Jeff Hirsch - The Eleventh Plague

Once we got to school we all split up and the rest of that morning was pretty uneventful. Tuttle lectured and while everyone else was struggling to stay awake I leaned over my paper and took careful notes. He talked about math and poetry and the Holy Roman Empire. I had no idea there was so much world out there to learn about. At noon he let us out for lunch.

It had grown colder in the past few hours and some clouds had begun to pile up, signs of fall moving headlong toward winter. All of us spilled out onto the yard, pulling our lunches out of bags and buckets. The little ones immediately swarmed around the slide and swing sets, fighting over who got to do what first.

“Okay!” Martin announced as he pulled a wrinkled sheet of paper out of his back pocket. “Time to make the lineup! Waverly is benched!”

“What? No way!”

“Quinn is taking your place.”

“You know,” Derrick said. “You people don’t appreciate me. I’m gonna start hanging out with Will Henry.”

“Oh go take a bath, Derrick,” Wendy said.

I laughed and the lineup talk went on. They all seemed so comfortable with each other, laughing and joking, trading mock punches. I looked around at everyone else in the school yard as they ate their lunches in their own small groups. The inside jokes and chatter of each one joined with the others into a low roar that somehow didn’t seem as grating as it had just a few days earlier.

I turned back to the negotiations, and when I did, I saw Jenny. She was sitting under the big sycamore, facing away from the school, in her torn-up jeans and Red Army jacket with her knees pulled up in front of her, sketching furiously in her sketch pad.

My body tensed immediately. The note. I had almost forgotten. I tried to stay calm, nibbling at my sandwich and keeping my eye on her, waiting for an opportunity. All the noise and movement below her — the laughing and yelling and flirting, the squeak of the old swing sets — didn’t seem to distract her in the least. She drew with great looping strokes and slashes, leaning down into the pad like she was wrestling with it and just barely winning.

When she was done, Jenny dropped the sketch pad on the grass and stretched out against the tree. She reached up and tucked a length of hair behind her ear, leaving the rest of it to blow over her face like smoke drifting over beach sand.

“I don’t know why she even bothers coming.”

Jackson had moved out of the lineup negotiations and was eyeing Jenny too.

“Does she always just sit up there drawing and stuff?”

“No, that one’s new,” he said. “She just started coming to school again the other day.”

Up the hill Jenny leaned over her sketch pad, erasing, drawing again. I thought of that lone horse, locked in the classroom.

“Sometimes I wish…” Jackson’s forehead wrinkled, his lips hardening into a tense slit as he watched her. Whatever he was going to say, he pulled it back before it could get loose.

“What?”

“Sometimes I wish she would go,” Jackson said, his voice a harsh whisper. “Just leave. Before she does something that gets us all thrown out of here.”

“Would they really do that?”

Jackson eyed me a moment like he was trying to make a decision.

“There was a family,” he said, “a few years back. The Krycheks. Had a little girl, like nine, I think. Mr. Krychek used to be a soldier, but all he did was drink by the time he got here. He hid it pretty well for a while, but it got worse. One night he was drinking out in the woods and tried to build a fire. It went out of control and got within a few feet of spreading to the houses. Caleb called a meeting about it the next day. Mom and Dad tried to speak up for them, but Caleb had more than half the town ready to vote against them and anyone willing to stand up for them. In the end it was pretty much unanimous.”

“Your parents…?”

“Dad voted to send them away. He didn’t want to but… I mean, the guy was dangerous, right? What choice did he have? Let the whole town get destroyed? Get us thrown out too?”

“What about your mom?”

Jackson’s eyes went unfocused as he drew his fingertip aimlessly through the dirt. “She was… sick, I think. Didn’t make the vote that day.”

“What happened to them? The Krycheks?”

Jackson didn’t look up. He shrugged. “Dad and some others insisted they at least give them some supplies but… it was the middle of January.”

He didn’t need to say any more. Middle of the winter and the dad a drunk and dragging along a nine-year-old. Only one thing could have happened. I looked down at the remains of my sandwich but wasn’t hungry anymore. I could see that family clear as anything, huddled together and snow-blind, making their slow way out of town. A sick shudder went right through me.

I jumped as the bell rang and everyone started packing up their lunch things and heading inside.

“Let’s go!” Derrick shouted, throwing up his arms. “It’s time to learn, people!”

Jackson lingered by the door. “You coming?” he asked. “Yeah,” I said. “Sure. Just a second. I’ll catch up.” The doors slammed behind them and the yard was quiet and empty.

Just me and Jenny.

Jackson’s story hung with me. Now more than ever I had to be careful. If Jenny was going to be a threat to me, I needed to deal with it. I looked around, making sure I was alone before stalking up the hill. Jenny didn’t notice me as I drew near, too busy sketching the landscape in front of her. The trees looked almost alive on her paper, caught in mid-sway against the gray clouds, the horizon ominous in the distance.

“You’re different,” she said without turning. “Your clothes and hair and stuff.”

I froze. Jenny looked me up and down over her shoulder. Her dark eyes made me feel like I was a fish wriggling on the end of a spear.

“It was, uh… Violet. She gave me some clothes.”

“Figures,” Jenny smirked. “You look like one of them now. You come up here for a reason?”

I cleared my throat and tried to force myself back to business. “The note.”

“Which note?” she asked innocently. “A? B? C major?”

“Your note.”

“Oh, my note!”

“Jenny, whatever you think you saw—”

“Oh please,” Jenny said with a flirtatious lilt. “Let’s not play games that aren’t any fun.”

I felt my legs go weak. My mind was wiped clear like Tuttle’s blackboard. Jenny chuckled.

“I need to know what you want,” I said, trying to find the steel in my voice that was always in Grandpa’s, but only managed what sounded like a strained squeak. For a second I thought Jenny would laugh, but she didn’t. She dropped her pencil and shifted around, looking up at me like she was awaiting a lecture.

“Have you always been a scavenger?” she asked.

“I’m not—”

“Salvager. Whatever. You go north to south, right? To those trade gatherings?”

“Jenny, the note. I—”

“Do you take the same route every time or do you mix it up?”

One time Dad told me about how when they were building the railroads way back when, there would sometimes be a mountain in their way and they’d have to decide whether to load it up with dynamite and blow it up or just go around. I had the feeling that this was one of those times and I was pretty sure I didn’t have anywhere near enough dynamite for the first option. If I wanted the information, it looked like I was going to have to play along.

“It changes.”

“Why?”

“If you keep to one path, people can predict it. Set ambushes.”

“Smart. How close do you get to the coast?”

“Not close.”

“Why? Is it dangerous?”