The Terrorist (2 page)

Billy decided on another new page in his notebook. He’d have a Nationality List. A Country Collection. Just in his sixth-grade homeroom were kids from Denmark, Iran, Syria, Argentina, Israel, Hong Kong, and America. He was pretty sure Juan was from somewhere else entirely, and Priya might be from India.

But the man who caught his arm actually smiled, saying, “Your friend dropped this.”

Billy was amazed and pleased by this unusual helpfulness. “Oh gee, thanks a lot,” he said. He grabbed the package and tore up the escalator.

Stopped by a woman who was awkwardly balancing a stroller with a baby across the width of the rising stairs, he glanced down at the package.

Funny.

He didn’t remember Georgie or Chris carrying anything. Just book bags slung on their shoulders.

There was something very British about the package.

Not American.

The whole way it was wrapped. The cheapness of the cellophane tape. The texture of the brown paper.

He remembered the signs and warnings at Heathrow. Do Not Leave Any Luggage Unattended. He remembered the fire drills at school, which the big kids said were really bomb drills.

There was a sickening moment of knowledge.

He could not throw the package into the innocent crowd.

There was no place to set it down.

Nor could he give it back.

In front of him was a sleeping baby.

Oh, Mom!
thought Billy, turning away from the stroller and wrapping himself around the package.

The package exploded.

L
AURA WILLIAMS TOOK THE
city bus. Buses were slower than the Underground, but she met more of her friends. Plus the air was better.

Laura loved her monthly commutation ticket and the flair with which she used both bus and Underground. She cherished her knowledge of complex routes. That was true urban sophistication.

Laura stood on Finchley Road, reveling in the wind that lifted her hair and turned her skirt into a flaring tulip. Wind was so romantic. Laura waited for the 113 bus and Eddie’s big, crazy wave.

Of course, nobody was as crazy as her brother, Billy.

Laura was proud of Billy, but only when nobody knew she was related to him. In public, Billy was embarrassing, and a person got tired of being embarrassed. Like the time Billy talked Mom into buying him a purple punk wig, which he wore to school with a necklace of bicycle chains. Or the many times he went to school in a suit of Dad’s, pant legs rolled up six times, sleeves shoved up past his elbows, swinging his book bag like a lion trainer’s chair. Plus of course the toilet paper collection and the profiteering on macaroni.

Eddie thought of himself as an exciting, disruptive kind of guy, but he was nothing compared to Laura’s brother, Billy.

Right now, Laura had two concerns in life.

The first was the Junior-Senior Thanksgiving dance. She did not have a date.

Oh sure, Eddie would take her, but he was an everyday friend. Laura wanted somebody dark and handsome and mysterious and romantic. Once Laura asked Jehran to bring forth a terrific brother or cousin who would fit this need. Jehran was amused by the thought that any brother or cousin of hers would want to associate with an American girl. Jehran was from Iran, or Iraq, or one of those places, but had never lived there, as her father had been a friend to the wrong people, and they had had to flee when the other guys came to power. (Actually they had fled
before
that, which was the whole trick to fleeing: you had to know when to get out.) Jehran’s family had tried life in Buenos Aires, and Paris, and now London, in search of a happy exile.

As for Eddie, his real name was Erdam Yafi, and he, like Jehran, was from almost everywhere. His family was fabulously wealthy and lived way out of London in an actual palace. (Laura had been there, and was very disappointed. Palaces in England did not have turrets and moats; they were immense grim stone houses with several million windows across the front. The palace in Disney World was better.) Sometimes his father’s driver brought Eddie to school, but more often Eddie liked to be driven to a bus stop so he could get on a bus with other kids.

Eddie wore the oldest, most torn blue jeans in the Academy. His American accent was Texan, from the year he’d been in Houston. Eddie wanted to be with Laura every minute of the day because he loved her hair. He was always trying to touch her hair, which was deep gold and straight as ribbons. Laura would hit his hand away, yelling, “Eddie! Leave my hair alone!”

Eddie was always asking if they could go out to a pub. Laura’s mother was beginning to say yes to things like that, as long as it was a group and not a date. Laura, for the last two Fridays, had had the unbelievable, completely not-American delight of going to a pub. The boys ordered beer, and Laura stuck to Coke so her mother wouldn’t kill her. The other girl to go along was Consuela.

Con’s father was with the American Embassy. They were originally from New Jersey, but hadn’t even visited in years. They’d lived in Singapore, Cairo, and London instead. Mr. Vikary had plans for his daughter Con to make a mark in the world.

All Laura’s friends studied.

Laura had never met such a studying crowd.

Not only did they study intensively, they talked about their class assignments, grades, and college goals instead of gossip or dates or basketball games or anything genuinely interesting.

Laura knew college was out there somewhere, like dessert after dinner, but she was too busy telephoning friends, planning her wardrobe, and thinking about the weekend to consider college just yet.

Con intended to go to Yale or Princeton and was very concerned with her Extracurricular Activities. She had an immense, appalling list of Extracurricular Activities and she was always in charge of each of them.

Laura had never participated in an Extracurricular Activity and certainly didn’t want to start now, what with the Thanksgiving dance coming up.

It was something Laura could not understand. How did people like Con get all this done, anyhow? How did they get a ninety-eight average in trigonometry, and an A plus on their European history term paper, and a Perfect in their Shakespeare tragedy essay, and still be in Student United Nations, the English-American Committee for Better Understanding, the Jazz Band, the Concert Choir,
three
sports, and never miss a meeting of the London Walk Club?

The London Walk Club killed Laura.

These kids would meet one afternoon a week and walk someplace. Perhaps it would be a Super Tour of Westminster Abbey. Or a hike to the British Museum to gaze upon the Rosetta Stone.

Every now and then, Laura went along because her friends did, and because Con insisted this would look good on college applications. Colleges, she said, liked to know you were interested in everything from Shakespeare to Inner-city Problems Abroad.

Laura was not interested.

Laura was interested in a date.

She was, however, beginning to worry about her own college application. On that blank white page where Con would list 207 Extracurricular Activities, what was Laura going to list? Phone calls. Fashion. Yelling at her little brother. Making brownies.

Actually, you would have to strike making brownies. It was not possible to bake brownies in England, as neither the ingredients nor the right oven existed, and furthermore Laura had to have a Duncan Hines or a Betty Crocker mix.

Luckily, for friendship, Con had normal human moments and Con, too, wanted a dark, handsome, romantic date for the dance.

Laura often thought that when her brother, Billy, grew up, he was going to be the heartthrob of his entire school. You could see in his arms the muscles that were going to come. And his thick, dark hair, which he never combed or brushed after a shower (assuming you could shove him into a shower with the water on in the first place), was going to lie around on his forehead, and girls would want to sweep it away from his flirty eyes.

However, Billy had a long way to go.

He had to get out of sixth and finish up seventh and eighth, which anybody knew were the worst years of all humanity. Signs of real life would sprout during ninth, and finally in tenth grade Billy would be a person. By then, Laura would be away at college.

Still waiting for the 113 (buses with a dozen different routes had come on time, but the 113 had chosen to be late), Laura considered college forms.

Her only true hobby was grading boys and men.

Most boys in school Laura considered to be Six or Seven. For some reason, it was hard to give out an Eight or Nine. You went straight to Ten. There were several Tens at whom Laura often gazed with adoration.

Dear College: My hobby is Not Going to Cultural Events or Places of Architectural Note. So far, I have not gone to Westminster Abbey and I also have not gone to Windsor Castle. Just last week I did not go to Canterbury Cathedral. I have not gone to the required Shakespeare performances, but have sold my tickets and bought clothes instead.

Somehow Laura had a feeling that colleges, like her mother and father, would think she should take advantage of a London year instead of throwing it away.

Laura loved London. She was from a small suburb and, like everybody else in America, considered a car the only way to move, and she was correct: at home, public transportation was a trial and a joke. But in London she could hop on a bus, take the tube, or flag down a taxi. From Shakespeare to sweatshirt shopping, she was free the way no kids at home were until they had their own car.

The 113 appeared with Eddie waving insanely.

She got on, said “Hi” to Eddie and three other L.I.A. students, and the five of them sorted out with whom they would have lunch, whether anybody was going on the London Walk that afternoon, and had Laura heard about the escaped terrorists?

At L.I.A., they had bomb practice, the way in Massachusetts they had fire drills. L.I.A. students marched out the door and lined up on the sidewalk while London police timed them and teachers checked lockers and possible bomb-hiding spots. Everybody was happy, especially the people who got out of math.

London International Academy was very security-minded.

Several kids arrived at school in their own limousines with their own guards. There were two kids in the Lower School who were not allowed to play at anybody’s house after school because their parents were worried they might become kidnap victims. Lots of kids didn’t have their phone number listed in the school directory. You had to telephone their embassy. You’d leave a message, the embassy personnel would be the ones who actually called your friend up, and finally your friend would call back.

Laura loved that.

That was so romantic.

She wanted to date a boy who didn’t have a phone number in the directory. A boy who was fabulously wealthy, living in a house with his own submachine-gun-carrying guards on the ground floor, pacing back and forth to keep out the terrorists.

Like Michael. Michael would be perfect. He possessed all of the above and, furthermore, was a Ten. However, Michael had thoughtlessly begun dating Kyrene.

“No, I didn’t hear anything,” said Laura. “What terrorists?” She wondered how the embassies would handle privacy once
Caller I.D.
appeared in London.

The five teenagers changed buses. They were disgusted with Laura. Hadn’t she watched the morning news? Hadn’t she read the morning paper?

They were exceedingly news-conscious, these kids. Their parents worked in the embassy or were in the army or had an overseas assignment from their corporation. Changes in the world meant changes in their parents’ jobs and the kids’ lives, sometimes overnight. And yet, as much as they could, L.I.A. students kept their own news hidden. Lots of times, kids didn’t even want to say what country they were from.

Like, if Laura was sitting at lunch with a boy from Syria (Syria hated Israel) and also with a boy from Israel (Israel hated Syria) and then up came another dark-complexioned kid (not the sallow dark of India, but warm, Middle Eastern dark) whose country Laura didn’t know—well, the school rule was,
Don’t Ask.

Laura and Billy had learned right away that they must not discuss countries of origin. It didn’t do. These kids’ fathers were probably at war with each other, or selling each other weapons, or telling lies prior to signing a peace treaty, or denying each other billion-dollar loans.

It especially didn’t do for Laura, who could never remember which country was which, anyway. She could not tell Iran from Iraq. It was unfair that they had such similar names. How were you supposed to get a grip on them when they were only one letter different? Jehran had said twenty times whether her people were from Iran or Iraq, and still Laura forgot.

That made her the only junior at L.I.A. who did. The rest knew exactly the status of peace talks in the Arab world, and exactly who in Africa was having a civil war, and exactly who in South America now had a decent economy.

But Laura had learned an important lesson. Other people so enjoyed giving
their
opinions that they liked her even better if she had
no
opinion. Then they could educate her to their way of thinking.

Laura nodded agreeably when Arabs told her how awful Israel was, and then nodded agreeably when Israelis told her how awful Arabs were. The world was a simple place, Laura had decided. The key was not to get worked up over things.

The bus halted with a lurch at their stop, which was in front of the tube exit and a mere three-block walk to L.I.A.

Laura was thinking that maybe terrific blond Andrew (a Ten) would talk to her after history. Maybe in the cafeteria she’d finally be in line next to that splendid hunk Mohammed (as opposed to Muhamet, who was sleazy, and Mohammet, who dated Jenny), and then—

Ambulances and fire trucks filled the sidewalks.

People were screaming and sobbing.

Police and teachers from L.I.A. were rushing back and forth.

Her friends—Andrew, Con, Mohammed, Jehran, Bethany—were clinging to one another.

What had happened? Who was hurt? It must be very bad, it must be somebody from school, it must be—