ALL MORNING, THUNDERSTORMS TRAILED ACROSS THE COUNTY, KEEPING EVERYBODY INDOORS. In third-period study hall in the library, Jesse huddled at one of the student use computers, keeping an eye on Honor, who sat at one end of the long reference table. Open in front of her was a strange book the size of a six-inch ruler. It had wooden covers, and its pages were narrow rectangles, strung loosely together by string threaded through holes in the pages’ outer ends. The pages looked brittle and were covered with wavy black writing. Honor copied the writing into an exercise book. She’d pause and recite what she’d written in a low quavering voice.
The students at the other end of the reference table, and those seated at the other places, nudged each other, whispering and nodding at her.
The librarian, Mr. Applegate, came over and peered over Honor’s shoulder. “My word,” he said, breaking his own strict rule of silence. “Is that a palm leaf manuscript?”
“A Balinese lontar.”
“That appears to be Indic writing.”
“Sanskrit.”
“My word. How remarkable. J. Robert Oppenheimer also studied Sanskrit. He was the father of the atomic bomb. When the first test bomb exploded in the desert, he recited a Sanskrit verse. ‘I am become death, destroyer of worlds.’”
Honor swiveled her neck and stared up at Mr. Applegate for a second before she spoke. “Kalo ‘smi loka-ksaya-krt provrddho, lokan sama hartum lha pravrttah.”
Mr. Applegate smiled uncertainly. “Sanskrit. Remarkable. Most remarkable. But please put that away for now. Here’s a hall pass. The office needs you to finish some paperwork.”
After she left, Jesse continued his Internet search. He finally found a newspaper article from an Indonesian English newspaper that confirmed what Honor had said about her father.
The article also added the information that, while the police recovered Mr. Jim Clarke’s body from the Balinese temple where he was killed by flying debris during a sudden windstorm, they were still looking for his head.
Andy sneaked up behind him. “What are you looking at?” he whispered. “A bomb recipe? Contacting your terrorist cell?” Jesse clicked away, but Andy made him go back to the page. Andy read, his lips moving silently, and then snorted. “How can you lose a head?” he asked. Coming from Andy, that was an excellent and thoughtful question, and one that was troubling Jesse for an unlikely reason.
Last Halloween he’d gone to a haunted house near Long Beach with his foster-home counselor to help with the younger kids. One of the horrors was a headless man lurching about a cell, moaning, Where is my head? Where is my head? Jesse thought the fake costume and the acting all very childish. The headless man stopped and faced Jesse, as though sensing his presence. Then, without warning, the headless man thrust his arms through the bars and grabbed Jesse with cold hard fingers. “Where is my head?” the man whispered in a wheezy voice of someone who has to squeeze words out of his lungs. He shook Jesse with a vise-like grip. “You have to help me find my head.” Suddenly this wasn’t so childish anymore. For a terrible moment, Jesse thought that perhaps the man really was headless. Then the man laughed and said, “Gotcha.” Even so, the incident had been so frightening that for weeks afterward the headless man came to Jesse in his dreams, whispering, Where is my head? Where is my head?
But surely that could have nothing to do with Honor’s father.
By lunchtime, the news about Honor had spread like bacteria in a petri dish. As Jesse shuffled through the line in the noisy cafeteria, he overheard one girl say to another, “Did you hear about the new girl? She’s, like, studying these black magic curses.”
All the pizza had been hogged by the jocks, so Jesse took the meatloaf. As he slid his tray off the rail, Betsy waved him over to her table. Not to join, that was for sure. She had that teasing sparkle in her eyes, and her friends were giggling.
“I think our new classmate likes you, Jesse. Must be your curly hair.”
“You’re jealous?”
“You like her too? Love at first sight. How cute. You can get her a spider necklace to go with her earrings.”
Their laughter followed him as carried his tray to his usual corner table. A moment later, Wesley Stephens plopped down in the chair opposite him. Jessie had gotten to know Wesley from the school’s photography club, which Jesse had joined so he could use the darkroom. He was the only club member who shot black-and-white film and developed it the old-fashioned way. This fascinated Wesley, a real gadget geek who had a fancy digital camera and was a Photoshop whiz. The third day of school, Wesley had sat with Jesse at the back table, and they’d eaten their lunches together ever since.
Wesley’s dad was a farmer. His mom made him bag lunches. He looked at Jesse’s plate. “Dude, the meatloaf? That’s last week’s leftovers.”
“The pizza was all gone.” Jesse stuck a fork into the hunk on his plate. A couple of gray peas rolled out.
Wesley grimaced. “I can’t sit here and watch you eat that. Here.” Wesley handed over half his ham sandwich, thick as a dictionary. He ate like a pro wrestler but stayed scrawny as a paper clip. He took a huge bite of his half. “You got that new girl in your section, don’t you? Does she really wear poisonous insects?”
“Scorpions aren’t insects,” Jesse said.
“Dude, an insect is anything you stomp on to kill.”
Jesse scanned the crowded cafeteria, wondering where Honor was sitting. Two tables over, where the arty students congregated, Allyn Shields was sketching something in the air. Her father was a local banker. She was in Jesse’s biology lab, the only class they shared. In two weeks of dissecting frogs, she’d said only a dozen words to him, more than half of them in one sentence when she leaned across his lab bench to ask, Can I borrow your pencil for a minute?
Her fingers paused in midair. She fixed her green eyes on him for a moment and then turned and whispered something to her friend. Jesse quickly lowered his head to take a bite of his donated sandwich.
At the jock table, Andy Turnbull was being loudly teased about his bee phobia. Everybody knew he could take a hit from a two-hundred pound lineman and come up for more, but bees and wasps scared him witless. “I hate needles,” he protested, “and that’s what bees are, needles with wings.” This was greeted with more teasing, which suddenly stopped. The din in the cafeteria quieted.
Wesley kicked Jesse under the table. He glanced up and saw Honor Clarke heading toward them, carrying a tray with only a glass of milk on it. She walked past their table and through the open door that led to the outside patio.
“Thank God,” Wesley whispered. “I thought she was going to sit with us.”
Honor picked a table that was under the overhang and out of the rain, now lightening to a drizzle. She took a sip of milk as a pigeon fluttered onto the next table over, boldly cocking its eye at her. She tilted her neck and stared right back. A second later, the bird exploded off the table with a furious beat of its wings.
Jesse took another bite of the sandwich and slowly chewed, thinking about that newspaper article. “Wesley, if somebody in your family had his head cut off and you could only get one part of him back, what would you choose—the body or the head?”
“The head,” Wesley said at once. “You could always attach it to a suit and pretend the rest is there.”
Jesse nodded. “That’s what I think too.”
As if she’d overheard, Honor swiveled her head to look at Jesse for a few long seconds.
Wesley kicked him again. “Whoa, dude, I think she’s hot for you. You should ask her out.”
“Why don’t you?”
“Are you kidding? Those could be old boyfriends she’s got dangling from her ears.”
For his art class after lunch, Jesse worked in the darkroom in the basement, printing an enlarged photo of the town’s water tower that he had taken his first weekend in Longview. He had borrowed one of the Mindells’ bicycles to wander around town and came to the tower down by the railroad silos. It looked like a bloated pumpkin on stilts. Somebody had painted a cornfield and blue sky around its middle. Just as he was taking the photograph with his old manual Nikon, a patrol car barreled up and skidded to a halt on the graveled yard. The policeman, whose name was Jenk, arrested him for suspicious behavior and took him to the station.
The chief sipped coffee and listened to Jesse’s explanation, which was more than the officer had done. Jesse tried not to stare at the drop of coffee clinging to the chief’s bushy mustache. Chief McMann made a phone call to the Mindells and let him go. On his way out of the office, Jesse heard Officer Jenk tell the chief, “Better safe than sorry, I say. You know who he is, don’t you? They let him go, sure, but he could still be a terrorist. They train them young. He could be a sleeper, just waiting for orders.”
Jesse whirled around, his fists clenched.
“Of course he’s a sleeper, Jenk,” the chief said, giving Jesse a friendly calming wink. “That’s what teenagers do. They sleep as much as they can.”
The following Sunday at the Presbyterian Church, after the grade school kids had bolted from their Sunday school classroom, Jesse mentioned Jenk’s reaction to Kellie Fairchild, his new caseworker from the county welfare office. Kellie taught the class as a volunteer, and Jesse was helping her. Jessie had liked Kellie from the moment she’d picked him up at the Chicago airport, when she’d given him a no-nonsense handshake and told him to drop the ma’am and stick to Kellie. It was hard for Jesse to say how old she was. One moment she looked like a college student and the next, she was looking at him with a gaze that said she’d seen it all, so no tricks from him. She’d been working with county welfare for less than a year. Her parents were diplomats, she said, and she had grown up all over the place. Perhaps that was one reason why Jesse felt so comfortable with her.
“That’s just how it is,” she said patiently, after she listened to his complaint about Officer Jenk. “After all, Immigration did hold you in detention and Homeland Security interrogated you and that’s a fact you can’t do anything about. Some people are going to be suspicious about you, no matter what.” Kellie never sugarcoated things or pretended everything was going to be just fine for Jesse. Everything wasn’t just fine, and they both knew it. “The important thing,” she said, “is how you’re going to handle it.”
“I know,” Jesse said. He wrinkled his forehead in thought and added, “You know what, though, sometimes I wonder maybe I am supposed to be a sleeper agent of some kind, but I just don’t realize it.”
Kellie looked at him with a mild lift of her brows that for her passed for astonishment. “Why on earth would you think that?”
“Hey, it’s not me,” he said, “it was Homeland Security who put that idea in my head.”
She knew his story, of course. In LA the previous year, Jesse happened to be in an empty convenience store when two teenage foster boys he knew strolled in. One pulled a gun on the clerk. For once Jesse didn’t stay in the back corner, watching. He grabbed a trolley stacked with cans to be put on the shelf and shoved it into the gun wielder’s back. The gun went flying with a bang, the stray bullet shooting a mirror into pieces, and both the robbers bolted. Like an idiot, Jesse picked up the gun as two policemen came charging in. They thought he did it. The terrified clerk thought so too, getting Jesse confused with the second kid. To top it off, the security camera was broken.
Eventually the police caught the real culprits, who confessed. But by then, Immigration plus Homeland Security had come to see Jesse. They had done some checking and found out that his birth certificate had been forged and that he had not been born in the U.S. Even though he’d lived in LA for as long as he could remember, to them he was no different from someone who had illegally crossed the border just yesterday.
He told Kellie, “They asked me the same questions over and over again, and it got stuck in my head.” Questions about his past and why he was in America and if strangers had been in touch with him, and what he was doing with that camera of his. He always replied with the truth, sticking desperately to it no matter how much they tried to shake him, telling them over and over again that all he knew was that he’d grown up in LA, in foster families when he was young and cute and in juvenile centers when he was older, trying to stay off the streets and out of the gangs, and that the Nikon had been given to him by a kind juvenile counselor. But the drip, drip, drip of those questions had eroded a little niche in his mind and planted a tiny seed that sometimes bloomed at odd moments. Maybe he was a sleeper agent. Maybe somebody was going to show up in his life and order him to carry out some plan.
In the school’s basement darkroom, the image of the water tower began to appear on the paper. He shelved his thoughts about Jenk and Homeland Security and sleeper agents in order to watch. This part of the process always entranced him. It was almost like magic.
The outlines of the tower took shape.
And there on the ground appeared a man, looking right at him.
“Huh?” Jesse said, leaning closer. What was this bald old man doing in the photo? There’d been nobody under the water tower when he’d snapped the picture. The image changed, the shape of the man melding into one of the tower’s legs.
Jesse exhaled in relief. Just to be sure, he exposed and developed another print. He watched every second with hardly a blink of the eye. This time no man appeared.
Just that seed, courtesy of Homeland Security, spooking his imagination.
Health was Jesse’s last class of the day. He arrived early and slipped into the empty classroom at the opposite end of the third floor hall. The rear window overlooked the Methodist Church across the street. He had his camera ready. Usually at this time the steeple was backlit by the sun, making an interesting composition, but today the sun was hidden behind clouds that looked like bland oatmeal, shedding a dull light.
He sensed somebody standing behind him and spun around. Honor stood on the other side of the closest desk, the gray of her eyes a piercing color as she studied him. Again there was that ridiculous sense of recognition, like a radar blip sparking sharply in his mind, before fading away.
“Aum hram hrum sah aung ung mang aum,” she chanted. She fell silent, studying him intently, looking right into him, as though waiting for some kind of internal reaction.
Jesse shrugged. “I have no idea what you just said.”
She blinked. “No idea at all?”
“The home-run ogre hammered one home?”
She didn’t smile. She said, capitalizing with that precise enunciation of hers, “Those are the Words of Words. The Primal Sounds of the Universe.”
“I thought that was American Idol.”
Still no smile, but she relaxed a little. “I was wondering about you. Do I know you from somewhere?”
So she felt it too. Strange. “I don’t think so. Unless you’ve been to LA. That’s where I’m from.”
“Never been there.” She studied him again, but this time the externals, his black eyes, his black curly hair with streaks of red, his light brown skin. “So what are you doing here in Longview, excitement capital of the world?” The question sounded casual, but he could sense lingering tension.
“Staying with a new foster family. It’s a long story.” He didn’t want to get into it so he asked, “You’re in health class?”
“PE.”
“You better hurry. I think that’s down in the gym.”
“Is it? I guess I got lost again.”
Yeah, right, Jesse thought. She must have deliberately followed him here. His gaze fell on her centipede bracelet.
She held it out for his admiration. “Like it? I made it myself.”
“Nice,” he said.
“This one bit me.”
Jesse thought of that newspaper article he’d read earlier, and he heard in a distant corridor of his mind that headless man’s wheezy voice. “Can I ask you something?”
A sly shadow rose in her gray eyes. “If you’re sure you want to know.”
Even though he knew it wasn’t appropriate, he wanted to ask her if they’d really never found her dad’s head. But his nerve failed at the last moment and he asked instead, “What kind of centipede is that?”
She rubbed her finger on the bracelet. “The Balinese call it the graveyard centipede.”
The sun broke through the clouds, a bright beam falling on the church.
“Such a peaceful, quiet town,” Honor said. “The sort of place where you think nothing bad could happen, because everything is already in a coma.”