10. The Right Answers

When the bell finally rang and she could escape Mr Hilbert's class, Zandra gave a long sigh of relief. It was lunch time now, and she was desperate to find out what Dell was planning. But she only got halfway to the cafeteria before an unwelcome memory made her heart sink again. She cursed the government's three languages policy under her breath, although she knew it wasn't really to blame. She knew that it made sense; the Internet brought people from all over the world into contact with each other, and just about any job that involved dealing with customer emails would hire people based on how many languages they were fluent in. And she knew that if she hadn't been forced to take up Tlingit this year, she would still have had another class after the lunch break.

That wasn't the point, though. The point was that Miss K was very strict about students completing their vocabulary worksheets on time, and Zandra took hours to complete them because she still couldn't remember which symbols went with which sounds. And after failing to maintain a regular sleep cycle last night, she still hadn't done the homework that was due in today.

"Hey!" Sabine raised a hand in greeting as they passed through the cafeteria doors. "Something eating you? I'm sure that hearing what Dell has in mind for your brother will cheer you up."

"That would be good," Zandra muttered. "But I fell asleep in the middle of homework last night. Got a worksheet still to do for K."

"Oh, wow. Ouch. Yeah, I got her for my Oʼodham class last year, they said it would be real easy because it's kind of similar to Navajo, but it really, _really_ isn't. And she was so strict, I heard she kicked one of the boys off the course for not handing in homework on time."

Zandra's hands clenched into fists at her sides. She could only feel her stress growing, even if she was pretty sure that particular story was apocryphal.

"Sorry!" Sabine said. "Look, there's Dell. We can chat while we're in line to get lunch. You got a packed lunch today? We can queue together anyway, right? A little chat, and you know that if you need to focus on your work, we'll do our best not to distract you once we've got food."

"No packed lunch today," Zandra said, giving a little sigh of relief. Jay had offered to prepare lunch for her again, and she'd refused sharply. That had made Dad curious, but he didn't say anything. He must have had some kind of guess about the reasons, though. Especially when Mum had just nodded and not said anything about gratitude or respect. Whether or not they had talked about what had happened the other day when Zandra wasn't around, she was sure that Dad knew just enough to believe her if she showed him the picture of what Jay had given her. In any case… it meant that she would have to stand in line for dinner, which she hadn't thought about when she hurried out that morning. But it also meant that she could talk to her friends briefly. And, like Sabine had said, she could go to a table by herself once she had food, and join the others when or if she had wrapped up the dreaded homework.

"Hey guys," Dell said, joining them a second later. "I got a table already, so no worries there."

"I'll have to eat alone," Zandra said, downcast again. "Homework. For K. But I'm getting nuggets for lunch today, that's my little treat. I need something to pick me up, so we can chat until we get to the counter."

"Sounds fair," Dell said, nodding. "So, have to condense a whole water-cooler moment into like, two minutes?"

"I was wondering what you're going to do to Jay," Sabine asked. "And something gives me the impression Zandra's no longer having second thoughts about it."

"I want him to understand how he's made me feel," Zandra said, and was surprised by how bitter her own voice sounded. She'd been telling herself that it didn't mean that much to her, and that she could just shrug it off if she really wanted to. But now she wasn't so sure, and somehow it felt good to admit that she needed help dealing with this particular problem. "Okay, that sounded all serious. I think maybe I can get over it, probably. But he needs to understand. And my besties got my back on this. What are you going to do?"

"I've got a way to get him to agree to be babied," Dell said with an enigmatic smile. "But it'll be easier if he's got a friend there. Sean's coming over for sure?"

"Probably," Sabine confirmed. "You know what boys are like for planning. Can never rely on them. But for _Party Harder_, well, it's one thing that'll surely get him out of bed over the late spring break."

"Right," Dell said. "I've been looking into a few options, but maybe the simple things are the best. I figure that once we're started, he'll have no problems agreeing to keep going if it thinks it'll avoid something more embarrassing. So we just need ways to make him feel like a little baby."

"Like dressing him up and making him suck a pacifier?" Sabine guessed.

"Feeding him baby formula?" Zandra suggested, with a wicked smile. Somehow that felt kind of like poetic justice. Kind of appropriate after what he had done recently.

"I'm sure he'll enjoy that," Dell said with a grin. "And don't worry, I promise I'll bring a couple of brands of formula for him to sample. They might have been at the back of the cupboard for a couple of months, but that stuff doesn't go off, does it? Anyway… I was thinking there's so many ways to get someone into a childish state of mind. But the one you hear about the most is… well… I don't know if you ever heard of it, but they say that if you put someone's hand in a bowl of warm water while they're sleeping, close to body temperature if you can–"

"Yeah, but that's a myth, isn't it?" Zandra said, only realising a second later that she was interrupting her friend. She thought back about the times she had heard that rumour in the past; stories of friends-of-friends who had put someone's hand in a bowl of water, only to see their friends wet the bed. It sounded completely unrealistic. "I mean, I heard about it before, it's the kind of thing kids try at a sleepover as some kind of uber-prank. But I never heard of it actually working."

"I don't know," Sabine said with a shrug. "But I'm pretty sure I can find out. There has to be actual research out there somewhere, some kind of report on the scientific basis of the prank. And I'm sure I can check it out if you give me a couple of days."

"Anyway," Dell said, "That's just one example. What do you think, babe? If you can make that jerk soak his pants like a little kid would that be a good start to revenge for you?"

Zandra gave a little laugh, thinking that it would be more appropriate than either of her friends could know. If she could threaten Jay with the same photos that he'd taken of her, it would mean that she was safe from his teasing for the foreseeable future. But she still couldn't believe that a prank like that would actually work. Nice to think about, but really they needed to–

"Excuse me!" The lady behind the cafeteria counter raised her voice slightly, just as Zandra felt Dell shaking her shoulder. She had drifted off into a world of her own for a second, and hadn't realised that the lady was talking to her.

"Sorry," she stammered. "Uhh… chicken nuggets please." She blushed slightly as she scanned her cafeteria card. It wasn't like her to be so unobservant. Jay's antics must have bothered her more than she thought.

She joked with her friends fot a couple of seconds more while they ordered their own meals. And then she was carrying a tray across to the land of losers; a barren space filled with tables that were more like the single desks seen in every period drama about an English boarding school. There was no space for two people to sit there; and barely enough space to get her dinner and her homework on the table at the same time. But it had the benefit that without groups of friends, she was partially separated from the cafeteria's pervasive background noise.

Settling onto the hard plastic seat, Zandra pulled out her Tlingit worksheets. The first few exercises involved listening to audio clips of common phrases and identifying the words or responding appropriately. She scribbled the translations quickly, the pronunciation cues coming back more easily now. After each one she finished, she reached out to take one of the crispy nuggets from her plate. They were quite pepery today, just the way she liked them, and she took that as a good omen. She didn't take any of the salad yet, or touch the mashed potato with green bits in that the cafeteria seemed to provide with almost everything. Buying her favourite nuggets might be a little indulgent, but at least she could tell herself that it was practical as well: a lunch that she could easily eat with one hand while she was doing her homework.

Her confidence wavered on the next section: a worksheet of Tlingit pictographs with blank spaces to write the words corresponding to each. Zandra squinted at the tiny parallel lines, struggling to recall what words they represented, and then struggling again to remember the Cyrilic letters to represent those sounds. She vaguely remembered that six months ago, the teacher had casually mentioned that some people wrote the language using regular letters; and she wished that she could have the same option.

"Let's see..," she muttered around a mouthful of crispy nugget. "The little box is...house? No, person. And the three wavy lines are...sun? No wait, that's not right..."

She sighed, rubbing her temples where a tension headache was brewing. At this rate she'd be stuck puzzling over the cryptic symbols right up until the bell rang.

As Zandra absently dunked a nugget in her barbecue mustard sauce, her thoughts drifted back to Dell's mention of the hand-in-warm-water prank. She frowned, nibbling a fry. It did seem far fetched that simply soaking someone's hand could make them wet the bed. But if it didn't work, why would she have heard about it so many times?

Even if it was effective, surely he would know that they were pulling a prank on him. She could imagine moving a bowl of water into the right place if Jay's hand was within reach, but she couldn't imagine doing it without spilling a little water. And she certainly didn't think she would be able to towel his hand dry and take the bowl away again without waking him. That seemed completely infeasible. So… he'd wake up with not just his sheets wet, but a hand that was dangling out of the bed and also wet. She tried to imagine waking up in that situation, and she didn't think it would be possible to think about anything but the well-known kids' prank. And then–

She looked up from her worksheet, eyes wide. The images were crowding in behind her eyes now. A small damp patch on the floor, which she assumed must have managed to drip from the side of her bed where the indentation made by her body on the mattress reached the edge. Her hand hanging down, trailing right in that wet patch so that it was the first sensation to wake her. And a flash of imagery from a dream; walking down a school corridor with a wet hand, and feeling an inexplicable sense of relief as she heard the sound of rain gushing down the side of the building.

"The jerk!" she growled, loud enough to raise a few heads from the other students eating in the loser zone. She didn't want to believe it, but it was too much of a coincidence not to be true. It explained everything.

She tried to get back to her homework, but the thoughts were just buzzing around in her head now, and wouldn't let up. She remembered waking up to see Jay taking a photo of her lying on wet sheets. She had been outraged, and also anxious about what he might use those pictures for now that he had discovered her secret. She had been panicking too hard to ask herself the more fundamental question of why he was in her room in the first place. She had the attic room; there was no way he could have been walking past and seen her predicament from outside. When she was younger, maybe, but not since she had moved up there. And she hadn't thought about it until something else set her mind on the right track.

Rain! One word from her musings jumped out at her. The parallel lines pictogram had to be rain. She wasn't sure, but she at least knew the word for that. Héen. She wrote Жи́ӊ into the box, and hoped that it was close enough.

But she still couldn't stop thinking about the way Jay had treated her. Since she was fourteen, the bedwetting had mostly stopped. It just happened every so often, once or twice a year. She'd thought she could see a kind of pattern about being stressed. And she'd certainly been stressed in the last couple of months, but it didn't feel like anything more than normal. And the other common factor was that Jay was always around. In the years he'd been at college, she couldn't think of a single wet morning that hadn't involved a visiting Jay laughing at her misfortune.

The more Zandra turned it over in her mind, the more plausible it seemed. Jay was always trying to outdo anyone else's pranks, and something over the top like this would just keep on going until he was stopped. More than revenge, she needed to know if it was true.

She might have finished her homework just in time, but there were other things on Zandra's mind for the rest of the day.