Chương 16: Green Marker

The board was four feet by eight and it lived on the wall outside the hall. Nita Sowerby had kept it since the second week of junior year, and she kept it because she was good at it. Two hundred names and five columns, all of it in green marker, in handwriting you could read from the other side of the corridor. There was a ruled line near the bottom that somebody had drawn years ago, so that being under it would mean something. It took her about forty minutes once a month.

That Monday it took two hours and ten minutes, and about sixty people watched her do it, and she cried twice, which nobody mentioned then or afterward. Abe got up there behind the crowd and stood at the back. Nita had the file paper flat against the wall with one hand. She started at the top. She got about four names in before somebody behind her said it out loud, and then everybody said it, and Nita told the whole corridor to shut up in a voice Abe had never heard her use.

Then she stopped and looked at the board for a long moment. Abe watched a girl work out that the job in front of her wasn't the job she had done every month for two years. She had to move everybody. Two hundred people had come up that corridor to find out where they'd landed. Every one of them had landed one place lower, and Nita Sowerby was the person who had to write it. Nita started at the bottom. She did it properly.

She went to the end of the list and worked up, so that she was always writing into a space she had just cleared. It took her two hours. By the middle of it her hand was green to the wrist and her handwriting had gone to pieces. People shouted things at her the whole time. Amrit offered to do the Rs. Ellis Naylor started announcing how many names she had left, wrongly, every couple of minutes, until she threw the cap of the marker at him and hit a window. Abe watched every minute of it.

He had planned that Monday down to the minute, and the one thing his plan had missed was that somebody would have to do this by hand. Nita got to the bottom five rows early on. That's where the newest Awakened sit, along with the ones who aren't going to climb much. It moved fast, because there wasn't much in those columns to change. Then she wiped DOLAN, A. · Layer 1 · Body 1 · Mind 1 off the wall with the side of her hand. She did it without ceremony, in about a second, the same as she did every other name.

It had been up there for four weeks. Four hundred people had walked past it every day. It had been wrong for twenty-three of those days, and there had been no way on earth to tell one single person. Nita wiped the green note out of the corner as well. TOP 10 BY NOV 3, gone furry at the edges, with somebody's thumb through the middle of the 3. Under the ruled line there was now nothing at all. Abe looked at an empty bit of wall over sixty people's heads, and it was the strangest thing that happened to him all day.

Then Nita worked her way up. About ninety minutes later she got to the top ten, and the corridor filled up again, because the corridor had been waiting for that bit. She rubbed out tenth. BEWLEY, A. · Layer 4 · Body 4 · Mind 1 Ada was standing about six feet from Abe with her bag over her shoulder and her coat already on. Tenth had been hers since September. She had it by going into the school hall every evening on her own, with no coach and no method and nobody watching her do it.

It took a boy in his first month one Monday morning to take it off her. Nita wrote BEWLEY, A. back on the wall one line lower and moved up to ninth. There were still nine rows to go and the corridor wanted the top of the board. Ada read the wall for a moment, like somebody checking a thing she already knew. Then she reached past two people and touched the board, once, low down, where her name had been. Abe never worked out why she did that. She did not seem to know either.

Her hand came away green and she looked at it, and then she picked her bag up properly and went off down the corridor to her lesson. On Friday she'd told him he was brilliant, in a corridor, with her whole face. Nobody else in that corridor was looking anywhere except the top four rows. Abe was the only person in that school watching Ada Bewley walk away. He'd spent nine hours on Sunday night planning what to say to her.

All of it had been built for a version of this where he came in somewhere near the bottom of the ten and she was still in it. Every word of it was wrong now. So he swallowed the lot of them. He stood at the back with sixty people in front of him and let her go. Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit. He told himself he'd find her tomorrow. Nita wrote his name at the top at about twenty after two. She had to do it twice.

The first time she wrote it too low, because her hand had been writing DANFORTH, P. at the top of that board for two years, and she stood there and looked at what she'd done and wiped it off and did it again. DOLAN, A. · Layer 6 · Body 5 · Mind 3 · The corridor made a noise. Miles Croft was at the back of it with his arms folded and he didn't make any of that noise. He had come up that corridor ahead of everybody and had not moved since.

Abe had been aware of him the entire time without ever looking straight at him, and Croft hadn't said one word to anybody. Then Nita capped the marker and stepped back and put her hand over her mouth. She'd been holding herself together for two hours and had just run out of names to write. She turned around and found him.

"There's nothing in the last column," Nita said.

"No."

"You're top of the board and there's nothing in the last column. There's never been anything in it." She was still holding the marker.

"Everybody else has got something. Mott's got lifts what she holds. Croft's got cuts through. Yours is just blank."

"I know."

"So give me something," Nita said.

"Anything. One word. I'll write anything you tell me." Sixty people were listening to that. Abe could feel it happening behind him. Nothing he had planned for that day covered this. He'd told the truth once already, in that same gym, in front of most of the same people. He'd said it was a training one and then got down on the floor and shown them exactly what that looked like. It looked like a boy doing push-ups while nothing happened at all.

There was nothing to show them in October and there was nothing to show them now.

"I can't," Abe said.

"You already did." Nita didn't move.

"October. On the pad. Tench asked you what you got and you said a training one, out loud, in front of the whole year, and I was standing right there." Abe stood there with his bag in both hands.

"I didn't write it down then because you'd just done sixty push-ups and nothing had happened, and putting training next to that would have been me making a joke about you where four hundred people could read it." She lifted the marker an inch.

"It's not a joke now, is it." And there it was. One word, and a true one. He'd said it out loud a month ago in front of two hundred people. Nita was the one person in that building who had ever been kind to him about it, and she was holding that word out to him now. In October it had meant nothing. That was exactly why it had been safe to say. It would not mean nothing up there. It would sit one line under a Layer of six, on a boy who'd been Awakened for thirty days.

Four hundred people went past that board every morning, and it would tell every one of them which question to ask.

"No," Abe said.

"Leave it empty."

"Abe."

"Leave it empty." Nita looked at him for longer than was comfortable.

"Can't, or won't?" she said. He could have said won't. It was the true one and he knew it while he was standing there.

"Can't." Then she nodded, and put the cap back on the marker, and left it empty. Miles Croft had stood at the back of that corridor for two hours without saying one word.

"Oh, come on." He said it loud enough that the whole corridor turned around. He's got a voice built for corridors.

"You can't. Right." Croft came off the wall.

"She just handed you your own word back and you wouldn't take it. I asked you in a shop. I asked you in a gym. Tench asked you in front of two hundred people and you told him you practice a lot."

"Croft."

"Three nights a week. Two years." He wasn't shouting anymore, which was worse.

"So tell me what I did wrong. Go on. Out loud, here, because everybody is already standing here anyway." Then he waited, with his hands out, in front of sixty people. And Abe stood there and understood that the true answer was that Miles Croft had done nothing wrong at all, and that there was no version of that sentence he could say out loud in a corridor.

"I practice it a lot," Abe said. That was the worst thing he did all day. Sam Ottley laughed, somewhere near the front. They didn't laugh at the joke. They laughed at Croft, and once Ottley had started, nine more joined in. Abe watched it land on Croft. Two months ago that corridor laughed when he told it to. It had just laughed at him for asking a question, and it had done that because Abe Dolan was top of the board and Miles Croft was not. Croft looked round at all of them.

Then he looked back at Abe, and his face closed up. Whatever he was going to do about it, he was going to do it later.

"Right," he said. He picked his bag up off the floor and went off down the corridor, and half that corridor watched him go, and one of them said something Abe was glad he didn't catch. Nita was still standing under the board with the marker in her fist and the last column empty. She hadn't been willing to make a joke of him on the seventh of October, and she wasn't willing to do it now. People started talking to him after that.

Abe hadn't planned for that part either, and it went on for the rest of the day, and it was much stranger than the shouting in the gym had been. Two Freshmen asked him if he could do a backflip, and when he said no they went away looking as though he'd been modest about it. A boy from another form showed him a video of the screen, taken from the back of the gym, and asked whether that was really him. Then Nell Mott asked him, quite seriously, whether he'd look at her build. That one frightened him.

Abe had been invisible in that building since he was thirteen and he'd gotten extremely good at it. By the middle of the afternoon he couldn't walk twenty feet without somebody saying his name, and every single one of them was friendly, and he wanted to go and stand in a cupboard. Nell Mott got there in the end. She caught him outside the science rooms, got about two words out, and then stopped dead and said, "So."

"So," said Abe.

"Right." Nell looked at the wall instead of at him.

"I got a two."

"I saw. That's brilliant."

"A two isn't brilliant." She'd gone pink to the ears.

"But I was on ones."

"You were on ones."

"Yeah." She thought about that and appeared to decide it was enough.

"Anyway. Well done. Obviously." Then she went off to her lesson at about twice her usual speed. Abe grinned at the floor and hoped nobody saw him do it. The theories were out by the end of lunch, and they came out loud.

"He's on something," Ellis Naylor said, to about eleven people at once.

"I've said it for two weeks and I'm saying it now."

"You said that when he beat you."

"I said it because it's true." Lena Ward had hers ready, and hers had an adult in it, which made it travel further.

"Danforth's coach stopped a session over him two weeks ago," she said.

"A professional. Stopped it dead and told him something was wrong. And now this."

"So what's he doing?"

"That," said Lena, "is what I'm asking." They said it in front of two hundred people, in a lunchroom, on the record. Neither of them backed off one inch, and both of them would still be saying it at the end of the school year. Piers Danforth came over at the end of it. He put his hand out, and he was two seconds late doing it. Nobody in that room noticed except Abe.

He only noticed because he'd spent a month watching Piers Danforth be decent without any effort whatsoever, and this was the first time it had taken him any effort at all. Then he did it properly, with his whole arm out, and said the honest thing.

"That's the best month anybody in this school has ever had," Danforth said.

"And I'd like to know how."

"Piers."

"No, listen. I'm not messing with you." He wasn't.

"If you've worked something out, I want it. So does everybody in this room. And if you haven't, then it's happening to you on its own, and somebody ought to be looking at you about that." It was said kindly. It was also the most dangerous sentence anybody said out loud all day, and Abe shook his hand. Mr. Tench took the little black notebook out of his back pocket at about half past two. He was standing at the end of the corridor with his back to the board and the ruined hand kept out of the way.

He wrote one line in it and put it away. He went back to his marking and left Abe to the rest of the day. By the last bell there were still people at that board. Abe went past it on his way to the cultivation department, with four hundred names behind him and his own at the top of them, and a signature to ask for. He was thinking about none of it. He was thinking about a girl going off down a corridor to her lesson without saying anything, and about the fact that he hadn't said anything either.