A Hole in Juan (20 page)

“What gives you that—”

Challenged, un-Serenity returned. “I simply know! They are dangerous and the chemistry—their chemistry—is bad. I want him out.”

“Who are these ‘they’ you keep mentioning?”

“That class. That group.”

“His friends.”

She shrugged.

“Then you should talk to the headmaster.” I tried not to sound as chilly—physically and emotionally—as I felt. “And the counselor. I can’t change anybody’s schedule.”

“And if he switches to your other section, he won’t have any additional difficulties.” It was a declaration, an instruction, not a question.

“I hope not.” And luckily, before she tried to make me promise her humiliating actions wouldn’t have any effect on her son’s behavior and grades, neither of which were good to begin with, the bell rang, saving us all.

I heard the din upstairs even before I was on the first tread. I forced myself to walk the steps at a normal pace, thinking only: Do not let that noise be coming from my room.

But, indeed, my room or the space right outside it was the noise’s epicenter. It was some relief to realize that while the students sounded agitated, they did not sound as if a catastrophe had taken place, and in fact, most of the talk was relatively hushed.

Nita and Allie were again in a huddle off to the side, across GILLIAN ROBERTS

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the hallway from their classmates, and judging by body language, once again disagreeing. This time, few words were exchanged, as if they both knew the other’s position and had reached an angry impasse. Nita stood her place, hands folded across her chest, half turned away from her friend, her expression stony.

Allie reverted to shaking her head slowly, then more quickly, then slowly again, as if she could not get beyond the gigantic

“No!” roiling inside her.

I am not arrogant—or insane—enough to interfere in the normal fluctuations of the student body’s interpersonal relationships. I see histrionic displays on a daily basis, but at this point, this ongoing dispute between the two girls warranted a question or two.

The worst that could happen would be that they’d unite against a common enemy—me—and be as happily close as they’d been the past two years. “What’s up?” I asked, keeping the question casual.

“Nothing. Why?” Allie’s voice was brittle as an icicle. “We’re
talking.
”

I felt a hand on my arm. “Miss Pepper,” Susan Blackburn said, “how is Mr. Reyes? Do you know any more about his condition?”

“That’s what we were talking about,” Allie said.

I didn’t bother to look at her or Nita. She was lying, and if Nita didn’t correct her, she was lying, too.

Nita said nothing.

I repeated what I’d been told. “He’s alive, but critical, and as far as I know, still unconscious. He’s had surgery and if he recovers, he’s going to need a great deal of cosmetic surgery because most of the glass hit his face, his lips, and eyes in particular.”

All three girls winced, as did everyone within earshot.

“He lost a lot of blood, too. He has, at best, a long haul ahead.”

I felt cruel, making the prognosis as painful and slow as it re-159

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ally was going to be. The unvarnished truth felt like a whip with which to punish them.

Which I supposed was my frustrated motive, because even though I couldn’t prove it, I believed that they—the sodium-stealing seniors—some or all of them, were involved in Juan Reyes’s disaster.

“Thank you.” Susan’s voice was tiny and defeated.

I turned back to the girls at war, and caught Allie giving Nita a look that chilled me through, it was so clearly a warning.

“Thank you,” Nita said to me, and turned and walked into my room, followed by Allie, both of them silent now.

It had been a useless nonconversation except for realizing that Nita was the weak link. All I needed now was an idea of what the chain was, so I’d know what to do with that information.

I entered the room to warning
shhhh!
s, a scramble to get to their chairs, and then, silence.

I thought the easiest road was to behave as if nothing exceptional was going on. Maybe that would make it so. “Today,” I said, “we’re moving ahead to the unit on critical thinking. You’ll be reading, discussing, and then writing on a variety of subjects, most of which are controversial, so there are no right or wrong answers. The point will be to formulate your position and express it in writing.”

I gave them a moment for the obligatory expressions of pained boredom, then switched gears. “But before we get to that,” I said, “I saw the notice about the Antigone Brigade. Anybody want to bring me up to speed on what that means?”

Allie’s expression changed to one of self-satisfaction. “It means we have values, beliefs, and we know our rights—everybody’s rights.”

“Great. But what’s the
brigade
part about?”

Now there were sideways glances, a silent mass checking in with one another. The decision had been made. Do not tell Pepper.

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“We’ve got ideas—but only in the planning stage,” Allie said.

I asked a few more questions and received a few more abstract responses about the Bill of Rights, freedom of speech, and democracy. The brigade was for those things.

“You can’t just let things happen,” Allie said. “You have to protest, to stand up for your rights—for everybody’s rights.”

A great sentiment, so why did Nita dart a look of pure an-guish at her supposed best friend?

I suddenly felt their silence grow deeper and more significant, and I knew it wasn’t anything I was doing. It was the hush that anticipates something, the same something, perhaps, that had caused the preclass buzzing.

Almost in unison, their glances shifted to the doorway, as well they might.

Wilson stood there in his T-shirt, holding a white-and-blue striped tailored shirt up to his face. Only one slitted and swollen eye was visible as he glanced at me before heading toward his seat.

“Wait—” I said, “you shouldn’t—you need—” I couldn’t help but think of his mother. Had we been standing outside the school talking about dangerous acquaintances while this was happening to her son? She’d said she was afraid for him. Her fears seemed justified.

The class still looked at the doorway, and I turned again and saw Seth, with a red-blue bruise covering his cheek and a bloody nose he was trying to stanch with an already saturated tissue.

“My God! Both of you—come here—you need the nurse, or a hospital. Who did this to you?” I admit I was babbling, helping nothing, covering the silence that grew ever more dense and frightening.

The bleeding boys and their classmates behaved as if their entry and appearance were completely normal, as if it was standard operating procedure to enter class leaking valuable bodily fluids.

Nobody had gasped in surprise. No one now whispered or commented. The room remained unnaturally still except for the 161

A HOLE IN JUAN

shuffle of the two boys’ steps and the snuffles from Seth’s battered nose.

I had to repeat “Come here!” three times until they turned at the same time—they looked choreographed—and moved toward me.

“Who did this to you?” I asked, sure some renegade group of toughs had decided our school was fair game. It was the big city, after all.

Wilson raised one shoulder a millimeter.

“You don’t know who they were?”

Three eyes—one of Wilson’s was so swollen shut it might as well not have existed—stared blankly at me. I checked the classroom for cues, but the seniors were into meaningful eye contact with one another, not with me.

I looked back at the bruised boys. “Then you were not attacked by invaders from Mars. What is going on? Why would you . . . No matter what disagreements, why . . . You guys play on the same teams, are friends!”

No. Maybe still on the same teams for sports, but no longer close. Seth had seemed separate from them—physically and emotionally—the past few days.

The poisonous glances about the exam. Was that it?

I cleared my throat. “Why would you—?”

“Don’t report it, please.” Wilson rasped out his words, as if his throat had been hurt as well. “We’ll be suspended.”

This was a particularly damning time in his life for that. If you needed to punch somebody out, a testosterone-based need I couldn’t fathom, best to not let it go until first semester of your senior year, when everything mattered too much.

With a bloody fight fresh on their minds, teachers and counselors writing recommendations were going to have questions and reservations. Plus, you couldn’t take exams or quizzes while suspended, and you were graded as if you’d failed whatever you’d missed, so the all-important semester’s grades would be lowered.

It surprised me to realize that I’d never had to cope with the GILLIAN ROBERTS

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aftermath of this kind of fight before. If there’d been a brawl, and surely there had, it had been spotted, and stopped by someone else, and necessary disciplinary action and medical attention had been taken care of before I knew about it. I had never been the first line of defense.

I therefore relied, possibly to my shame, on old movies I’d seen where the benign figure—always male—looks on the combatants sorrowfully, gives a brief moral talk, and then says, as I now did, “It’s time to shake hands and apologize.” That apparently was the manly thing to do, even while the men dripped blood onto the shaking hands.

Maybe fighting was a necessary male rite of passage. I’d have to ask Mackenzie. I knew he was strong and capable of doing physical harm, but I couldn’t envision him willingly doing so. I tried to imagine him young, skinny, hair dark brown with not a strand of gray, beating up a friend. I was glad to be unable to formulate the image.

But maybe I was simply behaving like the skittery women-folk in those same old movies.

Seth shook his head and Wilson, one beat later, did the same.

“I have nothing to apologize for,” Seth said. “I’m not to blame, and I’m not sorry, and I’m still angry.” As sore as his face must have felt, he pushed it forward in a classic position of belliger-ence. His lip was split; each syllable was fuzzed around the edges and must have been painful to utter, but he stood his ground.

“I’m. Not. Sorry,” he repeated, as if I’d challenged him.

“Well, I’m sure not,” Wilson rasped out.

“You need medical attention,” I said.

They shook their heads, both wincing as if it hurt to do so.

“S’nothing,” they said as one.

I walked them out into the hall and looked at them again. A black eye, a bloody nose, a bruised cheek, and who knew what else that I couldn’t easily see. Seth’s cheek looked raw, as if it had skimmed over cement.

They must have battled behind the school where nobody 163

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spotted them except the silent seniors who, I suspected, had watched the whole thing.

“What’s going on?” I asked in the lowest possible voice.

“Ask him.” Seth sounded sullen, foreign to me. But of late, everything about him was unlike my mental construct of him, so why not his tone as well.

“Wilson?” I asked.

Wilson continued to stare at the ground, shaking his head, as if he hadn’t an idea in the world what or why this had happened.

“Some things get broken.” Wilson looked at me with his one good eye. “They can’t get fixed.”

Seth glared.

“Nobody wants to fix them, either,” Wilson added.

I looked back into the now softly buzzing classroom, and finally understood that every member of the class except for me knew what had happened. They might even know why.

We weren’t a class. My role and relationship wasn’t what I’d thought. We had somehow become antagonists.

“A person needs to believe in something,” Wilson said, speaking to me more than he had ever chosen to before. “Like right and wrong.”

Seth made a choking noise. “How would you know?” His voice was muffled through the cloth held to his nose. “You’re the one afraid somebody—”

I caught Wilson’s fist in midswing and held on. “You have to—both of you—you have to stop this right now.”

When they finally and reluctantly agreed to see the nurse, I returned to the classroom, feeling as shaken and battered as the two combatants must have, and no closer to the truth of this thing that had fallen on the school and injured everything it touched.

Fifteen

It felt next to impossible, but when this most miserable day was over, and much as I wanted to crawl into bed with several layers of covers over my head, I had to switch gears instead and once again don my other virtual hat and pay attention to Berta Polley, the imaginary invalid.

Amanda Pepper, semi-private-eye.

First, still in my teacher and good citizen role, I phoned the police about the possibility the explosive substance was sodium.

I did not choose to share the information that bits of that substance had been missing from Juan Reyes’s room because I could not remember what he’d said was back in place and what wasn’t.

“No,” I said. “I don’t know who placed it there.”

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The official response was as patronizing and bored as I’d anticipated, but I’d done my civic duty.

I’d give Mrs. Polley two hours. I had
The Long Goodbye
on tape. I thought listening to a real down-these-mean-streets detective’s adventures would help pass the time and inspire me, but of course Philip Marlowe was never reduced to staring at a row house, watching nothing, and if he had been, someone would have come along and overturned his car, or taken a shot at him.

Not that I wished such events upon my own sleuth self, but there had to be a midground somewhere.

At least today, or tonight, was the last of the surveillance. The funds to pay us allowed only so many hours.

I settled in across the street from her house. Two hours of this, then the market, then dinner, then papers to mark, then . . .

I can’t say I felt overwhelmed by the prospects, but I definitely felt whelmed.

I called home, but nobody answered. Good. Pip was out exploring the city. I punched in the answering service numbers, and listened to my messages. I did this more readily than in the past, because as soon as I’d said “I do,” my mother found herself at a loss for words, and both the number of maternal messages and their annoyance potential had gone into serious decline.