Rapacia: The Second Circle of Heck (15 page)

24 · iN MARM’S WAY

MARLO CRINKLED IN
her plastic-coated chair. It was as if her butt were waged in a crackling, ever-shifting war of discomfort against her seat.

It doesn’t just smell like chicken soup
, she thought as she wrinkled her nose.
It smells like
years and years
of chicken soup …
every
chicken soup … chicken soup starring some long-extinct, prehistoric chicken, boiled along with mothballs
.

The class was Necroeconomics, a curriculum heavy on burglary and safecracking, with the promise of elective classes in blackmail and confidence games for advanced students. Normally this would have fascinated Marlo. But her teacher, Ms. Mandelbaum—an old, two-hundred-fifty-pounds-and-counting teacher who seemed intent on being referred to as “Marm”—sucked all the life out of her potentially interesting lessons. Perhaps it
was because she, like everything else in the room, was encased in the same stinky see-through rubber that was underneath Marlo’s disgruntled derriere.

It was as if Ms. Mandelbaum were a piece of exceptionally ugly dry cleaning, sealed inside of a tight, zippered garment bag for all eternity. Or a fatty cut of animated meat testing the strength of its cling wrap.

The rows of desks were surrounded by a jumble of decor more fitting for a lavish drawing room than a classroom. Perhaps Ms. Mandelbaum saw herself as the hostess of an elegant soiree rather than a daisy-pushing “deaducator” of young kleptos.

A large screen descended from the ceiling, announcing yet another taunting advertisement for the supreme spoils of Mallvana.

The girls trembled as one agitated body, twitching for silky, shiny, forbidden things kept out of reach.

“All right, you
farblondzhet
little women,” Ms. Mandelbaum said, unzipping the zipper covering her mouth as the lights flickered back on. “Maybe if I told you
something about myself, you’d stop looking at me like yesterday’s lox!”

Norm discreetly tossed a note on Marlo’s desk.

Marlo surreptitiously handed the note back to Norm.

“For over twenty years I oversaw the transport of nearly ten million dollars’ worth of stolen property” the teacher said, puffing out her swollen, plastic-wrapped cheeks like a shiny blowfish chomping chewing gum. “Back then, dat vuz a lot of
gelt
!”

The note returned to Marlo’s desk.

“The newspapers called me ‘the most successful fence in the history of New York,’ among other things,” the teacher snorted, her beady black eyes flickering with the career highlight reel that played in her head. “I vuz a felonious feminist zat helped many a young woman to get her criminal career off the ground … not that you girls care, staring at your
pupiks
!”

Marlo tossed the note back and began doodling in the margins of her binder paper, creating criminal equations with little
x’s
and diamonds.

The note was plopped quickly back onto her paper. She unfolded it.

Look up.

There was Ms. Mandelbaum, glowering down at Marlo beneath painted brows that held her high sloping forehead back like two pencil-greased dams. She slapped Marlo hard across the face. The Saran-Wrapped smack echoed through the sudden hush of the room.

“I’ve seen your type many times before,” the teacher seethed, fogging up the inside of her plastic coating. “You think you’re all that and a side of matzo.
But you’re bupkes … BUPKES
. Do you understand?”

Marlo rubbed her stinging cheek. Though it hurt, it helped her to focus on what needed to be done: proving everyone wrong, in a big, bad, bunny way.

“Yes,
Marm,”
Marlo said, staring her teacher dead in the eyes. “I’m bupkes. And you can
kiss
my
bup.”

A rap at the door stopped the teacher’s plastic palm from striking Marlo’s cheeky cheek a second time.

“Who is it?” the teacher barked.

The door creaked open. In rolled Poker Alice in her wheelchair. With just the lower part of her body encased in ribbons of white plaster, she resembled a
mummy on Casual Friday. Her neck brace restricting the movement of her head, she wheeled herself into Ms. Mandelbaum’s eye-line.

“Hello, Marm,” Poker Alice said. “I wanted to come by and personally introduce—”

Poker Alice spotted Marlo on the edge of her sight. She shifted her wheelchair with an angry jerk simply to glare hotly at the girl for a second, then jerked back to continue her conversation.

“—your new teacher’s aide.”

In behind Poker Alice walked a stocky, big-boned girl with eyes set a few millimeters too far apart and with the flared nostrils of a snorting bull. Like the other girls, she wore an oversized grandma sweatshirt, hers reading,
WRINKLED WAS
NOT
ONE OF THE THINGS I WANTED TO BE WHEN I GREW UP
.

There was something familiar and instantly dislikable about the girl, Marlo thought. By her furtive glances, it looked as if she recognized Marlo as well but was trying to hide the fact.

“Meet Amandi Firofnu,” Poker Alice said with a slight smirk.

The girl blew a strand of blond hair from her face and smiled. “Hello, girls,” Amandi said huskily.

Marlo shivered. The girls looked at each other, bewildered.

“Velcome to our little family,
bubeleh,”
Ms. Mandelbaum said as she gestured to a small desk next to hers.
The girls winced as Amandi’s bulk tested the tiny chair’s structural integrity.

Ms. Mandelbaum wrote Amandi’s name on the chalkboard, then waddled to her desk with crinkly squeaks.

“It’s nice to zee such a healthy young woman for a change. I’m sure with such a large, accommodating frame comes a large, accommodating mind, yes?”

“Oh yeah. Right,” Amandi replied, swallowing a tiny lump beneath the high, bunched collar of her sweatshirt. “I know a lot about”—she looked past the teacher’s shoulder at the chalkboard—“necroeconomics.”

The teacher stared at her expectantly.

“Um,” Amandi continued, “it’s like … regular economics, only …
necro
. Deader. Not alive at all.”

Ms. Mandelbaum nodded faintly. “So”—she hesitated—“you’re zaying that the underworld economy is dictated
by
and supported
through
a vast network of exchanges, most of vich occur beneath ze surface?”

Amandi bobbed her squarish head in agreement.
“Exactly
. Well said, Ms. Mandelbaum.”

“Call me
Marm.”
The teacher grinned. Appeased, Ms. Mandelbaum walked over to the chalkboard. “Finally, a
maidel
with some
saichel
between her ears,” she said while grabbing a stack of papers from her desk. “I was ze upper crust of the lower order,
bubeleh
, back on
ze Surface. I helped many young ladies like yourself off ze streets and into other people’s wallets—”

“It sounds like you were a veritable
Marm
Teresa,” Marlo said, her sarcasm level set dangerously high.

The teacher stormed angrily toward Marlo’s desk, like a hippo with hemorrhoids.

Amandi stood up suddenly. “Ms. Mandelbaum …
Marm,”
she interjected, “don’t let this little, um …
maidel
waste your time when you have so much knowledge to share with us.”

The steam went out of Ms. Mandelbaum’s kettle. She fidgeted, rustling in her plastic wrap like a restless slab of deli meat.

“Why don’t you tell us about being a”—Amandi looked at the blackboard—
“fence
. Isn’t that about hiding precious things like, say, jewels until the heat’s off? Where would one hide something of incredible value down here in Heck? Hypothetically of course.”

The teacher arched her penciled eyebrow at Amandi.

“Hypothetically,”
Ms. Mandelbaum continued with caution, “Sadia vould be a logical choice, because it vould be like breaking into a prison … and who in zere right mind would vant to break
into
a prison?”

Sadia
, Marlo scribbled in the margin of her notebook.
Perfect hiding place for diamonds
.

Ms. Mandelbaum hastily grabbed a stack of papers from her desk and tossed them to Amandi.

“But enough of hypotheticals,” she grumbled. “Pass these tests out and let us see exactly vat ve have to verk with here. And I vant to hear the sounds of happy pencils dancing all ‘Hava Nagila’ across test papers.”

As Amandi distributed the papers, she leaned over Marlo and winked knowingly. Why was this freakishly familiar teacher’s aide being nice to her? Marlo wondered as she looked down at her test paper.