Meanwhile, Theo wriggled valorously.
Ms. Hempel confiscated the sole.
“What is Jonathan, or any of you, going to do when the clowns sneak up behind you and clobber you over the head with a tire iron?” she asked. “Or stuff a chloroform-soaked towel underneath your nose, and you pass out? Dead to the world? What are you going to do then?”
“They do that?” Geoffrey asked.
“For real?” Julianne asked.
“Yes!” Ms. Hempel said. “I read it in the newspaper.”
The eighth grade looked appalled. Ms. Hempel felt appalled, at the enormity of her lie. Generally speaking, her lying was of the mildest sort, only because she couldn’t do it very well. A genetic failing. Her father was a terrible liar. “Did you get in touch with the insurance man?” her mother would ask, and he would answer, “Yes!” in a confident way that made it quite clear he had not. Once, when he picked her up from school, more than forty-five minutes late, he had glared at the dashboard and growled, “Emergency at the hospital,” even though his damp tennis shorts in the backseat were letting off a most powerful reek.
But he was scrupulously honest about important things. When faced with a difficult question, he never lied or dodged or even faltered. “Toxic shock syndrome,” he once explained to her, “occurs when a woman leaves a tampon or an IUD inside her vagina for too long, allowing bacteria to gather. The bacteria then causes an infection that enters her bloodstream and can, but not always, result in her immediate death.” Mastectomy and herpes were described just as clearly.
It was a model she admired. “Sodomy,” Ms. Hempel now said to her class, “is what’s happening in the back of those vans. And though sodomy is a word that can be used in reference to any sort of sexual intercourse, it most commonly refers to anal sex.”
They seemed to have a good understanding of what that was. Roderick made a joke about taking a shower and having to pick up a bar of soap off the floor. The class laughed warily. They shifted in their desk-chairs.
“The clowns do this to you while you’re unconscious?” Theo asked.
“Exactly,” Ms. Hempel said, and the kids fell silent. The other clowns, the ridiculous ones wearing wigs and clutching candy, had been replaced: these new ones marched through the homeroom swinging their tire irons, waving their towels, unbuckling their pants.
“So do you see why we’re scared? Why we want you to be careful?”
The kids nodded. They seemed to have gone suddenly limp. Ms. Hempel felt horrible.
“But don’t worry!” she said. “There are stickers everywhere. You’ve seen them. The blue ones? With the little lighthouse on them.”
“Safe Haven,” said Sasha dully.
“Right!” Ms. Hempel said. “If you see that sticker in a store window, you know that you can walk inside and they’ll take care of you and call the police and call your parents.”
“You mean if the clowns try to clobber us,” Zander clarified.
“Or if anyone strange approaches you,” she said. “Anyone who makes you feel uncomfortable.”
“But Safe Haven doesn’t work!” Gloria said. “When this gross guy was following me home from the bus stop, I went into Video Connection, and the girl there didn’t even know what I was talking about.”
“A gross guy followed you home?” Ms. Hempel asked.
“He kept singing, You are the sun, you are the rain, really quietly, just so I could hear. You know that song?”
The other girls squealed softly in disgust.
“When did this happen?” Ms. Hempel asked.
“It happens all the time!” the girls cried out, and like a flock of startled pigeons they seemed to all rise up at once. Didn’t Ms. Hempel know? Weirdness was lurking everywhere: behind the bank, holding a broom; on the subway, grazing your butt; at the park, asking if he could maybe touch your hair. What book are you reading? What grade are you in? The girls bounced up and down in their chairs, seething, commiserating, trying to outdo each other. When I was walking to school. When I was visiting my cousin. No, wait! Listen: When I was, like, twelve.…
Homeroom discussions always seemed to end this way. The girls in a glorious fury; the boys gazing dumbly at the carpet. What would possess a clown, Ms. Hempel wondered, to kidnap one of these beautiful girls? So lively, and smart, and suspicious. Such strong legs, from kicking soccer balls and making jump shots. So full of outrage.
The boys, though: brash and bewildered, oddly proportioned. Some of them were finally beginning to grow tall. They wore voluminous pants that hung precariously on their hips. They grinned readily. During the winter, when it was very cold, they refused to wear their coats in the yard: We get hot when we run around! they said. Their T-shirts flapped against their thin arms; their chests heaved. The ball rarely made it into the net, but they didn’t seem to mind. It was all about the hurling and the frenzied grasping and the thundering down to the other end of the court. And even though the girls were always plucking at Ms. Hempel’s sleeve, demanding that she listen, it was the boys who tugged at her heart, who seemed to her the ripest for abduction.
MS. HEMPEL WONDERED IF her story of that morning could be true, or if it were, factually speaking, impossible. The detail about chloroform bothered her; it struck her as transparently dramatic, like a woman who dashes about with a long, fragile scarf fluttering behind her. It was an anachronism; something from the days of white slavery, and opium smuggling, and jewel heists. Where had she learned about chloroform, anyway? Probably Tintin.
“If you wanted to kidnap someone, what would you use?” she asked Amit. They were lying in bed, with the lights off. “To knock them unconscious. So that you could drag them into the back of your van.”
“Chloroform, I guess.”
“Really?” She brightened. It made her happy that the person she was marrying would commit crimes in the same
