Alyzon Whitestarr (17 page)

“You’re too good, aren’t you,” Harlen said, and this time I heard a sharp spike of impatience in his voice. Then the bus started up and he had to get on board.

* * *

At lunchtime I decided to sit under one of the peppercorn trees growing around the courtyard. Maybe it was because Harlen was weighing so much on my mind that I noticed a kid I had seen hanging around him a lot when Harlen had first come to the school. He was sitting on a bench, watching some little kids play a game of soccer.

“Hi,” I said, going over to him, racking my brain for his name.

He nodded at me and went back to watching the game. I hesitated a moment, then sat down and unpacked my lunch. “How come you didn’t go to the tournament?”

He shot me a look that asked why I was asking, but because I was older he just said, “I’m not into sports.”

“You used to hang around with Harlen Sanderson, didn’t you? And he’s pretty sporty.” His name came to me then. Cole. I had shifted my number screen to a thinner segment and at the mention of Harlen his wet-dog smell thickened and became less pleasant. My heart beat faster, because the smell told me that, like Mrs. Barker, Cole did not like Harlen.

“That was last year,” Cole said.

“You don’t hang out with him anymore?” I let my eyes follow the ball as it sailed away from the toe of a little kid, as if I was hardly interested in his answer, but Cole sat very still, like a mouse hoping a cat would not see him. I felt a surge of impatience. I wanted to know what lay behind Harlen’s smell,
and the fact that Cole had liked Harlen and now clearly no longer did made me certain he knew something to Harlen’s discredit. And maybe it was the same thing Mrs. Barker knew.

On impulse, I asked, “Do you know what school Harlen went to before he came here?” At the same time I pushed the question at him mentally, hoping a focused scent message would encourage him to talk.

“He went to a private school called Shale something,” Cole answered promptly in a jerky monotone. I was startled into looking directly at him and saw that his face had gone chalk-white. His eyes, turned to me, were dark and cowed. He looked, I realized with a sick jolt, completely intimidated.

But I hadn’t bullied him, I told myself. It was true that I had mentally urged him to tell me what I needed, but that didn’t qualify as bullying!

Did it?

My bewildered silence had given Cole time to collect himself. “Why are you asking me all these questions?” he demanded. “Did Harlen send you to test me? I told him I wouldn’t say anything, and I haven’t.”

I opened my mouth and shut it again, hardly able to believe what he had just said. My danger sense began to thrum and I realized too late that Cole was bound to tell Harlen I had been questioning him. Without even thinking about it, I stared at Cole and said, “You don’t need to mention this to Harlen, Cole. Just forget about it.” I thought the same thing as hard as I could, feeling sick at the way he paled even further.

Then he looked confused. “Sorry. Did you want something?”

Reeling from what I had done, I managed to stammer that I had only asked what time it was. Cole checked his watch, told me, then got up and walked away.

* * *

I sat there for another twenty minutes trying to understand how I could have willed Cole to talk about Harlen when he hadn’t wanted to—had promised not to—and then willed him to forget. I had wished people to do things dozens of times since the accident, and no one had given any sign of obeying me before now. The only thing I could think of was that there was something about Cole that had allowed me to dominate him. I calmed down a bit then, because this fitted my theory that my enhanced abilities had primitive origins. Animals were always dominating one another, sometimes by force, but more often by will. One animal seemed mostly to know if another had a stronger will and would just signal acceptance. It must be that Cole had acceded to me in the same way weaker animals did when challenged by a dominant animal.

I turned my mind to what Cole had said, and a chill ran down my spine as the significance hit me anew. He had promised Harlen to keep some secret, and I was suddenly sure that it was not only the same thing Mrs. Barker knew, but also the thing that made Harlen smell so dreadful. I would not get more out of Cole unless I was prepared to force him to speak. And I wasn’t, because even if I had not set out to bully him, that was what I had done. But maybe I didn’t need to question Cole further, now that he had told me that Harlen had gone to a private school with Shale in the name. The school
had to be in or near Shaletown, which was only a couple of hours’ train ride up the coast. I could go there and question some of the kids Harlen’s age to see what they knew about him. I knew Shaletown pretty well, especially the bit around the Shaletown Detention Center, where refugees were sent while they waited to find out if they were allowed to stay in our country.

Just over a year ago, there had been a major political upheaval that had brought a stream of refugees to the detention center, and a furor had erupted because the government had insisted on sending all but a few of the refugees back to their war-torn country. There had been endless articles in the paper with some politicians talking about limited resources and quotas and terrorists, and other politicians talking about children and women and terror and compassion. Da had gone to the detention center with some other musicians to help protest and had ended up speaking with a refugee, a girl a year younger than me. Aya and Da had begun to correspond, and from those letters and later visits, he had learned that she had two tiny brothers, a mother, and a father, all in the detention center. They had left their country because her father had disagreed too openly with those in power. Da ended up writing to the newspapers and to politicians, like a lot of other people did, asking why innocent people should be kept in a prison for an unspecified time, after which they would probably be sent back to their own countries.

In her letters Aya had talked of her fears for herself and her family if they were refused permission to stay. The letters
had been heartbreaking. Were still heartbreaking, for Da had kept them. Aya had talked a lot about her baby brothers, and you could tell how much she loved them.

Da had taken Serenity and me with him sometimes when he visited, and we had both got to know the gentle, doe-eyed Aya.

It had been a terrible shock when we found that the government had refused Aya’s family permission to remain in our country. Da had done everything he could, but in the end, they had been sent back and Aya had never written again. We had no idea what had happened to her and her family, but there had been such awful stories at the time of the fate of refugees sent back. In the days when we had been trying to get the government to change its mind, I had felt as if something was winding tight in me, as one after another avenue proved useless. I had felt helpless and frightened, but Serenity had been utterly certain that something would happen to rescue them, even at the last minute.

It occurred to me that the whole Aya thing had been the last time I had really felt close to Serenity. I could remember vividly how shattered she had been when she finally realized what all the rest of us had figured out some time earlier: that there was no way to stop Aya and her family from being sent back.

She had been so angry at Da.

“You talk about doing the right thing! So do something!” she had screamed at him.

Of course, there had been nothing he could do that he
had not already tried. Aside from writing letters, he had offered to sponsor the whole family and support them until they were on their feet. He had said this in an open letter in the newspaper. But hundreds of people had written making similar offers regarding other refugees. All to no avail. The government only reiterated its determination to take a tough stance, calling the desperate letters of refugees emotional blackmail.

Da had not reproached Serenity for her unfairness. I had been angry at her for so unjustly attacking him, but I had been even more confused that the government had simply dismissed our passionate opposition to its decision. How could it not listen when it was supposed to represent us?

Da told me sadly that there were a lot of voters who wanted the refugees sent back to their own countries. “They don’t want to imagine how it is for a refugee, because thinking about people who are poor or frightened makes them feel unhappy and guilty at how comfortable and safe their own lives are.”

I knew that Da still wrote letters to the government and to various organizations in our country and Aya’s, trying to locate the family and urging that the laws about refugees and political asylum be changed. But nothing had changed except that the newspapers had found something else to write about.

I was no better than the government, I thought, feeling suddenly ashamed. I had not thought of Aya in a long time, and wasn’t it this sort of easy forgetting that allowed politicians to get away with their terrible inhuman decisions?

It came to me all at once that perhaps Serenity had not forgotten. That even though she had never spoken of Aya again after she and her family had left the country, this might lie at the core of her transformation to Sybl.

She had been so terribly angry and upset that final day, when we had gone with a lot of other people to make a last protest and stand vigil, to force the media to at least report the result of the government’s policy. All of us were there except Mum, who had been very close to having Luke.

Thinking back, it seemed to me that Serenity had not truly understood that we had failed until Da and the band had begun “Song for Aya.” I had seen the baffled rage on her face as she watched him sing. Dear gentle sorrowing Da, who was singing the song he had written, because there was nothing else he could do.

The song was not a protest song, despite what Aaron Rayc had said. It was a gentle and terribly sad ballad, and so beautiful that it had silenced the shouts and rage and jeers of the crowd. A helicopter that had brought a last-minute news crew carried away footage that was replayed many times on television in the weeks after the protest. The television cameras had also filmed the police stopping Da toward the end of the song, to tell him he had no right to perform there without a busker’s license. Da talked with them for the longest time, and even in the few seconds that made it to air, you could see those police officers found it hard to know how to deal with a man who was so nice and gentle and persistent. They had been trained to deal with people who were angry and wanting to hurt or smash something.

A record company had called Da, wanting to release the song, but Da had refused, saying it was Aya’s song, and that only she could decide what to do with it. Mirandah had thought Da was being idiotic, and Neil had said they ought to do it if only to raise awareness about the plight of the refugees. They could donate all the money they made. But Da wouldn’t budge. “I wrote the song for Aya,” he said, “and until she’s safe and free and able to hear it, nothing can be done with it, other than singing it.”

Unlike the others, I had felt like I understood. It would have been wrong to make a record, no matter who profited, when Aya had vanished and might even be dead. She and her whole family.

The night after that final protest, I had found it really hard to sleep. The sound of Da playing the guitar drew me downstairs, but when I looked from the doorway, he seemed so weary and hurt that I had not wanted to interrupt him. I had gone back to bed to lie in the dark, thinking about Aya and her little brothers and wondering where they were and what was happening to them; wondering how it would feel if that were my family.

I had called out to Serenity, but she had been asleep. But now, sitting on the school bench by the courtyard in sunlight that would not warm me, I wondered if she had really been sleeping at all.

There had been a week of despair and guilt and anger after the protest, and there had been phone calls from journalists trying to rehash the story, or link it to others. Da had been invited to speak to a few organizations, and there had
been talk of a concert to raise money for refugees. But then Mum had gone into labor, and there had been the swift and thrilling trip to the beach in the old van with the midwife, and the long wait until Luke made his entrance into the world; and life had gone on.

Except, maybe it hadn’t gone on for Serenity.

* * *

I decided to catch the regular bus home that night because it was half empty. To my surprised pleasure, Harrison was on it. I went to sit next to him, wondering too late if that would embarrass him. He might have read my mind, for he grinned at me and said in a loud whisper, “We have tae stop meeting like this.”

A businessman in the seat across the aisle gave us a suspicious look that reduced us both to splurts of laughter. Then he looked indignant, and that made it worse. What is it about laughter that the more you try to repress it, the more hysterical you get?

“How come you’re out so far?” I asked when we had got ourselves under control.

Harrison gave me a burning look. “Because I wanted tae see ye again, ma bonny lassie.”

I laughed in delight at his exaggerated Scottish accent. “But seriously, you want to come over to my place for a while? You could just get a later bus to see your friend. Is that where you’re going?”

He looked as surprised to receive the invitation as I felt to find myself offering it, and I half expected him to refuse,
but he just nodded and said, “Why not?” On the walk to my house, I asked him which school Sarry went to, and he said she didn’t mostly. “A lot of people think she’s a bit crazy, and she is, but only in a nice way.”

“Nicely crazy?”

He grinned and shrugged. “I think a bit of craziness is good for the world.”

Da was in the kitchen with Mel and Tich. I introduced them and asked Da how their gig had gone that day. He grinned and said it had been great—they had been paid on the spot. Harrison didn’t blink at Mel’s hair or the fact that Tich looked a lot like a white Stevie Wonder, right down to rocking from side to side like a distressed elephant.