Halifax (8 page)

Standing out, literally, from the others, was the Tall Girl from Rom’s math class. She showed no signs of trauma from her mysterious meeting with someone or something in the janitor’s closet. If anything, she looked better than she did before. Polished, pink and perfect.

Farrell looked at the all the cheerleaders and at his favorite cheerleader in particular, Nora Evans. The rest of the squad surrounded her as they began a routine and Farrell lost sight of her in a sea of pom-poms. She was the eye of a cheerleading hurricane.

Farrell wasn’t the only one taken aback by the sheer number of cheerleaders or by the newest additions to the squad. Coach Gwynn barely had time to get out of the way before his former point guard, Jon Roberts, came cartwheeling across the court. He was dressed in a Lexham yell leader uniform with stretchy tight white pants and a comfy white turtleneck sweater that his athletically large neck strained beneath. He held a megaphone with a large red
L
on the side and excitedly worked the crowd, encouraging them to cheer.

Coach Gwynn approached Jon, examining him carefully, almost reaching out to touch him to see if he was for real. “Roberts? What are you doing? And what are you wearing?”

“Hey, Coach,” Jon said chirpily. “I’m a yell leader now. Isn’t it awesome? I finally found the me I always knew I could be!”

Rom sat at his table in the library. He watched the librarian, studying her and her habits, watching her as she watched him. Watching her until she grew bored with him. She finally turned away and looked down at the crossword puzzle on her desk.

Rom seized the opportunity to peruse his penguin backpack and the seemingly bottomless pit of entertainment opportunities it held for him. It was filled mostly with toys strewn amongst the odd pencil or candy wrapper. Rom pushed aside the Magic Eight Ball he had used to destroy their old house, a Pez Dispenser with a scary clown’s head, a container of dried up Play Dough, a Yo-Yo, a binocular-like red Viewmaster, and a plastic bear-shaped honey jar.

He continued to search for something, moving things aside, jostling them around, peering into the backpack as he occasionally looked up to see if Ms. Goodman was watching him. Finally, beneath his blowtorch Barbie with her now charred and hairless head, he spied what he had been searching for. It was a half eaten bag of gummy worms. Rom reached in to retrieve them and accidentally brushed his hand against a bright yellow rubber duckie at the bottom of the backpack. The rubber duckie let out a loud “quack” and its eyes began to glow red. Rom ducked just as a beam of light shot out of the duckie’s eyes and past Rom’s head. The beam whizzed across the room, hitting the ceiling, and burning a Frisbee sized hole in the panel high above the librarian’s head.

Ms. Goodman looked up at the sound of the “quack” but didn’t notice the smoking hole in the ceiling above her. “Is there a problem, Mr. Halifax?”

“No,” Rom said, trying not to look at the hole but finding it almost impossible not to do so. He pulled a gummy worm out and began chewing on it nervously. “No problem over here.”

And Izzy had thought this was going to be fun.

From her vantage point at the entrance to the gym the scene before Izzy looked more like a cheerleading competition than a basketball game. The Westminster cheerleaders almost cowered in fear as the Lexham squad flipped and spun and danced around them. They were an annoying, sparkly and smiling gaggle of energy.

A basketball game was being played somewhere behind the cheerleaders. Farrell stood near the side of the court waiting for the inbound pass from one of his fellow players. He hadn’t seen much action thus far in the close game. Actually, he hadn’t seen any action at all other than running up and down the court as the other players went out of their way to keep the ball out of his hands—and those were the players from his own team. Finally, he was waiting to get the basketball as it was brought into play, but Andre jumped in front of Farrell and took it for himself, running down court and executing a text book lay up, scoring two points to put Lexham up by two.

Normally this would have driven Farrell crazy. He would have been interested in nothing but proving himself and defeating his enemy. In the case of basketball, the enemy was Andre, but there were more important things to consider and his attention, like Izzy’s, was on the cheerleaders. Knowing something was wrong, however, didn’t necessarily mean knowing why it was wrong.

Farrell caught Izzy’s eye and motioned to the side of the court where the cheerleaders were trying their best to whip the Lexham fans into a frenzy. Izzy spotted Carolyn Holcomb among their numbers and worked her way down the edge of the court towards her. In the few days since Izzy had last seen Carolyn, she seemed to have mastered all manner of cheerleading stunts and was now atop a pyramid of girls raising her arms in the air to form a
V
. She screamed out “Go Nimrods” and tumbled down as the pyramid collapsed in an orderly fashion beneath her. She rolled to a stop at Izzy’s feet.

“Carolyn?” Izzy asked, looking down on her, alarmed. “What the heck?”

Carolyn bounced up and brushed the dust off her pleated skirt. “Don’t worry,” she said. “Even if you can’t be a cheerleader you can still cheer. Go Lexham!” Her former friend began clapping in unison with the other cheerleaders and backed away from Izzy to stand proudly next to head cheerleader Shana Rowen. Shana beamed a thousand watt smile at Izzy, almost as if to say—“She’s
my
friend now…”

Farrell was relieved that Izzy was there. She could watch over things while he concentrated on basketball. Not that he really needed to concentrate on basketball. It didn’t help their mission in any way other than to keep up appearances and look normal. Part of being normal, though, was not letting someone like Andre Davies show him up.

As a Westminster player dribbled past him, Farrell stepped in and expertly stole the ball mid-bounce and was about to take it down court when he noticed something in the crowd. Shana Rowen had left the other cheerleaders and was whispering in the ear of a girl in the bleachers. The girl had long, unruly, black hair and thick, dark eyebrows that threatened to overtake her face. Shana took the hairy girl by the hand and led her towards the girl’s locker room.

Farrell absent-mindedly dribbled as he watched this, even as his fellow teammates screamed for him to pass the ball. Now completely distracted, Farrell was an easy target and a Westminster player swooped in and stole the ball back from him, taking it to the hoop to score.

Andre jogged past Farrell, slamming him in the shoulder as he passed by. “Stop looking at my girlfriend!” he warned him.

“I wasn’t looking at her,” Farrell said, and then he turned and
did
look at Nora. She looked back at him and then they both turned to look as Shana Rowen and her new friend left the gym.

Rom stood before the librarian. He patiently waited for her to acknowledge his existence. She finally looked up from the crossword puzzle she had been diligently filling in. “Do you need something, Mr. Halifax?” she asked. She didn’t even try to conceal her annoyance.

“What do you do in detention?” Rom asked. He was serious even if the librarian didn’t think he was.

“How about your homework?”

“I’ve completed my homework,” Rom said.

“Well, this
is
the library,” Ms. Goodman said, stating the obvious. “Why don’t you read a book?”

“I’ve read all these books.”

“You’ve read
all
these books?”

“Yes,” Rom replied.

The librarian looked at the stacks and stacks, the literally thousands, of books surrounding them. “You’ve read…
Great Expectations
?”

“Yes.”

“
Little Women
?
A Wrinkle in Time
?
War and Peace
?”

“Yes,” Rom told her. “My brother has a very extensive library. Much better than this one.”

The librarian gripped her pen tightly and took a deep breath. After a moment of stewing she finally came up with an idea. She reached under her desk and pulled up a very thick copy of the White Pages telephone book. It was the residential listing of everyone who lived in the Valley and was hundreds of pages long. She dropped it down in front of Rom.

“Here, Mr. Halifax. Why don’t you read
this
?”

Rom studied the phone book for a moment. Ms. Goodman probably didn’t expect him to take her up on her offer, but Rom picked up the book and headed back to his table. He thumbed through the pages as he walked. He seemed to actually be reading it.

The librarian shook her head in wonder. What an odd boy. She then picked up her pen and continued the hard work of completing her crossword puzzle.

“Halifax!” Coach Gwynn screamed from the bench. “Keep your eye on the ball!”

It seemed ridiculous for Farrell to keep his eye on the basketball when Andre and his teammates were making sure he would never get his hands on it. Besides, there was something so much more interesting to look at. Shana Rowen had returned to the gym and had brought the hairy girl back with her. Now, however, the formerly bushy-browed girl had been transformed into a living, breathing, bouncing cheerleader, complete with uniform and pom-poms. She was plucked and pruned to a perfectly coiffed state. She joined the rest of the squad to cheer on Andre as he made the final basket before the buzzer sounded at the half.

All the players headed for the boy’s locker room through a seemingly endless tunnel of cheerleaders. Farrell brought up the end of the line and searched the crowd for Izzy. He finally caught her eye and they both watched at Shana Rowen pulled yet another girl, a tomboy with a truly unfortunate pageboy haircut, from the stands and led her towards the girl’s locker room.

Farrell was about to follow Shana when Coach Gwynn grabbed him by the back of his jersey. “Let’s go, Halifax! Half time meeting.”

“I’m really not feeling that good, Coach,” Farrell told him as he looked over the coach’s shoulder to see Izzy trail Shana out of the gym.

“I don’t care if you’ve got the plague, Halifax. Get a move on!”

Farrell waited for the coach to enter the boy’s locker room and then quickly pulled his cell phone out of his gym bag and dialed Rom’s number.

In the library, Rom’s could hear his cell phone ringing from inside his backpack. He dug into his bag, desperately trying to silence the ringing, and grabbed the phone just in time for the librarian to snatch it out of his hand. For a split second, right before the librarian pressed the end button, Rom could see it was Farrell who had been calling.

“That was my brother. I really need to call him back,” Rom said as he reached for the phone. “It could be very important.”

The librarian dropped the phone into her pocket. “You’re in ninth grade. Trust me. Nothing’s important.” She trudged off back to her desk, leaving a worried Rom in her wake.

Izzy followed Shana Rowen and the tomboy into the dimly lit girl’s locker room. It was always an adventure going into an unknown situation. You never knew what you’d encounter or how you would react. A menacing monster could be lurking behind locker number fifteen—or it could be a pile of dirty towels. Izzy loved to test herself, to see how she reacted to stress, to danger, to surprises. Being that she was still alive and had survived hundreds of these situations, she was bold in her investigations. She was still alive so she must have been good, even great, at what she did. There was always, though, somewhere in the back of her mind, somewhere deep inside, a tiny little doubt. What if it was this time? What if this was the time, after so many times, that what she found behind the locked door or in the dark corner…or hiding behind the lockers…was the thing that finally proved once and for all that she should never have gone in alone?

Duty and pride and a sense of adventure, though, pushed Izzy forward through the rows of lockers and towards the light by the tiled showers. A voice could be heard. It was very low. A whisper. Almost a hiss. “I know it’s not easy being you,” the voice said. It was Shana Rowen’s voice and was soothing and bullying at the same time, like she was telling someone something mean but in a very nice way.

“I know it’s not easy being you,” Shana said again. “Not getting invited to the best parties. Or any parties. Not getting to date the most popular guys. Always on the outside looking in. Why would you want that?”

Izzy held her breath as she slowly looked around the edge of the final locker to see Shana Rowen with the tomboy. The girl was up against the tiled wall of the shower stalls with Shana almost up against her, pinning her to the wall, if not actually with her body then with her body language. Although Shana was smaller than the girl she was easily lording over her, intimidating her and controlling her.

“Why would any of you want that?” Shana asked as she reached out and felt the girl’s limp hair, twisting the split ends in her fingertips. “Why would you want to be like you when you could be like
me
?”

Suddenly Shana reached out and grabbed the girl by the neck. She stared into the girl’s eyes and as she did Shana’s own eyes began to change. They began to turn black. It was like a pool of oil was rising up from her pupils and spreading out, covering first the blue irises and then the white of the eyeballs, filling up until her eyes were nothing but black holes.

The young girl was so entranced by Shana’s eyes that she didn’t notice as translucent, pulsating tentacles of light began to protrude from the head cheerleader’s body, pushing out from her skin, growing and twisting in the air like the tentacles of a jelly fish floating in a current. The many glowing arms began to wrap around the poor girl and soon found openings in which to invade her body, sneaking into her ears, then slinking across her body and moving past her lips, frozen in fear, and down her throat.

Izzy watched in amazement at what she was seeing. Her need to study the scene and figure out what she was dealing with had overtaken any natural desire to help. She had been in situations like this before and knew better than to leap into action when you had no idea what you were dealing with. Besides, whatever was happening to the girl was happening quickly.