“Boys,” said the deep, cold voice of Mr. Stowe. The man stepped forward as Aaron wildly tossed the bone toward the hole and turned on his haunches to face his father, the shovel in his hand.
Alex stared at the bone, which had landed near his feet, and stopped pushing the mud into the hole, knowing that hiding the evidence wouldn’t help his case at all. He turned around slowly, the empty bucket swinging in his hand as hard drops of rain pounded against it.
Mr. Stowe stared hard at the ground, where Aaron’s house was slowly melting away. He looked at Aaron, then at Alex, then back to Aaron again. “Alex,” he said to Aaron, “give your brother the shovel and come with me,” he said in a horribly quiet voice.
Aaron’s eyes grew wild, and then he controlled himself. He handed the shovel to Alex and followed his father to the house.
“And Aaron,” Mr. Stowe said, not realizing he was actually talking to Alex, “finish up your brother’s work.”
What Mr. Stowe didn’t see as he walked into the house was the leap of hope and the pleading glance to play along that Aaron shot to Alex over his shoulder. Nor did he see the returned look of disbelief, followed by a cool shrug of indifference from Alex, the already Unwanted. Alex turned his back on his brother, and, using the shovel as he always did, he slowly, methodically, filled in the hole.
It was the slurping of the ice cream malts through straws that woke Alex. He opened his eyes, staring at an unfamiliar ceiling, trying to figure out where he was.
“Have a nice nap?” Meghan grinned.
Alex sat up and shook the sleep from his brain. “Yeah,” he said, “actually, I did. I haven’t been sleeping very well the last few nights.” He rubbed his eyes. “Where’s Sam?”
Meghan shrugged. “Library, maybe?”
Lani stared at the wall and didn’t say anything at all.
“Lani?” Alex said. “Are you okay?”
Lani stared at the wall and said even less than nothing, if that were possible.
Meghan raised her eyebrow. “Hmm,” she said. “What’d you do now, Alex?”
“I swear, I—nothing!”
Lani slurped on the dregs of her milk shake. Loudly.
Meghan looked back and forth between the two and slowly, uneasily, got up from the couch. “I’m … going to go find out where Samheed is,” she said carefully. “I’ll be right back.” She hurried over to Earl, glancing back occasionally over her shoulder.
“Lani, I—”
Lani sat up and faced Alex, silencing him with her glare. She breathed evenly three or four deep breaths, her eyes flaring. Finally she spoke. “You don’t just kiss a girl on the cheek and then ignore her for three days.”
Alex’s jaw dropped. He flushed bright red.
“Don’t do it again.”
“Uhh …” Alex whispered an oath under his breath and put his burning face in his hands, trying to think of something to say. Finally he sighed deeply, looked up, and gave Lani a helpless look.
“I said, don’t do it again.” Lani’s voice was growing louder.
“Okay! Okay, I won’t. I’m … sorry. I’m … wait a second.” He tipped his head to the side. “You mean, don’t … you know. The first thing? Or don’t, um, ignore you?”
Meghan sidled back over to them, clearing her throat loudly as she approached.
Lani rolled her eyes at Alex and smiled brightly at Meghan. “Is Samheed coming down tonight?”
“Maybe later, he said. He’s working on some art project in the library with Will Blair.” Both girls sneered at the mention of Will’s name.
Alex sat very still, not quite sure if he was allowed to speak. And not needing to, as it turned out, since Meghan and Lani were both suddenly quite chatty.
“So, what’s he working on?”
“It’s some sort of drawing thing. Threety, I think he called it? Alex, you know what threety is?”
Alex cleared his throat. “Uh, what?”
Lani tilted her head. “Do you mean 3-D? Like, three-dimensional?”
“Yeah, that’s it, I think. It’s like he’s trying to draw a closet door on the wall of his room, but it would be a 3-D doorway that led to a room you could actually go in and out of. He was thinking of it as a defensive spell—a place to hide, I guess.”
“How would you keep others from coming in it once you’re inside, though?” Alex asked, intrigued.
“That’s what I was wondering,” Meghan said. “Only Mr. Today can do that.”
Lani whipped her hair behind her ear and rummaged through her book bag. “Hold on a minute,” she said. “I know I read something …”
Alex thought Lani’s ear was just about perfect. He thought about how he’d whispered into that very same ear right before he’d kissed her, and he blushed again.
Meghan, eyeing Alex, rolled her eyes. Ahh, now I know what’s going on, she thought. Geez. She coughed lightly. “I’m still trying to figure out how Simber and Florence got into the theater that one time. They’re way too big to fit in the tube, and that’s the only way in there.”
Lani pulled out a book. “Oh, that’s not too tough, Meg. I wondered the same thing. In fact Alex could probably make that happen better than either of us or Samheed.”
“Who, me?”
“You’re the artist, Alex.” Lani said. She smiled; all traces of the earlier fire in her eyes were now extinguished.