Sister Mischief (17 page)

Mrs. D. cracks a smile. “I left Poe off the list because I thought it was a predictable choice, but if ‘The Raven’ sets your heart on fire, Tess, we’ll try to squeeze it in at the end. Oh, and also, the little ghost in the back is my daughter Johanna. Her school is closed today, so she’ll be joining our discussion.”

The name makes me start; Johanna is my mother’s name, after the Bob Dylan song, or that’s what Pops told me, anyway. I turn around to see a small besheeted figure wave shyly at us. Seeing Johanna makes me wonder what would happen if I ever met my mother on the street, randomly, a meeting I’ve both fantasized about and feared. How would I know she corresponded with me, her body with mine? How would I recognize her? Sometimes I don’t remember what she looks like. Looked like. Would she recognize me?

Tess leans over and whisper-sings the White Stripes’ “Little Ghost” in my ear. Though the sheet makes it hard to tell, I’d place this Johanna at about eleven or twelve, and think that she’s younger than a child I’d imagined someone of Mrs. D.’s stature having.

“Will someone volunteer to read the poem?” Mrs. D. asks. I raise my hand. She nods at me. “Thanks, Esme. Whenever you’re ready.”

I begin to read; the poem is long, lyrical, more than a little sensuous, rhythmic, and riddled with graphic fruit. It seems to be about two sisters walking through this surreal bazaar where sketchy goblins try to sell them evil fruit. One sister, Lizzie, is the good, virtuous, cautious one, and the other one, Laura, is too curious for her own good:

I look up. Mrs. DiCostanza smiles expectantly.

“So — first impressions? Where do we start with this poem?”

I love the dead silence that always follows open-ended questions like this, especially when they’re about poetry. We’re all word nerds, the Sister Mischief cohort, so I’m just waiting to see who jumps on it first.

It’s Marcy, hot on the buzzer. “The metric structure is pretty complex,” she answers. That’s my girl, finding the beats in everything. “It mostly alternates between iambic tetrameter and trimeter, but a lot of the lines stop short at dimeter.”

“Can someone translate that into English?” Anders Ostergaard quips from the back. What a genius.

Johanna DiCostanza lifts up her ghost face and smiles helpfully at him. “It means that the emphasis is on every second syllable, and that there are alternately three and four poetic feet per line. And that some of the lines stop at two feet.”

“Oh,
snap
!” I hoot, raising a snicker from the class.

“Yo, Mrs. D., your kid is like crazy smart,” Elijah Carlson, another of the white hats, contributes. I see Johanna kind of shrinking in her chair and remember viscerally how much it sometimes sucked to be the smart kid.

“Yes, my kid is smart,” Mrs. D. says. “Nicely observed, all of you. So what’s the thematic content of ‘Goblin Market’? What kind of narrative does it enact? And why did I choose it for Halloween?”

“Because it’s about goblins and it’s creepy as fu —?” Elijah offers another insight.

“Watch yourself, Mr. Carlson,” Mrs. D. responds swiftly.

Tess raises her ax. “This poem feels really sexual to me. Like, kind of violently sexual. This is a really intense sister relationship.”

“Can you push that a little bit harder?” Mrs. DiCostanza asks.

Tess continues. “It kind of feels like a fight with seduction. Like, Laura’s the greedy sister, the curious sister, and she gets all up in the market, but Lizzie’s a little more prudish, a little more wary. And the goblins are all after them in this sort of rapey way.”

“Do you think we’re meant to interpret this poem as an allegory?” Mrs. D. asks. “Is this a cautionary tale about girls and sex?”

“No,” Rowie pipes up unexpectedly. “It starts off wanting to make you think that. But it ends up being more like the sisters vanquishing the goblins, outwitting them at their own game.” She pauses. “As a whole, this feels to me like a poem about love between women.”

Rowie’s pupils dart around as if she’s being followed. Mrs. D. nods.

“I like that interpretation very much, especially considering it’s ultimately Lizzie’s love that saves Laura from ruination and death. Can we unpack the significance of fruit in the poem a little bit more —”

Mrs. D. still has her mouth open to continue her sentence when she is abruptly cut off by a whoop in the hall, followed by the fire bell. She hangs her head, having taught too many Halloweens to feign surprise. Resignedly plunking her witch hat onto her head, she ushers the class and Johanna toward the door.

We squeeze out the door with no preparation for what we’re entering. The hall is a scene of unbridled sensory chaos. Everyone’s pressing their ears and squinting against the jangling bell and flashing alarm lights, but, even more jarring, the central cafeteria floor is covered in a tempest of wretched shit — there are suds everywhere, suggesting that soap is one of the ingredients to this liquid disaster, and there’s gobs of something thick and shiny that looks a lot like Crisco mingling with the bubbles. I hear Wu-Tang’s “Shame on a Nigga” pumping, but I don’t know where it’s coming from. As we gape from the doorway, various stained people run by: two guys chortle as they slick the slime off their vintage North Star hockey jerseys, and a short girl weeps as she realizes her suede skirt is ruined. I clap a hand over my mouth, awestruck.

“This ish is bananas,” Rowie says. “B-A —”

“Cheese and rice!” Mrs. D. exclaims as shrieks begin to erupt from all the other classes emerging into the storm. “Come on, we’re taking the north stairs.” She snatches Johanna and marches our class toward the exit, but we move reluctantly, rubbernecking at the administrators who have begun to enter the scene.

People are catapulting into the bedlam, slipping and sliding around the lunchroom, veering and falling amid the teachers’ hapless protests. The white hats are all batshit trying to push each other down in the goop, and a group of burnouts form an impromptu blissed-out dance circle near the windows, obliviously gyrating in the muck. Coach Crowther tries to make his way over to break up the party — which I have half a mind to careen over and join — but totally eats it on his third step into the slippery lunchroom maw. As he writhes in the goo, I notice Marcy smirking like she knows something we don’t.

“Aren’t you going to help him?” I ask.

“Naw, I’m pretty sure they covered this in basic training. We should get moving,” she says, chuckling. “It’s about to get worse.”

“How do you —?” Rowie manages before the first water balloon hits, taking Lauren Wilshire down like she were made of Styrofoam. Shrieking, we scurry out of the line of fire as the ammunition descends like a hailstorm.

“NASTY!” Tess screeches as we try to run down the stairs. The banisters are covered in the same lardlike substance as the cafeteria floor, but mercifully, the terrorists have spared the stairs. Holding our hands up like hostages, we make our way down to the exit. There isn’t any more order outside the school: teachers don’t get training for emergencies like these, I suppose, and half the students have already started migrating over to the parking lot and driving out through the bus entrance on the other side of the school.

“Marce, you wanna fill us in here? I assume you have sources on this,” Tess says.

Marcy snorts and motions for us to draw back from the AP English crew a little, leaning in.

“Look, all’s I’m saying is I heard a little chatter about the hockey team trying out some new initiation strategies. I think the new guys had to come up with a prank that’d get everyone out of school early on Halloween,” she says.

“Oh, Lordy,” Tess says. “I hope Anders wasn’t up in this.”

“So why are we still here?” I say. “I say we follow the parking lot migration.”

“Won’t we get marked absent for the rest of the day if we bail?” Rowie says worriedly.

“Ummm,” Marcy says, “I think Project Mayhem here may have the fire alarm set to go off every fifteen minutes for the rest of the day.” The fire trucks roll up just as the alarm goes off again. I look over and see Mrs. D. on her cell phone, fighting with someone. The little ghost is fastened close to her side, taking in the anarchy around her with wonder.
Wow,
I think,
some people have moms at times like these.

“They’ve already started to leave, Ross,” she argues, yelling into her BlackBerry speakerphone like a Hollywood agent. “You have to notify the parents so they can pick up kids who don’t have cars. You’d also be well advised to do so before the press gets wind of this.”

“Marilyn, I can’t close the entire goddamn school because some little asswipes decided to unleash a holocaust of — of —
slop
all over the building,” the voice of Principal Ross Nordling warbles hysterically from the other end of the speakerphone.

“Ross, you can’t expect kids to learn when they’re knee-deep in
bullshit.
I just heard there are animals loose in the school. It isn’t safe. I’m telling my class to call their parents.” Mrs. D. ends the conversation, pitching her phone in her purse.

“Animals?” Rowie asks.

“Tess, can I see your iPhone for a sec?” Marcy’s got that impish look in her eyes again.

“Where’s your phone?” Tess asks suspiciously.

“I need interwebs,” Marcy replies, grabbing the magic gadget. She clicks on it for a minute,
⁴³
then gives us a thumbs-up.

43. Marcedemeanor DM @KIND11Tips:
If you guys have anyone near Holyhill, the high school’s been attacked. #holyhillholocaust


“Fuck all y’all, Holyhill.”

“What did you just do?” I arch an eyebrow at her.

“Direct-messaged the KIND-11 Twitter tip line.” Tess snatches her iPhone back and reads us the tweet.

“You said the school’s under attack?” Tess’s jaw hangs agape.

“The school
is
under attack. Sort of.” She hangs up, grinning at us.

“Oh, man,” Tess says. “Darlene would hit the roof if this was what I wore for my local TV debut.” She giggles and taps on her iPhone.
⁴⁴

44. TheConTessa @Marcedemeanor:
All hell’s breaking loose at Holyhill High. #holyhillholocaust


Marcy gets on her own phone and dials.

“Yo. No,
you
piss off, I
know
you’re at work. That’s why I’m calling. Look, just do me a favor and check the Twitter tip line. Naw, we didn’t get bombed or anything, but you’re still gonna wanna haul it over here. Dude, I am
not
trifling. Just grab whichever Botox Barbie is on duty and a camera and come here. Okay, bye.” She hangs up.

“Rooster?” I ask.

“You know it.” She grins.

“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,” the megaphoned voice of Principal Ross Nordling reaches us. “SCHOOL WILL BE CLOSED FOR THE REST OF THE DAY.” A cheer rises from the crowd. “PLEASE MAKE YOUR WAY TO THE PARKING LOT. YOUR PARENTS WILL BE NOTIFIED AND BUSES WILL BE ARRIVING SHORTLY FOR THOSE OF YOU WHO DO NOT DRIVE TO SCHOOL. IF YOU HAVE ANY INFORMATION ABOUT THE PERPETRATORS OF THIS INCIDENT —”

In a turn of events that can only be described as absurd, Principal Nordling is interrupted by a chorus of bleating. Turning around to face it, I see several goats trying to cross the street between the school and the track, where everyone who hasn’t already busted has gathered. More goats begin to appear at the exit doors of the school, looking pleadingly at us through the glass. I meet their gaze and understand how they feel down to their bleeding marrow. They can’t get out by themselves.

“Save the goats!” I scream, hurtling into the street to rescue the lost goats from the impending fleet of arriving buses.

“Save the goats!” Rowie squeals with equal fervor, dashing into the street behind me. The poor animals have Crisco all over their hooves. I hope it’s not, like, the guts of anyone’s cousin or anything.

“Here, you’re cool. Crunch on some munchies over here,” I soothe my new cloven-hooved homie, leading him over to the grass. “Keep an eye on him,” I tell Tess and Marcy. Rowie’s already back up at the school, springing the other goats from the building and steering them toward us. I run back to help her herd them across the street; there are two, four counting the ones we’ve already guided to safety. Rowie and I both have this animal instinct. I think it’s a Hindu thing for her; I’m pretty much just a dirty hippie. Two of the goats are covered in red liquid that appears at first to be the carnage of a senseless goat slaughter but upon closer inspection reveals itself as either fake blood or red Kool-Aid.