Tuesday afternoon
MAYBE HIS MOTHER WASN’T COMPLETELY CRAZY. COPS WERE CRAWLING all over school; according to his friend Ben, a forensics team was in Tut’s office right this minute.
“Don’t anybody believe this bullshit about a heart attack. This is homicide, son.” Chris Butler slid into a desk beside Nate and, opening a bottle of water, turned to him. “Looks like there’ll be one less senior page in the yearbook.”
“Huh?” Ben, sitting on the other side of Nate, said.
“You murder someone, you don’t graduate.”
“I’m innocent!” Ben held up both hands. “I told Tut I could be happy at Babson.”
Chris laughed. “When I first saw cops, I figured, ‘S.W.A.K. guy strikes again.’” Chris ran his finger along his neck and made a raspy, gurgling noise from the back of his throat.
“You wouldn’t joke if you were a girl,” Lily G. said.
They were in a fourth-floor classroom, all the desks in a semicircle, waiting for Hollins to show up.
“Poor Ms. Hollins.” Katie Spielkopf, sighing, looked up from the notebook she was doodling in and said in that spacey, singsong-y voice of hers, “She must be devastated about Tut.”
“I think she did it,” Lily B. said matter-of-factly. She was sitting and playing with a strand of hair cut short like Olivia’s.
“No way! Ms. Hollins was in love with Tut!” Then Katie paused, tapping her marker against her lip. “…Unless it was like, you know, an ‘Angel of Mercy’ thing.”
Ben thought Katie was hot, but Nate couldn’t see it. She was one of those annoying girls who thought being ditsy was cute.
“Uh-uh. Tut dumped her,” Lily B. continued.
“Why? Cause Mrs. Mac swallows and she wouldn’t?” Ben deadpanned.
Chris Butler choked, spraying water on the front of his shirt.
Lily B. ignored them. “Olivia heard her in his office yesterday. Around five-thirty. Hollins was crying.” Lily B. started imitating Hollins’s Southern drawl. “‘I’m not listenin’. Don’t say that!’…Classic breakup scene. Ask Olivia if you don’t believe me.” Lily’s thumb and index finger were cocked like a gun. “If she couldn’t have him, then nobody could. Kapow.”
“Except he wasn’t shot,” Lily G. said. “I texted Olivia. There was no blood.” Then she leaned across the desktop attached to her chair, her eyes glittery. “Here’s what I think. I think maybe she was trying to win him back, and they were doing it in his office Monday night.”
This whole conversation was idiotic. “Cut it out,” Nate said. “The dude was over eighty.”
“Please. Grampy and his new wife had a baby last year,” Lily G. said. “I mean have you ever taken a look at the stains on that couch? I would never sit on it. Maybe she was blowing him and he had a heart attack. So Hollins panics, zips him up, and tries to make it look like he was all alone when he croaked. But the cops aren’t fooled.”
“Except that Hollins left before Tut. I saw her,” Nate said.
“Maybe it only looked like she was leaving,” Lily G. said. She paused, eyebrows raised, waiting for Nate’s comeback.
But he didn’t have one.
Satisfied her point was made, Lily G. stretched her arms behind her back, like her shoulders were stiff, something she did a lot to show off her tits.
Chris took another swig of water and attempted to look solemn. “For all we know, forensics guys are down at the morgue right now dusting Tut’s dick.”
“Why? Do blow jobs leave lip prints?” Katie wanted to know.
Nate turned to Ben. And you like her? his look said.
“From what I hear, Lorimer was the last one to see Tut alive,” Elliot chimed in, fake-smiling at Nate. “We all thought you were one of his pets. Maybe you’ve got some grudge we don’t know about.”
“Me! You were the one saying you wished he’d hurry up and die.”
Elliot turned to the Lilys. “I never said that! That’s what I heard him say.”
“You’re such a fucking liar. I didn’t see you leave the building either.”
“Maybe not,” Elliot looked smug now. “But they did.”
Both Lilys nodded. Lily G. said, “He’s solid. We were waiting in the Rolls for a ride home.”
Oro Johnston looked up from the portable video game he was playing. “If anybody was in school after six, it’ll be on camera. Right, Chris?”
“You better believe that picture’s going on my senior page.”
One evening the first week of school, Chris had mooned one of the new security cameras, figuring it wasn’t hooked up yet. He got hauled into Marshall’s office the next morning.
“You think it counts as manslaughter if you blow somebody to death?” Ben said.
“No idea but it’s not a bad way to go!” Chris slapped palms with Ben. “Tut was a lucky man.”
Then the door opened. It was Ms. Hollins, clutching their papers on “Tintern Abbey” in her hand. The laughing stopped. So did the ping-ping gunshots of Oro’s video game.
“Everything’s just a big joke to all of you, isn’t it? A wonderful man just died. And if anybody here had anything to—” A choking, almost gagging, sound stopped her from saying anything further. Her face crumpled and, after staring hard at each of them, as if it was some police lineup, she turned on her heel and was gone, leaving the door wide open behind her.