The Sacrificial Daughter (11 page)

Seeing as Jesse wasn't going to do the assignment, she wasn't too worried about being caught by the plagiarism police. "Sure, I love bibliographies; they're my favorite part of any book. Sometimes I will read a research paper and skip right to the end, just to find out where they looked stuff up."

This last bit of nonsense had Mrs. Jerryman rolling her eyes in exasperation and when Jesse took a deep breath to expound on how footnotes got her "randy", a word she had been looking to use ever since Mrs. Jerryman had brought it up earlier, the teacher threw her hands up in frustration and stormed away.

"Good riddance," Jesse said under her breath.

She cast a sidelong look at Ky. He was reading, or so she thought at first. His grey-green eyes were seemingly intent on the book, yet they didn't stroll along the page as they should have. He only stared fixedly on a single spot. Jesse, thinking that she was being cool, reached into bag, grabbed her binder, and then straightened in her seat. When she did, she was a full six inches closer to the boy and practically falling out of her chair.

Opening her binder, she casually turned her head to inspect its far edge as an excuse to get a better look at the boy. She was filled with curiosity over him.

"Psst..."

Jesse turned with narrowed eyes. A plump freckled girl just in front and to the right of Jesse had her head turned slightly back. As if she were a spy, the plump girl made the tiniest eye contact and then gave her head an almost imperceptible shake.

Sadly, this was the friendliest gesture Jesse had yet received in Ashton. Though it might have been "friendly" it was also enigmatic. Was the girl trying to warn Jesse, or was she angry that Jesse was curious about Ky? Jesse raised an eyebrow in question, but just then the girl's face edged over a notch so that she was looking at Ky out of the corner of her eye.

Something seemed to startle her and she faced forward, going pale beneath her freckles. Jesse had to see what had so shocked the girl, it was a desire, a need beyond her ability to control, in fact it would have been physically impossible for her to have stopped her head craning around. What she saw wasn't shocking at all—Ky was simply writing on a piece of paper.

He was writing a note!

It's for me
, Jesse thought with a blush of excitement hitting her cheeks. She leaned over the slightest bit more and now her bottom was barely holding onto her chair. Gently, slowly she swayed in toward him and peeked at his note, but Ky's writing hand blocked what he wrote.

She froze in place, waiting with delicious anticipation. Finally he pulled his hand away, slipped the note to the side of his desk, and sat back with the impassive unvarying look of a slab of marble.

Leave me the F*** alone!

The note was like a slap in the face physically and emotionally and it stunned Jesse for all of a second. Then her anger, that constant companion, rose up fierce inside her. She hadn't been able to contain her curiosity, mostly because she didn't really try, but her anger was another thing altogether.

Sometimes it got away from her, whether she tried to control it or not. Like the time Rick Hobbson had cornered her with two of his friends. Her anger had flared like a sunspot on her mind and it had blotted out all thinking and demanded only action. She had sunk that pencil into his thigh a good three inches. It went in like it was running through warm butter. It went in until her fist ran up hard against his thigh and she felt something grate deep under his skin. The pencil sliding in so easily felt good...at least to Jesse who had grinned wickedly at the stunned look on Rick's face.

She had been lucky not to have been charged with a crime; one of the boys in his shock had blurted out the truth—how they had slapped and punched her...and threatened to do other things of a perverse nature to her. Though in truth they weren't threats, everyone knew that what the boys had planned to do weren't threats.

Sitting next to the Ghost...in her angry state of mind, once more the boy had become something less than human...Jesse stewed, trying to hold it together. It wasn't easy, especially with what she heard coming from the rest of the class.

Whether it was intentional or not, Mrs. Jerryman had her revenge over Jesse's mouthing off. The supposedly randy filled limericks were, judging by the snippets that could be heard plainly by all, not just randy filled, they were also
Jesse
filled.

There once was a girl named Jesse
... was the first attempt on every ones lips. There was a problem with this, however. The students had an impossible time trying to find words rhyming with Jesse. They came up with messy but after that they were clueless. This didn't stop them and eventually a consensus winner was discovered. A girl named Hayden came up with:

Poor Jesse had really quite an itch

Too bad that she was such a bitch

Though she looked for a while

She never got a boy who would smile

But found a dog would do in a pinch.

Jesse heard this one at least a dozen times before the end of class and by the last bell of the day, every freshman, most of whom had never laid eyes on Jesse, could recite it. Mrs. Jerryman pretended to be oblivious to what she had set in motion.

With her blood boiling and ghastly images of revenge flashing through her mind, Jesse stormed out of the room within a second of the class letting out. It was a good thing for her that she had calculus next.

Calculus, her favorite subject, helped a great deal to reign in the bitter fury within her. The objectivity of numbers meant that she could compete with the other students on a level playing field. In just this little world, one plus one meant the same thing for everyone. And as another bonus, the class was actually a few weeks behind her old calculus class back at Copper Ridge High. It made her fifty minutes an easy review.

Her teacher, Mr. Shay also helped to calm her. The fact that he loved mathematics was only evident by the gleam in his eye and the speed of his hand as he drew symbols and numbers to form long, wonderfully complicated equations on the chalkboard. The rest of him gave the appearance that he was apathetic, not only towards math, but to life in general. He slouched about in a somewhat slovenly manner, using desks and walls to keep himself propped up. His languid comportment had Jesse wondering if this was how a sloth would look if one was forced to stand upright in a tired suit for any span of time.

Mr. Shay's voice belied his love of teaching as well. He spoke in a monotone that made a metronome sound exciting, and again this was a good thing for Jesse. His droning words coupled with the fluid way he drew out equations had her in a sort of hypnotic state. Jesse watched and listened, her mind absorbed in the math and thus she was able to cool down before her next confrontation.

Ms Weldon sat waiting for Jesse in the art room. She was at her desk, whispering—under her breath, but not too far under—the catchy little limerick that was going around the school. It set Jesse's jaw and instead of repeating her mantra:
no tears
, in her mind, she repeated a new one:
no blood
.

"Do you have your essay, Jesse?" The teacher asked right off the bat. Wordlessly Jesse handed over her work, which was quickly scrutinized. "No bibliography? How am I to know whether or not any of this is plagiarized?"

There was that word again. It sent a warning signal going off in Jesse's mind. "You didn't ask for a bibliography."

Like a lion sensing a weakened gazelle, Ms Weldon moved in for the kill. "You are a senior in high school, Jesse. You have to start taking, not just initiative, but also responsibility for your actions. I'm afraid I'm going to have to give you a zero..."

As she had been talking Jesse slipped out the bibliography and held it out. "Your bibliography," Jesse said after a second, as Ms Weldon only looked at the paper.

Her long face was so tight that when she opened her mouth to speak Jesse was fairly certain that she heard a creaking sound like a rusty car door opening. "Why didn't you give me this with your essay?"

Because I wanted to find out just how much of a witch you were going to be to me
, Jesse thought to herself. Aloud she said, "I guess it got separated."

With a smoldering look, Ms Weldon took the paper and then turned dismissively and spoke to the class, "Alright everyone, take your seats. Quiet down, Valerie. I know some of you haven't finished your mock-ups; get them done today. No excuses. Everyone else keep going with your sections. Remember this will make Saturday go smoothly."

When she had finished her instructions, she turned back to Jesse. "Go on. You have a lot to catch up on...wait. Where is your original? Where is your life-sized mock-up? Where is your chalk?"

In confusion, Jesse looked around at what the other students were doing. Her eyes fell on a very large picture of what she took to be Adolf Hitler. "Chalk? I don't have..."

"Then you earned yourself another zero for the day," Ms Weldon said with a silky smooth tongue. She then turned sad and put a long arm around Jesse's shoulder. "I was just talking about initiative. You
wrote
an essay on
I
Madonnari
so
you must know what the basics entail with street art. Yet for some reason you show up here completely unprepared. Are you looking to fail this class?"

Jesse didn't think she had a snowball's chance in hell of passing the class. Because of her father's stringent methods she had run afoul of many teachers but none had ever been as bad as Ms Weldon and Mrs. Jerryman. Their vitriol was astounding to Jesse.

"No, I'm not trying to fail," she replied, trying to keep herself calm. This was great struggle for her. "Doing the essay kept me busy till after eleven last night. And really I didn't know exactly what the project is."

Still with an arm around Jesse's shoulders, Ms Weldon turned her to face the other students. "Initiative and responsibility, Jesse. These are my watch-words. You couldn't ask any of your fellow students? How tough would that have been?"

It would have been impossible. They were such an angry hateful lot; not a one of whom had done so much as smile in her direction, which in its way wasn't a surprise to Jesse. Her circumstances had forced her to mature faster than her peers and though she still seethed with rage at her treatment, she understood it.

Each one of the students had been affected, not just by her father's tough methods, but also by the down turn in the economy. Impotently, they watched as family members lost their jobs, friends take to food stamps in order to eat, and their childhood homes being foreclosed on. And now, in Jesse, they suddenly had someone upon whom they could focus all their harsh anger.

Jesse saw this and understood. She probably knew these kids better than they knew themselves. Three days ago none of them figured that they would be making up dirty limericks about a lonely girl, but Jesse knew something along those lines would occur. Just as she knew that eventually dog crap would be forced through the vents of her locker, or that her house would be TP-ed with a vengeance, or that her chair in biology or economics would be layered with super-glue.

Although it was only three classes into her second day, Jesse knew all about these kids.

Forced to be in her own little world, she had nothing better to do than to watch them and listen and learn. She saw the jocks and the nerds, the goth-girls and the cheerleaders, the emos, the sluts and all the rest, most of whom couldn't decide what they were or what they wanted to be. She saw them dance the dance of social cohesion, which from her outsider's perspective looked so dreadfully dull. Who cares if Jill cut her hair short again? Who cares if Danny is probably gay?

With hardly knowing any of their names, she knew them all very well. She prided herself on judging character, of grasping the not so subtle aspects of the teen mind.

Except...and there was a decidedly obvious except...there was something pointedly different about the kids at Ashton High. Their rivalries were less acute. Their divisions were aesthetic in nature rather than deep-seated. Their smiles, less. Despite Christmas vacation being only days away, there wasn't hearty, good-natured laughter ringing throughout the halls. Instead there was apprehension and watchfulness.

Jesse had been so involved with her confrontation with Mrs. Jerryman that she had barely noticed the watchfulness. At the beginning of second period calculus, she had been steaming mad, but still something odd was apparent. And then at the start of the art class only a few minutes before, when Ms Weldon had asked the kids to take their seats it clicked. Heads had turned, yes some to glare in her direction, but most turned to see who and more importantly who was not in class. The kids were taking stock, checking to see that their friends were still alive.

That was the difference. The killer attended Ashton High, or rather his presence did. He roamed the halls, riding along on the tops of everyone's minds, affecting everything and everyone. He was there, invisible and never spoken of, but he was there all the same...very much like Ky, the Ghost. In this way the two were alike. They...

"I asked you a question, Jesse," Ms Weldon said, jarring Jesse out of her reverie.

"Sorry. Like I said, I ran out of time," Jesse replied. "May I ask, what..."

She stopped in mid-sentence astounded by what she was seeing. The boy who was drawing the picture of Hitler had just turned it around to work on another part of it, and now that it was facing toward Jesse she saw that the picture wasn't of Hitler at all. It was of her father, James Clarke. The boy had captured his likeness very well, except that he had added the little Hitler moustache and instead of her father's hair being thick and wavy, it was greasy and lay flat across his forehead.

On each of the corners of the picture were swastikas and across the top in bold red and black was:
Arbeit macht frei--Work sets you free!

Wide-eyed and incredulous, Jesse asked, "What is this?"

"It's the art portion of the coordinated studies program," Ms Weldon said with all the innocence of a lamb. "We are learning about the importance of peaceable demonstrations as a means of affecting social and political change. Oh, speaking of which, there is a mandatory assembly on Saturday."

Jesse blinked. Saturday? So ingrained into her mind was the concept of the five day school week that the idea of having to go in on Saturday coupled with the bizarre and offensive picture of her father had her head spinning. "Huh?"

Ms Weldon smiled, seeming to enjoy Jesse's bewilderment. "Yes, Saturday. You are actually a lucky girl. Not only do you have the wonderful opportunity to learn about demonstrations, you are going to partake in one as well."

The words coming out of Ms Weldon's mouth were almost a foreign language that needed interpreting to Jesse's mixed up mind. Demonstrations?

"I am? What's it about?"

It couldn't be about war. The war in Iraq was over, and lately no one much heard or cared about what was happening in Afghanistan. Perhaps it was about racism. She hoped not. It had been beaten into her head with such repetition that she was sick of the subject. And what did her father done up to look like Hitler have to do with anything?

Ms Weldon smiled like the cat that had just eaten the canary. It was an unpleasant grin and there might as well have been feathers sticking out of her teeth. "We are protesting the deplorable, Nazi-like behavior of the new town manager. He is destroying people's lives, all in the name of the god that he worships: the all mighty dollar. The town council will be meeting with the town manager on Saturday to rubber stamp his proposals and the entire student body is going to be there to stop them. We're going to surround the building to keep them from entering."

Jesse blinked again. It felt like one long, slow, fluid motion that she could hear as well as feel. "You want me to protest my own father?"

"Why, do you not wish to?" the teacher replied, still smiling, still nasty. "Do you think that it's right to fire so many public servants, right before the holidays? Do you think that this spiteful behavior could, in anyway, possibly help the local economy? Do you think that it's a good idea to deprive children of a first rate education?"