Read Dark Energy Online

Authors: Robison Wells

Dark Energy (3 page)

BOOK: Dark Energy
11.96Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

“Oh, definitely. Like I said, gifted in math and science. Meaning: total dork. I have a spreadsheet.”

I laughed. “And who's at the top?”

Rachel grinned. “It's a personal spreadsheet. Password protected. If I ever let it get out, then Brynne would be my worst nightmare.”

Huh. I didn't want a roommate who would ever be anyone's worst nightmare. “How's that? Gossip?”

“No, not gossip. Because she'd harangue me every minute of the day to actually do something about the spreadsheet.”

“So, can I take it the reason you don't have ‘things' in the cafeteria with boys is because you don't ask a lot of boys to get pie with you?”

“Well, one of the girls in here put ‘succubi' on the door and one of them didn't. And she meant it.”

“I hate to ask it,” I said, “but how exactly is Brynne gifted and talented? Or would that be a question better posed to the boys?”

“Well, she is a genius. She's just a genius in lots of ways. Unlike me. I mean, I could tutor just about every one of
those guys in math—and have—but none of them remember that when Saturday night rolls around.”

“Do you ever ask them?”

“I grew up inside boarding schools. They don't really teach you how to talk to boys. The only parenting I got was from guidance counselors and report cards.”

“Then I guess I'll have to be your mom while I'm here.”

“Thanks.” She laughed, and then added in a bratty little kid voice, “You told me you were going to get me pie, Mom.”

THREE

T
he selection of pie was actually pretty good. In fact, the selection of everything was pretty good. Rachel told me classes had been canceled and most of the students had spent the day in one of the many common rooms, while the cafeteria churned out meal after meal, dessert after dessert. The UFO landing was going to be the single leading cause of heart disease at the Minnetonka School for the Gifted and Talented.

Kurt was there, sprawled out on a sofa with no room for me to sit beside him. He saw me walk in and hopped over the back of the couch to trot after me. I broke the news to him that I was going back to the dorm rather than staying with him, and he didn't seem too heartbroken, which threw me for a loop. Wasn't he supposed to be devastated? Instead
I got, “That's cool,” as he helped himself to more banana cream.

“Any exciting new developments?” I asked, balancing four slices of pie—two cherry, one key lime, and one coconut crème—on two plates. I wondered how I was going to open the dorm door.

“They've had to call in more military to get a better perimeter around the ship because protestors keep trying to get over to it.”

“Why?”

“I don't know. But some guy made it all the way to the ship and started attacking it with a crowbar,” he said. “They've been playing that video a lot. You should have seen them take the guy down. A beautiful chop block. The military says they're going to shoot anyone who tries to get in, because they're worried about bombs.”

“Wow. Well, welcome to Earth.”

“I can't say I blame the people protesting,” Kurt said. “They keep saying that the death toll is going to rise—right now they're still at eighteen thousand, but three thousand more are still missing.”

“Maybe I should stop being so flippant.”

He shrugged. “People deal with stuff in different ways. Some people make jokes and some people attack things with crowbars.”

He grabbed one of the forks I was holding and helped
himself to a bite of the coconut crème, then licked some extra cream off the fork.

“Hey,” I said, awkwardly trying to pick up a second fork without dropping my plates.

Another guy came over to the pie table and pointed to my hair while he cut a slice of cherry. “Nice blue. They'll make you dye it.”

“We'll see how long I can hold out,” I said. “I figure I'm in the clear at least as long as classes are canceled.”

“For being new, you're already pretty eager to break the rules. I like that.” He put his hand to his chest. “I'm William.”

“I'd shake your hand if I wasn't carrying pie,” I said. “Nice to meet you, William. Can I call you Will?”

His eyes narrowed into tired, annoyed slits. “No. Just William. Anyway, classes are probably going to be out again tomorrow. And maybe Friday, if we can milk it.”

Kurt looked at me. “So I'm betting you can keep the hair until Monday.”

“Tuesday,” I said, with a smile. “Anyway, I have to take this back to Rachel.”

“Redhead Rachel?” William asked.

“Yes,” I said, suddenly defensive. “She's my new roommate.”

He lowered his voice. “You're new here, so I'll help you out. Rachel is trying everything she can to beat me for the Bruner in math. But it isn't going to happen. I mean look
at her—frizzy hair and never wears any makeup. Introvert. Half of the award is citizenship. Leadership. You know, like proving that you will represent the school well. And Rachel's got a screw loose.”

“You're kidding, right?” I didn't know what the Bruner was, but if I was going to choose someone to represent me, it wouldn't be William.

A short girl with platinum blond hair in a pixie cut and thick eyeliner appeared next to me. “Hi, I'm Brynne,” she said. “Your other new roomie.” She glared at William. “So, Will, how does that hazing charge get you good citizenship? I know your parents got it covered up, but it would be so easy to uncover it.”

His face twitched, but only for an instant. “I don't know what you're talking about.” He looked like a snake, ready to bite if provoked.

“Hazing?” I said. “That's more than just losing a scholarship. That's criminal and civil lawsuits. I bet your parents would love that.” I liked provoking snakes. He took a step toward me, and I held my ground.

“Hey, Alice,” Brynne said, tugging on my sleeve. “Let's get back to the room.”

“Okay,” I said, my eyes still fixed on his. “See you, Will. You seem fun.”

Brynne grabbed one of my plates of pie, and we headed to the dorm.

“So you're the succubus?” I asked.

“We all are,” she said. “The whole room.”

“You're not fleeing? Heading home because aliens have landed?”

“I'm here on scholarship. Flying home at a moment's notice isn't part of the deal.”

“Really?” I asked, eying her perfect hair, perfect body, and immaculate clothes. “You look so, well, money.”

“Good genes,” she said. “Which is actually how I ended up here. Good genes. I won the national science fair last year.”

“Like
won
won? The whole thing?”

“Yep. Genetics. I thought about taking a bunch of tests during the summer to skip the rest of high school and go straight to college, but Minnetonka made me an offer I couldn't refuse. I get to do research instead of going to most of my classes, I have a full ride, and when I graduate from here I can practically write my own ticket to wherever I want. Maybe I'll already be published. That's the plan anyway. Not bad for a girl from Nowhere, Kansas.”

I nodded. “Gifted and talented.”

“That's what they say.”

“I'm here because my dad works for NASA,” I said, feeling stupid about it. “So it's not my gifts or talents—it's his.”

“I'm sure that's not true,” Brynne said. “We'll figure out your G and Ts.” She opened the door to our room and
Rachel looked up from where she was lying on the couch, reading
David Copperfield.

“Here,” I said. “One cream, one fruit. I didn't know which you would want.”

Brynne opened one of my shoe boxes. “Alice had the pleasure of meeting the wonderful William. He was as charming as always.”

I grimaced. “What is his deal? Please tell me he's just here because his family paid his way in.”

Brynne laughed. “Nope. William is definitely in the gifted category. He's vying for the top math scholar spot. Ooh. These are cute.”

Rachel took a forkful of whipped cream. “You'll find that every room in this school is named after someone.”

Brynne smirked. “One day I'm going to come back and donate. The Brynne Fuller Memorial Janitor's Closet. It's the only room left, I think.”

“They'll start putting plaques on the dorms,” Rachel said. “Brynne Fuller Made Out with Mark Richardson in This Room.”

“And Then Donated a Hundred Thousand Dollars,” Brynne said, closing the shoe box and sitting on my bed.

“Anyway,” Rachel said, reaching for one of my shopping bags. “Weren't we going to help you unpack?”

The process didn't take long. We all tried on the shoes, and Rachel fell in love with one of the sweaters. I told her
she could have it, but she insisted she'd go buy one of her own. I found out that Rachel was Brynne's sugar mama—Brynne got all her stunning clothes from shopping trips with Rachel. In exchange, Brynne tutored Rachel in biology and genetics.

I tried not to feel completely out of my depth in the room. I was there with two of the front runners for Bruner Scholars, one in math and the other in biology, while I was proud that I had my social security number memorized.

Oh well. Maybe I could be the Bruner Scholar in Fast Cars and Accessorizing.

The next morning at 8:04 sharp, I was in the office of the headmistress, Mrs. Cushing, sitting in the chair opposite her and getting an austere, if nervous, lecture about the history of the school. She seemed to be eager to name drop, as though she thought I was a spy from the Large Donation Society who was checking to make sure that philanthropists were getting the appreciation they deserved: the James Moore Center for Leadership, the Lynda Day Multimedia Lab, the Jack Montague Lecture Hall. I tried to put on a serious face and do some rigorous nodding at the importance of these names.

But in the end, aliens had landed, and I could tell her heart wasn't in it. She wanted to hear from me more than I wanted to hear from her, so I relayed everything my dad had told me (which, by now, was all on the news anyway), and she
listened with rapt attention.

She took down my sizes and told me that I'd have uniforms ready the next day, and in the meantime I could wear anything that fit within a small encyclopedia's worth of guidelines. From a cursory glance, it ruled out just about everything except for the uniform and perhaps Elizabethan ball gowns.

Oh, and I had to dye the blue out of my hair. I told her I would as soon as I could, and I decided that I could wait through at least four or five more warnings.

I made my way back upstairs and sat down in the cafeteria with a plate of eggs and potatoes. And I know what you're thinking: eggs and potatoes from a school cafeteria are usually powdered and frozen. But I'd swear these eggs had been hand-delivered from organic farms in the south of France, and the potatoes were yellow and purple and every color but brown. Everything tasted amazing. It made me think about my dad and the nothing he was probably eating.

I called him. The phone rang five times and went to voicemail. As I was leaving a message about the wonders of my breakfast, Kurt sat down across from me. He looked exactly the same as he had the night before, right down to the untucked shirt and loosened tie. Maybe this was just what he wore all the time. I'd have to consult my encyclopedia, but I thought it was against code.

“Good morning,” he said, reaching for the pepper.

“Aren't you a little late for breakfast?” After my orientation with Mrs. Cushing, it was nearly ten o'clock.

“Maybe I was waiting for you.”

“Were you? Because that would be weird.”

“Would it?”

“Yes. Because you could have eaten already, and then waited for me, and still sat at this table and you wouldn't have been hungry all morning.”

“But then I wouldn't have a good excuse.”

I speared a potato and popped it into my mouth. “Do you need an excuse?”

“I don't know. Do I?”

“This is a very weird conversation.”

“I agree,” he said, now taking the salt to his food. “Because most people make up reasons for doing things. Most people would find it weird for me to wait around for you and sit down without a plate of food. But food brings people together. We're sharing a common experience, and that leads to emotional bonding.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “Gifted and talented: psychology.”

“Gifted and talented: money.”

I held up my hand. “That's me, too. High five.”

Kurt slapped my hand, and then returned to his breakfast. “You're lucky. You're sharing a room with two Bruner Scholars. I share a room with three other guys who have rich, detached parents. We play a lot of video games.”

My phone buzzed, and I looked down at it.

“Important business meeting?” Kurt asked.

“Message from my dad.”

I clicked on it.

Turn on your TV.

I glanced up at the TV on the wall across the room. It was still on nonstop CNN. I reached for Kurt's hand and pulled him with me toward the small group of kids clustered around it.

CNN was showing the same thing they'd been showing for days—a wide shot of the ship with an inset of a commentator talking. Standard CNN format for everything.

Then the camera shifted and I saw Wolf Blitzer turning in his seat and putting his finger to his ear. The shot of him was quickly replaced with a close-up on one of the rectangular insets on the hull of the ship. It looked like any of the thousand other nooks and crannies on the side of the ship, except for the fact that it was glowing and sparking.

“What the hell is that?” someone asked, and then everyone started talking, pointing at the rectangle, calling it a door or a window or an airlock or a dozen other things. I texted my dad the same question, but I didn't get any response and I knew that I wouldn't, probably for a long time.

I sat down on the couch and felt Kurt's hand on my shoulder. I thought about shoving it off, but somehow my hand ended up in his, holding on tight. I looked down the row of
TV watchers and saw Brynne at the far end, sitting cross-legged on the floor. Some boy was absentmindedly combing through her hair with his fingers.

“Brynne,” I called, “do you have Rachel's number?”

Brynne stared at me for a moment, then pulled out her phone and typed out a message.

It was like we were watching the moon landing from the point of view of moon men, waiting to see what came out of that
Apollo
landing craft.

“They don't have power,” William said from across the room, a smile on his face. “They can't open their own doors. They have to cut them.”

“They have power,” Kurt answered. “Enough power to cut through that metal—the metal that dragged across two states without breaking.”

It took a long minute for someone to find the remote, but once a girl extracted it from the couch cushions, we turned up the volume. Wolf Blitzer was talking, describing the scene. He wasn't saying anything that the rest of us weren't already thinking. No brilliant insights, just the typical news anchor babble.

A different camera angle showed us that this rectangle was higher than the tallest tree, maybe a hundred feet from the ground.

Rachel came running in, wearing flannel pajamas and a thick bathrobe. I motioned for her to sit at my feet, and once
she did, I let go of Kurt's hand and put my hands on Rachel's shoulders.

BOOK: Dark Energy
11.96Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Maid of Murder by Amanda Flower
Treasure of the Sun by Christina Dodd
Crossing Borders by Z. A. Maxfield
The Da-Da-De-Da-Da Code by Robert Rankin
The Dislocated Man, Part One by Larry Donnell, Tim Greaton