My Boyfriend Merlin (2 page)

I sighed. I’d been enthralled as soon as I’d laid eyes on him. I’d moved not too long ago too. After my mother had died, I’d been brought from sun-soaked Texas to the cold Boston suburb of Concord. In my life of dull grey, Matt Emrys stood illuminated in full color.

Matt flung open the window. A screeching sound filled the room. He slammed the window shut. In a clipped British accent that could make ordinary words gold, he said calmly, “It appears to be the city siren.”

One of Grey’s football buddies shouted, “Let’s get out of here.”

Beside me, our soon-to-be valedictorian, a quiet girl, wheezed and pushed aside the thick brown hair that usually veiled her face. You had to be really nerdy to be valedictorian at Acton-Concord High School. Five out of the top ten kids had gone to Harvard last year. “Ms. Bedevere said to stay in class.”

“I’m not going to stay here just because she said so. Learn to make up your own mind, Bennett.” Grey scowled at her.

His buddies nodded along with him. Bennett blushed under the male scrutiny.

I rose up. “Leave her alone, Grey. It’s what Ms. Bedevere said.”

Grey gave me an irritated look. “And what do you suggest, Madam President?”

“Ragnar is right. This once. We should go.” Matt’s deep voice washed over me from the back of the room.

Grey looked at Matt in surprise. I could see in Grey’s face he wanted to take back his words just to spite Matt agreed. Since the first day Matt had started school, he and Grey had been going at each other. Grey could be overbearing. He pretty much ruled our class. Then Matt had transferred in and the
battle royale
had begun. I hadn’t seen it at first—I became a blubbering idiot at the sight of Matt—but the antagonism between them was mostly Matt’s fault. He needled Grey, and only Grey, purposefully. I didn’t know why.

The other students’ heads looked back and forth between the three of us.

“Emergency procedures state that we should go to the nearest safe room." I straightened to the full length of my five-foot-two-inch frame. “Ms. Bedevere will be in Hainey’s room. We’ll all go there.”

Like horses released from the gate, the classroom scrambled to close up their backpacks and rush to the door.

We went down the hall into the long physics room. It turned out we weren’t the only ones Hainey had alerted. Kids from the Chem-2 class next door had already beaten us there. Even though the class sizes for advanced placement classes were fairly small, fifty or so students were crowded in the room.

Ms. Bedevere smiled at me winningly. “Good work, Ryan. I knew I could depend on you to handle anything.”

“Right, as if you would have remembered to come get us,” Grey muttered behind me.

High tables and bench seats made up the physics room.  Hainey pointed under them. His class was already huddled beneath. “Get down. They say it will be here any minute.”

Grey asked, “What’s going on?”

A rumble shook the building. I lost my footing and stumbled.

A pair of male arms wrapped around my waist and stopped my fall. A smooth voice spoke into my ear, “Don’t panic. I have you.”

I took a breath. Matt. I should have pushed him away but I couldn’t. A sense of calm encased me. The building trembled, but it seemed far away. Lights flickered off and on. He pulled us to the side of the room behind a tall bookshelf filled with Hainey’s science knick-knacks.

The building gave a slight shudder. A few glass beakers tumbled off the lab tables and broke. The knick-knack shelf wobbled. Instinctively, my body moved to get away from it.

Matt’s arms around me tightened and held me in place. “Stay still.”

My heart raced. I wanted to stay with him.
Pathetic.

I tried to pull away from him. He held me in place.

“Are you crazy?” I pointed behind us where everyone else was huddled. “We need to get under—”

But it was too late. The building gave a violent shake. A model of the galaxy crashed to the ground. I heard a few gasps. Most of the knick-knacks flew off the shelf. I braced myself for the hit.

None of the knick-knacks hit us. A microscope, a floating ball as heavy as twenty-pound weights, and numerous other models tumbled down… and over us. I watched as they fell all around Matt and me. It was as if an invisible bubble was keeping us safe.

I glanced at Matt flabbergasted. Half-a-minute after it started, the tremor stopped. No one moved for what seemed like another ten minutes. Although with Matt holding me, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to move… ever.

There was loud shuffling as the kids under the tables started to come out. Matt let go of me. I grabbed his arm and pointed to the fallen knick-knacks. They made a neat circle around us. “Why didn’t they hit us?”

Dark eyes fixed on me, but then let go. Matt shrugged. “Guess we were lucky.”

“Ryan?” Grey said from the other side of the shelf.

I could hear the worry in Grey’s voice. My soon-to-be brother’s voice. The Ragnars had taken me in when I had no one left. Now they wanted to adopt me to make it official. I wasn’t entirely sure how I felt about it. It had always been my mom and me against the world and I’d lost her too. Being part of a family was as thrilling as it was scary. It also came with responsibility. As much as I didn’t want to let Matt off the hook, I stepped back around the shelf into the open part of the room. “I’m here.”

A few kids stared when Matt walked out behind me. One snickered, “Hope the earthquake didn’t distract you two.”

Grey looked at Matt with an unhappy expression.

“Was that it?” someone murmured. “I thought an earthquake would be bigger.”

“Joey’s car shakes worse than that,” one of Grey’s buddies said and made an old jalopy glug-glug sound. His friends laughed.

“But we don’t have earthquakes,” another kid said.

“Boston had a 3-pointer not too long ago,” our valedictorian intoned. “But I don’t know if one’s ever come all the way out to Concord.”

Hainey waved his cellphone in the air. “It’s not an earthquake. They’re calling it the Total Tremor. And it wasn’t just us. It went around the whole world.”

We crowded around the “lab.” Hainey had managed to cram a TV, floor-standing speakers, two video-game consoles, and a mini-fridge into a closet at the back of his classroom. I stood on my tiptoes. With my height I could only make out a corner of the TV through the crowd. Hainey flipped on the news.

Ms. Bedevere squealed like a five-year-old on a sugar-high. “I don’t believe it!”

“I knew you’d love this.” Hainey grabbed a potato-chip bag and started stuffing chip after chip systematically into his mouth. “It came down in a big explosion. Everyone thought it was a bomb. But then... poof. The giant stone just appeared. That’s when the Total Tremor started.”

“What appeared? What stone?” Grey muscled his way through the crowd to the front. I squeezed in beside him. His buddies followed close behind us, edging everyone else out.

“It can’t be?” I looked at Ms. Bedevere. “Is that what I think it is?”

One of Grey’s buddies exclaimed in a thick Bostonian accent, “It’s a metal cross.”

Another teammate guffawed. “It’s a sword, doofus.”

On Hainey’s flat screen, the tagline read ‘Trafalgar Square’.  Smoke and broken concrete littered the scene. A few pigeons persisted in hanging around the destruction. British policemen had closed off the square and stood on guard around the perimeter. Crowds of people gathered around them. They all looked wide-eyed at the spectacle in the middle.

A sword sat buried inside an obsidian-black rock at the center of the square. Half of it was on a fountain dedicated to Lord Nelson, the hero of the Battle of Trafalgar. Water sluiced off the broken fountain, flooding the square. Droplets fell on the hilt of the sword. It sat embedded halfway into the stone. Mammoth lion statues perched on the edges of Trafalgar Square stared impassively at the wreckage.

“It's a sword,” Ms. Bedevere repeated, not taking her eyes off the television.

“Not just any sword,” I murmured.

“It’s not a meteor, folks,” a cheery blonde reporter in a fitted suit says, “but it has caused a sensation. It has been confirmed that the epicenter of the Total Tremor began at the giant stone. Wait—” She touched the microphone piece in her ear. “I have a breaking update. We have an amateur video… a tourist in the Square today filmed the entire thing.” Anders waved to a crewperson on the screen. “Let’s roll this clip.”

A grainy video clip showed the giant rock appearing out of nowhere a few feet above the big fountain. It seemed to poof into existence. Gravity realized around it and it fell to the ground. A big boom and flying dust went everywhere. People screamed—no doubt thinking “
TERROR ATTACK”
. But the whole square shook. The video jostled at this point. People rushed past the tourist who was filming. The video righted again, this time on the surrounding buildings. Like a wave radiating out from the square, the buildings shook in sequence. Once the wave had traveled through, the tourist turned back to the center of the square.

A giant black stone sat directly atop the right half of the fountain. If I hadn’t known the King Arthur legend, the stone would have looked like something dropped by aliens—or some other higher power. The camera zeroed in on one side of the rock. On its otherwise smooth surface, the stone had one jagged side extending from the bottom to the top, almost like steps.

“Certainly the Total Tremor is no laughing matter. More reports are coming in as the tremor spreads.” The reporter gave an overbright smile. “Thankfully a minimal number of lives have been lost—mostly due to panic. Still the globe is abuzz. There hasn’t been an event this widespread since the meteor that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs.”

Images from around the world flashed across the TV. Paris, Madrid, Berlin, Times Square… They all had one thing in common—they had all trembled under the force of the tremor.

“But is it some sort of elaborate hoax? We have set up a panel to ask just that. Dr. Latimer, an eminent physicist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Northe, a noted King Arthur historian and lecturer at Essex University in the United Kingdom, is a man in very high demand today. They are both here to share their expertise.”

The picture changed to a white-haired man in a too-expensive suit.

“Dr. Latimer, what can tell us about the stone?”

“Yes, thank you, Ms. Anders.” The professor spoke in a nasally tone. “A rock of this size and mass would have created a much bigger crater if it had fallen out of sky.  The entire square would have been decimated. The impact here suggests the rock fell only a few feet.”

The TV showed an aerial view of the square.

Hainey leaned closer to the screen to get a good look. “Hmm…. he’s right about the point of origin.”

On TV, Anders nodded. “Other scientists who have seen the footage agree. This rock could not have fallen out of the sky. And it is not nearly big enough to have caused a world-wide tremor.”

Latimer’s face became as long as a basset hound’s. “The rock, despite its large size did not fall with such impact as to create such a world-wide phenomenon. However, there is a scientific explanation. We must find it—”

“Until then we shall look at a different theory,” Anders declared. “Let’s go to our history expert, Dr. Vivane Northe. We know what everyone is thinking—the sword inside the stone. King Arthur's sword. How can such a thing be possible?”

A lean yet gorgeous face filled the screen. With a rakish smile that said he knew exactly how attractive he was, Northe appeared more underwear model than mole-like history university lecturer. He also seemed really young—about nineteen. But that wasn’t why I gaped at Northe.

He could have been Matt’s double.

“
He’s
a professor?” a girl beside me murmured.

On TV, Northe said, “The myth of King Arthur starts with Arthur pulling the sword from the stone, and thus, claiming his right to the throne…”

My jaw dropped lower. He spoke in an eerily familiar British accent.

“Talk about hot for teacher,” a girl beside me murmured.

“He’s not that handsome,” Matt muttered.

We all turned to Matt.

“Missing a twin, Emrys?” Gray asked with a sneer.

“If we were, would not our surnames match?” Matt’s accent emphasized the droll bite to his statement.

Grey glowered at him.

“You
do
sound just like him,” Ms. Bedevere ventured.

Matt’s tone softened. “Yet he is not my twin.”

“Of course—” Hainey rubbed a hand over his bald scalp and gave a fake laugh. “Of course. Let’s leave Mr. Emrys alone.”

Everyone dutifully turned back to the TV. Hainey gave Matt an I’ve-got-your-back thumbs up sign. I don’t know what it was about Matt, but the teachers all treated him like he walked on water.

Anders said, “We have yet to see how the British government will respond. The question we must ask here is not just why but why now? And what do we do next?”

“Closer scientific study should begin immediately—”

“We should gather other historians—”

Everyone jumped when the class bell rang.

Hainey muted the TV. “Back to your rooms.”

We all hurried out.

I was throwing my notebook into my backpack when a couple of pep-squad girls tried to get my attention. One held up a scribbled sign on notebook paper, “Princess Prom. Perfect Party.”

I tried not to laugh.
Princess Prom. Really?
Instead I smiled and gave them a thumbs-up. They nodded happily.

Matt came up from behind my desk. He gave the Princess Prom sign a pained look. “You’re not serious, are you?”

My smile froze. I wanted to ignore him. Why did he have to wear that black leather jacket? It was the slim kind without a collar. It made him look so… intense. “I bring every idea to the committee.”

“Of course you do. You’re very… conscientious.”

I zipped up my backpack with a snap. “I’m student president. I have to be.”

“No. I don’t think so. You just don’t like to say no.”

“What do you want, Matt?”

“Plenty of things.”
From you,
his eyes suggested. His hand reached out to smooth a few stray tendrils of hair. I jerked away. His hand dropped. He smiled almost wistfully, “Odd day, don’t you think? This strange tremor and all—”