Irwin blinked owlishly at the barrel-chested man and shook his head. “I …” He glanced after the two retreating bullies and then around the cafeteria. “I guess … I accidentally knocked my tray over, Coach Pete.”
Coach Pete scowled and folded his arms. “If this was the first time this had happened, I wouldn’t think anything of it. But how many times has your tray ended up on the floor, Pounder?”
Irwin looked down. “This would be five, sir.”
“Yes, it would,” said Coach Pete. He picked up the paperback Irwin had been reading. “If your head wasn’t in these trashy science fiction books all the time, maybe you’d be able to feed yourself without making a mess.”
“Yes, sir,” Irwin said.
“Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” Coach Pete said, looking at the book. “That’s stupid. You can’t hitchhike onto a spaceship.”
“No, sir,” Irwin said.
“Detention,” Coach Pete said. “Report to me after school.”
“Yes, sir.”
Coach Pete slapped the paperback against his leg, scowled at Irwin, and then abruptly looked up at me. “What?” he demanded.
“I was just wondering. You don’t, by any chance, have a Vogon in your family tree?”
Coach Pete eyed me, his chest swelling in what an anthropologist might call a threat display. It might have been impressive if I hadn’t been talking to River Shoulders the night before. “That a joke?”
“That depends on how much poetry you write,” I said.
At this Coach Pete looked confused. He clearly didn’t like feeling that way, which seemed a shame, since I suspected he spent a lot of time doing it. Irwin’s eyes widened and he darted a quick look at me. His mouth twitched, but the kid kept himself from smiling or laughing—which was fairly impressive in a boy his age.
Coach Pete glowered at me, pointed a finger as if it might have been a gun, and said, “You tend to your own business.”
I held up both hands in a gesture of mild acceptance. I rolled my eyes as soon as Coach Pete turned his back, drawing another quiver of restraint from Irwin.
“Pick this up,” Coach Pete said to Irwin, and gestured at the spilled lunch on the floor. Then he turned and stomped away, taking Irwin’s paperback with him. The two kids who had been giving Irwin grief had made their way back to their original seats, meanwhile, and were at the far end of the table, looking smug.
I pushed my lunch away and got up from the table. I went over to Irwin’s side and knelt down to help him clean up his mess. I picked up the tray, slid it to a point between us, and said, “Just stack it up here.”
Irwin gave me a quick, shy glance from beneath his mussed hair and started plucking up fallen bits of lunch. His hands were almost comically large compared to the rest of him, but his fingers were quick and dexterous. After a few seconds he asked, “You’ve read the Hitchhiker’s Guide?”
“Forty-two times,” I said.
He smiled and then ducked his head again. “No one else here likes it.”
“Well, it’s not for everyone, is it?” I asked. “Personally, I’ve always wondered if Adams might not be a front man for a particularly talented dolphin. Which I think would make the book loads funnier.”
Irwin let out a quick bark of laughter and then hunched his shoulders and kept cleaning up. His shoulders shook.
“Those two boys give you trouble a lot?” I asked.
Irwin’s hands stopped moving for a second. Then he started up again. “What do you mean?”
“I mean I’ve been you before,” I said. “The kid who liked reading books about aliens and goblins and knights and explorers at lunch and in class and during recess. I didn’t care much about sports. And I got picked on a lot.”
“They don’t pick on me,” Irwin said quickly. “It’s just … just what guys do. They give me a hard time. It’s in fun.”
“And it doesn’t make you angry,” I said. “Not even a little.”
His hands slowed down and his face turned thoughtful. “Sometimes,” he said quietly. “When they spoil my broccoli.”
I blinked. “Broccoli?”
“I love broccoli,” Irwin said, looking up at me, his expression serious.
“Kid,” I said, smiling, “no one loves broccoli. No one even likes broccoli. All the grown-ups just agree to lie about it so that we can make kids eat it, in vengeance for what our parents did to us.”
“Well, I love broccoli,” Irwin said, his jaw set.
“Hunh,” I said. “Guess I’ve seen something new today.” We finished, and I said, “Go get some more lunch. I’ll take care of this.”
“Thank you,” he said soberly. “Um, Norm.”
I grunted, nodded to him, tossed the dropped food, and returned the tray. Then I sat back down at the corner table with my lunch and watched Irwin and his tormentors from the corner of my eye. The two bullies never took their eyes off Irwin, even while talking and joking with their group.
I recognized that behavior, though I’d never seen it in a child before; only in hunting cats, vampires, and sundry monsters.
The two kids were predators.
Young and inexperienced, maybe. But predators.
For the first time, I thought that Bigfoot Irwin might be in real trouble.
I went back to my own tray and wolfed down the “food” on it. I wanted to keep a closer eye on Irwin.
BEING A WIZARD is all about being prepared. Well, that and magic, obviously. While I could do a few things in a hurry, most magic takes long moments or hours to arrange, and that means you have to know what’s coming. I’d brought a few things with me, but I needed more information before I could act decisively on the kid’s behalf.
I kept track of Irwin after he left the cafeteria. It wasn’t hard. His face was down, his eyes on his book, and even though he was one of the younger kids in the school, he stood out, tall and gangly. I contrived to go past his classroom several times in the next hour. It was trig, which I knew, except I’d been doing it in high school instead of when I was nine.
Irwin was the youngest kid in the class. He was also evidently the smartest. He never looked up from his book. Several times the teacher tried to catch him out, asking him questions. Irwin put his finger on the place in his book, glanced up at the blackboard, and answered them with barely a pause. I found myself grinning.
Next I tracked down Irwin’s tormentors. They weren’t hard to find, either, since they both sat in the chairs closest to the exit, as though they couldn’t wait to go off and be delinquent the instant school was out. They sat in class with impatient, sullen expressions. They looked like they were in the grip of agonizing boredom, but they didn’t seem to be preparing to murder a teacher or anything.
I had a hunch that something about Irwin was drawing a predatory reaction from those two kids. And Coach Vogon had arrived on the scene pretty damned quickly—too much so for coincidence, maybe.
“Maybe Bigfoot Irwin isn’t the only scion at this school,” I muttered to myself.
And maybe I wasn’t the only one looking out for the interests of a child born with one foot in this world and one in another.
I WAS STANDING outside the gymnasium as the last class of the day let out, leaning against the wall on my elbows, my feet crossed at the heels, my head hanging down, my wheeled bucket and mop standing unused a good seven feet away—pretty much the picture of an industrious janitor. The kids went hurrying by in a rowdy herd, with Irwin’s tormentors being the last to leave the gym. I felt their eyes on me as they went past, but I didn’t react to them.
Coach Vogon came out last, flicking out the banks of fluorescent lights as he went, his footsteps brisk and heavy. He came to a dead stop as he appeared and found me waiting for him.
There was a long moment of silence while he sized me up. I let him. I wasn’t looking for a fight, and I had taken the deliberately relaxed and nonconfrontational stance I was in to convey that concept to him. I figured he was connected to the supernatural world, but I didn’t know how connected he might be. Hell, I didn’t even know if he was human.
Yet.
“Don’t you have work to do?” he demanded.
“Doing it,” I said. “I mean, obviously.”