XGeneration 1: You Don't Know Me (9 page)

It was the most unusual seating system Janis had ever witnessed—and also the most entertaining. Finally, she was one of only two students left standing.

“Graystone,” Mrs. Fern said.

“Yes?” Janis’s stomach quivered.

“Nothing too revelatory about that name. Nothing too much to glean. English in origin. Self-explanatory, really. And yet I sense there’s something more to you.” She stood silently for a moment. “And your first name, Miss Graystone, is…?”

“Janis.”

The twin globes of Mrs. Fern’s eyes seemed to swell beneath her lids. “Ah, yes. Now we have something to work with. Janis, a derivative of Jane, perhaps, but also a variation of
Janus
, who was a Roman god. A god of two faces.”

At this, Amy sniggered from her desk.

“But not two-faced in the sense of duplicity, oh no,” Mrs. Fern continued. “Janus is a powerful god, a diviner. A god of doorways. Think of
Janu
-ary. One face looking to the past. The other peering ahead, to the future. But we speak not just of doorways in the sense of time. No, there is also the doorway between here and there.”

Mrs. Fern’s head bobbed slowly. Janis had been anticipating having her name explained, but now she became uncomfortably warm. She curled her toes inside her white Keds, alternating feet.

“The doorway between this world and another. Yes,
another
. One not quite seen, perhaps?” When her eyes opened, it felt to Janis as if they were poised to swallow her. “Isn’t that right, Miss Graystone?”

But Janis couldn’t make a sound because she remembered why she had felt protective toward Margaret at lunch. She remembered what had happened the night before. The dream, the experience…

In a torrent of horrifying images, she remembered it all.

“This desk in the very middle of the classroom will suit a Janis quite perfectly, I would think.”

But Janis did not go to the desk Mrs. Fern was opening her arm toward. She turned from the classroom and fled.

8

Mr. Shine stood before Scott, chuckling and holding out a quarter. “Ain’t much magic to making her jump. Jus’ a little diligence. A little patience.” His brown eyes flashed sky blue as he snapped his fingers. The quarter changed from tails to heads. “Go on and try for you’self.”

Scott accepted the quarter from Mr. Shine, whose eyes had settled to brown again, and snapped it between his own fingers.

The quarter disappeared.

“Not bad, young blood. Not bad at all,” Mr. Shine said. “Course, it ain’t gonna happen overnight, but look at you!”

When Scott looked down, he was wearing a full-body uniform, dark blue except for what appeared to be a pair of Speedos and boots, both yellow. Above a broad red belt, abdominal muscles showed beneath the uniform’s fabric in interlocking columns. He was no longer Scott Spruel, he realized, but his favorite comic book character: Scott Summers of the X-Men.

Smiling, Scott began to feel for his cyclopean visor.

Brakes cawed, and Scott jerked awake to find the school bus approaching his stop. After disembarking, he stood a moment squinting into the heat, watching the bus rumble away. He turned to the bush beside the Pattersons’ garage door, the one he’d hidden behind that morning. Maybe it was because of the dream, or because he’d made it through his first day of high school intact, but in the light of midafternoon, everything appeared more promising.

Scott crossed the street, then ran the rest of the block home, rejuvenated, his arms and legs fueled by hope. One of Scott’s hopes was that if the FBI hadn’t come down on his head, it was because they didn’t have enough evidence or didn’t consider his crimes criminal enough. There were still no Crown Victorias in his yard, anyway. Scott let himself in the front door using the key kept on the string around his neck. He dropped his backpack in the hallway and, without breaking stride, headed toward his room, J.R. yipping circles around his feet.

The solution, Scott told himself, was to leave his equipment in the storage room in the garage and give his extracurricular activities a rest for a while, take a hacking hiatus—a long one if need be.

But standing inside his doorway, Scott could see that was going to be easier said than done. His brain still harbored a compulsion to beeline to his computer desk, flip on his equipment, and launch into his latest hack, the behavioral groove well established and deep. Scott did go to his desk, but it was strangely naked, like a hairless cat you had to look at enough times to get used to, much less feel affection for. Imprinted in the emptiness of the desk top was a large dustless square. A smaller square stood out where his modem had spent the summer beeping and crunching. Gone too were all the notes he had scribbled from the hacker boards.

Scott leaned his arms on the back of his office chair and pushed out a sigh. There would be no more navigating the networks, no head-splitting challenges, no fist-pumping victories. He was out of “The Game,” as some hackers called it. At least until he was no longer a person of interest.

You need Wayne.

Scott picked up the cordless phone and punched his number. The exchange and suffix pulsed out—a pause a few milliseconds too long—then a ring. With one hand, Scott ushered J.R. from the room, letting him keep the stick of pizza crust he’d foraged from beneath the bed, and closed the door. On the eighth ring, Scott hung up. Either Wayne had divined it was him, or he wasn’t home yet.

Scott scrubbed a hand over his face and drew up his blinds. Light flooded the bedroom, shining over stacks of boxes where plastic comic book bags peeked out, over D&D manuals, modules, and metal figurines crowding his lone bookshelf, over model spaceships dangling from vents and lining the windowsills, and over the mess that was the rest of his room. Scott frowned in thought. Something seemed out of place, and it wasn’t that the walls were bare from his having yanked down the hand-drawn Bell schematics the night before.

Then it hit him.

The room belonged to somebody barely out of elementary school, a child. So much of his attention the last three years had focused on Ma Bell, ARPANet, D&D, and comic books that he had neglected the fact that he was growing up. Today, he’d been the tallest in almost all of his classes. (His P.E. teacher had even asked if he would be trying out for ninth grade basketball—now
that
was a laugh.) But nothing in his room reflected that growth. And after the revelation at lunchtime that he was among a more mature, more accepting breed of student, he didn’t want to remain in his childhood any longer. He didn’t want to hide in his bedroom behind his computer. He wanted to belong.

Especially after his encounter with Janis.

Scott?

He drew a Glad Bag from the box his mother had set beside his trashcan (she had almost smiled when she said the trashcan was the one thing in his room that was actually clean). He whipped the trash bag open and pushed the scatter of RC Cola cans into its mouth. At the start of the day, he had imagined himself dropping into bed upon returning home and zonking out until eight or nine o’clock that night. But now that he
was
home, he found himself incapable of sitting still, much less nodding off. Because with the memory of Janis still swimming through his thoughts, he believed he could do this now, that he could remake himself. That he
could
belong.

Now tails, now heads.

Scott?

Yes, he had seen her. Better, she’d come and stood beside him before the start of seventh-period English. The flaming cascade of hair that, for so long, he could only watch from a distance, had been right there, at his shoulder. In that first moment, the classroom revolving around him, he’d had to summon almost all of his nerve to compose himself and then the rest to get her name past his stuttering lips. But he
had
gotten it out. He’d spoken to her, and that seemed a victory in itself—one more monumental than all of the printouts in his hidden box of hacks.

And she’d spoken his name, too.

Scott?

That one word, the texture of it, the breath behind it, were now the most precious things in the world to him. He’d been preparing to ask her how her day was going. It would’ve been a start, something to build on. Hard to screw up. But his throat succumbed to what felt like a seismic tremor, and the words became Larry, Moe, and Curly jammed inside a doorway. Then the teacher jumped out of the closet.

All of the students spun except for him. He wasn’t able to move his eyes from Janis, from the swirl of her hair and the excited shine of her eyes. When the teacher started in with her seating system, he had to bite back a grin. It was no alphabetical system, which would have doomed the names Graystone and Spruel to distant rows. No, it was something different. Something unique. Scott didn’t understand it entirely, but he stood a chance of sitting next to her—or close to her, anyway.

“Spruel,” Mrs. Fern said. “A derivative of Spurling, most likely. And not nearly as lowly as it sounds. The name means ‘little sparrow.’” And she proceeded to seat him as far as possible from another student whose name meant “great cat.” That received a healthy tide of laughter and a pretty smile from Janis—teeth and all. Scott returned the smile. It was crooked and brace-faced, he knew, but he didn’t care. Having her smile at him was right up there with hearing her speak his name. He would not be forgetting either for a long time.

But then something had happened.

Scott stopped pushing trash into the bag long enough to stand and gaze outside. The cul-de-sac in front of the Graystones’ house stood empty. The Prelude was still gone. He bounced the Glad Bag against his knee.

When the teacher had gotten to Janis, she talked about a Roman god and doorways—Scott remembered that. And then he watched Janis’s face change, going from open and bright one moment to tense and pale the next. It was as if she had aged—not outwardly but inwardly, as if she’d acquired all of the cares and concerns of an adult in a matter of seconds.

She ran from the classroom.

Whispers rose. Necks craned. Scott imagined himself going after her, seeing if she was all right. It’s what Scott Summers of the X-Men would have done. He would have pursued his red-haired love, his Jean Grey. But Scott Spruel was no Cyclops, he found out. That would have required something he didn’t have.
Gallantry? Courage? A working spine?

He just sat there and craned his neck like the others.

Mrs. Fern appeared unperturbed. “Now, now, settle down,” she said, closing her eyes again. “Our goddess of doorways just needs a little fresh air. A moment to reorient. She’ll return shortly.”

Janis came back maybe ten minutes later. By then, the final student had been seated and the course syllabus distributed. Janis smiled tightly and said something about becoming lightheaded but that it had passed. She still looked pale to Scott, especially around her eyes. And when she took her seat (two rows from him, damn it all), her hair looked as though it had lost some of its luster as well. Amy, a student from their middle school, muttered something—“Faker,” Scott thought he heard. When he turned, she leveled a hard stare at him. The stare reminded him so much of his mother’s that he lowered his eyes and turned back around.

After class, Scott had been determined to ask Janis if she was okay. He followed her the entire length of A-wing before losing his nerve and veering off toward the bus circle.
Tomorrow.

And that was the amazing thing. He had tomorrow, the next day—every day for the rest of the school year. He didn’t have a seat beside her, no, but he shared a class with her (one he wasn’t even supposed to have been in; he’d signed up for honors, not AP, English). A class with the same peculiar teacher, the same reading list—things to talk about. For the first time since they were kids, he would no longer have to resign himself to gazing helplessly on her from his bedroom window, a span which always felt farther than its actual distance.

Scott sighed and dropped the Glad Bag by the window. He pulled a comic book from one of the boxes beside his bookshelf and retired with it onto his bed, his pillows piled three deep under his head.

His favorite comic book artist was John Byrne, and Scott’s acquisitions for the last three years followed his career through Marvel Comics: old issues of
The Avengers
,
Captain America
,
Daredevil
,
Iron Fist
,
The Amazing Spiderman
. Byrne was currently illustrating the
Fantastic Four
, since issue #232, so that collection was ongoing. And last year, he had started this cool new series about a Canadian superhero team called
Alpha Flight
.

But Scott’s favorite John Byrne series by far—by light years—was
The X-Men
, issues #108 to #143. Those issues had everything, cool characters, awesome powers, riveting storylines, and all of them illustrated and co-plotted by John Byrne. The issues Scott liked the most, the ones he had absolutely fallen into (and whose condition he’d knocked down a peg or two through his constant handling) were the ones with Scott Summers and Jean Grey, also known as Cyclops and Phoenix. Scott would start the series at #108, read until Cyclops and Phoenix each presumed the other dead in issue #113, then skip to where they were reunited on Muir Island in issue #126.

He would read and reread the panels when it was just the two of them speaking intimately—before the mess with The Hellfire Club, before the power of the Dark Phoenix corrupted Jean. And maybe it was his knowing that their time together was short, that they only had those few precious panels, that made the panels seem to Scott sadder and more special than anything in his real life.

He opened issue #132 to one of those pages.

Byrne had stopped drawing
The X-Men
more than three years ago, so Scott had to track down old issues. Some he’d acquired at The Time Machine, others at comic book conventions. At the convention in Gainesville the year before, he’d had the good luck of scoring the two issues where the X-Men visited the Savage Lands. Still others he had bought at school.

Now he owned the entire series, save one: issue #137, the issue where the X-Men fight to save Jean’s life. And without it, he didn’t feel quite complete. It was less that there was a break in the collection and more that it left a hole in the complexity of feelings he had taken from the series and projected onto Janis and himself.