Drenched in Light (18 page)

“You’re missing your parking permit again,” Verhaden was telling the driver. “Sebastian, you get one more ticket from the security officer, you’re going to be parking off campus. Get going. One more tardy and you’ll be on probation during the district contest.”

Sebastian ducked back in the window. “Yes, sir!” With an overzealous salute, he piloted the car around the corner while hanging his parking pass on the rearview mirror.

Had he taken it down so that it wouldn’t be noticed at some taco stand on Division Street? When I was in high school, the parking decals were huge and permanently affixed to the car windows. Everywhere we went, we were marked as Harrington students, whether we wanted to be or not. When had the school changed to removable parking permits, and why?

Turning the questions over in my head, I hurried up the side stairs and through the entrance next to Mrs. Morris’s classroom. Fortunately, she was busy haranguing some student about chewing gum. Halfway down the hall, Cameron was stuffing his things into his locker, laughing and flirting with a couple of girls as he squirted breath freshener in his mouth, then offered it around.

“Hey, Barry,” he called, as my third-period office assistant frumped by in his oversize clothes, which did nothing to hide the spare tire his mom had been in to talk to me about already. She wanted us to regulate what Barry ate in the cafeteria, which, of course, we couldn’t.

Barry glanced up just as Cameron tossed a grease-stained paper sack at him. “Here, have some breakfast.” Cameron laughed, and the girls giggled. “You look hungry.”

Dropping his binder, Barry caught the sack, then bent over to pick up his belongings, his pants sliding down to show the fleshy roll at the top of his rear end.

“Hey, dude, say no to crack,” Cameron quipped.

The girls laughed maliciously.

Barry hiked up his pants and pretended to laugh along with them. Shifting the breakfast sack to the other hand, he pitched it into the trash, muttering, “No, thanks,” as he slouched off to his first-period class.

“He-hey!” Cameron complained, jogging toward the trash can. “Dude, that was my lunch.”

I strode up the hall with my teeth clenched and I met up with Cameron as he tried to fish his lunch from the refuse container. “Leave it,” I hissed, watching Barry disappear around the corner, hugging his notebook. “Next time, be more careful what you do with your lunch.”

Grinning in a way he no doubt thought was charming, Cameron leaned over to reach into the trash can again.

“I believe you heard me, Mr. Ansler,” I ground out. “Go to class. And leave Barry alone. He’s my main man third hour in the office.”

Cameron looked me up and down in a way that was shockingly improper, considering that he was usually a well-behaved kid, polite to the point that it was disconcerting. “You could do better, Ms. C.”

One of the girls by the lockers drew an audible breath, her eyes widening. Cameron grinned impishly.

Leaning close, I pointed a finger between my face and his. “You’re right there on the line,
young man,
and I am
not
in the mood today.” The gravel in those words surprised even me. Where did that voice come from?

Cameron snapped his lips shut, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. The girls stood frozen.

From somewhere nearby, Mrs. Morris’s voice squawked, “
What
is going
on
out here?”

“It’s under control,” I snapped in my new go-ahead-make-my-day counselor voice before I turned back to Cameron. “Go to class.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Grabbing his books, he scooted away like a dog who’d just been bitten by a much bigger dog. Waiting until he was gone and the halls were cleared, I fished the lunch sack out of the trash and looked through it.

Nothing but soft tacos in plain paper wrappings. I dropped it back in the trash.

In my office, I pulled out the antidrug leaflets the task force had left, then logged onto the Web sites and began composing a list of things that needed to be checked into around the school. An hour later, Mrs. Jorgenson called about some problems with achievement-testing report sheets from last year, and I spent time in the basement helping her sort through boxes Mrs. Kazinski had mistakenly sent to long-term storage. A textbook company representative was waiting in the admin office when we returned, and I was trapped into listening to a sales pitch and taking samples, because the principal was nowhere to be found. By the time I returned to my computer and logged on to the antidrug Web sites again, I’d completely lost my place. Mr. Stafford stopped by my door just as I was getting back in sync.

“That press release ready for this weekend’s sidewalk jazz review?” he asked casually, giving the mess on my desk a pleasant but detached once-over.

Something I’d been about to write down flew from my head and buzzed around the room like a fly. “No, sorry,” I answered, still trying to regrasp the thought. In my study of taco stands and other drug-related issues, I’d completely forgotten that press releases were due at the city desk by five p.m. Monday. Harrington sent out notices about some performance or other nearly every week. This week it was the Harrington Jazz Players giving a concert at the mall. “But I’ll have it done by the end of the day, I promise.” One thing I had learned in Mrs. Morris’s English class was to whip up paragraphs of nice-sounding drivel in a flash.

“Good enough. I’ll get Verhaden to e-mail you a few notes about the performance.” Mr. Stafford nodded approvingly, as if I were the world’s finest high school counselor because I could put together press releases in time to make the newspaper. Apparently, he’d had trouble getting even that much out of Ms. Kazinski.

“Grant application coming along?” He leaned against my door, seeming content to stay there and chat awhile. Stafford was hard to figure out. One minute, he was locking everyone out of his office, too engrossed in school budgets to be bothered, and the next minute, he had all the time in the world to stand around and visit.

“It’s coming along.” I nodded to make it sound more convincing. “I worked on it some this weekend.”
So
not true. Between Jumpkids on Friday and Bett’s wedding plans the rest of the weekend, I’d spent about twenty minutes on the grant.
Mental note—take grant materials home tonight.

“Good . . . Good.” Tipping his head back, Stafford narrowed his eyes, and I realized he was ogling the materials on my desk. Luckily, it was such a mishmash of student records, attendance sheets, grants, scholarships, state achievement tests, and drug prevention information, that he probably couldn’t tell I was scanning student files, trying to decide if this drug issue was real or imaginary. According to the files, there hadn’t been anyone at Harrington’s middle school reported, disciplined, investigated, or suspended for drug use or possession in the recent past. But, in the back of my mind, there was Shamika’s comment, and also Sergeant Reuper looking at me with emphasis when he said,
“The thing about a smart kid with some resources is, he can keep up appearances for a longtime. . . .”

The thought I’d lost when Mr. Stafford came in returned, and I jotted it on my notepad:
Drug dog.

Tapping the pen on the desk, I looked up at Mr. Stafford. “I noticed in the Harrington handbook that the school is searched regularly by a drug-sniffing dog.” I tried to sound casual, not accusatory. “When does that happen? I’ve been here seven weeks and I’ve never even noticed.” Any tone added a ditzy,
Isn’t that a funny thing?
But I was thinking,
If there’s a drug dog here, it’s invisible.

Mr. Stafford shrugged. “They come through on the weekends, when the students are out of the way.”

“Why on the weekends?”
Whoops, watch out. Question way too direct.

Pushing off the door frame, Stafford shifted to a defensive posture. “Certainly, we can’t have dogs and uniformed handlers wandering the halls during instructional time. How would that look if a parent or a reporter or a visitor came in?” Obviously, he’d been asked the question before, and it was a sore spot. “There’s
never
been a drug problem at Harrington.”

How would we know?
I thought.
The drugs come and go with the kids. You have to look for them when the kids are here. Duh
.

“This is a high-profile school, Ms. Costell,” he added, pulling off his glasses and using them to punctuate the air between us. “Public funding being what it is, and with support for the arts dwindling all the time, we have an image to maintain. That image brings in the grants and fellowships and private endowments we need to survive. There are plenty of important people out there who would say that the time of the arts magnet school has come and gone, that it’s all about drilling kids on reading, writing, and arithmetic until they can pass some idiotic state-mandated test. There are plenty who would like to see some scandal bring this school down. It’s our job to make sure that doesn’t happen. Harrington comes first.”

Which means the kids come second, third, or somewhere down the line. As long as they look good on the outside, nothing else matters.
“Of course it does,” I replied, doing a surprisingly adept job of hiding my emotions. “By the way—unrelated subject.”
Not exactly so.
“I was wondering, when did the student parking passes change? I remember the old ones with the big purple sticker that took up half of the back windshield.”

Stafford chuckled, relieved that we’d tacked to a safer subject. “Oh, that’s been”—rolling his eyes upward, he thought for a moment—“three or four years ago now. Our kids drive nice cars, and some of the parents didn’t like those big stickers junking up the windshields. There was also some discussion as to whether the display of a Harrington sticker might provoke harassment by students who attend school at Simmons-Haley High, down the block. There certainly are some latent resentments from locals. This way, our students can come and go in relative anonymity.”

I wondered if Harrington parents had any clue what their kids were doing with that anonymity. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

In the hallway, the lunch bell rang, and the corridor began to fill up with students. Mr. Stafford took a step backward. “You’ll e-mail me the press release for approval when it’s finished?”

“Always do,” I said, falsely cheerful.

“Good girl,” he replied, turning away, and I wanted to shoot him in the back of the head with a rubber band. Pop. Right on the bald spot.
“Good girl,”
indeed.

I realized it was lunchtime, and I hadn’t seen Dell Jordan or done anything about gathering some tutoring materials for her. With only two weeks left in the nine-week grading period, there was no time to waste.

Hurrying down the hall to the book storage room, I pulled together a set of seventh-grade teacher’s guides, then headed for the cafeteria, where I stood surveying the serving lines until finally I concluded that Dell wasn’t there. Since she hadn’t been reported absent for the day, she was somewhere in the school. I had an inkling of where that might be. Leaving the chaos of the lunchroom behind, I walked around the corner to the instrumental music hall.

Memories assaulted me as I crossed the room. The ballet studios were nearby, rooms similar to this one. I could picture them, with their high arched windows, tall pressed-tin ceilings, and yawning wood floors. Closing my eyes, I drank in the scent, the feeling of being there again. Outside in the courtyard, the metal clips on the U.S. flag slapped against the pole—
ping, ping, ping
—and my mind raced back through the years, until I was a sixth-grade girl, standing still and silent, in the moments before the music began, listening to the flag beat against the pole, protesting its imprisonment, knowing that in a moment, the music would carry me away, and I wouldn’t think about anything.

Every fiber of my body ached as I relived the anticipation of the dance. It was like remembering air, or water, or light, and realizing there was no more. There wouldn’t be. Ever.

There’s a time to every purpose,
Sister Margaret had said as I gazed out the hospital window and wept because my ballet career was over. Sister Margaret read patiently from Ecclesiastes, or quoted it from memory, I wasn’t sure, because I couldn’t look at her.

She filled the room with words while I lay silent, wondering what possible good there could be in my life, ever again. . . .

The sound of a door closing somewhere in the hallway snapped me back to reality, and I opened my eyes, half expecting to find myself back in the hospital room with Sister Margaret.

Crossing the music hall with her voice still in my head, I quietly opened the storage closet door. Dell was sitting on the floor in the window light, a sack lunch spread out around her, her body curled over the pages of a book—alone, except for the ladybugs, and the dust, and dozens of decaying instruments stacked high on shelves. Around the walls, dance bars testified to the fact that, at some time, the room had been a practice studio.

Dell jerked upright as I entered. Eyes wide, she searched my face with a mixture of uncertainty and trepidation, wondering, no doubt, what I would say.

Stepping into the room, I closed the door behind me, and she stiffened.

“Studying?” I asked, and she sagged against her knees.

She held up
The Grapes of Wrath,
so that I could see the cover, then set it on the floor again, propping the book open with her slim brown feet. “We have a test on the first three chapters tomorrow morning. I read it, but Mrs. Morris always asks weird questions, and I get confused.”