Deviant (11 page)

The bus driver opened the doors to let them in.

“Too cold, huh?” the driver said.

“Freezing,” Danny said. Charlie didn't speak. He went and sat at the back. Danny sat right next to him. “How the pager work out for ya?” Danny said.

“You think you're so smart. You're not smart,” Charlie hissed.

“Your dad drive a bus like this on the
Dr. Quinn
tour?”

“Who told you that?”

“Hey, can I get a discount if I bring my whole family?” Danny said.

“Aren't they all too drunk on your reservation, you Indian?!” Charlie said.

Danny laughed. “‘Indian' is not a bad word, you ignorant freako.”

Charlie tried to think of something else. “Who are you trying to impress with your Justin Bieber haircut? It's so gay, it's, like, gayer than the Ice Capades.”

“Saying something's gay is so gay. Where are you from, the 1980s?”

Charlie shook his head but said nothing.

“Whatsamatter? Not so tough without your shadow, Big Todd, huh?” Danny said, and darted his hand toward Charlie. Charlie backed away, frightened.

“That's what I thought,” Danny said with contempt.

They sat in silence while the gym class ended and the ninth grade filed back onto the bus. Charlie squeezed past Danny and went to sit next to Hector.

To get the whole ninth grade onto one bus, some of them had to sit three to a seat. But unfortunately there weren't any pleasant misunderstandings, because girls were on one side, boys on the other.

Danny supposed it was a budgetary thing. Squeeze all the kids into one bus instead of hiring two—a typical stingy move. Three to a seat, but Danny was sitting by himself until Tom plonked himself down next to him. Danny was relieved. He didn't want to become public enemy #1 in his first week. Tom didn't text him on the way back to school, but he seemed to enjoy Danny's company. Sometimes he pointed at things out the window and Danny nodded.

When they got back to CJHCS, Mr. Bradley took Danny and Charlie straight to the principal's office and knocked on the door.

“Come in,” Mr. Lebkuchen said.

When the teacher and the two boys entered, Mr. Lebkuchen was in the middle of hanging a framed certificate on the wall.

EXCELLENCE IN SECONDARY TEACHING
, the certificate said.

Mr. Lebkuchen turned and stared at the little group. A thin smile passed across his face.

“Mr. Bradley, what can I do for you today?”

“These boys, um, were fighting and talking,” Mr. Bradley said, sotto voce.

“Leave us, Mr. Bradley,” Mr. Lebkuchen said.

The gym teacher slunk out. Mr. Lebkuchen sat behind his desk.

“It's nothing to do with Charlie. It was my fault,” Danny began, but Mr. Lebkuchen put his hand up to stop him.

“I don't even want to know the details. The basic fact remains that you two boys had a problem with each other and instead of taking it to me, you triangulated. Danny, what did I tell you about triangulation?”

“No triangulation.”

“No triangulation,
sir
,” Mr. Lebkuchen said.

“Sorry, uh, no triangulation, sir.”

“Charlie, you should know better. You will have detention today. Forty minutes. I will call your mother and explain why.”

“Please don't call my mom,” Charlie begged.

“Silence. Danny, since this is your first week, you won't be getting detention. But I won't be so generous next time. Instead, I want you to write me out ‘I will not triangulate' a hundred times. I want it by Friday assembly. Lines are frowned upon in other educational systems, but here we learn the old way. Memorization, tables, reading, writing. You will learn not to triangulate, and I will be the one who teaches you. Now, both of you go.”

Mr. Lebkuchen had said all this with a calm, soft voice and with what Danny thought was a twinkle in his eye. He hated Mr. Lebkuchen's system and his school, but Danny couldn't quite bring himself to hate the man.

The boys didn't talk on the way back to Miss Benson's
class, but at the door Charlie turned to him and whispered, “You're OK.”

Danny was surprised. He offered Charlie his fist.

They fist-bumped.

“You're OK too,” Danny said.

“They're going to go after you now, watch out,” Charlie whispered, which surprised Danny because “they” implied that Charlie wasn't in charge.

“I'll watch out,” Danny said.

They went back to class.

The rest of the day dragged.

They did arithmetic problems on a sheet, which Miss Benson explained from her set script. Then it was reading time again.

Oliver Twist
had become nuts. The kid had asked for more gruel and all hell had broken loose. Danny was enjoying it, although he hated the vocab quizzes and the fact that everyone had to read a bit out loud. And if Miss Benson did read magazines under her desk, she wasn't doing it today, for every time Danny tilted his head to the left or right she tapped his desk with a ruler.

This was his second day at CJHCS, and he still wasn't even sure how many kids were in his class, or who they were.

Still, it didn't matter. He was sick of them all anyway, and after lunchtime he found a place by himself on the playground and stared at the mountains. Tom was texting everyone about various theories relating to the death of the universe, but Danny didn't join in.

He actually enjoyed the silence for the rest of the day, and after school Tony found him walking home alone up Alameda.

“Are you going back to your house?” she asked.

“It's either that or back to the Bat Cave, and if I went there I'd blow my secret identity … Oops, I've said too much already!” he said.

Tony laughed. “Come with me, then; we're meeting at Tom Sloane's house.”

“Who's ‘we'?”

“Us. The Watchers. Tom, Cooper, Olivia, me, you. Carol can't come today, I honestly don't know if she's still interested.”

Danny was suspicious. “It's not some kind of World of Warcraft thing, is it?”

Tony laughed. “No, no, nothing like that.”

“What do you do?”

“Mostly we talk about school, we talk about the system, building the gym … Most importantly we collate information on the SSU. But today I'm going to bring up the news that I showed you. I think there's more to it than meets the eye.”

Danny didn't fancy spending the afternoon talking about sewage plants with a bunch of geeks, but he didn't want to be completely alone in school and they were
trying
to be his friends. In his precarious state as a new boy and outsider he couldn't afford to alienate everyone, even if their interests didn't exactly intersect with his own.

“OK, I'll come,” he said cheerfully.

“Great. We'll have to get the bus. Tom lives in town. We can get the twenty-two on Federal right through Manitou. A buck fifty. You'll need exact change.”

Danny had forgotten to take his gloves off and now he did so with glee. He rummaged in his pockets and found half a dozen quarters.

They didn't wait long for the bus, and when it came they were the first passengers. They picked up a couple of others in Manitou, but by the time the bus dropped them at the corner of Kiowa and Williams in Colorado Springs they were the only passengers once again.

“This is us,” Tony said.

They got off and walked up a steeply curving road appropriately named Hill Street to Tom's house.

At first the houses were wood, and some were in poor repair and painted odd colors—mustard, cardinal red, sky blue—which in this climate looked gloomy rather than brash, but as the incline increased the houses got bigger and farther apart and the paint jobs became a uniform white. The leaves in the yards disappeared and the wire fences were replaced with high wooden ones.

The hill was steep. A light wind was blowing from the west and snow was falling horizontally from the Front Range.

Tom lived right at the top, opposite something called the Bijou Hill Restaurant. It was a massive house in the
Southern Plantation style. It looked a bit like Monticello or one of those presidential homes, with Greek pillars, a long porch, and a manicured lawn. There were two stories and a huge converted attic with a little turret on one end, which seemed out of place with the rest of the building and reminded Danny of something from
The Munsters
or
The Addams Family
.

“Cool house, eh?” Tony said.

“Yeah. Is Tom well off?”

“Yeah, I think so … His dad's a lawyer.”

“Really? He told me his dad was in Iraq or something.”

“Afghanistan. He's an Army lawyer. JAG reservist. You know he was lieutenant governor, right?”

“Tom's dad was lieutenant governor of Colorado?”

“Yup. Only served half a term, but still … Impressed, aren't you?”

“Yeah, a little,” Danny said. But he didn't feel impressed, only sad. Tony's father worked at NORAD, Tom's father was a famous politician now serving in Afghanistan, and Danny didn't even know who his dad was.

They rang the doorbell and while they waited Tony said, “Scope the three-sixty.”

The view from where they were standing was startling. All of Colorado Springs, the plains to the east, and of course Pikes Peak with layer after layer of mountains behind.

Tom opened the front door. “
Ah, La Grande Armée est complète,
” he said.

“That's kind of a bad analogy, isn't it?” Tony said.

“Yeah, I guess,” Tom admitted. “Considering what happened to the Grand Army.”

Danny had no idea what they were talking about, and this annoyed him. When you invited people to your home, you didn't try to make them feel uncomfortable.

They went inside.

“You want something to drink?” Tony asked. “Tom makes a famous hot chocolate.”

Danny nodded. “Whatever you're having.”

“I'm having the hot chocolate. If you're making it, Tom?”

“
Mais oui,
” Tom said.

“Fine by me, then,” Danny muttered.

“You take him up,” Tom said.

“This way to the attic,” Tony said, leading the way.

Inside, the house was a bit of a mess. Books, records, and CDs were everywhere. Antiques and souvenirs from various camping trips or something: shells, signposts, Indian rugs, ceramic jugs, even some firearms. “What is all this stuff?” Danny asked.

“Tom's mom is an antiques dealer. She has a little eBay business. You'd like her … Don't know where she is today. She runs the Sunday school at the church. Are you going to join our church, by the way?”

“The faith temple thing?”

“Metropolitan Faith Cathedral.”

“Uh, I don't think so.”

“Most of the Cobalt Junior High kids go there.”

“The second good reason not to go.”

A wooden, uncarpeted staircase led to Tom's room, which turned out to be the attic, the one with the turret. It was a big room with two old sofas opposite each other and at right angles to an enormous circular coffee table on which Tom had spread charts, newspapers, pens, pencils, and a laptop.

Tom's clothes were everywhere and the room had a teenage-boy funk.

The posters on the wall were a couple of years out of date and hypergeek:
Iron Man 2, Battlestar Galactica
, Arcade Fire,
Star Trek XI
. Hundreds of DVDs, mostly classics and sci-fi classics:
Vertigo, The Incredible Shrinking Man, Them!, Rear Window, Casablanca, Forbidden Planet, A Matter of Life and Death
. The enormous bookcase on the far wall had maybe a thousand books in it. Danny had never seen so many books outside of a library. Who had the time to read all of those? There were also dozens of computers and computer parts all over the room. Old Commodores, Macs and PCs, and new laptops. The bedsheets were black, and next to the bed there was a picture of Tom with his older brother, John, on some fishing trip. Danny liked the room enormously—it was like a villain's lair in a Bond movie.

There were two other kids in the attic: Cooper and Olivia, both of whom were still in their school uniforms. Olivia hadn't even taken her gloves off. Cooper was a skinny boy with wiry red hair and big jug ears that would forever condemn him to the role of comic foil if he ever
wanted a career in Hollywood. Olivia was a different kettle of fish entirely. She was obviously Spanish, with black hair cut into an old-fashioned bob, brown eyes, prominent cheekbones, and a rounded chin that reminded Danny of the stern end of his skateboard—high praise indeed. She was shy, and when Danny said hello she only nodded. She was very pretty, though—more so than Tony—more of a real girl, not a tomboy.

Everyone finished saying hi and Cooper said, “Have you seen the camera obscura?”

“The what now?” Danny said.

“No, Cooper, Tom doesn't like us messing with it,” Olivia said.

Ignoring her, Cooper pulled shut the heavy curtains, took a lens cap off a box in the ceiling Danny hadn't noticed before, and suddenly the world outside was projected onto the coffee table.

“Wow!” Danny said. But suddenly Cooper heard Tom's footsteps on the stairs and, in a panicky rush, pulled open the curtains and put the lens back on the camera obscura.

Tom appeared with five hot chocolates.

“My speciality. An original Mayan recipe. Actually, the only thing I can make,” Tom said.

Danny took a mug and contrived to sit next to Olivia on the two-seater sofa while Tom sat with Cooper and Tony on the three-seater.

After everyone had taken a sip of incredibly good homemade hot chocolate, Tom said, “Everyone, this is
Danny. Danny's from Las Vegas. For those of you who didn't witness it, Danny has already proved a valiant, worthy addition to the Watchers, taking down Todd Gilchrist and absorbing the wrath of Principal Honey Cake.”