Boy Toy (13 page)

Who sighed and said, "Come into my office, Josh. I'll try to figure out what we're going to do. Don't worry—we'll get you home." She didn't seem terribly happy about it.

"Wait a minute," said Mrs. Sherman as I was following the principal. "Look, you have to stay, right?" The principal and the secretary nodded miserably. "Then let me take care of this. I'll call the parents and get them to come pick him up."

The principal narrowed her eyes, but I could tell she wanted to jump on this opportunity to ditch me and get back to whatever it was she had to do. I guess principals don't get snow days. "You sure?" she asked Mrs. Sherman.

"Of course. I'm only five minutes from here; I can spend a few more minutes here to square things away." She held out one red hand to me. "Come on, Josh."

I knew Mrs. Sherman a hell of a lot better than I knew the principal, whom I'd only seen in the halls and heard speak at the occasional assembly. I felt a little weird holding a teacher's hand, but I took the one Mrs. Sherman offered. She smiled at me. "All right, let's take care of this."

Mrs. Sherman got my emergency procedure card from the secretary and took me out into the lobby. "Who do we want to try first?" she asked, squinting at Mom's tiny handwriting on the card. "Mom or Dad?"

Dad's job was pretty far away. I knew that because he regularly complained about his commute. But Mom was just down in Lake Eliot. "Mom."

"OK." She rummaged in her purse and pulled out a cell phone. Those were some tight-fitting gloves, because she was able to flip it open and punch out the number without taking them off.

I thought about how much Mom loved this job, how she had argued with Dad about vacation time. "She's gonna be pretty pissed," I told Mrs. Sherman, and then clapped a hand over my mouth as I realized what I'd said.

Mrs. Sherman tried to look angry, but she couldn't help herself. She giggled, rolled her eyes at me, and ruffled my hair. "Watch your mouth, goofball. And don't worry." She flashed me a reassuring smile—her dimple winked at me—and then she spoke into the phone:

"Hello, Mrs. Mendel? This is Mrs. Sherman, Josh's history teacher? Yes. No, no, there's nothing—Yeah, the snow. I know. Look, there was..." She looked over at me, chewed the corner of her lip for a second. "The buses got mixed up and some kids missed their buses. Is there any way you can come get—

"Oh. Oh, my God. Really?" Mrs. Sherman looked concerned. I guess something in my eyes echoed that concern, because she took my hand in hers and squeezed it tight. It didn't hurt—it felt kind of nice. "Yeah, yeah. I can see how that ... No, there's, uh, there aren't any of Josh's friends here. And I don't think we're allowed to send him home with one of them anyway. Is there a friend or a relative who could—I see. Right, right. No, I wouldn't want that, either."

Mrs. Sherman took a deep breath. "Look, Mrs. Mendel, if it's just going to be a few hours, why don't I just take Josh home with me?" I think my eyes might have popped out of my head, but Mrs. Sherman wasn't looking at me anymore.

"No, it's no bother. Really. I'm only five minutes from here. Let me give you my address and then you can just pick him up when you're ready."

They exchanged address and phone information. I felt a little weird thinking that I was going to see a teacher's home. I was going to go
home
with her. Was she going to make me do homework?

She hung up with Mom and put her cell away. "All right, Josh. You're coming home with me. Is that cool?"

The way she cocked her head and grinned at me as she said it, I couldn't help but say, "Yeah, sure."

Together, we cleared the inches of snow off her car and she explained what Mom had told her: The roads were even worse down in Lake Eliot and many of them had been closed to anything but emergency vehicles. Mom figured it was going to be a few hours before she could get out of Lake Eliot and back home, and Dad would take even longer.

"This just makes the most sense, don't you think?" She swept a big floe of snow off the windshield onto the ground. "Better than bothering the principal again."

"Yeah."

She was a careful, slow driver, focusing on the road, which meant I could look at her. It was weird how a coat and scarf and boots can make a woman's body look totally different, all straight and bulky and uncomplicated.

She looked over to check on me. "You OK?"

"Yep. Thanks for not telling my mom that I was the only kid who missed the bus."

She laughed. "I was a kid once, too, y'know. I know how parents flip out over little things. Don't worry about it."

And, strangely enough, that's what happened—I settled back in the seat and didn't worry about it.

She may have lived five minutes from school, but between traffic, snow, and plenty of time with the brake, it took more like twenty to get to her apartment complex.

I wasn't sure what to expect inside her apartment. It was basically normal and, therefore, sort of disappointing. I guess I'd been expecting something exotic. I had to remind myself that teachers are just normal people when they're not teaching.

The door opened into a living room-type area with a sofa facing a big entertainment center and a couple of chairs. There was a little round table with chairs tucked into a corner, and a big opening in the wall that showed the kitchen. A hallway ran back into darkness.

"Not much, is it? Make yourself comfortable," she said. "Are you tired? Do you want to take a nap? The bedroom's right down the hall."

I wasn't sure what to do. I had never been to a teacher's house before. I was afraid of doing something wrong. "No, thank you."

"Well, what do you normally do when you get home? Do you want to watch TV or something?"

"I guess."

"OK, well, take off your coat and your boots and sit down. Remote's on the table."

A minute later I had MTV2 going. Mrs. Sherman struggled out of her coat and tugged at her boots. One came off suddenly, flying out of her hands and hitting the wall, where it left a black scuffmark.

"Oh, goddamn." She caught her breath and turned to me. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that."

Dad said it all the time, but I felt bad for her because
she
felt bad. "It's OK."

"Please don't tell your parents I said that. They'll think I'm horrible."

Nah. They'd probably welcome her into the family. "I won't."

She grinned, "Our secret, right?"

"Yep."

"Want something to drink?"

I didn't want to say yes; it seemed like imposing. But I was really thirsty. "OK."

She ruffled my hair as she walked past me on the way to the kitchen.

"I don't have much!" she called from the kitchen. "Is OJ OK?"

I giggled at "OJ OK." "Sure."

A minute later she came in with a tall glass of orange juice for me and a wineglass for herself.

"Do you mind?" she asked, sitting across from me on a chair. She gestured with the wineglass. "It's not like I'm an alcoholic or anything. It's just that I always have a glass of wine when I get home from school. It's like a tradition."

"No, I don't mind."

I watched MTV a little while longer in silence. It wasn't very good, but I didn't know if she wanted to watch it or not, so I didn't say anything about changing the channel. After a few minutes, she got up and went into the kitchen, where I heard her use the phone.

"No, the roads weren't too bad yet. One of my students is here with me. Missed his bus. Yeah. I don't know. His mother works down near you, so who knows?" She opened the refrigerator. "I think we're OK. Maybe soda or something like that. We don't have anything to drink."

It was weird seeing her putter around in the kitchen, occasionally drifting out into the hallway. She wasn't wearing any shoes and her toenails were painted a vivid pink. She had tiny toes.

"You doing OK, Josh?" she called, craning her neck to look around the corner at me.

"Yeah!" I turned back to the TV quickly. Didn't want her to know I'd been looking at her feet.

I got bored with the TV, so I just looked around the room. It was almost all in black and white, with clear glass for accents. I had never seen a room so neat and ...
straight.
It just seemed like the whole room was set in a specific order. The artwork on the walls wasn't pictures or anything like that—it was patterns of colors. At first, they just sort of looked like someone had randomly splashed paint all over them, but the more I looked at them, the more I could detect a pattern of some sort. I wasn't sure
what
the pattern was, but I knew that it was deliberate. Cool.

I wandered to the entertainment center. On a shelf at eye-level there were a bunch of framed pictures. One of them was a little girl—kindergarten, maybe?—with pigtails, sticking her tongue out adorably at the camera. Another showed a guy around my age in a football uniform, sullen. There was a frame with two pictures in it, both of old people, but two
different
pairs of old people.

One picture, though, took my breath away. It was a photo of Mrs. Sherman in her wedding gown. I don't know enough about dresses to describe it, other than to say that it fit her down to the waist like a second skin made of shimmering, neon white, where it flared into a wide skirt that seemed to be made of overlapping clouds. It was so low-cut in front that I couldn't imagine how her breasts stayed put or how there could be any more breast to cover in the first place. She seemed almost completely exposed, yet still covered. Her skin glowed bronze against the white of the gown, except for the darker valley where her breasts came together and seemed somehow to gesture below and between them.

And her
smile.
Her smile was hypnotic. It was as if she loved the camera itself and couldn't help letting it know.

I stared at it for a long time, memorizing every detail, looking for new details. My God! Zik and I had thought she was gorgeous before, but we hadn't had any clue! She wasn't just beautiful—she was
supernatural.

I think if I'd stared any longer, there would have been a waterfall of drool running down my chin and puddling around my feet. I forced myself to stop looking at the photo.

Under the TV, on a shelf on the entertainment center, was another kind of heaven. I couldn't believe it—I crouched down to make sure I wasn't seeing things.

"Something wrong?" I almost jumped out of my skin. Mrs. Sherman was standing right behind me! The phone was nowhere in sight.

"Yes! I mean, no!" I got up and scurried back to the sofa. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to—"

She shook her head. "What are you
apologizing
for?"

For staring at the picture, really, I guess. But I couldn't tell
her
that. "Nothing. I don't know. I just..." I pointed. "I can't believe you have them! Xbox, PlayStation,
and
Nintendo!"

"Oh, I should have known!" She rolled her eyes. "Yeah, we've got them all. They're George's."

"Wow! You let your son have all of these? My parents won't let me get any video games."

"Not my
son.
I don't have any kids. George is my husband. He's a game tester. That's why we have all these things. We don't even have a DVD player—we just use the game machines."

Now something clicked: The coffee table, I realized, was covered with video-game magazines
—Official Xbox, PSM, EGM
...

"He's the luckiest man in the world," I said gravely, and meant every syllable of it. To play video games for a living
and
be married to Mrs. Sherman? How could one man be so fortunate?

She laughed. "If you say so. Do you want to play something? He won't mind. We've got ... I think we've got
all
the games. Sure seems that way, at least." She pointed to a closed cabinet door. "Help yourself."

I couldn't believe it! Mom and Dad wouldn't let me have a console in the house; they didn't even like to buy me games for the computer, though they'd usually relent for my birthday or something like that. I opened the cabinet door and beheld more video-game cases than I've ever seen before in my life. I usually played Xbox at Zik's house, but only when his dad and older brother weren't hogging it. Here was an Xbox and about a million games, and they were all mine!

Pretty soon I was sprawled out on the floor, frantically blasting zombies. The game was rated T—there were a bunch of M-rated games, too, but I didn't want to push it or get Mrs. Sherman angry at me.

Mrs. Sherman came up to me and I hit Pause so that I wouldn't get killed while she told me my mom had called and she was on her way. I was so absorbed in the game that I hadn't even heard the phone ring. I looked at the clock; hours had passed while I was submerged in the digital world.

"Keep playing. I'm going to start dinner. If your mom gets here first, fine. Otherwise, you can eat with us."

Us? That's right—her husband.

As if he heard my thoughts, he opened the door just then. "Fuck! It's crazy out there!" he shouted. He was tall and stoop-shouldered, his gut a little knot that protruded out from over his belt. He shook snow out of his sandy, unruly hair as he stripped off his coat.

"
George!
" Mrs. Sherman ran in from the kitchen.