Paradise Falls (3 page)

“He won’t let Elliot near the school. He’s my brother-in-law. Elliot, I mean.”

“I know,” said Jacob.

What? Oh, right.

“You did say you knew him.”

He shrugged. “He’s the mayor’s son and he works for the city. I don’t know him personally.”

“Oh.”

He moved closer, and she froze. She stood to her full height but she had to look up anyway.

“Do you know what he wanted?”

Jennifer started to answer, but bit her lip and looked away.

“Oh. I’m sorry. I didn’t… I… ah…” he trailed off, and backed away.

All of a sudden, she couldn’t take the way he was looking at her. It was her ring. Her wedding band went from itching on her finger to throbbing, like it was getting hot. She tugged at it, found it stuck fast as it ever was, and folded her arms again.

“Listen,” he said. “Rachel is right. If you want to go to the police, I’ll give a statement. I’ll back you up, one hundred percent. Promise.”

Jennifer looked up. “Why? Why’d you bother?”

She could see his jaw working as he thought about an answer, but the bell ringing interrupted. Students quickly filled the hall like they sprung out of the ground. Jacob stepped back, but it was too late. Jennifer could feel the wheels turning, the rumors and innuendos taking shape around her. Miss Katzenberg the Ice Queen was talking to a man.

“So, what’s your class load like?”

He blinked and leaned on the lockers. “AP Calc, Trig, Algebra II and another Trig.”

“Wow,” Jennifer said. “That sounds complicated.” She felt her mask settling back into place, and raised her voice a little. “Aren’t you a little young to be teaching?”

“I’m on an emergency cert. I only have my bachelor’s in math.”

“Oh,” Jennifer said. “Well, good luck with all that. I’ll be across the hall if you need me for anything.”

He looked at her again, and she could swear he appeared almost wistful. “I’ll be there if you need anything, too.”

As he retreated to his classroom, Jennifer leaned back on the cool brick wall and watched the kids. Krystal stole glances at her from down the hall, and conversed with some of her friends in a hushed huddle. Jennifer pointedly looked away, and avoided engaging them. Krystal drew up wedding plans whenever a male teacher showed her any attention. At this rate, she’d have to stop them from baking a cake. Gently explaining it was inappropriate and irritating only seemed to egg her on, so Jennifer simply gave up.

Free from hall duty when the warning bell rang, she stepped back into the room and closed the door all in the same motion, then took a sharp breath of chilly air. The ductwork that ran around the classroom’s high ceiling had the same Frankenstein quality of old grafted onto new, just like everything else in the building, but it worked well enough on the outside rooms. It would actually be cold in here until the students came in.

Jennifer took a walk around the room, swinging and lifting her arm in an attempt to dry out the sweat. She felt calmer now, centered. Still, the conversation in the hallway nagged at her. His scar, the expensive car, his fingers. His eyes. She shook her head and walked over to the window. The truth was she’d have plenty of work tomorrow, or maybe next week. But on the first day of school, there was little to do but lay out her materials.

Clouds rolled in and threw huge shadows over the athletic fields. Behind and to the right of her window, a large hill rose on the other side of the deep but narrow gorge dug out by the Susquehanna river south of town. A windy road led to the very top of the biggest hill, and a sprawling house held up by pilings driven into the ground crouched over a sheer drop. The house once belonged to her great grandfather. He founded the dairy, building it into a commercial empire that kept the town growing and prospering after the oil production declined and coal mines closed up.

Activity surrounded the house this morning. She couldn’t read the markings on the two large tractor trailer rigs crouched outside. Shiny yellow scaffolding crawled up the side of the house. Workmen in white coveralls gradually covered the fading white paint with a fresh coat. A nearly identical truck rumbled past the school and she caught a glimpse of the side: M. Morrel, Movers. Something about that tickled her brain. That name.

Jennifer pulled herself away from the window and distributed the syllabi. Ninety minutes was both an eternity and a blink in a school. She wasted nearly twenty minutes just staring at the house on the hill, thinking.

3.

Jennifer headed back into the hallway to wait for the bell. Jacob was out in the hall with his arms folded, towering over all but the tallest boys. Calmer than she’d been on her first day, he introduced himself to the students warmly as they walked into his room. He shook the boys’ hands while looking them in the eye, and gave the girls big smiles. Most smiled back, while a few formed knots in the flow of traffic and spoke secretly to each other. He ignored it just the right way, without making it obvious he was ignoring it. Jennifer couldn’t hear what he was saying over the din of the class change. She authoritatively looked around, stood to her full height, and then half-closed her door as a subtle reminder to the kids still lingering in the hallway that the time was upon them.

The warning bell tolled. Jennifer turned back to her classroom. She had a full count of kids, so she pulled the door shut and went to her desk to grab a stack of papers, letting them chat until the tardy bell. Honors courses could be just as difficult, behavior-wise, as any other class. This was a small group, but she couldn’t let that lower her guard. When the tardy bell rang, she strode to the center of the room.

“Everybody grab a syllabus,” she said.

Jennifer watched them pull the papers she laid out from the center of the tables and start flipping through them.

“Let’s make sure we’re all here.” Jennifer pulled her clipboard from under her arm.

She read off the list of names, acknowledging each grunt or feebly lifted hand. A quick headcount confirmed they were all there, but she needed to put names to the faces of the kids she wasn’t familiar with like a pair of transfer students, plus a few others that she didn’t know from her freshman classes.

Once that was done, Jennifer went around the room and had students volunteer to read sections of the syllabus that outlined her policy on attendance and make up work, a list of assignments to be completed throughout the semester, and a reading list some of the students groaned at.

A pale boy with long lanky hair and a tendency to dress in black raised his hand. “Do we have to read all of these?”

“Yes.” Jennifer said brightly.

Kelly raised her hand. Jennifer had her as a freshman. “It says here we pick five from the list.”

Jennifer smiled. “What does it say at the bottom?”

“Read the directions carefully,” Kelly intoned.

“Exactly.” She looked around. “That’s how I know you’ll pay attention. I often give written instructions. If you ignore the directions and ask me if you have to do all the assignments or read all the books, I’ll say yes.” She shrugged. “At least you might get some extra credit out of it.”

Several of them looked at her sharply, but said nothing. Jennifer kept her smile on her face, and strode around the room as she explained some of the syllabus’ finer points.

“You’ll see a writing prompt on the board.” She looked back at it. “I thought ‘tell me about your summer’ was a little trite, and frankly reading fifty of them would make my eyes bleed. So I’ll have you, as seniors, tell me about your future plans.”

“I ain’t got any paper,” one of the new boys said, sheepishly raising his hand.

Jennifer sighed and pointed to the supply table by the door.

“When I run out of paper, I’m out. The school only gives me so much,” she said.

“I forgot,” the boy shrugged.

“Did you ride the bus to school this morning?”

He nodded.

“Did the bus driver forget the bus?”

He shook his head.

“I think you see my point. In any case, there’s a supply list on the next to last page of the syllabus. I’d like to point that out again in case some of you missed it. You will be required to turn in your notebooks at regular intervals, and the journal and other requirements are thirty percent of your grade.”

“This is a lot of work,” said one of the girls. Jennifer had to think for a moment to place her. Jessica was her name, and she was in one of Jennifer’s sophomore classes.

“It’s nothing compared to what you’ll be doing in college, believe me.”

Jessica frowned.

“When it’s done, you’ll look back on it and be surprised how little it actually seems. This is the honors class. I have to push you, or I wouldn’t be giving you what you signed up for, would I?”

After she danced around a few more protests, she set them to writing. The assignment she gave them today would be the first of many for their notebooks. Truthfully, Jennifer hated the notebook assignment because it meant either lugging home fifty pounds of binders, or coming into the school on Sunday to get them graded. The work was incredibly mindless, as she mainly ticked off whether something was physically in the binder or not. She was sharp on spelling and grammar, but only in regards to essays, exams, and other formally graded assignments. If she read every journal entry that closely, she’d never sleep. The point was to get them writing and organizing their thoughts on a daily basis. preferably without hashtags. Jennifer’s soul died a little whenever she came across #YOLO in a student’s written assignment.

Procedural tasks occupied Jennifer as pens scratched on papers. She distributed the textbooks the kids would likely to keep at home and never actually use. A class set of ponderous tomes was provided at her own insistence. She still winced at the thought of arguing with Kazmeyer about it. The old man expected the kids to lug a text the size of a telephone book with them from their lockers to class, and then back home. Jennifer’s back hurt thinking about it. Rachel took her side and badgered the department head into ordering classroom sets of the books when they were replaced during Jennifer’s second year.

The books were woefully inadequate anyway. They took sections of great works out of context, and someone thought it was a good idea to teach the Odyssey to freshmen.

Of course, Kazmeyer wrote the curriculum, so there was no changing that. Jennifer was established enough that she didn’t have to worry about more than one freshman class unless she requested them.

An hour and a half always seemed daunting when it started, but Jennifer felt pressed for time by the end. She kept them in their seats until he bell rang, and grudgingly dismissed them. She nodded and smiled as they left the room, then sighed. She hated having first lunch, and preferred the last one. After this, she wouldn’t have a reprieve until the end of the day. Rachel would no doubt ask her to watch her class while she went to the bathroom or something at least once, or something else would come up.

She left her door open and returned to her desk, but a commotion in the hall stopped her from slumping in her chair A shriek followed loud shouting, and it sounded like a body hit the lockers. Jennifer limped as quickly as she could to the doorway. Two boys grappled with each other, twisting to shove the other into the walls.

Jennifer didn’t recognize either of them. Instinct kept her back. Usually, a fight between two boys was a few blows, maybe a punch or two thrown if there was a real grievance, a grave insult, or a dispute over a girl. Girls fighting girls were more dangerous, since they rarely held back once they pushed past the breaking point to physical violence.
 

This was no boyish struggle for dominance. The larger of the two boys in the hall shoved the smaller one’s face into a locker hard enough to draw blood, sending Jennifer back into her room. She slapped the intercom button, and Linda, the lead secretary, answered after the beep.

“There’s a fight down here,” Jennifer shouted.

The shorter boy was losing badly. Jennifer couldn’t just stand there, even as Rachel grabbed at her wrist. She put her hands on the taller boy’s shoulder, and without looking he shoved his elbow into her stomach, knocking the wind out of her sails. She stumbled back, and her hurt ankle sent a shooter of pain up her leg enough to cause her to fall.

Jacob caught her. Whether it was intentional or instinct she didn’t know, but he picked her right up off the floor, gently lowered her to sit on the tiles, and stepped into the melee. He didn’t say anything before grabbing the taller of the two boys by the belt, then dragged him away from the smaller one. The shorter boy wasn’t fighting back, just shielding his head and cowering against the lockers. The big one rounded on Jacob and threw a wild punch that hit nothing but air. Jacob twisted out of the way, took hold of the boy’s wrist, and pinned him against the lockers in less than half a second.

By then, the cavalry had arrived. Howard Unger, the vice principal, followed Edwards down the hall. Howard immediately put himself between the two boys, while Edwards touched Jacob’s shoulder and eased him away. The boy immediately twisted free and tried to run, until Edwards roughly held him against the lockers. The doors rattled from the impact as Edwards dragged the boy’s arms behind his back and handcuffed him.

“Stop moving,” Edwards snapped.

“What happened?” Howard turned frantically in the hallway.

“I don’t know,” Jacob said. “I didn’t see it start.” He nodded at the taller boy. “That one hit Miss Katzenberg.”

“His backpack,” the shorter boy said, panting. His voice went high and tight from tension. “Check his backpack.”

“You fucking snitch!” the taller boy shouted and renewed his struggles. Edwards just sighed and pushed him harder up against the lockers. Calmly, he looked at Rachel, who was standing in the middle of the hall, gaping.

“Mrs. Garrison, go buzz Linda and tell her to call the locals.”

Rachel nodded and retreated into her room.

Howard bent down and found the boy’s backpack, and pull it open. He jerked back, his bushy eyebrows rising.

“Jesus Christ,” he said, stepping back. “Nobody touch that.”