Black Creek Crossing

Right now he was going to have a drink.

Chapter 14

S THE CLOCK ON THE WALL TICKED TO EXACTLY THREE o’clock, Angel checked her work one last time. When Mrs. Holt had first announced the pop quiz, a sinking feeling had come over her, and it only got worse when the algebra teacher went on to say that since it was her first day in class, Angel didn’t need to take the quiz. She unconsciously sank a little lower at her desk as she felt the rest of the class staring enviously at her. But a minute later, when Mrs. Holt began writing the five equations on the blackboard, Angel relaxed. She’d solved the first equation in her head before Mrs. Holt had even finished writing the other four on the board, and five minutes after the quiz began, Angel was finished, the equations and their solutions neatly laid out on a single sheet of paper, while all around her the rest of the class seemed to be going through page after page.

Twice Mrs. Holt warned the two girls behind Angel that if they kept talking she would fail both of them, but even as the minute hand ticked closer to three o’clock, Angel could still hear them comparing answers and knew why they hadn’t stopped talking: neither of them had any idea of how to solve the problems.

“Time,” Mrs. Holt said. “Pass your papers forward.” As Angel took the stack from the girl behind her and added her own, the teacher spoke again. “I thought I told you that you didn’t need to take the quiz, Angel.”

Angel shrugged and passed the stack of quizzes to the boy in front of her, who put his own on the bottom, then handed them to Mrs. Holt. A moment later, as she saw the teacher glance at her test, then look up at her, Angel wished she hadn’t taken the quiz after all.

Or at least hadn’t turned it in.

But now it was too late.

“It seems Angel has set the standard for the rest of you,” Mrs. Holt said, holding her single sheet up for the rest of the class to see. “This is what a math quiz should look like. Every equation solved, and every step shown.” She smiled at Angel, and Angel slunk lower in her chair. “Thank you, Angel. Well done.”

All around her Angel could feel the envy the class had felt for her a few minutes ago hardening into resentment, and she knew she’d made a mistake.

Why did she have to write down the answers? Why couldn’t she have just solved the problems in her head, then taken a book out of her bag and spent the last ten minutes reading? But now it was too late, and everyone was staring at her, and—

The clock ticked one more time, and then the clanging of the last bell erupted through the school. As the rest of the class began picking up their backpacks and heading toward the door, Angel stayed where she was, deliberately slowing the process of putting her books in her pack so that by the time she left the room the rest of the class would be gone. But even hanging back didn’t keep her from hearing what the rest of the kids were saying.

“Of course she’s a suck-up — her name’s Angel, isn’t it?”

“Who cares if she’s smart — just look at her! Yuck!”

Her face burning and her eyes stinging, Angel sat at her desk waiting for the room to empty. After two minutes that seemed to take forever, the door swung closed for the last time and silence fell over the room. At last Angel stood up from her desk, picked up her backpack, and started toward the door. She was just starting to push it open when Mrs. Holt spoke to her.

“Angel? Is something wrong?”

She froze, her hand still on the doorknob. How could Mrs. Holt not know what was wrong? Couldn’t she see what had happened? Hadn’t she heard what everyone was saying? But it wasn’t her fault, Angel told herself. It was my fault. Mrs. Holt had said she didn’t have to take the quiz, but she did it anyway. Shaking her head but saying nothing, Angel fled from the classroom.

The corridor was even worse. All around her, kids were laughing and talking; lockers were slamming. Angel worked her way through the throng toward the foot of the stairs that would take her to her own locker on the second floor. Keeping her head down, she did her best to look at no one and be deaf to anything the other kids might be saying about her. By the time she reached the head of the stairs, the corridor was almost empty. Hurrying to her locker, Angel began working the combination, but the metal door didn’t open until the third try. She was reaching for the jacket she’d hung on the locker’s single hook when she felt someone behind her.

Felt eyes looking at her.

Go away, she thought. Just leave me alone.

Then she heard a voice.

A soft voice that sounded just as apprehensive as Angel felt.

“I thought — well, if you want to, maybe we could go get a Coke or something.” Turning away from her locker, Angel saw Seth Baker standing a few feet away, his backpack slung over one shoulder. Angel felt a lump forming in her throat as he gazed at her, and then her eyes began to sting once more as the tears she’d been struggling to control threatened to overwhelm her. The silence lengthened, then Seth started to turn away. Angel reached out toward him, trying to force something — anything — from her constricted throat, when he spoke again. “Come on — let’s just get out of here, okay? Then you can tell me what happened.”

Still without having spoken a word, Angel followed him down the stairs and out of the building.

Houdini was sitting on the sidewalk across the street, exactly where she’d left him this morning, and Angel wondered if the cat could possibly have been sitting there all day. As she and Seth crossed the street, the cat stood up, stretched, and gazed suspiciously at Seth. His tail twitched slightly, but when Angel introduced them, Seth squatted down and looked the cat squarely in the eye.

“Very nice to meet you,” he said, extending his hand, as if Angel had introduced him to another human being.

Houdini’s tail stopped twitching and he licked Seth’s hand, and when Seth and Angel started down the street toward the center of the village, he followed, walking between them.

“You really want to go in there?” Angel asked ten minutes later as she and Seth stood in front of the Roundtree drugstore, which still had the kind of old-fashioned soda fountain that had disappeared from most drugstores nearly fifty years earlier. All the booths were occupied, as were all but two of the stools. And every face was familiar, though Angel could put names to only two or three of them. As she and Seth gazed through the window, she saw her cousin Zack look up, glance toward then, then lean across the table to whisper something to Heather Dunne. Though they could hear nothing through the thick plate-glass, both Angel and Seth could see Heather — and everyone else — first laughing at whatever Zack Fletcher had said, then turning to look at the two of them.

“You want to go to my house?” Angel asked, and saw Seth hesitate. But then he nodded.

“Sure.”

Turning away from the drugstore, they continued along the sidewalk toward the corner, where they would turn right to follow Black Creek Road out of town. “I guess it was stupid to think anything would be any different here,” Angel said. As they’d walked from the school to the drugstore, she’d told Seth what had happened at the end of the last period.

“How come teachers do things like that?” Seth asked. “Seems like she didn’t have to tell the whole class what you did.”

“It’s not like she was trying to be mean or anything. And it was my fault. If I’d—”

“It wasn’t your fault!” Seth broke in, the words bursting from his lips with enough force that Angel jumped almost as if something had struck her. Seth barely seemed to notice. “So you could do the stuff in your head — how does that make you wrong? And how could Mrs. Holt not know what was going to happen when she started telling everyone what you did? Come on, Angel — it wasn’t your fault at all.”

“Then how come it felt like it was my fault?” Angel asked.

Seth shrugged. “How come it always feels like it’s my fault when my dad—”