Towering - By Alex Flinn Page 0,63

. . . ?”

I laughed. “It’s a vehicle. It picks you up near your house. It’s big and yellow . . . orange and ugly. A lot of people sit in it, fifty or sixty, two on each seat.”

“Sort of like a train?”

“Not as cool as a train.”

She got a faraway look in her eyes. “I remember a train once, before Mama brought me here. It was nighttime, and we had a private compartment, away from everyone else. Mama wouldn’t let me come out. She was too afraid. I felt sick, and she told me to look out the window, that moving while looking at the other stuff, not moving, was what made me sick. But if I saw movement, I’d feel better. She was right. I stared out, and most of the time, there was nothing outside—just like my window here. But, sometimes, there were towns and houses and stores lining the track. You could tell the name of each town by the signs on the businesses and the post office. Finally, I went to sleep, and when I woke, Mama was carrying me away.” She stared off, remembering. Finally, she said, “So you went on the big yellow-orange ugly bus. Were your friends on the bus too?”

“A lot of them.” I thought of Tyler and Nikki. We’d waited for the bus together, of course.

“It sounds wonderful.”

Sitting there, in the still room, I could almost smell the bus exhaust, hear the farting sound the vehicle made when it stopped, the screaming kids, and the bus driver, shouting at us to be quiet. “It was sort of loud. Every once in a while, the bus driver would flip out at us for being so loud.”

“Flip out?”

“It’s an expression. Get mad, upset.”

She nodded, like she was still picturing someone flipping over. “I don’t even know what loud would be like. My world is quiet, so quiet. Sometimes, I sing just to keep myself company.”

“I know. I’ve heard you.”

She looked at me, surprised. “You have?”

“When I was at my friend’s cabin one night, it was quiet outside. The sound carries here, I guess. I heard you sing. That’s how I knew you were here. I’d heard you before, but this was closer. But no one else heard you. They said it must be a bird, a loon. But I knew it wasn’t.”

“You were meant to hear me, and they were not. I had heard you too, for days before, or rather, sensed you. I knew you were coming.”

It was so weird when she said things like that. Yet, I believed her. I reached over and took her hand in mine. It was small, so small, and cold. I squeezed it.

“Tell me more about your school, when you arrive. What does it look like?”

I tried to picture the school, how it would look to someone who had never been there, who’d never been to a school at all. I closed my eyes, remembering me and Tyler walking up to it, any given day.

“The building is brick. The bus parks in the back by the basketball courts.” She wouldn’t know what that meant. “Basketball is a game we play. There are no trees or anything back there, but there are trees in the front, not as big as these trees. When we get there, there are already lots of people. Everyone finds their friends, their little group. At seven thirty, we go inside.”

“And inside?”

“There are hallways, white tile. Well, it used to be white, but now, it’s gray from all the people stepping on it for so many years. The walls are white too, but they’re covered with posters and signs, so you can’t really see the walls.”

She leaned forward. “What do the posters and signs say?”

“Um, different things. If there’s a student government election—where they choose the people who run things—they put up signs saying things like Vote for Lisa Amore or whatever. Or sometimes, they think of slogans. Like, once, this girl named Sara Mitts ran for president. Her signs had a picture of a shoe on them, and they said If the shoe fits, vote Sara Mitts. Or, sometimes, there was a pep rally.”

“What’s that?”

“Um, football, it’s a game, a contest. People get pretty excited about it.”

“Like the jousting contests in The Once and Future King?”

“Sort of like that. People at school sometimes acted like it was like that. Yeah, we’d challenge other schools to see who was the fastest and strongest, so yeah, just like that. Anyway, before the team