I looked away. There was a tree and I put my hand on it. I was seeing a kind of after-image, like a tiny checkerboard, where the black squares were pinholes into nowhere. “I think I’d better go back to the car,” I said.
“I’ve seen enough too,” said Jill.
“You okay?” I said. I’d’ve expected Jill to want to watch the light show a while longer. When they turned the zapper on, the air would tighten up like your skin when you get goose bumps and then there were great jagged anti-flashes—I don’t know what else to call them, if you’ve never seen it, and lots of people in Newworld have never seen a silverbug mob—as the bugs popped or squished or whatever it was they did in great sweeping swathes. (We’d been there when they turned it on at Hyderabad in June. But our moms didn’t know that one of Jill’s brothers had also taken us to the last big outbreak in Birdhill four years ago.) They were moving the zapper into position now. I wanted to be back in the car when they flipped the switch. The silverbugs that didn’t get zapped would dart out through the crowd of onlookers, almost like they were deliberately fleeing annihilation. Almost like they were alive.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I feel more like the way you describe it. Up and down are all . . . peculiar. And I don’t think I want to step on any bugs.”
So after all I got back to our house sooner than I wanted. We were mostly silent on the drive, although not wanting to shout over the car helped. But I didn’t like Jill looking all low amp and shut down like this. She’s not the low amp and shut down type. It might just have been seeing Eddie acting loopy and even more of a bakayaro than usual, but I didn’t think so. Finally I said, or shouted, “What’s wrong?”
She hitched up a shoulder and let it drop, still staring at the road. “You know, or you wouldn’t be asking,” she said (unreasonably but accurately). “F-word.”
“It’s bad?” I felt slightly sick.
She looked at me quickly and away again. “Nothing like your dad. But . . . yeah. Something big and ugly and dramatic. And—public.”
My stomach unclenched a little. Really not like my dad then. She might have just said that to make me feel better though. “A cobey, say.”
“I don’t know. But yeah. It might be.” She was silent a moment and then added: “I don’t mind knowing who Laura is going to fall for next. Or what Peta’s Café is going to have on special next week. But big stuff—no. It feels wrong and bad. Maybe the wrong is making it feel bad.”
“Yeah.” But we both knew we didn’t think so.
I heard Mom and Val laughing as I put my key in the lock and then as I opened the door it stopped like . . . like what happens when Mrs. Andover walks into a classroom. Doesn’t matter how great you were feeling a second before. Mrs. Andover is the human version of dropping your ice cream on the ground, a big ugly tick on your dog that you’re going to have to pull out, or getting a D on your algebra homework for the second time and seeing the akuma of summer school looming at you.
Bugsuck. Iya. Iya na creepo.
“I’m just taking Mongo out,” I mumbled, keeping my eyes on the floor—they were in the living room, and I had the feeling Mom had been sitting in Val’s lap—“And then we’ll go on to the shelter.” I put the lead on my overexcited dog and pretty much ran out the door. We didn’t get back till it was dark, and even Mongo was (relatively) tired. But we’d been practicing herding both with and without sheep (or alpacas, which are majorly evil from a herding point of view) and he had been absolutely dropping in his tracks when I yelled stop or held my hand up. My brilliant dog. So I had something to be happy about.
It was a good thing I had Mongo and the shelter. Because it was pretty much keeping my eyes on the floor and running away for the next six weeks. It was too easy to hate Val once he and his horrible shadows were around all the time, even with how unhappy the way I was behaving made Mom. But it didn’t make her as unhappy as being married to Val made her happy, so I hated him for that too. At the time I didn’t think Val gave a bucket of battery acid whether his new wife’s daughter hated him or not. Ran thought he was great, so he and Mom outnumbered me, right? I had to live in the house, but the garden had become a no-go area because of the way the shadows hung out around the shed. The slugs could just eat that end of the garden because I wasn’t going near it. I got desperate enough I even once asked Ran if he’d ever seen anything like what I saw—what Jill had seen—Val’s dreeping shadows. But it got obvious fast that Ran thought either my wiring was coming loose or I was playing some kind of joke on him, so I stopped.
One day when the shadows were particularly bad and I was totally absolutely sure one of them was following me around and trying to climb up chair legs to get at me so I couldn’t even sit at the kitchen table to do my origami (Val was in the shed), I blurted out that Val had only married Mom so he could stay in Newworld instead of being deported back to Orzi-whatsit, and Mom went rigid with fury and sent me to my room. I was too old to be sent to my room, but I went anyway. I’d never seen her so angry. She didn’t come around later and try to make it up either. So I hated Val for that too.
I tried to look up Val’s shadows on the webnet, but what was I supposed to look them up under? I half-tried a couple of times to talk to Jill about them—she’d seen full-current weird about the shed, after all—but she wasn’t having a good summer herself. It was like breaking up with Eddie had jerked her off her sprockets and she couldn’t find her own rhythm again. She told me once, trying to laugh, that she had this sort of permanent half headache of approaching doom. “It’s probably just knowing we’ve got Mrs. Andover for homeroom our senior year. How unfair is that?”
If it hadn’t been for Clare and the shelter I don’t know what I would have done. Run away from home for real and joined the army. (I’d be more likely to jump down one of the silverbug checkerboard pinholes.) Clare had lost a couple of workers over the summer (kids who looooove animals often find they don’t looooove cleaning up after them so much) so she could even pay me for a few extra hours. I was there so much I was totally tight with the Family, which are the mostly reject animals that live at what used to be reception, but Clare’s put a half wall across most of that room so you can sidle along this little aisle from the front door to Clare’s office, although Bella (the wolfhound) can still reach you if she wants to. You can tell a lot about a potential critter adopter by how they react to ten or twelve dogs enthusiastically bouncing off a three-and-a-half-foot barrier in welcome. (There are usually also a few cats in the bay window ignoring the fuss, Suri the parrot screaming, and Sherry the chameleon silently turning blue.)
Mongo became an honorary member, since I usually brought him along, and he was good at enthusiasm. (He never learned to love the bus ride, but he learned to put up with it.) And by the end of the summer he could bring the ponies or the wethers to the top gate, or Clare’s chickens back to the henhouse. (We were still working on the alpacas. Alpacas have minds of their own.)
The best times, that summer, were when Jill came to the shelter with me (mostly she was working too: she was a waitress at Peta’s Café and put in a few hours a week at Porter’s) and we took as many of the long-term residents for walks as possible. Clare tried to get all the dogs out of their kennels at least every other day, but her volunteer walkers didn’t always show up. Mostly you could only walk one or two dogs at a time—no more than you had hands and the dogs had to get along—but Jill and I took the Family out in bulk. I’d have Mongo and Bella and Jonesie plus Athena and Eld and maybe Mugwump, and she’d have Camilla and Twinkle or Angela and Dov and Doodad, who usually wore herself out early on and came home in a pocket.