Part 3
SHARON OBERHOFFER SET THREE alarms every morning so she’d be sure to wake up before her fourth. With most teachers at Xavier Desmond High School, students obeyed a fifteen-minute rule—if the teacher was fifteen minutes late to class, class was canceled. If Sharon Oberhoffer was one minute late, they sent a search party.
So when Robin was five minutes late to the sixth-floor common room where the students gathered Wednesday morning before leaving for the Tobin Center, he expected a certain level of cold shoulder. He hadn’t expected full piping conniptions and a barrage of sign.
“Sharon.” He stepped back, raised hands, and stuttered out, <Slower, slower,> in ASL.
Her eyes narrowed, and she mimed slapping him upside the head, which was fair. <I understand English fine, Robin. I spoke it for twenty-five years before I drew my card.> Her dime-sized pursed lips tightened into a furious dot.
“I’m so sorry. What’s the problem?”
<Can you count?>
He scanned the kids in the room, and bit his lip to keep from swearing. “Okay. Who here’s rooming with Antonia?”
Marissa and Adesina raised their hands.
“When was the last time you saw her?”
“Breakfast.” “Breakfast.” “She said she was going down to the pool. Took her swimsuit.”
“Okay. Great. Thank you. Sharon, do you mind if I…?”
<The shuttle bus is waiting downstairs.>
“I can be fast.”
He sprinted down the hall, considered the elevator, took the stairs instead. He vaulted over a railing and stretched. Arms attenuating, he swung to thread through the gap between the stairs until he reached the pool level and let go. His arms recoiled to their normal size with a gross wet thwack. After ten years of practice, that still stung.
The pool was, of course, empty except for a globular gentleman with a thick full-body coat of hair, swimming laps. Robin’s “Excuse me” echoed back to him without impinging on the swimmer’s consciousness. Robin tried again, with as little effect. Then he poked the fellow in the shoulder from ten feet away, which prompted a certain amount of flailing and splashing that eventually subsided into an angry glare. “Excuse me,” he tried again. “I’m so sorry. One of my students is missing—a girl wearing gloves, she came down here to swim, I think.…”
“Oh, her,” the fat man said in a tone of voice that made Robin consider violence, however briefly. “She left. Out that door.”
Out that door led to the gym, which was locked, but wouldn’t accept Robin’s key for some reason. He made his arm long and thin, pinched it between door and jamb, and opened the door from the inside, to find a shocked janitor.
“So sorry,” he said. “Guidance counselor. One of our students is missing. Gloves, sort of glowery expression?”
She’d entered wearing a towel, sat on the weight bench for ten minutes staring at nothing, then asked if the hotel restaurant was still serving breakfast, and left.
“Gracias,” and Robin was off again.
The waiter at the hotel restaurant held an unpaid check and was very upset about it. She’d tried to charge the meal to her room, but their room didn’t allow for charged meals, so she’d said she would head right up to the room and get her wallet, and never came back. “Here,” Robin said, “bill it to mine,” and hoped his would accept charges. Then he ran out, and back up to the sixth floor, past Sharon, who whistled, pointing to her watch. He knocked on 603, the room number she’d given the waiter. “Antonia. Are you in there?”
He heard footsteps.
“Everyone’s waiting.”
The footsteps stopped.
“We need to leave now, or we’ll lose rehearsal time. But if there’s something wrong—”
The door jerked open from within. The chain stopped it. “It’s not my fault,” Antonia said, “they didn’t check the room again.”
She’d waited until the others assembled before sneaking back in, but he wasn’t here to win an argument with a fifteen-year-old. He tried: “Are you sick? I can tell Ms. Oberhoffer. They can do without a drummer for one practice.”
She glanced away. Closed the door. He was about to knock again when it opened. “I’m fine,” Antonia said, as if someone had asked her how she’d slept the night before her execution. “Let’s go.”
“Do you want to—”
She shouldered her backpack and stalked past him into the hall. “I said I’m fine.”
When kids at Xavier Desmond High School came to Robin for advice, he started with questions. He asked about their classes, their lives, their families, their problems. He rarely offered answers, but when pressed, his tended to revolve around a consistent theme. Find your path and follow it—find work that gives you strength, that helps the world and its people, figure out how to do that work happily, and in peace. Life’s full of people and systems who want to tell you who you should be, what you should do. Don’t listen. Or at least, don’t listen naively.
The advice went double for kids whose cards had turned, leaving them with scales, tentacles, wheels for feet, or superpowers. Jokertown students had to be more careful than the rest. Just because you had a chameleon’s skin didn’t mean you had to live like one. Just because you had super-strength didn’t mean you had to go out punching people for Freedom and Justice. Just because your body was as elastic as good rubber didn’t mean you had to be some sort of stretchy crime fighter for example. Some people became guidance counselors.
The downside of this advice, of course, was that sometimes you ended up doing something you were bad at.
Robin sat outside the practice hall, failing to review his paperwork, and instead reviewing his students through the glass doors.
They played—music, basically. The rhythm didn’t thrill, but he had to consider the circumstances—twenty or so hours cramped in a bus, until they reached the one place in the country with crappier weather than New York. If Robin were in their shoes, his spirits would be squashed enough without having to march through a nat protest. Hell, most of the kids were jokers—Robin at least knew, when he shouldered past people who hated him, that they wouldn’t know they hated him unless he showed his card, and they couldn’t hurt him unless they tried very hard. The world offered no such comfort to Jacobson, or to Marissa, or, for that matter …
Antonia played the drums as if she were taking a math test. And she didn’t like math.
He had seen her play before. He visited extracurriculars every few weeks, on rotation—if you knew a kid only between the hours of eight and three you might see her exhausted slump between first and second period and miss her fire on the basketball court, miss his pride when he buzzed in for quiz bowl, miss the ferocity of their forensics. Antonia hadn’t beat out ten other potential drummers for the Jokertown Mob by accident.
But she wouldn’t have beaten them today. He’d hoped lunch, or the master class sessions, would have bucked up her spirits, but here they were, afternoon group rehearsal, and still, listless.
Something was wrong. You couldn’t press kids—you could ask, you could tell them you were there if they needed you, you could keep them out of trouble, but the more pressure you gave, the more you became part of the problem. Politicians, papers, talk show hosts, they all talked about teaching like an industrial process, like kids were unstamped metal and good instruction could mold or melt them into this shape or that. All metaphors were wrong, but that was more wrong than most. Kids were seeds that transformed as they grew. And as they grew, how did you know if you were doing right? Maybe without your touch they would have grown stronger, truer—or withered. And even when you knew they were suffering, how could you help? Robin could count on one hand the number of adults of his acquaintance familiar enough with their own minds to know when they felt upset, let alone to know why. And teenagers?
The band shifted into a tricky passage. Antonia’s brow furrowed as Jacobson tossed her the solo. Maybe people screwed themselves up worse as they got older, and if Antonia wanted him to know what was wrong, he would.
She hit the cymbals late. He couldn’t hear the difference, but he saw it in her frown.
His pocket buzzed.
He read through the lines of dead pixels on the screen—acid bath, again—GHST ALRT CM @ 1CE.
Jan’s number.
The kids had just finished their first break. Another hour and a half before they’d wrap up for the afternoon. Plenty of time to run to the Gunter, hunt a ghost, and get back before anyone noticed he was gone.
Speaking of not knowing the contents of his own head.
