She made flower after flower until her bed was littered with pink blossoms and the room perfumed with the smell of vanilla and the sea.
Max came back to visit at last, the next night. He was beaming when he arrived, but the only one who beamed back was Jean, who showed him the little pile she’d made of his letters. Though Nell had wanted him to come as much as anyone, seeing him irritated her because he had the look of someone almost too happy to talk, too full of having exactly what he wanted. She knew that feeling, because she’d felt it herself, the moment the flower had formed in her hand.
Of course, Max being Max, no amount of happiness could stop him from telling them about how great it was to learn with the old man, up there in the sunny room.
“He calls me son now. You know how old-fashioned people do that? But I think he means it, kind of. He says he’d teach his own son what he’s teaching me, if he had one. He never got the chance before. . . .”
Listening to him somehow drained the joy from Nell. She felt a small hurt flare in her chest, small like the pin that punctures the balloon, or the tiny break that starts a slow leak in the bottom of a boat. She realized after a while that Max was too full of his own happiness to see them, really. He didn’t see Kate sitting glumly by the window. He didn’t see Jean slowly deflate, watching him, until she sagged on the bed, slapping her Barbie against her knee. He didn’t see Nell nudge aside the pile of flowers at her feet. She’d been waiting to show them to him, but now she pushed them out of sight. Worst of all, he didn’t see how the moment after she greeted him, Susan’s face had glazed over again until she sat like a statue in the chair, moving only when she winced and jerked her head as if trying to shake something loose.
“You won’t believe what we did today,” he said. “Tur Kaysh said he’s been waiting for a student like me. We barely stay inside anymore. He takes me out to the gardens, to show me things. He says before the blight came — that’s what he calls the Genius — isn’t that a perfect word for him? Before the blight came, the world was a lot healthier all around. He said people barely even got sick back then, and neither did plants or animals. And if they did, well, the scholars back then could heal them — that’s how good they were.”
Nell wanted to break in, and she had the urge to say something cutting. But there was nothing to say. She wished the old man had been waiting for her.
But Max eventually became aware that none of them were saying anything. He looked around, frowning.
“What’s the matter?”
Jean slapped her Barbie against her knee, twice, three times.
“You’ve been gone almost a week,” she said. “I thought you were coming to take us home.”
Max colored. “I’m sorry, Jean, it’s just — there’s so much to learn. We work late, just the two of us. And I am working on getting us home. It takes a lot to make a window, you know?”
Kate brightened. “So you’ve asked him about it?”
“Well, not exactly, no —”
“Not exactly!” All of Nell’s confused resentment shot like an arrow to that point. He hadn’t asked about the window! What did he think he was doing there, anyway?
“What are you waiting for?” she shouted. “You think we like sitting around here? Look what it’s doing to Susan! You’re the one who said they knew things in this place. Well, do they or don’t they?”
Even Susan looked up at that. Max glanced at both of them, abashed.
“It’s not exactly the way you’re thinking. Listen, I know it isn’t easy for you guys to wait, but the window — there’s nothing like that here. Tur Kaysh talks all the time about what I’m here to do. What do you think he’d say if I asked him how to leave?”
Nell glared at him. “Why don’t you ask him and find out?”
But Max only shook his head. “It’s not like that. I will. I mean — I’m going to figure it out, but I’ve got to learn more, don’t you see? There’s so much more here than we knew! And he treats me like his own son! Don’t you see I won’t learn anything if he thinks I’m crazy? Or just ready to run off the minute I get the chance?”
He stopped then, aware, maybe, of the way they were all looking at him. He thought they didn’t understand. But Nell knew that feeling of wanting something terribly, wanting it more than you’d ever wanted anything before.
She understood it, but seeing it in Max now, this way, only made her angrier. And Max saw that anger, and Susan’s silence, and Kate’s disappointment and Jean’s hurt, and he flushed.
“You don’t understand,” he said again. “Today he showed me this poem that —”
But Nell had heard enough.
“Do you think we care?” she snapped. “Because we don’t, Max. We care about one thing: getting out of here. So are you going to help us or not?”
Max’s face was deep red now, and his neck was, too.
“You don’t get it at all,” he said. “Susan, tell her!”
But Susan said nothing. Max shook his head and went to the door. Jean jumped off the bed and ran after him.
“Max!” she said. “I care about poems!”
He
