Heads nodded solemnly. He walked to the wall.
"I could have sworn it sounded like this."
He made his fingers into a claw shape and scratched his nails down the plastered surface. A few kids squirmed in their seats.
"So I run out into the hall like an idiot, because I thought someone was playing a joke on me. But it was just an empty hallway. Later, when I went down to get my lunch I asked one of the other teachers if they played practical jokes on people here. It was then that he told me about the alcove, about the cover-up, about Bria Patterson. I didn't believe him. But when I went back upstairs to finish setting up, there was something sitting on my desk. It was something that hadn't been there before. It was a girl's blue cross-tie, laying there unbuttoned."
Lots of uncomfortable shifting. A boy was clawing his nails into his cheeks, eyes wide as saucers. A girl with multicolored beads in her hair had her knees knocked together and her hands in a finger web around the front of them. She was rocking and mouthing something unintelligible.
"I didn't want to touch it. Even though my common sense knew someone must have just stuck it there for a joke, my heart knew there was something unholy about it. Like it had come from the grave."
Someone was making a high-pitched moan up in her throat, but Ben hardly heard it. He had to finish and he had to nail this one. Damn the consequences, damn the torpedoes, damn everything.
"Now, I know for a fact that each and every one of us has a low grade level of E.S.P. I'm not talking about dumb stuff like bending spoons and reading minds and making flower pots fly across the room, but think about this. Have you ever been at The Old Country Buffet, or even in our crummy lunchroom, and you could swear someone was staring at you from behind? And then you turn, and they
are
staring, for real, for real?"
Heads nodded.
"That's the way I felt. I turned quickly, and I could swear that I saw the edge of a blue uniform skirt whip past the doorway. Then there was a swishing noise out in the hall. Like a jump rope dragging across concrete. I walked over, turned the corner, and she was there. I could see through her. She had blonde pigtails, and no eyes, just dark spaces. There was a line of blood coming down the corner of her mouth, and she was running that jump rope back and forth across the floor. She was moaning in the voice of the dead,
"'Mommie . . .'"
Ben was dragging the imaginary rope, playing the part, eyes far off, mouth slightly ajar. Here was where the story always ended. He had never figured out a proper conclusion, and he normally broke character, smiled and said something like,
"C'mon, guys. I was just kidding. You didn't believe that crap, did you?"
He did not get the chance. The fire alarm went off. Loud. It was a buzzer that was so overwhelming down here it actually made his skin vibrate.
Girls screamed. Boys jumped up from their desks as if there were snakes crawling on the floor. Three girls in the back row stood up, hands pressed to their mouths. They were hyperventilating. A tall girl with white stockings had rushed to the corner of the room, pulled out her blue sweater at the neck, and buried her face in the void as if she was going to puke into it.
Ben was terrified. Surely, he would hear about this from Johnson.
"Guys!" he shouted over the numbing buzz. "Out through the Cherry Street door! Go ahead, it's just an alarm! And I was only kidding about the ghost . . ."
No one really heard. They scrambled for the door. A boy was crying and rubbing the base of his palm against his cheek in angry shame. A girl with thick glasses and blackheads clustered around her nose was furiously punching numbers into a cell phone. Oh, Ben was in a shitstorm now. He wondered if he would be fired. He hadn't looked at his résumé for years. This was bad. The last thing he wanted was to be thrown into the system and assigned to a regular Philadelphia public school. They doled out positions by seniority. Charter schools did not rack up points, and he would probably wind up at some ghetto middle school where the kids took apart your emergency phone on the first day, ran in and out of the classrooms like mental patients, and found out where your car was parked before it was time for recess. Ms. Johnson ran a tight ship here with this charter, and he was lucky to have the position he did. He had never really been in trouble with Johnson, but he heard she was merciless if she had a cause. He supposed he could beg. At least he had that.
He walked out into the sunshine and crossed Cherry Street. It was tennis weather. Construction was going on down Broad Street and you could hear a dull pounding complemented by a slightly sharper ratcheting noise associated with cranes and oiled chains being rolled onto big pulley wheels. The kids were gathered in front of a row house with empty planters in front of the dark windows. There were faded white age stains shadowed up the brick. A couple of his tenth graders had migrated over and were sitting on the concrete steps one residence down. Ben waved to them absently and started working his way between children, pleading his case. It was lame and awkward and necessary. He had to do some kind of damage control no matter how slipshod it appeared.
"I was only kidding, guys. You know that, right? . . . I made the whole thing up. I tell it to my tenth graders all the time. . . . It's a silly story, really. . . . Didn't you see that I had no ending for it? Yes. It was just a joke. No girl like that ever went here at all."
Mr. Rollins got on a megaphone.
"Drill's over. Move on to your last-period class."
Ben had not worked the group in its entirety. He had gotten to the hyperventilators, joked it up, and earned a round of cautious, weak smiles. It turned out that the girl with the blackheads was simply supposed to call her mother at the end of seventh period every day and she had almost forgotten. Big relief there. Still, he hadn't made it to the crying boy or the tall girl who'd almost vomited into her sweater. There were a lot of loose ends here.
Ben went back inside with his head hung down.
This time he might have actually blown it.
His homeroom was up next. The brown tables were folded up and pushed to the back left corner of the lunchroom. There were rows of chairs set up in front of the steam table and the student council had put up crêpe paper streamers. There were some new plants suspended from the drop ceiling, and old Jake had hooked up a sound system. Ms. Newman's homeroom had just completed an oldies thing featuring the Electric Slide that the students laughed at and Ms. Johnson obviously preferred. A guy pretty high up on the food chain at Temple University sat with her at the judge's table, along with a man wearing thin rectangular dark glasses, close-cropped sideburns, and a long black overcoat.
Johnson had not called Ben in to the office today, thank God. He knew there was an unspoken code in the high school not to snitch about the wild stuff he pulled up there, but he had not expected the sixth graders to be so discreet. It had taken all his will power not to tell Kim about it like a confession when he got home yesterday, and he had woken in a cold sweat three times during the night. But he was pretty sure by now that everything was going to be all right. Ms. Johnson did not bide her time when she had to get something off her plate, so no news at this point in the day was certainly good news.
Laquanna walked to the center of the space, and the other girls followed. There was a hush. The boys filtered in and took positions between. Malik walked to the front, and there was a rousing cheer speckled by only a few boos from the small crew of guys from the "C" section that he had beaten in a parking lot rap battle last week. He looked over at Jake, and the music blasted on. The kids exploded in movement, and Ben grooved a bit where he stood. He was going to miss this homeroom next year. They had been a lot of fun.
Someone was pulling his sleeve. He looked down. It was a girl from the elementary school, short, probably fourth or fifth grade, long hair curled in sausage shapes and pulled back by a pink satin ribbon tied in a floppy bow. Her eyes were wide with terror.
"What?" he said. "What's wrong?" He had to nearly shout to be heard over the music.
The girl said something and he could not make it out. He leaned down, and her breath came hot in his ear.
"It's the dead girl. She's in the bathroom."
Ben pulled back a bit and raised his eyebrows.
"What?"
She made her lips frame the words in the deliberate manner one used when speaking to the slow or the deaf.
"Our teacher went out to make copies on another floor. Help us. It's the dead girl. She's in one of the stalls moaning,
Mommie
."
Ben pushed past her and marched out of the lunchroom. The music was cut to a haunt the minute he turned the corner, and he felt his face going hot. This was
just
what he needed. Some jackass sixth grader squatting up on the toilet seat so you couldn't see her feet, then groaning "Mommie" like a wounded doorbell when a younger kid tried to take a piss. Wasn't this always the way of things? He was so sure he had dodged a bullet, and now in this strange backlash, he was still going to get nailed. He could picture the meeting right now, the teachers all at their tables looking innocently at each other, Johnson up at the podium.
"It has come to my attention that some middle school children have been frightening the elementary school students in the bathroom. Evidently, a story about an abducted third grader has been going around the school, and I would like to know where this started. From the bits and pieces I have heard, the story seems rather sophisticated for a student. I want to know what teacher was involved with this. I want that teacher to come forward and take responsibility for . . ."
You know the drill.
Ben reached the end of the hall and made the quick left. He paused, but only for a bare second. He had never been in the girl's bathroom. He walked through the archway (there were no doors for bathrooms at People First), and before passing the brown steel divider that blocked the sightline, he called out,
"Teacher coming in! Excuse me! I apologize!"
The bathroom was empty. Besides the strange lack of urinals to the left, it was the same as most institutional boys' rooms. Brown tiled floor, drain grate in the center surrounded by a shallow puddle of water in a shape that vaguely resembled Texas. There was a row of sinks and each basin had a mirror above it, the reflective material more like tin foil than glass so as to avoid cracking under the variety of incidents that were often far from delicate. The soap dispensers each had spots of blood-orange residue pooled below on the sink tops where quick hands had missed, and only two had been converted to the newer white units that rationed out foam by palm activation. There was a Fort James paper towel dispenser by the entrance just above an industrial plastic yellow trash can surrounded by the damp, crumpled sheets that had been poorly tossed. There were four stalls, the first three standard issue, and the last sectioned off in its own private area that spanned the width of the space. All three of the doors on the regular stalls were open, but barely. It seemed the floor was pitched in a way that kept them resting an inch or two in off the lock plates. The handicapped door was half ajar.
Ben pushed open the door of the first stall with the middle knuckle of his index finger. Vacant. The bowl was unflushed from what looked like nine or ten sittings, all number one thank God for small favors, and on the wall someone had written, "Shaneeka sucks monkey nuts." Stall number two was in the same relative condition, and number three, of course, was filled with a deposit Ben could not believe someone had the guts to leave out on the surface of this earth. He backed out, breathed in deep, held it, shouldered into the thin stall, and reached for the flusher with the sole of his shoe. When it whooshed down, he pulled back quickly. These institutional mechanisms were sometimes loaded with such strong jets that they kicked up a bit of backsplash off the suction.
After the rush of the initial violent whirlpool, there was that hollow, pipe-like refilling sound, and just underneath it Ben heard a voice. From the handicapped stall. It sounded as if it was in tow just beneath the running water, an echo, a faint ringing. It sounded like a girl's voice. Before he could really make out words, it blended with the receding sounds and thinned out to silence.
Ben walked into the handicapped stall. There was a runner bar along the wall, another behind the toilet, a private sink, and a separate towel dispenser. To the right there was also one of those tinfoil mirrors, and he saw something move in it. His breath caught in his throat. It was blue, and it had seemed to shoot through the mirror like liquid through a distorted syringe. He moved closer to investigate, and sighed. It was his shirt, picked up in the light and worked through the microscopic steel grooves in an hourglass effect. How did the girls adjust their makeup with these funhouse things? The boys had them too, but he thought the female breed would have demanded better. Personally, he always used the faculty lounge up front by Johnson's office. It was worth the walk.
The hair on the back of his neck was up.
He turned.
There was a hand coming out of the toilet. The seat was up and there was a hand gripping the rim.
Ben grit his teeth and smiled, despite the knocking his heart was still making up in his ears. It was one of those dollar store, plastic dead hands you could affix to door rims and bed edges. So here was the dead girl. Ha ha.
He levered down a fistful of towels and approached. The artwork wasn't even good on this thing. The sores had red spots half covering the indentations and spilling over about a quarter of an inch. Probably a misaligned factory stamp. The nail polish on the scabby fingers had already flaked partly off, and at the edge of the wrist, the press that had molded the rubber most probably had a small void, since there were two renegade nodules sticking off that needed to be pruned. Ben reached down to pluck it off the rim and stopped.