Driver's Ed (11 page)

The fear of being found out puddled in her lungs.

S
chool was simply school.

Accidents were not mentioned. Teachers taught. Homework was collected. Morgan didn't run into Nickie. Was Nickie home pretending to be sick? Would he lie low till it was over? How would they know when it was over?

At eleven o'clock Morgan walked carefully into the library, balancing himself, imitating his mother's wonderful smile and his father's cool. He smacked hands with Taft and Chase and opened a
Car and Driver
to memorize, just like always. He felt Remy's presence but did not look up.

Better nobody should realize she had gone along. Best if nobody realized Morgan had been there, either, but at least he could do his part to keep Remy safe. The thing was to pretend he had never known her.

Driver's Ed filled up. Was it his imagination, or were they all uncharacteristically quiet? Was he self-conscious, or were they all looking at corners or shoes, anywhere but at each other?

“Today,” said Mr. Fielding, “nobody will go driving. A police officer is going to meet us out on the school lawn.”

Police
.

Morgan was immediately badly out of breath.

Shock, he thought. My lungs are closing down.

He tried to hide the quick, shallow breathing from Taft and Chase. Sequences of his life spun through Morgan's mind as if he were channel-grazing his future. Prison/handcuffs/trials. His father's horror blended into his mother turning away, his sister's cruel laugh.

“There was a terrible accident,” said Mr. Fielding. “Did everybody hear about it?”

Accident
. Morgan seized on the word. Yes. Totally accidental. Nothing to do with me.

Christine, assuming that not everybody had heard, repeated the television commentary. It was like a rerun from a younger, watered-down Anne. The words dripped in Morgan's ears like full sponges. He could wring his brain out.

“Why do they always blame kids?” said Kierstin, who got belligerent easily. She was duking up for a fight.

“And even if it is a kid,” said Taft, “it'll be one of the scums who goes around keying cars and spray-painting
buildings and breaking into vending machines. It won't be one of us.” Taft looked to Morgan for confirmation.

Morgan could not stop himself from looking down at the tabletop and swallowing hard. When he looked up, Taft was staring at him.

“Everybody outside,” said Mr. Fielding.

“It's cold out,” said Lark, though it was not. “I have to get my coat.” Lark would not join them on the lawn. She hated the outdoors and felt it had no right to exist.

The kids whined and complained. Why they were meeting this police officer on the lawn, instead of here in the classroom, nobody could imagine.

Morgan knew.

He was going to be arrested in front of his peers. They were going to make an example of him.

He pictured the phone call to his father. He hadn't talked to his father in years. The opening subjects would be jail and bail.

Somehow he stumbled with the rest out of the library and down the hall to the near exit. His feet landed on pavement and carried him across the bus drop-off circle.

He would not look at Remy. If he did, he would hang on to her, or she to him, and they would be ruined.

There, towed onto the winter-dying grass of the school campus, close to the flagpole, displayed to all traffic on Warren Street, was the vehicle that Denise Thompson had driven to her death.

It was so crumpled, so destroyed, Morgan did not know how they had gotten her corpse out. What parts of it had killed her? Remained stuck in her? Gone with her into the grave?

Kierstin and Cristin began to cry. Joss yanked out a little Kleenex pack and handed tissues around. No boy took one.

Morgan forced himself to look at the car. Taft was still watching him. Taft could not actually know, but he could guess. Morgan thought he had already guessed.

“So what've we got?” said the cop.

The steering wheel was folded in two, as if it had been made of Play-Doh.

“We've got a dead mother,” said the cop.

Remy's sob escaped her throat, a high, awful keening, like a dying bird.

Don't do that! thought Morgan. You'll give us away.

But in the strange way of girls Cristin and Kierstin seemed to find Remy's reaction reasonable, and they comforted her.

“All because some teenager wanted a sign for his bedroom,” said the cop. “You know what I mean? This woman died, she's not a whole lot older than you are, you know, and her baby's never gonna remember his mommy, all because some teenager didn't stop to think.”

I was like Lark, Morgan thought. I stopped, but I didn't stay stopped.

“Probably the same kids that are playing mailbox baseball did this. Something to do. Thursday night, kids didn't care about their homework, just wanted something to do. Well, you just remember this,” said the cop. “Denise Thompson is never going to have something to do again.”

Wait.

The cop had not come to arrest him. This was just driver education. Just another lecture. The car was a visual aid. More impact than a film.

“How do you know it's kids?” demanded Kierstin. Police set her off. She saw a uniform or a blue light and she took the offense.

The cop knew her type, just as he knew the sign-stealing type. “Kids don't think.”

“Some kids think,” she argued.

She was boring him. He said, “I meet the ones who don't.” The officer explained that it was state policy now to display car accidents rather than pretend they didn't happen. Therefore the wreck would lie on the lawn to sober the kids up. Speaking of sober, he added, the victim had been. Could have been plenty of alcohol in the vandals, though.

Christine coughed and fussed with her hair and her scarf. She looked like a person fidgeting with small decisions before making the big one. Christine, who had objected to the sign game.

Joss looked at Christine. Chase and Taft looked at Christine. Kierstin and Cristin looked at Christine. The eye pressure of peer pressure.

Morgan knew he should tell first. It would go better if he admitted it before they forced him to. I could leave Remy out, he thought. But would Nickie leave Remy out?

And the biggest
but
of all … would his father and mother go with him to the police station? He was no longer the kid they had in mind. The kid they had in mind did the right things.

The policeman got in his squad car.

The right thing would be to walk after the cop. Sir? May I talk to you for a minute?

Christine gave a funny little sigh and put a Kleenex to her eyes.

The cop started his engine and drove off with a sort of efficient speed, as if he could not get away from these kids and their sign-stealing fast enough.

Morgan replayed the night in Nickie's car. This time Good Morgan Campbell thought ahead to the consequences, because he was not a slime who keyed cars or spray-painted bridges.

But I am a slime. I'm glad I got away with it. I want to go on getting away with it.

He had a premonition of the headline:
GOOD KID KILLS
.

Kierstin poked Taft in the butt and got a nice reaction, equal parts irritated and flirty. Joss turned a cartwheel, whether to celebrate being alive when Denise Thompson was dead, or because the dead didn't matter, or because she was practicing for cheerleading, Morgan didn't know. Mr. Fielding wandered back in. Remy had wrapped herself so tightly in her jacket, she might have been bandaging cracked ribs.

He wanted Remy to be okay.

It would be wrong to tell. It would not bring back Denise Thompson. If he told, his life would be over. It wouldn't matter what he got on college boards. What college would take an application from a kid who had killed somebody?

It was just a sign. I didn't kill her. All I did was take a sign.

He went carefully back inside, refusing to turn around and look again at the moralizing exhibit on the grass.

“H
ey, man,” said Nickie behind him in the hall.

So he hadn't skipped school. “Nicholas,” Morgan
acknowledged. He kept walking. Kept hoping, somehow, that he was not friends with Nickie again.

Nickie caught up to him. Morgan was on his way to Phys Ed. The halls were packed with boys leaving and arriving at locker rooms. Nickie muttered, “Weird, isn't it?”

The last word Morgan would have used was
weird
.

“I mean,
we did that
,” said Nickie.

“Shut up.”

“I think about it at night,” said Nickie. “A person was alive and now she's not. We managed that.”

“
Shut up
,” breathed Morgan. It could not be pride he heard in Nickie's voice. Nickie could not be proud that he had “managed” to end a life.

“It's sort of the ultimate cool, isn't it?” said Nickie.

Morgan thought he might be having a seizure. The inside of his head changed colors and noises exploded between his ears. His balance shifted and he stumbled.

“Thing is,” said Nickie, “my parents wouldn't understand.” He took Morgan by the shoulders for emphasis. “We gotta shut up about it.” Nickie gave him a light punch in the belly. “See ya,” he said.

See you? thought Morgan. In my grave. I never want to see you again. I never want to think about you again. If it hadn't been for you we wouldn't have done that! It's your fault. You chose that sign.

He made it to the locker room and had to sit on the long, thin wooden bench that divided the lockers. His head wouldn't stay up. It felt as if his neck had gotten thinner, or been severed. He kept tipping.

The gym teacher was kneeling next to him. “Morgan?”

Morgan was afraid of speech. What if confession
popped out of him? What if, when the gym teacher only needed to know if Morgan was going to throw up, and if so, would Morgan please do it in the toilet, Morgan said, “I killed her”?

He rehearsed. Then, carefully, “I'm okay, I think.” He had never been less okay.

“You sit out,” said the gym teacher. The gym teacher also punched him lightly.

When Morgan finally managed to walk into the gym, and slid to the floor with his back against the wall, everybody else was doing a floor exercise. Basketballs sailed around like huge brown atoms in a science exhibit.

If he blamed Nickie, he didn't feel sick.

L
ark bounced from subject to subject like fizz in a soda. She must not let anybody bring up the sign thing. They might think she had taken it. She did have a stop sign, courtesy of long-gone Joel.

The thing was, you couldn't tell one stop sign from another. She could not risk having anybody look among her belongings.

Lark did not want to get involved with some sort of murder thing. She was a junior. Time to think about colleges. She had a nice background. B average, high PSATs, lots of theater and dance.

Lark eyed Remy. Her best friend was stumbling around, visibly upset, complexion pasty, hands cold, speech slow. Remy was not destined to become an actress.

Lark would cool the friendship till things settled down.

*  *  *

“S
way to the left!” cried Mr. Willit. “Sway to the right!”

“This is not cheerleading,” said Taft. “Try to be normal, Mr. Willit. We basses are compromising our masculinity by singing in chorus at all.”

“This isn't cheerleading?” said Mr. Willit, his jaw dropping in shock. “Oh, no! Taft, why didn't you tell me sooner?”

Concert Choir was happy. Another skit was under way. The only question was who the victim would be.

“I'd like our normalcy representative up here, please,” said Mr. Willit.

“He means you, Queen Joanne,” said Chase.

Morgan had not been able to eat in two days. A humming noise occupied his skull. He said, “Come on, Mr. Willit. I'm normal. Doesn't that exempt me from being a cheerleader?”

Everybody laughed. He must have delivered the line okay.

Involuntarily his eyes flashed toward Remy. She was sitting very straight, back away from the chair, like a punishment. Behind her was a row of three tubas on stands, so she was displayed against curves of gleaming gold.

Mr. Willit jerked dramatically to a halt. “Is that a blush of interest I behold upon your face, Morgan?” he said.

The chorus loved it.

Run with it, Morgan ordered himself, be the joke, laugh along. Don't fight it, not now.

Mr. Willit patted Morgan's cheeks, testing for heat level in this blush. Everybody who could whistle did.

Remy said, “Where, when we need him, is the God who Restrains Music Teachers?”

Mr. Willit laughed with everybody else. “Remy,” he said, “I kind of like you.”

“D
o we tell?” said Morgan.

That was their date. Remy wanted to be in his lap, in his arms, in his life, and instead she was in a mall, among shoppers and strangers and canned Christmas carols.

They stood in the vast multistoried center, decorated now for Christmas, although Thanksgiving had yet to arrive. A million glittering gold stars fell from invisible wires. High in a distant corner one star was much larger than the rest.

Mr. Willit kind of likes me, thought Remy Marland.

What would Concert Choir be like if he knew? If Mr. Willit kind of despised her. Kind of vomited at the thought of her.

Around them snaked a line of toddlers eager to sit on Santa's lap. “I know what I'd ask for,” said Remy.

Morgan nodded. “I'd take the night back.”

If only you could. It had been just a moment in their lives. It had no right, that moment, to have done so much without their consent.

Remy wanted the stars above to be stars of love. She wanted a kiss.

They slumped down on the pewlike curl of endless seating. Morgan put his arm around her. Her dreams for junior year had included just such an arm, in just such a place. She'd wanted to date Morgan, or a boy as terrific as Morgan, share movies and popcorn and have their favorite song, and she would wear his class ring on a ribbon around her neck. “Never mind, Morgan. You don't have to date me. I'm thinking of becoming a nun, anyway.”