An Apple for the Creature

balance.

“Bitch!” he yelled, and raised the free foot again to stomp on one of my arms. I ducked my head down as if that would help avert the blow.

I heard a thud and an exclamation from Brady as something hit him on his shoulder.

It rolled on the floor until it came to rest in front of the janitor’s closet.

It was a big Red Delicious apple.

I could see past him. It had been thrown by Sabrina Yarnell, who was now holding out her hand to the open door of the Pony Room. One of the children tossed her another apple, a Fuji this time. That apple, too, came at Brady with deadly intent, and this time Sabrina nailed him in the head.

Brady forgot he wanted to stomp me. Suddenly, he was far more interested in finding out who was attacking him.

“Who are you?” he called to Sabrina. “I ain’t here after you! Get back in that room.”

But he’d been distracted just long enough. A hoarse voice behind me said, “Brady Carver! Drop the gun!” Brady’s head whipped around at this new diversion, and though I was too anxious to keep my eyes on him to peek behind me, I figured the new entrant had to be the police officer.

Brady’s face had gone through a startling variety of expressions in the last minute: bewilderment, resentment, anger. But now he settled on hostility, and he began to raise his right hand to shoot.

“I don’t want to shoot you, Brady,” said the voice, still hoarse with tension, “but you better damn believe I will do it, I will shoot you dead.”

“Not if I get you first,” Brady sneered. I was sure I was going to be spattered with Brady’s blood, too, but the moment after, something amazing happened.

His right hand seemed to go numb. The fingers weren’t able to retain their grip. The hand relaxed completely, and the gun fell from it to clatter to the floor close to my head. To my immense relief it did not go off, and I instantly released Brady’s ankle to shove the gun across the floor in the direction of the police officer. I stayed still and low, though I sure wanted to get out of the middle of the floor and out of the line of fire. Just at the moment it seemed more important to keep the situation simple.

Sabrina was standing with her small plump hand extended in Brady’s direction. She didn’t look like a young schoolteacher at all. She looked like a ball of power and ferocity. I’d never seen a witch really look “witchy,” but I practically expected to see Sabrina’s hair stream back in an invisible wind while she kept Brady’s arm immobile.

The police officer pushed the gun a little farther away from Brady with her foot—yes, the officer was a woman, a brief glance informed me. And then she was screaming, “Down! DOWN!” with the persistence of a banshee. To my amazement Brady Carver knelt two feet away from me, and I scrambled backward in an ungraceful sort of reverse crab walk. His arms jerked back behind him, ready for the cuffs. His face was full of astonishment, as if he could not believe he was doing this.

In short order, Brady was cuffed, useless hand and all.

Sabrina was staggering from the effort as she went back into her room in answer to an anxious chorus from the kids.

I tried to stand up. It took two attempts, and I had to lean against the wall.

A lot happened in the next few minutes.

The EMTs rushed in, and brave Principal Minter was loaded into an ambulance. Her keys were on the floor where she’d lain, and I pointed out to the police officer that Sherry needed to be released from the janitor’s closet. The secretary was an emotional mess. She was taken to the hospital, too, to get something to calm her down.

By that time the state police had arrived.

The old school had never had so many guns under its roof.

All the people in uniform seemed relieved that the human damage hadn’t been worse, though a few newbies were silently a bit disappointed that the situation had been resolved without their assistance. Brady Carver was marched out to a state trooper car to be taken off to the county lockup, one arm still flopping uselessly, and the police officer (Shirley Barr) got a lot of slaps on the back for subduing the shooter. Shirley Barr was an ex-military woman of color, and I figured that in the line of duty here in Red Ditch she didn’t get too many chances to show what she was made of. She had to concentrate on not looking happy.

The parking lot began to fill with parents who had heard that something bad was happening at the school. With the principal and her secretary absent, there was no one to take charge until the school guidance counselor stepped up, driving over from the nearby high school to do the right thing.

Once I’d turned down an ambulance ride and I’d explained to the police why I’d been on the spot, no one seemed too interested in me. I went into the principal’s bathroom, since there was no one to stop me, and I carefully wiped away all the visible blood—Ms. Minter’s, and my own from the glass. My T-shirt was a mess, so I gave it to the policeman, who seemed to want it. I rummaged in the big box labeled “Donations” until I found a T- shirt that was way too tight but covered everything . . . just barely. It was better than being bloody.

I got a lot more attention from the state guys after I emerged in the tighter T-shirt.

But eventually I was able to walk back to the Pony Room to give Ms. Yarnell a hug. The kids were in surprisingly good spirits, which was a credit to their teacher. Hunter was just as glad to see me as he had been the first time I’d arrived that day, but he was definitely more subdued in expressing his pleasure. Ms. Yarnell had told the children that while they were waiting to find out what would happen the rest of the day, they might as well be celebrating Labor Day by partying.

A couple of the kids were too distressed, but most of them had gone along with the plan of singing the newly learned “America the Beautiful” and eating cupcakes. They’d poured out the contents of their goody bags as children ought to do. Hunter had gotten a thank-you hug from one little girl with about ten pigtails carefully composed in squares, and a big smile from a tousle-headed boy with cowboy boots. Hunter was doing his best to play a tune on his harmonica.

I hadn’t spotted Remy out front, but then the police hadn’t given me much of a chance to look. They were trying to take pictures of the lobby area and figure out the sequence of events.

They also seemed a little puzzled at some of the odder parts of the story.

They thought Sabrina had been suicidally lucky in throwing things at a shooter, and criminally irresponsible at opening the door of her room to step out into the hall. I didn’t know if she’d even keep her job in Red Ditch after this. She was well aware of that possibility. “I couldn’t let him keep on going,” she said quietly, as we stood alone behind her desk.

“It bothers me that it took a lot of us to stop him,” I confessed.

“Did any of us have a gun until the cop showed up?” she demanded. “Did he have any restraint, any of the rules of morality or society, when he broke into the school?”

I eyed her with some curiosity. Sabrina was a much more philosophical witch than my friend Amelia. “No, he was purely the devil,” I said. “He wasn’t hiding anything. That was the real Brady.”

“So we all had to show what we really were, too,” she said quietly. “And look, we brought down the bad guy. And they don’t suspect, none of them.”

The inexplicable weakness in Brady’s gun arm had been written down to some kind of heart event or even a stroke, and he would be having tests in the hospital after he’d been searched and booked at the jail. Several of the cops had even wished aloud that Brady had had a heart attack, one violent enough to kill him. They were eye-for-eye people . . . in their own, true hearts. And I didn’t think anyone who had arrived on the scene, or even the officer who’d actually witnessed the event, knew that Sabrina’s attack with the apples had been planned to make him look at her, give her magic a chance to weaken him. The police were convinced that only my grip on Brady’s ankle had kept him from charging down to the Pony Room and killing everyone in there. They would never know what Sabrina and I really were. At least Ms. Minter would get credit for her outstanding presence of mind and courage; those were her true attributes.

I looked at Sabrina and smiled. “Well, you’re right. We did our best with our own gifts. Now we’ve got to put them under wraps again. Someday, maybe, we’ll get to be what we are.”

There was so much we didn’t know in this world. But looking at the children, some of them playing at the back of the room, some of them obviously distressed and ready to reunite with their parents, I could see that there was a future, that what kids were learning in classrooms all over America was not going to stop because sometimes kids experienced terrifying or simply unfamiliar stuff. . . .