I didn’t see her move, but I knew she was now behind me—and the (new) stain on the carpet was gone. Mongo fell on the bed with a happy sigh. No one does a happy sigh better than a dog.
Quiet.
I looked at the algebra book. I was supposed to bandage it. Right. Um. I had some really pretty origami paper Jill had given me last Christmas that I was still waiting for the right moment to use. I got it out and started folding a chain. It took a while, but I finally had a long enough chain to wrap once completely around the book and enough left over to tuck in the space where the pages had been torn out, like a bookmark. I made those links extra-thick so when I closed the book the covers were almost parallel again. I laid it gently on the desk.
I got into bed gingerly. It’s one thing to wake up with a semi-visible, mostly intangible gruuaa having joined you some time in the night. It’s something else to worry that you’re lying down on top of her. Mongo gave another happy-dog sigh and I thought there was almost an echo to it, like the noise a semi-visible, mostly intangible critter might make. Her smell and the smell of clean dog went rather well together, like chocolate and vanilla. As I drifted to sleep I heard her start to hum.
When I woke up groggily the next morning to my alarm going NOW NOW NOW NOW my algebra book was on the bed. Mongo had his chin on it. I was sure I’d left it on the desk. I was pretty out of it last night but I wasn’t out of it enough to take the textbook from my least favorite subject to bed with me, even if it had saved my life yesterday. Was I? Maybe I was. I stared at it. The paper chain was gone. I blinked, trying to convince myself my eyes would focus before my first cup of coffee. Mongo had been a terrible paper shredder as a puppy (he’d been pretty much a terrible everything shredder as a puppy) but I was pretty sure he wouldn’t stoop now to eating an origami paper chain. Besides, if he’d tried, it should have woken me up.
Could a barely visible, semi-intangible critter have a taste for three-dimensional paper? I wasn’t sure if Hix was still here or not . . . and then a shadow on the wall moved in a way that nothing else in my room could have made a shadow of. Barely visible semi-intangible critters might very well be able to eat a paper chain silently and without making the bed shake. I wondered vaguely if there were any house-training issues with gruuaa. I didn’t think there’d been any weird stuff in the corners since Val moved in—well, any more weird stuff. Neither Mom nor I was big on housecleaning, Ran was hopeless and Val fit in with the family pattern very well. If gruuaa, uh, excreted, what was it? Nobody would notice more dust.
I climbed out of bed awkwardly, carrying my algebra book, and set it on the desk, feeling a bit like a dog trainer taking her dog back to the place she’d put him the last time she’d said “stay.” “Stay,” I murmured, thinking there was something funny about how it looked. Or rather there was something funny about the fact that it didn’t look funny . . . The covers were parallel. The top one didn’t slant down over the empty space in the middle. Okay, maybe that’s where the chain was. It must have got folded up inside somehow.
I opened the book. No chain slid into view. I couldn’t remember exactly where the ripped-out place was, so I fanned the pages, looking. It was toward the back—I thought. It should have been obvious. It had been very obvious last night. I yawned. Maybe I should get the coffee first. No, this was dumb. There was a dreeping great hole where I’d torn all those pages out.
No hole. There was, however, about two-thirds of the way through the book, a big clump of some rather odd pages. There was algebra stuff written on them—awful-looking equations with lots of letters and squiggles, but I wasn’t going to think about that now—but the paper was strangely shiny and there were faint patterns printed on it, as well as the textbook stuff. Colored patterns in a range of mostly pastels and some deep violet. Very like the pretty paper Jill had given me for Christmas, which I’d folded into a chain to make a bandage for a wounded algebra book. I flipped the strange pages back and forth. They were (apparently) bound into the spine with the rest of the ordinary pages, although if I ran my fingers over them they were slightly textured, like Jill’s paper had been, but the patterns were much fainter than they’d been on Jill’s paper. I thought, since the entire situation is totally screwloose and doolally, what’s a little more? Who cares?
The new pages were also more flexible than paper—either than algebra-book paper or fancy origami paper. I riffled them again. And while I was having my it’s-all-screwloose-so-who-cares attack, I looked at them waving back and forth and thought that it wasn’t me that was providing all the waving, and the way one of those pages felt between your fingers was almost muscular. Well, the book had to have got to my bed somehow. . . .
What was I saying?
I had to sit down kind of abruptly. Fortunately my desk chair was right there. I slapped the book shut and stared at it. It lay as still as a dog who knows you mean it this time. I kept staring at it. Of course it lay still. It was a book. And the shadows on the wall were just shadows. I kept my eyes averted from where Hix was playing with the pull cord of the curtain. I didn’t want to think about any of it—which included Takahiro’s secret—I wanted everything to be like it had been two weeks ago—two months ago—before Val—before Dad died. Especially before Dad died. I grabbed the edge of the desk and held on hard for a moment.
One of the great things about dogs is they don’t do regrets and what-ifs and all that useless human-thinking stuff. Mongo got off the bed and put his nose under my forearm and gave it a heave. It meant, Hi, I’m here, and, by the way, it’s morning, and I want a pee and breakfast. If Dad hadn’t died it might have taken me a few years longer to convince Mom to let me have a dog. And I’d rather not hate Val. And Hix was a friend. And Casimir. And Takahiro . . .
I got up—maybe a little unsteadily—put my dressing gown on and took Mongo downstairs. There was a faint breeze around my ankles that might have been Hix. I let Mongo out (with or without Hix) and groped my way into the kitchen to make coffee. Mom or I was nearly always the first one up. It was me today. It had seemed to me unfair for years now that it was like this. Ran got up cheerful but you needed a blowtorch or a jackhammer to wake him. Val was the same. Maybe it’s something to do with the Y chromosome.
I poured my first mug and chugged about half of it. I put the rest of the coffee in our big insulated pot, put it on a tray with three more mugs (although Ran was still drinking milk out of his) and brought it to the table.
Where my algebra book was lying.
I may have whimpered. I stared at it. Maybe it stared at me, I don’t know.
Mongo, who was watching through the glass for when I plunked the tray on the table, whined at the kitchen door to be let back in. So I did. Several gruuaa came with him; it wasn’t just Hix. They arranged themselves along the baseboards very like long thin shadowy dogs and . . . fell asleep? I don’t know that either. I sat down in my chair. The algebra book had sidled a little closer to where I’d left my mug on the table while I was letting Mongo in. I finished my first mug of coffee and poured my second. My hands were shaking.
Mom came into the kitchen yawning and rubbing her hair. She fell—well, sat—in her chair and started on her first mug of coffee. Halfway through it you could see the possibility of articulate speech returning. “Cramming already?” she said, nodding at the algebra book. “Is your teacher this year that bad? Poor you.”