Alyzon Whitestarr by Isobelle Carmody

to have gone straight home today. You look pale.”
    I stammered that I was fine, but she ushered me to a bench outside the staff room and sat beside me, giving off the yeasty bread smell of her essence. It seemed so wholesome after what I had smelled in the hallway.
    “The reason I wanted to speak to you was to tell you that you’ve missed a couple of important tests,” Mrs. Barker said. “I can’t rerun them for you because they’re through the Department of Education, but I can request makeup tests. The only thing is that you’ll need to take them outside of school hours. You could come in one day on a weekend and do both at once. How does that strike you?”
    I didn’t answer straightaway, because she had patted myarm. When her skin touched mine, I felt how much she liked me; not just as a student, but as a person. I was startled because, while Mrs. Barker was my favorite teacher, I had never imagined she felt so warmly toward me. Certainly it didn’t show in her expression. But now I suspected that if she wasn’t a teacher and I a student, we might have been close friends.
    “What is it, Alyzon?” she asked gently.
    “It’s … uh, I’m fine.” I didn’t dare look at her until I had managed to start counting again.
    She said with a frown in her voice, “Another alternative is that I could ask for an averaging of your previous tests.”
    “No … no, I want to do the tests,” I told her firmly, looking into her face but reciting the nine times table to myself so her attention would not overwhelm me. “But I’ll need a bit of time to prepare.”
    She looked pleased. “Of course. It will take a week or so to set it up anyway.” She looked me over. “Are you sure you’re OK? Your father said you were still suffering some reactions to your accident.”
    I smiled to think of Da preparing the way for me and felt better. “I think it’s just getting used to being around so many people. I ought to be used to it, with my family.”
    “You have a pretty special family,” Mrs. Barker said warmly. She might have said more, but another teacher stuck her head round the staff room door and said there was a call.
    * * *
    I had intended to phone Da to pick me up so I could avoid the crowded home bus, but coming out of the school, I decidedthat what I really needed was some space to think about what had happened with Harlen Sanderson. I set off to walk along the bus route, knowing I could hail the next bus if I needed to.
    The yellow afternoon light made the walls of houses and buildings look like biscuits saturated in honey, and there was a slight, sweet-scented breeze. I breathed it in and told myself that it was impossible Harlen Sanderson had smelled like that—meaning, I must have been wrong to think smells were only associated with feelings and emotions or people’s essences. Perhaps other things gave off smells, too. Maybe Harlen had been thinking of a really awful sight. Or he might even be sick and that was what I had smelled. I tried to focus better on what had happened by the lockers, but I was frustrated by my inability to think clearly about my changed senses. I just didn’t seem to have the words to describe my impressions.
    It was like this book Da had read us one winter, called
1984
, about a future where the authorities were trying to control everything. One of their methods was to cut words out of the language. This was very clever, because without the words people found they couldn’t think about the things those words had expressed. The word for love was taken out, and people stopped being able to love. The book was saying that the most basic things were hard or impossible to do without the words to express them.
    I felt I wouldn’t be able to think properly about what had happened to me until I could find words to think with. At the simplest level I could see, hear, smell, taste, and touch a lotbetter than other people. But smell and touch had gone far beyond what those words usually