The Terrorist Read online

  It was something Laura could not understand. How did people like Con get all this done, anyhow? How did they get a ninety-eight average in trigonometry, and an A plus on their European history term paper, and a Perfect in their Shakespeare tragedy essay, and still be in Student United Nations, the English-American Committee for Better Understanding, the Jazz Band, the Concert Choir, three sports, and never miss a meeting of the London Walk Club?

  The London Walk Club killed Laura.

  These kids would meet one afternoon a week and walk someplace. Perhaps it would be a Super Tour of Westminster Abbey. Or a hike to the British Museum to gaze upon the Rosetta Stone.

  Every now and then, Laura went along because her friends did, and because Con insisted this would look good on college applications. Colleges, she said, liked to know you were interested in everything from Shakespeare to Inner-city Problems Abroad.

  Laura was not interested.

  Laura was interested in a date.

  She was, however, beginning to worry about her own college application. On that blank white page where Con would list 207 Extracurricular Activities, what was Laura going to list? Phone calls. Fashion. Yelling at her little brother. Making brownies.

  Actually, you would have to strike making brownies. It was not possible to bake brownies in England, as neither the ingredients nor the right oven existed, and furthermore Laura had to have a Duncan Hines or a Betty Crocker mix.

  Luckily, for friendship, Con had normal human moments and Con, too, wanted a dark, handsome, romantic date for the dance.

  Laura often thought that when her brother, Billy, grew up, he was going to be the heartthrob of his entire school. You could see in his arms the muscles that were going to come. And his thick, dark hair, which he never combed or brushed after a shower (assuming you could shove him into a shower with the water on in the first place), was going to lie around on his forehead, and girls would want to sweep it away from his flirty eyes.

  However, Billy had a long way to go.

  He had to get out of sixth and finish up seventh and eighth, which anybody knew were the worst years of all humanity. Signs of real life would sprout during ninth, and finally in tenth grade Billy would be a person. By then, Laura would be away at college.

  Still waiting for the 113 (buses with a dozen different routes had come on time, but the 113 had chosen to be late), Laura considered college forms.

  Her only true hobby was grading boys and men.

  Most boys in school Laura considered to be Six or Seven. For some reason, it was hard to give out an Eight or Nine. You went straight to Ten. There were several Tens at whom Laura often gazed with adoration.

  Dear College: My hobby is Not Going to Cultural Events or Places of Architectural Note. So far, I have not gone to Westminster Abbey and I also have not gone to Windsor Castle. Just last week I did not go to Canterbury Cathedral. I have not gone to the required Shakespeare performances, but have sold my tickets and bought clothes instead.

  Somehow Laura had a feeling that colleges, like her mother and father, would think she should take advantage of a London year instead of throwing it away.

  Laura loved London. She was from a small suburb and, like everybody else in America, considered a car the only way to move, and she was correct: at home, public transportation was a trial and a joke. But in London she could hop on a bus, take the tube, or flag down a taxi. From Shakespeare to sweatshirt shopping, she was free the way no kids at home were until they had their own car.

  The 113 appeared with Eddie waving insanely.

  She got on, said “Hi” to Eddie and three other L.I.A. students, and the five of them sorted out with whom they would have lunch, whether anybody was going on the London Walk that afternoon, and had Laura heard about the escaped terrorists?

  At L.I.A., they had bomb practice, the way in Massachusetts they had fire drills. L.I.A. students marched out the door and lined up on the sidewalk while London police timed them and teachers checked lockers and possible bomb-hiding spots. Everybody was happy, especially the people who got out of math.

  London International Academy was very security-minded.

  Several kids arrived at school in their own limousines with their own guards. There were two kids in the Lower School who were not allowed to play at anybody’s house after school because their parents were worried they might become kidnap victims. Lots of kids didn’t have their phone number listed in the school directory. You had to telephone their embassy. You’d leave a message, the embassy personnel would be the ones who actually called your friend up, and finally your friend would call back.

  Laura loved that.

  That was so romantic.

  She wanted to date a boy who didn’t have a phone number in the directory. A boy who was fabulously wealthy, living in a house with his own submachine-gun-carrying guards on the ground floor, pacing back and forth to keep out the terrorists.

  Like Michael. Michael would be perfect. He possessed all of the above and, furthermore, was a Ten. However, Michael had thoughtlessly begun dating Kyrene.

  “No, I didn’t hear anything,” said Laura. “What terrorists?” She wondered how the embassies would handle privacy once Caller I.D. appeared in London.

  The five teenagers changed buses. They were disgusted with Laura. Hadn’t she watched the morning news? Hadn’t she read the morning paper?

  They were exceedingly news-conscious, these kids. Their parents worked in the embassy or were in the army or had an overseas assignment from their corporation. Changes in the world meant changes in their parents’ jobs and the kids’ lives, sometimes overnight. And yet, as much as they could, L.I.A. students kept their own news hidden. Lots of times, kids didn’t even want to say what country they were from.

  Like, if Laura was sitting at lunch with a boy from Syria (Syria hated Israel) and also with a boy from Israel (Israel hated Syria) and then up came another dark-complexioned kid (not the sallow dark of India, but warm, Middle Eastern dark) whose country Laura didn’t know—well, the school rule was, Don’t Ask.

  Laura and Billy had learned right away that they must not discuss countries of origin. It didn’t do. These kids’ fathers were probably at war with each other, or selling each other weapons, or telling lies prior to signing a peace treaty, or denying each other billion-dollar loans.

  It especially didn’t do for Laura, who could never remember which country was which, anyway. She could not tell Iran from Iraq. It was unfair that they had such similar names. How were you supposed to get a grip on them when they were only one letter different? Jehran had said twenty times whether her people were from Iran or Iraq, and still Laura forgot.

  That made her the only junior at L.I.A. who did. The rest knew exactly the status of peace talks in the Arab world, and exactly who in Africa was having a civil war, and exactly who in South America now had a decent economy.

  But Laura had learned an important lesson. Other people so enjoyed giving their opinions that they liked her even better if she had no opinion. Then they could educate her to their way of thinking.

  Laura nodded agreeably when Arabs told her how awful Israel was, and then nodded agreeably when Israelis told her how awful Arabs were. The world was a simple place, Laura had decided. The key was not to get worked up over things.

  The bus halted with a lurch at their stop, which was in front of the tube exit and a mere three-block walk to L.I.A.

  Laura was thinking that maybe terrific blond Andrew (a Ten) would talk to her after history. Maybe in the cafeteria she’d finally be in line next to that splendid hunk Mohammed (as opposed to Muhamet, who was sleazy, and Mohammet, who dated Jenny), and then—

  Ambulances and fire trucks filled the sidewalks.

  People were screaming and sobbing.

  Police and teachers from L.I.A. were rushing back and forth.

  Her friends—Andrew, Con, Mohammed, Jehran, Bethany—were clinging to one another.

  What had happened? Who was hurt? It must be very bad,
it must be somebody from school, it must be—

  Laura’s clothing shivered on top of her skin.

  Billy took the Underground.

  Billy could be such a jerk. He liked to play with the car doors. He’d stick his head out, or his foot, and yank himself back in the nick of time. Laura was always yelling at him.

  But of course it couldn’t be Billy, because Billy was the kind of person who survived. Billy would always land on his feet.

  Andrew saw Laura first, and turned toward her, his eyes bright and shocked.

  Jehran tagged a policeman’s arm, and pointed at Laura.

  Mohammed and Con and Bethany shifted to face in Laura’s direction. Her math teacher looked up and stared at her.

  It seemed to Laura that all those people swung toward her, as if attached in a chorus line. As if her own foot, leaving the bus, landing on the pavement, signaled them.

  She let go of her book bag. She held up her palm to stop bad news as if it were traffic.

  Beneath her, London swayed: a tube train passed below her feet like an aftershock

  “No,” said Laura Williams, trying to get back on the bus. Trying to go back in time. “No. Not Billy.”

  CHAPTER 3

  LAURA HAD BEEN CRYING so much, her face was as swollen as if she’d walked into a beehive. Her eyes were nearly puffed shut, and her fair complexion was mottled and patchy.

  It was Laura who had been talking to the police; Laura who had been phoning everywhere for her father, and not found him.

  I’m sixteen, thought Laura. In America, I lived in a little white house with a picket fence and maple trees. I lived in the same town where Louisa May Alcott grew up. I’ve never had a drink except Coca-Cola. I’ve never tried a cigarette. I’m ordinary. I’m the most ordinary American there is. And my very own brother has just been killed by terrorists.

  Billy had forgotten to take his lunch. It rested on the kitchen counter in the Williamses’ flat. The peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich was in its plastic bag, cut into triangles and not squares, the way Billy required. It was made of the only peanut butter Billy would eat: crunchy Jif, mailed by Grandma every month. Welch’s grape jelly was mailed in the same package, because if you asked for grape jelly in England, they looked at you as if you wanted jelly made from locusts or pizza. They would tempt you with their designer marmalade and their strawberry jam with Cointreau, but Billy wanted only Welch’s grape jelly with the cartoon glass.

  He would never eat that lunch.

  He would never finish up the grape jelly so he could drink from the Tom and Jerry glass.

  The flat was full of people. A horde of Englishmen filled her home. Laura’s mother had come back from her volunteer morning at the Royal Free Hospital and found them there: Laura and the police.

  But no Billy.

  Never again Billy.

  Her mother’s pixie face was twisted like paper crushed in your hand to throw in the trash. “I want to see my son,” she said over and over.

  They said it would be better not to see Billy. There wasn’t much to see. Just bits and pieces.

  Laura wanted to scream. She could even hear her scream, the huge ripping violence of her own noise, but she did not scream. She wanted to pick up candlesticks and library books and cans of tomato sauce and throw them at these intruders. But she sat quietly with her arm around her mother.

  “Who are all these people?” asked her mother. Her mother had become dim, like a bulb going out. They kept covering the same topics, but it didn’t stick and shortly, Mom would ask again.

  “Everybody,” Laura said. “Scotland Yard, Scotland Yard’s antiterrorist squad, the Metropolitan Police, representatives from the American Embassy, and faculty from the school.”

  Her mother said, “Please leave my flat.” She even remembered to say “flat” and not “apartment.” But nobody left.

  “Laura, where is Daddy?” said her mother. And to the strangers, “Where is my husband? Where did he go? Why isn’t he here?” And to herself, “Thomas? Thomas?” as if he were hidden by the Englishmen pacing in her living room.

  “We can’t find him, Mom. He’s on the road somewhere.”

  Dad might not get home till six, or seven, or even eight. Laura looked at her watch. Her father had gotten her the watch as a moving-to-London present. Bribe, actually, to make her cooperate. Laura had not wanted to come. “Miss my junior year?” she had shrieked back there in Massachusetts. “Leave my friends? Never! I won’t! You can’t do this to me!”

  The watch had tiny setting moons and suns that rotated around the clock face, like signposts to an antique world.

  If I had thrown enough tantrums, she thought, maybe we would have stayed in Massachusetts, and Billy would still be alive.

  It ticked like a bomb inside her heart: we didn’t have to come.

  “Don’t put it over the radio,” her mother begged the police for the tenth time. “Thomas listens to the radio when he drives. You can’t let him hear it over the radio.”

  They promised that Billy’s name would not be broadcast, but the news of an American child’s death had been on the air since ten o’clock that morning.

  Daddy’s going to hear it, thought Laura dully. Eleven-year-old boy from London International Academy killed by package bomb. He’ll hear it and he’ll say to himself, Don’t worry, it can’t be my son. And he’ll drive a little farther, and he’ll be furious with himself for not taking the cellular phone on this trip—he left it accidentally in Darlington; they’ve got it right there—and he’ll stop to use a public phone, and he’ll say to Mom, all casual, “Nicole, honey? Um … Billy have a good day?” He’ll be holding his breath, but he won’t make a big deal of it, because it can’t be Billy.

  It’s Billy.

  “Laura, we have a policewoman to sit with your mother for a moment. Would you find us a photograph of your brother, please?”

  The photograph albums had been left in America. They were wrapped in an old sheet and tucked carefully in Grandma’s attic. But school pictures had just been done at L.I.A. Laura brought an uncut sheet to the police.

  Billy was handsome. Dark floppy hair over a smooth, tan face, much darker in complexion than anybody else in the family. His easy wide American grin showed perfect white American teeth that were not going to need braces. For his school portrait, he’d worn a white sweatshirt with the school logo: a map of the worlds—scarlet land on blue seas. Behind Billy, the sky was as blue and clear as Arizona, which puzzled the police; London did not have skies like that. “It’s a backdrop,” said Laura. “They always use that fake sky backdrop for school pictures.”

  Back home, like millions of American households, the Williamses had had an entire wall of school pictures with the same gaudy fake blue sky. Laura and Billy in kindergarten, first, second, and so on. “You pay fifteen ninety-five for a pack,” said Laura, “because you want to trade the little wallet pictures. But nobody ever really does and by spring you’ve lost them all, anyway.”

  They cut apart the wallet-sized pictures and passed them out among each other.

  What a kick Billy would have gotten out of it Scotland Yard studying his photo.

  “Talk to me about Billy,” said one man. He was wearing a too-large wool suit, as if he had recently lost weight, but not enough to warrant buying a new suit. Laura had dimmed like her mother; she could not seem to get their names, even though Laura was terrific with names.

  “We need to find out if Billy was a specific choice,” the policeman went on. “He was murdered the day after terrorists escaped from their courtroom. He might have seen something.”

  At L.I.A. you were required to take current events no matter what other history class you might also have, because these particular students were so often caught in the maelstrom of changing governments.

  “London simmers,” her current events teacher liked to say. Mr. Hollober was Canadian. Laura loved his pale accent. “Exiles fill this city, and they’re all in a bad mood. All mad at s
omebody. Iraqi, Tamil, Nigerian, Cypriot, Azerbaijani, Hong Kong Chinese, Irish, Israeli, Palestinian, Kenyan.”

  It made Laura dizzy to think of so many countries sitting here in London, riding the tube and mad at each other. Or mad at America. There were an awful lot of people out there who didn’t think much of America. Laura was still trying to get used to that since as far as she knew, America was perfect, and she was luckier than they would ever be because she was American.

  “London,” Mr. Hollober would say, “is the seismograph of the world. A needle that shakes at the slightest political tremor.”

  Had Billy touched the needle? Or the people who held it?

  “Or,” said the policeman, “the bomb might have nothing to do with the escapees. Some other terrorist group might have done it. Nobody has claimed responsibility yet, so we have nothing to go on. Finally, Billy might have been chosen specifically as a child, or specifically as an American child.”

  Laura could hardly think about who had killed Billy. It filled her mind too much, knowing that Billy was dead. We need Daddy, she thought. We need him right now.

  Her father had been sent to England to close down factories. His company made electronic components, but business was poor and they were ending European operations. Daddy hated being the bad guy, but to be the American bad guy in towns already deeply depressed and jobless—well, it was not Laura who was sorry they had come. It was Dad. Laura had fallen in love with London and with L.I.A., Billy loved everything, anyhow, and Mom was having the adventure of her life. Dad had said only a few weeks ago that he couldn’t last much longer. “You have to last through the school year!” Laura had said. “You can’t ruin my junior year! What about my friends?” They had had a good laugh.

  But if they bad decided to go home last week, Billy would still be alive.

  She told the police about Billy.

  She brought them his notebook. She hated letting them touch it. What if they laughed at Billy? She showed them his brick collection. She didn’t even want them to touch the bricks. What if they didn’t understand? What if they couldn’t tell that Billy was the most interesting person on earth?