The Gray House

TABAQUI

DAY THE SIXTH

Let us take them in order. The first is the taste,

Which is meagre and hollow, but crisp:

Like a coat that is rather too tight in the waist,

With a flavour of Will-o’-the-wisp.

—Lewis Carroll, The Hunting of the Snark

Watching Noble the next morning, I notice a lot of strange things. He gets a coffee stain on his sweater and doesn’t rush to change out of it. Drops his pillow on the floor and doesn’t even notice, and when he does, neglects to change the pillowcase. Gives Lary two of his nicest shirts. When I, purely by accident, put on a pair of his socks, he doesn’t make a scene and seems genuinely surprised by my sincere apologies. Tiny trifles, sure, but it’s those trifles that composed the significant part of the Noble I knew, and it’s strange to see him not doing things he used to do, and the other way around—doing things he never would have done. He seems to have left a lot of other stuff in the Outsides along with his hair, and I have no idea what that is so I’m undecided if I should be happy or sad about it.

“See, people, here’s the deal,” Lary imparts on the way from the canteen after breakfast. He’s got on Noble’s blue shirt with white egrets on the front, and he looks gorgeous in it. “I say to him, ‘Sorry, Noble, I’ve been using some of your stuff while you were away. You know how it is, taking a girl out, can’t do that in the rags I had.’ So I say that to him and I wait for the fireworks. And he’s like, ‘Sure, take them, they’re yours now. And take these too.’ Dumps it all out in front of me, and goes, ‘Take whatever you want, come on.’ So I took some. And then he gave me his lighter. ‘Have it,’ he says. You know, the one with the dragon. And all I did was say to him, ‘That’s a really nice lighter you have, Noble.’ I didn’t mean anything like that, honest, and he’s like—bang, stuffs it in my pocket. ‘You have it, if you like it,’ he says.”

“Next thing you’re going to beg the underpants off him,” Humpback grumbles. “Have you no shame? Leave the guy alone.”

“I didn’t mean nothing. Just said how nice it was.”

Humpback and I shake our heads. Lary reddens and goes quiet. When we reach the classroom he steps in front of us, barring the way.

“All right. Screw the lighter. So I did figure he’d give it to me if I mentioned it. But you tell me this. Would I have, like, even considered that he might do that? I mean, before? No way. So you tell me, what’s wrong with him and why is he behaving like he’s not himself? I mean, he looks like our Noble and stuff. But he behaves kind of alien. Doesn’t that bother you? You know what I’m saying?”

“Go to hell,” Humpback says, shoving him in the chest. “Get out of the way. I don’t have time to stand here listening to your garbage. How’s that lighter doing, burning your butt yet?”

Lary carefully studies the egret in the center of his shirt, the biggest one, afraid that Humpback might have stained it. Then fingers the fabric.

“What’s with the shoving?” he says. “I call them as I see them, if you don’t want to listen—fine, don’t. Still no reason to go shoving. You think I’m not happy they brought him back? I too am happy! But there is this concern, you see, and I’m just saying. Because all those stories about changelings, they’re not for nothing, you know. Food for thought is all I’m saying.”

Humpback moves for his collar, but Lary wiggles away and runs into the classroom. Humpback and I exchange glances.

“Pitiful excuse for a human,” he says. “I should have smacked him one.”

I fiddle with my earring, turning it around and around.

“Probably. He’s always asking for it. But there is something in what he’s babbling. I noticed too. Noble did change. A lot.”

Humpback frowns, surprised.

“Of course he did. Grown up, that’s all. And also he missed us. Lary is a nitwit, he doesn’t get it, but I would have expected more from you. Where’re your eyes? And ears and everything else?”

He pushes me inside and retreats to his seat. I sidle up to the desk and take out my notes. The ear is burning because I tugged at the earring, but the cheeks do because of Humpback’s words. I stare at Noble. He’s right here, at the next desk, and I can stare to my heart’s content. He’s already hard at work over my notebook, correcting something in my scribbles. I hadn’t asked him to, but he did that before, too, without being asked. Refined aquiline face, unnaturally beautiful, bent over the grubby pages. Even the bald spots and the entire disgusting haircut are powerless to ruin the impression. The hair is not yellow like before, but more on the milk-chocolate side, the way it used to show near the roots. And a barely suggested shadow of a beard. A ghost of a beard. Because of it, or maybe because Humpback’s words are starting to have an effect, I can see that Noble has indeed grown up. Is that all it is? Only this and nothing else? I spend the whole class thinking about it.

The snow is a curtain outside the window. It falls and it falls, easing up only by dinnertime. The entire yard is now only bumps and folds under the white sugary blanket. Very beautiful. Even the Outsides is not quite itself, and it’s completely quiet, as if the House had been transported to a wintry forest. Pity it’s dark, or it all would have glistened and sparkled.

After dinner everyone rushes out. I drive down too. I like snow, even though wheelchairs have a habit of getting completely stuck in it, which is unpleasant, but on the bright side there are many delights that are only available when it’s been snowing.

I pick out a convenient spot and dump myself out into the snowbank. Then I assemble a store of snowballs, and then everyone passing by gets a snowball to the head. My aim is perfect, as usual; as long as I have things to throw, they always land where I want them. Noble soon joins me. The two of us give a good thrashing to the walkers of the Sixth and to Lary and his gang. Logs are uniformly clad in striped pom-pom hats, so aiming at them is ridiculously easy.

By the time the girls come out, everyone is fairly warmed up and wound up. The first barrage greets them right on the porch. They don’t even have time to step down. But there’s enough snow on the porch too, and it offers better opportunities for hiding, so they recover pretty soon and answer with an avalanche of their own. Noble and I are in a completely open spot and cannot run away, so most of it arrives our way. I am flattened against the snowbank and temporarily incapacitated, and by the time I manage to crawl out, the battlefield is strewn with half-exploded ordnance and Noble is wounded in the mouth. He barks out curses mixed with snow.

“What was that word you used to describe them?” I inquire. “‘Tender’? Or was it ‘charming’?”

Before Noble has a chance to answer, a girl in a blue parka gets him right on the bridge of the nose. He yelps and proceeds to prepare the snowball of vengeance, the size of a melon. While he’s thus busy I provide cover for him, picking off the hats that poke above the railing, but the blue parka girl manages to plonk him twice more. Finally Noble rises up and tosses his deadly missile at her feet. An explosion of snow and screams. The blue parka goes down like a bowling pin. I was doubtful that this thing would fly at all, so I’m amazed and humbled, and say so to Noble. He looks at me askance.

“You don’t think I hurt her too much, do you?”

“I think she only fell to flatter you,” I say. “It’s unlikely she got hit that badly.”

Noble doesn’t believe me and crawls to see for himself. “Crawls” is the wrong word here. It’s a slow word. Noble moves very fast. Well, right now he’s hampered by all the snow. By the time he reaches the porch, the girl’s already up and shaking the snow out of her hair. He asks her something from below. She laughs, shakes her head, and plops down into the snowbank next to him—so that he doesn’t feel himself awkward next to her standing. That’s how they continue the conversation—wet and plastered with snow. Like a comedic duo that just climbed out of a gigantic cream pie. But I don’t have time to observe them—someone is shelling me from behind the railing. I have to respond, even though the adversary is hidden and all my snowballs dash futilely against the porch. I wait for the someone to peek out, but she’s smart and keeps down. Which interferes with her aim, so her snowballs miss too. You might say we’re missing each other.

Then I accidentally look up and see Sphinx’s outline in the window of our dorm. It doesn’t matter that it’s just an outline, and it doesn’t matter that his mouth, invisible to me, is almost certainly smiling. I still know what he’s thinking when he looks over our snow battles. Half of my life was spent on windowsills staring down and dying from envy. So one look at his distant shadow is enough for me to lose the desire to frolic.

I toss the lovingly prepared snowball aside and crawl toward Mustang. After an eternity of being pelted from all sides I finally reach it, only to discover that Mustang is wet and slippery. Some clown had the bright idea of using it to shield himself. I try to climb in but keep slipping. Takes me three tries. Then I realize that the snow around me is so trampled that there’s no way to drive through. Mustang lists to one side, stalled irretrievably. A gloomy sight. Horse and Bubble, kindhearted Logs of the Third, offer help. They roll me up the porch ramp, and we are immediately mobbed by the girls begging me to play with them just a bit more. That’s unexpected and flattering, and I perspire anxiously all the way up to the second floor and to the doors of the dorm, recalling how they dubbed me “William Tell” and asked me to stay. And that’s considering that the yard was fairly swarming with guys. Every walker of the House plus the wildest of the wheelers.

The hallway is empty. Only Blind’s out, shuffling to and fro and kicking wet sawdust with his feet. When I wheel into the dorm, Sphinx is still by the window, inquiring testily of Alexander who Noble is cavorting with, buried up to his neck in snow, and who’s that girl running circles around Black, eyeing him salaciously.

“How is it possible, Sphinx,” Alexander says, “to see the salaciousness in the eyes from up here?”

Now warm and dry in my dressing gown, I sit over the chessboard. Sphinx is right across from me. Knitting his brow, demonstrating to the world how the little gray cells are working overtime, but in fact engrossed in the sounds filtering from the yard.

“Put the kettle on,” he tells Alexander. “They’re going to barge in soon and start whining and demanding tea. You’ll be running off your feet.”

Alexander plops the kettle on the hotplate and joins us on the bed. I have this ambush brewing, hidden in the corner of the board, and on no occasion should Sphinx notice it, so I sing the distracting Confusion Song and pointedly stare at the other corner, where a decoy attack is being prepared. Blind is sitting with his feet on the table, yawning and rummaging in the tool chest, already half-gutted. The screams in the yard grow less and less loud, then migrate to the hallways. Squeals, thundering feet: someone’s galloping down the corridor while being destroyed with snowballs.

I feign great interest and turn toward the door, but when I glance back at the board, the inventive attack is in ruins and Sphinx is pushing my queen off with the rake-prong.

Queen in the ashtray means the game’s all but over.

“The snow’s coming here,” Alexander says.

The door screeches and here they are, white as a gaggle of snowmen: Black, Humpback, Noble, and Lary, and two girls with them, the blue parka and the purple one. They’re all in hysterics. Lary, giggling moronically, smashes a large snowball in the center of the board.

The pieces scatter. Sphinx, scowling, uses his knee to wipe his face. The scowl is quite a friendly one, but Lary thinks better of dumping the second snowball on us and with the same idiotic grin breaks it over his own head.

Black and Humpback help the girls with their heavy clothes. Coats are tossed on the windowsill, hats are taken off, and scarves unwound. The blue parka turns out to be fiery red. It’s Ginger, of course—sharp face and inky eyes. And the purple one is Fly, swarthy and toothy, covered in moles. Now that I’ve identified them I’m free to jump up and down on the pillows and screech invitingly.

They immediately plop down on the floor. Sphinx sidles up, or down, to them, while Black and Humpback proceed to bustle, putting out the plates, cups, and ashtrays. They all leave wet squelching footsteps that Alexander keeps surreptitiously running the rag over.

I slither down to the floor too. We sit in a semicircle. Most of me is under the bed, only my head is peeking out. Tea’s served. A compelling installation of wet socks on a string stretches over our heads all across the room, spreading fragrant dampness. Drying boots stick out of the heater. Ginger and Fly are both wrapped in blankets, with smoke curling upward from under the makeshift hoods.

Lary is engrossed in excavating his nostril, imagining that he’s doing it discreetly. Noble and Humpback also put on blankets. Alexander roams the room offering tea, and the boombox is burbling unobtrusively. In short, a nice evening of pleasant domesticity. Not quite the way we would have done it by ourselves, though, or even with the Old Sissy Guard, because girls are girls and their presence is somewhat limiting. It’s one thing to imagine yourself sparkling with wit, but the wit itself does not readily present itself. Only stale, belabored jokes, not worthy of being thought of, much less enunciated. Better to keep silent. So I’m silent for a spell. Breathing in and listening to others.

They’re rehashing the snow battle. Can’t seem to get enough of it. Ginger’s bare feet peek from under the blanket. The feet are milky white and scratched, the curled-up toes move when she speaks. Fly makes faces, sways, and giggles. Then she chokes on the smoke and sweeps the corner of the blanket off her head, so we now see her sharp teeth and the metal rings in her ears, five in each. Eyebrows dusted with glitter. She looks like a thieving ragamuffin. Maybe because she constantly pouts, or maybe because she keeps flaring her nostrils. Takes no great leap of imagination to picture her doing something like stealing horses. Also, she talks too fast. Even for me.

Ginger is silent. Either smoking or gnawing at her nails. Looking at the two of them, an outside observer would say: now here’s a shy and quiet girl, and here’s a gregarious and talkative one. All nice and clear, choose whichever one suits you better. But those of us who knew them from a tender age know that it’s not so simple. Because Fly was the one who never said a single word for five straight years, from age six to age eleven. She was neither deaf nor mute, but she’d flee under the bed anytime anyone tried to approach her. Whereas Ginger had been at one time dubbed Satan by the counselors. Not even I have distinguished myself with a nick like that. So she’s about as humble and mild mannered as I am. And she’s grown quieter and quieter each year.

I pull at the edge of her blanket.

“Hey, Gingie, do girls still get sent to the Cages?”

She leans closer to me.

“Of course. But to the ones in our hallway, not those on the counselors’ floor. Godmother never allows Cases near us. They’re always drunk and tend to let their hands wander too much. So she does the honors herself. Locks us in and lets us out. She’s the only one with the keys.”

“Wow,” I say. “That sounds just like her.”

Counselor Godmother is the House’s Iron Lady. Looking at her you start imagining that she must be jangling and clanking as she walks, like the Tin Man. But the only sound you actually hear is those heels clicking.

Lary inquires about Blondie, the new counselor. Girls’ counselors are a favorite topic with Logs, and they absolutely adore Blondie. Ever since they first laid their eyes on her.

“Still feeling out the place,” Fly says. “She’s kinda cute, but on the nervous side. I don’t think she’s going to take an entire shift. Running errands for others is just about her speed. And that hair, it’s real, imagine that. A natural strawberry blonde. Gorgeous shade.”

Lary swallows and lets out a wistful sigh. As far as I’m concerned, blondes like that are better off being buried alive. Well, this one might be cute, I wouldn’t know. I’ve only seen her twice, and both times I could only look at the watch she had. Huge thing, the size of a large onion. Ticking like a bomb. Disgusting. So her hair was the last thing on my mind.

“Our Tubby is totally in love with her,” Sphinx says. “I was walking him down on the first. And she’d just left Shark’s office, straight at us. Tubby tossed himself out of his wheelchair and made a beeline for her. At a ridiculous speed. No one could’ve expected that.”

“And?” Fly says, opening her eyes wide.

“Nothing,” Sphinx scowls. “Gummed her a bit, that’s all. But you should have heard the screams.”

We are silent for a while, out of respect for Tubby’s broken heart. Ginger has emerged from under her veil. Humpback’s red shirt and her own fiery hair—the impression here is of a flaming torch. You just can’t go and set black eyes into a face like that. It’s scary. The skin does not exactly crawl, but definitely feels scratchy.

Fly keeps turning her head this way and that, looking for something.

“Where’s your crow? I heard you had a crow living here. I’d love to take a look!”

Humpback goes to take out Nanette. The poor bird, already tucked in for the night.

“How’s Mermaid doing?” I ask. “You know, the small one with the longest hair,” I clarify, because I’m still not sure about the nick.

“Ask her,” Fly says, pointing at Ginger. “They’re from the same room. The Dreadful Dorm.”

Ginger’s eyebrows jerk up. She’s not looking at Fly; her chin is buried in her knees, finger sweeping the lips distractedly.

“I mean, distinctive,” Fly backpedals. “The most unusual, I mean . . .”

Humpback returns with sleepy Nanette in an irritated torpor and parades her before the girls. Fly carefully pets the gunmetal feathers. The bird startles and pulls the translucent film over her eyes. Were she in a bit more conscious state, the enemy’s fingers already would have been pecked to a bloody mess.

“Isn’t she a darling . . . Beau-utiful . . . ,” Fly coos obliviously. “So cute.”

The cute darling looks daggers and is already starting to wheeze threateningly, so Humpback whisks her away back to the perch.

“Such a sweetie,” Fly persists. “I could’ve just eaten her up!”

“Before you do, make sure you have a spare set of eyes handy,” Black says. “It’s not a darling at all, really.”

“Nah,” Fly pouts, not taking her eyes off departing Nanette. “She’s a sweet girl, she can’t be a meanie.”

“So, how’s Mermaid?” I ask again. “I had a little talk with her yesterday.”

Ginger looks at my vest and smiles.

“Mermaid’s doing fine,” she says. “She’s one of those people . . . Well, maybe they only look like that, I don’t know. But anyway, they’re rare, those people who never have any problems. Or at least behave as if they don’t have any.”

We all look at Alexander. He blushes and gets tangled in the coffeemaker’s electric cord. We turn away, giving him time to untangle.

I have a strange aftertaste in my mouth after this exchange. As if I, too, know how she is, the girl who creates the most wonderful vests in the world and then gives them away to the first stranger she meets. This conversation calls for a smoke. Ginger and I light up in unison, except her cigarette, unlike mine, gets six lighters thrust at it from all directions, and the most insistent of them belongs to Noble, and I suddenly realize that he’s been kind of strangely bright red of color, and the looks he’s been giving Ginger are also strange. Probing and fiery. Predatory, one might even say. It is so obvious that I grow uncomfortable, and throw a sideways glance at Sphinx: Has he noticed yet?

Well, if he has, he’s not letting it show. He’s twirling the ashtray with the rake, all sleepy like. He and Wolf always looked like that when something piqued their interest. Deceptively relaxed.

“I tried my best to protect the ear.” Lary wades in with a non sequitur. “And still it got walloped. A nasty one, too. Hope it’s not going to get infected like the last time.”

He feels his ear and then examines the fingers. As if, when he touched it, the infection could have fallen out.

“You don’t look like your ears would be giving you trouble,” Fly notes kindly.

Lary considers this. Should he take it as a compliment?

We discuss the latest Gallery. The actual paintings there could be counted on one hand, but Lizard from the Third exhibited himself, painted. That was a sight to behold. Looking at Lizard is a scary proposition even under normal circumstances. But body-painted . . . Talking about the Gallery shakes Smoker out of his funk and he tells us about a couple of exhibitions he happened to attend back in the Outsides. Then we discuss the Fortune-Telling Salon. I worked there for a week as Madame Zazu, fortune-teller and palmist extraordinaire, and can impart some inside info. Fly and Lary proceed to gossip about the girls’ counselors—that is, Fly gossips while Lary nods excitedly. Ginger and I get into an argument about Richard Bach, also in a gossipy way. We both agree that he isn’t too bad as a writer, but as far as women in his life are concerned, he behaved like a complete bastard. Take, for example, his search for the One, where the aspiring girls more or less had to pass a private pilot’s exam at some point.

“And smokers were cut right out,” Ginger fumes. “Because, get this, he doesn’t smoke! As if she couldn’t just quit if it came to that.”

I still want to talk more about Mermaid, but can’t work up the courage.

Blind wants to know when Rat is expected back from her foray into the Outsides. Rat is the House’s principal Flyer, and he placed a large and expensive order with her. Ginger doesn’t know when Rat will return. No one knows. Not even Rat herself. Black tries to find out where Rat sleeps when she’s in the Outsides and generally how she manages to stay there for extended periods of time, but neither Ginger nor Fly can tell him anything about that because they, too, have no idea.

Ginger looks up to the ceiling.

“You used to have this wall with all those animals living on it,” she says out of the blue. “And you kept the door locked. And put snares behind it. Traps. Or so they said. I dreamed of that wall so often that at some point it became very important to see it for real. So I sneaked into your dorm through the window.”

“There are bars, and nothing to step on,” Noble whispers, not taking his burning eyes off her.

Ginger glances at him and chuckles.

“There were no bars back then, and there’s this crumbly ledge along the wall. I followed it about halfway and got scared. I was stuck there for an eternity, unable to move. Until the seniors spotted me. It was horrible.”

“They picked you off,” I venture. “Fetched a stepladder and talked you down.”

“No. They stood below and watched. With interest. So I had to get going.”

“Yeah.” Humpback shudders. “They were good at that. Watching with interest, I mean. Don’t ask . . .”

“Quiet!” I crawl closer, anticipating something very important to be revealed any second now. “Go on,” I urge Ginger. “So, what happened? You climbed in and . . .”

“And there I was in your room,” Ginger says, half smiling, fiddling with the cigarette in her fingers. “At first I was just glad that I made it. That I was standing on a solid, dependable surface. Then I studied the wall. It turned out to be completely different from what I had imagined, but it was still so amazing. Like it was boundless, stretching out into infinity on both sides.” Ginger spreads her arms wide, demonstrating the vast expanse. “It’s hard to explain. I didn’t have much time, I knew you were going to be back soon, and I still had to make myself climb out of that window, travel along that horrible ledge, and slide down the drainpipe . . . I found this thick marker in the nightstand and drew a bird on the wall. It came out so ugly, so . . . insignificant. Spoiled the entire wall. It got me so depressed that I almost didn’t notice how I crawled out. Cried myself to sleep that night.”

“And two days later you returned to paint it in,” Sphinx says. “To make it white. You signed it Jonathan. And then Jonathan started leaving us presents.”

“Oh god,” Humpback moans. “So Jonathan was you all along? And there we were, fiddling about with the traps and everything.”

“Now this, my friends,” I explain to my fingernails, “is what’s commonly known as a shock to the system. When you suddenly find out what’s behind an unsolved mystery. In the twilight of your years. The fastest way to a psychological trauma, I’ll have you know. You see, Black, we kept finding these . . .”

“I get it,” Black interrupts me. “You don’t need to spell it out.”

But he doesn’t. Neither he, nor Noble and Alexander, nor Lary. The only ones who would get it are Vulture, Shuffle, Beauty, and Elephant. If we told them. But no one else.

Soft rustling. Humpback searches his pockets. Blind rummages in some hidden recesses as well. I unhook the earring. Our hands meet over the blanket. Humpback’s palm cradles a small brass bell. Blind has a coin on a string. I’m holding the earring.

“To the foul-smelling pirate from Jo, the one flying across oceans,” I recite. “Except the note is long gone, of course.”

Ginger bites her lip.

“You’ve kept it! After all this time!”

“Those are gifts from Jonathan.” Sphinx laughs. “Treasure. If I’m not mistaken, Noble also inherited one. The seashell.”

Noble grasps at the shell, gripping it tightly. Looks almost obsessive doing it.

“Oh, and by the way,” I add. “Blind always ended up with the most gifts, for some reason. Some greedy people, such as myself, used to take offense.”

Ginger reddens. In her eyes I read a reproach, a plea to stop burrowing into the memories and a lot of other things that make my tongue freeze and my head receive belated insights concerning the real reasons certain people made an appearance in this room tonight.

“Interesting,” Black remarks, sipping his tepid tea and not looking at anyone in particular. “So Jonathan played favorites?”

Ginger blushes even deeper, but straightens up defiantly and shoots back, “He did. Still does. So?”

If I were Ginger I wouldn’t be saying things like that, not under the heavy gaze of Noble’s burning eyes. In fact, with him looking like that, which is inhumanly beautiful, I’d have probably lost the ability to speak altogether. But girls are mysterious creatures. If she thinks she likes Blind better, there’s nothing anybody can do about it. After all, it’s not for nothing Jonathan risked her life climbing the ledges and sneaking into other people’s windows.

“I know this one solitaire,” Fly says, breaking up the awkward silence. “Dream a Little Dream, it’s called. Almost never comes out, but if it does it means that your innermost desire will come true. Cool, huh?”

“Wicked,” I say. “Do it right now. I am full of innermost desires.”

Alexander passes the deck and pushes the cups out to the edge of the blanket. Fly begins dealing, stumbling through the rules. Ginger shivers and wraps the blanket tighter around herself, pulling in her bare feet.

“If you’re cold, you can take my socks,” I say. “You can return them whenever. Next time you come here.”

She agrees and Alexander goes to the wardrobe to fetch the socks.

“How about my sweater?” Noble says plaintively. “It’s really warm.”

“There,” Fly says, crestfallen, holding the last remaining card. “This always happens. Didn’t I say it never comes out right? I think it’s designed that way, to keep you from getting bored.”

She turns to Noble.

“Can I have your sweater instead? I feel kinda cold too. Freezing, actually.”

Noble nods impassively.

“Sure.”

“What’s your innermost desire?” I ask Fly. “The one that never comes out right?”

She waves the card at me.

“Get away! You can’t say it, or it’ll never come true.”

Humpback and Lary yawn furtively. Ginger pulls on my socks.

“Nice place you have, guys,” Fly says. “But it’s getting late. Anyone got the time?”

“Shhh!” everyone hisses, and Fly, startled, puts her hand over her mouth.

“What?” she mumbles into her palm. “What did I say?”

“That which you just mentioned should not be mentioned in front of Tabaqui,” Humpback says, shaking his head. “It really shouldn’t.”

“What was it I mentioned?” Fly whispers. “I don’t remember.”

Humpback and Lary tap their wrists, miming nonexistent watches. Lary does it with a look of utter disgust on his face, probably channeling me. Now poor Fly’s completely confused.

“What is it? Some kind of disease?” she asks.

This entire conversation, and especially the gestures accompanying it, do start to make me sick. Slightly. I do not appreciate my psychological peculiarities being put on display, and crawl farther under the bed. Then I put my hands over my ears. Now let them say whatever they want. By the way, a mere mention of a watch is never enough for me to fly off the handle, they’re well aware of that. When I crawl back out they are already discussing something else, and getting ready to leave.

The girls have discarded the blankets. Fly’s own speckled sweater is peeking out from under Noble’s gray one. She tugs on both, admiring her reflection in the wardrobe’s polished door, and cheerfully displays her teeth. Lary, putting on boots, heaps praise on her belt buckle that I completely failed to notice. Alexander rolls up the blanket formerly known as tablecloth. Sphinx and Blind are also going out, while Noble, who wheeled off into a corner to give everyone some space, watches Ginger from over there like a predator stalking its prey with a penetrating, unblinking stare.

I emerge fully, loath to miss even the smallest detail. But there isn’t anything to miss anymore: the guests are leaving, the evening morphed into the night, and the radio DJs are cheerfully greeting the insomniacs—in short, the predawn stupefaction is right around the corner. The saddest of all moods. Few are those who could gabble through the night with unrelenting intensity, like me, for example. Ginger is still wearing my socks and doesn’t seem to want to take them off before heading out, which means there’s a possibility of her coming back. On the other hand, she could always send them over with someone else.

“Bye,” she and Fly say to me, Noble, and Alexander.

Everyone else is planning to walk them home. With flashlights.

“Bye, Jonathan,” I reply. “Come again.”

She nods uncertainly and steals a sideways glance at Blind. Blind, of course, is not aware of that, but, honestly, he might have guessed. The others dutifully hold off inviting her back for a few seconds, giving him first dibs. When they do, they invite Fly as well. Lary, giggling, tells her to bring Gaby along. Idiot, that one.

Finally they file out. The whole crowd, leaving behind me, Alexander, Smoker, and also Noble. Ginger’s departure takes the sparkliness and fieriness out of him, leaving him dull and sullen.

I climb on the bed and start tidying it up. Spread out the plastic bag, shake the ashtrays out over it, add the half-eaten pieces of this and that, peel the gum blobs off the railing. Make a pile out of the textbooks and notes. Once the mess is localized and pushed to the edge, I create a burrow near the headboard and dive in. It’s warm and cozy here. Alexander’s broom swishes softly. Noble is completely quiet. I condense a cloud of drowsy fog around myself, a small one, to make it even cozier, and start remembering.

Jonathan. The ghost haunting our room. Probably the only case in the entire history of the House when a room had its own ghost. We were extremely proud. Countless times we had discussed the gifts he was leaving us, trying to decipher who he was. Countless times we had invented more and more elaborate snares and traps, only to come up empty again and again. Which served as irrefutable proof of his nonhuman nature. At first we had suspected our neighbors from next door. Then, the seniors. But neither could possibly know about our traps and snares, while Jonathan somehow evaded them all. Having despaired of catching him, we set to uncovering his identity through his handwriting. We diligently collected samples for comparison by stealing homework left in the staff room to be graded. We accumulated a sizable pile and were just about to destroy the evidence when a janitor stumbled upon it and told the administration on us.

I shuffle through the memories of that time. Funny how no one had even considered to snatch a girl’s notebook. Because, quite obviously, Jonathan was male. One thing we couldn’t grasp, though: Why hadn’t he chosen a more inventive nick? Why a simple name? Once the hopes of catching him had evaporated, we started leaving notes for him.

Why Jonathan?

In lieu of an answer, we received a skinny book about a seagull. We had collectively read it aloud, as was our custom back then. Because of Blind, because of Beauty, who could barely put letters together, and because of Elephant, who didn’t even come as far as the letters. So it was an obvious solution. Naturally, Wolf was best at reading, so he’d get the longest chapters. For some reason everyone agreed that I was the worst. We learned about Jonathan Livingston Seagull, but that hadn’t really helped us in figuring out the identity of our mysterious visitor. The book hadn’t been checked out of the library, so it didn’t have a card we could examine for clues, and pointedly dropping the word seagull around did not lead us to its supposed owner. Among seniors almost everyone had read the book; among juniors we were the only ones.

Are you a seagull? was our question to Jonathan in the next letter. Jonathan maintained his silence, leaving us instead a suspicious brownish feather. We kept the feather and showed it to anyone who had even a passing familiarity with ornithology. The scholars concluded that the feather did not belong to a seagull, but whose it was they couldn’t say.

I remember all of this and many other things besides, fall asleep, wake up again, remember some more, and suddenly it strikes me that I have missed a chance to unravel one of the mysteries that had so tormented us when we were kids. How did she know in advance about all of our traps? The fact that Jonathan turned out to be Ginger doesn’t explain anything at all. The more I think about it the more it bugs me that I didn’t think to ask. Now I have to wait until the next time she comes. And what if she never comes again? This thought strips the sleepiness clean off. I toss and turn, I sigh, I call myself stupid. Well, all right, so I did a stupid thing. But what about the others, the supposedly smart ones, huh? No one thought to ask about what’s most important! Unless . . . Unless they did. Of course! I shake myself up, peek out of the burrow, and look around.

Asleep. All of them, snuffling shamelessly. Smoker on the other end, Sphinx to the left of me, while Noble is nowhere to be seen. There’s a lonely silhouette on the windowsill, though, gazing at the stars. Very romantic. Must be him.

I kick Sphinx in the ribs.

“Hey! Hey, wake up! I need to ask something, quick.”

“Tabaqui! You bastard!” Sphinx shakes his bald head sleepily. “Never in my life have I met anyone half as nasty as you. What is it now?”

“Have you by any chance thought to ask how she managed to evade all our traps? You know, the most important and fascinating thing?”

“I have,” Sphinx grumbles and lowers his head back on the pillow. “But I’m not telling. Not until you mend your dirty ways.”

“Sphinx, please! Pretty please! Or I won’t be able to sleep . . . Tell me . . .” I keep jostling him gently in sync with my entreaties. “Sphinx, tell me . . .”

He sits up again.

“Damn it, Tabaqui! I would have told you everything when we came back, except you were asleep, and I respected that, by the way. And this is the gratitude I get . . .”

“I wasn’t asleep!”

I indignantly crawl out.

“See that? I’m fully dressed. Wouldn’t I be in pajamas if I were really asleep?”

“I see. So what I was supposed to do is dig up your nest and check if you’re dressed or wearing pajamas?”

“Yes, you were! Especially considering that I wasn’t asleep at all. I was thinking.”

Blind sits up on his mattress on the floor.

“Just tell him, Sphinx. He’s going to chew us all up by morning if you don’t.”

“She got it from Elephant,” Sphinx says reluctantly. “That’s all there is to it. And in return she allowed him to touch her hair.”

I remember now. Every time Elephant saw Ginger he would try to reach for her hair, huffing, “Want! Want!” Something of an unusually vivid color in a place where other people don’t have anything interesting—that’s all he saw. And more than anything in the world Elephant liked to touch unusual things: soap bubbles, cats’ tails, burning matches.

I sigh, disappointed. What a mundane explanation for the most intractable enigma of our childhood. It would have been better not to know.

“So that’s it,” I say. “Simple and boring.”

“And for that you had to wake me up,” Sphinx says vengefully.

“Yes. The suspense would’ve killed me. And now we can all sleep in peace.”

Blind lights up, and Sphinx sidles up to him to mooch a couple of puffs. My burrow is in shambles. I have to construct a fresh one. I quietly hum a new song, stacking the pillows. Mysteries revealed, Jonathan unmasked! Now that I’ve had time to think, that’s a great thing, and the rest is small details, not worth getting upset about.

Truth is the greatest friend. Now we can sleep in peace.

Certainty came in the night. There was a knock at the door.

The snowball crashed on the board! Then she entered the room!

Bearing the torch of Knowledge. Here’s how the story goes . . .

“Do you like her?” Sphinx asks Blind, a shadow from where I’m sitting.

I cut the song short, afraid of missing the answer.

“No,” Blind says after a pause. “Not really. She had this disgusting habit when she was little. She’d knock me over and run away laughing. It really ticked me off. Elk told me never to hit girls, or I’d have given her a thrashing.”

“Yeah, that’s right,” Sphinx says thoughtfully. “She always tried to shove you. I couldn’t really understand it. She wasn’t usually that way.”

I position myself by the entrance to the freshly constructed burrow, hugging Sphinx’s pillow.

“Yep,” I say. “In civilized societies little boys pull the hair of the little girls they like. And put dead mice in their pockets. To say nothing about tripping them. Which is how they express their love. We borrowed this kind of behavior from our prehistoric ancestors. Those were simpler times. You see a girl, you ogle at her, you whack her on the head with a woolly-mammoth bone—and that’s your wedding, right there. Later generations were more interested in peeking under the long skirts of their girl companions, where they, being smart to those ways, wore lacy underpants. Besides, the sight of a crying girl all spattered with mud is so touching. They unleash a maelstrom of feelings in the heart of the suitor, those pretty tears.”

“I doubt Blind looked particularly pretty when tripped up,” Sphinx mutters. “To say nothing about tears and lacy underpants. You’re over-philosophizing it, Jackal.”

“I thought I specifically mentioned the civilized societies? Of course, here it’s the other way around.”

“Let’s get some sleep,” Blind says. “Or next thing we know, Black was crazy about me and that’s why he was pummeling me all day long. To marvel at how beautiful I was when in tears.”

“Why not?” Sphinx sneers. “A fascinating concept. Except it would mean that with me it was simply love at first sight. Black clearly liked my tears much more than yours. And I had such a lot of them to share with him.”

“Guys, will you stop with the gossiping?” Humpback’s voice drones from the upper bunk. “He’s sleeping right here, you know, and you’re babbling this god-awful nonsense about him.”

“Play us something soft, Shaggy,” Sphinx asks, looking up. “A nighttime serenade. Jackal chased away our dreams, and all that’s left is gossip. Distract us.”

“Yeah, go on. That way no one sleeps,” Blind says.

Humpback stirs, then swings his legs down and begins playing. I jump into the burrow, intending to fall asleep to his flute, so I need to hurry before he stops. But I don’t pull my head in yet because Sphinx and Blind are still up, which means they might still discuss something interesting. Except they don’t. So there we are. They’re silent, I’m silent. Humpback plays, warding off the gossip.