A/N: Obligatory "sorry this book is over a year late," that was not intentional, but I'm so happy to return us all at last to the world of Swanwhite!
In my author's notes on the main book, I referred to these stories as "short tie-in novelettes," but as usual I seem to have wildly underestimated how much I have to say about these characters, so I hope you will forgive the extra time spent on my predictably ever-lengthening chapters. At this point I should just accept my fate, haha.
Each character's part will be multiple chapters, so for Eustace this is 1 of 4!
Thank you all for being so freaking patient with me, and with no further delay, I present to you, the Tie-Ins~
xXx
Eustace Clarence Scrubb stood abruptly from the kitchen table, scraping his chair back over the ugly tile floor that somehow still looked mudstained even after having been bleached within an inch of its life.
He slung his bookbag over his shoulder and aimed for the door, but not before Alberta broke away from the sink and caught his arms with soapy hands.
"You're leaving already? Do you have everything?" She looked him up and down, her neat brown hair tucked up into the silky yellow scarf that clashed so violently with the filth around her, haphazard stacks of unwashed dishes thoroughly ignored beside the rusty sink where the burgundy folds of her second best town dress floated like slimy islands amidst the suds. "It's so cold out today, why don't you wear a coat? I kept your nice black one with the buttons, you know, and you always look so smart when you—"
"I have what I need." Eustace pulled away and rubbed indignantly at the soggy handprints now soaking into his sleeves. "It's a longer walk now, I'm going to be late."
"Oh, well, yes—" Alberta reached for him again as he turned for the door, fingertips only just grazing his shoulder when he recoiled just as sharply. "Is it really so much farther?"
"Fifteen minutes, I already told you."
The foreign scent of dish soap on her hands drowned out even the faintest hint of her favorite rosebud perfume, coating his senses with the same grimy film that seemed to cling to every inch of the shabby kitchen with its broken light and ugly orange cupboards, and the stain on the window in the entryway door that turned even the sunlight into a greasy, greenish thing.
Eustace dragged his own hands over the thighs of his trousers as if he could rub the sticky feeling off, ducking away from his mother's touch for the third time and twisting the squeaky door handle.
"Good luck," said Alberta, "work hard—"
He let the door slam shut in her face.
A snap of icy January air struck him like a stinging whip as he descended the rickety front steps two at a time, his lungs stuttering against the abrupt force of the arctic breeze, but nothing in the world could have made him turn back for that black coat with the buttons.
He stuffed his bare hands deep into corduroy pockets and set off at a brisk pace up the litter-strewn sidewalk, kicking a stray can as he went.
Another door banged open just ahead, and a girl tumbled out onto her own front porch, nearly tripping down the stairs as raised voices caught the air mid-shouting match for the briefest moment before another bang cut them off again.
Eustace almost smacked straight into Jill Pole, sidestepping just as she skidded to a halt and puffy red eyes locked with his before flicking sharply down to the concrete.
His nose wrinkled involuntarily, and he brushed past her shrinking figure without a word.
The ragged hitching of her breaths dropped off behind him as his steps ever quickened, the image of her pale hand clutching a patchwork shawl against the snow-covered squalor of their pitiful front garden lingering in his mind's eye only until he blinked it away.
Yes, that's what he needed.
To be spotted with Crybaby Pole, that grubby little bird-faced beggar of a girl—then the jig would be up for sure.
Somehow Alberta covered for Harold's layoff so much more easily than he ever could.
Her story about a sick aunt in the lowertown who required near live-in assistance seemed to have convinced her stupid, gossip-crazy friends in their ridiculous white gloves and velvet-trimmed hats not only that the Scrubb fortune had not vanished overnight, but that Harold and Alberta were nothing short of saintly for doting on this poor imagined soul.
Then again, his parents didn't have to contend with shrewd fourteen-year-old schoolkids whose special business it was to dig up dirt on anyone and everyone they could.
His parents didn't have to walk halfway across town through the muddy slush in nothing but a flimsy school jacket to disguise the length of a commute that used to be half a block.
His fingertips had nearly turned to ice inside his pockets before he crossed the threshold into District Three's flat grey school building, and he ducked instantly into an empty classroom just off the musty front hall, pressing frigid fingers to his throat as his burning lungs heaved in the dry heat radiating from dusty vents.
Mechanically, he counted down the seconds as the tingling flush worked its way out of his face, drawing steady, deep breaths, straightening his jacket, and running both hands through his sandy hair until not a single strand slipped down over his forehead where the biting wind had blown it.
Now he could play like everything was as it should be.
Jill Pole would know better than to open her mouth—the uncouth noises of her parents' morning quarrel lodged in the back of his mind as easy ammunition if she didn't—and he wouldn't have to think about his wretched new house leaning identically next to hers with their hideous matching green shutters and peeling plaster and sagging roofs. At least not until he stole away home and played the whole charade over again the next day.
Slipping back out into the hall, he tucked his thumbs casually into his pockets and strolled toward the Fourteens homeroom with an easy air, passing a group of kids under a sickly-sweet cloud of vapor before at last reaching the open door and stepping into class.
"Steel Street, huh?"
He almost doubled back into the hall.
"That's what dad said," replied the unmistakable candied lilt of Eleanor Blakiston before he had time to pick a direction to run.
She hadn't seen him yet, but she sat in plain view of the doorway, legs crossed on top of Stanley Mitchell's desk like a fountain statue between the two boys gazing up at her from their displaced seats with plain curiosity, sharing a glance between each other as she spoke, one dark and one pale-haired, both suddenly hideous to Eustace as his stomach turned cold.
"They must have let him go quiet-like," said the pale boy, Stanley's nasally whine even more grating that usual, "otherwise we definitely would've—"
"Speak of the devil," interrupted the dark-haired boy, and grinned broadly before Eustace's heart could even jump at being noticed. Davy Ellis waved him over just as easily as if they had been talking about someone else.
Eleanor Blakiston wiggled her fingers in a beckoning motion when he hesitated, stacked silver rings clicking and glinting in the bland light of the second story windows as a matching gleam sprung into her eyes, and Eustace stepped stiffly over the threshold to join the trio in the middle of the room.
"What are you lot going on about?" he asked with an affected combination of confusion and boredom, shifting to loosen his shoulders.
"Ellie's dad says yours got sacked," said Davy, blunt as a gut punch without the slightest falter to his grin.
Several nearby heads turned, and Eustace resisted the urge to grit his teeth.
"Well, that's all rot," he drawled with a convincing edge of irritation, "he got transferred a few weeks ago."
"Transferred where?" sneered Stanley. "Manufacturing?"
Eleanor giggled.
"Very funny," said Eustace, unloading his backpack onto his own desk against the wall. "I don't have to tell you anything if that's how you're going to behave."
"What about the house?" asked Eleanor.
"What about it?" sighed Eustace, leaning back against his desk and gripping its sharp edge with both hands where they couldn't see.
"Daddy said you sold it. And I didn't see any of your cars there when I looked this morning," she added before he could contradict her.
Eustace just shrugged, as if it couldn't possibly matter. "So? What's it to you?"
"Well, you might have told us," said Eleanor, who could almost have been pouting save for the gleam her eyes harbored.
"I've been busy."
"Doing what?" asked Davy, propping one leg up on his desk. Keen brown eyes pierced him, scanning for the faintest flinch of a reaction. "I didn't know there was so much to do on Steel Street."
Eustace squinted in an attempt to hide the involuntary flinch under a shroud of incredulity.
For a moment he almost thought to try Alberta's story; but that would only make things worse for him now. Not only did Davy Ellis know perfectly well that his mother wouldn't willingly touch a rusty spoon, let alone an influenza-riddled sick bed, but then they would only ask why he hadn't told them sooner, and he had no answer to that.
"Steel…" whined Stanley, gaunt face and gap teeth just as unpleasant and rat-like as ever, his own father's position on the school board dripping from every inch of his snide demeanor. "Doesn't Pole live on Steel?"
"Does she?" asked Eleanor, perking up with sudden interest.
"I wouldn't know," spat Eustace, and he might have gone on telling them to mind their own business if Stanley hadn't interrupted.
"Ask her yourself!"
Eustace glanced sharply over his shoulder to Jill Pole, frozen in the doorway as all eyes turned to her.
"We heard you've got a new neighbor!" called Davy cheerily.
Eustace's stomach plummeted.
"You live with Scrubb now?" asked Eleanor, cruel glee leaping into her voice.
Stanley elbowed her. "It's the same street, numbskull, not the same house."
Davy laughed, loud and sharp. "Can you imagine?"
Pole's unusually large brown eyes darted around the room as if she were some half-starved street cat seeking shelter behind the nearest dumpster; as if Eleanor's grating giggles struck her like well-aimed rocks, and Eustace's face flushed in the crossfire.
"Well?" called Stanley. "Give us an answer, does he live on Steel or not?"
Pole's eyes flickered between Eustace and the rat-faced boy, unsure who to fear more as her shouting parents rose again to his mind like a knife grasped in last-minute desperation, but no one would care about a stupid row now that his secret had come out, and Pole only just managed to nod falteringly before her gaze escaped the floor and she tightened her grip on her bookbag, slinking away to her desk at the back of the room.
Eleanor's voice cut through the flood of murmuring before Eustace could speak.
"Come on, Scrubb, this is too crazy. Really? That's some awful bad luck." She grinned broadly.
"You don't know what you're talking about," he scoffed despite the damning heat prickling in his neck, and turned to his own desk, but Davy leapt up quick as lightning and caught him by the arm.
"Enlighten us, why don't you?"
Eustace tried in vain to wrench his arm free from Davy's iron grip, the stocky boy towering a good three or four inches above him despite the recent growth spurt he'd been so proud of.
A thick hush blanketed the room as Davy cocked his square jaw. "What, do we have a problem?"
"Not if you mind your own business," Eustace snapped before he could help himself, frustration and panic bubbling up like a chemical reaction in his chest.
"I'll mind what I want to mind," said Davy, the last hint of levity vanishing from his face in a blink. "And I mind being lied to."
"What are you talking about?"
"How long have you lived on Steel?"
Eustace swallowed. "I wasn't lying about that, it just didn't really seem important to bring up." Another lie. This time it wasn't even a bit believable.
"Do you enjoy making fools out of us?"
"Dave—"
"Oh, come off it, don't talk like we're friends."
"Aren't we?" He fought the urge to squirm as Davy's grip tightened around his skinny arm.
The boy quirked a brow. "Are you springing for lunch today?"
"I…" Eustace racked his mind desperately for an excuse, but no amount of explaining could fill his empty pockets. Not even a copper halfpenny for the sweetshop weighed in its usual place today. He rolled his eyes in painful, reluctant submission. "I can't."
"Yeah?" Davy turned his head toward the others, but never took his eyes off Eustace. "Hey Stan, how long has it been since Scrubb paid for lunch?"
"Couple weeks, at least," said Stanley, leaning back in his chair and watching them with the sort of mild interest with which one might observe a passably entertaining episode of television.
"You think you can take advantage of us like that?" asked Davy, turning full back on Eustace, dark eyes blazing. "Some friend you are."
"Listen, it's not a big deal, it's only a temporary situation while Harold gets business sorted and—" He blundered through the speech he'd so carefully constructed over the past weeks, too late and all wrong now. "And when everything goes back to normal I'll pay you back for whatever—"
"Nice try, your dad's not getting that job back if half the things Ellie says are true." Davy smirked and almost pouted, eyes like a wild dog in sight of its prey, that familiar hungry look that the grubby lowertown kids usually satiated, now turned exclusively onto Eustace. "Poor Scrubb, guess your mum'll have to start whoring herself out like everyone else on Steel Street, huh?"
If he hadn't flushed beet-red before, he did now. "Look," he breathed pleadingly, "I swear I can explain everything, can we just talk about this later?"
"Oh, now you want to talk?"
"Not here," he snapped, "can't you get that through your thick skull? Quit playing games and talk to me after class!"
A stifled intake of breath suffocated the few scattered murmurings across the room, and Davy scoffed, the corner of his lip curling down, suppressing a wry smile.
"You know, I'm getting really sick of your attitude."
The pressure around Eustace's arm tightened until he feared it would snap, but before the words 'get off' could escape his throat, it vanished, and Davy's fist flashed up and struck him square in the mouth.
Eustace stumbled back, catching himself against a desk as a ripple of low gasps washed over the room.
Stanley whistled.
His hand flew to his mouth as the warm tang of coppery liquid spread over his tongue, a wave of numb heat flashing through his skull for a split second before the classroom door opened and Mrs. Livingston walked in.
He blinked hard to regain his bearings and looked up, but the teacher only motioned absently in their direction as she stepped up to her desk. "Back to your seats, everyone, and get your mathematics textbooks out."
Davy dropped into his own seat behind Eleanor with an air of lazy ease.
"Been wanting to do that for ages," he murmured, and Eleanor laughed, glancing back to pin Eustace with a grin of removed interest, as if he were a particularly pitiful creature floundering in a sidewalk puddle, so utterly ridiculous in its tragedy that one couldn't help but laugh to watch it struggle.
She tucked a strand of silky yellow hair behind her ear, and Eustace swallowed as she turned away again to open her book.
"Back to your seat, Scrubb," the teacher sighed.
He barely comprehended the words, eyes wandering down as he pulled his hand away from his lips, a bright red rivulet dribbling down his fingers. His head spun at the sight. "I'm sorry," he choked, "may I be excused?"
The woman looked up from her desk, peering through narrow spectacles and pursing her lips. "Do you have a handkerchief?"
He blinked and furrowed his brow. "Y—yes…?"
"Then please, use it, and take your seat, unless it's a real emergency."
He opened his mouth to insist that it was a real emergency, but she'd already looked back down to her papers, and the back of his neck prickled with the disarming sensation that every eye in the room was still fixed on him as he stood there, ignored.
Even she must know that Harold had withdrawn from his position on the board.
His heart hammered with raw humiliation, heat threatening the backs of his eyes, and at last he turned hazily to his own desk and slumped into his seat, pulling the crisp white handkerchief from his breast pocket and pressing it to his mouth.
The taste of blood edged the jagged ridge where his teeth had punctured his lower lip, his head swimming as he traced it with his tongue to a sharp smarting sensation, burning eyes fixed on the merciful wall to his right.
Never before had he so desperately wished to sink into the earth itself.
The bulk of his bookbag shielded him from invasive glances, but still he caught snatches of whispers from the middle of the room as class began, and rage alone forced him to blink the tears back before they fell.
Who was he, Crybaby Pole?
No, he'd get a note from the nurse. He'd complain to the principal. He'd make Mrs. Livingston sorry she'd kept him in class, even if he had to do it the old fashioned way. And then when Harold found another job, he could get his seat back on the committee. Maybe he could even get Davy suspended. Then he'd really be sorry.
When they had money again, he would convince Harold to buy the school a new library or something, and then they'd have to do whatever he asked.
But before the satisfying mental image of the Blakiston parents learning their precious angel had been expelled for cheating could settle into glorious detail, the whole comforting daydream faltered.
When they had money again.
As if he didn't know exactly what Harold had gotten himself into.
With careful, measured effort, he forced himself to pull out his mathematics textbook as the numb shock in his jaw slowly faded, leaving behind a dull ache as Mrs. Livingston's voice droned on about trigonometric equations.
Three columns of perfect answers in clear, sharp handwriting materialized down the page before the rest of the class had even made it to the second formula on the blackboard, and he flipped ahead out of habit to the section in robotics where he'd been designing a trap for wolf spiders, notes and diagrams stuck in bits of fancy stationery. But even his own designs couldn't anchor his wandering mind today, and he never noticed when they switched to history.
The moment the bell rang for lunch he shot up and made a bee-line for the bathroom, dunking his dried handkerchief under the tap and letting it run pink for a moment before wiping his face down and pressing the cool, sopping rag to his lip.
He breathed out a deep sigh, glancing up into the splotchy mirror to meet his own grey eyes.
One lock of sandy hair hung out of place over his forehead, and he brushed it back reflexively, but aside from the pink droplets running down his chin when he pulled the handkerchief away, the rest of his face looked shockingly normal. His lip hadn't swollen, though the cut inside still smarted when he ran his tongue across it. The only visible damage was a dark red stain that had already dried into his white collar.
He dunked his handkerchief under the squeaky tap again, wiping uselessly at the stain and spreading pinkish blood further through soggy white fabric.
Davy's voice echoed in his head. "Been wanting to do that for ages."
He scoffed, and again the heat rushed into his face.
What had he ever done to Davy Ellis? Hadn't he shared his sweets with the gang since first year? Hadn't he let them copy off his homework and crash at his house when they'd exhausted all their usual haunts?
Sure, he'd never really liked them. They'd never actually cared about any of the same things he did, and honestly speaking they were quite stupid, aside from Stanley, and he was too lazy for it to count.
But still.
Maybe they'd never been friends, not really, but who ever was friends, really?
He scrubbed his collar harder.
It didn't matter.
He didn't need them.
Davy had always been an insufferable cow, hadn't he? Lording his hulking figure over the rest of them like he owned the whole school.
Why should I care?
Eustace threw his soaking, stained handkerchief into the sink with ten times the necessary force.
His collar now looked as if it had been smeared with cheap lipstick.
Wonderful.
The bathroom door banged open and he jumped, but spun only to meet a shrimpy boy from another class, who paused and eyed him with wary distaste before brushing past and disappearing into one of the stalls.
Eustace only just stifled the urge to snap at him for staring.
As bullheaded as Davy Ellis might always have been, he had also been a useful shield. Now nothing whatsoever stood between Eustace and anyone who felt like fighting back.
He wrung out his useless handkerchief with white knuckles and stuffed it back into his pocket, banging out into the hall and aiming straight for the nurse's office.
At least he knew how to get out of school with just a few well placed words, and then he wouldn't have to deal with any of this until tomorrow, and Alberta would worry over him and give him something cold for his lip, and maybe she would even know how to—
"Oof."
Jill Pole dropped her bookbag and Eustace sidestepped into the wall as he wheeled to miss it, rubbing his arm where her shoulder had caught it in her hurry out of the Fourteens classroom.
"Watch where you're going," he snapped.
"Sorry," she mumbled as she ducked to snatch the bag again, then glanced up as if only then recognizing who she'd barreled into. Her eyes flicked to his collar, and he almost recoiled before she spoke, quietly and hurriedly. "Cornstarch will take the bloodstains out."
She turned and darted off before Eustace could even formulate a response—before he had time to remember that she'd been the one to admit his secret in front of the entire class.
That pathetic little snitch, what gave her the right—?
He clenched his jaw against a fresh wave of indignant rage, and just barely held himself back from storming after her.
Sniveling, stupid, crybaby Pole? Giving him advice? As if they were on the same level?
He gripped the straps of his backpack as if he could strangle them, turning again toward the nurse's office where the cranky old woman sent him home with far less than the usual hassle, and frigid air struck his face like a welcome wall of ice as he stepped out through the swinging front doors.
His insides burned like someone had lit a fire in his stomach, the mocking flash in Pole's brown eyes replaying over and over as his furious pace carried him farther and farther from the wide, clean streets of civilized society.
If anything could add insult to injury.
He'd stormed halfway down Steel Street before the muffled noise of indistinct shouting yanked him unceremoniously from a sea of churning thoughts.
Were the Poles still at it?
Maybe the class would like to know that tomorrow. Once they'd gotten over the shock of his misfortune, Pole would pay for ratting him out.
But then… no, that didn't sound like the Poles.
He slowed at the top of his own front steps, reaching for the front door just as something banged against the wall from inside and his fingers withdrew sharply from the rusted knob.
"It wouldn't kill you to clean the place, or put something on the stove—"
"You know perfectly well I wasn't brought up to any of this! I didn't marry you to get stuck doing housework like a common servant!"
Disdain spat like venom from Alberta's knife-sharp voice on the other side of the door, already thin and scratchy from the strain of shouting.
Every muscle in Eustace's body went rigid as if to bolt, his lips parted wordlessly, frozen.
"Don't blame me, can I help it if my sector goes obsolete? I'm a highly specialized—"
"Don't make me laugh! How much do you owe?"
"How dare—"
"I'm not stupid, Harold, I know those men in suits don't come calling every day to offer you a position!"
"Keep your meddling nose out of my business, you can't possibly understand—"
"This is my business! I'm living like this because of your mistakes!"
Something slammed hard into the wall again, and Eustace stepped aside just as the front door burst open and Harold stormed out into the street without a single glance over his shoulder, the man's skinny frame and balding head oddly terrifying under the dull January sky with his fists balled at his sides.
He didn't spot Eustace, stiff as a statue mere inches from where the doorknob had dented the loose porch paneling.
"Harold!" shrieked Alberta from the kitchen, clutching the edge of the door with pale, bony fingers, the only part of her body that Eustace could see, but even they trembled with the rage that scratched in her every word. "What will the boy think?"
"Damn the boy!"
Alberta spluttered an incoherent string of protests before her raspy voice found itself again, too shrill and too clear in the open, public street. "You'll mind what you say when he out-earns you in a few years' time! He's a right sight cleverer than you, and you know it!"
"Let him take care of you, then!"
And Harold turned sharply down a narrow alley between slanted wooden buildings, his long strides all-too purposeful as he vanished behind the dustbins out of sight.
"Drinking again," breathed Alberta shakily from just behind the door that shielded Eustace from her view. "Before lunch time, too, the blasted fool!"
She slammed the door, plastic shades rattling against the window before another door slammed deeper inside the house.
Eustace tried to swallow, but his dry tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth.
What did they think they were doing? Shouting out here in the open where anyone could hear them? Like the Poles? Like rabid animals an inch from tearing each other's heads off?
The air still seemed to quiver with Harold's towering rage, lingering like a trail of radioactive fallout in his wake, something feral awakened within the unassuming flesh of a once-shrewd businessman.
Eustace could have believed his lungs were melting for how reluctantly his breaths came, as if the tiniest fraction of a movement would trigger an explosion.
He blinked rapidly as if to refresh his sluggish brain, forcing it back into action like rusty gears creaking against their own weight.
He couldn't just walk inside now.
The mere idea of letting on that he'd heard such an exchange made him want to shrink in on himself even more desperately than the feeling of fresh blood dripping down his face had done with twenty-five pairs of piercing eyes fixed on him.
And he certainly couldn't tell Alberta he'd been hit. He was supposed to be the clever one, wasn't he?
So clever that he couldn't even keep their secret for a full month.
He should have come up with a better excuse. He should have made the gang believe that stupid bed-ridden aunt story no matter how many lies he would have needed to invent.
Something sick and slimy churned in his stomach, and he swallowed it down as the icy wind nipped at the damp spot on his collar, bitterly indifferent to the rubbish-strewn street and its ugly houses and the ugly stain on his once-pristine uniform as he crossed his arms over his chest and slid down to the hard, bare porch floor.
xXx
"You're sure you don't need anything, dear? An ice pack? The icebox hasn't been working today, but I can ask if—"
"I said I'm fine. It was just a nosebleed."
"Brought on by stress, no doubt," Alberta sighed from the kitchen sink, scrubbing fruitlessly at his pink collar, every cleaning agent in the house lined up on the counter, each just as useless as the last. "I knew this move would upset your delicate system, you're such a clever boy, it only follows that such a thing would—"
"I said I'm fine," he snapped.
Clever boy.
Eustace flushed as if he'd been struck in the face, but Alberta might not even have heard him for all the impact his interruption made.
Her carefully plucked brows knit in concentration over the bewildering soap suds, thin lips pursed even thinner than usual. "And everything's alright at school, you said?"
"Yeah," he sighed, spinning his pencil over a history worksheet, no closer to absorbing a single word of it than he had been in class. "Obviously."
His tongue traced the ridge on the inside of his lip.
Alberta peered down at the tiny words on the back of a garish orange soap bottle, turning it over like she'd never encountered such a puzzling concept as fabric softener.
The maid had always handled stains in their old house. Alberta knew no more about laundry than Eustace himself.
"Try cornstarch," he put in abruptly.
Alberta glanced up. "What was that, dear?"
He averted his eyes and pretended to focus on his work, speaking offhandedly. "Might help."
"Really? Where did you learn that?"
He shrugged. "Everybody knows it."
Alberta nodded thoughtfully, accepting his explanation with the usual silent acknowledgement that she knew very little of the world compared to her husband or son.
She turned to rifle through the cupboard, or so Eustace thought, but the next moment something crinkled and she placed a handful of plastic-wrapped peppermints on the table beside his history homework.
He glanced up in surprise, the mingled scent of bleach and rosebud perfume launching their unified assault on his senses.
"I popped into the sweetshop after the grocer's this morning. No need to tell your father." She patted his arm as his eyes wandered back down to the candies on the table.
For some imperceptible reason, his stomach sank.
"Can we really afford that?"
"Oh, don't bother yourself about the money, dear, don't you know your father's getting offers left and right? He'll have a new position by the end of the month, now run along and enjoy your afternoon, I'm sure the studying can wait."
He glanced up to find her beaming expectantly down at him, and forced a small, strained smile in return that must have looked a great deal more like a grimace. But Alberta seemed not to notice, turning back to the cupboard perfectly satisfied, just as if she were a small child who had earned the approval of a favorite grown up.
Eustace stuffed the sweets into his pocket and collected his things with one hand before retreating into the glorified broom closet he now called a bedroom, tossing his bag into the corner and wheeling on the doorway where nothing but a lurid green quilt hung between himself and the hall.
He didn't even have a door to slam.
He almost punched the wall, but thought better of it at the last second and balled his fists in vain, energy building and slowly ebbing away, draining from his chest as he breathed shakily out.
How oblivious did she think he was?
Did she think he'd never heard them arguing in the old house? Did she think he never saw the black-suited debt collectors waiting for hours outside their door? Did she think he'd never heard the word embezzlement?
Did she honestly expect him not to question why a simple layoff should necessitate the sale of every earthly possession they could afford to live without?
The precious few clothing items he'd been allowed to keep hung up on a single old coat-hook in the corner, just above the drawers where he stowed the books too battered or obscure to sell, and the notebooks filled to bursting with his own handwriting. The empty ones had gone in the auction with everything else—his solid oak bookcases, his desk, even the glass case where he'd kept his collection of insects tacked up with all their carefully labeled index cards and encyclopedia clippings, now housed in the dusty mason jars he'd scrounged from the cupboards of the new hovel.
The only truly valuable objects he still possessed were the ones his classmates would see—his pocket knife and compass and silver pen and lighter, and all his delicate school utensils in their ivory studded case of polished wood.
Alberta knew perfectly well they were barely keeping up appearances as it was.
He threw himself onto his unmade bed and sighed against the stiff mattress, reluctantly popping a peppermint into his mouth despite the swirling frustration that still lingered in his gut as he stared up at the rings of water damage on the ceiling.
It might have been hours later that a noise outside his window finally broke the suffocating silence.
For a moment he thought Harold had come in through the back door, but then a distant, muffled click told him it had been the door of the next house over.
The Poles.
He sat up.
His bedroom window faced their house at just such an angle that it allowed him a straight line of sight into their back garden, and in a desperate play for distraction, he pulled his curtain aside and peered out into the sinking light of a dull afternoon.
The ugly paneled fence that enclosed their alley-like row of plots like a prison yard stood half-obscured by heaps of greyish snow, interrupted now and then by a leaning tower of deflated old tires, or the rusted frame of a bicycle stripped for parts. Amidst the haphazard clutter, one might almost have missed the unassuming figure perched on the back stoop of the Poles' hovel like a dusty brown bird, twitching as she glanced around to ensure her solitude, but Eustace couldn't have mistaken the hateful swish of her fluttering, short-cropped hair for anything, fidgeting and flinching at the faintest noises as if on the verge of flight.
He clenched his jaw, and for a moment he could have jumped up and confronted her on the spot. He had half a mind to unleash every biting remark he'd ever conjured in the depths of his most poisonous being, every ounce of disgust he felt for her pathetic, nervous twitching and her ugly, stained jumper, every joke he'd ever made in Davy's ear, all of it, and the tears would come only too easily. It would feel good to make somebody else miserable for a change.
But again that small, slimy something flopped in his stomach, and the idea lost its appeal at the overwhelming urge to shrink away into a hole and never come out. A disgusting kind of smallness crawled under his skin, out of place, all wrong, vulnerable and utterly unguarded.
He felt almost as pathetic as she looked, and the idea revolted him.
Outside in the ruffling breeze, Jill Pole lowered her bag to the step at her feet and pulled something out of it, extracting a scrap of paper from a notebook and turning it over in pale fingers, entirely unaware of his keen eyes on her every stiff movement.
It gave him a tiny flutter of satisfaction to know she didn't want to be observed, even if she wasn't doing anything interesting, folding the paper in her hands and creasing every edge with the flat of a fingernail, glancing over her shoulder as if expecting at any moment to be caught in the middle of a mundane passtime.
Perhaps she did expect him to do something. To take the bait.
But no, he wasn't going to give her the satisfaction. She could mock him with her unsolicited advice all she wanted, but she wouldn't get a rise out of him.
He let the curtain drop closed, and it occurred to him only after a very late dinner of canned fruit with Alberta's favorite sugary waffle cakes that Harold had not come home.
Even in the swirling depths of muddled dreams, his ears strained for the faintest noise of a door latch and the slimy something in his stomach squirmed ever tighter, until pale dawn interrupted the restless cycle of waking and sleeping, and a bird twittered somewhere in the dingy wasteland outside.
Alberta didn't get up to see him off.
The tinny hum of the television in her bedroom told him she'd be sulking in there all day, and part of him wanted to do the same.
Would it really hurt if he skipped school today?
Yes, he had to answer before the lovely fantasy could fully settle in his mind. The longer he avoided the gang, the worse it would be for him when he saw them again, not to mention how his marks would drop. And then how was he supposed to get himself out of this mess?
He pulled on his black coat with the shiny silver buttons, snatched a waffle from the counter, and slipped out the door, only to come face to face with Harold.
The balding man paused halfway up the front steps and pinned Eustace with vaguely unfocused, bloodshot eyes, the exact same shade of steely grey as his own, before brushing past him into the house without a word. The rotting, acrid stench of alcohol followed him as the door banged shut between them.
Eustace hurried briskly out into the street, suddenly keen to put as much distance between himself and the house as he could before the shouting started.
But the looming concrete block of the school building only offered a different kind of impending dread, and stepping in through the swinging front doors felt uncommonly like stepping into a trap for wolf spiders.
He fixed his eyes directly ahead of him as he entered the Fourteens classroom, aiming wordlessly for his desk against the wall.
"Morning," chirped Davy, so naturally that he almost responded without thinking.
Eustace bit the fresh scar tissue on the inside of his lip and slumped into his seat, busying himself by pretending to search for his pencil case so that he wouldn't have to meet the eyes that prickled over his skin like insects.
"No more guard dogs, huh Scrubb?" sneered a voice from across the aisle—Daniel White, that ugly git whose abysmal marks had been a point of hilarity for Eustace since first year. "You got anything to say to me?"
Eustace did indeed have several choice words he could have lobbed at the boy, but he clenched his jaw tight, feeling uncommonly exposed. Like a nerve.
"That's what I thought," the boy snapped, his stupid grin creeping into his lisp.
Eustace swallowed the hot anger bubbling up into his throat, and a shadow flickered briefly over his table as someone passed, black-buckled shoes scuffing the floor to a desk a few rows behind him.
Jill Pole's eyes burned the back of his neck from the moment she took her seat, raking his crisp, clean collar, only a little worn down and threadbare from Alberta's harsh scrubbing, as if her very existence were bleeding smug satisfaction that he had taken her advice.
I might have known it anyway, he retorted in his head. How should you know it's your doing? I know plenty of things you don't.
Her silence cut like a knife, though of course it was only imaginary. The real Jill Pole could only gloat from the safety of her desk as Mrs. Livingston's voice droned over the last scattered murmuring of the class, and he pulled out his books.
I suppose you think I should be thankful?
Silence again.
Why should he be thankful? He might just as easily have known it himself.
But his neck still tingled with the disarming sensation of being watched, and the silence between them only stiffened as the school day dragged on and Eustace kept his head down.
"Aw," cooed the occasional passerby when he slipped as quietly as he could down the hall, avoiding Davy's usual route, "forget your friendship tax?" Or "how's Steel Street? I hear they grow rats as big as dogs around there," followed by muffled bursts of giggles behind his back as he shouldered his bookbag and bored holes into the concrete floor with his eyes.
An age might have passed before the final bell rang, and he aimed for the front stairs at last.
He'd almost breathed a sigh of relief when something hard caught him in the back and he lurched forward with nothing ahead to break his fall, crashing down the shallow stairwell and slamming into the concrete at the bottom on his elbows.
He yelped and swore, shaking his head and struggling to right himself before his head even stopped spinning, shoes scuffing the floor as he shot up and turned to face Eleanor laughing into Stanley's shoulder, half in tears.
Davy grinned, leaning easily against the railing. "It's rude to ignore people, you know." And then said something to the other two with a laugh as Eleanor struggled to contain herself.
Eustace bit his lip hard and spun to shove through the front door. A blast of cold air hit him from the streets.
At that moment he could have turned right back around and told them exactly what he thought of them, the perfect words constructing themselves like a weapon in his head as the adrenaline slowly ebbed away and his elbows and wrists began to smart.
But the insults turned cold in his stomach as he crept in through the back door and slipped unnoticed into his room, blood beading through the knees of his slacks, too conspicuous now to call a simple accident.
And the thick, bland scent of starch clung to him as the week crawled on and his fingers calloused from scrubbing the bloodstained cuffs where his cut-up palms had caught the pavement for the third day in a row, unnoticed by Alberta, who left most days with her friends in their expensive cars, dressed as if she still lived in the uppertown.
Jill Pole's hunched figure ducked out onto her back stoop every afternoon like clockwork as her parents' raised voices drifted dully through thin walls, and Eustace pretended not to notice.
He wondered if she'd heard the back door slam when Harold stormed out with a half-empty brandy bottle and a bag of clothes to spend the night who-knew-where, or glimpsed the men in black suits who came asking after him, sometimes accompanied by their imposing peacekeeper friends, shell-white armor clashing starkly with the dingy grey of dust-caked walls.
How fascinating it must be, to watch from the outside.
How important she must feel, to know he would struggle with the menial servants' tasks she'd already mastered.
Not fair, he shot back mentally.
He couldn't help it if he'd grown up civilized. If he'd never needed to know how to wash the dishes that Alberta allowed to pile up until they ran out of clean surfaces to eat on. If he'd never learned to dry his own laundry or cook anything more complicated than a sandwich.
He couldn't help it if Alberta never bothered to try, or if Harold wafted in like a cigarette smoke ghost only to leave again without a word.
"Hey, Pole!" Eleanor Blakiston's voice rang across the lunch hall, and Eustace stiffened as his wandering thoughts scattered like roaches and he glanced up.
Out of the corner of his vision he caught Pole shrink in on herself, as if by pressing herself deeper into her seat she could disappear.
"Nice bow!" chirped the yellow-headed girl from her own table. "You fish that out of the trash?"
Pole's hand flew to her head, and Eustace glanced over surreptitiously as her fingers closed around the midnight blue ribbon holding a piece of hair smartly back from her face. Or, it would have looked smart, if it hadn't been Pole.
"Why, did you lose one?" asked Davy loudly enough for everyone to hear, glancing with a smirk to his counterpart. "Want me to get it back?"
Jill lowered her head, cowering just as reliably as always.
"Maybe later," Eleanor said in teasing threat of further torture if nothing else happened to entertain them.
Only Eustace, from his spot at the very edge of the room, heard Pole sniff.
For a moment he almost smirked; Crybaby Pole, right back in her place.
But then Davy glanced in his direction and he ducked his head, pretending to focus on the lunch he'd barely touched.
Nothing happened.
They hadn't even been looking at him.
He blinked, straightened his shoulders and took a breath, attempting to regain a scrap of dignity with a short glance around the room.
Davy gave a sharp laugh and he cringed.
Still, he hadn't been the target, but his nervous system didn't seem to have gotten the memo.
Pole sniffled again.
Oh, shut up, he willed silently with a sigh.
By the following Monday, the gang didn't even pass a snide remark when he slumped into his seat and pulled out his geography textbook.
In fact, nobody seemed to notice him now.
Even Pole paid him no mind.
Had she tired of him already? Did she have no more patronizing advice to impart? The best spots for crying on school grounds, perhaps?
He fingered his collar, tugging absent-mindedly on the soft material.
"Who can tell me," asked Mrs. Livingston in her usual monotonous drone, "why District Three gets more snow on average than the rest of the country?"
Eustace barely heard her, scribbling a list of numbers down a scrap piece of notebook paper—the household expenses he'd collected from the bills left unopened on the counter.
"Miss Blakiston," the teacher said, nodding to Eleanor's raised hand as Eustace spun his ivory-enameled pen between bony fingers, distantly contemplating how much it might fetch if he pawned it.
"Because we're north of the desert," she asserted proudly.
Eustace smirked.
"Incorrect."
Before he could help himself, Eustace raised his own hand, and Eleanor's blonde hair flashed as she spun to glare daggers in his direction.
He ignored her serenely.
"Scrubb."
"District Three is a snowbelt. That is to say, we border both the mountains and the sea."
Eleanor scoffed. "We don't border the sea."
"By map lines we do," he said before the teacher could interject. "You'll find it's only a few miles east of the fence, across an old forest called Owlwood. Perhaps you've heard of it?"
A ripple of giggles broke out in the back of the class and Eustace had to suppress a grin as Eleanor went pink.
"Isn't that the name of her dad's factory?" whispered someone just within earshot before Mrs. Livingston reclaimed the room.
"That is correct, Scrubb." She turned to the blackboard, drawing a chalk line over a simple diagram. "Lower level air collects vapor from the sea, and rises to the higher elevation of the shore where it freezes…"
Eustace pretended not to notice the gang's eyes on him, focusing ostensibly on his impossible household budget until the bell rang and he slipped out before anyone else had even collected their things, conveniently forgetting his way to their next class until it had already started, evading those dangerous in-between hallways where Davy was so likely to linger.
It was almost second nature now, slinking around like a hunted animal until the very last bell of the day when the flood of traffic and the din of lockers banging open and closed could obscure his escape.
In the dense hum of excited chatter, he slipped past Eleanor unnoticed, her petulant whine rising above the rest so that he caught the words "don't know what gives him the right, how was I supposed to know about the stupid ocean?" before the crowd swallowed her up behind him.
"Hey!" she snapped an instant later, and he spun without thinking as another small voice squeaked in alarm.
Jill Pole ducked around the open door of a locker just as Eleanor missed her with a swipe of her arm.
"Get back here, you little weasel," barked the bigger girl, and snatched a fistful of Pole's jumper before she could duck out of the way a second time. "Say that to my face."
"I didn't say anything!" yelped Pole, shaking her head so violently her hair slapped her paper-white face. "I didn't!"
"I heard you laugh, don't deny it, you think something's funny, huh? Do you?"
Pole shook her head again, glittering tears welling in wide brown eyes.
Eleanor reached up and ripped something out of Pole's hair before she could defend herself, slamming her back against a locker door with a cry as the girl snatched fruitlessly for the knotted black ribbon held high in Eleanor's hand.
"Wearing stolen property too?"
"I didn't steal it!" shrieked Pole, hysterical now as a shiny fat tear slipped down her cheek. "It was a birthday present, I didn't—"
"Birthday present!" laughed Eleanor. "From who? You know you haven't got any friends, Pole, what, did your horse-faced mum dig it out of the trash? I'd like to see that."
Eustace only realized he was staring when Pole's eyes flashed desperately to him, huge and glimmering, and he turned abruptly away.
"You know," snapped Eleanor as Pole choked and stammered, "maybe I'll let you keep it. It is funny, watching you walk around thinking you look nice with that thing knotted up in your hair. It's like playing dress-up with a rat. Maybe you could steal a tiara next, make yourself queen of the tramps."
Eustace bit his lip, shoving past a group of gawking kids toward the entry hall.
"Pretty stiff competition, though, my Daddy says they're all criminals down on Steel."
"Oh, shut up," snapped Eustace before his better judgment could catch up with bubbling frustration spilling over in his chest, wheeling as his voice echoed sharply off the concrete walls. "As if you haven't cheated off me since first year, or does it not count as stealing when it's you?"
Eleanor blinked with such gormless and bewildered surprise that it may as well have been one of the lockers who had spoken.
And the hall fell dead silent.
