The Secret of Zormna Clendar by Julie Steimle (great reads .TXT) 📖

against her bed, wiping the sweat off her forehead. It had been years the last time she had that dream. And it was the first dream she had had since she had arrived in the US. It had taken her several days to dream at all, let alone sleep well.

And how could she sleep? The fact that her great aunt had been found and killed haunted her thoughts.

Zormna rolled over and clutched her blankets in her arms, trying to go back to sleep. But the second she started to drift off, the pounding returned from the dream. Zormna jerked awake again, her heart thundering.

Someday they would find her.

She was too afraid to close her eyes again. Zormna peeked at the clock. Technically it was the next day, a couple hours until sunrise. At least she was adjusting to the time change now.

Getting up, she dressed. Then she flopped back onto the bed, fully clothed. Staring up at the shadowing ceiling, Zormna’s mind went over the day to come and what she had to do to survive it.

School. It was embarrassing.

Everything about it. The boys. The girls. The teachers. The classes.

Since day one, the boys stared without any self-restraint when she walked by. Some followed her, asking her for her email, cell phone number, and if she was on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. She had told them repeatedly she was not on-line, as they called it. But all they did was whine, “Why not?”

She would not tell them of course. They would not understand.

But really, being on any public forum such as the Internet was a bad idea. They could find her. Then all the Kevin’s work to protect her would be wasted. She had to remain unsearchable by electronic means. Registering her in the school under her real name had been a big mistake. As soon as she figured out how to read English, she vowed to break into the system and mess with the files, even if it mean sabotaging the entire Internet cloud.  

Thinking about sabotage, Zormna groaned over the petty ways the girls at school were reacting to her. They tried to sabotage her in PE by trying to dump red colored water on her pants—which she successfully escaped. Girls just got so catty when they felt threatened. But when everyone found out she could not read a word of English, all those catty girls acted like a grand celebration was in order.

Truthfully, not being able to read was so humiliating. Most of the teachers were kind about it, but Mr. Parker was flat out cruel. He frequently belittled her in front of all the other students and would not accept any of her translated math papers, even if she got all the answers correct.

“Eng-gleesh!” he frequently shouted in her face as if she were incredibly slow. “This is A-mer-ri-ca. Not leprechaun land!”

It took all her strength not to flatten him into the floor tile.

Just looking at the stacks of worksheets piled next to the tower of textbooks near her bedroom door, most half scribbled on in her native tongue with interpretive notes, she knew today would be just as bad.

Zormna sat up, picking the children’s reader from the rug. She had thrown it the other day after getting a headache from staring at the foreign letters. The book made absolutely no sense. She had managed to match some sounds to some letters but gave up completely when she ran into the vowels. Zormna added the book to the stack of texts on the cedar chest.

Her eye then caught on a folded paper Darren Asher had shoved into her book bag when she had left school the day before. She couldn’t read the words, of course. But a drawing of a flying saucer with his initials were on it.

Clenching her head, Zormna changed her mind. He was the worst part of school.

*

“Hi, Zormna!” Darren waved, striding on his long legs towards her like a velociraptor from that movie she had seen with Todd the night before.

Flinching, Zormna turned around to find another stairwell to take upstairs to her fourth hour class. There were four sets of stairs in the building, thankfully. But most took her out of her way and the trip often made her late. She passed Jennifer who smirked at her and watched the chase.

“Come on!” Darren lengthened his stride. He passed Jennifer with only a glance. “Why won’t you talk to me?”

“Because you are a weirdo,” someone called out.

“You’re a loser!” another shouted after him.

But Darren ignored those jibes like a master. If he wasn’t such an annoying pest, Zormna would have been in awe at his tenacity. It had been a week, and he had no luck cornering her with questions as he had that first day. And she could not go easy on him. Idiots had to learn the hard way.

In hasty stride, Zormna passed through the considerable crowd gathered around the enclosed sports display, hurrying to the north staircase. The display had been smashed up by some vandal that had broken into the school on Friday. The glass was broken and the pictures inside were doodled on. Not like she cared what was in it, but it made a big stink with Todd and his friends because it was the wrestling trophy case, and he was on the team. They had become state champs that year, he said. And now the entire wrestling team’s faces in their picture were blackened—especially that of the one who gained the title of state champ, Jeff Streigle, whose picture was now nothing more than a black blob. The trophies were in pieces. Everyone blamed Monroe High.

But the crowd made a perfect obstacle to hold off Darren.

Zormna fled up the stairs with Darren still trying to shove through the rubberneckers.

“Hey! Just one minute! That’s all I ask.”

“Quit it, loser,” another boy shouted after him. “She’s not interested.”

Zormna escaped onto the third floor, ran straight through the passing crowd to the other stairwell, and sprang into it before Darren could catch up.

Several watched her fly by, hastily pursued. Laughter followed her.

“Here comes Darren, the alien hunter!” someone shouted.

Skipping steps by twos to the fourth floor, Zormna rushed into the upper hallway then sprinted to Mrs. Ryant’s room. The moment she broke through the open doorway, Zormna ducked behind the nearest bookshelf. It obscured her enough from view. Barely any of her classmates were there. But those that had arrived already lifted their eyebrows at her.

So did Mrs. Ryant.

Her teacher cleared her throat. “Um. Excuse me, but what are you—?”

“Hiding,” Zormna said, and pulled back further.

Mrs. Ryant gazed dryly at her. She sighed, preparing a chastening remark. But then Darren stuck his head in and asked, “Is she here?”

Blinking at him, not quite looking to where Zormna was hiding (thankfully), the teacher asked, “Who?”

“Zormna,” he said with exasperation. “The Martian!”

Mrs. Ryant’s stare went dry. “What?”

Darren may have been an idiot, but he wasn’t stupid. Zormna could see him quickly reformulate his response.

“Sorry. I meant to say my neighbor. Her aunt was my next door neighbor.”

But Mrs. Ryant wasn’t going to play along. “Go to class Darren.”

He hung his shoulders. Defeat didn’t seem to be in his nature. A tactician, Zormna noticed however, he was. He glanced to her bookshelf, then to the teacher again before nodding and retreating out the doorway. Zormna waited a little longer in her hiding spot, just in case he came back to catch her coming out.

He didn’t. But then he wasn’t that childish. That fact made him more dangerous.

After more people came into the room, Zormna finally stepped out from her hiding spot and went to her seat. From there, she opened her book bag and took out her last assignment, unfolding it. Or more accurately, uncrumpled it.

Most of it remained undone.

Zormna stared at the markings on it; at the places where she vented her anger with the point of her pencil and perforated a particularly irritating reading exercise. She stared mostly at the blank spaces where she couldn’t even bother to leave a guess.

And the class hour began.

Announcements. The Pledge of Allegiance. The screechy intercom shared some mysterious school news that the teacher then explained afterward. Zormna didn’t really listen. She dragged her pencil long and slow over the page in a meandering doodle. Not an artistic masterpiece or anything. She was never skilled in that arena anyway. But she had no other use for either paper or pencil as she still could not finish the assignment to the proper specifications. And when the teacher gave the class permission to begin their individual assignments, Zormna flopped open the packet to the next page to hide the damage.

“Zormna, can I have a word with you?” Mrs. Ryant asked, gesturing to her back room office.

Zormna looked up, startled.

Quickly, she glanced over at the other students. They were, as usual, busy with their own assignments.

“Are they not going to miss you?” she said, hoping to delay a berating. Class was embarrassing enough. “I have never known a teacher that would leave their students unattended.”

Without even looking at the other students, Mrs. Ryant replied, “I think they’ll be fine.”

She led the way to the door covered in stickers. It was just beyond a set of shelves stuffed full of books.

Zormna shrugged and picked up her folder and textbook, breathing in then out. There was no way out of it. She might as well take the punishment.

She followed her teacher inside the room.

One side of the narrow office was crammed, from ceiling down to the middle of the floor, with even more books than in the classroom. Most of them were worn and ratty. Against the opposite wall stood a desk, which was heaped with papers in need of correction along with lesson plans. A chalkboard hung above it. Smeared with chalk dust in several colors, stubs of chalk littered the tray like multicolored after-dinner mints.

Mrs. Ryant gestured for Zormna to sit in the chair opposite the desk.

As Zormna sat, Mrs. Ryant stared down at the ground. Her expression was always pensive, but right now it was unusually so. Zormna recognized the look of someone seeking out the best stratagem to break through defenses. The woman glanced up at her intermittently, examining the look in Zormna’s eyes the same way Zormna was watching her. Mrs. Ryant smiled uneasily.

Zormna clenched her teeth, bracing for the attack.

“Zormna, why aren’t you doing the work I’ve given you?” Mrs. Ryant asked.

Shame washed over Zormna. She averted her eyes to the floor. “Mrs. Ryant, you know I cannot read.”

“But you aren’t even trying. I’ve seen how you handle the work sheets. You just look at it once and stuff it in your folder. The rest of the time you make paper airplanes…or mangle them.”

Scowling at the ground, Zormna grumbled, “I have been trying. I just cannot make any of your absurd language out. You know English is a foreign language to me. No matter how I try, I cannot read it.”

Mrs. Ryant’s stare went about as dry as she had when looking at Darren. Obviously she wasn’t buying any excuse at all. “Look. I’ve seen you sound out the letters. You are not entirely off, but you quit too easily.”

Zormna’s jaw dropped open. She quit too easily? 

“Your language can’t be that different from English,” Mrs. Ryant said.

Emitting an ironic laugh, Zormna shook her head.

Mrs. Ryant frowned. “You speak English fine. And I don’t see why you don’t even try to complete a paper.”

Shaking her head even more tersely, Zormna repressed the urge to scream. “No. You do not understand.”

“You’re right,” Mrs. Ryant interjected. “I don’t understand. And your excuses don’t make any sense.”

“I am not making any excuses!” Zormna stood up. “I cannot read your language, not even the letters. My language is not even the slightest bit like English! I CANNOT read English!”

Realizing that she had shouted, Zormna sat down and added, “Sir.”

The room echoed like a tomb, her voice hitting back faintly. Even the talking from the classroom beyond