Thirteenth Child Page 14

  “Well, well, lookee here,” said Tad Holiger. He was one of the new boys, the oldest and biggest of the group. By his age, he ought to have been starting in the upper school, but he’d started schooling late and never paid much heed to it except in Miss Ochiba’s class. “It’s the snobs from over on College Way. What do you suppose they’re doing here? Come to tell the Settlement Office how to run?”

  “Heading home,” William muttered.

  “What’d you say?” Tad shoved William’s shoulder, and the other boys laughed. I got a sick feeling in my stomach.

  “I said we’re heading home,” William repeated loudly. “So if you’ll just move out of the way, you can be rid of us.”

  “Oh, that’s cold,” Tad said, with an exaggerated look of hurt. He looked around the circle. “Isn’t that cold?”

  “Cold as the snow,” one of the other boys said.

  “Let’s see,” said a third, and scooped up a handful of snow. The other two boys followed his example, while Tad and the girls watched William and me.

  “Just leave us alone,” I said, and the sick feeling in my stomach got sicker. I’d said the same thing to Uncle Earn. I took a deep breath, trying to start the concentration exercise, but I was too scared—scared as much over what I might do as over what Tad and his friends were planning.

  “Oh, the little mouse has a squeak after all,” Tad said. “Let’s find out which of these two is colder.” He nodded and all three of the boys let fly.

  The snowballs didn’t get within two feet of William. All three of them whizzed sideways in mid-course and plowed into the snowbank. William gave Tad a nasty grin. “There are advantages to having a father who teaches magic at the college,” he said. “He likes it when I take an interest in more advanced magic than what they teach at the day school. Or didn’t you figure that out when your lunch pail trick didn’t work?”

  “You can’t block it if you’re not looking at it,” said a girl on William’s left. He turned to give her a disdainful look, and the boy behind him pitched another snowball hard at the back of his head.

  I yelled, too late, but the snowball veered sideways a foot before it got to William. The girl who’d set him up had to dodge in a hurry, and the snowball hit the side of the store with a solid thunk. William frowned. “There was a rock in that snowball,” he said.

  “Maybe there was, and maybe there wasn’t,” Tad said. “But we still haven’t found out which of you is colder, and everybody knows your girlfriend is no good at magic. We’ll just start with her.”

  “His fancy spell may stop snowballs, but I bet we can still stuff it down the back of his coat,” one of the girls said. She kicked a chunk of ice loose from the bank alongside the path and picked it up.

  “That’s a really bad idea,” Lan’s voice said, and a second later he walked around the corner of the store. He was seriously angry, I could tell, though he might not have looked it to anyone who didn’t know him well.

  Tad looked him over and sniffed. “Says who?”

  “Me,” Lan replied evenly. “Lan Rothmer.”

  “The double-seventh son!” the second girl gasped.

  “That’s right,” Lan said. “And Eff is my twin sister, in case you didn’t know. That’s why picking on her is such a bad idea.”

  A couple of the boys looked uneasy, but Tad just sneered. He made a show of scooping up another handful of snow, and this time he didn’t hide the rock he stuffed in the middle. “So you’re the hot-shot magician everybody talks about. How hot are you?”

  “Oh, about this much,” Lan said, and gestured.

  A tongue of flame three feet high shot up from the middle of Tad’s snowball. Tad yelled and dropped it.

  “Now,” Lan said. “All of you. Leave my sister alone.” He got a faraway look for a second, and Tad and all five of his friends, boys and girls both, started yelling and hopping up and down. One of the girls plopped down right in the snowbank and yanked off her boots, then buried both feet in the snow.

  “Don’t just stand there, you dummies,” Lan said to William and me. “Let’s get out of here.”

  So the three of us ran. When we finally stopped for breath, I said, “How did you come to be so handy?”

  “I had a feeling something was wrong,” Lan said. He looked at me, and I could see he was still pretty mad. “How long has that been going on?”

  “This was the first time,” I said quickly. “Lan, what did you do to them?”

  Lan grinned and held up a half-burned matchstick. “Hotfoot spell. Don’t look like that—it won’t really burn them. It just feels like it. For about five minutes, I think, until it wears off.” He sounded very pleased with himself.

  “Five minutes, you think?” William asked in a wary tone.

  Lan shrugged. “You’re supposed to use it on one person at a time. I had to do six at once, so I put a little extra power in it. I’m not sure what that’ll do to how long it lasts.”

  “You’re not sure?” I said. I’d burned my hand on the smoothing iron once when Mama was teaching me to iron shirts, and I remembered how much it hurt. Feeling like that for five minutes would be awful, even if you didn’t get blisters and soreness after. “If you don’t even know how long it’ll last, how can you be sure that the extra power won’t really burn them after all?”

  “You goose,” Lan said. “It’s an illusion spell; it can’t burn anything. More power just makes it last longer.” He looked thoughtful. “I wonder how long I could make an illusion last, if I really tried. Days, I bet.”

  “Lan! You could have hurt someone,” I said. “And what about that fire you shot out of Tad’s snowball?”

  “That?” Lan laughed. “That was just an illusion, to scare him.”

  “You’ll still be in trouble if he reports it,” William said.

  “He deserved it,” Lan said, unconcerned. “Anyway, he won’t say anything. If he told, he’d be the one in trouble, for putting rocks in snowballs. Besides, all I did was scare him off.”

  “You brought up being a double-seven, and then you used magic on them. Even if it was just illusions, that’ll bother a lot of people.”

  “I didn’t bring up being a double-seven,” Lan objected. “That girl did. I can’t help it if people know who I am, can I?”

  “I suppose,” William said doubtfully. He looked like he wanted to say more, but thought better of it. “Where did you learn that spell, anyway?”

  “From Jack. He got it from one of Papa’s students, I think.” Lan gave William a sidelong look. “I’ll teach you, if you want,” he offered. “It’s easy.”

  William hesitated, then nodded. I wanted to object, but I didn’t. After all, Lan hadn’t said anything to Tad about leaving William alone, just about me.

  It wasn’t until later that night, thinking things over in bed before I fell asleep, that a niggling little worry started in the back of my head. Lan had said that the flame that shot out of Tad’s snowball was illusion, but I distinctly remembered hearing the hiss and spit of water hitting a hot surface. I tried telling myself that it was part of the illusion, that Lan had remembered to include sound as well as sight in his spell. I convinced myself well enough to get to sleep, but not enough to make the worry go away for good.

  That was just about the end of the nasty tricks from Tad and his friends. The very end came a couple of days later. I was walking back to my seat in class, and I saw Tad shift his feet under his desk. I knew that he was going to try to trip me as I went past him. Only then he looked down and turned white as a bleached shirtfront, and went completely still. His head twitched as I came up next to him, like he’d started to look at me and stopped himself, but that was all.

  I looked down at his desk as I passed, and saw his slate with all the math problems we’d been doing. Right in the middle was a blank spot, like somebody had swiped a sponge across it, and in the middle of the blank were three words and two numbers: Don’t even try. 77

  After that, Tad didn’t just leave me a
lone; he avoided me every chance he got. That was fine by me. At the end of that week, Lan asked casually whether I’d had any more trouble. I told him no, and I didn’t think I would. I didn’t tell him I’d seen his message to Tad, and I didn’t ask how he’d done it, though I thought on it more than a little.

  Then, just when I figured the worst of the year might be over, Mama slipped on the back steps while she was carrying the wash water and twisted her knee and broke her leg in two places. The doctor strapped her in a heavy cast and she was weeks mending.

  Nan had just found a job in the shipping office at the railroad, so Allie and I had to take over running the house. You’d have thought that with Hugh at university in the East and Rennie off in the settlement, there’d be enough less work to notice, but it didn’t seem like it. It was harder on Allie than it was on me, because I’d been having as much trouble learning normal housekeeping spells as I did with my other magic lessons, so Allie had to do most of the chores that needed magic. Neither of us complained much, though, except to each other. We didn’t want Mama to take the notion she should get up and manage things herself, not until the doctors said she could, anyway.

  In the middle of everything, a letter finally came from Rennie. Papa didn’t pass it around to us all, the way he usually did with family letters, but he said she was sorry she’d caused a fuss. She was happy at the Rationalist settlement, she said. And she’d had a baby boy, named Albert Daniel Wilson after his two grandfathers, who she hoped to bring to Mill City to meet us all when he was older and better able to stand the journey. She didn’t mention a birth date, which annoyed Nan, but Papa added Albert Daniel Wilson and the year to the family Bible and said we’d put the rest in later.

  The news from Rennie cheered Mama up some. By the time school let out, she was up and around again, but she tired easily, so Allie and I kept on with the householding. It didn’t leave me time to worry over Lan, or Tad, or Rennie, or anything else, all that summer.

  CHAPTER 17

  THAT FALL, LAN WENT BACK EAST TO A BOARDING SCHOOL IN Pennsylvania. I’d known, out on the edge of my mind, that he and Papa had been talking about it all spring while Mama was in her cast, but I’d been too busy to pay it much mind. Papa said that it was time Lan had different magic teachers, who could show him a wider range of techniques.

  Lan didn’t seem too pleased with the notion. He said he wanted to stay in Mill City and go to the upper school that Allie and Robbie were in and study magic with Papa and the other college professors, the way he’d been doing. But Papa said the Mill City upper school wouldn’t give him the theoretical grounding he needed, and picking up bits and pieces from the other professors wasn’t anything like the kind of education he’d get from a top-drawer Eastern school.

  I heard them arguing about it more than once before Lan agreed to go. After a while, I noticed that Papa never once said straight out that Lan was a double-seventh son, but he talked a lot about how Lan needed to stretch and challenge himself and about reaching his full potential. He’d never talked like that to any of the other boys.

  He didn’t fool Lan one bit, either. A week after school let out, Lan came looking for me. I was out behind the house with Allie and Nan, beating the winter’s dirt and dust out of the big parlor rug. It should have been done weeks before with the other carpets, but we’d left it for last because it was so large, and then had gotten busy with other things. Whaling away with the carpet beaters was usually fun, but that day was warm, with no wind to carry the dust off, so it was just hot, sweaty, dirty work. It is truly amazing how much dust and dirt you can pound out of a carpet in the spring, even one that’s been sitting in a room that’s hardly ever used.

  We’d almost finished going over the carpet when Lan showed up with two buckets and asked if I could go frogging with him. I wasn’t slow about putting my carpet beater aside, though I wondered what Lan really wanted. He usually went fishing or frogging with one of the boys from down the hill, or by himself, if they couldn’t come.

  Lan handed me a bucket, and we started for the creek. As soon as we were well out of earshot, he said abruptly, “You know Papa’s been at me to go to this boarding school out East, don’t you?”

  I nodded.

  “What do you think of it?”

  “What do I think of it?” I stared at him. “That’s for you and Papa to decide, surely.”

  “Yes, but you’re my twin,” Lan said impatiently. “And…well, what if you need me again?”

  “Need you…Oh, you mean if Tad Holiger starts in on me again?” I considered. “He hasn’t bothered me or William since that time last winter. I don’t think he’ll start up again. And if he does, I’ll just remind him that I’m a double-seven’s twin.”

  “That should work.” Lan looked relieved. Then he frowned. “But what if—”

  “Lan.” I cut him off before I got to feeling cross with him. It was bad enough that he’d be going, even if we had drawn apart some, but it was worse that he was dragging me into helping him dither over a decision that was none of mine. “You’ll be at the upper school next year, even if you stay in Mill City. And I’m not totally helpless, just because I’m no good with magic.”

  Lan snorted. “That’s not the point.” But he didn’t say what the point was. He just stood there, digging the toe of his shoe into the dust and swinging his frogging bucket.

  “What do you want to do?” I asked suddenly.

  He flushed and looked away and didn’t say anything for a long time. Then finally he said, so soft I almost missed hearing it, “It’s not fair.”

  “Fair?” I thought at first that he meant it wasn’t fair that he was made to go off East to school, when he wanted to stay. Then I saw his face clear, and all at once I knew that he wanted to go as badly as he’d ever wanted anything in both our lives. What wasn’t fair was that he got sent East to school, just for being a double-seventh son, when there’d never even been talk of sending anyone else.

  If it hadn’t been for Miss Ochiba’s teaching, I don’t think I’d have seen even that much. I know for sure that I wouldn’t have seen, right then, that being a double-seventh son was near as bad for Lan, some ways, as being a thirteenth child was for me. Only nobody’d ever expected me to like being a thirteenth, or to be happy about it.

  “No, it’s not fair,” I said, thinking hard. “But it’s not like Robbie or Jack ever wanted to go to school out East.”

  Lan had to grin at that. Robbie had discovered girls, and there were lots more girls at the Mill City upper school than there were boys, because some of the settlement families let their girls stay in town for schooling when they went off to their allotments, but they took the boys along to help out. The last month of school, Robbie had walked a different girl home every afternoon, sometimes more than one. As for Jack, he hated school, and was happy to be finished with it for a while. When Papa told him he should start studying to get into a college, the way Hugh and Charlie and the older boys had, Jack said he’d only just gotten out of upper school and he wanted a break.

  I took a deep breath. “And it’s not fair that you were born last and a double-seven, and the rest of us are just regular people.” I didn’t have to add that it wasn’t fair that I was thirteenth-born. I knew that right then Lan was as mindful of it as I was. “It’s not fair, but it’s how things are.”

  “I can’t change when I was born,” Lan said, and stopped.

  “But you could change this?” I said for him. “Don’t be a…a goose! What good would it do any of us for you to give up the chance for the kind of schooling you want? Besides, if you stay, in less than a month you’ll be moping around making everyone else miserable. You know you will! How is that fair?”

  Lan had to admit I was right, though he was plainly still troubled. He cheered up when we got to the creek, though most of the frogs seemed to have gone into hiding. We barely got half a bucketful between us. That night he told Papa that he’d try the boarding school. So Papa made the arrangements, and in t
he fall Lan left on the eastbound train.

  I missed him more than I’d ever suspected I would. I’d thought that because we’d been in different grades for so long, and because he was off studying with Papa so much when we weren’t in school, I’d hardly notice he was gone. Instead, I noticed it all the time, even when I was in school or doing chores like the wash, that the boys didn’t ever do. Lan had always been somewhere nearby—nearer than Pennsylvania, anyway—and I’d known it. I felt like I was missing part of myself.

  School wasn’t much changed from the year before. I still had difficulty with my spells—the fire-lighting spell went off like a Fourth of July sparkler without actually starting a fire, the spell for lightening loads sort of stuttered, so that the weight went from light to heavy and back, over and over, and the far-seeing spell didn’t work at all. Even William got impatient with me over that sometimes. He was studying hard for the final examination, along with about a third of the eighth-grade class, the ones who meant to go on to the upper school. The rest were looking forward to finishing with school and going off to work or to their families’ settlements.

  I felt like I was drifting. I didn’t know whether to go on to upper school or not. If I didn’t, I could stay home and do more of the housework—the parts that didn’t take magic, anyway. Mama was still feeling poorly and not up to heavy cleaning, and with Lan’s school expenses, we’d had to cut back on having Mrs. Callahan in to help. Also, there was a part of me that cringed away from learning any more magic, which I’d have to do if I went on to upper school.

  But I knew that Papa and Mama would be upset if I told them I didn’t want any more education. I was pretty sure William would be upset, too, and I knew for a fact that Lan would give me a tongue-lashing the next time I saw him. I didn’t want to face any of them. So I put off making up my mind, and put it off, and put it off.