Chapter Text
A few minutes after I heard the sirens outside my window, my mother knocked on the door. “Amanda, there’s been a fire at the high school stadium.”
I almost knocked over a stack of notes for the history paper I was writing. “Nobody has been badly hurt,” Mom continued in her professionally soothing voice, before I could ask. “Do you want to come downstairs and watch the news with us?”
I spent the next half hour searching the screen for familiar faces. Trish (grouchily), along with her parents (full of school spirit), would have been in the stands, watching her brother Brent on the field. Our friend Jason might have been sitting with them, or he might have been sandwiched between his track teammates. If I hadn’t needed to at least start my essay on the feudal system, I might have been watching the game, too.
When Trish finally called me later, her voice only wavered once as she told me what happened. “We weren’t anywhere near the explosion, but we saw it go off,” she says. “The medics took Duncan Matthews away in an ambulance and made a few other guys wait before they drove home, and they let everybody else go. The fire was pretty much out by the time we left.”
“I’m glad you’re okay,” I said. “Does anybody know how it happened?”
“I’ll find out on Monday,” she said, and I knew that, in one way or another, it was the truth.
Before I went to bed, I noticed that Mom had set a row of crystals on the window sill.
The day of the football game, most of the teachers had eventually given up on trying to get students to pay attention. Streamers in the school colors had decorated the halls, lunchtime had quickly turned into an unscheduled pep rally, and Mr. Hunter interrupted his lecture on Macbeth twice to hush two of the cheerleaders, who were whispering and giggling loudly enough for the whole room to hear them.
The Monday after the explosion, Brent was quiet as he drove Trish and me to school, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel at traffic lights. The crowd swept him up as soon as we got to campus.
I ducked two swinging backpacks and wove around a desperately embracing couple to reach Jason’s side. “Amanda!” He flung an arm around me. “Hey, if I didn’t know better, I’d say you would’ve missed me if anything happened.”
“Maybe a little bit,” I teased.
During first period, as Mrs. Greene collected our history papers, the classroom was buzzing with whispered conversation that none of her glares or pointed throat-clearing could chase away. She’d just returned to the front of the room when someone knocked at the door.
Mrs. Greene opened it and admitted a boy I’d never seen before. He handed her a sheaf of papers, which she studied for a moment, and then raised her voice to address the rest of the room.
“Boys and girls, this is Kurt Wagner. He will be joining our class. Mr. Wagner, please take a seat at the back – you can share Miss Tate’s textbook – and stay after the bell so that we can discuss your work going forward.”
“Thank you,” Kurt Wagner said, and turned to face us. He was short and lean, with a pale, mischievous-looking face and shoulder-length dark hair. “Hello, everybody. I’m very glad to be here.” Once he’d spoken more than two words, his German accent was unmistakable, but he didn’t get to say much more than that, because our teacher cleared her throat again, and he moved hastily to his seat. I could have sworn that he smiled at me along the way, and I found myself smiling back.
Trish was eating lunch with the rest of the newspaper staff, so Jason and I shared a table in the courtyard. “What are you reading?” he asked, craning his neck to see my book. “Oh, the Scottish Play.”
“I don’t think it’s bad luck to say the name unless we’re actually in a theater.” I turned the page. Somebody had written in my copy, and I was pretty sure the notes were color-coded.
“Drama Club almost performed that one last fall,” he said, “but we decided to go with Death of a Salesman instead. Less decapitation, but about the same amount of despair.”
I caught a glimpse of Kurt as he carried his tray to a corner table, where two upperclassmen were waiting.
Jason followed my gaze. “You meet the new guy yet? He introduced himself in health class. He’s living with Jean and Scott, up on the hill.”
“You mean he’s living with…”
Jason nodded. “I guess he’s a new foster kid, or something.”
Neither of us had actually met Charles Xavier, but we’d both heard that he was the richest person in town, if not the entire county. He donated the money to rebuild the school library two years ago. As far as I knew, he was some sort of scientist who had lived in England for decades before returning to his family mansion, alone except for the staff… and, more recently, three of my schoolmates. Even if they hadn’t been connected to him, most of the school would probably know who Scott Summers and Jean Grey were, if only because he never took off his sunglasses and she was on more teams and committees than I even knew existed.
When I was growing up, I heard plenty of ghost stories, at sleepovers or Halloween parties, about the mansion on the hill. By the time I started high school, I had to acknowledge that they were probably only stories, but part of me never stopped wishing otherwise.
Just before last period, Trish and I heard Duncan Matthews from halfway down the hallway, braying about the lack of damage to his brain. I glanced at Trish, who shook her head. “I’d make a joke, but it would be too easy,” she said. “Paul wants me to write about the accident for our next issue. I’ve already talked to a couple of the players, but I know where I’m going to look next.”
I closed my locker. “Where?”
“After everything went boom, I saw Tolansky over there, sneaking away from the boom site. He was closer to it than anyone!” She nodded across the hall at a small, hunched-over freshman. Even from where I was standing, I could smell him – it was like an aquarium that hadn’t been cleaned in weeks – but she didn’t let the smell stop her from striding up to him. “You’re Todd, right?”
“Who wants to know?”
She pasted a smile on her face. “I’m Trish Tilby. I was hoping that we could spend a few minutes talking about what happened at the game the other night. It’s for the school paper.”
Todd’s eyes widened. “Look, I don’t know if Summers decided to tattle, or what, but I didn’t…”
“Amanda, could you leave us alone for a couple of minutes?” Trish asked me.
Before I could move, Principal Darkholme was swooping down on us. “Miss Tilby, may I ask what you’re doing?”
Trish scowled and opened her mouth, and I elbowed her in the side. She’s the confrontational one; I’m the one who gets queasy whenever I watch her fighting with her brother, or when my parents shut themselves in their room and start arguing. “We were just talking,” I said. “Ma’am.”
“I’m the one who needs to talk to Mr. Tolansky at the moment.” Ms. Darkholme placed her hands on her hips. “I think that you girls should be in class right now.”
By the time we reached my math classroom, Trish had stopped fuming. “You did hear him say ‘Summers,’ right?” I nodded. “I think I know who I’ll be interviewing next.”
At lunch the next day, I flipped through the notes that I’d made for my Macbeth paper, and tried not to sneak too many glances at the table claimed by Xavier’s foster kids. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I could tell that Jean was trying to be calm and friendly as usual, while Scott looked like he was hoping that something else would explode and blast Trish as far away from him as possible. Kurt was too distracted by his burger to join the conversation.
“Turns out that Summers and Tolansky got into a fight with some of the football goons, just before the explosion,” Trish said once she returned to our table. “He wouldn’t give me a quote, but Jean did.” She held up her notepad. “And I learned a little more about the Xavier Institute.”
“Wait, it’s an institute now?” That was the first time I’d heard the house on the hill called that. “Fancy.”
“Yep. The Xavier Institute for GIfted Children. It’s still a pretty new operation, I guess, which is why there are so few kids living there.”
Then, they weren’t foster children, but participants in some kind of live-in extracurricular club. “So, Kurt… and those others,” I added hastily. “They just study really advanced subjects?”
“I guess.” She gave me her familiar speculative look. “We could always ask what they do up there. If they’re anything like the gifted program back in junior high, we won’t be able to shut them up.”
“Did you ask if the house was haunted?”
She grinned. “You still believe that, don’t you?”
I shrugged and took a sip of my juice. “People have believed in weirder things.” The conversation about the Xavier Institute ended there… at least, for the moment.