A Parthan Summer by Julie Steimle (intellectual books to read TXT) 📕

—Then immediately choked on the extreme perfume coming from the girl who sat right behind her. Scowling back at her, Zormna groaned then groped the window catches to shove it open for air.

Out on the walk in front of the school, Zormna noticed Jeff’s wrestling buddies—Brian among them—loading up on the neighboring bus. Jeff, however, was nowhere to be seen. Technically, he was supposed to be her bodyguard. Not that she wanted one, but he insisted as it was supposedly part of the prophecy about her.

She stuck her head out the window and peered down the road to listen for cars. Except for the ruckus in the parking lot, the road was mostly silent—still early morning. Even the FBI wasn’t there yet. Zormna had seen the agents fast asleep in their sedan across from the Henderson home that morning. Or maybe this time they had finally managed to station themselves where they could not to be seen—though she doubted it.

Soon, as if answering her concern, she detected a distant engine rumble, followed by the screech of tires tearing into the parking lot. She turned her head towards the source of the noise and spotted the rusty brown truck that belonged to Al (Jeff’s so-called brother Alex). It stopped abruptly, his tires marking the asphalt.

Jeff opened the passenger side of the truck and let himself out. He was dressed in what he almost always wore: jeans, a red school tee shirt with the words Pennington Pirates Swab Up! in black letters on the front, and his typical black faux leather jacket from Home. Eyes turned when he arrived, but that was natural. If anyone had a worse reputation than her, it was Jeff—or as Zormna knew him, Jafarr. Everybody had believed he had once been in a gang in Chicago somewhere, and that his dad had abused him. He had the scars to prove it, after all. No one knew the real reason for his scars except for Zormna. She had been the cause of two of them—the ones on his face.

He walked to the open back of the truck and lifted his duffle bag out of the pickup. He waved goodbye to the driver. Al nodded to him and steered out of the parking lot, the gears screeching as he departed. Zormna was sure that noise was only for show. Jeff would never let a machine get in that bad shape if not on purpose.

He hurried to his bus, answering the calls of his friends as soon as they shouted out to him. And yet when he reached his bus’s steps, he stopped to peer toward the girls’ bus, glancing from window to window. 

“Al’ za tan,”[1] Zormna called out as if swearing at the sky, giving him a good smirk for measure. 

The girls sitting around her in the bus shot her looks. They rarely ever heard her use of her foreign dialect, and it was usually when she was angry enough to curse. They whispered among themselves.

Jeff, however, stiffened upon recognition and shook his head as he climbed onto his bus. Zormna did not care. She was sick of speaking English anyway, and she pulled back in her head as if to say so. Besides, the FBI car still had not arrived yet.

When departure time arrived, everyone loaded up onto his or her bus, their coaches and instructors taking their places and counting heads while taking roll to make sure no one got left behind. While they described emergency procedures to the crowds that didn’t care to listen, everyone kept whispering excitedly among themselves.

Their driver, who had been surreptitiously smoking on the other side of the bus, sucked in his last breath of nicotine before dropping the butt onto the ground and snuffed it with his toe. A teacher spotted him, then went after him. The kids on the bus overheard their argument. They started laughing. It was a no-smoking zone, after all. But the driver protested his right to smoke, as it was a free country and blah, blah, blah. And though the teacher threatened to get him fired, both stomped onto the bus in silence as he needed the job and they needed a driver.

The man took forever to adjust his seat, then his seat belt and mirrors—all which could have been done earlier if he hadn’t been sneaking a drag. Zormna just hoped he had not actually been smoking marijuana. The last thing they needed was someone with slow reflexes driving their seatbelt-less crew up winding mountain roads.

He pulled the handle to the doors, screeching with un-oiled slowness until they clamped shut with a dull klunk. Then the driver turned around in his chair to glare at every one of the students for quiet. No one paid him any attention. Though, his eyes met Zormna’s once. So he fixed his glare on her as if he could make a difference and intimidate at least one soul on the bus. But that didn’t work either. However, he turned around and faced front as if he had accomplished his goal. He revved up the motor, changing gears. At last the bus started to chug forward, spewing diesel vapors into the air. Crawling forward, and forward still, poking behind all the other busses, it slowly exited the parking lot.

Finally on their way, Zormna settled back in her seat. A cool breeze blew in from the window onto her face. The reek of perfume wasn’t so strong now, but she still didn’t think of closing the window at all, even when someone complained loudly that she was cold. It wasn’t cold to Zormna. It was so much colder at Home. Besides, the cold wind against her skin reminded her so much of Home that if she closed her eyes, she could imagine she was back there, flying solo in the wind on the surface like she used to.

The girl in the seat in front of her pulled the window shut, shooting Zormna a glare.

Zormna scowled right back, losing the old joy. But she didn’t fight over it.

As a caravan, the busses traveled through Pennington toward the edge of town then into the forest. This road was part of the old highway, traveling not far from where Jeff currently lived. Unlike the road that led to Star-Watching Hill, this highway had a less steep climb into the mountains. It switched back and forth for about an hour through fleets of pine trees in the sea of green. Zormna found the view pretty but monotonous. As her thoughts drifted, the others inside the bus grew noisier with eruptions of gossip, laughter, and chatter. Then floods of it.

The girls on her bus eventually started to sing songs—songs which Zormna did not know and could not join even if she wanted to. Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall gave way to popular songs like No, and that old 80’s song Don’t Worry, Be Happy (that Joy liked so much), and various versions of Row, Row, Row Your Boat. Zormna half-listened, half let her thoughts just wander. In an unexpected way, the singing made her feel homesick. It reminded her of those whom she hung out with back Home. Off shift, they sang songs when they got together at the drinks bar. And though she wasn’t much of a singer, she did like music. She wondered what her former comrades were doing at that moment. Were they happy? Were they safe? Were they thinking about her at all? Were they wondering where she was or what she was doing?

The crowd got louder and louder with every verse of Row, Row, Row Your Boat. Zormna leaned her head against the glass and stared out at the passing trees, drawing in a breath. She exhaled it in a sigh without realizing what she was doing. Joy who had come up from the back and sat next to her right before the bus had started up, turned from singing her part of the round with a look at Zormna’s cheerless face. Leaning near, Joy said, “Zormna, join in.” 

Zormna glanced blandly at her friend then looked out the window again.

“Heavens, you can’t be homesick,” Joy said.

Zormna looked up at the ceiling then chuckled mirthlessly at the thought as everyone knew that Zormna was an ‘Irish’ immigrant, who had already gone through a lot adaptation to U.S. culture. If only Joy really knew where she was really from, she’d flip.

“Why not? This is all so strange to me.” Zormna said, not even looking from the window. “Besides, I don’t sing.”

“You don’t sing?” Joy frowned. Whispering into Zormna’s ear, she said, “I’m sorry. But can’t you at least pretend to be excited?”

Zormna managed a painful grimace.

Joy groaned, pressing her hand to her forehead. “Forget it. ‘Fake it until you make it’ clearly doesn’t work for you.”

Zormna looked out the window again.

With a heavy eye-roll, Joy went back into the song. She sang loud enough for the both of them.

But as they got higher in the mountain, other girls started to open the windows again. Zormna lifted her head. The strong pine scent and even the crisp odor of the lake nearby came to her nose—two incredibly foreign odors to her olfactory nerves. And as she drew in another breath, she never felt so invigorated. Not that Pennington air wasn’t decent, especially compared to the stale manufactured air of Home—but that she had forgotten how rich the air inside the forest had smelled. When she had first arrived in the area, the forest was where the ship had landed. Yet it had been such an overwhelming experience that apparently she had blocked it out entirely. Now it all came back to her.

Her eyes turned to the glints of light reflecting off the lake. It flickered, mostly seen between the trees as they moved. She drew in a quick breath and stared. It was so amazing.

The busses rolled straight off the highway to a smaller road. They dipped down into the trees towards the lake and drove straight through a large wooden archway labeled in huge carved letters: Camp Lake Dale. The sky above it was a fine blue with light fluffy clouds. Tall pine trees towered over the gravel parking lot they rolled into, the sound of birds in the boughs and cicadas. Pine cones and pine needles were everywhere. Yet at the farthest end on the right was sloping lawn full of lush grass that dropped straight down into a pebbly beach edging a sparkling blue lake rimmed with trees.

Their bus pulled alongside the other yellow school busses already parked in the lot. The first bus was already unloading. Once they parked, everyone eagerly got out of their seats to climb out. It looked as if a fleet of these busses were being spawned up in the mountains—only some of the busses were different colors and shapes than just their yellow school type.

Neat and washed charter busses stood in another end of the gravel parking lot, unloading teenagers from Harvest High. These were painted a gradual blue with the name of the charter company on the side. Most of the Pennington students whispered to one another that these busses were probably air conditioned with two toilets and television sets. The other hired busses parked in the lot were from Billsburg High and their hated rival, Monroe High. Athletes from these schools gathered in lines outside their busses. The camp counselors were already handing out their information packets and directing them to the enormous split-log lodge across the lot. 

The Pennington busses unloaded, letting the wrestling and boys’ track teams climb out first to stretch their legs.