A Hole in Juan (10 page)

caution: wet floor.

Typical Havermeyer way of handling a problem, albeit abnormally terse for him, but need I say such signs were not a great help? Only luck and teenage agility had saved the students’ bodies to date.

I had time for two necessary preclass stops, and the first person I wanted to see wasn’t hard to find. Ms. Liddy Moffatt, the school custodian, would have found my grade book if it had spent any time overnight anywhere in the school.

“Yes, ma’am!” she said. “How can I help you today? You the one left the perfectly usable ballpoint in your room? I think that was all we found, oh, except for some notes. Did you know that somebody named Annabel is hopelessly in love with Chuck?”

Liddy, the world’s number one recycler, was not above studying the scraps and detritus she collected.

“I—no. I didn’t know, and I wish them well, but that pen wasn’t—”

“Didn’t think it would be you. You’re a good conservationist.

People like you aren’t the ones messing this planet up. But I did find something—a poem—on your floor and I know your kids did that poetry show.” She reached into one of the dozen pockets 75

A HOLE IN JUAN

on the oversized apron she wore. “Here it is! Don’t want one of your young poets all worried about losing his homework.”

I glanced at the sheet she handed me. It had no name or section on it. I looked at the poem:

Dim candles burn

Incense on the air

Evening has come

Far in the mist

Against all fear—

I stopped reading. I didn’t remember it from class, and I was not sad about that. It felt like precisely the sort of overly precious and meaningless mood piece that my students had feared all poetry was. I glanced further, and it looked just as bad:
Greatness arose

Limited nowhere

Intent fulfilled

Armor and Shield

Resist the night

I wondered whose work it was as I put it into my backpack.

“Thanks,” I said, “but I had a question about my roll book. I must have misplaced it.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“I was wondering if you saw it anywhere. You’re so thorough, you and your crew . . .” But of course, had she found it, she’d have galloped in with her trophy the way she had with the wretched poem.

She shook her head and said only, “Nope. Would have found it, too, if it was here.”

Nothing left, then, but to move on. I headed across the hall to Juan Reyes’s closed classroom door wondering whether I should tell him about his car before or after I asked for clarifica-GILLIAN ROBERTS

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tion of my “troubles.” I could see advantages and disadvantages to both placements.

Again, students milled about, exchanging gossip, awaiting the bell. Heaven forbid they should actually, willingly enter a classroom before it was compulsory. I made my way around them, greeting some, eavesdropping when I could, trying not to react to the lovesick tenth grade couple staring into each others’

faces with stunned and daft-looking adulation, and not to inter-rogate Seth, who stood in the middle of the crowd in his raingear, the hood still up.

I had to convince Juan Reyes that I understood his reserve, his need to preserve confidences, not to confuse opinion with fact—but despite all that, I needed to know at least this portion of what was going on in my life, because it could be important.

It might even help me find my missing roll book.

“Excuse me,” I said to the clump of students near Reyes’s closed door, a clump that included the usual suspects: Wilson, Susan, Erik, Nita, and Allie. Slowly, they acknowledged me and moved back, still talking to one another. I put my hand on the doorknob, mentally rehearsing how I would circumvent his scru-ples and get to the truth. Why did he so intimidate me that I was searching for my words?

The door was locked. I couldn’t blame him. I seldom locked mine, since there was nothing much worth taking, but he had every reason to lock up.

However, did that apply when he was inside? Light came from below the door, and I knew his car was outside. Was he hiding from us?

The question shredded under the impact of a sound so all-enveloping my brain rattled and I felt the detonation in my fillings.

Screams filled every bit of airspace the boom had left. Everyone pushed at once, trying to move to wherever they were not, shoving us all near to riot, to trampling and stampeding.

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A HOLE IN JUAN

“Don’t panic!” I shouted to them—and myself. Enough people near me heard and a small center calmed.

What had happened? My mind refused to comprehend it, but my mouth apparently knew what to do. “Move quietly toward the stairs,” I shouted, pushing through the mass of bodies, dividing them up. “Front and back. This part to the back.

You”—I waved—“the front.”

They had to get away—anywhere away—for fear it, whatever it had been, would happen again.

“Did the furnace explode?” The terrified-looking questioner was Moira deLong, the Romance languages teacher, her voice piercingly high and trembling.

But she at least remembered language. Explode. That was the word for that sound.

“I don’t think so—I think—in there—” I pointed at the closed chemistry lab. I turned to the two students nearest to me.

“Find Ms. Moffatt. She has keys to all the rooms.” I turned to a third student. “Go to the office and tell them there’s been an explosion in the chemistry lab, and Mr. Reyes is in there.”

“I’ll call nine one one. I’ve got a cell,” the student said, and only then did I remember that so did I.

I reached for it, but the screams that had died down resumed and then stopped, as if all breath had been inhaled as the chemistry room door opened, and Juan Angel Reyes stood there, one hand on the knob, so much blood pouring from his face I couldn’t tell what was injured. He put his other hand up to his chest, looked as if he might speak, then his eyes rolled up and slowly, slowly, mouth still open in a silent plea, he fell, knees crumpling, the rest of him toppling straight forward to the floor.

Eight

Bedlam. Sobs. Girls in tears, boys backing up, away, silently expressing horror.

And blind, rote action, clearing away the wave of students who pushed toward the lab, stemming the tide so that it came no closer to Juan Reyes, the room, and possibly more explosions, and away from each other to clear a path for the paramedics.

All around me, sobbing, and when I took a swift look, I was surprised to see Allie, Susan, and Nita among the distraught.

The paramedics scooped Reyes up, did a quick scan of the lab, while the accompanying police asked if anyone knew anything.

“Chemistry labs,” one said wearily. “Every single year one goes up. But it’s not usually the teacher who gets hurt.” They 79

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asked more questions and, one by one, the students shook their heads. Nobody knew much beyond what we’d all felt, heard, and seen.

“He just got there,” one young man said. I didn’t know him, but he looked ashen and close to being sick. “He
just
walked in. I know because I was leaning on his door. He asked me to move. I could have . . . if I hadn’t moved . . . I could have . . .” He put his hand over his mouth and rushed off.

“The door was closed and locked,” I said when it was my turn. “People out here couldn’t see anything.”

“Cigarette filter in the sink. He smoke?” the officer asked me.

I nodded, remembering those morning whiffs.

“Well,” the officer said, shaking his head. “My chemistry teacher would have flunked him. Stupid to light up in a lab.”

But only if something gaseous was in the air, I thought. And wouldn’t we have smelled it? Wouldn’t there be a big fire?

The police officer made note of my questions, and then agreed that we both wished we’d been more attentive chemistry students.

Only after they had removed Reyes, taken photographs, and tried to find out whatever they could, which was almost nothing, and only when the gurney was leaving the building, did Maurice Havermeyer emerge.

“What is it?” he asked, as if any of us had an answer. He looked irritated, his morning routine disrupted. Hardly an appropriate response.

He knew as much as any of us did. He’d spoken to the paramedics and police officers. Why question us? “Why aren’t these students in class?” he demanded.

I could only gape. “There was a . . . The explosion! Mr. Reyes was seriously hurt—his face—the paramedics—you saw—”

“Students are supposed to be in the auditorium or lunchroom before class on rainy days.”

“I know, but they weren’t.”

“Students need consistency, order, and routine.” Havermeyer GILLIAN ROBERTS

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clapped his hands twice. “Students,” he said in a fake sing-song nobody could hear. “Students!”

“Maybe we could ring the bell?”

“It has already rung,” he said, frowning.

I hadn’t heard it over the decibel level. “Again, then?”

He frowned and pursed his lips. “It’s on an automatic . . .”

He looked around, squinted. “What happened, precisely?”

“Something exploded. In there.” I nodded toward the open chemistry lab which now seemed peaceful enough. If there had been a fire, it had been put out.

All around us, students who’d been mute with the police were now free with supposed information.

“Accident.”

“I heard he smoked.”

“He did! I saw—one day right after school, in there.”

“Probably lit a cigarette and
boom
!”

“Probably experimenting with gunpowder. Or a bomb!”

“The door was locked,” I told the headmaster, “so nobody could get in quickly right after it—”

“Locked?”
he shouted. “At this hour?”

Trust him to fixate on the least significant aspect. Judging by Havermeyer’s expression, there was a rule that said you were not to lock yourself in your classroom prior to having something explode on you.

I continued. “Then Mr. Reyes opened the door, covered in blood, and collapsed.”

The voices around us continued telling more than I hoped Havermeyer was hearing.

“I heard Mr. Reyes and that girl from art upstairs . . .”

“His head was blown off, did you see?”

“I heard they—like three times a week in the morning—did she say the door was locked?”

“I heard it was a suicide pact, like Romeo and Juliet.”

“Romeo and Juliet took poison!”

“Not both!”

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A HOLE IN JUAN

“Okay, but they didn’t blow each other up!”

“That was then. This is now. He’s secretly married and she—”

“Besides, where is she? You made that up!”

Words reached me in idea fragments and layers, speculation, gossip, and illogical “facts” about what had just happened. But

“where is she” registered clearly.

The students were still standing back from the door, so the headmaster and I seemed to be on a small island, surrounded by agitated natives.

“Did the police say what caused the explosion?” he asked me.

Why hadn’t he asked them? “They didn’t say to me. One did say it seemed accidental, which I’d assume, too.” I shrugged.

“Horrible, but these things happen in chemistry labs.”

“Not in my school,” he said emphatically. I remembered at least two other explosions, though nobody had been hurt in them.

“Is he going to
die
?” a sobbing tenth grader asked the headmaster.

Havermeyer had no choice but to actually interact with a student. He turned his back to me, and blustered about probabilities and possibilities and waiting and seeing, and I was no longer the center of his attention.

I didn’t know if the paramedics or police searched the room, or the back room, the place Reyes thought nobody entered without his permission. They weren’t looking for a second person, after all, unless it was another casualty, who would be near to the explosion site. How thoroughly had they searched?

My mind leapfrogged across a dozen horrifying scenarios about what might be behind the half-open door.

“Students,” Havermeyer said, “we can but pray for Mr.

Reyes’s welfare, but in the interim, it’s time to return to your—”

Feeling guilty although I couldn’t see what rules I was breaking—there was no crime scene tape, no warnings, no posted signs—I ducked into the lab, glass crunching under my shoes. I stepped to the side, and twisted my ankle on what turned out to GILLIAN ROBERTS

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be Juan Reyes’s briefcase. It, too, was sprinkled with glass, as if he’d inadvertently flung it away when the explosion startled him.

I lifted it up and shook it to clean it off.

The abandoned, scuffed briefcase, its leather cut where I pulled out a particularly large shard, its insides scarred by yesterday’s acid attack, brought me close to tears. It was so unlike that fastidious man’s painstaking care of his possessions and appearance that it underlined the severity of what had happened.

Shards and fragments seemed everywhere; under my feet, and beside me, on the white counter next to a sink. I couldn’t see what had exploded or where it had been. I also saw dark stains I did not want to think about, and when I turned, I saw Tisha Banks, the student teacher. She huddled in the corner, her face down on her knees, trying to become invisible, and now she looked up with fear and shock on her tear-stained face.

“We weren’t doing
anything,
” she wailed as soon as she saw me. “And then boom! His head—his face! Blood all—” She seemed on the brink of losing all control. “I can’t . . . I don’t . . .

I didn’t do anything!”

I knelt beside her. Her raincoat, buttoned up to her neck, was bloodstained. She had socks on, no shoes, and I noticed flecks of blood on their white surfaces. “Nobody thinks you did.

Nobody even knows you’re in here. I was worried about you, about whether you were hurt.”

“If nobody knows I’m here, how did you?” she whispered.

Honesty seemed the only relief for the awkwardness of the situation. “Tisha, some people are apparently aware of your ro-mantic involvement with Mr. Reyes.”