The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories (18 page)

“Look what I got,” Johnny says, putting Agent Betsy in front of him like a prize he won at the carnival. God, is he trying to impress her? The woman is tied to a chair! “This my girlfriend Trinket, Mrs. Teach. In case you thought …”

It seems wise to act impressed. Agent Betsy says, “Is that your
hostage?
”

“Hell no. Better. This is my ticket to ride.”

Quick as
that
—maybe too quickly for a guy’s girlfriend, Trinket asks, “Ride where?”

When you’re seventeen sometimes your body takes you places your mind
isn’t ready to be. Johnny gives her a look of naked doubt, but covers quickly. “Like I’d tell you.”

In the chair, Jane Brill sits without moving. Agent Betsy notes that her ankles have begun to swell. Sometimes women can communicate without words. Trinket lowers her voice. “Has this lady, like, been to the bathroom?”

“Who gives a shit?”

“She’s no good to you if she croaks.” She hisses like something out of a scary movie. “Did you ever hear of
toxemia?
”

“Oh,” Johnny says. Smart, remember; in his time this kid has read everything.

“See how her ankles are puffing up?”

“Oh, shit.”

“You better let her go before she pops.”

Seven louts in black spandex and Army surplus boots converge, all cartridge belts and jangling chains. “Did we win yet?” “What took you?” “What did we get from them?” “You were going to bring pizza.” The biggest, the one with Sidekick written all over him, gives Johnny a bearish nudge. “Where’s the beer?”

“Fuck off, Dolph,” he says. “I’m bringing Trinket for the girls to take care of while I’m busy. He means:
surveill
. He knows the word but he knows not to say it. “But first. Trinket, these are the guys. Guys, Trinket.”

The gratifying rumble tells Trinket she is looking good.

“So, the Slaterettes are holed up … where?”

“Music room, what’s left of it. Susie’s putting up a tent.”

Dolph mutters, “You’re taking your chick to the
girls?
”

Johnny grins. “You got a problem with that?”

“You know how they are with new kids,” Dolph says.

Trinket gives him a sharp look. “I can take care of myself.”

He bends over Trinket with an amiable leer. “Just watch the fuck out for Mad Maggie.”

Then Johnny says something that absolutely terrifies her. “Fuck that shit, she’s mine. Mag knows I saw her first.”

Think fast, Trinket. “Like, you don’t want me to take Mrs. Teach here to the bathroom? If she pops on you, you’re screwed.”

Jane Brill says, “Especially if I pop right here.”

Trinket bores in. “You want dead baby all over the place?”

“Shut up.”

Jane’s voice is shaking but she says, “Think of the mess.”

Ever the cop, Trinket clinches it. “By me, that makes it Murder One.”

Jane says, “And they still fry killers in America.”

“I said, shut up.” Johnny plasters duct tape over Jane Brill’s mouth. Then he takes out his knife. Cool as she is, the teacher’s wife shrinks as the point touches her front. In a swift gesture, he cuts the tape that keeps her in her chair. “Go with them, Dolph.”

Dolph does. About the conversation between these women: there will be no conversation. Dolph lounges while Betsy helps the teacher’s wife stagger to the bathroom; he props the stall door open as she sits and without Trinket there to drop one strap of her tank top, creating a distraction, Johnny’s sidekick would have watched the pregnant lady peeing like a customer ogling a pole dancer in a topless bar. What he won’t see, no matter how carefully he watches, is the look of complicity, or that Trinket has slipped a razor blade into Jane Brill’s palm.

Deep in the bowels of the school’s heating system, Ace Freewalter has belted on the necessary equipment and snaked into a ventilating duct. Juvenile perps and Saddam wannabes, watch out. The Ace is on the move.

Days pass faster than they should. The prom is almost here! Adults in the city outside are in a righteous frenzy. No school has ever capped its prom with a human sacrifice, but there’s always a first.

The time whips by like nothing for the waiting city because we are more excited than we are scared—what a show!—and even faster for the excited kids, who are definitely on a roll, trying on outfits and dragging a lifetime supply of glits and Mylar and phosphorescent tubes up to the fifth floor, burning their favorites on CDs for the prom
DJ
and rehearsing some live music of their own; Johnny has the idea that they should dress Principal Wardlaw up as a Christmas tree and make him sing the kickoff number at the Tinsel Prom.

For the adults trapped inside High Rise High, chomping on graham crackers and Pepperidge Farms goldfish in Irving Wardlaw’s office or tossing on filthy wrestling mats in the gym while they wait to be rescued, however, the days and nights seem interminable.

Whereas Trinket is like a cat jittering on a fence. Time is whipping by too fast, in terms of Agent Betsy’s mission. In the last four days she’s tried a lot of things and accomplished zip. She had hoped to undermine the revolution or at the very least open the main doors downstairs for the swat team by this time, but when you’re in a building this size everything takes longer than you think.
Plus she’s heavily surveilled. For Agent Betsy, the clock is ticking and time is running out.

And Trinket? This is taking
forever
. She can hardly wait for the prom! When he isn’t with her, Johnny turns her over to the Slaterettes. She was worried about it going in, like this Mad Mag kid would mess her up, but it’s cool. This Mad Maggie everybody’s so afraid of turned out to be a fat, soft bully with a big voice. When Mag came down on this kid Evie for no reason, Trinket used her police training to deck the two-hundred-pound bitch and all the other Slaterettes clapped. Now she and Evie are best friends. Agent Betsy’s expertise has made Trinket something of a hero. To say nothing of her wardrobe sense. With Evie riding post, Trinket and the Slaterettes have raided closets on the dormitory floors for everything from dental mirrors to wing nuts and jewelry and hubcaps to pin onto costumes from the aborted Shakespeare thing. With Trinket as personal shopper, the Slaterettes scored big. Now they’re in the music room working on their Look.

“Don’t have much time,” Trinket says, suddenly confused. She looks up from the black gauze shift she is decorating, surprised. “It’s tomorrow night.”

Oh, man. Remember the mayor’s secret ultimatum? Agent Betsy has forgotten a lot of the things she had in mind but she hasn’t forgotten the threat the mayor made right before he patted her on the butt and sent her in. If she can’t bring the revolution down by the time they crown the prom queen, he’s going to send a plane in to nuke the place.

But tonight is the pep rally, and for a kid in high school, first things come first. It’s cool. After all, it’s a big world in here, and she still has twenty-four hours.

They like me
, Trinket thinks, doing makeup for the pep rally. Makeup: after her drab girlhood as a police officer’s orphan child, after rigorous police training to make up for it, hanging out with kids doing makeup is a trip.

And Johnny
, she thinks, even though she should not be thinking it, not with Harry Klein parting the razor wire down below and running his laser knife around a sealed opening that you don’t know about, not with Harry letting himself into the bottom of the exhaust shaft where he labors upward in spite of fumes and grit-filled smoke. She definitely should not be thinking,
and Johnny
, not with Harry tightening the crampons to climb a hundred stories straight up if he has to, just to get to her, but Agent Betsy is giddy with success and for a dead cop’s daughter who’s having her first real
girlhood
, this is distracting. If Trinket had a diary, her kid life in
HRH
has left her in such a state that she’d write,
Dear Diary
, she thinks, because she never had a diary, but instead of
writing it down or speaking aloud, she burns the words into the air:
They really like me. And Johnny. Johnny likes me.

In the streets of the city in crisis, mothers are on the march. They don’t know the mayor set the clock ticking, but they do know he has made threats. They think as one:
Not my kid.

Imagine being in a mothers’ march. Someone like you! Time’s gone by but you are still a mother and it twists in your gut like a knife.
My baby, my kid!

Your kids got too big for the nest, you thought, when they went off to school it was a relief. Then why do you find yourselves wandering into their empty rooms on bright autumn afternoons, remembering how cute they were when they were little and (yes, Marie!) satisfied with a little toy and now they are at risk so never mind what they do to you for breaking into their special place, you are out to bring them back. You don’t want them at home, really, but you do want them at home sort of, they used to be so
cute
, and you are determined to get them out of that school because no matter what he did to you, you love him, and you love her no matter what she said during the fight because whether or not you intended it, once you have become a mother you are a mother all your life; you have, etched into your consciousness, the legend of the mother’s heart. One more time: the thief cuts out his mother’s heart for a profit, he’s running to the highest bidder to collect the cash when he trips and falls in the dirt and drops the heart and the heart cries out,
are you hurt?

Mothers, do not hope to get into the building. Do not expect to change the outcome, you are only a mother and mothers can’t. Just go to the place and do what you always do. Coursing through the streets, you are joined by others occupying the same head, house cleaners and brain surgeons alike: intent not so much on their occupations or accomplishments or dreams or even maternal duties as on their job description, which is both name and self-fulfilling prophecy. There are thousands of you now.

In the refurbished auditorium. Johnny and Trinket are onstage for the pep rally, him in a red shirt with gazillion safety pins and slashes, her looking cool in a shift she made out of a rug she found.

“This is it, guys,” Johnny says but even he must notice that nobody’s listening. They are distracted by the threats in the sky outside—warnings from the mayor etched in the clouds in phosphorescent pink smoke.
GIVE UP
. The ultimatum hinted at.
TOMORROW BY MIDNIGHT
. The antique plane doing the writing has just put the final flourish on:
OR ELSE
.

There is, furthermore, the mysterious clanking coming from somewhere deep in the building, as though somebody’s running a forklift into the trash chute which, incidentally, is pretty much jammed right now since this Ace Freewalter guy, you know, the supe, disappeared without starting the incinerator and kids are throwing things in at such a rate that the stink is piling up. Still, these are his people and Johnny Slater is on a roll.

By this time he’s forgotten how this thing got started; he’s forgotten the promises he made to get his people going and he’s almost forgotten the Teach’s pregnant wife who is by this time sitting in her chair in the shop with a pool of water at her feet—don’t ask. What he’s thinking about now as he looks out over the assembly is that this is going to be the bitchinest prom ever, he’s here with an extremely sweet new woman, even though she still hasn’t let him fuck her it’s close, and nobody is never, ever gonna make him put on a stupid wig. He raises his hand for silence, which, forget it.

“Guys.”

Wait. No great moment gets launched without a slogan, but the uprising at High Rise High was spontaneous, no big moment he can point to, no main reason, just a thousand kids exploding all at once. Now Johnny’s people are milling and jabbering and he has to come up with some slogan or he’ll blow this deal. “Guys,” he says, but it’s getting so loud in here that nobody hears.

In the back of the auditorium kids have started throwing ninja blades at the velvet curtains onstage and one of them zips close, maybe too close to Johnny’s head. “Guys.”

Funny, it’s Mayor Patton that gets their attention. Amazing, his geeks have patched a remote into the school’s PA system and his voice is booming from every speaker.
GIVE UP OR WE NUKE YOU TO SAVE THE INSTALLATION
. They think it’s a bluff so only Agent Betsy knows it is true. The Mayor booms on, silencing the rally.
HAVE YOU CHILDREN EVER HEARD OF NERVE GAS
?

All it takes to move mountains is a really good threat. Kids start bumming right and left. Five minutes of this and they’ll be storming the secret staircase, swarming out like rats.

“Babe,” Johnny whispers into Trinket’s Day-Glo hair. “It’s you and me to the end.”

It’s odd, what happens to Agent Betsy then.
He loves me. Johnny
loves
me.

On the other hand, you can find ways to turn a really good threat, to make people mobilize. At Johnny Slater’s side, his girl Trinket starts shaking like a rocket at liftoff. Her thought balloon has a light bulb in it. She pulls a stick of something out of her front and with a wild grin, she lights it off. Johnny
flinches but it isn’t dynamite Trinket holds overhead like the Statue of Liberty’s torch; it’s a flare. “That’s just shit!” she cries, and in the front row Dolph mutters to the guys, “What did she just say?” and Fred yells, “I think she said
what the shit!
” This rocks so strong that every kid in the place takes it up, and as it passes through the room Agent Betsy’s angry outcry morphs into the kickass slogan to end all slogans. Pretty soon the place is rocking with it: “What the shit. What the shit!”