A nervous laugh trilled from Belinda's mouth. But â aren't you â a researcher? Dr. Longfellow's assistant?
He laughed again in response, with less sincerity. I suppose I'm something of an assistant, he said, grinning.
Belinda felt a finger of panic sliding up her spine. Pierre had begun walking ahead, and suddenly he was a stranger and Belinda was sure his smile had an oily look to it, and they were alone. Alone together on a deserted country path.
Wh-Where are we going? she stammered, planting her feet in the dirt. What's going on?
Pierre stopped, turned, and removed his cap. His eyebrows furrowed. Belinda realized she looked like a petulant child with her fists pressed into her hips and her mouth set in a stern frown. She let her arms loosen and dangle.
I â I just mean . . . I'm confused, she said. I thought you were part of the research team.
The who? Pierre scratched his head. I'm sorry Ma'am, he said. I don't know anything about research. I was told you wanted to see Woodhenge. The lady should very much like to see Woodhenge, Marshall told me. And I know the way.
Belinda bit her thumbnail, searching his eyes for dishonesty. Was this really Dr. Longfellow's idea of an assistant?
Look there, Pierre said, and pointed to a grassy plateau up ahead, ruins like stony knuckles breaking its green surface. Old Sarum, he said, his finger tracing the ruins.
The sight of a famous landmark quickly dissolved Belinda's uncertainty. It didn't matter what Pierre was, she told herself. He was only showing her the way. The remains of Old Sarum's magnificent motte-and-bailey castle emerged from the green like a misty spectre. Pierre followed behind her, and stood at a distance as she wandered among the old walls hanging off the hillocks in conglomerate sheets. This was what she had come for, she thought. To be awed. Surrounded by enigmatic wonders and left to her own silent contemplation.
We'd best be off, he announced after watching her for some time, and she obeyed, hoping her compliance would constitute an apology for her outburst. After this first glimpse of the ancient history bound to the land around her, she felt invigorated. The sky was a swatch of boundless grey, and the air tasted as crisp as an apple. She asked Pierre good-naturedly how far the walk to Woodhenge was.
Not far, he said, only about six more miles.
Six
miles?
Belinda cried. But that will take us all day!
Pierre shrugged. Do you have another engagement? he asked.
The sun was setting by the time they caught the bus from the parking lot at Woodhenge back to Salisbury station. Belinda asked why they hadn't taken the bus all the way there and Pierre told her, with a hint of disdain, that he'd thought she would enjoy the walk. Belinda had trudged along silently for most of it, and Pierre had quickly resigned himself to her irritable attitude like a guilty husband. In the end, Woodhenge had been much smaller than she'd imagined. Crooked concrete posts, pocked and devoid of any ornament, marked the places of the original timber posts, long since decayed and crumbled away. Dozens of tourists loitered about the posts like bored construction workers.
Belinda searched for a feeling of reverence, but she could only think about Dr. Longfellow. Had he planned this all along? She thought about his letters, and how her mind could not, even with the greatest effort, reconcile the gracious, encouraging character of those compositions with the man she'd met the day before. She wondered if the letters, the invitation to come to England, the meeting, the field trip to Woodhenge, had all been attempts to placate her, in the same way that she would sometimes indulge Sebastian's pleas to help with the laundry, knowing he would quickly grow bored or frustrated and leave her to re-fold the messy, balled-up bundles he left behind. Caught up in her thoughts, she forgot to remind herself of the child's grave in the centre of the monument. She had intended to walk over it and contemplate the scene, imagine the bones beneath her feet, even though she knew they'd been long since extracted by archaeologists for analysis. How many hundreds of years had the sacrifice outlived the wood? Before she could think to wonder, she'd walked away, leaving the posts with their lengthening shadows like heavy black capes.
MOST PEOPLE DON'T KNOW
that the Lost City of Atlantis is actually a real place. It's a chain of hydrothermal vents in the mid-Atlantic â basically a series of underwater volcanoes. The vents look like giant chimneys with smoke pouring out, which is partly what makes it look like a city. But the chimneys are also between thirty and sixty metres high, so the chain in its entirety looks something like the Walt Disney castle covered in algae. And because of the hydrogen and methane produced when the cold seawater reacts with the mineral-rich magma, there are actually thousands of weird microorganisms living on and around the vents, feeding off the chemicals and basking in the warm water. Of course, those microorganisms attract invertebrates like snails and shrimp who prey on them, so it's really one big deep-sea smorgasbord where everyone's invited. My kind of party. All you need to think about is eating, and no one cares how cool you look or who you talk to.
It depresses me sometimes to think about how trivial life on earth is. Wiley always says that high school is supposed to be the best time of your life, which pretty much makes me wanna slit my wrists and get it over with. Last year I had this friend named Nikki. She was one of those girls who would check her reflection in the vending machine whenever she passed by the cafeteria, thinking no one would notice. She was always talking about her boyfriend,
Doug said that movie blows
and
Doug hates when people say that
and
yesterday Doug and I did
this
and on and on. Doug was the scrawniest kid I've ever seen, and he always wore these skinny black punk-rocker jeans that made his legs look like tube balloons. I couldn't help picturing a clown grabbing one of those legs and twisting it into a poodle or a butterfly, Ta-da! I really didn't want to think about what his legs looked like without pants, but Nikki did her best to force that on me.
He's got so much hair all over his legs, she said, and at the tops of his thighs it just stops. Then it gets all bushy again around his thing. It's so funny. It looks like he's wearing white shorts with a hole cut in the crotch.
Don't wanna know, I said, covering my ears. Luckily Rose was there too, and she'd just gotten dumped by her boyfriend a couple of days before. His name was Zack and he bleached and gelled his hair in a swoop to look like Zack Morris from
Saved by the Bell
. Dead serious. I only met him once when his basketball team was playing against our school's team, and Rose made me sit in the bleachers with her and watch. It was more stimulating to watch Zack's hair flopping out of its do as he jogged back and forth across the court and him smoothing it back into place every chance he got than to actually follow the game. Rose had spent three hours making an orange poster-paper banner that said ZACK ATTACK in huge cloud letters. She'd drawn the letters by hand on sheets of blue construction paper, and by the time she was ready to cut them out and glue them to the banner, bits of the paper were flaking off where she'd pressed hard with her pencil and then erased the lines over and over again, trying to make them look perfect. I helped her cut the letters out 'cause I felt sorry for her spending so much time working on it after school, but she'd made so many overlapping lines that it was hard to see which one to cut along. In the end it was a total waste 'cause nobody else in the bleachers had a banner, so hers just sat rolled up at her feet during the whole game. I saw her bend down a couple of times to touch it, but I could tell she was too embarrassed to just whip it open and wave it proudly over her head. Anyway, when Nikki was nattering on about Doug that day, Rose was feeling all cynical because Zack had dumped her with a note scribbled on a piece of looseleaf â
Looseleaf?
Rose had said, Can you even imagine a more jerky thing to do?
â so she told Nikki to shut her hole, we didn't want to hear about Doug's bony white ass.
Nikki looked shocked at first but then she just shrugged. S'okay, she said, you're allowed to be a bitch after what happened to you.
I'm not friends with Nikki anymore, which is kind of a relief. She made me feel like I was turning into one of those typical girls who just wants to be popular, and wants people to think she's so badass â the kinds of girls that I hate. When she heard Mum was away she insisted we have a drunken sleepover at my house, even though I reminded her that Wiley would still be there.
So what, your stepdad sounds cool, she said. He won't care.
Actually, I said, he'll probably tell my Mum. She's got him on a leash, remember? I didn't feel like telling Nikki that I just didn't want drunk people in the house with Squid. She wouldn't have understood anyway.
Come on, she said, you deserve some fun after your mom left you all this crap to deal with.
I'd been complaining to Rose and Nikki about all the housework and babysitting I'd had to do since Mum left, and I'd exaggerated some of it just 'cause I liked to hear them say
Oh no way
and
I would die if I was you
. Truth was I hadn't really done anything around the house, and neither had anyone else. On Saturday I went straight to Rose's house after we got back from lunch with Da, and when I got home that evening I nearly cried 'cause I saw how disgusting everything looked. You'd think for all of Jess's Mum-ness she'd have taken care of it, but cleaning was one thing Jess didn't have a clue about. I hadn't noticed how bad it was until I knew people were coming over. There was hair all over the bathroom floor and in the sink and a huge skid-mark in the toilet. The dining room was still a disaster zone from Jess's collage project that had been due three days before,
Chatelaine
magazines splayed open on the table with their gutted pages furling out, little bits of paper scattered like snow all around the feet of the table, scissors and glue and markers spread on the pulled-out chairs. We'd made a stack of pizza and chicken boxes and put them beside the back door 'cause they'd started making the kitchen smell like corn chips. Seemed like a good idea at the time. There were pots of dried-up mac 'n' cheese stacked on the kitchen counter along with a couple of days' worth of dirty plates and cutlery left there 'cause no one had wanted to empty the dishwasher. All the unswept crumbs on the floor made the linoleum crunch under my feet. But the worst part was that the kitchen table was literally covered in hundreds of little screws and nails and bolts, and it looked like someone had just dumped them out of an old box. There was grey dirt dusted all around them. Seeing it from the other end of the house it actually looked like the tablecloth was silver.
Wiley was nowhere and the house was silent.
I only had time to do a half-assed job of cleaning everything, but I was feeling pretty sorry for myself the whole way through. By the time I had finished washing the pots I'd gotten myself all riled up. I was so mad I was sweating. I remember thinking I could probably call up Child Services, get Mum and Wiley arrested for neglect. When Jess came home from the park with Squid I was on my knees scrubbing a sticky puddle of grape juice off the floor, and when Squid saw my face he raced straight up to his room. I screamed at Jess, told her the dining room looked like a goddamn pigsty.
Jesus Christ, you sound like Mummy! she yelled back. I knew it was true but I punched her anyway. Smack in the boob. Of course she shrieked like a harpy which made me want to punch her again, except she ran off to her room crying and ranting about how much she hated me and wanted to kill me. I didn't blame her, 'cause there have been times when I've wanted to kill her too. Jess is the only person who has ever made me feel like I truly wanted them to die. And I really did when I told her my friends were coming over so she had to watch Squid and she said, Too bad, I'm going out to see a movie. I wailed on her until my vocal cords felt ready to snap, but she went storming out of the house anyway.
Nikki and Rose showed up two hours later and my hands still hadn't stopped trembling. My hair was plastered to my forehead with sweat. I'd just managed to get everything looking somewhat decent, all the junk stuffed into closets and a pan of McCain Superfries cooking in the oven.
Honey, you need a drink, Nikki said to me when I opened the door. She had her backpack slung over one shoulder and pulled around her front. She unzipped it and the long glass neck of a bottle with a red cap peeked out. I had this feeling that Squid was behind me so I stood in the doorway trying to block Nikki.
Jeez, are you gonna let us in? Nikki pushed her way past me.
Squid was standing at the bottom of the stairs when I turned around. He watched Nikki and Rose heel off their sneakers and toss their coats on the couch. I could tell by the little smile on his face that he wasn't going to leave us alone.
Can I have some French fries? he said quietly.
Yeah, I said, acting annoyed. I made extra so you could have some.
Whoa man, this is your little brother? Nikki said. He's cute.
Uh huh, I said. You guys hungry? I really wanted to change the subject, but Squid was totally sucking up the attention. His dark eyelashes were practically fluttering and his blue eyes were round as Bambi's. No one can pour on the syrup better than Squid.
He's got such blue eyes, Rose said. You guys don't look like brother and sister at all.
Yeah, well we are, I said.
That's 'cause I have a different dad, Squid said.
They
know
that already, I told him.
Oh my God, he is so cute, Nikki said. He's going to be totally hot when he grows up.
'Kay, can we just get the food and go down to the basement? I said.
Nikki sniffed the air like she just caught a whiff of something toxic. Oh, you're making fries? she said. Doug says McCain fries aren't even real potatoes.