Devilish (8 page)

“Not
exactly
,” Lanalee shouted over the music. “I can use the car, though. I’ve been driving forever. This car is great. You like Chopin?”

Chopin was deafening us, and we were almost certainly going to kill some other people, so I confined myself to a weak smile.

“I saw it on one of the school blogs,” Lanalee said. “Some people came in over the weekend for a yearbook meeting. They found it when they were taking some general background shots of the school. They’re going to take it down.”

“Saw what? You still haven’t told me what we’re doing.”

“No time!” She waved her hand at me. “No time! You’ll see.”

When we arrived at the long wooded drive that lead to St. Teresa’s and St. Sebastian’s, Lanalee turned off the headlights and crept along at about ten miles an hour. This felt considerably better speed-wise, but since it was completely black out and we were in a black car with tinted windows, we ran a disproportionately high risk of hitting an animal or, more alarmingly, one of the brothers or sisters walking back home from town. I was going to point this out to Lanalee, but it seemed best not to distract her. I think she managed to hit every single pothole on the way in, which was something of an accomplishment.

We managed to get to the parking lot without killing anything and glided silently past a parked truck from an asphalt company.

“My insurance policy,” Lanalee said, pointing at it.

The school was dark and still, with just a few lights flickering in the windows where repair work was still going
on. St. Teresa, still wounded from the storm, looked down on us as we stepped out of the car.

“Hey,” I said to Ally. “Busy week, huh?”

“Yeah,” she said quietly. “Sort of.”

“Come on!” Lanalee said, sprinting off toward the building. Ally and I looked at each other, then followed her. Over the doorway, covering the taped-up beveled glass sign, was a printed banner made of several pieces of paper taped together. It bore the previous message:
WILL YOU BE ASKED
?

“Come on,” Lanalee said. “It’s inside.”

“What is?” I asked.

“Come on!”

Lanalee dance-stepped her way into the building. To my surprise, Allison followed her without hesitation. It went against my better judgment, but I trailed right along with them.

Our school could be unnerving at the best of times, but in the dark, it was really odd. The sisters used the cafeteria for their dinner, so the whole place reeked of boiled beef and cabbage. We crept through the lobby, up the stairs, past the office. I decided not to look as we passed the giant oil painting of six medieval nuns being stoned to death for being Catholic and falling into a mass grave. (A nice little calling card they used to terrify incoming students and generally set a happy tone.)

When Lanalee turned the corner to the hall that led to the chapel, I stopped.

“I don’t think we should go in there,” I said. “The sisters use the chapel at night sometimes.”

“We’ll be fast,” she said, grabbing me. “And look!”

Allison was already through the chapel doors, her little red bob swinging with every step.

“This is
good
for her,” Lanalee whispered to me. “She needs to develop some courage. We’ll be in and out.”

“I can’t get caught,” I said. “
My
grandparents aren’t giving the school a driveway.”

“You won’t! Relax!”

Inside, we could immediately see the cause of the commotion. Three grotesque inflatable female mannequins had been lashed to the statues near the altar. They were dressed as nuns, but their mouths were harshly smeared with painful red lipstick. Balanced by their feet was a handwritten sign that read:

THE POODLE CLUB IS HERE AND ANNOUNCES THE SOCIAL EVENT OF THE YEAR: POODLE PROM. WILL YOU BE ASKED
?

“That,” Lanalee said with a huge smile, “is definitely a
message
. It’s a strange message, but it’s a message.”

I ripped down a flyer and read it over a few times, then looked to Allison. She was strangely still, mesmerized by the sight. There was a noise from above us, which caused us all to jump. It was probably just a tool being dropped, but it still seemed too close.

“Time to go,” Lanalee said.

We slid out of the chapel without any problem, but when we turned the corner, there was a figure between us
and the only way out. From the looping walk, it was clearly Sister Charles. She was struggling to get to us. The light in the hall was dim, so though she could see us, she probably was too far to tell who we were.

“Take off your coats,” Lanalee said quietly. “Quick. And flip them inside out.”

I yanked off my coat and flipped it.

“Over your head,” Lanalee said, draping hers over herself. “So she can’t see who you are. And run.”

“But she’s
right there
,” Allison said despairingly.

“What is she going to do? Tackle us? Cover and run!”

Lanalee took off first. There was no time to think this one over. I put my coat over my head, hunkered down, and ran for it. Ally followed.

It was pathetic sight, really. Sister Charles looked surprised by the three hunching figures coming at her but then squared off resolutely. We were all around her at once; Lanalee went to the left, so she turned that way, but I was on the right. She almost fell over while trying to move herself. She swung out and partially knocked Allison’s coat off her, but Lanalee grabbed it and pulled her along.

The run through the rest of the school was like something out of a video game—lots of quick, dodging movement through dark corridors. Then we were outside. We didn’t stop running until we got to the car, which slipped off the property probably before Sister Charles could even get to the house phone.

It was all down the next morning. You would never have known that anything had happened. The school was the same barely lit leaking concrete box that we’d seen the day before, only slightly less treacherous.

But everyone did know—the report had gotten around. You could almost feel the question pulsing through the halls, a kind of physical desperation. What was the Poodle Club? What was this Poodle Prom?

“It’s not a sorority,” I heard a junior saying as I came in, “it’s sort of a branch of Skull and Bones, that secret society at Yale that really important people join.”

“Yeah, it’s at other schools,” added a sophomore. “It’s at all the major academies. All the boarding schools. My friend knows someone who goes to Spence in New York, and it’s totally there.”

I passed the A3 deep in conference. They were spraying and balming themselves anxiously. Even Cassie was all wound up about it in calculus.

“It’s like a secret admissions committee,” she said. “They plant people. They get reports back.”

“Who?” I asked.

“The schools!”

“Which schools?”

“I don’t know,” she said, shaken. “But if you’re in the Poodle Club, you’re in.”

“Who told you this?” I asked.

“Everyone knows,” she said. “I guess we’ve finally made it onto their radar. It’s probably because of us. You and me.”

Cassie was one of those people, I could tell, who would fall for absolutely everything she heard in college. That story about automatically getting all A’s if your roommate dies. Rumors of dorms that had pools on the roof.

There was a squawk, and the intercom came alive.

“Jane Jarvis,” it said, “please report to Sister Albert’s office at once. God bless.”

Cassie gave me a look that said,
See
?

Sister Albert was the principal of our school. She and I had spent some quality time together—and with Brother Frank’s warning, I was definitely not happy about being called in.

“What are you here for, dear?” Sister Bernie asked, leaning over her counter. She leaned in close enough that I got a good look at a jagged tear running down the arm of her habit, which she had sewn up in rough, Frankensteiny
stitches. This was also the kind of thing that always got to me. It reminded me that the sisters really were poor.

“I don’t know,” I lied.

“All right, then,” she said happily. “Mother Mary be with you, Jane, dear.”

Sister Albert’s office was high-ceilinged and poorly lit. For some insane reason, she was running the air conditioner, even though it was kind of cool. It was probably some technique to make us confess. Maybe a leftover from the Spanish Inquisition.

Sister Albert herself was an enormous, boxy woman with a square head, square fingers, square torso, and square man-boobs. My deepest fear in dealing with her was that on one of these visits, she’d say, “Okay, Miss Jarvis, enough talking. We’re going to settle this with some good old-fashioned wrestling. Get on the floor!”

I don’t really know why I thought that. I’m told I have an overactive imagination.

“Sit down, Miss Jarvis,” she said.

I sat down under the huge latch-hook rug portrait of the Virgin Mary that covered the wall across from Sister’s desk. On the desk itself was a very fat manila folder, which I knew at once was my personal file. I could see layers of strata detailing my various types of offenses and achievements—many inches of pink paper, a few inches of green. Pink was disciplinary report paper; green was for academic achievement records. Just looking at my folder, I realized that it wasn’t something you read—it was just something
you
weighed
. Sister opened it and shuffled through the papers a bit.

“These are your records, Miss Jarvis.” She looked up and fixed me with a stony stare. “You have a reputation for questioning and mocking this school and everything it stands for.”

“I don’t mock,” I said. “I just ask questions.”

“So, you are saying that you have nothing to do with this Poodle Club? Don’t try to tell me you haven’t heard of it.”

“I’ve heard of it,” I admitted. “But I don’t even know what it’s supposed to be.”

“Jane,” she said, closing my file. “Do you really want to be here?”

“Here, as in …”

“As in St. Teresa’s,” she said. “You have never really seemed happy here, never seemed like you fit in. We don’t like to make anyone stay here who isn’t committed to what our school stands for.”

“I’m committed, Sister. Totally committed.”

We listened to the air conditioner hum for a moment.

“We had to open your locker this morning because of the leaking,” she said. This was such an obvious lie that she had to turn away from the searching gaze from the latch-hook rug. “We found this.”

She held up the crumpled flyer from the night before.

“We removed a display of these flyers last night,” she said. “Would you care to explain why this one was in your locker?”

The truth was, I couldn’t. But it was there, and I had to account for it somehow. And just saying I didn’t know wasn’t going to cut it.

“I found it on the floor this morning,” I said. “I picked it up and read it. I’d seen them before, in the hallway one afternoon.”

It seemed wise to include that—to make it seem like I was laying all of my cards on the table. Sister definitely noticed, and one of her thick, square eyebrows cocked a bit.

“You’ve seen these before?”

“I was late a few days ago. They were in the hall when I went into class and gone when I stepped out.”

My honesty stalled her.

“All right, Miss Jarvis. You may return to your class. But I would advise you to watch your behavior.”

It seemed useless to point out that I hadn’t done a thing.

Along with the standard three from Owen, there were three notes waiting for me when I checked my e-mail at the end of the day.

The first was official. Poodle Prom had officially been declared off-limits by the school—not that they knew where it was going to be, or when, or who was throwing it. Not that anyone was supposed to know about it. The message was written in a terse, no-nonsense voice that participation in “the recently announced event” was forbidden. Which meant that Poodle Prom would definitely be the most popular, must-attend event in the history of the school.

The second was from Allison, asking me to meet her for coffee at a place called Pasquale’s. The third had just been sent, and it contained the best news I’d heard in a long time. There was still extensive damage at both St. Teresa’s and St. Sebastian’s that required immediate repair, including a potentially dangerous electrical problem. Both schools would be closed the next day in order to bring in work crews.

Lanalee came bounding up to me.

“Listen,” she said. “Had an idea.”

“What?”

“Let’s just … join in. We’ll start with something small. I thought about this all last period. How about, ‘Poodles wear them sideways’?”

“What does that mean?”

“I have
no idea
,” she said, stifling a laugh.

“Listen, Lanalee,” I said. “If we get caught putting up flyers that look like those poodle flyers, we will be killed. I’m not kidding.”

“We won’t get caught.”

“Lanalee,” I said, “I know you want to help Ally, but we came really close last night.”

“Sister Charles saw three people with coats over their heads. Three inside-out coats, so she can’t identify them.”

“Seriously. I can’t explain how bad that would be for me right now. They already think I did it.”

“Okay,” she said, obviously disappointed in me.

I knew I was preserving myself, but saying these things made me feel like a traitor to all I believed in. Here was Lanalee, proposing a really good plan, and here I was, being all, “Well, you know. School rules …”

But still. There comes a point where you know you have to play along, and I had reached it.

A half hour later, I was walking down Thayer Street to meet Ally when the suited man I’d met in front of my mom’s
restaurant stepped around the corner and practically right into me. He had a woman with him this time.

“Miss Jane,” he said. “I had a feeling we might meet again during my stay. This is my companion, Claris.”

I don’t speak Pretentious, but I figured that was just a way of saying “girlfriend.”

Claris didn’t seem like someone who would be with Mr. Fields. I think she was older—I could tell it from her eyes, her face—but she seemed younger. She was a little punkette, with black fishnets, short leather jacket, black leather skirt, high black boots. Her hair was a rainbow of frostings and tintings, so it was hard to say if it was brown or red or blond or copper or maroon. She was spiked as well, but her spikes were much longer than mine and shocked out all the way around her head in a series of thick points. She was small and clearly muscular—seriously athletic, in a dancery kind of way. But she didn’t seem graceful, just hard. You sort of knew that if you touched one of those muscular arms, it would probably feel like a rat trapped in a bag.