Devilish

by Maureen Johnson

  He heaved himself against the lockers with a deep puff of breath, as if he liked to have these kinds of casual talks with me every morning. Which he sometimes did, just not in the hall, in the dark, with Sister Charles wobbling next him and the entire school coming down around us.

  “Well, yeah. I was, you know, doing homework,” I said.

  He seemed to relax now.

  “Don’t lie to a man of the cloth, Jane,” he said. “I’ve been in this business too long. As long as you’re safe. As long as you’re safe.”

  “Mother Mary was with you,” Sister Charles said sternly, but, to my surprise, with a real sound of relief in her voice. She reached over and put her veiny hand on my arm and gripped it with surprising strength.

  “Right,” I said. “Definitely.”

  She withdrew and took hold of Brother Frank’s heavy arm, and they continued their slow way through the hall. I managed to get the locker open and was fumbling through it blindly when Allison crept up.

  “I’ve been looking for you,” she said. “I’m sorry about yesterday. I was just feeling weird.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said.

  An announcement came over the intercom saying that they were giving up the effort. The school was too dark and too wet to stay open, and we were all being directed to go home. Buses were coming. Parents were being called.

  “Perfect,” I said. “Let’s get out of here. Come to my house with me. We’ll feast on leftovers and watch TV until our irises explode!”

  Ally hesitated, gripping my locker door for a moment.

  “I can’t,” she said. “Maybe later?”

  “What do you mean, can’t?” I asked. “It’s not like you had other plans. It’s a free day.”

  “I promised I would do something for someone if we closed,” she said, looking down. “I’m really sorry.”

  There was almost no use having a day off with no best friend to spend it with. I slammed my locker door in frustration, thinking that for once, I would not be identified because of the dark and could get away with it. And I did. I stormed off, only to meet up with Sister Rose Marie as I flew through the lobby and got flagged for “lack of caution in adverse conditions.”

  twelve

  It’s fair to say that up until this point in our history, Allison had been the most predictable person I’d ever known. When she wasn’t at school, she was at either one of two places: at home and easy to reach or with me and therefore extremely easy to reach. She didn’t go out, except with me. Predictable was good. We were best friends, always together. No secrets. Our lives and schedules were open books.

  But after the storm, all of that changed. I had no idea why. For the next week, I only saw Ally in class and maybe a few minutes before or after school. Every night, she had “something” she had to do. A few times she told me that her mom needed her help or her family was going out. If this was true, the Concords were more active than they had been in the entire time I’d known them. And apparently, they were going shopping because on each day, I noticed Ally had something new. One day, a brown leather jacket. The next, a black-and-silver Coach bag. Then came a silver bracelet, followed by a chunky silver choker to match. Finally, there was a new cell phone that Ally didn’t seem to know how to use. Her slim little bag would start to vibrate in class, and she’d smack it desperately, trying to get it to stop. Who was calling her, I had no idea.

  When I tried to ask her where these things had come from, she said her aunt Claire had sent them. This was sort of possible—Allison’s aunt Claire worked for a multinational bank and made a ton of money. But she was also mean and gave famously cheap Christmas presents, like five-dollar gift cards wrapped up in novelty socks, which Ally would dutifully wear.

  Then the week was over. The weekend was a silent one. I sat around, bored and miserable. I convinced Joan that Earth actually had a second moon, which we could never see because it was made of glass, but even that didn’t provide much joy. I called Ally, but she never answered, either because she was busy or because she couldn’t figure out how to. So I fell back on my standard activity for when I had too much time on my hands—I wrote a six-page note to Elton, which took me four hours and which I promptly destroyed when I was done.

  But I wasn’t totally forgotten because my e-mail in-box was full of notes from my new friend, Owen. They streamed in, relentless and terse:

  Hey, it’s Owen. Want to talk?

  Haven’t heard from you. Want to hang out?

  Doing anything today? Call me?

  This alarmed me. This was crazy fresh-guy behavior. When he showed up at our door on Sunday evening, I had Joan send him away. She had to make up a story on the fly, so she told him I was out getting “a really complicated waxing.”

  “Why won’t you talk to him?” she asked. “He’s cute.”

  “He’s a freshman,” I said, moving the dog and throwing myself onto the sofa. “And he’s stalking me.”

  “Yeah, but stalking is kind of cool. My friend Kiera got stalked by this guy Ryan. He used to break into her locker and read all of her e-mail, and one time he took her phone and wrote down all the phone numbers. But then they got together, and they’ve been dating for like a year! Which is kind of creepy but also really romantic.”

  I decided not to comment.

  “And he’s cute. So cute! He has little vampire eyebrows!”

  “Vampire eyebrows?”

  “You know how vampires have eyebrows that are pointy like their teeth? It’s, like, the teeth point down, and the eyebrows point up? His teeth aren’t pointy, though. And vampires are always trying to get into your house. They can’t come in unless you ask them….”

  She trailed off thoughtfully and jumped when the phone rang. I was wondering why both my sister and my best friend devoted so much thought-time to vampires when the phone landed in my lap.

  “No,” I silently mouthed to Joan. “I’m not home.”

  “It’s some girl,” she said, waving her hand.

  It was Lanalee.

  “Get your galoshes on,” she said. “We’re going on a trip!” “Galoshes?” I repeated. I’d only ever heard my gran use that word.

  “Whatever. Allison and I’ll be there in ten minutes. Be outside.”

  “For what? Allison is with you?”

  There was a click.

  thirteen

  I’d been used to the steep streets of Providence all my life, but I’d never experienced taking them on with Lanalee Tremone tanking around at about eighty miles an hour in a car the size of a garden shed. The inside was deeply dark and reeked of clove cigarettes and musky rose. Lanalee kept fumbling with the radio, blasting a piano solo that rippled all around the inside of the car.

  Allison sat in the front seat with her knees drawn up to her chest. She had cocooned herself in the snow-white pom-pom wrap she was wearing, another recent acquisition. I had the massive backseat all to myself. I couldn’t find the seat belt in the dark, so I kept sliding from door to door on the slick leather seats. I guessed this was the start of Lanalee’s “project.”

  “You’re sixteen?” I asked, clawing for the handle on the right side door for support.

  “Not exactly,” Lanalee shouted over the music. “I can use the car, though. I’ve been driving forever. This car is great. You like Chopin?”

  Chopin was deafening us, and we were almost certainly going to kill some other people, so I confined myself to a weak smile.

  “I saw it on one of the school blogs,” Lanalee said. “Some people came in over the weekend for a yearbook meeting. They found it when they were taking some general background shots of the school. They’re going to take it down.”

  “Saw what? You still haven’t told me what we’re doing.”

  “No time!” She waved her hand at me. “No time! You’ll see.”

  When we arrived at the long wooded drive that lead to St. Teresa’s and St. Sebastian’s, Lanalee turned off the headlights and crept along at about ten miles an hou
r. This felt considerably better speed-wise, but since it was completely black out and we were in a black car with tinted windows, we ran a disproportionately high risk of hitting an animal or, more alarmingly, one of the brothers or sisters walking back home from town. I was going to point this out to Lanalee, but it seemed best not to distract her. I think she managed to hit every single pothole on the way in, which was something of an accomplishment.

  We managed to get to the parking lot without killing anything and glided silently past a parked truck from an asphalt company.

  “My insurance policy,” Lanalee said, pointing at it.

  The school was dark and still, with just a few lights flickering in the windows where repair work was still going on. St. Teresa, still wounded from the storm, looked down on us as we stepped out of the car.

  “Hey,” I said to Ally. “Busy week, huh?”

  “Yeah,” she said quietly. “Sort of.”

  “Come on!” Lanalee said, sprinting off toward the building. Ally and I looked at each other, then followed her. Over the doorway, covering the taped-up beveled glass sign, was a printed banner made of several pieces of paper taped together. It bore the previous message: WILL YOU BE ASKED?

  “Come on,” Lanalee said. “It’s inside.”

  “What is?” I asked.

  “Come on!”

  Lanalee dance-stepped her way into the building. To my surprise, Allison followed her without hesitation. It went against my better judgment, but I trailed right along with them.

  Our school could be unnerving at the best of times, but in the dark, it was really odd. The sisters used the cafeteria for their dinner, so the whole place reeked of boiled beef and cabbage. We crept through the lobby, up the stairs, past the office. I decided not to look as we passed the giant oil painting of six medieval nuns being stoned to death for being Catholic and falling into a mass grave. (A nice little calling card they used to terrify incoming students and generally set a happy tone.)

  When Lanalee turned the corner to the hall that led to the chapel, I stopped.

  “I don’t think we should go in there,” I said. “The sisters use the chapel at night sometimes.”

  “We’ll be fast,” she said, grabbing me. “And look!”

  Allison was already through the chapel doors, her little red bob swinging with every step.

  “This is good for her,” Lanalee whispered to me. “She needs to develop some courage. We’ll be in and out.”

  “I can’t get caught,” I said. “My grandparents aren’t giving the school a driveway.”

  “You won’t! Relax!”

  Inside, we could immediately see the cause of the commotion. Three grotesque inflatable female mannequins had been lashed to the statues near the altar. They were dressed as nuns, but their mouths were harshly smeared with painful red lipstick. Balanced by their feet was a handwritten sign that read:

  THE POODLE CLUB IS HERE AND ANNOUNCES THE SOCIAL EVENT OF THE YEAR: POODLE PROM. WILL YOU BE ASKED?

  “That,” Lanalee said with a huge smile, “is definitely a message. It’s a strange message, but it’s a message.”

  I ripped down a flyer and read it over a few times, then looked to Allison. She was strangely still, mesmerized by the sight. There was a noise from above us, which caused us all to jump. It was probably just a tool being dropped, but it still seemed too close.

  “Time to go,” Lanalee said.

  We slid out of the chapel without any problem, but when we turned the corner, there was a figure between us and the only way out. From the looping walk, it was clearly Sister Charles. She was struggling to get to us. The light in the hall was dim, so though she could see us, she probably was too far to tell who we were.

  “Take off your coats,” Lanalee said quietly. “Quick. And flip them inside out.”

  I yanked off my coat and flipped it.

  “Over your head,” Lanalee said, draping hers over herself. “So she can’t see who you are. And run.”

  “But she’s right there,” Allison said despairingly.

  “What is she going to do? Tackle us? Cover and run!”

  Lanalee took off first. There was no time to think this one over. I put my coat over my head, hunkered down, and ran for it. Ally followed.

  It was pathetic sight, really. Sister Charles looked surprised by the three hunching figures coming at her but then squared off resolutely. We were all around her at once; Lanalee went to the left, so she turned that way, but I was on the right. She almost fell over while trying to move herself. She swung out and partially knocked Allison’s coat off her, but Lanalee grabbed it and pulled her along.

  The run through the rest of the school was like something out of a video game—lots of quick, dodging movement through dark corridors. Then we were outside. We didn’t stop running until we got to the car, which slipped off the property probably before Sister Charles could even get to the house phone.

  fourteen

  It was all down the next morning. You would never have known that anything had happened. The school was the same barely lit leaking concrete box that we’d seen the day before, only slightly less treacherous.

  But everyone did know—the report had gotten around. You could almost feel the question pulsing through the halls, a kind of physical desperation. What was the Poodle Club? What was this Poodle Prom?

  “It’s not a sorority,” I heard a junior saying as I came in, “it’s sort of a branch of Skull and Bones, that secret society at Yale that really important people join.”

  “Yeah, it’s at other schools,” added a sophomore. “It’s at all the major academies. All the boarding schools. My friend knows someone who goes to Spence in New York, and it’s totally there.”

  I passed the A3 deep in conference. They were spraying and balming themselves anxiously. Even Cassie was all wound up about it in calculus.

  “It’s like a secret admissions committee,” she said. “They plant people. They get reports back.”

  “Who?” I asked.

  “The schools!”

  “Which schools?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, shaken. “But if you’re in the Poodle Club, you’re in.”

  “Who told you this?” I asked.

  “Everyone knows,” she said. “I guess we’ve finally made it onto their radar. It’s probably because of us. You and me.”

  Cassie was one of those people, I could tell, who would fall for absolutely everything she heard in college. That story about automatically getting all A’s if your roommate dies. Rumors of dorms that had pools on the roof.

  There was a squawk, and the intercom came alive.

  “Jane Jarvis,” it said, “please report to Sister Albert’s office at once. God bless.”

  Cassie gave me a look that said, See?

  Sister Albert was the principal of our school. She and I had spent some quality time together—and with Brother Frank’s warning, I was definitely not happy about being called in.

  “What are you here for, dear?” Sister Bernie asked, leaning over her counter. She leaned in close enough that I got a good look at a jagged tear running down the arm of her habit, which she had sewn up in rough, Frankensteiny stitches. This was also the kind of thing that always got to me. It reminded me that the sisters really were poor.

  “I don’t know,” I lied.

  “All right, then,” she said happily. “Mother Mary be with you, Jane, dear.”

  Sister Albert’s office was high-ceilinged and poorly lit. For some insane reason, she was running the air conditioner, even though it was kind of cool. It was probably some technique to make us confess. Maybe a leftover from the Spanish Inquisition.

  Sister Albert herself was an enormous, boxy woman with a square head, square fingers, square torso, and square man-boobs. My deepest fear in dealing with her was that on one of these visits, she’d say, “Okay, Miss Jarvis, enough talking. We’re going to settle this with some good old-fashioned wrestling. Get on the floor!”

  I don�
��t really know why I thought that. I’m told I have an overactive imagination.

  “Sit down, Miss Jarvis,” she said.

  I sat down under the huge latch-hook rug portrait of the Virgin Mary that covered the wall across from Sister’s desk. On the desk itself was a very fat manila folder, which I knew at once was my personal file. I could see layers of strata detailing my various types of offenses and achievements—many inches of pink paper, a few inches of green. Pink was disciplinary report paper; green was for academic achievement records. Just looking at my folder, I realized that it wasn’t something you read—it was just something you weighed. Sister opened it and shuffled through the papers a bit.

  “These are your records, Miss Jarvis.” She looked up and fixed me with a stony stare. “You have a reputation for questioning and mocking this school and everything it stands for.”

  “I don’t mock,” I said. “I just ask questions.”

  “So, you are saying that you have nothing to do with this Poodle Club? Don’t try to tell me you haven’t heard of it.”

  “I’ve heard of it,” I admitted. “But I don’t even know what it’s supposed to be.”

  “Jane,” she said, closing my file. “Do you really want to be here?”

  “Here, as in …”

  “As in St. Teresa’s,” she said. “You have never really seemed happy here, never seemed like you fit in. We don’t like to make anyone stay here who isn’t committed to what our school stands for.”

  “I’m committed, Sister. Totally committed.”

  We listened to the air conditioner hum for a moment.

  “We had to open your locker this morning because of the leaking,” she said. This was such an obvious lie that she had to turn away from the searching gaze from the latch-hook rug. “We found this.”

  She held up the crumpled flyer from the night before.

  “We removed a display of these flyers last night,” she said. “Would you care to explain why this one was in your locker?”

  The truth was, I couldn’t. But it was there, and I had to account for it somehow. And just saying I didn’t know wasn’t going to cut it.