Timothy July first noticed the jars lining the top shelf along the side of room 117 at the beginning of the school year, but by mid-April he’d still not looked closer. The specimens inside the jars had been pickled decades earlier in an opaque and yellowish liquid by some forgotten alumnus of Paul Revere Middle School. Over the years, most of the labels had faded or peeled away from the glass, and so the true identity of the strange multilegged worms, the twisted slimy bodies of mammalian fetuses, and the hollow exoskeletons of beetles would be left to the imaginations of those students who bothered to crane their necks and peer into the dusty heights of the classroom’s shadowy wall.
Until today, Timothy had taken no interest in them. No one had, not even Mr. Crane, Timothy’s seventh-grade history teacher, over whose classroom the specimens watched silently and who was presently providing instruction for the next day’s field trip.
“You’ll work in pairs,” said the teacher evenly, pacing in front of the long green chalkboard. “Together, you will choose a single artifact to study. I want ten pages from the two of you, illustrated in the manner of your choice--collage, drawings, charts, graphs, whatever--describing where your artifact is from, how it compares to the art of the era, and how . . .”
Timothy was not paying attention. Something in one of the jars was staring at him with a glassy black eye.
Stuart Chen leaned across the aisle and nudged him. Timothy jumped. “This is so lame,” Stuart whispered. “I thought field trips were supposed to be fun. I can’t believe he’s actually going to make us do work.”
Timothy glanced at his friend and distractedly grunted in agreement before turning back to the specimen in the jar. It’s funny, he thought, how things that were once invisible suddenly become visible. The black-eyed creature continued to watch him, silent and unmoving, as if waiting for him to turn away so it could shift position . . . or maybe unscrew the lid. Timothy shuddered with the sudden thought that there might be countless other invisible things out there in the world that he’d never noticed before, watching him all the time.
“The whole idea is dumb,” Stuart quietly droned on, speaking over Mr. Crane’s speech. “I mean, how are we supposed to know what to pick? Anything in the whole museum . . . ?” He glanced at Timothy. “You’re going to have to choose for us. I don’t really care.”
Timothy nodded. “I don’t care either,” he whispered.
To his right, he heard a strange clicking sound. For a brief moment, he thought the thing in the jar had actually moved; then he quickly realized that the sound had not come from the shelves above but from two rows away in the back corner. The new girl was hiding something underneath her desk. She rested her left ankle on her right thigh and stared at something she held in the crook of her knee. Timothy heard the clicking sound again and watched as a small flame from a silver lighter burst at this new girl’s fingertips.
“Let’s get you paired up,” said Mr. Crane, taking a notebook and pen from his desk.
As the teacher began to ask each student whom they would like to work with, Timothy watched the new girl in the last row continue to quietly flick the lighter open and closed. Like the specimen jars above her head, he’d never really paid attention to her before. She’d only been at the school for a month. She was quiet and didn’t speak to anyone. She wore gray--sweatshirt, jeans, sneakers. If it weren’t for her thick, messy red hair, she might have faded entirely into the wall. The next time she lit the lighter, to his surprise, she held it against her ankle. The flame raced up her white sock before extinguishing itself. Timothy couldn’t have been more shocked if the thing in the jar had leapt off the top shelf behind her and landed in her lap.
“This is going to stink,” Stuart said, not noticing the pyro in the corner. Timothy was too fascinated by what she was doing to pay any attention to his friend. Stuart poked Timothy in the shoulder and said, “Right?”
Suddenly, her brown eyes shifted toward him, and Timothy realized that he’d been caught.
“Abigail Tremens?”
The girl cupped the lighter in her fist and looked to the front of the classroom, where Mr. Crane was staring at her. “Yeah?” she said.
“Who would you like to work with?”
“Oh.” Abigail let her eyes fall to the desk. “I . . . uh . . . don’t know.”
Mr. Crane peered across the blank faces of his students, who waited in silence for him to continue. “Would someone please volunteer to be Abigail’s partner? We’ve all got to have a partner.”
Abigail seemed to shrink into her seat with embarrassment.
The class did not answer.
Timothy absentmindedly scratched at his ear. Mr. Crane suddenly exclaimed, “Timothy July! Good.”
Surprised, Timothy managed a weak whisper. “But--”
Mr. Crane didn’t seem to notice. “Abigail and Timothy,” he said pointedly, writing their names down in his notebook.
Timothy turned around. The girl stared at him, her mouth open in shock.
“Moving on. Stuart Chen, who would you like to work with?”
Timothy glanced apologetically at the boy who had been his usual partner, whenever they’d been given the opportunity, since kindergarten. But Stuart’s mouth was pressed tightly shut; his face shone faintly red through his olive skin. He glared at Timothy, sending a different type of fire across the three-foot aisle.
Copyright © 2011 by Dan Poblocki. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
