Earth/Sky (Earth/Sky Trilogy) (5 page)

She grinned, moving her hands off the proper position to return to hunt-and-peck with her index fingers.
“It’s a nickname for Katherine. My parents called me Kitts as a baby and it stuck. You like weird names? There’s a boy in the freshman class named Bandit Jones and a sophomore named Leland. A sophomore
girl
. And there are so many Sages and Willows at this school that we could stock a nursery. Hippie families.”

Nodding to Zakia, I said, “His name is different, too.”

“God, he’s hot,” Kitts muttered, blowing air through her lips while glancing out to him in appreciation. “I work at the florist downtown so I’m sick to death of flowers, but if
he
sent me some? Mmm.”

Zakia worked through the whole period, not even stopping to wipe off his forehead, and at the bell he vanished around the corner.
I said goodbye to Kitts and hiked to my creative writing class. There hadn’t been a lot of choice for electives at Spooner High, and I didn’t want to take auto shop or art history. No one was going to thank me either for plunking on the piano in orchestra. Checking my schedule, I saw with dismay that the teacher was Mr. Rogers once more.

The classroom had four rows of tables for two, going six deep back to the far wall.
I selected the one farthest away from the front, and by the window. Directly outside was a little grove of shaggy grass and shaggier planters. Students filtered in and claimed tables while I looked out and thought of an unbroken sweep of ocean. If only Dad had won three tickets! It was worth missing a year of school to sit on a deck chair and work on my tan while I floated around the world.

The bell rattled
through the air. Mr. Rogers started just like he had in trigonometry, handing out the syllabus one by one so he could shake hands. Maybe I could switch to auto shop. But thinking of grease on my clothes changed my mind. At least in here I’d stay clean, if not healthy, from shaking a hand that must have shaken a hundred others over the course of the school day. Slowly, ever so slowly, he made his way around the room, and he’d just reached the top of my row when the door opened.

I winced to see Adriel Graystone come in
with a note. He passed it to Mr. Rogers and said, “Sorry to be late. Mrs. Collins needed someone to bring in boxes from her car.”

“No problem.”
Mr. Rogers shook his hand warmly and passed him a syllabus. Scanning the room, he said, “Ah, there’s one last open seat back there with Jessa Bright!”

Great.
I edged closer to the window and looked away. He dropped his backpack on the table and sat down in the second chair. I focused on the botanical mess on the other side of the glass. This school was such a disaster area. I bet it was marijuana growing in the planters, whatever those plants looked like. Mixed in among the vines was trash.

I imagined myself on the deck of the ship, a
cold soda by my chair, the sun beating down, not a care in the world. At every port, people could choose if they wanted to go down for some local sightseeing of museums or monuments, or stay on board and soak in the rays. I was going to stay on board, here in this perfection.

“Well, hello again, Jessa!”
Mr. Rogers said, extending his hand over the table. I shook it for the second time that day. “Why don’t you tell the class a little about yourself?”

“Still from Los Angeles,” I said ruefully, biting back the comment
still stealing your water
. He smiled, waiting for more, and I smiled back without giving any.

Lamely, he said, “Concrete jungle.
It’s hot down there.”

“Yes, it is,” I agreed.
The syllabus landed on the table and he returned to the front of the room to read it out loud.

Clapping his hands together
once it was done, he said, “The hallmark of creativity is experience! Not only having your own, but listening to others’ experiences and imagining yourself in their shoes. Why don’t you talk to your seatmate about an experience you recently had? Five minutes.”

I groaned inwardly.
It was the last thing I wanted to do. Picking up the syllabus to look it over, I spotted a raisin stuck to the bottom of Adriel’s binder. Still angry and embarrassed about the orchestra room, I blurted, “Were there explosives in the box?”

“You’d think so,” Adriel answered
amiably, like there was nothing mean in my tone. He picked the raisin off and set it on the far corner of the table since the trashcan was out of reach. “It must have fallen out of my lunch bag when I put it in my backpack this morning. Just when I think I’ve found the last one, I find another squashed somewhere else. What a mess.” He chuckled, and against my will, my anger ebbed. Sitting so closely to him, I saw threads of gold woven through his dark blond hair. “So that’s an experience for you to imagine, going through the first day of school with raisins falling off your things. Falling off everything, and all day long.”

“I don’t think that beats mine, finding every restroom locked and desperately needing
a place to change.” I sighed. “I really did think I was alone.”

“The teacher’s office
in there has a terrible motion sensor light that flicks off every fifteen seconds. I was waving at it like mad, but it wasn’t sensing me.” Looking me straight in the eyes, he said earnestly, “Don’t be upset. All I saw was your back.”

That
wasn’t as bad as what he could have seen. I relaxed and prayed that he was telling the truth. “Can I ask you something? What’s with all the handshaking in this school? It’s been three teachers and the secretary today.”

“It’s supposed to facilitate tr
ust,” Adriel explained.

“I
t’s going to give me swine flu,” I said.

Mr. Rogers cleared his throat.
“So, why doesn’t everyone take out a piece of paper and a pen? Write down your seatmate’s experience as you imagine you would feel in their shoes. This will be good practice for future characters in the short stories you’ll be writing for my class. Then we’ll read them out loud.”

“Please don’t,” I whispered in mortification.

“You really aren’t very trusting of people, are you?” Adriel said.

“Of course I’m not trusting!
I grew up in L.A.!” I exclaimed. “Have you ever been there?”

“Sure, many times.”

“You don’t leave your doors unlocked, you don’t think that just shaking someone’s hand makes them trustworthy, and you don’t assume some guy won’t take the opportunity to embarrass you in front of the whole school!” It was hard to keep my voice to the same level as the dull roar of chatter about the room. I looked at Adriel in frustration, and he looked back through his lovely blue eyes with only sympathy. The melancholy I’d sensed before was still there, and though he looked eighteen, I felt for a moment like I was in the presence of someone far older. To calm down, I took out a blank piece of paper and wrote my name on it.

“
You must feel like a fish out of water here,” Adriel said at last.

“Yeah,” I muttered.
“I know how to live down south. But not here.”

“Why are you here?
Your parents’ jobs?”

“
No. My parents won a cruise, one of the very best ones in existence. And they work so hard to support our family.” Hearing it made me cringe, but nothing would bring it back. The state of our personal finances was a topic I kept to myself, since my friends were all from such better-off families. “They were going to turn it down, but I wouldn’t let them. I couldn’t. It’s one of those golden chances, you know? The ones you take or lose forever, and regret forever, too. I couldn’t stand for them to regret it, or for me to be one of the reasons standing in the way. So now I’m here for the year, and they’re off seeing the world.”

Pens scratched over papers. P
eople mumbled back and forth with details of their experiences to help flesh out their seatmate’s story. Adriel wrote his name on the top of his paper and said, “That was a beautiful thing you did.”

I flushed.
“Thank you.”

“I’ll write about that, and I won’t read it out loud.
It’s something you’d prefer to keep private.”

He’d done it again, seen something in my story that I hadn’t spoken.
“How do you know that?”

“
I’m good at people. And bad at keeping my lunch in its bag. You can write about that.” Then he smiled and my heart skipped a beat. Why was this gorgeous guy at Spooner High School? He should have been in the movies. We got to work on our assignments in a companionable quiet. I wouldn’t read his story out loud either for people to mock. I’d dropped my ninth grade science textbook on an overripe peach. Thankfully, that had happened at home without any witnesses.

In ten minutes, Mr. Rogers called for volunteers to read their stories.
Hands darted up from eager writers, who read short vignettes of hitting a deer on the road, camping at the reservoir, and having cavities filled at the dentist. We clapped politely after each one. Then we were set to corrections, trading our papers with our partners to have them circle misspellings and fix punctuation. Adriel and I were done in seconds, neither having found a single mistake. He had written a sweet story about being excited about his parents going on the cruise but worried that he was going to miss them.

“Why were you in Los Angeles?” I asked
quietly while the rest of the class worked studiously and the teacher wrote common misspellings on the board.

“I’ve been all o
ver California,” Adriel said.

“With your family?” I asked.
That was dumb. Did I think that he had gone by himself? Of course it was with his family.

He overlooked my stupid question.
“Yeah. Well, I live with my second cousin Drina and her family, so I travel with them. We’ve lived all over California and go sight-seeing, too.”

“Is it rude to ask why
you live with your cousin?”

“Not when you ask like that.
My parents died a long time ago, and I didn’t have living grandparents or any other close relatives.”

“I’m sorry!” I said, not having meant to bring up a sensitive topic.
“How did they die?”

“
An accident.” He didn’t elaborate, and I assumed it was a car crash. “I was six at the time, and I don’t remember them too well. Taurin and Drina had recently adopted two kids. That’s my older sister Kishi and my younger brother Cadmon. She’s at the junior college up in Hightree. So they just took me in as well.”

I checked on the teacher, who was writing
their/there/they’re
on the board with the proper usages. “And Cadmon? Does he go here?”

“He’s home.
School is too much for him.”

Wondering what that meant, I glanced out the window.
Zakia was headed over the concrete, his eyes on the shaggy planters and a black trash bag over his shoulder. Something had changed very subtly in Adriel’s posture when I looked back to him. His shoulders now tense, his eyes flicked to Zakia and back to the paper. He skimmed it a second time for something to correct. Then he pushed it back to me. “You’re good in English.”

Cl
ipping sounded outside. “Yeah. It’s my strong subject.”

“What are other mistakes you’re finding?
Quick, the bell is about to ring!” Mr. Rogers called, his whiteboard pen at the ready to jot them down.

“
How do you spell disappear?” someone yelled over a multitude of voices. Mr. Rogers returned to the board and started scribbling.

Spotting me through the window, Zakia tapped softly on the glass and grinned.
I smiled. He was so tall that he didn’t even have to stretch to reach the planters dangling from the overhang. That kind of work would have had me panting and in a sweat, but he wasn’t showing the most remote strain.

It didn’t sit well with me that I was in here learning while he was doing manual labor.
I commented, “He should be in school.” Adriel didn’t answer. “He’s homeschooled. But don’t you think?”

“No,” Adriel said shortly.
Vines slithered down to the grass, which Zakia gathered up and moved out of the way.

Was
it possible for me to say anything that
wasn’t
stupid to this guy? I kicked myself internally. It sounded like his brother Cadmon was being homeschooled for severe emotional issues of some kind, so naturally Adriel wouldn’t see a problem with it. But that was the reason for homeschooling! It was something to do out of necessity. Zakia didn’t strike me as someone with problems like that, nor had his little sister Lotus.

All of the sym
pathy in Adriel’s eyes from before was now replaced with tension. “How do you know him?” he asked.

“I used to know his older brother Jaden.
I just met Zakia yesterday.”

Lips
thinning, his eyes went back to the window. “You should stay away from him. From all of the Coopers.”

Surprised, I said, “Why?
They’re nice people.”

“They’re not,” Adriel said, and the bell rang.
He was out of his seat like a shot, backpack open on his shoulder and his binder tucked under his arm. Mr. Rogers called for everyone to drop the assignment in the basket on his desk. I stacked our papers together in confusion and packed up my things, watching through the window as Adriel strode away from the classroom.