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“So? Did you understand?”
Sola, who had been watching a beetle crawling along the wall, deigned to look at her companion only after he addressed her directly.
“…Could you just be quiet for a while?”
A crease appeared once again on his yellowish forehead, bearing witness to the ill temper of its owner.
“You weren’t even listening!”
With a flick of her wrist, she set the timer on the edge of the table.
"Fine, just get off my back."
Sola moved one of the pawns at random. Then she did it once again, this time under annoying correction. The game, which promised to be a quick one and end at the sound of the bell, continued with monotonous questioning and occasional instruction. The boy simply could not calm down.
“Protect the king. And the queen protects the king better than anyone. She is the strongest piece.”
Sola nodded, while at the same time trying to make him understand that she was not involved in the meaning of his words.
“I am Stupid.”
The rook, clutched in the girl's fingers, stopped in midair. She stared at him indifferently. For a long time.
“I know.”
“How?”
For the first time, Sola had nothing to say in response. The meaningfulness of their dialogue was fading into nothing with each following minute.
“I say my name is Stu Pitt. Stu Pitt.”
Sola didn't understand if it was supposed to be funny or not, as the guy's face took on a serious expression.
"Your parents have a good sense of humor.”
Not too offended, Mister Pitt continued watching the game, which had been paused.
“So, you’re one of those people?”
Even though he didn’t finish his sentence, Sola understood exactly what kind of people he meant.
“Yeah, of course. I just slammed some nerd into a wall.”
His tan ears took on a faint crimson tint. He turned away in embarrassment, hiding them behind a mass of wavy curls. A dark bruise was visible along his jaw, apparently a reminder of the humiliation he’d suffered in the hallway that morning.
“These guys from the sports club are only good at scoring goals, not at socializing with people. Some of them are even on the student council,” he said, then snorted. “Amazing.”
“Yeah, I saw one like that in English class. He was hitting on the teacher. Whatever.”
Stu immediately knew who she was talking about.
“Shawnee? So you’ve got English with Miss Peters? Lucky you! She’s the only teacher everyone here actually likes.”
He was clearly pleased that Sola had finally joined the conversation. And more relaxing, he lowered his voice and whispered.
“He’s just the tip of the iceberg. Since this is the only high school in town, you’ve got both normal people and complete psychos here.”
The piercing clang of the bell jolted every student, pulling them away from whatever they had been focused on. Sola grabbed her backpack, eager to get away from the nosy busybody as quickly as possible.
“Hey, uh…”
Stu glanced away for a split second to grab the jacket hanging over his chair. Its worn fabric had been carefully patched by hand with pieces of different cloth. They looked like decorative stickers people put on their clothes for style. Except these patches were covering holes.
“…you.”
With a sea of unspoken thoughts swirling through his mind, he turned back. But the girl was already gone.
The floor plan didn't help her figure out where the library was.
"Left side... I think."
The wall guide indicated her current location, making it difficult to navigate the numerous directions and paths. Especially for someone who was new to the school. She traced her finger along the long lines, following the descriptions of hallways and classrooms that resembled the burrows of a mole rather than a school plan. All she had to do was ask a passing student.
But the moment she opened her mouth, people who weren’t paying attention to anything around them nearly shoved her aside as they rushed past. She wouldn’t have recognized any of the kids from English by face – even if they’d actually talked. Deciding it was a lost cause, she continued down the hallway, figuring she’d just sit through the next class without her textbook.
Then, through the gap between two open locker doors, she caught sight of a jacket covered in colorful patches, and a voice made her stop. Behind the locker door, the boy was crouched down, speaking quietly into his phone.
“Yeah, Mom, I ate! Yeah, everything’s fine. No, Mom, I’m on my way home. Yeah, I’ll call you when I get there. No, Mom, you don’t need to call me for the sixth time today!”
He hung up and reached back into his locker. Sola cleared her throat to announce her presence.
“Hey. Show me where the library is.”
Leaning back against the wall with her arms crossed, she watched him. Pitt grimaced the moment he saw her and went right back to rummaging through his locker. Deliberately avoiding her gaze, he started rearranging the textbooks inside, hoping she’d eventually leave.
“Why are you digging around in there? You already took everything you need.”
He didn’t answer, turning his head away. Standing at his full height, he was still a couple of inches shorter than she was.
Sola didn’t press the issue. Instead, she calmly stepped closer, closing the distance between them by a couple of paces. She pulled the sheet the principal had given her from the side pocket of her backpack. As she skimmed over the information again, she noticed one surprisingly convenient detail.
“Oh. Our lockers are next to each other.”
She remarked on it casually, without any intention of giving the words a negative undertone. But Stu suddenly slammed his locker shut and finally acknowledged her existence.
“Walk out of the school and turn right to the other building. Go in from outside and ask the security guard where the library is.”
Sola gave him a playful little bow and turned to leave.
“You’re going now? Most people head straight home if they get the chance instead of picking up books.”
“Home? I’ve got, like, math.”
She held out the schedule, invading the space between them. Stu looked at her, then hesitantly took the sheet she was offering.
“You’ve got math on the second floor. So do I. The teacher’s at an off-campus seminar, so she won’t be here today. Everyone who doesn’t have any after-school activities gets to go home.”
Sola nodded, already ready to bolt for the exit, mowing down anyone in her way. One of her backpack straps caught on Pitt’s locker and snagged. When she jerked forward, the other strap slipped off her shoulder, and the open backpack tumbled to the floor. Its meager contents spilled out: a chewed-up pen, her journal, and a broken digital camera. They both reached down at the same time to gather the scattered items and bumped their foreheads together.
“Ouch.”
“Sorry.”
Sola rubbed the spot where they’d bumped heads while Stu examined one of her belongings.
“That’s cool!” he said with genuine admiration, turning the scratched camera over in his hands and peering through its dirty lens.
“But it’s broken.”
“Give it to me. I’ll fix it.”
Sola picked up her backpack, now stuffed once again with everything that mattered. Stu’s offer wasn’t nearly as appealing to her as he seemed to think it was. She wasn’t about to trust a find like that to someone she’d just met. Then again, if it really was broken, she didn’t want to spend money repairing something that wasn’t even hers.
“I don’t know anything about cameras, but even I can tell it’s practically new. You’ll just keep it and never give it back.”
“You really think that of me?” He pursed his lips, this time visibly offended.
“I don’t think anything about you. I don’t know you.”
She snatched the camera out of his hands and tossed it into the half-open backpack. Sola started to walk away, but Stu tagged along behind her like a lost puppy.
“So, what’s your name?”
“Sola,” she muttered reluctantly.
Under his expectant stare, she realized what he was really asking.
“My last name’s De Angelis.”
“I don’t know anyone around here with that last name…”
Sola let out a snort, realizing there was no escaping his relentless curiosity now.
“Oh, sure. It's like you know everything.”
This remark turned out to be somewhat inappropriate. After all, as it turned out, Stu was indeed an "encyclopedic-man." The short walk was filled with one long monologue about awkward incidents and amusing stories – ones that liked not the listener, but the storyteller himself. It felt like someone was following her around, reading the school newspaper aloud, covering every little thing that had happened on campus. The kind of newspaper only the people who wrote it actually bothered to read.
But what set Stu apart from other chatterboxes was his favorite habit: finding hidden meanings where there weren’t any. Every other sentence ended with some far-fetched conclusion based entirely on his own theories. Usually, it was something like:
“…but I think that flood in the bathroom was deliberate. The school administration staged the whole thing to punish the students for that prank in the gym.”
Every time he came out with another “That didn’t happen for no reason” or “There’s more to it than that,” Sola made a point of rolling her eyes.
“I think Mr. Freeman has a twin brother. But the brother’s mentally disabled – and a danger to society. I’m telling you, it’s true! Every Saturday, Mr. Freeman goes out for an early morning run. Never misses it. But one Saturday, after sunrise, I saw him just standing outside his house. He wasn’t moving. Just standing there… staring at me.”
Sola slowed her pace, finally deciding to say something after letting him carry the conversation by himself the entire time. He was the only one who’d seemed interested in it, anyway.
“You don’t have any friends, do you?”
“No…”
“That wasn’t a question.”
As they stepped outside, Sola was about to head in the opposite direction.
“So… what are we gonna do about the camera?”
“We?”
Clinging to the chance to keep around the one person who’d managed to tolerate a few minutes of his company, Stu said,
“How about we go to my home? I’ll take a look at it while you’re there. Maybe I can fix it. It’d be a shame for something that expensive to just sit around.”
At first, Sola couldn’t believe what she’d heard. The help wouldn’t hurt, and at the very least, it’d give her something to do.
Go home with someone you’d known for less than a few hours? No matter how harmless he looked, she could almost hear her grandmother’s warning echo in the back of her mind:
Don’t trust anyone.
After giving it all careful consideration, Sola delivered her final verdict.
“Eh… sure.”
Глава 4
Chapter 4
Debes, ergo potes
Flyers, one after another, appeared at the entrances of establishments, over signs, on street poles. So fresh that the smell of printing ink could still be noticeably felt all the way. Young volunteers glued them onto yet another surface and cut themselves on the sharp edges of the stiff paper. After yet another bleeding scratch, Sola hissed aloud from the throbbing pain.
“You attach them so sloppily! They’ll be blown away by the first gust of wind.” — Stu supervised her like a mentor, stretching out a thin strip of tape for each notice. Glancing at the work of the girl accompanying him, he merely sighed and limited himself to new remarks.– “It’s like explaining to you how to cast pearls before swine.”
They were already approaching his house. But the girl’s sluggish appearance gave away her indifference to her first visit to a peer’s home. She perceived it more as a necessity than as friendly pastime. Sola looked gloomy, which could not be said about the surroundings around her. Weeping willows, with their drooping foliage, hid beneath it the little bodies of chirping birds. Their wondrous singing filled the streets and put passers-by in a good mood. At that moment, some teens walked by, and they didn’t look very good. The girl looked at the houses and trees surrounding her with boredom, while the boy tried to play along with her mood, attempting not to open his mouth too often. The gray sky, blocking the sunlight with its dense clouds, was enveloped by a damp fog that spread across the dead, broken streets.
The forced silence was broken only by the rustling of the flyers and the sound of bicycle wheels rolling along. Sola thought about how soon she would hide herself under the covers of her bed and remain alone with herself and the music from headphones. And Stu awkwardly fiddled with the edge of his jacket, considering how to gain her favor.
The boy did not have to think for long, for they had reached their destination. The Pitts’ welcoming home was hardly any different from the others. The alley leading to it was located almost in the center of the town, and the residential houses here looked decent, unlike those in the girl’s neighborhood. Behind the building, a modest estate could be seen, planted with fragrant flowers of various kinds. Among those battered houses and abandoned premises with broken windows and graffiti on the walls that had appeared in the morning, what she was looking at now looked much more pleasant than the place where she lived.
While Sola was gazing at the bird feeder next to the mailbox, Stu was rummaging through his backpack, searching for the keys and his button phone.
"My mom is in love with her home garden. During breaks from working at the café, if she isn’t in the kitchen, then she disappears there.”
— He remarked, noticing his companion’s long gaze at the flowering bushes in their yard. The first thing Stu did after taking out what he needed was call his mother, and only then did he open the front door.
"I’m here. We have a guest over… No, Mum. No, mum! Everything’s fine, honestly, mum. I’ll do it. Bye, love you.”
The remaining posters of the missing boy were left lying abandoned on the cabinet in the hallway. The beautiful exterior matched the interior as well — the carefully tidied house gleamed with cleanliness. To Sola, it was downright blinding.
“Everything here is so clean. It almost sparkles.”
A soft blanket, carefully spread out on the sofa, and plush toys on the hanging hammock chair created a special harmony. The living room and kitchen, painted in a warm beige tone, were combined into one room on the first floor. An old-fashioned television under a lace tablecloth, family photographs on the walls, and the lingering smell of freshly baked goods evoked nostalgia in Sola, although she had never been here before. In the corner of the wall stood a cardboard box, stuffed with neatly kept things.
“Oh, I completely forgot. Mom gathered my childhood things and wants to give them to some acquaintances. She said I should put something in there that I don’t need anymore, too.”
“Mhm.”— Sola felt a sudden pang in her chest.
In her family, it was not customary to give their belongings away to strangers like that. Despite the fact that the people in their native lands had always been quite welcoming, the girl’s mother behaved distantly and coldly toward them. For the most part, the hardships the woman had experienced in life had influenced her in such a way that they were later passed on to her children as well. Sola’s family had a custom of keeping their old belongings and later passing them down to younger members to wear or use.
The teenagers immediately headed to the bedroom. Stu was about to say something else, but suddenly changed his behavior. He stopped by one of the doors, leaving his hand hanging in the air without ever touching the wooden handle. As the girl understood, this was a door leading to the young man’s bedroom, judging by the pile of stickers on it, seemingly all meaning something along the lines of: “Do not enter.” But she couldn’t understand the reason for his sudden hesitation until he spoke.
“Um… my room is… a little messy. Like, really.”
“Man, you froze like there’s a corpse in there. Just hurry up and go in so I can leave.”
The boy awkwardly nodded and opened the way.
She was met not by a “little messy” room, but by a place where the necessary deep cleaning was apparently prohibited by law. A crumpled bedsheet lay under the feet of those who entered, drawing the gaze toward a bed that didn’t look like it had ever been made. But the main feature of this room, resembling a landfill, was the space theme. Countless posters with rockets and stars covered the walls, homemade planets sat on shelves that also held comic books about superheroes. Collectible figures, starship building sets, and a multitude of merch from different movies and TV shows. Sola stepped on one of them as she entered this dump.
“Uh… lemme just…”
Stumbling over his words, Stu hurriedly began cleaning up. The crumpled blanket fell onto the bed, while all the junk from the desk flew onto the lilac carpet on the floor. Sola flopped down onto the bed, lazily crossing one leg over the other.
“Don’t trouble yourself, neat-freak. Let’s get to the point.”
Sola took the switched-off camera out of her bag and tossed it into Pitt’s hands. He gave a short nod and sat down at the desk.
“If you have plans… then I can fix it today and give it back to you tomorrow in math class. Do you have Skype? We’ll keep in touch.”
“I don’t even have a computer. Although, what am I talking about, my grandma has a voltage regulator for her electronics.”
Stu sighed and began examining the camera.
“You’re not planning on taking it apart piece by piece, are you?”
“I’ll just look up what model it is on the internet and check if everything looks fine externally.” — And since each of his answers was embellished with an autobiography, he added:
“Three years ago, I imagined I’d become a movie director. Well, I wanted to make science fiction and stuff like that. Then I wanted to become a cameraman, did video editing, special effects, you know. That’s where I started messing around with equipment. And then I realized that mom expected something serious from me. So I quit.”
The mattress creaked under the girl’s weight as she settled more comfortably on the bed. She realized she was stuck here for a long time.
“Where did you find it? I mean, the camera. You said it wasn’t yours.”
“In the woods.”
Stu backed away, stretching his neck with his eyes wide.
“You went into the woods?”
Sola snorted at yet another meaningless question from him. — “Nah, it just flew out of there and landed right on me.”
The boy shrank back, looking at her ambiguously.
“We’re not allowed to go into the woods.”
“And why’s that?”
“Two years ago, some guy was mauled by a coyote there.”
Now Sola expected Pitt to once again start going on about how there was a hidden meaning behind this story too. But he was silent. Yet he did it in such a way that he seemed to be bursting with something he shouldn’t have said out loud.
“But?” — Sola couldn’t let the only topic that interested her be forgotten at the first mention.
“But that’s only the official version. We don’t have any animals here. In reality, the police closed off the deeper part of the woods because teenagers were always hanging around there and throwing wild parties.”
“So that’s it. You got so quiet, I thought you had ghosts living there.”
“There are some things worse than ghosts.” — Stu wanted to add something else, but forcibly bit his tongue. Several rustles and clicks could be heard.
“Listen, it’s just dead. Let’s go to the electronics store across the street and get a cable. I’ll connect it to my computer.”
Sola stood up, revealing one of her emotions for the first time: with a sigh, she grew darkened.
“I don’t have any spending money on me.”
“Let’s go anyway. I’m on good terms with the guy whose shift is today, I’ll ask him to put it aside.” — Noticeable pride seeped through his voice, as if he had found the solution to the most difficult problem.
Gathering her things, Sola and her walking, newly acquired headache left the room and went back into the hallway.
“I live here with my mother. She works at a café until evening, so I’m always alone. If you want, you can come over. I have a lot of board games… and tapes…”
“We’ll see.”
Luckily, their next destination turned out to be not far away. Otherwise, Sola would have already started howling out loud from the never-ending chatter beside her.
A multitude of dusty appliances, from small TVs to the latest models, filled the room. The section with games on optical discs mainly caught the attention of most teenagers. There was no one behind the counter, but the girl didn’t have time to ask her companion about it. Stu was mesmerized by the gaming consoles, no longer seeing anything in front of him. So, there was nothing left to do but freely walk around the equipped space and examine the displayed goods.
“…This is really crossing the line.”
It sounded not far from the girl, somewhat muffled by the distance. However, due to the absence of customers and the complete silence, she managed to make out every word.
“You’re always late and leave early. And I’m supposed to bust my ass for you like your fucking errand boy?”
Sola noticed two looming shadows cast from the half-open door leading to the stockroom. Coming a little closer to the counter with the chargers, she caught the silhouettes of the sources of the noise in the corner of her eye. Judging by their builds, both were male. One of them – the one being reprimanded, stood closer to her and seemed somehow familiar. He wore an open black hoodie, which resembling a sweater, over his work uniform and looked far too tired to start a conflict.
“Get off, I showed up.”
The other one, a little bit older and more hostile, finally lost his temper over such carelessness.
“If you’re able to show up, then you’re able to leave. Take off your uniform and get the hell out of here. And don’t come back here again.”
“You can’t fire me.”
“It wasn’t my decision, it was the boss’s. So stop getting in my face and get the fuck out of here.”
Holding him under a lingering gaze, the guy who had just been fired, dashed to the changing room.
Sola headed back to the one who had brought her here and who was now glued to a display of expensive computer equipment.
“And by the way, I found what we need, Sola. I’ll sort everything out in a jiffy.”
Behind the counter they approached now stood a lanky young man who, based on his appearance, looked as though he hadn’t finished middle school. Besides suffering from severe acne and embarrassing his coworkers, Sola wouldn’t have been able to say anything else about him.
“Hey, Isaac! Dude!”
The “dude’s” face showed no reaction to the appearance of his so-called friend. His swollen eyelids mindlessly fixed themselves on Stu, frozen in a gaze dripping with bile. The clerk sneered. — “Your mommy not gonna give you a belt for walking an inch away from home?”
Stu showed no outward reaction to the jab.
“We’re here for that cable, the one over there. Can you put it aside until the end of the week?”
“Yeah, I’m already on it, sweet boy.”
Not understanding the obvious sarcasm in the clerk’s reply, Stu continued standing there.
“You’re still here? Now get the hell out, you little piece of…”
And just as Sola turned around and started walking back, Stu ran after her with both thumbs raised.
They left the room and strolled back home. One of them was quiet, feeling humbled after his boasting.
“Pretty normal friendly banter you guys have.” —The girl teased him, but it had no effect on the discouraged Stu.
“And why are you getting upset over it? If you take everything too personally, they’ll keep humiliating you.”
“I’ll do something about it. Well, about the charger.”
The long‑awaited insight just struck him. After a minute of consideration, the boy smacked himself on the head and noticeably cheered up.
“Exactly! There should be a similar cable in Dad’s office. I’ll rummage around for it now.”
“Why didn’t you look there before?”
“It’s just that Mom doesn’t let me go in there after… never mind. I’ll bring it out to you now.”