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  The first time, when she took the seat next to me, I caught a little scent of her in the air that moved when she sat down.

  That was it. That’s what really started it with her. That time she sat down. Gosh! It was like the smell of fruit or something. It must have been the shampoo she used. It was faint, but smelled like peaches and apples. Maybe that’s what it was called. Peaches and Apples. Whatever it was, it filled up the space around her. Being so close to her was an unbelievable thing. If I ever sat behind her in class — which I never would at St. Catherine’s — I don’t know if I could ever get any work done. I would be leaning forward all the time and smelling her hair.

  I nearly fell into a trance at the table that day.

  But when Courtney began to read parts of the book she had chosen for the group, she spoke so clearly and with all the ups and downs in her voice that helped you understand what the characters were feeling, that I almost couldn’t bear it when she stopped and Kayla began to read. Courtney seemed so excited at the exciting parts, too. It all just blew me away. She really was perfect. She was beautiful, of course. I knew that just by looking at her. But the moment she started to read, I knew she was really smart, too.

  Since then, since that afternoon — on the bus, at night before bed — I had begun to think of ways I could save her life.

  I couldn’t be the only one who did that. I couldn’t be. There wouldn’t be all those adventure stories and comic books and movies and TV shows with all their action and lifesaving going on if I was the only one, would there?

  Maybe it was from reading Jeff’s comics in the afternoons or thinking about being in the Cobra or not being out there enough and having too much time alone, but I thought about saving Courtney’s life nearly every day.

  This is how it worked. It could be just an ordinary day — like today at school with the teachers and books and milk cartons and the smell of lockers and backpacks all around me — and I would suddenly sense that Courtney was in danger and I would have to rescue her.

  For instance, Courtney and I would be the only ones at school, left behind because of something with the buses being gone and it was late or we were late. Then I would see her at her locker, reaching for the top shelf and looking up into the back of it.

  Suddenly, the walls would begin to shake. The ceiling would rattle and the floor tiles would start popping up out of the floor. Pop! Pop! You could see them shooting up, silhouetted in the big square of light coming from the end of the hallway. I’d seen that light a million times before, only this time the tiles were popping right up into it.

  Pop! Pop! Pop-op-op!

  I knew right away what it was.

  “Earthquake!” I yelled, running to her locker. Her hair was moving in a wave as she turned herself to the light then back to me. Ignoring the danger to myself, I pulled Courtney by the waist down the hallway toward the light. But as far as it actually was from our lockers to that doorway, it now seemed totally endless.

  Pop! Pop-op-oppppppp!

  We ran faster. Now the fluorescent ceiling lights began exploding one by one above us, the floor opened, and huge cracks appeared. A cloud of steam and flames burst up out of the ground under the school.

  “I knew it — the center of the earth!” I said angrily. “It was just a matter of time!”

  She looked at me, her eyes so wild. “But, Tom —”

  I shook my head. “Just come with me!”

  Dancing over the widening cracks, holding her closely, I drew her toward the doors to safety. We plunged through a small gap of daylight just as the walls thundered down behind us.

  Standing next to her, breathing hard, as the police and fire engines and ambulances roared up around us, my arm still around her waist, I turned and smiled. “First period tomorrow’s going to be a little tough.”

  She fainted then, but I caught her, moving my other arm swiftly up under her knees.

  Chapter 4

  But that wasn’t all. I had lots of rescues.

  Masked marauders — I always liked the word marauders, which I got from one of Jeff’s comics, and of course they had to have masks on, really creepy masks with horns — would try to steal Courtney for some reason involving lots of money.

  But there I was, battling my way past them, breaking the chains on her wrists, and carrying her up through some kind of tunnel of falling blades, which turned out to be not far from school when we surfaced. We dived right into my fat red Cobra and out of the parking lot, our pockets dripping with gold and jewels — enough for us to live on for the rest of our lives.

  Or I would be at recess, flapping cool air into my blazer and talking with the guys about the science quiz, when I’d suddenly look up — I was the only one who knew to do this at just that moment — to see Courtney plummeting through the air. The jet her uncle was piloting was on fire and crashing.

  “She bailed out!” I would say. “Stupid chute didn’t open!”

  Tossing my blazer aside, I would somehow leap up from the roof of the gym (I was on top of the gym now) and jump sort of sideways across the school yard and catch her just as she fell. We would tumble slowly and softly to the ground together, on the bright green grass of a golf course that was across the street, and her hair would fly across our faces as we rolled and rolled down a little green hill. Then it would get a little hazy, but suddenly everyone was crowding around us — Joey and Rich and Darlene and Mrs. Tracy and Samantha Embriano.

  And there would come the moment in front of everyone when Courtney would thank me.

  Thank you, thank you, thank you!

  And she would always be with me after that.

  It could happen.

  A short snapping sound of loose papers being stacked on a desk made me lift my head. Mrs. Tracy called on Joey Sisman to hand back some graded papers. He started in the back corner, putting a couple on Courtney’s desk. She nodded and then leaned forward, moving her right hand between her skirt and the desk seat.

  She looked up, maybe at the clock, and I turned away.

  Of course, Courtney Zisky never actually noticed me. She was popular and had her own big bunch of friends that had never included me. Why would it include me? I was just a sweaty, fat kid with baggy pants, and she was Courtney Zisky.

  But being unknown was actually good. Here’s where not “getting out there” was a good thing. Not being noticed was perfect for a superhero. And I sort of was a superhero in all the adventures I thought of with her in them. I was pretty fearless. I had powers.

  I had powers, even though I have to say that there was a pretty strange thing about every rescue story I thought of. The powers I had were not the usual superhero ones. They were small. Little powers. Not very remarkable. You could say they were even dumb.

  In my battle against the marauders, for instance, I didn’t have amazing strength or superspeed. When it came to the big moment to rescue Courtney, I found that what I could do was spin really fast — so fast I was like a blur! — on one foot.

  If spinning fast was almost worthless in most situations, it happened to be the perfect thing against the marauders. They could do nothing against my spinning around. They fell away from me, dropping their weapons, which clanked to the floor. Their mouths (I could see their mouths behind the masks) were open wide and yelling. Their eyes were full of fear. Finally, I stopped spinning long enough to pull Courtney away to freedom. We lived a happy life after that.

  One-foot spinning was not all I could do, though.

  Sometimes a hand made of glue was the one thing I needed to stop the bad men. Once I used a detachable ear to trick them. A very loud finger snap, invisible elbows, an earthshaking hum, legs of snow, and the ability to roll uphill were just some of the many powers that helped me in my Courtney stories.

  Each time, before I hopped into my famous roaring red Cobra and tore off into the night with her, I would use one of these abilities and leave all the powerful evildoers falling down in defeat.

  Not that these rescues were eve
r easy.

  Some of them were very tough. A lot of the time there would be a point when I’d have to choose between two really horrible things to save Courtney.

  It was either the pit of hissing snakes or the rushing bunch of sweaty men with big iron clubs. The stairway of flashing sabres or the man-eating-snake-infested pool that stank like garbage.

  Faced with these kinds of dangers, there came a moment when everything stopped and an instant of complete stillness fell over me and over everything around me.

  I stood there, sizing up my choices.

  It was like I was standing in the middle of a flimsy, little rope bridge. On one side the ropes were on fire, burning away from the rocks that held them. On the other was a troop of sword-waving bandits with painted faces charging at me.

  At this moment in the soundtrack — my adventures were always accompanied by booming horns and thundering drums — everything would go silent except for a single long note played on a violin, a note as thin and sharp as a thread (like the thread that held up that bridge I was on).

  While that one note played, everything stopped. The bridge didn’t burn. The bad guys didn’t charge. No one breathed.

  Sometimes, that violin note went on too long and my daydreams faded away. Someone would snap some papers or the school bell would ring or a bus would honk its horn, and the adventure couldn’t go on. Then I would look around and pretend to be with everybody else again, which meant that I’d have to start at the beginning of the story. That was okay, too. The start of the adventure was the best part, anyway. I had lots of beginnings about how I could be the only one to really save Courtney.

  There was a sharp knock at the classroom door. It opened a crack, and I heard a voice say “Linda?” Mrs. Tracy went into the hall for a second then came back with a pink note.

  I looked again and Courtney was reading. I didn’t imagine that I was completely alone in feeling something for her. She was really too beautiful for me to be the only one. From the way Jeff acted when she was around, I half suspected that he liked her, too. Sometimes he seemed to worm his way close to her in the lunch line, nudging ahead of the others in a way that looked almost natural. I tried not to worry too much about it because Jeff never actually seemed to talk to Courtney. He never talked about her with me, that’s for sure.

  I had decided that the best thing was never to bring up the subject, even though Jeff was the only other kid I had ever talked to about very much at all. He knew about the Cobra. He knew about most stuff with me. But he didn’t know about Courtney or my dumb little powers. No one did. And I liked that no one did.

  I felt I could hold onto everything better if I never talked about it and nobody ever knew. As long as it stayed mine, it could still happen. It could.

  Thank you, thank you.

  Chapter 5

  Mrs. Tracy clapped her hands together and everybody looked to the front of the class.

  “I have two announcements to make,” she said. “The first is something that worked very well last year in social studies, so I’d like to try it again with you.”

  “No tests?” said Rich. “Yay, no tests!”

  “Funny, Rich, but no,” Mrs. Tracy said. “I’m talking about having an election in class. Just like the real political elections coming up in a few weeks, in which I hope your parents will vote, I’d like to have a little mini-election right here. An election for classroom president.”

  Mrs. Tracy was beaming. I liked to see her excited. It was fun when she was really into something. She was tall and thin and not too old. Though she had been around for as long as I had been at St. Catherine’s, she still seemed to get excited with each new class. I knew from the way seventh graders had talked about her in the past that she was the teacher to get, and it turned out to be true. Our first month in seventh grade had been one of the best so far.

  “This is how it will work,” she said. “For the next three weeks, we’ll be learning about how governments work and what it means to hold public office. At the end of that time, we’ll have a primary. That’s when you can choose candidates from among yourselves. Everyone will have a chance to nominate someone they think would be best to lead the class in several activities we’ll do this year.”

  “Can we nominate ourselves?” asked Joey Sisman.

  “You better,” said Jeff. “No one else will nominate you.”

  “Yes, we can nominate ourselves,” Mrs. Tracy said, “though it would be nice if you offered your support to someone else in the class.”

  Joey pretended to nod thoughtfully. I heard Jeff chuckle quietly, probably because he got away with what he said.

  “Once we decide on the candidates, we’ll vote,” Mrs. Tracy said. “The winner will be our classroom president. The first thing he or she will do is help me plan our Thanksgiving presentation for the parents. The president will form a committee for that. If this works out, we might have another election before Christmas for a new president. Maybe we’ll do it every month. There’s planning for our spring field trip, too.”

  “I would make sure we went to see a Broadway show, maybe Phantom,” said Darlene, reminding everyone that she was Alice in last summer’s peewee Alice in Wonderland and that she was taking professional singing lessons.

  Mrs. Tracy smiled. “I’m sure that together we can think of a lot of good ideas to consider. And because of all the committees, everyone who wants to be involved can be. Trust me, every other class has loved this, and I’m sure it will be exciting and a lot of fun for you, too. It’ll be a great way to learn about ourselves and the way people work together….”

  I glanced over at Courtney. She was looking up at the teacher, her pencil swaying back and forth between her fingers.

  It was stupid, but I remember wondering right then if there might be something in this election, some way that things could happen, that would give me a way to do something she might notice. Maybe I couldn’t exactly save her life, but … my mouth suddenly went dry.

  No! Keep it to yourself! I thought.

  But it was so easy, I couldn’t keep it to myself. I got hot again under my blazer. Sweat rolled down inside my shirt.

  I could nominate Courtney.

  I could nominate her and then vote for her.

  Wait, could I?

  I could! It would seem so natural because she’s so incredible, who wouldn’t nominate her. But if I nominated her it would move me to another whole level. I’d be “getting out there.” And I’d finally be visible. Mostly, it would connect our names in class.

  Mrs. Tracy, I’d like to nominate Courtney Zisky.

  Me, Tom. Her, Courtney. She was so popular she would win, of course, and then she would say it:

  Thank you, Tom.

  Was it possible? Could it happen? Never mind the adventures for now. This was real. This was actually possible.

  My heart was beating very fast. Courtney. Yes.

  Ryan Ponacky said, “What’s the second announcement?”

  “No tests?” said Rich, trying his joke again and snickering quietly, but getting no laughs at all this time.

  Mrs. Tracy glanced at the note on her desk. “Well, a new girl will be joining our class today,” she said. “In just a few minutes, actually. Her name is Jessica Feeney.”

  Right away the class broke into a low buzzing noise.

  “It’s nice she’s here for the elections,” said Kayla, looking directly at Mrs. Tracy. “Right at the beginning, I mean.”

  Samantha Embriano raised her hand. “I’ll show her around, and she can be my lunch buddy for a week — this week, okay?”

  “I guess I’ll take next week,” said Eric LoBianco, a large boy who everyone said had wet his seat in second grade because the teacher wouldn’t let him leave the class to use the bathroom. “Wait, is she good-looking?”

  The girls in the room squealed and gagged.

  Jeff laughed sharply. Rich howled.

  A new girl?

  I looked at Mrs. Tracy’s face for some sign of
what kind of person this girl might be. She had a cool name. Jessica. For an instant I wondered if she would be as pretty as Courtney. Just after I’d made all these plans about the election, wouldn’t it be strange if a new girl came in smelling like peaches, too?

  No way! Forget that. I nearly laughed out loud in my seat. No matter how good Jessica Feeney looked, no matter how nice she was, she’d never replace Courtney. A flash of Courtney in skiing clothes suddenly came into my mind. There was a distant echo of sniper shots in the white mountains behind her.

  I smiled a little to myself. So that was it. I would nominate Courtney and vote for her. Then she’d know. It would be so cool.

  It’s odd now to think of how I almost missed what Mrs. Tracy said next. I almost missed it, thinking about Courtney, but I looked up just in time and now I can never forget it.

  “There is …,” Mrs. Tracy was saying quietly, “there is something you need to know about Jessica….”

  Chapter 6

  Mrs. Tracy held onto her smile, but it was clear that something really wasn’t right about the whole second announcement. The pink was draining from her cheeks as she looked at us all. Then I noticed that she didn’t so much look at us, as over and around us.

  “Jessica,” she said, “is a girl who has —” She stopped and looked at the door.

  “What?” Kayla said softly behind me.

  There was a tap at the door, and two or three kids in the middle of the room whispered and leaned forward to see out into the hallway. The door opened and the janitor walked in, sliding a desk noisily ahead of him.

  “Where —” he said to no one in particular.

  “In the back, please.” Mrs. Tracy pointed to the end of the second row. The addition of another desk would make that row the longest.

  “She’s putting the new girl in the back of the room,” Kayla whispered to me.

  “I think I take back what I said,” said Eric, just loud enough to be heard.

  “Shh!” said Samantha Embriano.

  The janitor scraped the desk along the floor between the first and second rows. I didn’t like the way he did it; he could have carried it, after all. He set it at the end of the second row, spacing it perfectly from the desk in front of it with a flick of his wrist.