Alyzon Whitestarr (21 page)

“Glad?” I echoed.

They both pointed to a tall, fit girl with spectacles who was dribbling the ball along the field. She moved beautifully as she went for a goal, and I drew in a breath of pleasure because it was such a long shot, and yet she managed it. I found myself exchanging a smile with the two girls, who suddenly looked more friendly. “She’s good, isn’t she?” said the one who had not yet spoken, sounding exactly like the one who had.

I nodded. “That’s Glad?” I turned back to study the girl, marveling at the names some kids got.

The bell for the end of recess rang, and the two girls dashed off. I waited until the older girl was leaving the field, then fell in beside her and asked my question again.

She said at once and decisively that he had never attended the school. “I run the school magazine, see?” She shot me a bright glance and saw that I didn’t see. “Look, our mag comes out biweekly, and we always feature a few students each issue. We publish a photo of them and a mini interview—their thoughts, dreams, et cetera. A lot of rot, most of them talk, but still. If there had been a Harlen Sanderson here, I’d know because by the end of a year we’ve done everyone. But if you want to double-check, they have back copies in the library.
The Roving Eye
, it’s called.”

I didn’t need my extended senses to know that Glad was not the type to have made a mistake. Having come so far,
though, I was determined to be sure that Harlen had not gone to Shaletown High. It wasn’t hard to locate the library, but I was immediately stopped by a librarian demanding to know what I thought I was doing. She had restless eyes and smelled like burnt potatoes, so I obeyed my instincts and launched into a dull, slow explanation of a project I needed to research before she had the chance to ask who had sent me. It worked. She was one of those quick, impatient people who couldn’t bear to dally for more than a second on anything. Soon I was safely between the magazine racks.

It was easy to find
The Roving Eye.
I checked the contents pages for the first half of the year in which Harlen would have been there. By the time I had reached March, I was beginning to accept that he had not been to the school, but I went right through to June. Then I went back and checked the whole of the previous year. No Harlen.

I left the school feeling flat and disheartened. The whole trip had been a waste of time.

I checked the map to be sure I was heading the right way back to the station, and my eye fell on the yellow square marked Detention Center. There was easily time enough to visit it and still get the train I needed. In fact, I had to kill some time. I checked the map again, worked out a route, and set off.

* * *

The high, dingy yellow wall that surrounded the block of buildings that were Shaletown Detention Center looked even more prison-like than it had when Aya and her family had
been inside. I wondered how any government could justify locking little kids and even babies in such a place. Had any of those politicians who approved it ever come to look at it? Had they tried to imagine how it would be if they or their families had to stay indefinitely in such a place? Not so long ago I had heard a female politician arguing that the women and children ought to be let out to live with volunteers while the men remained in a detention center. Even that seemed horrible to me. How would that politician have felt if it was her husband locked up while she was free; how would her children feel to be without their father for so long?

“You wonder how anyone could build something so ugly,” said an old woman who had come quietly to stand beside me. She wore a rosette that announced she was a protester.

A fleeting but painfully vivid memory of Aya came to me; her satin brown hands clasped together in her lap in the brightly lit, white-painted visiting room; her huge dark eyes that had never stopped pleading. “Maybe it just reflects the ugliness of the minds of the people who dreamed it up,” I said savagely.

“Do you know someone in there?” the old woman asked gently.

“I used to know a girl. She and her family were refused asylum. They … they were sent back.” All of a sudden tears were spilling down my cheeks.

“Oh my dear, come and sit down,” the old woman said. “I’ve got some tea in a thermos.”

I went with her, unable to stop crying. Memories of Aya
were all mixed up with my disappointment about the whole long trip to Shaletown being a total waste; I would have to go back to school and be pursued by Harlen again without any idea of why my senses regarded him as a danger. By the time I managed to get myself under control, my face felt swollen and my eyes were puffy and itchy.

I felt vaguely embarrassed by my outburst, but aside from the old woman, who had introduced herself as Rose Cobb, the only other person at the protest tent was a huge, muscular young man with a strangely beautiful face and a halo-like mass of soft golden curls. He stared at me fixedly, and I might have felt uneasy except for his smell, which was a combination of baby shampoo and toffee and something that reminded me a lot of Luke’s smell.

The old woman introduced him as Davey I was afraid he would want to shake my hand, but he just stared at me even harder, as if he were trying to look through my face and into my head. Then he gave a funny bending nod that seemed a bit like a bow and announced that someone called Simon had said he should go home. Watching him lumber away, I realized he was slow-witted. Rose Cobb said gently that he lived close by in a trailer on the industrial park. “He’s a lovely boy,” she added.

I drank the tea she poured and told her my name as I sat down gingerly on one of the little fold-up stools. “It’s ages since I came here last. I didn’t realize I would feel so … angry.”

Rose Cobb sighed. “Anger is a powerful force. I ought to
know, because I spent most of my life being ruled by it. I was angry at my parents for bringing me to this country, angry at my friends for not loving me as I thought I should be loved. Angry at my husband for not being what I thought he should be and at my children for preferring their own lives to mine. The people here taught me about the futility of anger.”

“The refugees?” I asked.

She shook her head. “The protesters. I live across the road, you see. I’d see the protesters coming with their placards and petitions, and I would glare at them through my curtains—a bunch of scruffy, drug-taking hippies and welfare cheats, I used to think. Max would say they were just people protesting about something that troubled them. I daresay I had some smart, nasty answer for him. The truth was that I didn’t understand why they were there, because I didn’t think of refugees as people.”

“So what happened?”

She sighed. “Max died. I was angry at him over that, too. A month or so after his funeral, I was sitting here feeling angry about everything, as usual, and all that lifetime of rage seemed to boil up in me and turn me into a lightning bolt that needed earthing. So I went across the road to give those hippies the edge of my tongue.” She laughed. “Oh, how righteous I felt. But before I could say a word, some young mother pushed her baby into my hands and asked if I wouldn’t mind holding him because she had to pour the tea. She’d mistaken me for one of them, and I was so taken aback that I just … well, I held the baby.” She laughed. “It was winter and very cold.
The baby was sneezing and sniffing, and I was struck by how insubstantial he was. It made me think of my own children. I felt such a tenderness for them in that moment that it was like a little earthquake inside me. It was as if I hadn’t understood how much I had loved them until that second.” She laughed again. “When the mother took her baby back, she handed me a mug of tea. Then one of the young men asked the woman with the baby about a letter she’d received from someone she visited in the center. She got it out and read from it. It was so … well, I am sure you had letters from your friend, so you know. I found myself for the first time imagining how it must feel to have traveled here fleeing famine or drought or political upheaval or persecution, and all at once I understood why a woman with a baby would stand out in the cold to protest. It was because she had the imagination to empathize with the refugees.

“I have heard so many stories since then, many far worse than that of the person who wrote that letter, but it is that one I remember best because it broke down the wall of my ignorance and raked open my heart.” She shook her head with a prim little tightening of her mouth.

“Doesn’t it make you angry, though?” I nodded toward the detention center. “Doesn’t that?”

Rose Cobb studied the yellow wall for a moment. “A lot of volunteers do feel angry to start with. Being powerless to make the authorities see or care fills them with rage and frustration and makes them want to smash something just to get someone to listen. Maybe it is because of a lifetime of anger
that I know there is no good in anger, least of all for the person who feels it. Anger is a sickness that afflicts anything and anyone it touches.”

“You think of anger as a sickness?” I asked, thinking of Serenity.

“I think it is a sickness of the soul,” the old woman said. I was disappointed, and maybe she saw it, for she said, “I’m not talking about religion, Alyzon. When I say soul, I mean no more than your essence.”

I shivered, because I had got into the habit of thinking I could smell people’s essences, but it seemed too prideful and eerie to think I could smell people’s souls.

Rose Cobb sighed. “Poor Max. He deserved a better wife than he had. I would change that if I could. Go back and be a kinder and more compassionate partner. But that’s the one thing you can’t do, is it? You can only go forward and be the best person you can.”

“I’m sure he loved you,” I said.

“Oh, he did, but that was more due to his sweet nature than mine.” She poured herself another half cup of tea and offered me more, but I remembered that I had a train to catch. Before I left, Rose Cobb pointed out her house, telling me to drop in if I came back to visit any of the refugees.

* * *

Gilly was waiting for me at the station, and I asked worriedly if she’d mentioned my doctor’s appointment to her gran. She shook her head and, seeing my relief, asked why.

I took a deep breath. “Because I didn’t go to Remington
and there was no doctor’s appointment. I didn’t tell you the truth this morning because I didn’t want you to have to lie if Harlen asked where I was.”

“But … where did you go, then?”

I told her about going to the detention center in Shale-town and about meeting Rose Cobb, which led into the story of Aya and my belief that whatever was wrong with Serenity stemmed from what had happened to Aya and her family. As I hoped, Gilly jumped to the conclusion that visiting the detention center had been the only reason I’d gone to Shaletown.

Then she said, “Harlen did ask about you. He said you hadn’t mentioned any doctor’s appointment to him, and I asked why you should have.” She frowned. “It’s weird how possessive he acts about you.” She hesitated, then she added, “He said he had a date this weekend with you.”

“He sort of cornered me,” I said wearily. “I made it for the middle of Saturday in Eastland Mall.”

“I don’t get it,” Gilly said. “Why are you so nervous about just telling him straight out that you don’t want to go out with him? Oh, I forgot, there was a notice about the holidays.” She began to rummage in her bag. After a minute, red-faced and muttering, she gave up, saying she must have left it in her locker. “I am so disorganized! I swear it’s my natural state! I keep thinking when I do this or that I will finally be able to get organized, but of course then there is always something else to get in the way.”

I grinned sympathetically. “The thing is to tell yourself this is life and chaos is part of it.”

“You sound like some sort of wise guru. Maybe that’s what you’re gonna be when you grow up.”

I grinned. “All right, so I was raving on.”

“Yeah, but in a good way,” Gilly said, and we both laughed.

“That was great last night when you came to dinner,” she went on. “You had this amazing effect on my grandmother. Usually she is so stuffy and disapproving.”

“I didn’t have an effect,” I said. “We did. The three of us. I think that the dynamics between the three of us produced the right chemistry for her to talk.”

“Yeah, but it has been the same ever since.” Gilly shook her head. “I mean, we actually talked over breakfast this morning and … she made me laugh!”

“She made me laugh, too,” I said. “Spooky.”

“Idiot!” Gilly retorted.

* * *

Mrs. Rountree and Da were eating sponge cake and drinking tea in a pretty little conservatory I had not seen the night before.

“Hello, Alyzon,” Da said. Then he held out his hand to Gilly. “We meet again, Gilly. I’m not sure if I mentioned how much I enjoyed your playing the other night. You have a fine technique.”

Gilly reddened with pleasure.

“It is lovely to see you again, Alyzon,” her grandmother told me warmly. “Macoll has been telling me that your mother is a painter.” I stifled a grin to see that her cheeks were pink. Da has visible swoon range.

* * *

“Oh, Da! You kissed her hand!” I laughed when we were driving off down the road. “That’s so old-fashioned!”

“Millicent Rountree is an old-fashioned type of lady,” Da said with dignity. “And she liked it.”

“She loved it,” Gilly said, and flushed scarlet when she heard the wistfulness in her voice. That broke me up, and I laughed until Gilly forgot to be mortified and elbowed me hard. Da pretended not to notice any of this, and only when we had quieted down did he look sideways and ask how school had gone. Which wiped the smile right off my face.

Gilly told him about her own day, making it sound as if she was speaking for both of us and without her ever actually uttering a single lie. It was pretty impressive, and I told her so when we got home and went upstairs to my room.

“I’m not sure I want to be congratulated for being a good liar,” Gilly said primly as we came through the door, then she saw Serenity’s half of the room and her mouth fell open.

“Serenity’s side of the bedroom,” I said.