“Not that much,” drawled Macguire, his mouth sloped downward. “I really hate Spanish, and German is too hard. What interests me is your coed dorms. I did my senior thesis on sexual liberation.”
“Macguire, please!” cried Miss Ferrell over the squeals of amusement. “I told you not to talk about sex, religion, or politics!”
“Oh, God, fuck, I’m sorry, Miss Ferrell… well, I don’t care about politics anyway.”
“Macguire!”
“Well, I don’t want to go to Vassar anyway,” he whined. “I can’t get into Stanford or Duke. I just want to go to Indiana.”
“Yes, and we’ve all seen just how likely that’s going to be,” snapped Miss Ferrell. “Let’s get two more people up here. Julian Teller,” she said, pointing, “and Heather Coopersmith. What school interview do you want to role- play, Julian?”
Julian shuffled between the desks. He flopped into the chair formerly occupied by Macguire, ran his hand nervously through his mowed hair, and said, “Cornell, for food science.”
“All right,” said Miss Ferrell. “Heather,” she said to Audrey’s daughter, a dark-haired girl with her mother’s face, pink-tinted glasses, and thin, pale lips, “let him ask the questions.”
“This is not fair.” Greer Dawson was miffed. “I didn’t really get a chance.”
“That’s true, she didn’t,” piped up her father.
“You will, you will,” said Miss Ferrell dismissively. “This is a learning experience for everybody ? “
“But the period’s almost over!” Greer cried.
Miss Ferrell opened her eyes wide. The sherbet-colored dress trembled. “Sit down, Greer. All right, Julian, what are you going to ask Heather about Cornell?”
From the gallery came the cry, “Ask her about home ec! Can I learn to be a smart caterer here?”
Julian flushed a painful shade, My heart turned over. Julian touched his tongue to his top lip. “I don’t want to do this now.”
The exasperated Miss Ferrell surrendered. “All right, go back to your desks, everybody.” During the ensuing chair-scraping and body-squishing, she said, “People, do you think this is some kind of joke?” She put her hands on her sherbet-clad hips. “I’m trying to help you.” She panned the classroom. She looked like a Parisian model who had been told to do peeved. And the class was taking her about that seriously.
To my great relief, the bell rang. Miss Ferrell called out, “Okay, drafts of personal essays before you leave, people!” I fled to a corner to avoid the press of jostling teenage bodies. By the time everybody had departed, Miss Ferrell was slapping papers around on her desk, looking thoroughly disgusted.
“Quel dommage,” I said, approaching her. What a pity. “Oh! I didn’t see you here.” She riffled papers on top of her roll book. “It’s always like this until a few days before the deadlines. What can I help you with? Did you come to see me? There’s no French Club today.”
“No, I was here to see the headmaster. Forgive me, I just wanted to drop in because, actually, Arch loves French Club. But he’s having trouble with his schoolwork ? “
She looked up quickly. “Did you hear about this morning?” She drew back, her tiny body framed by a rumpled poster of the Eiffel Tower on one side and a framed picture of the Arc de Triomphe on the other. When I shook my head, she walked with a tick-tock of little heels over to the door and closed it. “You’ve talked to Alfred?”
“Yes,” I said. “Mr. Perkins told me about Arch. About his academic and… social problems.” Come to think of it, he’d only mentioned the schoolwork mess.
“Did he tell you about this morning?”
“No,” I said carefully, “just that Arch was flunking a class.” Just.
“This is worse than that.”
?Worse??
Miss Ferrell eyed me. She seemed to be trying to judge whether I could take whatever it was she had to say.
I asked, “What happened to Arch this morning?”
“We had an assembly. The student body needed to know about Keith.” Her abrupt tone betrayed no feeling. “When it was over, I’m sorry to say Arch had a rather strenuous disagreement with someone.”
I closed my eyes. For being basically a kind and mature kid, Arch seemed to be getting into quite a few disagreements lately. I wondered what “rather strenuous” meant. “Who was it, do you know? We’ve just had someone throw a rock through one of our windows, and maybe…”
“Later Arch came and told me he’d gotten into a fight with a seventh-grader, a boy who is frequently in trouble. The other boy apparently said Keith was a tattler. Puzzling… most seventh-graders don’t even know seniors.?
“Is that all?”
“No. When Arch arrived at his locker, he found a nasty surprise. I went to check and… there was something there… .”
“What?”
“You’d better let me show you. I put my own lock on the locker, so it should be undisturbed.”
She peeked out into the hallway. The students had settled into the new class period, so we were able to make it down to the row of seventh-grade lockers without being seen.
Miss Ferrell minced along just in front of me. Her bright red scarf fluttered behind her like a flag. She fiddled expertly with the clasp on Arch’s locker. “I told him to leave it alone and the janitor would clean it out. But don’t know what to do about the paint.”
What I saw first was the writing above Arch’s locker. Block letters in bright pink pronounced: HE WHO WANTS TO BE A TATTLER, NEXT TIME WILL FACE A LIVE…
Miss Ferrell opened the locker door. Strung up and hanging on the hook was a dead rattlesnake.
6
It was all I could do to keep from screaming. “What happened when Arch saw this?”
When Miss Ferrell did not answer immediately, I whacked the locker next to Arch’s. The snake’s two-foot- long body swayed sickeningly. It had been strung up just under its head, and hung on the hook where Arch’s jacket should have gone. I couldn’t bear to look at the expanse of white snake-belly, at the ugly, crimped mouth, at those rattles at the end of the tail.
Miss Ferrell closed her eyes. “Since my classroom was nearby, he told me.”
I felt dizzy. I leaned against the cold gray metal of the adjacent locker. More quietly, I said, “Was he okay? Did he get upset?”
She shook her head. I recognized generic teacherly sympathy. “Of course he was a bit shaken up. I told the headmaster.”
“Yes, right.” Tears burned at the back of my eyes. I was furious at the crack in my voice. Hold it in, hold it in, I warned myself. “What did Perkins do? Why didn’t he tell me about it this morning? What happens now?”
Suzanne Ferrell drew her mouth into a slight moue. Her topknot with its bright scarf bobbed forward. “AIfred … Mr. Perkins said that it was probably just one of those seventh-grade pranks. That we should ignore it.”
Beg to differ, I said silently as I whirled away from Miss Ferrell and headed back to the headmaster’s sumptuous office.
“Is he still in?” I demanded of the receptionist.
“On the phone. If you’ll just take a se ? “
I stalked past her.
“Excuse me, sir!” I barked as heartily as any marine. “I need to talk to you.”
Perkins was staring at the oil painting of Big Ben, droning into his receiver. “Yes, Nell, we’ll see you then. Okay, yes, great for everybody. We’ll be like… underground bookworms who have come up to feast on ? “
At that moment he registered my presence. Just for a fraction of a second he raised the bushy white eyebrows at me, and I knew Nell had hung up. No worm feast for her. Perkins finished lamely, “… feast… on volumes. Ta-ta.” He replaced the receiver carefully, then laced his short fingers and studied me. There was a shadow of weariness in his pale eyes.
“Yes? Here to check on Friday night’s event at the Tattered Cover? Or about the muffins and whatnot before the SATs? Or is it something else?”
