Fallout (Lois Lane) by Gwenda Bond Read Free Book Online

give them the satisfaction of looking.
    Or, I thought, it might have been an attempt not to provoke them.
    Anavi flinched and rolled her head from one side to the other with an odd jerk.
    I leaned forward and spoke low. “Anavi, try to breathe. They can’t do anything to you here, not with all of us around.”
    Anavi squinted at me through her glasses. “Who are you?” But she must have recognized me from the day before quickly enough. “You . . .” She spoke in little more than a whisper. “I entreat you not to talk to me. They might ascertain that I spoke to someone.”
    Her eyes widened, like she’d realized they might
hear
as well as
see
her. She made that same weird flinching motion again, her head shaking from side to side—like she heard voices the rest of us couldn’t and wanted them out of her head.
    “Um,” I said, “yes, because you’re speaking to me right now. They might ascertain that. But I’ve got your back.”
    I looked over at Devin.
    “I’ve never seen her act like this,” he said, quiet enough so only I would hear. “She’s usually low-key. Model student, smart game player . . . ”
    “And them?” I asked. “Is this casual jerkery the norm?”
    “Yeah, I have seen them be like that before. And worse in
Worlds
.”
    The tightly wound Ms. Johnson cleared her throat from right behind us. Devin stopped talking and reached up to accept the papers she held out to pass along the row. She moved on to the next one.
    I scanned the wording of the quiz questions and understood some of it, mostly from conversations with SmallvilleGuy about security and encryption protocols. He was into secrets. Protecting them, and obtaining them. But I wouldn’t be able to answer anything on this quiz with any confidence.
    At least you don’t have to take a spelling test.
    The teacher returned and stood over me. “Since you’re new, we’ll use your quiz to gauge what kind of catch-up you’ll need.”
    Like that was a reassuring thought.
    Finally, almost as if she’d been putting it off, the teacher took the remaining papers to the Warheads’ table. A boy took the sheets and then they all mechanically passed the sheets down the row in a way that was so synced, each person’s movement exactly the same, that it looked the opposite of natural.
    “You’ll have five minutes for this,” Ms. Johnson announced, and if the Warheads’ arrival had rattled her prim groove she had it back now. She set an egg timer that
tick-tick-tick
ed at the front of the room.
    I pretended to fill out some answers, and then skipped ahead to circle a few random multiple-choice responses. I’d have tried to get some help from Devin, but becoming an expert in comp sci wasn’t why I was here. I wanted to see how the Warheads treated Anavi.
    The overly-loud-for-stealth whispers came first. “What do you think?” said one, and another, “I think she should study harder.”
    “Or try harder.”
    “Now, now, it’s so hard when you just can’t remember.”
    “What should she put for number two? A big word?”
    Anavi shifted in her seat, uncomfortable. She twitched, moving her head like she heard voices again—but only
after
they’d stopped talking. Sweat ran down her cheek and, behind the lenses of her glasses, her eyes were squeezed nearly closed. She was gripping her pen so hard that I worried it might break.
    Her head turned from side to side yet again, and she raised her free hand to brush by one of her ears.
    I thought of how she’d described what they were doing to her to Butler the day before. She’d said it was like they were inside her head messing with her, on top of the whispers and harassment visible to everyone else in the class.
    Including the teacher, who wasn’t doing anything.
    Another round of whispers started up from the Warheads.
    “It’s hard to concentrate with all the noise,” I said, loud enough that Ms. Johnson couldn’t pretend she didn’t catch it. “I didn’t realize we were allowed to