No nines no nines never nines NO NINES NO NINES NO NINES!
The light bulb on the young woman’s table ex plodes without warning. At the same time, the flashlight trained on the ceiling catches on a face there, a woman hanging upside down. Tarquin jumps back, mouth open.
There are gasps and cries of surprise, of fear. Somebody switches on the lights.
It is the young woman. She stares down at the misshapen bulb on her table, the glass irrevocably and inexplicably crushed, the tape still wrapped around what remains of its shape.
Though the air is warm, the tattooed boy is white and shivering, trying to pull more of his shirt around himself. The glow around him grows marked, and the tattoos hiding underneath his clothes
ripple. It is almost like a shadow is rising out from them, snaking past his chest and neck.
“How—how—” The young teacher stutters, then remembers the sea of inquiring faces before her. She checks the ruined bulb hastily and seems relieved that none of the glass has flown out of the tape. “This is why you mustn’t try this at home without any parental supervision,” the young woman finishes, but it is clear that she herself is distressed over what has happened, though she fights hard not to let it show.
The boy’s shivering has also passed. Color returns to his face, but he, too, is unnerved. The peculiar shadow seeking to fold itself around him has disappeared.
“Experiment’s over for now! Who can tell me what the difference is between a positively charged atom and a negatively charged one? Brian?”
The lessons continue until the bell rings again and the children file out of the classroom, eager to be off. “I want everyone to leave the room through the back door!” the young woman warns. “Just to be on the safe side, in case there’s glass on the floor that needs sweeping up!”
“I’m sorry,” she tells the boy after most of the students have left. “I have no idea how that happened.” The boy’s backpack has fallen off the table, some of its contents spilling out: one binder, three books, and two sharpened pencils. The young woman bends to pick them up.
“Oh, these are good, Tark!” She holds up the binder, now
opened to pages of quick sketches and rough drawings: landscapes, animals, miscellaneous people.
The boy snatches it back. “Thanks,” he says, more embarrassed than angry. He stuffs it back into his bag. “I really gotta go, Callie. There’s a shrink waiting to see if I meet her minimum requirements of crazy.”
“Stop that,” the young woman says with a natural firmness that she often adopts with her charges. “You’re not crazy, so stop saying you are.”
The boy grins at her. Something unnatural lurks at the corner of his eyes, something not even he seems aware of. “Sometimes I wish I could believe that, Callie. But my own mother’s batshit crazy, and I’ve seen so much other strange crap in my life that there’s no doubt I’ll be following in her footsteps soon enough.” He glances up at the ceiling again, but there is nobody there. “I don’t think your attempts at immersing me in the sanity of the general population’s hive-mind are going to work here, but thanks anyway.”
“Tark!” But the boy has already walked out of the room, a hand raised in farewell.
The young woman sighs, sinking into her chair. She picks up the broken bulb and turns it sideways. There is no doubt that the glass inside has been smashed, like a hammer has been violently taken to it. A shield of tape still holds some of the shards in place. “What happened to you?” she whispers, her tone wondering.
She lifts it to get a better view and sees her own slightly distorted image on the surface, tiny and unfocused.
As she watches, another reflection within the bulb moves beside her own.
She gasps, whirling around. “Miss Starr?”
It is the girl called Sandra. The young teacher’s heart is pounding. “Sandra! You startled me…”
“She’s really sorry,” the child says sincerely. “Who is?”
“The girl who broke the light bulb. I know she’s sorry. It’s ’cause you brought nine a’ them. And she really, really doesn’t like the number nine.”
The young woman stares at her.“I still like her better than the other lady, though.” “The other lady?”
“The lady with the strange face. The one with Mister Tarquin. She scares me.”
She skips out, leaving the young woman staring after her, and on her face I can read her terror.
There is a crackling sound. Something is on the floor, trapped underneath a table leg. It is a piece of paper from the tattooed boy’s binder.
The young woman picks this up with shaking hands. Unlike the other detailed drawings the boy has drawn, this is a mass of uneven loops and spirals. It is a rough drawing of a lady in black wearing a pale white mask, one half-hidden by her long, dark hair.
The therapist is named Melinda Creswell. That is the name written on a small golden plaque on the door: Melinda J. Creswell and, underneath that, Psychotherapist. Past the door is a room with two armchairs, two footrests, one couch, and one long table filled with folders. Two windows look out onto the busy street below. There are three certificates framed on the wall and one leafy plant in the corner.
The tattooed boy walks in with an air of expecting to be pounced on and devoured. He stares at a large painting of a summer meadow like he believes a wild beast is lying in wait for him amid the painted weeds.
Melinda Creswell herself is smaller than the room implies. She has graying curly hair and a rosebud mouth, and she is pouring tea the wrong way into two small, unadorned cups. She uses no bamboo whisks or caddies, and so the steam rising from the resulting mixture is of unsatisfactory sweetness. Finally, she smiles at him. “Hello, Tarquin. How was school today?”
The boy says nothing. He slumps into one armchair, and the
woman sits across from him in the other, offering a cup and a plate of small, round biscuits that he halfheartedly accepts. I begin counting the books behind her, which fill numerous shelves spanning from one wall to the next.
“I’ve just had a talk with your father,” the therapist says, “and I understand you’ve been having difficulty adjusting to Applegate since moving here. Do you want to talk about it?”
The boy blows noisily into his cup and takes a small sip. Then he sets the tea to one side.
“All right. Let’s cut to the chase.” “What do you mean?”
“My dad paid you money to get me sitting in this chair— probably overpaid you too, since his solution to every problem is to throw money in its face until it chokes from taxes. I’m pretty sure you have all my vital statistics—height, weight, eye color, allergies, my favorite breakfast cereal. You know we’re from northern Maine, which is the coldest part of the United States except Alaska. There should be a government mandate preventing anyone other than yetis and hobbits from living in northern Maine, that’s how cold I think it is.
“And now we’re in Applegate where the sun is actually doing its job but where the people are all so. Damn. Friendly. I can’t take two steps without someone asking how I’m doing, or what my name is, or why I’m wearing thick clothes in this kind of weather, as if they’re all required by the government to introduce themselves to everyone else like friendly, neighborhood child molesters.