TEACH HIGH SCHOOL AS long as I have, you get antenna. I mean, there’s days you’ll just walk in the cafeteria and feel it, something’s up. A week later you find out that was the day some girl got the results of a home pregnancy test and tried to give herself an abortion in the girls’ room. Passed out in home ec a week later from internal hemorrhage and infection. That’s when the teachers finally get clued in. But the kids—they knew that day in the cafeteria. Which was what you were picking up on.
Now that I look back on it, I can see last February was one of those times. I mean, at first you would’ve thought it was simply Suzanne Maretto’s husband being found murdered. Reason enough for a certain sense of malaise, I’d say. But instead of blowing over after a week or two the feeling grew stronger. By the time vacation week rolled around the whole school felt ready to snap. We’re not talking about academic tension, mind you. I’m talking about a crowd that isn’t exactly spending their every spare moment bent over their books. And still, you knew they were all charged up about something. You’d walk into study hall and a hush would come over the room. You’d leave the room and feel the whispers starting again the moment you stepped into the hall.
Slowly the rumors began to surface. Someone had seen a photograph of Jimmy Emmet holding Suzanne Maretto on his lap. Someone else heard Suzanne had bought Lydia a pair of sneakers. Someone else said no, it was a CD player. A leather jacket. They said Suzanne Maretto was pregnant. Someone said that video they were making wasn’t really about high school life at all, it was a pornographic video in which Mrs. Maretto and Jimmy Emmet were naked, in bed together. They said Jimmy did all sorts of things to her, with shaving cream and cucumbers. Or that Lydia and Suzanne were lesbian lovers. Or that Larry was selling drugs to Russell, and Russell got mad when Larry sold him a bad batch of crack. A girl who’d been having sex with Russell Hines said she’d heard him and Jimmy Emmet talking about how to keep Lydia quiet. Someone else said Suzanne Maretto had a tattoo that said “Jimmy and Suzanne” on her buttocks.
We had a special assembly about AIDS and safe sex sometime in March. When it was time for questions and answers a boy in the senior class raised his hand and asked if it was true you could get AIDS from a tattoo needle. The speaker said she had to admit there were conflicting opinions on that one and she couldn’t say for sure. Someone in the bleachers called out, “Let’s call up the cable TV station and ask the weather girl.” You could almost feel five hundred people gasp. I guess by then everybody knew.