Chemistry Read online

  “Claude! Claude!” Peter calls to me. He’s running toward me. I can barely hear him over the sound of my own self-loathing. “They’ve arrested him for assault,” he says, and for a moment, I think maybe he’s talking about Phoebus. “You should have seen it. He took on three guys, sent Robin flying… again.” Nope. It’s Valentine all right. Valentine went off on my errand, and now he’s sitting in the back of a cop car for it.

  Even so, all I can think of is… “Esmeralda.”

  “What?”

  “Is she okay?”

  BOOK THREE

  Shall I twist the knife a little before I go on? You might like to know a few more things about me, about Valentine and Peter, about some of us who have or are soon to “age out” of the foster care system. Eighteen is the final buzzer in my state. They call it emancipation, like they’re setting us free or something. But really, they’re just letting us go, and depending on the height of the cliff we’re dangling from at the time, it can be exhilarating or downright terrifying. Regardless, once eighteen happens, we have nothing left to do but walk our tightrope lives without a safety net.

  It usually makes more sense to drop out of school and focus on survival. But I had a brother, and I knew I had to be there for him, to give him a path to follow. So, even after I turned eighteen and they dropped me off at the homeless shelter with a trash bag full of everything I owned, I stayed in school. I used all my free time to study. When I found out Peter was struggling in his math and science classes, I poured my energy into helping him. When I met Valentine, I used every resource I had to give him a decent life. All these things, if you can believe it, I did for Gene. I thought if my little brother could see what I was capable of accomplishing, he might fight for himself, too, instead of just giving up.

  Now I think I probably should have done it all for Valentine.

  We discovered each other, Valentine and I, because he used the eaves of my home for shelter one night. My home, which I am fast approaching with my hands shoved so deep in my pockets it’s as if I am willing them to disappear, is a local church. That’s right. I live with the Holy Father, the Blessed Virgin, and her angelic child. And they’re the most dysfunctional family in the world. They don’t even talk to each other, honestly. They never talk to me, that’s for sure, though I sometimes think they talk to Valentine. It’s the way he looks at them, like he’s listening intently to something only he can hear. I’m not trying to make him sound crazy, but he seems to take a comfort in these iconic statues that I can only try to understand. I hate them. I feel like they’re watching me, judging me without even telling me what their judgments are.

  It’s all nonsense, I know, and I never used to be a religious person. But living in a church this beautiful does something to you. You suddenly want to believe in its purpose, in the purpose of the people kind enough to let you stay. You want to fight for the sanctity of the only home you have.

  It’s night, but I can still see the tagging on the outer walls of my church. Certain groups want to own the place, so they mark it like dogs. It’s close enough to the school to be a target, it has enough vegetation on its grounds to provide privacy for those who don’t want to be seen, and it’s usually pretty quiet. I love it here. Aside from the occasional miscreant, it’s a paradise to me. I mean who could ask for a better house? It has beautiful stained glass windows, priceless artwork on the walls, and all the amenities a person needs to be comfortable. As long as I make myself scarce every Sunday and Wednesday, I can stay. In fact, they want me to stay. I act as a sentinel, calling the police whenever there’s a disturbance on the grounds. I keep the place clean, and they pay me for it. There are good people here, and I owe them—Valentine and I both do.

  I pass by the grand entrance, the one for guests and worshipers, and follow the walls around toward the back. There’s a small door for those of us who work behind the scenes. I shiver, turn my key, and enter. It’s cold inside, but it always is and I usually like it that way. The chill keeps me awake while I study. Tonight, though, I wish it were warm. I wish I could wrap myself in the arms of the church and feel safe for once. I wish the Virgin Mary didn’t stare at me with those stony eyes that keep asking for Valentine: “Where is he, Claude? You promised you’d look out for him. Why has he not come home?”

  Though the sanctuary is dark, I find my way easily. I’ve only been living here a year or so, but already I feel like this is where I took my first steps, spoke my first words, spent every day of my life.

  I stretch myself out on a pew without even bothering to change out of my suit. I want to see the little light in the organ loft flicker to life—the one that means Valentine is going over his music, silently tapping the keys with his fingers, memorizing a piece. I want to know that he’s okay, that his foster parents won’t give him too much grief about having to bail him out.

  Ah, who am I kidding? They’re the only people in the world who ever manage to make him cry.

  BOOK FOUR

  A distant city clock strikes midnight, and each hollow toll fills my memories with dismal music. It is officially Valentine’s Day.

  I’m not a fan of holidays, and Valentine’s Day is second only to Christmas in a long list of celebrations that rub salt in my wounds, but not for the reasons you think. I’m not a person who wears all black every fourteenth of February and mopes around because I have no date and no one’s paying attention to my pain. Why would I? Love and I have never gotten along, so I’ve never wanted anything to do with it. I do just fine on my own, thank you.

  No, I hate Valentine’s Day because this is the day my parents were killed. On this day, my boarding school’s counselor called me out of class to tell me about the head-on collision. On this day, I packed my clothes, left the dormitory that had become my home, and sat in a sterile room at the hospital, avoiding the nurses’ sympathetic looks.

  Then again, on this day, I met my kid brother for the first time, so I guess it wasn’t all bad. His name was Eugene, they told me, and he was my father’s child by another woman, who had died of an overdose the previous year. The kid had no one—I could see it in his face—and unlike me, he wasn’t fine with that. He was miserable, lost and alone. I could barely stand to watch him sit in the corner and cry like the world was ending for him.

  I had no words of comfort for Eugene. What did words ever do to help anyone buried so deep in the pit anyway? I just sat next to him, so he wasn’t alone. Eventually, he stopped crying and fell asleep.

  I made the doctors promise not to wake him when they told me neither of our parents survived. I said I would tell him myself, and I did. I told him without any flourish or pity. I told him quick like a Band-Aid, and he barely reacted at all. He’d already lost his mother, so this wasn’t anything new. And I think maybe he appreciated that I wouldn’t coddle him over it.

  We spent the rest of our days in the system. At first, we lived in a group home together. Then they found a foster family for Gene, but not me. The family only wanted one, and they wanted a boy about Gene’s age. Even back then, I was too old.

  The day I turned sixteen, I got work at the church across the street from my high school. Nothing glamorous, but I planned to attend the best college in the state with the money I would save. I wanted to study chemical engineering, get a good job, and be much better off than guys like Phoebus, who can’t do anything other than kick a soccer ball and… dance, apparently.

  Gene and I were lucky enough to attend the same school, which may not have been the best thing for him. The older he got, the more trouble he caused. So there’s one failure on my account. Because who did he look to for guidance? Me. And now he’s a lost cause. God help me, I love him, but he’s already an addict and a near dropout. I’ve failed him. And now, it seems I’ve failed Valentine, too.

  The only person I’ve ever done anything good for is Peter Gringoire. Peter and I became fast friends, as he was in need of a tutor and I was in need of someone I didn’t have to talk down to. He’s smart—he reall
y is. He’s just distracted most of the time. He still lives in the same group home I left after I turned eighteen. He’s almost like a brother to me, and he deserves so much better than what he gets. He deserves better than all of us, except maybe Valentine.

  II

  Here, we come to the last bit of my little history. I met Valentine, as I said, on Valentine’s Day. I noticed him hugging his knees under the eves of my church one night. My first thought when I saw him was that he looked exactly the way Gene had the day I first met him: utterly lost.

  I stood staring at him, hoping he would look up and notice me. He never did, so I spoke. “Hey. What are you doing here?” I didn’t give him the private-property speech. It was clear to me he was only here because he had nowhere else to go. “Hey, you.” I tapped his shoe with my foot, and he looked up at me. It was all I could do to keep myself from leaping back in shock.

  His face looked more like B-rate horror movie make-up than a true face. Lumpy, one-eyed, and huge. He was a Cyclops. I had expected a fat kid by the shape of him, but he was far from fat. As he pushed himself to his feet, I could see he was all muscle. And for a moment, I believed he was going to reach out and snap my spindly, little neck. But he didn’t. He just blinked and bowed his head. I think he must have been crying, but his face was already wet from the rain, and I never bothered to ask. I try to leave people as much dignity as I can. Dignity is important when you’ve already lost everything else. I know it’s always been that way for me.

  “You should probably come inside.” I started for the door and assumed he followed, but when I turned back, I saw him standing just where I’d left him, his head still bowed, rainwater dripping from his bright red hair.

  “Well, are you coming?”

  No response.

  I think the look on his face was what gave me courage. I’m not normally a courageous person, but his expression told me there was nothing I could do that would move him to anger. He was too far gone for that. He was already drowning. So I walked back to him, took him by the elbow, and led him to the door.

  I flicked on the sanctuary lights, turned up the heat, and sat him down in the front pew. He shivered and breathed like a horse through his mouth. Poor kid.

  “You wanna tell me why you’re here?” I said.

  He just stared at the floor.

  “I won’t call the cops.”

  Still nothing.

  I wanted to leave him—go to the kitchen and fix myself dinner, read a bit, and then head to bed—but I didn’t dare. I didn’t know who he was or what he wanted. If something happened to the church because I let him in here, I would lose my job and my home in one shot. His stubborn silence tried my patience.

  “Look.” I frowned at him. “I don’t know what’s going on with you, and frankly, I don’t care. But I’ve got to know you’re not going to damage the building. Okay? Can you at least assure me of that? I mean I didn’t have to bring you in here, did I? I could have left you outside.”

  At some point during my speech he looked up. He didn’t say a word until I finished, and then he said very few in a thick accent. “Sorry. I’m deaf.”

  We spent the rest of the evening learning to communicate. He could usually read my lips if I made sure he was looking at my face and didn’t try anything ridiculous like over-enunciating every syllable. And he could speak, though he hated to do it. He much preferred to write and sign, which meant I would have to learn some basic ASL. That was fine by me. I knew, as soon as we started talking, we were going to be in each other’s lives for a long time.

  He was a ward of the state, like me. Though not yet aged out, he was unlucky enough to have snagged the world’s worst foster parents. Because he was a “special needs” case, they got an extra stipend to care for him. Of course, the stipend was their primary interest, so when he finally ran away, they never reported him, which was fine with him. He’d been in the system since he was a baby, and he was tired of it. It was win/win: he got out, and they got their monthly allowance, as well as the pleasure of rarely having to deal with him. The trouble was, as an underage deaf boy with a frightening face, where the hell was he supposed to go? So he ended up loitering across the street from our school, taking shelter in the eaves of my church.

  I heated a microwave dinner for him, which turned out to be far less than he needed—he has an impressive appetite—so we ended up at an all-night diner. There, I saw the way he existed in the world. He was utterly visible, a huge bubble of look-at-me, when all he wanted to do was disappear. Everyone saw him, but no one spoke to him. They all spoke to me instead, like I was the master and he was the dog.

  “Would your friend like anything else with that?” they would ask. And if I had any courage, I would have answered, Why don’t you ask him? Do I look like I have a psychic link to his mind? But I didn’t. Because I did have the closest thing to a psychic link: I had his complete confidence.

  I don’t know why he chose me. Probably I never will. He never got along with anyone else. He’s an ornery guy with a short and violent temper. If he weren’t so physically intimidating, that might have been beaten out of him at a young age. As it is, people just tend to avoid him. Best to leave the beast in peace. He must have been starving for real human attention by the time I came into his life.

  I once asked him, “Do you ever get tired of the way people stare at you?”

  And he answered, “Do you ever get tired of being invisible?”

  Yes. Yes. Yes. It must be true for everyone. At some point in life, we are all exhausted by having encountered the same situations over and over again. Let something new happen, we think. Anything. But it never does. By the time we reach high school, we’ve learned that nothing ever changes, and all our efforts will only perpetuate whatever endless cycle we’ve been living in since they day we were born. We are what we are because we don’t know how to be anything else.

  Even now…

  Valentine is a monster on the outside and an angel to his core.

  I am the devil in a cassock.

  Who do you suppose is the most dangerous between us? I honestly don’t know. If you beat an angel over the head with a stick again and again, won’t that angel eventually strike back? Does it even have a choice? And what about me? No matter how much charity you throw at the devil, can you ever really hope to change its nature?

  III

  At first, I shared my income with Valentine, and he secretly helped with my daily chores. I enjoyed having someone to work with. It made the hours go by faster, and the more I got to know Valentine, the more I appreciated his self-deprecating, sarcastic brand of humor. Then I discovered his talent for music.

  He was toying with the pipe organ one evening. I was vacuuming the sanctuary, but I soon found I’d been going over the same spot for what must have been fifteen minutes. The piece Valentine played wasn’t one I’d ever heard before. I could only imagine he was improvising, but I didn’t ask. I didn’t dare interrupt him while he played, not for fear of his temper, but because I didn’t want the music to stop. I turned off the vacuum, sat down, and listened. I closed my eyes. I leaned back. I soaked it all in.

  You can measure the divinity in a piece of music by how long it takes you to notice it has ended. It will transport you to another world, and even after the player walks away from his instrument, that’s where you’ll find yourself: listening to that other world. I didn’t notice the music had stopped until Valentine tapped me on the shoulder.

  “Finished?” he said.

  I shook my head and signed, “Sorry. I was listening to you play.”

  He blushed.

  “You’re good.” I wasn’t lying. “Really good. You should talk to the choir director—see if he needs a player. I’m sure he’d like a break once in a while.”

  That was how Valentine got his job as the church organist, and Mass has never sounded better. I suppose you think I must be exaggerating. He’s deaf, after all. How can he hear the music? I’m telling you he feels it, probably be
tter than anyone I’ve ever listened to. He could be the next Beethoven for all I know. And I’m not usually generous with that kind of compliment.

  These days, he sleeps in the organ loft and spends hours going over his music before bed. He’s named the instrument and talks to it when he thinks no one is listening. He’s a mad genius. Music is everything to him—well, music and me. I’m not bragging about this. In fact, I’m a little ashamed of it. He would do anything for me. He worships me. The idea that I can order him around still doesn’t sit right with me.

  And now, Valentine is sitting in a cell, waiting to see his foster parents and suffer the humiliation of having failed to thrive without them, all for the sake of a girl I can’t stop thinking about… I’ve never felt so sick in all my life.

  BOOK SIX

  This is probably the second stupidest idea I’ve ever had, next in line after my determination to rescue Esmeralda. Rescuing Valentine seems even more laughable. He’s a monster of a boy, and Esmeralda looked like such a fragile thing when I first saw her. But I wonder whether the opposite is true. Maybe she can handle herself just fine. Maybe I was wrong to worry about her falling for Phoebus’ lines. Valentine, on the other hand…

  It’s late morning, and I’m on my way to his foster home. I don’t know what I think I’ll do once I get there. Carry him off into the sunset? My noble steed is an old, rusted pickup the church allows me to drive only when doing maintenance. But I don’t care about breaking the rules any more. Anyway, doesn’t retrieving the church organist count as maintenance? I decide it does.

  It takes me more time to find the house than I expect, and I immediately hate this neighborhood. It has what most people might call “a woman’s touch” about it. All the houses are pastel pink or beige or white. Picket fences all around. It reeks of middle-class nobility, of polo shirts and khaki pants.