The Time Fetch (3 page)

For a moment Mr. Ross was confused. “Oh. Yes. You’re right,” he said pulling himself together. “How did we get off on that tangent?”

“Well, gee,” Edward said, looking away from Feenix. “I haven’t got a clue, but I have a rock.”

“All righty then,” said Mr. Ross. “Let’s see it.”

Dweebo reached into his pocket and pulled something out. As he did, the windows rattled loudly and the wind gave a long low howl.

Dweebo got up. Slow as mud. He brought his rock to where Mr. Ross was standing.

Mr. Ross bent over and peered at it with interest. He reached out and Dweebo’s fingers tightened around it protectively.

“It appears to be covered with some sort of matter,” said Mr. Ross. “Why don’t you go clean it at the sink?”

Dweebo did as he was told. He moved across the room at his own turtle-footed pace, looking at no one. When he brought the stone back, everyone could see that its surface was marbled, pearly gray and pink.

What was that smell? Feenix sat up, her bracelet clinking. It was wonderful. Familiar, somehow, but also very strange.

“Where, exactly, did you find this?” Mr. Ross asked. He tried to take the stone from Dweebo’s hand, but Dweebo wouldn’t let go. “Did you go to the park, as I asked you guys to do?”

“Well, uh, no. Not exactly. But I was like walking along and it was so interesting looking, I thought you would . . . um . . . appreciate it.”

He was right. Mr. Ross couldn’t take his eyes off the thing. “Well, what do you think? Igneous, sedimentary, or metamorphic? Let the rest of the class take a look. Let’s see what they think.”

Dweebo walked slowly to the front of the room and approached Danton first. Danton leaned forward curiously.

Feenix always thought that when Danton sat down he looked like a folded up grasshopper, his elbows and knees sticking out all over the place. When he stood up the story changed. Standing up, everything came together. On his feet he looked ready for everything. He was very tall. Taller than her, for sure, and he was getting taller every day. Humongous feet and hands and this unbelievable sunshiny smile. His skin was obviously the product of some ethnic funny business like in her own family. Though his was darker. It reminded her of shiny nutshells. She left him alone. Her mission was to wake people up and he was already wide awake. He moved easily from crowd to crowd, though he never quite seemed to settle anywhere. She could tell, too, that he didn’t exactly approve of her. Well, many people didn’t. So what? Most great minds were not appreciated in their own time.

As Dweebo approached him, Danton flashed his grin and then reached out and touched the rock.

“Igneous, sedimentary, or metamorphic?” Mr. Ross questioned.

“Uhh. Igneous?”

Mr. Ross didn’t say anything. “Show the rest of the group, Edward.”

Edward approached Brigit.

Oh boy. Feenix held her breath. Everybody held their breath. Brigit had shown up here at the Community Magnet Middle School for Misfits and Dimwits about three weeks ago. She had yet to say a word. She was red-haired and pale skinned, and she had this very colorful disability.

Feenix waited hopefully.

Brigit leaned forward and touched the stone. Odd, but the disability did not manifest itself.

Mr. Ross ignored the wind rattling at the window. “So what do you think?” he asked Brigit gently. Brigit pulled her hand back and gave a tiny shake of her head.

Feenix was next and Dweebo was slowly and reluctantly approaching her. Dweebo’s expression was as coldly distant as the planet Pluto. She was about to tell him that his fly was down. Which it wasn’t. Then her attention was distracted by the rock.

What was it? It looked like a regular rock, but also it didn’t. And there was that smell again.

“Let me get a better look at it,” she said. And her fingers curled around it, without waiting for his permission.

“Hey!” he objected.

She had the weirdest impression that the stone nearly jumped into her hand.

Now the wind gave a great wolf howl. It threw itself against the window and there was a loud shattering sound as glass exploded into the room.

CHAPTER THREE

Edward Loses It

Edward just stood where he was, watching all the commotion. Everyone else jumped up from their seats and moved away from the window, laughing and yelling. There was glass all over the floor and the wind was shooting around the room with a high-pitched whistling sound blowing papers into the air.

Feenix had stepped away from him, and Edward saw how amused she was by everybody else’s excitement. She just loved it when people got discombobulated.

He had a feeling she knew perfectly well he was watching her, but she didn’t turn in his direction. After a while she moved away and started searching for something on the floor. She bent down and when she came back up she had her ridiculous pink purse.

Meanwhile, Mr. Ross was calling for everyone to keep calm. “Into the hallway, please. One at a time. No pushing. Let’s go. You over there, under that desk, let’s not be ridiculous. Edward, you can move a little faster than that.”

He managed to shepherd everyone out into the hallway and sit them down against the wall while he sent Danton to go get the custodian.

Calmly, Mr. Ross went up and down the line of kids to make sure no one had been hurt. Except for some minor scrapes everyone was fine. No sooner had he finished checking everyone out than the bell rang again.

In study hall Edward considered the problem of time. He’d actually been listening fairly closely to the discussion. He wondered what Mr. Ross would make of his aunt’s theory that time was a great treasure and without it everything would happen at once. He would undoubtedly think she had marshmallows for brains. Her theories were generally without any scientific foundation. He had a brief, horrifying vision of her lecturing Mr. Ross about the Great Web of Being. Just the thought made him want to sink into the ground with mortification. He would have to be very careful to make sure they never met.

His thoughts went back to time. Would everything just collapse if there were no time? Edward’s guess was that time was just another illusion like the illusion that things around us were solid. The past, after all, had already vanished and the future didn’t exist yet. As for the present, how could you ever get hold of that, either? By the time you had the thought, “here is the present,” that moment was already gone. Wasn’t time another one of those things people invented just to get them through the day? Something that depended completely upon your point of view? What
did
fruit flies feel about living only ten days, he wondered? And what about rocks? Did a million years feel like a short time to a rock? If you were a rock—

It wasn’t until that moment that he remembered. How could he have forgotten? His stone. He started to get up out of his chair, then wondered what he thought he was doing. Really. It was only an old rock and the science room was all the way up on the third floor. Way too much physical exertion. He sat back down. He tried to put it out of his mind.

The thought of the stone kept coming back to him.

Somehow he didn’t like the idea of anybody else picking it up. The stone pulled at him. At last he found himself rising from his seat and heading toward the stairway.

When he got to the science room it was empty. Someone had swept up the glass and put a large sheet of cardboard over the broken window. The air was chilly, but the wind was gone.

He searched the floor. He searched the desks. He searched among the shelves and jars and boxes and terrariums that were Mr. Ross’s pride and joy.

The stone was nowhere to be found.

At lunch Edward spotted an empty seat over by a couple of guys he knew. They were playing chess and they were so totally in another dimension, they probably wouldn’t even look up.

The cafeteria was a minefield, but Edward’s shield of invisibility was coming along well. Most people barely noticed him because they assumed that nobody was home. Which was exactly as he wanted it. He had a rich and busy interior life and he liked to keep it interruption-free.

As he headed toward the empty seat, Edward had to pass by two girls giggling and carefully dividing up a Twinkie with a plastic knife. Happily, they ignored him.

But then, just as he sat down, someone made a loud farting sound.

“Oh, that Dweebo, what a bean machine.”

The person was attempting to change her voice, but it was a low, sandpapery voice that was impossible to disguise. Edward would have recognized it anywhere.

The two girls sawing at the Twinkie looked up and stared at him and burst into loud laughter. The two guys playing chess paused. They gazed at him curiously, then decided he was just some sort of temporary hologram projection or something. They returned to their playing.

Edward sat down. He pulled out the cheese and pickle sandwich on rye his aunt had made him. His favorite. She made the bread herself, too. He took a large bite and considered which entertainment to choose.

He could play the Change One Variable game. That was where you tried to imagine what would happen to the world if you changed just one small thing—like, what if people had three eyes instead of two? Or, what if there were eight days in the week, instead of seven?

Or he could work on one of his inventions. He had a lot of invention ideas he was always tossing around in his head, but he wasn’t exactly in the mood for that amount of effort.

No. What he settled on was the game he called Imagine Different Ways to Make Feenix Suffer.

That was a reliable old favorite.

The first thing he did was have her trip and fall down the stairs. The second thing he did was have her deliver an English report without knowing that she had a piece of spinach stuck between her front teeth. The third thing he did was tie her to a stake and pile up lots of wood around her feet. Then he set fire to the wood. The little flames were just beginning to lick at her boots when he was startled out of his pleasant dreaming. Brigit, who had been carrying her lunch tray toward an empty seat, had stopped suddenly right where she was.

Brigit had first shown up at the school a few weeks ago in November. It was now the middle of December. No one had yet heard her speak a single word. There were many rumors about this. Some people decided she didn’t speak English. Other people said she was deaf, but could read lips. Someone else claimed to have seen the inside of her mouth once when she yawned and that she didn’t have a tongue.

Edward was sure that if anyone had given him a choice between starting at a new school three months into the year or disguising himself in a clown suit and joining a traveling circus, he would have chosen the clown-suit thing.

But apparently no one had offered Brigit this choice.

His theory was that she was extremely shy. Besides the fact that she never spoke, she was an insane blusher.

Right now she was staring at a spot on the ground right in front of her feet. Edward tried to figure out what she was staring at. He couldn’t see anything remarkable, just the usual junk on the floor—an empty squashed milk carton, a couple of cupcake wrappers, and a grape.

Brigit took a hesitant step forward and, as she did, another grape appeared. It rolled out from underneath the table and hit her foot. She looked around nervously and another grape came shooting out from under the table. Unable to help herself, she stepped squarely onto it. The thing squished juicily. Now there was another and another—more and more, five, six, ten grapes rolling crazily across her path. Muffled laughter came from across the table.

Brigit stopped moving and kept her eyes fixed on the floor.

Here it comes. Oh no,
Edward thought. He heard the laughter growing from behind them and watched Brigit with hopeless fascination.

She began to blush. Brigit had red hair, which she wore in a long braid down her back. She was one of those red-headed people with that very milky, show-through kind of skin. The blush began slowly, like a match dropped into a dry forest. As the heat surged up into her neck and spread over her face, she turned a bright burning rose color. The blush was so intense it was hard to take your eyes off it. Although it was embarrassing to look at, too. Painful almost.

Brigit just stood there, paralyzed. You could tell she knew exactly what was happening and that everybody was watching.

A low, rough voice began to sing:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of Brigit’s burning blush.

Just because a grape or two has turned the girl to mush.

We have seen the red go creeping from her neck into her face.

The grapes go rolling on.

Glory, glory hallelujah,

Glory, glory hallelujah

Glory, glory what’s it to ya?

The grapes go rolling on.

Feenix’s squad of evil henchwomen had gathered around her and joined in. Beatrice the Poisonous Toadstool and Alison the Hangnail stood at her side popping grapes in their mouths.

The thing that happened next happened very quickly. A hand appeared from out of nowhere, and snatched Feenix’s little pink purse from off her shoulder.

Feenix stopped singing. For a moment she was too surprised to move. Then she gave a yell of fury.

“Eddie!” a voice called. “Heads up! Comin’ to ya.”

The little purse flew through the air and, without thinking, Edward put his hands up and caught it. It was a little pink-beaded affair, lumpy with personal junk.

“Hey!” Feenix called. She began to leap over chairs and around people in his direction.

Edward, his heart pounding, rose from his seat and began to run.

Around them, everyone else stopped singing and gave a cheer.

“Over here, Eddie!”

Danton was grinning happily, his hands up in the air, ready for the catch. Edward threw the bag toward him and Danton caught it easily.

Alison and Beatrice attempted to tackle Danton, but he laughed and eluded them smoothly. Feenix jumped on a chair and lunged for the purse.

“I’m open!” Edward yelled.

Danton threw the purse back to him and Edward tucked it under his arm like a football and began to run down the crowded aisle between the tables, heading for open space. Edward generally avoided any public physical activity since it might reveal that he had the hand, foot, and eye coordination of a sock puppet. To his surprise, the moment he had the purse in his grasp he found himself as light and swift as a deer. He held on to it tightly and felt the glorious pleasure of speed. Although shouting and laughing arms reached out to catch him, he was too slippery and too fast. He reached the open space by the water fountains and saw the exit door ahead of him. He put his head down and barreled through a knot of kids scattering them in all directions. When he looked up, there was Feenix, blocking his way.

He stopped short. She was, as always, taller than he was, and dressed to make other people stare at her. Today it was cowboy boots and pink leggings and some kind of lacy black skirt thing. He closed his eyes briefly, blinded and feeling the warm lightness in his veins swiftly leaving him, hissing away like air out of a balloon. She shook one finger at him as if he’d been a naughty child. She held out her hand.

Edward took the lumpy beaded purse out from under his arm and looked at it. It had a metal closure at the top. He started to hand it over to her and then stopped. With a quick snap, he twisted it open and, at the same moment, tossed the bag upside down in the air. A fountain of girly junk came flying out: eyeliners, Chapsticks, lipsticks, cell phone, snotty tissues, breath strips, half-eaten candy bars.

A low growl of fury came from her throat.

Girls hated it, he knew, when their purses spilled on the floor.

He watched with triumph while she scrabbled to pick it all up and stuff it back into the bag.

When she was done, she stood and snapped her bag closed. It had a thin pink strap, which she now slung over her shoulder, tucking the bag tight under her arm. She was breathing a tiny bit hard as she met his gaze with those unnerving eyes of hers. It was then that he spotted it, in the edge of his vision. On the floor near her foot.

His rock.

“Hey!” he exclaimed.

She followed his gaze and, quick as a snake striking, she bent down and snatched it up.

The wind rattled the windows of the lunchroom. It gave a low, hungry moan and dashed itself against the side of the old school building, like the waves throwing themselves against the rocks.

“Hey!” he repeated.

“I’m not happy with you, Edsel,” she growled.

“That’s my rock.”

She lifted her eyebrow. “Your name is on it somewhere?”

“No, my name isn’t on it.”

“Then how do we know it’s your rock?”

“I found it in my aunt’s garden this morning and I put it my pocket.”

“Well, then maybe your aunt’s name is on it?”

“Nobody’s name is on it, but that’s the rock I brought in for science class.”

“What if I told you that I picked up this rock last night when I went for a walk in the park?”

“You would be lying.”

“It’s just a rock. What are you popping your pimples about?”

“It’s
my
rock.” He felt how stupid this sounded, even as the words came out of his mouth.

The wind shrieked and Edward could have sworn he felt the building tremble.

“Whoa. Will you look at that?” someone whispered.

Edward turned.

The windows in the lunchroom rose nearly to the ceiling and looked out upon a gray afternoon. High up in the sky a gray object came falling toward them. It rushed down from the clouds in odd jerks and starts. Edward wanted to back up, but found that his feet were cemented to the floor.

The thing grew larger rapidly and now they could see the shape of a person with arms outstretched.

It was headed for their window, not in a straight line, but like a kite being pulled in, stopping and starting. Edward saw, with a very unpleasant drop in his stomach, that the thing had no head.

There were gasps and whispers.
“What is it?”

The thing hit the glass with a thud and someone screamed. For a moment, it hung there, suspended. Its arms seemed to stretch up and reach toward them. Then, suddenly, it crumpled and twisted sideways.