Teen Phantom

by Chandler Baker

  Only it was. Bad things were always happening to me or maybe because of me and I honestly couldn’t tell which anymore.

  TWELVE

  Lena

  Mrs. Dolsey really shouldn’t have done that.

  She really, really shouldn’t have.

  The rest of the class period passed in an unseeing blur. It was as though rigor mortis had passed through my body, locking up my joints and freezing my muscles, but my brain and my vital organs had somehow managed to continue ticking along. The worst part was that I could feel Chris beside me, feel him like the air pressing in and out from my own lungs, feel the temperature rising and wafting on him in heat waves.

  I forced myself to take breaths, in through my nose out through my mouth, but guess what? It wasn’t working. It felt as if I were taking in steam and it was burning me all the way up.

  This wasn’t my fault. This was not my fault. It was Mrs. Dolsey’s.

  I just didn’t think Mrs. Dolsey should have yelled at Chris like that. It wasn’t right. I was reasonable but I was also Chris’s friend and she was out of line. Surely, everyone had seen that.

  Rule Number Three: Absolutely no trouble.

  Mrs. Dolsey didn’t know about the rules.

  Detention was the very definition of trouble, and worse it was the kind of trouble that would get back to Chris’s aunt and uncle and, really, it wasn’t fair for her to single Chris out like that. It wasn’t fair at all. How would she like it if she were singled out that way?

  I didn’t think she’d like it at all.

  At some point, the bell that marked the period’s end rang, and it sounded to me as distant and unimportant as a mosquito buzz in my ear. Chris slid his book straight into his bag and stood sullenly like he’d just lost a championship game.

  “Chris, I—”

  He held up his palm, stretching out his arm in front of himself, pushing the distance between us without touching me. I wished he would touch me. “It’s not your fault,” he said.

  “I—” I didn’t think it was my fault. It was dumb Mrs. Dolsey’s. But before I could say so, Chris was raking his fingers through his hair and pulling it at the roots.

  “I just want to be alone for a few, ’kay? Need to think of a way to tell my aunt and uncle before the end of the day.”

  “Chris, don’t—” My voice was never as loud as I needed it to be.

  “See you around later. Detention, I suppose.” He wiggled his fingers—jazz hands—but he wasn’t feeling jazzy. He wasn’t even feeling like Chris.

  “After school, Miss Leroux,” Dolsey said without looking up from her keyboard as I left the class.

  I glanced back at her spiky-haired head bent over her computer as she tapped away, filling in boxes on a spreadsheet, already forgetting me. But she was also forgetting something else.

  Everyone had a secret.

  I left the classroom. Ideas twisted around like thorny vines in my mind. And by the time sixth period had rolled around, they had tangled and born their spikes so far into my thoughts that I could not escape them.

  There were two hours until the end of the day. There were two hours before Chris’s aunt and uncle and maybe his parents had to know that he had gotten detention. Time—like a secret—was worth something.

  Both were worth different amounts to different people at different times.

  What was a secret worth to Mrs. Dolsey at this very moment, I wondered. Was it worth a job?

  Was it worth a wedding ring?

  I hung around, haunting the outside of Mrs. Dolsey’s classroom. I gnawed on the inside of my tongue until I tasted the sharp tang of blood in my mouth and, at a tickle at the corner of my mouth, brushed the back of my hand against it to find a smear of red. I swallowed down the mix of blood and saliva.

  My locker was just across the hall from the block of red-doored math classes. My hands weren’t shaking, but my fingers felt like live wires as I spun the combination lock. Right, left, right again, click and open. It had been a couple of days since I’d been home. I’d been spending the night in the theater control room, showering in the frightening dark of the locker room at night, anything to avoid going to Misty. But my locker was a mess of slouchy cardigans, wadded up shirts, and worn tights. My dad hadn’t even called the school to ask where I’d been.

  The black, school-issued camcorder sat on the top shelf. I retrieved it and then stood on my tiptoes, reaching into the highest shelves, fumbling blindly until I felt a plastic bag filled with hard, square objects.

  I tucked the recorder underneath my arm and unzipped the seal of the bag, flipping through the labeled tapes, each miniature in size to fit inside the handheld device. Altogether, I might have a documentary on Hollow Pines High. I might know more about Hollow Pines than anyone in this entire town. The feeling was strange, an odd juxtaposition, given how little it knew about me.

  I watched this place as if it were a season of my favorite TV show, and I collected and kept all the best plot points. On these reams of tape were breakups, make outs, steroid use, and homework being traded for unsavory favors. But I flipped to a tape from last year, and I snapped it into place in the camcorder.

  There was at least one good thing about being nearly invisible, I realized, and that was being nearly invisible.

  According to my master schedule, Mrs. Dolsey’s classroom would be empty for another fifteen minutes. She would have disappeared after the last class into a shared workspace located between a grouping of four classrooms. Though I’d never been inside it, I understood that back there were faculty bathrooms and the teachers’ laptop computers where they checked Facebook and personal email accounts between periods.

  I slipped into her now-vacant classroom and selected a red marker from the ledge that framed the bottom of the white dry-erase board. My fingers wrapped around the cap, a moment of indecision seizing me before Marcy of all people popped into my head. A vision of my back turned to Marcy as I lost her for good, all because I’d chosen to do nothing. But not again. Not this time. I yanked the red cap from the marker, and it came away with a squeak and a pop.

  On the board, I scrawled a note in neat block letters.

  MRS. DOLSEY—

  YOUR HELP IS NEEDED ON THE ROOF DECK RIGHT AWAY.

  —MR. ROY

  I re-capped the marker and set it on top of the eraser without a second thought. I couldn’t afford to waste time. I checked the clock, noting the hour. Another thrill raced along my skin. I emerged into a rapidly populating hallway and quickly reached the emergency exit where the corridor dead-ended. Checking to see if anyone was paying attention, I pushed my way through the thick door to the vertical concrete chamber where red lights flickered. I gripped the metal rail and my boots clanged on the grated steps as I climbed my way up the four flights and out onto the school’s rooftop.

  I spilled outside and instantly felt the weight of the sky pressing down. The drizzle in the air landed on my cheeks, and I squinted against the glare cast by the cloud ceiling above. But below, Hollow Pines spread out before me. I could see all the way to the shadowy edge of trees that marked the hemline of the Hollows and to its left a hulking scrap of hardware that was the long-abandoned Golden Heart Flour grain mill where I lost Marcy for good.

  The hum of an industrial air-conditioning unit reverberated through the damp air.

  I began to pace.

  Would Mrs. Dolsey show? What if she hadn’t gotten the note? I stuffed my hands in the warmth of my armpits. I still cradled my bag, scared to put it down anywhere. The video recorder was a dead weight at the bottom of it.

  The rooftop was a dismal, grease-stained cement slab with cracking seams and unidentifiable aluminum odds and ends sprouting out from it. An ankle-high brick ledge wrapped around its border. I waited behind the giant cube of an air-conditioning unit and beside a drum of what looked and smelled like gasoline. The seconds turned into minutes, and they stretched like taffy, every moment passing longer than the one before and marking another cha
nce to turn back.

  I steeled my grip around my bag.

  I couldn’t let her get away with it. She couldn’t get away with it. She couldn’t, she couldn’t and then—

  There was a creak of hinges and a scrape against cement.

  I could fix this.

  “Tom?” I heard Mrs. Dolsey call. “Tom, I got your note.”

  Footsteps. The door swung shut behind her. My heart beat hummingbird fast. This was it.

  “Hello?” Her voice sounded more tentative now.

  The noise of students laughing and screaming floated up, an eerie out-of-place soundtrack.

  As the sound of her steps grew closer, I stepped out of the shadow of the air-conditioning unit. Dolsey stopped walking. Her jaw went slack. The curve of orange lipstick pointed down.

  “Lena?” she asked.

  “I’ve come to negotiate.” I heard the tremor in my voice and felt the hot flush in my cheeks.

  Her cheeks puffed out with air. “I don’t have time for this.”

  I lowered the tenor of my voice. “Chris Autry and I will not have detention today.” This time there was no crack. “Do you understand me?”

  She glanced up at the sky, held her palms up as if checking to see if it had already started to rain. “Lena, it’s detention. Don’t do it again, and you won’t get it again. There’s no negotiation. It’s settled.”

  “No!” I shouted. She blinked. She looked so slow and stupid and boringly adult when she did that, I wanted to stab her. “No,” I repeated, more calmly. I held out one finger, only now recalling the plan. I had had a plan. Plans were important. I pulled out the camcorder and flipped open the viewfinder.

  “I’ve been a teacher for fifteen years and—”

  I hit play.

  “How long have you been seeing Mr. Roy anyway?” I asked, watching the events unfold on screen. A week’s worth of after-school footage, a few stolen moments from a time in which Mr. Roy picked up Mrs. Dolsey in his beat-up Pinto by the dumpsters behind the school.

  “What are you—” She cocked her head. “What are you implying?”

  “Well, I have footage since the end of last year. Only one actual kiss, but—he’s married, isn’t he? I mean, not to you. You’re divorced. Isn’t that right?”

  Mr. Roy was a toadish man with rimless glasses and a penchant for polos made out of athletic performance fabric. He was the faculty adviser to both the Anime and Save the Endangered Animals clubs. He was good-natured and let people sit where they wanted to during his classes. Lots of kids thanked him in their graduation acknowledgments. He was also cheating on his wife, and I honestly didn’t know whether that erased the rest of it or not.

  I turned the camera so that she could see the screen and what was playing on it, though I was sure she could already guess.

  Her teeth clamped together. She took a step closer to me, but a sneaky one.

  I noticed things.

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

  “I do know. You know I know. Don’t play games with me.” I kept my eyes trained on her.

  “What you’re doing here is very serious, young lady.”

  Nobody ever called me a lady.

  “You will leave Chris Autry alone,” I said. “You will tell him that you made a mistake. Before the end of the day. Do you understand?”

  There was a visible lump in her throat. A breeze fluttered the lapel of her blazer, and she shivered. The descending weight of the mist made the never-ending blanket of clouds feel impossibly close and they seemed to wrap us together, Mrs. Dolsey and me, like a funeral shroud. The chill of the wet had turned the tip of my nose cold. “Am I right about that?” I asked.

  “Give me the video camera.” She held her hand out. Her toes were edging closer and closer.

  Mine were edging back.

  I felt the ledge behind me. The dizzying height creeping up with nothing between me and the ground crawled up my stomach and into my throat.

  “No,” I said.

  She took a bolder step forward.

  “Do we have a deal?” I asked.

  Her eyes flitted to mine then straight back to the camera. She nodded, the motion hardly visible.

  Then she made a halfhearted swipe for the video player.

  “No, no, no.” I waved my other arm, swishing her away. “I’m going to need to hear you say it. Out loud.”

  Her eyes darted around like a cornered animal. “He loves his daughter. He loves his daughter. He can’t stand the idea of not seeing her every day. You don’t understand.” Her words tumbled out on top of one another. “You don’t understand.”

  “Out loud.”

  “Y-y-yes,” she muttered. “Now?” She twitched her fingers, asking for me to hand over my only piece of evidence, asking for me to be a total idiot.

  I snapped the viewfinder shut, ready to stow it back in my bag. But that was when I noticed the jerking movement. My eyes downcast, I barely caught it in time to jump clear. She lunged.

  Full body, hands stretched out, ready to snatch away the camera.

  I stepped sideways. And then I watched the toe of her heel catch one of the aluminum sprouts cropping up out of the cement roof slab. I let out a hoarse scream. Mrs. Dolsey’s kneecap hit the brick ledge. The rest of her slender, pantsuited body stretched out over open air.

  She plummeted headfirst before her heels flipped over her and she was over-rotating, a poorly executed dive, hands reaching and reaching, fingers gracefully stretching to grasp onto something. I reached the edge just in time to see the whites of her eyes staring up at me, pleading for help. And the thing that stuck with me when I heard the raw-meat smack of her body against pavement was that final sight of her tonsils, trilling visibly in her throat while no sound came out.

  I leaned carefully over where Mrs. Dolsey had splattered at the entrance of Hollow Pines High and, from this angle, I could just make out the orange edges of the school banner fluttering above. Dolsey’s spiky hair had landed at the feet of a group of students who were returning from the outdoor picnic area. An oily slick of blood crept out from her head, and a trickle of red ran from the corner of her mouth.

  Shrieks pierced the gray halo of impenetrable clouds above us.

  Mrs. Dolsey was dead.

  I stared down at my hands. I stood by, waiting for the deluge of horror to wash over me, sweep me sideways, tear my feet out from underneath me.

  But it didn’t.

  There lay poor, dead Mrs. Dolsey. She really shouldn’t have yelled at Chris like that.

  THIRTEEN

  Chris

  I didn’t want to see anyone. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I didn’t want to hear anyone or be around anyone. And yet the halls were filled with elbows and shoulders and after-lunch breath and dollar-store perfume.

  I wished for a temporary lobotomy. Something to push the rest of the world away so far that I didn’t have to deal with it. Outer space.

  Instead New York and Honor’s soon-to-be summer intensive felt like air above me, tantalizingly real but unreachable, as though I were drowning in six inches of water. My uncle, who was nice, would think he was doing the right thing by calling my father about the detention. My aunt would tell me my father would understand.

  But nobody seemed to get that it was cruel and unusual punishment to send a teenage boy to the middle-of-nowhere USA halfway through high school.

  I walked to seventh period letting my feet literally drag, scuffing the bottoms of a pair of brown leather half-boots that I actually really liked. I had another hour to figure out how to tell my aunt and uncle what happened in such a way that they wouldn’t tell Dad.

  That should be easy … not.

  My own thoughts were on a loud loop, over and over, but as I was passing the front entrance doors, I noticed the noise from outside, though muted through the thick glass of the doors, was cumulating into a bit of a commotion. What was that?

  Other students in the hall were slowing down als
o. “Do you hear that?” a girl next to me asked.

  I was nodding yes when Principal Wiggins shot out of the administration office to our left and ran right past like none of us existed.

  “Fight!” someone yelled from over near the trophy case behind me. “Fight in the front.”

  Bodies began to jostle around, and I was being pushed toward the doors. I tried digging my heels in, but there was no use. I actually didn’t like watching fights. After throwing a series of poorly performed punches, the expressions on the boys’ faces—yes, usually boys—always held this raw shame that was difficult to look at.

  But in high school, a fistfight was the equivalent of gladiator entertainment.

  On my way being pressed out by a small but eager crowd, my hips rammed the push bar across the door, and I stumbled into the open air that felt sweaty with rain.

  There, I saw the white ring of the principal’s hair just outside. He was screaming. Or at least I thought that he was. There were so many screams it was hard to pluck one from the crowd. The air was pungent with fear.

  That was when I saw Honor at the edge of a ring of onlookers.

  Her pale skin was translucent underneath her spray of freckles. She clutched a script to her chest and on the back of it, I noticed several drops of bright-red blood.

  The world fell to a hush around me. My heart beat in my ears. Because near Honor and the other students beside her was what was left of my math teacher, Mrs. Dolsey.

  My mind emptied out. There was nothing. Nothing but silence and the space between me and Honor. Her eyes lifted to mine. She mouthed my name, and all I could think to do was run to her like I was on fire and she was water.

  The smell of fresh blood caught me squarely in the nose as I raced past the body unable to tell whether my teacher was moving or breathing or even still warm. Honor dropped the script and collapsed into me. Her forehead fit beneath my chin exactly the way I knew that it would, and I folded around her. There was no room between us now for rules, and I didn’t want there to be.

  My head was still filled with the great, roaring emptiness, like the inside of a seashell.