Crushed (13 page)

Chapter 40

Mrs. Leacock

Audrey had hoped to see Wickham again before Mrs. Leacock's third-period class, but hadn't. He walked through the door just before the bell, looking calm and assured, carrying his Heisenberg paper, his textbook, and, sandwiched in between, a copy of
The Yellow Paper.
He wasn't alone. Up and down the rows, Audrey could see
The Yellow Paper
lying under notebooks or peeking out of book bags.

Mrs. Leacock must have seen them, too. “Before handing in your papers, people, please pass forward for disposal any copies you may have of the yellow sleaze sheet distributed today—and please, it would behoove you not to protest First Amendment rights. In this small fiefdom, the right of privacy and personal dignity trumps one's right to defame. So please, if you will, pass them forward.”

A reluctant rustling; then, from silent student to silent student, the
Yellow Papers
moved forward.

“Careful how you handle them,” Mrs. Leacock said. “They're germ-bearing, and the disease is communicable among weaker individuals.”

Mrs. Leacock stood at the head of the class, twisting her ring and waiting. She wore one of her striped sweater sets, and her nails were the exact same shade of red as the stripes across her perfectly smooth acrylic sweater. Her lipstick was freshly applied and inhumanly dark. When the
Yellow Papers
were collected into a stack, she held open a plastic bag for a girl in the first row to drop them into. Mrs. Leacock tied the bag's handles and ceremoniously dropped the bag into the metal wastebasket.

“And now,” she said, visibly relaxing, “your own papers, please.”

From behind, Wickham handed his paper to Audrey. Audrey handed both of their essays—the type fonts like identical twins—to Greg Telman, who added his own and passed them forward.

“Well, well!” Mrs. Leacock said as she flipped through the papers handed to her from one row. “Someone had the nerve to do Freeman Dyson's quest to extend human life into the extreme future.”

Audrey regarded Mrs. Leacock's smile—dark-lipped and tight—and realized she had never seen her laugh. Actually laugh. And she couldn't imagine Mrs. Leacock crying. She couldn't imagine Mrs. Leacock's personal life at all, or her past, either. She was always twisting the gold ring on her ring finger, and she was
Mrs.
Leacock—so she must be married— but who, really, would have fallen in love with her? And if she'd had kids, what kind of mother would she have been? Audrey tried to imagine Mrs. Leacock smothering a toddler in kisses, but couldn't.

Lots of her teachers would illustrate things they were teaching with examples from their own lives, but not Mrs. Leacock. No, Mrs. Leacock was there to teach you physics or human biology or chemistry, and you either learned it or you didn't—it was all the same to her—and then, when she drove away from Jemison High and entered her private life, she locked and double-locked the door behind her.

Well,
Audrey thought,
that's why it's called your private life—
because it's private.

Or at least it used to be.

But now you knew that Patrice Newman wasn't just a World Cultures teacher, but also a former teen shoplifter. And you knew that Miss Taylor, while teaching French, was afraid of getting old. And when married Mr. Ingram stood in front of your class, you could sit there imagining him trying to walk a straight line while his girlfriend and a cop stood and watched.

And it wasn't just open season on teachers. It was open season on everybody. Audrey had the awful feeling that Wickham was Clyde's next victim. What did Clyde know about Wickham, and how did he find it out?

Mrs. Leacock slipped the fat bundle of essays into a canvas tote bag and turned to the chalkboard. She began to write, and Audrey began to copy, trying not to think about somebody out in the world whose name was Jade Marie Creamer. She thought about writing a note to Wickham and passing it back, but made herself stop.

You will not ask Wickham,
she thought.
You will not ask
Wickham.

But she didn't have to.

Chapter 41

People vs. Wickham Hill

Just before lunch that day, Audrey went to her locker and found that two sheets of paper had been slipped through the narrow vents of the locker door. Normally, Lea and C.C. were the ones who took advantage of the built-in mail drops— pushing notes, photographs, and the occasional cartoon inside—so Audrey unfolded the papers expecting diversion, but instead found herself looking at some sort of abbreviated legal printout, which read:

Cypress County Superior Court, State of South Carolina
People vs. Wickham Edward Hill

Vehicular manslaughter. Guilty. Sentenced: 5 years parole.
Driver's license revoked.

So this was from Clyde Mumsford. This was what he'd wanted to hand her between classes, and when she'd refused the papers, he'd stuffed them into her locker. It made her furious, and she knew she ought to crumple them up without reading them, but she couldn't. She turned to the second page.

It contained a downloaded article from a newspaper called
The Cypress Telegram,
which read:

A Cypress County teenager was charged yesterday with vehicular manslaughter in connection with the death of a juvenile female on March 3 of this year.

The 16-year-old male allegedly lost control of the Toyota sedan he was driving, resulting in the immediate death of Jade Marie Creamer, age 15. Two other passengers in the car were injured. The name of the juvenile driver was withheld by the court.

According to court documents, the accused is enrolled at Leighton Hall, a private school located two miles southeast of Cypress. The
Telegram
has also learned that three of the passengers in the car are enrolled at the school. A spokesman for Leighton Hall would neither confirm nor deny involvement of any of its students.

The deceased girl, Jade Marie Creamer, was a cousin of one of the other passengers in the car. She was a sophomore at Cypress West High, a member of the Thespians Club, the Model UN, and the debate team.

The accompanying photograph of Jade Marie Creamer looked like a school picture. She wasn't a beautiful girl, but she had perfect teeth and an expression that seemed both perky and assertive.

Audrey flipped quickly back to the legal page. Wickham's conviction followed the news account by just less than three months. About the right time. And it would explain why Wickham never drove.

An image returned to Audrey's mind, the scene she'd dreamed up while Mrs. Leacock was talking about Schrödinger's Cat. Men and women in lab coats stood around a steel box. They said the cat was dead. They said the cat was alive. They said he was both. They checked their watches to see how much longer they had to wait for their observations to change reality. The cat, meanwhile, didn't even know what they were waiting for.

Audrey stuffed the papers back into the envelope. Sweat dampened her shirt and she felt almost dizzy. She headed for the bathroom, the only one she and Lea and C.C. would use, the one tucked between the C and D buildings, where almost nobody ever went.

It is just as likely that no atom has decayed, the acid remains in
the flask, and the cat remains alive.

That's what Mrs. Leacock had said, and Audrey had written it down.

It was lunchtime, but she didn't care about lunch. All she cared about was calming down. Calming down and figuring out how to keep Clyde Mumsford from crushing the flask and opening the box. It would be so easy for Clyde. All he would have to do is smear poor Wickham all over the next
Yellow
Paper.

Chapter 42

Two Birds

The C&D bathroom was empty. Someone had written “XES YEKNOM NO SEY” on one of the stalls in red ink, which made no sense to Audrey until she saw it reflected in the mirror—“YES ON MONKEY SEX.” What was she doing in a school like this, with people like these? She had no idea. Absolutely no idea.

Audrey pulled back her long hair, twisted it, and tucked the loose ends into her collar, then wetted her face. The water felt cold, but good. She rolled up her sleeves and ran water on her forearms. She was feeling better. She closed her eyes and was touching wet fingertips to her eyelids when, from just behind her, she heard a voice, a
male
voice.

“Just freshening up?”

Audrey's eyes shot open, and she spun around.

Theo Driggs stood to her left, blocking the doorway.

Audrey couldn't think what to say. She said, “You can't be here.”

Theo smiled, but not enough to show his teeth. “Yeah, those are the rules. But only losers play by the rules. That's why they lose.”

He stepped closer and looked in the mirror at their reflections.

Audrey said to his reflection, “You need to leave now.”

Theo didn't move. “Know what I've been thinking a lot about?” He did something with his eyes. Something that made them lift slightly, as if to put them on high beam. “You. And how far you've worked your way up my to-do list.” He leaned close to Audrey's neck and took a deep breath. “God. You smell so good.”

Audrey felt a clammy fear enfold her.

Theo leaned closer to the mirror and seemed to be checking his teeth for food bits. As he leaned forward, a folded piece of yellow paper was observable in his shirt pocket. Theo closed his mouth but kept studying his image. His eyes were on low beam now. “A girl told me I have sensual lips. What do you think? Do I have sensual lips?”

Audrey didn't answer.

Theo turned from the mirror to stare at her directly. “You don't think we're compatible, do you?” he said.

Audrey still didn't speak.

“Why is that?” he said, and his eyes shifted to high beam again. “Because you're rich, or because you think you're smarter than me, or what?”

They stood staring at each other.

“You know, you might be smarter than me, and then again you might not. The school makes me go to this lady headshrinker, and she tells me I've got the big IQ.” Theo made a false smile. “She thinks I just don't know how to channel my abilities
constructively.
”

He laughed a hard, derisive laugh and kept his high beams fixed on Audrey.

From outside, a voice called in: “Hey, Theo, what about it? We going to the car or not?”

Theo stood between her and the door, and the moment Audrey thought she ought to scream was the moment she knew she couldn't. Screaming wouldn't help.

Theo's tone turned falsely conversational. “The thing is, compatibility's not so easy to read. You need to go for a spin with us, spend a little time with the guys and me, get to know us.” He leaned forward, and one side of his mouth slid upward. “We're not so bad,” he said, close enough so that she smelled a sour mix of tobacco and licorice on his breath.

He leaned farther forward. Suddenly, without thinking, without really meaning to, Audrey said, “I know who wrote that stuff about you in
The Yellow Paper.
”

Theo's eyes, already on high beam, brightened further. “And who would that be?”

“You'll let me out of here?”

A full few seconds passed before Theo nodded.

“You promise?”

He nodded.

“Clyde Mumsford.”

Audrey thought she saw Theo's pupils actually dilate and then contract as he absorbed this news. And then he seemed to relax, as if he now had something else to look forward to.

“You can go, Miss Caviar,” he said. But when she stepped forward, he didn't immediately move. “Just so you know, you're not off my to-do list.” He looked off to the side. “All that's happened is, somebody moved ahead of you.” He was looking at her again, fastening his salamander eyes on her, smiling at her. “I'll get back to you after I stop the presses.”

Theo stood aside then, and just like that she was past him, out the door, onto the pavement. Three of Theo's friends looked up as she passed, but she kept her eyes straight ahead.

Once she was beyond them, she wanted to stop feeling scared, but couldn't. She also felt like a coward, but what she'd done was what she'd had to do, wasn't it? And besides, she'd killed two birds with one stone. She'd saved herself from Theo and she'd saved Wickham from Clyde.

Chapter 43

Transportation Services

All afternoon, Audrey wanted to be with Wickham, be in a warm house with him while snow fell outside, but when she and Lea and C.C. found him after school, he was at the rusty water fountain near his locker, swallowing his migraine medicine.

C.C. asked what he was taking, and he made a faint smile and said, “Imitrex, and”—he glanced at the water fountain— “swamp water.”

He just wanted to go home, he said, and so Audrey drove him, with C.C. and Lea in the backseat asking solicitous questions about the migraines. They seemed to come in streaks, Wickham said. They weren't that bad. He just had to ride them out.

Lea leaned forward. “This is what my dad does for my mom when she has migraines,” she said, and began slowly rubbing two fingers in tight circles on his temples.

Wickham leaned back, closed his eyes, and said, “Mmmm.” “Be careful,” C.C. said. “If that cures your headache, Lea'll start trying to convert you to her whole homeopathic lifestyle.”

In her soft voice, Lea said, “A girl takes a few antioxidants and her friends turn on her.”

Wickham said weakly that if she cured his headache, he'd just say “maybe” to drugs—which got a laugh from everyone, including Audrey.

“I'll call you when the Imitrex kicks in,” he said to Audrey as he got out, and after C.C. climbed into the front seat, Audrey backed up the Lincoln to drive C.C. and Lea home.

The roads were lined with hard, dirty snow, and Audrey was trying to remember the night this same snow had fallen and she and Wickham had slipped inside the snow globe. It seemed like a long time ago.

“Any progress on the music front?” C.C. asked Audrey, pointing to the cassette player.

“I tried tweezers,” Audrey said. “They didn't work, either.”

C.C. sighed. “Then let's visit the one-record record shop,” she said, punching the power button and releasing sprightly soprano voices from within:
“Ev'rything is a source of fun.
Nobody's safe, for we care for none!”

From the backseat, Lea said, “I think you need to ditch Wickham.”

Audrey gave her a quick look of surprise. “You do?”

Lea nodded.

“How come?”

“So I can grab the discard.”

They all laughed, and in the warm familiarity of the car Audrey considered telling them everything—about the quiz, the Heisenberg paper, even the car accident that hadn't been Wickham's fault—but C.C. said, “You guys hear what they did to Miss Taylor?” and the opportunity was gone.

What they'd done to Miss Taylor was superimpose a blowup of her yearbook head shot on a
National Geographic
foldout of a three-thousand-year-old mummified woman. Then, when no one was there, they used a human pyramid to pin it to the ceiling of her classroom so that it required a janitor and a ladder to get it down. Audrey remembered Mrs. Leacock's warning that the weakest individuals were the ones most likely to be infected by the germs
The Yellow Paper
carried.

“I guess that's funny,” Lea said doubtfully, and Audrey, thinking of Wickham, said, “Not if you're Miss Taylor.”

Audrey pulled up in front of C.C.'s house, where both C.C. and Lea climbed out. “Okay,” Audrey said to both of them. “So you're going to change your clothes and then come over?” They were all going to make cookies and study together, but C.C. needed to bring her own car so she could drive to her aunt's birthday party afterward.

“Right,” C.C. said. “See you in ten minutes.”

Audrey drove the rest of the way home wondering how she might get Wickham to talk about the accident without her directly mentioning it. She was sitting in the driveway, still wondering, when a big white truck pulled up.

It parked at the curb, and three men in sweatshirts and blue jeans hopped out. Small cursive letters on the side of the truck read, ANCHOR BROS. TRANSPORTATION SERVICES
.
The men walked up Audrey's driveway and, to her surprise, opened her front door and went in.

Audrey gathered her books, scrambled out of her car, and picked her way across the icy patches of the driveway. There was another, smaller truck already parked behind the house, and it read, ANCHOR BROS
.,
too. Maybe her dad was home. If he wasn't, maybe she shouldn't go into the house. She stood on the porch uncertainly, then pushed softly on the door.

“Dad?”

A few seconds passed, and then he called, “I'm in here.”

His voice came from the study, where two men in dirty blue sweatshirts had picked up her father's desk and were carrying it out the French doors. The room was freezing, as if the doors had been open a long time, and the office supplies her father had taken out of the drawers and off the top of the desk were scattered across the floor and bookshelves.

Audrey was dumbfounded. “Are we moving?” she said.

“Yes,” her father said, opening a cupboard and pulling out a box. He started dumping pens and CDs and paper clips into it even though it was a file box half full of papers.

“To where?”

“A place nearby. Don't worry. You won't have to change schools.”

“I hate my school,” Audrey said. “What I mind is changing houses.”

He didn't look at her. In a strange, lifeless voice, he said, “We all have to give up things.”

He scooped up the remaining clips and pens and framed photographs and set them on the leather chair. But the men had come back from the truck and were standing by the chair, waiting to take it. “Oh, for God's sake,” he muttered, and tried to scrape up everything again. This time he set the bits and pieces in the trash can, and the men picked up the chair.

“Why didn't you at least tell me so we could pack?” Audrey asked. “I mean, did you decide we were moving
this morning
?”

It scared Audrey that her father was scrambling around his office with pens and paperweights. He was usually so organized. She felt as if she were having one of those nightmares where every door you open leads to a stranger world.

Audrey picked up a framed photograph of her mother to keep it from getting broken. “Are they taking all the furniture to the new house and then coming back for the little stuff?”

One of the men, the only one who was middle-aged, looked at her father when she asked that. Her father said, “Something like that,” and looked dully at Audrey. The middle-aged mover turned to the guy standing next to him and said, “Let's roll up this rug now.”

Audrey watched them begin to roll up the rug, which she knew from overheard conversations to be a hundred years old and authentically Persian, and heard heavy footsteps upstairs.

“Are they doing
my
room now?” Audrey asked suddenly. She hurried from the study, wondering if her father had actually gone crazy and what she would do if he had. She was starting to take the stairs two at a time when C.C. and Lea walked in the wide-open front door. C.C., who'd been unwinding her scarf, stopped. Lea stood absolutely still, a bag of chocolate chips in her hand. Finally, C.C. said slowly, “Why are the repo men here?”

Audrey looked at C.C. “They're not repo men,” she said.

“Oh,” C.C. said, and her cheeks pinkened. “It's just that my cousin Mark works for Anchor Brothers,” she stammered. “I thought that's what he said they do. Maybe I've got it mixed up.”

“My dad said we're moving, is all,” Audrey said. A few minutes ago, moving had seemed like the most outrageous thing her father could do. Now she climbed into the idea as if it were a lifeboat.

“Why?” Lea asked. “I love this house.”

Audrey didn't say anything.

“Where are you going?” C.C. asked.

“Somewhere nearby, my father said. It's a surprise, I guess.”

Two men carried a velvet sofa to the doorway and waited for C.C. and Lea to move away from it. On the backs of their dark, dirty sweatshirts were dirty white anchors.

“You could ask them,” Lea suggested. “They probably know where they're taking it all.”

Audrey sensed the danger in this. She might learn her new address, or she might find out in front of C.C. and Lea that their furniture was, in fact, being repossessed, which meant her father had somehow gone broke. “I doubt it,” Audrey said. “They probably just carry the furniture to some warehouse.”

C.C. and Lea nodded. “It's freezing in here,” Lea said.

Audrey glanced up the stairs. “Look, I have to finish packing. I don't think I can make cookies after all.”

“Want us to help?” C.C. asked.

“No,” Audrey said, trying to sound normal. “I'll just finish up and call you later, okay?” She looked back at them and realized she was about to cry.

“Okay,” C.C. said, and she and Lea stepped uncertainly back. In a soft, regretful voice, Lea said, “Bye, Audrey.”

After they left, Audrey moved stiffly up the stairs and then, at the door to her room, stopped short.