The Secret of Zormna Clendar by Julie Steimle (best ereader for pdf TXT) 📕

involved. People liked easy.

She clutched the bars tighter. With all her strength, Zormna heaved herself up, bracing her feet against the lower part, while cringing against a particularly sharp piece of glass in her sole. Pain also shot through her leg when she put pressure on it. A stinging wetness opened in her hand, making them slick. And a warm dribble ran down to her ankle. She slipped.

Gritting her teeth, Zormna held tighter, pulling up, bracing her feet better.

Yet something sharp pierced her side when she was not even a foot off the ground.

Zormna did not glance back or stop, though. She forced herself to shimmy higher. She reached for the top fence rail, touching it with her fingertips. Just two more feet, then she could lift herself up and over.

Feet thundered behind her on the grass.

Just one more foot.

But already her strength swept out of her. Even if she had her fingers around the bar, she could not pull that extra distance that had been so close a second ago. Somehow, her hands no longer were able to make fists.

Zormna slipped down.

She tried to hold tighter. She ordered herself to do so. But her muscles refused to cooperate. They relaxed against her command to keep going. Her feet then slipped entirely. No longer able to hold on with her hands, her body tipped backward and she fell.

The sky above was so blue. Wasn’t it gray a few days ago? And wasn’t there rain?

When she struck the ground, flat like a rag doll, Zormna stared up from the grass, panting. Little feathery clouds floated overhead, which would have been perfect on any other day. But today feet rumbled up to her like thunder, overshadowing the bright sky.

*

Kevin Jacobson ran out of his house, sure he had heard someone call his name. And a gunshot. He halted by his car in his driveway and looked around. Squinting his eyes, he scanned the street. He could have sworn he had heard Zormna screaming his name, actually. That unmistakable shrill brogue sounded like her at least. Peering over his neighborhood, his eyes stopped on the mental institution on the hill. The high iron bars had always given him chills. Great for Halloween, but for the rest of the three hundred and sixty four days of the year—yuck. However, beyond the gates, instead of seeing of the usual vacant yard, he spotted men in dark suits and lab coats gathered around something heavy they were collecting off the grass. That something, he soon saw was a person.

Exhaling, Kevin wondered who had escaped. Someone dangerous maybe? He had heard a gunshot. He was sure of that. But you didn’t out and out shoot lunatics, did you?

He watched as the group lift the escapee off the grass.

But then Kevin staggered forward. Zormna’s limp head had flopped into view. One of the men propped it up along with her sagging arms and what looked like a leg covered in blood. Then they encircled her body entirely, carrying her back to the building.

One man turned around.

Kevin ducked behind the car. As the man scanned the neighborhood while tucking away a gun into his pocket, Kevin’s heart beat too hard for him to think. He waited, peering through the car windows to watch the man with the gun. Eventually the man turned with the rest of the crowd, going back into the building.

Kevin rose as soon as they were gone. He stared up at the building along with its large fence, shaking his head. “What was she doing in there? Was that really Zormna?”

He had to find out. Jennifer had been entirely devastated when Zormna had run away from her home on Friday. But would that Irish girl have run away to an asylum? Not likely.

Trying to make the journey look casual, Kevin stuffed his hands into his pockets and strolled across the street. He walked along the wrought iron fence, pretending it didn’t give him the heebie-jeebies. Then just a little quicker, he hurried to the gate and peered at the guards. Their chins remained stiff, though their eyes followed him as he walked nearer. Kevin pulled his arms in closer to his body. That was when he noticed an elderly woman trotting out of the building. As she went all the way down the long walk, twitchy, muttering to herself, the woman kept glancing back at the building. At first Kevin thought she was an escaped patient, but as she passed the gates, the guards let her go by.

“I’m not putting my son in an institution like that. …Letting dangerous people run about.”

She lifted her eyes towards Kevin as he walked by, still on his pretend stroll. Sharply, she waggled her finger at him. “Don’t you go near there, young man. They’ve got a mad girl that can drop kick a horse.”

Drop kick a horse? No kidding. It was Zormna. No one else could be described like that.

Turning around with a nod to the woman, Kevin rushed back across the street at a pace that was near a run. He jogged up the driveway, going straight to his front door. Then he hurried to the kitchen, plucking the phone off the hook. He dialed. He had to tell Jennifer.

The phone on the other end began to ring.

<<Hello?>> a little child voice answered. He knew whose.

“Hi, Mindy. It’s Kevin. Is Jennifer there?” Kevin leaned against the wall, trying to keep his legs from shaking.

He could hear Mindy call out Jennifer’s name. Todd responded in the background, but Kevin could not hear what he was saying.

Mindy returned to the phone. <<She’s not here. Todd says she’s out sulking and won’t be home until late. She’s mad at Mom and Dad over Zormna running away.>>

Kevin sighed. “I see.”

<<Want me to take a message?>> Mindy asked.

Shaking his head, he said, “No, I’ll just talk to her on Monday. Thanks.”

Kevin hung up the receiver and slumped against the wall. What would he say anyway? Those people seemed awfully intent on keeping Zormna inside. Then again, maybe that little smart-mouth was insane. After all, her great aunt was crazy. Yet in the jumble of questions that filled his mind, one floated to the top. How would Jennifer react if she heard that Zormna had been committed to a mental institution? Especially after the whole bumping her head and believing Zormna was an alien, if only for the briefest of moments.

Shrugging it off, Kevin stepped to the refrigerator to grab a canned soda. There really was not much else he could do either way. He peered out the window at the forbidding building once more and shivered. Crazy people just had to stop coming to Pennington.

 

Chapter Twenty: Dirty, Stinking, Drunk Trashcans

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“When times are at its worst is when you must not quit!”—anon—

 

That Monday, Jennifer woke up with a stomach full of lead. Todd didn’t fare much better. Both of them glared at their parents, unable to reconcile with Zormna’s absence. Neither of them wanted to return to school—not with how they expected their classmates to pounce on them once they reached the campus.

But they went anyway.

It felt like an eternity since the school Olympics. Yet the moment they entered the ground they saw that the entire student body was still floating on that emotional high. It was like entering another dimension. No one else except for Kevin knew that Zormna had not come home that Friday, and Jennifer probably would not see him until lunch. Also, she had not spoken to Darren since the night Zormna had run off, so even he was trotting around without a care in the world. That is, until he saw Jennifer walking to her first hour class alone.

“Where is Zormna?” He cocked his head curiously.

Jennifer looked at the floor. “She didn’t come back.”

Blown by the news, he swayed there. It was strange how Darren stared. Doubt was not a look that often crossed that idiot’s face. “She didn’t come back? You mean she went home to her planet?”

Jennifer continued on walking. “Just shut up.”

“Oh…” he gasped. “The FBI really did pick her up. Didn’t they?”

But she ignored him, trudging up the stairs to her class. He was too stunned to stop her.

Jennifer took her seat in her first hour class, slumping onto the desk.

“Hey, Jennifer.”

She turned. A boy she hardly talked to leaned over the aisle towards her. That Michael Peterson. Normally she ignored him because he was that ultra-brain from the chess club that always made snotty comments in class, trying to one up the History teacher.

“Where’s Zormna?” he asked.

Jennifer blinked at him, wondering why he would care.

“She didn’t come to the dance, and we’ve been waiting to give her the trophy we won. Our class had to take the picture without her.”

Oh, one of Mrs. Ryant’s freaks. Jennifer immediately looked away, tears welling up in her eyes. “I—” What could she possibly say that wouldn’t sound totally nuts? “Something urgent came up. I don’t know when she’ll be back.”

Michael leaned back in his chair, eyeing her critically. He didn’t seem to believe her.

As expected, he was not the last person to ask about Zormna either. From class to class, hour to hour, Jennifer’s classmates converged on her. She got questions all day. And not just from Zormna’s homeroom classmates, who wanted to hand Zormna a special award for being an outstanding team captain. But also from a few others who were just curious. Rumors of her absence had begun to spread. Since Zormna had a way of stirring things up, they were eager to find out why she had gone missing.

Jennifer lied every time.

That is, until Mrs. Ryant approached Jennifer right before lunch.

“Jennifer McLenna, could you hold on a minute?”

The teacher had cornered her in the hall leading to the cafeteria. After hearing her name called for the thousandth time, Jennifer stopped where she was. Her shoulders sagged from exhaustion, as she thought not again.

“Is Zormna sick?”

But facing this teacher, Jennifer could not spew out the same lie. Mrs. Ryant, unlike most of the other in the faculty, actually cared about her students. Her eyes were currently reading Jennifer’s distress with intense concern.

Tears rolled down Jennifer’s cheeks. She shook her head. “No, she’s not. Zormna ran away.”

Mrs. Ryant carefully drew Jennifer to the side of the hallway. Lowering her voice, the teacher whispered, “She what? Why?”

Jennifer looked out for the janitor and those new teacher’s aides. None were in sight. It was just more awful proof the FBI had her. Yet gazing to the teacher, Jennifer thought maybe this woman could be an ally, at least in this one thing. She finally confided, “Zormna got in an argument with my parents after the Olympics about that ugly mark on her shoulder. They flipped out. And I’m really worried about her because Zormna just up and vanished. Normally she’d go to that house she inherited from her great aunt, but she hasn’t been there all weekend.”

“Have you called the police?” Mrs. Ryant asked.

Nodding, Jennifer wiped a tear away with the back of her hand. “Yes. They came over Saturday night. Todd gave them a full description. But my parents think she went home to—to her country. Only I know she couldn’t have gone home. She had no way of getting home.”

Mrs.