The scent keeper, p.9
The Scent Keeper, page 9
“I’m sorry, but there’s no money for special attention,” the principal was saying to Colette. “I’ve got K through twelve here, all in one building, and more budget cuts than students. You say she just turned thirteen…”
On the first day of spring, I thought. Colette had brought in a cake one evening after dinner. There had been candles. She’d showed me the date on the calendar. I hadn’t had the heart to tell her that Dodge and I had followed our noses to the edge of the woods and found violets two days before. I’d put my face in them and cried.
“… that would put her in eighth grade,” the principal was saying. “We’ll start her there and see how it goes.”
I sat in a chair, barely listening. I had learned that sometimes it was better to let go of words and listen to smells. The principal’s were sturdy, unexceptional—scrambled eggs and soap that didn’t have flowers in it.
“She’s extraordinary…” Colette began.
“I’m sure she is,” the principal replied.
I breathed in the scents of faded couch cushions, old tea and older grief, rough and dry as sandpaper. The principal tapped her pencil, looking up at the clock.
“Okay then,” she said. “We’ll take it from here.”
Colette hesitated, looking at me. I had known she was going to leave, but the loss struck me suddenly. If I watched her go, I would break, so I shut my eyes hard.
“Emmeline?” Colette said. I kept them closed. “Maybe it’s too soon…?”
“She’s thirteen years old. She’ll be fine.” The principal’s voice was firm. There was a long silence.
Finally, I heard Colette stand. “I’ll be back at the end of the day, Emmeline. You can tell me all about your adventures.” I felt her hand, soft on the top of my head. Smelled the scents of coffee and fresh bread; felt them leave with her.
“Caroline,” the principal called out, and I heard bustling footsteps behind me. “Can you take this young lady down to room seven?”
“Is she blind?” a woman’s voice asked tentatively. I opened my eyes, stared at her.
“Oh!” she said, then recovered. “Well okay then, let’s go.”
* * *
We went down a hall that smelled of hot oil and potatoes. The corridor was easily three times as wide as any of the wooded paths on our island, but I felt the walls closing in on me all the same.
After about forty paces, the woman opened a door on the right, and ushered me in. The room was square and white, with narrow windows along one side and a big black desk at the front. Facing the desk were rows of strange little tables, each one attached to a seat like the shell of a hermit crab.
“Sit anywhere you’d like,” the woman said. “The others will be in soon.” She put a piece of paper on the big black desk and left.
I went to the back row and slid into a chair in the corner, waiting. After a few minutes, I could hear voices bouncing off one another and starting to fill the halls. The door opened and in came a flood of noise and bodies. Boys, long limbed and smelling of sweat and too much energy. Girls, drenched in lemon or flowers or strawberries, except the scents weren’t actually any of those things. They were like the saturated colors I’d seen in magazines. Too sweet. Too strong. It made me rub my nose.
“Whatcha doing, new girl?” A boy stood next to my desk. “Going on a booger hunt?”
I didn’t know what he meant, but the odor that came off him was like the flare of a match, tight and excited. In my mind, I could almost hear Dodge’s low growl of warning.
* * *
The room filled up, girls and boys jostling for seats. The match boy sat in front of me, scooting his desk back so I had to pull my feet in, but the chair next to me stayed empty. The teacher arrived, a thin, brisk woman with dark eyes.
“All right,” she said, inhaling on the word. “Welcome back, everybody. We all know each other by now. Are we ready for another year?”
I heard muffled groans. The teacher picked up the paper the other woman had left on the desk and scanned the room.
“Emmaleen?” the teacher said. I watched the others, waiting. “Emmaleen,” she repeated, walking up one of the aisles and stopping when she reached me. “We don’t have time for games here. You’re supposed to answer when I call your name.”
“That’s not my name,” I said, confused.
“What is your name, then?”
“Emmeline. Like Once upon a time, Emmeline.” I could see my father’s smile, hear his voice, rolling around the rhyme.
There was a burst of laughter. I looked about, startled by the wide, unbelieving faces of the kids in the seats.
“Weirdo,” the boy in front of me said. The words invaded the memory, curled its edges.
“That’s enough, Dylan,” the teacher said sharply. She turned to me. “All right, Emmeline,” and she pulled out that last syllable like it was a potato stuck in the ground, “now that we’ve had our pronunciation class, can we start our school year?”
I slipped deeper into my chair, staring at her back as she returned to her desk.
* * *
I had thought, perhaps, I could handle school. I’d read people’s scents like I’d read the bedsheets in the cottages and everything would be okay. But that room was filled with so many smells, so many needs and fears and secrets. The teachers cycled through—math and English and history—and I tried to listen to what they were saying, but the words had to make their way through all the other messages floating in the air, and I couldn’t concentrate. The teachers asked me questions, and the glee of the boy in front of me grew with each of my fumbled responses. Finally they gave up.
“We’ll let you settle in,” they said, one after another, and even in the clamor of scents I could smell their disappointment.
At lunchtime, when the other kids shouted their way down the hall toward the odor of hot oil and potatoes, I turned my head in the opposite direction. I caught the scent of grass and followed it outside. I saw small children, climbing on something that looked like a metal memory of trees. To one side was a row of the blue-green plants that grew in front of the boardinghouse—rosemary, Henry had taught me. I went over and sat down, letting their fragrance sweep the morning away.
Please don’t make me go back inside. Please don’t make me go back inside.
I wanted to run, to find the road, a boat, go back to the island. I didn’t care what was or wasn’t there. I just wanted the silence of the trees, the comfort of my loft.
One of the girls from my class walked across the playground toward me, half a sandwich in her hand.
“Hey,” she said, sitting down, smiling, “where are you from?”
I couldn’t read her well; she was one of the strawberry girls—the smell seeming to come from her lips. The cloying sweetness took over the air like a wave of pollen.
“Secret Cove,” I said.
“Before that,” she prompted. When I didn’t say anything, she lowered her voice.
“Everybody knows you came from the islands. What was it like?” Her eyes were bright as she leaned forward, but she didn’t look dangerous. I inhaled deeply, searching for the scent of who she really was.
“What’re you doing?” the girl asked, pulling back.
My thoughts scrambled. Panicked, I picked a sprig of the rosemary.
“Here,” I said, offering it to her.
“What?”
“You can rub it between your hands.” I fumbled. “It’ll balance out the pink.”
“What?”
“The strawberry…”
“You’re telling me I smell bad?” The girl stood up. It was strange, I realized—anger was actually a good counterbalance to pink, too.
“Sorry for trying to be nice, freak,” she said.
And then she was gone.
I sat there, shaking, until the bell rang and a teacher rounded up the smaller children.
“Do you know where you’re going, honey?” she asked me, and I could have cried at the softness in her voice.
She took me with her, leaving me at my room. I didn’t realize my mistake until I saw the other students look up from their desks and notice the little kids in the doorway. I saw the strawberry girl lean over and say something to the boy next to her. I heard the whispers running up and down the aisles of the classroom like gritty sand through my fingers. Saw the grins.
* * *
“How was it?” Colette asked that afternoon when she picked me up.
I looked at her face, still tired from the summer. I smelled the damp wool scent of worry. I couldn’t go back to the island, I knew that; Colette and Henry were all I had. What would happen if I became too much for them?
“Fine,” I said. “It was fine.”
FISHER
In the second week of school, the red-haired boy appeared.
“Look who came out of the woods!” the kids chorused as he entered the room.
The boy ducked his head and walked quickly to the only available seat, the one next to me. He sat down, and I saw that he wore long sleeves, even though the day was hot for September and most of the kids had on T-shirts. I could smell nervousness on him, but beneath that was the scent of alderwood smoke, clean and honest.
The boy looked over and saw me watching him. He watched me back for a moment, and then he cocked his head. His eyes were astonishingly green. Like trees in the spring.
“I’m Fisher,” he whispered.
“Emmeline.”
He didn’t laugh. I smiled. It was as simple as that.
* * *
Like me, Fisher was an almost silent presence in the classroom, but his silence was the most active I’d ever seen. He was like a squirrel or a mouse—constantly watching everything around him. It was a skill he took with him wherever he went. I knew what that was like, although I used my nose instead of my eyes.
“What do you see?” I asked as we sat on the side of the playground one day during lunch. We’d found it was easier to be outside—anywhere, really, except the cafeteria, which felt like a beach full of hungry seagulls. It was there that I’d learned Fisher was a year behind.
“He’s so slow he can’t even make it to school half the time,” Dylan had joked. Fisher had turned red. I felt sorry for him, but a part of me swelled with relief to find someone else who was odd like me.
Now Fisher pointed over to the swing set on the playground. A little girl was working her legs hard, but not getting much momentum. A boy about her age was waiting, shifting his weight from side to side.
“That boy there is going to shove the girl on the swing.”
“How do you know?”
“Look at his mouth.”
The little boy’s lip curled, just on one side.
“Now check out his hand.”
I looked. At the boy’s hip, his hand curled into a fist. I caught a whiff of something, sharp and hungry.
“I can smell it,” I said. “I mean, I can see it.”
The boy pushed the girl and sent her sprawling. She started crying, and the teacher came over, dusting her off and ushering her away. The boy sat on the swing and started pumping his legs.
“The teacher’s scared of him,” Fisher said. Then, “What do the smells tell you?” he asked abruptly.
I listened, but heard only curiosity in his voice.
“Everything,” I said finally.
Fisher nodded.
“You know, I found one of those bottles once,” he said. “The ones on the beaches?”
I didn’t move.
“I smelled something on the paper, but nobody else believed me.”
My heart beat fast and heavy at the same time. “What did it smell like?”
“Like nowhere I’d ever been.” A faint smile crossed his face.
Red wax, I thought.
I tried to calm my breathing. He’d smelled what no one else could. I couldn’t tell him how the bottles got in the water, not without explaining a lot of other things I didn’t want anyone to know, but I basked in the knowledge that here was someone who thought the way I did.
“What happened to the bottle?” I asked.
“My father took it.” Fisher shrugged. “He said I wrecked its value by opening it.”
* * *
It was becoming apparent that my scattered academic background was going to cause a lot of trouble for the teachers. Add to that my utter abhorrence of participating, and most of them found it easier to ignore me, which suited me just fine. The one exception to this rule was the science teacher, Ms. Boyd, who seemed to have taken it as her personal mission to make me feel special—which, of course, only made things worse with the other kids.
One Monday she came into the classroom, the smell of excitement buzzing on her skin.
“We’re going to travel to France today,” she said, “and learn about some truly amazing animals.” She looked all the way to the back of the room, found my eyes, and smiled.
“They have some of the best noses in the world,” she continued. “They can find truffles, hidden underground.”
“What’s a truffle?” one of the kids asked.
“It’s a kind of mushroom.”
“We have mushrooms all over the place.” Dylan was unimpressed.
“This is a special kind,” Ms. Boyd said. “Just this year, a single two-pound truffle sold for three hundred and thirty thousand U.S. dollars. See how important a good nose is?”
There was a collective gasp in the classroom. Again, Ms. Boyd smiled at me. I took in the warmth of it, pulled it close.
“What kind of animals?” Dylan asked, leaning back in his chair.
Ms. Boyd opened a big book and held it up. I couldn’t quite see the illustration.
“Is that a pig?” said the strawberry girl, turning and staring at me with jaw-gaping delight. I’d hoped she would forget our encounter on the playground, but it was clear that wasn’t going to happen.
Ms. Boyd realized her mistake, but there was nothing she could do. From that point on, I was Miss Piggy. Dirt Sniffer. Snuffles and snorts followed me down the hall and haunted my chair in the classroom. By the end of the week, it felt as if there was nowhere I could go.
“I know a good place,” Fisher said that Friday.
At lunchtime, he took me down the corridor and opened a door that said Library. I saw rows of books, rising to the ceiling like drawers of secrets.
“Oh,” I said, relaxing for the first time since Miss Piggy had entered my life, and Fisher smiled.
“Let me show you the computer,” he said, and led me over to a row of three boxes with screens like a television. Fisher sat down in front of one and his fingers typed out a series of letters. The word Google came up in front of us.
“Look,” he said. “Magic.” He entered the word cat and then he showed me images and movies of cats and puppies until a woman came over and told him that the computers were for research, and we reluctantly allowed ourselves to be ushered away.
That weekend, the computer was pretty much all I thought about. Here was a machine more magical, more powerful, than my father’s. It didn’t have scents, but like them it could take me anywhere, and unlike them or television, I got to say where I wanted to go.
I had almost given up on the idea of ever learning anything more about my father, or where I came from. Now, however, I saw a chance.
* * *
Fisher wasn’t in school Monday morning. I hadn’t realized how much I counted on the emotional armor of his friendship until it wasn’t there, and by midday, I was overwhelmed. I threw my lunch in the trash and fled to the library.
Other kids were on the computers, so I had to wait. I wandered through the aisles of books, stopping in the little kids’ section, when I saw several books of fairy tales laid out on a low table. I checked every cover, looking for gold writing, for the princess and the crumpled man, but none of them was the one I had grown up with. Even so, it was calming to be near the volumes—though I knew that if anybody from my class saw me, I’d have even more to contend with.
When a computer was finally available, I went over and looked at its blank screen. It reminded me of the time my father had given me my own scent-paper. I hadn’t known what it meant, what it could do. I’d learned what I needed to know by playing scientist.
Eliminate the variables, Emmeline.
I typed in my name. The first thing I saw was the title of a book: Emmeline, the Orphan of the Castle, but it had been written hundreds of years ago. There was an image, of a woman with a stern chin and dark eyes—but she’d lived a long time ago, too, in another country.
The only thing left was the meaning of my name: work, and somehow that didn’t surprise me at all.
What else could I try? Jack? John? I typed in scent-paper, but all that gave me was something called do-it-yourself craft ideas that involved steeping paper in tea leaves and water. I tried whale bones but that became a different science lesson quickly enough.
I needed more. A clue. One good word—but I didn’t have it.
* * *
Fisher was back in school that afternoon. I was going to tell him what I’d been doing, but I realized it would be difficult without revealing what I was looking for. I wasn’t ready to risk the possibility that he would find it all too strange and no longer want to be my friend.
He was quieter than usual, and when he was taking notes I saw that he held his hand in an awkward position.
“Where were you?” I asked him as we were leaving school. “What happened to your hand?”
“Got caught in a doorjamb,” he said. “Stupid, huh?”
There was something about his voice that made me want to ask more questions, but before I could, I heard footsteps behind us.
“Hey, Miss Piggy,” Dylan said, coming up next to me. He snorted and pawed the toe of his shoe in the ground.
“Stop it,” Fisher said, his voice tight.
Dylan tugged on one of my curls. “They even look like pig’s tails.”
I didn’t move.
