“Oh, gods’ engines,” I said. “No. Nothing like Mr. Roberts.” Mr. Roberts had taught geometry at our high school till his stepdaughter had told her best friend that he was sleeping with her and she wished he wouldn’t. It was about the biggest scandal Station had ever had. Mr. Roberts went to jail and the stepdaughter and her mom left town. I hoped they were okay.
“Like Arnie then,” she said, and all the life went out of her voice, and she leaned against me as if she was cold, although the weather was so warm I was only wearing the shawl because my dress didn’t fit. (Just by the way, Jill and I looked amazing. You’d never know my dress didn’t fit, and I’d bought these fabulous pink shoes on sale, and Jill’s mom had let her wear her grandmother’s gold locket.)
“I thought you liked Arnie,” I said. Arnie was Jill’s mom’s live-in boyfriend. He ran the big hardware store in town: Porter’s: Everything for Your Projects. They had a good arts and crafts section, including lots of origami paper, even though the local origami crowd was mostly Takahiro and me, and Jill when she was trying to buy either of us a present.
“I did,” she said. “But he’s gone all—weird.”
“Weird how?” Arnie has always been weird. He’s the only person I’ve ever met who doesn’t have a pocket phone. But he’d been a tireless piggyback-ride giver when he and Jill’s mom first got together and Jill and I were eight, and he didn’t stop because he got bored with his girlfriend’s kid and her friend, but because we decided our third-grade dignity couldn’t take it. And now he always looked at me like I was me and not a teenager, which is a rare gift in adults.
“Weird weird.”
“That’s clear and helpful.”
She was silent a moment. “You know that selling-you-something face he has? Smiling and smiling and—like Mongo watching the hand with a dog biscuit in it? It’s okay in the store. It’s probably why he sells so much stuff. But he never used to wear it at home. He does now. It’s like—I don’t know what it’s like. It’s buggie.”
Like Val noticing me noticing his shadows? “I’m sorry,” I said uselessly.
“Well, I’m sorry you don’t like Val,” she said. “Doesn’t do either of us much good, does it? Hey, there’s a silverbug outbreak at Long-iron. Dena phoned while you were primping. It’s supposed to be pretty epic. Peak forecast is for tomorrow. Want to go take a look?”
“Silverbugs?” I said. “Again? That’s the second flare this summer.”
“Yeah,” she said. “It probably doesn’t mean anything.”
There are always a few silverbugs around. If you see one you’re supposed to report it. If you didn’t mind stepping on them you were supposed to do that and then report it. If you did mind you were supposed to put a bowl or a bucket or your coat over it and then call your local Watchguard base and they’d send someone over to bash it for you. (There were silverbug buckets all over town, of course, like trash cans and mailboxes, but there was never one around when you saw a silverbug.) The auto-report buttons on pocket phones only came in a few years ago and that made it a lot easier, because you could snap the coordinates and run away. When I’d been a little kid you had to phone it in and wait. But if your Watchguard was having a bad day you could be there a while so mostly people like me who did mind stepping on them went and found someone who didn’t mind and let them deal with it.
It’s not that I’m totally squeamish about killing things. I kill things like slugs and aphids in Mom’s garden (she pays me. She says it’s the only way to get me to stay home from the shelter occasionally). But silverbugs aren’t bugs, and they aren’t really alive. Nobody knows exactly what they are, but they may be some kind of tiny cobey—cohesion break. I’ve stepped on a silverbug exactly twice. The first time on a dare when I was seven years old and the second time two years ago when it was suddenly there too late for me not to step on it, although I tried. I only clipped the edge of it but it still went pop and I fainted, like I did the first time, and then I threw up like six times and was sick for two days afterward, which was also pretty much like the first time. But the nightmares were a lot worse the second time, although that may be because I hit my head pretty hard on the sidewalk when I went down. Us bug woopies are in the minority but there are enough of us around it’s not that big a deal, although I’m pretty sure Cobey Central keeps a list of us.
But a cloud of silverbugs is amazing to see and although if it’s a really big cloud the army’ll be along at peak forecast to zap it, they’re usually happy to have some ordinary members of the public around to step on the ones that get away because some always do get away, and there doesn’t seem to be a fancy army gizmo that works any better than people’s feet. But the other thing about silverbugs is that if you step on a lot of them one right after another you get high. It varies from person to person, how many you have to step on. Jill says one is plenty for her, but Takahiro says he’s never noticed any effect at all—and he stepped on eight or ten at the outbreak in June, which should have made him as off his head as a triple-fried. So while the army is happy to have company, they’ll have a few spotters keeping an eye on how everybody’s doing.
(Everyone was really curious about Taks’ invulnerability, but when Steph tried to ask him about it he did the Patented Takahiro Silence so everyone rolled their eyes and gave up. It might have been something about being half Japanese, but none of us had ever heard that Farworlders are any more resistant than anybody else.)
One more thing about silverbugs. Big explosions of them might mean there was a cobey coming. One outbreak, okay, it happens. Two outbreaks . . . But it was like earthquakes. Sometimes you got tremors and sometimes you didn’t. Sometimes the tremors didn’t mean anything. Sometimes they did. But after a second big silverbug mob they’d probably be sending a few cobey troops to the local Watchguards. If there was a third they might even reopen the big old cobey unit camp, Goat Creek, out in the barrens. They’d put a cobey base there at all because a couple of generations ago this area had been kind of a hot spot for medium-sized cobeys—and Newworld mostly doesn’t have cobeys, not like Oldworld, which has them everywhere all the time—but they closed it down after the cobeys stopped. At the moment the only thing that lived at Goat Creek was a lot of feral sheep. So Jill was right, it probably didn’t mean anything. But . . .
“Let’s go indoors,” said Jill. “At least there’s cake. And I think your mom would let us have a little champagne if we asked really politely.”
Ran went home with one of his friends and I went home with Jill that night so Val and Mom could have one night alone with each other, although he’d been sleeping over for a while by then and I could (mostly) not think about it. But they couldn’t afford a honeymoon: this was it. I tried to think of something nice to say to Mom before we left but I couldn’t. The last thing I said was, “Don’t forget to put Mongo out. I’ve walked him already. You can just put him out in the back yard. And bring him back in again.”
She gave me a lopsided smile. Seven and a half years ago she’d been giving the A Dog Is a Big Responsibility lecture and here I was telling her what to do. “I won’t forget,” she said.
“And you have to close the kitchen door really tight or—”
“Or he gets out and sleeps on your bed,” she said. “I know.”
I hugged her. Val was standing behind her. I gave him a stiff little nod. If he tried to touch me I’d scream. He didn’t. He just nodded back. It was so dark in the hall I couldn’t see his shadows.
I watched Arnie that night. I actually looked for any weird shadows on the wall behind him and there weren’t any. Arnie did look like he was carrying a little too much charge, but all of our teachers look worse by the end of the school year. Some of them look worse at the beginning.