A Hole in Juan (28 page)

“Please?”

“Okay.” Sighing for my benefit, she again read the lines, then looked up at me. “Was I supposed to see the glimmer of genius this time? You know I don’t know anything about poetry in the first place but . . . I still say it stinks.”

“Yes, of course, but the first letters of each line,” I said softly.

“Diefa—oh,” she said slowly. “But that must be a coincidence because what would be the point?
You
got the poem, right?”

“It was on the floor, under a desk. The cleaning woman is a fanatic about saving things. If for no other reason, she’d think we could write on the back of the page, use the paper.”

“So that means you don’t know when it fell on the floor, which class, if anybody besides the wretched poet saw it, or if it has anything whatsoever to do with your students or real life.”

She tossed the paper onto the coffee table and yawned.

“It does,” I said softly. “I’m sure it does.”

“Manda, you’re really overreacting. You look stressed out, you’ve had a rotten week—give it up. This is trash. Bad poetry and not worth a second glance.”

“It’s Mischief Night.”

“And what else is new?”

“Time to kill. That other poem about Mischief Night, about crime?”

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“It was nonsense, too. What are you doing?”

“Maybe they were left on purpose, but not for me—for a victim. For somebody they were tormenting.”

“I really wish you’d—”

“I have to go. I’ll be back—you’ll see. I’ll be back before you all finish your cocktails—but I have to go.”

She stood up, all six feet of screaming sheath. “You just got here, and here is where you’re supposed to be—we’re having a dinner party—and what on earth is wrong with you?”

“I’ll sound crazy but—”

“You already do.”

“I’ve been getting signals—”

“Please don’t say from little green men with antennae?”

“From kids. From poems like this. From random remarks. I think from kids who were too terrified to speak directly. A kid.”

Nita. I was sure she’d sent the messages, including the concise one that simply said friday. But why did she have to remain anonymous, afraid to speak to me even this afternoon? “I caught the signals, but I misread them.”

I was up by now, grabbing my jacket and nearing the door.

“And today I made it worse. I think a kid’s going to wind up being humiliated or hurt tonight because I meant well. He told me he was in a war, and I didn’t think it through. I think I sent him into an ambush. And if that’s so—or if he anticipates it—I don’t know what he’ll do in return.”

“Call the cops if you think something dangerous is going to happen!”

“I wouldn’t know what to tell them, and I don’t mean that level of danger. It’s at school, after all. Lots of people, but I’ve felt something was coming to a head. It’s so amorphous—look how I can’t convince you, so how could I convince cops?” I shook my head in frustration at the vagueness even I could hear. “I don’t know what I’d say.” It wouldn’t bring out the forces if I said futures were about to be destroyed.

“There are adults there, right?”

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I nodded.

She smiled, playing coy. The dress helped the act. “What could happen that’s worth missing dinner with great people?”

I could easily envision a brawl. Property damage. Havermeyer going ballistic. An arrest record. Futures upended and cur-dled.

I thought of Nita saying she was probably staying home tonight because she didn’t want to see the fruit of her labors.

Whatever was scheduled to happen had been planned. The quar-rels made sense if she’d refused to be a part of what was going on, or had once been a part, but then broke with the others as the war escalated.

I’d spent too much of the week looking for the villain of the piece, becoming convinced it was Seth, but I’d been duped. Juan Reyes had been duped.

Nothing rankled more than the idea that one—or several—

of my students had set me up, except the idea that it had worked.

“Wait till Mackenzie gets here. You can go there together, later. Meanwhile, eat something. Have another glass of wine, and then you can go. Maybe it’d be best if you let the kids work it out together. Whatever it is, in the end, they’ve got to handle it themselves.”

She stood there like a stone wall, a blind alley. I sighed and nodded, and she looked relieved.

“I’ll get us more wine,” she said and retreated into the kitchen. Luckily, the condo she’d inherited as a by-product of one of her parents’ many marriages and divorces was rambling and large, so that she was out of sight—and then, so was I.

We’d work it out later.

I had to do this. The worst scenario would be that I was completely wrong and I’d be humiliated. I’d already been there, so that prospect didn’t even rankle. But I had created a situation that I was now sure would be bad and I couldn’t shrug and ignore it, sit back and allow Seth’s, and possibly his antagonist’s future, turn dark.

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There were indeed other teachers there, but poor sniffly Carol had no inkling of what had been going on, and neither did Havermeyer—if he actually stayed in hearing distance—and Edie Friedman would be guarding her gym or looking for a parent to date. The hapless parents who were chaperoning would be oblivious as well. And even if I could send a warning, what would I say? I didn’t know what would happen, only that something would.

I walked double—triple time in the damp dark chill, wishing as always that Benjamin Franklin, who’d first thought of the good idea of daylight savings time, had thought it was good enough to be in effect all year long. Wasn’t winter dark enough without making it worse with the clock change? Wasn’t daylight always worth saving? I grumbled my way toward school which, luckily, was only a matter of a few blocks’ walk. It was so much easier to be angry with Franklin and the daylight wasting lobby, whoever they were, than with the mess at school. Still, it would help, would always help if everything had to be done in broad daylight.

For starters, there would be no Mischief Night.

I passed one knocked-over city trash can, one soaped-up dry cleaner’s window, and what looked to be a new splat of red paint on the side of a corner deli, but I didn’t see any mischief makers.

Still, I upped my pace even more, wished for better streetlights, and was relieved to turn the corner toward the school.

The Square was dark across from me, and silent, though I could see the ghostly outline of a tree that had been toilet-papered.

I also could hear music from the school. The sound system worked and the party was apparently in full swing. I was only steps away. I took a deep breath, squared my shoulders against what, I didn’t know—and heard footsteps, loud and fast, and gar-bled words, “It’s her!” from behind me.

I whirled around, expecting to see kids running from toilet-papering another tree but the masks were the first clue I was wrong. Unless they were headed for the school dance dressed as 227

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burglars, there was no reason for the black Zorro masks the trio of lummoxes wore. Halloween was tomorrow.

Before I could do or say anything, they grabbed me, each arm held in a vise grip, one of the attackers behind my back, hands on my shoulders.

I screamed as loudly as I could.

A hand was clapped over my mouth. “Chill!” a gravelly voice said from behind me. “We’re friends of Mitty’s!”

His words were slurred and he sounded drunk. I didn’t chill, and I couldn’t speak with that huge hand over my mouth, couldn’t say I didn’t know Mitty, wasn’t Mitty, didn’t care about Mitty—

and what kind of friends grab women in the street?

They laughed—all three. Different laughs, drunken but vastly amused laughs.

I struck out with my only free appendage—my leg—trying to kick sideways at one of them. Sideways kicks are rather pitiable.

“Whoa, whoa,” another equally drunk sounding voice said, and then he laughed. “Fierce, isn’t she?”

“C’mon, calm down. It’s Mischief Night and we’re the Mitt’s buds!”

Whoever they were, they were strong. I tried to move my lips, to get some distance from the hammy paw over my mouth to bite it, but I couldn’t, and nibbling his fingers wouldn’t help much.

“You don’t want him to think he’s in love with a bitch, do you?” one said as I struck out with my other leg which, alas, also didn’t have much room to move. “He never stops talkin’ about you, Madeleine—thinks the world of you! We know you’re still seein’ Drake, but you’re making a big mistake and we’re here to prove it.”

“ ’Cause it’s Mischief Night—and we’re makin’ mischief—

the good kind.”

They found that observation hysterical. If they weren’t still clamped on to me, they’d have doubled up and rolled around on GILLIAN ROBERTS

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the ground from the sound of it. As it was, I could feel their bodies shaking with laughter. I thought I might get drunk myself on the alcoholic fumes their laughter produced.

“Hey! Mitty and Maddy! It even sounds good together!”

I shook my head as much as I could. I wasn’t Madeleine. I didn’t know a Mitty, was not dating Drake, and Ham Hand had to get his paw off my face.

“Don’t be scared—come on. You’ll see, it’ll be fun. Mitty’s home—you’re our Mischief Night surprise.”

I realized that they were stupid and drunk but probably not malicious. Still—who cared what their intent was? They’d terrified me and they were keeping me against my will.

Where were other pranksters or passersby or homeless people when I needed them? Nobody was on the street. Nobody would hear me even if I could free myself and scream. Nobody would save me. I had to save myself.

I moved and squirmed as much as I could, pulling sideways and rolling my head, shaking it in a futile
no-no-no!
and rolling my eyes up toward the skyline with a momentary fantasy that Superman had relocated from Metropolis to Philadelphia and if I screamed
Help! Help!
he’d rescue me.

If I could scream, of course.

Surely they could look at me and realize I was not the girl they had in mind. If they had minds.

They weren’t vicious. They didn’t react by increasing pressure. They were stupid. They laughed more. I didn’t know that was much better.

Then my eyes and head rolled back and up toward the rooftop, and I had one of those times when what the eye sees and the brain is willing to receive don’t mesh. What I saw was impossible. Therefore, I took too long to see it.

Superman wasn’t on the roof, but six Screams were.

Robes darker than the sky against which they were silhouetted, bone-white distorted skull heads with frozen screaming 229

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mouths gleamed in the light of a sliver of moon. If I hadn’t had a hand across my mouth, I would have joined in their screams, been the voice for all of them.

The rooftop. What was there? The art studio. The music room. The tennis court.

But those were enclosed, and these figures were outside, on the off-limits part of the roof where, in the warm months, a small garden was planted, and botany experiments attempted. The spindly tree struggling to grow in a large pot up there was also silhouetted.

Why there? And was that another figure, one in street clothes? Without the costume, the grotesque mask, he looked so much less substantial than they did.

This was it: the worse thing that was going to happen. The Friday thing.

I’d thought they had humiliation, at worst a fistfight in mind. What was more useful than using the crowd downstairs to thoroughly embarrass someone? Leaving the audience behind made no sense.

In their black robes, they looked like the nightmare jury of six that they in fact were, a jury of his peers who had found him guilty a long time ago. This, I feared, was the sentencing.

The group shifted, but whatever they were doing—debating, accusing, taunting—they weren’t touching him.

All this probably took up no more time than an eyeblink, but it felt centuries, geological epochs, and it meant I had to get up on that roof before time ran out altogether, drunken louts or not.

The trio was well beyond sensitivity or nuance. Time was running out. I had to resort to primitive means.

I went limp and thought about Cupcake, the dog I’d had in elementary school, the sweetest dog ever, who’d broken away from me while I walked her, and had been run over by a truck.

And as always, the guilt and loss and the sweet memories of that dog filled my eyes with tears.

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The ham-handed one pulled his paw off my mouth. “She’s crying!” he said. “Don’t cry, don’t cry! We thought it was funny and Mitty—”

“I’m not Madeleine!” I sobbed.

“What?” One of them came close and blinked as he looked at me. “Sure you are.”

“No. You could check my ID, but there’s no time.”

“But this is where he said you—”

“And he was almost right. I know where she is. She’s here on this street. Follow me—”

They weren’t ready to spring to action. “You’re not the right girl?” one of them said. “You sure?”

“She’s at that party up there—see? Quick—before she goes off with”—What was his name?—“Drake!”

They listened. In their stupid dazed way, they half understood and nodded and followed me as I ran them around to the back entry. I did not want to be detained by Havermeyer at this moment. Then up the stairs, up and up until we were on the third floor, inside the school.

“Is she gone then? I don’t see her!” the third stooge said, looking around.

“Nobody’s here. You lied!” his comrade brilliantly observed.

“You’re probably Madeleine!”

“They’re outside. Remember—you saw her from down on the street because she was outside.”

“Oh, yeah. Right.”

I led my band of jokers to the door that led outside. “Shhh,”

I said. “Let’s surprise her.”

“Wait,” one of them said. He sounded as if he might be sobering up. “Wait. This isn’t such a good idea.” His features scrunched together as he looked out the glass pane. “I don’t see her, anyway.”