Noble turns his face, curtained by the silver-colored dark shades, to me and stretches his lips in a wide grin. I smile back and then see, to my horror, that he’s surrounded by sloppily made copies as well. I shake my head but the ghosts refuse to disappear. A couple of Logs on both sides of Noble, the High Keepers of Noble’s crutches, one per person. Both are wearing mirrored glasses and Noble-style goatees. With no time off for chewing, gossiping, or Shark’s speeches, Zit and Termite polish the crutches with their handkerchiefs and scrape dirt off the rubber tips. A ridiculous, risible sight. I can’t help but smile. Noble lifts his eyebrows quizzically. I nod at his retinue. He shrugs—“What are you going to do?” Ginger’s colorful crest is flaming by his elbow, her translucent chin sunk into the hands is positioned a little lower, and then the slanted front teeth and devoted eyes of the crutch-bearers, proud of their assignment. I again note with surprise how much Noble grew up during his trip to the Outsides. It only took him six months to learn to accept stoically the things that still push me over the edge.
“I shall now announce the names of those few who passed the tests with reasonably high scores . . .”
Into Shark’s expectantly snapping fingers Pilot inserts another file. Shark grabs it and grumbles threateningly.
“So . . . In the First . . .”
The teachers’ row hums and whispers. Humpback produces an ashtray from his pocket, flicks it open, and puts it down on the floor. There isn’t anyone actually seen to be smoking, but the telltale gray cloud hangs thick overhead. Shark reads the first batch of names. I whisper them after him, recollecting vaguely that I seem to already have encountered them recently.
“Strange,” I say. “I would have thought there’d be more Pheasants. But it’s their own business, of course.”
“Of course,” Blind confirms right over my ear, laughing softly, his maddening insane laugh.
His Adam’s apple performs a dance on the bare neck, his eyes are mirrors, each containing a Sphinx, just like the puddles of Noble’s glasses.
“They were on the list that Ralph had,” I explain. “The list of students wishing to bolt as soon as possible.”
“Now we shall see,” Blind says, overjoyed for some reason, “how well they are going to manage that. And who else besides them.”
“You mean you knew about them?” I ask suspiciously.
“You crazy?” Blind says, aghast. “You just told me yourself.”
I did, didn’t I? But he wasn’t very surprised when I did. Or he hid the surprise very convincingly. At least he didn’t ask any questions, or demand clarification.
Shark, in the meantime, has moved to the geniuses of the Second. That doesn’t take too much time, because the Second boasts just a single outcast—poor unfortunate Squib.
“Take that! Yeah . . . that’s the way,” Rats drone two rows ahead of us, after the “interpreter,” forcibly divested of the earphones, attracts their attention by gesticulating wildly and then relates the news to them. “Keep on it, listen, you’ll tell us all later,” they encourage the interpreter before the entire pack plugs the phones back in. Well, not the entire pack, rather a dozen of its imprisoned representatives, but for Rats that’s a lot when we’re talking about a function as dull as an all-hands meeting.
Red loudly cracks a nut with his teeth and spits out the shell. Ringer, the interpreter, sighs and turns back toward the lectern. Squib, the immediate beneficiary of the whole business, does not react, doesn’t even move at all, indifferent and self-absorbed, the bill of his cap lowered all the way to his nostrils.
Having skipped over the Third, who flunked the tests in their entirety, Shark declares, “The Fourth . . . ahem. Congratulations! It’s Zimmerman!”
Smoker’s death sentence flies up and flutters between the rows like a small graffiti-covered kite, and in the counselors’ row R One’s sharp-beaked head turns around and stares at me.
“One way or another,” I whisper. “Somehow we do rid ourselves of them.”
“Were you discussing Smoker with Ralph?” Blind wonders. “Why would you do a thing like that?”
Ten rows ahead of us, Ralph grimaces as if he heard what Blind just said, and turns away. He slightly resembles Smoker at that moment. They seem to have temporarily swapped their eyes, to better confuse me. Shark is done with the Sixth, all of three names, and is now talking about the girls.
“Whatever gave you that idea?” I ask Blind.
“Oh, that’s just my bright, logical mind,” Blind says proudly. “It’s come to this conclusion.”
“Your bright mind appears to be malfunctioning lately.”
