The Call Read online

  Even Frankenstein has been dragged out of whatever hole he lives in, his eyes as large as an owl’s in his underfed face. He picks at his food as if not convinced the pigs have done their job properly. To his right, Mr. Hickey shovels his meal down with military efficiency.

  “By Danú’s tits,” says Megan. “Somebody get that man a funnel before he starves!”

  Diane Mallon has finally left the college, so of the veterans only Shamey and Melanie remain. They both sip from something they keep under the table, even though the rumor now is that she’s pregnant and he’s the father. Ridiculous of course. Everybody knows pregnancy would kill her with that heart of hers.

  Farther along, Ms. Breen, the Turkey, raises her tiny chin so that her gaze sweeps the room and every student feels her suspicious glance pass over them. And not a word is spoken at the top table, not a single word until the last hideous lump of “bread pudding” has slithered its way into the Turkey’s stomach.

  Then she stands and waves off the kitchen workers, who are already dumping hot pots of nettle tea onto the Year 1 tables.

  “Listen,” she says, and they do. Even Megan’s gob stays glued shut. “We know you have heard by now what took place at Bangor Survival College. And Mallow, of course, before that. And many of you are asking why these things are happening. Why the Sídhe, the enemies of all our people, can’t just continue to murder us bit by bit. Why, after thousands of years, they are now so … so impatient. Well, let me tell you, there are minds all over the country working on this. But if you ask me, their impatience is a sign of our success. Of your success. We learn more about them with every survivor, and we’re getting more and more of those.” She grins horribly, working hard at believing her own words. As though losing nine in ten of a nation’s people, on and on into the future, can only end well.

  “But things must change around here. So, on to good news. Another of our wonderful veterans, Shamey here, will be moving home.” He looks up, startled, woozy. This is news to him. But he makes no protest.

  “Probably going to a hospital to get him off the drink,” whispers Marya, and Nessa can only agree, but her heart is beating, thumping with excitement, because she knows what’s coming next.

  “And our own Anthony Lawlor—Anto, to most of you—will be returning to us. To share his … um, his fresher recollections and his survival strategies.”

  Nessa feels her face burning. This is what she has wanted, but as her guts turn to water, as her mind darts from joy to fear to confusion, she realizes how hard it will be to keep her concentration with him back in the college. His return will be a danger to her if she can’t learn to control her emotions. And of course she can’t. She knows that now. Her only skill is to hide them. The first test of this comes mere seconds later when Marya says, “He’s a handsome lad, that Anto. Swimmer’s body, as my mam would say. I wouldn’t mind, I’ll tell you that.”

  “You never even looked at him before, Marya!” This from Megan, who has no time for boys, or girls for that matter.

  “Well”—Marya has thin wrists and tiny little hands that dramatize everything she says—“he had that whole crazy vegetarian thing. The not-fighting thing.” In other words, she expected him to die. “Maybe we should all give it a go! Seems to have worked for him.”

  Conor won’t be giving pacifism a go. He’s been let out to hear the speech and sits in his usual place between Fiver and Keith. Liz Sweeney is sitting with them at the boys’ table, and after what happened to her brother, none of the teachers even think to tell her to move. As though she is some kind of miracle, or maybe a disease. Some from the top table whisper and look at her. Some of them don’t see her at all.

  Conor turns around and locks his gaze with Nessa’s. She used to think he hated her, and she couldn’t have been more wrong about that. It’s only now that she sees what his spite actually looks like, and it’s an electrical current that moves from his eyes to pass through the rest of his body, stiffening him like a board, lowering his chin so that his forehead points toward her, the horns of a bull. It is not the look of a boy. Or a wild animal. Or a serpent. This is the spirit of the Call itself. Deadly and inevitable and imminent.

  Nessa actually jumps as Megan speaks right at her ear. “That poor Conor looks like he’s constipated.”

  Is that all she sees? Nessa wonders, as her friend goes right back to picking at her dessert without a care in the world. Is that all that anybody sees in him?

  It’s hard to avoid somebody in your own year, and most especially Conor. His so-called knights are everywhere and all of them pay Nessa special attention. Tony with his old man’s eyebrows and pocked skin; Bruggers, the scrawniest of them all, but with the reflexes of a reptile taking a fly; Keith and Liz Sweeney and even members of other years, like the now mournful and abandoned Sherry, desperate to be queen again.

  Nessa’s ability to hide her emotions has left her with no defenders other than Megan, who can never be in more than three places at once.

  Thus, when sparring a few days later, Bruggers takes Nessa down and wallops her head into the floor. While she’s still trying to clear the ringing sound from her skull, she hears him apologizing. “By Crom, I’m sorry, Nabil. I thought she was still over the matting.”

  At lunch, Liz Sweeney drops a cup of scalding tea, and only luck keeps it out of Nessa’s lap. “Oops,” says the big girl. And Nessa grabs her by the wrist.

  “What are you doing, Liz Sweeney?”

  “I said, ‘Oops.’ Doesn’t anyone speak English in Donegal anymore?”

  “This is serious, Liz Sweeney.” Nessa is proud of how calm she sounds. “We don’t … we don’t actually injure each other.”

  “Well, you should have thought of that before you snitched on Conor to get him Cage time. And the lies you told about him! As if! As if he’d want to sleep with Crom-twisted Clip-Clop!” Nessa has never seen her so angry, and this in a week when her brother survived the Call! “You’re like something out of The Elephant Man. So, yes, Nessa. Yes, it’s serious. You’ve brought this on yourself and the gloves are off.”

  And then Liz Sweeney gasps and her eyes bug out, and Nessa realizes she is still gripping her classmate’s wrist, hard enough to feel the bones rub together.

  “I could break it,” Nessa says. Broken bones are a serious matter in Year 5. A potential death sentence. “You’re like a twig.”

  “Go on then, bitch. I won’t scream.”

  “But I don’t have to break it. Just say you’ll keep the peace between the two of us.”

  “Go on, I said. Deliberate damage means expulsion. Conor will be delighted.”

  “You would risk this just to get back at me?”

  “If you’re not going to do it, I need to fetch more tea.”

  And Nessa, with a fake shrug, releases her, but she feels chilled.

  Two more days pass without further attacks from the Round Table. The mourning bells ring several times, but not for Year 5. Nor are there any new survivors for the college to celebrate. At least the snow has gone again, melting away in the face of a driving frigid rain.

  Shamey stays off the drink long enough to make his good-byes, mainly to Melanie, his fellow veteran, and to Anne-Marie, the last of the Year 7s, who still awaits the Call. He is a sad little boy, walking away toward Boyle in donated clothing, awkward in his shoes. Nobody has come to replace him. Not yet.

  The next morning is Halloween. To celebrate, the Sídhe have left a gift in the boys’ dorm. It is Keith, one of the Round Table. They have sculpted his face into a delicate flower of blood and skin.

  Outrage and doubt consume the remaining knights. “We are the elite,” Conor has told them. “Our odds are better than anybody else’s.”

  But Keith and Cahal and Chuckwu have all been caught, and caught early enough for the Sídhe to have had their fun. And Rodney’s gone too, when he was too slow to get out of Cahal’s way. Thus far, Year 5’s only survivor has been that grass-eating rabbit of a boy, Anto.

  Wh
en they meet that morning before breakfast, Conor knows he’s in danger of losing them.

  “It’s just the odds,” he keeps saying. “At least three of us are going to make it. I can guarantee it.” But they need more than this, and so, strangely enough, does he. He feels a grin twisting his face.

  “At least we’ll get Clip-Clop,” he tells them. “They’ve cleared out the Sídhe girl in the forest and fenced off the mound. And that means the weekly hunts are back on. So”—his great height is imposing, his gestures those of a wise old man—“we need to put her in her place.”

  “Her place is in the ground,” says Bruggers, still basking in his triumph from sparring with Nessa in the gym.

  And Conor nods, meeting their eyes one by one to show he’s serious, challenging them to join him at this new level.

  “We should do Megan too!” says Bruggers, yet Conor, the exasperated but proud parent, shakes his head.

  “The little red whore deserves it for sure. But we only get to have one … one accident. You understand me? Any more than that would attract all kinds of suspicion. So … so here’s the plan.”

  Nessa avoids Conor’s friends where she can: feigning illness if she finds one of the knights opposite her at sparring, keeping herself in the sight of instructors as much as possible. But in a small school it can only work for so long.

  She makes it a full week into November before she figures out that they are avoiding her. Why? What are they planning? It has to be something more than a beating. Something far worse.

  A realization begins to dawn on her that she needs to transfer away from Boyle. She saw the way Conor was looking at her the other day and there was nothing in his face to suggest even the possibility of rational restraint.

  Ms. Breen will arrange a move for her if she asks for it, but the one time Nessa finds herself outside the office, she raises her fist, yet fails to knock. That’s right. The girl who above all else yearns for survival, leaves herself surrounded by enemies in the hope that one more time, just once, she will get to see Anto.

  She imagines talking to him, really talking to him, and the feeling is the same one she had when she climbed out the bathroom window for the first time, vertiginous, giddy, joyful.

  Nessa will apologize for doubting him, the way everybody doubts her. Both are stronger by far than they appear, and they belong together. Or will do, when she proves that she too is worthy.

  And that very evening—the day she fails to ask for a transfer—Anto returns. Marya, who never can resist a bit of scandal (she refers to it as “ska”), witnesses his arrival and she flies up to the dorm to tell everybody.

  It’s already dark outside and, apart from Aoife, the remaining Year 5 girls hug one of the two radiators that stick up from the floor, equidistant from all of the beds.

  “What’s happening, Marya?” asks Nicole, who fancies herself quite the smart aleck. Her chunky head is always cocked at an angle, her generous lips twitching upward. “You win the lottery?”

  Marya beams in reply, her arms twitching with excitement. “Oh, I’m a bit closer to it than I was, girls! I surely am! I saw Anto!” She tells them of the minibus that pulled up behind the school.

  “And what were you doing back there?” Nicole wants to know, but other voices tell her to “shut it or prepare to swallow teeth.” There’s not a girl in the room that doesn’t have the training to make good on such a threat, although Nicole is as wiry and wily as anyone there.

  “It screeches to a stop,” Marya says, her brown eyes wide, her hands palm out, as though she herself had halted the vehicle, “and this guy hops out. But listen! He was wearing a cloak, like something out of Dracula. And the moment, the very moment his feet touch the gravel, he’s sprinting, and I mean sprinting for the door at the back of the instructors’ building. I’ve never seen anything like it. He runs funny too, like he has a limp. And then, when he gets there, it’s locked or something and he’s banging and banging at it, all panicky.”

  “Sounds like Anto all right,” says Liz Sweeney, rolling her eyes.

  And Marya wags a finger at her. “You don’t talk about a survivor like that!” Heads nod all around and even Liz Sweeney ducks in embarrassment. “Anyway,” Marya continues, “I didn’t know it was him yet, did I? It was dark out there. And Ji—I mean, I was alone. I was by myself out there and had to squint. And then he turns around and I see it’s him. And I wave and call out to him. ‘Hey, Anto!’ And I start walking toward him. And—” She gulps, and now Nessa, who has been hanging on every word, sees that the girl is actually a bit upset.

  “Go on!” says Megan. “By the Cauldron, squeeze it out of you!”

  Marya takes a deep breath. “I was slow getting to him. You know the gravel out there. Sore on our bare feet.”

  “That’s why they put it there—” Nicole starts to explain, but the others shut her up.

  “And he sees me and … and he’s terrified. He’s … he’s banging at the door and screaming to be let in. Hammering it with his fist until somebody opens up and he falls inside. And me just stopped there with the stones digging into me.”

  “He thought you were a Sídhe,” Megan says.

  “Crom take you, you useless red-haired slut!”

  But Megan holds up the palms of her hands in a sign of peace. “No, Marya, I didn’t mean it that way.”

  “That’s a first!” Nicole says.

  “I meant,” Megan continues, “that it’s just the post-traumatic stress, right?”

  And Marya relaxes at once. “Oh, right. What was I thinking? Oh, right. In the excitement I forgot.” Relief fills her voice and everybody nods wisely, as if they know the first thing about it. “Anyway,” she says, “Anto’s back.”

  It’s not that people don’t talk to Aoife these days; it’s that she’s invisible to them. She brings the Plague of Doom with her everywhere and nobody wants to catch it.

  Oh, she’s not stupid, in spite of her legendary laziness, her overindulgence in just about any vice she can gain access to. She is aware of her own peril, sliding through one empty experience after another: through listless sparring in the gym; through runs in the hills; through spear-making classes. She lifts no weights in circuit training, and when the time comes for push-ups she is facedown on the mat, and only Taaft out of all the instructors has the heart, or the lack of it, to scream her into a shadow of obedience.

  “The problem,” somebody says—Nicole, in fact—“the problem is the lack of funerals. I liked Squeaky Emma.” She scratches at the brown bristles on her scalp. “And I miss her too. We need a proper chance to mourn and we never, ever get it, do we?”

  Liz Sweeney has only sneers in reply to that. “And what else would we have time to do, if there were two or three funerals a week? And anyway, what the Sídhe sent back of Squeaky Emma wouldn’t fit into any coffin I’ve ever seen.”

  At this point Aoife pulls the pillow over her head. She has to. She preferred it in the Cage. A cell as cold as death all to herself, whose black walls she painted with her imagination—always a talent of hers. She is a girl who can dream about anything she wants. But it’s hard work and it crumbles at the slightest mention of what happened out in the forest.

  She does not know how many days have passed since then. Enough for everyone to stop asking her opinions, for Marya to stop drawing her into the latest “ska” or for Nicole to openly rifle through Aoife’s locker right in front of her. Has Nicole always done this? Does she steal from her dorm mates? It’s the first interest that Aoife has felt in the world for some time. However, it’s still not enough.

  Her awakening does not happen until two days after Anto’s return, when Sherry comes into the dorm to find Liz Sweeney alone there. Well, except for Aoife of course, who no longer counts.

  She has a pillow pulled over her head, and it muffles their conversation.

  “You’re not allowed in this dorm. You’re a Four, in case you forgot.”

  “I’m not staying.” The younger girl’s voice is
resentful and a little bit shaky. “I need to talk to you.”

  “So talk.”

  Sherry must have made a gesture of some kind, because Liz Sweeney snorts and says, “Oh, she’s not here, you understand? That one will sleep right through the Call when it happens. She’s one of the dead now.”

  “I’d prefer—”

  “Crom eat your preferences, little girl. You need to get over it. The king doesn’t want you anymore.”

  “But … but he has to. I need you to make him.”

  “Make him? Make him talk to you? Why on earth—Oh.”

  Oh, indeed! No pregnant girl has ever survived the Call. A few deliberately got themselves with child way back in the early days in the hopes it would mean they were no longer “adolescents,” but adults. That was the theory anyway, but it didn’t save a single one. In fact, when the State first set up the college system, strong arguments were made to separate out the sexes altogether. Aoife can’t remember why that never happened. It doesn’t matter to her. Gay students are ignored. They do whatever they want until they survive the Call. At which point all of society leans and leans on them to have children, regardless of their own wishes …

  “I’ll get it fixed,” says Sherry. “They’ll let me fix it. But he deserves to know. And I won’t turn him in.”

  “You’d better not! Or I’ll break that slutty little face of yours!”

  “Oh!” and Sherry’s voice hardens. “Oh! Of all the people, you call me a slut, Liz Sweeney?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “You want him for yourself, is what. As if he’d touch you, Liz Sweeney, with your man features and your man’s body. Maybe Bruggers the bugger would be more your type!”

  The springs of a bed sound and Liz Sweeney must be leaping to her feet right now to give the younger girl a beating, although some of the Year 4s can give back as good as they get.

  And then Liz Sweeney comes to a stop. “You … you brought a knife? Are you crazy?”