Chris
I didn’t want to see anyone. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I didn’t want to hear anyone or be around anyone. And yet the halls were filled with elbows and shoulders and after-lunch breath and dollar-store perfume.
I wished for a temporary lobotomy. Something to push the rest of the world away so far that I didn’t have to deal with it. Outer space.
Instead New York and Honor’s soon-to-be summer intensive felt like air above me, tantalizingly real but unreachable, as though I were drowning in six inches of water. My uncle, who was nice, would think he was doing the right thing by calling my father about the detention. My aunt would tell me my father would understand.
But nobody seemed to get that it was cruel and unusual punishment to send a teenage boy to the middle-of-nowhere USA halfway through high school.
I walked to seventh period letting my feet literally drag, scuffing the bottoms of a pair of brown leather half-boots that I actually really liked. I had another hour to figure out how to tell my aunt and uncle what happened in such a way that they wouldn’t tell Dad.
That should be easy … not.
My own thoughts were on a loud loop, over and over, but as I was passing the front entrance doors, I noticed the noise from outside, though muted through the thick glass of the doors, was cumulating into a bit of a commotion. What was that?
Other students in the hall were slowing down also. “Do you hear that?” a girl next to me asked.
I was nodding yes when Principal Wiggins shot out of the administration office to our left and ran right past like none of us existed.
“Fight!” someone yelled from over near the trophy case behind me. “Fight in the front.”
Bodies began to jostle around, and I was being pushed toward the doors. I tried digging my heels in, but there was no use. I actually didn’t like watching fights. After throwing a series of poorly performed punches, the expressions on the boys’ faces—yes, usually boys—always held this raw shame that was difficult to look at.
But in high school, a fistfight was the equivalent of gladiator entertainment.
On my way being pressed out by a small but eager crowd, my hips rammed the push bar across the door, and I stumbled into the open air that felt sweaty with rain.
There, I saw the white ring of the principal’s hair just outside. He was screaming. Or at least I thought that he was. There were so many screams it was hard to pluck one from the crowd. The air was pungent with fear.
That was when I saw Honor at the edge of a ring of onlookers.
Her pale skin was translucent underneath her spray of freckles. She clutched a script to her chest and on the back of it, I noticed several drops of bright-red blood.
The world fell to a hush around me. My heart beat in my ears. Because near Honor and the other students beside her was what was left of my math teacher, Mrs. Dolsey.
My mind emptied out. There was nothing. Nothing but silence and the space between me and Honor. Her eyes lifted to mine. She mouthed my name, and all I could think to do was run to her like I was on fire and she was water.
The smell of fresh blood caught me squarely in the nose as I raced past the body unable to tell whether my teacher was moving or breathing or even still warm. Honor dropped the script and collapsed into me. Her forehead fit beneath my chin exactly the way I knew that it would, and I folded around her. There was no room between us now for rules, and I didn’t want there to be.
My head was still filled with the great, roaring emptiness, like the inside of a seashell.
My Adam’s apple bobbed against her forehead, and I knew that no matter how much I protested, my eyes were going to search out the very thing that would be sure to haunt my memories for years to come. That was human nature. That was why when passing roadkill on the highway it was physically impossible not to look to see what type of animal had been crushed. That was why when watching a horror movie, everyone peeked through their fingers to catch a glimpse of the monster even though that one look would guarantee nightmares for a month.
That was why I looked over the top of Honor’s head to Mrs. Dolsey, whose skin was already turning gray. Blue veins branched out under paper-thin flesh. Dolsey’s blond hair was matted and red at the roots. At the edge of the pool of blood, I spotted my own footprint and when I raised the toe of my shoe I looked down to see a red imprint beneath me.
I squeezed my eyes shut against the well of nausea and held Honor more tightly. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” I whispered into her hair.
But was it?
My stomach convulsed violently. I breathed in through my nose as deeply as I could, but the tang of blood was still sharp in the air. At last I wrenched us away, turning to use my back as a shield against the carnage that lay behind.
Before today, I’d never seen a dead body. Dolsey’s face lingered underneath my eyelids like red dots after a camera flash. Slowly. Though the sound started to come back for me. The first thing I heard were sirens. From a distance still, but coming.
And then there were tiny vibrations in my chest. Warm, moist breath slipped through the cotton of my T-shirt and turned cold on my skin. And that, I realized, was Honor saying, “She fell from nowhere.” I had to ask her to repeat that part because initially it’d been lost in the sea of my temporarily loud deafness.
“She fell from nowhere.” Honor was rubbing her nose into the plate of bone between my lungs. I slid my hand along the ridges of her spine and looked up at the vertical stretch of building toward the roof. Not from nowhere exactly, I thought.
“I was walking back from the theater and then … She was so close,” Honor said. “I could have touched her hair.”
I pressed my nose into the top of Honor’s head, letting her scent flood my senses. The world around me was taking shape. The ambulances had arrived. I didn’t know where Principal Wiggins had gotten to, but he wasn’t here. There were teachers around, but not as many as you’d think and the ones that were there were all looking as shaken up as the students.
I kept my arm around Honor’s back while herding her over to join a cluster of students who had gathered in the western shadow of the school building, far enough to be out of the way, but close enough to watch. The stunned electricity of shared experience ran through us all like a current. Murmurs of “suicide” had begun to pop up. Questions about whether Mrs. Dolsey had left a note, whether she was depressed, did she take medication? Snatches of phrases caught between hushed conversations.
I had the feeling of standing at a funeral only the undertakers had forgotten to dig the grave and so we were all left milling around while we tried to figure out the next right thing to do.
To my immense relief, men and women in uniforms now obscured the view of Mrs. Dolsey’s body. I knew I should feel bad. I had been laughing at an unflattering cartoon of her not more than an hour before her death. But instead, all I could think was, what kind of teacher killed herself in front of a whole school full of students? The thought didn’t sit right. She had to have known the mental image she’d be leaving on a group of teenagers. Despite our recent run-in, Mrs. Dolsey had seemed like an okay lady who wished we would pay attention in class and who’d once gotten very bad advice from a hairstylist. But to do something like this, she must have really, really hated kids.
And that was the thing to which I kept coming back like a Ferris wheel that I couldn’t get off of. Because I wouldn’t have thought her capable and based on the snippets of talk happening around me, no one else had thought so, either. And that meant it was impossible to know the inner workings of anyone’s mind. We were all opaque beings walking around with the ability to crush someone else under our dead weight. It was a chilling thought for a Wednesday morning.
“Hello.” Lena slipped through the crowd as unobtrusively as ever, and she appeared before me as though by magic. “Did you hear?” She wore a strange half-smile.
Out in the parking lot, the sound on all the sirens had been mercifully cut, but the lights continued to flash. The school looked to be in a state of emergency. I would never understand why a fire truck was sent in nonfire emergencies, but there was one now along with three police cars and two ambulances. Nobody would be able to get out of here anytime soon.
I thought Lena’s question was odd. We were standing in the middle of a full-scale crisis and the entire student body learning about Mrs. Dolsey in this very moment. But the whole situation was odd, so who was I to criticize? “Yeah,” I said, gesturing over my shoulder with my thumb. “Honor saw it happen. She’s a little shaken up,” I said.
“Shame,” said Lena, peering around me at Honor. Honor was sniffling into her sleeve. I frowned.
“Are you all right?” I asked. Perhaps Lena was in shock. “Did you see—well, did you see her?” The question brought the sight of Mrs. Dolsey freshly to mind. Here was what I would remember about my math teacher: her fingernails broken on the pavement, an ankle snapped sideways, blood gone sticky on my shoe.
Already I couldn’t recall the sound of her voice or what she’d said to me this morning to make me so angry or why it mattered.
“For a moment,” Lena said thoughtfully, “yes.”
I gave a grim nod. Because I wouldn’t wish that on anyone, let alone someone as fragile as Lena.
From behind me, Honor’s fingers curled around my forearm. She dried her eyes as she moved up to stand beside me. “Hi, Lena,” she said in a small voice. “Hope you’re okay.”
Did Lena respond to Honor? I didn’t catch it. What I heard was, “So do you want to hang out after school today?” and it was aimed pointedly and only at me. “No more detention I guess.”
My stomach clenched. But was Lena right? Would I voluntarily tell my aunt and uncle that I’d received detention?
It was a stupid thing to think about at a time like this. What did it matter? A woman was dead.
My eyes skirted quickly to Honor, who gave away no reaction other than the shaky unease that had seemed to rob her of her normal poised energy since Mrs. Dolsey had fallen.
Lena’s face was placid, but interested. My brows twitched. “I … can’t,” I said slowly.
At last check, someone was still dead within a twenty-foot radius. The body hadn’t even been moved yet. And sorry, but I didn’t feel like making after-school plans just to “hang out.”
“Why not?” she asked as though that weren’t totally obvious.
But something was keeping me from saying that. I took off my glasses and wiped the lenses with my shirt to buy myself some time. The neckline was still wet with Honor’s tears.
“I have a lot of homework,” I lied. I pushed the glasses back over my ears and the blur that had been Lena came into focus again. I felt Honor’s eyes on me, but she didn’t say anything.
Lena picked her heel up and itched at her leg through a hole in her stockings. “I doubt any of the teachers are going to care much about homework now that Mrs. Dolsey’s dead,” she said.
“Lena!” Honor’s hand jerked from my arm.
“Well, she is dead.” Lena cocked her head. “You saw her.”
“What is wrong with you?” She swept back her hair and shook her head at Lena while retreating from her a few steps.
I stretched my arms between them. How did I get here? “She’s processing. You’re just processing, right, Lena? You don’t mean that?”
“Were she and Mrs. Dolsey close or something?” Lena asked.
Honor rolled her eyes and turned away. “I’ve got to get out of here, Chris. I feel queasy.”
“I—” I hesitated for a moment, stuck between Honor and Lena. I pressed my hands into my sockets, but the vision of Mrs. Dolsey with her head cracked open wouldn’t go away. How long was it going to be stuck there? Sixteen years in New York and I’d never seen a person die. And now here, in this town where I never wanted to be in the first place, I saw it within weeks of arriving. I needed air. Not the open skies, unpolluted air of Hollow Pines, but the gray smog of New York that, though it may kill me in the end, at least felt like home. “God, I wish I could, too,” I muttered. “Get out of here, I mean. I wish … I wish I could just go home. Christ.” I looked once more at where, if I squinted—and I did—I could make out the chunky heeled shoes of Mrs. Dolsey as a small team of EMTs lifted her onto a stretcher. My stomach seemed to wring out like a dishrag. “I’ve got to go, Lena. We … can talk later, okay?”
And I left before the ambulance doors had closed behind my former math teacher.