Retribution (17 page)

Her first assignment was the cheerleading squad, fourteen girls, mostly juniors and seniors, whom she found one rainy day after school building themselves into a human pyramid in the Our Lady auditorium, with blue mats spread out beneath them. “Who are you?” Julie Turly asked. Julie Turly was the squad captain and had just attained the peak of the pyramid, balancing herself carefully on the backs of a dozen other girls. She was a beautiful blonde who drove a white convertible Rabbit. Her father was a plastic surgeon. He did breast enlargements, Rachel had heard. And Julie herself was rumored to have performed group sex with Jeff Montoya and Tony Green, two linebackers on the football team. Cruel. So cruel what people said about others. Group sex. What would you do with more than two people? What would just two people do with each other? Rachel hadn't even kissed a boy. At the same time, she didn't like these girls and almost hoped the rumor was true. “I'm from the yearbook,” Rachel said, pointing to the camera around her neck.

“Smile, girls,” Julie said.

As soon as she got behind the camera, Rachel began to enjoy herself. This was one of the strangest objects she'd ever photographed: a living pyramid of the school's most beautiful and popular girls, dressed in red and gold, the colors of Our Lady, all smiling fakely, bulging eyes and stretched facial muscles betraying their real strain. “Hurry up, please,” Julie said through her smile.

“A few more,” Rachel said just when Christi Howard screeched, then screamed from the bottom of the pyramid, and the sky rained red miniskirts and white sneakers as the girls, Humpty Dumpty–like, came tumbling down.

Two days later, when Rachel developed her first roll of black-and-white film, these last pictures, she felt, were small masterpieces. They showed the girls broken down over the mats, on their stomachs, their backs, or on all fours, hands cupping the places that hurt most. Rachel overexposed their faces a bit, making them glow a bone-colored white, and touched up the dark backdrop of the auditorium until it became primitive and sepia-colored, until it shone black like night against a pane of glass, and Rachel's squad of cheerleaders transcended their stupid teenage vanity in a ghostly chromatism, in which the viewer could barely see that Julie Turly was Julie Turly, that Christi Howard was Christi Howard, that Samantha Woolsey was Samantha Woolsey. They were all just black-and-white figures wearing miniskirts, hobbled and apparently in terrible pain. It was spooky, very spooky, and Rachel was pleased.

“Look at these,” she said to Rand, who was still in the yearbook office, working on the computer, when she emerged from the darkroom. This was the first time she'd spoken to the quiet, skinny blond boy with tender acne and thick horn-rimmed glasses, who for some reason had caught her eye again and again.

“Ouch,” he said.
“Das schmerzt.”

“What's that mean?”

“It means that it hurts them.”

“Funny way to talk,” she said.

“I am coming from Germany,” Rand said, his face flushing red.

“I didn't mean funny. I meant different. I meant”—she felt herself straining—“nice. I'm going to start off the sports section with this one and call it
The Agony and the Ecstasy: Girls Feel Pain, Too!
”

“What's agony and ecstasy meaning?”

“Extreme pain and extreme pleasure,” Rachel said.

She saw from his eyes, watery and magnified behind his thick lenses, that he was thinking.
“Die Qual und die Ekstase.”

“Sure,” Rachel said. “I guess.”

He wrote the words down in a small notepad. “Thank you,” he said, as if Rachel had genuinely given him something. “Agony and ecstasy,” he repeated.

“Agony and ecstasy,” Rachel repeated after him.

He looked at her picture again. “Why ecstasy?” Rand asked. “I don't see ecstasy. I only see agony.”

Rachel looked for herself and could only concede. “Yep,” she said.

*   *   *

Mondays and Wednesdays were gory, bloody days. They were driver's education days. After school let out, Rachel would sit in a darkened room with other sophomores and juniors, including the German boy, Rand, and view the graphic footage of car accidents, which was supposed to scare her into driving safely for the rest of her days. She saw bodies decapitated by steering columns, heads bashed into red mush by dashboards, limbs shorn and oddly lying in shattered glass on the roadside. “Hamburger films,” she'd heard one girl call them. “Fast food.” They showed survivors, too: mothers screaming and holding their faces in the white halls of hospitals, a boy weeping into the camera that zoomed in on the burn scabs on his face, then on the bandaged stump of his right arm as he said, wiping away the tears with his remaining hand, “I was drunk. I never, never should have been driving.”

One day in the darkened room, Rachel grabbed Rand's hand and held on. He had hands, after all—fingers intact—and so did she. He seemed to stiffen, then relax, and Rachel felt him turn and look at her. But she stared at the screen, captivated, disgusted. “He was my son, my only son,” a woman said, suddenly unable to speak for grief. Paramedics pounded a needle into the bloody sternum of an accident victim. They beat at his stopped heart with fists. The camera fled upward, away from the scene and into a darkness gouged with the strobing shadows of red and blue from the emergency vehicles below. The lights came on and Mr. Bobs, the driver's ed instructor and one of the assistant football coaches, stood in front of the class with his football whistle around his neck and his small flinty eyes shining black in the too-sudden fluorescent brightness. He blew on the whistle, and Rachel and Rand and forty or so other students gripped their ears. “Stupidity is death,” he said. “If you think you can outsmart death by being stupid on the road, then you really are stupid.”

“Jesus,” somebody whispered behind Rachel.

Everyone seemed to agree that Mr. Bobs was more or less despicable, with his whistle and his red coach's pants and his super-short haircut, through which his pale scalp shone. He had a bony, bladelike face and wore the sort of small goatee that was popular now with the Our Lady boys and made the juniors and seniors who could grow one look slick and a little satanic, though it just made Mr. Bobs look boyish: a forty-five-year-old adolescent with a pointy spot of hair on his chin. He was horny, too. Rachel was sure that he stared at her breasts during her Wednesday driving lessons, though he pretended to be looking at her hands on the wheel, her feet on the pedals. “Good,” he'd say. “Excellent.” Adjectives that had really been meant, she knew, for her tits.

“All right, people,” Mr. Bobs said now, “close your eyes. Eyes closed and heads down on your desks. Every last one of you.” Behind him was a huge chalky blackboard, above which the bland white face of a wall clock with a red second hand sweeping slowly around was the last thing that Rachel saw before sealing her eyes. “Now,” he said, “I want you to imagine your own funeral. The guests, the priest who christened you, the family friends, the aunts and uncles.” He paused, then said in a fierce whisper, “Your mother. I want you to take a good long look at her. I want you to see exactly what she's wearing. Maybe the earrings you gave her one Christmas. Maybe the silly necklace you bought her for Mother's Day, the one she wears once or twice a year just to be polite or just because she loves you. I want you to be inside her head and feel exactly what she feels as she weeps over your coffin. Do it, people!”

He paused, and Rachel could hear his breathing, heavy and persistent, as if he'd just climbed a flight of stairs. The fact was, Rachel told herself, that Mr. Bobs was just sharing his torment with them. He was a freshly injured man and not the loud, hard soldier he pretended to be as he stood in front of the class. His wife, Mrs. Judy Bobs, a former English teacher at Our Lady, had fallen in love last spring with Mr. McGuan, the then Our Lady principal. They had fled the school in a bustle of controversy and were said to be living together in California somewhere. Now he was a small, hurt, horny, abandoned man, whose only solace in life was to stare at girls' breasts and to torture and frighten the kids in his driver's ed class. “One stupid, selfish prank from you means a life of loss for her,” he said. Rachel refused to think of these things. Instead, she pictured inside the warm, velvety interior of her head absolutely nothing, a dark void, over which she saw the needle of the clock sweeping round and round as she tried not to let Mr. Bobs's words—
dead, mother, funeral, coffin
—puncture that deep black covering. But finally she could not resist seeing herself at her mother's funeral, herself in a baggy white T-shirt and a pair of oversized jeans, looking a little formless in her too-big adolescent clothes, which her mother hated so much. Rachel wouldn't even look pretty at her own mother's funeral, though Carol wouldn't be there anymore to say what she always said: “You're hiding yourself. You have a nice figure. I can tell you do behind all those clothes. But nobody else can. Nobody can see how nice you are, sweetie.” It would be raining, of course, and her father would stand beside her in his dark suit, sobbing in the sloppy and terrible way that men do when they cry, loud and snotty and gasping for air. Rain water would fall from his matted bangs. Daddy, she'd want to say, but wouldn't. She would not cry. Not one tear. Not one, she promised herself.

“Okay,” Mr. Bobs said. “Open your eyes now.” When Rachel did, she had to squint at the brightness, and all she saw was Mr. Bobs, stupid Mr. Bobs, saying, “I hope you learned something. I hope you all now have a small idea of the pain you could cause.”

*   *   *

After the gory films and after the stupid lecture, Rachel and Rand walked outside Our Lady and sat over on the grass, still holding hands. “Gross,” Rand said. “Those films. I'm feeling sick in my stomach.”

Gross
was a word Rachel had taught him just yesterday. Rand was a fast learner. “You didn't really imagine it, did you? What Mr. Bobs told us to imagine.”

“I couldn't not,” Rand said.

“Your coffin and everything?”

Rand was picking clumps of grass out of the ground. “Not a coffin. I want to be burned and put in a jar. What is it called in English?”

“An urn,” Rachel said, hating this conversation.

“An urn,” Rand said. “My mother was crying over my urn. And you?”

“I was just in a coffin,” Rachel said, lying. “A big, stupid black coffin. It was raining.”

“Yeah,” Rand said, “I know.”

“Were there flowers at yours?” she asked.

“I don't think so,” he said. Then he seemed sure. “No. No flowers. Just my parents and two really old grandmothers I don't know very well. And yours?”

“Sure. Lots of flowers. I hate that man,” Rachel said. But she was already thinking about something else. “What if you could watch those hamburger films without being scared? If you could just do that, you might learn something. Not about driving, but about death.” She was thinking about a boy in one of the films who had been cut out of a VW Bug with the Jaws of Life. He'd emerged bathed in blood, with his eyes wide open, glazed, and just looking at the world, seeming, Rachel thought, to have apprehended something beyond the mess of bent metal and screams and pain. Calm, hugely round eyes.

“You are not scared at the films?” Rand asked.

“Yes,” Rachel said, “I'm scared. Definitely scared. But if I weren't…” Then she said, “Do you believe that God exists?”

“I believe that the man can't know this,” Rand said.

“That's a funny kind of faith,” she said. A hot wind that smelled of rain and fresh asphalt rose up. In the distance, a thunderstorm darkened the sky. Fall in Tucson often meant sudden, violent afternoon storms. “I hate people,” Rachel said. “I don't think I can hate people and still believe in God, can I?”

“Maybe not,” Rand said. “But I don't think you are hating people, really.”

“Mr. Bobs,” she said. “I hate him. He's a horny bastard, you know. He looks at me in the car during driving lessons.”

“Horny?” Rand asked.

“That means he wants it all the time.”

“It?” Rand asked.

“It,” Rachel said.

“Oh,” Rand said.

Rachel unzipped her backpack and took out a small black canister of Mace she'd taken from her mother's bathroom drawer the other day. Her mother had always worried about certain kinds of men and had carried this when she was still well enough to leave the house. “This is for Mr. Bobs,” she said. “It's tear gas or something. If he tries anything…” She pretended to spray it into the air in front of her. “Bang,” she said. “I hate him.”

“God,” Rand said. “I'm not sure. Tear gas. That seems…” His English failed him and Rachel saw that he was worried, maybe even a little scared.

“I probably won't ever use it,” she said, putting the black canister away. Poor worried Rand, she thought, lifting his hand and placing it on her cheek, where its warmth seemed immense. His hand smelled of pencil lead and wood shavings. A schoolroom smell. The smell of a smart boy, a fast learner. A boy who could never die, who could never just be ashes in a jar. Never. She kissed him right below the knuckles then—their first kiss—and felt the small, rapid panic of her heart.

“See,” Rand said. His face was red and he was smiling. “You aren't really hating people, are you?”

“Maybe not,” Rachel said. They felt the first large raindrops—one, two, three—big and wet and warm, before it began to pour all at once and they had to run for shelter.

*   *   *

But Rachel did hate Mr. Bobs. She hated him for his black mind and for undressing her with his eyes as she drove. There were always three student drivers in the car, but the other day—the day after which Rachel had decided to carry her mother's Mace—he'd dropped these students at their houses first, so that Rachel and Mr. Bobs were alone together. “Signal now,” Mr. Bobs ordered. He had a deep robotic voice. “Good,” he said. “Now ease into the turn.” He wore large sunglasses with mirrored lenses—the kind that state troopers wore. They hid his eyes behind icy glass, so that Rachel could only feel his gaze on her and not see it. At times, when she knew he was staring at her, Rachel would look right at him until he said, “Eyes on the road, Rachel. Eyes on the road.” As they turned on to Presidio that afternoon, one of Tucson's busiest streets, Rachel felt them again, Mr. Bobs's eyes probing deep inside her loose T-shirt while cars rushed by on both sides of the little Ford Taurus. A huge purple Cadillac in front of her had
AMJAM
on the license plate, and the pulsing bass of hip-hop reverberated from its insides. “What's AMJAM mean?” Mr. Bobs asked her. “That a rock group? A kind of music?”