Looks Page 18

  Meghan melts aside.

  “Um, yeah, I’m writing a thing for the . . .” Meghan freezes as Aimee searches her mind for the name of the student paper. Valley Voice, Meghan transmits to Aimee in violent ESP. Valley Voice, Valley Voice! “. . . um, school paper? About the new in-school suspension laws?”

  “Dr. Dempsey’s gone for the day,” Ms. Champoux drones, thoroughly bored.

  “Um, no, I wanted to ask you some questions,” Aimee persists, rigging her face with a polite smile.

  “Me?” Ms. Champoux says warily. “Why me? What do I have anything to do with the new rules?”

  “I just heard that you’re a highly informed source about, um, the way the new rules, um, relate to juvenile criminal law? And so um, do you have any thoughts on that?”

  Out of the corner of her eye, as she glides around the side of the reception counter and moves into the center of the office, Meghan registers Ms. Champoux’s transformation from scowling attack dog to flattered interviewee. Her whole face warms and softens. Even her perm seems to relax.

  “Well as a matter of fact I do. I don’t know who told you but as a matter of fact I do have some thoughts on that.”

  Ms. Champoux leans toward Aimee, propping her elbows up on the reception desk and making herself comfortable—Meghan is a little shocked to see her kick off one scuffed high-heeled shoe and rub her pantyhosed foot on the opposite calf as she begins to talk.

  “Well first of all, public school and juvenile detention—they’re not as far apart as you might think.”

  Out of her satchel, Aimee produces a notebook and a pen and begins to take notes as Ms. Champoux expounds on the new cruel and unusual punishments the regional superintendent has devised for out-of-control students.

  As she draws open Ms. Champoux’s desk drawer, the one where she keeps the master calendar and the morning announcements folder, the one that clicks and squeaks when it’s two-thirds of the way open, Meghan has a funny sensation. She feels like she’s at once liquid and solid, visible and invisible—she made it all the way over here without making herself disappear. She’s opening one of the best-guarded vaults of secrets in the entire school right here in broad daylight, and she’s not even made of mist, and still no one is watching her.

  “Oh, really?” Aimee says encouragingly from the other side of the counter.

  “Oh, yes!” Ms. Champoux enthuses, nodding vigorously. They’re having a real conversation. Ms. Champoux could clearly go on about this topic for hours. Meghan feels like she has all the time in the world.

  She finesses the drawer over the telltale click and squeak with a practiced hitch of her wrist. The announcements folder is on the top of the pile inside, beat up and very familiar. She slips her finger under the cover to find the purloined poem on the very top of the stack of papers to be read on Monday morning. Too easy, all too easy. She makes the switch smoothly, hands crossing and poems fluttering, like a white-gloved magician conjuring a rabbit from a hat. Close folder, shut drawer, glide back toward Aimee and the escape hatch of the office door.

  “But so you’re saying it’s sort of a violation of a kid’s human rights to be incarcerated during the day with nothing to do?” Aimee seems to be as deeply involved in her conversation with Ms. Champoux as Ms. Champoux is.

  “It sure enough would be, if this weren’t a school. But in a school, now, you can get away with all kinds of things that can’t happen in the real world. You get what I mean?”

  Meghan drifts behind Aimee toward the front door of the office, hoping to catch her attention without having to speak to her.

  “Um, this is so interesting,” Aimee says to Ms. Champoux, “but I have to go, I have to . . . catch the late bus. Can I come back and talk to you more about this on Monday?”

  “You surely can,” Ms. Champoux says, smiling as radiantly as a newly crowned beauty queen. “It’s refreshing to have a student take an interest in the nuts and bolts of disciplinary reform. About time. And tell your classmates. This affects all of you, you know.”

  “She is so weird, that woman,” Aimee says admiringly, leaning her back against the wall outside the office door and scribbling furiously in her notebook.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I just want to make a couple notes before I forget what I saw. I think I might want to write a poem about Ms. Champoux.”

  “Speaking of . . .”

  Aimee looks up from the page and Meghan offers her the twice-stolen poem. Aimee’s face breaks into a joyful smile and she snatches the poem from Meghan’s hand.

  “You did it! And she didn’t even notice!”

  “No one ever does,” says Meghan proudly. “Okay, so I was thinking one last thing: just to be double-triple sure about this, I want to go check the Photon box and make sure there’s not, like, a spare copy floating around in there. Just on the off chance something goes wrong, or in case after it gets read Cara’s upset and goes looking for evidence. We just want to cover our tracks.”

  “Smart,” says Aimee, “but I’m not going in there. Cara could be in that office doing editorial stuff, and I’m not going anyplace she might be.”

  “That’s cool,” says Meghan. “I can handle it. It’s just a quick sweep.”

  “It’d be in the Photon box on Mr. Handsley’s desk, the one by the—”

  “Please,” Meghan interrupts. “I know exactly what I’m doing.”

  Meghan lets herself into the English office as quietly as possible. She scans the room, but it appears to be empty. Late afternoon light, rich as butterscotch pudding, streams in through the ancient venetian blinds. Meghan makes her way to Mr. Handsley’s desk and begins rummaging through the stacks of papers on it, searching for the page with the long, thin poem on it.

  “Looking for something?”

  Meghan freezes mid-rifle.

  Across the room, Mr. Handsley rises from where he has been crouched down in front of a filing cabinet, out of sight.

  “Please don’t tell me Meghan Ball, of all people, is trying to cheat. I don’t believe my battered heart could withstand the impact of that one. If Meghan Ball is trying to cheat, my heart may just break right here in my chest.”

  Meghan’s barely breathing. She shakes her head, mute.

  Mr. Handsley nudges the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet closed with his toe, and Meghan notices that all around him on the floor are open cardboard boxes half full of papers and files. He’s already packing up his stuff.

  “Well?” Mr. Handsley slips his hands into the pockets of his corduroy slacks and strolls toward Meghan casually, as if he’s got all the time in the world to cross the room. “Surely that’s not what you’re after.” He gestures with a jerk of his white-bearded chin at the paper in Meghan’s hands, the one she happened to be holding when he called her out. Meghan looks down at it; it’s the master sheet for the Julius Caesar vocabulary quiz from two weeks ago, the one she got a 93 on. Countenance=face. Bootless=useless. “You got a ninety-three on that, didn’t you?” Mr. Handsley remarks amiably. “You only missed ‘countenance’ and ‘bootless,’ so I can’t imagine why you’d want to look it over again. May I?”

  Mr. Handsley has reached the desk now, and he leans across it, thumb and forefinger poised, and plucks the quiz from Meghan’s hands, lays it back down on the desk and pats it tidily. Meghan’s palms have gone sweaty, and she’s panting tiny pants, like a bunny cornered by a wolf. In all the years she’s been watching, listening, looking, she’s never had the feeling of getting caught before.

  “Have a seat, please.”

  Meghan starts to lower herself into the desk chair behind her, but Mr. Handsley cries out, “Not in my chair, please, here, here, the victim’s chair.” He points to a spindly metal folding chair set up against the wall by his desk, clearly the place he makes students sit when they come here to conference, or cry, or confess their sins against Shakespeare. “I’ll assume the throne, thank you very much.”

  Meghan maneuvers out of the narrow space bet
ween Mr. Handsley’s desk and the wall and sits gingerly on the folding chair; she can feel it mustering all its pitiful strength to hold her up as she gradually trusts her full weight to it. Mr. Handsley settles himself somewhat grandly in his squeaky desk chair, crossing his legs, knitting his hands together behind his head, and leaning back as if he means to sunbathe beneath the fluorescents.

  “So, what were you looking for?”

  Meghan shrugs a slight shrug and stares down at the floor. Such ugly tiles—terminally ill gray with little flecks of red and blue scattered across them—and somebody actually made them like this on purpose. It strikes Meghan now, as she tries with all her might to absent herself from this confrontation she’s having, that every ugly thing in this school was intentionally designed by someone to look and function as it does. Chairs intentionally made small and uncomfortable, tiles intentionally made butt ugly—the conspiracy of deprivation and humiliation that is high school extending all the way to the manufacturers of floor tiles and chairs—

  “Handsley to Meghan Ball—come in, Ball.” Mr. Handsley broadcasts into Meghan’s vacant reverie, his hands cupped around his mouth for effect. Reluctantly, Meghan lifts her eyes to his face. “Your purpose in rummaging through my things?” he prompts, but Meghan can only shrug apologetically and look down again. Mr. Handsley sighs.

  “Look,” he begins, undoing his kicked-back position and sitting up to face her squarely, “there’s something I’ve been wanting to say to you for some time, and since it looks like I might not be around here much longer I’m just going to come out and say it. All right?” Meghan nods. “I get kind of a strong feeling off you, Meghan Ball, that you think nobody else in the world can see you. You sit in the corner and you never say boo and you generally keep the lowest profile of any student I’ve ever taught—and my dear, at this point in my career I’ve taught thousands. In a certain way I admire your disappearing act. It’s hard work not being noticed, and I speak from experience. I spent years, decades, killing myself trying not to be seen.”

  “You?” Meghan asks in frank disbelief.

  Mr. Handsley smiles devilishly.

  “Yes, me, and I’ll take your obvious shock as a compliment, because that part of my life is long over. I have no interest in keeping silent or blending in anymore. But I remember all too well what it felt like to be invisible—I used to imagine that I was holding up a big one-way mirror, you know, that I could look through to see everyone else but that no one could look through to see me. Does that sound familiar?”

  Meghan shrugs noncommittally.

  “Well, after a while you realize that the big mirror you think you’re hiding behind is really just a clear pane of glass, and people have been seeing right through it all along. Like me. I see you. Would you like me to tell you what I see?”

  Meghan gives Mr. Handsley a pained look: Not really.

  “Great, I’ll take your silence as a yes, which by the way is what everyone else will do, too. As long as you never open your mouth and tell other people how to treat you, they’re going to treat you however they please, maybe even quite badly, and they’ll take your silence as permission to do so. Don’t let that happen, you mustn’t let that happen to you!”

  To Meghan’s surprise, Mr. Handsley flushes bright pink and starts to tremble a little, as if he’s struggling to control himself.

  “When I look at you, Ms. Ball, what I see is a lovely young woman who is bright and strong and sensitive, and so observant I can actually observe you observing sometimes.”

  Meghan feels stripped bare by this revelation; impulsively she moves to retract herself, pull herself in.

  “I see how closely you pay attention to everything. I bet you know everything about everybody, don’t you. Tell me something I don’t know about . . .” He looks up at the ceiling, as if running through a mental class roster. “Rebecca Trainer.”

  Without missing a beat Meghan says, “Her mom was Miss Massachusetts twenty years ago, but she told Becky that her proportions and her teeth are wrong for pageants and she’ll never get anywhere off of her looks.”

  Mr. Handsley barks a short, rueful laugh.

  “Interesting,” he says. “Enlightening, actually. I bet you can do that with every kid in this school, can’t you.”

  Meghan shrugs. “Most of them.”

  “So you take all this stuff in but you never put anything out. I’m telling you, that’s no way to live. If you were more like Jonah I wouldn’t worry so much about you.”

  “Jonah Boyd?”

  “I’m not saying you’d want to be like him in every way, I’m just saying that the boy has moxie, he’s got a mouth on him. You’ve seen him, he never misses a chance to stand up for himself.”

  “Because he’s an idiot,” Meghan says, low.

  “Now, see, I disagree. He employs a different strategy than you do, that’s all.”

  “He doesn’t even hear what people say about him half the time.”

  “That’s exactly right, and is that such a bad thing? Has he been hurt by one nasty thing that someone else has said to him when he wasn’t paying attention?”

  “No, but . . .” Meghan tries desperately to summon the words to describe the humiliation, rage, and disgust she feels on behalf of Jonah every time someone says something about him that he cheerfully doesn’t acknowledge.

  “And when he talks back to his enemies, when he yells back right in young J-Bar’s face, what happens? Is he injured? Is he even threatened?”

  “They’d kill me,” Meghan whispers, barely audible.

  “I know it feels that way, but you’d be surprised how well people respond when you stand up to them.”

  “Like how you stood up to Dr. Dempsey about J-Bar?” She doesn’t mean for it to come out as mean-sounding as it does.

  Mr. Handsley’s expression skips a beat. He takes a breath, smoothes over the hairline fracture in his composure. When he speaks, he speaks sharply.

  “What do you know about that?”

  Meghan shakes her head vigorously, trying to take it back: Nothing.

  Mr. Handsley seems like he’s about to gear up for one of his rants. Meghan braces herself. “Look,” he begins bluntly, but then stops, seems to wilt back against his chair. He exhales a measured breath. “I feel as if have been standing up to people for a very long time,” he says thoughtfully, “and this afternoon, quite all of a sudden, I came to the end of my line. If young people want to play Wiffle ball or Masters of Doom or Internet poker instead of performing the works of the greatest writer in the history of the English language, who am I to tell them they shouldn’t? I’ve done what I can with young J-Bar and his cohort. I’ve done what I can with you.”

  Mr. Handsley gives Meghan a look of such ragged weariness that it embarrasses her—it’s a private look, a face so unguarded that it doesn’t belong in a high-school English office. Flustered, Meghan gets to her feet and makes for the door.

  “Ms. Ball,” Mr. Handsley calls out behind her.

  Meghan stops, turns halfway around. The sight of Mr. Handsley slumped in his throne, surrounded by boxes overflowing with his belongings, hits her hard. He looks old; he looks unhooked from his energy source.

  “You never said what you were looking for on my desk.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Meghan says quietly.

  He nods and seems to be waiting for her to go, but she doesn’t move. She can’t walk away without saying something more, something final, to him. She wants to tell him that she loves Julius Caesar, that his class is the only one she’s never walked out of. She wants to tell him that she loves him for never calling on her when she didn’t want to talk, and for never making her read out loud when they went around the room, and for letting her work the curtain backstage instead of exposing her to public ridicule on stage in a giant bedsheet.

  “Then is there something else I can help you with?”

  “I wish you wouldn’t leave,” Meghan mumbles self-consciously.

  Mr. Handsley�
��s face softens. He looks away from Meghan for a moment, puts his hand to his chest and pats it lightly, as if checking to make sure his heart is there, the way a man pats his pocket to check for his wallet.

  “Truly, dear heart,” he says after a moment, looking not at Meghan but down at his desk, “I wish I didn’t have to go.”

  In Music Practice Room D, Aimee is waiting.

  “Did you find another copy?” she asks eagerly.

  Meghan shakes her head.

  “Did you bump into anyone in the office?”

  Again Meghan shakes her head.

  “Okay, so now what do we do?”

  “Now,” Meghan says calmly, “we wait.”

  18

  Monday. First real cold morning of fall. Silvery coating of frost over the whole town, the whole school. Kids still in their skimpy early fall clothes, chattering on their hurried way between the buses and the front doors. The drop-off road billowing with smoky bus exhaust and the frozen breath of teenagers.

  Meghan is shivering inside her windbreaker on her bench, on the lookout for Bus 12. She imagines standing up as Aimee gets off the bus, imagines walking over to her, imagines Aimee lighting up with a smile when she sees Meghan. Imagines them walking through the front door together, lingering and giggling until the second bell rings and they have to tear themselves away from each other to go to their separate homerooms to wait out the last few moments before the Event.

  But as Bus 12 rounds the corner of the school and rumbles toward Meghan, she rapidly cycles through another vision of the morning: awkward meeting out front, uncomfortable silence walking through the doors, strain of small talk in the hall—nothing to say—split into separate homerooms, wait out the last few moments before . . . nothing happens. What if something has gone horribly wrong? What if over the weekend someone has intercepted their interception? What if the decoy is still there but Ms. Champoux reads it wrong, or what if she reads it right and nobody cares, nobody even notices the difference or gets the reference? What if the whole thing is a total anticlimax and Aimee thinks she’s stupid and never speaks to her again?