Crushed (21 page)

Chapter 70

The Place I'm Going

It was Friday, seventh period, World Cultures—the last hour before Christmas vacation—and the minute hand on the wall clock seemed never to move.

Clyde slumped at his desk while images of displaced Indian villagers flashed on the screen at the front of the dim room. Patrice had tried to explain how this documentary “cross-pollinated” with their studies of sub-Saharan tribesmen, but as far as Clyde could see, the connection was pretty sketchy. He stared through the slit of window just below the drawn window shade, watching the ebb and flow of students outside. Most of the teachers seemed to have given up. Even as the video played, the door to Patrice's room kept opening and closing as kids came and went. He glanced at the door as Sands and Zondra slipped quietly out.

Clyde thought of some lines he'd heard once on a CD of his father's:
“I do not like the place I'm coming from. I do not like the
place I'm going to. So why do I wait for the bus with such
impatience?”

Clyde hated being here, but he didn't really look forward to going home, where the pleasure of seeing his mother would be immediately swallowed up by the fact that she was dying. But at least today he'd have the vase. It was glazed and fired and dried, and all he had to do was pick it up from Mrs. Arboneaux on the way home.

When the kid at the next table put his head down to sleep, Clyde had a good view of Audrey Reed—and what, he wondered, was up with her? She came into class looking like someone who'd been living in a car, and even though she was with her pal C.C., when the pale pretty one came in, C.C. and Audrey cut her cold. Which was exactly what Clyde had done to Audrey when she glanced back at him as she had entered the room, and of course, after he'd cut her, he felt kind of bad about it.

Through the window he could see Theo sizing up Zondra and Sands. Clyde smirked.
There
was some golden matchmaking.

A whispered “Hey!” Then: “Mumsford!”

He looked up, and a girl with a bored expression handed him a folded piece of paper. He opened it and turned it so it picked up some of the window light.
Clyde,
it read,
I need to
talk to you—Audrey Reed.

He glanced up at Audrey, who seemed to be writing in her notebook in spite of the dark. First she'd avoided him, and then she'd ratted on him and gotten him pulverized in public by Theo Driggs. And now she thought she had the right to lay something else on him. Well, thanks, but no thanks. Under her short note, he wrote:

I didn't write the new
Yellow Paper,
if that's what you want to
know (just for the record, I didn't write any other
Yellow Paper
either). Please leave me alone.

He folded the paper, sent it up the tables to Audrey, and then made a point of looking out the window—away from her—as she read it. A few minutes later, the bored girl whispered, “Hey!” again, and handed him another note, but this time Clyde just wrote,
Leave me alone
on the outside and returned it unread.

When, at last, the bell finally rang, Clyde inserted himself in the middle of the outward flow, and once out in the corridor, he headed for Mrs. Arboneaux's room without looking back.

Chapter 71

What're You Doing? Where're You Going?

As other students drifted off toward lockers and cars, Audrey and C.C. paused in the hallway. “So what was all that note-passing between you and The Mummy?” C.C. said, and when Audrey just shrugged, C.C. gave her a frisky look. “Audrey, honey, are you pulling the Mumsford man off the back burner?”

“No,” Audrey said in a tired voice.

“Well, that's a shame, because I think he's got the Heathcliff thing going for him.” She grinned. “Your new boyfriend would be
Heathcliffian.
”

Audrey was in no mood for this. Clyde was past-tense. He might have been interested, but he wasn't anymore. Everything was past-tense. House. Wickham. Oggy. Everything. “I've got to go,” she said.

C.C. nodded. “I'll call when we get back,” she said. Her mother had a no–cell phone rule when they went to their cabin.

“Okay,” Audrey said. The hall was nearly empty now. Someone had torn down one of the red foil garlands that had been draped overhead and it lay now on the floor. Audrey had never looked forward to Christmas less.

C.C. said, “You know, I'll never forgive Lea for this.”

Audrey looked past her, down the hall. A laughing boy she didn't know was wrapping a laughing girl she didn't know in the red foil garland. Audrey in a dull voice said, “I wouldn't blame Lea too much.”

“I do, though,” C.C. said stoutly. “We were friends. Sister-women.”

Were,
Audrey thought. Lea was one more thing in the past tense.

“You okay?” C.C. said.

Audrey nodded without looking at her.

A few seconds passed, then C.C. said, “Look, I've got to buy some stuff for this trip. Want to come with me?” Audrey shook her head, and C.C. said, “So where're you going?”

Audrey shrugged. “Home.” The Commodore.

But she wasn't. After C.C. left, she went to Wickham's locker in the east wing. She'd left two notes there in the morning, and before seventh period she'd wedged another between the door and frame of his locker. It was still there.

She sat down on the stairs at the end of the empty hall. She felt too tired to move. She just sat, slowly eating stale currants from an old box in her backpack. She'd been sitting for perhaps twenty minutes when a boy appeared at the other end of the corridor. He kept referring to a slip of paper in his hand as he made his way past the lockers. At Wickham's locker, the boy stopped, looked at the paper in his hand, and began spinning the dial on Wickham's lock.

Audrey, standing, said, “What're you doing?”

The boy had just swung open Wickham's locker. He had dull eyes and a heavily acned face. “Just doing what I was told to do,” he said. “Getting stuff for some dude.”

“Who?”

“The guy whose locker this is.” He pulled out Wickham's leather backpack. “A dude with a drawl.”

“Why didn't he come himself?”

The boy gave a who-knows shrug. “Dude just said he'd pay me a couple bucks for a favor and told me what to do, and here I am.” The boy looked at Audrey and smoothed a finger feelingly across a swollen whitehead. “He said some girl was, like, stalking him.”

Audrey took a step back and fell silent. The pimply boy picked up the note on the floor, and two other notes Audrey had fed through the locker's vents. As the boy walked away, he detoured to a GIVE A HOOT! barrel and dropped them in.

She supposed he'd been told to do that, too.

Chapter 72

Safely Under His Arm

The vase was done, and it was perfect.

True, Mrs. Arboneaux had helped with the glazing, but still, the vase itself was Clyde's work, and nobody else's. So on this Friday afternoon before vacation, after helping Mrs. Arboneaux pack away her papier-mâché Santas and woolly reindeer, Clyde wrapped the vase in newspaper secured with masking tape, and gave Mrs. Arboneaux a nod on the way out. “Thanks,” he said.

The teacher smiled. “Hope she likes it.”

“She will.”

“Clyde?”

He turned, and the teacher smiled. “Merry Christmas.”

“Same to you, Mrs. Arboneaux.”

Clyde had his book bag over his shoulder and the vase safely under his arm as he headed off toward the parking lot.

Chapter 73

Firebird

“Some girl was, like, stalking him.”

That was what the boy had said, and that was what she'd become. Wickham's stalker.

When Audrey pushed open the heavy doors of the west wing, the school's lawn was a deserted expanse of brown grass and frozen mud. The sky was still and gray. Everything seemed empty, as if the field had been turned upside down and everything not tied down had spilled out and rolled away.

She moved along the hedge-lined walkway as if through a cold tunnel. Straight ahead, there were a few bicycles left in the lot, and a couple of motor scooters, but her old Lincoln was one of only four or five remaining cars. One of those, a red Firebird, started up and began to back out after Audrey walked past.

The lock on her car door was nearly frozen, so she tried the passenger-side door, which opened after a few seconds of gentle pressure. The coldness of the car seat went right through her as she slid across to the steering wheel. Three times the engine turned over slowly and stopped, but on the fourth try, it finally caught.

Audrey put the car into reverse, looked into her rearview mirror, and saw the red Firebird pull up behind her and stop. Three boys were getting out of the car and walking toward her. Their movements were casual and unhurried. The chubby one had spiked, bleached hair that seemed more orange than blond. The tall one wore a black leather jacket studded with chrome. The third was Theo Driggs.

Audrey instinctively locked her own door and was reaching for the lock to the passenger door when it swung open.

Theo Driggs peered in with his high, slanting eyes. “Well, well,” he said. “Miss Caviar.”

He unlocked the door to the backseat for the two other boys. Immediately they slid in behind her and shut the door.

“What're you doing?” Audrey asked, fear already beginning to numb her lips and hands. Theo eased himself into the seat beside her and snapped the last door shut. She was locked in with them now. Three against one.

“What're you doing?” Audrey said. “What do you want?”

Theo pretended real interest in this question. “You know what? That's just what the lady headshrinker asked me the other day. ‘What do you want, Theo? And how do you intend to get it?' ” Theo's eyes were on low beam. His smile was loose-seeming. “Know what I told her? I said, ‘All kinds of things, and however I have to.' ” He smiled at Audrey. “That lady headshrinker was taking lots of notes.”

Theo's friends shifted in the backseat. They were so big that the car felt weighed down, and the cold air of the car smelled like hair gel and cigarettes. Audrey felt in her coat pocket for her cell phone. If they touched her, she would speed-dial her dad. That's what she would do. It was just one button. Just press “2.”

In a voice that sounded too high in her own ears, she said, “I meant, what do you want with
me
?”

Theo peeled off a black glove and with his bare hand unfolded a piece of paper from his pocket. He looked at it for a moment, then turned it for Audrey to see.
To-do List,
it said at the top. There followed a list of names that had all been crossed out—Clyde Mumsford's was the only one she recognized. Just one name had not been crossed out, and that was Audrey's. Maybe she should have told the principal about the list a long time ago.

Theo was grinning and pulling on his tight black glove. “Visiting hour is over,” he said.

Audrey felt nauseated now. She worked her thumb into the fold of her phone and tried to flip it open within her pocket.

Behind her, a leathery creaking sound. A hand from the backseat passed a flask to Theo, who unscrewed the lid. “What you need to improve your mood,” he said, “is a little
elixir.
”

Audrey tightened her lips, and Theo grinned. “It'll put you in the holiday spirit.”

“I'm not drinking that,” she said, working at the top flap of her cell phone. Her pocket felt suddenly too small, and her hand too large. Then she managed to unfold it.

Theo, smiling, reached forward and pulled her keys from the ignition. He tucked them in his pocket and turned to Audrey. “Last time we met, we made a little deal. You gave me the name of the Yellow Man and I let you proceed with your day.” His eyes switched to high beam. “Only you gave me the wrong Yellow Man.”

Audrey didn't speak. She felt along the keypad of her cell phone for the “2” button. If she pushed “2,” her father's phone would ring. But why were there so many buttons? Was that the top row of numerals she was touching? She didn't know. She couldn't tell.

“So I'm giving you another chance here,” Theo said. “Either you give me the right Yellow Man, or you have a cup of holiday cheer with us.”

Audrey shivered inside her coat, and she ran her finger over the phone's surface again, trying to feel the pads that were “1,” “2,” and “3.”

“If I drink some of that,” she asked, “will you let me go?”

Theo drilled into her with his high-beam eyes. “That wouldn't be much of a deal, would it? No, you have, let's say, three good snorts.”

From the boys in the backseat came a rustling.

She pushed hard on the button she hoped was “2.” She had feared it would make a beeping sound, but she heard nothing. Nothing. She wanted to bring the phone out of her pocket and see if her father's phone number had appeared on the screen, but she couldn't. She listened. The phone made no sound. It seemed wrong that it made no sound at all.

Theo handed her the flask. She took it with her trembling left hand, but kept her right hand in the pocket. Was that the sound of her phone dialing? Would her father say, “Hello?” She put the flask to her lips, closed her eyes, and swallowed. All at once her throat burned, her eyes clamped more tightly closed, and her body wanted to expel the alcohol even as it trickled down her throat.

“Dad?” she heard herself say.

A keenness came to Theo's eyes. “What do you mean, ‘Dad'?” he said, and when she didn't speak, he scanned the parking lot. Audrey could hear the boys in the back scraping against the seats, could see the orange-haired guy craning his neck to see behind the car.

No sound came from the pocket. Where was Wickham, where was her father, where was Oggy? Where were the people who were supposed to save her?

Theo turned back to her, evidently satisfied that no one was coming to her aid. And he was right, she knew that now—no one was. “Daddy's not here,” he said. “It's just big grown-up you and big grown-up us.” He smiled and nodded at the flask. “That's one snort,” he said. “Two more to go.”

Audrey took another swallow of the burning alcohol, then a third swallow, and all at once, she began to retch, and it all came back up, along with bile and black currants, onto the seat and floor and Theo's shoes.

Theo drew back and stared down at the mess in revulsion.

Behind her, Audrey felt for the door lock.