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  “Then he won’t hear me.” Mounting her bike, Sal pedaled off quickly. “Firsts have to practice.”

  Brydan caught up with her, arms pumping. She slowed her pace.

  “Who was that girl?” she asked. “D’you think she’ll be all right?”

  “Tauni Morrison?” asked Brydan. “She’s always been weird. Freaks easy, but she should be okay if people leave her alone for a while.”

  Sal could relate. “I think we’re going to be late.”

  “No kidding. It’s twenty after nine.”

  “It is?” She gaped in astonishment.

  “You were playing for half an hour.” Brydan gave her an odd look. “Didn’t you notice?”

  A delicate fear winged through Sal. How could something rise out of her and change everything, just like that? Where had that beautiful playing come from, those lovely sounds that had trickled through her like willow trees stroking water? They were gone now, lost, like everything else in her life that had blessed her, then disappeared. Grinding her foot hard against the pedal, Sal put on a burst of speed.

  “Hey!” hollered Brydan.

  “Oh, sorry.” She braked and waited for him to catch up. “You got any condoms?”

  A slight flush hit Brydan’s face as he coasted past. “What is this, an invitation?”

  She did this to him sometimes, talked to Brydan as if he was Dusty, Lizard or another of her brother’s uncouth friends. It never failed to take Brydan into the red zone, as if he thought she’d somehow managed to deke his civil pretenses and zoom straight into his thought life. Why did guys think they were so different from girls when it came to thinking about sex? “I just thought, in case the office secretary asks us what we were doing, we could show them to her. Put her mind at ease.”

  Brydan laughed drily. “Sal, did anyone ever tell you that your grasp on reality let go a long time ago?”

  “Hey, I’m holding on with my phantom limbs.”

  He liked the joke. Everyone liked a joke. Tell enough jokes and no one looked past the surface, down to where the strange wailing cries were hidden. Putting on an easy grin, Sal pedaled through the clean wet morning toward the sunlit walls of Saskatoon Collegiate.

  Chapter Four

  The third scroll was dropped onto her binder as she rushed between classes at mid-morning break. The halls were crowded, she hadn’t seen anyone of note beside her — the scroll hadn’t been there, then suddenly it was. Instinctively, she pulled the binder to her chest, crushing the scroll to invisibility. A mad screaming started in her head: No, it can’t be, it can’t, why is this happening to me? To her left, she spotted an open maintenance closet, full of cleaning solutions and wet mops. Stepping in, she closed the door and fumbled for the light switch. The air gave off the usual slight crinkling sensation as the electricity cut in, and the small room grew sharp-edged with light. Frantically she tore at the ribbon and the wax seal, not caring if the paper ripped. Things often came in threes, it was the number of finality. This had to be the last scroll, the last blank scroll, and the end of a tasteless joke that just didn’t know when to quit.

  The crushed paper opened uneasily. Sal’s eyes skimmed the contents, then darted to the bare bulb above her, its vivid electric wire. In the stillness her breath repeated itself, harsh in her throat. Thick chemical odors closed in like a cage. As her eyes reluctantly returned to the black message scrawled across the page, the lightbulb’s electric afterimage danced across her retinas, confusing her vision, but the third scroll’s contents had already been seared deep into her memory.

  Congratulations! You are this year’s lottery winner. Report high noon, you know where. Tardiness will not be tolerated.

  She was on her bike, pedaling furiously. She burrowed deep into her bed, sucking her thumb. She huddled in a bean- bag chair under the giant Winnie-the-Pooh at the downtown library branch, nose buried in Miss Pickerell Goes to Mars and shaking uncontrollably. Endless escape scenarios flashed through Sal’s head as she slouched near the back of her French class, each granting a brief virtual-reality burst of freedom before returning her to the late-morning classroom, the desk with the cracked seat that pinched her butt, and the clock at the front of the room sweeping its hands around the final fateful arc toward twelve o’clock.

  She sucked at her tongue, swallowing and swallowing the sour taste of fear. There was no way to avoid this meeting. All over S.C., Shadow Council members were slouched in similar desks, faking interest in quadratic equations and the dissection of dead rats while they plotted her doom. Her name hadn’t yet been released to the general student population — no one had started treating her as if she’d contracted rabies — but the important students knew. She could feel their minds, like lasers in an electronic network, closing in on her from all over the school. In thirty minutes ... in fifteen ... in ten, the twelve o’clock bell would ring and those minds would materialize into bodies. Someone was probably already standing guard, waiting for her outside in the hall. They’d have her class schedule; Shadow Council always took care of details like that. Hell, they probably had a plant sitting somewhere in this very classroom, watching her right now.

  “Sally Hanson, lisez le commencement du chapitre trois, s’il vous plaît.” The teacher’s voice, its crisp concise accent, was a sudden missile winging through Sal’s brain.

  “Huh?” As Sal straightened, her hand slipped on her notebook, leaving a sweaty imprint on the blue-lined page.

  “Frère Jacques, Frère Jacques, dormez-vous?” singsonged the teacher. The class laughed, a sound defined by its ordinariness. Over by the window, Kimmie faked a coma, then flashed a sympathetic grin. Swallowing hard, Sal stared at the friendly neutral expressions that surrounded her. In approximately one hour, her first meeting with Shadow Council would be over, the invisible all-important X marked permanently on her forehead, and her name released like oxygen into the bloodstream of S.C.’s rumor-mill. At that time, she would be set finally and ultimately apart. Never again would anyone look at her with generic friendliness or indifference. This ordinary moment, this classroom of grinning faces was like a banished prisoner’s last glimpse of a familiar homeland as the king’s ship took him to the deserted island where he’d been condemned to live alone, forever in exile.

  It was a door like any other, in a hallway shared with classrooms and a girls’ washroom. Bare and nondescript, there was nothing to announce its purpose, unlike the insignia that appeared on the school store, yearbook, and darkroom doors. No sign had been tacked to it announcing Enter With Trepidation, no neon skull and crossbones glowed above the doorknob, but there wasn’t a single S.C. student who approached its threshold without having achieved the elite rank of membership or a direct summons. Teachers, even Mr. Wroblewski, the school principal, knocked before entering.

  Officially, Shadow Council fronted as the Celts, a club that had been established decades earlier to assist with school events. Members helped the maintenance department with various tasks such as setting up for school assemblies and sports meets, and they frequently did odd jobs for other clubs, such as distributing publicity posters throughout Saskatoon. In return for these services, they’d been given the use of a small clubroom. Applications from students who wished to join the club were voted on by the current membership. Over the years the Celts had gained an elite status as an exclusive, all-male club, until a female principal had forced the gender issue. Now it was an elite, gender-inclusive, exclusive club that put in its required muscle-time stacking chairs, distributing posters, and posing for its annual yearbook photo surrounded by cartons of Molson Canadian — a club that, on the surface, looked as ordinary as the door that closed it off from the rest of the school.

  As Sal approached the door she could hear muffled voices punctuated by bursts of laughter. To either side the hallway stretched into an echoing emptiness, the early noon-hour rush over, only the occasional student ambling past. For the past ten minutes, she’d been drifting in and out of the girls’ washroom across the hall
, disguising herself as a weak bladder, but none of the glances thrown her way had been remotely speculative. Even after receiving the third scroll, there was nothing to set her apart — she continued to fade into the masses as seamlessly as she’d always done.

  No one had been waiting outside her French class. Shadow Council must have assumed, in its arrogance, that she’d show as expected, no matter what kind of blood, sweat and dissolving entrails she dragged in her wake. Another burst of laughter erupted inside the room, inverting her stomach, and Sal groped for the doorknob. The cool metal slipped under her hand, and she had to try a second time. Then, suddenly, the door was swinging toward her, panic opening wide, as if someone had torn the ribs from her chest and now there was nothing to stand between herself and the sheer fear of her heart.

  For a moment she saw them as they were without her — nine senior students in jeans and rugby shirts, sprawled across an old couch and several armchairs, and laughing over cans of Pepsi and cafeteria lunch trays. Linda Paboni, vampire queen, perched on a guy’s lap. Others sat, feet dangling, along a row of cupboards. They could have been a group of popular students from any public high school. There was nothing to distinguish them in any way except the presence of Sal Hanson herself, standing in the doorway with the third scroll clutched in her right hand.

  A face turned toward her, then another. Like a chalkboard eraser, silence moved across the group, erasing conversation. A gleam seemed to hover over them and they radiated an invisible menace, their layered eyes looking out from behind secrets. Even though Sal was the only one standing, it felt as if they were all looking down at her. Someone snickered.

  “Come in, come in,” called a soft voice. “Don’t let the grass grow beneath your feet.”

  The speaker sat in a burgundy armchair, a shaggy, dark-haired guy with long sideburns — Willis Cass, trumpet player, Student Council vice president, and one of the school’s top athletes. Not once, during all of last year’s Concert Band practices, performances and parties, had Sal spoken to him. Now, as she stepped slowly into the doom of that room, she felt his eyes watching her speculatively, as if she was some kind of conversation piece, curious and oddly shaped. Settling onto the arm of his chair, a bleach-haired girl giggled and slapped his shoulder.

  “Close the door behind you, if you don’t mind.” Willis’s voice seemed to lean toward Sal, encircle her with concern. Turning too quickly to comply, she knocked her hand against the doorframe and felt nothing. She’d gone completely numb. The door clicked quietly as it slid into place, closing her in, and she stood staring at the doorknob as if she’d never seen one before.

  “We’ve saved a chair for you. Come and sit down,” Willis continued, his voice gentle and insistent. Sal watched her hand slide off the doorknob as if it belonged to a stranger. It did belong to a stranger — she was a stranger, she’d never met the person she was becoming, walking woodenly toward the footstool Willis was indicating at the center of the group.

  “Sit down,” he said and she sat facing him, her eyes on his sloppily laced Reeboks.

  “Give me the scroll.”

  Automatically, she handed it to him, his voice the key that unlocked her movements.

  “Thank you,” he said and a silence ensued, a silence of eyes and breathing. All about her she felt it — a soft-breathing circle of watching eyes. She wasn’t looking up, no way was she making eye contact with the horde of predators that pressed so close, she could have touched any one of them without stretching. She might have to be here, trapped in this room, there might be no physical escape, but she knew how to squeeze her mind small and run off into cracks and crannies. They could stare at her body for as long as they wanted, she was already gone, crawled into a hole in the baseboard or deep into the wall — The Wall Live, her favorite CD, the classic album of all time and the one she and Dusty pumped to top volume in the rec room when their mother wasn’t home. “Don’t be a brick!” they would yell at each other, twitching and convulsing to Gilmour’s achingly gorgeous guitar chords and Waters’ heartbeat bass, throbbing at the core of the universe. “Don’t be a brick!”

  “You know why you’re here,” Willis said after a long pause.

  Eyes fixed on the double knots in his shoelaces, Sal jerked out a nod.

  “Tell us why you’re here,” said Willis.

  “The scroll,” Sal croaked faintly. The girl beside Willis giggled and Sal fumbled for her name — Ellen Petric, a girl who had mixed success with Nice’n Easy. One day she’d be honey-blonde, the next, a vibrant carroty sheen.

  “The scroll?” probed Willis.

  “... told me to come,” faltered Sal.

  “And why did it tell you to come?”

  “Because I won the lottery.”

  “That’s right,” Willis said approvingly. “Tell me, Sally Hanson — what does it mean to win the lottery?”

  The words were automatic, unthinking, her brain dulled by fear. “It means I’m your dud for the year.”

  Willis’s eyebrows rippled. A look of amusement crossed his face.

  “Demerit,” said a voice directly behind Sal.

  “Reason for the demerit?” asked Willis mildly, looking past Sal to the girl who’d spoken.

  “Victim showing disrespect to Shadow Council president,” replied the girl, her voice clipped and flat.

  “Rolf, record one demerit,” said Willis, nodding at a lanky blond guy on the couch.

  “Sally Hanson, one demerit,” murmured Rolf, marking an X in the binder on his lap.

  Not even five minutes had passed, and there was already an X beside her name. “What’s a demerit mean?” Sal blurted, her voice a small explosion in her throat, scaring her.

  “Second demerit,” snapped the girl.

  “Reason for demerit?” asked Willis, his face expressionless.

  “Victim speaking without permission,” said the girl.

  “Record second demerit,” said Willis, and Rolf’s hand marked another X.

  Sal’s lips parted slightly, as if trying to speak without sound. Jagged waves skittered across her brain, coming and going — nothing that made sense, nothing to hang onto.

  “If you wish to ask a question,” Willis said softly, “raise your hand and wait until you’re given permission to speak.”

  Slowly Sal’s hand rose.

  “Yes?” asked Willis.

  “I’m not a victim,” said Sal.

  “Demerit,” the girl behind her snapped again. “That’s not a question.”

  “Record demerit,” said Willis.

  Fear was a large dry tongue, filling Sal’s mouth. Again, her hand went up.

  “Yes?” prompted Willis.

  “Do I get to give demerits?” she asked.

  For a moment, Willis’s face seemed about to break into a laugh. Then he leaned forward and took her chin in his hand. Sal stopped breathing. Touched — she hadn’t expected to be touched.

  “Listen to me, little sis,” Willis Cass said quietly. “We know you better than you think. In fact, we knew you before you entered this school. We were waiting for you to start S.C., and we’ve been watching you since you got here. Maybe it’s a coincidence you won this year’s lottery, and maybe it isn’t. Whatever — your name got drawn, and you’re the lottery victim. You know what that means. Everyone knows what that means.”

  He paused, letting the silence gloat. Sal stared at the network of blue veins on his upturned wrist.

  “You ever talk to last year’s victim?” he asked finally.

  Knowing descended upon her. Motionless, she sat without speaking.

  “I asked you — did you talk to last year’s victim?”

  Sal shook her head.

  “So, you know how it works. Everyone cooperates. Everyone wants a victim, Sally — even you. So how can you complain? Did you protest when it was someone else? No, you watched, you enjoyed, and now it’s your turn. Now you’re Shadow’s victim, Shadow’s dud for the year. We’ll assign you duties, and you’ll perform the
m. When we pull your leash, you’ll come. We whistle the tune, and you dance. Listen up now while we introduce ourselves, so you won’t confuse us with the masses that dwell under our guiding light.

  “I’m Willis Cass, Shadow Council president.” Releasing Sal’s chin, Willis raised his right hand, the middle three fingers pointed upward, the fifth and the thumb tucked in.

  “Ellen Petric,” smirked the carrot-blonde beside him, also raising the middle three fingers of her right hand.

  “Rolf de Regt, Shadow Council secretary,” said the guy with the binder, giving her the same hand signal.

  “Fern O’Brien,” said the girl next to him, and so it went, the circle introducing itself one by one, pausing longest at Linda Paboni, Shadow Council vice president and demerit enthusiast sitting directly opposite Willis Cass. Jesus, thought Sal, I left my back wide open. Several runaway glances were enough to match the girl in front of her to Kimmie’s vampire queen stories — the power smirk, the knowing eyebrows, the direct hazel gaze sharpened to a killing edge. Slightly giddy, Sal continued to rotate on the footstool, obediently receiving each name and three-fingered salute until she found herself once again facing Willis, another lengthy pause, and a long swallowing silence.

  “Four demerits,” Willis mused, stroking his chin. “Punishment begins at five, Sally. You’re lucky I didn’t give you two for your last indiscretion, but we’re going easy on you today. We’re not brutes, we know you’re learning the ropes, but we have to follow the traditions that were set in place long before any of us started at this school. We all have our parts to play. You play yours, and you’ll find out we’re really on the same side. Friends.”

  Sal’s stomach lurched, and she fought the neon urge to throw up all over his double-knotted Reeboks.

  “In fact, we’re the only friends you’ve got now.” Willis’s voice faded to a whisper and the circle around Sal sighed and rustled as if some kind of epiphany had been achieved, something beautiful released.