Friendly Face, page 1
Title Page
Friendly Face
Sea Bonnies
Together Forever
About the Authors
Teaser
Copyright
Edward’s cereal bowl hit the floor and shattered; milk and soggy flakes splashed his jeans. Edward jumped up, frowned, and looked around, reminding himself of where he was. Right. He was in the kitchen—old-fashioned red laminate counters, bright white farm-style sink, retro fridge and stove, smells of ripening bananas and the alfalfa his mom put in her “energy smoothie”—he’d been eating breakfast until he got lost in his book. He looked down and stared at the remains of his bowl.
“Edward, you have to be more careful!” his mom snapped.
Edward glanced at her. His mom looked harried, as usual. A few auburn strands had come loose from the twist she always wore her hair in. She was shaking her head and rubbing her temples as she stared at the mess on the scuffed hardwood floor.
“How’d that get down there?” Edward asked.
His mom sighed. She leaned over and started picking up pieces of green stoneware. Edward bent over to help her … and their heads bumped together.
“Ow!” they shouted in unison.
His mother straightened and scowled at him. In one hand, she held the stoneware shards. She used the other hand to probe the red spot on her forehead.
Edward opened his mouth to apologize, but a look from his mother silenced him. She walked to the trash can under the sink and dropped in the broken cereal bowl. Edward grabbed a napkin from the round kitchen table, squatted, and started wiping up the milk and cereal.
“Edward.”
His mom held out a wet rag for him to use on the floor. He took it and started swiping it this way and that. His swift motions flung bits of cereal farther across the floor.
His mom sighed again. “Just leave it. I’ll get it. Go brush your teeth. You’re going to miss the bus.”
Edward stood and seized the moment to apologize. “Sorry. I don’t know how that bowl fell.”
His mom opened her mouth, closed it, took a deep breath, and then reached out and ruffled his hair. He squirmed. He wished she wouldn’t do that. It was like she couldn’t tell the difference between eighth grade and eight. She still tried to treat him like a little kid, even though he’d been thirteen for months. He was a teenager now. He needed her to get that.
He looked at her tight face. Now probably wasn’t the best time to try to explain it, though.
Edward and his mom had been on their own for a long time, and for the most part, they were close. They looked alike, too, which could be embarrassing. Even with the subtle makeup his mom wore, her hazel eyes, small nose, wide mouth, and strong jaw were almost mirror images of his own features. It was uncanny. His hair was the exact color of hers, too—but his hair wasn’t long enough to twist.
“Well, my little science geek,” his mom said, “what was that question you were asking the other day about unstoppable forces?”
“What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object? That question?” Edward scrunched up his face. What did the irresistible force paradox have to do with anything?
His mom nodded. “That one. Well, I can’t answer it. But I do know what happens when a cereal bowl pushed to the edge of the table meets the elbow of an inattentive boy who is reading at breakfast instead of eating.”
“Not a boy,” Edward said.
“Fine. Teen. Same result. You need to focus on one thing at a time, Edward. You get in a hurry, and that’s why you’re so prone to accidents. If you want to live through your teen years, you need to pay attention.”
“Well, I was paying attention to what I was reading,” Edward said.
“That’s not—” His mom sighed again. “Go pay attention to brushing your teeth.”
Edward shrugged and turned to leave the kitchen.
“Your book?” his mother said.
“Oh.” He turned and took it from her. She shook her head and smiled at him in the lopsided way she had whenever he messed something up. It was like she was saying, “You’re a hopeless case, but I love you anyway.”
Edward hesitated, then hugged his mom. “Sorry.”
* * *
“Edward, are you listening?”
Edward looked up at Mrs. Sterling, who frowned at him from the front of his eighth-grade science class. “Sorry?”
“I asked if you could please grab the iron filings from the cabinet. You’re the closest to it.”
“Oh. Sure.” Edward turned around and opened the metal cabinet behind him. They’d been talking about the whole unstoppable force/immovable object thing again at the start of class today, and his brain couldn’t stop chewing on it. Thanks to his many questions about it, Mrs. Sterling had assigned a paper on the subject. He thought about how he was going to organize his essay while he grabbed the filings.
“Okay, so now we’re going to witness the power of magnets,” Mrs. Sterling announced.
She beamed at the class. Mrs. Sterling was middle-aged with a round face and a wide smile. She always looked like she was having the time of her life, even when she wasn’t. She presided like a game show host over the classroom, which was full of desks, lab tables, and cabinets of vials and beakers. Charts, diagrams, and photos of scientific anomalies littered the walls—an endless number of distractions for Edward’s curious mind.
“Edward, since you’re up here,” Mrs. Sterling said, “why don’t you sprinkle those filings on that magnet?” She pointed to a flat gray boxlike contraption on her desk before turning away to write something on the blackboard.
He tried to see what she was writing while he opened the vial he’d grabbed, and, without looking, sprinkled a mound of filings on the flat surface.
“Thank you, Edward,” Mrs. Sterling said. “You can return to your seat.”
Edward nodded and headed back to his desk.
“Okay, here we go.” She flipped the switch on a fan that was set up in front of the magnet.
Suddenly, the front of the class was pelted with tiny black particles … and everyone started to sneeze. Mrs. Sterling, being nearest to her desk, sneezed the hardest. She also closed her eyes tightly.
One of the girls in the front row squealed. Another cried out, “My eyes!”
“Turn off the fan!” a boy shouted. Mrs. Sterling, her eyes still shut, groped around for the fan and ended up knocking it over.
Edward sneezed, and his eyes started to burn. What had happened?
“Are you sure those were iron filings you grabbed?” his best friend, Jack, asked, pulling his shirt up over his nose.
Edward wiped at his runny nose. “Sure, I …” He cringed and turned to look at the cabinet.
The vial of iron filings was still sitting there. He’d grabbed the pepper Mrs. Sterling had used in their surface tension experiment a couple days before.
“Everyone out!” Mrs. Sterling commanded in a shrill tone. She was staggering around, tears streaming from her eyes. But she was still smiling.
“Klutz face strikes again!” one of the boys shouted as they all ran from the classroom.
“Sorry,” Edward said when he joined his classmates in the hallway. “I …” He stopped and shrugged. There was no point in trying to explain. So, he just repeated, “Sorry.”
* * *
“I wonder how many times a day I say, ‘Sorry,’ ” Edward said to Jack as their bus trundled away from school that afternoon.
“Sorry?” Jack tugged on his earbuds and turned his smiling face toward Edward. “I didn’t hear you. Could you please repeat what you said?”
“Nothing.”
Jack shrugged and put his earbuds back in. His smile stayed in place.
Jack was nearly always smiling—one reason for that was that his lips were naturally upturned. Another was that Jack was just generally happy all the time. Edward had never known anyone as good-natured as Jack. His warm brown eyes already had faint smile crinkles at the corners.
Edward gazed at the golden spiral on Jack’s baggy T-shirt for a second and wondered what Jack was listening to (it was always an audiobook, never music). Then he turned and stared out the window.
The junior high school Edward and Jack attended was part of a complex that also included the town’s high school. The complex had been built just the year before to replace the old middle school, which had succumbed to a mold problem deemed too expensive to remedy. The new school complex was nice, but due to a zoning issue, it had been built a few miles outside town. Because of this, the first part of the bus ride home went through a relatively wild area. Or at least, Edward thought of it as wild.
The route cut through a thick forest. Tall fir trees pressed up against one another at the edge of the gravel on the roadside. Most of Edward’s classmates loved the woods—on Monday morning in homeroom they’d talk about catching crawdads in the creek, floating all day in a deep swimming hole a half mile or so from the school, and playing king of the hill on what the local legends said were old burial mounds. Edward, however, didn’t like the forest. It was too dark, too easy to get lost in. It left a chill on the back of his neck, the idea of the trees closing in, dampening the sound so no one could hear you scream.
Edward shifted on the hard bus seat. The padding under the vinyl was worn, and for an uncomfortable moment, he felt swallowed by his thoughts. When he repositioned, he flung out an elbow.
“Ow!” Jack said.
“Sorry.” Edward winced. There it was again. He should start counting. Was the en dless repetition of sorry a mental condition? Like Tourette’s or something? Maybe he had a neurological issue and that was why his elbows, and his body in general, were always getting him in trouble.
He shifted again, and this time, he kicked Jack in the ankle. Jack jerked his leg away and studied Edward.
“Sorry,” Edward said.
Jack again removed his earbuds. This time, he put them away. “Do you have something weighing on you? You’ve been weird all day.”
“As opposed to other days? Do you think there’s any day that I’m not weird?”
Jack quirked his full lips and rubbed his nose. “You make a valid point.” He leaned over and bumped shoulders with Edward. “But it takes weird to know weird.”
One of the girls seated in front of Edward and Jack whirled around and gave them a look. “You’re both weird.”
Edward flushed. The girl, Julia, was one of the most popular kids in his year, which meant she was the antithesis of him. Most days, that didn’t bother him. He and Jack had decided a long time ago that they existed in their own universe. They might have to hang out in this one, but theirs was separate. They were sort of like the Loch Ness Monster, which Edward was convinced lived in another dimension and occasionally came through a wormhole to visit this one. Why else would the monster be spotted only ten times or so a year?
He looked into Julia’s pretty eyes. He wondered if his theory would interest her. He opened his mouth, but before he could speak, she rolled her bright blue irises. “Thanks to you two, we all have to write papers on why it’s impossible for an unstoppable force to exist in the same universe as an immovable object!”
Jack’s smile widened, and he bounced in his seat. “What’s the issue with that? It’s quite entertaining to think about. Just imagine if this bus had infinite energy and—”
“Shut up!” Julia turned around.
Edward stared at the way her wavy black hair hung from the back of her head like a waterfall cascading over rocks on a moonlit night. He glanced at Jack, remembering Jack’s laughter when Edward had shared his feelings with him a couple weeks before.
“Have you lost interest in the sci-fi genre and developed one for romantic fiction?” Jack had sputtered between guffaws. “She lives on a different plane of existence, Edward. It’s not possible.”
For reasons Edward didn’t understand, this universe (not the one he and Jack were from) had its basis in a couple of strange equations.
Equation 1:
Interest in science - Interest in sports = Weird
Equation 2: Weird + Small = Outcast
Who decided this stuff? He wasn’t sure. It seemed like nerds generally made more money. Nerds created stuff that made the world better. So who invented this popularity calculus? And who distributed the memo about it? It just seemed to be something everyone knew.
“You coming?” Jack asked.
Edward blinked and looked around. Several kids were getting off the bus. Edward looked out the window. This was their stop.
Jack and Edward stood, but something wet and gooey smacked Edward in the cheek. Before he could reach up, the gooey object—chewed gum—bounced onto his chest and stuck to the left eye of his smiley face T-shirt. He tried to flick it off, but it clung. He grabbed it, almost gagging at the grossness of the slick spittle covering the gum. In spite of that human slime, the gum stuck to his fingers.
“Come on,” Jack urged. He was already standing in the aisle.
Edward sighed and pulled on the gum. He got most of it off his shirt and had to hold it as they got off the bus. He was tempted to try to wipe it on a seat as he went down the aisle, but that would be wrong. He’d wait until he got out; then he’d wipe it onto a rock or something.
He looked around. No way of knowing who threw the gum. Anyone in this universe might have.
As soon as Edward was off the bus, the driver, Don—a big, semi-retired man with curly gray hair—called out, “Have a good one!”
Edward waved at Don as the bus doors closed with a thump. The bus belched exhaust and rumbled away.
Jack carefully centered his stack of books in front of his belly and asked, “What would you like to do this afternoon?”
Edward watched the other kids meander down the street. He stepped away from the curb and reached down to pick up a rock from the flower bed at the edge of Mrs. Phillips’s yard. After a glance at her window to be sure she wasn’t watching, he used the rock to scrape the gum from his fingers. Then he bent back down to reposition the rock, gum side down, exactly where he’d found it.
As he set the rock in place, he heard a faint sound. Edward froze and listened. What was that?
The bus was nearly at the end of the block. When it turned the corner, the noise of the engine grew fainter. And the sound coming from Mrs. Phillips’s flower bed got louder.
It seemed to be a cross between a squeak and a chirp. Was it an injured bird? A chipmunk?
Edward dropped to his knees and began looking around under the big rhododendron shrub guarding Mrs. Phillips’s seasonal plantings. Because it was January, the flower bed held no flowers at the moment. Instead, it held a collection of winter-clad gnomes, all of which wore handknit sweaters Mrs. Phillips had made herself.
Whatever was making the sound made it again. It was louder now. Chwee, chwee.
“What are you doing?” Jack asked.
“Shh. Don’t you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
Edward ducked his head under the bush and gently repositioned a gnome wearing a ski cap.
The sound shifted to a pronounced hissss, and he yanked his hand back.
“I think there’s a snake in there,” he said.
“Well, then why are you placing your hand in that vicinity?”
The hissing stopped, and the sound returned. Only this time, it was more of a mwee than a chwee.
“Hey, I heard that,” Jack said. “A snake couldn’t make that sound.”
Jack leaned over, brushed off a spot on the sidewalk, and positioned his stack of books at the edge of the flower bed. He knelt next to Edward and leaned in to peer past the gnomes.
Together, Edward and Jack moved another gnome. From beyond their hands, something hissed again and then emitted another mwee.
Jack held aside a rhododendron branch, and two yellow eyes peered out at them.
“It’s a kitten!” Jack exclaimed. His usual smile turned into a huge grin.
The kitten said again, “Mwee.”
“Hello, kitty,” Jack said in a soothing tone. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, little guy. You have no reason to be afraid. We have no intention of hurting you.”
Edward leaned over and craned to see past Jack’s outstretched hand. It was dark under the bush, and the only part of the kitten that was clear was its eyes.
“Come on, little buddy,” Jack coaxed, his voice an octave higher than Edward had ever heard it. “We can assist you.”
Jack turned to whisper to Edward, “I don’t suppose you have any cat food in your backpack?”
Edward snorted. The kitten hissed.
Jack whispered again, “I don’t think Faraday likes you.”
“Faraday?” Edward whispered back.
“You know, Michael Faraday, the famous scientist? He founded two laws of electrochemistry?” Jack was still whispering. The kitten had stopped hissing.
“Of course. Him.” Edward grinned. Every day, Jack told Edward something he didn’t know. Edward was pretty sure he learned more from Jack than he did at school.
A truck engine revved, and Edward turned to frown at it. On the other side of their neighborhood, some developer was putting in a new subdivision. Heavy machinery had been cutting through Edward and Jack’s neighborhood for the last week or so. According to Edward’s mother, dump trucks would be going back and forth for months.
The truck’s roar faded away. Someone yelled out. The kitten opened its mouth and let out another mwee.
“I thought kittens meowed,” Edward said.
“Kittens have a wide variety of vocalizations,” Jack replied. “Their communication is as idiosyncratic as that of the average human. Although the homogeneity of our classmates’ utterances argues against human singularity.”
Edward frowned and opened his mouth to ask Jack to explain what he was talking about, but Jack went on, “I recommend that you retreat for a moment. I believe I am establishing a bond with Faraday. We’ll include you as soon as we’ve solidified our connection.”
