A Plague Year (27 page)

Coach looked puzzled. “It didn’t what?”

“Whoosh. She said if it doesn’t whoosh when you open it, it wasn’t sealed right.”

The coach laughed. I think he wanted the rest of us to laugh, too, but we didn’t. “Well, we’re not selling whooshes here, honey. We’re selling strawberry preserves.”

Ben raised his hand. “I had the runs all day Saturday.”

Several people groaned, but his point was made.

A girl named Mia spoke up. “We gave some to my grandmother, and she had to go to the hospital.”

Coach sputtered, “Aw, come on now! That’s not fair. Maybe your grandmother was sick anyway. She’s an old lady, right? Old ladies get sick.”

“It happened right after she ate the strawberries.”

Ben followed up. “My dad says you have to give us our money back.”

Coach held up one hand and spread out his fingers. “Well, on that deal there, I can only tell you what Reg told me. He takes your money, and he uses it to pay for the fruit, the jars, and the pectin. So that money is gone.”

Ben was ready with a reply. “Then my dad says we can sue you.”

Coach shook his head. He answered tightly, “Well, I guess what your dad chooses to do within the United States legal system is up to him.”

Then he went back to the Dred Scott decision.

The door to my second-period classroom was closed. That was unusual, so I stopped and peeked through the window. Mr. Proctor was pushing desks toward the back of the room, one row at a time, like he was pushing a train of supermarket carts.

Arthur came up behind me and looked in; then Jenny did, too. Neither seemed surprised.

Jenny said, “It’s for play rehearsal. Mr. Proctor told us that we need more rehearsal. He’s going to use our class time for it today.”

Arthur added, “I guess we suck. I know I do.”

Jenny objected to that. “We do not!” She took a quick look left and right and then whispered excitedly, “Did you guys hear that a teacher got arrested?”

From the looks on our faces, we clearly hadn’t. It was Arthur who replied, “No way.”

“Yeah. Arrested in the parking lot, after school on Friday.”

“For what?”

“Selling drugs.” Jenny reconsidered that. “No, wait. It wasn’t selling. It was possession of drugs.”

I asked, “Who was it?”

“Mr. Byrnes, from the high school. He carpools with Mr. Proctor.”

“How’d they catch him?”

“One of his own students turned him in.”

Arthur said, “No way! A kid was a narc?”

“Sort of. See, the kid got busted himself, right outside the auditorium, for selling weed.” Jenny went on with total authority. “The kid made a deal with the police. If they would charge him with possession instead of selling, he’d give them the name of a teacher who had weed.”

Arthur nodded knowingly. “He traded up.” Seeing that I was confused, he explained. “They offered Jimmy Giles a deal like that. If he’d trade up, if he’d give the name of his dealer, they’d go easy on him. Jimmy wouldn’t do it, though. Jimmy’s no narc.”

Mr. Proctor, red-faced and panting, finally opened the door. He pointed me and the other nonactors to the back of the room. He pointed the actors—including Jenny, Arthur, Wendy, Ben, and Mikeszabo—to the front. They stood by the whiteboard, where they were soon joined by a half dozen high schoolers from the Drama Club, including Chris Collier.

Mr. Proctor told the nonactors in the back, “We’ll be having play practice today. You’re welcome to watch us, or you can do other work.” Most of the kids put their heads down and fell asleep.

I watched.

Mr. Proctor told the actors, “We’ll start with the blocking.”

Arthur commented, “That’s what we do in football, Mr. P. We start with the blocking.”

Arthur was clearly joking, but Mr. Proctor didn’t get it. “No, no, Arthur. Blocking in Drama Club means placing actors where they need to be onstage.”

Arthur rolled his eyes.

Mr. Proctor positioned the lead actors, Chris and Wendy, first. Chris had his Bible cheat sheet in hand; Wendy did not. She had memorized her part.

Wendy delivered her lines like a real actress, with emotion (and empathy). Chris, however, was awful. He may as well have been delivering his “Vote for me for Student Council” speech. He sure didn’t sound like the priest in a plague village four hundred years ago.

Anyway, after the priest and his wife had been blocked, Mr. Proctor took other actors by the elbow and positioned them. Then they read their lines.

Ben’s character had a long argument with Jenny’s character. Ben was actually pretty good, and Jenny was very moving as a doomed teenage girl.

Mr. Proctor took Arthur’s elbow and moved him in and out among the others. Arthur had a few lines, and they were pretty crazy, like a village idiot’s should be. I had to admit he wasn’t bad, either.

After class was over, I walked out with Arthur. I asked him, “So, do you mind playing an idiot?”

He looked at me quizzically. “I’ve done some hard things, cuz, but this ain’t one of them. All I have to do is show up, wander around, and read my lines. For that, Proctor gives me an A in English. Even if I don’t do anything else, which I probably won’t. I can just sit in front of him and sleep for the rest of the year. So tell me: Who’s the idiot?”

Arthur suddenly grabbed my elbow and turned me toward the wall. “Listen, I gotta tell you something. Something not good.” He checked around for eavesdroppers. “Jimmy Giles started using again.”

“Oh no!”

“Oh yeah.” Arthur shook his head, disappointed. “He bought himself some crack and smoked it up.”

“No!”

“Yeah. It’s what Catherine Lyle would call a ‘relapse.’ ”

“Right. Is he okay now? Has he stopped?”

“I don’t know. I doubt that
he
knows.”

I used my counseling-group experience to ask, “What was the trigger for him?”

“United flight ninety-three.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. He saw something on TV about how they’re identifying the dead people at the crash site. They’re finding all these little bits of human bodies, you know? Like bone fragments and teeth. They’re asking their families to bring in people’s combs, toothbrushes, and stuff for DNA samples. It flipped poor Jimmy out.”

“That is some creepy stuff.”

“He just got up from the TV, climbed into his Ranger, and took off. To his old dealer, I’m thinking. My mom heard the truck leaving and thought somebody was stealing it, or it was damn repo. Then she saw that Jimmy was gone. By the time she woke me up, it was too late.”

A large group of students swirled past us. Arthur lowered his voice. “Guess where he wound up?”

“Where?”

“The crash site in Somerset County, down those dark country lanes. He drove off that gravel road and broke the back axle of the truck. The county sheriff called us at five a.m. to come get him. As far as I know, the Ranger’s still out there, or they towed it to that big scrapyard.”

He finished by saying, “Don’t tell anybody.”

I assured him, “No. I won’t.”

When I showed up for the counseling group, I saw kids huddled in front of the conference room door. I joined them, leaning my face over Jenny’s shoulder to see what they were looking at. (I couldn’t help noticing how good her hair smelled.)

A note was taped to the door, written in a feminine cursive hand. It read:
Due to a recent family emergency, the group will have to be canceled this week
. The note was signed
Wendy Lyle
.

I whispered to Jenny, “What’s the family emergency?”

Jenny looked at Mrs. Cantwell’s office before answering, “Her father got busted.”

“What?”

“The state police raided a bunch of houses up at Blackwater University—frats mostly, but Dr. Lyle’s house, too.”

Arthur demanded to know, “Where do you hear all this stuff?”

Jenny’s hands fanned out to encompass the whole office. “Right here. Officer O’Dell was talking about it today.”

I asked her, “Did they find anything?”

“They did. They found weed at his house.”

Suddenly the stoners all started talking at once about police raids, and search warrants, and narcs. They really knew their stuff.

Mrs. Cantwell stepped out of her office, frowning at the level of noise coming from our group. She pointed at the door. “Jenny Weaver, what does that note say?”

Jenny read the note aloud to her. Mrs. Cantwell shook her head. “No. That’s not right. Mrs. Lyle called me an hour ago. She said they’re moving away, so the group is canceled permanently.”

Ben Gibbons’s face drained white. “Permanently! She can’t do that. I still have pica disorder.”

“You have what?”

“Pica disorder. I eat things that aren’t food. Compulsively.”
Mrs. Cantwell just stared at him. He added, “I eat chalk. I eat wood. I eat rocks.”

Mrs. Cantwell finally found her voice. “Please, that’s enough! You need to stop doing those things.”

Lilly turned the conversation back to the note. “But Mrs. Lyle can’t just end the group like this. Can she?”

Mrs. Cantwell said, “I’m afraid she can. Mrs. Lyle is a parent volunteer. This group was her idea. If she leaves, then it’s over.”

A ringing telephone pulled Mrs. Cantwell back into her office.

Arthur commented bitterly, “She said she was gonna talk to Mrs. Cantwell about the new shirts. Yeah, my ass.”

Mikeszabo pulled out a red marker. “Listen, that’s no problem. I will turn any T-shirt into an ‘I Hate Drugs’ shirt. Just bring it to me and I’ll do a custom-made design for you.”

Arthur nodded. “Righteous. That’ll do it. Everybody bring your shirts to Mike.”

After that, though, the group members started moving toward the exit, heads down, feet shuffling, looking totally defeated.

Jenny raised her voice. “Wait! We can’t just leave like this. We can’t just give up. We’re in a war here. Remember?”

She waited until she had everybody’s attention. “All right. My parents ran an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting every Monday night until a few months ago. People stopped showing up because, well, because alcohol is not the problem anymore. We could meet where the AA did and do our small sessions, just like here. We don’t need a leader.”

Lilly asked, “Where was the meeting?”

“The Hungarian church on Sunbury Street.”

“I know where that is.”

“Everybody does.”

Ben asked, “What will we talk about? Should we think of topics?”

Jenny replied solemnly, sincerely, “There’s only one topic now: the meth plague. We need to talk about that. Bring whoever wants to come. The people in our town are dying. We need to save as many of them as we can.”

When I told Mom about the meeting at the Hungarian church, she got all excited. She started talking about it like it was the homecoming dance. “I can drive you! And I’ll stay if they need adults. And I’ll get your father to donate some food.”

Lilly’s face contorted. “Geez, Mom. Do you want to hang up balloons, too? It’s a frigging drug-counseling group.”

“Lilly! Don’t talk like that.”

“Like what?”

Mom persisted, “That f-word. And there is nothing wrong with me volunteering to help your group.”

Lilly tried reason. “We can’t have a parent sitting in our group, listening to us talk about how messed up our parents are.”