The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl Read Free

he’d scratched out every drawing he’d begun, and she wondered what he was trying to create. She went to the kitchen with the bus tray, took her disc out of the stereo, and said good night to Bobby-O. It was two o’clock, and she was done for the day, having come in at five a.m. to open. She had the night off—a rarity—and since she didn’t have to work tomorrow, it was practically a vacation, given her usual work schedule. The guy with the sketchbook was bent over his work, drawing furiously, and she paused, thinking of talking to him—she suspected he might be interesting. But no. If he turned out to be a regular, she could be friendly later. Right now she just wanted to get to her drafting table and sketch the sandstone savage, get him out of her head and into the pages of her comic. He could be a minor villain in the next issue, or maybe a mysterious figure with an undisclosed agenda of his own—her comic was full of such shadowy characters, some of them with intentions so ambiguous even Marzi could not have said with certainty whether they were villains, heroes, or something else entirely. Marzi walked out the front door.
    Lindsay was coming up the stairs as Marzi went down. “No, no, don’t go,” she said. “I have to tell you what happened in class today.”
    “Oh, joy. Tales from the ivory tower of academia.”
    Lindsay stuck out her tongue. “I get just as much paint on my clothes as you do, working girl. You’ll want to hear this, believe me. Save me a seat,” she said, pointing to the mostly full patio.
    Marzi thought longingly of her pencils, her paper, and her drafting table, but she nodded. She and Lindsay had trouble synching their schedules and getting together during the school year; Lindsay was still on academic time, while Marzi had been a civilian for two years and had a somewhat erratic work schedule to boot. Marzi expected to be at home alone all evening anyway, so she could be social now. Her sandstone savage would wait.
    Lindsay returned a few minutes later with a pint of Guinness and a cup of tea, and set the latter ceremoniously before Marzi. “So you met Jonathan,” she said.
    “Who?”
    Lindsay rolled her eyes. “The new
boy
. The one who’s getting Pigeonholed. I wouldn’t mind if he pigeonholed
me
. But boys just lead to trouble.”
    “Oh! You mean the guy in the Circus Room? With the black hair and the sorta sunken eyes?”
    “Sunken? They’re dark and mysterious and haunted, hinting at a dangerous past, Marzipan.”
    Marzi sipped her tea. “Duly noted. So I met him. Glad we got past that awkward first step. So what’s the story you have to tell? The sordid tale of a pop quiz gone wrong?”
    Lindsay shook her head. “I was in class this afternoon, the class I have with Beej? We were all working, painting with oils—I hate oils—and Beej just flipped
out
. He fell off his stool and put his arms over his head and started yelling ‘Earthquake!’ And we all stopped, you know, Dr. Payne, too, and sorta paid attention to the world around us for a few seconds, and there was no earthquake, but Beej kept yelling. Dr. Payne threw him out of class, and Beej went stumbling out of the room like he was drunk or something, like the ground really was shaking under him.” She shook her head. “Creepy. And he smells weird lately, too—weirder than usual—like ashes and old garbage and stuff. You saw him yesterday, you know how he is, right? I worry about his mental health. Maybe he should drop out of school for a while, get some help—” She stopped talking and winced. “Sorry, Marzi. I wasn’t thinking.”
    “It’s cool,” Marzi said, dredging up a smile. “It was a long time ago. Taking the withdrawal was good for me. I needed to do it.”
    “I kinda wish you’d come back to school afterward,” Lindsay said, looking down into her beer.
    Marzi just nodded. They’d had this conversation before, and it never went anywhere new. For Lindsay, school was important: She