Too many goddamn cooties.”
“Couple o’ friggin’ losers,” said Altoona. “You wonder how they live with themselves. ’Course, if anybody had bullied either of these twits, we’d’ve held the bullies down and branded ’em. So go figure. Leave losers alone? Hey, we tolerate that. Cause ’em grief? We flog you to beat the band.”
“Cuz we understand how it feels. The being mocked, I mean.”
“Right.”
Clouds scudded behind the school building as they approached the lot. Jacketed students directed with flashlights. Altoona saw Tweed Megrim’s kid sister, Jenna, a peppery little junior, splitting cars off this way and that.
“Jesus fuck, it’s the prom!” screamed Pim, jiggling fit to burst out of her dress.
What a love bunny, thought Altoona.
And what interesting times lay ahead later tonight, when they bared their nether parts for those yummy zippermouths, Condor and Blayne.
Altoona’s lobes peppered and zinged like a string of pinched Christmas lights.
At the punchbowl, Jonquil Brindisi, teacher of the greater vices, ladled orange glop into the outheld cup of Claude Versailles, teacher of the lesser vices.
Jiminy Jones, ignored in a bow tie, roved on the risers, setting out thick binders of charts on the dance band’s unsteady black stands. Poor sad Jiminy. Such a humorless stub of a fellow, short, bristle-browed, full of gray bland business grit in faculty meetings. His demeanor had surely had the effect of turning off potential mates, as now they turned off Jonquil.
Artificial fog drifted across the floor from that towering effrontery in the center of the gym, the Ice Ghoul.
“Thank you,” said Claude. He took a sip of punch. “And yes, Jonquil, I concur. This year’s crop of seniors showed execrable taste in choosing as the centerpiece of their prom the hoary old Ice Ghoul. He’s not only a slap- in-the-face to a fine principal, our poor dear Futzy chum. But as much as, to the adolescents who while away a mere four years here the Ice Ghoul seems a source of endless merriment, to those of us logging our third decade and counting, he’s dull, dull, dull.”
Jonquil smiled. Wordy bugger, hair starting to thin. But Claude was tall, arguably handsome, all-in-all a not inconsiderably sexy man. “Maybe they took your lessons in Sloth to heart.”
“Indeed,” said Claude, licking orange foam from his upper lip. His suit was bright yellow with bold black stitching, his lobebag the same. “The Ice Ghoul this class. A particularly vicious bunch this year, perhaps?”
“I try, Claude, I try.”
Knock off a few years, ungray a few streaks at the temples, plunk him in a singles bar, and Jonquil would jump him in an instant. A pity she had stricken colleagues from her list of possible playmates. Pity too that the bar fodder, men and women both, came nowhere near Claude’s quality and allure.
“In my lessons on Rage,” she noted, “a full six weeks we dig and delve into that fine and unjustly maligned passion, I do my best to instill a love of the vicious.”
“One would think it natural.”
“One would think so.”
Across the gym, Jonquil saw Adora Phipps nod her tight-bunned head and excuse herself from an early gaggle of seniors. She headed their way, young but dressed in a spiffed-up version of the granny clothes that marked her off as one of the oddest of the odd.
To Claude: “But men and women are vicious in so predictable and plastic a way, and they’re no better as kids. In class, I work myself up-you know how I get-but they stare back, as dull as a crusted plate, these hormone-pumped wonders. Take Notorious, for example. Sure it’s sexy to see someone fry on TV.”
Miss Phipps nodded to them, listening as she poured herself some refreshment. A wormy seam, as she leaned, ran up the back of her stocking from fat-heeled black shoes. When she straightened, the seam was abruptly hidden, her long severe frock falling to cover it.
“Watching someone fry,” continued Jonquil, “invariably gets me off.”
“Me too,” said Claude. He waved to Miss Phipps, who gave him a fuck-off nod and stared over her cup at Jonquil in mid-peroration.
“My point, though, is that smell they give us!” Cluck of the tongue, roll of the eyes.
“Surely you don’t want the real thing?”
“Of near the amazing smell of a corpse. For heaven’s sake, if you’re going to get people off, you really shouldn’t cheat the most critical sense of all with cheap cosmetic substitutes. For all the distaste TV viewers claim, there’s nothing like the aroma of victims, freshly butchered or fried, to bypass the veneer of civilization and go straight for the beast in the brain-nothing like it to snag one’s lust and turn it positively ravenous.”
Jiminy Jones bobbled a low sour blat out of his trumpet.
“I wonder,” said Adora Phipps, taking another sip.
“Don’t wonder,” Jonquil said. “Believe it.”
The lobebag Miss Phipps wore had that second-generation feel to it, as if it had been rummaged out of her grandmother’s hope chest.
Her right lobe, thank goodness, was bare. A year ago, Jonquil and Ms. Foddereau had taken the English teacher aside, hoping to persuade her out of repression’s past in that regard at least, and the resumption of school in September had seen Miss Phipps abandon the antiquated right bag that the rest of Demented States society had trashed so decisively in the mid-sixties.
Claude said in annoyance, “Where’s Gerber Waddell when you need him?”
She followed his gaze to the wetness plashing down the papier-mache and chicken-wire face of the Ice Ghoul.
The creature half-knelt, half-crouched. It was daunting in its crudeness but so overdone as to be laughable: buttocks doughy and split apart, a thick spearhead erection beribboned and far too huge, bright red everywhere except where brush had missed newsprint.
Its musclebound arms lofted skyward-the knife, the torch, an obvious parody of the Statue of Liberty-and its massive head was bent to peer triumphantly at the dead couple soon to be laid before it.
Jonquil’s gaze returned to the splash of drops, slow but predictable, that hit the concave crimp in its brow, sorrowed along its cheek, and dripped down the muscled chest before it passed out of view.
“Rained all night, didn’t it?” she said.
“It woke me up,” agreed Miss Phipps.
Jonquil took in the seething gush of dry-ice fog issuing from vents cut in the figure’s broad pedestal.
“Yes it rained,” said Claude. “But Futzy had the roof redone just last year. I told him-past experience ought to be trusted!-not to switch to Flashpoint amp; Sons based on bid alone. He ignored me. Now this.”
“You think there’s standing water up there? Perhaps a puddle?” Jonquil pictured a dark mirror of water rippled with night breezes, spread wide over ineptly tarred swatches of roof.
“More like a lagoon!” he answered. “As my favorite bumpersticker puts it, ‘Life’s a bitch, and then she whelps.’ On this of all nights, the roof has chosen to fail. Water is trickling along crossbeams and onto the runways of the slasher’s typically dry modes of access up there. Should he or she have an occasion to employ them tonight, he or she will be in for a case, at the very least, of wet knee. Early onset of gout, arthritis, or chilblains is not out of the question. Where the devil is our esteemed head janitor?”
Another of Claude’s rhetorical questions.
Maybe he would go in search of the janitor. Or he might stoically wait for him to wander in. More likely, he would gnaw on this new peeve all evening, spinning elaborate rhetorical flourishes to feed his upset. None of it would diminish him in Jonquil’s sight.
At the far door, a threesome strode in: Brest Donner, arm in arm with her man Bix, and Trilby, their third, bringing up the rear.
“Brest!” Jonquil called out, waving her toward the refreshment table when she got her attention.
Clusters of early seniors looked up too. But with the lights on full and the dance band only beginning to assemble, it felt not yet as though the prom had quite begun.
More kids, lights gone low and colorful, the front entrance padlocked shut, a cymbal whisk as the first notes
