Crushed

by Laura McNeal

  Audrey felt herself flush, and when she took the essay from Mrs. Leacock, she saw first the frozen expression on Mrs. Leacock’s face, and then the sentence written in red marker: Please see me after class.

  Audrey sat down as Wickham’s name was called. She flipped through the pages of her essay and saw no grade, no marginal comments. Bad, she thought. This is bad.

  As Wickham walked back down the aisle with his paper in hand, he looked as he always looked—comfortable with himself, and pleased with his place in the world—but that, she knew by now, was just Wickham: he might have had an A plus on his paper, or he might have had an F.

  Everywhere kids were paging through their essays and stuffing books into bags, which might have provided cover for Audrey to turn and ask Wickham what he’d gotten, but when she glanced up at Mrs. Leacock’s desk, Mrs. Leacock’s frozen eyes were fixed on her.

  The bell rang and there was the usual crush of students in the aisles, hauling sweaters and overloaded bags. Mrs. Leacock was still staring her way, so Audrey couldn’t even turn around to look at Wickham. She stood up slowly, and as she walked to the front of the room, she became aware that Wickham was doing the same. He followed her all the way to the desk. Audrey’s stomach clenched tighter. He’d received the same message, then.

  Mrs. Leacock watched them approach. She didn’t smile or say hello, or even take a deep breath. She just said, “So who wrote these essays?”

  Audrey, panicked and confused, felt like blurting something out, but Wickham said, in a pleasant voice, “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that we have two papers signed with two names written in one voice, a voice that I know pretty well at this point in the term. What I’d like to know is what Audrey’s voice is doing in your paper.”

  “Oh, that,” Wickham said. “I can see where the misunderstanding—”

  Mrs. Leacock held up one hand. “If you don’t mind, Mr. Hill, I’d like to hear what Audrey has to say first. Could you step outside the room?”

  Wickham looked at Audrey. His eyes were transmitting strength. Strength to lie, or strength to make a good case for the truth? She didn’t know. She knew he was good at making muddy water clear, but she wasn’t. She’d always told people too much, had always bubbled over with explanations and tangential details, a habit that made her father sigh and say, “You’re just too honest.”

  Wickham strolled out into the hall.

  “And close the door behind you,” Mrs. Leacock said.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, and after giving Audrey one last encouraging look, he shut the door.

  Mrs. Leacock slid the blue stone back and forth along the silken cord. “Why don’t you pull up a chair, Audrey?”

  There weren’t any chairs, only heavy desk-and-chair units. As Audrey pulled one over, it vibrated loudly across the linoleum. Sitting in it made her feel small.

  “Okay,” Mrs. Leacock said. “Tell me the process by which these two papers were written.”

  Audrey watched the blue stone go back and forth. She opened her mouth. “How they were written,” she said, trying not to panic.

  Mrs. Leacock nodded, looking impatient.

  “Wickham came over to my house,” Audrey said. “He doesn’t have a computer, so I let him use mine to do research and write his paper.” She touched a finger to her cheek. Was her cheek that warm, or was her hand cold? Probably both.

  “All right,” Mrs. Leacock said. “And?”

  “And he printed it there.”

  “And you had what kind of input into the way it was written?” Mrs. Leacock asked. She’d let go of the blue stone, but now she absently turned the ring on her hand. Her expression was detached, impassive, cold.

  “I read it,” Audrey said, fumbling now. “And I . . . I had some ideas about making it smoother.” Then: “I shouldn’t have helped him, I guess.”

  If Mrs. Leacock recognized the conciliatory note in Audrey’s voice, she didn’t show it. She merely said, “And how did you present these ‘ideas’?”

  Audrey couldn’t bring herself to say that she rewrote his paper. It was too terrible. She didn’t want to say it, and she didn’t want it to be true. “I gave him suggestions for editing it,” she said, surprised at the lie but also grateful that she had thought of it. “I helped him fix the grammar and add descriptive details.”

  “Meaning you wrote, like a teacher, in the margins, and he used your comments to revise the paper on your computer?”

  Audrey so intensely wanted this to be true that she almost believed it. “Uh-huh,” she said, without looking Mrs. Leacock in the face. She nodded slightly, and blushed. Surely Mrs. Leacock would see she was lying.

  Mrs. Leacock was silent for a few seconds. “You realize I’m now going to talk to Wickham alone.”

  Audrey nodded, and stared at the corduroy knees of her pants.

  Mrs. Leacock stood up and went to the door. “Your turn, Wickham,” she said, and signaled Audrey to take his place in the hall.

  In passing, Wickham smiled at her, looking unworried, and Audrey gave him a solemn look in return.

  The hall was cold. She couldn’t hear their conversation through the door, and she didn’t dare look through the window at them. She leaned against the wall and rubbed her fingernails obsessively across the brown corduroy surface of her thighs. The bell had rung, and students were at lunch. Bits of trash—candy wrappers, an empty plastic cup, a ticket stub—lay at her feet. She checked her watch once, twice, three times. She jumped when suddenly the doorknob turned, and Mrs. Leacock stepped out.

  “You may go,” she said. Her expression was, if anything, even colder than before. “I need to look at these papers again, and I’ll give them back to you on Monday.”

  Audrey nodded, feeling sick and close to tears. Mrs. Leacock hadn’t been fooled, and she, Audrey Reed, was going to fail, or be expelled, or who knew what. Audrey looked shakily at Wickham, who lifted a hand and smiled. Then he strolled away from them both.

  Audrey picked up her backpack; murmured, “Thank you” to Mrs. Leacock; and then, walking off in the opposite direction so that she didn’t seem to be Wickham’s co-conspirator, wondered what there had been to thank Mrs. Leacock for.

  Chapter 52

  Something Wrong

  Wickham sauntered up to Audrey’s locker a few minutes later.

  “So what did you tell her?” Audrey asked.

  “Same thing you did.” Wickham grinned. “I listened through a plastic cup.”

  “What plastic cup?”

  “The one right there on the floor.”

  “That actually works?”

  He shrugged. “More or less, yeah.”

  “So you heard what I said, and said basically the same thing.”

  “Hey, it’s what I would have said anyway.”

  This might have been enough to convince Audrey, except for the memory of Mrs. Leacock’s frozen expression. “But she still doesn’t believe us,” Audrey said. “I think we’re in big trouble here.”

  Wickham stiffened. “Why?” he asked in a cold voice. “If you’d written in the margin and I’d taken your suggestions and printed the paper myself, how would it be different? You just eliminated the step where I, like some chimpanzee, make the changes.” He stared off, his face handsome even in annoyance. “And like I said before, any kid in this school with a college-educated parent is getting more help than that on every paper.”

  There was something wrong here; Audrey could feel it. She waited a few seconds and said quietly, “What’s wrong, Wickham? It’s like you not only don’t care what Mrs. Leacock thinks about all this, but you don’t care what I think, either.” She paused. “It’s like you’re mad at both of us.”

  This prompted the reappearance of the Wickham she loved. “No,” he said, softening his voice and slipping an arm around her waist. “I’m a little torqued with Mrs. Peacock, sure, but how could I be mad at you? None of this was your fault.” He nipped her ear and said in a whispery drawl, “You were jus
t trying to help me.”

  Audrey found herself thinking again of a college apartment where she would live with the very same Wickham who was everything she’d ever wanted, and just like that, everything was clear again. She pushed everything that bothered her to the edges of her mind—or tried to—and wrapped her arms around Wickham, closing her eyes so that the world as he saw it was all she could see.

  Chapter 53

  A Situation, Colonel

  Thanksgiving came and went. Audrey and her father went to a great-aunt’s house in Cortland. Audrey had invited Wickham, whose mother was working that day, but he said she should just come over with a piece of pie when she got back. “Nothing like a great-aunt’s house to bring on a migraine,” he’d said.

  He seemed to be avoiding her apartment, always suggesting that she come to his house. Audrey, for her part, avoided the subject of Jade Marie. Don’t ask, she told herself. And silently, to him, she said, Don’t tell.

  On the Monday after Thanksgiving, the moment Audrey dreaded finally arrived. Mrs. Leacock asked to see them after class. “I do not have good news,” she said briskly, holding the two papers out.

  Audrey felt her stomach drop. The papers were folded open to pages three and four, and in both, several phrases had been circled in red pencil.

  “There are just too many verbal similarities,” she said. Audrey read a circled phrase in one paper: Heretofore the tide had been against him. She saw that Mrs. Leacock had circled Heretofore in the other paper. Both papers also contained ebullient, pilloried, and several identical phrases.

  Mrs. Leacock pressed her lips together, then said, “You will both need to write these papers over, in longhand, after school on Monday, December 15, so that I can watch your personal handwriting flow across the page. It will behoove you to choose different subjects, naturally, and you can bring your research materials with you—books, notes, et cetera, et cetera.”

  Audrey waited. She could tell there was more to come, and there was.

  “What cannot be undone,” Mrs. Leacock said, “is the damage to your citizenship grades. You will both receive a U in this class, and while I suspect this will cause little discomfort to you, Mr. Hill, I’m afraid that in Audrey’s case, this means I cannot recommend her for the Honor Society”—she paused and let her eyes fall directly on Audrey—“as I had, with pleasure, planned to do.”

  Audrey blinked and nodded, not risking a word. Her throat tightened, and she was afraid she would cry. Audrey turned, folded the paper, and went blindly through the doorway. In the hall, Wickham caught up with her and said, “Well, that could’ve been worse.”

  In a dull voice, Audrey said, “Really? How?”

  “Let me count the ways . . . ,” Wickham began, but Audrey, numbly, said, “No, Wickham, not now,” and turned and headed off.

  As she walked, she saw nothing, heard nothing, felt nothing.

  “Hello in there?” It was like a voice calling into a cave, and it came again. “Hello in there?”

  Audrey stopped and stared at the boy in front of her for a moment before realizing it was Brian.

  Into his cupped hand, as if it were a microphone, Brian said, “We’ve got a situation here, Colonel.”

  Audrey just stared at him. He was wearing his reggae cap, and pea-sized earphones were wrapped around his neck. Into his cupped hand, he said, “Sleepwalker in lion’s den. Repeat, code red, sleepwalker in lion’s den.”

  Audrey stared at him and said, “Leave me alone, Brian.”

  She walked on, but Brian overtook her. “Whoa,” he said softly, as if gentling an animal. “Whoa, now.”

  She stopped, and the moment she looked into Brian’s eyes, her own eyes began to moisten. Brian touched a finger to her face, and it was as if a button had been pushed. Tears flooded down her cheeks.

  “What?” Brian said softly. “What?”

  Audrey tried to calm herself, sniffing and wiping one cheek with her sleeve. “Sorry,” she said.

  “Nothing to be sorry for,” Brian said. Then: “So what is it?”

  “Mrs. Leacock just accused me and Wickham of cheating. I helped him with a paper and . . .” She didn’t know how to put it. “We both have to do the papers over now.”

  Brian stiffened, then took her paper and leafed through it. “Why’d she circle this stuff?”

  “Because those words were in Wickham’s paper, too.”

  Audrey knew she should have explained more completely, but she felt too sick and ashamed to go into the details. More tears leaked down her face.

  Brian seemed oddly angry. “So, what, like you can’t use the same words in two papers? Since when do people get exclusive rights to a word?”

  “Well, it was a combination of things,” Audrey said, and began to search for a tissue in her pocket. Maybe she’d get straight U’s in citizenship. Maybe she wouldn’t even get into Syracuse.

  “This isn’t right,” Brian said. “You should appeal to the ombudsman or something.”

  Audrey wiped her nose with a ragged tissue and shrugged, but Brian was serious in a way she’d never seen him before. “You don’t deserve this, Aud.”

  “But I do,” Audrey said. “That’s the bad part. I do. Just forget it, Brian. I got what was coming to me, and now I have to live with it.”

  Brian stood holding the bent, red-marked paper and shook his head. “No,” he said, almost to himself, his face set and hard. “This is wrong.”

  Audrey took the paper from his hands, balled it up, and threw it in a trash barrel painted with a bargeman and the words GIVE A HOOT!

  “Forget it, Bry,” she said, touching his arm. “That’s what I’m going to try to do.”

  But Brian didn’t change his serious expression—which, Audrey thought later, should have been her first clue.

  Chapter 54

  The Commodore

  Audrey was tired of avoiding things. She was tired of avoiding Clyde, who always looked up, then away, when she came into Patrice’s class. She was tired of the excuses Wickham gave for not studying at her apartment. She was tired of pretending she’d never heard about the car accident.

  It was the Friday before the makeup essay, two weeks before Christmas. Snow was falling again, and as she drove herself and Wickham home through the whitening neighborhoods, she said suddenly, “Let’s go to my apartment.”

  “Now?” Wickham asked. “We might get snowed in.”

  “Come on. You’ve never seen it.” She drove slowly straight ahead, passed Wickham’s street, followed a bus for blocks without wanting to pass, and then, finally, after making a left onto a street of bland, blockish apartment buildings, she parked in front of her own.

  “Home-a-jig,” she said cheerfully, trying for her father’s tone.

  The asphalt sidewalk led between two stunted firs to a blue awning that read COMMODORE. It was only four o’clock, but the front light had come on, and while Audrey was looking for her key to the front door, Wickham stood silently beside her. He had his hands in his pockets and his scarf pulled tight around his neck. His cheeks were attractively pink, as in a J.Crew ad.

  “It’s not that bad, is it?” Audrey asked, finally locating her key.

  “What?”

  Audrey pointed up. “The building. The double-hung windows. I love it that there are three together in the living room.”

  Wickham gave a quick upward glance. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s nice.”

  They walked silently into the cavernous lobby, a tiled room without furniture or plants. Someone had set up a fake Christmas tree in the corner, and it was unevenly hung with red satin balls. One wall was lined with locker-style mailboxes, and Audrey went to open hers, saying, “My dad says this tile is called ‘hex tile.’ And that along the edges is a pattern called Greek key.” There was no letter inside the box from Oggy, and no catalogs, either. Just throwaway flyers for things like pizzas and refitted windows.

  As she threw the flyers away, Audrey noticed that the hex tile she was bragging about was s
meared with muddy boot prints. She led Wickham to the elevator, calling it the Lily Bart Memorial Lift (“Lily who?” he asked without interest), and was just trying to close the heavy brass gate when Beck, the maintenance man, came clomping down the stairs in a pair of work boots and a torn Black Sabbath sweatshirt.

  “Hey,” Beck said, taking a drag on a stubby cigarette, “I found a table for you. Down in the basement. If you have a sec, I can show you.”

  Audrey flushed. Her father had finally confessed that the furniture had been repossessed and they weren’t getting it back. Beck had come up the night before to fix a toilet problem (and smoke a cigarette), and he’d noticed (as anyone would) that she and her father were eating off a makeshift table—boxes covered with a tablecloth. After accepting a plate of moo goo gai pan, he’d offered to scout around for a kitchen table because he came across a lot of loose furniture in the course of his work. Midnight move-outs, he’d said, tended to leave stuff behind.

  “We can do it later, if you want,” Audrey said uncomfortably to Beck. She neither opened nor latched the gate. “You’re probably busy.”

  “Well, now would actually be better, because I’m heading up to Oswego after this.”

  “Okay,” Audrey said. She wondered if she should do an introduction, but Beck had snuffed out his cigarette in a pedestal ashtray and was already heading down the stairs.

  The Commodore’s basement was the most medieval room Audrey had ever seen. There were windows, but they were small, high up, and dirty. A single bulb illuminated the front part of the long, stony room, where a coin-operated washer and dryer stood slightly askew on the uneven floor. They worked fine, but Audrey had done exactly one load before locating a Fluff-n-Fold a few blocks away.

  “Creepy little Laundromat you’ve got here, Beck,” she said.

  Beck grinned and said she wasn’t the first to remark on that. “One tenant, her name was Erica, called it a psycho’s dream come true. She thought we should call it Blood-n-Suds.” A pause; then, deadpan: “Erica’s been missing a couple months now.”

  Audrey laughed, but when Wickham didn’t, she turned the subject back to the table.