by Stephen King
Grace nodded brightly. There were roses in her cheeks. That’s what my mother always says about someone who has high color.
Irma Bates just looked demurely at my red bandanna.
“Stop it!” Ted Jones snapped. “You said you weren’t going to hurt anyone, Charlie. Now, stop it!” His eyes looked desperate. “Just stop it!”
For no reason I could fathom, Don Lordi laughed crazily.
“She started it, Ted Jones,” Sylvia Ragan said heatedly. “If some Ethiopian jug-diddler called my mother a whore-”
“Whore, dirty whore,” Irma agreed demurely.
“… I’d claw her fuggin’ eyes out!”
“You’re crazy!” Ted bellowed at her, his face the color of old brick. “We could stop him! If we all got together, we could-”
“Shut up, Ted,” Dick Keene said. “Okay?”
Ted looked around, saw he had neither support nor sympathy, and shut up. His eyes were dark and full of crazy hate. I was glad it was a good long run between his desk and Mrs. Underwood’s. I could shoot him in the foot if I had to.
“Ready, girls?”
Grace Stanner grinned a healthy, gutsy grin. “All ready.”
Irma nodded. She was a big girl, standing with her legs apart and her head slightly lowered. Her hair was a dirty blond color, done in round curls that looked like toilet-paper rolls.
I dropped my bandanna. It was on.
Grace stood thinking about it. I could almost see her realizing how deep it could be, wondering maybe how far in over her head she wanted to get. In that instant I loved her. No… I loved them both.
“You’re a fat, bigmouth bitch,” Grace said, looking Irma in the eye. “You stink. I mean that. Your body stinks. You’re a louse.”
“Good,” I said, when she was done. “Give her a smack.”
Grace hauled off and slapped the side of Irma’s face. It made a flat whapping noise, like one board striking another. Her sweater pulled up above the waistband of her skirt with the swing of her arm.
Corky Herald went “Unhh!” under his breath.
Irma let out a whoofing grunt. Her head snapped back, her face screwed up. She didn’t look demure anymore. There was a large, hectic patch on her left cheek.
Grace threw back her head, drew a sudden knife-breath, and stood ready. Her hair spilled over her shoulders, beautiful and perfect. She waited.
“Irma for the prosecution,” I said. “Go ahead, Irma.”
Irma was breathing heavily. Her eyes were glazed and offended, her mouth horrified. At that moment she looked like no one’s sweet child of morning.
“Whore,” she said finally, apparently deciding to stick with a winner. Her lip lifted, fell, and lifted again, like a dog’s. “Dirty boy-fucking whore.”
I nodded to her.
Irma grinned. She was very big. Her arm, coming around, was like a wall. It rocketed against the side of Grace’s face. The sound was a sharp crack.
“Ow!” someone whined.
Grace didn’t fall over. The whole side of her face went red, but she didn’t fall over. Instead, she smiled at Irma. And Irma flinched. I saw it and could hardly believe it: Dracula had feet of clay, after all.
I snatched a quick look at the audience. They were hung, hypnotized. They weren’t thinking about Mr. Grace or Tom Denver or Charles Everett Decker. They were watching, and maybe what they saw was a little bit of their own souls, flashed at them in a cracked mirror. It was fine. It was like new grass in spring.
“Rebuttal, Grace?” I asked.
Grace’s lips drew back from her tiny ivory teeth. “You never had a date, that’s what’s the matter with you. You’re ugly. You smell bad. And so all you think about is what other people do, and you have to make it all dirty in your mind. You’re a bug.”
I nodded to her.
Grace swung, and Irma shied away. The blow struck her only glancingly, but she began to weep with a sudden, slow hopelessness. “Let me out,” she groaned. “I don’t want to any more, Charlie. Let me out!”
“Take back what you said about my mother,” Grace said grimly.
“Your mother sucks cocks!” Irma screamed. Her face was twisted; her toilet-roll curls bobbed madly.
“Good,” I said. “Go ahead, Irma.”
But Irma was weeping hysterically. “J-J-Je-Jesusss…” she screamed. Her arms came up and covered her face with terrifying slowness. “God I want to be d-dd-dead…”
“Say you’re sorry,” Grace said grimly. “Take it back.”
“You suck cocks!” Irma screamed from behind the barricade of her arms.
“Okay,” I said. “Let her have it, Irma. Last chance.”
This time Irma swung from the heels. I saw Grace’s eyes squeeze into slits, saw the muscles of her neck tighten into cords. But the angle of her jaw caught most of the blow and her head shifted only slightly. Still, that whole side of her face was bright red, as if from sunburn.
Irma’s whole body jogged and jiggled with the force of her sobs, which seemed to come from a deep well in her that had never been tapped before.
“You haven’t got nothing,” Grace said. “You ain’t nothing. Just a fat, stinky pig is what you are.”
“Hey, give it to her!” Billy Sawyer yelled. He slammed both fists down heavily on his desk. “Hey, pour it on!”
“You ain’t even got any friends,” Grace said, breathing hard. “Why do you even bother living?”
Irma let out a thin, reedy wail.
“All done,” Grace said to me.
“Okay,” I said. “Give it to her.”
Grace drew back, and Irma screamed and went to her knees. “Don’t h-h-hit me. Don’t hit me no more! Don’t you hit me-”
“Say you’re sorry.”
“I can’t,” she wept. “Don’t you know I can’t?”
“You can. You better.”
There was no sound for a moment, but the vague buzz of the wall clock. Then Irma looked up, and Grace’s hand came down fast, amazingly fast, making a small, ladylike splat against Irma’s cheek. It sounded like a shot from a.22.
Irma fell heavily on one hand, her curls hanging in her face. She drew in a huge, ragged breath and screamed, “Okay! All right! I’m sorry!”
Grace stepped back, her mouth half-open and moist, breathing rapidly and shallowly. She raised her hands, palms out, in a curiously dove-like gesture, and pushed her hair away from her cheeks. Irma looked up at her dumbly, unbelievingly. She struggled to her knees again, and for a moment I thought she was going to offer a prayer to Grace. Then she began to weep.
Grace looked at the class, then looked at me. Her breasts were very full, pushing at the soft fabric of her sweater.
“My mother fucks,” she said, “and I love her.”
The applause started somewhere in the back, maybe with Mike Gavin or Nancy Caskin. But it started and spread until they were all applauding, all but Ted Jones and Susan Brooks. Susan looked too overwhelmed to applaud. She was looking at Gracie Stanner shiningly.
Irma knelt on the floor, her face in her hands. When the applause died (I had looked at Sandra Cross; she applauded very gently, as if in a dream), I said, “Stand up, Irma.”
She looked at me wonderingly, her face streaked and shadowed and ravaged, as if she had been in a dream herself.
“Leave her alone,” Ted said, each word distinct.
“Shut up,” Harmon Jackson said. “Charlie is doing all right.”
Ted turned around in his seat and looked at him. But Harmon did not drop his eyes, as he might have done at another place, another time. They were both on the Student Council together-where Ted, of course, had always been the power.
“Stand up, Irma,” I said gently.
“Are you going to shoot me?” she whispered.
“You said you were sorry.”
“She made me say it.”
“But I bet you are.”
Irma looked at me dumbly from beneath the madhouse of her toilet-paper-roll curls. “I’
ve always been sorry,” she said. “That’s what makes it s-s-s-so hard to s-say.”
“Do you forgive her?” I asked Grace.
“Huh?” Grace looked at me, a little dazed. “Oh. Yeah. Sure.” She walked suddenly back to her seat and sat down, where she looked frowningly at her hands.
“Irma?” I said.
“What?” She was peering at me, doglike, truculent, fearful, pitiful.
“Do you have something you want to say?”
“I don’t know.”
She stood up a little at a time. Her hands dangled strangely, as if she didn’t know exactly what to do with them.
“I think you do.”
“You’ll feel better when it’s off your chest, Irma,” Tanis Gannon said. “I always do.”
“Leave her alone, fa Chrissake,” Dick Keene said from the back of the room.
“I don’t want to be let alone,” Irma said suddenly. “I want to say it.” She brushed back her hair defiantly. Her hands were not dove-like at all. “I’m not pretty. No one likes me. I never had a date. Everything she said is true. There.” The words rushed out very fast, and she screwed up her face while she was saying them, as if she were taking nasty medicine.
“Take a little care of yourself,” Tanis said. Then, looking embarrassed but still determined: “You know, wash, shave your legs and, uh, armpits. Look nice. I’m no raving beauty, but I don’t stay home every weekend. You could do it.”
“I don’t know how!”
Some of the boys were beginning to look uneasy, but the girls were leaning forward. They looked sympathetic now, all of them. They had that confessions-at-the-pajama-party look that every male seems to know and dread.
“Well…” Tanis began. Then she stopped and shook her head. “Come back here and sit down.”
Pat Fitzgerald snickered. “Trade secrets?”
“That’s right.”
“Some trade,” Corky Herald said. That got laughs. Irma Bates shuttled to the back of the room, where she, Tanis, Anne Lasky, and Susan Brooks started some sort of confabulation. Sylvia was talking softly with Grace, and Pig Pen’s eyes were crawling avidly over both of them. Ted Jones was frowning at the air. George Yannick was carving something on the top of his desk and smoking a cigarette-he looked like any busy carpenter. Most of the other; were looking out the windows at the cops directing traffic and conferring in desperate-looking little huddles. I could pick out Don Grace, good old Tom Denver, and Jerry Kesserling, the traffic cop.
A bell went off suddenly with a loud bray, making all of us jump. It made the cops outside jump, too. A couple of them pulled their guns.
“Change-of-classes bell,” Harmon said.
I looked at the wall clock. It was 9:50. At 9:05 I had been sitting in my seat by the window, watching the squirrel. Now the squirrel was gone, good old Tom Denver was gone, and Mrs. Underwood was really gone. I thought it over and decided I was gone, too.
CHAPTER 21
Three more state-police cars came, and also a number of citizens from town. The cops tried to shoo them away, with greater or lesser degrees of success. Mr. Frankel, owner and proprietor of Frankel’s Jewelry Store amp; Camera Shop, drove up in his new Pontiac Firebird and jawed for quite a while with Jerry Kesserling. He pushed his horn-rimmed glasses up on his nose constantly as he talked. Jerry was trying to get rid of him, but Mr. Frankel wasn’t having any of it. He was also Placerville’s second selectman and a crony of Norman Jones, Ted’s father.
“My mother got me a ring in his store,” Sarah Pasterne said, looking at Ted from the corner of her eye. “It greened my finger the first day.”
“My mother says he’s a gyp,” Tanis said.
“Hey!” Pig Pen gulped. “There’s my mother!”
We all looked. Sure enough, there was Mrs. Dano talking with one of the state troopers, her slip hanging a quarter of an inch below the hem of her dress. She was one of those ladies who do fifty percent of their talking with their hands. They fluttered and whipped like flags, and it made me think of autumn Saturdays on the gridiron, somehow: holding… clipping… illegal tackle. I guess in this case you’d have to say it was illegal holding.
We all knew her by sight as well as by reputation; she headed up a lot of PTA functions and was a member in good standing of the Mothers Club. Go out to a baked-bean supper to benefit the class trip, or to the Sadie Hawkins dance in the gym, or to the senior outing, and you’d be apt to find Mrs. Dano at the door, ready with the old glad hand, grinning like there was no tomorrow, and collecting bits of information the way frogs catch flies.
Pig Pen shifted nervously in his seat, as if he might have to go to the bathroom.
“Hey, Pen, your mudda’s callin',” Jack Goldman intoned from the back of the room.
“Let her call,” Pig Pen muttered.
The Pen had an older sister, Lilly Dano, who was a senior when we were all freshmen. She had a face that looked a lot like Pig Pen’s, which made her nobody’s candidate for Teen Queen. A hook-nosed junior named LaFollet St. Armand began squiring her about, and then knocked her up higher than a kite. LaFollet joined the Marines, where they presumably taught him the difference between his rifle and his gun-which was for shooting and which was for fun. Mrs. Dano appeared at no PTA functions for the next two months. Lilly was packed off to an aunt in Boxford, Massachusetts. Shortly after that, Mrs. Dano returned to the same old stand, grinning harder than ever. It’s a small-town classic, friends.
“She must be really worried about you,” Carol Granger said.
“Who cares?” Pig Pen asked indifferently. Sylvia Ragan smiled at him. Pig Pen blushed.
Nobody said anything for a while. We watched the townspeople mill around beyond the bright yellow crash barricades that were going up. I saw some other mums and dads among them. I didn’t see Sandra’s mother and father, and I didn’t see big Joe McKennedy. Hey, I didn’t really expect he’d show up, anyway. Circuses have never been our style.
A newsmobile from WGAN-TV pulled up. One of the guys got out, patting his process neatly into place, and jawed with a cop. The cop pointed across the road. The guy with the process went back to the newsmobile, and two more guys got out and started unloading camera equipment.
“Anybody here got a transistor radio?” I asked.
Three of them raised hands. Corky’s was the biggest, a Sony twelve transistor that he carried in his briefcase. It got six bands, including TV, shortwave, and CB. He put it on his desk and turned it on. We were just in time for the ten-o’clock report:
“Topping the headlines, a Placerville High School senior, Charles Everett Decker…”
“Everett!” Somebody snickered.
“Shut up,” Ted said curtly.
Pat Fitzgerald stuck out his tongue.
“… apparently went berserk early this morning and is now holding twenty-four classmates hostage in a classroom of that high school. One person, Peter Vance, thirty-seven, a history teacher at Placerville, is known dead. Another teacher, Mrs. Jean Underwood, also thirty-seven, is feared dead. Decker has commandeered the intercom system and has communicated twice with school authorities. The list of hostages is as follows…”
He read down the class list as I had given it to Tom Denver. “I’m on the radio!” Nancy Caskin exclaimed when they reached her name. She blinked and smiled tentatively. Melvin Thomas whistled. Nancy colored and told him to shut up.
“… and George Yannick. Frank Philbrick, head of the Maine State Police, has asked that all friends and family stay away from the scene. Decker is presumed dangerous, and Philbrick emphasized that nobody knows at this time what might set him off. 'We have to assume that the boy is still on a hair trigger,' Philbrick said.”
“Want to pull my trigger?” I asked Sylvia.
“Is your safety on?” she asked right back, and the class roared. Anne Lasky laughed with her hands over her mouth, blushing a deep bright red. Ted Jones, our practicing party poop, scowled.
“… Grace, Placerville’s psy
chiatrist and guidance counselor, talked to Decker over the intercom system only minutes ago. Grace told reporters that Decker threatened to kill someone in the classroom if Grace did not leave the upstairs office immediately.”
“Liar!” Grace Stanner said musically. Irma jumped a little.
“Who does he think he is?” Melvin asked angrily. “Does he think he can get away with that shit?”
“… also said that he considers Decker to be a schizophrenic personality, possibly past the point of anything other than borderline rationality. Grace concluded his hurried remarks by saying: 'At this point, Charles Decker might conceivably do anything.' Police from the surrounding towns of…”
“Whatta crocka shit!” Sylvia blared. “I’m gonna tell those guys what really went down with that guy when we get outta here! I’m gonna-”
“Shut up and listen!” Dick Keene snapped at her.
“… and Lewiston have been summoned to the scene. At this moment, according to Captain Philbrick, the situation is at an impasse. Decker has sworn to kill if tear gas is used, and with the lives of twenty-four children at stake…”
“Children,” Pig Pen said suddenly. “Children this and children that. They stabbed you in the back, Charlie. Already. Children. Ha. Shit. What do they think is happening? I-”
“He’s saying something about-” Corky began.
“Never mind. Turn it off,” I said. “This sounds more interesting.” I fixed the Pen with my best steely gaze. “What seems to be on yore mind, pal?”
Pig Pen jerked his thumb at Irma. “She thinks she’s got it bad,” he said. “Her. Heh.” He laughed a sudden, erratic laugh. For no particular reason I could make out, he removed a pencil from his breast pocket and looked at it. It was a purple pencil.
“Be-Bop pencil,” Pig Pen said. “Cheapest pencils on the face of the earth, that’s what I think. Can’t sharpen ’em at all. Lead breaks. Every September since I started first grade Ma comes home from the Mammoth Mart with two hundred Be-Bop pencils in a plastic box. And I use ’em, Jesus.”
He snapped his purple pencil between his thumbs and stared at it. To tell the truth, I did think it looked like a pretty cheap pencil. I’ve always used the Eberhard Faber myself.