Children of the Fleet (Fleet School #1)(66)

Monkey shrugged. “Some teachers were retained. Stories have a way of not dying. I’m not saying the stories are all true. Maybe not any. But if it was teachers who passed on the Bean stories, doesn’t that mean they’re more likely to be true? When I got here, because I’m kind of small, another kid told me I should start crawling around in the ductwork like Bean. And this exact intake was pointed out to me as Bean’s first entry point into the air system.”

To Dabeet it sounded like pure folklore. What kind of name was “Bean”? Frijole. Was the kid from Lima or something? There was no such kid.

Except that the name was there in the test-score tables, with numbers so high that Dabeet couldn’t even aspire to equal them.

“He used to crawl through the ductwork all over the station,” said Monkey. “Listening to the teachers talking, figuring out things that kids weren’t supposed to know.”

“He must have been tiny,” said Dabeet. Now he realized there was no point in doubting her story openly. She enjoyed telling it, and Dabeet was in need of a friend. Well, an assistant, but the only way to get one was to turn an appropriate person into a friend.

She was still talking. “They locked down all the air-intake covers so tightly that no kid could possibly duplicate Bean’s spying. Only who could do it anyway? Even I would get claustrophobic trying to go in there, and I’m not exactly a giant.”

“Big enough in the battleroom,” said Dabeet, trying to say nice things.

She looked at him quizzically. “What do you need me to do?” she asked.

Dabeet tried to hide his consternation.

“Oh, come on, Dabeet, you spend half a year hardly talking to anybody, not even when we were building pillars and towers and walls in the battleroom, and suddenly you’re complimenting me and not sneering at the legends of Bean? He is real, you know. His name is Julian Delphiki and he was in Ender’s jeesh in the war. It came up in the trial. Bean figured things out when Ender couldn’t. Really brilliant people figure things out because they don’t believe everything the adults tell them. When are you going to start doing that?”

“What’s to figure out?” asked Dabeet.

She laughed softly. “You’ve been wandering around every level, every corridor, looking for something. Trying to figure out something. Zhang He says you got a coded message after that time you got a private meeting with somebody by ansible.”

“I didn’t know I was so obvious.”

“It was obvious because I was looking. This whole school is full of the smartest kids in space, it’s not like we’re dumb as houseflies. But nobody cares what you do, so it doesn’t matter,” said Monkey.

Nobody cares. Well, he had tried to be invisible. Nobody caring what he did was pretty much the only way to disappear. “If nobody cares…”

“I care,” said Monkey. “All this school stuff—you’re good with the book learning, bad with the body-training, really bad with the friend-making. Zhang He tried to be your friend but it’s like every word you said to him was a slap in the face.”

Now Dabeet really was surprised. And hurt. He had tried to be nice to Zhang He right from the start.

“No, no,” she said. “It was obvious you were trying to be nice, you’re just bad at it, so you always sounded condescending. Yes you may help me if you like, and I’ll be really patient when you screw things up. Like that.”

“That’s not even how I felt or thought,” said Dabeet. “Zhang He never screwed anything up. I thought I was treating him like an equal.”

Monkey rolled her eyes. “Dabeet. You’ve never met an equal. How would you know how to treat one?”

Dabeet felt a flash of despair. He knew nobody at Conn really liked him, but he chalked it up to envy. No, Mother told him it was envy. And maybe it was. But human beings need acceptance by a community, and Dabeet didn’t have that—not at school, not in the barrio. Not even from the adults. He was never aware that this hurt him until this moment, when Monkey said it all outright. He had the normal human need to belong to a community, and he had actually believed that here in Fleet School, at least in the box-building squad that he had created, he finally had it for the first time in his life. He hadn’t thought of it this way before, but yes, it had made him happy. And that was all stripped away.

“Come on, Dab,” said Monkey. “I didn’t realize it would hurt your feelings.”

Dabeet heard her call him by an unthinkable nickname, and his first reaction was to lash out at her and forbid her ever to take such liberties. But he stopped himself instantly, because he realized that he was going to use the nickname as an excuse for hurting her back, rejecting her the way everyone rejected him. Only that was stupid and pointless because he needed her. And because she was being nice. She had shown him the respect and the kindness of telling him what was really going on.

“Don’t go away,” said Monkey. “Not right now. People will see your eyes are kind of red and they’ll wonder what’s going on.”

“I thought they didn’t notice me,” said Dabeet.

“If you actually showed human emotion, Dab, they’d notice, believe me.”

Dabeet brushed at his eyes with his sleeve. They came away wet. Which was really stupid. Counterproductive.