by E M Kaplan
But Jane wasn’t at her desk. In fact, her computer was shut down, and based on the blinking lights on the multi-button phone on the desk, she hadn’t been here for a while—maybe not since before lunch.
On a whim, she knocked on Professor Sanborn’s office door to see if he’d returned from the hospital. When no one responded, she even rattled the handle, but the door was locked. Standing outside his office, she lifted the handwritten note about his new office hours and ran her fingers along the Escher print until she found an indentation. She located a groove in the wood right in the wrist of the upper hand. Ouch.
She picked at the corner of the print and peeled the tape back until she exposed the gash in the door. Interesting. While she was no expert in cutlery, it seemed like a person would have had to have exerted a lot of force to ram a knife into this particular door. An act like that would have been noisy and violent.
She stood on her toes to look at the cut more closely. It was a good six inches above her head and at a downward angle. Really weird. The person who did it either had to have been extremely tall—taller than a freshman female, even one of Leah’s stature—or standing on a chair. Josie experimented for a minute or two with a two-handed, overhead motion, but with her puny upper body strength—recent weightlifting not having made much of a change—would have just made a glancing blow off the door.
The hallway was just plain laminate tile flooring—no waiting areas. A couple of bulletin boards. A few more office doors to either side of Professor Sanborn’s. In other words, no chairs in sight, which meant the stalker would have had to drag a chair with her to the doorway. That made no sense at all. The risk of discovery should have dictated a hasty posting of the message and a quick getaway.
#
“This is goofy,” Josie said to herself. She had returned to her dorm—actually to the basement faculty apartment where Professor Sanborn lived on the floor beneath hers—and was standing outside his door, hand poised to knock.
She knew he wouldn’t be there, otherwise the door would be open most likely. Plus, one of the Brandon-sized galoots who lived down the hall from the professor had paused in his indoor disc golf match and yelled at her, “He isn’t therrrrre,” as if he’d often shooed away groupies from the professor’s front door.
Why was Josie still standing there?
She was Oliver Twist. She was Jean Valjean, about to take a five-finger discount on a crust of bread. She was that dystopian girl in the leather bodysuit killing other kids on a game show. She was hungry and not too proud to admit that she’d take home-boiled pasta from a box over the mass of gooey gluten at the “dining hell,” as she’d taken to calling the dining hall. In fact, she was willing to cook the pasta herself, if the professor didn’t feel up to the task.
But as luck would have it, he still wasn’t home.
Josie trudged up the steps, her feet echoing in the cavernous, cement stairwell, up one floor to her own hallway, where she pulled open the metal door to the humid, noisy chaos filled with freshmen angst, guitar music, hormones, and…
What was that? She sniffed the air. Was she having olfactory hallucinations? Was her nose deceiving her? Her feet propelled her down the grungy, worn carpet to the common room.
“Oh my gawd,” she said, the words falling out of her mouth as drool pooled. She swallowed.
Her Scooby gang had assembled—minus Sarah, who was still at work, presumably—and they were making pancakes.
“Here,” Tyshawn, in a full frontal apron. “You look like you’ve had a tough day. Welcome to Papa Ty’s Kitchen.” He handed her a paper plate with a skyscraper of four or five flapjacks roughly the size of her head.
Brandon intercepted the plate and doused it with syrup—not the real stuff, but she wasn’t about to complain at this point. Her plate was an ooey-gooey, high-rise apartment complex of carbs and artificial flavors.
“That’s what I’m talkin’ ‘bout,” Josie said with a sigh. “This. This is how America gets fat.” She shoveled a pie-shaped wedge of syrupy heaven into her mouth even before taking a seat on the couch next to Leah. Through a muffled mouth, she said her thanks, which Tyshawn acknowledged with a tip of his spatula.
And in her sugar-induced delirium, she made a major error, blurting out, “Now if only I could get into Professor Sanborn’s office to find those missing letters, life would be perfect.”
The silence that followed was deafening. Still mired in her pancake euphoria, she swallowed, looked around the room at the faces of her minions, and then mentally backed up.
“Oh, no,” she said, waggling a finger at them. “No, no.” And then, for good measure, added, “No, no, no, no, no. Don’t even think about it. I know what’s going through your collective hive mind right now, and it’s a terrible idea. You could be expelled. And remember that part about me denying any knowledge of these conversations? I will retract anything I said faster than you can say let’s get a room at the Watergate.”
She looked around the room at their faces, pointing an accusatory finger at each of them in turn, just to make sure her point was driven home.
“Don’t look at me,” Leah said, shrugging. “I’m going to the gym.”
“How about the rest of you? Promise me you won’t get into trouble. Promise me. And don’t make me get out my mom voice.”
Brandon looked intrigued. “You have a mom voice?”
Chapter 20
Josie stood in the middle of what was clearly a demilitarized zone—a DMZ—that marked the center of Leah and Sarah’s dorm room. So as to not show favoritism, Josie straddled the center rug line with one foot on either side. “And who said we can’t have a functioning bipartisan system?” She swung her head to gaze back and forth.
The two girls had delineated their territories by cutting two area rugs—one dark blue, the other pink—in half and taping them together. Sarah’s side was pink and girly with glittery star designs on the bedspread. A matching pink desk set of pen holder, stapler, and drink coaster decorated her desktop next to a laptop and printer that was also decorated with stickers of ironic unicorns and rainbows. One of them said Nyan Cat, whatever that meant.
Leah’s side was bright tie-dyed prints and peace signs. She also had a collection of medical-related memes printed and taped to her wall. The most prominent one was a Valentine that said, “Hey girl. Blood is red. Cyanosis is blue.”
But one thing they matched in were twin posters of the actor, Rod O’Connor—or, as Josie knew him, Patrick. She debated internally for a minute about whether she wanted to mention to Leah that she knew the guy. She’d met him during the fiasco in Arizona about a year ago and, in fact, had kissed him at one point, before she’d gotten together with Drew. But she wasn’t sure if she wanted to test the theory that a scream from Leah could shatter glass on the other side of campus. Yeah, maybe keep that bit of trivia close to the chest.
Leah had temporarily crossed on the pink side, looking out of place. Her hand gingerly delved into a dresser drawer and she spoke into the phone in her other hand. “Not the blue ones? The gray with the blue stripe down the side? Okay. Got ‘em. Thanks, girl.”
Prize in hand, she turned to Josie. “Sarah says you can borrow these.”
Josie took the proffered sweatpants, which were just her size. They’d do just fine for her first self-defense class. Anything was fine as long as it didn’t have words across her backside. She didn’t need any advertising about juiciness or pink color—thanks very much—and didn’t understand why anyone would want that. “Thanks. I’ll meet you at the gym.”
She went back to her own room to change and bumped into Brandon, once again exiting Tiffany’s room directly across the hall. Though he didn’t look as disheveled as before, Josie suspected they'd been fooling around.
“Again?” she said, shaking her head as she unlocked her own door.
“Just getting a lesson,” he said with a smirk.
Behind him, the door swung open to reveal Tiffany, armed with a marker, stan
ding in front of an easel mounted with a large pad of paper. She’d just unfolded the previous piece of paper, which hung down so that Josie could see it. Maybe they really were having a study group. Josie had been fairly quick to judge them.
What was that a drawing of? A boat? A canoe with a little dude in it? A….Oh. A large scale rendering of female anatomy. Wow. Talk about getting an education. Josie tilted her head to the side.
“It never hurts to have a refresher course,” Brandon said over his shoulder from halfway down the hall.
“Yeah, and you need it, Mr. Romance,” Tiffany yelled at him. She made a noise suspiciously like an old lady’s hrumph and shut her door. Of all the kids in the Scooby gang, Tiffany seemed the most likely to spurn the opposite sex and become a crazy cat lady.
Josie retreated to the safety of her own room.
#
Dressed in Sarah’s sweatpants and her own Paramore t-shirt—the one with the sideways tolerance symbol or whatever it was—Josie kept her gaze glued on the bug-eyed karate instructor, Victor. She’d picked a place in the room to hang out against the wall and close to the back, but still, he kept making eye contact with her, which made her nervous, like he was going to ask for a “volunteer” at any moment.
Yeah, right, volunteer, her left butt cheek. She didn’t want any part of that. She’d been on the receiving end of both a knife blade and the head of a shovel within the last twelve or so months. If Victor here put his hands on her, she might just go full Fists of Fury and punch him in the junk. Or curl up into a fetal position and cry. One of those things—it could go either way.
Leah, the rat fink, wasn’t even taking the class with her. “Sorry, dude,” she’d said from the safety of the check-in desk. “I gotta work.” She’d flashed Josie one of those big, glossy smiles. The traitor.
“Professor,” Victor shouted. And when everyone looked around, he pointed at Josie. “You. Come up front.”
Of course.
She shuffled her feet across the rubber, blue floor mats, wondering if she should mention to him she might have the tiniest case of PTSD from previous attacks.
He told the class, “Each of these lessons you come to, we’ll be talking about a different hypothetical scenario. So, the more times you come, the more tools you’ll have in your toolbox—the more weapons you’ll have in your arsenal.”
“The more beers in your six-pack,” she blurted. “The more hooks in your tackle box. The more thugs in your limo—sorry. I’m nervous.”
The twenty-odd other students in the class were silent.
He blinked, then continued on with his spiel without further acknowledging her outburst. “So what the professor here and I are going to do is demonstrate tonight’s scenario, which is Choking from the Front. We’ll show you several times, then we’ll break up into pairs so you and your partner can practice.”
Josie swallowed hard, taking a nervous gander at Victor’s meaty hands. Rough, reddened skin covered swollen knuckles that had probably been broken more than a few times in his life. She could almost feel his hands tightening around her neck. He could probably encompass her entire throat with one palm, his fingers squeezing off her air passageway, harder and harder until black spots danced across her vision, maybe even breaking her hyoid bone—that fragile, U-shaped bone in the neck underneath the tongue. In pictures, it looked like the foot pump on a hair stylist’s chair, and Josie could imagine pushing it up and down to make her tongue move—but she wasn’t sure how it really worked.
She really needed to stop watching forensics reality TV shows. But lately, her favorite cooking shows—Gabe Facinelli's Restaurant Roadshow or even Julia Child reruns—hadn’t been holding her attention as much as the ridiculously gruesome accounts of regular people snapping, as well as psychopaths and serial killers. Maybe it was a new occupational hazard now that that small piece of paper identifying her as a private detective burned a hole in her wallet. As phony as it was or wasn’t Greta Williams had presented it to her without much explanation as to how she’d obtained it for her, especially since it bore Josie’s authentic-looking signature…
“Don’t be afraid to pick a choking partner who’s a different height from you,” Victor said, whiffing a hand over Josie’s head to demonstrate that, yes, she was short. Thanks for that newsflash, meathead. “Attackers are going to come in all shapes and sizes.”
And wasn’t that encouraging.
He got down in a semi-crouch in front of her, and her heart began to pound with an uncomfortable kickstart of a squeeze as her adrenal floodgates opened. Though his arms were at his sides, he tipped his chin at her in a belligerent manner. Oh, gawd, were they also going to have to role-play this scene? Was she going to have to improv some victim dialogue?
“I really don’t think—” she started to say. A dribble of sweat went down the center of her back under her tee.
He stopped again to admonish the class, “Everyone is going to be trying this tonight, so don’t think you’re going to just sit back and watch. This is a hands-on class. It only works if you practice it—multiple times.”
Then he turned back to Josie and said, for her ears only, “Look at me. It’s going to be okay. I know what you’re thinking. This is going to trigger something in you, something that happened to you—I’m a social worker and I can see it all over your face. I’ve witnessed it a hundred times in other survivors. Take some nice, even breaths. You’re okay. We’re okay.”
And while she was still stunned by his words, he crouched down again and said for the benefit of the class, “All right, professor, come at me. Choke me with those tiny little mitts of yours.”
#
“Good class, professor,” Victor told her at the end. If she had been a guy, she thought he might have smacked her on the tush, as if they’d had a successful football first down. Then again, she’d misjudged him before.
“My name’s Josie,” she said and actually regretted the fact that she wouldn’t be around for next week’s class in all likelihood. “I’m just visiting,” she added, to help set his expectation.
He squatted by a duffel bag at the edge of the mat. The other students had already filed out of the room, and Josie wondered how many of them would be back. She wanted to tell them that of all the classes they took this semester, this was the only one that could actually be a lifesaver. Literally.
In fact, she wished she’d had a class like this in high school. Basic Self-Defense. Beginner Car Maintenance. How to File a Tax Return. Ignoring Dumb Comments on the Internet. Nutrition for Newbies. These were the life lessons a young person needed to survive in today’s world.
“Do you live in the area?” he asked, and when she hesitated, he noticed and changed his question to, “I mean, if you’re local to the area, you can visit me at my dojo.” He handed her a business card.
“I appreciate it. I might just do that.”
“No problem. I also run a hotline for vets and other people with PTSD. The number’s on the back of my card.”
Then he winked. Which was weird, just when she was getting a mellow vibe from him. She never knew what a wink meant. Was it flirting? Was it like a winky-face emoticon in an email? Did it negate the sincerity of the previous statement? She wasn’t sure.
Her mind suddenly wandered to Drew and Dr. Lisa First and The Kiss. Had Drew done something—like winked—at the woman? Some signal that had been misinterpreted? But, no, Josie couldn’t picture that. Drew wasn’t a winker and he had never been very flirty with her in all the years leading up to the beginning of their actual romantic relationship. Not that she’d been aware of…but maybe she was really that bad at reading flirting signals.
Footsteps pounded outside the door, which was not in itself unusual for a gym, though the hallway wasn’t the greatest place for running sprints. Leah poked her head through the doorway.
“Hey, you missed a really good class—” Josie started to say.
“Oh my God,” Leah said. “Sarah just texted me. She was filling
out her timecard in the catering office with her manager, Linda. And Linda got a phone call from the police—not just the campus police, but like the Northam city cops. They wanted to know if she’d saved any of the dishes from the lunch today and they wanted to get into the kitchen at the faculty center to check.”
“Check what?” Josie tried to filter some precious nuggets of meaning out of Leah’s verbal flood.
“Dean Handley hasn’t recovered from lunch. They found poison in his stomach. He’s in a coma.”
Part 3: Midterms
Remember pulling all-nighters studying for exams? We downed sugary, caffeine drinks toxic enough to make an elephant fly, like BeastMode 5000 with its red slashed logo. And their cute cartoon gorilla with the jetpack full of rocket fuel.
I’m not going to pull out charts and graphs to show you what they’re doing to your blood pressure and heart. And how their toxic levels of chemicals can trigger migraines. I’m not going to rant about how they’re labeled as supplements and therefore skirt the already shoddy nutrition labeling system our government has in place. I’m not going to turn all Angry Auntie at you about staying up late.
I’ll just say, do what you have to do to get through your tough situation—whatever is causing you to stay up all night. But know that nothing happens without consequences. And give my regards to your necrotic liver.
Josie Tucker, Will Blog for Food
Chapter 21
Josie made a beeline back to the dorm. At this point in her life, she could recognize a fiasco while it was happening. She’d been in a similar situation before in San Francisco—when shit hit the proverbial fan…what did that old saying even mean?—and though she was pig-headed, she wasn’t entirely unteachable. A few wallops from the school of hard knocks were enough to educate even the most problem students.
