The Golden Thread (14 page)

Two girls pushed past, heads close together. “Come on, tell me who it was,” one of them said, elbowing the other one in the ribs.

“No, I can't.”

“Well, don't tell me her name, then, just give me a hint.”

In the girls' room, some sophomores were at the mirrors over the sinks. I hid in one of the booths, the Phantom of the High School.

“I
hate
my nose.”

“I hate
my
nose.”

“Your nose is okay, it's cute.”

“What kind of eyeliner is that? Let me try it?”

I could hear them jostling and giggling.

“My sister hates
her
nose.”

“Why? It's not so bad.”

“Shhh. You're not supposed to say anything about it or she gets real upset.”

How come they get to compare noses and I get to tackle an ice princess from another planet?

The bell rang and the halls emptied out again. Wandering around, I found Barb on the third floor putting up her photographs. She was going great guns in the school photography club this term, using the classic Leica she'd been given for Christmas. She'd been asked to put up the best prints from her stay in Barbados with her aunt, who was a doctor down there.

“Nice pictures,” I said, admiring shots of a muscular kid clowning on a beat-up-looking boat. “Who's he?”

“Cousin,” she said through a mouthful of pushpins.

“You know what?” I said. “You were right. My foreign guest is bad, bad news.”

Barb considered this while she went on placing pictures. When I tried to help she snapped at me, insisting that I only touch the white edges so I wouldn't get any fingerprints on the photographic prints. Some of these pictures didn't even
have
white edges.

“Bad, bad news, huh? Like what?” she said finally.

My best friend should at least have some idea of why I didn't make it to graduation. I told her all while she finished arranging her prints.

“Peter
Weiss
?” she crowed. “Into a deer? I've got some people this girl has just got to meet!”

“Seriously,” I said, “that dork Peter is running around on all fours in Central Park with hooves, horns, and a flippy little tail.”

Barb said, ‘How come she didn't turn him into one of these leaf-taker things, like the store clerk?”

“I have a theory about that,” I said. “I think the longer she's away from her own home the shakier her memory gets. That thing isn't a ‘leaf-taker.' It has a name in Bosanka's own language, but she couldn't remember it. Maybe everything's fading, which is why she's so frantic to get to her people before it all goes.”

Barb studied the arrangement of her photos. “Maybe that's why she's drawing pictures of her native animals in Central Park, trying to keep it all alive for herself as long as she can. And I've noticed some other funny things in the park lately—lines of little stones, twigs stuck in the ground to make patterns. I know people who would take one look and say it was magic.”

“Magic?” I said, stunned. “Barb, are you saying you
believe
me?”

“Valentine, you may be a stuck-up fool sometimes, but you've never been a liar—not to me, anyway.” Barb looked up and down the corridor; we were alone. “That time you came bombing into my mom's shop with Ushah the Awful after you?”

“I remember,” I said. “If you hadn't helped me, I never would have escaped in one piece.”

“My hand-mirror that I gave you that afternoon?” she said. “The one that helped you rescue your mom? I kept the little piece you gave me back afterward. I thought I could see special things in there. Wishful thinking, I told myself. But I kept that piece of glass with me.

“Well, I showed it to somebody in Barbados, a sort of special-talents person Aunt Ruth knows. He said he could see traces of strong magic inside the glass, so something big had happened around my mirror, just like you told me yourself.

“Now I saw this man do things you wouldn't believe—well, maybe you would, with your magic Gran and all. So yeah, I believe that my mirror helped you beat an evil wizard. And if you tell me now that Bosanka is harassing this committee of yours, I believe that too.”

I felt my heart thump and my eyes get big. “You mean you've seen some magic yourself, in Barbados?”

“Oh, a couple of things,” she said nonchalantly. “Tell you all about it sometime, when you got a minute. But first, what are you going to do about Bosanka?”

Back to the horrible here and now. I sighed. “Lennie and I are going to ask her for more time, today, at drama club. I don't know what will happen. She's so crazy and arrogant—!”

“Indeed,” Barb said dryly. She shut her photo portfolio and fished her camera out of her backpack. “Good thing I've got this with me today.”

“Why?” I said.

“To take to the auditorium, of course,” she said. “I want to get some shots of this royal witch of yours.”

I had heavy, scary second thoughts. “Listen, Bosanka may be hazy about the details of her home magic but she's still dynamite. I mean, she's dangerous, Barb!”

“Valentine, I understand that,” she said sweetly. “I'm the one who gets the A's, remember?”

“Okay,” I said, in a burst of creative annoyance, “so how about standing in for Beth Stowers in the Comet Committee? Then I can tell Bosanka that I've got a replacement, somebody who's gone through some weirdness with me, and maybe we won't get killed on the spot.”

Barb hooked her arm through mine and we headed for the auditorium together. “I thought you'd never ask.”

Lennie met us outside the big double doors.

“Barb is joining the Comet Committee in Beth's place,” I said. “That's one down!”

Lennie solemnly shook Barb's hand.

We slipped inside and sat down in back. The drama club was rehearsing a modernized
Hamlet
. Kim Larkin, the school clique queen, was Ophelia, and gorgeous Michael Scott (the senior heartthrob who had completely slipped my mind lately) was Hamlet.

To my utter amazement, Bosanka was reading the part of Queen Gertrude, Hamlet's mother. I could not believe it! Lennie quickly got the story from his friend and passed the word on to Barb, who passed it to me. The girl playing Gertrude had failed a crucial chem test, so she was busy being tutored for a makeup. Mr. Fischer, the drama club's faculty advisor, had somehow or other ended up letting Bosanka pinch-hit as the queen.

I bet he had no idea why he did that. We did.

Barb slipped off down the side aisle with her camera in her hand. I stayed put in the back row, feeling ravenous with tension.

Michael declaimed, “Now, mother, what's the matter?”

Bosanka read from some mimeographed sheets in her hand. “Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended.” The effect was amazing. It didn't matter how square and plain she was. She was the Snow Queen, lofty and cool, with Hamlet dithering around somewhere about knee level.

My friend Megan sat down next to me. “Wow,” she whispered, “what an actress! I should have signed up for a foreign guest, too, though with my luck, I'd get some nerd. What's she like, really?”

“What wilt thou do?” said Bosanka with cool disdain. “Thou wilt not murder me?”

“What you see,” I said, “is what you get.”

“My mom is always yakking about ‘really strong women,' you know?” Megan said. “She should meet Bosanka.”

Was this Megan talking? Megan who had been madly in love for years with a boy who treated her like a wad of gum stuck to his shoe?

But she was right, Bosanka was impressive as the completely unruffled monarch of all she surveyed. Poor Michael was just part of the scenery. On the stage with Bosanka, he was a mere cute boy saying words he didn't really understand very well.

“O, speak to me no more,” Bosanka said, “spurning” him, that was the only term for it. She sat down in the lone wooden chair on the stage and gazed coldly up at him. “These words like daggers enter in mine ears. No more, sweet Hamlet.”

Even Mr. Fischer was impressed. I could tell by the polite way he talked to her, Fischer, who usually prowled the balcony roaring, “I'm not convinced!
Convince
me!”

He said, “Gertrude, I think you could be more
upset
when you do this scene. The queen as a proud, powerful woman who follows her own will and isn't used to being criticized is very effective. It will work even better if she falters here and lets what Hamlet says really get to her. Would you try that approach, please?”

He was treating her the way a real director treats a real actress.

Every single person in that auditorium was watching her while Michael, bemused, fished out his line and delivered it. It wasn't his fault that he barely existed up there. He was on stage pretending to be a prince with a person who was royal without having to pretend.

“Alas, he's mad,” said Bosanka contemptuously.

Royal and threatening. She had a ruthless streak a mile wide, something to do with being “highborn” in a place that I was beginning to suspect had been pretty rough, tough, and basic, no matter how magical. Her brutal simplicity came through, making her Queen Gertrude absolutely convincing.

She was removed from everybody else. You could see it in the way the other kids treated her. They deferred to her, but nobody kidded around with her the way friends do. They wouldn't shout her name in the hall or ask her how she liked or didn't like her nose. She was only playing at being one of them, and they sensed it.

No wonder she was so desperate to get back to “her people.” We were not them.

Megan said in an awed whisper, “You know what she's got? She's got
presence
.”

“Why, look you there!” Michael yelped. “Look how it steals away! My father, in his habit as he lived! Look where he goes even now out at the portal!”

Mr. Fischer, standing in for the ghost, tiptoed away.

Bosanka said icily to Michael, “This is the very coinage of your brain. This bodiless creation ecstasy is very cunning in.” I don't think any of us knew what the heck “ecstasy” meant in that sentence, including Bosanka. It didn't matter a bit. Michael cringed.

“Excellent!” shouted Fischer. “Let's stop there, everybody, for today.” He talked briefly with Bosanka and then walked out with Michael, the two of them intent on some line-reading or other. Not that advice from Fischer or anybody else would make much difference for Michael in the scene.

Bosanka stood on the stage holding a long wooden dowel used as a sword in the duel scenes. She gave the side curtain a quick, vicious, capable-looking jab with it.

When we were alone with her, I went down front with Lennie. Close by I could hear Barb's camera snick.

First the good news. “Bosanka,” I said, “we need to talk with you. We've been working on getting the whole committee together for you tomorrow. Beth Stowers just is not available, but we have a replacement, somebody who really belongs in the Comet Committee.”

Her pale eyes narrowed with suspicion. “Who?”

“My friend Barbara Wilson,” I said.

Bosanka pointed the dowel at Barb. “That one?”

“Yes, that's Barbara—”

The dowel whistled down and cracked against the back of the chair they had been using in the scene. The chair screamed. I mean
screamed
, a high-pitched shriek that left my ears ringing and my heart paralyzed.

Bosanka roared, “Should be you I hit! Or this walking darkness, witch of the left hand, night demon!”

“What, what?” I stammered. I squinted at the chair. Had it really moved in a creaking flinch under the whiplash blow of the stick? “Demon? Who?”

“Me,” Barb said loudly. “She means ‘black.' ”

“Black, black, black!” Bosanka yelled. She stamped on the stage, which boomed like a drum. “Even here you say it—black magic!”

Which goes to show that I had just not taken Barb's objections seriously enough. After all, how did racial prejudice fit in with royalty from another world? The plain fact is, I forgot there might be a problem and Barb had not reminded me. Maybe she'd hoped, deep down, that she was wrong.

There was no more room for doubt.

“The girl is crazy,” Barb announced in trembling fury. “You-all will excuse me if I take my wicked black self out of here so as not to lose my terrible left-hand temper and tear off somebody's head.”

I ran after her. Behind me I heard Lennie talking soothingly to Bosanka. Was he crazy? What do you say to a magical savage who is also a raving bigot?

Barb and I burst out of the auditorium together.

“What's going on?” said Mrs. Denby, nimbly skipping out of our way. “Who's in the auditorium, girls?”

“Imperial Wizard-ess of the Ku Klux Klan,” Barb snapped, and stalked off.

I panted. “Um, just rehearsing, Mrs. Denby We'll be through soon.”

“Valentine,' she said, “you know students aren't supposed to be in the building after classes without a faculty advisor. Didn't Mr. Fischer just leave?”

“Uh, yes.” How could I stop Mrs. Denby from going into the auditorium? A student turned into a deer was one thing, but the assistant principal?

Mrs. Denby studied me with her well-known X-ray eyes. “What's going on here?”

“Just a rehearsal,” I said. Paavo Latvela had once commented, ambiguously, on my talent for lying. He would have been proud of me now. “We're doing a skit demonstrating the meaning of the First Amendment.”

Mrs. Denby said, “Really,” and walked past me into the auditorium. I plunged in after her.

The place was empty—nothing, nobody, just the chair up on the stage.

“What's all the mystery about?” Mrs. Denby asked.

“Uh, what mystery? There's no mystery, Mrs. D.”