by Meg Cabot
I tell you, if that's not proof there is a God, and that he or she has one heck of a wacked-out sense of humor, I don't know what is.
"Stop." Professor Le Blanc took the Brahms away and put another music book in front of me.
Beethoven. Symphony Number 3.
I don't know how long I sat there looking at it. Maybe a full minute before I was able to rouse myself from my Shane-induced stupor and go, "Um, Professor? Yeah, look, I don't know this piece."
Professor Le Blanc was still sitting on the piano bench, his arms folded across his chest. He had put away the Palm Pilot, and was now watching me intently. The fact that he was, in fact, a bit of a hottie, did not make this any pleasanter than it sounds. He looked a little like a hawk, one of those hawks you see all the time, wheeling in tighter and tighter circles above something in a cornfield, making you wonder what the stupid bird is looking at down there. Is it a field mouse, or the decomposing body of a coed?
Professor Le Blanc said, enunciating carefully, "I know you don't know this piece, Jess. I want to see if you can play it."
I just stared at it.
"Well," I said after a while. "I probably could. If you would maybe just hum my part first?"
He didn't look surprised by my request. He shook his head so that his kind of longish, curly brown hair—definitely longer than mine, anyway—swung around.
"No," he said. "I do not hum. Begin, please."
I squirmed uncomfortably in my seat. "It's just," I explained, "usually, back home, my orchestra teacher, he kind of hums the whole thing out for us first, and I really—"
"Aha!"
Professor Le Blanc yelled so loud, I almost dropped my flute. He pointed a long, accusing finger at me.
"You," he said, in tones of mingled triumph and horror, "cannot read music."
I felt my own ears turning as pink as Karen Sue's had out in the atrium. Only not just pink. Red. My ears were burning. My face was burning. It was air-conditioned enough in that practice room that you practically needed a winter parka, but me, I was on fire.
"That isn't true," I said, trying to appear casual. Yeah, real easy to do with a face that was turning fire-engine red. "That note right there, for instance." I pointed at the music. "That's an eighth note. And over here, that's a whole note."
"But what note," Professor Le Blanc demanded, "is it?"
My shoulders slumped. I was so busted.
"Look," I said. "I don't need to read music. I just have to hear the piece once, and I—"
"—and you know how to play it. Yes, yes, I know. I know all about you people. You I-hear-it-once-and-I-know-it people." He shook his head disgustedly at me. "Does Dr. Alistair know about this?"
I felt my feet beginning to sweat inside my Pumas, that's how freaked out he had me.
"No," I said. "You aren't going to tell him, are you?"
"Not going to tell him?" Professor Le Blanc leaped up from the piano bench. "Not going to tell Dr. Alistair that one of his counselors is musically illiterate?"
He bellowed the last word. Anyone passing outside the door could have heard. I went, in a small voice, "Please, Professor Le Blanc. Don't turn me in. I'll learn to read this piece. I promise."
"I do not want you to learn to read this piece." Professor Le Blanc was on his feet now, and pacing the length of the practice room. Which, only being about six feet by six feet, wasn't very far. "You should be able to read all pieces. How can you be so lazy? Simply because you can hear a piece once and then play it, you use this as an excuse never to learn to read music? You ought to be ashamed. You ought to be sent back to where you came from and made to work there at the IG of A as a sack girl."
I licked my lips. I couldn't help it. My mouth had gone completely dry.
"Um, Professor?" I said.
He was still pacing and breathing kind of hard. In school, they made us read this book about this guy named Heathcliff who liked this loser chick named Cathy, who didn't like him back, and I swear to God, Professor Le Blanc kind of reminded me of old Heathcliff, the way he was huffing and puffing about something that really boiled down to nothing.
"What?" he yelled at me.
I swallowed. "It's bag girl." When he only gazed at me uncomprehendingly, I said, "You said I'd have to work as a sack girl. But it's called a bag girl."
Professor Le Blanc pointed toward the door. "Out," he roared.
I was shocked. The whole thing was totally unfair. In the movies, when somebody finds out the other person can't read, they're always filled with all this compassion and try to help the poor guy. Like Jane Fonda helped Robert De Niro when she found out he couldn't read in this really boring movie my mom made me watch with her once. I couldn't believe Professor Le Blanc was being so unfeeling. My case, if you thought about it, was really quite tragic.
I figured I'd make a play for his heartstrings … if he had any, which I doubted.
"Professor," I said. "Look. I know I deserve to get thrown out of here and all, but really, that's partly why I took this gig. I mean, I completely realize my inability to read music is hampering my growth as an artist, and I was really hoping this was my big chance to, you know, rectify that."
I totally did not believe he would go for this crap, but to my never-ending relief, he did. I don't know why. Maybe it was because I was trembling. Not because I was nervous or anything. I was, but not that much. I mean, it wasn't like the steam table held that much horror for me. It was just because it was about thirty degrees in there.
But I guess Professor Le Blanc thought I was suitably cowed or whatever, since he finally said he wouldn't turn me in to Dr. Alistair. Although he wasn't very gracious about it, I must say. He told me that, since his class schedule was completely filled, he didn't have the time to teach me to read music and prepare my piece for the concert at the end of the summer. I was like, fine, I don't want to be in the stupid concert anyway, but he got all offended, because the concert's supposed to be, you know, what all of us are working toward for the six weeks we're here.
Finally, we agreed I'd meet him three times a week at seven A.M.—yes, that would be seven in the morning—so he could teach me what I needed to know. I tried to point out that seven A.M. was the Polar Bear swim, which also happened to be the only time I could realistically bathe, but he so didn't care.
God. Musicians. So temperamental.
While I was sitting there back in Birch Tree Cottage, thinking about how close I'd been to getting fired, and talking about Paul Huck, I looked out at all the kids in front of me and wondered how many of them were going to grow up to be Professor Le Blancs. Probably all of them. And that saddened me. Because it seemed like they were never even going to get the chance to be anything else, if they only got two hours of free time a day to play.
Except Shane, of course. Shane, the only one of the kids at Camp Wawasee for Gifted Child Musicians who probably could make a living as a musician one day if he wanted to, clearly didn't. Want to, I mean. He wanted to be a football player.
And you know, I could sort of relate to that. I knew what a pain it was to have a gift you'd never, ever asked for.
"—so Paul Huck got jobs around the neighborhood," I went on, "mowing lawns and doing people's yardwork in the summer, and chopping firewood in the winter. And pretty much nobody noticed him, but when they did, they thought he was, you know, a pretty nice guy. Not a whole lot upstairs, though."
I glanced at Scott and Dave. They were sitting on the windowsill. In a few minutes, I would give the signal, and one of them would sneak into the kitchen to say his line.
"But there was actually a lot going on upstairs in Paul Huck's head," I said. "Because Paul Huck, while he was in people's yards, digging up their tree stumps or whatever, he was watching them. And the person he liked to watch most of all was a girl named Claire Lippman, who, every day during the summer, liked to climb out onto her porch roof and sunbathe in this little bitty bikini."
It was kind of disturbing the way real people crept in
to my made-up stories. In my dad's version, the girl was named Debbie. But Claire, who'd be a senior at Ernie Pyle this year, just seemed to fit somehow.
"Paul fell for Claire," I went on. "And Paul fell hard. He thought about Claire while he ate breakfast every morning. He thought about Claire while he was riding his tractor mower every afternoon. He thought about Claire when he was eating his dinner at night. He thought about Claire while he was lying in bed after a long day's work. Paul Huck thought about Claire Lippman all the time.
"But." I looked out at all the little faces turned toward me. "Claire Lippman didn't think about Paul Huck at breakfast. She didn't think about him while she was sunning herself on her porch roof every afternoon. She didn't think about him while she ate her dinner, and she certainly never thought about him before she fell asleep at night. Claire Lippman never thought about Paul Huck at all, because she barely even knew Paul Huck existed. To Claire, Paul was just the handyman who knocked squirrels' nests out of her chimney every spring, and who scooped the dead opossums out of this decorative little well she had in her backyard. And that was it."
I could feel the crowd getting restless. It was time to start getting to the gore.
Eventually, I told them, Paul got desperate. He knew if he was ever going to win Claire's heart, he had to act. So one spring day when he was cleaning out Claire's gutters, he got an idea. He decided he was going to tell Claire how he felt.
"Just as this occurred to Paul, Claire appeared in the window right where he was cleaning out the gutter. This seemed to Paul like the perfect time to say what he was going to say. But just as he was about to tap on the window, Claire started taking her clothes off." This caused some tittering that I ignored. "See, the room she was in was the bathroom, and she was getting ready to take a shower. She didn't notice Paul there in the window … at first. And Paul, well, he didn't know what to do. He had never seen a naked woman before, let alone the love of his life, Claire. So he just froze there on the ladder, totally incapable of moving.
"So when Claire happened to glance at the window, just as she was about to get in the shower, and saw Paul there, she was so startled, she let out a scream so loud, it almost made Paul fall off the ladder he was on.
"But Claire didn't stop with one scream. She was so startled, she kept right on screaming. People outside heard the screaming, and they looked up, and they saw Paul Huck looking through Claire Lipp-man's bathroom window, and, well, they didn't know he was there to clean the gutters. He had always been a weird guy, who lived at home with his parents even though he was in his twenties, and who talked like a nine-year-old. Maybe he'd flipped out or something. So they started yelling, too, and Paul was so scared, with all the yelling and everything going on, he jumped down from the ladder and ran for all he was worth.
"Paul didn't know what he'd done, but he figured it had to be pretty bad, if it had made so many people mad at him. All he knew was that, whatever it was he'd done, it was probably bad enough that someone had called the police, and if the police came, they'd put him in jail. So Paul didn't go home, because he figured that'd be the first place people would look for him. Instead, he ran to the outskirts of town, where there was this cave. Everyone was scared to go into this cave, because bats and stuff lived in there. But Paul was more afraid of the police than he was of bats, so he ducked into that cave, and he stayed there, all the way until it got dark.
"Now, once Claire got over being startled, she realized what had happened, and she felt pretty bad about it. But she didn't want to admit to anyone that it had been her mistake—that she'd asked Paul to clean her gutters, and that's what he'd been doing on that ladder. Because then she'd look like a big idiot. So she kept that information to herself, and let everyone think Paul was a Peeping Tom."
I went on to describe how Paul, scared for his life, stayed in that cave. He stayed there all night, and all the next day, and the next night, too. I explained how by then, Paul's parents were really worried. They had called the police to help them look, but that just made things worse, because one time Paul came out of the cave, to see if people were still looking for him, and he saw a sheriff's cruiser go by. That just drove him deeper back into the cave, where when he was thirsty, he drank cave water.
"But there was no food in the cave," I said. "And Paul couldn't come out to buy any, because he might get caught. Eventually, he got so hungry, well, he just lost his mind. He saw a bat, and he grabbed it, ripped its head off, and ate it raw."
This elicited some groans of disgust.
And that, I told the boys, was the beginning of Paul's descent into madness. Very soon, he was living on nothing but cave water and bat meat. He lost all this weight, and started growing this long, matted beard. He couldn't wash his hair because he didn't have any shampoo, so it started getting all filled with twigs and dirt. His clothes became tattered and hung off him like rags. But still, he wouldn't come out of the cave, because he couldn't face the shame of whatever it was he'd done to Claire.
Time went by. Winter came. Soon Paul ran out of bats to eat. He had no choice but to leave the cave at night, and root through people's garbage for old chicken bones and rotten milk, so he wouldn't starve. Sometimes, little children would wake up in the night and see him, and they'd tell their parents the next morning about the strange, long-haired man they'd seen in the backyard, and their parents would say, "Stop telling lies."
But the children knew what they'd seen.
More time went by. One night, Paul Huck was going through someone's garbage when he came across a newspaper. Newspapers didn't interest Paul much, on account of his not being able to read. But this one had a picture on it. He squinted at the picture in the moonlight and realized it was a picture of his old love, Claire Lippman. He didn't need to know how to read in order to figure out why Claire's picture was in the paper. In the photo, she was dressed in a wedding gown and veil. Claire Lippman had gotten married.
Paul, crazy as he was now, couldn't think like a normal person—not that he'd ever been able to before. But after a steady diet of bats and garbage, which was all he'd had to eat for the past few years, he'd gotten much worse. So what seemed to Paul like a really good idea—he ought to give Claire a wedding present, to show there were no hard feelings—well, that just wouldn't have occurred to a normal person.
"What was worse," I said, "Paul's idea of a wedding present was to go through all the yards in the town and pick every rose he could find. He did this, of course, in the middle of the night, and all over town children woke up and looked out the window and said, "There's Paul Huck again,' and they wondered what he was going to do with all the roses.
"What Paul did with all the roses was, he piled them up on Claire Lippman's front porch, so she'd see them first thing when she came out of her house to go to work."
And there, I told the kids, for the first time ever, an adult woke up and heard Paul Huck. It was Claire's new husband, Simon, who was a stranger to the town. He didn't know who Paul Huck was. All Simon knew was, when he came downstairs into the kitchen to get a glass of milk before going back to sleep, he saw this gigantic, shaggy-haired man, covered in dirt and blood—because the roses' thorns had cut Paul everywhere he touched them—standing on his front porch. Simon didn't even think about what he was doing. Since he was in the kitchen, he grabbed the first thing he saw that he could use as a weapon—a carving knife—and went to the front door, threw it open, and said, "Who the hell are you?"
"Paul was so surprised that someone was speaking to him—no one had said a word to him, not in five long years—that he spun around, just as he'd been about to leave the porch. Simon didn't understand that Paul was just startled. He thought this giant, hairy, bloody guy was coming after him. So Simon swung the carving knife, and it caught Paul just beneath the chin, and whoosh … it cut off his head. Paul Huck," I said, "was dead."
Silence followed this.
I went on to describe how Claire's husband, in a panic after seeing what he had done, ran inside
the house to call the police. Hearing all the commotion, Claire woke up and came downstairs. She went out onto the porch. The first thing she saw was all the roses. The second thing she saw was this great big bloody body laying on top of them. The last thing she saw was a head, almost buried in the roses.
And even though the head had this long beard, and the eyes were all rolled back, Claire recognized Paul Huck. And she put together the roses and the fact that it was Paul and she knew that her husband had just killed the man that, because of her, had been living like an animal for five long years.
Claire wouldn't let Simon call the police. He had killed, she insisted, an innocent man. Paul had never meant to hurt either of them. If word got out about this, Claire and her new husband—who was this very important surgeon—were going to be socially ruined in town, and she knew it. She explained all this to Simon. They had, she said, to hide the body, and pretend like nothing had happened.
Simon was disgusted, but like Claire, he enjoyed his status high at the top of the town's social ladder. So he made a deal with her: he'd get rid of Paul's body, if Claire got rid of the head.
Claire agreed. So while Simon wrapped Paul's body in sheets—so he wouldn't bleed all over the back of his new car while Simon drove over to the lake, where he intended to dump the body—Claire lifted up the head and threw it in the first place she thought of: down the well in her backyard.
When Simon got back from the lake, the two of them cleaned up all the blood and roses. Then, exhausted, they went back to bed.
Everything seemed to go okay at first. Nobody except the children of the town had ever believed Paul Huck was still alive anyway, so nobody noticed that he was gone. Little by little, Claire and Simon were able to put from their minds what they had done. Their lives went back to normal.
Until the first full moon after Paul's murder. That night, Claire and Simon were awakened from their sleep by a moaning they heard coming from the backyard. At first they thought it was the wind. But it seemed to be moaning words. And those words were, "Where's … my … head?"
