The Scientist by Sian Webster (top rated ebook readers txt) 📕

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The halls of St Elizabeth’s School seemed much smaller filled with students than they had earlier that morning when I arrived late for my first day of school. I had been amazed at how wide the hallways were compared to the hallways in the small school for celebrities and their siblings we had gone to in Hollywood. A school that Oliver had never seen the inside of; he was always too bust touring or doing interviews or photo shoots. I wondered how much he would see of these hallways. Chances were he’d be at school for his first day and then pulled out for the rest of the year. That’s how it always was when he decided he wanted to start school again. He would never complain; half the time he had only been at the school for a day or two, so there was nothing keeping him there. I couldn’t imagine that there would be anything worth keeping him here in Brooklyn.

The school – St. Elizabeth’s – had the biggest library in America which, by extension, meant the biggest library in the world. Or at least, the biggest school library. Oliver reckoned that was why he wanted to come back to Brooklyn. I doubted that; he was probably just like Mum and Dad and couldn’t live in the house where Libby died. They were always so down about it and it irritated me beyond measure. You aren’t the one who killed her! I always feel like yelling. It’s not your fault she’s dead!

I remember, after it happened, they got Oliver to see a counsellor. Just Oliver. Not Josh, the one who came down to see what happened and saw her lifeless body slouched against the back wall of the basement. Not me, the one who killed her in the first place. After Josh came down, the staircase collapsed and the three of us had to be dug out. The Scientists came and took Libby’s body away before my parents or Oliver could see it. You would’ve thought that Josh and I were the ones who needed counselling. Not Oliver. And we did, but our parents only cared about the way it might have impacted Oliver’s singing career, so we had to get over our psychological issues by ourselves. We were happy in Hollywood. We had just started getting over Libby’s death. Yet Mum, Dad and Oliver never had, and that was why they moved us back to Brooklyn.

Trudging through the halls of St Elizabeth’s, I felt more alone than ever. Stares followed me everywhere I went because of the ugly scar that covered my right arm, but it wasn’t really the stares that bothered me. It was the looks of pity on peoples’ faces. I don’t deserve your pity! I wanted to yell at every one of them. I deserve this scar! But after two years of being burdened with it, I had learned to keep my mouth shut, even though I hadn’t learned to stop messing around with the Scientists’ inventions. It took my mind of things – I couldn’t help it.

My gaze swept the hallway, searching for my locker number. I found it quickly, it was right beside the only other person in the hallway still at their locker. A lanky boy with black messy hair and green eyes who was all arms and legs. He looked up as I stopped beside him, his eyes wide.

“Did it hurt?” He asked me.

I turned to face him, a look of indifference colouring my features. “If you’re going to follow that with ‘When you fell from heaven’, you can stop talking right now.” I snapped.

He smirked. “I meant your arm. How you got that scar.”

“Of course it hurt,” I said indignantly. “But when things hurt it’s usually for a reason.” My heart clenched as I repeated the last words Libby had ever said to me, but it felt like the right thing to say. Even if it was to this boy I had known for about twenty seconds.

“You’re not wrong,” His eyes travelled up and down my arm, taking in every piece, every flaw. Suddenly I felt very self-conscious about the scar.

“Look,” I said, “If you’re going to go on about how sorry you are that I have this damn thing, don’t bother. I deserve it.”

Perplexity coloured his features. “How?”

I sighed. “I accidentally started a fire in the basement of my own house. It killed my two-year-old sister.”

“Oh,” he looked down, “I’m sorry,”

“Yeah,” I muttered, hoping that would end that topic of conversation. “So am I,”

His eyes widened once more when he looked at my arm again. “Your watch! It’s—”

“Purple? Yes. I know. I did that. Blue is so boring, don’t you think?” I asked, happy for the change of subject.

“I was going to say still counting down,” he said admittedly. “Nearly everyone’s here has clocked off. They tease me all the time about mine still counting down. Though, it is pretty cool that you turned yours purple. How did you manage that?”

“I hacked into it,” I told him.

“I thought only Scientists could do that!” He exclaimed.

I smiled. “I’m going to be a Scientist one day,”

He shook his head in awe, “what’s your name, Scientist Girl?”

“Calliope,” I said. “Calliope Jackson.”

He smiled down at me. “I’m David Williamsburg,”

I smirked, an idea forming in my head. “I’ll tell you what, David Williamsburg, I’ll help you out. Three easy steps. One; take off that watch. Two; hide it in the bottom of your bag and don’t take it out. Three; follow me home tonight and I’ll fix all your problems – I’ve never liked bullies.”

“No way.” David scoffed as we walked up the stairs to the front porch of my house. “You do not live here. Holy shit,”

I wish I didn’t. I thought to myself idly. Mum had left because she could bear to stay with the demons lingering around our old house. Hers may have left, but mine followed me. They always did. I didn’t mention that, though. I was lucky to have David at all; there was no use loading all my rubbish onto him the first day we met. It was bad enough that I already told him about Libby.

I sighed. “Well, being related to a certain ‘Hollywood Golden Boy’ does tend to have its perks.” I made quotation marks with my fingers around the words ‘Hollywood Golden Boy’ and rolled my eyes, grabbing the key from the key safe beside the door and let us in the house.

David hesitated at the front door, one eyebrow raised. “Wait,” he said slowly. “Calliope Jackson… you’re Oliver Jackson’s sister?”

I smirked. “A little slow on the uptake there, but yes,”

David stood shamelessly in the doorway, his jaw dropping to the floor.

“I’m anything but lucky.” I told him. “Him and my parents kinda really make me wanna kill myself.”

David flinched and awkwardly walked over to me. “But you’re still here,” he pointed out.

“Yeah,” I laughed humourlessly. “I think they’d enjoy my death a little too much. So there’s no way I’m handing it over to them on a silver platter.”

I spun away from him then, suddenly very self-conscious about the fact that he had been in my personal space. People tended to avoid me. When I found the rare few that didn’t, I didn’t know how to act around them. “Come on,” I said, motioning for him to follow me, and running down the stairs to the basement.

A few minutes in the perfection of my parents’ living room had already made me nauseas. They wanted our family to be as perfect as that room. I was the crack in the wall that would always reappear. The crease in a shirt that refused to iron out. So I tended to avoid being anywhere upstairs except for meals and when I was sleeping.

When he reached the bottom of the stairs, David stopped in his tracks, his eyes scanning the room, an expression of wonder colouring his features. “This is… incredible,” he said, almost breathlessly.

I followed his eyes, observing the space I had created for myself. Numerous long, rectangular, wooden tables were in the middle of the room, pushed together to create as much workspace as I could. The majority of the space was already cluttered with tools and wires and motherboards. Behind that, I had hung a string of metal wire from one wall to another and slung three or four sheets over the top of it to act as a door. The walls the wire hung from had been painted over in white-board paint and were filled with equations and algorithms and experiments and results. In an over-flowing storage box that sat in the corner of the room were all the experiments or inventions of mine I could fit in there.

I raised my eyebrows. “Is that another way of saying ‘you really need to get a life, Calliope’? Because if it is, I completely understand what you mean.” I said sarcastically before my tone turned serious. “But there is no other life for me, David.”

He shook his head. “No. No! I mean, incredibly as in incredible, Calliope. How…?”

I smirked then. “I’m not one for following rules.”

“Figures,” he mumbled.

“Speaking of,” I said, walking over to the only clear table in the middle of the room. “your watch?”

He shook his head as if he could shake away the wonder, and made his way over to me, dropping his bag on the floor at his feet and rummaging through it until he found it under everything else in his bag. Exactly where I told him to hide it. He passed it over to me.

I carefully placed it on the table in front of me and began work on the screws holding the back on. Libby’s voice swam through my head, repeating the conversation we had the first time I decided to experiment with the watches.

Can you do it?

Do you even have to ask?

You’re going to be one of them one day, a Scientist. Aren’t you?

Anything to get out from under Oliver’s shadow.

Back then, getting out from underneath Oliver’s shadow had almost seemed possible. Now his shadow covered my whole life. Covered the whole world. I didn’t think I would ever be able to escape it. Or at least, not in my parent’s eyes.

“So, how does this work?” David asked cautiously as I unscrewed the last screw holding the back onto his watch. “Am I like… your Igor or something?”

I gave him a questioning look. “…Igor?”

He smirked. “In really ancient times, before the Third World War – before even the First World War, that is – scientists had these scraggly little hunch-back midget type people that would be like their assistant. The only one I can remember personally was called Igor.”

I observed the boy in front of me once more. He was tall and skinny – all arms and legs. He didn’t seem like he fitted the ‘Igor type’. I raised my eyebrows. “You’re not short. Or scraggly. Or a hunch-back.”

A smile etched its way onto his face. “It’s a metaphor, Calliope,”

“You’re not my Igor.” I said sternly, carefully lifting the back of the watch from its place with tweezers. “But you can help me if you want,”

David could barely stop the