Jordan evidently couldn’t think of anything satisfying to reply to this. He spluttered for a bit, then turned tightly on the spot and marched back out into the lane, Mum and Roland close behind him.
It was all getting a little bit too weird. Freddy moved as slowly as she could down the walk towards the back gate. When she heard Josiah start up with, “So now you’ve gone and alienated the ducklings’ parents, and we’re going to have the cops here, and see if I bail you out this time,” she softly ducked behind the rhododendron halfway between the door and the gate.
Mel was already there. Their eyes met, and Mel nodded. “I heard voices behind Josiah,” she whispered.
“Josiah almost said ‘we’ when he talked about breaking down the door,” Freddy whispered back.
Her sister could be a pain sometimes, but one thing Freddy had always appreciated about Mel was that it was rarely necessary to explain things to her. The two girls crouched behind the rhododendron. It wasn’t a great eavesdropping spot. Though Josiah and Cuerva Lachance hadn’t closed the door yet, they were at least twenty feet away and not speaking particularly loudly. Freddy had always wondered how characters in books and movies ended up hiding coincidentally in convenient nooks and crannies while people held long expository conversations nearby. It never seemed to work out that way for her. Most of what she could hear now was incomprehensible.
“But Josie,” said Cuerva Lachance at one point. Then her voice sank again. A bit later, Josiah said, “… intimidate their parents. You know we have to find out…” The rest of the sentence was lost.
“… which one it is,” Freddy eventually heard from Cuerva Lachance, and then, “… don’t really fit. It’s very exciting.”
They missed a large chunk of the discussion as Josiah’s voice sank to an angry murmur. Freddy thought she caught the word “organ” and maybe also “complete moron,” but nothing else came through clearly until Cuerva Lachance said, “… after September twenty-seventh, isn’t it?”
“Maybe,” said Josiah, “but there’s no guarantee. Why did you have to…?”
The rest was whispers, with the occasional growl from Josiah. A minute or so later, the door closed, and the voices died away. Freddy and Mel crouched in the damp grass and looked at each other. Are they investigating us? thought Freddy. It seemed unlikely. Why would anyone want to? And what was going to happen on September twenty-seventh? From the expression on Mel’s face, she was just as baffled as Freddy. The light went out in the house on Grosvenor Street, and Mel melted to shadow. Freddy had known eavesdropping was useless, but she hadn’t realised it would leave her so much more confused than before.
5
“Oh my God,” said Cathy. “What’s your boyfriend doing now?”
They were in math class. The situation had deteriorated. She should have known it would.
The first week of school, after the initial terrible Tuesday with Josiah popping up everywhere and dragging her into his world, Freddy had hoped Josiah would calm down and settle in. The second week, she’d been pretty sure he wouldn’t. Now it was Thursday of the third week, and “pretty sure” had tipped over into “absolutely certain.”
There had been the presentation in science class. Freddy figured Ms. Treadwell had seen plenty of bad presentations in the past, but even so, the teacher had had a hard time finding anything nice to say about Josiah’s, which had involved him rolling a marble down the slopes of three broken toys and declaring he had proven gravity existed. The closest she’d managed to get was, “That was a very creative use of materials, Josiah.”
There had been the incident in drama. Josiah hadn’t started out the year in Freddy’s drama class, but he’d been kicked out of shop after threatening another student with a soldering iron. He was probably about to be kicked out of drama as well. She did have to admit it was bad luck that had led Mr. Singh to walk into the classroom when Josiah was in the middle of a spirited imitation of him, though she thought the fact that Josiah had then kept going was likely his own fault.
There had been the problem in English. It hadn’t started as a problem; it had started as poetry. Mr. Dillon had been trying to teach them about iambic pentameter. Freddy, who thanks to her mother had known what iambic pentameter was since she was eight, had happily blocked him out, right up until the point where Josiah had said, “Fun poetry fact: Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote ‘Kubla Khan’ while strung out on opium. I vote we follow his example and see how many great poems we produce.” Mr. Dillon had made matters worse by getting drawn into a debate about how drugs could be bad if they were seen as the direct cause of poems.
There had been band, with the trombone players in open revolt against Josiah’s tendency to distract them constantly with sarcastic comments. There had been PE and the painful five minutes involving the volleyball and the handful of thumbtacks. There had been the time Josiah carried a pigeon into the cafeteria and set it loose right next to the table occupied by grade twelve jocks. Now there was math class. It was a little sad. Math was the last class Josiah hadn’t propelled into disorder.
Ms. Liu was staring at the proof he had written on the whiteboard, her mouth opening and closing with shock. Freddy knew it was a proof because she had seen proofs in films, plus occasionally doodled on scrap paper by Mel. She didn’t know what it was for. It didn’t look much like the geometry problem Josiah had been set.
All through his campaign of terror and destruction, Josiah had kept his word and left Freddy out of it. He hadn’t brought up her name or even looked at her while he was spreading amusing anarchy through the school. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was that she was having to struggle so ferociously against the impulse to join in.
I’m not like him, she told herself. And she wasn’t. But she had the strangest feeling that despite the black eyes and the fact that nobody liked him, Josiah was having much more fun in school than she ever had.
Ms. Liu said, “But that’s unsolvable. It’s existed since 1978!”
“Oopsy,” said Josiah, sounding bored.
Most of the class was giggling. Freddy knew that Josiah had just added “math nerd” to the long, long list of things that were wrong with him. She wanted to shake him. She also wanted him to show her how he had done the proof. Asking him about the proof would have been social suicide. Her life was giving her a headache.
Roland stood up. When Roland stood up, everyone noticed. Every head in the room except Ms. Liu’s swung towards him. Distractedly, Freddy saw he had somehow managed to make a math textbook and three sheets of loose-leaf paper look like a hopeless mess.
“Sit down,” said Roland to Josiah. “Why do you have to make such a big deal of everything?”
Freddy found she was watching through her fingers. Now half the class was laughing at Josiah and half at Roland.