Sapphire: A Paranormal Romance (27 page)

Jimmy smiled.  He
liked the way Warren had a way with words and could make him feel better.

"So are you
visiting the school this morning?" Warren asked.

"Once Tabitha
wakes up, yes."

Warren laughed. 
"She was up late last night.  She can be notoriously bad at getting up in
the morning.  She is not a morning person.  You may want to head up and knock
on her door."

Jimmy looked
dubious.

"Don't look
at me," Warren said with a laugh.  "I now know better."

With that, he
winked and stood up.  He poured more hot water from a kettle on the stove over
the bag of tea in his mug.

"You're a
guest, so maybe she won't actually bite your head off," Warren said. 
"Just be careful.  Both of you."

He vanished into
his office.

Jimmy sat there
for a moment, mulling things over.  He looked at the clock.  It was still very
early.  He decided he would wait another half an hour and then go knock.

He hoped she did
not bite his head off.

Tabitha
was really not a morning person, so Jimmy had been warned.  When the half hour
was up, Jimmy decided to give her another fifteen minutes.  When those went by
without a peep from Tabitha or Warren, he headed upstairs.  He knocked on the
bedroom door.  When there was no answer, he knocked again.

"Mmmmm,"
was the reply he got.

"Tabitha?"
he asked.  "It's Jimmy.  It's time to get up.  We need to go to the
school."

"Mmmm.
M'sleepin'," was the very muffled reply.

Jimmy nudged the
door open.  There was a pile of blankets on the bed that formed the general
shape and outline of a human being.  The blankets were right up to her chin,
though Tabitha was sleeping on her stomach with her face looking away from
Jimmy.  Jimmy stepped into the room cautiously, but was almost immediately betrayed
by a creaking board.

"Wha'?"
Tabitha moaned.

"It's Jimmy,
Tabitha," Jimmy said.  He cleared his throat and tried to speak more
loudly.  "We need to get going."

"Hmmmmmm,"
was the reply.  This was followed by another hum that turned into a moan.

A moment later,
Tabitha sat upright in bed.  Her eyes were half closed and her hair flew about
her head as if she had endured some terrible electric shock.  A red line ran
down one side of her face, probably from sleeping on a crease in the pillow.

"OK,"
she said, sounding just a bit irritated.  "Go downstairs.  I'll be down in
a minute."

She waved in a
kind of abstract way towards the rest of the house.  Jimmy smiled, but when it
was not returned, he slowly backed out of the room.

Jimmy headed back
downstairs and sat at the kitchen table, sipping some of the same tea that
Warren had been drinking.  He eventually heard the shower running. About
forty-five minutes later, Tabitha emerged dressed, her hair in a ponytail and
her face looking washed and fresh.  She still had a bit of a scowl on her face.

She walked down
the stairs, through the living room, and then into the kitchen.  When Jimmy
tried to say good morning, she held up her hand.  She walked to the fridge,
opened it, bent over, and rummaged around for a bit.  A moment later she came
out with a small plastic bottle of Diet Coke.  She cranked open the top and
downed the entire bottle in seconds.  She belched quietly into her hand, tossed
out the bottle, reached back into the fridge, and emerged with a new one.  Only
then did she turn to face Jimmy.

"Good
morning," she said.  "Never speak to me until I have had that first
blast of caffeine."

Jimmy gave a kind
of salute.

"Are you
ready?" she asked.

Jimmy assured her
he was.

"Then let's
get on the road," she said.

With that, she
turned and headed back into the living room.  She found her purse and her car
keys.  Jimmy stood by and waited, and then followed her out the door and into
the garage.  Outside was a Volvo SUV, and he got into the passenger seat. 
Tabitha situated herself in the driver's seat and opened the Diet Coke.  She
set the bottle in the cup holder, pushed her key fob into the dash, and started
the car.  Moments later, they were backing out of the garage and down the
driveway.

"Are you
ready for this?" Jimmy said.

As she shifted
into drive, Tabitha looked at him and smiled.  "I'm a award-winning
professional journalist, Jimmy.  I'm always ready."

They drove off.

There
is something about a school when it's very early or very late.  Even though,
throughout the day, the halls are buzzing and alive with more activity than it
seems possible for the walls to hold, it is equally abandoned, lonely, and sad
when it is empty.  The building seems to be a dead zone, and haunted.  You can
almost feel the spirits of students and teachers still walking the halls, lost,
alone.  It's a building without its soul.

Tabitha and Jimmy
pulled into the parking lot just as the sun was coming up from behind the
trees.  The sky was blue, and it looked like another gorgeous day was brewing. 
There was only one other car in the parking lot, and Jimmy knew it was Mrs.
Walters’s car.

They entered the
school through the same door that Jimmy had been dragged through just a day or
so before.  Their feet echoed eerily in the empty halls.  Tabitha seemed to
know the way.  They immediately took the stairs to the left and went upstairs
to the second floor.  They made their way down the hall, just past the
teacher's lounge and the restrooms near the center of the hall, and then they
reached the room.  It was the only one, during the summer, that had air
conditioning.  There was Mrs. Walters, looking old and hunched over, behind her
huge oak desk.  She was grading papers, just like she always was at this time
of the morning.

Tabitha knocked.  Mrs.
Walters looked up, startled, and then smiled.  Then she looked confused when
she saw Jimmy standing there.  She waved, and Tabitha opened the door.

"Well,
well," she said as Tabitha and Jimmy entered, "if it isn't two of my
favorite people.  How are you, Tabitha?  And Jimmy, I heard about what happened
to you.  I cannot say I approve of you missing school, and technically and
officially I cannot condone what you did.  However, good shot!"

She smiled, and it
was contagious.  Tabitha and Jimmy both smiled back.  They found seats in front
of Mrs. Walters's desk.

"So what can
I do for you two?" 

Tabitha sighed,
seemed to compose herself for a moment, and then said, "Well, Mrs.
Walters, we have some questions for you.  Hold on to your seat, as we have
quite the story to tell."

Tabitha and Jimmy
began their tale.  They started out slowly, at first, hesitantly.  Then, as
they got further and further along, they got more confident, louder, and more
animated.  By the time Jimmy began telling Mrs. Walters about Devlin Little
trying to run him off the road, he was on his feet re-enacting the entire scene
by ducking around the chairs and desks.  Mrs. Walters watched carefully,
nodding, smiling, and making humming noises from time to time, but did nothing
to reveal her true thoughts.  When Tabitha and Jimmy were done, both of them
sat back in their seats in silence.

Mrs. Walters
waited to see if there was more, and then sighed.  She opened her mouth and
then closed it.  She shook her head, adjusted her glasses, sighed again, and
then cracked a smile.  Her entire face appeared to wrinkle as she did it.

"That is
quite a tale," she said.

Tabitha and Jimmy
smiled and leaned forward in their seats.

"It is quite
a bit to digest so early in the morning," Mrs. Walters continued.

Tabitha and Jimmy
nodded, but said nothing else.

"Well, I
hardly know where to begin.  First off, yes, of course, I remember Sapphire. 
It would be hard not to remember her."

Mrs. Walters
leaned back in her chair.  Her face took on a kind of distant look and she
stared up at the ceiling.

"She was
beautiful.  She was also smart.  She was one of the best students I have ever
had, and given the number of students I've had by now, that's saying
something.  She was kind, and she wasn't afraid of me the way most students
are.  Even back then I had a reputation of being rather fearsome.  I cannot
imagine why, other than that I demand that my students perform well.  But what
can you do about the teenage mind?"

She paused and
smiled.  Tabitha smiled back.  Jimmy bobbed his head up and down.

"I loved
reading the term papers she wrote, and I remember that she loved to read and
write poetry.  I would recommend books to her and she would sometimes give me a
book report just because she enjoyed it so much, not because I assigned one. 
Truly remarkable."

She sighed again,
but there was sadness tinged within the exhalation.

"As she got
older and developed, I knew that boys were going to notice her.  It was
inevitable.  The one thing most students around here think is that we teachers
are safely tucked away in our classrooms and teachers’ lounges and we have no
idea what you all are talking about.  The fact is that the hallways here are
like picking up an old party line phone.  You can hear the conversations on the
other end while remaining silent and hidden."

Tabitha shuddered
at this analogy.  Jimmy frowned, but kept his focus on Mrs. Walters.

"So I knew
that the boys were noticing her.  Sapphire was fiercely independent.  This was
just before the whole women's lib movement really caught on.  She was at the
forefront, though.  She would debate men in the classroom about fair pay for
women in the workforce and whether or not a woman's place was at home.  She was
considered by some of the men—particularly the athletes and those on the
football team—to be a stuck-up prude.  She was some crazy women's rights nut,
and they felt that they were the ones who would tame her."

She shook her
head, thinking, her eyes still distant.

"I tried to
warn her.  In a town like this, as conservative as it was, perhaps still is,
her stance on things were so radical.  She was talking about things that were
almost unheard of in Knorr, and certainly frowned upon.  As the big dance
approached that year, I had overheard Devlin Little and his cronies talking
about her.  They had intentions of asking her out and probably attempting to
have their way with her or something equally diabolical.  They often behaved as
if the women’s suffrage movement had never happened and women really had no
rights.  What could I do?  I had nothing but rumors and overheard bits of
conversation, and times were so different then.  I tried to talk to her after
class one day, asking her if she had plans for the night of the dance. She told
me that she had gone out with Jesse a few times and that she hoped he would ask
her.  Later that very day, he did, as I heard.  I liked Jesse and I was hopeful
that things would work out.”

"Anyway, I
was there that night.  I was at the dance when she came in.  She just sucked
all of the air out of the place.  The band even missed a few notes when she
came in.  It was like she had swallowed the sun and it shone through her; she
glowed everywhere she went.  I was standing off to the side when I witnessed
Devlin Little and his gang heading over there.  I was in the middle of a
conversation with a student and another teacher, trying to watch the event
happening out of the corner of my eye.  I tried to get over there and head them
off at the pass, but there were too many other kids in the way.  Well, then
there was a confrontation and Jesse threw his drink on Devlin.  I was sure that
Devlin would murder the both of them, what with the way Sapphire was laughing
at him.”

"Anyway, I
got to Sapphire as she was dragged out of the gymnasium.  I grabbed her arm. 
She was so angry she nearly tore out of my grasp and knocked me over.  I asked
her if she was all right, and there was just fury in her eyes.  Jesse looked
terrified and was sweating.”

"Sapphire
cried to me, 'It's just not fair, Mrs. Walters! It's not fair and it's not
right.  Devlin and his crude friends should be the ones leaving, not me and
Jesse.'"

Mrs. Walters
rubbed her eyes.

"I told her
that it would be best if she went home and that we could talk about this more
on Monday.  She shook her head and said that she and Jesse were heading out on
the town.  Nothing that happened here was going to stop her and Jesse from
having fun.  I was worried about what that might mean and I tried to get her to
explain, but she would have none of it.  She grabbed Jesse's hand and stormed
out of the gymnasium and into the night."

Mrs. Walters
sighed. “That was the last I saw of her."

She looked down at
her hands and a wistful expression crossed her face.  Jimmy could see that her
eyes were wet and that she was close to tears.

"I haven't
thought about her in some time," she said quietly.  "I tried to find
out what happened to her.  I had never met her family.  They never came to any
of the parent-teacher conferences.  I didn't talk to her about her family,
either, so I have no idea if she had brothers or sisters or if her mother and
father were still married or alive.  I heard from others that her family had
simply up and moved.  No one was certain if she was with them, and there were
countless rumors as to what happened."