In the Dead of Summer

by Gillian Roberts

  “That doesn’t make sense—what did April have to do with the shooting?”

  “Nothing, but they don’t know that, do they?”

  “But she’s Vietnamese, too.”

  “So what? She wouldn’t go with Vanny. Shamed him. And what if…what if she did go with somebody else? Somebody white? She was the problem, they must think. Besides, it could have been her brother, maybe, who shot Vanny, to keep him away from her. It doesn’t matter, anyway, does it? She’s dead. But…” He clasped his hands as if they might fly away and shook his head, mumbling.

  “Yes?”

  “The worst thing is…”

  We were close to a revelation. Unfortunately, we were also close to the school bell. “What’s the worst thing?” I prompted.

  He looked full of tears. Not ready to cry, but loaded with moisture and pressure, like a storm cloud that hovered dark and low. “It’s my fault,” he whispered after glancing around. “It’s because of me.”

  “Because you were close with her? More than just two people who attended the same school?”

  “We—” And suddenly the urgency and the anguish disappeared and he grinned at me as he gathered up his books. “So I smoke,” he said loudly. “So what? I don’t do it inside school, and it’s a free country out here. So I’ll live a year less. Big deal, thanks for the lecture, but I’m not askin’ you to pay my health insurance, Miss Pepper.”

  “What on earth are you talk—” Then I got it. “Some day you’ll be sorry, Woody,” I said, also in an overloud voice. “Young people think they’re invincible, but when you’re wheezing with a respirator—”

  I am amazed at how easily I can slip into the role of obnoxious, meddling elder. Like those dolls that have two heads. Turn them upside down, invert their long skirt, and you have somebody all new. My change of costume came complete with a script and a sound tape of one meaningless prefabricated admonition after another.

  Woody was just as good a quick-change artist. I watched him pull on his Hostileman cloak, face mask, and dialogue. He didn’t even need a phone booth for his quick-change.

  It was a convincing exchange. His buddies slapped him on the back, looked at me with a bare minimum of grudging deference, then ignored me. “Gotta light?” Tony asked him just as the school bell—purposely loud enough to be heard across the street where we were—rang.

  “Sure,” Woody said, and they moved toward the school with all due sluggishness, lighting up and dragging deeply.

  As I passed the dawdlers I shook my head at their smoke screen. Woody made no sign. Woody, who thought April was dead and that he was to blame for it.

  Woody, who’d just passed some sort of test with his friends. If only I knew what it was.

  *

  Once inside the building, I thought I heard another bell, or a warning siren. But it was Flora Jones, shrieking.

  Flora, the elegant and unflappable, outside her classroom, splattered with viscous brown globs that leaked down her cream pantsuit jacket as she screamed. “Whoever did this! This is the absolute—”

  A crowd of returning students and faculty formed around her. “Flora,” I said, “what happened?”

  She turned in my direction. Dark goo dripped onto her forehead from her hair. “I quit! This does it—I can’t take any more of this. My civil rights are—”

  “What is that gross stuff on her?” a girl behind me asked.

  “Dirt!” Flora screamed. “Dirt all over my room—dirt in my files and wet dirt smeared on the boards. Dirt on my computers! Dirt in a bucket over the door so that when I walked in—look at it in there! Go look at it!” A dozen students accepted the invitation, as did I, for a second.

  There were dribbles and splats and small mounds of wet earth everywhere, smeared on the chalkboard, clogging the computer keys. The look of the room and its purpose felt lost, and for the first time I understood what the word defaced really meant.

  “It says mud on the board. M-U-D! Do you know what that means?” Flora’s hands were shaking up to the elbows, the veins in her neck looked ready to pop, and tears filmed her eyes. I put my arms around her shoulders, trying to avoid as much mud as I could as I steered her away from her room, hoping we could make it to the nurse’s office, to any place with a couch, better still, with sedatives. I almost asked the gathered students if they had any spare downers.

  “Don’t tell me it’ll be all right,” she said as we walked. “It won’t. It hasn’t been. I’m quitting, that’s what. I don’t know how I’ll afford grad school—won’t go, then, that’s what. Because I’m not coming back to this—this is—nobody should have to—intolerable! My computers! My files! I was at lunch! The one day I go outside—it happens here—in a school!”

  We approached the wide marble staircase to the first floor. “I hereby quit!” she announced to gape-mouthed students coming up from lunch. “You see why? Huh? You see? Find some other fool to try and teach you. I know you’re here, whoever made those calls and sent those notes and painted my—I know you’re here.”

  I said nothing. She wasn’t ready for words yet. But neither was she necessarily right. Outsiders could and probably had done this for reasons of their own. I visually checked the doorways. We didn’t have much in the way of security. Anyone could come in while the doors were wide open. Something had to be done about that, although the idea of a permanent guard further depressed me.

  When we reached the bottom of the stairs, I guided her toward the office and the nurse’s room, but she pulled away. “No,” she said. Her voice now contained only a normal amount of decibels. “I’m out of here. Tell my class to do whatever they want to, somewhere else. The computers need to be looked at before anyone touches them, anyway.”

  “But—but you’ll be back tomorrow?”

  “I’m not dirt, Mandy. I’m not slime and slop and mud. Mud! You know why they wrote that on my board? Because the crazies call people like me and Asians and anybody who doesn’t have their gray skin—they call us the mud people. It’s more of the same, it’s the letters and the phone calls and the paint on the front door, and I’m not taking it anymore.”

  “Flora, please. Think about what you want.”

  “My grandma used to say that when hell was full up, the dead would walk the earth. Hell must be full up, because we’re surrounded by ghouls.”

  I hugged her, I wished her well, I offered to drive her home, to have somebody cover my class. I promised to call her this evening. I made her promise to call me whenever she needed me, wherever. I gave her Mackenzie’s phone number, too. I told her to call the police again.

  She left, and I couldn’t blame her, but I felt a wave of pure terror and saw the edge of the earth, with people falling off it—good people like April and Flora. Or maybe they were being pushed.

  *

  Even without major miseries like disappearances and defacings, these quadruple-long sessions themselves provided heat rash. I could barely endure my afternoon section, and not because of anything its participants did or didn’t do. Blame it on the clock, which insisted on creeping at its normal rate. Blame it on the D.D. Index, which estimates Deodorant Despair. There are days where the combination of heat, humidity, and adolescent hormones defeats the heavy artillery of the pharmaceutical companies. Nobody’s fault, precisely, but if there’s anything to aromatherapy, then eau d’afternoon is its antithesis—aromatraumatic and catastrophic for one’s mental health.

  But blame it more on the lasting image of Flora Jones, mud-splattered and justifiably enraged. What was going on? Should I have anticipated what felt like an unending series of ugly events as a part of growing up and being an adult? Or was the world really getting more and more mean-spirited?

  The class didn’t need to talk about April, because she’d been discussed in their morning sessions, and nobody had anything new or tangible or helpful to offer. I didn’t feel like rehashing the attack on Flora Jones’s room, so it seemed important to move on, at least imitate normality in the form of a
planned lesson on writing business letters.

  A schizoid afternoon. I made notes on the board as we collectively created a request for an interview. “You think there should be something in here, too, about why you want a job at this particular place?” I suggested. “A little flattery, maybe? A little selling of your special aptitudes?” Meanwhile, my brain ignored their employment futures. It kept picturing the boy being blown off the sidewalk; April being dragged into a van; Flora, splattered with mud, accusing the school population of viciously harassing her. And to balance things out with a bit of the irrelevant and ridiculous, my stomach keened, audibly, a primitive lamentation because I’d skipped lunch.

  The class talked about salutations and conclusions, then switched to the actual writing of letters, answering job opportunity ads they’d clipped the night before. They uncapped pens and opened notebooks and busied themselves. Quiet time for me, a little independent thinking for them. Running a summer school class is a lot like running a nursery school. Class time is drastically longer than attention spans, and keeping the group from becoming a mob depends on changing activities at regular intervals. Make them use different muscles, feel that what they’re doing is forever new. I just wish we had nap time, too.

  This was an assignment they appreciated because it was pragmatic. It didn’t require analysis of anything except what they themselves wanted. I watched with pleasure as they wrote away, even though their work would become my work this evening, as would the morning class’s essays.

  I should have taught driver’s ed, or gym, or cooking. I’d leave school empty-handed, whistling, and free. Or even math, if only I were better at it, because there an answer was an answer, not something to be pondered and explained the way a sloppy sentence needs to be.

  I pulled out the morning’s exams and flipped through masochistically, guesstimating the degree of misery they’d provide. I was hoping that inside the fractured syntax and shattered spelling I’d find interesting ideas. They’d been asked to discuss the relative responsibility of Romeo, Juliet, and their respective families and society in creating the tragedy. We’d discussed aspects of this, such as prejudice, immaturity, hot-headedness, rigidity, grudges, and adult roles.

  I saw the usual suspects—smartasses, semiliterate, unpunctuated, nonresponses: “Well of course Juliet was immature isn’t it obvious she still had a nurse what do you think that means when a grown girl is still nursing?” We needed a lesson for the comma-challenged. Or “Romeo should have dumped her right away, get somebody who’d come down from her high balcony and party.” Or “It was everybody’s fault—they talked so funny how could anybody know what was going on? Why didn’t they say what they meant instead of whithers and yons?” Also, there were the uninspired but well-meaning ploddings of a flat-footed mind. “Although it is my understanding that people married much younger in those days, if you ask me, thirteen is not mature enough to make major life decisions like who a girl is supposed to marry. I think you should be sixteen before you make major life decisions like that. If she had waited until she was sixteen, like I have, to make such major life decisions, maybe things would have worked out better instead of so tragical.”

  And always, creative spelling and expressions: “Nobody was to blame for nothing. It was there fate. They should have stuck with there own people not the enemy and not brought wrath down on there heads with all that pubic fighting.” Would I tell him what he’d said?

  And a surprisingly good one. “It was a setup, the way all blind prejudice is. People Romeo and Juliet didn’t even know had decided for reasons nobody can even remember—probably power or money or something else completely irrelevant to this generation—to hate one another, so of course their children became forbidden fruit to one another. Nobody should have to deal with secondhand hate.” That was from a small and silent boy who had never before voiced an opinion on anything. I was heartened, and I resolved to work on one of my many prejudices. I too readily dismissed the pod-people who occupied chairs and did nothing else but deplete the oxygen supply. Look what had been going on behind those vacant eyes.

  I flipped through all the papers. Woody hadn’t handed one in. That can be a ploy—the student insists he turned in his exam and implies that I have lost it, but I didn’t think Woody was playing that game. I thought that instead, whatever had driven him outside to smoke and brood had been operating in the classroom while time passed and the paper in front of him remained blank. After all, I had asked about fault just when he believed himself responsible for a fresh tragedy.

  I rifled the stack a last time and was struck by the odd look of Miles’s paper. I’d been surprised when he docilely consented to a garden-variety essay exam, but I’d assumed he lacked the energy to be his usual overly creative self, because he’d been distracted and agitated at the time. He, too, had come from April’s home school. She was his friend.

  However, his “essay” was anything but standard.

  Who’s supposed to say whether present guilt lies with

  A group? An idea? A tradition? A

  Person? Not Romeo, Juliet or that gang. They’re dead.

  Assigning guilt is useless, something he wouldn’t

  dare.

  Would he?

  Ask him.

  Perhaps he is

  Afraid.

  Probably is, because

  Reality

  Is too much like fiction and

  Life sucks.

  I sat down and reread it. Who was the him I was supposed to ask—assuming I was supposed to ask anyone, that the question wasn’t rhetorical—and about what? And what was that about present guilt? I was tempted to leave my class and, if Miles was enrolled in an afternoon class as well, find and interrogate him.

  Maybe this was just a cryptopoetic outpouring, or a bluff, words on paper, any words, arranged “poetry style” as a sop for the teacher. Or maybe Miles thought poetry was supposed to be obscure, that ideas were more impressive if incomprehensible.

  Or maybe it made sense and I simply wasn’t getting it. Maybe it meant what it said. Life sucks.

  Ten

  AT THE END OF THE DAY, TIRED AS I WAS, I DIDN’T FEEL ready to leave the building, even though my classroom felt sore and empty like the gaping socket of a missing tooth.

  April should have been here, working on pronunciation and writing. Learning. But the room was silent.

  I couldn’t bear to accept Woody’s assumption that the girl was dead, although I understood the logic of it. And even if she was, miraculously, alive, I didn’t want to think of her in fear, or pain.

  Five was at my open door, his hand raised as if about to knock on its frame. “You in a hurry?” he asked politely, even though I was an inert lump.

  “Kind of the opposite. I feel at loose ends. Normally this would be the hour I tutored April.”

  He sat down in one of the classroom chairs and lowered its writing arm so that he could stretch out his rangy frame. I wondered if they grew all of them like that out there. He made the rest of us seem not only pale and unathletic, but crabbed and undersized and Eastern.

  “That’s kind of why I hoped we could talk,” he said. “Maybe I seem fixated, but let’s forget the word logic. I won’t use that anymore, but all the same, there must be a motive behind it, and if all of us who knew her pooled our data, we might get somewhere.”

  “Like what? You don’t think anybody from here in school took her, do you?”

  He shook his head. “I mean maybe we learned something relevant through her essays and class discussions, and your extra time with her. Something we don’t yet recognize as useful. Reasons for her behavior and what happened. For starters, what was she doing hanging around a—let’s face it—a whorehouse? What kind of family does she come from that lets their daughter—”

  “She couldn’t have worked at a massage parlor.” Of course, I had no hard evidence, only instinct, scraps and tidbits, bits and pieces of what constituted April Truong, the kind of information you glean when
you aren’t in search of any. The kind that simply stuck to what you were wearing. “She said she worked in a café. I believe her.”

  “Then why did the news say the place didn’t exist? Wouldn’t you make up a cover story for your teacher if you worked in a massage parlor?”

  “She didn’t! I’m sure she wouldn’t have. There was a—there is a great innocence about her. Not naïveté, but an excitement about the future, a belief in herself and the possibilities. It isn’t how I’d think a girl who had to do that kind of work would sound.”

  “Drugs?”

  “I’d be astounded.”

  “Maybe not using, but involved in sales—”

  I shook my head.

  “—or having a boyfriend who was? Sometimes revenge is carried out pretty widely by those gangs.”

  “What gangs?” Who had said anything about gangs?

  “Gangs involved in drugs and massage parlors. Vietnamese gangs.”

  “No boyfriends, no drugs that I know of,” I said honestly.

  “Who were her friends?” he asked. “Was she a loner?”

  “The other people from her home school seem as if they were friendly with one another, but I don’t know how social a person she—”

  “Hello there!”

  It was nothing short of amazing. Phyllis the Sibilant hadn’t visited me once since the day before school began, when, by incredible coincidence, Five had also been in my room. Now that he’d escaped the lunchroom, she must have been prowling the building in search of him. I wondered how often she found him.

  However much it was, was too often. He flinched when he heard her warbled greetings.