Chapter 14: Awkward Journey

Just because Georgie was refusing to face his family didn’t mean we didn’t have to tell them.  So guess who got to do it instead?

Yeah.  Lucky, lucky me.

I started with his grandfather, partly because that was the phone number I had in my phone, and partly because I figured I might as well get the worst over with.

Worst.  Phone call.  Ever.

“Hello,” a curt voice said.

“Hello, um . . . is this Georgie’s grandfather?” I asked in a rush.  In my frantic nerves, I couldn’t remember the clan leader’s name.  It was weird to call adults by their first names, anyway.

There was an unfriendly pause.  “. . . Speaking.”

I had the nasty feeling he was still mad at me.  I gulped and looked at Kegan for support.

She gave me a thumbs-up and mouthed, “Go for it.”

Easy for her to say.  She wasn’t the one making the most awkward phone call in the history of phone calls.  But I still had to do it.

I took a deep breath.  I said all in a rush, “Georgie asked me to turn him and I tried to turn him and it went wrong and now he’s a tellem instead.”

There was a pregnant pause.  So pregnant that it could have been carrying triplets.

“Where is that boy now?” Georgie’s grandfather growled.

“Um . . . under the seat,” I said sheepishly.  “I’m not sure which seat.  Of the car I’m in.  He turned to the size of a bug and flew under there, and we can’t try to grab him without injurying him.”

“Why is he in your car?”

Come to think of it, he wasn’t going to be very happy with that answer, either.

“So I got this text, and I showed it to Georgie, and it was really important that we go to the place on the map as soon as possible —”

“Never mind,” Georgie’s grandfather cut me off.  “Put the phone on speaker.  I want to talk to that boy.”

Better him than me.  I put the phone on speaker.

“GEORGIE!” the clan leader’s voice roared.  “I didn’t raise you to be a coward, and neither did your parents!  Get out from under that seat right now, stop hiding, and put on a ding-dong seat belt!”

A tiny black speck zoomed up from under the driver’s seat and landed in the middle of the back seat.  It swelled into a now-three-foot-tall and brown-skinned Georgie with a surly look on his face.  He adjusted the shoulder belt to its lowest setting, which was just barely short enough for somebody of his height, and buckled it.

“He did,” I reported, putting the phone on Georgie’s lap.

“Good,” Georgie’s grandfather snarled.  “Now, boy, what in the world were you thinking?”

“I was thinking that somebody had to be the first person Lisette turned,” Georgie said defensively.  “I figured her stone was originally a turkey vulture stone.  I didn’t know it was going to turn out to be tellem!”

“A tellem!  A tellem, of all things!” his grandfather shouted.  “They’re not even rare!”

“I know!  I know, and I’m very sorry, okay?  I’m sorry!”

Kegan and I exchanged glances over Georgie’s head.  I knew how it felt to expect to be a common species and instead become a rare one.  I’d never thought about how the opposite would feel.

“He’s very brave, you know,” Kegan volunteered.  “He’s going to help us save the hostages.”

That was the wrong thing to say.

“Hostages?  What’s this now?!”

“So, um,” I said, leaning in to the phone, “I got this text from Rodrigo, or one of his allies, I guess, because he’s in jail and he probably doesn’t have a phone, but anyway, it said there were hostages and if we didn’t go to this place on the map in time, they would die, and it also said ‘no police,’ so, like, we decided to go there and Georgie wanted to go with us, which I guess is pretty brave, but I think mostly it was because he didn’t want to face his parents, which isn’t really brave at all, so —”

There was silence for a brief second.  “GEORGIE!”

“I didn’t want my turning to be a complete waste!” Georgie shouted.  “At least if I go with them, I could be a secret weapon and help them stop the bad guys and maybe save some people!”

Georgie’s grandfather sputtered.  “‘Stop the bad guys’?!  Are you listening to yourself?!”

“We stopped them a few months ago,” Kegan said helpfully.  “Nothing bad happened to us.  We’re fine.  Well, one guy did die, but it wasn’t anybody we knew.”

“Speak for yourself,” I shot back.  “I knew him from Rarity Clan.  And you were the one who didn’t want to do this.”

“That was when I thought you were gonna run off and get yourself killed.  Now that we’ve got four of us to protect you, and one of them’s a secret weapon, it’ll probably be fine.”  Kegan sounded pretty cheerful.

The clan leader didn’t.

“GET OUT OF THAT CAR RIGHT NOW!”

“We’re in the wrong lane to pull over,” Kegan’s mom said tersely from the front seat.  “I’ll change lanes as soon as Mr. Truck stops cutting me off.  He’s not even driving the speed limit, that jerk.”

“Please let me stay,” Georgie pleaded.  “Nobody ever trusts me to make my own decisions, Grandpa.  That’s why I wanted Lisette to turn me.  I’m almost seventeen, and I’ve had every important decision made for me.  I want to do something myself!”

“You can do whatever you want with anything else, but not with this!” Georgie’s grandpa roared.  “Now get out of that car!”

“I can’t do whatever I want!  That’s the point!  You set me up on a date with a complete stranger without asking if I wanted to go!  My parents made me transfer schools because they thought it would look better on my college application!  I’m not even allowed to hang out with Colin, because apparently being a werecrow is some tremendous crime!”

“Colin?” Kegan mouthed, looking at me.

“Brother,” I mouthed back, hazarding a guess.

“For once — for once! — I want the right to do something I want to do!  And if you try to make me leave now, I’ll just turn bug-sized again and fly back under the seat!”

“GET OUT OF THE CAR!”

“NO!”

I slouched back against my seat, groaning softly.  I was never going to be allowed anywhere near the werevulture clan again.  There was no doubt Georgie’s grandfather was going to blame me for this.  This was a disaster.

“I’m changing lanes now,” Kegan’s mom reported, turning the steering wheel as she did so.  “Tell him I can drop Georgie off at the next bus stop I see.”

With a furiously stubborn look, Georgie brushed the phone off his lap and started to shrink.

“Hang on, hang on!” Kegan cried.  “Devil’s advocate!”

“You must be joking,” Kegan’s dad said.

“This isn’t the time for that,” Kegan’s mom added.  “This is somebody else’s family dispute.”

“Which is why it’s the perfect time for that.  They’re in the middle of an argument that neither of them can win, right?  So they need to play devil’s advocate!”

“Would you please explain what you’re talking about?” Georgie’s grandfather snapped from the phone.

“It’s something we do,” Kegan’s mom called from the front.  “We started it when Kegan was an argumentative little preteen.  It helps us have arguments without fighting.”

“It’s really weird,” I said.  “The rules are —”

“The rules are that everybody has to make one argument for every side of the disagreement,” Kegan’s father cut in.  “Nobody gets to contradict or rebut unless it’s their turn of the appropriate round.  No getting emotional or yelling.  I think my daughter might have a point.  It might be something that would help you right now.”

“Fine,” Georgie’s grandfather snarled, barely restraining his anger.  “If that’s what it’ll take to convince him.”

“That’s not the point,” Kegan said.  “The point is that you listen to each other.”

“It’s all right.  It’s all right.  Let them learn as they go.  They’ll have lots of time to practice.”  Kegan’s dad snapped his fingers in the face of the incredible shrinking boy, who was now paused mid-shrink.  “Georgie.  You go first.  Give us an argument for why you should get out of the car right now.”

“I’m not getting out of the car right now,” Georgie said in a surly voice.

“That’s not what I asked.  I asked you to make an argument for why you should get out of the car right now.  Your grandfather will have to make an argument in favor of you staying in the car in a minute.  Now come on.  Out with it.”

Georgie folded his arms.  “It might be dangerous,” he said in a monotone.

“Now your turn,” Kegan’s dad said, picking the phone up off the seat and putting it back on Georgie’s lap, where it was closer to both of their mouths.  “One reason why Georgie should get out of the car right now.  Only one reason, and no orders or shouting.”

“It might be dangerous!” Georgie’s grandfather snapped.  “You’re trying to rescue hostages?  Are you crazy?”

“Oh, I forgot,” Kegan’s dad said.  “You should try to make your reason different from what’s already been said.  Especially if the person you’re trying to convince is the one who said it.  If they already know that reason, hearing it again is not going to convince them.  That’s something we learned quite early on with Kegan.  Try again.”

“All right,” the old man snarled.  “He should listen to me because I’m his grandfather.  And his clan leader!”

“You’re not my clan leader!” Georgie yelled.  “My turning went wrong, remember?  Some tellem somewhere is my clan leader now!”

“Just because you were so irresponsible as to —!”

“No yelling and no rebuttals,” Kegan’s father said.  “You can rebut the other’s argument in the next question, if you want, but then that is your one argument.  Speaking of which, this time, give me an argument in favor of Georgie staying in the car.  Georgie, you go first.”

“Okay, my argument is that you’re not my clan leader,” Georgie said furiously.  “You’re not my legal guardian, either, because that’s my parents, so you’ve got no right to tell me what to do!”

“What’s your argument in favor of him staying in the car?” Kegan’s dad asked.

There was stony silence for a few seconds.  “Well, in theory he could stay in the car and not do anything dangerous,” the old man said at last.  Another pause.  “If there are hostages, shouldn’t the police be handling that anyway?!”

“No, see, the message said ‘no police’ —” I began.

“Rodrigo was the werebat —” Kegan added.

“And he could still pretend to be one of them again —”

“Plus they’d probably know and kill the hostages if we —”

“And if I don’t go, they’ll just set a different trap for me —”

“We’d love to,” Kegan’s dad broke in, “but if we call them, we have good reason to think it will make the situation worse.  We’re dealing with a group that’s infiltrated the police before.  If you want to spend time discussing that, we can, but in the meantime, we’re nearly at the city limits, so it might be better to resolve your discussion with your grandson first.”

“Or you could just stop the car!”

“I’ll shrink!” Georgie shouted.

“I’m really, really sorry, but we were given a time limit, so we can’t stop the car unless you both agree that we need to put Georgie on the side of the road,” Kegan’s dad said.  “Georgie has to agree, because if he doesn’t, he’ll just shrink again.”

Georgie had a defiantly triumphant look.

Stop looking like Annette, I thought with annoyance.

Because he did.  Or at least, he looked more like her than like himself.  Half the size and with brown skin and black hair . . . I had a feeling that if his grandpa could see him, the old man would freak out all over again.  Even though Georgie had the same Caucasian facial features and wispy-thin hair as ever . . .

Okay, yeah, he didn’t look like Annette at all, now that he was no longer smirking that way.  He just looked bizarre.  Clearly white people should not be tellems.  Not that I could ever, like, say something like that, but boy, he looked weird.

I tuned out both sides’ arguments for and against Georgie helping us rescue the hostages, staring out the window and tapping my fingers on my arm and wishing that they weren’t using my phone to do it.  I only caught the tale end of Georgie’s grandpa’s argument against because Kegan started tugging my sleeve to get my attention.

“— and I’m much older than you, with a lot more life experience, so I can tell you when you’re making a good decision or a bad one.  This would be a bad one.”

Kegan leaned forward and hissed, “They’re lousy at this game.  I could beat them both with my mouth tied behind my back.”

I leaned over and whispered, “That doesn’t make any sense.”

Georgie glowered up at us both.

Kegan giggled, putting her hand over her mouth to muffle it.  She leaned back over her seat, waited until he looked down again, and then mouthed, “Neither do their arguments.”

Kegan’s dad gave us a warning look.  “All right.  Results time.  Georgie, what is your opinion after this discussion?”

“The same thing as before.  I want to rescue the hostages.”

“And you?”

“The same thing as before!” his grandpa snapped.  “I want him out of the car!”

Kegan snorted and rolled her eyes.  She mouthed, “I knew it!”

“All right,” Kegan’s dad said briskly.  “Who’s in favor of making this a conference call and adding Georgie’s parents for round two?”

“No!” Georgie cried.

“Me,” Kegan said, raising her hand.

“Me,” Kegan’s mom said from the driver’s seat.

“Me,” Kegan’s dad said.

“I am,” Georgie’s grandfather said.

“Can we use a different phone, please?” I pleaded.  “I can’t play Angry Werebirds while they’re fighting on mine.”

“Okay, that’s four votes for yes, one for no, and one for using a different phone,” Kegan’s dad said.  “Majority rules.  And yes, we can use my phone instead.  Let me get this set up . . .”

Yeah, the conversation didn’t go any faster once we added two more freaked-out adults into the mix.  Fortunately, I was able to plug in my headphones and listen to music while I played Angry Werebirds, so it wasn’t nearly as awkward as before.

The argument just kept on going and going.  The scenery outside the window kept on changing.

Finally, the car pulled to a halt.  I looked up and saw we were parked beside a tall, dusty hill in the middle of nowhere.

“Are we dropping Georgie off?” I asked, pulling an earbud out of my ear.

“No, we’re here,” Kegan’s mom said, pulling her key from the ignition.  “I told his family that if they didn’t resolve things soon, the point would be moot because we were almost there.  They spent the last ten minutes making a compromise.”

I glanced at the seat beside me.  Georgie was gone.

“Um . . .” I began.  “I think he’s hiding again . . .”

Kegan pointed at her pocket smugly.  “Yeah, from bad guys.  That’s the compromise.  He has to stay bug-sized and stay in my pocket.  Unless I go insubstantial.  Then he has to pretend to be a bug and fly off to look for help.  Also, he’s not allowed to talk once we get out of the car.”

“So they don’t realize I’m here,” came Georgie’s muffled voice.

“That’s not the only part of the compromise,” Kegan’s dad said.  “His family’s also calling 911 as we speak.  I don’t know how long we’ll have before the cops get here, but we’d better do whatever we can as quickly as possible.  Come on.”

He opened his door and got out of the car.  Kegan and her mom did the same.

It was weird to see them using a door the normal way.  I was guessing they were trying to hide that they were specters in case any bad guys watching didn’t know already.

“Okay,” I said.  “Now what . . .”

I stopped abruptly.  There, dug into the hillside, not even hidden at all, just at eye level, was a turning stone.

It was blue.