Prom (3 page)

I opened my eyes.

Three fire trucks pulled up in front of the building. The fireguys dragged their hoses inside. This was not a drill. This was real. Really real. We might be stuck outside for hours.

I could hear my skin frying. I covered my ankles with open textbooks. “I’m gonna get burned if they don’t let us in.”

“You’d get burned worse in there,” Lauren pointed out.

“There isn’t any smoke,” I said. “I bet a teacher pulled the alarm ’cause he was sick of us.”

“Maybe it was that coach,” Monica said.

“What coach?” asked Lauren.

Monica said her cousin Lily was in the nurse’s office with a bad stomach, and she heard the nurse talking to a secretary about a lot of money being missing from some account. Vendors were calling the school, and the cops were investigating.

I pulled up the hood on the sweatshirt even though it was eighty degrees. My friends argued about which coach was the kind of jackass who would rip off the school like that. I thought about snow.

Eventually, the fireguys came out of the building, rolled up their hoses and drove away. When we went back inside, the Consumer Ed teacher made my girls cover everything back up. They were very anti-sex at Carceras.

Spanish was boring except for the note that got passed around. It said the kid who started the fire was caught on a security camera. He didn’t want to take an algebra test, so he lit a roll of toilet paper. Then he felt bad and pulled the alarm.

The security cameras on the second floor actually worked. That’s the kind of thing you needed to know to get by.

After Spanish, I had Study Hall. I hid under a desk in the back row and used Lauren’s cell phone to call TJ. He never picked up.

I was over being mad at him. I was nervous.

To be honest, I was hungry, too. TJ was right. Breakfast at Burger King had been a good idea. Ma was always saying I should eat toast before I left the house. She was big on toast. If I had eaten toast, maybe I wouldn’t have been such a bitch, and then TJ and me could have had a nice time at Burger King with hash browns and a sausage biscuit, and he’d answer his phone.

Nat caught up with Lauren and me outside Study. She heard that the kid who started the fire was a Nazi wacko, and he had wired the whole building to explode when the bell rang at the end of the day. But she didn’t think it was true, because if it was, the school district would get sued for making us go to class and all.

We dropped Lauren off at Calculus. She was such a kick-ass student, she was going to Drexel on a full ride for her brains, not sports.

Nat and me kept walking to the end of the hall, to the class for normal students: Applied Mathematics for Life, aka Slacker Math. It was one step up from Retard Math and one step down from State College Math. It was a million miles and five doors down from Calculus.

Miss Crane was our Math teacher, a rookie. Back in the fall, she tried to be our friend by telling us everything that sucked about her life. We had to listen about her college loans and how she had to pay her parents back for her car and how her roommates both moved out (maybe she bored them to death) and on and on. The only thing that shut her up was when a couple of the guys in class got real interested in her apartment, where it was, did it have a sliding glass door, did she sleep with the windows open, did she sleep nude . . . you know.

When she stopped trying to “connect with us” and focused on math, I liked her better. Nat fell in love with her the minute she announced she was the new prom advisor, “because prom is such a magical moment.” Nat had a thing for magical moments.

Crane was having a crappy day, I could see that right off. Her hair was flat on her head like a “before” shot in an ad for volumizer spray. She wasn’t wearing any foundation, and you could see day-old green eyeliner in the crusty corner of her left eye. She forgot to put on lipstick and she was wearing khakis—khakis!—stretched one size too tight over her thighs, along with a faded red polo shirt.

“What’s up with her?” I whispered to Dalinda, sitting in front of me.

Dalinda blew a bubble. “Ashanti Williams has her for homeroom and said she was crying in her cell phone first thing. Maybe she got dumped.”

People were sleeping, eating chicken nuggets, listening to music, talking, and doing homework (not math). Big Mike Whelan was chewing a toothbrush. Nat was in the back of the room, nose in another prom magazine.

Crane stood up. Her eyes did not look one hundred percent focused. Maybe she finally snapped under the pressure of teaching us. Or she was buzzed. Nah, not her
.
She had been cranky ever since we came back from spring break. She must have snapped. I was kinda bummed. As far as teachers went, Crane wasn’t the worst.

She picked up a textbook. “All right, people, that’s enough!”
Bam!
She slammed the book on her desk. “Get out a sheet of paper and a pencil. We’re having a quiz. No, not a quiz. Quizzes are for babies, and you’re always telling me how grown-up you are. A test. Forty percent of your grade, in fact.”

The class moaned. Nat whined that this was not fair. She was always wanting things to be fair, although they never were.

Crane screamed louder. “Shut! Up! The next person who speaks will automatically get an F and be sent to Mr. Gilroy.”

The only sound was paper being ripped out of notebooks.

Our mouths weren’t moving, but our eyes were, blinking and flashing like billboards. Some people were saying, “Bitch is wack,” and some people were saying, “Forty percent?” and some people were saying, “She’s high.” Nat looked at me, and her gray Russian eyes said, “Something’s really wrong.” I said back to her, kind of desperate, “I need a pencil.” She dug one out of her purse and tossed it to me.

A couple guys in the back of the room didn’t get the hint and started talking the old-fashioned way again. Crane handed them passes to Gilroy and pointed to the door. After they left, she scribbled some problems on the board.

“You’d better get started,” she said.

The problems were hard. Way hard. I wasn’t your A+ kind of student, but I swear she never showed us half of what she was testing us on.

And then it happened.

The second miracle. Two of them in one day—the kind of thing that made you wonder if maybe the priests were telling the truth after all.

A knock on the door.

Everybody stopped writing, because if we were lucky it was going to be Gilroy wanting to conference with her in the hall about the students she sent to him, and if they were con ferencing in the hall you better believe we were going to conference in the classroom, so we all lifted our pencils from our papers and held our breath.

It was Mr. Banks, the principal. He stuck his head in the door and asked Miss Crane if she would come out and talk to him.

Even better.

Except that she didn’t go. She didn’t answer him or look his way. She slumped in her chair with her eyes on the paper in front of her.

We all put our pencils down. Mr. Banks stepped into the room.

“I’m sorry to disturb your class,” he said. “But I need to see you, Miss Crane. Now.”

Alex Mullins was sitting closest to the door. He stretched his neck to see what was in the hall, then spun around to look at us, his eyes bugging out. Something or somebody was out there.

Crane stared at her desk. A tired lock of hair flopped in front of her eyes and she tucked it behind her ear. Her hand was shaking.

Mr. Banks walked over and stood next to her. “Amy.” Since he looked all serious and sad and he used her first name, I was thinking that maybe she had a death in her family, or maybe somebody ran over her dog and called the school, or maybe they just found out she flunked her graduate school class and she couldn’t teach anymore and she knew that was coming, which was why she didn’t take a shower that morning and why she had been so bitchy the last couple weeks.

“You’re making this harder on yourself,” Mr. Banks whispered.

We were all holding our breath so we could hear him.

“You need to come with me to my office. We have some questions for you.”

Crane was a statue.

Mr. Banks turned to the open door and nodded to whoever or whatever was out there. A cop and one of our security guards walked in. Both wearing uniforms. Cop packing her piece. A lady cop. In my math class. A cop here to bust a teacher, not a student.

Crane pulled a tissue from the pink box on her desk and wiped the tears that had started rolling down her pale face. Nat’s jaw bounced off the top of her desk. She had figured out the end of this movie but was too shocked to clue anybody in.

Big Mike spoke up. “Mr. Banks, you arresting her?”

I crossed my fingers and prayed to the math gods. A bad test grade at that point was going to keep me from getting my diploma on time. Summer school for sure.

Before Mr. Banks could think up a lie, the lady cop said, “We just want to ask Miss Crane a few questions. Come on, ma’am. Let’s do this the easy way.” She slid her hand under Miss Crane’s arm. Miss Crane stood up. She let the cop walk her out of the room, followed close by the security guard.

Mr. Banks paused and told us to stay in the classroom until the bell rang and he would be sending an aide just as soon as he could find one.

He closed the door on his way out.

We waited until they were down the hall, then we exploded in cheers and screams and high fives and dancing in the aisles. Never in the history of high school had there been a better end to a test.

Nat didn’t make any noise. She didn’t even laugh when Big Mike used his gut and his fat behind to wipe the problems off the board. She just sat there, frozen, like Crane. I couldn’t get a word out of her.

The bell rang. I asked Monica to keep an eye on Nat because I had to go to Science. My homework was done for a change.

By the time I got to the lunchroom seventh period, Nat was surrounded by a bunch of zombie girls—staring dead ahead and mouths hanging open.

It was the prom committee.

Somebody moved over so I could plant half a butt cheek on a seat. “Nat?” I waved my hand in front of her face. “Yoo hoo, anybody home?”

Lauren put her arm around Nat. “She’s in shock. We all are.”

“Is this about Crane?”

A couple girls sniffed. Lauren nodded her head.

“And? What’s going on?”

Lauren took a deep breath and let it all out. “Miss Crane stole the prom money.”

“Wait,” I said. “I thought that was a coach.”

“Nope. Crane.”

“You’re shitting me. She stole it? How much?”

“They’re not sure yet. A lot.”

It took a minute to sink in—our Math teacher stole the prom money. Wow. How low could you get?

“Hang on,” I said. “So you have to cancel the prom?”

Junie wailed and buried her head in her arms.

“Way to go, Hannigan,” Lauren said.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Really, I mean it. This sucks.”

I had been saying prom was stupid for years, and it still was, but it was different for them. They had been waiting forever for this. Dichelle, she lived with a foster family who had nothing, but everybody, even the second cousins, had pitched in to buy her a dress and shoes and a sparkly headband that looked like a beauty-pageant crown, only not as tacky. Junie had been dating the same stand-up man, Charles, since freshman year, and they were the cutest couple on the planet, and he was going into the army right after graduation, and we were all sure he was going to ask her to marry him at prom. Aisha had been working for free at a braiding shop so she could get her hair done. Monica, her mom died of cancer last year—hell, if anyone deserved a dance, it was that girl.

Prom was stupid for me, but not for them, and I wasn’t such a butthead that I couldn’t see the difference. But I didn’t know what to say or do.

“Anybody want a Tastykake?” I asked.

They didn’t even look at me.

Rumors about Crane jammed up the food court, making it even slower than usual.

When I finally got to the register, I used all the change in the bottom of my purse to buy four Tastykakes. I made sure one of them was a Butterscotch Krimpet because that was Nat’s favorite.

Back at the table, we split up three of the Kakes, except for Monica because of her dress diet. I put the Krimpet in front of Nat. She didn’t reach for it.

That was a bad sign.

Banks came over the PA system. Everybody in the lunchroom shut up. I was hoping the entire staff had been arrested on conspiracy charges and they had to close school on account of a lack of teachers.

“Pardon the interruption. Teachers, please excuse any prom committee members from class immediately for a meeting in my office. Thank you.”

That was an even badder sign. A worse sign.

The prom committee cried harder. They hugged each other and smeared makeup on their shirts and chewed Tastykakes and cursed, and finally they stood up, all except for Nat, who hadn’t even looked at her special Krimpet.

The girls picked up their books and purses and bunched together in a herd. Nat still hadn’t moved.