Crushed (16 page)

Chapter 52

Something Wrong

Wickham sauntered up to Audrey's locker a few minutes later.

“So what did you tell her?” Audrey asked.

“Same thing you did.” Wickham grinned. “I listened through a plastic cup.”

“What plastic cup?”

“The one right there on the floor.”

“That actually works?”

He shrugged. “More or less, yeah.”

“So you heard what I said, and said basically the same thing.”

“Hey, it's what I would have said anyway.”

This might have been enough to convince Audrey, except for the memory of Mrs. Leacock's frozen expression. “But she still doesn't believe us,” Audrey said. “I think we're in big trouble here.”

Wickham stiffened. “Why?” he asked in a cold voice. “If you'd written in the margin and I'd taken your suggestions and printed the paper myself, how would it be different? You just eliminated the step where I, like some chimpanzee, make the changes.” He stared off, his face handsome even in annoyance. “And like I said before, any kid in this school with a college-educated parent is getting more help than that on every paper.”

There was something wrong here; Audrey could feel it. She waited a few seconds and said quietly, “What's wrong, Wickham? It's like you not only don't care what Mrs. Leacock thinks about all this, but you don't care what I think, either.” She paused. “It's like you're mad at both of us.”

This prompted the reappearance of the Wickham she loved. “No,” he said, softening his voice and slipping an arm around her waist. “I'm a little torqued with Mrs. Peacock, sure, but how could I be mad at you? None of this was your fault.” He nipped her ear and said in a whispery drawl, “You were just trying to help me.”

Audrey found herself thinking again of a college apartment where she would live with the very same Wickham who was everything she'd ever wanted, and just like that, everything was clear again. She pushed everything that bothered her to the edges of her mind—or tried to—and wrapped her arms around Wickham, closing her eyes so that the world as he saw it was all she could see.

Chapter 53

A Situation, Colonel

Thanksgiving came and went. Audrey and her father went to a great-aunt's house in Cortland. Audrey had invited Wickham, whose mother was working that day, but he said she should just come over with a piece of pie when she got back. “Nothing like a great-aunt's house to bring on a migraine,” he'd said.

He seemed to be avoiding her apartment, always suggesting that she come to his house. Audrey, for her part, avoided the subject of Jade Marie.
Don't ask,
she told herself. And silently, to him, she said,
Don't tell.

On the Monday after Thanksgiving, the moment Audrey dreaded finally arrived. Mrs. Leacock asked to see them after class. “I do not have good news,” she said briskly, holding the two papers out.

Audrey felt her stomach drop. The papers were folded open to pages three and four, and in both, several phrases had been circled in red pencil.

“There are just too many verbal similarities,” she said. Audrey read a circled phrase in one paper:
Heretofore the tide
had been against him.
She saw that Mrs. Leacock had circled
Heretofore
in the other paper. Both papers also contained
ebullient, pilloried,
and several identical phrases.

Mrs. Leacock pressed her lips together, then said, “You will both need to write these papers over, in longhand, after school on Monday, December 15, so that I can watch your personal handwriting flow across the page. It will behoove you to choose different subjects, naturally, and you can bring your research materials with you—books, notes, et cetera, et cetera.”

Audrey waited. She could tell there was more to come, and there was.

“What cannot be undone,” Mrs. Leacock said, “is the damage to your citizenship grades. You will both receive a U in this class, and while I suspect this will cause little discomfort to you, Mr. Hill, I'm afraid that in Audrey's case, this means I cannot recommend her for the Honor Society”—she paused and let her eyes fall directly on Audrey—“as I had, with pleasure, planned to do.”

Audrey blinked and nodded, not risking a word. Her throat tightened, and she was afraid she would cry. Audrey turned, folded the paper, and went blindly through the doorway. In the hall, Wickham caught up with her and said, “Well, that could've been worse.”

In a dull voice, Audrey said, “Really? How?”

“Let me count the ways . . . ,” Wickham began, but Audrey, numbly, said, “No, Wickham, not now,” and turned and headed off.

As she walked, she saw nothing, heard nothing, felt nothing.

“Hello in there?” It was like a voice calling into a cave, and it came again. “Hello in there?”

Audrey stopped and stared at the boy in front of her for a moment before realizing it was Brian.

Into his cupped hand, as if it were a microphone, Brian said, “We've got a situation here, Colonel.”

Audrey just stared at him. He was wearing his reggae cap, and pea-sized earphones were wrapped around his neck. Into his cupped hand, he said, “Sleepwalker in lion's den. Repeat, code red, sleepwalker in lion's den.”

Audrey stared at him and said, “Leave me alone, Brian.”

She walked on, but Brian overtook her. “Whoa,” he said softly, as if gentling an animal. “Whoa, now.”

She stopped, and the moment she looked into Brian's eyes, her own eyes began to moisten. Brian touched a finger to her face, and it was as if a button had been pushed. Tears flooded down her cheeks.

“What?” Brian said softly. “What?”

Audrey tried to calm herself, sniffing and wiping one cheek with her sleeve. “Sorry,” she said.

“Nothing to be sorry for,” Brian said. Then: “So what is it?”

“Mrs. Leacock just accused me and Wickham of cheating. I helped him with a paper and . . .” She didn't know how to put it. “We both have to do the papers over now.”

Brian stiffened, then took her paper and leafed through it. “Why'd she circle this stuff?”

“Because those words were in Wickham's paper, too.”

Audrey knew she should have explained more completely, but she felt too sick and ashamed to go into the details. More tears leaked down her face.

Brian seemed oddly angry. “So, what, like you can't use the same words in two papers? Since when do people get exclusive rights to a word?”

“Well, it was a combination of things,” Audrey said, and began to search for a tissue in her pocket. Maybe she'd get straight U's in citizenship. Maybe she wouldn't even get into Syracuse.

“This isn't right,” Brian said. “You should appeal to the ombudsman or something.”

Audrey wiped her nose with a ragged tissue and shrugged, but Brian was serious in a way she'd never seen him before. “You don't deserve this, Aud.”

“But I do,” Audrey said. “That's the bad part. I do. Just forget it, Brian. I got what was coming to me, and now I have to live with it.”

Brian stood holding the bent, red-marked paper and shook his head. “No,” he said, almost to himself, his face set and hard. “This is wrong.”

Audrey took the paper from his hands, balled it up, and threw it in a trash barrel painted with a bargeman and the words
GIVE A HOOT!

“Forget it, Bry,” she said, touching his arm. “That's what I'm going to try to do.”

But Brian didn't change his serious expression—which, Audrey thought later, should have been her first clue.

Chapter 54

The Commodore

Audrey was tired of avoiding things. She was tired of avoiding Clyde, who always looked up, then away, when she came into Patrice's class. She was tired of the excuses Wickham gave for not studying at her apartment. She was tired of pretending she'd never heard about the car accident.

It was the Friday before the makeup essay, two weeks before Christmas. Snow was falling again, and as she drove herself and Wickham home through the whitening neighborhoods, she said suddenly, “Let's go to my apartment.”

“Now?” Wickham asked. “We might get snowed in.”

“Come on. You've never seen it.” She drove slowly straight ahead, passed Wickham's street, followed a bus for blocks without wanting to pass, and then, finally, after making a left onto a street of bland, blockish apartment buildings, she parked in front of her own.

“Home-a-jig,” she said cheerfully, trying for her father's tone.

The asphalt sidewalk led between two stunted firs to a blue awning that read COMMODORE. It was only four o'clock, but the front light had come on, and while Audrey was looking for her key to the front door, Wickham stood silently beside her. He had his hands in his pockets and his scarf pulled tight around his neck. His cheeks were attractively pink, as in a J.Crew ad.

“It's not that bad, is it?” Audrey asked, finally locating her key.

“What?”

Audrey pointed up. “The building. The double-hung windows. I love it that there are three together in the living room.”

Wickham gave a quick upward glance. “Yeah,” he said. “That's nice.”

They walked silently into the cavernous lobby, a tiled room without furniture or plants. Someone had set up a fake Christmas tree in the corner, and it was unevenly hung with red satin balls. One wall was lined with locker-style mailboxes, and Audrey went to open hers, saying, “My dad says this tile is called ‘hex tile.' And that along the edges is a pattern called Greek key.” There was no letter inside the box from Oggy, and no catalogs, either. Just throwaway flyers for things like pizzas and refitted windows.

As she threw the flyers away, Audrey noticed that the hex tile she was bragging about was smeared with muddy boot prints. She led Wickham to the elevator, calling it the Lily Bart Memorial Lift (“Lily who?” he asked without interest), and was just trying to close the heavy brass gate when Beck, the maintenance man, came clomping down the stairs in a pair of work boots and a torn Black Sabbath sweatshirt.

“Hey,” Beck said, taking a drag on a stubby cigarette, “I found a table for you. Down in the basement. If you have a sec, I can show you.”

Audrey flushed. Her father had finally confessed that the furniture had been repossessed and they weren't getting it back. Beck had come up the night before to fix a toilet problem (and smoke a cigarette), and he'd noticed (as anyone would) that she and her father were eating off a makeshift table—boxes covered with a tablecloth. After accepting a plate of moo goo gai pan, he'd offered to scout around for a kitchen table because he came across a lot of loose furniture in the course of his work. Midnight move-outs, he'd said, tended to leave stuff behind.

“We can do it later, if you want,” Audrey said uncomfortably to Beck. She neither opened nor latched the gate. “You're probably busy.”

“Well, now would actually be better, because I'm heading up to Oswego after this.”

“Okay,” Audrey said. She wondered if she should do an introduction, but Beck had snuffed out his cigarette in a pedestal ashtray and was already heading down the stairs.

The Commodore's basement was the most medieval room Audrey had ever seen. There were windows, but they were small, high up, and dirty. A single bulb illuminated the front part of the long, stony room, where a coin-operated washer and dryer stood slightly askew on the uneven floor. They worked fine, but Audrey had done exactly one load before locating a Fluff-n-Fold a few blocks away.

“Creepy little Laundromat you've got here, Beck,” she said.

Beck grinned and said she wasn't the first to remark on that. “One tenant, her name was Erica, called it a psycho's dream come true. She thought we should call it Blood-n-Suds.” A pause; then, deadpan: “Erica's been missing a couple months now.”

Audrey laughed, but when Wickham didn't, she turned the subject back to the table.

“Over there,” Beck said, pointing beyond the dryer to a chrome-legged, Formica-topped table. “Pretty cool, no? It's vintage diner.”

“It's nice,” Audrey said, though it wasn't, not really. The Formica was scratched, and one leg had been repaired with duct tape. Still, it was a table.

Beck lit another cigarette and offered one to Wickham, who, to Audrey's surprise, seemed to consider taking it before shaking his head no.

“Give me a hand, will ya?” Beck said to Wickham, who seemed reluctant to touch anything down there. As they jockeyed the table out, Beck asked Wickham his name.

“Wickham.”

“Anybody call you Wick?”

“Not really,” he said in a not-quite-frosty tone, the same tone he'd used with Clyde Mumsford the night she'd introduced them at the country club.

They carried the table up to the elevator and then, on the third floor, maneuvered their way through Audrey's door. The apartment was blissfully warm, as usual, and Audrey relaxed a little. Wickham and Beck put the table down in a little alcove by the kitchen and Beck, tapping ash into his hand, said he was off to Oswego.

After Beck left, Wickham looked around and said, “Is it always this hot in here?” He took off his scarf, coat, hat, and sweater. He sat down on a floor cushion by the windows. “I think the janitor has a thing for you,” he said, but without the playfulness he normally used for a remark like this.

“That seems doubtful.” She went into the kitchen, mixed cocoa with some water in a saucepan, and lit one of the burners. Wickham sat in the front room, glaring out the window.

“Can you believe that thing with Leacock?” he said finally. “And you know what it comes down to? She thinks I'm too stupid to have written that paper. That's what she's thinking.”

“It's my fault,” Audrey said, her stomach clenching at the reminder. She wished Wickham would come into the kitchen so they could talk properly.

“It's the whole Southern thing. Yankees believe we're rubes, and then they do whatever they have to do to prove themselves right.”

“Could you come in here?” Audrey said. “I'm making hot chocolate and I can't hear you very well.”

“Hot chocolate,” Wickham said, walking slowly into the kitchen and sitting on the red wooden chair her father had found at St. Vincent de Paul. “What I need is a cold beer. It feels like August in here.”

Audrey stirred the cocoa with a sense of dread. It boiled, and she added milk.

“Do you miss South Carolina?” Audrey asked, thinking for the hundredth time of Jade Marie Creamer.

“Sometimes I do, yeah,” Wickham said sullenly.

“Now?”

“Yeah, sure. A little.”

“What do you miss?” She thought of Schrödinger's Cat again, but she was part of it now, was one of the scientists in lab coats gathered around the steel box.

“I don't know,” Wickham said. “The weather, I guess. And some friends.”

“Like who?” She knew it was a mistake, but she couldn't stand the uncertainty any longer.

Wickham paused and gave her a measuring look. “You sound like you're hunting for something here.”

Audrey poured hot cocoa into two mugs, but when she handed Wickham his, he set it on the counter untouched.

Audrey took a sip and burned her tongue. “I want to know what people you miss,” she said, plaintively, and took a deep breath before adding, “and why you don't have a driver's license.”

His eyes registered this. “What makes you think I don't?”

Audrey touched the burned surface of her tongue to the roof of her mouth. She couldn't bring herself to say Jade's name. “Well, do you?”

“No.” His voice was low. “What difference does it make?”

“None,” Audrey said, her anguish growing. The snow was falling outside the kitchen window in thick, heavy flakes. It was like the snowfall at the beginning of things, hushed and pure. “Someone gave me a newspaper story about an accident that happened in Cypress,” she went on. She looked into her cocoa and tightened her grip on the cup. “An accident that killed a girl named Jade Marie Creamer.”

His expression didn't change, unless it became more set in its stoniness.

“I know it wasn't your fault,” she said earnestly. “I just wanted you to know that the story is out there, and people might get it wrong.”

Wickham turned to stare out at the falling snow. He still hadn't touched his mug of cocoa, and she realized he hadn't touched her all afternoon. In a sullen voice, without looking at her, he said, “I'll tell you the story, if that's what you want. But it won't make any difference. Those people who want to get it wrong will make sure they get it wrong.”

“I know,” Audrey said, “but I'm not one of those people.”

He fixed his eyes on her and gave her a significant look. “And this is what you want?”

What did Audrey want besides Wickham? She nodded and managed to say, “Yes.” Then she closed her eyes, and the door to the steel chamber swung open.