The Girl With All the Gifts(5)

Sergeant comes out to the front of the class then, and he does something really horrible. He rolls up his sleeve, all the way to the elbow, and he holds his bare forearm in front of Kenny’s face; right in front of Kenny, just an inch or so away from him. Nothing happens at first, but then Sergeant spits on his hand and rubs at his forearm, like he’s wiping something away.

“Don’t,” says Miss Justineau. “Don’t do that to him.” But Sergeant doesn’t answer her or look at her.

Melanie sits two rows behind Kenny, and two rows over, so she can see the whole thing. Kenny goes really stiff, and then his mouth gapes wide and he starts to snap at Sergeant’s arm, which of course he can’t reach. And drool starts to drip down from the corner of his mouth, but not much of it because nobody ever gives the children anything to drink, so it’s thick, half solid, and it hangs there on the end of Kenny’s chin, wobbling, while Kenny grunts and snaps at Sergeant’s arm, and makes kind of moaning, whimpering sounds.

And bad as that is, it gets worse–because the kids on either side of Kenny start doing it too, as though it’s something they’ve caught from Kenny, and the kids right behind twitch and shake as though someone is poking them really hard in the stomach.

“You see?” Sergeant says, and he turns to look at Miss Justineau’s face to make sure she gets his point. And then he blinks, all surprised, and maybe he wishes he hadn’t looked at her, because Miss Justineau is glaring at him like she wants to smack him in the face, and Sergeant lets his arm fall to his side and shrugs like none of this was ever important to him anyway.

“Not everyone who looks human is human,” he says.

“No,” Miss Justineau agrees. “I’m with you on that one.”

Kenny’s head sags a little sideways, which is as far as it can move because of the strap, and he makes a clicking sound in his throat.

“It’s all right, Kenny,” Miss Justineau says. “It will pass soon. Let’s go on with the story. Would you like that? Would you like to hear what happened to Pooh and Piglet? Sergeant Parks, if you’ll excuse us? Please?”

Sergeant looks at her, and shakes his head really hard. “You don’t want to get attached to them,” he says. “You know what they’re here for. Hell, you know better than—”

But Miss Justineau starts to read again, like she can’t hear him, like he’s not even there, and in the end he leaves. Or maybe he’s still standing at the back of the classroom, not speaking, but Melanie doesn’t think so because after a while Miss Justineau gets up and shuts the door, and Melanie thinks that she’d only do that right then if Sergeant was on the other side of it.

Melanie barely sleeps at all that night. She keeps thinking about what Sergeant said, that the children aren’t real children, and about how Miss Justineau looked at him when he was being so nasty to Kenny.

And she thinks about Kenny snarling and snapping at Sergeant’s arm like a dog. She wonders why he did it, and she thinks maybe she knows the answer because when Sergeant wiped his arm with spit and waved it under Kenny’s nose, it was as though under the bitter chemical smell Sergeant had a different smell altogether. And even though the smell was very faint where Melanie was, it made her head swim and her jaw muscles start to work by themselves. She can’t even figure out what it was she was feeling, because it’s not like anything that ever happened to her before or anything she heard about in a story, but it was like there was something she was supposed to do and it was so urgent, so important that her body was trying to take over her mind and do it without her.

But along with these scary thoughts, she also thinks: Sergeant has a name. The same way the teachers do. The same way the children do. Up until now, Sergeant has been more like a god or a Titan to Melanie; now she knows that he’s just like everyone else, even if he is scary. He’s not just Sergeant, he’s Sergeant Parks. The enormity of that change, more than anything else, is what keeps her awake until the doors unlock in the morning and the teachers come.

In a way, Melanie’s feelings about Miss Justineau have changed too, after that day. Or rather, they haven’t changed at all, but they’ve become about a hundred times stronger. There can’t be anyone better or kinder or lovelier than Miss Justineau anywhere in the world; Melanie wishes she was a god or a Titan or a Trojan warrior, so she could fight for Miss Justineau and save her from Heffalumps and Woozles. She knows that Heffalumps and Woozles are in Winnie-the-Pooh, not in a Greek myth, but she likes the words, and she likes the idea of saving Miss Justineau so much that it becomes her favourite thought. She thinks about it whenever she’s not thinking about anything else. It makes even Sundays bearable.

So one day when Miss Mailer unstraps everybody’s right arms from the elbow down, slots the tray tables on to their chairs and tells them to write a story, that’s the story that Melanie writes. Miss Mailer is only interested in their vocabulary, of course, and doesn’t care much at all what their stories are about. This is really obvious because she gives out a word list alongside the assignment and tells the class that every word from the word list they use correctly gets them an extra point in the assessment.

Melanie ignores the word list and cuts loose.

When Miss Mailer asks who would like to read their story aloud, she’s the first to wave–as far as you can wave with just your forearm free–and say “Me, Miss Mailer! Pick me!”