Stutts glances at Patrick, like he’s looking for an answer, his face blotchy red.
“We may not have much time,” I tell him, turning my back to the kids, hoping they don’t hear.
He gives me a long look. I stare back. Finally, he says, “Okay. Just you. You come right back. And don’t try anything. You hear?”
“No problem,” I say, springing into action. Emery helps me lift the teacher as I bend down, slide my arms under her shoulders and knees, and pick her up from the floor. I shift Mrs. C.’s weight onto me and Emery drapes her arm over her body.
“Where are you going?” Natalie asks.
“Jake’s going to take her to find a doctor, sweetie,” Emery tells her.
“Does she have to have a operation?” Alicia asks.
“No, they’re just going to give her the medicine she needs.”
“You okay here?” I ask Emery.
She hesitates, then nods. “I’m fine. Go.”
“Can we go, too?” Carlos asks.
“Not right now, but maybe in a little bit,” Emery tells him. His lip trembles, and she leans down to speak to him; I notice she’s leaning on the desk, like she needs the support.
“Emery, you sure you’re okay?” The color’s gone from her face, and I hate leaving her.
“Go, Jake! I’m fine.”
She realizes she’s snapped at me, and she changes her tone as she reaches out and pulls Carlos to her. “I need you to help me with these coloring puzzles,” she says to him. She turns to the other kids. “Will y’all show me what you’ve done so far?”
The kids flock around her, several talking at once. They love to show off their work. She’s herding them to the back of the room as I turn to leave.
I pause at the door, realizing I have no idea what’s going on in the hallway. It seems like a good time to give them a heads-up, so I call out, “This is Jake Willoughby. I’m coming out. I’m bringing the teacher, and she’s unconscious.”
A voice answers, “Come on out, Jake. Nice and slow, okay?” I recognize Reed Walker, the police chief. It hits me they think Stutts might use us as a shield, and I wonder briefly why he doesn’t.
I walk through the door and into the hall, lifting my arms a little to shift Mrs. Campbell’s limp body toward my chest for better support. It’s clear and quiet. All classroom doors are closed. Dark red drops stain the floor—shit—a trail of blood, right where the security guard fell. No sign of his body. A man with a police helmet aims a gun in my direction from around the corner. Chief Walker looks out from behind him.
“Slow and easy, Jake,” the chief tells me. “Just keep coming; you’re fine.” He’s watching the hall behind me.
“She’s diabetic. She passed out. She needs help!”
I round the corner, and two other police officers crouch low, weapons drawn. A guy with a paramedic badge on his shirt comes from behind them to take Mrs. Campbell while they continue to cover the hall I just came from. Farther down, several men lean over a blueprint of a building, I’m guessing this one, one of them pointing.
What the hell? Are they gonna climb in through the air vents or something? Do they think this is a damn Bruce Willis movie?
After handing off the teacher, my arms feel light but my legs are suddenly tired. Just as I’m about to turn back, a familiar figure steps from the front office.
“Dad.” I try to swallow the lump in my throat.
“Jake, are you all right?” he yells as he breaks into a run.
He’s racing toward me calling my name, and I run to him like a first grader.
He reaches me and wraps me in a huge bear hug. It’s taken me years to catch up to my former linebacker dad’s height, and he still has about fifty pounds on me. I’ve only seen him cry once—the night Mom died—but I feel his chest expand sharply and he says my name in a strangled voice. I hang on to him for a few seconds, then pull away.
“Dad, I have to go back.”
“Jake, no! You’re not going back in there.”
“You have ten seconds,” Stutts calls from the classroom. I figure he doesn’t want them to have time to ask me questions or give me instructions. “I’m counting,” Stutts yells through the hallway. “Ten . . . nine . . . eight . . .”
“Is everybody okay in there?” Chief Walker asks me.
“Yeah, the kids are fine. Scared, but fine.” Dad’s still holding my arm, but I pull away. “I have to get back or I don’t know what he’ll do.”
“. . . seven . . . six . . . five . . .” Stutts yells.
“No one’s been hurt?” The chief’s holding his walkie-talkie toward me with his thumb on the button, so I know others are listening.
“No, everybody’s okay. Don’t worry, we’ll take care of the kids.”
“Who’s with you?” he asks.
“Emery. Emery Austin’s with me.”
“Jake—” Dad starts again.
“. . . four . . . three . . .” Stutts counts.
The chief starts to ask me something. “Can you tell me—”
“There’s no time. I have to go.” I’m already moving back down the hall.
“Jake, be careful, son.”
“I will.” I stop and look him in the eye so he can see I’m okay. “Dad, don’t worry. We’ll be okay.” Then I sprint toward the classroom.
CHAPTER 9
EMERY
As soon as Jake is out of sight, Stutts becomes even more nervous and jittery, like he’s afraid he’s made a mistake letting him go. He crouches by the door and points the gun down the hall.
It’s terrible being in the room without Jake.
Several kids try to talk to me but I shush them, herding them all back to the reading carpet and pointing to their papers. It takes all my energy to fight the rising panic. I even drop a couple of books so I’ll have an excuse to lean down to pick them up, a trick I’ve learned to keep from blacking out. If I can get my head down by pretending to pick something up or get something out of my shoe, it sends the blood flow back to my head without anyone knowing I’m on the verge of passing out.
When Stutts starts the countdown, we’re all frozen in fear.
“Ten . . . nine . . . eight . . .”
What will he do if Jake isn’t back in time?
“I think I’m gonna puke!” Natalie yells, and I hand her the trash can, barely looking in her direction.
“. . . seven . . . six . . . five . . .”
The kids watch the door as Stutts counts.
“. . . four . . . three . . .”
I look around the room desperately for something—anything—I can use as a weapon if he starts shooting. How can I stop him if he goes crazy?
“. . . two . . . one.”
I know this is it. Jake isn’t coming back. Stutts will kill us all. How will he decide who to shoot first? Or will he just open fire?
Stutts’s flint-hard eyes meet mine. The part of him that’s human seems to have shrunk to a tiny pinprick of light. Madness has taken over.
And then—thank you, God—Jake is there.
Tears of relief fill my eyes.
“I’m here. It’s okay, guys. And Mrs. Campbell’s gonna be just fine. They’re taking good care of her,” he says, looking around at the anxious faces as he enters the room.
Jake gives me a long look, and I turn away to keep from falling apart. I’ve spent so much energy learning to live without him, and now all I want to do is run to him. I don’t want him to know how much I need him. A devastating wave of longing washes over me.
He leans down to Natalie with her garbage can. “Natalie, you okay?” He directs the question to her, but his eyes, full of concern, are on me. I lift my head and lock on his gaze. Natalie nods and sniffles and puts the trash can down, crisis over.
Crisis over. The countdown crisis, anyway. I know there will be others. The kids are watching. I square my shoulders and take a deep breath. Jake and I are now the sole authority figures—the only “adults” standing between them and th
e crazy man with the gun.
Suddenly Stutts is screaming at Jake. “No one leaves this room again. You got that? I don’t care what happens. No one’s going anywhere.”
Jake holds up his hands and nods but doesn’t speak. He can see how wild Stutts is right now.
Stutts didn’t say—out loud—that he’d shoot us, but we all know that’s what the countdown was about. If he doesn’t get what he wants . . .
“I want to go home.” Natalie starts to cry again. Me too, Natalie, me too.
Several others start up. The absence of their teacher has sparked a panic. I try to channel her calm presence, the way she anchored the rest of us and made the situation seem somehow manageable. Miraculously, I feel my body relax a little as I concentrate on adopting her rocksteady demeanor.
“Our teacher’s gone,” Kimberly wails.
“Are you gonna leave us, too?” Simon asks, speaking louder than usual above the noise.
“No way, Jose,” I answer. Simon looks up, surprised that I’ve assumed Jake’s rhyming role. Jake grins and comes over to stand beside me.
Suddenly I notice what he’s wearing. “Nice shirt, Biscuit,” I say, giving Justin Bieber an appraising look. I fight the urge to laugh, which seems ridiculous in this setting. I’m afraid that if I start, I’ll never stop.
“Don’t start with me,” Jake warns, one dark eyebrow cocked in my direction, but he’s smiling. He walks over to his wet shirt and picks it up off the floor. I recognize it as one of his brother’s hand-me-downs; he loves them because they’re soft with age. I try not to think about the way the worn shirts felt against my face, with their fresh cotton smell and their hung-over-the-back-of-the-chair wrinkles.
He slides his arms into the damp sleeves and buttons the shirt over the offending photo. “Man, that’s embarrassing,” he says with a grin.
That’s classic Jake. He told me once the thing that’s most embarrassing in life is when other people know you’re embarrassed. So if you just admit it up front, nobody makes fun of you because everybody knows how it feels.
It’s one of the things I liked best about him from the beginning—that he’s totally unself-conscious. Lots of people say they don’t care what other people think, but Jake really doesn’t. He’s always the first one to get up and dance at a party—crazy dancing that’s so bad, it’s almost good.
Sometimes he turns the car radio up and sings really loud. He pocket-dialed me once, and when I listened to my voice mail, I could hear him wailin’ on “Single Ladies,” singing with Beyoncé in this high girlie voice. When I played it back for him, he just laughed, and then he put my phone on speaker and played it for everybody in art class.
For me, Champion Sociophobe of the Universe, he was a good teacher. He peeled away my shyness and taught me not to take myself so seriously. When I confessed to him how nervous I am when I think other people are watching me, he said, “I promise you, the world isn’t looking at you. Everybody’s too busy. And basically, most people just care about themselves, if you wanna know the truth.”
When I admitted I’m paralyzed sometimes by fear of screwing up, he laughed and said, “You know, Em, if you do screw up, people will remember it for about two minutes until they move on to the next person who screws up—well, unless you’re Marilyn Holderfield and you wet your pants in fourth grade; people do kinda remember that one.”
Jake makes everyone else feel like it’s okay to mess up. I’ll never forget the day this poor ninth grade girl tripped in the lunchroom and her food went all over her and she slipped and went down in the mess. The whole school was staring at her. People started laughing and pointing. The girl just sat there on the floor, her head down, about to burst out crying.
And then, before she could even try to get back up, Jake was there. He sat down next to her on the floor, like they’d planned a big ole picnic, and started talking to her, telling her jokes and acting like nothing was wrong—he even picked up a cookie off the floor, gave her half, and started eating the other half.
After everybody lost interest in them, he helped the girl up, looped her hand through his arm, and made a big production of escorting her to her table.
Yep, you guessed it. The ninth grade girl was me.
It was the beginning of my heart-stabbing, gut-twisting, butterfly-producing crush on Jake Willoughby.
• • •
“I’m hungry,” Mason Mayfield III yells at the top of his lungs, bringing my thoughts back to the first graders around me. “When do we eat?”
“Is Mrs. Campbell coming back?” Rose asks.
“No, but don’t you worry,” Jake tells her. “We’ll be just fine, Valentine.” He winks at me.
“Quiet!” Stutts barks at them. “I’ve had about enough of all this racket.” But the racket continues.
“There’s ants everywhere!” Mason yells. “All over the place.” He jumps up and starts stomping the floor around him like he’s doing some kind of war dance. Within seconds, all the kids are up and running, jumping across the ants that have appeared out of nowhere and are swirling in wavy lines across the floor.
Lewis immediately begins to howl. “Stop! Don’t hurt ’em. They’re mine.” He shoves Mason to the floor. Mason gets up and makes a dive for Lewis, knocking him down. The two of them roll over each other on top of the scattering ants, punching and slapping and pulling hair, while the other kids gather around to yell encouragement. Great! Just what we need right now!
“Hey, that’s enough!” Jake springs into action, grabbing Mason, so I wade into the fray and pull Lewis off the floor. He’s sobbing uncontrollably, trying to drop out of my hold.
“They’re my ants. He killed my ants.”
“Lewis, stop it,” I yell. “Lewis, listen to me. What are you talking about?” I shout above his crying until he finally hears me.
“I found them. They’re mine.”
“You found them where?”
“Outside.”
“You brought them in from outside? When?”
“This morning before school.”
“How did you bring them in?”
“In my lunch box.”
I look at the trail of ants. It definitely leads to the cubbies in back where the kids’ lunches and coats are stored.
“Why would you do that?” I ask.
“Joey Hopper has an ant farm and I didn’t never have one.”
I let go of Lewis long enough to follow the ant line, which ends at a Spider-Man lunch box. I lift it gingerly by the handle and lay it on the table. When I unlatch the lid and open it, there’s a little pile of dirt, several clumps of grass, and an awful lot of ants—who are pretty disturbed about the sudden change of habitat. I slam the lid on the angry insects.
“Oh, Lewis, you shouldn’t have done that. Did you get bitten, sweetie?”
He holds up his hand and shows me several small bites on his fingers. “Just a little. But it’s okay. They didn’t know I was trying to save ’em.”
“Where is your lunch?”
“My mom gave me money to buy it. I just brought my lunch box for the ants.”
“Get that thing out of here,” Stutts growls, impatient with the whole mess. “Get rid of it.”
I look up helplessly.
“Throw it out the window,” he orders.
“No, no, no.” Lewis sets up a howl. “Don’t throw my ants out the window!”
“Here.” Jake picks up a big plastic storage tub from a shelf and pops the lid off. He dumps some blocks out and throws the lunch box—dirt and grass and all—into the empty bin.
“But what about them ants that got out?” Lewis yells, pointing to the floor.
“We’ll get them. Don’t worry.” I grab a couple of sheets of paper and begin scooping the ants up with them. The irony is not lost on me—that I’m suddenly expending all kinds of energy saving a bunch of ants when a few minutes ago I was worried about children getting killed. You do what you have to do.
I toss the papers into the pla
stic bin with the rest of the ant paraphernalia.
“But how are they gonna breathe in there?” Lewis whines.
“There’s plenty of air inside the bin,” Jake tells him with a look that dares him to complain. Lewis takes the hint and pipes down.
Then Mason starts up again. “He hit my lip. He made my teeth hurt.”
“There’s no blood, Mason. You’re fine,” I tell him. Several other kids chime in with their versions of the fight.
“These kids are driving me crazy,” Stutts yells. I can tell he’s about to go ballistic over the noise and chaos.
Suddenly I clap out a rhythm—just like I’ve heard Mrs. Campbell do. Magically, the kids respond immediately, stopping all noise and clapping back a matching pattern. Mrs. C. does it to keep from yelling over the noise to get their attention, and they love it. Some patterns are simple and others more complex, but she changes them up so they have to listen to repeat them. Several of them look up at me, smiling, and I’m glad I’ve given them something familiar to hang on to.
“Reading time, everyone,” I tell them, changing gears after a few minutes. Their attention spans are so short. “Everyone move back to the reading corner.”
“Will you read Giraffes Can’t Dance?” Janita asks.
“No, read Strega Nona,” Alicia says.
“Whoever’s quietest gets to pick the book,” I tell them, herding them back to the carpeted corner lined with bookshelves. I get them seated and start passing out books. Jake takes one to Patrick. “Everyone can just look at the books for a bit, and then I’ll read one to you,” I say.
Lewis is lying on the floor under a nearby desk, but I decide to pick my battles, so I leave him there.
“I want Interrupting Chicken,” Nick says, throwing down the book I’ve handed him.
“Nick, it doesn’t matter which one you get right now,” I say.
“Here.” Kimberly hands him Interrupting Chicken and he hugs it to his chest.
“Miss Emery,” Natalie says, “my uncle Robby, he ran his truck into a tree and he’s in the hospital and my daddy said it’s ’cause he dranked too many beers, and my momma got mad and told my daddy—”
This Is Not a Drill Page 6
