rather than have all the Aspen Meadow students attempt the trek to Denver, forty miles away. In the spirit of noblesse oblige, Headmaster Perkins had ordered me to prepare quadruple the amount of morning snack, so we could serve ? his words ? “the masses.” Time to get cracking.
I got out strawberries, cantaloupe, oranges, and bananas, and began to slice. Soon hills of jewellike fruit glistened on my cutting boards. Worry about Julian again surfaced. Had he been safe at his friend Neil’s house? As far as I knew, he had slept less than twenty hours this entire week. Julian, the college-scholarship kid. Why had someone done that for him?
When I finished the fruit I started mixing the muffin batters. From the freezer I took the doughnuts I had been making during the smoke episode, along with extra homemade rolls from the clergy meeting. With these set out to thaw, I mixed peanut butter into flour and eggs for the final batch of muffins and set it into the other oven, and then began to put together something I had only been thinking about, something with whole grain but sweet, like granola. My food processor blended unsalted butter into brown and white sugars. I repressed a shudder. Given the school’s reputation, I should call these Cereal Killer Cookies.
I scraped ice cream scoopfuls of the thick batter onto cookie sheets, took all the muffins out of the oven, then nipped outside with two hot ones wrapped in a cloth napkin. The policeman doing the surveillance accepted them gratefully. He wouldn’t follow me to the school. His orders were to watch the house, not me. Back inside, the enticing scent of baking cookies filled the kitchen. When they were done, I packed up several gallons of chilled vanilla yogurt along with the rest of the goodies and set out for Elk Park Prep, waving to the officer in his squad car as I pulled away. He saluted me with a muffin and a grin.
The heavy clouds sprinkling thick snowflakes reminded me of detergent showering into a washing machine. Someone had the foresight to call the county highway people and get the road to Elk Park Prep plowed. At seven, after carefully rounding the newly plowed curves, I arrived at the school driveway, where a pickup with a CAT was smoothing a lane through the thick, rumpled white stuff.
I skirted the truck, put the van in first gear, and started slowly up the snow-packed asphalt, already much traveled by vehicles carrying test-taking students. In a spirit of Halloween festivity, the elementary grades had carved row upon row of pumpkins to line the long entrance to the school. But the sudden cold wave had softened and crumpled the orange ovoids so that their yawning, jagged-toothed mouths, their decaying, staring faces now leered upward under powdery white masks of snow. A jack-o’-lantern graveyard. Not what I’d want to see the day of a big test.
The parking lot was already three-fourths full. With relief I noticed the heavily stickered VW bug that belonged to Julian’s friend, Neil Mansfield. When I came through the front doors that were still draped with wilted black crepe paper, Julian spotted me through the crowd of students and rushed over to help.
“No, no, that’s okay,” I protested as he took a box. “Please go back over to your friends.”
Cereal Killer Cookies
2 z cups old-fashioned oats
2 6-ounce packages almond brickIe chips (Bits O’ Brickle)
1 2/3 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
? teaspoon salt
1 cup firmly packed dark brown sugar
z cup granulated sugar
1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter
2 large eggs
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
Preheat the oven to 375°. In a small bowl, mix the oats with the brickle chips. Sift the flour, baking soda, baking powder, and salt together. In a food processor, mix the sugars until blended, then gradually add the butter. Continue to process until creamy and smooth. Add the eggs and vanilla and process until blended. Add the flour mixture and process just until combined. Pour this mixture over the, oats and brickIe chips and stir until well combined. Using a 2-tablespoon measure, measure out scoops of dough and place at least 2 inches apart on ungreased cookie sheets. Bake for 12 to 15 minutes or until golden brown.
Cool on wire racks. Makes 4 to 5 dozen.
“I can’t,” he said brusquely. He hoisted the box up on one knee of his jeans and shot me a beseeching look. “They’re driving me nuts asking each other vocabulary questions. After that bookstore meeting last night, Neil and I played five-card draw until midnight. It was so great! The only question we asked each other was, How many cards do you want?”
Neil also came over to help. To my surprise, so did Brad Marensky and Heather Coopersmith. My sudden and unexpected popularity seemed to be owing to their not wanting to test each other on last-minute analogies. I directed the four teenagers to set up two long tables and layout the tablecloths and disposable plates, bowls, spoons, and forks that I had brought. Julian, to my great relief, had already started coffee brewing in the school’s large pot, but he had done it in the kitchen, and I didn’t know how to move the immense pot out to the foyer.
“I wanted to start the coffee out here,” Julian informed me as if he were reading my mind, “but I couldn’t find the extension cord that’s usually with the thing.”
Oh, spare me. For the hundredth time since finding Keith Andrews’ battered body out in the snow, I pushed away the thought of the dark cords twisted around his body. “Julian,” I said as I searched for a sugar spoon, “never say the words extension cord to me again. Please?”
He gave me a puzzled look that abruptly changed to a knowing one; He and Neil brought out cups of coffee on trays. When the bowls and platters were uncovered, kids began to come up to me to ask if they should eat now, where were they supposed to go, were the classrooms marked?
Desperately, I turned to Julian. “I need to do the food. Would you please find a faculty member or somebody to shepherd everyone around?”
He sighed. “Somebody said Ferrell went to get the pencils.” Before we could worry about it further, thankfully, a pair of faculty proctors appeared. The kids could take another twenty minutes to have their breakfast, they announced. Then alphabetized assignments were made to classrooms. The students crowded around the serving tables, shouting encouragements and vocabulary words to one another as they juggled muffins, doughnuts, cookies, bowls of yogurt with fruit, and cups of coffee. I was so busy refilling platters that I didn’t have a chance to talk to Julian again until just before he went into the P-Z classroom.
“How do you feel?”
“Okay.” But his smile was halfhearted. He clamped his hands under the armpits of his gray sweatshirt. “You know, it’s funny about that scholarship. Somebody ? somebody besides you ? cares about me. Maybe an alumnus, maybe one of the parents of the other kids. Not knowing who did it is kind of neat. I kept waiting for Ferrell or Perkins to say, Well, you have to do this, or you have to do that. But nothing happened. So now I think it doesn’t matter so much how well I do on these tests. They’re not the be-all and end-all. And that gives me a good feeling. I’m all right.”
I said, “Great,” and meant it. Egon Schlichtmaier, his hair fashionably tousled and his hands in the pockets of a shearling coat, came up and shooed Julian along to the classroom. I went back to clean up. The foyer was empty except for one lone student. Macguire Perkins stared morosely at what was left of the Cereal Killer Cookies.
“Macguire! You need to go take your test. It’s starting in five minutes.”
“I’m hungry.” He didn’t look at me. “I’m usually not up this early. But I can’t decide what to have.”
“Here,” I said, quickly grabbing up a handful of cookies, “take these into your classroom. Follow Schlichtmaier down the hall.”
Still not meeting my eye, Macguire stuffed them into the pouch of his baggy sweatshirt. “Thanks,” he muttered. “Maybe they’ll make me smart. I didn’t have any last year, and I only got 820 combined.”
“Oh, Macguire,” I said earnestly, “don’t worry…” His miserable pimpled face sagged. “Look, Macguire, everything’s going to be okay. Come on.” I scooted out from behind the long table. “Let me walk with you down to
