Here Lies Linc (8 page)

Sylvie went first. She sounded like she was running for Miss America. “I chose Lenora S. Cadwaller, MD, born 1840, died 1910,” she told us loudly, “because I’d like to be a doctor too someday and Lenora must have been one of the first female physicians in our state.”

I rolled my eyes along with everybody else.

Pretty soon it was Mellecker’s turn. All day long I had been waiting for him to pounce, to tap my shoulder at my locker or stop by the BattleBots table, ready to teach me a lesson for daring to call him Teddy Blair. But so far nothing. Obviously, he was saving his revenge for fifth period, when the entire class would be watching.

“All right, Mellecker,” Mr. Oliver called out. “Who’d you pick?”

Mellecker leaned back in his desk with his fingers laced behind his head. “Is it okay if I pick more than one person?”

“What do you mean?” Mr. Oliver asked.

“I mean I picked a whole family. The Ransom family.”

“That might be all right. Why’d you choose the Ransoms?”

“Because they were
rich
,” Mellecker said, sending a ripple of laughter through the room.

Mr. Oliver was trying not to smile. That’s how it was for Mellecker. Even teachers let him get away with being a smart aleck. “And how did you reach that conclusion?” Mr. Oliver asked.

“Well, they’re all buried in one of those giant, creepy-looking vaults with columns and fancy carvings. So they must have been pretty important, right?”

“It’s a good possibility,” Mr. Oliver said. “I guess you’ll need to get started on your research and find out if your theory is true.”

Then Mr. Oliver moved on. Although Mellecker hadn’t chosen a war veteran like I expected, Beez and some other guys in our class made up for it. Corporals, captains, cadets. I stopped listening. There were only five kids to go before my turn.

No blushing
, I chanted to myself.
No blushing
.

I could feel the air in the classroom turning thick with suspense. Of course everyone had been waiting to see what I would say.

Two more kids to go.

One more …

I took a deep breath and licked my lips and squirmed in my seat.

“Linc?” Mr. Oliver called.

That’s all it took. In a split second my face felt hot enough to melt.

“I’m hoping you were able to complete yesterday’s assignment?”

I gave a quick nod. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Mellecker and Beez angling to get a better view.

“Well?” Mr. Oliver asked, shifting his weight impatiently. “Would you care to share with us who you chose?”

I nodded again and then made my announcement, but the words didn’t come out the way I had planned. I had thought maybe if I said my answer loud enough, no one would notice the quiver in my voice. So I ended up bellowing by mistake. “The Black Angel!” I practically shouted.

The room went still.

Sylvie was the first one to recover from her surprise. “Wait!” she called out, flapping her hand at Mr. Oliver. “I thought you said the Black Angel was off-limits!”

“Well, not exactly,” Mr. Oliver said carefully. “I remember saying that I wasn’t going to allow any more discussion about superstitions and legends. But maybe Linc has a different approach.”

“I do,” I insisted, forgetting to be nervous for a few seconds. “I want to find out the facts, like who’s really buried there and what happened to them, so I can prove there’s no such thing as the Curse of the Black Angel.”

“Sounds intriguing,” Mr. Oliver said. “But do you mind my asking what the professor thinks of your plan?”

I pretended not to notice all the whispering and kids trading looks across the aisles. “She really likes the idea,” I lied. “She told me I’d be doing this town a big favor if I could show, once and for all, that the Black Angel legends are nothing but a bunch of bull.”

Mr. Oliver’s bushy eyebrows climbed higher on his forehead.

The truth was I hadn’t even told Lottie yet. I had wanted to tell her last night—right after I apologized for that tirade up in my room. But she didn’t get home from work until after dinnertime, and when I had wandered downstairs to talk, she said she was exhausted from her trip and needed to go straight to bed.

Sylvie was still complaining. “It’s not fair,” she grumbled to no one in particular. “I bet you anything he’s gonna get his mom to help him.”

“What’s wrong with that?” somebody across the room shot back. I stared in confusion. It was Mellecker, and it sounded like he was taking my side. “She’s an expert on graveyards,” he said to Sylvie. “Wouldn’t you ask her for help if she were
your
mother?”

Sylvie slouched back in her seat with her arms crossed over her chest. I kept gawking at Mellecker, wondering whether I had heard him right. But before I could figure out for sure, Mr. Oliver raised his hand for quiet. “I’m sure Linc will rely on his mother for advice and nothing more,” he said, turning to me with a pointed glance. “We’ll look forward to
hearing the truth about the Black Angel when you deliver your report in November.”

Cliff flashed me a quick thumbs-up sign from the next row. I smiled back at him, feeling a tiny surge of triumph and relief. My turn was over, and so far American Studies class was going a lot better than I had expected.

Then I snapped back to attention. Mr. Oliver had just called on the new girl, Delaney, and she was talking in that dreamy, sipping-lemonade-on-the-front-porch voice of hers. “I’m not too sure why I picked the one I did,” I heard her say. “I just had a feelin’.”

“Feelin’,” she said, without the
g
on the end.

“And I thought the name on the headstone had a nice ring to it,” Delaney added.

Mr. Oliver closed his eyes and kneaded the heel of his hand into his brow bone as if he were fighting off a headache. “All right,” he said. “I wouldn’t exactly say your reason for your choice is very strong. But now you’ve got me curious. What’s the name with the nice ring to it?”

“Raintree,” Delaney announced. “Robert Raintree.”

Raintree?
I whipped around in my desk and stared at Delaney, hard. She stared right back with her clever cat eyes. I had never heard of anybody else with that name before. Nobody except for me and my dad.

O
NCE THE BELL RANG
, I waited for Delaney to collect her books and leave the classroom first. We were supposed to turn in our Adopt-a-Grave work sheets on the way out. I dropped mine in the basket on Mr. Oliver’s desk and hurried to catch up with Delaney in the hall. I had just gathered up enough courage to tap her on the shoulder when I heard Mr. Oliver call me back. “Linc, can I have a word with you?”

Delaney turned around with her green eyes wide. I snatched looks back and forth, from her to the classroom, like I was watching a Ping-Pong match. “I’ll be right there,” I called to Mr. Oliver.

“Did you want something?” Delaney asked.

By now the hallway had started to fill up with kids, and a few of them bumped me with their backpacks as I stood planted in the middle of traffic.

My face was heating up. “Yeah. Or … I mean, that’s okay,
it can wait till later. Never mind.” A group of girls bulldozed between us as I tried to give her one of those don’t-worry-about-it waves. “Well, I’ll see ya,” I spluttered. Then I lurched back toward the classroom. Jeeter’s term for a big loser landed on the tip of my tongue. “Heehaw,” I muttered. That was me. A total heehaw.

Mr. Oliver had no idea his timing had been so rotten. He led me into the empty classroom and lazily settled himself on the edge of his desk. “Listen, Linc,” he finally started, “I’m not sure exactly what happened yesterday.…” He paused, waiting for me to jump in with an explanation.

“It’s kind of complicated,” I said.

Mr. Oliver nodded. “Can you at least fill me in on why you didn’t tell me before the field trip that Professor Landers is your mother?”

I winced. “Um. I guess I just thought it would make things easier. But it was dumb not to tell you. I’m really sorry.”

Another nod. He reached over and retrieved my work sheet from the basket beside him. I followed his gaze down to my drawing at the bottom of the page. It was terrible. Last night, after Kilgore had run me out of the graveyard, I had had to resort to sketching the Black Angel from memory. Under the bright lights of the classroom, my scribbly drawing looked like a third grader’s—like a lamppost with wings instead of a statue.

“You didn’t follow my instructions,” Mr. Oliver said. “You’ve got a sketch, but where’s the name and the dates? Isn’t there an epitaph on the Black Angel?”

“I guess I forgot to check,” I mumbled.

Mr. Oliver sighed and handed me a new work sheet from a stack on his desk. “Listen, Linc, I gave you permission to do this monument because from what you said in class, I thought you were serious about this project. If you
are
serious, you’re going to need to start over and pay a lot more attention to detail.”

“I will, Mr. Oliver. I promise.” I grabbed the work sheet, thanked him, and bolted for the hallway. I needed to find Delaney, but there were only three minutes until the next bell. Maybe she’d still be at her locker. I always passed her there on my way to French. A few times I had caught a glimpse of a little calendar that she had hung on the inside of her locker door. She had x’d off in red Magic Marker each day since school started. I couldn’t help wondering about the countdown. What was she waiting for? Her birthday? Summer vacation?

I took the stairs two at a time. My backpack banged against my shoulder as I cut in and out of stragglers on their way to class. But by the time I made it to the east wing, there was no sign of Delaney.

I checked back at her locker after sixth period. Nope.

After seventh period—the last one of the day.
Still
no. She’d probably left for a dentist’s appointment or something. I stayed a few more minutes, searching for her in the river of faces flooding down the hall. But soon the crowds dwindled down, and when some kids chatting by their lockers started to give me funny looks for lurking, I gave up and set off for my own locker downstairs.

I almost ran into Mellecker coming out of the boys’ bathroom.
He looked startled to see me. “Oh, hey,” he said, wobbling for a second.

“Hi,” I mumbled, and kept heading for the stairwell.

“Wait,” he called after me.

I stopped.
Here it comes
, I thought as I slowly turned around. At least there weren’t a lot of kids nearby to witness whatever happened next.

Mellecker sauntered toward me. He started to smile. “Remember when we used to climb up that huge dirt pile in the Ho-Hos’ backyard and you kept saying we were climbing Mount Everest?”

I blinked up at Mellecker, speechless with surprise. “Yeah,” I finally answered softly. “And I brought that rope from home, and we tied ourselves together in case one of us fell in a crevasse.…”

Mellecker laughed and looked at the floor, shaking his head. “Yeah. What dopes.” Then his expression suddenly shifted, and he glanced at me with a pained light in his dark eyes. “Listen,” he said, “I had no idea that lady on the field trip was your mother. If I had remembered, I never would have drawn that stupid cartoon. You know that, right?”

I founded myself nodding. He actually looked sincere.

Mellecker’s face cleared. “I recognized you right off, though, as soon as I saw you coming down the hall. You still do that same little move with your head.” Mellecker imitated me flipping my hair out of my eyes. “I used to think it was so cool back when I first met you. I kept trying to do it too, but my hair was never long enough.”

I smiled in amazement. Mellecker thought my “little move” was cool? I never even knew I had a “little move.”

“So if you recognized me,” I asked, “why didn’t you say anything?”

Mellecker shrugged. “Why didn’t
you
?”

I paused and let out a big breath of air. “I don’t know. You weren’t a Ho-Ho very long. I guess I figured you didn’t want to be reminded.”

“Yeah,” Mellecker confessed. He shoved his hands into his pockets with an embarrassed grin. “I kinda thought my Teddy Blair days were behind me.”

“Sorry about that,” I said sheepishly.

Mellecker shrugged again. “It’s okay. Let’s call it even.” He glanced toward the clock on the wall. “Well, I better be getting to practice,” he said, starting to walk backward down the hall. “But I’ll see ya tomorrow, Crenshaw. Okay?”

“Yep.” I lifted my hand in a wave as he turned and disappeared around the corner. Then I stood there with my heart swelling like the Grinch’s on Christmas morning when he hears all those Whos singing down in Whoville. So Mellecker wasn’t such a jerk after all. He remembered everything—the dirt pile, even the dumb way I flipped my hair out of my eyes. And he had called me Crenshaw, just like he called the rest of his buddies by their last names. Suddenly the idea that we could ever be friends again didn’t seem so far-fetched anymore.

I headed downstairs, humming, still thinking about all the possibilities. I was so preoccupied that I didn’t even notice Delaney until I was halfway down the hall. She was leaning
against one of the lockers toward the end of the corridor. Not just any locker. It was
mine
.