It had been better, thought Freddy as she sidled away from Cuerva Lachance and back towards the hallway, when the key had been just a key. It almost had to mean something now, and she wasn’t sure whatever it meant was going to end up being a good thing. If Cuerva Lachance had had it all along and gone back in time after the fact to give it to Freddy, would the key really be meant to help her? What if whatever way it seemed to help Freddy really helped Cuerva Lachance?
It was no good thinking like this. That was the problem with time travel; it turned everything twisty. It didn’t help that Cuerva Lachance was involved, as she could make anything mean anything at all.
*
“Where’s Roland?” Freddy asked Todd and Marcus, who were sitting in the cafeteria, staring at her in disbelief.
It was only afterwards that she realised how many invisible lines she must have crossed. She had walked calmly into the section of the cafeteria usually occupied by the Deaf kids, gone straight up to two boys who were widely known to be geeks, and spoken straight to them as if the three of them were friends. The social implications hadn’t even occurred to her. She’d just wanted to find Roland before he did something irreversible.
Todd and Marcus exchanged glances. Todd shrugged.
“No, really,” said Freddy, “where is he? I need him.”
“Uh,” said Marcus, “why?”
“Because I do. Just tell me,” said Freddy.
Marcus shot a nervous look out towards the kids who were staring avidly at the lunchtime theatre from seats all around the caf. “Only he specifically said he didn’t want to talk to you.”
Todd pointed at her hair, her face, her chest, her hips, and quirked an eyebrow interrogatively.
“Haircut. I know he doesn’t want to talk to me,” said Freddy, “but it’s important.”
They exchanged glances again. If they did it a third time, Freddy decided, she was going to bang their heads together. “Important, like, as in girl stuff? With boyfriends and clothes?” asked Marcus.
Freddy decided it was her steady, piercing glare that eventually made them both go red. Marcus was fiddling nervously with his plastic fork.
“Do I ever talk about boyfriends and clothes?” Freddy demanded when she had reduced the two boys to squirming piles of agonised shame.
“Don’t know,” said Marcus. “Don’t you? Have you ever said two words to us before in your life?”
She probably hadn’t. Freddy was becoming less and less sure she liked the person she had been yesterday. For the first time, she really looked at Todd and Marcus, who were over at her house for hours every weekend and tended to pop up frequently throughout the week as well. She’d always thought of them as a sort of collective: Todd-and-Marcus, Roland’s geeky friends. They weren’t a collective. Marcus was the shouty one with the hearing aid. He put it in every morning before school and took it out once classes started because he found a world with too much sound in it confusing. This was what he’d told Roland, anyway. Roland thought it was because Marcus felt different from Roland and Todd, who were both profoundly deaf, when he wore the hearing aid. Freddy knew this only because she’d overheard Roland telling Mel. Everything else she knew about Marcus was what she could see, which wasn’t all that much. She thought he was mixed-race, white and Indian or Middle Eastern, plus tall and skinny and more athletic than anyone had ever admitted. Todd was smaller and quieter. He rarely spoke aloud. She’d seen him signing a lot, though. He had reddish-brown hair and glasses, and he had grown noticeably fatter in the past year or so. And it was stupid that this was all she knew about the pair of them.
“I know. I’m sorry,” said Freddy, prompting a third exchange of glances and a signed, What’s happened to her? from Todd. Freddy tucked her hands behind her back. “And later,” she continued, “I’ll have a whole conversation with you about it if you really want me to and don’t just think I’m boring, but right now, I honestly have to talk to Roland.”
They looked at her. She thought about role-playing games and pleasure-domes and desperate battles against tentacled monsters, and she added, “It’s a matter of life and death. Sort of like a quest. Um.”
“What kind of a quest?” asked Marcus after a moment, cautiously.
“Well,” said Freddy, “let’s say Roland is hiding a … a deadly secret that could bring about the end of the world if he, uh, tells it to the wrong person. But he’s convinced himself the end of the world is coming anyway, so he’s gone all, you know, self-destructive. And I’m the one who has to jump in at the last minute and convince him not all hope is lost.”
Todd and Marcus looked at each other yet again, this time because Todd wanted to sign for a bit. It all went a little fast for Freddy, though she caught the initials “GM” … game master. Were they talking about…?
“We didn’t know you were into RPGs,” said Marcus. “Are you and Roland doing a LARP or something?”
Freddy hadn’t the faintest idea what a LARP was. “Yeah, or something,” she said.
“Cool,” said Marcus, and abruptly, he was about a hundred times friendlier. Freddy felt as if she had passed a test. “Roland’s eating lunch in the courtyard,” Marcus said. “He told us not to tell anybody, but I bet that was part of the game, right?”
Freddy tapped the side of her nose, something she had never done before in her life, and left. Dozens of eyes followed her out of the room. She looked back over her shoulder once, so she knew.
She knew Josiah was trailing her, and Cuerva Lachance could easily have been nearby, too, but as there was nothing she could do about it, she simply walked to the courtyard and tried to pretend she was alone. The courtyard was occupied by the usual tight bunches of smoking Deaf kids, all of whom ignored Freddy as she slipped through the door. It had rained during morning classes. The ground was damp, and little puddles had collected on the benches. Roland was sitting on one of them anyway. He tensed when he saw Freddy, but he didn’t get up.
She wiped off as much of the water as she could with her hand and sat down beside him. Roland looked away, and Freddy had to bite back an impatient sigh. For a Deaf person, looking away at the beginning of a conversation was the equivalent of covering your ears and going “La la la la la!”
She touched his shoulder. He still wouldn’t look at her. Freddy heard a snigger from a group of smokers. Okay … she had been feeling sorry for Roland, but it could only go so far.
Freddy got to her feet, moved around in front of her stepbrother, bent down, took his chin in her hand, and said, “I know you’re afraid of what’s going to happen. I can help.”
She let go and sat down again. There were more sniggers, but Roland was looking at her now.
“I’m not afraid,” said Roland.
“Josiah’s following me around,” said Freddy, keeping her expression casual. “Cuerva Lachance is here, too. They’re trying to find out what we know.”
“So this is a stupid conversation for us to have. Go away.”
“We can be careful,” said Freddy. “Look, all I want is for you to agree to talk to me and Mel about it tonight. There’s no use in running away—”
“I’m not running away. Jesus.”