Sarah Benadine is Dead

Chapter XVIII, Part II

***Warning: This chapter includes references to racism***

No one was going to investigate the death of a bunch of rats. Caleb knew that. Sure, there would be confusion as to how that many rats set up shop in the shed so fast, but it was nothing anyone was going to label impossible. As for the mutilation of the dead rats...well, that could be attributed to the surviving ones.

Living rats were, of course, not what had gotten to the dead ones. But Caleb wondered if that was something the normal community wanted—or even needed—to know.

Caleb had returned to Briargate by himself. Rain still hadn't come—Caleb wondered vaguely if it ever would—but the gloomy day did not really inspire a want to be outside for much longer. The other kids had gone home, an eerie unsettlement hanging over their heads. Part of Caleb wished he had another place to go; Briargate seemed too close to the cemetery, and, though he wouldn't have told anyone, he half-expected to see a whole swarm of rats congregated on the grounds of the school when he returned. A silly fancy, but one that stuck in his mind nonetheless.

Caleb spent the afternoon in the library. He hadn't any homework, and there wasn't much to do in the school. Some other kids from the second year class were throwing a flying disc around outside, but Caleb had seen Quintus, Dean, and Vince lurking around by the kitchen door and the empty chicken coop and he didn't much want to see what trouble they would end up causing. Caleb didn't mind being alone; in fact, sometimes, secretly, he thought it was safer. That was one thing he learned rather quickly as one of the few black kids at the school: sometimes it's better to blend into the background.

There was no place better to blend into the background than in the library. The fiction shelves were the best stocked and the best tended to, and that's where Caleb headed. There were a few other students milling about, mostly older kids, and they paid Caleb no mind. There were probably more somewhere deeper in the stacks, working on homework and searching for books, but it was nearly silent. Odd, even for the library.

When he first heard them, he'd settled in at one of the tables in between the shelves with a book he'd chosen mostly at random (he did that sometimes; surefire way to ensure variety). He nearly groaned out loud when the first sounds of their voices met his ears, so loud in such a quiet space. He was morbidly unsurprised; he'd been doing his best to keep a wide berth of Quintus Zima and his gang, but that had been getting a lot harder recently. Apparently they'd lost interest in whatever they'd been doing outside.

Caleb winced when he heard Charlie Mouser's voice. That, as well, was unsurprising; Charlie practically lived in the library. A small part of Caleb's mind wondered if that was the only reason Quintus, Dean, and Vince had made their way into library at all; it certainly wasn't a place they could be found often.

For a few painful moments, Caleb was at war with himself. One part of him—perhaps the more rational part—wanted to let it go. The last time he'd interceded on something Quintus and his friends had been doing, he'd ended up with a thirteen-way fistfight in the snow. But he felt bad for Charlie; he was one of the kids who just sort of screamed 'beat me up!' to the people tuned to the right frequency. He was rather small, and had those damned giant glasses that amplified his eyes to huge blue saucers, and it was no secret that he was a bit of a loner. Even Caleb, who was one of his roommates, didn't see him that often. Caleb felt bad that life had dealt him sort of a lousy hand, but it was even more than that, Caleb supposed. Caleb understood Charlie. He knew what it was like to be a target of Quintus and his friends. As the only black boy in the second year class, that was sort of a no-brainer.