Authors: Michelle Knudsen
He takes a step toward his desk and then stops, turning back to face us again. “I am very proud of all of you for coming to class today,” he says.
Then he nods and continues to his desk, opens his copy of the textbook, and in his normal gruff Italian directs us to turn to chapter six. We all exchange wide-eyed glances while obediently turning pages. This is not the Signor De Luca that we know and strongly dislike. Or rather, it wasn’t; now that he’s perched on the edge of his desk with his book in his hand, his imperious gaze seeking out the uncertain and unprepared, he seems to be returning to normal. But the ghost of the man who addressed us in serious, compassionate English a few seconds ago is still there, and I think it will be hard to unsee him again. It’s disconcerting, like De Luca has suddenly become two people, one superimposed upon the other. I don’t like it. I like people to be who they are and stay that way and not become different people all of a sudden.
Like Annie has, for instance.
I notice that even though De Luca has reverted pretty much to form, something still seems off, somehow. He’s distracted, not quite as barky or intimidating as usual. Maybe it’s the lingering effect of his earlier words, or maybe he’s going easy on us because of what happened, or maybe his own sadness and surprise over the principal’s sudden death is simply keeping his heart from being fully in his lesson plan for the day. That would certainly make sense. They might have been friends, for all I know.
But there is something else, and after a while I am finally able to tease it out. He does not look at Annie all period. When he rises to prowl around the room and look over our shoulders as we struggle to compose competent Italian sentences with proper verb conjugation and creative vocabulary choices, he avoids the aisles near her desk. He usually enjoys calling on Annie; she’s almost always paying attention and can often give him the answer he wants, and even when she can’t, she appears perky and interested and probably makes him feel that at least one of his students is actually trying to learn something. But today it’s like she’s not there at all for him. I watch more carefully, and I can actually see his eyes just skip right past her as he looks around for his next victim. And I know, without the slightest doubt, that he is remembering how she touched his hand yesterday, and how it made him not-the-same afterward, at least for a while.
It does seem to only have been for a while; there are no traces of that vacant look that was there when she first touched him. I hope very hard that this means Leticia is back to normal by now, too. She stayed home today, but she texted me to let me know, and her text seemed perfectly regular and Leticia-like. It’s not easy to glean a whole lot of reassurance from
STAYIN HOME 2DAY MOMS FREAKED ABOUT MORSE ME TOO TALK L8R?
but I do my very best.
Not all the students seem to recover so quickly, though. I think about those vacant faces in the hallway this morning. Is Mr. Gabriel getting a whole lot of kids to stop by the library before homeroom every morning? Probably not. Maybe when
he
does . . . whatever it is he does . . . it lasts longer. Maybe Annie doesn’t quite have her soul-sucking chops yet. Maybe it’s the kind of thing that gets better with practice.
I hate that I’m thinking about my best friend this way.
I want to ask Ryan if he’s talked to Jorge and his other friends, if they seemed okay today, and I plan to do this as soon as the bell rings, but about ten minutes before the end of class, a student comes in, hall pass in hand, and announces that Ryan Halsey is wanted in the assistant principal’s office.
Ryan turns to look at the messenger in surprise, then turns a little farther and catches my eye. I am trying to will him not to go. I am instantly and completely very certain that the message is actually from the librarian, and that Ryan is being summoned from class to have his throat slit and his lifeless body shoved into a locker or sacrificed to demon gods or fed to rabid squirrels on the front lawn or some other horrible thing.
Ryan seems to correctly interpret the
Luke, don’t — it’s a trap! It’s a trap!
message my eyes are beaming at him, but Signor De Luca is telling him impatiently to gather his things and go, and finally Ryan only shrugs a little helplessly and gets up. I watch him walk toward the door. I watch him walk out through the doorway. At the last second he glances back at me but he doesn’t stop. He keeps walking and is gone.
Signor De Luca returns to the lesson, but I can barely pretend to listen because I am busy imagining Ryan being led to his doom like some fairy-tale urchin following a will-o’-the-wisp, forgetting the danger, walking blithely into the evil librarian’s clutches. In remarkably quick succession, my tireless brain is able to concoct all kinds of terrifying scenarios. Their one common element is Ryan’s painful and horrible death at Mr. Gabriel’s hands.
Before I really understand what it is doing, my hand raises itself and then my mouth is calling out, “Signore? I’m sorry — I think I need to go to the nurse.” The other kids turn to look at me, but De Luca hesitates only a second before nodding and gesturing toward the door. I grab my books and my bag, and via monumental effort, I am able to walk, not run, for the hall.
But the second I am out of sight of the classroom I launch into a sprint, noticing but not caring about the students who gape at me from open classroom doorways, caring about nothing but getting to the library in time to stop Mr. Gabriel from whatever he is about to do (
about to do, still about to do, not done, not finished, please, not too late
) to the boy of my dreams who also happens to be the only person who is awake and aware of being in this nightmare with me. I tear up the stairs in giant, superhero-size leaps, and the third-floor hallway is so long, it’s never been this long before, he’s made it longer somehow, he’s pushed the library farther away so that I will get there just too late, will only be in time to see Ryan’s bloodied body dropping to the floor at the monster’s feet.
Finally the impossible distance is covered and the doors are there before me and I burst through them screaming Ryan’s name.
And skid to a halt as thirty pairs of startled freshman eyes turn to stare at me. A completely human-looking Mr. Gabriel is standing in front of a screen displaying examples of proper MLA citation style. He does not seem startled. While the students begin to titter and whisper and generally try to figure out what to make of me and my sudden dramatic entrance into their obligatory pre–research paper library visit, Mr. Gabriel pins me with his laughing eyes and his terrible, knowing smile.
“Can we help you, Cynthia?” he asks, sounding even to my knowing-better ears absolutely sympathetic and concerned, a kindhearted adult worried about a student in distress. “Are you — are you all right, my dear?”
Ryan is obviously not here.
“No. No, I’m — I’m sorry, I —” I give up and turn around and walk back out into the hall. The racing and the terror and the relief and the humiliation have all suddenly caught up with me and I’m finding it hard to catch my breath. I want to take a moment to lean against the wall and allow the world to realign itself around me, but I don’t. I keep walking, back to the stairs, down and around, until I reach the AP’s office on the first floor.
From the hall, peeking, I can see Ryan in the guest chair. Ryan, perfectly fine and alive and apparently being reprimanded for too many late homeroom arrivals or something. I want to march in there and punch Jensen in the face. Really? Today?
Today
you had to call him to your office to threaten him with detention? I want to scream at him for scaring the hell out of me when I’m clearly already at the edge of my tattered sanity as it is. I want to cry and fall into Ryan’s arms and have him reassure me that he’s fine and that everything is going to be okay.
I don’t do these things. I turn away and walk back down the hall. The bell rings and students pour out into the space around me, and I ignore them as I make my way to gym.
I text with Ryan between every class for the rest of the day, but Mr. Gabriel never makes a move.
At rehearsal, Ryan finds me as soon as he enters the auditorium. I had just gotten his latest
STILL ALIVE, YOU?
text a few minutes before, but it is still a relief to see him standing whole and breathing before me.
“Do you think he’s just torturing us?” Ryan asks. I’d told him that I saw Mr. Gabriel moving freely about the library (not the other humiliating details of my crazed and panicky library visit, thank you, just the facts, ma’am), and so we are pretty certain that he could have done something violent and deadly to us by now if he’d wanted to.
“Maybe. Probably. I don’t know.” I’m happy to not be dead, don’t get me wrong, but the waiting and the not knowing is maddening. Around us, the other theater kids are arriving, dropping off stuff on chairs, getting onstage or heading backstage or sitting down and opening notebooks to get started on homework until their scenes come up. No one here seems zombie-ish so far. Mr. Henry is consulting his notes in his favorite eighth-row-center seat.
“Well,” Ryan says, dropping his stuff off next to mine, “we’re safe for the next couple of hours, at least. He’s not going to show up here and kill us in front of all these people, right?”
“Right.” Right? I find it hard to feel sure about anything.
Ryan gives me one of those yummy lopsided smiles before turning and loping toward the stage. I almost (almost) wish I could ask him to turn down the charm a little; I can’t quite handle it in my current fragile state. I sit before my weakening knees betray me. My favored viewing position when I want to see how the set looks from the audience is twenty-third-row-right-center-aisle, and as I settle in with my notebook and my feet up on the arm of the chair in front of me, I let the delicious anticipation of watching Ryan in action push aside my worries about evil librarians and brainwashed best friends and everything else.
Mr. Henry says a few words about Principal Morse and echoes the general consensus that Morse would want us to carry on, so let’s honor his memory and carry on, people. He cues Mr. Iverson (musical director and rehearsal accompanist in one) to lead the vocal warm-ups, and then everyone leaves the stage except for Ryan and Mrs. Lovett (played by senior-class hard-core-diva Gina Rosenberg). Today they are doing “Epiphany” for the first time in front of the rest of us. This is the song during which Sweeney pretty much loses it all together and decides that everyone deserves to die and that he will start making that happen. It’s one of my favorites. The stage lights dim, and Mr. Henry tells Ryan he can begin whenever he’s ready. Ryan nods and then looks down and closes his eyes and takes a second to get into character. I think I am suitably prepared for how awesome this will be. As soon as Ryan lifts his head, I realize I am not prepared at all.
He narrows his eyes and with a voice that is his but different, deeper, full of rage and gravel and despair, he shouts the opening lines of dialogue and the piano starts its soft accompaniment and Gina comes running up and their voices build and the music does, too, and then Ryan launches into the song proper and everything else stops.
In my peripheral vision I can see that everyone — Mr. Henry, the other cast members, my minions painting flats in the wings — is motionless, watching, listening, unable to do anything else. Only Mr. Iverson on the piano manages to keep doing what he is doing, and I imagine that this is only because he is part of it, that he is swept up in Ryan’s song like the rest of us even as his fingers unerringly perform their key-striking choreography despite him. Ryan has absolutely become Sweeney on the stage before us. He stands there, eyes blazing, singing about darkness and loss and regret and revenge and we are all locked together in this moment with him, overcome, feeling this toxic, enthralling, undeniable combination of love and madness swallow us whole.
When he begins the part where he addresses the audience, razor thrust out before him, I am pinned to my seat with pity and horror and a weird, twisted affection laced with longing and traces of lust. And awe. I am unaware that my mouth has fallen open until the final exquisitely discordant notes of his last words fade along with the final piano chords into the absolute silence of the auditorium. For several seconds no one moves or speaks or, as far as I can tell, breathes. Finally, Gina, after a gentle and somewhat hoarse-sounding prompt from Mr. Henry, comes back to herself and says her next line, and the show goes on.
I close my mouth, still experiencing residual tingly feelings in all of my nerve endings, and try to shake it off. There are probably some set notes I should be making. Which would be easier if I had remembered to take out my pen. I turn to rummage through my bag and Mr. Gabriel is sitting there beside me.
I scream. I can’t help it. The complete and total shock of him there would have knocked me flat to the ground if I’d been standing up. As it is, I can only shrink back against my seat in terror. Which is followed, stupidly and quickly, by horrified embarrassment, because in a second Mr. Henry will ask me why I have interrupted the rehearsal with my inexplicable screaming, and I will turn to see everyone staring at me and what will I be able to say?
Except — he doesn’t, and they aren’t. Somehow I am able to look away from Mr. Gabriel and notice that the rest of the auditorium seems to not be quite there in the same way it was a second ago. I can still see it, but it’s like watching through a thick wall of glass. Like we are slightly somewhere else. I look back at my uninvited companion, fear and confusion fighting a horrible little battle inside me.
“Wow,” Mr. Gabriel says, eyes wide. “He is
amazing.
I had no idea.” He laughs a rueful little laugh. “I’m so relieved you stopped me from killing him before I had a chance to see this. I know you said Mr. Henry was doing
Sweeney
this year, but it never occurred to me that your boyfriend might be involved. I had him pegged for more of a sports type.”
“He plays rugby, too,” I say before I can help myself. “And he’s not my boyfriend.”