The cat slithered out of the little girl’s arms, dropping to the floor and stalking the room suspiciously, inspecting every corner as if he was taking inventory. Apparently satisfied, he jumped up onto Amy’s bed, curled himself up on the pillow, and promptly went to sleep. “Isn’t this neat?” Amy asked. “These rooms are so much bigger than the ones upstairs. I just love it.” When Josh said nothing in reply, her happy grin wavered, then faded away. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m in Adam’s room,” Josh explained. “It’s kind of creepy.”
Amy stared at him. “They put you in
there?”
she breathed. “I’d hate that room. I’d never be able to go to sleep.”
Josh felt himself flush as Amy spoke the thought he’d had only a few minutes earlier. “It’s not
that
bad,” he told her, but Amy, her smile returning, saw right through him.
“It is, too,” she teased. “And I bet he comes back tonight. I bet there’s something in his room he forgot, and he’ll come for it, and when he finds you—”
“Amy!” Josh broke in. “Stop that!”
“Josh is a scaredy-cat, Josh is a scaredy-cat!” Amy singsonged.
“I am not! All I said was it was weird. I didn’t say I was scared!”
He turned and stomped out of the room, and in the sudden silence, Amy realized what she must have sounded like.
Just like all the kids who had teased her all her life.
“Josh?” she called out, running after him, leaving her door standing wide open. “Josh, wait up. I’m sorry! I didn’t mean it!”
Josh, at the head of the stairs, paused, her taunting words still burning in his head. “If you didn’t mean it, how come you said it?” he demanded.
“I was just kidding,” Amy pleaded. “Don’t be mad at me. Please?”
For a second Josh was tempted to ignore her, to turn his back on her and just walk away. But then he, too, remembered how it had been at school back home, and he relented.
“It’s okay,” he mumbled. “Just don’t tell any of the other kids, okay? If they know I’m scared, they’ll prob’ly pull some dumb trick on me in the middle of the night.”
“I won’t,” Amy promised. “Just don’t be mad at me, all right?”
Josh, feeling a warm glow bloom inside him at the appealing look on her face, broke into a grin. “Come on. Let’s go over to Dr. Engersol’s office and see when we’re getting our new computers.” Hand in hand, they ran down the stairs and out the front door.
Watching them from her office, Hildie Kramer smiled in satisfaction. She and George Engersol had definitely made the right choices. Soon, perhaps even this very day, their conditioning would begin. And when their time came, they would be ready.
Steve Conners locked his classroom door after the final class of the day and started toward the parking lot behind the classroom wing of the Academy. There were still two full hours of the warm afternoon left, and it was his intention to head back to his small rented house a few blocks from the beach, strap his surfboard onto the roof of his three-year-old Honda, and drive down toward Santa Cruz. With any luck at all, the afternoon surf would be up, and he could catch a few waves before the sun dropped into the ocean. But as he inserted the key in the lock of the driver’s door, a flicker of movement caught his eye. He spotted Josh MacCallum coming out the door of a maintenance shed that clung like a limpet to the back of the mansion. Clutched in the boy’s hand was a large screwdriver, but even at the distance from which Steve was observing him, it was clear the boy wasn’t certain he’d chosen the right tool for whatever he was planning to do.
Conners was about to turn away, leaving Josh to whatever he was up to, when he remembered that Josh MacCallum, along with Amy Carlson, hadn’t appeared in his
English class that morning. During his free hour in mid-morning, he’d found a note in his mailbox from Hildie Kramer explaining that both Josh and Amy were having their schedules rearranged but would be back in his class tomorrow.
There had been no explanation for the change in schedule, however.
Abandoning the surf for another day, he relocked the car, calling out just as the boy was mounting the steps to the enormous house’s back door. “Josh? Hey, Josh!”
Josh glanced back over his shoulder, recognized the English teacher and waved. He was about to go on into the house when Conners called out again.
“Josh! Wait up!”
Josh paused uncertainly. Was Mr. Conners mad at him because he’d missed English class that morning? Hildie Kramer had said she’d told the teacher he and Amy would be absent. But what if she hadn’t?
“What are you doing?” Conners asked as he came to the foot of the stairs.
Josh’s uncertainty jelled into worry. Maybe he wasn’t supposed to go into the toolshed at all. “I—I just needed a screwdriver,” he stammered. “The shed wasn’t locked or anything.”
The teacher, hearing the nervousness in the boy’s voice, smiled reassuringly. “I don’t know what you’re unscrewing, but that looks pretty big.”
Josh shrugged. “It’s the only one I saw. I’m going to move some shelves in my new room.”
“You mean those shelves that hang on brackets?”
Josh nodded.
“Well, I think we better see if we can’t find something better than that. Most of those things hang up with Phillips screws. That won’t work at all. Come on.”
Feeling a tide of relief that he didn’t seem to be in trouble after all, Josh followed Conners into the shed, where the teacher was already rummaging among the clutter that covered a long workbench that ran the length of one wall. “Kind of a mess, isn’t it?” he asked.
Josh shrugged but said nothing, and Conners began
pulling open a series of drawers that stood under the far end of the bench. In the third one down he found what he was looking for. Pulling three different sizes of Phillips screwdrivers out of the drawer, he kept hunting until he found a small hand drill and a set of bits.
“You have a ruler?” he asked Josh.
Josh shook his head.
In the top drawer Conners found a tape measure. “Okay,” he said, handing the screwdrivers to Josh and picking up the drill, bits, and tape measure himself. “Now let’s go see what a couple of master builders can accomplish.”
When Josh turned down the broad second floor corridor a minute later, Conners paused. “I thought you lived on the third floor.”
“Hildie moved me,” Josh replied. “I needed a bigger room.”
Conners’s brows knit as he followed the boy along the hall. “How come?”
“My new computer,” Josh told him. “And I guess there’ll be a lot of new books for Dr. Engersol’s class.”
Conners’s frown deepened. When they came to Josh’s room, he stopped short. “Wasn’t this Adam Aldrich’s room?” he asked. Josh nodded, and once more his face reflected the uncertainty Conners had seen on the back porch a few minutes earlier. “You feel okay about that? I mean, I’m not sure I’d like sleeping in here, if you know what I mean.”
Josh gazed up at the teacher, trying to figure out if maybe Mr. Conners was teasing him the same way Amy had earlier. “Th-There aren’t any such things as ghosts,” he said, wishing he could put more conviction into his voice.
Conners shrugged. “You’re right. But just because we know they don’t exist doesn’t make them any less scary, does it? And it just seems strange to put someone in this room so fast. I guess I thought they’d probably leave it empty, at least the rest of this year.”
“Maybe Hildie thought we’d just keep on thinking about Adam all the time,” Josh suggested. “And anyway, it’s not
like it’s the same as it was when he lived here. We moved the furniture around, and all his stuff is gone.”
There was a note in Josh’s voice that told Conners the boy was trying to convince himself almost as much as he was trying to convince his teacher. He decided to drop the subject, at least for the moment, having already voiced doubts he knew he probably shouldn’t have. But it still seemed oddly macabre to him that Hildie Kramer and George Engersol would not only put Josh immediately into the vacant spot left by Adam in the artificial intelligence seminar, but move him into the dead boy’s room as well.
Almost as if they were trying to replace Adam with Josh …
He said nothing more of his thoughts, but set to work, helping Josh unload all the books and miscellany from the shelves above the bed. When the boards had surrendered their load, Conners handed them to Josh, who stacked them neatly against the wall next to the door. “Two of these fit,” Conners said as he tested the screwdrivers he’d scavenged from the drawer in the maintenance shed. “Give me a hand.”
Immediately Josh scrambled up onto the bed, took one of the tools from Conners and set to work. Within five minutes they had the brackets off their braces, and the three metal braces off the wall.
“Now comes the tricky part,” Conners told Josh. “We have to find the studs behind the plaster, or the screws won’t hold when we put the braces up on the wall.” He began tapping on the plaster with the handle of one of the screwdrivers, while Josh watched him curiously.
“What are you doing?” the boy finally asked.
“Listening. Didn’t you ever locate studs before?”
Josh shook his head. “My mom doesn’t do that kind of thing, and my dad …” His voice trailed off and he fell silent. Finally, he took a deep breath. “My dad took off when I was a baby. I hardly even remember him anymore.”
Steve carefully kept his eyes averted from Josh, sensing by the tremor in his voice that the boy was on the verge of tears. “That must have been pretty tough.”
For a second Josh said nothing, but then nodded. “I kept
hoping he’d come back, but he never did. I don’t even know where he lives.”
“I bet he misses you,” Conners suggested.
“No, he doesn’t,” Josh replied. “If he missed me, he’d have come to visit me. But he doesn’t care about me anymore.”
Conners stopped tapping at the wall and turned to face Josh squarely. “That might not be true,” he said. “He might care about you a whole lot. There might be reasons why you haven’t seen him.”
Josh’s expression turned stormy. “No, there aren’t. If he cared about me, he’d have come and seen me, or at least called sometimes. But I haven’t heard anything at all for almost two years. And I don’t care!” he added in a sudden outburst of anger. Its intensity startled the teacher. Conners reached out and grasped Josh’s shoulder. “Sounds to me like maybe you care a lot.”
“No, I don’t!” Once again Josh sounded as if he was trying to convince himself more than the teacher.
Conners turned back to the wall, giving Josh a little privacy. “Well, you’re doing better than I am,” he said quietly as he tapped once more at the plaster, though he’d already located the stud and knew he could measure out the next two. “My dad took off when I was eight, and I’m still pissed off at him. It was like one day he just stopped caring about me. But I couldn’t stop caring about him.”
Josh said nothing for a few seconds, then: “So what did you do?”
Conners shrugged without turning around; he knew that if he faced Josh right now, the boy would close up immediately. “I hurt,” he said. “I tried not to let my mom know how much I hurt, but some nights I just cried myself to sleep. And I kept hoping he’d come back.”
“D-Did he?” Josh asked, his voice trembling now.
Conners shook his head. “No. He sent me birthday cards for a couple of years, but then I never heard from him again. For a long time I tried to hate him. But then I decided maybe he had his own reasons for taking off.” At last he turned around, and squatted down so his eyes were level
with Josh’s. “And maybe he did,” he said quietly. “But even figuring that out didn’t make me stop hurting.”
Again Josh was silent for a long time. When at last he spoke, his voice was barely audible. “My dad didn’t even say good-bye to me,” he said. “He just … left. How could he do that?”
Steve Conners put his arms around Josh, hugging him. “I don’t know.” His voice was almost as quiet as Josh’s. “I just don’t know how people can treat other people that way. But it seems that they do, and when it happens to us, all we can do is go on living, and not give up. And after a while the hurt gets a little easier. You don’t forget, but you get so you can live with it.”
Josh’s arms tightened around the teacher’s neck, and as the boy choked back a sob, Steve felt his own eyes moisten. He said nothing for a few moments, until he felt Josh steady again. Then, giving him a quick squeeze, he released the boy and stood up. “Tell you what,” he suggested. “What do you say we finish these shelves, then go out and get a hamburger and maybe go to a movie. Just you and me. Okay?”
Josh stared up at him, his eyes eager. “Really?” he breathed. “Just us?”
“Sure,” Conners told him. “Why not?”
“I—I’ve got a lot of homework,” Josh said, worried.
“Nobody’s going to kill you if you don’t have it all done tomorrow,” Conners told him. “Besides, the reading I assigned would take two hours, and since you missed class this morning, you didn’t get the assignment, right?”
Josh nodded.
“And you’d eat dinner anyway. So let’s just use up the time you’d have spent doing my homework on going to a movie. I guarantee it’ll be a lot more fun, and I can fill you in on the reading while we eat.” He winked conspiratorially. “Just between you and me, it’s poetry, and it’s not very interesting.”
Josh grinned. “You going to tell the rest of the class that tomorrow morning?”
“Of course not,” Steve Conners replied. “I’m going to
talk about all the symbolism in it, and all the deep meanings everyone thinks the author buried within the lines.”
Josh cocked his head. “It sounds like you don’t think there’s deep meaning,” he ventured.
Conners chuckled. “Very good. You’re right, I don’t. I think authors tend to say exactly what they mean, and a lot of people who can’t write like to pretend there’s a lot more to it than there really is. Which is the lesson for today. Got it?”
“Got it,” Josh agreed.
“Then let’s figure out how this drill works, and finish this up. And if the shelves aren’t straight, don’t blame me. I teach English, not math.”
Half an hour later, when they were done, the shelves were on the wall, and they were perfectly straight.