Gifted (12 page)

Bathed in twilight's glow, the Compound was eerily silent as I crept out of the cabin and raced furtively to a clump of bayberry bushes growing conveniently between Cabin F and the mess hall. I knelt behind the shrubbery in order to catch my breath. Not a soul to be seen.
So far so good
. I counted to three and with a burst of speed made it all the way to the building. With my body flat against the wall, I leaned into the open window, the very window Sam and Jason had terrorized me through at lunchtime, just far enough to let half an eyeball inspect the room.

One hundred seventy-nine student bodies were massed inside. Anita was sitting alone at the table Mr. Z and I had occupied earlier, doubtless in memory of me. Anita always had a sentimental streak. I tried whistling to get her attention, but my whistle got lost in the din, so I reached inside my jacket, felt around for a chocolate bar, then deftly lobbed one in her direction. The missile sailed through the air in a soft and graceful arc before it crash-landed onto Anita's dinner tray, causing an upsurge of tomato soup to mantle her face. She vaulted off the bench with an agility I found impressive for a girl her size and stood glaring at me through the window, her eyes flashing
fire. I gave her a little wave and watched her disappear from view.

Then through the doorway she came, marching straight into the Compound, looking neither left nor right. I hustled to catch up with her and, when I reached her side, tried to break the ice with “And there's plenty more where
that
came from!” in reference to her fondness for chocolate, but she wasn't having any. Without turning her head, she plowed straight into her cabin, plowed back out carrying a girlish-looking traveling case and a towel, then plowed into the girls' latrine, still ignoring me even though I matched her pace, stride for stride.

I waited for her to come out, but she was taking forever. Since there was no one around, I decided in desperation to be daring once again. I edged in backward through the door and, knowing the layout as I did, made my way without misadventure to the main room. Anita was there wearing the bath towel wrapped around her head, leaning over a sink with her face close to the mirror.

“Hi!” I said brightly.

Anita jumped two feet off the floor. “George!” she cried, spinning around. “What do you think you're doing!”

Then I jumped even higher than she had.

“What do you think
you're
doing?” Her face was covered in a thick white paste. She might have warned me.

“This is the
girls' room!
You're going to get us both in trouble!” She came toward me and, using both hands, slammed me into one of the stalls and swung the door shut behind us. She stood with her hands on her hips, her eyes were glittering, and I could tell right away that forgiveness would not come in a snap.

“I am really, really sorry,” I said. “I really, really am.”

Anita said nothing. She just kept looking at me as though she were waiting for me to say the magic word or something.

“
Please
don't be mad anymore. I need your friendship right now. My life is in danger out there.”

“Your life is in danger in here, George,” she said in a really menacing way, and I'll admit frankly that I shivered. Anita's face, seen in its natural state, is a little scary, but her face covered in all that goop was straight out of the pages of Stephen King. “You are the biggest jerk that ever lived. All you ever think about is yourself, and
that's
why everyone hates you!”

I took her comments silently because I was still shivering, which must have moved Anita to pity for her eyes softened a bit. “I don't mean to hurt your feelings, though.”

“Thank you,” I said, “that's very big of you.” We stood quietly for a moment.

“Just answer me this. Is everything about you, George? Everything?”

I cupped my chin. I had to think about that. I guess I thought about it too long because she suddenly got surly again.

“Just go! Get out of here before we get caught!” Then she more or less catapulted me through the swing door, and I would have kept right on going except I heard a shriek of feminine laughter that stopped me in my tracks. The girls' latrine, which had probably stood empty for hours, had suddenly become Studio 54. I made a diving leap back into the stall. There had to have been a dozen girls out there, judging by the number of feet sashaying under the door, and I wasn't going anywhere.

I will say this for Anita. When push comes to shove,
she can display the qualities of a true friend even while hating my guts. She could so easily have pushed me or shoved me right back out there to meet my doom, exposing me, so to speak, to the female populace, but she didn't. Instead, she grabbed me roughly around my midsection and hoisted me feet first onto the commode, commanding me with a whispered, “Bend down and don't fall in,” which I was happy to obey. I set my backpack on the lid of the tank before it could throw off my center of gravity and made like a statue.

Anita stood at the door with her eye to the crack. I couldn't tell what was going on out there, but the noise made me think of a tickle fight in a henhouse. Lots of earsplitting revelry. Through the giggles and the whispers I thought I could detect some serious nail polish discussions, but my powers of observation were pretty limited. We stayed that way for God knows how long, and the crick developing in my lumbar region was becoming fairly pronounced when I heard the latrine door open abruptly, as if an express train had hit it.

“GIRLS!”

A hush fell over the room. Anita turned to me with wide eyes.

“You have THREE seconds! Just THREE seconds before you ladies receive ZEROS for the Scavenger Hunt! Starting now!” Strong words from Miss Dixon, our robust health teacher, who must have stood there in her legendary pose, tapping her legendary foot. All we heard then were the sounds of scurrying feet and the heavy latrine door banging at intervals.

Finally, all was quiet. “Let's give it a minute,” Anita whispered, “before we go.”

I nodded, relaxing my posture. I sat down on top of
the tank to wait, and learned that the minute was up when Anita wrenched me down from the plumbing and snarled, “Now get lost.”

“Wait!” I begged. “I need to talk to you!”

“We'll talk at the Scavenger Hunt. You might not be getting a grade for this, George, but I am.”

“But I can't go to the Scavenger Hunt. They're going to kill me out there! I mean it! I need your help!”

“Okay, okay,” she said. “I'll meet you then. You go first and wait for me at the watchtower. I'll get there as soon as I can. But then
I
have to participate, George, even if
you
don't. And you're making me late. So get moving!”

I nodded happily and, with my best friend's assistance, shot out of the stall like a leaping jackrabbit and hared it all the way to the observation tower.

Not knowing, of course, that a pair of callous ears in the adjacent stall had taken careful note of our plan and that my enemies would soon be making plans of Their own.

Haring it to the observation tower took me along a brief stretch of shoreline—a rather dirty brief stretch of shoreline littered with seaweed, driftwood, and countless jellyfish, which from a distance looked like innocent soggy plastic bags but up close scared the bejesus out of me.

Still, it was heartening to see signs of Hurricane Judith and to know that in fourteen hours we would be hitting the road. Because all this fleeing from danger was exhausting. I just wanted to go home. I missed my mom like crazy. I pictured her face, her sympathetic smile, her kind worry lines. It brought a lump to my throat. I imagined us in our cozy kitchen over steaming mugs of cocoa, catching up on lost time and looking into private schools—because that's what I needed—a fresh start. With a fresh start I would do everything differently. I'd be cool from day one, which would require a whole new wardrobe and possibly different hair. And I'd be popular. In the classroom I would go for the cheap laughs instead
of the more erudite jokes that only I understood. The words “yo” and “later” would replace my “hello” and “good-bye,” and every individual I addressed would be known to me only as “dude,” regardless of age, sex, or social standing. And that was just the beginning. With a bit more planning, there was no telling how far my coolness would go.

I was just considering the wisdom of getting a tattoo, maybe something along the lines of the periodic table of elements, when my thoughts returned sharply to the dismal present. The tower loomed in the foreground—seventy-five feet of steel-reinforced cement rising gray and formidable against the darkening sky. I wondered if it might be safer to go inside, climb the one hundred and fourteen steps to the top, and wait for Anita there, but thought better of it. According to the film we saw, the tower walls were a foot thick and had two rows of viewing ports positioned at thirty-nine-degree intervals. A fine defense if you were facing the Nazis, but would it protect me from the Bruise Brothers? They might easily ambush me up there. I would take my chances on the ground.

I sat down facing the bay, with my back to the tower, trying to relax, but it was pointless. My body was set on high alert. My pulse raced, every noise made me jump, and when a local bird of indeterminate species exploded out of the trees behind me, my heart crashed into my rib cage and hammered on it for the next five minutes. You could say I was feeling a bit tense. Which is why when I heard the distinct sound of a person going,
“Pssst,”
behind me, I almost bit my tongue in half. I turned my head. It was coming from the woods.

“Pssst!
Hey George. Over here.”

A feminine voice. Was it Anita's?
No
, I decided,
it's much too feminine
. I sat up straight and squinted into the trees. It was getting dark, and the forest was comparatively black.

“George!”

I squinted harder and sat up straighter, then felt a thrill of elation as a halo of light moved to the edge of the beach. “I need you,” a musical voice called softly. “I'm all by myself, and I'm not good at finding things.”

It was Allison Picone, her yellow hair twinkling like fairy gold in the twilight. She was beckoning me with a dainty flashlight clasped in a dainty hand. Her other hand held a paper grocery bag and an itemized list.

“Will you help me, George?” she begged.

Now I should have been suspicious. I should have asked myself right away,
Where are the Ugly Girlfriends
? But instead I thought,
So, I'm weird, am I? Brooke Walters made the whole thing up. Guess we'll see who's weird now!
And I leaped to my feet and skipped merrily into the trees. Inside the forest, though, I lost sight of Allison.

“Where are you?” I called into the gloom.

I glimpsed her waving to me from some distance away, but when I got there, I found she'd vanished again.
Aha! Playing hard to get
, I decided, for I knew that women were apt to do that in the heat of the chase. At least they were in books, anyway. Throwing caution to the wind, I followed the elusive beam of light in and out of the trees, letting it lead me deeper and deeper into the forest.

A little
too
deep.

“Stand still a minute,” I called, stumbling, “or at least slow down.” I couldn't help feeling irritated. It was like playing cat and mouse, only the mouse had her own
flashlight and the cat kept getting tangled up in pricker bushes.

I was just disentangling myself from an especially nasty one when I heard a sound. The sound of rampaging wildebeests crashing through the forest. I froze in mid-bush.
It was the Bruise Brothers
.

“He's right over there!” a bell-like voice rang out, followed by a peal of heartless laughter that I had once considered musical. I was devastated. Too devastated to think clearly. So I let panic take over and did what came naturally. I hunkered down into the bush and prayed, silently and hard.

“Where's he at?”

“Did you see him?”

“He's gotta be around here somewhere.”

From my hiding place, I watched Them, five apelike silhouettes in conference just a few yards away. I didn't move a muscle. My breathing I kept to the barest minimum.

“Maybe he ran off.”

“No, we woulda seen him. He's here someplace.”

A bit of shrewd deductive reasoning coming from Gabriel Arno, whose bulky form was so close to me I could have reached out and touched it. Not that I would have. Then the snap of a twig in the near vicinity caused Them to fall silent and me to gulp. I stared hard in the direction the noise had come from. It was Anita, lumbering alone under the trees, wearing
her
black aviator jacket and carrying my backpack, which I had left in the girls' latrine. I feared for her safety, with her hair pinned back in a bun and wearing my same getup. Now, any human
being with a brain could see that it wasn't me, but would
They
know the difference?

In the next instant my fears were realized. Gabriel Arno's thirst for my blood must have clouded his vision. There was a rush of feet and a flurry of fists. He'd jumped her. Anita fell to the ground like a stricken fawn.

The Bruise Brothers were on him like a pack of wolves, trying to pull him off. “That's not him, you idiot! Get up! That's Anita New-Face!”

It took a moment for this to penetrate Gabriel's thick skull. Then he sprang up with a startled oath and took off like a shot, joining his teammates in Their flight through the woods. Anita just lay like a crumpled leaf. I crawled out of the bush and made my way over to her.

“What on earth happened to you?” I cried.

Anita blinked at me. “Where were you?”

“Far away, but I sensed danger. Can you stand up?”