Crushed

by Laura McNeal

  She was shocked how little was there. Less than half a page. She turned it over, but the back was blank.

  “Quantitatively,” she said, “we’re a little short here.”

  Wickham took no offense. “Yeah, well, that’s why I came to you. For inspiration.”

  Audrey read what he had written, which was a joke about Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle: Heisenberg was driving

  down the Autobahn at high speed when he was pulled over by a policeman. The policeman asked, “Do you know how fast you were going back there, Herr Heisenberg?” “No,” Heisenberg replied, “but I do know exactly where I am.”

  Audrey chuckled, then frowned. “So you’re starting with this?”

  He shrugged.

  “Then what? Do you have some dates and anecdotes?”

  Wickham looked not only stiff and possibly sick but also lost and vulnerable, which only sharpened Audrey’s affection for him. “Not to worry,” she said. She slipped off his lap and led him by the hand to the chair in front of the computer, which she leaned over and switched on. “Which search engine do you use?” she asked.

  He looked at her blankly.

  “Google, Teoma, Yahoo?” she said.

  Again the blank look. “Those aren’t nomadic tribes of the American Southwest?”

  Audrey gave this a polite laugh and leaned over to type Teoma, then Heisenberg. “Okay,” she said, seeing with satisfaction a long list of scholarly-looking sites. “Now you just scroll down until you find something that looks promising and take a look. If it contains information you need, go ahead and print it.”

  “Where are you going to be?”

  She nodded toward a nearby armchair. “Right there, finishing my geometry homework.”

  “Way over there?”

  “Way over there,” Audrey said, sounding more curt than she intended. Usually, being with Wickham was like being the only two people in a place isolated by gently falling snow. But tonight that sense of snug communion was gone.

  Wickham read aloud—and printed—a few more physics jokes; then he became quiet. Finally he said, “Okay, time for the cavalry,” and rummaged in his backpack until he found the familiar cardboard sheet. He popped an Imitrex through the foil and washed it down with a gulp of Coke.

  So it was a migraine. Again. Audrey rose and came over to him. “Bad?”

  “Pretty bad, yeah.”

  It wasn’t just his face that was stiff now. It was his whole body. He walked carefully to the sofa and eased himself down. Audrey put a pillow beneath his head and brought him a damp, hot washcloth.

  “Why didn’t you take a pill sooner?” she asked.

  He made a faint smile and said, “Trying to conserve. I’m almost out. And they’re fifteen bucks apiece.”

  Audrey wasn’t sure which was the news here—the fact that the pills cost so much or the fact that Wickham, who wore pricey clothes and took taxis to pricey restaurants, would care.

  When he was settled and quiet, she sat down at the computer and found some even better sources about Heisenberg. (That wasn’t cheating, was it? It was like when a librarian steered you toward the right Dewey decimal number.) She looked to see if Wickham was still awake, and when he rubbed his eyes, she said, “Um, we need a thesis statement over here.”

  Without opening his eyes, Wickham said, “Herr Doktor Werner Heisenberg, born in 1902, dead some time later, certainly knew how to use uncertainty to his advantage.”

  Audrey couldn’t help laughing. “He was born in 1901, not 1902, and I’m afraid you’re mistaking Mrs. Leacock for someone with a sense of humor.”

  Wickham kept his eyes closed. “It’s just a biography, right?” He sounded tired, or bored, or both. “Heisenberg was born here, his mother did this, his father did that, he disowned them and became famous.”

  “He disowned his parents?”

  “Maybe that was somebody else,” he said without much interest. He sighed and said, “So how would you write it, Miss Term Paper?”

  “I am not Miss Term Paper,” she said coolly.

  “Look, Audrey,” he said. “I just can’t do this right now. Let’s skip it, okay?”

  “If you skip it, you flunk.”

  This seemed not to faze Wickham. “Yeah. . . . So?”

  Audrey’s voice softened. “So I thought we were going to college together.”

  They had planned it one night in this very room, when her father was working late and they had the house to themselves. They would get married after graduation. They would both go to Syracuse University, her father’s school—not Audrey’s first or even tenth choice, but her father was always giving money to the school and she thought he might be able to help Wickham get in there. Hadn’t her father always wanted Audrey to attend his alma mater?

  “I just can’t write a paper when my head is doing this,” Wickham said. “I’m sorry. Give me an hour and I’ll feel better.” Then he put the pillow over his face and fell asleep.

  Her father came home, and Audrey tracked the sounds of his car door, the front door, and his footsteps on the stairs. He said, “Knock, knock,” and stuck his head in.

  He looked tired. He always looked tired now. He regarded Wickham on the sofa. As far as Audrey could tell, her father liked Wickham. They had met one afternoon in the kitchen, and Wickham had made a good impression, shaking Audrey’s father’s hand, calling him “sir,” and talking knowledgeably about her father’s favorite basketball team. Her father had said afterward that he seemed “genteel—not like most kids today,” and when he’d asked if Wickham was smart, Audrey had grinned and nodded yes. For her father, a boy wasn’t a candidate for anything if he wasn’t smart.

  Tonight, her father looked at the sleeping Wickham and said, “Dead of a heart attack at age seventeen?”

  Audrey laughed, mostly out of relief, and said, “He’s got a migraine.”

  Her father nodded, but somberly. “It’s getting late, Audrey. And if he’s sick, he needs to be home.”

  Wickham slowly sat up. “I’m sorry, sir. It’s the medicine I take—it knocks me out sometimes.” Absently, he began to fold the blanket Audrey had put over him.

  “Can’t he stay until ten o’clock?” Audrey asked. “He needs to finish his paper.”

  Her father silently considered this. It pitted propriety, which Audrey knew he believed in, against getting your homework done, which he also believed in. “Ten’s okay,” he said finally, “but no later.”

  What Wickham wrote at the computer that night was shocking to Audrey. He had to be able to spell better than that, and how could someone so charming and witty seem so simple-minded on paper? Maybe it was the migraine—probably it was—but Audrey read the paper with a perfectly blank expression at 9:55 and said it was great, but maybe she should just go through and fix a few commas.

  “And whatever else you find wrong with it,” Wickham said as he shouldered into his heavy coat. The taxi he’d called had just wheeled into Audrey’s driveway. After Wickham kissed her at the front door, she watched him walk out into the snow. She hoped he would turn around to wave good-bye so she could see his face one more time, but he didn’t. He just slipped stiffly into the cab, which rolled away.

  Audrey went back inside and sat down at the computer. Wickham had gotten some dates wrong (like saying that Himmler had exonerated Heisenberg of charges the SS made against him in 1983 instead of 1938). When she checked that fact, she found a great anecdote he hadn’t even used and a few other details that would make the paper more interesting, and she put those in, too. Then she set to work on Nikola Tesla’s alternating currents, her own topic. It was 2:15 when she finally crawled into bed.

  In the morning she called Wickham.

  “Hello, schoolmarm,” he said, which hit her the wrong way, especially since it was said in the cheerful tone of someone who’d gotten a good night’s sleep.

  “Don’t call me that,” she said. Then, softer: “Meet me at my locker so I can give you your paper, okay? I don’t t
hink I should be pulling it out of my bag in class. It’d look like we’re cheating.”

  “Which we’re not,” Wickham said. “You’re just my editor, is all. My editress.”

  Editor. Editress. It was true—that’s all she was. Audrey again felt the sensation of snow falling softly outside a room where she and Wickham were safe and warm.

  “See you at my locker,” Audrey said, and Wickham, in his soft drawl, replied, “Yes indeed.”

  Chapter 36

  Top Collar

  The problem with the vase was the top collar. Clyde had gotten to the point where he could shape the basic vase without thinking, but then his hands would rise to the collar, where the gentlest type of two-handed throttle had to be undertaken, and he just couldn’t get it right. The more he concentrated, the worse the results. Now, however, he was merely building the basic vase—his hands ran smoothly through the spinning wet clay—and he was left to his own thoughts, which led him to Wickham Hill.

  Clyde hated Wickham Hill, hated him in a way he didn’t even hate Theo Driggs, because Theo Driggs was just a thug. But Wickham passed himself off as older, richer, and more sophisticated than everyone else.

  He had to warn Audrey. Tell her what he’d found out. It would be hard for her at first, but then she’d be grateful to him, and look at him differently. . . . And then, without meaning to but unable to help it, Clyde began thinking of Audrey, the dream Audrey, on her bike on a sunny country road, with her long legs bare and her sandy hair streaming back. And then he thought of how, when Clyde had remembered Cary Grant’s name, she’d said maybe she should pay the reasonable, non-negotiable price to Clyde, and Clyde began to think of Audrey Reed standing before him and smiling shyly and undoing a long, thin dress with a line of cloth-covered buttons running down the front—a reverie that was easy to take pretty far, and in fact only ended when Clyde became suddenly aware of the clay gently enclosed in his hands.

  The collar was there.

  Somehow, the collar was there.

  On the spinning wheel it looked weirdly triangular, but he knew that was the way it was supposed to look.

  He very gently released his hands, and the triangular shape turned into a circle before his very eyes.

  Clyde sat staring at the pot, almost in disbelief.

  Look, he thought. Look what just happened.

  He raised his eyes to his teacher’s desk. “Mrs. Arboneaux,” he said. “The vase.”

  She rose and came to his wheel. She stared at it a long time. Then she said, “It’s perfect. It’s absolutely perfect.” She turned to him. “How did you do it?”

  “I don’t know.” He honestly didn’t. “I was lost in my thoughts”—he colored slightly at the kind of thoughts he’d been lost in—“and it just . . . happened.”

  Mrs. Arboneaux laughed. “You let your fingers do the thinking.”

  “Is it too big?” Clyde said.

  “It’ll shrink a little in drying, and a little in firing.” She gazed again at the vase. “It’s just the most beautiful shape,” she said. Then, after they’d stared at it in wonderment for perhaps a full minute, she helped him move it from the wheel to a drying tile, which he set on a high shelf, out of harm’s way.

  Chapter 37

  Forewarned

  For Audrey, Monday, November 24, was not a good day. First of all, it was freezing. The streets were white with salt, the snow was black with dirt, and the sky was an impenetrable beige. The second issue of The Yellow Paper was sticking out of people’s backpacks and textbooks and lying facedown on wet, dirty entryways, footprints like postmarks on the edges.

  Audrey picked up one that wasn’t too grimy and stuffed it into her coat pocket to read after meeting Wickham. He was already waiting for her, leaning casually, handsomely, winsomely against the wall. “Well, well,” he drawled when she drew close, “look who looks fetching as can be.”

  “Thanks,” she said, feeling it to be true only when he said it.

  She unzipped her backpack and pulled out her physics binder. There was the sepia picture of Heisenberg; there were the neat black letters of his name. Handing the essay to Wickham, though, was like driving down the street with a patrol car behind her. She looked up to see Clyde Mumsford moving down the hall toward them. He glanced at her and at what she was handing to Wickham, and walked on past them. Audrey felt her face go bright red.

  “What’s the matter?” Wickham asked.

  “Nothing,” Audrey said.

  “This looks professional,” Wickham said, thumbing through the pages and nodding. He closed it up again and asked softly, “Did you change the typeface?”

  “What?” She was still feeling Clyde’s gaze. What had that look been?

  “I mean, is it the same as you used for your paper?”

  It was. Suddenly this seemed like a dead giveaway. And if there was something to give away, it meant there was something to hide.

  “It’s the same,” Audrey said softly.

  “Well, that’s okay. It’s not that distinctive. Don’t worry about it, Aud. You look like you’re on trial for murder here. All you did was edit me, remember? Half the papers at this school were radically ‘edited’ ”—here he put his fingers up to make quotation marks—“by overachieving parents.”

  “Right,” Audrey said doubtfully. “Okay. Well, I’ll see you in third period.”

  She started to go, but Wickham pulled her back. He kissed her in the subterranean gray-green hall of a high school she had hated three months earlier. “Thank you,” he whispered. Other students looked at them, and somebody let fly with a “Hubba-hubba!”

  Audrey felt momentarily happy and weightless except for the one rope that tied her to earth—the suspicion that what he was thanking her for was helping him cheat in school.

  “Bye,” she said, and hoped that Clyde was not somewhere watching.

  Chapter 38

  Ignominy

  As she headed off toward English, Audrey pulled out The Yellow Paper, which was full of the usual tasteless stuff:

  URINE TROUBLE NOW!

  NOT-WATER BALLOONS

  ARE URINIFEROUS

  FILL-UP STRICTLY A GUY THING

  Ugh. With a mixture of dread and curiosity, Audrey turned the page over and found the “Outed!” column:

  Lovers of Yellow Journalism let us as they say get right down to bidness. What Social Science Teacher-type going by the initials D.B.I. might think of changing that middle initial to U? That’s correct, Bargefolk, one of our esteemed educational professionals made the police blotter two weeks back with a blood alcohol reading of almost triple repeat triple the legal limit and here’s thinking the fact that the nice Police Officer pulled our So-Sci pedagogue over at 2:15 a.m. in the company of a female companion other than his wee wedded wife might explain why our D.B.I. has taken up temporary quarters at the YMCA. . . .

  Probably Mr. Ingram, Audrey figured. He taught social science and she thought his first name was David, but he seemed so meek and bland—maybe five foot six, nearly bald, and always wearing the same nerdy cardigan—that it was hard to think of him out drinking with some woman. But that was the thing about people you saw from a distance, or even people close to you—you had no idea in the world what they might do when they thought they were alone. Who would have guessed, for example, that she would do what she did with Wickham? Letting him look over her shoulder during quizzes. Writing his paper for him. Letting him undo her blouse on the sofa in his living room.

  Audrey shook her head quickly to dispel these thoughts, and kept walking and reading.

  Stiff upper liposuction, Mademoiselle Taylor, but when asked whether your name and cosmetic surgery should be uttered in the same breath we must in all candor confess the answer be oui.

  Miss Taylor, the spinster French teacher, whose face, Audrey had to admit, did seem to have that stretched-taut look. She continued reading.

  Here’s yet another poll to hold on to, Bargemen, and no we don’t mean that pole you deviate you.
Results from the 1st Annual Large-Margin-of-Error Poll are finally in and we now have winners of awards in categories both coveted and un. Speaking of uncoveted and starting with scalp scurf, The Demonest Dandruff Award goes to . . . drumroll and miscellaneous juvenile sounds imitating flatulence . . . Mr. Dan Hans the Science Man! Your top choice for the Lady-Godiva-Ride-Through-the-Food-Court Award is . . . drumroll and heavy breathing . . . Evie Berkowitz!

  Audrey scanned a few more ersatz awards until she came to Theo Driggs’s name:

  And finally, Fellow Inmates, the award you’ve all been waiting for, the highly pejorative Biggest Horse’s Ass Award for which let’s face it there were a wide variety of nominees but this was the one award with a landslide runaway and thumbs-down winner . . . our very own punkster and mugster Theo-the-Sniggering-Stallion-Driggs. That’s right, Theodora, you may have the brains and breath of a Shetland pony but the consensus is you are indeed The Biggest Horse’s Ass on campus and to be truthful our tireless staff (no not that staff you overly hormonal moron) can think of no one more deserving of this ignominy. (Sorry Theo, but we can’t tell you what ignominy means—you’ll just have to look it up.)

  Audrey wasn’t sure whether the Yellow Man was foolish, brave, or both. But she knew one thing for sure: the Yellow Man was in for a serious pulping if Theo ever figured out who he—or she—was.

  Chapter 39

  Discovering the Yellow Man

  “Audrey?”

  Clyde Mumsford stepped out from a hallway alcove, where he must have been waiting. He was wearing the pink-and-black bowling shirt again, but he had shaved, and his hair looked wavy instead of helmet-mashed.

  Audrey gave him a half smile. “Hi.”

  “I need to talk to you.”

  The urgency in his voice made Audrey apprehensive. She glanced toward room 456, where her English class met. “I’ve got class right now,” she said.

  He said, “Perry’s class, right?”

  She nodded, and wondered how Clyde knew this.