Читать книгу The Lost Celt - A. E. Conran - Страница 13

CHAPTER EIGHT

Miss O’Brien’s already finishing roll call when we hit the classroom. I manage to get my backpack in my cubby and sit down before she calls me. That’s one good thing about having a last name near the end of the alphabet. Kyler’s name has already been called out. She waits until she’s called everyone else before she goes back to him. She gives us a look. I’m sure she’s going to send us to the office. Then I notice Sawyer Bradstone isn’t here yet. Thank you, Sawyer. He’s always late. He doesn’t come in for another ten minutes, which makes us look like angels.

Miss O’Brien isn’t mad when Sawyer arrives, but she makes him go to the office because she’s already emailed her class numbers.

“What was it today, Sawyer?” she asks when he gets back. He’s got a huge smile on his face, and we all know we’re in for a story.

“Justine pooped right when Mom was buckling her in. It squirted down her leg and all over the car seat. Massive pool of yellow poop.”

“Ewwwww!” The whole class groans. A few kids hold their noses and pretend to gag. Babies are gross like that, especially Sawyer’s new twin sisters.

“Thank you, class,” Miss O’Brien says. “Your mom did well to get you here at all, Sawyer. Twins are hard work.”

I think Miss O’Brien knows when Sawyer’s going to gross us out, and she lets him speak anyway. It brightens our day. Miss O’Brien likes us laughing, as long as we’re not too wild.

It’s only after we get started on Language Arts, which I dread, that I wonder about Ryan. He’s not here yet. I pass Kyler a note. “Where’s Ryan?” I write.

Kyler replies with “Oooooh, nooooo, just goooooo!” in jiggly writing that would be squeaky if it could speak.

The rest of the lesson Kyler keeps his head down over his work. He fills in his worksheet in double-quick time, which means he has time to do the harder worksheet for “fun.” The annoying thing is, he does seem to find it fun. It takes me nearly the whole class to do the first one, so I only have a few minutes to think about how amazing it was to find the Celt…or for him to find us, as Kyler suggested. That gets me thinking. Kyler said something about science and magic…magic and science. The idea plays around in my head. I remember some of the sidebars in my military history book about how the Celts didn’t believe in death, which is what made them so scary on the battlefield, and I don’t have to crunch anything. My neurons are popping on their own today! I draw a jack-o’-lantern on my scratch paper. It has the biggest grin ever because that’s how I’m feeling right now.

When Miss O’Brien lets us out for recess, I can hardly wait for Kyler to find his snack bag. “Come on, Kyler, let’s go to the bushes. I have an idea.”

We’re running across the blacktop with Kyler fake-swinging his snack bag at me when we notice a whole group of kids clustered around a boy from another class. He’s talking loudly and looking toward the school office, saying something like, “The guy was freaked!” We exchange glances and run over to listen.

“No seriously, Ryan O’Driscoll was attacked! Guy jumped out at him from an alley.”

“How do you know?” someone asks.

“I told you, he was in the office when I went for a bandage.”

“Did he get mugged?”

“No, but the lady from the laundromat found him. She said he refused to go home, so she brought him to school.”

“He wanted to come to school instead of going home? That’s weird,” another kid jokes.

“I heard them talking. Then they sent him to see Miss Wendy.”

Miss Wendy is the school counselor. She comes into our class to talk about bullying and being fair on the playground, things like that. Kyler nudges me. We make for the bushes, but some other kids have already snagged them, so we hide behind the Lost and Found rack instead.

“What are we gonna do?” he says. “Do you think the laundromat lady saw us, too? Do you think Ryan’ll say we were with him?”

“If he does, our moms will find out we were on the wrong street, not the mom-approved route. They’ll be really mad,” I say. We look at each other.

“What can we do?” Kyler asks.

I shrug. “I suppose we should come clean and tell Miss Wendy we saw everything. But we’ll be in real trouble. We shouldn’t have left Ryan behind.”

Kyler ignores my last comment. “Tell Miss Wendy about our Celt? No way!”

“Keep your voice down. He’s our secret. Remember? No one knows except us.”

“And Ryan,” Kyler says.

“Ryan saw him, but he doesn’t know he’s a Celt. Only we know that. Even you didn’t recognize him at first.”

“Don’t remind me. I totally blew it.” Kyler hammers on his head with a fist. “I’m so dumb. We had the chance to talk to him, actually talk to him, and find out how this whole thing works, and I ran away. If he’s gone back to his own time now, I’ll—”

“Maybe he can’t get back yet,” I interrupt, feeling myself grin like a dopey dog while I wait for Kyler’s reaction.

“What do you mean?”