A Talent for Trouble Read online

  “Reveille’s OK, really,” he said. “It’ll be better this term, because it’s light in the mornings. Last term it was dark, and freezing, especially when the boiler broke down . . .”

  Alice folded her arms and stared at the ceiling. Jesse, not noticing the wobble of her lower lip, wished that it were yesterday again, and that they were back on the train and she was asking him about school. “There’s this race,” he would say, and today they would have run it fair and square, and he would almost certainly have won it, but properly, and now they would still be friends.

  Timidly, he picked up the mallet and held it out to her.

  “You hit the gong three times, as close to the middle as you can,” he explained. “Do you want to try?”

  Alice passed him without a word.

  Sometimes you can wish all you like, but it won’t change anything. Jesse, silenced, followed her meekly up the stairs.

  The first-floor landing had a bare wooden floor and scuffed walls, one painted red, the other blue.

  “Cost saving!” Fergus, who (as Jesse had said on the train) did like to show off, but also wanted to make amends for his idiotic behavior, took up the role of tour guide. “The major gets people to donate paint. He says it doesn’t matter what color. He thinks it’s cheerful. Observe the brightness of the red! Behold the soothing nature of the blue!”

  Alice scowled. Fergus tried not to feel discouraged.

  On they went, down a pink and yellow corridor—So light! So pretty! So like icing on a cake!—up one narrower flight of stairs and then another as Fergus rattled off information, pointing out classrooms and labs, common rooms and dorms, until finally they reached the top floor, and a lilac corridor with a lot of green doors.

  They stopped in front of the last door.

  “And this,” announced Fergus with a bow and a flourish, “is your room.”

  Homesickness slammed into Alice the moment she walked in.

  Until now, it had felt almost like a story happening to someone else. The train, the mad drive, the insane race . . . But the quiet little room she now found herself in felt real.

  It wasn’t unpleasant. The walls were painted the same soft lilac as the corridor; the bed was narrow but covered in a thick, squishy duvet; the view outside her small casement window was impressive. It was just those words—your room.

  Your room belonged to a completely different place.

  Alice puckered her brow as tears threatened to well up.

  “You’re very lucky,” Jesse hazarded. “Most Year Sevens sleep in dorms, but this room just happened to be free. The girl who had it before you was in Year Twelve.”

  “She was expelled because she kept setting the chemistry lab on fire,” said Fergus, looking up. “I guess she tried to burn this too.”

  Alice followed his gaze to a large black patch on the ceiling.

  “She was helping Professor Lawrence with her fireworks,” he continued. “Professor Lawrence is the chemistry teacher, and she’s inventing a new kind of daytime firework for Visitors’ Day, to set off from the middle of the loch. The major said Melanie—Melanie van Boek, she was the girl who lived here before—had a Talent for Science, but honestly, she was one hundred percent a pyromaniac—that’s a person who burns things down on purpose, in case you didn’t—”

  “I know what a pyromaniac is,” said Alice, finally breaking her silence.

  “Do you?” Fergus was delighted. “I’m collecting maniacs. There’s pyromaniac, of course, to do with fire. And kleptomaniac, which is a person who can’t stop stealing. And ablutomaniac, which is when you can’t stop . . .”

  “Washing.” Alice sighed.

  Fergus was impressed. “And bibliomaniac . . .”

  “Books.” Alice rolled her eyes, exasperated. “Obviously.”

  Jesse had no idea what they were talking about. He only knew that it was bad enough that Alice wasn’t talking to him, without having her launch into incomprehensible conversations with Fergus. He tried to think of something clever to say—something that wasn’t Shut up, Fergus—and couldn’t.

  “Dinomaniac!” cried Fergus.

  Alice pushed him out of the room. Jesse hovered and tried to apologize again. She pushed him out too.

  Fergus Mackenzie was the sort of smart that plays chess against computers, would rather do math puzzles than watch TV, and hacks into people’s computers just because he can (remember that, it’s important). He could read fluently in English by the age of four, in his mother’s native German by five. By seven, he had taught himself Italian. By the age of ten, he had too many trophies for debating, math, and general brilliance to display.

  Nobody disputed that he was a genius. Nobody even minded. What they did mind was that he played really, really stupid pranks. Like putting a toad in Esme’s bed or salt in Amir’s tea, or tying Joshua’s bootlaces together before rugby practice. He wasn’t even intelligently stupid. When Fergus was bored—and he was easily bored—he became positively imbecilic, and sometimes even mean. He had tripped Alice for literally no reason other than to see what would happen (and it had, he felt, been extremely satisfactory—all those people shouting at each other, and even the pigs were something new).

  But as he and Jesse showed Alice around the school—the loch that changed color depending on the weather, the rowboats they used to go fishing, the farm where they grew their food, the spooky old keep that housed the new music rooms—he became fascinated by her. She had remained entirely silent all afternoon. At first he was disappointed, because he had enjoyed their brief exchange about manias and had hoped for more. But then—I told you he was smart—he became interested in her silence.

  Alice’s silence, Fergus felt, had the tightly wound quality of a kettle about to boil, or a baby about to scream, or a bomb about to explode. Which is to say that Alice’s silence was very, very loud indeed.

  At dinner, which she hardly touched, he watched as she answered the questions from the other Year Sevens who flocked to their table to meet her, nosy Jenny and shy Samira, little Duffy and Amir “the philosopher” and spotty Zeb. He saw that she was very still, and very poised, and very careful.

  Not open, but not rude either—actually rather fascinatingly neutral, except for an interesting tic, her left hand moving as if she were writing. The only time she revealed anything interesting was when nosy Jenny asked what her father did.

  “He’s an actor,” Alice said a bit too quickly.

  “Is he famous?”

  “Almost.” And here Fergus, enthralled, saw that she actually blushed. “I mean, he will be. He’s really good. He just needs a lucky break.”

  Fergus could guess what she was doing. He knew all about denial—he had been shocked the year before when his parents told him they were getting divorced, though looking back, all the signs had been there clear as day for him to see—the shouting and fighting, the constant traveling, the sleeping in separate rooms. The eye sees what the heart desires, the therapist his parents sent him to had said.

  Whether she knew it or not, Alice Mistlethwaite was lying about her dad.

  Fergus rather liked that.

  Nine

  A Talent for Trouble

  For a heartbeat, as she woke on her first morning, Alice thought she was still at Cherry Grange. Light filtered in around the curtains as it had at home, and the duvet had the same comforting snuggliness. She turned off the alarm and burrowed back down. She wasn’t going anywhere until Patience called her for school . . .

  School!

  She opened her eyes again, and saw the sooty patch on the ceiling. The snuggly feeling gave way to dread. She looked at the time. It was six forty-five . . .

  She groaned as she remembered, slid out of bed, and went over to the window. There was the loch—almost black today—and there were the mountains, the sky, and the wind-tossed clouds . . . She pulled off her pajamas and pulled on her lumpy uniform. Still yawning, she stepped into the lilac corridor. And now here were the green doors, and the nar
row staircase, the pink and yellow landing like a cake, the cheerful red and blue one, and here was the entrance hall with its patched-up windowpanes . . .

  The castle was eerily quiet in the early morning—the sort of quiet that plays tricks on the imagination. What if they are watching me? Alice wondered as she passed the glassy-eyed stag heads, and did someone speak as she passed the rusty suits of armor?

  Here was the gong, and was there something lurking in the shadows of its recess? She picked up the mallet. It looked old. She wondered who had been the first person ever to use it.

  The clock on the wall struck seven.

  Alice hit the gong exactly as Jesse had instructed, right in the middle, and as the castle exploded with its boom and vibrations shot up her arm, she felt the thin line between reality and her imagination rip.

  BOOM!

  The stags were leaping from the wall . . . The suits of armor were creaking back to life . . .

  BOOM! BOOM!

  Somewhere on a three-mast ship on the open seas, a tiger roared, and a circus girl climbed the rigging with the wind in her hair. Alice swung the mallet again, harder, and it felt like all the stories she had ever written were flowing out of her, and as they swirled about her like living things, so did the emotions she had kept silent for so long—anger and sadness and fear—except they weren’t silent anymore but turned into music by the mallet and the brass disc, making the air shake.

  BOOM! Take that, Fergus Mackenzie, for tripping her up, and take that, Jesse Okuyo, for breaking his promise! As Alice smashed the reveille gong, she thought of every person who had ever made her furious. BOOM! BOOM! Take that, hateful Brown-Watsons, for stealing her house! Take that, Aunt Patience, for sending her away! BOOM! BOOM! The rage grew wilder. TAKE THAT, MUM, FOR DYING, AND BARNEY FOR . . .

  “What do you think you are doing?”

  The whirl of sound faded. The air stopped spinning and deposited Alice gently back on the ground, where she saw a small, stout woman dressed in a puce quilted bathrobe, her hair rolled into baby-blue curlers and her face purple with indignation.

  Alice stared at her in astonishment.

  “I am Matron,” the small, stout woman announced, “and I am ordering you to give me that mallet! Three strikes! Did nobody explain? What you are doing now is the fire alarm! Just look at the commotion you’ve caused.”

  Slowly, Alice looked up. The entire student body were trooping down the stairs in their pajamas, some of them dragging their duvets.

  Matron held out an imperious hand. “Young lady, relinquish that mallet!”

  But Alice wasn’t ready to relinquish anything.

  Alice, who never showed her emotions.

  Alice, who had been so quiet for so long.

  BOOM! BOOM!! BOOM!!!

  Take that, Matron, with your purple face and curlers and “young lady” and “commotion”!

  “Upstairs, this minute!” shouted Matron, snatching away the mallet.

  Up Alice went, cheeks flushed but head held high, a small smile tugging at the corners of her mouth, as the students watched in wonder.

  Her aunt wanted her to live as she wrote. It looked as if Patience was going to get more than she’d bargained for.

  The major, standing draped in kittens in the doorway of his study, wondered if dreamy Alice Mistlethwaite might be developing a Talent for Trouble.

  Ten

  Humongously, Enormously, and Superlatively Sorry

  Jesse had spent most of the night worrying. The more he thought about his behavior—he, the fastest runner in his year, taking off without warning to beat someone half his size—the less he liked himself. He cringed when he tried to see himself through his classmates’ eyes.

  No knight of old would have behaved as he had.

  Worse, though, was that he liked Alice. He thought about the train again. He had liked the quiet, serious way they had spoken, the fact that she hadn’t laughed at his explanation about his brothers, her own funny, generous admission. He had felt a connection with her. He couldn’t believe he had thrown it away.

  Shortly before dawn on that first day, he decided to make his peace with her by offering to share reveille, and resolved to get up early to show her the ropes. Immeasurably relieved, he fell asleep and only woke, like the rest of the castle, to the sound of Alice’s explosive gonging.

  And now he was confused, because he was sure he had explained what she was to do. It didn’t occur to him that Alice might simply not care about how things were done—his brain didn’t work like that. He decided to explain again at breakfast. But when he came into the dining hall, she was already sitting with Samira and Jenny.

  He saw her ahead of him on her own as they filed into assembly. He quickened his pace to catch up with her—then shrank back, because Fergus had got there first.

  “So I want you to know that I am humongously, enormously, and superlatively sorry for yesterday,” Fergus said as he fell into step beside Alice. “Sometimes I behave like an idiot. Ask anybody! I’m famous for it. But I also want to say that what you did this morning with the gong was one hundred percent awesome.”

  Just because she had roused the whole school with a fake fire alarm did not make her suddenly talkative or trusting. She stared at him suspiciously.

  “So awesome,” insisted Fergus, before breaking into an excellent imitation of Matron. “Alice Mistlethwaite, look at the commotion you have caused! Surrender that mallet!”

  Alice’s lips twitched. Fergus beamed approvingly.

  A few rows behind them, Jesse watched, and bristled.

  Alice wasn’t sure what she’d expected from assembly at Stormy Loch, but it certainly wasn’t for it to be as dull and ordinary as at her old school. A succession of teachers stood up to talk about sports events and orchestra rehearsals. Morag Hamilton, the farmer, talked about what was growing in various polytunnels. Madoc talked about the Great Orienteering Challenge. Alice remembered how excited Jesse had been when he told her about this.

  She glanced toward him and felt something tug at her heart when he looked away. She had liked him too, yesterday on the train. It might have all gone wrong since then, but she couldn’t remember when she had liked anybody.

  Sighing, she turned her attention back to the stage, where Matron was talking about the housework rotation.

  “Not that anyone actually does the housework,” whispered Fergus.

  The major came on, and the assembly veered into the surreal as he asked for volunteers to help with his rescued kittens.

  The major had a lot to say about kittens.

  He talked about the difference between cow milk and kitten milk.

  He lingered on the importance of regular feeding.

  He paid particular attention to toilet training.

  “After feeding, the mother cat would habitually lick the genitals and tummies of her babies to stimulate toileting,” he boomed. “She would then clean them by eating their feces.”

  “What’s feces?” whispered a girl called Esme, who was sitting on the other side of Alice.

  “Poop,” said Fergus.

  “What? That’s disgusting! No way am I volunteering for that!”

  “No way!” echoed Esme’s best friend, Zuzu.

  Alice’s laughter bubbled up suddenly, surprising her as much as the morning’s gonging.

  “It’s true,” whispered Fergus. “Feces are poop.”

  “I know what feces are,” she whispered back.

  And oh, the deliciousness of trying not to laugh! Alice’s shoulders shook, and her face turned red, and her eyes began to stream, and the giggling was infectious because now Fergus was snorting, and leaning forward on his knees pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes, as if that could stop the gales of laughter building up from his stomach, and the laughter spread to Jenny, and Amir, and Samira until most of Year Seven were sniggering and snuffling, except Esme and Zuzu, who thought the others were too childish for words, and Jesse, who stared ahead eaten up with jealousy beca
use Alice was laughing not with him, but with Fergus Mackenzie.

  And so, with rituals and meals and alliances, a new term began. Finally, they were liberated. The Year Sevens shuffled away to math, where Fergus was immediately set extra-difficult problems, Jesse agonized as numbers swum meaninglessly on the page, and Alice smiled politely and pretended to pay attention, but wrote out in her math book the bones of a new story, in which the kittens became miniature, magical tigers that performed rescue missions when called to action by the beating of a magical gong.

  Three young people, all very different. All, in their own way, waifs and strays. All searching for something, though none of them knew quite what.

  All unaware, as yet, that they might find it in one another.

  Eleven

  We’d Be Mad to Try It

  Dear Dad,

  I’ve been here three weeks today! I know it seems incredible, but it’s true.

  Life at school continues better than expected. In French, Madame Gilbert, who is really a playwright, is making us be villagers in a market square. We have to say things like “Trois carottes, s’il vous plaît! Je suis un enfant, je ne comprends pas!” which means “Three carrots, please! I am a child, I don’t understand!” So that will be useful one day (maybe), but for now she says we are not passionate enough about vegetables. In geography, we spend most of our time logging wildlife sightings for Mr. Madoc, because he is really a zoologist and not a geography teacher at all, and sad because his fiancée ran away to Costa Rica to rescue sea turtles and didn’t want to marry him anymore. I don’t know why. Yesterday in “class” (really a field at the end of the valley), I counted three hares, twelve rabbits, and a skylark, and he was very pleased and smiled and was actually almost good-looking. Oh, and in art, we all have to paint ourselves with blue mud called woad and pretend to be an ancient Scottish tribe called Picts, fighting off Romans. Our teacher, Frau Kirschner, says we are an Installation, and she is calling us “Democracy Failing.” She says it’s Experimental. She plans to show some of us off on Visitors’ Day. We’re to sing on Visitors’ Day too, the whole school together, a song called “Scotland the Brave.” It’s all about mountains and islands and leaping blood. It actually sounds quite good. I’m trying not to hide at the back.