Tweed tugged at Dex’s sleeve. “Look,” she said. “Our teachers are up to their elbows in it too.”
The air was misty with blood. But the spray was fine enough, atomized even, that they clearly saw Nurse Gaskin sail in; Claude Versailles, whose outsized body belied the deftness of his killer cuts; Ms. Brindisi, Miss Phipps, Mr. Buttweiler, and the others.
Tweed billowed with pride in Corundum High.
Out of a night of trauma, they were pulling together. Students and faculty alike.
For all the hell they had endured, a special bond would unite them forever, a bond as tight and conjoining as the mad janitor’s futtered body was loose and undergoing disjointure.
Tweed gripped her bloody prize and smiled at Dex, who beamed back at her and held up the ruddy whorl of his catch.
Something jinged like a spun quarter at her feet. She looked down. “A key,” she said.
It was gold and thick and angled. The word YALE gleamed upon it.
“The key to the padlock on the front door is my guess,” said Dex. He bent to pick it up. “The one he took from the sheriff.”
Tweed touched it in Dex’s hand. Hard planes. The key was wet from the janitor’s futtering, warm from his pocket.
She slid a finger along its length. She kept sliding, clasped Dex’s hand, palm to palm, the key to their salvation trapped between.
Then she lost herself in her boyfriend’s eyes.
24. The Mouths of Babes
Friday, October twenty-sixth.
Jonquil Brindisi, her long legs crossed, sat in Claude’s generous futon chair, sipping a banana daiquiri as she listened to Futzy Buttweiler and Delia Gaskin hold forth from the couch.
Futzy had called them all together, the major players who had survived the prom. They needed some sort of closure, he said, and he was right.
A lot of changes had come down.
Claude had divorced his wives and swiftly remarried. His new mates? The couple Jonquil herself had lusted after until the state of their earlobes had cooled her passions.
The three of them sat now in clunky dining room chairs, listening and nodding.
Lovey-dovey motherfuckers.
Futzy had replaced his pair of hellions with Adora Phipps. While they insisted a third would surely come along any day now, Jonquil doubted they were looking in any serious way.
And no secret to anyone and not a scandal to the unbigoted, Delia Gaskin, while maintaining the fiction of a separate residence, was deep in lust with Bix Donner’s widows, Trilby and Brest, their threesome a virtual marriage.
Trilby’s little whistleblower knelt alone on the living room carpet. Pill busied herself with a deck of cards, some weird sorting exercise whose rules only an eight-year-old could divine.
Near Pill sat Tweed and her kid sister Jenna, crosslegged on pillows. They bookended a chipper Dexter Poindexter, who had replaced a slaughtered bank clerk at First National soon after the prom.
“Now that the media brouhaha has died down,” continued Futzy, Adora’s loving eyes on him, “I thought a nice quiet evening of putting the pieces together would benefit us all.”
Claude nodded and spoke. “A final look at things, one last breath and benediction before we move on with our lives. Is that what you mean?”
Jonquil, bemused, said nothing.
What a load of crap this was. Were they a bunch of fucking wimps? She could take on such a night again easily. Truth be told, she missed it already. The terror, the hunt, the futtering of the crazy janitor whose bones she had wanted to leap but had ended up breaking instead.
Might it somehow happen again?
She thrilled at the thought.
“Yes,” said Nurse Gaskin. “Victims of major traumas tend to obsess about them. We should look on this retelling as a ritual signpost, a mark of punctuation on the way to healing.”
“Back to normal after tonight, eh?” said Jonquil. The looks Bray and Winnie gave her reinforced her doubt.
“By no means.” Nurse Gaskin’s eyes flared with hatred.
Then she smoothed it over.
Delia Gaskin, in Jonquil’s opinion, needed to be taken down a few notches. The upstart bitch in whites had far too lofty an opinion of herself.
“The horror of that night,” the nurse said, “will haunt us for the rest of our lives. But going over the ground again may make it in some sense manageable.”
With that, she and Futzy launched into a retelling of the events of prom night.
Like obedient little androids, the others, everyone but Jonquil, chimed in with one part of the story or another.
Jonquil clinked and sipped, remarking what odd ducks she had fallen in with. Between bouts of savage fucking in the supply closet, she liked to regale Benji Rubblerum, the new head janitor, with stories about her colleagues and how very odd they were.
Then the weird thing happened.
Futzy and the school nurse, caught up in their tale, came to the killing of Pesky and Flense in the faculty lounge.
Jonquil saw seeds of worry sprout in Trilby Donner’s eyes.
Her little girl looked up from her playing cards, listening and staring.
Jonquil might have jumped in to deflect the telling. But she loved to witness the fruits of violence, especially violence inflicted in all innocence.
“Then,” said the nurse, who wore a stylish denim dress, long-sleeved, with embroidery that suggested cowboy motifs, “it’s my guess that old Gerber took a pellet of dry ice in his gloved fist and forced the poor girl to swallow it.”
Her hands illustrated as she spoke.
“Miss Gaskin!” said Trilby, ever the mom.
Then Pill’s eyes bugged out. Her eyelids fluttered and she keeled over. No one was near enough to break her fall.
But the girl, on her knees already, did not fall far. In a glancing blow, her scalp knocked against the futon frame. The cards she cupped in her hands fanned out over the carpet, a sprawl of red and black and white.
Jonquil observed it all coolly.
She clinked her ice.
It looked as if the poor girl was choking on her tongue.
She would die if no one helped.
But the nurse barreled in to clear the girl’s passageway, hovering like a benevolent angel. She rubbed Pill’s hands vigorously, feeling for pulse and heartbeat, moving deft fingers everywhere on her body. “She’ll be all right, I think. Claude, do you have maybe a day bed Pill can lie down on?”
“There’s the guest room upstairs, with the coats. Just shove them aside.”
“Trilby, why don’t you stay with her, out of earshot of the rest of this?” Delia said.
Upstart bitch.
Granted, Little Miss Nursiepoo was caught up in a minicrisis. But that gave her no excuse for addressing Claude as Claude, for calling Trilby Trilby. It ought to have been Mr. Versailles and Ms. Donner, even outside working hours.
In the privacy of her threesome, the bitch could use first names all she liked. But in mixed company, it was
