The Talents (13 page)

For another…well…I thought about the feeling of Cam's hand covering mine, and the way my heart skipped when he'd said, “I'm looking out for you, Dancia.” I couldn't hide from Cam—or if I could, I sure didn't want to try. And Esther and Hennie were the best friends I'd ever had. When they were around, I forgot how different I was, and felt like someone who could fit in. Someone who belonged.

In an odd way, Delcroix was giving me my first chance to be a regular kid, and I didn't want to give it up. No, I refused to give it up. The fact was, in the short time since Mr. Judan and Cam had first come to my house, I had changed. Hiding and trying to be invisible weren't enough for me.

Not anymore.

BY THE
time I came out of the bathroom, the bell had rung and people were headed down to lunch. I waited for the crowds to thin out before I tried to move down the hall. I limped along slowly, still dizzy and weak enough that I had to stop every few feet and take a deep breath. I wasn't sure how I was going to make it back to my locker, which was all the way in the basement. Then I heard a familiar voice behind me.

“You look horrible.”

“Jack, I don't want to talk to you right now.” I tried to ignore him, but he reached over and grabbed my backpack and slung it over one shoulder, and then took my elbow and supported my weight as we hobbled along.

“Because I made some comment in ethics class?” He was incredulous. “I don't get it. What's wrong with you?”

“Look,” I snapped. “It's been a long day. I'd really rather not end it by fighting with you.”

He frowned, a look of concern crossing his face. “Sorry. Anything you want to talk about?”

I had to grit my teeth at the sting of tears in the back of my eyes. Though I'd gone years without anyone to confide in, now it seemed I couldn't get enough of it. And I was so used to confiding in Jack, it was odd to remember that there was something huge and horrible in my life I could never tell him about.

“No.”

“Well, don't pull any punches on my account.”

The corners of my mouth turned up just a hair. “Sorry, I'm not trying to be rude. It's just…” We reached the top of the staircase and peered over. There was a long line of kids waiting to get into the cafeteria. It was loud, people were laughing and yelling at each other, and I spotted Hennie and Esther a few feet away.

I imagined facing Hennie and having her hear that “second voice” she had told us about the day before. A groan escaped from my throat. “I don't think I can handle this right now.”

Jack nodded. “You look pretty green. I'm not sure the cafeteria is the best place for you. Why don't we skip lunch? I want to show you something anyway.”

“Show me what?”

“It's hard to describe. You'll have to follow me.”

Hennie and Esther were, of course, engaged in conversation, so they hadn't seen us yet. If they saw me, I would have no excuse not to sit with them. I looked back at Jack.

Too much had happened that morning, and the last thing I wanted was Hennie figuring it out with her weird way of sensing things. And I definitely couldn't take Esther's bubbly confidence right now.

“Come on,” Jack said, a mischievous look in his gray eyes. “I won't get us in trouble, I promise.”

I shook my head. “You have a way of saying ‘I promise' that is entirely unconvincing.”

He laughed. “You're a smart cookie, Dancia Lewis. Now come with me.”

He turned and headed up the stairs while I followed a pace or two behind. We were on the second floor, where most of the classrooms were, but Jack led me up to the third. I hadn't been to the third floor since orientation. Trevor had briefly walked us around up there, mainly to show us a couple of dance studios and practice rooms for the orchestra students. I think they said the honors seminars, like Cam's class, met up there as well.

“We're going to walk around the building, and as we do, I want you to picture what it looks like from the outside.”

“What do you mean?”

“The shape of the building,” he said patiently. “From the outside.”

I pictured it, three stories of red brick, tall windows on every side. “Okay, I've got the picture. Now what do you have in mind?”

“Come on.” We walked past a bunch of studios and smaller classrooms with chairs arranged in a circle. The halls were deserted, and the squeak of my sneakers reverberated in the silent air.

The school was shaped like a square doughnut, with the auditorium filling the middle. Jack opened a few doors, pointing out that each outside room had windows overlooking the grounds, and all the inside rooms looked over the auditorium roof. They all appeared to be about the same size and shape. We turned two corners and walked down two sides of the square, then got to the back of the building.

“Now these are the practice rooms.” Jack pushed open the door to a gleaming white studio with scattered chairs and a dry-erase board along one wall, with a staff for writing music. “They're rectangles, right? And unlike the other outside rooms, they don't have windows.”

I shifted uneasily on my feet. “That's because they have special acoustic panels on the walls.” I took a few hesitant steps through the door. “They told us that. I heard that guy Tony who plays guitar raving about how great it was to practice in here.”

“Sure,” he agreed. “But humor me for a minute and let's try something.” He carefully walked from the door to the back wall, placing the heel of each foot next to the toe of the other as he did. “Thirty paces,” he said, a note of triumph in his voice. “I walked the rooms on the other side of the building this morning. They were forty-five paces. Now granted, I was doing it fast because we were supposed to be meeting with our advisers, but still. That's a considerable difference, yet the building is a square, and the cutout in the middle is a square, so the front and back rooms should match, right?”

I backed out of the doorway and into the hall. “You must have measured wrong. I think we ought to be getting back downstairs. I'm feeling much better now. We can still get lunch if we hurry.”

He paced back to me. I couldn't help but count along. Thirty paces.

“They didn't tell us we couldn't come in here.” He flipped a lock of black hair out of his eyes as he stared down at his shoes. “And lunch just started. Trevor won't even know we aren't there yet. It usually takes him ten minutes to come find me. We need to go to the front rooms now. You can watch me pace it.”

I bit my lip. Something about this felt wrong, like we were doing something we shouldn't. But we were just looking at classrooms, right? Not stealing or anything. And it would be weird, wouldn't it? If the rooms were different sizes?

“Okay, but let's be quick.”

We ran back along the silent hallways, our feet slapping against the smooth wood floors. The front of the school flooded with a blaze of yellow light as gray clouds slipped past the sun. The classrooms had tall windows divided by dozens of individual glass panes, all sparkling with reflections from the sun's glare.

Jack paced carefully from the door to the windows. Forty-five steps. He paced back again. Forty-five steps.

“Someone's going to be pissed at the architect,” I joked weakly. “His square isn't exactly square.”

Jack spun around, facing the window. “There's something weird about this place. I knew it from the first time Judan showed up at my house. I bet there's a secret corridor on the back of the school. They didn't have any excuse to put it on the first or second floors, so they've got it up here. I wonder what it's for? How do you get to it?”

His words caught me by surprise. I hadn't thought about Mr. Judan, or recruiting, since the first day of cross-country. So he had visited Jack? He hadn't visited Esther, but had he visited Jack?

“You mean he came to recruit you?” I asked. “He came to your house?”

“Of course. Along with Pretty Boy.”

“Pretty Boy?” I asked, though I suspected I knew exactly who he meant.

“You know,
Cameron
,” he said with an exaggerated air of importance.

Cam had gone with Mr. Judan to visit Jack, but not Esther or Catherine? Jack didn't even live in Danville, which blew apart my theory that he only visited people in town.

What did that mean?

“I'm going downstairs,” I said. “This is crazy. The hall must be a different width on the other side, or the inner classrooms must be different.”

“Wanna bet?”

I shook my head. “No. I don't.”

“What about the gates, and the keys, and codes, and all the places for cameras. What about all that, Dancia?”

“That was a joke, Jack.”

“Maybe for you.”

“You're crazy. They're into security, that's all. If I knew you were taking any of this seriously I would have stopped it a long time ago.” I turned and headed back toward the stairs. A moment later I heard Jack's footsteps behind me.

“Maybe you can ignore it all, but I can't. Not anymore.” He got in front of me. “Cam nearly killed me with that electric handshake of his, and Judan would make a snake nervous. And now this? The whole building's probably rigged so they can spy on us. Who knows what's in the secret corridor up here.”

I stared up at him, wide-eyed. Cam had given him a shock?

He picked up on it immediately. “He shocked you too, didn't he?” Jack crowed. “I knew it. They handpicked us, Dancia. You and me. But why? What for?”

“They're recruiters,” I snapped. “That's what they do. They find kids with special talents and try to get them to come to Delcroix. No mystery.”

“Okay, so tell me why I'm here. You and I both know I don't fit in. Delcroix students are dancers and debaters, and they've got parents who sent them to special camps and enrichment programs starting when they were two. They're lab rats and Button-downs, like your friend Catherine. I barely made it through eighth grade.” He started to tick off items on his fingers. “I don't do sports, dance, draw, or sing. I can't add numbers in my head. My penmanship is lousy. So you tell me, what am I doing here? What's so special about me?”

I grabbed the banister for support as I started down the stairs. “How should I know why you're here? Maybe they need poor kids.” I hated myself for sounding like Catherine, but the words just came out. I couldn't help it.

Jack stopped me halfway down. “If they had just wanted a poor kid, they could have picked one a whole lot nicer and smarter than me. I'm a delinquent. Ask anyone. I'm barely getting by. And what about you? How many times since school started have you told me that you don't know why you're here? You're mediocre at everything. So what's really going on?”

With that, my patience ran out. Even though I didn't think I belonged at Delcroix, the last thing I needed was Jack acting like horrible Catherine and all her friends. “Look,” I said, poking my finger into his chest. “If you think the school is so weird, why are you still here? Why not go back to whatever place takes delinquents like you? I'm sure everyone would breathe a sigh of relief if you decided to take the bus all the way back to Portland.”

He stared at me. He was so close, I could see his nostrils flare. I thought I had gone too far, and he would get pissed and stomp away from me, but he didn't. He just kept staring.

Noise from the stairwell below filtered up to us.

Jack pushed his hair back from his eyes. “I've got nowhere else to go,” he said flatly. “They told me I could start over here. They said things would be different, and I believed them. I have no idea why, but for some reason, when Pretty Boy told me that, I believed him. I must have been crazy.”

I pictured my conversation with Cam at Bev's Café, and the night before in the kitchen. He had convinced me too. Sometimes I thought he could say anything and I'd believe him. My thoughts flew to that moment at my door when he'd told me he was looking out for me.

I'd believed that too.

“He's right,” I said, more confidently than I felt. “Delcroix
is
different. Look, I know it seems odd, and I feel weird here too sometimes, but we've got to give it a try. It could be our only chance.”

“I did try,” he said. “But it isn't working. The whole roommate thing doesn't work for me, and those gates. Well, you know how I feel about the gates. And I think they follow me when I leave school on the weekend.” He leaned back against the wall, looking defeated. “Sometimes I want to just take off and not come back.”

I stared at him, astonished. I had no idea things had gotten so bad for Jack. Then I started to get a little panicky at the thought of him leaving. Even if he was trouble, there were times when he was the only person I could talk to. What would I do without him?

“I promised Grandma I'd stay until Christmas. You have to give it that long before you really know, one way or the other. You can't leave now. It's not even Thanksgiving yet. You have to stay at least that long,” I babbled.

“Maybe.” He didn't sound convinced.

“There are things about the school I don't like either, but we've got to keep trying. We'll never know if we don't try.” I wasn't sure if I was talking to him or to myself, but it was suddenly vitally important that he agree.

Jack stared at the wall in front of him. After an interminable pause, he let out a loud sigh and turned to me. “All right. As long as you're with me. No more blowing me off when you're upset, okay?”

With a huge feeling of relief, I knocked against him. “Okay, you got me. But you can't kill off any more of our classmates. Agreed?”