Chapter 10

We had settled closer toward the floor, still on our knees, the backs of our thighs now resting on our calf muscles. Grant still clutched at me tightly with his teary face pressed against my neck—there was no possibility of either of us sitting on the floor or anywhere else. We were just too sore. Very gradually, Grant’s crying abated, and he spoke suddenly, as if I had asked a question.

“I was eight years old when I found out what I was meant to do.” Grant’s voice was choked and hoarse, constantly interrupted by sniffles, and muffled by my shoulder, but I could understand him. “My Uncle Seymour was a Nooseboy\. He graduated from here. Did you know that? No, you couldn’t. I never told anybody that. I never tell anybody anything.” Grant shook his head slightly, and paused for a prolonged bout of sniffling.

“Anyway, Daddy and Mom got invited to Uncle Seymour’s hanging. They knew the guy who bought Seymour, and he figured my dad would want to be there for his brother’s hanging.”

Just like my dad inviting Kevin Warren to see Miranda’s hanging. I guess that must be kind of a standard thing. Only the idea that Grant had had a life before the Academy took me by surprise.

Grant’s voice grew slowly stronger. “I didn’t care one way or another about going, it just wasn’t that big of a deal, but my parents always thought I should have a lot of experiences, and they didn’t see any harm in taking me. Uncle Seymour had stayed with Mom and Daddy a couple of times when he got weekend furloughs from the Academy in his Third Year, and he was so sweet, and so happy, and so handsome, and I really loved him. Anyway, Daddy just explained to me we that were going to Uncle Seymour’s going-away party, and there’d be a lot of guests and he’d put on kind of a show. He wanted me to understand that Uncle Seymour wasn’t really an escaped slave, that was just part of the show, make-believe. I promised him I understood that.

“So we went, and I stood right in front of the stage because I was the smallest person there, and ... and my whole life changed.

“I’d seen people hanged before, of course, everybody has, but they weren’t anything like this. I can’t say I exactly understood about sex, just kind of a vague idea, but I understood about ... attention. About people paying attention to you, really noticing you, being totally fascinated and enthralled by what you’re doing. Every kid understands that and wants it. And standing there, I caught on about connecting with people, that you could be performing in front of a big crowd of \people and somehow, some way, be able to make each individual person feel like you were performing for him or her alone.”

I nodded, surprised. That’s a lesson Grant had definitely learned.

“Anyway, every minute, every second of watching Uncle Seymour hang is engraved in stone in my memory. I can call up any image, any sensory impression from watching the show and live it again. It was ... well, obviously you can tell, it was the biggest thing that ever happened to me or ever will happen, until I do my own show.

“I don’t even really remember the dinner after, not even the desserts, which will show you how much I was affected at 8. We must have stayed, and I’m sure I must have eaten something, but I was like in a daze. That night at home, I told my dad, “Daddy, I’m going to do that. How can I learn to do that?”

“Probably, just for a few seconds, my dad thought it was just a standard kid announcement, like ‘I’m going to be a nurse’ or ‘I’m going to be the President of the World,’ but I’m sure he saw something in the way I said it. I mean, you know how intense I can be.”

“No kidding.”

“Well, Daddy knew I was serious, so he went out and got some books. They were big-people books, not kiddy books, but I was always pretty smart. Books about hanging, I mean. You can’t get most of the hanging books the Academy uses on the outside, but you can still get some pretty detailed and useful info. Plus stuff like anatomy, and chemistry, and physics, like we study here, those are available to anybody. If I didn’t understand something in the books, if it was too complicated and grown-up for me ... well, I’d just take what I could get, what I could understand, and promise myself to understand the rest later. I’d always find I understood more the second time through than I did the first time.

“I got so into it, spending so much time with it, that Daddy took me out of school. I was home-schooled. My mom did the teaching until I was fifteen, and then Daddy hired a tutor.

“If I’d fall behind in my standard school studies, Daddy would take away my hanging books until I got caught up. I didn’t let that happen very often. So I learned a lot of stuff, besides hanging. I didn’t have any high school grades when I applied to the Academy, so they used the scores on my college entrance exams. I kind of blew the top off those.”

One thing you didn’t learn, I thought, was socializing. There’s a little more to school than books. I wondered whether Grant understood that.

“And of course, I wanted to practice actual hanging, too. It took me until I was twelve to talk Daddy into letting me do that. Eventually I think he realized I’d start doing it on my own, all by myself—he could forbid me to do that, but he knew that wouldn’t work forever. It was either let me do it in the open or I’d endanger my life in secret. So he hired a coach for that.

“Of course, by the time I was a teenager, I knew more about sex, and I recognized that was a big part of what Uncle Seymour’s show was about. So I started working on getting that into my act. By that time my coach decided I was too much of a natural for him to interfere with anything I tried doing. After a couple of years he stopped finding much new he could tell me about hanging. I was doing it all.

“My parents were always so totally supportive. Dad loved that I’d been so inspired by his brother, and Mom always told me I was born to be the best ever. They never pushed me, it wasn’t like that. You know, like those big tennis stars who never even liked the game, but their parents never let them think of anything else but being the best tennis player ever. My parents just knew ... they saw what it meant to me. They saw they couldn’t stop me even if they wanted to.”

Grant stopped talking, long enough for me to think his story was over. I had just opened my mouth to respond when Grant spoke again. “Amy...” The quaver had come back into Grant’s voice, so I knew that the tears were starting again. “This is the most important place in the world to me. You don’t really think I’m going to wreck it, do you? My Uncle Seymour was here. He must have been in this very room sometimes. And I’ve got a little sister. She’s only nine. Maybe she’ll want to come here. She’s not into hanging, but maybe she’ll get excited about it after she sees my show. Amy, please tell me I didn’t mess everything up.” His shoulders heaved, and his body shook with sobs again.

I felt a strong need to have Miranda’s head with me. I hadn’t known why I saved Grant, but I knew now that Miranda had known why I needed to do it. I tried, as the next best thing, to fix the image of Miranda in my mind, to make her so real I could almost reach out and touch her.

I shifted and pushed Grant gently away from my shoulder, and turned his head so he could look at me. Grant’s eyes, reddened and still seeping tears, didn’t want to meet mine. I said softly, “Grant ... look at me.”

I waited patiently for Grant to comply, and went on. “Grant, you’re probably the smartest person I’ve ever met. And you’ve done so much with it, you’ve learned so much. But you missed some things. It’s not your fault. You didn’t have a chance to learn them. You understand?”

Grant, looking as if he feared I might slap him, whispered, “What things?”

“I guess the biggest thing is that you didn’t go to school for so many important years. You didn’t learn how to... be with people. I mean, I’m sure you went places, like probably parties, clubs, the mall...” I looked questioningly at Grant. After a pause, he nodded.

I continued, “But you could pick and choose when and where you wanted to go, and who you wanted to be with. You missed having to deal with people who were around you all day, whether you wanted them to be or not. People competing for things you wanted, or people who had something they were willing to share with you, or ... all those situations. You just know you want to be the best Noosemeister ever, and now suddenly you’re surrounded all the time with a lot of other teens who want the same thing, and you never learned how to handle that kind of thing. You’re just now dealing for the first time with situations you were supposed to be learning about when you were nine or ten, and the only method you’ve got right now is to bull your way through the enemy, shouldering them all out of the way so you can get where you want to go before they get there.