4

This morning Angela had worn her hair differently, J.P. noticed, when he entered the school library and saw her sitting there waiting for him.

Usually J.P. paid no attention to hair. He paid no attention to his own, except to have it cut now and then, when his mother insisted; and he certainly paid no attention to girls' hair of any sort.

Yet this morning he noticed that Angela Galsworthy was wearing her hair differently. It was not flowing loosely across her shoulders as it had last week, and it was not tied into a thick, gleaming ponytail as it had been yesterday. Today it was folded into a smooth, shimmering knot at the top of her head, exposing her slender neck. And in front of her small pink ears, strands of the golden hair fell in tendrils.

Tendrils. J.P. actually thought that word. He cringed. He blushed and felt his face grow warm.

Angela was smiling at him. "Good morning," she said.

"Hi," J.P. muttered. His shoulders bumped the side of the door as he entered the library, and he tripped over the end of one shoelace. A book toppled from the pile of schoolbooks in his arms. When he knelt to retrieve it from the floor, his calculator fell from his shirt pocket.

On top of everything else, he sneezed. J.P. didn't have a cold, or any allergies that he was aware of. But he sneezed, and he knew that when he sneezed his face got all scrunched up and looked weird, right in full view of Angela Galsworthy. Probably, too, the sneeze left a highly visible drop of something repulsive on the end of his nose; he couldn't reach to wipe it because of the armload of books.

Red-faced, he stumbled and lurched to the library table where she waited. When he sank down, finally, to the chair across from her, its imitation leather seat made a noise that was half hiss, half squeak. Even the furniture was out to humiliate J.P. Tate.

But Angela Patricia Galsworthy only smiled and reached for the folded map that was on top of his stack of books.

"What a perfectly lovely map, J.P.," she said.

He cleared his throat and hoped that his voice wouldn't come out a squawk, as it sometimes did.

"Call me James," he told her.

Mrs. Hunt called J.P. aside as English class ended. He could see Angela linger in the doorway, as if she were waiting for him. Then some of the girls pulled her away and she followed them down the hall toward her next class.

"I want to commend you, J.P.," Mrs. Hunt said. "It was so helpful, having that map. I think the whole class has a much better sense of where the book is taking place, now."

"Yeah, well, it was really Angela who showed them. I've never been in London myself."

"I know. And I did thank Angela. But the reason I kept you here was to speak to you about something privately. I didn't want to embarrass you in front of the class."

J.P. looked at her uncomfortably. There was something massively unnerving about a teacher wanting to speak to you privately. He tried to remember if he had handed in all of his book reports.

"I've been noticing the past few days," Mrs. Hunt went on in a concerned voice, "that you seem to be walking a little unsteadily."

"Unsteadily," J.P. repeated.

Mrs. Hunt nodded. "I saw you bump into the doorframe when you entered the classroom this morning. And then you stumbled in the aisle as you went to your seat."

"Stumbled," J.P. said.

"Are you feeling all right?" his teacher asked.

How on earth could he answer that? How could he tell Mrs. Hunt, who was about a hundred and nine years old, that he felt fine, that he felt wonderful, that he was in love for the first time in his life? And that it was making him walk into doors, and trip over his own feet, and causing his hands to sweat and his ears to itch and his voice to croak and warble? Mrs. Hunt, he should say, my heart is soaring all the time, and I hear music playing, and when Angela Galsworthy smiles my pulse jumps to about three hundred and my nerves all tingle and the temperature of the back of my neck shoots up to about 140 degrees Fahrenheit, and—

"Yeah," J.P. mumbled, looking at the floor. "I feel okay."

Mrs. Hunt stood and gathered her papers from her desk. "Well," she said dubiously, "you're a sensible boy, J.P., and I assume you'll stop in to see the school nurse if you're having problems."

J.P. looked at his watch.

"I do care about all my students," Mrs. Huntwenton. "And it worries me when I think something might be wrong. Goodness," she said sadly, "I still remember little Raymond Myerson, and my heart just breaks."

"May I go now?" J.P. asked politely. "I'm going to be late for History."

She nodded. J.P. turned, and bumped the corner of her desk with his hip. He winced. So did Mrs. Hunt.

Raymond Albert Myerson

There is no Death! What seems so is transition...

H. W. Longfellow

J.P. stood in the hallway outside the science lab and stared at the face in the framed photograph. Raymond Albert Myerson looked like a wimp. Apparently he had been a rich wimp, because after his death, his parents had donated the science lab to the Burke-Thaxter School in his memory. Technically, it was called the Myerson Lab; a plaque on the door said so.

The picture had hung there for as long as J.P. could remember—as long as he'd been a student here—but he had never really looked at it before. Now he did.

Raymond wore glasses and had Brillo hair. He stared at the camera without smiling. J.P. squinted, looking more carefully, trying to perceive whether Raymond was already dead when the photograph was taken. His face was so expressionless that J.P. thought he might have been a propped-up corpse. But on careful examination, he saw a tiny blurred spot around the ear, indicating that Raymond Myerson had moved his head a tiny bit just as the camera's shutter was released.

There was no information except his name, the Longfellow quotation, and the dates of Raymond's birth and death in the corner. No explanation of why Raymond Myerson had died at the age of thirteen.

But Mrs. Hunt had thought of Raymond when she talked to J.P. about his own clumsiness. Had Raymond bumped into doorframes and desks, too?

"Who's that?" Angela's voice, so close to his shoulder, startled him.

"A dead kid," J.P. replied. Instantly, he hated himself. He couldn't believe he had said something so stupid. He should have said "a deceased kid." He wouldn't blame Angela if she stomped away in disgust.

But she continued to stand there, so close he could smell the fragrance of her skin.

"Did you know him?" she asked sadly.

Of course J.P. didn't know Raymond, who had been dead for ten years. He had never even really looked at him before, not carefully. And he had no reason to lie to Angela, who had never lied to him.

But the sweet sadness in her voice had affected him in an odd way. The sound of that little tremble as she spoke entered his skin and burrowed into his brain and heart and turned him into a person he had never been. It turned him into a liar.

"He was my cousin," J.P. said reverently, looking straight into the glassy eyes of Raymond Albert Myerson.

Angela gasped slightly. Then she did an incredible thing. She did it right there in an almost public place, the hallway outside the Myerson Lab on the third floor of the Burke-Thaxter School.

She reached over and took J.P.'s hand in hers.

He said nothing. Mentally he ordered his hand to stop perspiring. He continued to stare sadly at the dead wimpy face of Raymond.

"What did he die of?" Angela whispered. "Do you mind talking about it?"

"I don't talk about it to just anyone," J.P. said in a terse, low voice. "But I don't mind telling you. It was a—a—very rare disease."

"Oh," breathed Angela sympathetically.

They stared together at Raymond. Angela's hand was still in his. He thought he felt her squeeze his hand, very slightly. He wasn't positive, but it seemed as if a tiny squeeze had taken place, just for a second.

"What was it called?" Angela asked mournfully, in a whisper.

J.P. froze for an instant. He hadn't any idea what had done in poor Raymond Myerson. He could only guess that maybe Raymond, like J.P., had tripped over his own shoelaces and bumped into doorframes.

Angela was waiting for his answer.

"He had triple framosis," J.P. told her.

She gasped. And now—he was certain, this time—she did squeeze his hand.

"It runs in families," he whispered to her in a stricken voice, just as a bell rang, the doors at the end of the hall opened, and students began swarming toward them. Angela dropped his hand, but she was looking at him with awe and grief.

"I have to go to gym," J.P. told her in a normal voice. Then he added, more quietly, "I try to keep up my strength by exercising."

"Of course," she said, looking into his eyes with sorrow and with—yes, he was quite sure—it was with love. "I understand," she whispered.

A folded piece of paper dropped onto his desk during Math class just as Angela walked past on her way to the blackboard. "Private" was lettered neatly on the outside in impeccable handwriting.

J.P. unfolded it surreptitiously, in his lap, and glanced down.

"DOES ANYBODY KNOW?" the note said. It was signed simply with her first initial. "A."

J.P. gazed at it. What a wonderfully sophisticated way to sign a note, he thought. What a British thing to do. He wondered if Prince Charles signed notes that way, with a simple C. Or maybe P, for Prince.

He looked at the front of the room. Angela had just finished solving the problem on the board. She turned, brushed some chalk dust from the sleeve of her blouse, smiled at the teacher, and headed back to her desk. J.P. followed her with his eyes. Finally she looked back at him quizzically, as if she were waiting for an answer to something.

Oh. He had almost forgotten the question in her note—he'd been so captivated by the signature initial. He read the note again. "DOES ANYBODY KNOW?" Does anybody know what, J.P. wondered. Was it a math question? She had done the problem on the board without any trouble. Angela seemed to be quite good at math.

Finally, using his ballpoint pen, J.P. wrote on the same sheet of paper: "KNOW WHAT?"

Then he made a large J and folded the note again. On his way to the pencil sharpener, he dropped it in her lap.

Angela read it. He watched her from his desk. Then she looked over at him with a sad, affectionate smile.

When class ended a moment later, she edged her way close to him through the crowd of students heading to the hall. "I meant about your disease," she whispered. "Does anyone else know about your disease?"

"My disease," J.P. repeated stupidly.

Angela stood very close to him and spoke quietly in his ear. "Triple framosis," she whispered. "Does anybody know, besides your family? Is it a secret?"

J.P. cringed inwardly. He hadn't even remembered the name he'd made up for the disease. He knew exactly what he should do at this moment. He should start to laugh. He should laugh loudly. He should explain that it was a joke.

But her large sad eyes were so close to him, and they were so sympathetic, and so sweet. There was no way he could laugh, not as long as those eyes were there.

"No," he whispered to her. "No one knows. Only you."