Thresholds (5 page)

“Like, you guys all know everybody in all the apartments, and maybe you all cook in the same kitchen? Or—” If they had strict rules about food, maybe they were religious. A cult, even? Maybe she shouldn’t be so nosy.

“Of course we know everybody in the building,” Benjamin said. “We’re all related. And we do have one big kitchen, though every apartment has its own kitchen. My mom makes the school lunches for everybody. It’s easier that way.”

“Those dishes are really nice.” Their food smelled good, too.

Maya opened her paper sack to see what Dad had packed in her lunch. Carrots and celery, PBJ, juice box, a small, red apple, Twinkies, a couple of napkins. The usual. She opened the ziplock bag that held her sandwich and poked the straw into the juice box.

“What is that?” Benjamin asked, peeking at the juice box.

“Apple juice,” she said. She glanced around the cafeteria. Other kids had juice boxes.

“I’ve seen them before, just never up close.”

So he probably didn’t go grocery shopping with whoever shopped at his house. She shrugged and handed him the box. “You want to taste it?”

His eyebrows rose. Okay, was that too weird a question? He shook his head and handed the box back. “Thanks, but we’re on a special diet,” he said again.

“You don’t eat store-bought food?”

“Not very often.”

“Well,” she said and bit into her sandwich.

Nobody talked.

Was she the one killing their fun?

Rowan finished first, repacked his dishes into his tin, pushed away from the table, and stomped off.

Twyla and Gwenda heaved simultaneous sighs. Then they smiled.

Kallie laughed. “Okay, my brother is a big wet cloud,” she said.

Maya set down the remains of her sandwich. “Is it just me he hates, or does he hate everybody?”

“Everybody,” said Kallie. She frowned. “Well, it’s not that he hates them. It’s just that people don’t behave.”

“They don’t behave the way he thinks they should, anyway,” Gwenda said.

“That’s it,” Kallie said. “He only wants to run the world.”

“He should find the right world and go there and leave us alone.” Gwenda scraped the bottom of her bowl, then stuffed a cloth napkin into it. “I wish he’d stop trying to rule me.”

“And me,” Twyla agreed.

“And me,” said Kallie.

They all looked at Benjamin, who shrugged. “He’s bossy, but he knows what he’s talking about most of the time.”

“You’re such a
drook
,” Kallie said.

“
Drook
?” Maya repeated.

Kallie sighed. “Kind of like a ball of lint or a dust bunny. Fuzzy and without a spine.”

“What’s
chikuvny
?”

“
Chikuvny
?” Twyla’s eyes widened.

Benjamin jumped in before she could say anything else. “I already told you. It’s kind of like a perfume.”

“In what language? Another guy said it to me this morning. Twice in one morning, a word I never heard before in my life. And I don’t wear perfume.”

They all stared at her.

“Who said it?” Benjamin asked.

“I don’t know. Some guy I bumped into in the hall when I was trying to follow you this morning.”

“Nobody at this table?”

“Of course not. It was some guy. Taller than us. I think he’s an eighth grader, maybe even a ninth grader. He looked really sick.” She took out her notebook and sketched the guy’s face. Thin face, strong jawline. Wavy hair. Shadows under the eyes, the cheeks almost hollow. Narrow lips, a long nose, freckles. “He said, ‘Where’s the portal?’” She turned the notebook around and showed them the sketch. “The portal. Like, huh?” She shrugged.

They all stared at it, paying much more attention than people usually did.

“Gwenda?” Benjamin said.

Gwenda shook her head, her fingers playing with the patterned stone charms on her bracelet. “No one I’ve ever seen.”

“He didn’t tell you his name?” Benjamin asked Maya.

“We didn’t have much of a conversation. I asked him where M44 was, and he didn’t know. Why? Why are you guys acting weird? What’s so important about perfume?” Perfume she wasn’t even wearing.

She glanced at her hand. The faint dusting of gold caught her eye.

Wait. She
was
wearing it.

Fairy dust. These people could smell fairy dust. They had a name for it.

And so did the stranger she had bumped into before class.

“It’s just not
that common a scent,” Benjamin said. “We figure anybody who knows where to get it must . . .”

She held her hand up to her face, sniffed her fingers. The spicy scent had faded. She reached out and, finally, touched the skin on the back of Benjamin’s hand. Faint tingles, not like the sizzles she’d felt when she grabbed the stranger’s arm that morning.

He twitched his fingers a couple of times. She lifted her hand away.

She was losing it, her evidence that the fairy had been in her room.

All these people knew something about it, though. Even though they wouldn’t talk, they knew something.

“Where do you buy
chikuvny
?” she asked.

Benjamin and Gwenda exchanged glances. Gwenda turned to her. “Actually, it’s a controlled substance.”

“You mean it’s like drugs? Jeez!”

“Not so much drugs . . .” Benjamin said. “Maybe more like diamonds? Or uranium?”

Maya frowned, trying to follow.

“Maya, can we have that picture?” Twyla asked.

“Sure.” She ripped her picture of Sick Boy out of her notebook.

“Thanks.” Twyla bit her lip. “Someone should take this home,” she said. She glanced at the others, who nodded, but nobody took the sketch. “I guess I’ll do it.”

“Whoa, this
is
important?” Maya asked.

“It might be. We can’t tell you why, though,” said Benjamin.

“Arrrrgh!” She could already tell they would be frustrating friends.

Frustrating, but fascinating.

Sooner or later she’d get them to talk.

The bell rang, signaling the end of lunch. She shoved her apple and Twinkies into her backpack for later.

“Ready for
español
?” Benjamin asked. “Señora Hernandez?”

She dragged her schedule out of her pocket. “Oh, yeah! I always wanted to learn another language. What language do you guys speak?”

“Kerlinqua,” said Gwenda. “Kind of a family language—not a lot of places in the world where you can speak it.”

“Spanish is much more useful,” Benjamin said.

“We can show you the way to class,” said Gwenda. “Benjamin and I are both taking it.”

They said good-bye to Kallie and Twyla and hit the halls.

Kids moved away from them. There was room around them, even though the corridor was crowded.

“You guys are wearing an antiperfume, right?” Maya asked. “What do you call that?
Nyvukchi
?”

Gwenda smiled, and Benjamin shook his head and smiled a little, too. “It’s not the way we smell,” he said.

“We’ve all known each other since kindergarten, and the older kids in our families knew each other before we got here. This has been going on for more than a hundred years,” said Gwenda. She stopped, gripped Maya’s shoulder as Benjamin slipped past them into the room.

Maya looked up. They were at the doorway to their Spanish class.

Gwenda pulled Maya to the side. “You chose us, and we’re social suicide. You can stick with us now, and there you’ll be, out of the mainstream, pretty much,” she said in a quiet voice. “Or ditch us now and make regular friends. We won’t be upset.”

“But we’re neighbors.”

“So what? You’ve got lots of other neighbors. You’ll make other friends.”

Maya shook her head. “I like you guys.”

“I like you, too,” Gwenda told her, “but we, well, we don’t make the best friends. Really. We can’t invite you home. We have lots of after-school activities, extra studies, that take up almost all our spare time, and we don’t eat normal food or watch TV.”

“Are you guys in some kind of religious cult?”

Gwenda looked surprised, then nodded. “I guess you could call it that.”

“I could invite you to my house, though, right? Or are you not allowed to see how outsiders live?”

“We’re allowed to see anything we want,” Gwenda said, “if we can find time for it.”

Second bell rang. The halls had cleared. Gwenda went past Maya into the classroom.

Maya stood at the head of the class, studying the other kids. They looked perfectly nice. She might find her next best friend anywhere in this room.

She glanced toward the back row, where Benjamin and Gwenda had staked out their territory, surrounded by empty desks. A glow warmed her from the inside.

Social suicide or mainstream?

She headed for the back of the classroom and sat down next to Gwenda.

 

 

 

Maya had never taken a foreign language before, so Spanish class surprised her in a lot of ways. She knew a few words of Danish because her grandparents spoke it, and she’d learned one or two things in French, because she had lived in northern Idaho—close to the Canadian border, a lot of the labels on food were bilingual and the names of towns were French, though they weren’t pronounced the way a French person would pronounce them.

She was still mulling over Spanish vocabulary words when Benjamin nudged her arm in the hallway. “I’ll show you the way to art class,” he said, and she smiled. She’d been looking forward to art all day.

There were no desks in the art room, just big, paintsplattered, scratched-up tables with chairs around them. Benjamin and Maya sat at the table farthest back.

Every other table filled up. More people she recognized from their essays in language arts: Movie Extra Jessie, Multiple Movie Girl Keisha, Tovah, whom Gwenda had run off to compare summers with before school—What was up with that? If the Janus House kids didn’t have any outside friends, how come Gwenda and Tovah seemed so tight?—Guitar Hero Alex, and Campout Boy Steve, they were all in art class.

Travis strolled in right before second bell. “Hey,” he said. He dropped into the chair next to Maya’s and slumped immediately.

“Hey,” Maya said, and smiled at him. She was relieved that he didn’t seem to hate her after the dumb stuff she had said at lunch. She wondered if he would fall asleep again.

A black woman with really short hair and a red-and-orange tunic and trousers came in and set a bunch of giant pieces of paper on the teacher’s raised desk at the front of the room. She wrote MS. JAMILAon the green board, then turned and beamed at them.

“Hi. I’m Ms. Jamila,” she said. “Welcome to art!”

Maya grinned. She settled in her chair. For the first time all day she felt completely comfortable.

After she took attendance, Ms. Jamila said, “Now I want you to forget everything you know about art and start new!”

The one thing Maya could do well, and she was supposed to forget it?

Ms. Jamila walked from table to table, handing each student a giant piece of paper. “Spread out as much as possible,” she said. “You three have plenty of room, don’t you?” She smiled at Benjamin, Maya, and Travis. “Each take a side of the table. Here.”

Ms. Jamila returned to the front of the class and got a shoe box, then walked around the room again. “Take three colors each,” she said. Kids pulled big fat marking pens out of the shoe box.

By the time the teacher got to them, there weren’t many choices left. Travis snagged a green pen and Benjamin got a red. They also got brown and gray. Maya got brown, gray, and black.

“Okay, class! Let’s do something wild! I want you to draw a picture of your family. But not a portrait! More a picture of who they are inside. If you’re right-handed, I want you to draw this with your left hand. If you’re left-handed, draw it with your right hand. No cheating! This isn’t about making a picture that looks good, it’s about finding out something you didn’t know you knew.”

Movie Extra Jessie raised her hand.

“Yes?”

“Can we share markers? Three colors isn’t very many.”

“I know. It’s part of the challenge. I want you to work with what you have. Sometimes limits teach us how to expand inside them.”

“What does
that
mean?” Travis mumbled to Maya.

Maya shrugged. She was already mad that she was supposed to draw with her left hand. Sometimes she had contests with her sister Candra to see who could write the neatest with her left hand. Neither of them was good at it. She hated that the first picture she did in this class was going to be a bad one.

Well, she could draw the assignment really fast and then get back to her sketchbook.

“Ready? Begin!” said Ms. Jamila. Kids bent heads over their tables. Markers squeaked.

Maya started with black. Okay, a symbol for each member of her family.

Candra was easy: a camera, with a big long lens that stared out of the picture like a giant eyeball.

Peter was—well, Peter should be some kind of animal, Maya guessed. There wasn’t an animal alive he didn’t want to catch or touch or study. Which was his favorite? Maybe a dog, though his favorite changed all the time. She drew a picture of Sully to stand for Peter.

What was she going to put when she drew Sully, though? A food bowl. She drew one with Sully’s name on it. She drew chunks of meat inside. Not that you could tell. She shaded them with brown and gray, and that helped a little bit.

What could she draw for Mom and Dad? They were both teachers, but was that who they were inside? Maya thought about teacher symbols. Apples. Books. Chalkboard. Erasers? Erasers might be nice. Get rid of everything you didn’t like. But that didn’t really define either of her parents.

For Mom she drew a piano. Every Saturday night in Idaho, they had had a jam session in the living room after supper. Mom played the piano and gave Maya and Candra turns—she’d offered everybody in the family piano lessons, but Candra and Maya practiced, and Peter didn’t. Dad played an acoustic guitar he’d had for a million years, Peter kept time on some old bongos or sometimes played wooden spoons, and everybody sang—sometimes new songs, sometimes ones they’d known for years.