Stones and Spark by Sibella Giorello Read Free Book Online

time?"
    He has to correct everything. Like I said, tedious.
    "Yes, sir. At what time?"
    "Two-thirty.” He stands, but almost simultaneously sweeps his leg toward the suitcase, pushing it under his desk. “Or perhaps it was closer to three,” he adds. “The real question is: ‘But is there for the night a resting place?’”
    Quoting the poem again.
    I want to strangle him. And that’s no metaphor.
    “Miss Harmon, the next line?”
    I don’t know it, because I haven’t memorized that far. “Something about a roof. Where was she, when you saw her?”
    “’A roof for when the slow dark hours begin.’” He gives the suitcase another push, sending it deep under the desk. “‘May not the darkness hide —’”
    That's it.
    His words trail behind me like some neglected ghost and don't fade away until I reach our lockers. They're side-by-side, and when I lift Drew's combination lock, I see that little white arrow. It points directly at zero.
    She's compulsive about that, too.
    I spin the dial and click through her five-digit combination. Maybe she's setting up some scavenger hunt. Leaving me clues. Like suddenly having her bike outside. I pop open the tinny metal door and see her textbooks, standing like soldiers in alphabetical order. On the back wall behind them a photo shows the Milky Way, expanding into crystallized eternity; on my right, inside the door, Richard P. Feynman grins.
    I dig behind the books, lift Feynman's photo.
    Nothing.
    I slam the locker shut, spinning the combination dial, but refuse to replace that white arrow at zero. I walk down the hall and kick all the paper across the floor. I've known Drew for three years, and it started at these lockers. We had just moved up to St. Cat's Upper School, the hallowed ground worshipped by the Lower School. Drew was the weird girl who had already explained to our math teacher that space travel was only mathematically possible if the universe was rotating instead of expanding.
    One day she looked over at my open locker and asked, “What is that?”
    It was a photo of a geode, taken right after my dad gave me a rock hammer for my twelfth birthday. In the photo, the quartz crystals radiated like frozen sparks.
    “It's a geode,” I said.
    “Oh." She stared a moment longer. “And I assume the crystals have perfect atomic form because they're growing in a relatively unconfined space.”
    “Uh. Yeah. That’s right.”
    Holy. Cow.
    We slammed our lockers, walked to the cafeteria and spent the next thirty minutes talking about earthquakes, pyroclastic ash—even synclines. And that day, I felt something lift from my shoulders--some invisible weight I never realized was there until it was gone. By the next Friday I was eating dinner at her house, watching Jayne down an entire bottle of wine in one hour while Rusty went upstairs. Drew nuked our frozen cheeseburgers and fries, and when I asked for mayonnaise for the fries, she said, “That’s entirely gross, but I can live with it.” Ever since, we’ve lived with each other’s idiosyncrasies—even celebrating them. For me, it felt like I’d finally found the place where I belonged.
    The lights are out in the Physics lab. I slide my hand along the wall, flicking on the switch.
    Unlike Sandbag's classroom, here the chairs are all aligned behind their desks. The white board gleams clean. Probably Mr. Straithern, our Math and Physics teacher. He is just about as compulsive as Drew.
    Her purple jean jacket hangs on a chair at the back of the room. I walk over and see her notebook with one stiletto-sharp Ticonderoga poking from the pages like a bookmark.
    “Drew?”
    The wall clock ticks to 12:15.
    So, Miss Compulsive was working in Mr. Compulsive’s classroom. Every table wiped clean, the chairs just so, no scraps of paper on the floor. But the purple in her jacket looks as vivid to me as bruises, due to an experiment she came up with when I was playing with acids and alkalis to grow geology crystals.