We were a long way away from Florida. The proprietor of that little occult store had given me the genuine willies, what with her filmy eyes and the shifting mass of stuff trailing behind hera cloud of disturbance regular people wouldnt see, but would feel like a cold draft. Shed given me a long, measuring look before Dad snapped his fingers and informed her that she was talking to him , thank you very much, maam.
I should have told him about the owl . The sudden certainty was chilling, and my fingers turned numb, prickling with cold.
Um. Causes of the Civil War. Uhhh . . . The kid in front of me stumbled, and Bletch had him. She spent the rest of the class period picking on him, even though he eventually came up with the right answerswhen she let him get a word in edgewise. By the time the chimes rang for the end of the round, even the back of his neck was red. I felt bad about it, but I didnt let it slow me down.
The halls were the usual crush, jocks snapping like sharks, cheerleaders simpering, and the rest of us just trying to get by. A contingent of stoners clustered around a locker, and Im sure I saw a brown paper bag change hands. I glanced backnope, no teachers in sight. A girl from art class looked right past my tentative wave and swished away, her backpack sagging dispiritedly from one shoulder.
I hate being the new girl.
The cafeteria was a surf-roar of noise and the smell of floor wax and industrial food. I had some change for the bank of pay phones between the caf and Death Alley leading down to the office, so I plugged it in and dialed the number written in my Yoda notebookthe last in a string of similar numbers scrawled in pencil or blue pen. The phone had been on when we moved in, listed under the last tenants name, and it was easier just paying the bill for a while. I couldnt be expected to memorize every goddamn phone number. Or at least, thats what Id told Dad when he ragged me for having them written down.
He told me to watch my mouth and stopped bugging me about it. Domestic harmony, thy name is Anderson.
The handset rang in my ear. Once. Three times. Five.
He wasnt home, or he was working out, not picking up. I thought about skipping the rest of the day, but hed be pissed off and Id just get another lecture about the value of education. If I dared to point out that
education wasnt everything and high school wouldnt teach me how to exorcise a room or put down a zombie, Id just get another lecture about how I was supposed to be normal.
Just because he hunted things out of fairy tales didnt mean I had any right to skip school. Oh no. Even if he was pretty blind without me, since only the maternal side of his family was the one gifted with what Gran always called the touch.
Some touch. I havent figured out if it meant crazy or just spooky. The jury, you could say, is still out on that one.
Dad never seemed sad or unhappy about missing out on the woo-woo train. Then again, Gran never did stand for much of what she called moping, and I couldnt imagine her being any different when Dad was a kid. Weird as it is to think about him being gawky and adolescentbut Ive seen the pictures.
Gran was big on pictures.
I hung up after fifteen rings and stood staring at the phone, chewing on a hangnail. It hurt like hell, and there was a healing scrape on my left-hand knuckles from the heavy bag. Other girls dont have fathers who yell at them to work through the pain, to hit harder, to get in there and kill it kill it kill it! Other girls never filled thermoses with holy water or handed ammo through a window while their fathers held off skittering things like giant mutant cockroaches. That had been Baton Rouge, and that had been bad . Id had to drive Dad to the hospital and lie about how he got the chunk taken out of his calf.
Sometimes it was hard to tell where the lying to the normal world ended and the bullshit posturing necessary in the Real World began. Theres so much paramilitary hanging out under the edge of the Real World that the macho bull snorting reaches epic proportions.
The phone just kept ringing.
Screw it, I said under my breath, under the surf-roar of noise echoing from the cafeteria. I didnt even get my fifty cents back; the machine ate it.
For a second I stood there, just looking at the phone like it might suddenly give me a good idea. It smelled like damp wool and wet concrete in here, as well as formaldehyde carpet and the exhalation of two thousand kids. Not to mention sweaty stocking feet and food pried from underneath Ronald McDonalds bumpers. School smell. Its the same pretty much everywhere in the U.S., with only slight regional differences in the foot-sweat and served-roadkill departments.
The crowd noise from the caf hurt my ears and made my head ache like one of Moms migraines. I was hungry, but the thought of going in there and elbowing through the line, then finding a place to sit where I wouldnt be required to look at anyone or share a table with some jackass kids just seemed like too much hassle.