The Eleventh Plague (9 page)

Tuttle gave him a withering look, then stepped back to the blackboard behind him. It was covered by some kind of pull-down screen. The class groaned as he reached for it.

“Yes, class,” Tuttle said. “That’s right. If you were able to better control yourselves, these little tests wouldn’t be necessary. So take out your —”

Before Tuttle could finish, the doors behind us burst open again, smacking against the walls. The class turned as one body toward the sound as Jenny Tan strode barefoot into the classroom. She carried a tattered notebook. A nub of pencil was stuck behind one ear.

“Well, well, well, this is quite an honor,” Tuttle deadpanned. “We haven’t been graced with your presence in weeks. So nice of you to join us today, Miss Green.”

“It’s Tan,” Jenny said as she plopped down into an open seat toward the back of the class and put her bare feet up on the chair in front of her. “And you’re welcome.”

A ripple of laughter went through the classroom. Jackson had his eyes closed tight and his head in his hands. Irritation pulsed off him in waves. Tuttle slapped his ruler down on the corner of his desk.

“I won’t have any more disruptions.”

Jenny raised her hands, palms up, as if to say he wouldn’t get any from her. Tuttle considered her a moment, made a notation on his sheet, then stepped back to pull on the screen in front of the blackboard. It shot up toward the ceiling, revealing a long list of
questions written in chalk. Jenny bent over her desk, laying her chin in the palm of one hand while she dug into the wood of her desk with her fingernail.

Jackson handed me a sheet of paper from his notebook as the rest of the class picked up their pencils and began writing. Jenny flicked her hair out of her face, turning just enough to catch me staring at her. It was like being stuck out in the open as lightning flashed all around me. I knew I should look away, and quickly, but I froze.

Jenny raised one eyebrow, and when I still didn’t look away, she jutted her face out at me, bugging her big brown eyes and making a show of staring back. I looked away immediately, up at the test questions, trying to calm the thrill of nerves in my stomach.

I was surprised to find that the test was on
Great Expectations,
a book I had actually read and more or less remembered. I made a stab at the questions, but it was hard to concentrate. I could feel Jenny across the room. It was like her body had this gravity all its own and it was pulling at me, trying to make me turn. I thought of her drawing spread across that rumpled paper. The riderless horse, motionless but somehow pulsing with movement and life.

Jackson nudged the back of my shoulder. “Ten minutes, Steve,” he whispered. “Come on.”

I shook thoughts of Jenny out of my head and forced myself to focus. The test was a fill-in-the-blank thing and time was ticking down, but I rushed to fill in the last answer just as Tuttle pulled the screen back down in front of the questions.

“Now, class,” Tuttle said as he collected papers. “We will continue our discussion of algebra. Turn to page two twenty-three….”

Jackson nudged me again. When I turned, he was holding a folded
piece of paper. He jerked his thumb over toward Jenny, who was bent over her notebook, drawing in the margins. I took the paper and unfolded it.

It was a short note, just two lines long, but when I was done reading, it felt like something had sucked every last wisp of breath out of my lungs.

Across the room, Jenny was smiling in a way that reminded me of a wolf.

The note said, in a jagged scrawl:

I saw what you buried in the woods Friday night.

You are a naughty naughty boy.

As soon as Tuttle dismissed us for the day, I jumped out of my seat and ran for the door.

“Hey!” Jackson cried. “Where are you going? We’ve got a game!”

I ignored him. Jenny had started to leave before “Class dismissed” had even left Tuttle’s mouth. I raced down the hallway behind her, but by the time I made it through the school’s front doors and outside she was gone.

The doors behind me opened again and someone rammed into my shoulder, pitching me forward. I turned around just in time to see a golden flash of blond and Will’s grinning face.

“You oughta watch where you stand. I think some people are trying to walk this way.”

Will and his friends laughed.

That’s it.

I grabbed two handfuls of Will’s shirt and spun him around, slamming him into the wall. An icy thrill went through me as his eyes bulged with surprise and fear. I was about to cock my fist when someone grabbed my elbow.

“Stephen, don’t,” a voice said. “Tuttle.”

As soon as he said it, Tuttle appeared behind us like a pillar of black smoke. “Mr. Green, Mr. Quinn, Mr. Henry. What’s going on here?”

“Nothing, sir,” Jackson said quickly. “Right, Stephen?”

Jackson gave me a nudge and I managed to back away from Will and agree through gritted teeth that everything was fine.

“Good,” Tuttle said. “Mr. Henry?”

Will jumped forward with barely disguised glee. “He’s got a knife, sir,” he said, pointing at my waist. “He keeps threatening us with it and it’s making all of us feel really unsafe.”

“That’s not true! I didn’t —”

Before I could say anything else, Tuttle pulled aside my coat and yanked the knife straight out of its sheath.

“I see,” Tuttle said, turning the dark blade over in his hands. “Mr. Henry, you and your friends are dismissed.”

“But —”

“You’re dismissed.”

Will’s glare bloomed into a wide smile. He held up one finger and mouthed the words
strike one
behind Tuttle’s back before he and his friends glided lazily up the hill and away from the school.

“You three may go as well,” Tuttle said to Jackson, Martin, and Derrick. As they left, I caught Jackson’s eye. He had a strange, worried look on his face but motioned that I should follow them toward the field east of the school when I was done.

“It’s old,” Tuttle said as he turned the leather-wrapped handle of the knife over in his hands. “Older than you. Your father’s?”

I nodded.

“I thought as much,” he said quietly. “He’s hurt, I understand.” I nodded, struggling to swallow something bitter that had risen in my throat.

“I see,” Tuttle said. He ran his finger gently along the knife’s blade. “I will not have chaos in this place, Mr. Quinn. There’s enough of that on the outside. To discourage it, there are a range of punishments I have for my students. Would you like to know what they are?”

I stood my ground, saying nothing.

“There is detention. There is extra homework and cleaning of the schoolhouse. If that doesn’t work, there is brief but vigorous corporal punishment. Now, for someone such as yourself, someone who has no ties to this town, I believe there is another option, the one I hear that Caleb Henry and a few others are already eager to exercise. Expulsion. From school and, if needed, from the town. I believe that would be something you or your father could ill afford, would it not?”

Tuttle waited for an answer. An ember burned down in the pit of my stomach. My fingernails stabbed into my palms. For this man who I didn’t know, had never met, to have that kind of power over me and my dad … it took every ounce of my strength to shake my head.

“I thought not. Luckily for you, there is another option.”

Tuttle turned the knife’s hilt back toward me.

“The stern warning. Take it home and do not bring it to my class again. Do you understand?”

I paused, expecting some sort of trick, then took the knife from him. Tuttle clasped his hands behind his back and stepped down to the concrete sidewalk.

“I’ll be watching you, Mr. Quinn,” he said over his shoulder. Then he was gone.

I fell against the brick wall behind me and clamped my eyes shut, grimacing from the spiky seed of a headache that was sprouting in the back of my skull.
What was I thinking? First Jenny sees me burying that stuff in the woods and now this?
Will said he’d make sure Dad and I
weren’t here long, and now it was pretty clear how he intended to make that happen. In coming to school, I couldn’t have helped him any more if I had tried. I should have seen it. I let my head fall hard onto the brick behind me, relishing the dull shock of the pain.

“Well,
that
was kind of awesome.”

I opened my eyes. Derrick was grinning madly and bouncing on the balls of his feet. Martin and Jackson were behind him.

“Just what we all needed before a little baseball game, right? Excitement!”

His voice was like broken glass in my head. I pushed off the brick wall and blew past the three of them without a word.

“Hey! Where you going?” Derrick cried as he jogged alongside me, trailed by the others. “We need you! You can even play second base!”

“Leave me alone, Derrick.”

“But —”

“I don’t want to play some stupid game, okay?”

“Stupid
— are you kidding me? Have you ever played baseball before? I mean, what the hell have you been doing all these years?”

“Gee, Derrick, maybe he’s been spending all his time looking for food and shelter and stuff.”

“Valid point, Green!” Derrick said, and darted in closer to me, sticking his face right in mine. “But you don’t have to look for food and shelter right now, do you?”

I glared at him, but he kept going.

“Okay, I get it. Crappy day for you. No question,” Derrick went on. “And I know that most people would back off at this point and let you go and gather your thoughts or whatever, but I can’t. My mom says it’s ‘cause I’ve got, like, this thing in my head that makes it so once I get on something I can’t let it go, and I get kinda hyper about it. She said when
she was a kid they’d have doped me to the gills on this stuff called Ritalin, but now — ha! — everyone has to just put up with me!”

“It’s true,” Jackson said. “He won’t stop bothering you until you play or one of you dies.”

“Ha! Nice one, Green. Steve, look, seriously —”

“I said leave me ALONE!” I planted my palms on Derrick’s chest and pushed him so hard he stumbled and fell back into the grass.

Everything went quiet except the sound of blood pounding in my ears.

Derrick looked up at me with huge eyes. Jackson and Martin were motionless, just behind me, waiting.

“Steve,” Jackson said, his voice tremulous. “Hey, come on, we were just trying to —”

I turned and shot him a hard glare. He staggered backward as I tore past Derrick and up the road.

The Greens were both gone when I got back to the house. I slammed the door behind me and threw my coat in a heap by Dad’s bed, fuming.

How could I have been so stupid? School. What was I thinking?

My fingernails found the scabs on my palm and sank in. I gritted my teeth. I wanted to break something. The chair by the fireplace. The frames on the mantel filled with pictures of idiotic smiling boaters, tanned and lying about in the sun, with no idea that their world was about to come crashing down around them.

I wondered how it would feel if I put my hand through the window above Dad. The glass would tear through my skin and scrape along the bones, maybe shattering them. I flinched at the idea of it, but still my hand collapsed into a fist and drew back. Just then, there was a rattle next to me as Dad’s chest rose slightly and then fell again.

My fist fell open. Will wanted me kicked out of here, and hadn’t I helped him enough already?

I break something, maybe Marcus gets mad, maybe that’s strike two….

I sucked in an angry breath, and slowly the redness that clouded my vision flowed out of me, replaced by something cold and dark, something empty.

“You okay?”

Startled, I turned to see Violet standing in the doorway, a big medical book tucked under her arm. I found a nearby chair and pulled it up to Dad’s bedside. I sat with my back to her as a tidal surge of guilt rocked through me.
This is where I should have been the whole time.
I took Dad’s hand in mine. It was light as a handful of grass.

“I imagine they’re getting a game started over there. I’m surprised you didn’t join them.”

I glanced over my shoulder. Violet was sitting in a chair just behind me. She had grabbed an old ball cap off a nearby table and had pulled it down over her hair. The book lay open in her lap.

“It
is
the national sport, you know.”

“It
was
the national sport,” I said. “I don’t understand why you people talk about America like it still exists. My grandfather would say it was” — I searched for the phrase. I had heard it a thousand times growing up, generally whenever one of us suggested a slightly shorter hike or a little more sleep — “like square dancing on the
Titanic.”

Violet’s book closed softly behind me. I didn’t move. My eyelids felt heavy watching Dad’s shallow breathing rise and fall.

Outside, the remaining leaves of fall swayed in the fading sun. Two kids, a boy and a girl with wide, bright faces, were playing out in the
park. I looked away and my eye fell on Violet’s cabinet, the cabinet that only I knew was lighter a few bottles.

“Why are you people helping us?”

“Why wouldn’t we?”

“You don’t know us,” I said, surprised at the wave of disgust rising in me. “You’re giving us medicine, food, your home, and you’re just getting in trouble for it. It’s stupid.”

“You’re what was put in front of us,” she said.

“That’s not an answer.”

Violet crossed her arms and looked out the window over my shoulder. “Because there was a time when people helped each other,” she said. “And that made the world a little bit better. Not perfect, but better. We’d like to think we can have that time back.”

“But what if you’re wrong?” I asked.

Violet shrugged. “Maybe we
are
on the deck of the
Titanic,”
she said. “Maybe the Collapse isn’t over and this will all be gone tomorrow. I don’t know. What I
do
know is what it’s like out there, we all do, and even if I can only have a little break from it, if I can be the kind of person I was before all this happened, then I’m going to take it. Even if it’s just for a day.”

Violet tossed the baseball cap into my lap.

“You know what I mean?”

She left without another word, entering the kitchen and leaving me alone.

I shifted in my chair. Outside, leaves swayed across the blue sky. Dad lay before me, as still as ever. I turned Violet’s threadbare cap over and over in my hands.

There was a squeal of laughter and the two kids flew by the window. They were maybe six or seven years old, the girl with a long stream of
golden hair. The boy was taller and thin as a sapling. They were both holding sticks that had colored streamers attached to the ends so as they went by they were a streak of red and purple and blond, like a flight of brightly colored birds. I pulled the cap down over my head and watched as they banked into the sunshine and disappeared into the park.