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“Maybe, if I can think of the right words, I can even make you stop wanting to hit me. I’ll make you a deal, okay?”
“Yes,” Max breathed.
“If my desk hasn’t talked by the time we’re out of this school, you can hit me. Twice. And your fist will be bigger then. And if it does—”
“You get to hit me?”
“Sure, if that’s what makes you happy. I get to hit you. Sound fair?”
It worked better than Thomas had thought it would. His parents were mostly immune to this sort of thing by now. Max nodded. He looked like he was going to cry. Thomas felt it best to exit while he was still mercifully unpunched. He turned to go, almost tiptoeing, as if he could give them all the slip and vanish like a spy in a comic book. But he couldn’t, not in real life. Max came to and flailed out with his foot. He knew he’d been shown up somehow, and no small primate can bear that for much longer than a minute. Max’s kick landed and Thomas went sprawling, the Secretive Satchel flying open, his baseball and his pencil and Inspector Balloon skittering out under the toothy mouth of the jungle gym. His mittens did not unravel into real paws. They landed in a freezing, half-dried mud puddle. One of his Golden Galoshes came loose as he landed on the pavement. One of the Other Children snatched it up. His stocking foot soaked through in a moment with filthy, sludgy water.
Goodbye, shoe.
“What’s that?” one of Max’s friends shrieked. “Is that your diary, Thomas?”
The Other Children gasped all together at this juicy bit of fresh meat thrown before them. Thomas scrambled for Inspector Balloon, but Max was faster. He seized it and held it up like a hunter parading the head of a vanquished lion. Only then did a snag in his plan seem to dawn in his eyes.
“Well, but I can’t read it, though.”
Thomas breathed relief. Saved by Mrs. Wilkinson only having gotten to the letter L today. But it was not to be: A girl in the back of the throng trilled out:
“Make him read it!” The voice was only a little thing, strangely flat and soft, but it carried over all their heads and into Max’s ear.
Max, triumphant, shoved Inspector Balloon back into Thomas’s muddy hands. “Read it or I’ll thump you till your mummy won’t know you,” he barked. “Nice and loud, Bobby’s deaf in one ear.”
Thomas wiped the rainwater off of his notebook. He shoved the Carnivorous Mittens in his pocket and sniffled. They would hate him forever if he read them his rules. They would stare at him like his father did and tell him to shut up shut up shut up. They would know he wasn’t Normal. That he had no Common Sense. That he couldn’t understand things the way they could understand them. He would be a leper in the Kingdom of School forever. For the first time, Thomas Rood longed for his house full of things that he wanted so desperately to be alive but stubbornly refused. Real alive things were terrifying. And they could pull out your stuffing if you disappointed them. But none of the Great Battles of Britain had much to say on the subject of just wanting to go home and have some milk and a sulk.
Thomas tried to make his eyes deep, endless pools with soft stars in the mud of their bottoms. But he was crying too much and his nose was dripping and they just stayed a little boy’s red eyes. He tried to make his voice kind and hushed and seductive, but it cracked and shook like a skinny twig in the wind.
“The Laws of the Kingdom of School,” he squeaked. “One: A Teacher is the same thing as an Empress only a Teacher wears skirts and uses a ruler instead of a scepter. Two: Be present at eight o’clock sharp or you will be marked Tardy and if you are Tardy enough you will be banished to the Land of Detention, where no food or joy can live. Three: If you write that you shall not do a thing five hundred times you cannot do it again for your whole life. Only Teachers possess this magic, as Mother and Father have never tried it. Four: A race of Giants live in the Kingdom of School. They are the Big Kids and they dwell in the Upperclassmen’s Wing. They must be treated as dragons and never bothered or they will destroy us, for they know great and terrible magic as well as how to drive cars. Five: When the clock strikes three in the afternoon, the power of the Teacher is broken with the pealing of a bell and all go free. Six: There is a curse called Homework a Teacher may cast if she longs for her power to continue after the great bell has rung…”
Thomas stopped. Twenty children stared at him. Twenty children gawped at Thomas the Un-Normal in the wet, gray play yard. Finally, Max coughed.
“You got any more?” he whispered.
When Gwendolyn Rood collected her son from his first day at school, she was surprised to see him surrounded by boys and girls, all smiles and chatter and See you tomorrow, Tom! Bye, Tom! My mother says you can come round for cake if you want, Thomas! Thomas was surprised to see her waving in the distance. It had not occurred to him that his exile was not final and absolute, that he would be allowed visitors—that he would be allowed to go home and have toast with honey and play with his toys as though the castle on the hill did not exist at all. He folded this away with all the other facts he had learned about the fell land of Public School 348, drawing it into a kind of map he could hold in his head, a map that showed the classroom and the play yard and Mrs. Wilkinson and HUMPHREY! and Max and staplers and carpets with little red flowers on them.
A warm hand settled on his shoulder. At first, Thomas thought it was a teacher, or perhaps, perhaps—the hand felt like something he could almost remember, but not quite, another hand, gloved in red, and how it moved on a pelt of black fur…But the hand did not belong to the Red Wind, nor to Mrs. Wilkinson. It belonged to a girl his own age. It belonged, in fact, to the girl who looked like a bull at the Battle of Hastings.
Thomas turned and saw two curious, hickory-brown eyes dancing before him. The girl was staring at him with acute interest, standing awkwardly, like an improbable giraffe poised to flee through the long grass. She twisted the ends of her hair in her fingers, fine and thick and black. Her skin was darker than his, and in places here and there the fine lines of scars snaked over her limbs. Her skirt had a threadbare hem and she clutched her satchel like it could save her from drowning.
“What happened to your shoe?” she said in a soft, bright voice. He’d heard that voice before, only then it had said: Make him read it. Thomas opened his mouth and closed it again. He lifted his sodden stocking foot.
“I lost it,” he said.
The girl smiled. It was a smile like a soapbox racer—tiny, uneven, crooked, a smile that looked brand new, as though she had just made it in her cellar and was trying it out for the first time.
“You didn’t lose it,” she said, letting her soapbox smile run free, careening all the way across her face. “You left it.”
She held up one of his Golden Galoshes, rinsed clean and shining.
“My nam
e is Tamburlaine,” she offered.
“That’s a funny name,” Thomas said, and immediately regretted it.
“It’s not funny, it’s Marlowe,” she sighed. “My father is a librarian.” She seemed to think this was an explanation.
