Why They Run the Way They Do (3 page)

“What if we bought something for Ms. McDaniel?”

She stared at me. “What?”

“I don't know.” I dug my hands into the shag carpet. “Just, you know. We could buy her something. You know, with part of it.”

She shook her head slowly. “You're a freak, Anne. Do you know that?”

“So?” I said. “You're a freak too.”

“But you're a different kind of freak than me,” she said thoughtfully. She twisted some hair around her finger. “I come from freaks. But you, like, sprouted up all on your own.”

“So?”

“So fine,” she said. “I'm just making an observation. What d'ya want to buy her, ya freak? Frilly underwear?”

“No,” I said, my cheeks warming. “Something cool. Like, drawing pencils or something.”

“Drawing pencils,” she said flatly. “You've thought about this.”

I shrugged.

She gazed at me impatiently, with the look of someone who in two or three years would no longer want to be my friend. We were two weird kids who had leapt from the ship of fools and splashed blindly toward each other, scrambled aboard the same life raft. Perhaps it was only a matter of time before we leapt again and made for separate shores.

She threw me one of the tens. “It's your money,” she said.

The next day I ditched recess after lunch and ran with a full heart to the art room. Ms. McDaniel was sitting at her desk nibbling on celery sticks and reading a thick book that bore no title on its cover. I shifted from one foot to the other in the doorway until she noticed me.

“Hello, Anne,” she said, sliding the book into a desk drawer. She cocked her head cheerfully in the way of young teachers and enthusiastic babysitters. “What can I do for you?”

“I found these,” I said. I approached her desk with the pencils held at arm's length in front of me. “Yesterday my mom needed to go to Art Mart and she gave me five dollars to spend and the thing that I wanted cost three-fifty so I picked these up off the sale table that was right next to the cash register and I thought you might want them.”

Exhausted from the lie—I'd practiced it a dozen times that morning in the shower—I dropped the pencils on the desk beside her lunch bag. She looked at them curiously, then at me.

“Well, thank you,” she said. “That's quite a story.”

“It's what happened,” I said emphatically, thinking she was on to my lie, but shortly thereafter realizing she was merely making conversation.

“You're very thoughtful,” she said. She brushed a wayward hair from her forehead. “I love working with pencils.”

“I know,” I said. “One time you said that. In class, I mean. You mentioned that.”

“I don't think I realized you had such an interest in art,” she said.

“Sure,” I said. I looked at her as she smiled expectantly, and I wanted to tell her that she didn't have to do all those things to Dr. Dunn, even if he was the principal. “Art's good,” I said. “It's, you know, it's really . . . it's amazing.”

“What did you get at Art Mart?” she asked.

“Paper,” I said.

“Drawing paper?”

“Yes,” I said. “White.”

“Well, it's very thoughtful of you to think of me,” she said again. She wadded up her brown paper bag and turned to throw it in the trash can, and when she did, the collar of her shirt shifted so that I could see her bra strap. In a burst of vivid color I imagined Dr. Dunn sinking his teeth into that shoulder, tugging on that bra strap like a dog with a rope, and I felt so dizzy I had to hold on to the desk to keep from falling over.

“Anne?” Ms. McDaniel said, turning back to me. “Honey, are you okay?”

Dear Dr. Dunn,

If you want to keep your affair quiet, place forty dollars in the envelope and put it in the appointed place.

The x's

ps Don't you think you're a little old for Ms. McDaniel?

Louise frowned. “What the hell is this?”

We were sitting on the school bus in our usual seat, fourth from the back on the right. This particular bus, for reasons none of us understood, always smelled like tuna salad in the morning and Bit-O-Honey in the afternoon.

“What's wrong with it?” I asked.

She ripped the paper in two and dropped it in my lap. “This is about blackmail,” she said. “This is not about you being the pope or something.”

“She's nice,” I said. The bus went in and out of a pothole and the boys in the back seats whooped. “He's just using her for sex.”

“Anne,” she said. “You don't know anything about this. You don't have any idea what it's like to be an adult.”

“Neither do you,” I said, though I was realizing more and more this wasn't really true.

“I'm the letter writer from now on,” she said. “We're just gonna stick to blackmail. We're not going to get into stuff we don't know anything about.”

We dropped off the note the next morning, with directions that forty dollars be left in the usual spot by sixth period. Right after lunch, Louise went to the nurse's office and—according to another kid who was there with a splinter in his palm—barfed the Thursday Special (Sloppy Joe, Tater Tots) in a steaming pile at Nurse Carol's feet. So Louise got sent home to the loving arms of her mother, and I was left alone to secure the afternoon's payoff.

We had planned poorly; my sixth period class was in the west wing of the building, three halls and a flight of stairs away from the bathroom in question. By the time I reached it the warning bell for seventh period had already rung. A couple girls were drying their hands and rushing out when I bolted myself into the middle stall and reached behind the toilet. Despite my tardiness (the final bell was sounding as I grasped my prize), I remained in the stall and tore open the envelope. Inside was a 3 x 5 notecard on which was printed, in tidy black letters:

Anne, Louise: There is nothing to tell. This foolishness ends right now.

Something that felt like cold water rushed from behind my ears all the way down to my heels. My brain flailed about senselessly for at least ten seconds before lighting upon the first thing it could recognize—
I have to get to social studies
. Hands trembling, I started at the latch, then froze when I heard the door to the hallway
whoosh
open. Six footsteps on soft-soled shoes, then silence.

“Louise?” I whispered hopefully, though I knew full well that Louise was at home safe in bed, which is exactly where I wished I were.

“It's not Louise.”

It was Ms. McDaniel. I stood in the stall, my knees quaking, wondering: If I didn't open the door, didn't come out willingly, how long would she stand there? An hour? Overnight? Until school let out for the summer? I imagined my family sitting around the dinner table waiting for me, years passing, my mother's patience waning, my father's smile turning melancholy, my brothers stealing away with their own Ms. McDaniels.

I slid the latch to the side, let the door swing open of its own accord. She was leaning against the wall next to the paper-towel dispenser. Her face was all blotchy and her lips were somehow crooked, but she wasn't crying. She looked like she should be in the emergency room.

“Well?” she said.

“Hi,” I said.

I was standing there holding the index card; I could have run but it seemed pointless. Suddenly she sprang from the wall and grabbed my wrist, twisted it until the note dropped to the floor. Still gripping my wrist, she leaned over and picked it up, read it once, then read it again. Then she straightened up, loosened her grasp, and regarded me coolly.

“Are you satisfied?” she asked.

I had no idea what she meant. More important, I didn't know which answer would get me out the door faster. “Yes,” I said, then changed my mind. “I mean no. Yes and no. Not really. Sort of.” I bit my lip.

“Someday you'll know what it's like to really love someone,” she said. She said it kind of gently, like she was talking to a little kid. “Some day you'll know what it's like to look at a man, his neck and his knees and his warm hands, and know that everything that was missing in your life has come knocking.”

“Ms. McDaniel—” I said. I'm not sure what I had it in my mind to say, but it didn't really matter, because she wasn't listening.

“And someday, Anne Foster,” she said. “Someday some awful little girl you don't even know will ruin your life for no reason. And when that day comes I want you to think of me.”

Louise called that night and my father came to get me. I buried my head in my math book and told him I had to study for a test tomorrow. When she called again I told him the same thing. He returned to my room a few minutes later.

“Louise says you don't have a test in math tomorrow.”

“She wouldn't know,” I said. “She had to go home early today.”

He leaned in the doorway. “Everything okay?”

I wanted to tell him what had happened in the bathroom. I wanted him to sit on the edge of my bed and explain point for point what had transpired, help me understand what Ms. McDaniel had said to me. But I knew, somehow more than I'd ever known anything, that even had I the courage to ask the questions (which I did not) that he would be unable to answer a single one of them. It was a realization that left me cold: the machinations of the human heart were inexplicable, not only to me, but to my parents as well, and thus, apparently, to anyone. Was this what Louise had known all along? I wondered. Was there truly no one in her life from whom she had ever,
ever,
expected a satisfying explanation?

“Everything's fine,” I said.

“You're gonna have to tell me sometime,” Louise said from her seat at the desk behind me. We were in math class.

I turned to her, deliberately put my finger to my lips.

“What the hell?” she said. “What happened to you?”

“When Mr. Payne was alive . . .” Mrs. Payne began.

Mrs. Payne, a pain in the butt, a punch line to the joke of every fifth grader. Yesterday she'd been as flat and clear as a pane of glass. Today I gazed through her sagging breasts and jowls and saw her as a young woman, as young as Ms. McDaniel, a mystery slipping out of her nightgown and into the arms of her beloved.