Innocent Blood

a maroon polyester shirt was waiting beside her Explorer. His face was the same maroon as his shirt, and beaded with sweat.

‘What the fuck do you call this?’ he demanded.

‘What the fuck do I call what?’ Lynn didn’t want to show that she was the slightest bit afraid of him.

‘What, you’re blind? Where’s your goddamned guide dog? You parked on the goddamned grass, for Christ’s sake.’

‘Well, I’m sorry, but there was no parking space anyplace else.’

‘Oh, and you think that’s some kind of excuse? If there was no parking space anyplace else you should’ve gone around the block again until there was. You’re all the same, you women. You think you can do whatever you damn well like and say whatever you damn well like and park wherever you damn well like and you don’t give squat for nobody else.’

Lynn opened the Explorer’s door and climbed into the driver’s seat, but the man clung on to the door to prevent her from closing it.

‘Listen, lady, I don’t even have to take care of this piece of grass, but I do, because it’s outside of my house and I’m proud of my house, and then somebody like you comes along and drives their goddamned vehicle all over it. How would you like it if I came around to your house and drove my goddamned vehicle all over your goddamned grass?’

‘I think you’d better take your hands off my door,’ said Lynn.

‘And what if I don’t?’

‘I’ll call for the school security guard, that’s what.’ All the same, her heart was thumping wildly. The man had a large maroon wart on the left side of his nose and she couldn’t stop looking at it and she was convinced that he knew she was looking at it.

He turned his head around for a moment, as if he were looking for somebody, and wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. Then he turned back to Lynn and said, ‘OK. I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to curse you for this. I’m going to wish on you the shittiest day that you ever experienced in your entire life.’

He took his hands off the door. Lynn immediately slammed it and locked it. He stood beside the Explorer, not saying anything more, but he lifted his finger and pointed it at her as if to say, you mark my words, lady, you’re going to remember this day for ever.

Wednesday, September 22, 8:43 A.M.

Ann Redmond looked out of the window of her study and frowned. A group of children had gathered around the bench on the far side of the schoolyard, ten or twelve of them at least, and she was experienced enough in grade school crowd patterns to see at once that they were huddling.

Huddling was what children did when there was something exciting to look at and they didn’t want the teachers to see what it was. As far as Ms Redmond was concerned, they might just as well have raised a placard announcing WE ARE BEING NAUGHTY. She took off her half-glasses, marched out of her study, and went out on to the front steps where Lilian Bushmeyer, the physical education teacher, was sitting on the wall and supervising the schoolyard by reading a dog-eared copy of The Bridges of Madison County.

‘Over there, Ms Bushmeyer,’ she said curtly, nodding her head.

Lilian Bushmeyer shaded her eyes and peered across the asphalt. After a while she shook her head and said, ‘I don’t see anything.’

‘Conspiratorial body language,’ said Ms Redmond impatiently. ‘Go and see what they’re up to.’

Lilian Bushmeyer reluctantly put down her book and plodded across in her Birkenstocks to see what all the fuss was about. As she came closer, she could hear the children giggling and squealing, and then suddenly there was a flustered ‘Shh! Shh! It’s Bush Baby. Put it away!’ Some of the children broke away from the huddle, leaving a small knot of girls right in the middle. Lilian Bushmeyer walked right up to them and held out her hand.

‘What?’ asked Jade Peller. She had just turned eleven, and she was taller and more mature than most of the girls in the sixth grade. She had long black hair, a thin pale face, and she always dressed in black, with silver bangles around her wrists. Her father was Oliver Peller, who had written music for Wes Craven and John Carpenter.

‘Whatever it is, give it to me,’ said Lilian Bushmeyer.

‘It’s nothing.’

‘Well it’s obviously a very interesting nothing. Hand it over.’

‘It’s only a stupid game, Ms Bushmeyer,’ complained Helen Fairfax. She was plump and pink-cheeked but she had a mass of curly blonde hair and it was obvious that once she had lost her puppy fat she was going to grow up as stunning as her mother, Juliana. Her father, Greg, was one of Hollywood’s most talked-about independent producers and had recently bankrolled the stalker movie, Breather.

Lilian Bushmeyer waited patiently, her hand still held out. Maybe she hadn’t yet developed Ms Redmond’s radar for subversive crowd formations, but she knew how to deal with the spoiled children of minor celebrities. You had to act resolutely unimpressed, which Lilian Bushmeyer genuinely was.

At last, Jade produced a crown-shaped piece of paper from behind her back, and handed it over. It was nothing more than one of those fortune-telling devices, with the paper folded into triangles, and a fortune written on each of them. Except that the fortunes on this device were much stronger than the usual ‘you will be lucky in love’ or ‘you will be rich and famous’ or ‘you will go to jail.’

One of them read ‘you will suck Mr Lomax’s cock.’ Another said ‘you will lose both your legs in an auto accident.’ A third predicted ‘you will get pregnant at thirteen.’

‘Like Helen said, it’s only a game,’ Jade protested as Lilian Bushmeyer opened each triangle in turn. The last prediction was ‘you will die before your next birthday.’

When she had finished, Lilian Bushmeyer looked at the children one after the other. It was obvious that three or four of them were really embarrassed and ashamed, and it seemed that the boys went pinker than the girls.

‘Do you want me to show this to Ms Redmond?’ she asked.

‘Sure,’ said Jade. ‘Might give her a thrill.’

‘No!’ gasped David Ritter. ‘She’ll kill us. I know my mom will kill me. My stepmom will kill me, too.’

Lilian Bushmeyer said, ‘I know that you probably didn’t mean any real harm, but you know what this is? It’s tasteless, and there’s little enough taste left in this world without you young people making things worse. Supposing one of you did lose your legs, or did get pregnant, or did get sexually abused? How would you feel then?’

‘I’d feel like my fortune-telling really works.’ Jade grinned.

‘So which one did you pick?’ Lilian Bushmeyer asked her.

‘Die before my next birthday.’

‘And do you want that to happen, just to prove you right?’

‘I don’t care. Like, what’s death? It’s only like not being born.’

Wednesday, September 22, 9:03 A.M.

Ms Redmond stood up in assembly and the sun shone on her glasses so that she looked as if she were blind.

‘As usual, October brings our first great event of the year – the all-school camp-out. This year we will all be going to Silverwood Lake in the beautiful San Bernardino Mountains. Over the weekend, students and parents will get to know one another by camp-fire singing and storytelling, pot-luck dinners, hiking, swimming and picnics. This is a wonderful way for new families to join the Cedars community. At the end of October, we will be holding our first fund-raising event, which this year is going to be a Latin fiesta.’

‘Arriba! Arriba!’ called out Tony Perlman, the geography teacher, and then looked deeply embarrassed.

Wednesday, September 22, 9:06 A.M.

A tractor-trailer had jackknifed right across the off-ramp from the Hollywood Freeway, causing a southbound tailback of glittering cars as far as Ventura Boulevard. Frank shifted the Buick into neutral and pressed down the