Enthralled: Paranormal Diversions (Wicked Lovely 5.50)

Which means, nothing to eat. Nothing like they got around here.

We did it to ourselves. We wanted Tresspassin to fall off the map; at least, the folks before us did. No matter what kind of Drinker you were—whether you were a Dirt or a Viral—you agreed to that. Breathers barely even knew we existed, except in the movies. They had no idea we weren’t all the same, not that it mattered. The less Breathers knew, the better. Soon as we figured out about the Blackouts, that Breathers couldn’t recall a thing we’d done to them after we’d done it—well, we just kept doing it. Things were better that way, at first. Better for them, better for us. Now, it’s just how things are, and that’s powerfully hard to change. Mainstreaming. I hear my Grandma Hoban snort every time Mr. Skrumbett, Tresspassin’s principal and mayor and owner of the gas station and, in a way, my college counselor says the word.

Not me. I think of Mainstreaming as living in a supermarket. The answer to my problems, all wrapped up nice in a college sweatshirt, like plastic wrap in the freezer section. Dinner on aisle seventeen, come back tomorrow now, y’all . . .

My stomach rumbles. Hopper answers back, digging his elbow into my side. “Shut up.”

But I know he’s as hungry as I am, and I guess that’s why the school approved this trip in the first place. It’s time. Mr. Skrumbett himself let us use the computer center, showed us how to fill out the online Common App, which Hopper calls the Common Slap, since the whole process makes you feel about that low. It’s not as easy for us as it is for the Breathers. There isn’t much to do in the way of extracurricular activities in Tresspassin, unless you count cow-tipping or maybe cow-sipping. I probably could have learned how to play a sport or something, but there’s no other school for us to play against, not within about two hundred miles. Hopper and I looked around on the Breathernet for something you could do with just two people, until we found an actual sport called woodcutting once. They have it at Dartmouth or somewhere. It’s where you cut wood with a big saw, one person on each end, like something you’d see in an old cartoon. We may not have woodcutting in Trespassin, but at least we have cartoons.

The SAT, that’s a whole other problem. It’s made for rich white Breathers, who live in cities and talk right and don’t worry about things like Drinker extinction. Some of the kids in my class, Dirts from old families who’d been alive for like, centuries, they did all right. Natalie Anne Rutledge says she was actually in the French Revolution, so she completely nailed that passage in the Reading Comprehension section. I didn’t think it was fair, but Hopper pointed out that she’d also had to live with herself for going on two hundred and fifty years, so things had a way of evening out in the wash. The rest of us Virals who hadn’t dug our way up out of the grave like the Dirts had, those of us who still had things like growing up to do, we weren’t so lucky. At least when it came to standardized testing.

The rest of us were going to have to rely on our grades. I have great grades; Hopper and I worked really hard on our transcripts. We had to make them up based on Wikipedia, which is helpful like that. Once we figured out what an AP was, I put that I’d taken a million of them. My favorite class was AP Human Geography. I still don’t know what that means, but the words are really beautiful together. Hopper says it’s a map of the human body. I think it means all the human bodies on the map. Either way, as soon as I get into a real school, I’m going to take it just to find out.

The Common Slap hurts. It’s like they speak a whole different language, the Admissions Breathers. Normally, I’m okay with Breathers, but I feel sick to my stomach when I think or talk about the Admissions kind. Sort of like how my Grandma Hoban used to sound when she talked about the people who came around collecting taxes. I did the best I could. Mr. Skrumbett says my teacher recommendations are really strong. I couldn’t find any good ones on the Breathernet, so I pretended to myself that Atticus Finch was writing it. He’s a character from a movie in the old Breather library and everything he says sounds pretty smart, especially when he’s talking to his daughter. Sometimes I like to imagine I’m her. I stole my second letter from this other messed-up Breather movie, where an old guy named George Clooney plays some kind of big jerk who flies around the world firing people until he feels so bad he writes a letter to help some other super-annoying girl get a job. I keep a copy of both letters in my backpack, single-spaced, folded up all small inside my wallet where the money’s supposed to go. I don’t know why, but I sort of like knowing Atticus Clooney and George Finch have my back. That was Hopper’s idea, to switch the last names in case anyone besides me had seen the movies. Then he signed them.

I signed Hopper’s. All he wrote was M. Hopper Wilson is the smartist kid in the hole school. Respectibly, Lola Lafayette. The way I signed, you couldn’t read the signature. Just in case. Seeing as he’s not all that smart and I’m not all that respectable.

The essays were harder. Mr. Skrumbett passed around a book that was supposed to help you write them. It wasn’t that helpful, though, because the book mostly told you what you weren’t supposed to do. Like, you’re not supposed to write about the time you scored the winning touchdown in the big game, but I never did that anyway. I didn’t even know what kind of game we were talking about, to tell you the truth. I also never had a dog that died, took a trip that changed me, fed the homeless, or built a latrine. Which was sort of sad, because the bad essay examples were still better than anything that ever happened to me. Eventually I gave up and wrote about being the first person in my family to go to college. I didn’t tell the truth.

I didn’t say it was because most of my family was dead or gone, or at least my Grandma Hoban talked about them same as if they were. That I fell asleep hungry and woke up that way in the morning. That if I didn’t get out of Tresspassin soon, folks were going to find Natalie Anne Rutledge lying in her bed with an ax handle whittled to a point and sticking straight up out of her chest. That Hopper and me, we’d been making plans to leave since we were old enough to walk as far as the highway.

This trip, it’s the last thing.

Four days.

Four days and twelve universities, and I’m starting to think Grandma Hoban was right. If I can’t manage four days, how will I spend four whole years around here? I haven’t had a decent night of sleep, or what passes for sleep. Haven’t had myself a decent meal. Haven’t even talked to one. Mr. Skrumbett says we can’t draw attention to ourselves, but I don’t know how much longer I can hold out.

In fact, I’m starving.

Now the engine sighs louder than Natalie Anne Rutledge, and the whole bus jerks forward and back. My backpack falls off the seat, and a week’s worth of college brochures go sliding and skidding across the floor. UNC and SC State. Tufts and Georgetown and Penn and Penn State—blue skies and fall leaves and a fat-faced, warm-blooded freshman on the front of each one. The bus is still shuddering, bad as if it has some kind of whooping cough, and I don’t try to pick them up. Probably going to stall out again, like it has only about three times a day since we left Tresspassin. I look down through the high window I cracked open somewhere between BC and BU—I forget which is which.

Breather schools. They all look the same.

A tour group of chubby children tumbles past, an uneven line centipeding down the brick pavement beneath me. I can smell them baking in the late fall afternoon, sort of like a pie resting and sweating in my Grandma Hoban’s kitchen window. My stomach turns over, and now all I can think about is a plate piled high with pudgy-sweet little arms, arms like spaghetti, arms laced with salty veins. My grandma always says my eyes are ten times bigger than my stomach, which makes no sense at all. Right about now I feel like my stomach is ten times bigger than this bus.

“Don’t do it. You’ll be sorry.” Hopper barely angles h

is head toward me. I can see the spread of blue veins underneath his Hopper-white skin. His voice is a pin in a balloon; it always is. Soon as he starts talking, the spaghetti-arms disappear and the kids become kids again.

“What I won’t be is hungry.”

“You talk big, but you know you got a bigger heart for Breathers than the rest of us.” His voice is quiet, for only me to hear, so I don’t punch him. It’s an insult, but he doesn’t mean it that way.

“You’re one to talk, Maynard.” He hasn’t said anything, but we all know Hop has a problem. He’s soft as a boiled egg, which is one reason I keep him around all the time. Somebody has to. I wonder how skinny he actually is these days, under that hood of his. He never takes it off, not even for me.

“Get your eatin’ disorder under control, Wrennie. Skrumbett’ll kill you himself if you step outta line up here.”

“Just thinking about some Tater Tots.” I keep my eyes on the youngest stragglers, the strays at the end of the class. Safety in numbers, I think. Catch up. Or don’t. I’m hungry.

We lurch to a stop, and I hear Mr. Skrumbett’s voice up front. “We’re here. Off the bus. Try not to make a scene. You know, blend.”

Right.

II.

So there’s this statue of a guy sitting in some kind of chair in front of a building where the grass is. He’s got a shoe, well two, actually, but only one is shiny and brass-colored. You’re supposed to rub it; it gives you some kind of luck. It smells like pee.

“Where do they come up with this garbage? Every school has some old dead Breather statue to rub.”