The drumroll went on and on, as if for a hanging rather than a circus stunt. The chain of the bicycle rattled relentlessly in the silence inside the light. Beyond the light, in the darkness, the heartless crowd laughed and clapped and cheered. And through the sound of their applause, low, but building, came the growl of the tiger, pacing behind the bars, waiting its turn.
The drumroll never stopped. The clown rode in tighter and tighter circles, faster and faster. The wheels of the bike began to scream. The crowd shouted for more. “Stop it,” Nita yelled. “Stop it!
Can’t you see it’s killing him?”
“As often as possible,” growled the tiger. “And never often enough.”
The crowd roared louder. “Stop it!” Nita shouted back, but now they were drowning her out, too.
“Stop it!”
“STOP!”
She was sitting up in the dark, alone. It took her a ragged three or four breaths to realize she was in her own room, in bed, and that her own shout had awakened her.
Nita sat still for a few moments, praying that she wouldn’t hear anyone coming to find out if she was okay. She wasn’t, but she still hoped no one would respond. There wasn’t anyone in the house who’d been sleeping well for a while now.
She stayed still for a long time. Mercifully, no one showed up, and Nita began to relax, realizing that she might have expected this outcome if she’d really thought about it. Dairine, when she slept these days, slept hard, in utter exhaustion. Their dad lately had been doing much the same, a change from the previous month, when he had hardly slept at all. It didn’t take a wizard to figure out that he’d been afraid to fall asleep, because of who he would, again and again, not find beside him when he woke up. Finally his body had overruled that kind of behavior and now was trying to sleep too much, to not wake up at all, if possible. The reasons were the same, and just thinking of them made Nita want to cry all over again.
She lay back against the pillows and let her breath out at the thought of the dream. It’s just me, she thought. She hated to describe it any further, for the next line of explanation would have been, Since Mom
— And she refused to blame her mother for it; her mom now had nothing further to do with pain. It was Nita’s own pain that made her nights so awful. The shrink at school, the counselor at the hospital, both told her the same thing: “Grief takes time. The pain discharges in a lot of different ways, in old repeated patterns, weird symbolic images, mental unrest. Try to stop it, and it just takes longer. Let it take its own time; let it go at its own speed.”
Like I have a choice
, Nita thought bitterly. She could have used wizardry to combat the sleep disturbances, but the manual had told her plainly that this would be counterproductive. Easing others’ pain is one thing; willfully trying to avoid experiencing one’s own is another, and has its own price, too high for the intelligent wizard to pay. It was smarter to let the hurt discharge naturally, without interfering.
But these commonsense counsels were still no comfort in the middle of the night, when she was alone in the dark. All Nita could do was wipe her face repeatedly, dry her eyes on the pillow, and hope to fall asleep eventually. Lacking that, she’d lie there and wait for dawn.
Nita lay there, almost seeing the eyes hidden in the exaggerated colors and shadows of the painted face, and squeezed her own eyes shut. It’s just my pain in disguise
, she thought. Pain expressed as a symbol, one step away from the reality.
I wish this were over with. I wish life were normal again
… But she knew that the old kind of normal was never going to come back. Somehow she was just going to have to make a new one.
Nita turned over to try to go back to sleep, but it took a long while: From the shadows of dream, those eyes kept watching her…
The next day was Tuesday. Kit went through his early classes more or less mechanically. The problem of Tom’s “lost wizard” was on his mind. Tracking him down and identifying him wouldn’t be a problem — the manual would be able to localize him and point him out when Kit was close enough. But what then? he thought as the bell rang for fourth period. He picked up his backpack and walked out of his math class on his way to history. Do I just walk up to him, say, “Hi, there. I’m on errantry and I greet you. What’s the problem?” Is it better to just take a good look at him from a distance, maybe?
“Hey, KF, don’t say hi or anything!”
Kit glanced around and found Raoul Eschemeling walking along next to him. Or rather, he glanced over and then up, because Raoul went up a good ways. He was a skinny, pale blond guy, tall enough to be a basketball player — the kind of person for whom the word gangly originally could have been coined. Friendly and gregarious, Raoul was constantly inventing bizarre nicknames for the other kids in the advanced history class, a motley crew of crazies of various ages, all fast-tracked together into a single advanced unit. “KF” was short for “kit fox,” and this nickname had stuck longer than any of the others Raoul had hung on Kit at one point or another.
“Hey, Pirate,” Kit said. “Sorry, I was daydreaming.”
“Saw that. You almost walked into a locker there. You ready for Machiavelli’s quiz?”
“Oh, god, no,” Kit said as they turned the corner and headed down the corridor toward their classroom. “Machiavelli” was Mr. Mack, their history teacher, and, in his case at least, the nickname was justifiable: He had a twisty, calculating mind that made learning history from him a pleasure. “I forgot. Well, I did the reading. Maybe I’ll survive.”
Raoul looked at him closely. “You got stuff on your mind?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“She doing okay? I haven’t seen her around a lot lately.”
“Huh? Oh, Nita.” They went into the classroom together and took seats near the back wall. There was no assigned seating in Mack’s class, which meant there was always a rush for the rearmost seats, everybody’s desperate attempt to be somewhere that would make Machiavelli less likely to call on them… not that sitting in the back ever seemed to work. “She’s okay, pretty much.” Kit paused, watching the room fill up hurriedly — no surprise since Mack made the lives of latecomers a question-filled hell. “I mean, as okay as she can be under the circumstances.”
Raoul looked at Kit with interest. “So if you weren’t going all vague about her just now, then what’s on your mind?”
“Oh, just home stuff…”
The bell rang. Saved! Kit thought. With the bell came Machiavelli, moving fast, as always, five feet tall and balding, in a blue suit and wearing a red tie ornamented with the images of many tiny yellow rubber duckies. The suit never changed, but the tie changed every day, and in the few seconds of fascination it produced, Mr. Mack would always pick the unfortunate student who looked most off guard and start peppering him or her with questions. “Rodriguez,” he said, and Kit’s heart sank. “You ready for our little quiz today?”
Wizards do not lie; too much depends on the words they use seriously for them to play fast and loose with the less serious ones. “I don’t know, Mr. M., but I think I’m about to find out.”
Machiavelli grinned at him. Kit restrained the urge to groan out loud, and once again wished it wasn’t unethical for a wizard to use his powers to read the closed textbook in his backpack. All he could do now was pray for the bloodshed to be over with quickly.