The Shadow Thieves Page 6

  “I should never have let you play soccer with the upper-school boys.”

  Like that.

  “Aunt Tara!” Zee’s eyes widened. “It has nothing to do with that, this happens all the time!”

  Charlotte winced.

  “Oh, it does?” Mrs. Mielswetzski exclaimed.

  Charlotte tried to signal to Zee to cut his losses. This was not the time to reason with Tara Christine Miller Mielswetzski, and if Zee kept talking, she might never let him leave the house again. But he was opening his mouth, even though his face was pale and his eyes were shadowy and his head looked so heavy against the pillow.

  Charlotte coughed. “Hey, Mom?” she said. Her mother’s head whirled to her. “Um, weren’t you supposed to call the nurse when we got home?”

  “Oh my goodness!” said Mrs. Mielswetzski. “Oh my goodness!” She sprang up and out the door.

  Neither Charlotte nor Zee moved for a moment. They listened to Mrs. Mielswetzski’s footsteps as they went through the hallway, down the stairs, and into the kitchen. A door closed. They both exhaled. Zee’s head tilted slightly, and he whispered, “Thanks!”

  “Yeah,” Charlotte shrugged. “Let’s watch a movie.”

  Zee’s days of bed rest meant he was not in school on Monday, Tuesday, or—just to be safe—Wednesday. As a result he was not there to notice that the school seemed to be slowly emptying out. On Monday, Ashley, Angie, Lewis, and Elizabeth were absent. On Tuesday, Chris, Brad, Gretchen, Audrey, and Larry were gone too, along with half of Charlotte’s homeroom. By Wednesday nearly one third of the students in the school were out. Every class had empty seats, and the traffic in the hallways between classes was noticeably lighter. This happens in schools, of course. One day somebody sneezes, and the next day half the school is out sick. It happens every year, twice a year; nothing to worry about, really, though it is perhaps—this time—a little early? Still, it happens. The students will stay home, one by one, and then they will come back, one by one, and there will be all sorts of missed tests to proctor and late assignments to grade and make-up work to, well, make up—or so discussed the teachers in the faculty room, as they do every time.

  “It’s like a germ incubator in here,” said Ms. Dreeper, a science teacher.

  “The student body is a fraction of its former self,” said Mr. Crapf, math.

  “It’s as if the black plague has swept through our school,” said Ms. Bristol-Lee, history.

  “It’s the end of the world,” said Mrs. Benihana, drama.

  “I suppose we’ll all get sick too,” someone sighed.

  “Yeah, I’m beginning to feel it already,” another lied.

  “You know how it is in schools. On Monday one student sneezes, and on Tuesday half the school is out.”

  “What is this? Cold? Sore throat? Stomach?”

  “I don’t know….”

  Everyone in the faculty room looked at one another. They shrugged. They shook their heads. No one spoke. Nobody knew. At least, no one who was saying. Physical examinations were normal, blood tests were normal, everything was normal. Nothing was wrong with the kids, except that they were clearly sick.

  By Wednesday afternoon parents had called parents, doctors had called doctors, and all of them had called Mr. Principle, the principal. Whatever it was, it was becoming an epidemic, and parents of students who were not afflicted had no desire to send their children to ground zero. Twenty students gone on Monday became fifty on Tuesday became eighty-five on Wednesday, and that was just too many for Mr. Principle’s own comfort. Stranger still, a few more phone calls showed whatever was afflicting the students seemed largely restricted to the middle school—and mostly his middle school. There were ten freshmen and five sophomores out in the upper school, and five fifth graders in the lower, but in the other grades attendance was completely normal.

  With the help of the board and the headmaster and the lawyers, Mr. Principle came to the conclusion that there would be no school at Hartnett Prep Middle on Thursday or Friday. It was a long weekend anyway, and that would give everyone a chance to recover, he could get the building examined and cleaned just to make everyone happy, and really, no one needed to be calling in the Centers for Disease Control, that would be really extreme at this point. There was no need to panic. You know how it is at schools. On Monday one student sneezes, and on Tuesday half the students are out sick.

  The principal called the parent council leader. The parent council leader called the homeroom parents. The homeroom parents called all the families. And, from their perches in the sitting room, Mr. and Mrs. Mielswetzski called in Charlotte.

  Charlotte found her parents poised in their usual chairs, with books in their laps that they were decidedly not reading. Both Mielswetzskis had a look of some combination of concern and suspicion that made Charlotte want to back away slowly.

  “Um, you wanted me?” Charlotte asked, biting her lip. She didn’t know what she had done wrong, but there was obviously something.

  “Charlotte,” Mrs. Mielswetzski said, “what’s this about a flu?”

  “Oh!” Charlotte relaxed a little. “Yeah. A lot of kids are sick.”

  “Quite a lot, I gather,” Mr. Mielswetzski said.

  “I guess,” Charlotte shrugged.

  “You didn’t say anything!” said Mrs. Mielswetzski.

  “I guess not,” Charlotte said. She hadn’t. She still hadn’t mentioned Maddy to them. There was nothing to say.

  “Are you feeling all right?” asked Mr. Mielswetzski.

  “Totally,” said Charlotte.

  “Are you sure? We could call the doctor.”

  “Nah, I’m totally fine!” said Charlotte.

  “Well…they’ve called school-wide sick days for tomorrow and Friday. So many kids are sick they want to investigate,” said Mrs. Mielswetzski.

  “Or at least cover their butts,” said Mr. Mielswetzski.

  “Really, Michael,” said Mrs. Mielswetzski.

  “Well, it’s true, dear,” said Mr. Mielswetzski.

  “Wait,” said Charlotte. “What? A sick day?”

  “Yes,” her mom nodded. “There’s no school Thursday or Friday.”

  “Really?” said Charlotte.

  “Really,” said her father.

  “Sweet!”

  And before her parents could say anything else, Charlotte ran up to the den to tell Zee. He was supposed to go back to school on Thursday—really he could have gone back on Wednesday, but Charlotte’s mother liked to be extra careful, and so she had exaggerated the doctor’s orders a wee bit.

  “Hey, Zee! Guess what?” Charlotte burst in to find Zee sitting up, flipping through their history book with a dazed expression that she thought probably had nothing to do with the concussion. Bartholomew slept peacefully on his lap.

  “What?”

  “You don’t have to go to school tomorrow,” said Charlotte. “Not all week!”

  Zee closed the book. “I’m much better, really. Please, tell your mum—”

  “No, no,” said Charlotte. “I mean there’s no school the rest of the week.”

  Zee’s eyebrows went up. “Why?”

  “Oh, bunch of kids are sick. They want to cover their butts.”

  “Wha—?” Zee said.

  “Lots of kids are sick. So I guess—”

  “Wait,” Zee leaned forward. “How many?”

  “I dunno,” Charlotte shrugged. “Maddy’s got it. She’s been gone for a week.”

  Zee leaned toward her and grabbed her arm. Bartholomew fell off his lap. “What is it? What does she have?”

  Charlotte stared at him. “I don’t know! Nobody knows. She can’t get out of bed, it’s really awful, she’s just lying there—”

  Zee fell back into the couch. “Oh no.” His hands flew to his face. Charlotte and Bartholomew stared.

  “What?”

  “It’s my fault,” he said slowly. “It’s all my fault.”

  Charlotte could not stand it anymore. “What’s your fault? Zee, what’s going on?”

  Zee had lost all color in his face. He seemed to be shaking. “They followed me.”

  PART TWO

  Now, the Beginning

  CHAPTER 7

  The Last Summer of

  Grandmother Winter

  SIX MONTHS AGO ZACHARY MILLER HAD BEEN AN ordinary boy living an ordinary life in an ordinary part of the ordinary city of London (for, despite Charlotte’s feelings on the matter, London is very ordinary if you grew up there). Zee liked music, he liked football (that’s British for soccer), and most of all he liked Samantha Golton, the dark-haired forward on the girls’ school team. He had spent quite a long time trying to name the exact shade of brown of her hair—it was richer than “nut,” yet not as red as “mahogany” or as black as “raven.” He had finally settled on “chocolate,” which had the added benefit of connoting something extremely delicious.

  Samantha was the fastest girl in her year at Feldwop and Egfred’s School for Girls, and Zee was the fastest boy in his at Feldwop and Egfred’s School for Boys. Zee thought it was time for some coeducation.

  At night he dreamed of a summer running back and forth across football pitches with Samantha, practicing his passes with her, but there were a couple of problems with this scenario.

  Problem Number One: He was going to spend the summer in Exeter living with his grandmother and training with the summer club there. Zee was actually really looking forward to going; he always came back from his summer holidays fit, well fed, sun drenched, and happy. But he did not know how he could survive ten weeks without a glimpse of those dark tresses rippling behind her as she ran, like the waves of a cocoa-dark sea.

  Problem Number Two: He had never actually spoken to Samantha.

  Not that there hadn’t been plenty of chances. F&E offered plenty of opportunities for (well-supervised) interaction between the girls’ and boys’ schools. In addition to various formal social functions there was the drama club, the yearly F&E Olympics, and the chess club—which, due to its coeducational nature, was far more popular than it reasonably ought to have been.

  But Zee did not do drama, he was terrible at chess, and he was unwilling to fake it for the sake of either club. He grew so quickly that tuxedos never seemed to fit him right, and anyway, most of the social events seemed designed for people with Roman numerals after their name. He had watched the girls’ team play a few times, and he’d become friendly with some of the members of the team. He even went running occasionally with their captain, Nicki, who lived down the street from him.

  But he had never been able to talk to chocolate-haired, almond-eyed Samantha; in fact, he had never been able to talk near or around chocolate-haired, almond-eyed Samantha. In fact, if you took any preposition and put chocolate-haired, almond-eyed Samantha as its object, what you’d get was one mute Zee. He thought it would be better at least to babble incoherently, the way Chad Blightmere did near or around Nina Desai—at least then Samantha would know he was there. But alas. Her very presence in a room turned him perfectly still and mute, a lovesick banister.

  So even if he were going to stay in London, he could not frolic, because a banister does not frolic. In Exeter he could frolic all he wanted, but that frolicking would be entirely Samantha-free.

  Or so he thought.

  One day, just as spring was easing into summer and he had already mentally begun to pack for his trip, Zee went to see a senior girls’ match with Nicki. On their way home they talked buoyantly of the match, of their teams, of school, and of nothing in particular.

  “You going to play this summer?” Nicki asked.

  “I’m going to Exeter,” Zee said. “I’ll play with the club there.”

  “Pity,” Nicki said.

  “Nah. I like it. My gran’s there, and I stay with her.”

  “Every summer?”

  “Yeah. My dad travels for work in summer. Mum’s a teacher, so she goes with him. Gran’s fun.”

  “Is the club any good?”

  “Ah, they’ve got some brilliant players. The club attracts people from all over, and we always win the district.”

  “Oh,” Nicki gave a shrug, as if to say that winning a district isn’t a big deal when that district isn’t London. “No girls’ team, I suppose.”

  Zee blushed. “No.”

  She nodded. “Well, there’s some sort of camp at the university there this year, and they actually let girls play. One of ours is going to be there in July.”

  Zachary stopped. “One of yours? Who?”

  “Samantha Golton. The forward. Know her? She’s almost as fast as you.”

  Zee’s eyes popped open. “Samantha?”

  “I see you do know her,” Nicki grinned. “Shall I put in a good word for you?”

  “Yes. No…I don’t know!” Zee grabbed her shoulder. “What should I do?”

  “Sam’s cool. Why don’t I, you know, lay the groundwork?”

  “No! No! Don’t!”

  “Okay, okay. Why not?”

  “Because…because…” Zee stopped. Why not, indeed? Because either Samantha wouldn’t be interested and then he’d have to curl up in a corner and die, or else she might be interested and then she’d try to talk to him and he might not be ready and then he’d embarrass himself and would have to curl up in a corner and die. Either way the consequences would be dire. Dire!

  For the last three years, ever since his parents had enrolled him in Feldwop and Egfred, Zachary Miller had worked on his football game. His parents had insisted on sending him to a school that still wanted to train lords and ladies, whereas Zee wanted to go to a school where all the real people were, the ones who lived in this century. But F&E was known as one of the “best” day schools in the country, and he suspected that neither of his parents realized that in some ways that just meant that F&E attracted the “best” people.

  All of the students at F&E were something. Most of those things involved having the most land or the longest name or the highest aristocratic rank or the most drops of blue blood or, at the very least, the most money. Zee didn’t belong to that world. His dad was an American businessman, his mother was a schoolteacher and the daughter of immigrants. Most of the boys there belonged to something very old, very insular, and very, very, very white—something that people with grandmothers from Malawi and grandfathers from South Africa were not a part of. There were not a lot of biracial earls of Northumberland, nor were there many brown faces at F&E, no matter how many times the administrators took pictures of Zachary, Matthew Hollywell, and/or Phil Higsby for their promotional brochures.

  But the opposite of something is nothing, and Zee had no interest in being nothing. He was determined to find his place at F&E. And since he could never be something based on bloodline, he would have to settle for merit. But he could not be the smartest. Zee was smart, certainly—consistently around tenth in his year. But F&E attracted its share of young geniuses, the kind of boys who were in the chess club for the actual chess—like, for instance, Phil Higsby, who was nationally ranked. Zee could not be the best singer because, while he had a nice voice, he was no match for the still-soaring soprano of wee little Boyd Brentwaithe. He could not be the best at cricket because he thought cricket was dull, or at polo because he wasn’t a total twit, or at debate because he preferred it when everyone just got along. But if he worked, if he practiced and trained, he could be the very best football player, and that—at F&E, like at any other British school—was truly something. There he had the lineage; his parents may not have been peers of the realm, but his mother was the University of Exeter cross-country champion, and his dad had played basketball and baseball at the University of Minnesota. Zee had speed, he had talent, he had mental and physical agility, and he had drive—plus he’d been kicking around a football ever since Grandmother Winter gave him his first one when he was three.

  And Zee was the best. There was no denying it. There were rumors they were going to let him play for the senior team next year, a year early. He was the best, his teammates revered him, and he was something.

  But no matter what, he was never as happy as when he was in Exeter, playing football all day and spending his evenings with Grandmother Winter. The boys there came from all over the West Country, and they were just people; they went bowling and wore T-shirts and didn’t care about which fork to use, and they were Irish and Asian and African and sometimes all three.

  And they were good. Much better than the F&E team, even the much-lauded senior team. Zee was just average on the club team, and in Exeter being average was just fine with him.

  All of that was perhaps why Zee was even more nervous to hear that Samantha Golton would be in Exeter for July. Samantha was a part of the world of F&E, where all the boys carried their somethings around with them like medals of honor. Exeter had cows, and he had to carry nothing with him at all. He could just wear blue jeans and play football and be with Grandmother Winter, who made excellent lemonade and lots of cake, who took him to museums and bought him ice cream and laughed at his jokes, and who seemed to think he was really something.

  But nothing that summer was to be as expected.

  One night, a week before he was to leave, his mother sat him down with a sort of ominous-sounding “I want to talk to you about this summer.” Zee’s first thought was that she had found out about Samantha and wanted to give him love advice.

  “Um, okay.”

  “Your father’s travel schedule is light this year,” she continued, “and he’s got some holiday. I thought we might come out to Exeter in July and visit with you and Gran, if you don’t mind.”

  “Really?” Zee said.

  “Yes. It’s been a while since I’ve visited my mother. We’ll just come for two weeks or so.”

  “Okay,” Zee said. That was fine, especially if it would be just for a couple weeks. And it was much better than love advice.

  “And your dad thought we might invite Aunt Tara and Uncle Mike and Charlotte up for August, too. They’ve been talking about coming over.”