The Bronze King (20 page)

While I was standing there getting teary and mad, two guys came up and one of them asked me in a heavy French accent what the statue was.

“It's a monument to Jagiello, a medieval Polish king,” I said.

They discussed this in French. Then the short one asked me, “What 'e doing zere?”

“Guarding the lake,” I said. “Protecting us from monsters.”

I walked away.

Somebody caught up with me, but it wasn't one of the French guys. It was Joel.

He and I had not spoken together since that last phone call. We'd been avoiding each other.

He said, “Hi. I came to say good-bye.”

“What?” I said. Why say good-bye to someone you never talked to anyway?

“I'm going up to Boston to stay with my aunt and uncle. I leave next week so I can settle in over the summer before term starts in my new school.”

He looked very good, very slim and dramatically handsome. He was wearing jeans and a rugby shirt and a plaid scarf.

“It's too warm for a scarf,” I said.

He got red in the face. He took off the scarf. There was the fiddler's brand on the side of his neck, fresh and sore-looking.

“I'm glad you're still playing,” I said.

“I play like a pig,” he said bitterly. “I don't even have his bow to use, did you know that? It burned up. I mean all of a sudden it flared, like a torch, and I could see again by the light it gave. That's how I found my way out of the damned subway where you left me. Though I nearly got run over by a northbound express.”

“Joel,” I said, “what's eating you? We won, you know? It cost us, but we won.”

“You won,” he said. “Wasn't it right around here that you killed the kraken with Coke bottles?”

“Oh boy, Joel,” I said. This was really very painful, and I wished I'd taken the bus across town after all. “It was Paavo Latvela who killed the kraken and paid the price for it too. I was along for the ride, that's all.”

“That's all,” he mimicked. “Don't be so modest. It isn't every day that the damsel in distress goes to fight the dragon while the gallant knight sits waiting to be rescued from a crummy hologram of a subway station. While you were pulverizing the kraken, I strolled out of the subway with the ashes of that bow on my hand and a fiddle under my arm, not a mark on me. I might as well have been asleep the whole time.”

I said, “Joel, if you'd gone and fought the kraken and come back the winner, I wouldn't be sulking and whining about it. I'd tell people you were a hero and we'd have a party.”

“That's right,” he said. “That's what you're supposed to do. You're a girl.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Oh. That's right. Think about it a minute.”

“I am thinking. You're jealous.”

“I'm not!” he said.

“Admit it, Joel. You're jealous!”

He wouldn't look at me. Suddenly he hauled off and smacked his fist into the tree next to us. Then he stood there hugging his hand and yelling, “You had no right! You're the girl, you're the one who should have been stuck in the subway! Who ever heard of a girl fighting a monster! It isn't fair!”

I shouted back. “What is this? I'm supposed to leave all the serious, exciting stuff for you to do because you're a boy? Hey, did you ever hear of such a thing as a human being? A human being, you know, a person? I'm one of those, though I happen to be a female-type human being. That means I do things for myself like anybody else, even if they happen to be dangerous things. Which I'd better be able to do, too, because there isn't always going to be some guy around to take care of it for me—like that night, for instance.”

Which was a low blow, but he'd asked for it. Besides, it was his own fault he'd been stuck in the subway. Nobody had asked him to try to use the key instead of giving it to Paavo the way he was supposed to.

“You could have been killed!” Joel said murderously.

“But not you, right? Because you're stronger and smarter and better, right? Because a girl can't fight a kraken, or how will the boys be able to talk about how superior they are? I'm glad you play the violin like a pig, because you are a pig, Joel Wechsler—a selfish, greedy, macho pig!”

“And you're a nut,” he snarled. He shook his hurt hand at me. “Look what you made me do! I can't play the violin with a broken hand!”

“Joel, nobody made you sock that tree. Nobody
made
you do anything, so don't give me that crap, all right?”

“It doesn't matter,” he said, hugging his hand again and turning away from me. “I'm giving up the violin, I'm not going to play anymore.”

“Oh, make up your mind,” I said.

“I have. I'll quit There's no point to it.” Suddenly he swung around and yelled in my face, “He was going to teach me, I know I could have gotten him to teach me! I'll never find a teacher like him again, never in my whole life. He was an old man, and he didn't know his way around like regular New Yorkers, and he went up against a monster. And I wasn't there. And he died.”

So that was it. If Joel had been there he could have changed things. Ha. I'd seen the kraken, and I knew differently. That alone made me not so mad at what he said but sorry for him, a little. Besides, I saw that his eyes were glittering with tears.

“Well, I was there,” I said, “and I couldn't make it come out any differently. And I'm sorry.”

I walked away. Joel didn't follow me. I felt, besides miserable sadness and anger, this pulling in my chest, under my heart. There should have been something between us, something besides jealousy and anger and mean words. There was, too. I felt it and I knew he felt it. Paavo didn't tell me what you do when you feel that pull and it's to somebody who causes you a lot of grief, even if it's mostly because that person is feeling a lot of grief himself.

Anyway, that was all I heard from Joel before he left. Meantime, I've started seeing Lennie again, just a friendly sort of hanging around together. And there's a very nice guy, Brian, a new kid who only moved here last summer from North Carolina. I'm teaching him about New York, which he loves.

Yesterday, we walked across the park and sat down by the lake. A lady came by in front of us towing a little kid. She settled herself on the grass across the path from us and started to read, and the kid discovered a scoop of melting ice cream somebody had dropped on the pavement. He got down on all fours and started licking. We both stared, fascinated, sort of nudging each other with our elbows and wondering when the lady would wake up. She had her nose in one of those interchangeable romance novels that Megan is always trying to get me to read, so maybe the answer was, never, not on her own.

“The kid gets to finish the ice cream,” Brian whispered to me.

I thought of all the times I got stopped from doing things I wanted to do for no good reason except the sixth sense my mother had had about stuff like that. “Nope,” I said.

“How much?” Brian loves a bet.

“A nickel.”

“A dime.”

“Okay.”

A man with a dachshund on a leash came by and stopped. He tipped his hat to the lady on the grass and pointed out to her that her kid was eating ice cream off the sidewalk. The lady smacked the kid, the kid began to scream, and the dachshund gobbled up the ice cream. Brian paid me a dime.

“Real New York,” I said.

My New York, which the kraken didn't get to scarf up like that dog ate up the ice cream, because we didn't let it.

The other day I got a letter from Joel.

 

My hand wasn't broken, which is a good thing, since this school is for teaching music first, everything else second. They are tough up here. I've got calluses on my calluses and permanent cramps in my shoulders. If you don't practice all the time, you're dead. My teacher is great, but he keeps telling me there are no shortcuts: no magic formulas, he says. (You know who I wish he could talk to. Wish I could talk to that person too.) And then he piles on the assignments, because he says he thinks I'm “promising.” What I'm promising is to kick myself around the block for letting myself in for all this. How's your writing?

 

Joel, trying to be less of a pig

 

P.S. Maybe you would consider coming to my rescue sometime?

 

Boston isn't so far. Maybe I will.

 

 

——

 

Val's adventures continue in
Sorcery Hall 2: The Silver Glove
.

More Young Adult Titles
by Suzy McKee Charnas

 

 

The Sorcery Hall Series

Book 1:
The Bronze King
Book 2:
The Silver Glove
Book 3:
The Golden Thread

 

This is the story of Valentine Marsh, a New York kid faced with the call of an impossible destiny; of her divided family, her enemies both home-grown and far-flung, and her awed and unlikely fellow-adventurers who, with Val in the lead, battle their way to the lofty gates of Sorcery Hall.

 

 

The Kingdom of Kevin Malone

Amy, brooding on a family crisis, retreats to Central Park—from the frying pan straight into the fire! Out of her past swoops her old arch-enemy Kevin Malone, the neighborhood punk who used to bully her. Kevin's feverish imagination has transformed Central Park into the Fayre Farre. Here, among castles, elves, monsters, battles and prophecies, Kevin is a Prince and a legendary champion. He's also still a self-centered jerk, and he's lost control of his magnificent creation. Will Amy risk her life to help Kevin, or just leave him to sort out his own mess? And either way, where will that leave
her
?

 

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