“SO HOW EXACTLY WOULD you date a prehistoric mummy?” asked Mr. O’Toole in first-period physics the next morning. “Mark?”
Rosie looked up from his doodling. “Um … ask very nicely?”
The class burst into laughter.
Me? I was barely paying attention. It had been a horrible night. I’d managed to track down Chief Hayes, who had been eating dinner at Arby’s with his family. (They were the only customers. The rest of Wetherby had been in hiding every night since Rick had been found.) While they stared at me, chewing away, I had showed him Rachel’s ring and explained what had happened.
He had told me not to call the Greens or John Christopher until he’d had a chance to investigate. So I had gone home and faced a ballistic assault from Mom, who was sure I’d been killed. After that I’d called Ariana, who hung up on me. Then I’d had insomnia.
By Friday physics, I was a train wreck. The shock of Rick’s death was still in the air, and now Rachel was gone. And John was in my next class, English.
I dreaded going. How could I not tell him? It would be impossible.
I was seriously thinking of giving myself a bloody nose so I could end up in the nurse’s office.
Come to think of it, slitting my throat might have been a better idea.
“… concept of radioactive half-life,” Mr. O’Toole droned on. “Who can explain it? David?”
“What?” I muttered.
“Tell me about half-life.”
Rachel Green, I wanted to say. That was a half-life. Less. She was only seventeen.
“Okay, I guess Mr. Kallas needs a little jump-start this morning,” Mr. O’Toole continued. “David, say I have a radioactive substance that weighs eight ounces. Its half-life is twenty minutes. How heavy will it be in one hour?”
What language was this?
As I sat there, mute and fishlike, Jason Herman was having a cow behind me. “Ooh oohoohooh …”
“Jason,” Mr. O’Toole said.
“Well, it decays by half each time period. Sixty minutes is three periods, so eight becomes four, then two, then one. The answer is one ounce!”
Mr. O’Toole’s face brightened. “Thank you, Jason. Had you answered a few more like that earlier in the semester, you may have pulled ahead of the rest of your classmates.”
“Which isn’t saying much,” said Ed Lyman from the back of the class.
“Hark! He speaks!” Mr. O’Toole said. “The rumors of brain death are not true!”
Somehow I made it to the end of class without further verbal abuse. But as I was walking out, Mr. O’Toole stopped me. “David, I want you to know I will flunk a senior as quickly as a junior. I once hoped you would be my best student. Right now I’ll settle for a basic understanding of principles. Got the message?”
“Yes,” I said.
This was the latest version of The Speech. The “I Read About Your IQ Score and You’re Not Living Up to Your Potential” speech I’d heard many times, in different forms, all four years at school.
Had I known my teachers would expect me to be Einstein, I would have screwed up that test on purpose.
Depressed, I slumped out of class and headed for second period.
I met Jason in the hallway. “You think his wife treats him like that?” Jason asked.
“What?” I walked briskly toward English, and Jason trotted along beside me.
“I read that if a person is mistreated, but feels powerless, he represses his anger, then lets it out at a safer target — meaning us! See? It’s Freudian.”
“Jason, thanks for the analysis, but — ”
Jason laughed. “It’s not analysis. If it were, I’d be charging you! That’ll come in a few years, after I graduate … Perm State!”
That was more an announcement than a statement. He was grinning proudly. “Was that the one you were wait-listed at?” I asked.
He nodded. “A local Penn State alum called me at home this morning — and he’s meeting me here for lunch, to congratulate me. Amazing, huh? See you!”
He sprinted away, cornering another classmate. I turned left into another hallway.
“David! Wait up!”
My blood ran cold. Goose bumps sprouted on my arms.
Rachel Green was running toward me.
For a dead person, she looked good. Solid. Happy, even.
“Guess what?” she gushed. “Mr. Brophy found out one of his workers wrecked the yearbook! The guy was drunk the night he set the text, and he admitted to it. So Brophy fired … what’s wrong? Why are you looking at me like that?”
“R-Rachel?” I creaked.
“Y-yes?” It was a cruel imitation.
“I just thought — did Chief Hayes call you last night?”
“Yeah. He brought me this.” Rachel held up her left hand to show me her ring. “How did you know?”
“I … was the one who found it.”
“Well, thanks. That’s what I get for exchanging rings with old Pigskinhead.” She held up an enormous ring hanging around her neck. “Do I lose his? Noooo. Wait till I get my hands on him. You haven’t seen him today, have you?”
“No.”
“Well, if you do, let him know I’m after him.”
“Rachel — ” I blurted as she started to run off.
“What?”
My head spun. I tried to picture the foot, but I couldn’t. Was it male? Female? Could it have been John’s?
“Earth to David,” she said. “Come in.”
“Um … nothing,” I replied.
I ran to English. John was absent. I sat through forty agonizing minutes of William Faulkner, then headed straight for the Voyager office.
I punched John’s number on the yearbook phone.
“Hello,” said a stiff voice. “You have reached the Christopher residence. We cannot come to the phone right now, so — ”
I hung up and tried the police station. I was put right through to the chief.
“Hayes.”
“This is David Kallas, Chief. I found out that Rachel Green had actually given her ring to a guy named John Christopher. That’s C-H-R — ”
“David, I know,” he interrupted. “We found him.”
My throat instantly parched. “Alive?”
“No.”