Anne Ursu - The Shadow Thieves

"Wha-?" Zee said.

"Lots of kids are sick. So I guess -"

"Wait," Zee leaned forward. "How many?"

"I dunno," Charlotte shrugged. "Maddy's got it. She's been gone for a week."

Zee leaned toward her and grabbed her arm. Bartholomew fell off his lap. "What is it? What does she have?"

Charlotte stared at him. "I don't know! Nobody knows. She can't get out of bed, it's really awful, she's just lying there -"

Zee fell back into the couch. "Oh no." His hands flew to his face. Charlotte and Bartholomew stared. "What?"

"It's my fault," he said slowly. "It's all my fault." Charlotte could not stand it anymore. "What's your fault? Zee, what's going on?"

Zee had lost all color in his face. He seemed to be shaking. "They followed me."

SIX MONTHS AGO ZACHARY MILLER HAD BEEN AN ordinary boy living an ordinary life in an ordinary part of the ordinary city of London (for, despite Charlotte's feelings on the matter, London is very ordinary if you grew up there). Zee liked music, he liked football (that's British for soccer), and most of all he liked Samantha Golton, the dark-haired forward on the girls' school team. He had spent quite a long time trying to name the exact shade of brown of her hair-it was richer than "nut," yet not as red as "mahogany" or as black as "raven." He had finally settled on "chocolate," which had the added benefit of connoting something extremely delicious.

Samantha was the fastest girl in her year at Feldwop and Egfred's School for Girls, and Zee was the fastest boy in his at Feldwop and Egfred's School for Boys. Zee thought it was time for some coeducation.

At night he dreamed of a summer running back and forth across football pitches with Samantha, practicing his passes with her, but there were a couple of problems with this scenario.

Problem Number One: He was going to spend the summer in Exeter living with his grandmother and training with the summer club there. Zee was actually really looking forward to going; he always came back from his summer holidays fit, well fed, sun drenched, and happy. But he did not know how he could survive ten weeks without a glimpse of those dark tresses rippling behind her as she ran, like the waves of a cocoa-dark sea.

Problem Number Two: He had never actually spoken to Samantha.

Not that there hadn't been plenty of chances. F &E offered plenty of opportunities for (well-supervised) interaction between the girls' and boys' schools. In addition to various formal social functions there was the drama club, the yearly F &E Olympics, and the chess club -which, due to its coeducational nature, was far more popular than it reasonably ought to have been.

But Zee did not do drama, he was terrible at chess, and he was unwilling to fake it for the sake of either club. He grew so quickly that tuxedos never seemed to fit him right, and anyway, most of the social events seemed designed for people with Roman numerals after their name. He had watched the girls' team play a few times, and he'd become friendly with some of the members of the team. He even went running occasionally with their captain, Nicki, who lived down the street from him.

But he had never been able to talk to chocolate-haired, almond-eyed Samantha; in fact, he had never been able to talk near or around chocolate-haired, almond-eyed Samantha. In fact, if you took any preposition and put chocolate-haired, almond-eyed Samantha as its object, what you'd get was one mute Zee. He thought it would be better at least to babble incoherently, the way Chad Blightmere did near or around Nina Desai- at least then Samantha would know he was there. But alas. Her very presence in a room turned him perfectly still and mute, a lovesick banister.

So even if he were going to stay in London, he could not frolic, because a banister does not frolic. In Exeter he could frolic all he wanted, but that frolicking would be entirely Samantha-free.

Or so he thought.

One day, just as spring was easing into summer and he had already mentally begun to pack for his trip, Zee went to see a senior girls' match with Nicki. On their way home they talked buoyantly of the match, of their teams, of school, and of nothing in particular.

"You going to play this summer?" Nicki asked.

"I'm going to Exeter," Zee said. "I'll play with the club there."

"Pity," Nicki said.

"Nah. I like it. My gran's there, and I stay with her."

"Every summer?"

"Yeah. My dad travels for work in summer. Mum's a teacher, so she goes with him. Gran's fun."

"Is the club any good?"

"Ah, they've got some brilliant players. The club attracts people from all over, and we always win the district."

"Oh," Nicki gave a shrug, as if to say that winning a district isn't a big deal when that district isn't London. "No girls' team, I suppose."

Zee blushed. "No."

She nodded. "Well, there's some sort of camp at the university there this year, and they actually let girls play. One of ours is going to be there in July."

Zachary stopped. "One of yours? Who?"

"Samantha Golton. The forward. Know her? She's almost as fast as you."

Zee's eyes popped open. "Samantha?"

"I see you do know her," Nicki grinned. "Shall I put in a good word for you?"

"Yes. No… I don't know!" Zee grabbed her shoulder. "What should I do?"

"Sam's cool. Why don't I, you know, lay the ground work?"

"No! No! Don't!"

"Okay, okay. Why not?"

"Because… because…" Zee stopped. Why not, indeed? Because either Samantha wouldn't be interested and then he'd have to curl up in a corner and die, or else she might be interested and then she'd try to talk to him and he might not be ready and then he'd embarrass himself and would have to curl up in a corner and die. Either way the consequences would be dire. Dire!

For the last three years, ever since his parents had enrolled him in Feldwop and Egfred, Zachary Miller had worked on his football game. His parents had insisted on sending him to a school that still wanted to train lords and ladies, whereas Zee wanted to go to a school where all the real people were, the ones who lived in this century. But F &E was known as one of the "best" day schools in the country, and he suspected that neither of his parents realized that in some ways that just meant that F &E attracted the "best" people.

All of the students at F &E were something. Most of those things involved having the most land or the longest name or the highest aristocratic rank or the most drops of blue blood or, at the very least, the most money. Zee didn't belong to that world. His dad was an American businessman, his mother was a schoolteacher and the daughter of immigrants. Most of the boys there belonged to something very old, very insular, and very, very, very white-something that people with grandmothers from Malawi and grandfathers from South Africa were not a part of. There were not a lot of biracial earls of Northumberland, nor were there many brown faces at F &E, no matter how many times the administrators took pictures of Zachary, Matthew Hollywell, and/or Phil Higsby for their promotional brochures.

But the opposite of something is nothing, and Zee had no interest in being nothing. He was determined to find his place at F &E. And since he could never be something based on bloodline, he would have to settle for merit. But he could not be the smartest. Zee was smart, certainly-consistently around tenth in his year. But F &E attracted its share of young geniuses, the kind of boys who were in the chess club for the actual chess-like, for instance, Phil Higsby, who was nationally ranked.