Devilish (3 page)

Help Ally
, my good inner Jane told me.
You didn’t really care that much about getting a little
.

“You want me to run down to the caf and get you a ginger ale?” I asked.

Finally, a reply.

“I want you,” she said, “to kill me.”

The bathroom door opened, and a very tall girl slipped inside. She was long. Easily six feet, one of which was all neck. The blue stripe on her blazer pocket told me she was a sophomore. The blazer looked very squeaky-new, and I’d never seen her before. She was the kind of person you would remember if you saw.

“Hey,” the girl said. She didn’t look like she’d come in for any real purpose—just one of those time-killer visits. She stood in front of the mirror and minutely adjusted the bands that held her two rust-red ponytails in place. Then she turned and looked at Ally’s shoe bottoms.

“That was an interesting assembly,” she said to the mirror. “I didn’t think anything cool would happen here, but that was pretty good.”

Together, we looked down at Allison’s shoes. They did not reply, but the left heel did sink toward the ground a bit.

“I’m new,” the girl said. “That’s why I was there. I’m Lanalee. Lanalee Tremone.”

The warning bell rang. The shoes didn’t budge. I got down on my knees and peered under the door. Ally was resting with her head on the seat and a blank look on her face.

“Shouldn’t she go home?” Lanalee asked.

“They don’t really let us go home here,” I said, poking my hand under the door and stroking Ally’s ankle in a pathetic attempt to comfort her. “You pretty much have to be dead. And even then I think they’d just keep your body in the front office until the end of the day.”

The shoes shifted a little and drew themselves out of reach.

“Do you think you can make it to English, Al?” I asked. “We have to go or we’ll be late.”

One hoarse word of reply:

“Go.”

“I don’t want to go without you. Sister Charles will freak.”

“Go.”

“Can you come out?”

“Go.”

I got to my feet. The girl leaned down and addressed the opening under the door gently.

“Did you get a little?” she asked.

I heard a slight shifting from inside the stall, but no answer was forthcoming. I shook my head.

“Well, you can have me,” she said brightly. “I didn’t get a big. There!”

This was an amazingly generous offer, considering. I’m not proud to say that it only highlighted the fact that I was still little-less.

“I’ll stay with her,” the girl offered. “I wasn’t planning on going to next period anyway.”

I didn’t really want to leave, but there wasn’t much I could do. Sister Charles had never actually killed anyone, but she did leave you with the feeling that she was capable of some deeply frightening behavior.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll go and tell her you’ll be late. Okay, Al?”

Nothing.

“Go on,” the girl said. “Really. Let me bond with my big.”

And so I left the bathroom, just as the second bell rang. I got a demerit from Sister Rose Marie for running in the hallway between classes for my trouble.

Sister Charles was old enough to have figured prominently in some of the later Bible stories. She was constantly angry, and it took her forever to get down the hall. The reason for these last two was that she had no big toes.

How she lost her big toes was kind of a mystery, but when you have no big toes, it ruins your sense of balance and causes you to walk in circles. It doesn’t help when you are already old and generally a little nuts and you have to walk with a three-pronged cane. The added insult of walking in circles all the time makes you hate the teenage girls you teach—because you already think they are lazy and dumb and sex-obsessed and illiterate—so you are furious from the moment you wake up in the morning that big toes are wasted on them. I guess, to be fair, I’d be a little edgy too if it took me five hours to cross the soccer field because I just kept looping and looping and looping. But still, I wouldn’t take it out on innocent youth.

This is who we spent the first period of every day with.
Her class, English, was also the only class that Ally and I had together this year. I took mostly AP and special classes, but this English class was the only one that fit my schedule.

I opened the door as carefully as I could, but I don’t know why I bothered. It wasn’t like Sister Charles wasn’t going to notice that I was late. She wheeled on me.

“Did you not hear the bell?” she asked. “At this school, when girls hear the bell, they proceed to class.”

“Yes, Sister,” I said, heading right for my desk. “I was with Allison. She’s sick.”

“You are a doctor?” she asked curiously.

A ripple of movement, submerged laughter, went around the room. It made my skin go cold, even in the painful heat. Sister noticed this and looked around.

“She’s very sick,” I said, keeping my eyes only on Sister.

“She is. We all saw her. She was throwing up in the assembly.” This was from Donna, who was also in the class. Somehow, being student counsel president gave her the ability to verify things. She did it all the time. Homework assignments, weather conditions, days of the week, pages we left off on. Donna was happy to tell us all.

Sister was about to reply when the door creaked open once more and Allison pressed her way through about six inches of opening. She was totally and truly white—almost blue.

“I understand you have been ill,” Sister said. “Is that so?”

Allison froze, still in the crack of the doorway. All eyes
turned to her. She put her hand on the door, high enough that it was clear to see that she was not wearing her ring. At the very least, she was going to show the room that she had managed to get herself a little.

Nothing
actually
happened. No one
actually
said anything. The earth does not have to split open and a thousand-foot gulch does not have to appear for you to know that someone has been cast out. Especially if that someone has never really been in. I’m sure if some behavioral scientists filmed the room and watched the footage they’d be able to point out some things. The way some people looked mildly repulsed, as if they could still smell vomit. The way Donna had a completely inappropriate smile. The way some people didn’t even bother to turn at all, and just looked at the diagram of an introductory paragraph on the board and pressed their lips together, trying not to laugh. The way Allison walked to her desk as if she didn’t belong on the planet, as if she wanted to apologize for her existence. The spell on the room was total. Even Sister Charles seemed fascinated by it. She went right back to the lesson with no further comment, which was very telling. The pressure in the room actually
hurt
.

Which is why I did what I did next.

We had many stupid rules at St. Teresa’s, but one that I really couldn’t stand was that—no matter how hot it was—the most we could ever do to cool ourselves was take off our blazers. We couldn’t roll up our long sleeves, push down our woolen kneesocks, open our shirts another button or
untuck them. So I did
all
of these things, slowly, deliberately, and as broadly as I could get away with. I unbuttoned my cuffs, rolled the sleeves to the elbow, reached down and pushed down the socks, loosened my collar.

And it worked. Slowly, attention went away from Ally and over to me. Even as I was doing it, I was dreading Sister Charles’s long, loaded silence. A stifled giggle came from behind me. But I kept on doing it, drawing out each gesture as long as I could.

Finally, when I had reached the point where I’d actually have to strip if I wanted to go any further, Sister Charles decided to speak.

“Are you warm, Miss Jarvis?” she said politely.

“Kind of, Sister,” I said loudly.

A laugh now from the front.

“I think we are all warm. Yet we remain clothed. But perhaps an exception should be made for you?”

“I was just doing what seemed sensible, Sister.”

I had engaged her now. Sister smiled slightly. It looked unnatural on her, like mascara on a baby.

“Well, Miss Jarvis, you may have a point.” She crossed around the desk in a loopy path. “Do you have your PE outfit in your bag?”

I stiffened. Our PE kit consisted of a very tight and unflattering T-shirt, with the world’s shortest, most terrifying shorts. Lap dancers wouldn’t wear our shorts. Our school made us dress extremely conservatively, but for gym, tiny tees and butt-kerchiefs were considered healthy. It was
a trauma, but it was a trauma we went through together, and it never left the gym.

“I would like you to go to the ladies’ room and put it on,” she said. “You will wear it for the rest of the day. I will call the office and let them know this is acceptable. Please do keep your school shoes on, though.”

I rose with all the dignity I could muster, smiled at the people who snickered, and made my way to the bathroom.

I spent the rest of the day walking around school in tiny shorts, kneesocks, and saddle shoes. Ally was nowhere to be found. It would have been completely understandable if she was avoiding me. It was hard to believe that I could have compounded the problem—but no one will ever say that Jane Jarvis isn’t an innovator.

Calculus II was my last class of the day. I had it with only one other person, Cassie Malloy. It was kind of a special thing; they offered it just to us. We didn’t even use a classroom. We sat in Brother Frank’s office, which was no more than an elaborate broom closet on the third floor, just big enough for a desk and two chairs. Still, the intimacy gave it a real scholastic feel.

Cassie took in my outfit in a brief glance and decided not to comment.

“Oh my God,” she said. “Who did you get? Oh my God. You probably got, like, five offers. I only got one, and I don’t even think she knew who I was. Are you
going to spend a lot of time with yours? Because I have, like,
no time
right now.”

She reached into her bag, pulled out a slim silver thermos, and took a long gulp of coffee. The caffeine was no good for her—it made her hands shake mildly. But she needed it. Cassie didn’t sleep. She was a hard worker. I had long speculated that she would be dead by thirty in an attempt to do medical and law school at the same time.

“How late were you up doing this?” she asked, flipping through her notebook, through page after page of neatly written equations. Cassie did them in order, step by step, six to a page. I pulled out my own work—a collection of scribblings written on some paper from our printer’s recycling box.

“Oh … a while,” I lied, looking at the work I had done while watching TV.

At least Cassie wasn’t asking me about Allison. I wasn’t sure she was asking me anything. She produced a pen from her wildly sproingy hair and hurriedly scribbled something in her Filofax while she was talking. Whether I was there or not was probably irrelevant.

“They do this at the
worst
time. I mean, I’m doing SATs again on Saturday. Fourth time. God! Are you doing them again? I seriously have no time to spend with this girl. I’m just going to get her a teddy bear or something and that’s it. Do you like yours?”

And then, Cassie screamed, a particularly high-pitched, nerve-jangling scream. Which made me scream. Screams
are catchy. I followed Cassie’s gaze to a tiny black-veiled head in the doorway.

“I see PANTIES!” it shrieked. “I see blue panties!”

Cassie clapped her legs tightly together. The head snapped out of sight.

“God,” she wheezed. “Why does she do that?”

Sister Rose Marie would pop her head into classrooms at random, examine the horizon, and look for people sitting in a manner that exposed underwear. This shock attack was supposed to make us more ladylike. It just made us paranoid. For one moment that day, I was glad to be wearing my shorts.

Brother Frank, our teacher, came in. I liked Brother Frank the most out of all my teachers. He was brilliant, for a start, and Irish (though his accent flitted in and out like bad radio reception), and he had a shock of gray hair that stuck up straight from his head, the way really good mathematicians should.

Something was wrong today, though—his huge salt-and-pepper eyebrows were knitting themselves together and unwinding again. He dropped himself down in his chair heavily.

“Cassie,” he said. “Sister Charles needs some help this period. She isn’t feeling well because of all the heat. She needs someone to watch over her freshman English class for a period while they workshop their papers. Would you mind giving her a hand? It’s just for this period. Downstairs, room 3A.”

Cassie looked shocked. There was something decidedly odd about this—but being asked to help teach another class was a temptation that Cassie couldn’t possibly pass up. When she was gone, Brother Frank shut the door.

“New uniform?” he asked.

“I just think this is more flattering,” I said.

He didn’t laugh. This was troubling.

“Your friend Allison,” he said. “How is she?”

“She’ll be okay,” I said. “Someday.”

He nodded.

“That was very unfortunate. I’m sure she’s upset. I’ve never taught her. I take it math isn’t her strong suit?”

“She doesn’t really have a strong suit,” I said honestly. “She’s kind of, you know.”

“A normal student,” he said. “Unlike you.”

It had never been said so bluntly.

“Let’s not dance around the subject, Jane,” he said. “You’re not a normal student. You don’t have a normal mind. You have an exceptional one. This class, for instance. I’ve had to pace it for Cassie, and I think I might kill her as it is. We’re about to enter some topics in abstract algebra, which, to be perfectly honest, are never, ever attempted on a high school level. This is what I teach my second years at MIT.”

I felt my cheeks glow a little. Praise from Brother Frank actually meant something. It was nice to be having this cozy little moment together on this otherwise tragic day. Maybe he knew I needed a pick-me-up.

“We need to talk, Jane,” he said. “That’s why I asked Cassie to leave.”

“About what?”

“About what it means to be here, at St. Teresa’s,” he said. “It would be unfortunate if the only developments you made here were academic. We need to talk about how you’re going to apply your talents to this world. I know that you don’t believe in everything this school stands for and teaches….”