Duplex Read online

  And then Ryan walked through the doorway into first period, which was also Homeroom, which was also AP European History, which was also inhabited entirely by the most intellectual kids in the school. All five contenders for valedictorian were in this class, and everybody listened closely to the teacher and took notes.

  Ryan didn’t feel like doing that today. He sat down and, in his open notebook, he inscribed, “A House Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand.”

  Then he closed his eyes and let the drone of the class wash over him.

  “Ryan de Burg,” said Mr. Hardesty. His voice seemed to be coming from somewhere very close to Ryan. Perhaps to his left, leaning over him.

  Ryan uncurled his back and sat up straight. He wiped his face on his sleeve because a sudden chill on his skin told him he had been drooling. There was a pond on his desk that was nearly ready for frog eggs to be laid in it.

  “The name,” said Ryan, in a voice croaky with sleep, “is Burke. Irish, not French.”

  “De Burg,” said Mr. Hardesty. “Norman French, came over with William the Conqueror. They were counted among the Old English, the original Hiberno-Norman settlers who asserted overlordship in Ireland.”

  Ah, yes. This was European History, and Mr. Hardesty was one of the few teachers who still cared about his subject matter twenty years into teaching it.

  “Mr. Hardesty,” said Ryan, “I concede the probability that you are correct, though nobody in my family would answer to de Burg, and half of them can’t spell Burke. However, you deliberately interrupted me during a deep sleep phase, in which I was drooling copiously on my desk. May I get paper towels from the back of the room?”

  “You may, as soon as you answer the question I was asking you.”

  “Unless your question also became part of my dream, sir, I don’t believe I know what that question was.”

  “Then answer the question that you think you were asked in your dream.”

  Ryan was sure that Mr. Hardesty actually liked him and enjoyed these little contests of will. Ryan had no idea what, if anything, he had been dreaming. But he did know where they were in the coursework, more or less.

  “The family name of the dynasty founded by Geoffrey of Anjou and Empress Matilda was Plantagenet.” Ryan gave the name its French pronunciation, and a couple of other kids emitted sighs or glottal stops to show their disdain for his showing off.

  “Excellent information, which we stopped talking about some three minutes into your nap,” said Mr. Hardesty.

  “The three sons of Geoffrey and Matilda were Henry, who would become Henry the Second, the first Angevin king of England; Geoffrey Junior, the Count of Nantes, which is in Brittany; and the youngest, William FitzEmpress. William may have been the smartest of the Angevin boys, since he studied Vegetius and actually followed his advice during military campaigns.”

  “You have a remarkable ability, Mr. Burke, to pronounce your semicolons so that they can be distinguished from commas without ever sounding like a full stop.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “You need to come home from the local bar much earlier in the future, so you can get the sleep you need at home. And yes, your answer did include the information I asked for, along with much extraneous but interesting material. Clearly you have decided to emulate me and learn everything there is to know about European history, preparatory to becoming that pinnacle of educational attainment and authority, a teacher of AP European History in a second-rate high school in the greater Charlottesville area.”

  “Third-rate, I submit, sir,” said Ryan.

  “Do not take unseemly pride in the low status of your high school,” said Hardesty. “The cheerleaders in this class will report your lack of school pride to the jocks and you’ll be beaten.”

  “There are no cheerleaders in this class,” said Ryan.

  “Are you sure of that, Mr. Burke?” asked Hardesty.

  Ryan gestured around the class. “Just look,” he said. “There’s no cheerleader material here.”

  “And once again,” said Hardesty, “you manage simultaneously to show off to and insult the rest of the class.”

  Hardesty was right, of course. But Ryan also knew that all but a few of the students were happy when he was able to distract Mr. Hardesty for five minutes at a time. Which he figured he had just done.

  “I’ll get more sleep at home, sir,” said Ryan. “I truly want to excel in this course.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Haskell,” said Hardesty. Ryan had Googled it once and found out that “Haskell” was a reference to an old TV show about beavers, but he never bothered to YouTube it.

  Ryan had almost blurted out that his lack of sleep came from trying to sleep on the hideous couch in the dining room, which now was the “great room” in their half of the duplex that had once been a united house. But he decided that there was no reason for his domestic arrangements to become the subject of gossip around the school.

  Hardesty apparently wasn’t done with him, though. When he got to the front of the room, he gestured toward a girl sitting in the New Kid seat, nearest the door. “I imagine you slept through the introduction of our newest student, Ms. Bizzy Horvat. Please stand, Ms. Horvat, so you can get a look at Ryan Burke, a student so proficient that he can pass this class in his sleep.”

  The new girl stood up. She was pretty, so she would never have spoken to Ryan without being forced to by a teacher. She also looked a little awkward and uncertain, probably because she knew that she was being enlisted in Hardesty’s attempt to heap ridicule on Ryan and had no way of knowing whether this was going to make her life in this new school harder.

  So, out of compassion and solidarity, Ryan rose to his feet. “I’m honored to make your acquaintance, Ms. Horvat. Would you be so kind as to spell your first name, since it is cognate with the English word ‘busy’?”

  Other kids rolled their eyes.

  “She has already done so, Mr. Burke,” said Hardesty.

  “Then I assume the spelling is ‘B-I-Z-Z-I-E,’” said Ryan.

  “There’s a ‘y’ at the end,” she said. “Not ‘i-e.’”

  “So you don’t have a small ‘i’ to dot with a little hollow heart,” said Ryan, trying to sound crestfallen.

  “But I have the small ‘i’ before the ‘z’s,’” said Bizzy Horvat. “If I should wish to draw hollow hearts.”

  Several of the other students clapped at that, since Bizzy had sounded triumphant, as if she had somehow bested Ryan in a duel of wits. Which, perhaps, she had. She had matched his intellectual pretension with verve, and he respected that.

  Maybe the social aspects of first period were about to become interesting. Because Bizzy had actually spoken directly to Ryan and had responded to his words and his tone. Something no girl had done since sophomore year, when Sylvia Creason had pretended to be Ryan’s girlfriend for a week to annoy the boyfriend she had just broken up with. Ryan had been such an inconsequential threat that the boyfriend didn’t even bother to beat him up. In fact, he paid for Ryan’s lunch in the cafeteria every day until Sylvia dropped Ryan and went back to the guy without letting Ryan know about the status change until he saw her clinging to the jock-of-her-dreams after school.

  Ryan hadn’t realized until now that the sound of a female voice speaking to him, even sarcastically, could be so pleasant, as long as it wasn’t either his mother or his sister Dianne.

  So after Ryan bowed to her slightly and sat down, he occasionally glanced at her and mapped out his strategy to make friends with her. Not that any of his strategies had ever worked before; Sylvia had picked him, presumably for maximum annoyance to her boyfriend.

  He quickly settled on the strategy of not walking up to Bizzy after class and certainly not finding out where she lived, her mobile number for texting, or whether she found sleepy, wet-faced droolers attractive as long as they could name the three sons of Ge
offrey of Anjou and Empress Matilda.

  Thus, he was, as usual, the last person to shoulder his backpack and head for the door of the room. Hardesty was already gone—he was always the first person out the door because, as he explained, “Getting older does not increase the capacity of one’s bladder.”

  So when Ryan passed through the door of the room and turned right to head toward Hell—or Calculus, as others called it—he was surprised that not only was Bizzy Horvat waiting for him, she fell in step beside him. “You have Calculus next,” she said.

  “Thank you,” said Ryan. “I’m awake now, so I knew that, but it was kind of you to wait for me and make sure.”

  “They told me in the office that I have all the same classes as you,” said Bizzy, “and once I identified you, you’d show me where to go.”

  Ryan’s first instinct was to be annoyed at the front office for saddling him with an assignment without even asking him if he minded. But since that instinct would include being needlessly rude to her, and since he realized that if he behaved that way she probably wouldn’t speak to him again, he changed his tone before saying anything. “My pleasure, Ms. Horvat,” he said.

  “Mr. Burke,” she said, “perhaps you would call me Bizzy?”

  “I might,” said Ryan, “if you tell me what Bizzy is short for, what nationality or language ‘Horvat’ comes from, and why you moved here in the middle of the school year.”

  “My first name is Bojana, spelled with a ‘j’ that’s pronounced like a ‘y.’ It’s a Slovenian name that’s the feminized version of Bojan, which means ‘warrior.’ I narrowly escaped being named Brina, which means ‘protector.’”

  Ryan thought of telling her about Defense, whose name, Defenseur, also meant “protector.” Then he thought about not telling her about Defenseur until he had cemented a friendship with her first.

  “My last name is also Slovene,” she went on, “because my parents are Slovenians who immigrated to the United States as soon as Yugoslavia broke apart. My father was a world-famous tennis player, or so we thought until he lost a few tournaments. Apparently he only played brilliantly as a Communist. Capitalism destroyed him, and now he’s working on a doctorate so that he can teach Slovenian culture, history, and language at a university that has students who want to study Slovenian culture, history, and language. There is no such university outside Slovenia, so my mother supports us as an emergency room nurse, a job she just took so she could get away from oncology, which was too depressing.”

  “That’s the job you moved here for?” asked Ryan.

  “Father is staying close to the University of Virginia till he finishes his dissertation, because he has to teach classes every semester to keep his fellowship.”

  “I assume you’re fluent in Slovenian yourself,” said Ryan.

  “I don’t ever demonstrate my fluency to people who don’t speak Slovenian,” she said, “so please don’t ask.”

  “You also speak Italian and Serbian.”

  “Croatian. Same language as Serbian, pretty much, except it’s spelled with the Latin alphabet instead of the Cyrillic. How did you know?”

  “Because Slovenia is close to Italy and used to be part of Yugoslavia.”

  She tossed her head a little. “It’s also close to Austria.”

  “German is a hard language to learn and it sounds ugly even when you’re fluent. Plus, the Austrian version is the language that gave Arnold Schwarzenegger his baby-talk accent.”

  “I never lived in Slovenia,” she said. “I was born here in the US. But Slovene, Croatian, and Italian were all spoken in my house growing up, especially when my two grandmas lived with us—at separate times, thank heaven, since one was Italian and the other Croatian and they hated each other as only Catholic biddies can.”

  “So the whole family came to America,” said Ryan.

  “Is Calculus actually taught at this high school,” she asked, “or are we walking to another?”

  Ryan realized they were nearing the front entrance of the school. He had missed the turn to the math wing. “Sorry,” he said. “Got too interested in the conversation.”

  As they retraced their steps and turned into the math wing, she said, “I don’t think that was a conversation. I think that was an interview.”

  “I thought it was a conversation, because I was interested,” he said.

  “I thought it was an interview, because all I did was answer questions.”

  Ryan could feel himself blushing, and it made him angry. At himself, but he couldn’t keep the edge out of his voice. “I answered every question I was asked.”

  “Ah,” she said. “My fault, then.”

  Your fault for being so interesting, he didn’t say. Your fault for having just the tiniest trace of an accent and for forming your words and sentences so charmingly and also your fault for being somewhat attractive-looking and for treating me as a person because you’re so new here you don’t know that it’s everybody’s job to ignore me or treat me like something they scraped off their shoe.

  “Yes,” he said. “Your fault, but I enjoyed listening to you.”

  They were at the door of the room, so he stopped. “Do you want me to introduce you?” he asked.

  “Would that improve my social standing in the class?”

  “I call this class ‘Hell,’” he said. “Nobody likes me in there. So no, you should enter the room before me by about three seconds.”

  “Several people, as in about two hundred, saw us walking to class together. Am I already socially dead?”

  “I’d administer CPR but I’m not actually trained in it,” said Ryan.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I like how well you faked being interested in my nattering, so I’ll continue to speak to you after class and even eat lunch with you, if there’s any room where you sit for lunch.”

  “I would be honored, Punca Bizzy,” said Ryan, using the Slovenian word for “Miss” that he once noticed when he was reading a book about Slavic languages.

  “I am not your girlfriend, Ryan Burke, but it’s sweet that you think you actually know a word in Slovene.”

  “It means girlfriend?” asked Ryan. “I thought I was saying ‘Miss Bizzy.’”

  “And ‘fant’ means boyfriend,” said Bizzy. “Now I’m going inside. The Slovenian lessons will continue after we’ve logarithmed our brains out.”

  Lunch was fine, even with Defense joining them and trying to conduct pretty much the same interview that Ryan had conducted. Only Ryan already knew all the answers because he had paid close attention to Bizzy’s conversation and so he preemptively told Defense everything she had told Ryan.

  And he told it in the form of a long monologue, leaving neither Defense nor Bizzy a chance to say a thing.

  “A-plus,” said Bizzy when he stopped.

  “Did I leave anything out?” asked Ryan.

  “Was anything you said actually true, or were you just doing your guessing thing?” asked Defense. To Bizzy, he said, “He tries to do a Sherlock Holmes thing and know everything before anybody speaks.”

  “In this case,” said Bizzy, “he actually listened, he actually heard what I said, and then he remembered it and repeated it to you with complete accuracy, without leaping to any additional conclusions. It was an amazing performance.”

  Defense smiled at Ryan. “It’s an act of God, you can’t deny it. A girl comes here, and just by being your obnoxious self, you impress her.”

  “I don’t know if God should get the blame,” said Ryan.

  “It can’t be the devil,” said Defense, “because she’s also pretty.”

  “Pretty what?” asked Bizzy.

  “Pretty cute,” said Defense. “That’s what Ryan’s going to tell me when we talk about you after school.”

  “Not pretty,” said Ryan, feeling extravagant and bold. “Very.”
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br />   “This lunch is surprisingly close to being edible, for cafeteria food,” said Bizzy, her mouth full.

  “The old subject change,” said Defense.

  “But a truthful statement,” said Bizzy. “Play along, boys, so I can stop blushing.”

  Yeah, Bizzy did everything right. So much so that she actually stayed with him at the end of the school day and Ryan actually had the confidence to say, “Can I walk you home?”

  “I’m not sure how close I live to the school,” she said, “because I haven’t actually been to my house yet. In fact, we may still be in a motel tonight for all I know—that’s where I started the day—and my mom is picking me up. Another time?”

  “Anytime you want,” said Ryan. He didn’t say, “For as long as we both shall live,” because that sounded both presumptuous and like plagiarism from Mom’s and Dianne’s favorite movie, You’ve Got Mail.

  When Ryan left Defense at his apartment building and then walked on home, he was surprised to see a small moving van in front of the house. The new family was moving in.

  Then an SUV pulled up behind the van, and a woman got out and went to the back and started pulling out suitcases. A moment later, two other people got out and started helping her. One of them was a boy who looked both athletic and handsome but probably attended middle school, so Ryan wouldn’t have to deal with him.

  The other person was Bizzy. Of course, of course, of course.

  This was either the best thing that ever happened in his whole life, or the worst.

  Definitely the worst.

  Because if Mom was right, Dad might somehow be involved with the Horvat family in some despicable and unmentionable way. And even if Mom was lying and they just happened to be the new tenants, Mom was bound to either treat them as if her stories were true—i.e., as enemies—or else take Mrs. Horvat into her confidence and tell her everything about everything, which would totally destroy Ryan in the eyes of the new neighbors.

  If only he lived alone in his side of the duplex. Or if only Dad were the one he lived with. Dad never embarrassed him. Dad never told horrible stories about his childhood to strangers.