The Revealers Page 3

  I was not in this group. I was definitely not in this group.

  “Predators might wait until they could pick off a straggler,” Elliot said. “But they probably wouldn’t attack a whole crowd.”

  “Why not?”

  “Most predators’ brains weren’t very large. If a crowd scattered in all directions they probably got disoriented.”

  I sat back and imagined this big dumb kid charging into the white-shirted crowd—and kids stumbling all over each other, scrabbling on the floor for fallen-off glasses and tossing lunches and electronic equipment out of their backpacks to appease the rampaging beast, who becomes confused and stands there with his big head twitching all around, surrounded by wire-rim glasses and graphing calculators and bologna-and-peanut-butter sandwiches.

  “Of course, tyranno was different,” Elliot said. “He’d lie in some undergrowth near a clearing or a stream bed. When prey came along, he’d charge out with his jaws wide open. Tyranno didn’t care how big a herd was! He’d always get somebody.”

  Suddenly in my mind I saw only Richie’s face. He was looking right at me. He raised his eyebrows.

  I sagged in my chair.

  “Right,” I said.

  A girl came in and sat down at a table between us and the door. She was in our grade, a girl named Catalina. She was new this year, and different looking: tall and skinny, with big squarish glasses and straight, extremely dark hair, almost black, that hung below her ears. Her face was the color of coffee ice cream, and behind her glasses it was expressionless.

  I first noticed that about Catalina, the blank look she had, at the beginning of the year, when she was the new girl being introduced in our social studies class. Ms. Hogeboom, who knew a Learning Opportunity when she saw one, asked the new girl to tell a little about herself

  The new girl stood up. People started whispering.

  “I am from near Manila. In the Philippines,” she said, and sat down. The whispers turned into giggling.

  “There’s no need to stand when you’re called, Catalina,” Ms. Hogeboom said. “Is that what students do in the Philippines?”

  Catalina started to stand again, but stopped partway. “In my school, yes,” she said, bent over like a grasshopper. More giggles erupted. She sat down fast.

  “Excuse me, please,” Ms. Hogeboom said loudly. When the class settled down she said, “Now, Catalina. How did you happen to come to this country? You don’t have to stand.”

  “My father is from Ohio,” she said. “He was in Manila for his company. He decided to come back.”

  “Oh. I see,” Ms. Hogeboom said, and she turned to the rest of the class with a pleased expression, as if to say: See how totally we can embarrass someone when we all work together? Because by then half the kids in class—mostly the girls—were whispering and giggling again. Everyone was looking at Catalina, who sat bolt upright and looked straight ahead, with no expression at all.

  Catalina sat down now at the library table and unloaded a bunch of books from her shoulder bag. I was watching her over Elliot’s shoulder. He was deep in his books. Catalina opened a book and then she was deep in hers, too. Through the doorway behind her came a gaggle of seventh-grade girls.

  There were four of them, walking close together and almost tiptoeing like they were holding their breaths. They came our way stealing quick glances at Catalina, who sat with her back to them. In the center of the group was Bethany DeMere.

  Bethany DeMere is the ruler of the top clique of seventh-grade girls. She’s popular, and she’s one of those people who knows just what to say to cut you down. A lot of times she doesn’t say anything—she just looks away and shakes her head so her hair ripples down her back. She has this long, wavy blond hair that she knows is pretty eye-catching. If she wants to show you that you are not worth seeing or hearing, she shakes her hair as she turns away and sighs or rolls her eyes at somebody who is worth seeing and hearing. Of course, to her I did not exist. I didn’t even have hair-shaking status.

  Bethany and her crew crowded past us looking pressurized, like they could barely contain themselves about whatever they were up to. They went into the stacks and I heard whispering, and stifled giggling.

  Before long Catalina stood up and walked over to the catalog computers. About two seconds after she was gone, the DeMere clique came out from the stacks. The girls quick-stepped till they were just passing Catalina’s books and notebook, where one of them lifted her arm above the table’s edge.

  She dropped a folded piece of paper beside Catalina’s books. It bounced once, and then lay there.

  As soon as the girls had veered out the door they burst into fierce laughter. Then their fast steps faded down the hall.

  Elliot was still burrowing in his books. “Hey, look at this,” he said.

  I held up my hand. His forehead crinkled. I put my finger to my lips, and pointed over his shoulder.

  “What?” he whispered. I pointed at the note.

  “What?” he said. “That?”

  I nodded.

  Catalina came back. Elliot shrugged and turned back to his books. I lowered my head, but I still watched.

  At her table Catalina stopped. She definitely spotted the paper, and she froze. Then she carefully, steadily gathered up her books, slid them into the shoulder bag, slung it on her shoulder and walked out.

  She left the folded paper on the table.

  “Psst,” I said.

  Elliot looked up. I motioned with my head over his shoulder, toward the paper. He twisted his head to look, then turned back and shrugged.

  “Grab it,” I whispered.

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re closer.”

  “But why?”

  “Just … I just want to see it. All right?”

  He looked around, ducked to the table, grabbed the paper, and ducked back.

  With one finger he slid it over. It was folded neatly, tightly, carefully. I slowly unfolded it.

  It said:

  Pop Quiz

  Q: Is there a special school for people from someplace weird who look like Olive Oyl and are the color of diareea?

  A: WE SURE HOPE SO!

  On the side one of them wrote “(in Popeye)” with an arrow pointing over to Olive Oyl, just to make it clear.

  Elliot looked up. “Where’d this come from?”

  “You know Bethany DeMere.”

  “Well, Not really.”

  “Elliot.”

  “What?”

  “This sucks, man.”

  He squinted at it. “I don’t think diarrhea is spelled right,” he said. “I’m pretty sure it has two r’s.”

  I stood up. “Come on,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “Come on—quick!”

  “But what about the tyrannosaur?”

  “Never mind about the tyrannosaur?”

  I was out the door. Elliot came scrambling after me.

  ANATOSAURS

  I popped into the hall in time to see a set of fire doors closing slowly, down at the end. Through their glass I saw the top of a dark head bobbing down the stairs.

  “Come on,” I said again.

  “Where?” said Elliot. “Why?” His eyes were darting around, alert for danger. But the hall was empty.

  “Look. Do you like to see people getting treated … like you get treated?”

  Elliot looked carefully at me. “No.”

  “So let’s just go talk to her.”

  “Talk to who?” Elliot tilted his head like a puppy. I realized: He’d been deep in his dinos. He hadn’t seen anything.

  “You know that new girl, Catalina?”

  “The tall skinny girl?”

  “Yeah.”

  “With the big glasses?”

  “Yes.”

  “She came in the library.”

  “Yes.”

  “She looks kind of like a salamander,” Elliot mused, his eyes unfocusing. “Like a really long newt.”

  “Okay. Bethany and her
pals came in and dropped that note so she would read it.”

  He blinked. “They did?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did she?”

  “No. But I think she knew what it was. It looked like maybe this was not the first time.”

  Elliot nodded slowly. “Well … so?”

  “She went downstairs. At least I think she did. Let’s just go talk to her.”

  “Why?”

  Here we were again, back where we started. And actually, I wasn’t sure why.

  “Okay,” I said. “You know how you were talking about those defenseless dinosaurs? There were big ones, little ones …

  “Sure—like the duckbills. Anatosaurs. They didn’t even have claws. Ever see a picture?”

  “Yeah. I mean, no. But what I mean is, if one of those defenseless ones was pretty much all by themselves, they’d be in a lot more trouble, right?”

  He nodded. “They’d be pretty much dead. Sooner or later.”

  “Right.”

  “There are fossils in Montana that show how duckbills grouped together around their nests. They protected their young. Only dinosaurs known to have done that.”

  Geez. But I kept trying. “So what if this new girl is separated from her regular group, or herd, or whatever? What if we just went and, you know … checked up on her?”

  “You mean if we were like anatosaurs?”

  “Well. I don’t mean …”

  “Hey, sure! Let’s go!” Elliot said, and he went scooting down the hall.

  The basement of Darkland School is dim and dungeony, but it’s where the “special” rooms are, so it’s not that bad. The art room, the music room, and the computer lab are all down here. Looking for Catalina, we checked around. The art room’s paint-spattered tables were full of plastic bottles with yellow and blue and red paint caked around the tops. Nobody was in there. The computer lab was full, as usual, of kids hunched before beeping machines. But there was no spectacled girl with almost black hair.

  Next was the boiler room. Its heavy louvered door was shut.

  “She could be in there,” Elliot said.

  “The boiler room?”

  “Well? She could …”

  An awful noise—“Sqwer … ONK!”—came from somewhere.

  I said, “What was that?”

  Elliot perked up. “The crested duckbill might have sounded just like that!” he said. “It had this long curving hollow bone crest that reared up and back from its nasal cavity. Kind of like a horn, you know? It must have sounded …”

  “SqueeeeEEEEEEE—HONK!”

  “Like that,” he whispered, awed.

  “The practice room,” I said. “Come on.”

  Down here in the basement, across from the band room, there’s this mazelike music practice room, full of cubicles. They ought to be soundproof, the cubicles, but they’re just padded panels about five feet high. I’ve seen the same thing in the bank. The kids practicing can’t see each other, but they can hear each other. Sometimes when you go by there it sounds like a demented barnyard.

  This time the practice room looked empty. We started exploring among the cubicles when, from farther in: “Sqwa-REEEEEE! Sqwaa … HAWWK1”

  We followed the aftershocks till we saw Catalina.

  She was sitting hunched over in a blue plastic chair with her back to us, holding a big brass sax. Her head dipped and her shoulders clenched; she got ready to blow again.

  “No?” Elliot said. “Wait!” He clapped his hands on his ears and staggered backward.

  Catalina turned just as Elliot stumbled into a chair behind him that was on rollers—so it rolled, and tipped and then crashed into a music stand, and both the stand and the chair clattered into a booth while Elliot toppled over, caught another chair with a flailing arm, and that chair—which had music folders piled up on it—flipped and dumped on top of him. The chair’s casters were spinning. The folders sifted across the floor. Elliot lay at the bottom of the wreckage.

  I grinned and shook my head. Amazing. Catalina’s eyes, magnified behind her glasses, were wide.

  “Uh … hi,” Elliot said. He waved.

  “Hello.”

  “You’re terrible.”

  Catalina looked sadly at the sax. She nodded. We waited for her to say something, but she didn’t.

  “I tried to play the trombone once,” I offered. “I even took lessons. But I always sounded like a really drunk moose.”

  Catalina looked at me. “How does a drunk moose sound?”

  I shrugged. “Got a trombone?”

  She smiled, almost without moving the rest of her face.

  “Russell,” Elliot said. “Would you please get this thing off me?”

  “Okay.” I set the chair on its wheels. Elliot struggled up till he was sitting. Catalina looked at her sax.

  “I’m only renting it for a month, to try it,” she said. “I probably sound like a really weird donkey.”

  “Elliot says it’s more like a … what was it?”

  “A crested duckbill.”

  Catalina said, “Anatosaur.”

  Elliot’s face lit up. “Yeah! And those crests were honkable. They’d blast the forest when a predator was coming.”

  “I think they were cute,” Catalina said.

  “You … you do?”

  “Yes.” She nodded. “Like edmontosaurus. That soft, dumb-looking face. You’d like to pet him.”

  Elliot scrambled up amid the debris. “I know! He didn’t have the crest,” he explained to me, “but he might have had a big skin balloon on top of his head. He could maybe inflate it, to honk or call or something.”

  “Yes,” Catalina said. “Can you imagine all those honks and toots and blasts, all singing through the forest? It must have been incredible. A whole communication system.”

  I shook my head, smiling in amazement. “A meeting of the minds,” I said.

  That’s when Catalina saw the folded-up paper in my hand.

  Her face shrank into a blank mask. She turned away and started yanking apart her saxophone and packing it in the case.

  “What?” Elliot said. “What’s wrong?”

  “If you came here to bring that to me,” she said without turning around, “just leave it. Wherever you want.”

  “Leave what? Bring what?” Elliot looked at me.

  I held up my hand with the note.

  “Oh,” he said. “Hey—we didn’t …”

  The case snapped shut. Catalina snatched it up by the handle and started sidling past us. She was a head taller than me.

  “Hey,” I said, “we didn’t bring this to give it to you. We came looking for you ’cause we think it sucks.”

  She stopped.

  “Yeah,” Elliot said. “We’re duckbills, too.”

  “Well,” I said, “I mean, you—”

  She said, “What?”

  “We’re kind of like the plant eaters in a swamp of killer reptiles,” Elliot said, and he grinned.

  “Well,” I said. “Not all—”

  “My favorite was diplodocus,” she said. “I think he was extremely cute.”

  Elliot said, “Cute? He was thirty feet tall!”

  Catalina smiled. “That’s right.”

  We were walking up the stairs together.

  “Did every plant eater have its predator?” I asked.

  “Some had more than one,” Catalina said.

  “That’s me,” said Elliot.

  “You have more than one predator?”

  “I have ’em all.” Elliot looked at me. “Don’t I?”

  “Pretty much,” I said.

  “Russell just has one tyrannosaur.”

  “I’m Russell,” I said. “This is Elliot.”

  “I’m Catalina.”

  “We know,” Elliot said. “I think Bethany and her friends are like those medium-sized meat-eaters that hunted in packs. You know, velociraptor?”

  “From the movie,” Catalina said. “With the slashing claw.”

 
; “Yeah! And I’m like troodon.”

  “I don’t know him.”

  “He wasn’t very big—but he also had slashing claws.”

  “Oh, that’s you all right,” I said. We were walking down the hall toward the main door. Suddenly I thought about what was waiting for me outside.

  I stopped. “So I want to know what we can do,” I said. “For real.”

  “He means about the predators,” Elliot told Catalina. “He thinks there’s something we can do.”

  “Well, why not? There must be something,” I said. “Some weakness. Some strategy. I mean, all those helpless dinosaurs weren’t really helpless, were they? They all created some strategy for surviving.”

  “All the dinosaurs died,” Catalina said.

  “Okay. Right. But … what about those furry little characters? The mammals and stuff. The platypuses.”

  Elliot said, “The platypuses?”

  “Yeah—the creatures that did survive. They created some strategy, right? For surviving.”

  “They didn’t,” Catalina said. “Evolution did.”

  “Right. Yeah. So let’s evolve.”

  Elliot squinted at me. “You want us to become weird little furry mammals, squatting in mud to lay eggs?”

  Catalina smiled. “They are duckbills,” she said.

  “Hey. Yeah!”

  “Aw, just stop it,” I snapped. They stopped.

  “You know what?” I said, backing away. “I’m not really into this, okay? I mean, I’ve got a real problem—and he’s most likely out there right now, waiting for me. And don’t you say anything about tyrannosaurs.

  “It’s not a fantasy world, you know? We can’t just pretend we’re somewhere else in between getting clobbered.”

  Elliot looked down. I started to feel bad, but still.

  “I was just thinking maybe you could help me figure out some stuff,” I said to them, more quietly now. “Like why this one person is doing certain things, and what I could do to get him to stop. But I guess … I don’t know. I guess it wasn’t very realistic.

  “Anyway,” I said to Catalina, “it was nice to meet you.” I was thinking she and Elliot could be friends. That would be good for them.