Authors: Gillian Roberts
“Because he’s an alien.”
“From space?”
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“From
Spain.
Probably a spy.”
“Okay,” I said. “Enough. We’ve reached the ridiculous. Terrorists have nothing to do with this or us, and Mr. Reyes is a native-born citizen and certainly not a spy.” The bell was going to ring any minute. “I need to take roll, but as my roll book is missing, I’m going to pass a paper around the room and—”
“What’s that behind you?”
I turned. The roll book sat primly atop my desk.
I whirled back around, and scanned the class, looking for an expression that suggested involvement in this. Glee, amusement, interest even.
Twenty-two ninth grade faces looked back at me; twenty-two faces I saw briefly once a day for homeroom, twenty-two people who had no reason to care what grades I gave my classes. None of the voices and none of the expressions hinted at anything out of the ordinary.
When the bell rang again for the end of homeroom, I examined the roll book, flipping its pages. I saw no sign of tampering.
No white-out, no funny-looking grades, nothing.
I seriously considered whether I was going stark, raving mad.
My first-period class, the poets, arrived armed to the teeth with questions about the explosion. I couldn’t blame them. And yet I had no answers, so the questions seemed pointless. Therefore I didn’t so much guide the discussion back to the poetry unit as haul and shove and drag it back there.
But once there, they seemed to accept the idea and, in fact, to decide that reveling in yesterday’s performance and accomplishments was almost as interesting as analyzing the explosion.
“My friend Annie? She thought it was really cool, and so did her whole class! I think they want to do one.” Alison Brody’s eyes were wide, and she smiled as she spoke, making her difficult to understand for a moment. I realized again how brave it had been for some of them to go public that way, and I was delighted anew 93
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by how the process had worked out. Nothing validates a teenager more than approval from a peer—and who would have anticipated getting it through poetry?
The approval was not, apparently, universal. Carl, a wiry boy who always seemed worried about being too small to be noticed, shouted out. “Yeah, well, Derek, you know, the kid who did the tech part? He got in trouble from it. He’s got detention.”
“Why? He did a terrific job.”
“His teacher didn’t like Derek working for you.”
“He wasn’t working for me!” That made it sound as if I’d acquired an indentured servant. “He was getting experience with sound and—”
“Right, but he ran over into the next period—putting the equipment away and all, so he was like five minutes late to class and his teacher gave him detention.”
“Which teacher?” I asked, but I guessed the answer before Carl said, “Mr. Applegate.”
“I’ll write him a note. Derek shouldn’t be penalized. It was all set up in advance, and he had permission.”
“From the other teacher, the first-period one. That’s what Mr.
Applegate said. Not from him.” Carl’s interest had wandered to the girl across the aisle who was brushing her long hair with a va-cant expression on her face.
“Alicia?” I asked, and she looked as startled awake as Sleeping Beauty must have been when the prince made it through the hedge and planted one on her. She blinked, then put the brush away in her purse.
“Let’s hear what you collected,” I said after a quick check of who was in class.
Because only a small portion of the class had shared original poetry, I’d asked the rest of the students to find poems that mattered to them, and to share those with the class. In other words, they, too, in their ego-protected way, had become participants in my stealth public speaking and poetry program. They read, blushing, protesting, explaining why they’d picked this or that GILLIAN ROBERTS
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poem: “I like the way it rhymes and sounds when the raven says
‘Nevermore.’ ” “Because Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning loved each other so much,” said with scarlet ears and zero eye contact. “Because I guess it made me see people long ago had the same feelings I did and, no offense, Miss Pepper, but because this isn’t a girl poem. It’s about war.”
And so forth and so on.
I stood in the hall between periods, staring at the closed door of the chemistry classroom as if it would reveal something—the
why,
at least, of what had happened. And the
who,
if there was one, would be kind of great.
I was so absorbed in trying to see the invisible that it took me a moment to realize there was pressure on my forearm. “Pepper, is it?” I finally heard.
I stared into the gray eyes of a stranger.
“It is Amanda Pepper, isn’t it?” he asked, removing his hand from my arm.
I nodded, though I disliked being referred to as an
it.
“Detective Norton. If I could have a few minutes of your time?”
“I have a class in four minutes,” I said. “You can have those.”
This had to be about hiding Tisha Banks, my only current crime.
“Won’t take long,” he said, visibly unimpressed by my peda-gogical responsibilities. “You knew the injured teacher, Juan Angel Reyes?”
I nodded and pointed. “His room was—is—right across there, so of course.”
“You were friends, confidantes, perhaps?”
Students slowed down as they passed us, their ears revolving in my direction like satellite dishes. “Colleagues,” I said.
“He said—”
“He’s conscious?” I felt a wave of relief and smiled. “Thank heavens!”
Detective Norton seemed overly interested in my response and slow to offer up his. “He was,” he said after too long a pause, 95
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during which he watched me as if he thought I might bolt.
“Briefly. Kind of in and out, but his throat’s seriously hurt so he can’t talk much at all even when awake. He said your name.”
“Mine? Why?”
“That’s my question.” With no subtlety, he led me away from the door and the students filing in as slowly as they could. When we were nearly across the landing, he spoke again. “Were you and Mr. Reyes perhaps more than colleagues?”
My jaw dropped comic-book fashion. Perhaps faces do that when the mouth part disengages from the brain part. I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, shout, or turn my back. Instead, I took several deep breaths, hoped that not a single student had heard his suggestion, and finally said that I’d barely known him.
“I know nothing personal about him. I’d see him when we left our classrooms at the same time. I’d be very interested in what prompted that question.”
He raised his eyebrows, making it quite clear he didn’t believe me. “He said your name. He had around two minutes of full consciousness. We asked him what happened and he said your name.”
“Are you suggesting that I had something to do with the explosion?”
He shook his head.
“Then why would he say my name?”
“We were hoping you’d answer that.”
“I wish I could.”
“Why do you
think
he said your name?”
I’m sure Detective Norton considered himself thorough, focused, and determined, and it’s possible he was all those things and that they were good traits for a detective. But I found his one-note persistence obnoxious and stupid. “Why does it even matter?” I asked. “It was an accident.”
“Apparently. But still, when he came to and we asked what happened, he said your name.”
I felt an unpleasant thrum in the pit of my stomach, a sense that I was the crack brain, and that I was lying in some way.
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If Reyes had said my name because he thought—or knew—
I knew something, that would mean the explosion wasn’t an accident. But the only things I “knew” were rumors, fears, gossip, whispers, and Juan Reyes’s sense that the seniors were out to get him.
I knew I’d be a half-wit if I shared my thoughts or those amorphous fears and speculations with this dull man whose only talent was hanging on to his pre-existing ideas even when they made no sense. If I breathed suspicion on the seniors this man would haunt and hound them forever, and their futures would be jeopardized for no real reason.
“He was new. Never taught before, and he was having a rough time adjusting,” I said instead. “He complained to me.
Maybe that’s why he said my name.”
The detective frowned. “Doesn’t make sense to me.”
I could have helped it make sense if he’d seemed at all interested, but he wasn’t. I could have described Reyes’s complaints, or clarified what the “rough time” meant if he’d asked me what I’d meant, but he didn’t.
“I really must go to class,” I said.
He pursed his lips and exhaled in a manner designed to make me realize how much I had displeased him.
“May I?” I asked. Maybe we were playing Simple Simon and I’d forgotten the secret passwords.
“If this is all you’re going to say—that you don’t know . . .
you might as well.”
I nodded agreement. “If I think of anything—any reason he’d have said my name—I promise I’ll get in touch.”
This time, his expression made it clear that my promises weren’t worth a response.
“Was Miss Banks okay?” Ma’ayan asked almost as soon as I was in the room.
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“Excuse me?”
“Miss Banks—the new art teacher,” she said in her bright, clear voice. “Is she okay?”
How did she know Tisha Banks had been in there? We’d been discreet about getting her out, waiting till the halls were clear.
Even Detective Norton hadn’t mentioned her existence.
Interesting if Juan Reyes said my name because he thought I knew something, but he didn’t think Tisha, who was there, knew.
Or perhaps he was simply protecting her.
Ma’ayan continued blissfully, her face innocent and mildly amused. “My brother phone-texted me. He has art first period.
She came in and then left—and he said there was blood on her coat!”
“She’s fine.” I left it at that, and thought instead about the less than obvious web of connections between students. Phones that transmitted messages. Brothers and friends of siblings. Classmates of brothers and sisters. I hadn’t ever thought about how information must be everywhere, instantly now that in addition to merely passing in the hallways and spreading the word, they could check their phones between (or, unhappily, during) classes and find out the news from other floors. From, in fact, everywhere. The possibilities were awesome.
In a relatively short while, after the class had a few minutes to whisper and pass notes about the hapless student teacher, and I to try, unsuccessfully, to decide whether I should have told Detective Norton about Tisha, we seemed ready to return to the discussion of
A Separate Peace.
I think it went well and smoothly, but most of my mind was still in the chemistry lab and with Detective Norton. I had to remind myself that the police had accepted it as a sad but not surprising accident, so why wouldn’t I? I was second-guessing them because Juan Reyes had apparently said my name.
Why?
The tenth graders’ homework assignment was up on the GILLIAN ROBERTS
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board and I went over it with them to the accompaniment of moans and groans. “Write out why you think this is called
A Separate Peace.
That’s it.”
I thought of my headmaster’s messages and my obligation to the next generation. “I’m not going to say write five hundred words or any amount. I don’t want you to pad it. In fact, I want you to say as much as you can with as few words as you can, but that doesn’t mean it might not be long. Write in full sentences and paragraphs and think the question through.” More moans, grimaces, and groans. “Tomorrow, we’ll read a few at random”—
more groans—“and discuss your ideas, then I’ll collect them.” A final, futile round of heavy sighing.
I smiled. “You’ve been positively brilliant so far,” I said.
“Why pretend that writing your thoughts down is so much harder than saying them?”
Next period was a necessarily dry lesson about suffixes and prefixes, but in a way, the unemotional and mechanical nature of that lesson helped push the morning’s events into the background. Also, this class barely asked for updates or clarification about the morning. Juan Reyes had had his fifteen minutes of fame and he was no longer a front-page story.
Class ended, lunch was here, and I felt as if I’d accomplished something major, but happily, I did not try to define what it was.
I looked up to see Lucas, one of the second-period tenth graders, back in my room, standing next to my desk, impossibly small for his age. He was a quiet boy who often looked as if he wanted to be part of the discussion, but was shy and fearful. I’d been giving him time, hoping he’d feel sufficiently secure to speak up soon.
Now, he stood there swallowing hard. I smiled, tilted my head and said nothing, hoping he’d feel pressured to fill the silence.
“I!” He gulped, looked down at his feet and took a few breaths. “I have to confess,” he said in a rush. His skin was scarlet, as if he’d been in the sun too long.
“Confess? To what?”
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What else was there? I saw the blood again, felt the impact of the explosion—and looked at tiny Lucas and could only think no-no-no-no!
His shoulders hunched. “I was dared.”
“Oh, Lucas.” Oh, what a world of things to say about dares and macho games, all too late.
“It was supposed to be a prank. Only a prank.”
“A prank,” I repeated. I tried to keep my voice soft, but I wasn’t sure I succeeded.
He nodded and without turning, waved to the vagueness behind him. “Nicky dared me, but I’m the one who did it. Only me. Then he said he was only joking, but that was later, after I did it.”
I looked behind him and indeed saw Nicky, a tenth grader twice Lucas’s size, standing in my doorway, his eyes fixed on the floor. “Lucas,” I said. “Please—what exactly did he dare you to do?” I tried to envision this undersized boy as a mad scientist, arranging a mysterious concoction to avenge a teacher he couldn’t know well. Tenth graders did not take chemistry. Why a grudge against a teacher you didn’t know?