Battle of the Beasts

Ruby looked at Eleanor like she was surprised to see her there. “We’re not doing anything. We were just talking.”

“You think you can make me feel bad, but you can’t. I’ve done a lot of amazing stuff that you would never ever understand. I’ve taken down a real witch.”

“A realwitch?” asked Zoe.

“What are you talking about?” said Ruby. “You got in a fight with Ms Carter?” There was a rumour going around school that Ms Carter, who had dreadlocks and a skull tattoo, was actually a witch.

“No, I—” Eleanor started to explain, but then realised that if she told them any more of the story, she would sound completely bananas. So she just muttered under her breath: “Forget it.”

Ruby put a hand on her shoulder. “You need to calm down. You’re not, like, so important that we just gang up on you to make fun of you.”

“Really?”

“Yeah,” Zoe said. “But you should probably get something better than a grandpa phone.”

Ruby laughed, just a little, and the two girls breezed past Eleanor into school. Eleanor’s head was spinning. She looked back at her phone, at the question “Is everything okay?”

She wanted to get into how Cordelia was mean on the ride over, and how they’d run into Dad and he looked terrible, and how these two girls were making fun of her and she almost spilled the beans about the Wind Witch, and how she just wanted things to go back to normal, the way they were before … but instead she wrote to her mom:

Everything’s fine

She had a feeling that was the way grown-ups handled it.

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Brendan, meanwhile, was in the building that had classes for sixth, seventh and eighth graders, and he was rocking his backpack. It wasn’t just an accessory; it was like a force field that let him walk in a different way, with his chest jutting out, looking at everybody. Because what if they look back? What’ll they see? One of the best backpacks in the world, that’s what.

The bell rang; Brendan was late for class. But so what? I can’t walk fast wearing this. This is a backpack for strutting in. He went to his locker and fiddled with the combination without even noticing the guys behind him: Scott Calurio and his posse.

“What do you think you’re wearing?” Scott said.

Scott was Brendan’s own personal bully, a junior-varsity wrestler, beady-eyed and muscular, with meaty hands and a neck wider than his head. He had curly blond hair, which Brendan thought was a big reason he got away with so much. Nobody suspected a bully with cute, poofy hair. Scott targeted people he felt were different, stupid, and poor, and he had a bunch of wrestler friends who helped him in this mission.

“It’s a skull backpack from Japan. With real diamonds on it.”

“Where’d you get it? Off eBay?”

“None of your business … why are you even bothering me? What did I do to you?”

“You’re walking around like you just scored a winning touchdown, which we all know could never happen in this universe,” Scott said, sharing a laugh with his group. “And hey … I’ve been wondering … what happened to your ear?”

“I got shot,” Brendan said, touching his left earlobe. Scott and his cronies laughed, but it was true. Brendan’s missing earlobe was a small souvenir from his adventures in Kristoff’s books – the pirate Gilliam had blasted it off. Brendan didn’t miss it too much, but it was pretty sad that for the past six weeks, his parents hadn’t even noticed it, because they were caught up in their own problems, and now here was Scott Calurio pointing it out.

“Yeah, right,” Scott scoffed. “Your cat probably licked it off!” His goons all laughed – and then they grabbed Brendan and pushed him to the ground. He fought, kicking and clawing, but he couldn’t get any leverage – there were too many of them.

“Hey! Stop! Help—”

“Shh,” Scott said. “We’re not gonna hurt you. We’re just gonna take a closer look at this.”

Scott pulled off Brendan’s backpack and squinted at it. The diamonds gleamed under the fluorescent lights. Brendan struggled but it was no use; he tried to scream but a hand covered his mouth. I could bite, he thought, but then I’d get made fun of as the kid who bites people.

Scott palmed the inside lining of the backpack until he found a tag. He tore it out and held it up for Brendan.

“What’s that say, huh? I’ll read it for you, in case you’re dyslexic like your little sister. ‘Old Navy.’ Old. Navy. Now why would a backpack from Japan have an Old Navy tag on it? I’ll bet these aren’t diamonds either. I bet they’re made of glass!”

And with that, Scott ripped six or seven “diamonds” off the backpack, put them in his mouth, and … chewed them up! When they were ground to a fine powder, Scott spit them in Brendan’s face.

“Told you!” growled Scott. “You can’t chew real diamonds. This backpack’s fake. Like you. Like your stupid family that came out of nowhere.”

Scott threw the backpack down on to Brendan. People were passing him in the halls while all this was happening, pointing and taking pictures on their phones. The teachers were no use; they were in their rooms drinking coffee, which was probably better because if a teacher saved you from a kid like Scott, that was even more mortifying than being targeted in the first place. But the worst part? Scott’s right, Brendan thought. I am fake.

“Hope you didn’t spend more than ten bucks on that,” Scott said, before walking away down the hall with his minions. The ambient noise of the building took over. Brendan got up and stuck his head far inside the shadows of his open locker. He didn’t want anyone to see him crying.

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Cordelia was feeling a lot better than Brendan. In fact, since she’d started going to Bay Academy Prep, she found that she was happier at school than she was at home, which was a little sad but she didn’t mind. She looked at the place as an opportunity to reinvent herself; at her old school, everyone knew her as the girl who was reading all the time or the quiet girl or “Brendan’s older sister”, because Brendan had such a personality – but not here. Here Cordelia was the person who had started the Student Tutoring Program.

It hadn’t been so hard, and it had come together quickly. In her first two weeks at Bay Academy, Cordelia noticed that a lot of freshmen and sophomores were getting tutors outside the school, which seemed silly, because there were very smart juniors and seniors who could tutor them just fine. And those juniors and seniors wanted extracurricular activities for their college applications, so Cordelia thought: Why not start a programme that turns older students into tutors for younger students?

She went to the Student Union Office to talk about the idea. There she met Priya, student body treasurer, who liked it and liked her. That was how Cordelia found herself participating in student government – or “school politics”, as people called it, but for her it really wasn’t about politics; it was about helping. She set up the Student Tutoring Programme in two weeks and it was a big success, with twenty pairs of tutors and students already signed up.

Maybe helping people is what I’m supposed to do, she thought now as she passed the Student Tutoring sign-up board in Douglas-Kroft, the building that held high-school classes. Help people. It feels good, and it makes me stop thinking about myself, or Will, or what I’ve been through. Priya, the treasurer, had suggested to Cordelia that maybe she should run for class president next year. It was an idea that scared Cordelia and excited her – or maybe it excited her because it scared her.

Cordelia went into her first class, history, with Mrs Mortimer, and sat in the middle of the room. She tuned out her thoughts and got into the work of school, which was something she always had the ability to do … until she felt someone looking at her.

It was a nasty, prickly feeling. Cordelia had felt it a few times in the last few weeks, at school and at home, and she always stopped what she was doing to try and catch the watcher. This time was no different. She sat stock-still and moved only her eyes. Was one of her classmates looking at her? She dropped her pen to give herself an excuse to look behind her. No, it wasn’t any of the students – but it was someone!

Suddenly she saw somebody – out the window, moving away. She couldn’t see the person’s face, just a long black body that quickly disappeared.

She stood up, aghast, but stopped and sat back down.

Something was happening to her hands.

It started with the veins. Below her skin, which was fair, her veins were not things she paid much attention to. But she knew she didn’t have veins on her fingers. Who had veins on their fingers? Old people.

And yet: She had them now. They were dark, and thick, and rising to the surface of her skin.

It was like she was seeing it from outside her body; the veins were stretching, fattening, and the skin around them was shrinking, becoming paler and paler, drying up as if it were going to flake off, like she had a disease, or …

Like I’m getting old, Cordelia thought.

This is a nightmare. It has to be. I’m not really even at school. My mind is sabotaging me. I’m not here at all. She flipped her hands around – her palms had deep lines. Her nails were growing, turning orange, becoming dirty underneath. As she looked at them, a piercing cold hit her side, like a frozen bullet biting into her. Cordelia wrenched over in pain, biting her lip to keep from crying out.

Her hands were curling now, becoming like tangled, dead-grey roots. She remembered something she had learned about foot binding in social studies, how when Chinese people used to foot bind women, the goal was to make their toes turn inwards, to make a “golden lotus,” the most beautiful kind of foot there was, a foot you couldn’t even walk on, and that’s what her hands were turning into – a dead lotus, cold inside—

She screamed.

Everyone in class turned to her. Cordelia quickly hid her hands beneath her desk.