flushed Alison’s face and she had to force herself to speak calmly. “I seriously doubt it, Sydney.”
“Huh. Maybe it was meth or acid, then. Something must explain how come Arnold don’t act like a normal person.” And she flounced off to join the other popular girls, leaving Alison to clench her fists under the rejects’ table.
“Don’t pay her no mind. That little witch just loves ruining other people’s days,” Shaniqua said.
Alison sighed. “You’re right, of course. But it’s just so weird that Arnold would mouth off to security. The poor kid’s afraid of his own shadow.”
Shaniqua leaned across the table and lowered her voice. “Think it might actually be true? About the drugs, I mean.”
It took Alison a minute to answer. She was distracted imagining Shaniqua in her American Heritage getup. “Arnold? Never in a million years. The stuff he makes up in his head is so freaky, no way does he need drugs. Plus, no one would ever sell to him.” Should she tell her friend about her double, Sharon, in the other Chincoteague? If she did, Shaniqua might think she was just as weird as Arnold. She decided not to, at least for now.
It was hard paying attention in class after lunch. When she went to get her books she discovered that someone, probably Don Peabody or one of his flunkies, Lee Parker or Tom Filkins, had spray-painted her locker with a swastika again. A swastika with a blue dot in its center. Earth for the Earth-born, was what the “blue-eyed swastika” meant; and Jews like you ain’t from Earth.
The paint was still wet, and she was running late for history class, so she ran to the girls’ room, wet a clump of paper towels, ran back to her locker and smudged up the hateful thing enough so no one could tell what it was supposed to be. Then she ran on to class, making it just as the bell rang, and tried to forget about her locker, which she could do a better job of cleaning off later with the bottle of turpentine she kept hidden behind her books. It wasn’t that important—after all, she had Arnold and her parents to worry about.
Still, it was no wonder she didn’t even hear Miss Burbage calling on her, though she suddenly became aware that everyone was looking at her. “I’m sorry, what was the question?”
“I said, what were some of the problems the world faced when the High Ones arrived? It’s the subject of your term paper, Alison.” There was disappointment in the teacher’s voice.
“Oh, right! Of course. Well, there was the Vietnam War, which was part of the Cold War between America and the Soviet Union.”
“It wasn’t too cold in the jungles, though, was it?” The class snickered. Miss Burbage could be hard to take when she indulged her temptation to do stand-up comedy. If she didn’t have a face like a frog maybe she could do that for a living, instead of giving me a hard time.
“No, I guess it was pretty hot over there,” Alison said around an angry lump in her throat. There was an awkward silence, which Miss Burbage broke by pointing at Shaniqua, who said something about pollution and how the High Ones had ended it with their angstrom air-filters and controlled nuclear fusion, like at the Wallops Island plant.
“What was the matter with you in there?” Shaniqua asked as they walked out into the hallway after the bell rang.
“Can’t concentrate. Do you think they might expel Arnold?”
“Depends what he actually did,” Shaniqua said. Her virtues as a friend included being relentlessly truthful—like her little brother, Alison hated reassuring lies. “My brother Tavon got suspended once for grabbing his Kools back from Mr. Ramsay, the last time they were going through people’s backpacks, after that big Patriotic Front jailbreak up in New York. But they let him go back to class a week later.” That would have been more comforting if Tavon hadn’t had such a hard time graduating and finding a job afterward. He now worked part time cleaning up litter in the National Wildlife Refuge across the bridge on Assateague Island.
Luckily there was no more class for the rest of the day. Instead there was an all-school assembly in honor of the victims at the Capitol. The bomb had gone off in the visitors’ gallery overlooking the House of Lords just as an elementary school group from Montana was arriving, and a good hour and a half before the High Ones’ diplomatic delegation was due to arrive. Once the identity and age of the victims was known, the Patriotic Front and the Human Defense League had quit trying to claim credit and instead began blaming each other. Alison went numb as the smiling little-kid faces appeared, ten times life size, in the stage box where they usually showed tri-dees of the Martian settlements and the Oort Cloud Observatory, or giant model molecules for chemistry class.
“James Allen Franklin, age seven,” Principal Robert Wright intoned as a dark-haired kid with sticking-out ears like Arnold’s appeared. Alison wondered if Arnold also saw the resemblance… if they were letting him attend the assembly. “He was in second grade and had just made his mom a card for her birthday,” the principal said. “Sarah Jane Beckman, age eight, said she didn’t mind being called ‘Freckle-Face’…”
Principal Wright jogged down Maddox Boulevard early every morning, all the way out to the Assateague ocean beach and back, but he was still portly, with a shiny bald head now gleaming with perspiration. He lived on the mainland, just this side of the Maryland state line at Temperanceville. The rumor was his wife had left him and he was trying to lose weight to get more dates. Alison doubted he was having much luck, if he scowled half as much in private as he did at school.
There was a rustling behind Alison, who did her best to ignore it while also trying to tune out the images of the dead kids. At times like this she secretly envied Arnold his ability to disappear inside his own head. She felt all too grounded in the here and now, grinding along at one second per second, day after day, in this podunk little island town, sitting out school dances with nothing but a paper cup of punch and Shaniqua’s chatter for company. No boy was ever going to ask the fat Jewish girl to dance. What would she do without Shaniqua? She’d be exposed as just as much of a social reject as Arnold.
Something wet slapped against the back of Alison’s neck. She spun around in her seat and saw Don smirking while Lee and Tom tried to stifle their laughter.
“Which of you morons threw a spitball at me?” she hissed. They all threw up their hands.
Mr. Wright paused in his recitation. “Is there a problem up there?” he boomed into his microphone.
Oh, no. Poor Dad—first Arnold, and now me.
Mr. Wright was storming up the aisle toward where Alison was sitting. Shaniqua scrunched down in her seat while Alison steeled herself.
“Don threw a spitball!” she said, pointing.
“Who, me? I would never be so disrespectful, sir.” Lee and Tom both held solemn faces for a moment, but then Lee doubled over, choking with laughter.
“All of you report to my office, right after the last bell!” Mr. Wright yelled, loud enough to send a squeal of feedback through his microphone. There was a rising murmur through the auditorium, and he spun on his heel. “You all need to show some respect! We may be a tiny part of the Cosmic Harmony, but this is still the good old USA, the United Satrapy of America, and we show RESPECT for innocent lives lost!” Dead silence was his reward. The principal pointed at the tri-dee image of a chubby-faced, brown haired, smiling woman. “Those Montana kids’ teacher, Mrs. Violet Switzer! She was torn in two by that terrorist bomb! She could have been any of your mothers, any of you!” Someone let out a sob, or maybe it was just a hiccup. The principal let the silence stretch out, ten seconds, thirty, a full minute before dismissing the assembly.
The bell jangled as they filed out, Alison following Don, Tom, and Lee, who were right behind Mr. Wright—she wouldn’t put it past them to spitball her again, while they were all on the way to the principal’s office. Fortunately all she got was three days’ after-school detention and a humiliating lecture on how Mr. Wright had expected better of her, “though maybe I was being naive, given your family background.”
Alison clenched