school or I could go home. No choice.

But I guess I did go into P&P with kind of an attitude. Just like Jill knew there was something up with me when I got in the car, she knew I hadn’t been telling the truth that it was the algebra book. (Well, it was yanking my wiring: who wants to be wearing a big loser sign their senior year? But she was right it wasn’t the most important thing.) Keisha and Lindsay had gone on ahead while Jill was still trying to get whatever it was out of me as we went through the door and I was being about as friendly as a bucket of battery acid till she said, “Oh, Magdag, don’t be such a bugsucker,” and she said it in one of those little quiet spaces that happen somewhere like a crowded restaurant, especially when you don’t want them to. I know there’s often a brief pause to stop and look when someone comes through the door, but it doesn’t usually stretch past the first few tables, which may be having their breadsticks shot across the room by the draft, and it doesn’t usually last more than two syllables unless whoever is coming in is a movie star or something, and we don’t get movie stars in Station.

But—thanks a lot, fate—this time it was like everyone had shut up to hear someone call her best friend a bugsucker. The other weird thing was that the lights sort of flared and flickered for just a second, just enough to notice—which at least should have distracted everyone I might know from “Magdag.” I used to punch Jill out for calling me that when we were six. I didn’t think I’d get away with it at seventeen. I was still biting on “Val is not going to wreck my senior year of high school” like Jonesie on that burglar’s leg (that’s how he ended up back at the shelter, the family he’d protected decided they were scared of him, can you believe it?), and now Jill had called me Magdag in public. So I put my shoulders back and glared like the flickering lights were deference to my greatness. (Or that I was Jonesie and the restaurant was full of burglars.) I’m not usually the don’t-mess-with-me type. In fact, I’m never the don’t-mess-with-me type.

One of the people who looked up when the lights blinked was a boy delivering a pizza to one of the tables beside the aisle we were swaggering down. He straightened up at the commotion and I was sure I saw him flinch when Jill said “Magdag.” So I was planning on giving him my very best death glare when he finished turning around, since he was clearly turning to get a look at us.

I always thought that “my heart turned over” was just a phrase. Also, Jill and Laura both find boys cute really easily. I don’t. (Okay, I’m not entirely interested only in their minds.) But this one . . .

He was tall, but not a skinny phone pole like Takahiro. He had shoulders and arms—oh wow, those arms—his P&P T-shirt and apron were too baggy to guess what the rest of him looked like, but I guessed anyway. I saw the tight little butt before he turned around. I was pretty sure that my death glare had been neutralized by a nice curve of thigh through the apron as he finished turning toward us. And then he smiled. At me. At me.

My heart turned over.

He had long curly black hair tied back in a ponytail and gigantic chocolate-brown eyes—dark chocolate, not that feeble milk stuff. Heavy black brows, but artistically arched, and long eyelashes—long like you figure there’s probably a breeze if you’re standing near him. I wished I was standing nearer. Dramatic cheekbones, straight nose, full lips, wide mouth (smiling at me), golden-brown skin somewhere between fourteen carat and caramel. If it weren’t for the long square jaw and the gorgeous neck (the neck was obviously part of the package with the shoulders and arms) he might have been too pretty.

He wasn’t too pretty. Trust me. He was not too pretty. Oh, did I mention the dimple? He had a dimple in one cheek. Oh. Gods. Oh. Gods.

“Oh, gods,” breathed Jill next to me, like an echo of my thoughts. “Mags, he’s staring straight at you. Get his phone number.”

I hoped I wasn’t drooling. “Uh,” I said. We were nearly on top of him. “Uh, hi,” I said. It was pretty much the hardest thing I’d ever done in my life that I tried to keep going. But it was just too tacky to stop. He must be used to having nearly every female who’s ever seen him asking for his phone number. And a lot of the guys too.

I was trying to remember how to smile. I’d managed to turn the death glare off but I’d kind of stalled at that point.

“Hi,” he said back. To me. Still staring into my eyes. Still smiling. He’d smiled a little less while he said “hi” and then turned it back on again full blast, so the dimple showed.

“Mags,” hissed Jill, clutching at my elbow, dragging me to a stop. I probably didn’t struggle all that hard.

“Uh,” I said again. “I—er—I haven’t seen you here before.” And then felt myself turn purple. That was almost as bad as asking for his phone number.

“I have been here only a few days,” he said. He had a slight accent, but I had no idea where it was from. Well, I had pretty much no idea about anything with him staring at me like that. “Now I am glad I came to this town,” he said, still staring at me.

My jaw really did drop. I’m sorry, but it did. I’m not ugly or anything, or stupid (at least not usually, about things other than math and science and taking tests), but this guy . . . guys like this don’t stare at girls like me.

“Her name’s Maggie,” said Jill. “Usually she talks,” and gave my elbow a shake. “When’s your break? Come join us. If you want.”

“I would like that,” he said. “Thank you.” He flicked a little piece of his smile at Jill and then refocused on me. “I will see you later.”

“Oh—great,” I said (I think that’s what I said), and then Jill was dragging me again, forward this time, toward our table.

Wolf whistles greeted us. Keisha and Lindsay had been sitting down while I was having my little encounter with Mr. To Die For, and one of the other waiters was putting down a pitcher of beer and some more glasses. “Hey, give her a beer,” said Laura, only half-annoyed that Mr. TDF had noticed me, not her. She was pretty tight with Ryan, and Ryan was a good guy.

“Anybody get his name?” said Jill, who was apparently my agent for the evening.

“Casimir,” said Zach. “Is that weird or what?”

“Not everyone is from No Town, Nowhere,” said Jill. “I think it’s a nice name. Casimir. Yeah.” She grinned at me.

There was a lot about that evening I didn’t take in very well. I was completely dazzled by Casimir, of course, but that wasn’t all of it. It was like the lights that had flickered when we came through the door went on flickering in my brain somehow. As if something was turning itself on and off. As if my wireboard was being rerouted or something. I didn’t like it.

But then again it might just have been Casimir. He was enough to make anyone short out a few circuits. He did join us during his break—Jill saw him coming and nearly shoved Hadar off his chair to make space for Casimir to sit down next to me. He’d taken the apron off but the P&P T-shirt underneath was still hopelessly long and baggy. He’d brought a cup of coffee with him, so I got to say something else totally lame: “Oh, I can’t buy you a cup of coffee then.”

He looked faintly puzzled—maybe he was having second thoughts about me: I wouldn’t have blamed him—and then the smile (and the dimple) broke out again. “No, I have my coffee, thank you,” and I think he was going to say something else—like maybe I could buy him a coffee some other night or even that he’d buy me something some other night? Maybe it was just my brain going zot. ZZZZ. Zingo. But Jason interrupted and said, “So, where are you from? You don’t sound like you’re from around here.”

“No,” said Casimir. “I learnt my English in England.”

“That’s not an English accent,” said Jason, and I thought, what’s he so pissed off about? Jason’s really good-looking if you like them blond and stuck on themselves, but he’s never thought I was worth more than “hi,” and it’s supposed to be girls who get rats’-assy about looks.

Casimir said that he’d been born in Ukovia and his parents were Ukovian and he had spent most of his childhood there, but then he had been sent to boarding school in England and only came home for holidays. He said some stuff about how different Ukovia and England were and then Jason interrupted again and said, “Are you here to go to school?”

I hadn’t been paying much attention to what Casimir was saying, although the sound of his voice was making me feel all petted and velvety. He was sitting close enough—there were nine of us wedged around a table for six—that I could feel his body heat. When he moved his arm or his knee, it would brush mine (that made my brain turn on and off). I was trying to think of a way to say “Back off, Jason,” without getting in his face about it. But I heard Casimir saying “Runyon” and I snapped back to attention.

“I accepted a place at Runyon,” he said, “because it has perhaps the best physics of the worlds department of any school in Newworld.”

“The physics of the worlds?” said Jason in a disbelieving voice, and a little silence fell.

My heart sank. Only loopheads wanted to know any more about physwiz than that silverbugs should be popped and where to find your local Watchguard. Senior year you have a bunch of required seminars in stuff the government says you have to know something about: history of magic, why they gene-chop you, what they think they know about cobeys, like that. They’re all short—none of them lasts more than two weeks—and from everything I’ve heard they don’t actually teach you anything, but it goes on your Watchguard record that you’ve been cranked through the informed-citizen education machine. Most of it’s just stuff like all of school is stuff (although I was a little interested in what they were going to tell us about gene-chopping), but physwiz freaked a lot of people. Every year there was a petition from some of the parents that it’s an inappropriate subject for high school kids and should be removed from the syllabus. Since these were usually the same parents who had meltdowns when a book their kid checked out of the school library had the word “vagina” or “dickhead” in it, the petitions were mostly ignored. But physwiz creeped out a lot of relatively sane people too.

I knew Runyon had an important physwiz department. But it was its own little territory and anybody who didn’t have to go there didn’t. When I had the campus tour last year our guide reluctantly waved a hand at a path through some trees and said vaguely, oh, physwiz is down there, and then flipped back into guide mode and started talking about advisers and food. I guess I knew, but it was the sort of thing you didn’t want to know, that Runyon’s physwiz department was a big deal, really more of a brain bureau with students.

The cutest boy in the known universe is a loophead. Well, that might help to explain why he seemed to like me.

“Oh, wow,” said Jill, not willing to let my unexpected conquest go without a struggle. “Um. Are there, you know, jobs in physwiz—the physics of the worlds?”

Other than being disappeared by a brain bureau, I added silently.

“I want to study history,” Jill went on, “but my mom keeps telling me I need to get a degree in something that’ll let me pay back my student loan.”

“I hope there are jobs,” said Casimir, “because it is what I want to study. But there is a trust, the Nowak Trust, to bring students here, and to send some of your students to Oldworld, to study the physics of the worlds. I was offered a much better scholarship to come here than if I stayed home. And if there are no jobs, well”—and he made a short, graceful gesture that wasn’t from around here either, but it meant that (momentarily) his shoulder pressed against mine—“this is a nice place to work. And the coffee is good.”

Everybody but Jason laughed, and then Casimir’s break was over and he left. I tried not to be too obvious about watching those shoulders and that butt walking away, but when I surreptitiously glanced around the table almost everyone else was watching too. Then our pizzas arrived, fortunately for me, because everybody got busy eating and forgot to give me a hard time.

When it was time to go—school-night curfews for another whole year, joy—Lindsay and Keisha were getting a ride home with someone else, so it was just Jill and me. We were all leaving when Jill suddenly said, “Oh, where is my—um?” and went back. She made a big show of looking around her chair and under the table, and then she glanced at the door, but Laura, Ryan, and Ashley were waiting for us. “No, you go on,” she said, and flapped her hands at them. “I’m sure I’ll find it in a minute.”

Laura looked at me and grinned. “I’m sure you will,” she said, and all three of them left. Jill was sitting down and digging through her purse with a scowl on her face, but as soon as the door swung shut behind them she was on her feet again. “I’m going to go get the car,” she said to me, slowly and carefully, like maybe I didn’t speak her language. “You can wait here. I will pick you up in a few minutes. You have a few minutes.”

“Jill, I’ll walk to the car with you,” I said, exasperated. “I’m not going to ask for his phone number!”

“Tell him that,” she said, and darted past. I turned around and there was Casimir walking toward us, looking slightly uncertain. “See you!” Jill sang out to Casimir, and kept going. He had a little piece of paper in his hand. “I—your friend—” he said.

“Jill thinks she’s being tactful,” I said, not sure whether to die of embarrassment or stare into his big brown eyes as a way not to stare at the piece of paper in his hand.

He held it out to me. “I was hoping if I gave you my phone number you would give me yours,” he said, and turned the smile on again. “It is a large enough piece of paper that if you tear off the bottom, you could write yours on it.”

Our hands met as he gave me the paper. So many connections exploded I could feel the smoke coming out of my ears. I could barely write, or remember my phone number—I had to sort of mutter it over to myself so the rhythm would remind me. I could have pulled out my pocket phone, put his number on it, and sent mine to his, but where’s the romance in that? Besides, my hands were shaking so badly I’d probably have pressed the wrong buttons and sent my number to Joe’s Live Bait House, which is a major local landmark on the edge of the barrens, but I didn’t want Joe asking me out for a cup of coffee. It was my pocket number I gave Casimir, of course. I didn’t want Mom or Ran or—worst—Val to answer the ground phone with Casimir on the other end. Supposing he did call, which still seemed to me about as likely as that I’d decide to go to Runyon after all to study physwiz. (It might even be worth living at home, if Casimir was my TA next year.) When I gave him my little piece of paper I could see that at least half the restaurant was watching. Some of the women were really old. He probably did this six times a night every night with different girls. I wasn’t going to think about that.

“Talk to you soon,” I said, and fled.