The Bonaventure Adventures by Rachelle Delaney

Author:Rachelle Delaney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PRH Canada Young Readers
Published: 2017-05-01T16:00:00+00:00

Part 3

BÊTES NOIRES

FOR A TIME, it seemed like Seb’s fire breathing excuse was going to work. He used it tentatively at first, murmuring it to the juggling teacher when asked to demonstrate a three-ball cascade, and later to the aerials instructor, who assumed he’d be a natural on the silks.

“You’re a what?” The juggling teacher looked alarmed.

“Mon Dieu!” The aerials instructor grimaced outright.

“Yes.” Seb nodded ruefully. “My circus is pretty outdated. That’s why I’m here: to learn the ways of the modern circus.”

The juggling teacher shook his head in wonder. The aerials instructor shuddered.

“Take a seat, then,” both told him.

It was almost too easy.

He did, however, sneak off to the library one night to brush up on his fire breathing knowledge, just in case. And he found it was as he remembered. The gist of breathing fire was pretty simple: it required a fuel source, a flame and a disconcerting lack of fear.

Basically, the performer would take a swig of fuel, hold it in his mouth, then spray it over an open flame, which would make the flame burst into some striking shape, like a giant pillar or a ball of fire. So he wasn’t truly breathing fire, but just creating the illusion of it.

Unsurprisingly, there were untold ways the performer could muck things up. He might spray his fuel in the wrong direction, or with the wrong consistency (a fine mist was best). The flame might balloon out of control or blow back toward him. And, of course, he could accidentally swallow the fuel, which would make him very sick, if not kill him outright.

When you broke it down, Seb concluded, fire breathing was full-on bonkers.

But it made an effective excuse, and so he kept on using it. Sometimes he’d even embellish it a little with stories he remembered the Konstantinov fire breather telling—like how he’d once misjudged the direction of the wind and received a faceful of flames.

By the end of Seb’s first month at Bonaventure, telling this story had begun to feel almost normal.

The daily routine was feeling normal as well. From Monday through Friday, the fifteen first-year students were nearly always together. They ate breakfast elbow to elbow each morning, raced each other to the cafeteria at lunchtime and haggled over the couches in the student lounge, where many did their homework every evening.

And then on Friday afternoon, as soon as the last bell rang, they were gone, streaming out to the waiting cars, letting the front doors slam shut behind them. Sylvain would always leave Seb what remained of his weekly candy bag, which Seb would take up to the choir box to watch the Friday soiree, both for the acts and to see what the circophiles were wearing. Sometimes Frankie came too, if she wasn’t busy practicing her parkour moves in the gymnasium.

Seb, however, never set foot in the gym on weekends. For one thing, there was really no point in practicing his skills. But more important, he didn’t want Angélique Saint-Germain to see him.

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