Harrison Squared (6 page)

But this coldness in the phantom limb—that was new. Yesterday the feeling had died down as the day wore on. This morning it was still going strong, as if my ghost foot was missing the California sun. I know I was.

The main hallway was as empty as it usually was when class was in session. I managed to find the cafeteria in only a couple minutes, a new personal record for locating any room in this place.

The doors were open. No one sat at the tables. What did Coach mean, “Behind the cafeteria”? I walked in, looking for another exit door, but there were only the wide doors that led to the kitchen. I could hear women talking back there.

I walked up to the buffet line—the steam tables were mercifully empty—and called out, “Hello?” No one answered. The big silver table where the woman had been cutting fish was clean and gleaming. I called out again. A voice back there laughed, though the laughter didn't seem to be directed at me.

I walked around the serving line and stood at the entrance to the kitchen. Over in the far corner, three lunch ladies were gathered around a huge metal pot. One of them, the horse-toothed lady who'd tried to serve me yesterday, was pushing a big wooden paddle through the liquid. None of them had noticed me.

I approached slowly. The women were dressed identically in olive green smocks, and differed only in their ages: Old, Older, Oldest. The most senior of them was hunched over the pot, her face hovering over the gray, bubbling liquid. A dense fishy smell kept me back like a force field.

“Excuse me,” I said. “I'm looking for the nurse's office?”

The old one—by which I mean the youngest of them—stopped stirring the paddle.

“Who's there?” the oldest said. Her eyes were still closed.

“Give me the glasses,” the middle lunch lady said. The one with the paddle handed her a pair of glasses on a chain.

“Oh!” the middle lunch lady said. “It's the new one.”

“The one with the weak stomach,” the first lunch lady said.

The oldest threw back her head and cackled.

“The nurse?” I asked again.

The old one nodded toward a door at the other end of the kitchen. “You can go through there.
Once
. Next time, use the outer loop.”

“Sorry,” I said, and hurried away from them. What was “the outer loop”?

The door opened to a waiting room with four wooden chairs and a small desk with nothing on it but a clipboard and a small metal bell. A hand-drawn placard said D
O
N
OT
R
ING
B
ELL.

The clipboard held a sign-in sheet with columns for
IN
and
OUT
. There were only a few names on the list. All had signed in, but no one had signed out.

I signed my name and took a seat with my backpack beside me. I wasn't sure what I was going to tell the nurse. It didn't matter that I didn't have any medical records with me, because there was no medical reason why I couldn't get in the pool. I just didn't feel like explaining myself over and over. At home nobody asked me to go in the ocean anymore; they just accepted that that wasn't my thing.

I looked at my phone. No bars. To torture myself I paged through photos, looking at pictures of my friends. It was three hours earlier in California, and they were probably just getting up.
I
would have been just waking up. For a moment I could picture myself in my old room, lying in bed as the morning sunlight lit up the wall, listening to the seagulls argue outside my window.

A sound made me look up from my phone. Maybe thirty seconds passed, and then I heard it again: a low moan.

I stood and went to the door with the signs on it. The moan came again, louder, and definitely from the other side of the door. I pictured someone lying on the floor, bleeding, waiting for the nurse to come back.

I knocked on the door. “Hello? Are you okay?”

There was no answer. I turned the knob, pushed the door open a few inches. “Hello?”

A woman lay on a padded table. No, not just a woman, a nurse: She was dressed in a white skirt and white hose.

She turned her head to look at me, and her blond hair fell across her face. She groggily pushed the hair from her eyes and looked at me through half-closed lids. “Do you have…” Her voice trailed off.

“What is it?” I asked. “Tell me what you need.” The room was only big enough for a desk and chair, the exam table, and a big metal cabinet. The door of the cabinet was ajar, and several of the shelves were filled with orange pill bottles. “Something in there?”

“… an appointment?” she finished. That word “appointment” seemed to require a great deal of thought. A plastic tube was attached to her left arm. The IV bag dangled above her, half-filled with some yellowish liquid.

“I can come back later,” I said. “Maybe Miss Pearl can—”

“No!” The nurse lurched to a sitting position. “I can handle this.” She rubbed her hand across her face as if it were numb.

Her gaze swiveled toward me. Her eyes were bloodshot. “You're not from around here,” she said.

“I just moved from San Diego,” I said. “My name's—”

“… are you?” she said.

I took a breath. Talking to her was like trying to hit an off-speed pitch.

“No,” I said. “I'm not.”

But she was no longer listening to me. She slid the needle from her arm and sighed as she let the tube drop. She might have been beautiful if she didn't look like she'd been up for a week straight. There were dark circles under her eyes, and her lipstick was smeared.

She swung her legs over the edge of the table and considered the floor. “Why did you come here…?”

I waited.

She looked up at me and raised a black eyebrow. So, maybe not a natural blonde.

“I need a note,” I said. “For—”

“… to Dunnsmouth?”

“My mom's here doing research,” I said.

“For?”

“Herself. She's got a grant and—”

“No, who's the note for?”

“Coach Shug,” I said. “Swim class.”

“Idiot,” she said. She placed a foot on the linoleum, testing the surface as if it were pond ice, then put the other foot down. “Can't stand him.”

She made it to the desk and sat heavily. Then she pulled open the center drawer and rummaged through it, picking up pads of paper, putting them down, scrutinizing pens. “I know what you're going through,” she said. “It's not easy to live.”

“I wouldn't go that far,” I said.

“… here,” she said.

She licked the tip of a pencil, then jerked as if she'd gotten a static shock. She stared at the pencil, daring it to shock her again. After a moment she said, “And
what
 … is this in regard to?” she asked.

“It's because of my leg,” I said. “I need a pass out of gym class.”

“Pass out,” she said. “Can't do that.” She began to write on the pad of paper anyway. “They hired me two years ago,” she said. “I needed the money. I was straight out of state college.”

“Really,” I said. She looked at least forty.

“… Pennsylvania.”

She signed the note, and pressed down so hard that the tip of the pencil snapped and went flying. “Give this to good ol' Coach,” she said bitterly. “Put it right in his big … fat…”

Her eyelids drooped. Then she slumped forward in slow motion until her head came to a stop against the desk. Her eyes closed.

I backed out of the room and then pulled the door shut as quietly as I could. In the waiting room I looked at the note. In faint, loopy handwriting she'd written, “I love you. I love you. I love you. Yours, body and soul, Mandi.” She'd drawn a heart over that last “i.”

*   *   *

It took me a long time to get back to a part of the school I recognized. I hadn't wanted to go through the kitchen, so I'd taken Door #3, which led to a long, doorless hallway identical to all of Dunnsmouth Secondary's hallways except for an orange stripe painted down the middle. The outer loop, I supposed. I started walking, and ten minutes later the corridor ended with an abrupt turn—and I was in the atrium, standing opposite the cafeteria. Somehow I'd gotten to the other side of the main hallway.

The change gong sounded a moment later. Too late for PE, then. And thank goodness; my note was useless. I stood by the wall as the atrium filled with students, and finally I saw Garfield, the bat-eared boy, then a few other juniors I recognized, and then Lydia, wet hair gleaming in the weird light. I fell into step beside her. For some reason it amused me to keep bothering her.

We turned down a corridor that I was surprised to recognize. “Hey, the library,” I said.

“Nobody goes in the library,” Lydia said.

“Why not? It's not so bad.”

She looked at me. “You really went inside?”

“Yesterday. What's the big deal?”

She harrumphed. I'd never heard anyone under sixty harrumph before.

The next class was taught by the weird little man in the baggy suit that I'd seen next to Montooth during Voluntary. Up close he was even weirder. His eyes were so far apart that they seemed to be looking in two directions at once, like a hammerhead shark. He stood in the corner of the room, hands behind his back, watching the students with a disturbing sense of eagerness as they took their seats. Before I could find a seat he nodded at me, and I had no choice but to walk over to him.

“Welcome to World History,” the teacher said. “I'm Mr. Waughm. I am also vice principal of Dunnsmouth Secondary. Go Threshers.”

“My name's—”

“Oh,” he said. “I
know
.” A smile worked its way onto his face like a worm caught aboveground after a rainstorm. “Take a book from the stack by the window, Mr. Harrison. We're taking a test today, so you can use the time to do a little catch-up reading, eh? Hmm? Yes?”

“Uh, yes,” I said. “What chapter are you on?”

“The one on Vlad the Third.” He pointed at a desk at the back of the room. “That should do for now, yes? Hmm?”

The book was very heavy and bound in what looked like actual leather. The title was
The Subjugation and Domination of Various Peoples and Lands: A Guide to Effective Government
.

Okay then. I took my seat. The test was evidently an essay test; Mr. Waughm handed out question sheets, and the students went to work in their spiral notebooks.

I opened the book and found the chapter about Vlad III, otherwise known as Vlad the Impaler, otherwise known as Dracula's role model. Bram Stoker had based his vampire on this fifteenth-century warlord, who liked to keep the peace by—spoiler alert—impaling his enemies on large wooden stakes.

I glanced over at Lydia. She was reading the first problem but hadn't written anything yet. She clutched the pencil in her left hand, while the fingers of her right hand made a rolling motion, trilling that ol' invisible piano. Then her fingers stopped. She started to write an answer; then her fingers started moving again.

I looked over my shoulder at the rest of the class. At least four other people were also doing the finger-tapping thing. Not constantly. Like Lydia, they started and stopped, like musicians trading off solos.

About twenty minutes into class, the door opened. It was Principal Montooth, and behind him the round form of Miss Pearl. Mr. Waughm hurried over to them, and then Montooth and Waughm went into the hallway. Miss Pearl waddled over to Waughm's desk, studied the chair, and finally sat down.

Thirty seconds later, Mr. Waughm came back in and announced, “Class, I have something to attend to.” He looked at me, then quickly looked away. “Everyone except Mr. Harrison, turn in your tests to Miss Pearl when you're finished. As for homework—” He glanced toward the doorway where Montooth was waiting for him. “Nothing tonight.” The door closed.

“Stop gawking and get to work,” Miss Pearl said.

No one, however, was gawking. They went back to the essay without a word. Their fingers, however, were fluttering and flicking, like the ghost typists.

The hand-wiggling continued all through World History and continued in Practical Skills class. While Mrs. Velloc sat at her desk, the students seemed to be working hard on their knots—except their fingers were moving way too much.

Finally, it clicked.

When we walked out of class, heading for lunch, I whispered to Lydia, “I know what you guys are doing.”

Her eyelids lowered to half-mast.

“The signing,” I said. I waggled my fingers.

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

“That's what I don't know—what you're talking about. Are you gossiping? Telling jokes? Talking about me?”

“Don't flatter yourself,” she said.

“You have to teach me,” I said. “Just a few words. What's the sign for ‘I'm so bored I could scream'?”

We entered the cafeteria. Lydia looked around to make sure no one was listening. “I'll meet you over there,” she said, and gestured toward a lunch table. Then she picked up a tray and joined the serving line.

I walked toward the table, where Garfield and Flora sat with three other kids, one a tall boy with a forehead like an anvil and long black hair that fell to his collar. Flora saw me coming, pursed those red lips, and then set those fingers to moving. Captain Forehead looked my way. Two fingers of one hand tapped the table, twice.

I sat down at an empty spot at the table. They said nothing. “Lydia said I should sit here,” I said.

They seemed to accept that, and went back to their own meals, bowls of that gray liquid I'd seen the lunch ladies stirring. I was glad I'd packed my own lunch, and set out the peanut butter and jelly sandwich I'd made this morning, as well as a bag of trail mix. It was the best I could do with the remains of the road supplies. Mom and I really needed to get to a grocery store.