Crushed (12 page)

Chapter 36

Top Collar

The problem with the vase was the top collar. Clyde had gotten to the point where he could shape the basic vase without thinking, but then his hands would rise to the collar, where the gentlest type of two-handed throttle had to be undertaken, and he just couldn't get it right. The more he concentrated, the worse the results. Now, however, he was merely building the basic vase—his hands ran smoothly through the spinning wet clay—and he was left to his own thoughts, which led him to Wickham Hill.

Clyde hated Wickham Hill, hated him in a way he didn't even hate Theo Driggs, because Theo Driggs was just a thug. But Wickham passed himself off as older, richer, and more sophisticated than everyone else.

He had to warn Audrey. Tell her what he'd found out. It would be hard for her at first, but then she'd be grateful to him, and look at him differently. . . . And then, without meaning to but unable to help it, Clyde began thinking of Audrey, the dream Audrey, on her bike on a sunny country road, with her long legs bare and her sandy hair streaming back. And then he thought of how, when Clyde had remembered Cary Grant's name, she'd said maybe she should pay the reasonable, non-negotiable price to Clyde, and Clyde began to think of Audrey Reed standing before him and smiling shyly and undoing a long, thin dress with a line of cloth-covered buttons running down the front—a reverie that was easy to take pretty far, and in fact only ended when Clyde became suddenly aware of the clay gently enclosed in his hands.

The collar was there.

Somehow, the collar was there.

On the spinning wheel it looked weirdly triangular, but he knew that was the way it was supposed to look.

He very gently released his hands, and the triangular shape turned into a circle before his very eyes.

Clyde sat staring at the pot, almost in disbelief.

Look,
he thought.
Look what just happened.

He raised his eyes to his teacher's desk. “Mrs. Arboneaux,” he said. “The vase.”

She rose and came to his wheel. She stared at it a long time. Then she said, “It's perfect. It's absolutely perfect.” She turned to him. “How did you do it?”

“I don't know.” He honestly didn't. “I was lost in my thoughts”—he colored slightly at the kind of thoughts he'd been lost in—“and it just . . . happened.”

Mrs. Arboneaux laughed. “You let your fingers do the thinking.”

“Is it too big?” Clyde said.

“It'll shrink a little in drying, and a little in firing.” She gazed again at the vase. “It's just the most beautiful shape,” she said. Then, after they'd stared at it in wonderment for perhaps a full minute, she helped him move it from the wheel to a drying tile, which he set on a high shelf, out of harm's way.

Chapter 37

Forewarned

For Audrey, Monday, November 24, was not a good day. First of all, it was freezing. The streets were white with salt, the snow was black with dirt, and the sky was an impenetrable beige. The second issue of
The Yellow Paper
was sticking out of people's backpacks and textbooks and lying facedown on wet, dirty entryways, footprints like postmarks on the edges.

Audrey picked up one that wasn't too grimy and stuffed it into her coat pocket to read after meeting Wickham. He was already waiting for her, leaning casually, handsomely, winsomely against the wall. “Well, well,” he drawled when she drew close, “look who looks fetching as can be.”

“Thanks,” she said, feeling it to be true only when he said it.

She unzipped her backpack and pulled out her physics binder. There was the sepia picture of Heisenberg; there were the neat black letters of his name. Handing the essay to Wickham, though, was like driving down the street with a patrol car behind her. She looked up to see Clyde Mumsford moving down the hall toward them. He glanced at her and at what she was handing to Wickham, and walked on past them. Audrey felt her face go bright red.

“What's the matter?” Wickham asked.

“Nothing,” Audrey said.

“This looks professional,” Wickham said, thumbing through the pages and nodding. He closed it up again and asked softly, “Did you change the typeface?”

“What?” She was still feeling Clyde's gaze. What had that look been?

“I mean, is it the same as you used for your paper?”

It was. Suddenly this seemed like a dead giveaway. And if there was something to give away, it meant there was something to hide.

“It's the same,” Audrey said softly.

“Well, that's okay. It's not that distinctive. Don't worry about it, Aud. You look like you're on trial for murder here. All you did was edit me, remember? Half the papers at this school were radically ‘edited' ”—here he put his fingers up to make quotation marks—“by overachieving parents.”

“Right,” Audrey said doubtfully. “Okay. Well, I'll see you in third period.”

She started to go, but Wickham pulled her back. He kissed her in the subterranean gray-green hall of a high school she had hated three months earlier. “Thank you,” he whispered. Other students looked at them, and somebody let fly with a “Hubba-hubba!”

Audrey felt momentarily happy and weightless except for the one rope that tied her to earth—the suspicion that what he was thanking her for was helping him cheat in school.

“Bye,” she said, and hoped that Clyde was not somewhere watching.

Chapter 38

Ignominy

As she headed off toward English, Audrey pulled out
The
Yellow Paper,
which was full of the usual tasteless stuff:

URINE TROUBLE NOW!
NOT-WATER BALLOONS
ARE URINIFEROUS
FILL-UP STRICTLY A GUY THING

Ugh. With a mixture of dread and curiosity, Audrey turned the page over and found the “Outed!” column:

Lovers of Yellow Journalism let us as they say get right down to
bidness. What Social Science Teacher-type going by the initials
D.B.I. might think of changing that middle initial to U? That's
correct, Bargefolk, one of our esteemed educational professionals
made the police blotter two weeks back with a blood alcohol reading of almost triple repeat triple the legal limit and here's thinking
the fact that the nice Police Officer pulled our So-Sci pedagogue
over at 2:15 a.m. in the company of a female companion other
than his wee wedded wife might explain why our D.B.I. has taken
up temporary quarters at the YMCA. . . .

Probably Mr. Ingram, Audrey figured. He taught social science and she thought his first name was David, but he seemed so meek and bland—maybe five foot six, nearly bald, and always wearing the same nerdy cardigan—that it was hard to think of him out drinking with some woman. But that was the thing about people you saw from a distance, or even people close to you—you had no idea in the world what they might do when they thought they were alone. Who would have guessed, for example, that she would do what she did with Wickham? Letting him look over her shoulder during quizzes. Writing his paper for him. Letting him undo her blouse on the sofa in his living room.

Audrey shook her head quickly to dispel these thoughts, and kept walking and reading.

Stiff upper liposuction, Mademoiselle Taylor, but when asked
whether your name and cosmetic surgery should be uttered in the
same breath we must in all candor confess the answer be oui.

Miss Taylor, the spinster French teacher, whose face, Audrey had to admit, did seem to have that stretched-taut look. She continued reading.

Here's yet another poll to hold on to, Bargemen, and no we
don't mean
that
pole you deviate you. Results from the 1st
Annual Large-Margin-of-Error Poll are finally in and we now
have winners of awards in categories both coveted and un.
Speaking of uncoveted and starting with scalp scurf, The
Demonest Dandruff Award goes to . . . drumroll and miscellaneous juvenile sounds imitating flatulence . . . Mr. Dan Hans the
Science Man! Your top choice for the Lady-Godiva-Ride-Through-the-Food-Court Award is . . . drumroll and heavy
breathing . . . Evie Berkowitz!

Audrey scanned a few more ersatz awards until she came to Theo Driggs's name:

And finally, Fellow Inmates, the award you've all been waiting
for, the highly pejorative Biggest Horse's Ass Award for which let's
face it there were a wide variety of nominees but this was the one
award with a landslide runaway and thumbs-down winner . . .
our very own punkster and mugster Theo-the-Sniggering-Stallion-Driggs. That's right, Theodora, you may have the brains and
breath of a Shetland pony but the consensus is you are indeed The
Biggest Horse's Ass on campus and to be truthful our tireless staff
(no not
that
staff you overly hormonal moron) can think of no one
more deserving of this ignominy. (Sorry Theo, but we can't tell
you what ignominy means—you'll just have to look it up.)

Audrey wasn't sure whether the Yellow Man was foolish, brave, or both. But she knew one thing for sure: the Yellow Man was in for a serious pulping if Theo ever figured out who he—or she—was.

Chapter 39

Discovering the Yellow Man

“Audrey?”

Clyde Mumsford stepped out from a hallway alcove, where he must have been waiting. He was wearing the pink-and-black bowling shirt again, but he had shaved, and his hair looked wavy instead of helmet-mashed.

Audrey gave him a half smile. “Hi.”

“I need to talk to you.”

The urgency in his voice made Audrey apprehensive. She glanced toward room 456, where her English class met. “I've got class right now,” she said.

He said, “Perry's class, right?”

She nodded, and wondered how Clyde knew this.

“He's late,” Clyde said. “I just saw him go into the teacher's lounge.”

Audrey hesitated, and Clyde said, “It'll just take a second.” From inside his coat, he pulled out a manila envelope.

“What's that?” Audrey said, afraid it was connected somehow with Wickham's Heisenberg paper for Mrs. Leacock.

“It's . . . ,” Clyde began, then looked down at the envelope. His long fingers were caked with light brown clay.

Audrey glanced down the hallway—it was almost empty now. If she kept standing here, she was going to be late. “It's
what
?” she said impatiently.

Clyde looked both serious and fearful. “It's . . . information I think you should have.”

He extended the envelope toward her, but Audrey wasn't ready to take it. “What kind of information?” she asked.

Clyde sounded almost apologetic. “Important information.” He made his voice softer. “About someone you know.”

Audrey's voice was sharp. “Who?”

Clyde looked at her uncertainly, then lowered his eyes. “Wickham.”

A kind of rage took hold of Audrey. What right did Clyde Mumsford have to be giving her information about Wickham? In a tight voice she said, “So you're here to debrief me about Wickham Hill?”

Clyde stood there, stiff and quiet.

“Where did you get this so-called important information?” Audrey asked, and when Clyde just stood there looking uncomfortable, something occurred to her, something that felt like a revealed truth. She said, “You're the Yellow Man, aren't you?”

He had a caught-in-the-headlights look. “What?” he said.

She held up
The Yellow Paper.
“This is your work, isn't it?”

“Oh, that,” he said. “I couldn't tell you who's behind that.” He took a deep breath and rubbed some of the dried clay off his hands. “Look, Audrey, I'm giving you this envelope because I'm worried about you.”

Audrey had to keep herself from shouting. “
You're
worried about
me
? What right do
you
have to be worried about
me
?”

Down the hall, Mr. Perry stepped out of the teacher's lounge and ambled toward them, carrying a coffee cup and his tattered literature anthology. His hard heels clicked on the concrete floor.

Audrey turned back to Clyde. “I'm not taking that envelope,” she said in a hard, low voice. “I don't want your sleazy information, because I think what you're doing right now is sleazier than anything that envelope might contain.”

When Clyde spoke this time, his voice had more bite to it. “Well,” he said, “that's where you'd be wrong.”

Again he extended the envelope in his clay-caked hand.

Mr. Perry, drawing near them, said amiably, “Miss Reed, if you were to beat me through that door, I could avoid marking you tardy.”

Audrey glanced at Mr. Perry, then back at Clyde. “Keep your important information to yourself,” she said in a tight whisper. “In fact, keep everything about yourself to yourself.”

As she turned to go, Clyde, in a rising voice, said, “Then ask Wickham about a girl whose name was Jade Marie Creamer.”

Audrey felt as if she were fleeing a bad dream. She hurried through the classroom door and, avoiding all eye contact, slid into her seat.

Mr. Perry, entering the room, said, “Today, fellow lovers of literature, I have the pleasure of introducing you to a book and a boy named Huckleberry Finn.”

Audrey stopped listening and went back over the weird conversation she'd just had with Clyde Mumsford.

Jade Marie Creamer.

Who in the world was Jade Marie Creamer? And what did Wickham have to do with her? Images piled up, and questions, until Audrey almost couldn't think.

Up front, Mr. Perry was saying, “So if you will turn to page 1045.”

I couldn't tell you who's behind that.
That's what Clyde said when Audrey showed him
The Yellow Paper
and asked if he was the Yellow Man.
I couldn't tell you who's behind that.

Which wasn't the same as denying it, was it?

And if Clyde was writing
The Yellow Paper—
and deep in her bones, she was sure now that he was—what would keep him from using his sleazy information about Wickham in the next installment of “Outed”?