Читать книгу Heroes of Earth - Martin Berman-Gorvine - Страница 6

CHAPTER 1

The door to the school library burst open, and a boy ran in, his eyes wide with terror. Voices called after him, the voices of other boys pitched high in falsetto.

“Hey Gross-fart, where you running to?”

“Hey Gross-fart, try not to stink up the library too much! Other people need to use the n-readers, you know!”

A woman stepped out from behind the counter in a swish of long skirts. She walked over to the door and stopped, her arms folded over a deep purple blouse, a patchwork quilt of a skirt, and high but ill-matched boots.

“Is there a problem, boys?” Skittering footsteps and mocking laughter answered her. She shut the door, shook her head, and turned to the boy who had run in.

He stared at her. “Th-thanks for scaring Matt and Jared off, but who are you, and where is Mrs. Wilkes?”

“She retired over Thanksgiving. I’m the new school librarian, Gloria,” the woman said, extending her hand.

“Umm, hello, I guess, Miss Gloria,” the boy said. “I’m Arnold—Grossbard.” He said his last name hesitantly, and Gloria thought he must be waiting to see if she would laugh at it. When she didn’t he slowly reached out his hand to take hers, but suddenly jerked it away. “Hey—you’re hot! I mean, your hand, your hand is hot!” He stared at her as she smoothed her long red hair down around her ears. “Hey, what’s the matter with your ears?” he asked. “How come they’re pointy on top?”

Gloria smiled. “I’m glad to meet you, Arnold. You’re the first person I’ve seen here who didn’t come into the library just to use the neural readers.” She motioned with her head toward two bulky gray machines mounted in carrels. To use one you sat in a bright orange Naugahyde® easy chair and attached electrodes to your temples. Then you more or less became a part of the furniture yourself. Gloria thought the people using the n-readers looked dead, curled up in a fetal position or sprawled all over the chairs with their eyes shut and their mouths wide open. Nevertheless the carrels were always occupied, and there was always a waiting list. There were two users now, a girl and a boy of about fifteen, probably the same age, Gloria thought, as Arnold himself. She noticed the way Arnold’s gaze lingered on the girl’s legs, which poked out from a red cheerleader’s skirt. One of her shoes had fallen off.

“I’m not allowed on the n-readers,” Arnold said, turning his attention back to Gloria and wrinkling his nose as if he smelled something bad. “Not since Mom got so sick from the Net. Though that happened back home—I mean, when we lived in Pikesville.”

“You’re not a ‘from-here,’ then.” Gloria was still smiling.

“Me? Born on Chincoteague Island? Never in a million years. Not like Bill Cherricks and Hailee Pruitt, here.” He gestured at the n-reader users. “Pikesville is near Baltimore, Miss Gloria,” he added.

“Just Gloria, dear,” the new librarian said, but Arnold wasn’t looking at her. He was looking around the room, wide-eyed.

“Do you like how I’ve changed things?” Gloria asked.

“Where did you get those wooden shelves? Did you pay for them yourself?” Arnold replied. Gloria smiled and dipped her head, without answering. “And what’s that hanging plant?” he added.

“It’s called a spider plant,” Gloria said. “You can re-pot those little clusters of leaves hanging over the sides and they grow into whole new plants.”

“That’s neat, I guess,” Arnold mumbled, looking at the floor. The black-and-white tile pattern down there was pretty, as Gloria had found out herself once she’d ripped out the musty pea-green carpet that covered it, but Arnold obviously wasn’t admiring the pattern. The tips of his ears were red. How to get through to him, she wondered, past that awful shyness?

Gloria had an idea how. “Well, now that you’re here, Arnold, would you like to browse the new books I’ve brought?”

“Why did you move everything around?” Arnold asked, walking among the new wooden shelves. The old shelves had been horrible gray aluminum. How could a kid ever daydream among them? Gloria followed him.

“I like it better this way,” she said.

“It seems you don’t like the Dewey Decimal System, though,” Arnold said.

“I never could figure it out.”

She had science books mixed in with fiction and history. Sometimes she liked to group them by author. For instance, there was Rachel Zilber, who had written both a science fiction novel about a swashbuckling hero called Zap-Gun Jack Flash and beside it a nonfiction book about the geology of Mars. But she also felt, for reasons of her own, that an atlas of the currently nonexistent country of Khazaria belonged next to Charles Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which in some versions of history he had died before completing.

Arnold jumped. “Don’t creep up on me like that!”

“Sorry,” Gloria said, pursing her lips.

Arnold pulled the book he had been looking at off the shelf and held it out to Gloria. “I though Mark Twain was banned? Like, not just from school libraries, but from all libraries?”

“Really?” said Gloria, wide-eyed.

“My Dad has lots of his books anyway, up in the attic,” Arnold said.

Gloria smiled more broadly. She had just known there was something she liked about this kid, the moment he ran in the door.

“But I never heard of this one,” he added. Then he seemed to forget all about her, as he sat cross-legged on the floor, propped his chin in his right hand and started flipping through Letters to a Woman Sitting in Darkness. After a few minutes he looked up, his eyes narrowed. “Hey! This isn’t a funny story like I expected!”

“Really?”

“Well, parts of it are funny in a sick way. But all this stuff that Private Sam Shipman is writing to his girlfriend Daisy back home about what the American Army is doing in the Philippines, back in 1902? Killing all those women and children? That not what the history textbook we use in Miss Kelley’s class says.”

“What does it say, Arnold?”

Arnold shut his eyes and recited from memory. “The Spanish-American War broke out when a feeble, declining Spain met the surging power of the New World. The new harmony that America imposed from Puerto Rico to the Philippines was like a faint foretaste of the greater, Cosmic Harmony to come later in the century, when the High Ones came from the stars, bringing peace to the whole world.”

Gloria was impressed. “What do you think about that, Arnold?”

He shrugged. “It’s just boring. No one else in class pays much attention to that stuff. But Dad says it’s propaganda, and it makes him really mad.” Arnold looked back down at the book, flipping through it from front to back, then more slowly, from back to front. “Hey, this is weird!” he exclaimed, pointing at the Author’s Note.

“What is, dear?”

“It says here that Mark Twain meant for the book to be published ‘only after my death, if ever, out of an excess of cowardice on my part. Frankly, I was afraid for my earnings. But then a certain enchanting flame-haired lady convinced me that I must not withhold my thoughts any longer, and so I dedicate this work to Gloria.’ That’s your name, and you have red hair!”

“That is a strange coincidence, dear,” said Gloria, who knew perfectly well that it was not.

Arnold flipped back a bit further, to the title page. Then he whipped his head around and stared at Gloria. “Where is it?” he demanded.

“Where is what, dear?”

“Don’t make like you don’t know. Where’s the sticker? The Society for Common Decency sticker?”

Gloria pursed her lips again. “You mean the tiny American flag with a pair of hands clasped around the letters SCOD?”

“That’s the one! It’s stuck to the title page of every school and library book I’ve ever seen.”

“But I’ll bet it’s not in the books in your Dad’s attic.”

Arnold’s whole body trembled. It was a little scary for Gloria to see, especially because he was as tall as she was.

“You’re trying to get me in trouble!” he shouted. “It won’t work! I’ll, I’ll tell the principal, Mr. Wright, on you!” He pushed past her and pounded out of the library, past the slumped-over forms of Hailee and Bill, just as the bell rang.

Gloria smiled to herself and hummed a little tune as she put the offending Mark Twain book in a cubbyhole below the counter. She walked toward the back, her boot heels clacking on the tiles, until she turned a dim corner and disappeared from sight. There was a scraping noise, followed by a thump. A few moments later an orange tabby cat with strangely curved ears came trotting briskly out, just as Hailee and then Bill yawned and stretched.

The girl brushed the blond hair out of her eyes, smiling when she saw the cat. “Here, kitty kitty! Such a sweet puss! Who let you in here?”

“Yeah, who?” Bill grumbled, stifling a sneeze. “I’m allergic! Come on, Hailee, let’s go, we’ll be late for English!”

“Don’t worry, Bill, I’ve got your essay all written for you,” Hailee said, taking his arm as they walked out.

The cat leaped up on the counter and yawned widely, showing her sharp teeth. Nobody naps as well as a cat, she thought happily as she settled in. It was true what she’d told Arnold about his being the only person to come to the library for any reason other than using the n-readers, so the counter promised to be a good place for a nice long rest. Foreseeing this, Gloria had brought in her favorite comfortable cushion, a wine-colored throw pillow that was a gift from her old friend Teresa in Philadelphia, and put it beside the date due stamp that was gathering dust next to the inkpad. Suitably settled, Gloria (or Tiferet as it said on the tag she wore when she chose to be a cat) dozed away the day.

Not all her dreams were sweet. Luckily everyone was at recess when she started yowling.

* * * *

Quiet returned with the afternoon, a quiet that was hardly broken by the two tenth-grade girls who came in to use the n-readers for their algebra class. Tiferet opened one green eye and watched as they signed their names in the register: Madison Marbury and Kayleigh Scott. Madison had dirty-blond hair and a scattering of acne on the right side of her face, and Kayleigh was a little plump, with chestnut hair and a shrewd twinkle in her eye. They kept on chattering as they applied the electrodes to one another.

“Didja see that spaz Arnold this morning?” Madison said.

“Yeah, he was acting weird even for him,” Kayleigh said. “Like something was freaking him out.”

“His own face, probably.” Both girls laughed, then slumped as suddenly as if they’d been shot.

When the final bell jangled Tiferet looked up, jumped down from the counter, and trotted away into the dim back of the library. A moment later Gloria stepped out, smoothing her long red hair down over the pointy tips of her ears. As she walked up to the counter, first Kayleigh and then Madison yawned, stretched, and rubbed their eyes.

“Shh-kool’sh over already?” Kayleigh slurred. “That shucks. I was really into that massthink. Some of the guys in it were really dreamy.”

“I wish they’d let us stay here all day,” Madison said as she combed the electrodes out of her hair. “Even when I don’t get to see Justin, I always feel like a million bucks after being in the net.”

“You mean after ‘virtually’ making out with Justin,” Kayleigh teased as she wiped the last of the electrode-gel off her temples with a tissue.

“Girls, could you hurry up please?” interrupted Miss Fredericks, the music teacher with the long brown hair. “You’ve already used up five minutes of my time!”

“Me, too!” said the gym teacher, Mr. Lynch, as he shifted his weight from one hairy, bare leg to another.

The girls shouldered their backpacks, giggling, and pushed past Arnold as he came slouching back in, his eyes firmly fixed on the floor. The two teachers had already wired each other up by the time Gloria said hello to Arnold again.

“Hi,” Arnold said. “I—I just wanted to tell you I’m sorry.”

“Sorry for what, dear?”

“For being so rude to you earlier.” He turned around and watched the noisy end-of-the-day crowd in the hallway for a long moment.

“You can close the door if you want,” Gloria said. The teachers slumped in their chairs. Mr. Lynch’s eyes were half-open, staring at infinity.

Arnold nodded, the wrinkles on his forehead smoothing themselves out after he shut the door. “Thank you. I didn’t want anyone listening. Everyone on this island is so nosy.” Arnold clenched and relaxed his fists. “It just startled me, seeing a stickerless book like that.”

Gloria said nothing.

“I mean, you were right, my dad has, like, hundreds of books without stickers in them in the attic, and he made a lock for the trap door himself.”

“He must really like to read.”

“Do the Assateague ponies like to poop on the dunes? Yeah, he really likes to read. And he doesn’t like SCOD or anyone else telling him what to read, either.”

“What do you like to read, Arnold?”

He acted like he hadn’t heard. “I mean, you should be careful, Miss Gloria.”

“It’s just Gloria, Arnold.”

“You should be careful, anyhow. It’s not actually against the law for my dad to have all those books, though he’d probably get fired from his job if anyone found out. But if they catch you keeping stickerless books in a school library—”

Gloria smiled. “I know. They’d make me drink hemlock.”

“Hemlock?”

“The poison they made Socrates drink for corrupting the youth, dear. I told him to watch what he said, but he wouldn’t listen.”

Arnold smiled uncertainly.

“But you don’t need to worry about me,” Gloria added. “I don’t show those books to everyone.”

Arnold thought for a second. “Who do you show them to?”

“So far? Just you.”

Arnold frowned. “Why me?”

“Because I know you’ll appreciate them.” She held out the novel Arnold had been looking at. “Here. I saved it for you.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“No need for thanks, dear. And I have a present for you.” She held out the potted spider plant Arnold had noticed earlier. “Just take it straight home and put it where it can get plenty of light all day.”

“Thanks,” Arnold said again. He touched the leaves and they crossed over themselves primly, like a woman crossing her legs under her skirt.

“You’re welcome,” Gloria said. “Oh, and please tell your big sister to come in and introduce herself. Alison’s her name, right?”