The Dreadful Future of Blossom Culp (3 page)

Her person, which I glimpsed through the steam and soapsuds, was pink and dimpled all over. I could only hope this bathing business wouldn’t continue on into cold weather, which is not good for your health.

From Girls’ Gym we went daily to the study of history. It was taught by a new teacher, name of Mr. Ambrose Lacy. Many of the sillier girls had crushes on him. Because Letty Shambaugh sat across the aisle from me, I happened to notice she’d written Mr. Lacy’s name on her notebook cover, encircled it with a heart, and lettered in the following poem:

Sickening though this was, Mr. Lacy took it in his stride, seeming to have a long history of being admired. He was a handsome man and knew it, with regular features and a cleft in his chin. His hair was yellow and wavy, and all his neckties and pocket handkerchiefs matched. As high school teachers go, he was about average, but he struck so many vain poses that I personally thought he’d have done better on the stage.

He was fond of the sound of his own voice. One time early in the semester he clasped his hands in the small of his back and proclaimed: “Rome is dead, and the once-great British Empire is on its knees. But Bluff City is in her prime! Where else on earth do the tracks of the Wabash Railroad and the Illinois Central cross, creating prosperity and a top-notch daily wage for those willing to work?

“Boys and girls, we had better search the history of Bluff City to learn why we’re sitting so pretty. What is history but mankind’s record where we look for guidance? We search the past for wisdom because the future is the Great Unknown!”

“I’m not so sure about that,” I said, speaking out before I thought.

Mr. Lacy looked down at me, startled. He’d been as cranked up as Miss Fuller’s Victrola before my interruption. “You aren’t?”

“Well, no,” I said. “An aunt of mine foresaw the
future, so it wasn’t the Great Unknown to her. Here awhile back she had a vision of the San Francisco earthquake a week ahead of the actual event.”

Across the aisle Letty Shambaugh threw herself onto her desktop and began drumming it with her little fists. “Oh, no. Blossom’s going to tell more lies about her trashy family. I could just die. Somebody stop her.” Et cetera.

But Mr. Lacy paid her no heed. He hadn’t noticed me before, but now he did. “Did your aunt make this—ah—prophecy known?”

“Shoot, yes,” I explained. “She was living right there in San Francisco at the time, in a rooming house on Mission Street. She preached the earthquake’s coming from the street corners and notified all the newspapers.”

“I see,” said Mr. Lacy, staring at me like a cat had spoken.

“It didn’t do her any good, though, as it turned out.”

Letty moaned. “Oh, don’t let Blossom finish the story. Her endings are always simply awful. Somebody stuff something in her mouth.” Et cetera.

“Nobody likes hearing bad news,” I said, “so my aunt was widely ignored. She began to lose faith and to disbelieve her Powers, and that led to a regular tragedy.”

“It did?” said Mr. Lacy. The whole classroom had gone quiet except for Letty moaning.

I nodded. “My aunt failed to save herself. Her
vision foretold that the entire south end of the city would collapse into its own cellars. But on the night before the great quake she just went to bed like anybody else. Of course, when it struck at dawn and she was throwed across her room and felt the floor give under her, she was proved right.

“But it was too late to get out. Down she crashed and ended up pinned under half a house. Alive though she was, she’d have been left to rot except that one of her arms was poked through the wreckage and stretched exposed on the sidewalk.”

Mr. Lacy shuddered, but all the boys were attentive. Ahead of me, Alexander was listening. He wouldn’t turn around, but I saw how red his ears were getting.

“There my aunt was,” I said, “like a rat in a trap all day with only her hand and arm free out there on the public pavement.”

I dropped my voice as I came to the terrible part of this true story. “On that hand my aunt wore a diamond ring. Imagine her horror and dismay when some looter came along on the sidewalk outside and all but trod on her helpless hand. Then he looked down and saw it.

“This looter fellow hunkered down and took hold of her hand, which my aunt tried to jerk away. Then he saw it wasn’t a dismembered limb or lifeless. By then he’d noticed the diamond sparkling on one of her fingers.

“He took her hand in his rough grasp and commenced
to twist at her ring, determined to take it from her. But it was a tight fit and wouldn’t work loose.

“Well, sir, the looter rubbed my aunt’s finger raw, but he couldn’t pull that doggoned diamond ring over her knuckle. All this time she was screaming from under the house, unheeded.”

I fell silent then to give everybody time to picture this awful scene and to figure out what was coming next if they had any imagination.

“Then my ill-fated aunt knew the worst when her hand was raised to the looter’s stubbled face. She felt the hot wetness and sharp teeth when his mouth closed over her ring finger.”

The classroom was tomb-silent. Mr. Lacy, who is naturally pale, went paler. “You don’t mean,” he began, “that—”

“You bet your boots,” I said. “The damnable looter chewed my aunt’s finger off and bit the bone in two. Then he made away with her ring. The fire department didn’t dig her out till nightfall. They never located her diamond ring, though her finger was found in a gutter nearby just where die looter had spat it out.”

The room remained hushed except for the pounding sound of Maisie Markham’s feet as she galloped to the door with both her hands clamped over her mouth. Maisie doesn’t have the stomach for a good story.

I
SAT BACK PRETTY WELL SATISFIED
at this true story of my nine-fingered aunt.

Besides, it was history, being about the San Francisco earthquake, and this was history class. But across the aisle Letty was clutching her forehead. Up ahead Alexander sat slouched in his seat, his ears burning with embarrassment. A person knows when her efforts to contribute aren’t appreciated. I got no better from Mr. Lacy.

He swallowed heavily and said, “Blossom, since you’re responsible for this upset, you’d better skin on down to Miss Fuller’s locker room and see that Maisie is all right. The child may need to stretch out on the cot down there until she’s better.”

“I’ll need a pass,” I said, reminding him of one of the many rules around this place.

“Just go, Blossom,” he barked, so I went, making a dignified exit.

Any moment of freedom in a school day is worth its weight in gold, so I took my sweet time getting down to the locker room on my errand of mercy.
Since high school teachers don’t work a full day, they have such a thing as a free period. Miss Fuller was having hers when I finally sauntered into her office at one end of the lockers.

She was at her desk busy with paper work. But Maisie was nowhere in sight, and she’s hard to miss. When I explained that I’d been sent down on her behalf, Miss Fuller recounted how Maisie had lost her lunch on the way here but had recovered enough to be sent home.

“She has a weak stomach,” I remarked. “She stuffs her face with candy the livelong day—licorice and suchlike.”

“A very unhealthy habit,” Miss Fuller noted.

“And nasty,” I added.

As I had no place to be, I lingered at Miss Fuller’s desk, noticing that she was extra wan-looking today. Behind the horn-rimmed reading spectacles, her magnified eyes were more soulful than usual. Though she’d seemed intent upon her paper work, her mind was drifting. This is the sort of thing I can often tell about people, don’t ask me how.

I expected to be sent on my way, but Miss Fuller’s thoughts were off gathering wool. I thought of taking a peek at her gradebook, but who cares about a gym grade? Then my eyes fell upon a fatal document.

It was a note on the desk. There was a page of writing that ended with numerous
X
’s, representing kisses. I knew that handwriting even upside down.
My eyes popped, but I kept a poker face. It was a letter from Mr. Lacy.

Miss Fuller seemed to notice me again. “What class did Maisie get sick in?” When I told her, she only said, “Ah.” But her hand fluttered up to the back of her neck. “Ambrose—Mr. Lacy is quite a good teacher, I believe?”

So-so,
I nearly said, but I was on my guard now. “He is right good,” I remarked, “and many of the girls are sweet on him.”

“Indeed?” she said.

Naming no names, I quoted to her the poem Letty Shambaugh had written to Mr. Lacy on her notebook cover. I hoped to share a good laugh with Miss Fuller, but I was in for another surprise.

“‘No knife can cut our love in two,’” she echoed. “That is a real beautiful sentiment.”

It was about the worst corn-fed sentiment I’d ever run up against. But something was dawning on me fast. Love had come to Miss Fuller. She had it bad for Mr. Lacy, and being a gym teacher, she didn’t know a good poem from drivel.

She sighed and returned to her work, but she was watching me on the sly. Since I often do the same, I can tell when it’s being done to me. Miss Fuller’s hand skated over the papers on her desk, concealing Mr. Lacy’s note and picking up another page.

She stroked the artistic knot of hair that rode high above her bandeau. “Speaking of poetry,” she remarked, “how does this strike you?”

She read aloud in a mournful voice like the coo of a mating dove:

I like to have gagged. This poem was more sickening than Letty’s. Miss Fuller had no doubt cribbed it off a two-cent valentine.

“What do you think?” she asked, and waited for a reply.

My head whirled. Not only was Miss Fuller stuck on Mr. Lacy, but she was writing slop to him like a young girl. It shook my faith in grown-ups.

“I have heard worse,” I said cautiously, though I never had.

Miss Fuller sighed again and plucked at the tails of her bandeau. “Don’t be kind,” she sighed. “My poor words are unworthy. For me, Artistic Expression is limited to the dance. With poetry, I seem to strike out.”

She’d get no argument from me on that score.

“I don’t suppose you know any . . . suitable poetry, Blossom?”

I could see the woman was desperate, so I racked my brain. Then suitable poetry came to me. It was Miss Blankenship’s daily words from
Hamlet,
which had seeped into my head.

“How about this?” I said.

Miss Fuller blinked at me from behind her horn-rims. Her hand stole up to her long cheek. “That has a nice ring to it,” she said. “Did you write it?”

“No, but Shakespeare did,” I explained, “in
Hamlet,
Act Two.”

“Nevertheless,” she said, “it seems to hit the nail right on the head.” She pushed paper and an ink pen across the desk at me. “I’ll be much obliged if you’d just copy out those words. I would like them for . . . my scrapbook of Beautiful Thoughts.”

She grew shifty-eyed then as people will when they’re lying.

The bell rang just as I finished my copy work. I was ready to scoot, but Miss Fuller looked up in a dreamy way, saying, “You are a strange child, Blossom, and not a promising physical specimen. Still, you are somehow sympathetic.”

“Many thanks,” I told her, as these were the first halfway civil words I’d heard in high school. Then I cut out.

The schoolyard was emptying when I stepped out into the afternoon sunshine. There, at the foot of the steps, stubbing his toe in the earth, was Alexander Armsworth. Reminding myself how Miss Fuller could make a fool of herself over the male sex, I
meant to breeze past him in case he had no greeting for me. But he did.

“Well, Blossom, you’ve put your foot in it again with that tall tale about your so-called aunt getting her ring finger gnawed off.”

With so much on my mind, I’d nearly forgotten history class until this rude reminder. Alexander smoothed the front of his argyle sweater and expanded his chest to its limit.

“Now that we’re in high school,” he said, “we’re not kids who’ll swallow everything we’re told.”

“Is that a fact?” I retorted. His voice had changed some more over the summer, and he clearly liked the sound of it. I lit into him.

“Alexander, I’ve had it up to here with lectures. You’re sounding more like Letty Shambaugh every minute, and it’ll be a cold day in you-know-where when I need advice from either one of you.”

I felt my face heat up, though I’d meant to keep calm. A person can take only so much.

“I’m only speaking for your own good, Blossom. And of course, on behalf of the freshman class.” He pointed to his beanie. Being provoked, I scanned the ground for a rock big enough to lay across the side of his head. But there’s never one when you need it.

“Some friend you turned out to be, Alexander,” I said, more in sorrow than in anger. “Here I am just coming out of Miss Fuller’s locker room with some real interesting news I might be willing to share. But all you can do is carp and complain. I suppose you were hanging around just to put me in my place.”

Alexander cast his eyes to the sky. “Don’t flatter yourself, Blossom. I’m hanging around because we’re going to have a meeting of freshman class officers.”

“You and Letty are getting too thick to stir,” I remarked.

Alexander spoke then of what he called “the entire slate of officers.” Letty had appointed Harriet Hochhuth secretary, Ione Williams treasurer, and Tess and Bess Beasley sergeants at arms.

“Trust Letty to make officers out of her whole club,” I said. “And what business do you have to conduct anyhow?”

Alexander drew himself up importantly. “One item of business is the Halloween Festival, when each class holds a fund-raising event. Us officers have got to come up with a crackerjack event for Halloween night to show the entire school there are no flies on the freshman class.”