Heartstopper (3 page)

Just as Candy left no mourners.

But this girl, this heartstopper with the big blue eyes and large, natural breasts, will be different.

Not only will a lot of people be out looking for her—they may even be looking for her now—she’ll be more of a challenge all around. Candy was a trifle dim-witted to
be much fun. This girl is stronger, both mentally and physically, so I’ll have to up my game, as they say—move quicker, think faster, strike harder.

She’s looking this way again, as if she knows I’m here, as if she can hear the scribbling of my pen. So I’ll sign off for now, go grab something to eat. I’ll come back later, initiate phase two of my plan.

Maybe I’ll keep the girl alive till morning. Maybe not. Risk management after all. It doesn’t pay to get too cocky.

Stay tuned, as they say. I’ll be back.

O
kay, everybody. Get out your journals.”

Sandy Crosbie leaned back against the front of her desk at the head of the twelfth-grade classroom and watched her twenty-three students—it should have been twenty-five, but both Peter Arlington and Liana Martin were absent—reluctantly separate their journals from the rest of their books and plop them down on their desks with varying degrees of disinterest and dismay. Bored, glazed eyes rolled slowly back toward her. Bodies slumped dispassionately in their seats. Denim-covered legs stretched lazily across the floor. Pencils absently tapped out an overlapping series of unrecognizable tunes. Everybody, including Sandy Crosbie, clearly wished to be somewhere else.

And why not? Who in their right minds wanted to be cooped up inside a stuffy portable when they could be outside cavorting in the sun? (Would any of her twenty-three students—twenty-five if you included the absent Peter Arlington and Liana Martin—even know what
cavorting
meant? And was cavorting exactly what rumored sweethearts Peter Arlington and Liana Martin were doing in their absence?) Sandy’s gaze floated above the five rows of reluctant scholars toward the portable’s long expanse of side windows. Outside, it was a beautiful April day, although much cooler than was usual for this time of
year. At least that’s what everyone kept telling her. “You should have been here last April,” they kept saying. “This is a good ten degrees colder than normal.” But Sandy didn’t mind the cooler temperatures. In fact, she actually preferred them. It reminded her of upstate New York, where she’d been born and raised. Everyone—especially Ian—had always complained about the brutal Rochester winters, but Sandy was one of those rare creatures who’d genuinely enjoyed the snow and often frigid temperatures. She liked bundling up. It made her feel safe.

What the hell was she doing in Torrance, where the average annual temperature was a humid eighty-five degrees?

Last summer’s move to Florida hadn’t been her idea. It had been Ian’s. He’d spent the better part of two years promoting the move from big northern city to small southern town. “It’ll be good for my practice, for our kids, for our marriage,” he’d promised, cajoled, and ultimately badgered. “I’ve made some inquiries, and you won’t have any trouble finding a teaching position. Come on. Where’s your sense of adventure? At least give it a try. Two years tops. I swear if you’re not happy, we won’t stay.”

At least that’s what he said. What he meant was: I’ve fallen madly in love with this woman I met on an Internet chat line, and I’m determined to sell my practice, uproot you and the kids, and move to this little town in Florida to continue the affair in person. If it doesn’t work out, then we can leave.

Which he had. Exactly seven weeks ago today, Sandy calculated silently, her eyes focusing on a poster promoting literacy at the back of the class, in a concerted effort to keep from bursting into tears. While she doubted this was his first affair—her suspicions had been aroused, although never proven, several times over the years—the news that he was leaving her came as a total surprise. She’d actually
considered the reason he was so eager to leave Rochester might have been to get away from a dalliance gone stale. It had never occurred to her he might be running toward a fresh one.

So she’d watched in shocked silence as he’d packed his old suitcase and his new doctor’s bag, the one she’d given him as a gift when he’d opened his new office, and moved into a spacious, one-bedroom apartment on the other side of town, which just happened to be around the corner from the home of Kerri Franklin, Barbie clone and Internet paramour extraordinaire. The only thing that had prevented him from actually moving in with the big-lipped, bigger-haired divorcée was that her mother had already beaten him to it, settling in comfortably after the collapse of Kerri’s third marriage, and showing not the slightest inclination of moving out again. Since local gossip held that it was Rose Cruikshank’s money that was responsible for the recent—some might even say alarming—increase in the size of Kerri’s bosom, Kerri was naturally reluctant to kick her mother out in the cold. This April being, after all, ten degrees cooler than usual.

There was also the matter of Kerri’s daughter, Delilah. Sandy glanced toward the first seat of the third row, where, in another of life’s annoying little ironies, the unfortunately named teenager had landed front and center in Sandy’s first-period English class. She currently sat chewing nervously on the end of her black, ballpoint pen, and looking toward the floor, obviously hoping she wasn’t about to be called on to read her latest entry aloud.

Because Torrance had a population of barely four thousand people—according to the sign on the outskirts of town, its official total was 4,160—and most of those people lived in what locals referred to as the suburbs, and what Sandy called the swamps, there was only one high school in town. Torrance High was host to almost four hundred
teenagers, and the teacher turnover rate was almost as high as the daily student absentee rate, hence Sandy’s ease at finding a job. The school itself, a sprawling one-story structure, was an attractive, if unimaginative, mix of modern and traditional, wood and stone. It was originally built to hold a maximum of three hundred students, but a sudden explosion in the number of young people in the area had resulted in the recent addition of four portable classrooms at the back of the parking lot. Being the new girl on the block, Sandy had been assigned the last of these mini-prisons, and it was here she taught English literature and composition to the largely disinterested sons and daughters of the good citizens of Torrance. Included among them was Kerri Franklin’s daughter, Delilah.

The name Delilah was unfortunate because, unlike the notorious biblical siren, Kerri Franklin’s eighteen-year-old daughter, while pretty enough, was what once might have been described, euphemistically, as big-boned. When Sandy was feeling generous, she concluded that Delilah likely resembled her father, Kerri’s first husband, who had disappeared from her life when the child was two; when she wasn’t feeling quite so generous, she decided Delilah no doubt looked exactly like her mother had before plastic surgery had turned her into small-town Florida’s answer to Pamela Anderson. When Sandy was feeling downright peckish, she liked to imagine Kerri Franklin’s multiple surgeries collapsing all at once—the tiny button nose popping and falling from her face, the cheek and breast implants leaking, then imploding, the giant lips deflating, the wrinkle-free forehead shriveling, the miles of Botox in her system turning malignant and unleashing their toxins, causing Kerri’s skin to flake, discolor, and turn scabrous.

Sandy sighed, louder than she’d intended. The wayward sigh caught the attention of Greg Watt, a muscle-bound troublemaker she’d moved from the back of the class to the
front in her latest effort to retain at least a semblance of control over her restless brood. Greg—tall and vacuously good-looking, with closely cropped blond hair and small, dark eyes—was staring at her as if he were about to pounce. If he were an animal, Sandy thought, he’d be a pit bull.

And she’d be the poor little toy poodle he was about to tear limb from limb, she thought, tucking her curly, chin-length, brown hair behind her right ear, and feeling vulnerable, although she wasn’t sure why.

“Something wrong, Mrs. Crosbie?” he asked.

“Everything’s fine, Greg,” she said.

“Glad to hear it, Mrs. Crosbie.”

Was it her imagination or had he placed undue inflection on the
Mrs.
part of Mrs. Crosbie? Certainly it was no secret in Torrance that her husband had just left her after almost twenty years of marriage. Nor was it a secret whom he’d left her for. In fact, Sandy had quickly learned that there were few secrets in a town the size of Torrance. It hadn’t taken much longer to realize that, in spite of this, everybody seemed to have one.

“Okay. Who wants to read their latest journal entry?” Sandy asked, bracing herself for the rush of silence she knew would follow. “Any volunteers?” Why am I not surprised? she continued under her breath when eager hands failed to push their way into the air. She looked up and down the first two rows, finally settling on Victor Drummond, in the second-to-last seat of the second row. The boy was dressed completely in black, his naturally tanned face covered by a layer of white powder. Pale blue eyes were outlined in black; the natural pout of his lips was exaggerated by bright, Marilyn Manson—red lipstick. “Victor,” Sandy said with all the cheeriness she could muster. “How about you?”

“You sure you can handle it?” Victor asked with a smirk. He glanced toward the similarly outfitted diva in the seat beside him. The girl, whose name was Nancy, and whose
thinly plucked left eyebrow was pierced with three small safety pins, stuck out her tongue.

Sandy winced. She couldn’t bear the sight of the metal stud jutting out from the middle of Nancy’s tongue. It looked too painful. And didn’t the girl worry about infection? Didn’t her parents? Sandy suppressed a second sigh. She considered herself lucky that neither of her children had seen fit to disfigure themselves with stray piercings or tattoos. At least so far.

“I’ll risk it,” she told Victor. “I’m sure you have some very interesting observations to share with the class.” If he was thinking about shooting up the school, she might as well have some advance warning, she reasoned as she walked around her desk, then sank into her chair, waiting, and wondering when this whole Goth fad was finally going to run its course. Hadn’t it been around long enough? Certainly she’d seen enough of it in Rochester, and while she recognized it was largely a rebellion of style over substance, it troubled her nonetheless. Still, she couldn’t help but like Victor, in spite of his ghoulish getup. Unlike most of her students, he possessed an active and fertile imagination, and his compositions, filled with often bizarre and exotic imagery, could usually be relied on to be, if not as provocative as he might have wished, at least moderately interesting.

“You want me to stand up?” Victor hovered several inches above his seat.

“Not necessary.”

Immediately he lowered his skinny backside into his chair. He paused, cleared his throat, then paused again. “‘It’s a full moon,’” he began, reading without expression or inflection. “‘I’m lying here in bed, listening for the howling of the wolves.’”

“There aren’t any wolves in Florida, dipshit,” Joey Balfour called out from the back of the class. Joey was the
nineteen-year-old captain of the football team, who was repeating his senior year. He was a strutting stereotype—big, brawny, and brainless—and altogether way too proud of it.

The rest of the class laughed. A paper airplane flew across the room.

“Dipshit,” Victor repeated quietly, but with just enough venom to recapture the class’s attention. “I was talking metaphorically.”

Joey laughed, lifting large hands in front of his wide face, as if trying to shield himself. “Whoa. I didn’t understand. He was talking met-a-phor-i-cally.”

“That’s a pretty big word for such a scrawny little guy,” Greg Watt said, his smile curdling, his voice growing dark.

“Does somebody want to tell the class what it means?” Sandy interjected, hoping to ward off an actual confrontation. She’d taught a whole lesson on metaphors earlier in the year. It would be nice to find out if anybody had actually been paying attention.

Delilah raised her hand.

Wouldn’t you know it? Sandy thought. Not only did she have to have this oversize reminder of her husband’s betrayal staring her in the face first thing every morning, but now the misguided young woman actually felt the need to contribute. Didn’t she know that every time she opened her mouth, it was like a dagger to Sandy’s heart? Talk about metaphors, she thought, shaking her head and dislodging the hair she’d just tucked behind her ear, realizing, technically, it was a simile. “Go ahead, Dee,” she said.

“Dee?”
Greg repeated incredulously.
“Dee?!
Hey, if you’re gonna give her a nickname, how about Deli? Yeah, that’s better. God knows she could eat everything in one.”

Once again, the class erupted in laughter. But unlike Victor, Delilah had no quick comeback, no clever retort.

“That’s enough,” Sandy warned.

“Tell that to the Deli,” Joey Balfour shouted from the back of the room. A fresh wave of laughter swept through the class.

“Or how about Big D?” Greg continued. “You know, like the song—”

“I said, that’s enough.”

Delilah lowered her head, creating an unfortunate double chin. Sandy felt immediately guilty. The poor girl had enough problems without being saddled with a nickname that was worse than the real thing. What had she done? It wasn’t the teenager’s fault that her mother had seduced Sandy’s husband during an intimate online chat. It wasn’t her fault that Ian had grown restless and dissatisfied being the proverbial small fish in a big pond, that he’d yearned to be a bigger fish in a smaller pond.

Make that the biggest fish, Sandy amended. The smallest pond.

Make that frog, she amended further. Make that quagmire.

“Okay. No more of that. Unless you all want to stay late after class.” Immediately the room fell silent. No need for clever retorts when you had power. “Delilah,” Sandy encouraged.