“I have to be getting home,” said Bod, hastily. “They’ll be worrying about me.”
“Of course,” said the Persson family, and “Lovely to meet you,” and “A very good evening to you, young man.” Amabella Persson and Portunia Persson glared at each other. Roderick Persson said, “If you’ll forgive me asking, but your guardian. He is well?”
“Silas? Yes, he’s fine.”
“Give him our regards. I’m afraid a small churchyard like this, well, we’re never going to meet an actual member of the Honour Guard. Still. It’s good to know that they’re there.”
“Good night,” said Bod, who had no idea what the man was talking about, but filed it away for later. “I’ll tell him.”
He picked up his bag of schoolbooks, and he walked home, taking comfort in the shadows.
Going to school with the living did not excuse Bod from his lessons with the dead. The nights were long, and sometimes Bod would apologize and crawl to bed exhausted before midnight. Mostly, he just kept going.
Mr. Pennyworth had little to complain of these days. Bod studied hard, and asked questions. Tonight Bod asked about Hauntings, getting more and more specific, which exasperated Mr. Pennyworth, who had never gone in for that sort of thing himself.
“How exactly do I make a cold spot in the air?” he asked, and “I think I’ve got Fear down, but how do I take it up all the way to Terror?” and Mr. Pennyworth sighed and hurrumphed and did his best to explain, and it was gone four in the morning before they were done.
Bod was tired at school the next day. The first class was History—a subject Bod mostly enjoyed, although he often had to resist the urge to say that it hadn’t happened like that, not according to people who had been there anyway—but this morning Bod was fighting to stay awake.
He was doing all he could do to concentrate on the lesson, so he was not paying attention to much else going on around him. He was thinking about King Charles the First, and about his parents, of Mr. and Mrs. Owens and of the other family, the one he could not remember, when there was a knock on the door. The class and Mr. Kirby all looked to see who was there (it was a year seven, who had been sent to borrow a textbook). And as they turned, Bod felt something stab in the back of his hand. He did not cry out. He just looked up.
Nick Farthing grinned down at him, a sharpened pencil in his fist. “I’m not afraid of you,” whispered Nick Farthing. Bod looked at the back of his hand. A small drop of blood welled up where the point of the pencil had punctured it.
Mo Quilling passed Bod in the corridor that afternoon, her eyes so wide he could see the whites all around them.
“You’re weird,” she said. “You don’t have any friends.”
“I didn’t come here for friends,” said Bod truthfully. “I came here to learn.”
Mo’s nose twitched. “Do you know how weird that is?” She asked. “Nobody comes to school to learn. I mean, you come because you have to.”
Bod shrugged.
“I’m not afraid of you,” she said. “Whatever trick you did yesterday. You didn’t scare me.”
“Okay,” said Bod, and he walked on down the corridor.
He wondered if he had made a mistake, getting involved. He had made a mis-step in judgment, that was for certain. Mo and Nick had begun to talk about him, probably the year sevens had as well. Other kids were looking at him, pointing him out to each other. He was becoming a presence, rather than an absence, and that made him uncomfortable. Silas had warned him to keep a low profile, told him to go through school partly Faded, but everything was changing.
He talked to his guardian that evening, told him the whole story. He was not expecting Silas’s reaction.
“I cannot believe,” said Silas, “that you could have been so…so stupid. Everything I told you about remaining just this side of invisibility. And now you’ve become the talk of the school?”
“Well, what did you want me to do?”
“Not this,” said Silas. “It’s not like the olden times. They can keep track of you, Bod. They can find you.” Silas’s unmoving exterior was like the hard crust of rock over molten lava. Bod knew how angry Silas was only because he knew Silas. He seemed to be fighting his anger, controlling it.
Bod swallowed.
“What should I do?” he said, simply.
“Don’t go back,” said Silas. “This school business was an experiment. Let us simply acknowledge that it was not a successful one.”
Bod said nothing. Then he said, “It’s not just the learning stuff. It’s the other stuff. Do you know how nice it is to be in a room filled with people and for all of them to be breathing?”
“It’s not something in which I’ve ever taken pleasure,” said Silas. “So. You don’t go back to school tomorrow.”
“I’m not running away. Not from Mo or Nick or school. I’d leave here first.”