– 15 –

Peter stops by Andrea’s room. He knocks. He waits. After a while she comes down the hall.

“I’m not in there,” she tells him.

Gamely, he tries, “Are you certain? We could check.”

“That is —”

She hesitates. She looks at him. “That is attempting to be clever, to one who has known the greatest of dwarf-smiths.”

“Well, yes,” says Peter.

She opens the door. She goes in. She nods sideways and he follows.

“Why,” she says, flatly, looking around and spotting herself, “so I am.”

Technically he could get in trouble for being in her room but the penalties for being wayward at the Lethal Magnet School for Wayward Youth are markedly lax.

She turns her attention from her own presence to his. “Did you need something, Peter?”

“There’s a dance,” he says, bluntly.

“I’m aware,” she says.

He goes a little still. “Are you?”

“It’s my nature,” she says.

“I don’t understand,” he says.

“As a dance student,” she says. “It is my nature to be aware of the fact that there are dances. I see the flyers on the wall; I think: aha! And I file the information in my mind.”

“I thought it might be that other thing,” he says.

She doesn’t bother lying about it, nor does she confess. She just looks at him with her pupils slit like a cat’s.

“I was just thinking,” he says, bluffly, moving on, and rubbing the back of his head, “that since you’re an alien freak and all, that you might not have anybody to dance with.”

“With,” she says.

“Yes,” he says. “Like, I mean, a boy.”

She stares at him in complete bafflement.

“You know.” He puts one hand in the air, and the other hand lower in the air, and mimes turning. He cannot quite manage a quarter-rotation before embarrassment stops him from proceeding further. “Like that.”

She scratches above one ear. “How extraordinary,” she says. “I had assumed that my teacher was merely joking.”

“You’re making fun of me,” Peter says. “I won’t have it. I’m a human, you know, not like . . .”

He trails off, because he can tell from her reaction that she wasn’t making fun of him.

“You really . . .” He laughs a little. “You really . . . no way.”

She blushes. She looks off. “It’s not funny,” she says.

“Dang right it’s not,” he says. “That’s awful, is what it is.”

“What?”

He sprawls on her bed. She almost objects, because he hasn’t taken his shoes off, but then she ignores it. “You freaks are all so lonely,” he says.

“There’s more of us? Of me, I mean? Of . . . I don’t know what grammatical case to use,” she says.

“I knew the Devil when I was a kid,” says Peter. “Had to punch him in the nose to get him to go away. I always felt bad about that, after.”

“What?”

“I thought, maybe he comes around, temptin’ everybody like that, because he doesn’t have any other way to talk to people. But now I’m sure.”

He sits up.

“There’s a wolf-boy,” Peter says, “too. Guy couldn’t be any stiffer if you shoved a triad of trissors up his butt. Er, if you’ll pardon my saying so.”

“Edmund,” says the nithrid. “He is not like me.”

“Could have fooled me,” says Peter.

“He is useless,” says Andrea, bitterly. “I am trying to teach him transcendence, but how can I? There is nothing to transcend.”

Peter swings around. He sits up. He looks at her.

“Him?” he says. “Oh, you shouldn’t.”

“What?”

“He’s too tight-wound already,” says Peter. “You push him and you’ll split him in half.”

“He’s not splitting,” says the nithrid. “He’s just . . . lumping there.”

“Look,” says Peter. “Kid thinks he’s a milksop who ought to grow harder. But he’s not. He’s a born rotter, that one, trying to hang on to the gentle way. You give him too much rope, he’ll just tie it to a tree and hang himself. Stands to reason.”

Her eyes search his face. “You’re joking,” she says.

“No,” he says.

“I need him,” she says. The chains through her hurt her as she breathes. Her ghost-duck glowers. “He will burst my chains. I will go out, alive and free and blasting about the world. I will shatter its cities. I will fill them up with the anima of God. They will look at me, and him, and we shall storm and marvel; we shall fill them with wonder at our glory; we will light the souls of the survivors and make them great.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he says. “Kill, destroy, get admiring looks, oh how marvelous! Whatever. If you just do — whatever — then you won’t be alone, right?”

“What?”

“You all think that,” he says. “If you just — break your chains. Kill people. Tempt people. Eat people. Wolf stuff. Devil stuff. Whatever. If you just do that, then everybody will love you. That’s how the Devil thought, too, you know. That it wasn’t him, or me, that stood between us. That it was God, or mebbe Hans. That it’s all that easy, you just do what you want and everybody will love you and it won’t actually be bad.”

“Stop it,” she says.

“You know,” says Peter. “You people don’t have a right to be on our world. Doing what you like, spreading fear and devastation — you’re just —”

“Stop it.”

He stops.

He looks down at his hands for a while. She paces back and forth. Then he looks up.

“So,” he says, “I was wondering, if you wanted to dance. With me. At the dance. But obviously I was —”

“Fine!” she says.

“Huh?”

“Fine,” she says. “Get out. I’ll dance with you. Go!”

“You don’t have to,” he says, as he backs out of the room. “I’ve just served you two big steaming platefuls of truth, you can —”

“Get out!” she yells, and throws a shoe at his back and it dissolves into lightning as it touches him and he convulses and the back of his uniform smokes and he falls painfully against the wall as she slams the door behind him.

A few other doors are open now. A few girls are peering out and looking at him.

“And then there’s that hat guy,” Peter says vaguely. “I bet that hat’s one of them, too. I bet that the hat needs people.”

He gives the floor monitor an awkward shrug and he walks away.

<< – 14 –

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