by Sue Lange
Every time they spoke, they expelled white clouds of breath that lay in the air behind them for a moment.
“Not true,” May said. “I think Justin Blaine is kind of cute.”
“Justin Blaine!” Elsa laughed. “Yeah, he’s cute all right with that red rectangle in his hair.”
“I know, I sort of felt sorry for him.”
“May, he was drooling in class.”
They turned their attention to the middle of the left half of the schoolyard where a dark muddle of somethings had gathered. The early drop of the sun rendered anything further away than 15 feet indistinguishable. All the girls could see was a group of people, but they knew who they were.
“It’s them,” May said. “This is so macabre.”
“I see them,” Elsa answered, cool.
“I don’t want to walk by them. They give me the creeps. You never know what they’re going to do.”
“Probably nothing, but okay, we’ll go in another door.” Elsa pulled May over in the direction of the East Wing.
“Slice,” May said in a quiet voice. She averted her eyes to the right as if not acknowledging the danger on the left would take away its power. She tried light conversation to prove she was calm and not afraid. “Hey, there’s a new boy in school,” she said. “A basketball recruit.”
“I ran into him this morning,” Elsa said, glad for the subject change.
“Really? What’s he like?”
“Tall.”
“Cute?”
“If you like that sort of thing,” Elsa lied.
“Let’s go look,” May answered.
“We’ll be late. Besides he’s coming to the science meeting.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I talked to him myself. He said he was coming.”
“Why would someone with a basketball scholarship care about the Science Society?”
“Just because someone is talented in sports doesn’t mean they don’t have interests elsewhere.”
May clicked her tongue in disbelief. “You sound like Dean Williams in assembly. I don’t believe it, anyway. I’ll bet you a two-for that he’s in there.” She pointed to the gym.
A two-for was a double of cigarettes. It cost twenty dollars and was considered a bargain because one ciggy alone cost thirteen. The lunchroom supplied two-fors out of the same vending machine that sold the milk and cookies. Phillip Morris sponsored the setup: machine, ciggies, Horizon, Oreos. A true win/win situation for the students, the school, and of course Phillip Morris.
“You’re on,” Elsa said. She didn’t smoke as much as May, but a friendly bet was always fun, especially if you were definitely going to win.
By now they’d made it to the front doors of the East Wing which responded to their attempts to enter with a canned message.
“I’m sorry but as per after hours rules, these doors are locked. If you are a—”
“Shit,” Elsa said under her breath. “Come on!” She grabbed May and pulled her around to the rear side of the building without waiting to hear the message about consulting their email to determine which doors were tonight’s designated entrance. She had no intention of walking past the anti-Rifs to the West Wing. The only alternative was to try the door at the backside of the gym.
They knocked until an annoyed Coach Budzynski, with a whistle held between his lips, leaned into the door from the inside to open it and see what the hell was going on.
“Yeah,” he said keeping his eyes on the play, the whistle in place. He was uninterested in whoever it was interrupting his session. He dropped the whistle and screamed at a hapless player, “the other left, the other left!”
As Coach B. shouted orders, the girls peaked around him and scanned the room for the new boy until Budzynski returned his attention to them. “Yeah?” he repeated, louder.
“Uh,” they mumbled together, then Elsa said, “We need to get in for the science meeting.”
“Oh, for Chrissake’s girls, West Wing. What’s the matter with you?” He left off the door and returned to his session.
The door’s spring action effected a quick closure, leaving Elsa and May stranded outside. They listened for a moment to the coach’s whistle and his “Hey, Johnson, which is your left hand? Okay, so now which would be your left foot do you think?” They looked at each other and shrugged.
“I didn’t see him,” Elsa said, “I win.”
“Doesn’t mean he’s not in there,” May answered.
Elsa said nothing, just looked at May in the “I told you so” stance.
Just over May’s shoulder a dark blob rounded the corner of the building. The weak security light above cast an orange glow on the newcomer as it ambled up to the girls. Elsa pulled May back in an attempt at retreat, but May, ignorant of the intrusion, was fumbling in her waist pack for her generic menthols. She said, “Uh, uh,” as she extracted a cigarette, flipped it up into her mouth, and flicked her lighter ineffectually. The bangles tinkled at her wrist with each movement. “Still doesn’t mean he’s at the meeting,” she said. “I don’t owe you yet.”
She looked up to catch Elsa’s response, but instead saw a scraggly, mop-haired hulk with a circle-and-line tattoo on his right ear. His fingerless gloves reached up to her face with a lit match. Even with colors washed out in the dim light, May knew he was wearing olive, the signature color of the anti-Rifs.
She blinked, too confused to get scared at first, and realized her only course of action was to inhale politely. Like a mouse that saves itself from the cat by sitting very still right under the cat’s nose, she kept movement to a minimum. She didn’t flinch, didn’t show fright.
Behind the man with the match, four more dark-clad individuals wearing dusters and spike-hair were scruffing up out of the dark to enter the group.
“Ralph,” said the stranger with the match.
May laughed nervously as she blew smoke out from her lungs. “Ralph?”
“My name.” He nodded to the door leading to Coach Budzynski’s practice. “You trying out for the team?”
May puffed another little laugh, the smile stayed stuck on her face.
“We’re trying to get to a meeting,” Elsa said, “but the doors are locked.”
“We can get you in,” Ralph said. “Or you can skip your meeting and hang with us. We’ll keep you warm, right K.C.?”
K.C. standing directly behind Elsa, laughed. She could feel a gush of warm air from his lungs on the back of her neck. A sour smell came with it. Beer breath.
“I’m sure we’ll be fine,” Elsa said. “We just couldn’t remember which doors were the right ones.”
She gathered her wits and grabbed May’s cape to pull her back around the building. Unfortunately May was hypnotized by fright and planted like a block of cement. Elsa gripped her friend’s upper arm to uproot her and drag her away from the crowd.
K.C. and the others cackled and Ralph called, “Next time, then.”
“Sure,” Elsa answered back.
“I need my shadow book,” May said when her wits returned and they were out of sight. Her teeth were chattering and her hands shook until she almost dropped the cigarette.
Elsa made no comment as she hurried May around the front of the building and across to the West Wing, cursing herself for ignoring today’s school notification. She ignored most text messages from school. They were usually just advertisements from official sponsors like McGraw-Hill or Google•Schoogle. Sometimes it was a reminder on good conduct. Rarely did they have meaning for her life.
Today’s message was no doubt still in her phone, but that was in the bottom of her pack. She didn’t want to stop and start digging for it. Ralph and his friends would any minute be ambling over in their cavalier, and at the same time intense, way.
She’d try every dang door in the building before she’d ask him for help. He looked like those bikers on the Hell’s Angels historical website. The East 3rd Street, New York Hell’s Angels of Altamont fame. The ones with horrible initiation rite
s requiring wannabes to perpetrate heinous acts on local high school sophomores. She didn’t know why but Ralph and his pals seemed like that. They scared her as much as they scared May even if she pretended that they didn’t.
The two raced to the bank of West Wing doors and yanked on the handle of the closest. Their arms simultaneously jerked back and forward as they met the resistance of the locks.
“We can get you in!” a voice called from the dark. Ralph was just entering the pool of light the building’s front security lamp shed on the sidewalk.
Elsa and May frantically tried all the doors, none of which were open. May flung her cigarette down to the sidewalk and started pumping at the handle of the final door. Just as they were going to give up, Ms. Utrecht, the history teacher, stepped through the first door.
“Ms. Utrecht,” Elsa cried. “Hold that door for us. We’re trying to get in.”
“Hello, girls,” she said, pleasantly, as if there wasn’t a potential murderer just outside in the yard. “Didn’t you get the text message?”
Ms. Utrecht held the door with her foot. “The outer door on the other side of the parking lot is tonight’s door,” she said.
“It totally slipped my mind,” Elsa said.
“Yeah, we didn’t get the text,” May said.
“Well, I’m not supposed to let you in, you know that, girls.”
“Yeah, but there’s . . . people out here . . . harassing us,” Elsa sputtered her excuse. “We just got nervous.”
“And scared,” May said.
Ms. Utrecht was indignant. “What? We need to call the police,” she said, digging in her backpack for her cell. “We can’t have that sort of thing here.”
“Well, they haven’t actually—”
Elsa turned to the pool of light and saw it was empty. Ralph and his group had retreated to the shadows or behind the maple, or who knew exactly where.
“Yes?” Ms. Utrecht said, her hand was poised to key in 911 on her phone.
“They were here,” Elsa said, before turning to the woman. “I swear.”
“Don’t swear, dear. It’s so common,” Ms. Utrecht said. She opened the door wide and said, “Well, anyway, here you go.”
“Thank you,” the girls said together. They slipped under her arm and ran into each other in the door jamb. They jostled a moment to get through until breaking free.
Ms. Utrecht watched, shaking her head sadly at the inscrutability of today’s irresponsible youth and then she headed off for the parking lot.
Inside the building the girls rested against the wall next to the doors that had just saved their lives.
“I need my shadow book,” May said for the second time.
Elsa ignored the statement. She made no judgments on May’s religion. Certainly she herself had dabbled in everything: Buddhism, veganism, anarchy, libertarianism. Amongst the various fads that came and went in the high school milieu, Elsa had found no passion. She sampled and then dropped each new idea as easily as it had come. Having the constitution of the truly apathetic, she neither believed nor disbelieved and allowed May her witchcraft without comment or collusion. She pushed off from the wall and entered the fray.
The West Wing’s night business was different than during the day when a regimented schedule, hourly bell ringing, and militaristic atmosphere held sway. Now the place was relaxed, fun, partyish. The hallway bustled with students participating in various after-hours activities. Backpacks displaying Nintendo, Dell, Sony, Motorola, and AOL flew past. Remote contraptions roamed aimlessly in between hollering students, their handlers unidentifiable in the crowd. Groups of kids with studded bluetooth chips attached to their ears held animated discussions outside project rooms. Apparently friends from far flung places were joining in a nighttime communications orgy.
Automaton hall monitors rolled through the crowd, snapping photos as if they were recording the activity, but every child knew the score. The law prevented documentation after hours. After hours was free time. The robots were not really photographing at all. Their memories were disengaged. They simply went through the motions as programmed. It was cheaper and easier to just let them run, rather than collect them up every night for storage. There was no storage area, in fact, and if they were left inactive in the hallways, they’d be robbed of parts for the various student projects.
The girls’ destination lay around a corner a couple hallways off the main one. They approached room 310 with caution, not sure they really wanted to go in. Could they change their minds if the situation called for retreat? What if there were only snobby girls and cute boys that would snub them every chance they got?
After the ordeal with the anti-Rifs, Elsa felt like she could handle anything. May, however, was still shaking. She stopped and lifted a silver pentacle from around her neck to her lips as Elsa listened at the door. In sharp contrast to the party going on behind them, the room was deathly quiet. And dim. The two exchanged glances. Had nobody shown up? They shrugged and entered.
Inside the gloomy room, 25 or 30 students—all wearing coats or sweaters because the room was cold—sat in obedient silence, waiting for something to happen. Mr. Brown had not yet shown up.
The girls slid into seats in the back. Elsa was by now quite calm and considering an iHigh hit. She thought better of it though, knowing she needed a clear head if she was going to impress the tall, new boy. If he was here.
She recognized two or three classmates sitting close by, but couldn’t see much of anything else. No one spoke to them, even the ones that knew them.
Elsa and May were not particularly popular. May was an odd little dreamy girl. She liked weird lute and dulcimer music and seemed to make herself unattractive on purpose. The rage at the time was dark and heavy, May stuck to last year’s light and cotton, even in winter. And she never flaunted the brands of her measly sponsor, a company based in New Hope that dealt in botanicals such as Belladonna and Jimsonweed. May truly believed in the Celtic gods and was of the opinion that the Romans were wankers. Nevertheless she saw no reason to shill.
Elsa was just plain shy, and until today her hormones hadn’t kicked in. Having lived on her parents’ no-meat regime all her life, she hadn’t had the benefit of Tru•Farm bovine or avian growth factors to provoke the early onset of adult maturity. She appeared young and out of place. She was not in competition with anybody for the attention of boys or Frito O’Lay and Sally Hanson sponsorships. Everyone in the game had pretty much written her off. And in her turn, up until one-fifty-five this afternoon, she’d found no one worth sighing over.
She looked around, trying to see which mass might work out to be tallish, but nothing showed promise.
“Well, well! Students in the dark as usual,” Mr. Brown’s loud voice entered the room at the same instant he flipped the light switch. Up front the CalcuScreen jumped to life in response to the flood of light. It’s voice chip stated the canned startup speech: “Good morning students. Welcome to . . . Northawken High . . . GoogleConnect is now available. Have a nice day.”
The students jumped a little at the shock of the sudden illumination. They rubbed their eyes and adjusted.
Mr. Brown promptly moved up to the front of the room and placed a contraption that resembled a miniature Ferris wheel on the front desk next to the sink.
He was in casual mode tonight, wearing a blue and white Penn State sweatshirt over the standard khaki slacks. When he moved behind the desk to switch the screen off, it said, “Good night, students,” before blinking twice, the Dell registered trademark signoff.
“Won’t be needing that tonight,” Mr. Brown said. Tonight was his night. No pre-packaged lectures designed by some Harvard Teach School Ph.D.
While the students watched Mr. Brown, Elsa watched the students. She could not see all the way to the front so she stood and took off her coat to get a better look.
“I see we have Ms. Webb with us this evening,” Mr. Brown said before stepping over to the wall thermostat which he fiddled with to give the r
oom some of the school board’s closely hoarded heat.
Meanwhile the students were turning in their seats to see who Ms. Webb might be. Ignoring the uncomfortable feeling from the attention, Elsa took a few seconds to search faces. With grave disappointment, she returned to her seat, slumping and shivering. Unimpressed, the students returned their eyes to Mr. Brown.
Elsa pulled her coat over her shoulders and looked over to May whose face was asking a question. She pushed out her lips and shook her head.
May nodded and mouthed “You owe me.” She held up two fingers to make sure Elsa remembered just what it was she owed.
Elsa leaned over and whispered, “Justin’s here.”
May glared and held her finger to her lips in a forceful display of shush.
Elsa scrunched up her eyes tight and opened her mouth wide, mocking her friend.
“Now then,” Mr. Brown began. “Tonight’s meeting is special for two reasons. First we’ll be initiating our ten newest members. Second, we have a number of sophomores who are here to see what we’re all about. Hopefully we can entice them to join us.”
And so the meeting began. One by one, the formal members—all seniors—stood and introduced themselves. After that, Jerome Swarz, the president, took over. He read the mission of the society, conducted business, took reports from the treasurer, secretary, and historian, requested ideas for new business, and in general followed Robert’s rules for an efficient meeting.
May had a coughing spell at one point, but other than that the audience uttered not a peep, even during the new business portion. Elsa sat with her arm on the desk and her chin in her palm. She clicked her nails against her teeth to pass the time. The meeting seemed on the brink of dismal failure when the time came for open discussion on the annual Northawken FutureWorld competition.
FutureWorld was the holy grail for any student with scientific intentions. Held every year, anyone was allowed to enter an exhibit in the contest, but only the creative, forward-thinking, or clever won. The winner was assured entrance to their college of choice. And as everyone knows, college is the holy grail for any student of any intention.
