At Risk of Being a Fool (2 page)

A phone rang. Dillon pulled the tiny phone out of his coat pocket and flipped it open. “It’s me,” he said, as he’d said countless times in the last few weeks, sometimes several times in an afternoon. His eyes still on the math book, he held out the phone. Jeanie took it.

“Hi, Randy, it’s Jeanie McCoy. He’s here.” Her eyes traveled to the clock over the door. “Yes, on the dot. He’s working just fine. What? Oh. Yes, I got Sorrel, no problem.” She switched off the phone, and set it on the desk. It was handy having Randy Firman as parole officer to both Dillon and Sorrel, though she doubted they’d agree. “Sorrel, put the mirror away.”

Sorrel threw her a
look of
open-mouthed contempt. “In a minute, woman.”

“It’s ‘Jeanie,’ not ‘woman.’”

“All right, all right, girl.
Jeanie
.”

Brynna snickered. Without looking, Jeanie knew Brynna wore the look of sly pleasure that ate at Sorrel like water torture. Drip, drip, drip.
Brynna, you’ll be the death of me
, Jeanie thought. Envy was part of the equation. Sorrel’s colorful extravagance suited her. Brynna’s surreptitious attempts along the same line only made her look like a hooker on the prowl.

She sidestepped, shielding Sorrel from Brynna’s vulture act. Sorrel’s eyes dropped. Jeanie didn’t rush her. Slowly, I-was-about-to-do-this-anyway, you’re-not-pushing-me, Sorrel put away the mirror. She stood and stretched elaborately, sank back down, crossed her legs, and pulled her book closer.

“So Brynna,” said Jeanie, “can I snitch a pretzel from you?”

Startled, Brynna shoved the bag over. Jeanie slipped out a broken pretzel and slapped the bag shut, as though trapping a mouse. “Have to move fast,” she whispered, “so the calories don’t get out.”

Brynna’s wide-eyed look faded perceptibly. The ghost of a chuckle escaped. Jeanie winked as she left, drawn by Quinto’s unnatural silence. She drew up a chair next to him. If she’d been in her high school classroom, with a student obviously upset, she’d have opened with a casual punch on the shoulder. Not here, though. Mackie had drilled her on that during those first watchful days.
Never touch. Not ever
.

“Hey, Quinto. I heard there was some trouble at your work site. Are you doing okay?”

His hand jerked. Seeming to move by itself, his hand shaded a rose petal. “Hmm.” A thorn sprouted from the rose’s stem, sharp and deadly.

“Mackie said you were doing really well there. She’s proud of you.”

Quinto’s face lightened. “Yeah, I done real good, Mr. Rivera said. Even the boss, the big guy.” Earnestly, Quinto’s eyes sought hers. “Only now, I can’t go for a while, ‘cause the boss, Mr. Wogan, he got hurt real bad.”

“Yes, I read about that in the paper. An explosion?”

His voice dropped. “Pipe bomb, cops said. He’s hurt bad. One of his eyes got ripped out, and his hands are all—well, you know.”

“I’m so sorry, Quinto. It must have been a terrible shock. Were you there when it happened?”

“No. It was right after I left. See, Mr. Matthews, he comes for me every day, to take me back to the House.” The rose sprouted thorns, dark and savage. Drops of blood dripped from them. “Pipe bombs, they’re really bad, ‘cause they stick nails and stuff in them and they all go flying.” From the side of the rose, a nail shot out. Another arched higher. A third spiked into an unidentifiable mass, possibly human.

Quinto’s face twisted. He threw the pencil across the room and sent the wadded paper after it. He buried his face in his arms. “Some of the guys thought he was mean, but he wasn’t so bad,” he said, voice muffled and cracked. “He was getting to like me, said I done good. It really means something, you know, when a guy like that says it. I was so happy when I left work, told Mr. Matthews all about it. And then, later on, the cops come.”

“Quinto.” Jeanie’s hand edged out to touch him on the arm. She snatched it back.
Never touch
. “Quinto, I’m so sorry. Do you want make a card for him or something? Send one of your drawings to the hospital, so he knows how you feel?”

“The cops think I done it.”

“They do not! Quinto, don’t you even
say
such a thing.”

“I worked there, I’m in a gang. I mean, I was in a gang.”

“Quinto, you’re in the House now. You’re under someone’s eye all day long. The police know that. How could you possibly build a pipe bomb?”

Quinto raised his head. The tear-streaked face looked oddly wise. “Shit, Jeanie, it don’t take nothing but a phone call to get a pipe bomb. There’s phones everywhere. I could of done it. Two minutes, that’s all.”

“I guess I’m out of touch.”

Quinto snorted softly. His half-smile pulled at her. “Hey, like that’s news? They think somebody brung it over, and I hid it by the truck. But I didn’t. Nobody touches that truck but Mr. Wogan. I did once, the first day, see, and he had a fit. Damn, I thought he was gonna hit me, or something, but it was just, you know, Mr. Rivera, he said Mr. Wogan really liked that truck a lot.”

“Quinto, you’re a graffiti artist, a shoplifter, but you’re not violent. The police know that.”

“Yeah. I couldn’t hurt nobody. I don’t got the balls for that.”

“It’s not a matter of balls, Quinto.”

The aged eyes in the childish face studied her pityingly. “Yeah, well. Mr. Maldonado, you know, the supervisor at Dandridge? He told the cops that, they looked up my record. Mr. Rivera, he talked for me too, said how Mr. Wogan was okay with me. I ain’t got no
reason
to do that stuff. I mean, I got me a job there, when I get out the House, you know? Like I’m going to throw that away?”

“Of course not, Quinto.”

“Of course not, Quinto,” mimicked Brynna. “Like Quinto gives a shit about that son-of-a-bitch.”

Quinto shied back, edging his chair another foot or two from Brynna. He clamped his mouth shut, snatched up another sheet of paper, and sketched a battered truck as if his life depended on it.

“Brynna, hush. This is a private conversation.”

Brynna rolled her eyes. “Jeanie, get real, would you? Wogan was a first-class bastard, sticking his damned nose into everything, a real prick. Ask Dillon, he worked there last summer, until Wogan—”

“Shut up,” said Dillon, his voice flat.

Brynna cut her eyes at Dillon, and took another tack. “Quinto don’t care nothing about no job. Nine to five, work your guts out—”

Sorrel’s voice stabbed the air. “Leave Quinto alone, bitch.”

Oh no, they were back on the merry-go-round again. Jeanie jumped out of her seat. She should have seen it coming. Consciously or not, Sorrel had decided to drown her fears in rage.

“Who you calling a bitch, bitch?”

“Stop it,” Jeanie yelled over the screams. She waved her arms. She’d broken up fights in the high school by walking between the combatants, putting an arm around one and literally walking him away. Try it here? Fat chance. Sorrel or Brynna, either one, would view it as an assault or a deep insult.

Sorrel slapped the desk and threw out one hand, middle finger rigidly extended. “Fuck you, whore. If I had me a knife—Bitchmeat!” She writhed in her seat, but stayed in it, as though riveted into place. Fear of the State Detention Facility fueled the restraint. Sorrel was maddening, but she wasn’t stupid. Not at all.

“Yeah, like you did that one guy?” spat Brynna. “You fucking bitch, need a knife to get tough, huh? Or a pipe bomb, maybe, like your boyfriend? Well tough shit, slut. All you got is your hands. Come at me, why don’t you?” Brynna also remained plastered to her chair.

Jeanie grabbed a portable room divider and yanked it between the girls. The classroom had come equipped with several, a fact for which she frequently thanked God and Mackie Sandoval. Mackie had scrounged them when a state office revamped its cubicle farm.

Dillon seemed amused. “Let ‘em fight, for God’s sake.”

“Oh, hush up,” Jeanie snapped.

Dillon’s mouth shut and his eyes narrowed to slits. Snake eyes, just what she needed. Jeanie ignored him, zipping her own mouth closed before she said anything worse. Soon, rules or not, the girls would be rolling on the floor scratching out each other’s eyes. She couldn’t have that. One of them might break a fingernail.

Jeanie grabbed Sorrel’s chair and pulled it and the screeching girl backwards. She kicked open the door to Mackie’s office and towed Sorrel inside. Back out again, she grabbed two more partitions and boxed Brynna into a cubicle all her own.

The screams reached new crescendos. Jeanie marched to Dillon’s desk. “Excuse me,” she said tartly, as she unplugged his earphones and
thumbed up the volume as high as it would go.
She
put
it
on the table
near the office door. Music blared, the raucous beat pounding its way through the screams. Jeanie blinked as the lyrics filtered into her brain, but shrugged. For drowning out screams, she couldn’t beat it.

Jeanie stood by the boom-box and met four pairs of eyes. Rosalie and Quinto gave her the excited, joyful looks of small children at a slumber party; Dillon and Tonio were stony-faced. Two to two, then. They were tied.

Someone pounded on the classroom door. Jeanie opened the door and popped her head into the hallway.

An aggressively clean-cut young man stood there, his fist poised in mid-air. The inexpensive, immaculate suit, combined with the arrogance of frustrated superiority, marked him as a freshly graduated, professional something-or-other. She recalled the business listings in the lobby, and ran them through her mind. Not a dentist, social worker, or civil servant. They were all too accustomed to loud, angry people. Who did that leave? Ah yes, a lawyer, Mr. Oscar Kemmerich. It had struck her as an improbable name.

She couldn’t hear his words. She raised a finger asking for his patience, and turned back to her room full of live wires. She pointed to the hallway and raised an eyebrow. Rosalie and Quinto took her invitation and bounded into the hallway. Dillon and Tonio glowered. Jeanie stepped out and closed the door. The shrieks dimmed.

“May I help you?” she asked.

“Would you kindly maintain some order in your insane asylum? This caterwauling is totally nonconducive to a professional environment.”

Almost absently, Jeanie returned a soft answer as she glanced to the end of the hallway. Rosalie tip-tapped back and forth, like Judy Garland on the
Yellow Brick Road
. Quinto wedged himself into the corner at the far end of the hall, next to the building’s side exit. He wore his hunted look again. His eyes were riveted on Mr. Kemmerich.

“That’s the boy who worked at the construction site.” Mr. Kemmerich said, following her glance. He sounded darkly triumphant, as though vindicated in some private opinion.

Jeanie jerked to attention. “How would you know?”

Mr. Kemmerich stepped back half a pace and recovered himself. “It was in the newspaper.”

“No, it wasn’t,” she stated. No newspaper would list Quinto’s name. They couldn’t publish Quinto’s name or picture without Dandridge House’s permission, and they would never give it. This man had special knowledge, either of the crime or of her students. “Excuse me, Mr. Kemmerich, but how did you know that?”

The classroom door bumped into her from behind. Prudently, she turned toward it and wedged the toe of her shoe into the crack under the door to jam it. The girls were still carrying on, and she didn’t need Tonio or Dillon charging into the middle of this little confrontation. The door hit her again, and then shuddered with heavy blows. The door scraped over her toe. Ouch. It had to be Dillon, not Tonio.

The pounding stopped. After a moment, she relaxed her stance. She wriggled her toes, trying to get back some feeling.

Mr. Kemmerich leveled a finger at Quinto. “Keep away from my motorcycle, punk. If it goes missing, I’ll sic the cops on you.”

Oscar Kemmerich didn’t have a brain in his head, she thought tiredly. Imagine saying such a thing to a kid with a criminal record. “Quinto would never steal a motorcycle,” she said. Spray-paint it, possibly, but not steal it. “Mr. Kemmerich—”

At the far end of the hall, Mackie’s office door flew open and banged against the wall. Dillon erupted through it and checked his stride at the sight of Mr. Kemmerich. He straightened slowly, and stood there, immovable, stiff-legged, hackles raised, his fingers curved like claws at his sides.

Well, thought Jeanie, it’s about time to break this up. She grabbed Mr. Kemmerich’s right hand, which she pumped vigorously. “Thank you very much,” she said, in the kindly but firm “teacher-voice” known throughout the world. He retreated without conscious volition. Mr. Kemmerich, newly out of law school, still had all the reflexes of youth. “I appreciate your concern for my young ladies,” she said. “I’m sure they’ll calm down shortly. Good day to you, Mr. Kemmerich. I’m sure we’ll meet again sometime.”

Mr. Kemmerich found himself on the stairs. “If they do not calm down shortly, the police will be here to investigate. I will see to it,” he blustered. With a final scowl at Quinto, he left.

Jeanie walked down the hall. Dillon stared down at her with burning yellow eyes.

“Nobody touches my stuff,” he said, voice grating.