In the Dead of Summer (19 page)

Maybe April had, too. Maybe the rigid pressures of her life, the careful monitoring by her family, and the dark side of all her self-discipline had been too much. Maybe she well and truly needed a break for freedom so that she didn’t break instead.

Except that she’d been seen struggling. Was it an act? A cover-up?

I should let go of futile and directionless speculation about April Truong, and direct all future futile and directionless speculation to my own life. And be safe.

And give up Flora, too? And anything else I wanted that didn’t meet with my anonymous censor’s approval?

Finally, I stood up. I was getting nowhere here, except closer to the fear again. Back off, a part of me insisted. The adult part, I feared.

But the two-year-old in me dug in and refused. I was going to do what I thought was right. There was nothing else I could do.

I walked down the hall. Bartholomew Dennison the Fifth, approaching from the other direction, waved. A sign, I decided, that I had made the correct decision and I was on the right track.

“I’m still thinking about April,” he said when I caught up to him. A perfect opening.

“Me, too, and feeling really sorry for her family,” I said. “Whatever hullabaloo or concern there was that first night is over. No yellow ribbons on trees for her. The Truongs must feel abandoned. I’m going to make a—not a sympathy call, but a sympathetic call, even though I’m a little nervous about going.”

I’d thought I’d have to sell him the idea, but he nodded immediately. “Great idea!” he said. “Want company?”

I was enormously relieved. I didn’t know whether April’s parents would welcome our concern or consider it an intrusion. I didn’t know if they spoke English, or whether April’s sullen brother would willingly serve as interpreter.

“When?” Five asked.

“Tonight, around eight? The Truongs work all day, so after school wouldn’t be any good. I’ll call them around six, see if it’s okay. If it’s not, I’ll call you. Otherwise, does it sound all right?”

“Fine,” he said. “I’ll meet you here, at school.”

I walked taller, felt just a tad John Wayne-ish. No yellow-bellied sheet of paper was going to tell me what I could or could not care about.

My momentary elation ebbed when I reached the back stairs and realized that sour Aldis Fellows had been watching me. She had a gift for creeping up on a person. “For a minute I thought you were part of the man’s midday mob,” she said.

“Five’s?”

Aldis nodded. “Current events, my foot! The man’s blind and has no sense of discipline whatsoever. Did you hear the noise from the room while he was out there with you?”

“I’m sorry. I’m not following you.”

“He thinks they’re reading magazines and having small group discussions, but just ask around. They’re using him. He doesn’t understand what kind of boys they are.”

“Using him for what?”

She looked at me as if I were pathetic. Then she
looked around. “Drugs,” she whispered. “That room at noon is ground zero for dealing and making plans, talking over strategy, distributing.”

I must have looked dubious.

“He’s a dupe. A nice enough man, but a fool. People must have fawned over his good looks his whole life, and he’s gotten too used to it. He would never wonder what those boys actually want from him, just take it for granted that they like him.”

Was it possible? He had joked about how little actual attention he paid the group. He thought of it as insulation against Phyllis and Edie, so maybe
…
I felt sorry for him if it was true, but worried, too.

“I’m sorry to drag a nice man like that into this, but I am going to have to report it, and anyway, if he’s that stupid and lax, he deserves it.”

“What made you think that drugs—”

“I thought it would be different here, this summer. I was looking forward to it, but it’s all the same, everywhere.” She gestured in the direction of Flora’s closed room. “She still in hiding? Still in a righteous sulk?”

“I wouldn’t call it…it must have been—” I was having trouble shifting gears, still worrying over the possibility that Five was an unwitting front for student crime.

“Those people,” Aldis said with a weary shake of her head. “Anything that happens to them becomes a major issue.”

“But having your room trashed—”

“Look, it happens. We’re way past the sweet little schoolhouse of yore.” She clomped down the stairs behind me, lecturing. “You’ve lived in an ivory tower here with your privileged students.”

“I thought you just said things were the same everywhere.”

She ignored my point. “Now,” she went on, “what with the people who were let in this summer, you can see how the world really is. And it’s her people who are responsible for a lot of the change, too. And not for the better, either.”

“I don’t feel comfortable with this talk about Flora’s people, as if she’s an interchangeable—”

Aldis simply didn’t care what I had to say. “Some people should wise up and smell the coffee,” she continued. “Maybe other people who are tired of what’s been going on in this country for the last twenty years are trying to get their message through.”

“What do you—”

“Don’t you just get sick of how everything gets twisted into a big civil rights case?” she demanded from behind. “I mean if a white teacher is hassled, who would care? You’d look to see if they had
caused
their problems in some way, antagonized somebody. But with
them
—it’s all a great meaningful outrage, a hue and cry. Poor me, poor me, I’m so oppressed. Meanwhile, who made the problem in the first place? I tell you, this minority business has gone too far. Time to put on the brakes.”

She was so sure of the universal acceptance of her words that when we reached the bottom of the staircase and we were again side by side, she almost saluted me in a burst of camaraderie. “Good talking with you,” she said as she strode off and out the door.

I stared at her retreating back, her sensible shoes, wondering just how intensely she believed those brakes had to be applied—and where—and whether mudslinging and mail, phone, and in-box terrorism were a part of the braking apparatus.

Aldis, her dark suspicions about student drug-dealing and her ugly assumptions about Flora, became part of the note, of the mud in Flora’s room, of the desecrated church.

Too much, I thought, my breath short. My short-lived self-confidence had gone through meltdown and there was no oxygen left in the
building. I needed air. Desperately.

I MEANDERED THROUGH A SPECIMEN NOON FOR HALF AN hour, wishing I were in a better mood, because the weather deserved it, could in fact be bottled and marketed as Essence of Summer. Its blue and gold perfection balanced out mosquitoes; flies; broiling, muggy, steamy days; thunder and lightning; and summer colds. I was sorry I had driven to school. This was a day to walk straight over the horizon.

Nonetheless, I was
not
in a better, or even a good, mood, not even when I forced myself to stop thinking about Aldis. The yellow warning note haunted me, and I couldn’t stop the low-grade shaking deep inside me.

How
dare
some anonymous coward tell me who and how I should be or live! Except—one had, and as enraged and combative as I felt, I also struggled against the urge to run for the hills and hide.

I needed help. There was no time for a shrink, and the best the weatherman had to offer wasn’t doing it for me. Time to try retail therapy. It supposedly works for many of my sisters.

I tried, but stores, in their ineffable wisdom, live a season ahead, and the displays were filled with falling leaves, itchy-looking sweaters, tam o’shanters, and thick knit stockings. Even with plate glass separating us, the ensembles gave me prickly heat.

Their
tempus fugit
message layered misery on top of my anxiety. Each wooly-warm window along my route sang the same rondelet. Summer’s no longer a’comin’ in, hey, nonny nonny. It’s here, and it’s a-going out, and you’ve missed it!

As the Chinese have long warned, I should have been more careful about what I asked for, because I’d gotten it: Mackenzie without the commitments of his often-draining job. What I hadn’t gotten were the delights of his companionship or of the season: the swims we could be taking, the walks on the beach or in the park, the picnics, and even, let us be frank, some uncomplicated, logistically simple shows of affection.

Happy student sounds came from the square as I made my way back toward it. That didn’t seem at all fair. I looked yearningly across the street and did a double take as I saw Miles Nye, gesturing with great animation for one so ill this morning. That seemed even less fair.

“Sorry I missed class,” he said when the warning bell had rung and I intercepted him on his way in. “An abscess.” He waved authentic-looking letterhead. “Dentist wrote me an excuse.”

“Did you get the part?”

“I got a toothache. Honestly.”

“You’re a good actor. I’m sure you’ll make it But I need to talk. Can you spare a minute?”

“I have class.”

“Your dental appointment took four hours, Miles. Must have been pure hell. Maybe it took four hours and five minutes?”

He lowered his head in an eloquent show of submission, and, gesturing him to follow, I moved to the side of the hallway. “I want to know about your exam. About the ‘Would he?’ and the spelled-out name.” I was trying to be discreet, not mentioning April directly, as students made their way past us. Every one of them checked us out and then moved on, the way a herd might glance at one of its members that had been seized by a lion. They felt sorry for their captured kin, but they had their own skins to protect. “What about it, Miles?”

The normally voluble boy said nothing.

“You sent a signal. I caught it. What sense is there in being coy now?”

“I wanted you to get it, and you did. What else is there to say?” He was bleating for rescue, but the laws of nature are relentless, and self-preservation is its bottom line. The uncaught moved on past us.

“I talked to Woody,” I said. “He didn’t see her at all that evening. Isn’t that what you were saying with the ‘Ask him’?”

“No. That was about assigning blame. That was about Romeo and Juliet.”

“But Woody said they weren’t…um…” In love? Girlfriend and boyfriend? I mentally stammered, unsure of what terminology played with these kids now. Lovers? Significant others?

“
Romeo and Juliet
,
the play,” Miles said. “It was an exam, remember? I was talking about the play.”

“What about it?”

“Oh, Ms. P., if anybody here knows about that, you surely do. What could I, a mere student, possibly say that would add to your vast storehouse of knowledge?”

“Anything, Miles. You’re being smarmy. Devious. Of no help. Why? Don’t you care about April? Care what’s happened to her?”

“Sure,” he said. “She’s my friend.”

“Are you sure she still can be anybody’s friend? Some people think she’s dead. If you know something and don’t do anything about it, maybe it’s past tense now for her. Maybe she
was
your friend, but you let something bad happen to her.”

His nostrils flared as he flashed a look of pure resentment. And then, with a breath, he was again bland and noncommittal. “If I were you,” he said, “I wouldn’t get into an uproar. What’s done is done. Go with the flow.”

The crowd around us had thinned to three stragglers, shuffling toward their classrooms. I couldn’t believe how heartless Miles had become. The class jester, overflowing with emotions and quick, mostly joyous reactions to life, had turned into permafrost. “How can you say that? Maybe she’s being held somewhere. Maybe it isn’t too late.”

“Please, Ms. P., I can’t say anything else. If I could, I would have already. And I’m in big trouble with Miss Fellows. She has this rule that she drops you a half grade for every tardy. No exceptions.”

I envy the self-confidence of despots. Rules with no exceptions, no room for human error or happenstance. A part of me wants to be like that, wielding my pathetic power for all its worth. But the other parts of me are too lazy or rebellious or democratic.

“I need a good grade in Modern History,” Miles said. “I don’t want to take it during the winter. I want to be in the school play and it takes up a whole lot of time. That’s why I’m here, mostly.”

Grilling him was getting me nowhere, even though I was still sure he knew something important. “I’ll take you to Miss Fellows and explain,” I said. I thought of Aldis’s accusations again. “Miles, did she…did you ever hear anything funny about Mr. Five’s noontime sessions?”

“Funny ha-ha?”

“No…odd.”

Miles stared at me with laser intensity, then shook his head. “Don’t know a thing about them.”

I returned to the subject at hand, the one I was sure wasn’t pure speculation. “One more try—when I saw April’s name, and those allusions to guilt, I was sure you were trying to tell me what had happened, or who was responsible.”

“And you were right. Correct.” He tilted his head, waiting for more, but that’s what I had. April. Woody. Present guilt. Romeo and Juliet. A mess.

Speaking of messes, I had a class upstairs, undoubtedly raising hell in my undespotic absence. “Okay, let’s go face Miss Fellows,” I said. “By the way, are you enjoying her class?” It was a mean-spirited question asked only because I wanted to hear what a rigid bitch she was.