A Hole in Juan (29 page)

“She’s probably in disguise,” I said. “She is, in fact. She’s disguised as a famous painting.”

“A painting? That’s nuts. Is she in a frame, is she—”

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A HOLE IN JUAN

“Shhh! Don’t scare her.” I hoped that the entry of three large and unfamiliar males and one teacher who could name names would at least stop events for a while.

“Shhh,” I said again as I quietly opened the door, which had a narrow wedge keeping it from locking. I wondered when in the week the seniors had taken care of that. “Shhh. Don’t say anything till I give the sign, okay? I’ll point to where she is.”

They nodded, but the one who was sobering up looked as if he was trying to think of an objection. Happily for me, his thought processes were not yet, if ever, swift. Before he could think it through, we were outside, creeping onto the dark terrace, the rough shadows of dead and dried-up flower beds next to us.

“Now?” one whispered, but I shook my head. We crouched at the back near the wall in dark shadow.

“Jump!” a female voice said. I hadn’t noticed her from below, but Allie stood to the side, arms folded across her chest. The sight of her in that position made me shudder. She was orchestrating it—whatever it was. Disguised as her or not, she was Lady Mac-beth. “Just
jump
and end everybody’s misery. It’s either you or all of us, so guess which it’s going to be?”

“Her?” the nearly-sober one said. “She’s not Madeleine. She’s a blonde and Madeleine’s—”

“Shhh—I told you, she’s in disguise. One of those people in the cape and mask,” I whispered.

Seth was encircled, but nobody was touching him. He’d backed right to the edge and was pressed against the wall, which was low, too low. All it would take was minimal hoisting . . .

“No—don’t jump,” a low voice said. His back was to me, but I thought it was Wilson. His voice was strained, his tone urgent.

“Don’t. Come on, man. Just agree to keep your mouth shut. Don’t tell. You tell and we’re all screwed for the rest of our lives, starting with not getting into college. Nobody’d believe you, anyway. They think you did it. All of it.”

“Because you framed me,” Seth said. “You were my friends and you—”

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“How can you be friends with somebody you don’t even know? Who will never give in or compromise? Who doesn’t care about anybody else? Who thinks he’s the best person on earth—

maybe the only one?” Allie’s voice was low, flat, and cold.

“You didn’t make it easy, man.” Whoever said that sounded sad about it. “We asked you not to, just to stay cool, but you had to push. You started it all.”

“The party could have been
perfect
if you hadn’t insisted on your so-called Rights.” Allie’s voice sounded like a snarl.

Seth was quiet. I had missed the beginning of this, but even coming into it now, I could feel we were in a lull, a held breath, after which things could go either way, and one of the ways was too frightening and insane to contemplate.

“Go!” I said to my trio. “She’s one of them.” And then I used my only attack weapon, The Teacher Voice. “Stop right now!”

I shouted in the ultra classroom decibel. “You! Wilson! Erik!

Jimmy!!!”

The various Screams froze in place, making it even easier for Curly, Moe, and Larry to reach them, and though the drunks were outnumbered, they had the element of surprise, bulk, and alcoholic bravado on their side.

“What are you—”

One of my would-be kidnappers was working on pulling off a mask. “My head!” a male voice shouted, pulling off the mask himself. It was Wilson, his bruises from the fistfight still visible.

“You aren’t Madeleine!” the drunk said. “Hell—you’re not a girl!” He turned to me. “What’s going on?” He turned back.

“Madeleine? Where are you? Which one are you?”

By then, I’d reached them. “How could you do this? Are you crazy? On drugs? Drunk? What on earth—you wanted him to
die
? I can’t believe you’re
murderers
! I—I—” I ran out of words, of ideas, of anything that could encompass what had been going on.

“It was up to him,” Allie said in that new frozen voice. “He threatened
us.
”

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A HOLE IN JUAN

I’d heard them ask him to promise not to tell, and they surely didn’t mean about tonight’s fracas.

“He threatened all of you by saying he’d tell about what happened to Mr. Reyes,” I said as if I knew it to be true. “About the jar of sodium.”

“Nobody meant that to happen,” Erik said. “Honestly, Miss Pepper.
Nobody.
Just for him to find it there and get mad again, like with the other things. We left other things in the sink, too,

’cause you couldn’t see them there at first, so it was a bigger surprise. We didn’t mean . . .”

“We only wanted him to leave—to quit! To stop giving us such bad marks and ruining everything for us. He kept acting like he was going to—threatening us. We thought we’d speed it up, give us a chance.”

“So what’s the point of Seth telling what happened? The cops think it was an accident–and it was!”

They looked at me, their masks in their hands or dropped on the roof, their anonymity gone, their expressions bewildered, as if I’d startled them awake, and in fact, I thought I had.

They looked pitiable. Barely grown young men, vulnerable and human without their disguises.

Bad company, indeed. “This started because you wanted better grades for college,” I said, punching out every word. “Better grades! And look where it took you—to trying to murder someone! What happened to all of you? How did you get from there to here?”

The red-haired drunk poked his finger into my shoulder and spoke with the air of revelation. “Madeleine’s not here.”

“Sorry,” I said. “My mistake.”

“This is boring,” the heavyset one said. “These are kids. High schoolers.” And the three of them turned and walked back into the school. I didn’t try to stop them, though I knew I should—

they didn’t belong in the building. I hoped they’d find their way out, that Havermeyer wouldn’t find them first, that if he did, he GILLIAN ROBERTS

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wouldn’t find out how they’d gotten into the building in the first place, and that en route they would do no damage.

They were now in the hands of fate. I had my hands and attention sufficiently full up here.

Allie looked like a broken toy. Her hands hung at her sides and her eyes focused somewhere internally.

“How
could
you?” I asked her, and the question wasn’t rhetorical. “To try to goad somebody into—” I had to stop. I was controlling the urge to cry because it hurt too much to believe this could be true. I cleared my throat. “This morning you were crusading for civil rights, marching and talking to the TV

reporter and now, now you wanted a friend to
die.
Why Seth?

Why pick on him? Is it because you don’t approve of his emotions? Of his right to be who he is?”

She snapped into attention and defensiveness. “That’s not it!

I’m not a bigot—none of us are. Nobody . . . we were all cool with it when he came out. But that was
enough,
and then he pushed it too far. He was bringing a guy to the party, and that was too much. It made everybody uncomfortable, and we tried to reason with him. Nothing would have happened if he’d just . . .

given in.”

“You have rules for Seth that don’t apply to you? Does he vet your dates? Were special exclusions for some people what you were marching for today?”

“That’s not the same! We would have all looked . . . Nobody ever did that at a Philly Prep party before, why did he have to say he was going to do it at ours?” She shook her head and sounded as if she was running out of steam, and when she continued, her voice was lower, less sure of itself. “We all said we wouldn’t go with dates, but he—it was this
thing
with him. He needed a lesson—that was all—that’s all we wanted—just for him to stop being so . . . stop thinking he was better than everybody. That’s why we—we were already doing things to Mr. Reyes, but that’s why we made it look like . . . like he was doing those things. Two birds with one stone.” She looked surprised by her own words.

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“Your friend Nita—”

“Not my friend anymore. I hate people who don’t finish what they start. You can’t count on her. She thought it was a good idea and then—did she tell you? Is that how come you’re here? Those stupid poems? Her stupid hints?”

I didn’t blame Nita for being afraid of Allie. Allie scared me, too.

“Nobody was supposed to—nobody ever meant—”

I didn’t bother to look over and see which boy had spoken.

“We aren’t like you think,” another boy said softly.

“But you were—” I had to take deep breaths before I could finish. “You were forcing your friend, your teammate off the roof, goading him to
suicide
—do you realize you nearly
murdered
him?” More deep breaths.

One of the robed figures ran toward the edge of the roof and doubled over, sick.

“What—what happens now?” Allie wailed. “What happens to us now?”

I didn’t have an answer. What I hoped happened was that they began to grow up, but along with that, I thought the worst had already happened. They were all casualties now. Seth would face the least official punishment, but of them all, he was perhaps the most wounded. It is anything but easy to recover from betrayal by those you thought your friends. I suspect it takes close to a lifetime.

The bass below at the party throbbed into the night like a subterranean heartbeat.

“Think about what nearly happened, about what you nearly did, and what you nearly became,” I said, though it hurt to speak. “Think about what you already have done to others and to yourselves while you walk downstairs in an orderly fashion. Do you hear that music? Good, because what happens now is: You’re going to face it.”

✶

✶

✶

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“What happens” covers a whole lot of time. Forever, perhaps.

Where do cause and effect end? A butterfly changes course in Guatemala and there’s a tsunami in Asia.

A group of arrogant teens decide to force a teacher to quit because he’s grading them too harshly and then, because he’s crossed an imaginary line they set, because he’s bringing the date of his choice to a party, they decide to frame a friend for their pranks. Two birds with one stone, as Allie said.

And the waves that bird or stone set off continue to stir the air and a prank backfires horribly, maiming and nearly killing a teacher.

And the scapegoat catches on and is horrified and furious and lets them know he’s going to report the fact that the chemistry lab explosion was not an accident. Unintended, but the conditions for it had been set up deliberately.

And mass hysteria, the madness of crowds—something—

propels them onto the roof to persuade him to remain silent. Or to jump.

So what happened
next
was beyond my ability to know.

What happened
immediately
was that all six of them admitted planning to set the sodium in the lab. Wilson ran it in, but he was no more than their courier.

They only wanted to further infuriate Juan Reyes and never thought he’d turn water onto the sodium block. They should have included Seth in their plans. He was a good student. He might have thought ahead, considered the possibilities.

They did not.

As for me, I don’t know when, if ever, I’ll erase that scene on the roof and what it meant. I look back now on my anxiety and worries about the seniors this week and my imagination seems so limited and innocent. I’d raced there fearing a scene of humiliation for Seth or, at worst, another fistfight.

It sounds so
Leave It to Beaver
now to me, but I wish I could rewind back to that point, those ideas.

The current and future medical bills and lost income Juan 237

A HOLE IN JUAN

Reyes suffered—because he was now on the road to a difficult but real recovery—became the responsibility of the students involved in the series of pranks including the sodium planting, and of their parents.

And somewhere in the bedlam, I had a chance to ask, “Why me? Why the stolen exam?”

“It wasn’t stolen,” Allie said sullenly. “Never was.”

“But why me? Did you want me to quit, too?”

She shook her head. “We wanted somebody to pay attention and at least get Seth in trouble and Mr. Reyes wouldn’t. We knew you would and maybe then he would.” Her voice lowered to the mumble again. “It made sense back then.”

Back then, four days ago, when we were all so much younger.

She looked directly at me. “And in a way, it worked. You paid attention.”

Seth told me two things late in the evening, after all the parents who could be summoned had gathered and questions of guilt and innocence had been answered as best as they could be.

The first was that he did not want to press charges. “I don’t know what they’d be,” he said. “And I don’t want anything from them anymore. All I want is to finish this year and get on with my life.”

And later, outside on the sidewalk, when Mackenzie had come along with the entire cast of the dinner party to retrieve me—we were all, plus Pip, going to an all-night diner to find food for me—Seth pulled away from his parents and said, “Excuse me. There’s something I want to say.” He looked around, and I was afraid whatever he had in mind would be censored or silenced by the presence of strangers, or perhaps simply by the sight of Sasha, still nothing short of incredible in her orange getup and a black fur stole.

But I should have realized Seth was not that easily daunted.

“Thank you,” he said. “I’m ashamed to say it, and now it seems crazy, but right then, I felt as if—I felt so—They’d been my friends, my best friends, and then, for a minute, it seemed easier GILLIAN ROBERTS

238

to just let go—of them, of everything.” He cleared his throat and nodded. “I think you saved my life,” he added softly.

“Thank you,” I said. “I understand, but you saved yourself, and I’m beyond glad that you didn’t give in to that feeling, that moment. You’ll find better friends. True friends.”