Savant (The Luminether Series) Read online

  His name was Howard Winthrop and Emma loved him. An eighth grader, he played football for the school team and was already being courted by over a dozen high schools, public and private, all over the state. He was a year ahead of Emma, and a recent growth spurt had made him a full head taller than any other boy in school. Emma often found herself gazing at him from across the cafeteria, at the way his hair, parted along one side, swept across his forehead in a swath of dark orange loveliness. His freckled skin had a sun-tinged quality that gave him the look of someone who spends most of his time outdoors.

  And Howard was smart, too. A straight-A student, he’d recently been elected class president. The speech he had delivered in front of their class, in which he referred to himself as “just a regular boy from outside of town,” had left Emma unable to breathe right. She always went for that same type of boy; the leader that everyone looked up to, the overachiever who made it look easy.

  But there was only one problem, and her name was Alicia Bergensen.

  Alicia was the physical opposite of Emma. Where Emma was blonde and slight of frame and wispy-looking, Alicia was raven-haired, tall, and athletic. She couldn’t walk down the hallway without turning the head of every boy there.

  After school each day, Emma would pass Alicia and a few other girls from the track team stretching on the grass near the parking lot. It was obvious why they did it, and Alicia always made sure to wear her shortest shorts to better display her sculpted legs. And each day, dressed in their football uniforms with those shoulder pads making them look huge and powerful, Howard and the rest of his teammates would jog by, and Alicia would call out loudly: “Hi, Howie!” and Howard would wave back and say “Whatsup, cutie?” or “Lookin’ good, Leesh!”

  It made Emma cringe. How could someone as intelligent and humble as Howard Winthrop be even remotely interested in someone as stuck up and mean as Alicia Bergensen, who once poured a thimbleful of crushed glass into another girl’s track suit to make her itch uncontrollably during a race?

  And what did Alicia have that Emma didn’t? Sure, she was pretty and she was a good athlete, but Emma was pretty in her own right. There were tons of boys in her class who simply melted every time she said hi to them. Or maybe she had imagined all those sappy stares and stuttering responses?

  These insecurities, which had never plagued her before, suddenly began to follow her around like a nasty smell, reminding her at every step, in a nagging, persistent voice, that maybe she wasn’t good enough for a boy like Howard; that maybe she never would be. After all, she was pretty clumsy (surely she got that from her father, the clumsiest man alive) and she had a bad habit of sucking up to her teachers and outsmarting everyone else in class by answering the tough questions when no one else could.

  In retrospect, she came to the conclusion that it was likely no one in her class even liked her very much. Even her closest friends, Rachel, Sandra, and Kylie, sometimes gave her those looks that seemed to say, Hey Emma, why don’t you tone it down at bit? Don’t you know that boys don’t like girls who are smarter than them?

  One day after school, Emma decided to take matters into her own hands. She walked straight into the principal’s office and said, using a defiant tone of voice she often heard her mother use on the phone during her “serious conversations about money,” that she was ready, willing, and eager to participate in the school talent show.

  “But you missed the auditions, little one,” Mr. Ronaldo said. He was a well-dressed, polished Argentinean man who put a little too much gel into his boyish crop of black hair. Emma walked in to find him slumped at his desk, carefully polishing the nails of his left hand. “I believe I sent an e-mail to all the teachers. They were supposed to address the matter to their classes. Maybe yours simply did not ‘get the memo,’ as they say here.”

  “I know,” Emma said, and then she continued in Spanish, one of her best subjects in school: “Es que soy bailarina y tengo muchas ganas de mostrarle a mis compañeros algo que preparé. Tengo un video para mostrarle”—she reached into her bookbag and pulled out a CD case—“Después de ver esto, creo que me dejará participar.”

  The man put aside the nail file and gave her a stunned, wide-eyed look. “You’ve been paying attention in my class. And I always thought you girls were more interested in your texting messages and Friendbook, or whatever this program is called.”

  “Oh, not at all.” Emma smiled. She reached forward and placed the CD case in front of him. “I listen to every word you say. I love Spanish. It’s so much prettier than French.”

  “Indeed it is,” the man said, flashing his teeth in a wide, handsome smile. “Well, you have missed the auditions by two weeks, but maybe it is possible that I make an exception.”

  He pressed a button on his laptop and delicately placed the CD onto the tray. All of his movements were like that—delicate and refined, almost feminine in their grace. He watched the video Emma had prepared of herself dancing in her back yard to the Christina Aguilera track. Next to him, Emma stood in silence, watching the video and biting her lower lip.

  Mr. Ronaldo looked up at one point and winked at her. Emma clapped her hands in delight as he signed her up to perform in the twelfth slot, right after Joey McNamara’s monologue from Othello and before Halley Svenson’s solo rendition of “Sway With Me.” This was her chance; she would show the whole school (and Howie Winthrop) that there was more to Emma Banks than met the eye.

  The evening finally came, and of course Milo and her parents were among the faces in the crowd. Emma was backstage for some of the first eleven performances but spent most of the time in the bathroom in the grip of such a powerful spell of nausea that at one point she thought she would start puking blood. No one, as far as she knew, was aware of just how close she had come to having a nervous breakdown that evening. The thought of being out there, beneath those lights, before that darkened sea of faces, made her stomach flop around like a fish out of water.

  At around the seventh performance, Emma came out of the bathroom looking haggard and dripping with sweat. Naturally, the first person she saw was Alicia Bergensen. Emma tried not to look up as they passed each other, but it was impossible not to admire Alicia’s outfit. Alicia was also one of the dancers performing in the show, and she was wearing a pair of black tights that fit her as though they’d been tailored to her exact body type, muscular thighs and all. Emma was not one to feel envious of others, but seeing Alicia’s confident strut and that shapely dark face, free from even the slightest trace of sweat, made her want to rush back into the bathroom and puke some more. Alicia gave her a single dismissive glance and kept walking.

  Then, before Emma could push through the double doors leading into the gymnasium’s back area, Alicia began to speak.

  “Hey, Emma. Emma Banks.”

  Emma turned and gave Alicia a defensive look. “Yeah?”

  “Can I ask you something?”

  Alicia had begun to walk toward her. There was a friendly look on her face that made Emma feel slightly more at ease.

  “Sure,” Emma said.

  Alicia came so close that Emma could smell the girl’s fruity perfume. With her right hand, she reached toward Emma’s face. Emma actually thought Alicia was going to pat her on the back and wish her the best of luck. Instead, she grabbed the collar of Emma’s top, glanced at the label, and said:

  “You bought this at Riley’s?”

  Emma nodded.

  “Figures,” Alicia said, and her smile changed into a catty grimace of disgust. “Poor people shop there.”

  She gave Emma one last pitiful look and turned away.

  It was the most awful sensation Emma had ever known, like there were cold, parasitic fish swimming around in her belly. Was her family poor? She knew they were having trouble with money, and that her father had recently taken out a second mortgage on the house, whatever that meant. She was also aware of the fact that her mother worked two jobs, one as a kindergarten teacher during the school year and one as a
gardener in the summer.

  But were they poor? And did it matter?

  She was starting to think it did.

  It took every ounce of willpower she possessed to hold in yet another wave of nausea long enough to tell the director of the Talent Show, old and crabby Mrs. Letorneau, that she, Emma, had come down with a sudden and debilitating illness, making it impossible for her to perform onstage.

  Emma considered looking for her family in the audience but shied away from the idea. She was in no mood to be anywhere near a large crowd of people right now, especially an audience that would only serve to remind her of how close she had come to embarrassing herself.

  And what would her parents think? And Milo? She had been talking obsessively about the talent show for over a week, and now to have it come to this—it was just too much. They would surely be disappointed, but not as disappointed as Emma felt at that moment as she ran down the empty corridors of Dearborn Elementary, past endless rows of hard, green lockers that seemed to be closing in on her, toward the double doors that—SLAM!—burst open into the parking lot.

  She was standing there looking up at the stars when Milo found her. A look of worry had come over his comically young-looking face. Emma wasn’t surprised by the fact that he had known exactly where to find her. She and her brother had a strange, almost telepathic, connection that allowed one to sense—in a vague and distant way—whenever the other was in trouble.

  “It’s OK,” she said. “I’m fine.”

  “Whatever it is, Emma, you can tell me.”

  Emma sniffled and wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “Alicia told me…”

  Milo reached out and took her arm. There was a spark of intensity in his eyes that made his words seem harder than stone.

  “You’re a better dancer than she is, Emma. And a better person, too.”

  Emma threw her arms around her brother. “I know, Milo. Thank you.”

  She sensed his embarrassment and pulled away. His face had gone a light shade of pink that was noticeable even in the dim, waxy yellow light washing over them.

  “What?” she said, placing her hands on her hips. “A sister can’t hug her own brother in public? Gee whiz, sorry if I embarrassed you!”

  Milo shook his head. “You’re so dramatic. You should’ve gone for theater instead.”

  “Whatever.” She walked back into the building with her arms crossed over her chest, her chin raised in an arrogant way. “Walk me back to the gymnasium.”

  Milo shrugged up at the sky as if to say, What did I do? And then he obediently followed his sister inside.

  And yet, despite her crippling stage fright, in the privacy of her own home Emma became a dancing fiend—as well as a safety hazard.

  During an intense practice session in her living room the week before school started, she happened to trip over a ripple in the carpet. She had been in the middle of one of her dances, and the jarring shift in her body’s course of momentum sent her sprawling across the room, arms and legs all over the place. She hit the side of a small table on top of which one of her mother’s vases—the one covered with drawings of athletic men and women drawn in silky blue lines riding chariots pulled by winged horses—had been strategically placed. The vase toppled, fell, and broke on the carpet in a powdery burst of jagged, triangular shapes. While pushing herself up, Emma happened to place her hand over one of the fragments. She pulled it back to discover a deep gash in her palm.

  She began to cry, but not because of the pain. There was too much adrenaline coursing through her body for the pain to be anything more than a faint tingling. She was crying because she knew her mother was fond of her vases and would be disappointed to find that Emma, having already broken a sacred rule (“Absolutely no dancing in the living room”), had gone and broken her favorite one.

  “Stupid,” she said, smacking her forehead with her good hand. “Stupid, stupid, stupid.”

  That was when Milo found her. He had been upstairs in his room, lying on his bed and staring up at the ceiling, thinking about his father’s explanation after the Holly Gerald incident a week earlier: You had the sun in your eyes, Milo. I didn’t really jump that high. You’re young, and young boys see what they want to see, especially when their fathers are involved.

  At some point, he heard the vase shatter downstairs and knew his sister was in trouble.

  He jumped off his bed and ran for the stairs. He found Emma sitting on the couch, nursing her wounded hand and crying. Without stopping, he took out the first-aid kit his mother kept in the cabinet beneath the kitchen sink and helped her dress the wound.

  “They might be able to save the arm,” he told her, “but I’m not so sure about the hand.”

  “Shut up,” Emma said, laughing a little though she was still crying.

  Milo had spread antibiotic cream and was now bandaging the palm.

  “What were you doing, anyway? Gymnastics?”

  “The vase,” Emma said. “I broke Mom’s favorite vase!”

  “Don’t worry so much. She has a hundred of those things. Dad gives her a new one every time he gets back from a trip.”

  That was another strange thing about the Banks family. Milo’s father was a salesman, but Milo and Emma were both uncertain as to what it was he actually sold for a living. He said it was antiques, rare books, and other precious items, but the look in his eyes told a different story. Whatever it was, it took a great toll on him, and he often looked weary and upset the day before he had to leave. And he would always come back with unusual little gifts, like the time he gave Milo a wooden top that could spin forever unless someone stopped it, or the time he gave Emma a baby doll that could say over a thousand words in a language she and Milo had never heard before.

  And of course, he always brought back a vase for his wife, because vases were her favorite.

  When Milo was finished bandaging his sister’s hand, he ran out into the back yard. His mother was crouched inside her garden, yellow boots reaching halfway up her calves and a straw hat casting a shadow over the delicate features of her face. She was a tall, slender woman, and whenever Milo saw her working in the garden he’d get the impression that she was having a conversation with her vegetables. Not that he ever saw her lips move, but still. One day he could have sworn he saw his mother wagging her finger at her tomatoes, as if urging them to grow. And they always did, as big as softballs.

  Seeing the alarmed look on her son’s face, Alexandra Banks threw off her hat and removed her gloves. She ran across the yard, her rubber boots squeaking and her nut-brown hair tossing in the breeze.

  “Is she OK?”

  “She’s fine, Mom.” He ran after his mother. “She’s more worried about the vase.”

  “I don’t care about the vase!”

  He followed his mother into the living room. By then, Emma had stopped crying and was standing over the broken shards, her good hand gripping the bandaged one.

  “Mom,” she said, glancing up at her mother and then looking down at the shards. “I can save money and buy you a new one. Milo owes me like five dollars.”

  Milo scratched the back of his head. “I thought I owed you four.”

  “Plus interest, dummy.”

  Alexandra shushed them. “Emma, honey, let me see your hand.”

  She inspected the bandages and nodded.

  “Good work, Milo. I’m proud of you.”

  Milo slid his hands bashfully into his pockets.

  “But Mom, the vase!” Emma looked heartbroken. “I shouldn’t have been dancing in the living room. I’m sorry.”

  “Well, I guess you learned your lesson. Let me see the cut.” She peeled back the bandage. “Oh, it’s not so bad. It might need a few stitches, but it’ll be OK.”

  Milo went and stood by the couch. He was studying the broken pieces to see if they could be glued back together when a gust of wind curled against his face. It was not an ordinary wind at all. It crackled, as if laced with electricity, and it made the fine hairs o
n his arms stand up. He looked at his mother and sister, at the point where their hands met—

  —and saw a puff of misty, glittering blue light drift from his mother’s fingers and seep into his sister’s wound.

  Alexandra did not seem to be aware of what was happening. Her expression was one of vacancy, as if her mind had flown to some other place. Then the blue light was gone. She stood up and looked around the room until her gaze finally settled on her children.

  “Mom?” Emma said. “Did you feel that? It was like electricity, but it felt really good.”

  “I felt it,” Milo said, stepping forward. “Mom, what just happened?”

  “Oh, nothing. I just had a moment, that’s all. Oh boy. Um…”

  They all looked down at Emma’s hand, the one with the bloody bandage hanging off the edge of her palm. When they realized what had happened, all three of them gasped.

  The wound had been fully healed.

  Chapter 3

  Their parents spent that evening trying to convince Milo and Emma that nothing out of the ordinary had taken place. The twins didn’t buy it, but they bowed their heads in acceptance and said nothing more. They had never seen their mother or father look so desperate and scared.

  That night, Milo crept down the stairs to his father’s study. He planned on asking the man a few questions and not leaving until he got answers.

  But when he got there, Emma was already standing by the door, which had been left open a crack to reveal yellow light inside. She nearly jumped when she saw Milo. Then she put a finger to her lips to shush him and waved him over.

  The twins stood by the door and listened as their mother and father spoke in hushed whispers inside.

  “There’s not a whole lot I can do,” Max was saying. “We’re not even legal citizens of this country. Or this world!”