The Gate Thief

11

Danny hadn’t had enough sleep, but his inner clock woke him at exactly the time required for him to make it to Coach Lieder’s house for a special practice. Now that Danny had capitulated and ran his fastest for Lieder’s stopwatch, he found that he enjoyed it. Showing off, not competing.

Danny was human enough to like being admired, and one thing about Lieder, when he was working with an athlete who was really trying, he knew how to show respect and give encouragement. It was a side of Lieder Danny had never seen, and never would have seen as long as he was with the slackers and geeks.

He was still with the slackers and geeks, but he was also running for the Parry McCluer track team, and even though it was a while before any of the meets would begin, and for all he knew he wouldn’t live long enough to compete in any of them, it was fun to get to Lieder’s house before sunrise, running the whole way in the dark, and then see how Lieder had laid out fixed courses for him on the streets of Buena Vista, so that he would know just how far Danny was running in a given amount of time.

Now that his friends were all enlisted in the Great Gate project, the only way that Danny still connected with high school life was his running. He had come here to get away from magery and live a normal life; he had brought the magery with him, and running was the only normal thing left for him to do.

This morning, though, Coach Lieder wasn’t alone. Nicki, his daughter, was with him, and though she seemed a little sleepy, she didn’t have that wan look. That dying-nymph appearance. Her passage through a gate had healed her of whatever she was dying of. Lieder may not know it, but Danny had prepaid him for all the private track coaching. And yet it had cost Danny nothing. The effortless gift of a god. Need healing? Well here it is, because why not.

But just because it cost Danny so little didn’t change the fact that she was dying, and now she would live. Maybe that had something to do with why Lieder was more encouraging than Danny had expected. After all, he had so much less to feel angry and bitter about.

“Do you mind if Nicki watches?” asked Lieder. “She was up anyway, so…”

Did he think he was good at lying? Danny knew that Nicki must have asked him to waken her especially for this. And maybe Lieder was simply indulging his little girl. Or maybe he thought Danny would perform better with a girl watching. Or maybe he hoped something might happen between Danny and his daughter, though why Lieder should wish for such a thing Danny didn’t know.

It had to be the first one. Nicki liked Danny-and what’s not to like? — and when a daughter who had been this close to death now had a crush on a boy, what father wouldn’t indulge her? Especially when he was right there to supervise any interaction between them.

Danny felt her eyes on him the whole time. He ran short sprints today-Lieder was keeping him close to the front porch so he was never out of Nicki’s sight. And if the idea was that Danny would work harder to impress a girl, it wasn’t exactly wrong. He certainly made his best times in the various dashes. And this despite having run the whole way here, and not having had enough sleep the night before.

Last night I was this close to pledging my undying love to Pat, and this morning I’m showing off for Nicki. I’m such a teenage boy. Which is to say, I’m such a fickle jerk.

Well, running in front of a girl wasn’t kissing her. There was a difference and he’d keep it well in mind.

Even in the cool of an autumn morning, Danny was dripping with sweat. He had really given it his all, and he knew that sweat wasn’t unattractive to girls, not when it had been earned by real exertion, not when the guy doing the sweating had an athletic build. It was only sweaty fat kids and geeks that turned high school girls off. Danny had learned this from his reading of young adult novels during the years he was studying to prepare to be a normal high school student.

“Hi,” he said to Nicki when Lieder beckoned him to the porch. She gave him a little wave and a shy smile.

Lieder ignored the exchange between them and began reading off the times. “And you ran here, right?”

“Yes, sir,” said Danny.

“So the idea is to have these sprints in you at the end of a long race. To pace yourself so that you stay in contention but you don’t have to lead.”

“You know that I don’t care about leading,” said Danny.

“But the team needs you to win. To rack up points. So not for yourself, but for the team. You stay close enough to be in contention, but sprints like these are still inside you.”

“Why not just have me run the sprints?” asked Danny.

“I’ve got guys who can do the sprints. They’re not as fast as you, but they win enough. I need you in long distance. You’re a coin I can only spend once or twice in a meet. I’m not going to use you up on the short stuff.”

“You want me to be a quarter, not five pennies, is that it?”

“Yeah, smart guy,” said Lieder. “I want you to be a damn Susan B. Anthony dollar.”

“But fifty cents will do,” said Nicki. “He wants you to try for the dollar so you might make the fifty cents.”

Lieder reddened. If any other kid had said such a thing, he would have been angry. But it was his daughter, so the redness went away quickly. “She thinks she sees through her old man,” he said with a smile. “But I want the buck. I want a buck fifty.”

“Well, I better get home and shower,” said Danny.

“Oh,” said Nicki. She looked disappointed. Then, realizing that Danny was looking at her curiously, she stepped back and turned away, embarrassed.

“Nicki’s going back to school today. She was kind of hoping you might ride with us.”

Danny indicated his dripping shorts and tee-shirt. “I can’t go like this.”

“You could shower here,” said Nicki. Then she covered her mouth as if to keep more words from coming out.

“And put these back on?” said Danny, laughing.

“Look,” said Lieder, “Nicki’s right. I’ve worn you out with sprints. Now if you run all the way home and shower and change you’ll be late to school.”

It was true. They had gone long.

“You shower, and throw on something of mine. It’ll be baggy on you, considering that you’re made of toothpicks, but we’ll swing by your house and you run in to change. We’ll wait.”

Danny considered for a moment. It was a very generous thing. But could he afford to arrive at high school in Lieder’s car?

“How about if you drive me home and drop me off? Then I can walk to school on time.”

“Well, I’m not letting you get in my car as sweaty as you are right now,” said Lieder. He laughed, but … was it really so important that he shower at their house?

Danny shrugged and stepped up on the porch. “Whatever I do, I gotta do it now.”

Nicki rushed ahead of him and showed him to the house’s one bathroom. It really was an old place. But the tub was modern enough-it wasn’t sitting on claw feet, it was molded to the floor, and instead of a shower curtain there was a glass door.

He turned on the water and heard Nicki close the door behind him. He got his shoes and clothes off as soon as the door was closed and by then the shower was steaming a little. He got in and was washing his hair with regular soap when he heard the door open.

“Not looking not looking,” said Nicki. He couldn’t look because he’d get soap in his eyes so he’d have to take her word for it.

When he got out there was a towel laid out for him, and a pair of pants and a shirt in a style no self-respecting kid would wear. No underwear. His own clothes were nowhere to be seen. She must have taken them.

She was going to wash them for him. She was showing him how domestic she was.

No, she was trying to do something nice. Give her credit for being kind. Don’t assume that girls want your body just because Xena does. Xena knows you’re, like, a Norse god.

The only way the pants would stay up was if he held them with one hand while he held his shoes with the other. He went barefoot out of the bathroom. “Somebody stole my clothes,” he said, “but we’ll have to search for the thief later, when I’m wearing pants I can run in.”

Lieder laughed. “I didn’t think anybody could look worse in those clothes than me.”

“He doesn’t,” said Nicki. Then blushed. Then laughed.

“Can I make it to your car barefoot? There’s not any, like, gravel or hot coals or anything?” Their driveway was gravel, but it ran around the back of the house.

“It’s all paved,” said Lieder. “Back door.”

Danny followed Nicki out the door, catching the screen with his shoulder because both hands were occupied. Only after he was through the door did she remember and turn back to hold it open for him, and so her reaching hand smacked him in the chest.

“Ow,” she said. “Your chest is hard!”

“Sorry it got in your way,” said Danny. “Like your dad said, all toothpicks.”

Then she led the way to the car, which stood on a paved carport pad. There was loose gravel all over, though, so Danny had to pick his way carefully to the back door. Nicki ran around and got in the front passenger side, and Lieder backed them down the driveway and out into the street.

Only now did Danny realize that they didn’t know where he lived-nobody knew that except his friends. Unless they had looked up his school records. Which they must have done, because Lieder drove right there without any directions.

Of course, in the days when Lieder was spying on him to try to catch him running and time him, he might have seen where Danny ran to after school. Surely he hadn’t planned this out far enough in advance to consult the school records.

“Thanks,” said Danny as he got out of the car. “I’ll bring these clothes back to you at school.”

But they didn’t drive off. They followed him up the short walk into his house. That bothered him. He hadn’t invited them in. In fact, he had made it clear he wasn’t inviting them in. So he had to gather up his clothes that were scattered in the living room and retreat into the bedroom to change.

When he came out, there was Nicki, washing the dishes that had stacked up by the sink. “You know, if you rinse them right after you use them, they’re easier to wash.”

“But I don’t mind scrubbing,” said Danny.

“Now you won’t have to,” she said, drying her hands. “At least, not the ones I washed.”

Danny looked around for the coach.

“Daddy went back to the car. He said this place was too messy for him to find a place he trusted enough to sit there.”

“Yeah, well, I wasn’t expecting company.” Though in fact it had looked just like this when Pat came over last night. Hadn’t expected her, either. “We’d better get to the car,” he said.

But she didn’t get to the car. She walked up to him and put her hands on his waist. Shyly. How does a girl shyly do something as bold as that? But she radiated shyness even as her hands rested on his waist just above his jeans, so that her hands were right on the stems of his hips. Her touch was just exactly perfect. And she looked up into his eyes and said, “Danny North, I don’t know how you did it, and I haven’t dared say this to Daddy, he’s just calling it a miracle, but I know you healed me. I don’t know how or why, but I felt it that day you visited. I felt it wash over me, and I felt stronger. Every hour, every day since then, stronger. I know you did it. I made Daddy take me to the doctor right away and he said it was all gone. The cancer. I was clean of it. He’d never seen anything like it. He actually asked me if I’d been to a faith healer.”

“Had you?” asked Danny.

“No. My healer came to me,” she said. “I don’t expect any explanations. I don’t want to know how you did it. I just know it was you, and thank you.” Then she tiptoed to kiss him on the mouth. Full on the mouth. It hadn’t even been twelve hours since he kissed Pat, and here he was getting kissed again. Only this girl didn’t even know he was a mage. Though she did know, somehow, that he had power, so it amounted to the same thing. Apparently you show a girl you can do real magic, and she’s got her mouth on yours as soon as possible.

Are you complaining, you idiot? Is this bad? Do you hate it?

Not really, he had to admit to himself.

And she was still kissing him. And now her arms were around his waist instead of on it, and she was pressed against him, and-

The car horn tooted outside. A house this small and so close to the street, it sounded like the car was right in the living room.

“Thank you,” she said again. Whether for the kiss or the healing Danny wasn’t sure. For the kiss, he wanted to answer like a store clerk: “Thank you.”

Instead he just followed her out to the car.

Shy? She showed not a speck of embarrassment when she got out of the front seat and climbed into the back beside him. “It’s not right to make him sit alone in the back,” she explained to her father.

“But it’s fine to leave me alone in the front?” he asked, but he was joking.

Have I got me the coach’s daughter for a girlfriend? I’m trapped in a young adult novel. A girls’ novel, so it’s all about the love story instead of the death squads coming to get me.

I already had a triangle with Xena and Pat. What does Nicki make it? A square? No, this is solid geometry now: a tetrahedron.

But at school the strangest thing happened. Nicki made no effort to follow him in. She just waved at him, and it was Lieder who explained, “Got to get her all signed in.”

And when Nicki showed up in his first period class partway through-was that arranged on purpose? To have some of the same schedule as him? — she gave no sign that she recognized him. One of the guys near Danny whispered, “Hubba hubba,” and for the first time Danny realized that Nicki, now that she wasn’t sick-looking, was quite attractive. Not that he had thought she was ugly, but he hadn’t realized that she was attractive in general, and not just a nice-seeming person to him in particular. Her shape was high-school-girl slender, but with unmissable breasts, though she wasn’t Laurette-there was no cleavage showing. How did I not notice this before? Even when she was kissing me and those breasts were pressed up against me, how did I not notice how they give her a pretty nearly perfect shape?

Nicki turned toward the hubba-hubba guy and gave him the shy smile. What a tease, she can turn it on and off whenever she wants. The come-hither, I’m-so-shy smile that she must have practiced in front of the mirror.

Has she been playing me?

She spent the whole rest of the period not playing him. Unless ignoring him was the game. She certainly had him thinking about her most of the period. She had spent the morning on the porch in her nightgown and lacy robe watching him sweat, she had come into the bathroom while he was naked in the shower and taken away his clothes, she had come into his house and washed his dishes and then kissed him long and with her body pressed to his and now, in this class, she didn’t notice he existed?

Two can play at this game, he thought.

But a moment later he realized, no they can’t. Girls can play it on guys, but guys can’t play it on girls. At least I can’t play it, because I keep glancing at her and she never looks at me, it’s like I had gone through a gate and was now watching invisibly through a porthole in spacetime, and why would I do that? Because I can’t take my eyes off her. She’s playing me and it works, I’m just a fish dancing on the line.

He made it a point to eat lunch with his friends, but that was worse, because while everybody else was normal-Xena flirting with him had to be regarded as the new normal-Pat was also playing the I-don’t-see-you-you-don’t-exist game.

The difference was that he and Pat were friends, and the kiss last night had been his idea probably more than hers.

Or had it? Girls were all manmages, when you thought about it. They wrapped guys around their fingers and dragged them any way they wanted.

First time I’ve ever envied the gay, thought Danny. But then he had to admit to himself, being honest, that he felt nothing of the kind. This was all kind of exciting. Complicated, yes. A little dangerous. But what had he come to high school for, if not for the fact that this was where they kept the high school girls?

Just before P.E. in the afternoon, a freshman doing office time for some freshman sin brought him a note from the principal. “Come see me right now,” it said.

“What did you do without asking us along?” asked Wheeler.

“Nothing,” said Danny. “I’m on Lieder’s team, why is he bothering me?”

“Want company?” asked Hal.

“Looking for an excuse to ditch P.E.?” asked Danny.

“Always.”

“Don’t worry. Lieder’s in a better mood. His daughter’s all better and she’s even back in school.”

“I didn’t know he had a daughter,” said Hal.

“Or that she was sick,” said Wheeler.

“Somebody mated with Lieder?” asked Hal.

“He has a job,” said Danny. “There’s always some woman who wants a man with a job.”

“Really?” asked Wheeler. “That’s the first time anybody ever gave me a reason why I should graduate from high school. So I can get the kind of job that will make a woman want to mate with me.”

“Naw,” said Hal. “No way. You’re going to have to swim upstream and spawn.”

With that Danny left them and jogged to the office.

Mama and Baba were sitting on chairs across from the principal’s desk. Baba at once rose to his feet. “Danny,” he said, “we’re your Uncle Alf and Auntie Gerd. I know you haven’t seen us in a long time, but when we heard you were living here with your Aunt Veevee gone half the time, well, we had to look in on you.”

“We had no idea his guardian was absentee.”

“She’s not,” said Danny. “We see each other nearly every day. It’s these people that I don’t know. Did you ask them for I.D.?”

Baba chuckled. “We just want a chance to talk to you, Danny.”

“We didn’t know how else to do it,” said Mama. “You don’t answer your phone.”

“I don’t have a phone,” said Danny.

“You see our problem,” said Baba. “But Principal Massey kindly offered us the use of his office for our conversation.”

“No,” said Danny, walking back out of the office.

“Come back here, young man!” demanded Massey.

Mama followed him. “Please,” she whispered. “Please, I beg you. If you have any feeling for me at all.”

“I spent most of my life with feeling for you,” whispered Danny. “It almost led to Hammernip Hill. Should I tell the principal to ask the sheriff to do some excavating there?”

“Please,” she said.

Principal Massey had followed them out into the corridor by then. “Danny North, that was the rudest thing I’ve seen you do-and that takes some doing.”

“I don’t remember a single act of kindness from these people,” said Danny. “I’m settled in here now and I don’t know what they want from me. Don’t you have rules about letting strangers have access to the children in this school?”

“But…” Principal Massey reached his hands out helplessly, one toward Danny, one toward his parents. “It didn’t occur to me that they might be strangers. I still don’t believe they are. They look so much like you.”

Danny had no answer to that. It had never crossed his mind that he could not deny being his father’s son, let alone his nephew. He looked just like Baba. Except for the fact that he also had a strong resemblance to Mama. Both resemblances in the same face, at the same time. If Principal Massey had half a brain in his head, he’d wonder why anybody looked so much like both his aunt and his uncle, one of whom, presumably, was not his blood relative.

“We’ll talk out in the parking lot,” said Danny. “We’ll talk where I can walk away if I feel like it.” And where nobody can listen through a door. And nobody can sneak up unobserved.

“Well, that’s all right then,” said Massey.

“In fact, we’ll talk out on the street, which isn’t school property. Then you won’t get in trouble, Principal Massey.”

“Very … thoughtful of you.”

They left him behind and walked in virtual silence until they were beyond the parking lot and across the street. Virtual silence, because Mama kept trying to talk and Danny gave her a sharp sh! and walked faster. Finally they were so out of breath from keeping up with a young man who was, after all, a sprinter that they couldn’t have spoken if they tried.

“I told you the terms,” said Danny. “I told you that I’d come for your answer. I told you not to come for me. As far as I’m concerned, there’s no Great Gate for you. You’d have been too dangerous, anyway. The two of you.”

“We aren’t the ones the Family chose,” said Baba. “I’m not Odin anymore.”

“They took back Gyish? Or was it Zog?”

“It was Mook,” said Baba. “They couldn’t trust me to make an unbiased decision because I was your father and because they all know now how we plotted to keep you even after we knew you were a gatemage. We’re lucky we aren’t in Hammernip, for putting the family at such a risk.”

Danny wanted to say, Boo-hoo. But he realized that Baba was telling the truth. He and Mama had taken a risk, knowing about him but not killing him. They had risked everything.

“So Mook will have an answer for you. We’re not invited to the councils,” said Mama.

“Why are you here, then? To ask for a private passage through the Great Gate? Here’s news for you-it hasn’t been built yet, and I meant what I said. No special favors for anyone, no extras.”

“It’s not about the Great Gate,” said Baba impatiently. “It’s about us. As your parents. What did you expect us to do? We hoped you’d be a gatemage. All right? We didn’t hope for any baby at all, we hoped for you, very specifically. A tricky, mouthy, linguistically brilliant brat with no loyalty to anyone, because that’s what gatemages are. We hoped you’d open a passage to Westil, yes. Of course we did. Before we knew you, we expected to be able to use you.”

“And you still do,” said Danny.

“Because we’re not insane,” said Baba. “You exist. Everybody wants to pass through a Great Gate. What do you expect, that we alone, of all the Westilians in Mittlegard, would care only about our beloved boy, with not a thought about the gates that we created you to make?”

“I don’t expect anything from you,” said Danny, “which is a good thing, because ‘anything’ was what I never got.”

“Danny, we gave you all we could,” said Mama. She came closer. “And I don’t just mean life itself. We had Mook and Lummy look after you. Feed you when you stayed late. Listen to your questions and answer them. Watch out for you to give you warning if you did something dangerous. We made sure that Thor was in charge of the watchers, so that if you needed to get away, you wouldn’t be caught.”

“If we stayed close to you,” said Baba, “then the Family would never trust us to be impartial when it came time for decisions about you. We could either have the power to protect you, or we could be your loving affectionate parents. Not both.”

Danny knew that this was true. He had always known it.

Mama interpreted his silence as a kind of victory, and she pressed the advantage. She placed her hand on his upper arm, not gripping it, exactly. Just holding him.

But he had been touched by enough women in the past twenty-four hours. He was done with being betrayed by his natural reaction to physical touch. A bit of physical affection from his long-absent mother? It sent a thrill of relief through him. He wasn’t having any of it. He shrugged away and backed up a step.

“Touch me again and you’re out of here,” Danny said.

Mama gave something like a sob and stepped away, holding the hand that had held him in her other hand, as if she had been devastatingly wounded, as if the hand were pumping out blood and the injury could not be healed.

“We were proud of you,” said Baba, not even glancing at his wife’s reaction. “You were so clever. You understood your danger-not gatemage danger, but drekka danger. You kept your head down. You kept trying to find ways to survive. We saw it and admired you and respected you. I don’t know if I would have had the self-control to handle myself as you did. The trickster boy you were as a child disappeared completely, swallowed up in the careful, careful young man who finally found his power and used it to run away and save his life.”

“How nice of you to admire me from such a distance,” said Danny. But his father’s words of praise filled him with light and brought tears to his eyes.

We human beings are such machines, thought Danny. All the emotions are available at the flip of a switch. Predictable as robots.

“Danny,” said Mama. “I get it that you hate us. I do understand it.”

But Danny didn’t hate them. He was angry with them, had been hurt by them, but no, he didn’t hate them. After everything, all he really wanted was his mother’s affection and his father’s approval. Now they were offering exactly what he wanted. Only these things had been so long withheld that Danny refused to trust the fulfillment of his longing.

“Whatever you want from me,” said Danny, “I don’t have it. Or if I do, it’s not for you, not anymore.”

“That’s what I was afraid of,” said Mama.

“I told her not to expect anything better than this,” said Baba.

For a moment, hearing such finality in Baba’s voice, Danny believed that this whole meeting had been a trap. That, having failed to win him over, they would now unleash whatever assassination they had planned for him.

So he gated fifteen feet away.

Mother burst into tears.

“We aren’t going to betray you,” said Baba coldly. “How could we, even if we wanted to?”

“Let’s go, Alf,” said Mama.

“Yes,” said Baba. He led her away toward the family pickup-which looked even more beaten-up now, having spent a short time buried in a crevice in the earth.

Watching them walk toward the truck, Danny saw them for the first time, not as the crafty leaders of a group of ruthless mages, but as a middle-aged man and woman, weary of everything, having been repudiated by the ungrateful son who blamed them for having done only what was possible for him, and nothing more.

Danny passed a gate over them. He did it smoothly, carefully. They did not miss a stride. If they felt anything, he would have been surprised. But their steps looked younger, not so tired as they continued to the truck and got inside. He did not wish to punish them. He had thought he did, but now he felt no such desire. He just wanted to stop wanting them to love him. Because now they were saying that they did, and he was hungry to believe them; but they had so many motives to lie that he could not trust a word they said or a thing they did.