the logical and brainy chick in the Peanuts cartoons) was my lifeline these days.
“The lesson being,” he continued as if I hadn’t spoken, “that you can’t always have your way.” He scooped up Marcie, wrapped the earphones around her, and dumped her into his top desk drawer. “No music for a week.”
“You can’t do that,” I said immediately. My palms began sweating, itching for the cool comfort of Marcie in my hand. “I have a medical condition that—”
“Oh, yes, Mr. Killian, I know all about your ‘illness.’” He smiled, all too pleased at having gotten a reaction from me. “Twice-a-week visits with your shrink, during school hours, no less. Permission to leave class as needed. Music allowed during your lessons so the ‘voices’”—he waggled his hands near his head—“don’t bother you.
“But do you know what I think?” He closed the drawer with a snap and pulled a key ring from his inside suit- coat pocket. “You’re a bad seed. Somewhere along the line, you figured out how easy it was to fool everyone and coast through life with a ‘disability.’” He separated a small silver key from the jumble on the key ring and locked the drawer. “But you don’t fool me.”
Without Marcie, I was toast. The dead talk all the time, even when they think no one is listening. The noise is overwhelming, not to mention the effort it takes not to respond.
Suddenly, I couldn’t breathe. Going to class, walking the halls without my music … I’d be curled up in a corner somewhere before first hour was even finished. The week Marcie had been gone, getting her battery replaced, my mother had nearly signed the commitment papers then and there.
I couldn’t let that happen again. I’d have to take the risk with Brewster.
Brewster shook his head, tsking. “Too much coddling at home and self-indulgence in these flights of fancy. If your mother had sent you to military school as I—”
“Like your grandfather sent your father to military school, hoping they’d beat the fairy out of him?” I asked, unable to believe that the words were slipping out despite everything I’d vowed. He really should have left Marcie out of this.
Brewster’s face turned white and then red.
I tensed in my seat but kept my voice steady. “It worked for a while too,” I continued. “Till your mom died and he retired to Florida where he met this nice neighbor guy, Charlie—”
Brewster didn’t even bother to come around the desk. He shot out of his chair, his hand stretching out to close around my throat.
I shoved the chair back in the same instant, and his fingers caught nothing but air.
“You can hear me.” Brewster’s dead grandfather — young again and dressed in his World War II uniform — gaped at me from his seat on the highly polished wooden credenza next to the desk. His unfiltered cigarette, still burning, fell from his mouth to the floor and rolled to a stop next to my foot.
I ignored Grandpa Brewster and the cigarette with the practice of many visits to this office. Brewster’s grandfather hung out here most of the time, talking to his favorite grandson, willing him to mend fences with his father while there was still time for them to have a decent relationship, something he’d never managed while he was alive.
That was the key with the dead. Ignore them long enough, and they’ll give up. Oh, they won’t stop talking … ever, but they’ll stop expecting you to respond, figuring what they took for awareness was just a fluke.
“You retarded little pervert,” Brewster spat. “You don’t know anything. My father is a good man.” He charged around the desk toward me.
I tensed, ready to move, and faked an easy shrug. “I’m sure he is. He’d probably be horribly disappointed to hear his son got fired for trying to choke a student.”
Brewster froze.
“What do you think you’re up to, kid?” Grandpa Brewster demanded. He’d recovered enough from his shock to slide off the edge of the credenza and stand over me. “Messing with my Sonny like that?”
I met Brewster’s glare without flinching. “Give me my music back, and none of this happened.” It was a gamble, but he’d backed me into a corner.
His jaw clenched furiously, and I could see him working through the alternatives. “No one else saw anything. There are no marks on you. It’ll be my word against yours.”
“True,” I said, pretending to consider the possibility. “But at this point, I wonder if it’d take much more than words to convince the school board? I heard it was a really close vote last time.”
Brewster stared me down, but I refused to look away. Then, the pungent stench of something burning reached my nose.
Automatically, I glanced to the floor, searching for Grandpa Brewster’s cigarette, and found the rubber edge of my Converse high-top smoldering, a tiny blue flame lapping at the side. “Shit.” I jumped up, twisting my foot against the carpet to put the fire out.
“Will you look at that?” Brewster’s grandfather said with a note of awe in his voice. “I’ll be damned.”
“No kidding,” I muttered. With the smoke from my shoe lessening, I paused long enough from my extinguishing efforts to grind out the cigarette beneath my heel. A cigarette Principal Brewster couldn’t see.
I stopped and looked over to find him watching me, disgust spreading across his face.
“Pathetic,” Brewster sneered. “Do you really think I’m going to fall for your ‘crazy’act?” Of course. From his perspective, I’d jumped up from my chair to scuff my shoe against the carpet for no apparent reason. Story of my life.
Brewster shook his head. “You tell the school board anything you want. No one is going to believe you.”
Unfortunately, he was right about that. I had a slight credibility problem these days.
“I could call my mother.” I winced inwardly. God, there was just no way to utter that sentence with any kind of dignity.
“If you do, you’ll know she’ll pull you out of here in an instant and dump you in the nuthouse.” His gaze dropped down to my feet and the carpet. Only Grandpa Brewster and I could see the scorch marks. The damage to my shoe was real enough in this world, but unless someone touched the melted rubber on the side of my sole to find that it was still warm and freshly burned, it could have happened anytime. “I’m beginning to think that’s where you belong.”
“Then let me have my music back. It … helps.” I stole a quick sideways glance at Grandpa Brewster, who still stood next to me, silent for once as he watched our exchange. That couldn’t be good.
Brewster smiled, an expression of his I’d learned to dread. He turned (“About-face!”) and strode to his office door, pulling it open. “Mrs. Piaget!” he barked.
Something crashed, and I heard the sound of pencils or pens clattering as they hit the desk and rolled off onto the linoleum floor. “Uh, yes, sir?”
“Write Mr. Killian a pass to class. Tell his first-hour teacher he is not to have any kind of distraction during class, including music. Then, make sure the rest of his teachers know as well.”
“But, sir, he has—”
“That will be all.” He closed the door with a snap.
“I could skip class,” I pointed out as he returned to stand behind his massive desk. It wasn’t like I’d never done that before. I still managed a 3.4 GPA.
“I could recommend expulsion,” he said.
Dr. Miller, my psychiatrist, would be thrilled. It would give him just the excuse he needed to make the more permanent arrangements he felt I needed “to be safe.” Translation: a steady lithium drip and a kid who eats gravel as my roommate.
“What is your problem?” I demanded. “I’ve never done anything to you.” Until today, obviously. But he’d held this grudge from the first instant I’d met him.
“Isn’t it obvious, Mr. Killian?” He began shoving my books, notebooks, and folders back into my backpack any which way, crumpling pages and tearing paper. “You are an insult to every student here making a real effort. You’re a bad influence on otherwise responsible and well-behaved children, like young Miss Turner.”
I felt sucker-punched at the mention of Lily, but I refused to let it show. “That was a first-tier party.” No way in hell I was there. She shouldn’t have been either.
Brewster ignored me. “Not to mention, you’re a disruption and a distraction with all of your ‘special needs.’”
“You say that to all the sick kids?”
He paused, sensing trouble from a new direction. Public schools weren’t allowed to discriminate … for any
