The Time Fetch (9 page)

CHAPTER TEN

Remembering

The morning dawned clear and bright, with a bite of coldness to it. Everyone and everything hurried along—the high, distant clouds, the people descending into the subway—as if a giant broom were sweeping everything in front of it. The buses and taxis raced each other through the yellow lights.
Where did they all think they were going,
Edward wondered? Were they just all excited about the holiday season, wanting to get to the end of the day where maybe there would be parties and singing and alcoholic beverages? Or were they just afraid, without really knowing it, that Mr. Ross’s darkness was overtaking them?

Edward, for one, was not going to be suckered in by it. When he got to the bus stop, he was already late for school, but it was against everything he stood for to allow himself to be rushed. Rushing was stressful. He decided to wait for the next bus, although he knew he had just missed one and that walking would be faster.

When the bus finally arrived, Edward got on and saw that there was only one seat left. Before he could start in its direction, someone slipped past him and grabbed it—a small quick man with a ponytail, wearing a dark suit. The man looked up at Edward and smiled in an unpleasant way. Edward ignored him and grabbed onto a pole and gazed out the window at the morning world speeding by. He did his best to relax and slowly emptied his mind of all unnecessary junk. He was just shifting himself into a pleasant half sleep when the thought again came into his mind that he had forgotten something.

He tried to ignore it. But it wasn’t any good. It whispered in his ear, it itched at his brain.

He found himself staring out the window, hunting for the answer. But whatever it was that was missing, it wasn’t there. The problem nagged at him till he got off at his stop. It nagged at him till he reached the front steps of the school and he found Danton buzzing around worriedly like a bumblebee in basketball sneakers. He yelled at Edward when he saw him. “Eddie! What took you? You’re slow as sludge. We’re going to have to get late passes. C’mon!”

He moved Edward along, herding him down the hallway.

“Where, exactly, is the fire?” Edward demanded, but Danton ignored him and pushed him through the door into English class.

There were two seats left near the back of the room. Danton took one and Edward took the other. Just as Edward was snuggling himself down for a little nap, he saw, from the corner of his eye, a small hand reach over and drop a folded piece of paper onto Danton’s desk. Edward turned his head curiously to see who had done this and he felt an unpleasant jolt of electricity go through his system when he realized it was Brigit.

What could it mean?

He watched Danton cautiously open the paper and stare at it. Danton stared at it for a very long time. Then he folded it up and passed it over to Edward.

Edward could not remember the last time he had been so curious about something. He waited until he was sure no one was looking and then he opened the paper.

It was a simple drawing, in pencil, of a tall girl in cowboy boots and a long dark coat. She seemed to be staring right out of the paper at them, almost accusingly.

Edward knew that he was waking up from a long dream. “Who is that?” he asked himself. Although, really, no sooner did the question shoot across his brain, than he knew the answer.

At lunchtime, Danton came over to Edward’s table carrying a fully loaded tray of troll-lady food. He sat down with a grunt of pleasure and began eating. For several minutes he didn’t say a word.

Edward didn’t say anything either. He waited, putting off the inevitable. The big lunchroom was crowded and noisy. Everybody seemed to be excited and in a hurry. The troll ladies had framed their serving area with silver and gold tinsel garlands and dangling blue tinsel stars. Under this jolly display, they waved their ladles at the kids, yelling at them to move along.

Edward took a bite of his anadama bread, which his aunt had liberally smeared with cream cheese and strawberry jam. In the corner of his eye, he saw someone pass by him quietly. He caught the brief flash of red hair. There were a few empty seats to Danton’s right, and Brigit took the third one down.

“Don’t look at her,” Danton said through a mouthful of chicken nuggets. “If you look at her that thing will happen.”

Edward nodded.

When Danton had finished everything on his tray, he gazed at it sorrowfully. “You wouldn’t happen to have any of that bread left, would you?”

Edward sighed and reached into his backpack and pulled out a package neatly wrapped in aluminum foil. It was a half a loaf of anadama bread, sliced and slathered in butter. “When I told my aunt somebody at school liked it, she insisted I give this to you.”

“What? She did? Really? She thought of me?” Danton took the package in excitement and opened it and tore off a hunk. He sniffed at it appreciatively and took a big bite. Mumbling through the bread, he said, “Tell her I love her! Tell her she’s a genius! When are you going to bring me to meet her?”

Edward dreaded to think what would happen if he started bringing people home. It would not only lead to more stress but would give his aunt encouragement. It was against his principles to give his aunt encouragement. So Edward said nothing and Danton was too busy eating to notice. He looked like he was having an out-of-body experience. He kept sighing and closing his eyes. But when he got to the very last slice he appeared to have another thought.

He leaned down the table and extended his arm toward Brigit. He held out the bread.

“You’ve got to try this,” Danton said to her. “It’s really unbelievable.” It was like he was trying to coax a little wild bird or something.

Brigit blushed faintly, but it didn’t get any worse than that. Without looking at Danton, she took the bread.

“Taste it. C’mon. You’ve got to taste it. Eddie’s aunt made it. She’s a genius.”

Brigit blinked and then she took a small bite. When she’d swallowed it, she nodded. She threw Danton and Edward a shy smile and looked away. She nibbled at the bread.

“Listen,” Danton said to her, “we wanted to talk to you.” He slid, in a casual way, a couple of seats toward her. He beckoned to Edward, who reluctantly moved down, too.

Danton pulled the piece of paper out of his back pocket and unfolded it.

For a while they all just sat there staring at it as if the three of them were on their own little island. Edward found this kind of embarrassing.

“So who is she?” Danton asked.

“You don’t remember?” Edward asked. “It’s Feenix.”

Brigit nodded at him.

“But—what happened to her—?” Danton looked confused. “Didn’t she . . . ? Wasn’t she . . . ?”

“Yeah . . .” said Edward, frowning. He was experiencing a sensation like the one you get when you put on someone else’s glasses and take a few steps and the ground rises up to meet you. “We followed her to the park and there was that fog,” he said. “When was that?”

Danton tried to count backward on his fingers. “Last Tuesday. No, it was Wednesday. But what happened to her?”

“Maybe she’s been sick,” Edward suggested.

“But why did we forget?” asked Danton. “It’s like something wiped her clean out of our minds.”

Edward, of course, had no answer to this.

Danton looked at Brigit, but she still had nothing to say. He moved his gaze around the noisy room, which was in constant motion like a pot of bubbling, boiling water. His eyes came to rest on the next table.

Alison the Hangnail and Beatrice the Poisonous Toadstool were sitting there as usual like they shared one marshmallow brain between them. They were giggling over some photos on a cellphone.

Without hesitating, Danton jumped up and bounded over to them.

“Hey, Beatrice. Hey, Ali. Whassup?” Danton said.

Now the two girls pretended they were trying to hide the pictures.

“Hey, what you looking at there, lovely ladies?” Before the girls could answer, Danton grabbed hold of the cellphone and examined the picture. Grinning, he held it out for any nearby spectators to see. From where Edward sat, it looked like it might have been a picture of Beatrice and Alison standing on the beach in bikinis. Edward had no desire to look any closer.

Danton, however, examined the photo with interest and said, “Cute babes.” He handed it back to them with his shiny killer grin. Then he said. “So where’s Feenix?”

Edward shivered. The air down here in the basement cafeteria had a special smell. This was mostly a mix of body odor and a hundred years of crumby lunches. But at this moment he caught a whiff of something more—a rotten, moldy, old-bone smell. Old teacher burying grounds under the school?

The girls looked at Danton expectantly, as if they were waiting for the punch line of a joke.

“So where’s Feenix?” he asked again.

Toadstool cocked her head to the side. “Who’s Feenix?”

“Funny.”

The girls stared at him.

“Is she cutting?” Danton lowered his voice “You’re covering for her?”

“Is who cutting?” Toadstool asked suspiciously.

“Feenix. You know who I mean. Tall girl, wears a lot of noisy jewelry. She sits right here every day, bringing sunshine and light into the lunchroom. You know who I mean.” He was getting impatient.

Beatrice looked at Alison. “Do you know what he’s talking about?”

“Not a clue. This your dream girl, Danton? She sounds very special.”

“No, she’s not my dream girl,” he said. “You know who I’m talking about.
Feenix.
She usually sits right here between the two of you.”

The girls, Edward could see, were confused. It wasn’t like Danton to make fun of people, but the girls were beginning to decide that this was what was going on. It was a death warrant to allow someone else to make a fool of you in a public place. Alison’s little close-together ape eyes squinted at him coldly. “Why don’t you go find a basketball hoop and throw yourself through it?”

Danton stared at the two of them dumbly for a minute and Edward felt sort of sorry for him. Danton shook his head like a horse trying to get the flies out of its ears. Then he turned around and came back to Edward and Brigit.

The bell rang. No one was ready. There was a great outcry and then the crowd began rushing toward the exits.

Now that he had remembered, Edward was afraid. He could see it in Danton, too. His usual cheery I-can’t-wait-for-whatever-is-going-to-come-next face was shadowed with worry. Brigit still didn’t make a sound, but you could tell that she was thinking hard.

Health and Hygiene class, which generally seemed like a ten-year prison sentence, passed like a comet. Ms. Mankeweiz barely had time to describe the slow, painful death caused by not eating enough leafy greens, when the bell rang again.

In history, Mr. Channer rushed through the Boston Massacre, the Intolerable Acts, and Boston Tea Party. The buzzer drilled straight into everyone’s brain. The mob rose and stampeded to the door.

“Tomorrow the Revolutionary War! Read chapter eight!” Mr. Channer roared at them.

Danton whispered loudly in Edward’s ear. “Distract him. I want to check the roll book.”

Edward knew what he was up to right away. He did what Danton ordered and stopped by Mr. Channer’s desk to ask him if the whole Tea Party thing was what got people drinking coffee. Mr. Channer told him way more than he ever wanted to know in answer to this question. When he finally escaped, Danton was waiting for him in the hallway. His face was grim.

“She’s not in the rollbook,” he said. “It’s like she was never there.”

They walked silently to science class.

Edward sat down in the back row and tried to think things through. A few days ago Feenix was a terror, a plague, a human tsunami, and now she was gone. Not only was she gone; it was like she had never existed. No one even remembered her, except Danton, Brigit, and him. Why? How could such a thing be? Rack his brain as he might, there were no good answers. What if it turned out that his aunt’s rantings about mysteries and balls of yarn had some truth to them? Was it possible that mysterious forces could make people just disappear off the face of the earth? Where would they disappear to? Could it happen to just anybody?

Mr. Ross was standing in the middle of the room holding the fruit-fly jar aloft. It was now absolutely, totally jammed with fruit flies.

“As I said the other day, they get ten days to grow up, breed, and die. Each female lays about four hundred eggs. Let’s say there’s a hundred females in here right now and each one lays four hundred eggs in the next few days. How many new fruit flies will be in here by the end of next week?

“A million,” someone offered.

“What’s important for you to understand,” said Mr. Ross, “is that the growth of the population is exponential. It doesn’t merely double in size. Every ten days it is four hundred times bigger than it was ten days earlier. In theory, in ten days there will be forty thousand fruit flies in here. In twenty days, there will be sixteen million. If we let them out of here, by the end of next month they will have taken over the world, won’t they?”

A confused look of worry appeared on a couple of faces, but Robert said, “No, of course they won’t take over the world.”

“And why would that be, Robert?”

“Because they’ve got to find fruit to eat. When they run out of food, they’ll stop reproducing.”

“Excellent. There are many checks and balances built into ecosystems. One check of a population is how much food it has to eat. It can only keep on growing for as long as it has adequate nutrition. So when these guys run out of food they will start dying. Can you think of any other things that might keep this population from growing out of control?”

“Not enough room?” someone offered.

“Sure,” said Mr. Ross. “If this population keeps exploding in here, they soon won’t have enough room to breathe or move.”

“Not enough to drink?”

“Right, again. Drought is a very effective way to keep populations in check. What about disease? And predators? If we let these fruit flies go in a nice sunny meadow full of swallows, they’d probably be mostly eaten up in an hour. In other words, a population can keep on growing only if no other checks are put upon it. In our world, the checks and balances are part of an extremely delicate and complicated system. Human beings, as we are continually discovering, are generally the worst offenders when it comes to messing with the balance of things.