not stir from that spot until the ringing of the second bell.”
The rapture on the faces of the Borgstroms, as Delia passed them, was an extraordinary sight to behold. Their jaw-notches positively glowed with anticipation.
Peach popped her gum. “Let’s go,” croaked Cobra, grabbing her wrist.
She jerked about into his tug, reluctant to leave the gym with its orange and blue and green lights, its glints of sequins and spangles. Even the buffed brown of the gym floor struck Peach as beautiful. But delay might mean death, and Cobra’s word- he thought so, anyway-was law.
In the glow of night light, the hallway was dim and spooky. The click-click of heels and the rustle of pastel dresses beside tuxedo’d boys made everything feel somehow like a movie set, one last masquerade before real life began.
“Where we headed?” she asked.
“Shut it,” Cobra snapped.
She did.
He hadn’t even shown her the envelope, the one the shop teacher had given them.
Cobra’s eyes were a flat gray. That, Peach was convinced, was how he saw the world-if his taste in clothes was any indication.
She had had sex with that weird old guy from Topeka just because she knew Cobra really wanted a coat he kept mentioning, and the fifty-dollar bills the guy peeled off into her hand would buy it.
But when Cobra came back from the store with the coat, it turned out to be the same old lousy leather as always, an uninspired black with three silver studs along the right sleeve. Hardly worth being flogged for. Hardly worth the taste of some grown-up’s dick.
A bunch of kids-most of them dorks, though Babs Nealy and Kinny Conner waved at her-hustled up the stairs by the glass doors to the butchery wing.
Cobra hurried her past the stairs, shoving a scrawny hawk-nosed nebbish out of the way. “Move it!” said Cobra, both to the hawk-nosed guy and to her. Peach gave the kid an apologetic look before Cobra yanked her onward.
That was another thing about Cobra: The violence he visited upon her always arose from smolders of hate. Rarely did he give her the kind of whap, poke, or pinch that signaled true love.
Cobra called that pop-song bullshit. She didn’t think so.
Peach watched Tweed Megrim and Dexter Poindexter go into the chem lab. Neat kids. A little unformed for her tastes, but sometimes maybe bland was better.
Twin inverted J’s of silver gleamed inside, tall thin spigots over sinks. Then Cobra strong-armed her past the labs.
“Did they stick us on the first floor?” she asked. She was afraid Cobra would try to bulldoze through the shoving mass of students on the stairs to their left.
Instead he dragged her, without reply, toward a darkened classroom set in the corner of the next turn. He yanked open the door and pushed her through.
Desks were shoved together in the center of the room in a logjam of fake-wood planes. Along the walls hung posterboard squares with a number scrawled in black felt-tip pen.
A couple of girls, Dixie Rathbone and Bliss somebody, slumped like stuffed scarecrows on the floor beneath the blackboard.
“Here,” Cobra said.
Peach saw their number and beneath it a dark arrow directed downward. Pillows had been placed on the floor, thin as a threadbare blanket but gentler on the butt than hard tile.
She settled in. Cobra humphed down by her side. From where they sat, Peach could see Dixie and Bliss. She wondered if they were the ones, if they’d be slaughtered without warning, if she and Cobra and the others arrayed around the classroom would witness the sacrifice. She wiggled fingers at them, but they didn’t move, almost as if they were dead already.
Commotion outside the door, raucous boy-talk. From the unclaimed numbers on the walls (she had overheard Bowser mention theirs), Peach guessed Bowser McPhee and his date Fido Jenner. A moment later, they walked in.
Peach had always thought Bowser was cute and little-boy brash and funny, a ferocious mismatch for Fido in her opinion. He had picked up a book she dropped once, then blushed and stammered like an idiot when she kissed his right lobe in thanks.
Now he and Fido started along the far wall, looking for their number.
“Over here,” Peach yelled to them.
Cobra smacked her for speaking.
“Thanks,” Bowser said. He and Fido collapsed ten feet to her left, beneath their sign.
“Hey weenie,” Cobra said, “shut the fuck up.”
“Come on, Cobra,” Bowser replied, clapping a hand on Fido’s knee. “Everybody’s up against it tonight. Lighten up, okay? It’s a free country.”
Cobra tensed beside her.
“Listen, doggie boy. Your fuckin’ free country’s got two things in it: your face and my fist. You say another word, they’re gonna fuckin’ connect. It’s gonna be one bloody mess of zits, skin, and flesh, you dig, scumwipe?”
She could see Bowser retreat inside his skin, though he glared iron pellets at Cobra. That took more guts than most kids had.
Too bad.
Peach knew, but never told anyone, that when it came right down to it, and without of his gang members around, Cobra would fold.
She had seen, alone late at night, the little boy in him. She knew Cobra was one scared coward hiding beneath layers of protective armor.
She also knew that she was just about ready to dump him.
The bell suddenly clanged. It sent a shock through her system.
Same damn bell signaled the end of one class and the beginning of the next. But in this context, it sounded three times as loud.
All talk ceased. A pall fell over the half dozen in-turned duos seated around the room.
Twenty minutes until the next bell, the one that meant find-the-dead-folks.
Those twenty minutes might be choke-thick with silence.
Or the shiv of a scream might slide into their heads from a nearby classroom, a scream both chilling and relieving.
Or the wall they leaned against might give way and a rough hand draw quick steel across their throats.
On the opposite wall, above two dorky girls in scared embrace, a large clock ticked.
Cobra’s hand slipped into hers where no one could see and gave it a private squeeze.
His terror met hers.
10. Defying Gravity
Dark delight.
The school understood perfectly.
Through the glass doors that led into its butchery wing waltzed Flann Beckwith and Brandy Crowe, high- toned worshipers of style, the best slap’n’smack dancers Corundum High had ever seen. Flann and Brandy were odds-on favorites for prom king and queen, despite the run Rocky and Sandy had given them.
Whoever assigned stations-many doubted its much touted randomness-had surely wanted to bring Flann and Brandy down a few pegs.
