The Here and Now (8 page)

“Yeah?” Suddenly I am wondering why, if this is so important, he never told me about it before, and why he is telling me now.

“I don’t really talk about it much. I mean, I told my folks at the time and they had no idea what to make of it. I made some drawings to show them, and they made an appointment to show
me
to the school shrink.” He laughs, but it doesn’t seem to strike either of us as funny.

Slowly the hubbub in the hallway is dying down, and now it’s quiet enough to measure the full weirdness between us.

“I told Mona—Dr. Ghali—the physicist I was talking about. And actually, I told Ben Kenobi. I showed him drawings. He’s the one who, well, anyway …”

“Ethan,
what?
What happened?” I am getting nervous and impatient. I don’t know where this is going, what it has to do with me, or just how much trouble I am potentially getting us into, and yet I can’t seem to hold back.

“Just this strange kind of … disturbance in the air over the river. Really hard to describe, and then …” Still that searching look.

“What?”

He shakes his head. He looks tired and uncertain. “You really don’t remember, do you?”

Mr. Robert calls twice before dinner and I don’t pick up. This is not okay. The cell phone I carry is for his convenience more than mine, though he would never say so. You can sometimes
get away with a couple of standard excuses: I’m so sorry—I lost my charger and now my phone is dead. OMG, my phone didn’t even ring, isn’t that weird? But I am at the very outer limit.

I go over to Katherine’s house right after dinner. My mom gives me a heavy look as I walk out the door. The windows at Katherine’s house are dark. Katherine and her dad aren’t go-out-at-night people. I try to think of comforting excuses on the way home. It’s not curriculum night or college night or science social night at school, is it? Could be, right?

“Mr. Robert called,” my mother tells me as soon as I walk in the door.

“I misplaced my phone,” I say lightly. “I must have left it in my locker at school.”

“Make sure you get it tomorrow,” she warns me.

“I will.”

“He wants you to stay put for the rest of the evening and come home directly after school tomorrow, and I assured him you would. He said he’d be in touch about speaking in person before your next scheduled session.”

I am already halfway up the stairs.

“Prenna?”

“Uh-huh?”

“Everything okay?”

I need to say something. She needs to feel like she’s doing her job. “The homeless guy from the parking lot at the A&P said a bunch of weird stuff to me because he’s crazy, and Mr. Robert wants to follow up. That’s all.”

Later on I sort of, oops, drop my phone out the back window of my house. Before I do, I make sure it’s not supposed to
rain. It lands among the daffodils that I myself planted. Now my phone really is misplaced. Darn.

I think about what Ethan said. I try his words a hundred different ways. A thousand. There is no way I am going to sleep tonight.

Katherine is not in school the next day. I am starting to panic. What am I going to do? I am in agony. I wait by Katherine’s locker between every class, hoping I am wrong. Hoping she’ll show up. Maybe she just had a sore throat or something.

I can’t stand the idea of going home after school, especially because of being ordered to. It occurs to me: I could wait for Mr. Robert to find me, or I could go find him.

He’s not at his office the first time I check. The second time he is.

“Prenna. Just the girl I’ve been trying to reach,” Mr. Robert says, opening the door for me.

Without thinking, I go and plant myself on his couch as I’ve done for the last four years. “Where is Katherine Wand?”

He sits down and creaks around in his swivelly office chair. He adjusts his glasses, no hurry at all. “Katherine has decided to complete the semester at a terrific boarding school in New Hampshire.”

I glower at him. “
Katherine
has decided?”

“Please watch your tone, Prenna.”

I take a deep breath. “Why did she decide that?”

“Frankly, Cynthia and her father encouraged her,” Mr.
Robert says evenly. “Among other things, we felt perhaps the two of you needed a break. I think you are putting her in a difficult position, discussing inappropriate subjects with her and demanding her secrecy. She is very loyal to you.”

I am translating as he goes: they wanted information from her and she wouldn’t tell them, so they sent her away. It’s almost certainly not to a terrific boarding school, but it’s probably some measure short of actually harming her. Probably a community safe house. At least, I pray it is. It may or may not be in New Hampshire.

“Katherine didn’t do anything wrong. Why are you punishing her?”

He creaks back in his chair and crosses his arms over his fat stomach. He, like a lot of the adults in our community, has taken a bit too much advantage of the abundance of easy food they’ve got here.

“We’re not viewing this as a punishment, Prenna. This is an opportunity to take her out of a difficult and possibly compromising situation.”

Blah, blah, blah. What I’m wondering is, why don’t they send me away? If it suited their purposes, they would put me away in a second. They’d give my mom the same lame-ass story about the terrific boarding school, and she would support them, no problem.

“Let us spend a moment talking about your friend Ethan,” Mr. Robert says, exactly as expected.

“Okay.”

“The conversation you had at the end of the school day yesterday.”

I shrug. “Yeah.”

“Do you know what he was getting at?”

I look straight at him. It’s nice to take a brief vacation from lying. “Not at all.”

“Do you understand why he was discussing it with you?”

I shrug again. “I guess because of being in physics together.”

I stare into the bowl of jelly beans he keeps on his coffee table. I used to eat them by the handful until the time I got pneumonia, and I haven’t eaten one since.

Then it dawns on me: maybe they are letting me stumble around for a while longer because they want to know what I might find out.

“You know that old homeless man we were talking about before?” I say. I sound combative to my own ears. I am sure anyone listening to me right now would wish I would shut up. I know I wish I would.

“Of course.”

“He says we’re not doing anything to prevent the plagues or make anything better at all. He says we’re just hiding out here.” I want to get a rise out of him, but Mr. Robert is pretty good at controlling his expression.

“And you believe what he said?”

“No. I don’t know. I don’t think so. But even if he’s crazy, is it possible he knows something?”

“Do you think that?”

“No,” I say with more conviction this time. “But it made me think about it. So are we doing anything? What are we doing?”

Now he’s leaning back with his arms up and his head resting in his hands. I am looking into his armpits.

“Prenna, you need to trust that we are doing what is best
for the community and for the world. But as you well know, we need to operate within the rules. When you are a little older, and if you can prove you are capable of observing those rules with absolute strictness and discretion, you will take your part in our efforts.”

I basically tune out everything he says after my name. Whenever he starts a sentence with my name, I know he’s lying. Whenever he starts a sentence with a word other than my name, I know he’s lying.

“Right, Mr. Robert. I understand,” I say.

And as he drones on about the deep importance of trust, I sit there gazing at the jelly beans and finally coming to terms with a deep and basic conflict: How can you fix anything if you can’t change anything?

Mr. Robert won’t get anywhere with me and I won’t get anywhere with him. But if he’s giving me the latitude to gather some information, maybe I should gather information until someone stops me.

He looks at his watch. “All right, Prenna. Take your pills, stay healthy, be good.” He always says some version of that when it’s time for me to go.

He stands; I stand. I frown at him. “You should bring Katherine home and send me instead.”

He loosens his shamrock tie. He’s had about enough of me. “Don’t tempt me, Prenna.”

I retrieve my phone from the daffodils and walk to the park as evening falls over my neighborhood. I pause for that moment when all the street and sidewalk lights come on at once. Then
I keep going. I go to the picnic table where the old man is most likely to be perched with his cart and his cans and his grimy peacock feathers, but he’s not there.

I sit by myself and check my phone. A missed call from an unfamiliar number and three voice mail messages from Mr. Robert. I delete the messages without listening. For no good reason I call Katherine’s number. There is no way she’s going to pick it up. I’m sure she’s got another number by now, if she has any phone at all. I hear her sweet whispery voice on her outgoing message. I call again and listen again, and then I start to cry. I lie back on the picnic table and watch the leaves moving like a veil of black lace over the deep evening sky.

My mind goes to Aaron Green. He tried to make it here. He really did.

I don’t want to end up like that. None of us is remotely free, but at least I get to walk in the sunshine and grow flowers, eat raspberries and swim in the ocean sometimes.

There is no way they can do that to Katherine. I won’t let it happen. I will never tell her another thing if it means she can come home.

EIGHT