The Spell Book Of Listen Taylor (25 page)

“Playing with fire,” the A.E. said, wanting to talk about the Secret again. “Crash down on you like a house of cards.”

“What do you mean, exactly?” Marbie was slicing up an onion. “The house of cards will catch on fire? Or the house of cards will fall on our heads. Because guess what, a house of cards
would not hurt a fly.
”

The A.E. sat on his kitchen counter, drumming his heels against the cupboards and watching as Marbie chopped the onion. The frown was in the center of his forehead again.

“Ton of bricks then,” he adjusted. “Crash down on you like a ton of bricks.” Then: “Don't think a lawyer's going to pull any punches, do you?”

“What's the charge?” pounced Marbie. “What charge?” She spoiled the effect by sneezing seven times.

“Hay fever?” said the aeronautical engineer.

“So?” said Marbie spitefully.

“You've probably got a cold. Not hay fever at all. As for the charge,” he continued, “ever heard of a particular little document known as the Convention for the Protection of Individuals with Regard to Automatic Processing of Personal Data? Hmm?”

“What in the world makes you think I'd have heard of such a thing!” cried Marbie with a flurry of onion skins.

The aeronautical engineer simply breathed.

“You made it up,” said Marbie.

He turned his palms upward. “Did I?”

There were disadvantages to being at Redwood Elementary. For example, there were no laboratories or kitchen facilities, which meant that, in Science and Food Tech, they did nothing but theory for the term. A lot of the girls complained about this and the effect it might have on their futures. Also, although Redwood was only a five-minute drive from Clareville Academy, some teachers could not make it there in time for a class. So they often had substitute teachers, and once, they even had a Redwood teacher step in at the last moment to teach Commerce.

His name was Mr. Bel Castro. His own class, he said, was doing gym.

“Excuse me, sir,” said Donna Turnbull, pretending to be polite. “Can I just check with you about something?”

“Of course,” said Mr. Bel Castro, also polite.

“What
grade
do you teach normally?”

“Fifth grade,” he said.

“So,” Donna continued, slowly, “don't take this the wrong way or anything, but could I just ask, have you ever had any, kind of like,
experience
with teaching junior high—I mean, students like us?”

Anxiously, she looked around the room as if concerned about the fate of her class. Beside her, Caro giggled.

“Teaching students like
you
?” said Mr. Bel Castro, pausing as he picked up a marker. “Well, I don't know about students like
you.
I did spend five years teaching Economics to twelfth-graders at Riverview before I came to Redwood. So, I don't know, which would you say are more like
you
—my senior students from Riverview, or my fifth-graders here?”

Everyone laughed, and someone said, “Haaa, Donna, he got you good.”

Then Mr. Bel Castro wrote his name on the whiteboard and moved straight on to teaching. Afterward everyone said he was better than their
regular teacher. In fact, he seemed to have a whole lesson stored in his head, which he taught by asking questions.

“You've been doing advertising?” he began. “Consumer awareness and so on? Well, who here thinks that the Valerio Empire is messing with our minds?”

He smiled when everyone said,
“Huh?”
and soon had them shouting out Valerio products from their homes and their days, including Valerio toys, pies, cars, computers, TV shows, and cleaning products. Then he waited while they began reciting Valerio jingles, and lines from the recent Nikolai Valerio biography, which had outsold the Harry Potter series in the first two weeks of its release.

“Okay, you've got Valerio jingles jumping around in your minds, and Valerio's book on your shelves. You've got Valerio films on your TV screens, and Valerio junk mail in your mailboxes. Who thinks the Valerio empire might be invading their privacy?”

This led to a discussion about whether you could invade somebody's privacy by getting products and words inside their mind. Also, whether it made a difference if people chose to buy the products and watch the movies. Kelly Favoloro pointed out that you sometimes
couldn't
choose because Valerio shows were the only things worth watching on TV. “Good point,” said Mr. Bel Castro.

Then Angela Saville said, “But isn't it really the other way around, and
we
invade the Valerio family's privacy?”

“Ah-hah!” said Mr. Bel Castro. “
Interesting!
Well, let's see how much we know about the Valerio family. Who's in the family for a start?”

Of course, everyone knew the Valerio family: Nikolai, his wife Rebekka, and their three handsome, grown-up sons. Nikolai and Rebekka had now retired of course, and liked to play tennis and gin rummy in their South Carolina mansion. They had their own bowling alley! Nikolai had been a beautiful young motor mechanic, working in New York with
a smear of motor oil on his nose, when he was discovered by a movie producer. His seven films were generally considered the best ever made. He became an icon and a sex symbol immediately after his first film. He designed a line of Valerio underwear, which was an instant smash. When he married Rebekka, a Romanian model, after his first film, women all over the world threw themselves off buildings. There was a famous photograph of Nikolai and Rebekka dancing in a buttercup meadow,
in bare feet.
Bees buzzed close to their naked toes.

Nikolai and Rebekka's three sons, although still young, ran the family empire. Each of the sons had been troubled by drugs and shoplifting in the past, but had recovered after treatment in a Swiss resort. The eldest was only twenty-one, but was always Bachelor of the Year.

“So,” said Mr. Bel Castro. “Do you think Rebekka can paint her toenails without somebody noticing? Can Nikolai buy a hamburger? Could any of the three Valerio sons take up guitar without
you
finding out?”

“Yeah, that's a true point,” said Donna, “but I'd put up with being watched all the time if I had about one quarter of the money they've got.”

“It's because they're like the royal family of the world,” said Angela, “because Nikolai made his seven movies in seven different countries, so it's like he spread himself all over the world, like peanut butter, and now
everybody
loves him.”

“But not everybody loves peanut butter,” somebody pointed out wisely.

Listen was quiet, thinking about how much work it was to hide from the eyes of the girls in her year, and the teachers, and her dad. She had to hide, because if they saw her alone, they saw this: a girl with no friends. Once they had seen her in that way, they could never see her any other way. She couldn't change it. She couldn't make it stop.

“I don't think it's worth it,” she said, without even putting up her hand. “You'd forget how to be yourself.”

“Yeah,” said Angela. “But Nikolai
chose
to be a movie star.”

“That's just one choice,” said Listen. “After that, the world decided he and Rebekka were
perfect
people, and they wouldn't let them change. They were like a king and queen, because that's what everybody wanted. Then they had three sons so that's a fairy tale. So now they're a fairy-story family, and there's nothing they can do to make it stop.”

Everyone was quiet and surprised. Listen Taylor rarely spoke in class.

“Huh,” said Mr. Bel Castro, “sorry, I don't know anybody's name—you are…?”

“Her name's Listen Taylor,” said Angela.

“Her name's not actually Listen,” said Donna.

“It's
Alissa,
” Caro added. “She just
calls
herself Listen.”

Mr. Bel Castro looked from Angela to Donna to Caro, and then back to Listen. “She just calls herself Listen?” he said. “I like that.” He smiled at Listen, and nodded his approval.

One night, watching
Law & Order: Criminal Intent,
the aeronautical engineer laughed at something Marbie had just said, and murmured, “Maribelle, you are a riot!”

“Who's Maribelle?” said Marbie from the floor, where she liked to watch TV.

He continued to watch the screen, leaning back on the couch. After a moment he said, “Isn't Maribelle your name?”

“No, Maribelle is not my name.”

“Well, what else could Marbie be short for?”

“What else?! And you call yourself a visionary. It's short for Marbleweed.”

“Marbleweed!” He laughed so much that he had to mute the TV. “Why would your name be Marbleweed?”

Marbie explained about her mother—how she had wanted to give them gifts with their names. She gave Fancy the gift of
imagination,
and Marbie the gift of good luck.

“Good luck!” cried the aeronautical engineer. “With a name like
Marbleweed
?”

Marbie explained that “marble” was, in fact,
excellent
luck, according to a book on witchcraft that her mother once owned. If marble grew like weeds, her mother thought, you'd end up with a surfeit of good luck.

“
And,
” Marbie added, “it worked. I've had
excellent
luck all my life.” Then she frowned for a moment, considering this, and cleared her throat.

“Marbleweed,” he whispered, shaking his head at her. Then he giggled, and began singing the name, over and over, humorously.

A few days later, the aeronautical engineer fell asleep, lying flat along the couch, while Marbie watched
Survivor: Cook Islands
from the floor. When it finished, she tried to wake him to tell him that the Convention for the Protection of Individuals with Regard to Automatic Processing of Personal Data did not apply to the Zing family. It was irrelevant.

And even if it technically applied, she thought, exasperated, what did the law or legal documents have to do with her family and its meetings in the shed? The Zing Family Secret was a family matter, far too complex, emotional, private, fragile, and delicate for the application of
rules.

“Hey,” she said. “Hey. Wake up.”

He gasped in his sleep, said, “Huh? What? Huh?” and turned on his side. A cushion fell off the couch.

She found this display extremely affected.

“Oh,
forget
it,” she said, and went home.

One night, after dinner at Fancy's place, Marbie asked her sister when Nathaniel would return. “You said he'd come back,” she accused.

“Well,” said Fancy, cheerfully. “Has he had an affair with someone else yet?”

Marbie gasped.

“Because,” Fancy explained, “he won't come back until he's had an affair of his own.”

“But I only slept with the A.E. once!” cried Marbie.

“And you're not seeing him anymore, are you?”

“No!” she lied.

“Still, that's just a technicality. As soon as you slept with your aeronautical engineer, you gave Nathaniel the right to sleep with someone else. It's a rule.”

Although Marbie begged Fancy to change her mind, she refused.

“He
has
to,” she said gently. “Otherwise it's not balanced. Didn't you realize?”

“I would die if Nathaniel even touched someone else.”

“You should have thought of that before.”

“Stop it, Fancy, it's not funny. I don't
want
him to have an affair. Come on, please?”

“It's not up to me. Revenge is his right.”

Oh, God!
thought Marbie, breathless with panic. Nathaniel's hands on another woman's hands, Nathaniel's thighs against another woman's
thighs! Nathaniel playing the astronaut game and moonwalking across another woman's bed! Why had she not thought of this before?

If he had to get revenge—and Marbie supposed that he did, because Fancy was generally wise—if he had to get revenge, then couldn't the revenge be something else?

The next day, Marbie slept with the A.E. again.

For weeks he had seemed perfectly content to ask her, now and then, if she would like to “give it a whirl again.” Each time he asked, she would pretend to consider, politely, and then say, “No. Thanks, though.” But on this day she arrived to find him wearing nothing but boxer shorts and a bow tie. He was carrying a bottle of champagne.

“Marbie,” he said, as she walked in the door and raised her eyebrows at him, “Marbie, this can
not
go on.”

“Can't it?” she said.

“No, my beautiful, it cannot. You
cannot
sleep with me once and then not again. You
cannot
use those pouting lips to tell me your delicious family scandal and then keep your lips away from mine. You
cannot
come over, night after night, with those sexy legs and that husky voice, and
not
sleep with me again.”

She gazed at him for a few moments. “All right,” she said. “But not on the living room floor.”

For the next few days, Marbie stayed at home. She explained to the A.E. that she had to do one hundred and forty-seven Business Activity Statements for the various Zing Family Secret corporations. (This happened to be true; She had an excellent mind for corporate structures and formalities.) She phoned Nathaniel and offered to do the Banana Bar BAS, as usual, but he said he had found an accountant.

The next time she saw the aeronautical engineer, it was in the Night
Owl Pub, after her work friends had gone. He did not even sit down. He whispered in her ear, “Have a drink on me,” and placed a schooner of beer in front of her. Then he took out a curl of paper, tied with a pink ribbon, and added, “One of my new visions,” before he slipped away. Marbie opened the vision and read it. It left her somewhat cold.