Adam and Evil

by Gillian Roberts

  “That’ll take forever.” I could feel bruises working their way from my insides out. I was going to feel like hell. I didn’t need a professional to tell me that.

  “We’ve got time,” he said. “An’ then we’ll go home, and we’ll talk. Then. So it’s not rushed and cramped and prone to misunderstandin’.”

  I nodded and followed him to wherever his car was parked. My hip didn’t hurt as much as it had, and I knew I’d be fine, and that the hospital would be a legal technicality. For Ray Buttonwood’s sake. To prevent a heavy-duty medical claim.

  “I really do have one thing to say first,” I repeated.

  He stopped and looked at me with patient despair. “You’ll never change, will you? You are the most bullheaded, stubborn—”

  I hated what was ahead. Knew it was the most important thing I was going to do today and tonight, knew it was imperative—for him, for me—but nonetheless hated it.

  “Well, then, go ahead,” he said. “You’re so stubborn you’d let yourself die rather than not say your piece, wouldn’t you? What is it you so absolutely have to say first?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  I’d just made history, and the shock of it registered on Mackenzie. Saying that word is not my strong suit, even when I think it and feel it and know it. “I’m sorry,” I repeated, trying not to notice as he quickly erased the delight and surprise from his face. “I treated you shabbily and hurt your feelings, and although I didn’t mean to do it, I did do it, and I’m very, very sorry.”

  He seemed ready to say something back, inhaled, closed his mouth, nodded again, and took my hand once more, looking extremely concerned. “We’d better rush you to the hospital,” he said. “You’ve gone into shock.”

  Before I could protest, he grinned. “I know that was real hard for you to do,” he said softly as we slowly walked through the city. “Therefore damn noble and brave. And it’s much appreciated. Very much appreciated. But in future, if we have one, let us both work on this. You don’ need to stage a war an’ nearly get killed, an’ I don’ need to think you’re dead, before we’re both scared enough to say the things that need saying. Deal?”

  “Deal.” We moved on.

  Except for somebody having tried to kill me, it had become a fairly decent evening.

  Eighteen

  ONE THING I HAVE HAD THE CHANCE TO LEARN—OVER AND over again, alas—is that no matter how staggering and stupefying the events of your (okay, my) life may be, it pretty much doesn’t matter to the rest of the universe.

  And so the next morning, mind abuzz with confusion and questions about what precisely had been going on the night before and why, limping and bruised but declared not in need of hospitalization or medical pampering or even serious mind-altering drugs, I went to work. Had I not needed to, had I not already been in major occupational jeopardy—had I left a decent and current lesson plan—I might have stayed home to spend the day wallowing in self-pity and obsessing about my problems. But I couldn’t, and there is nothing quite as efficient as a gaggle of teens to disabuse you of the illusion that you’re the center of the universe.

  In preparation for this, I attempted to look on the positive side of everything, much as that concept annoys me. But there were positives: primarily, that thanks to a crazed driver, whether or not he—or she—or they—had been trying to kill me or my sister, my love life seemed in a better place than it had for some time. This was good.

  Also, because of that same driver, my mother, who had immediately heard about or intuited Beth’s accident, was sufficiently distracted by the one daughter’s near loss of life that she failed to ask the other daughter what I was doing with the remainder of mine.

  End of list. A very short list.

  I’d add reprieves. Bad things that hadn’t happened. Yet.

  The Yet List.

  I hadn’t been fired. Yet. I had a few weeks more of employment. It was odd how much that meant to me, even though all the while I was deciding whether I even wanted to continue, whether I was still doing a decent job, whether it wasn’t time for something altogether new. But as long as I wasn’t fired, I could still feel in control of my destiny, and it was a shock to fully realize how basic and profound that need is. I was holding on by my fingernails, true, but that was infinitely better than falling into the abyss—or being pushed there by Havermeyer.

  Second, Adam hadn’t been found. Yet. I wasn’t sure if that was good or bad news for him when I imagined him on the street somewhere, high or sick on whatever drugs he was finding, subject to the whims of the bad company surrounding him, police out searching for him.

  But Adam’s missing and wanted status had stalled his parents’ suit against me. They probably didn’t want to attract more attention to him while he was the prime suspect in a murder. So I wasn’t being sued. Yet.

  The Yet List was underwhelming, too. All it had established was that a lot of bad things were poised, waiting to happen to me when the time was right.

  Nonetheless, I was in stasis, carefully balanced, but still in the game. All I had to do was keep Havermeyer’s requested low profile, mine and the school’s, while I figured out what I wanted and how to get it. There was time and maneuverability. Cowardly Havermeyer wasn’t going to do anything publicly.

  To my delight, I realized I was, for the most part, okay. My sibling was going to be fine, too, after her torn ligaments healed and her stitches were removed. Until then, her partners could cover for all her ambulatory duties. And I’d promised to pitch in as much as I could. When the term ended, I might wind up working for or with her. Who knew? That might be my next stop. But for now, I was still employed. No permanent damage to either sister.

  I was halfway up the staircase, en route to my room, when the Bobbsey twins—Jill and Nancy—barreled down, stopping as soon as they saw me. “There she is!” they told each other.

  “Good!” Jill said as Nancy nodded agreement. “We thought we missed you and we had to talk to you?”

  “Tell you something,” Nancy said.

  I suggested we do the telling upstairs because otherwise we risked trampling. It’s amazing how resolutely our students push up or down the stairs en route to classrooms they’d rather avoid altogether.

  The girls didn’t settle down once inside my empty room. Bad sign. Something was off-kilter. Something minor, I decided, or their faces would reflect more. They were the least cryptic of young women.

  But I had other worries, so I gave the girls only a third of my attention. The brush with death the night before had prevented my finishing the garbology collection, and I was juggling lesson ideas to see how I could finesse that gap and catch up on lost time with my other classes as well. “What’s up?” I asked. “I’m so sorry, but I haven’t had time to edit your news story. It will be in the next issue—the end of this month—but I’ve …” No way in hell could I explain the last two days to these innocents.

  Instead, it felt acceptable, or at least expedient, to play on their sympathies. “I had an accident last night—sideswiped by a car. Didn’t get home from the hospital till late.”

  The joy in life disappeared from both their faces. “Oh, Miss Pepper,” they said in unison, conveying volumes of grief and sympathy in three words.

  “I’m fine. Really nothing. I was lucky—only banged up.” I liked playing the stoic heroic guy thing—especially when what I said was the whole truth but sounded as if I were underplaying. I was indeed fine. “Now, what’s up?” Once again I gestured toward chairs close to my desk, but they stood where they were. So be it. I had work to do, so I sat down at my desk and pulled folders out of my briefcase.

  Both of them cleared their throats. “Our parents,” Nancy began. “Our parents are really excited about the newspaper article.”

  “We gave them a copy of the story we wrote?”

  Someday I had to edit Jill’s punctuation, tell her this questioning vocal tag was a sign of insecurity, a need to seek approval. That men did not speak that way. That she
had to purge the habit, speak assertively, fight for verbal equality. Someday. Now I had to find out what was up.

  “They’re real excited that you’ve approved the story and that we’re going to have our own article in the paper and all.”

  Pause. No comment from the echo chamber. Big worry signal. I put down a stack of vocabulary quizzes and gave my visitors my full attention.

  “The thing is, they say that since it’s about an actual illegal crime thing, the school administration has to know about it. I mean, we can’t go around knowing about a crime and not reporting it, that’s what they said.”

  “My uncle Josh is a lawyer? He said so.”

  “And reporting it in the school paper, which is what you’re doing, doesn’t count?” I asked. It seemed as if it should. Isn’t that what actual journalists do? Had Woodward and Bernstein filed a police report first?

  “My mother said it wasn’t right. That at least the headmaster of the school had to know about it—”

  “—sooner than a month from now, which is, like, when it’ll be in print? Because it wasn’t fair to spring it on him through an article? It’s his reputation, too?”

  As if I needed reminding of that. Connect the dots into the future, the rest of this term. His school is the viper’s nest, the corrupt center of a criminal ring. It could not be worse.

  And my profile, promised to be kept low, would jump into the stratosphere. At least it would seem that way to Havermeyer, who would scapegoat me as the troublemaker, she who authorized the story.

  The girls’ parents were probably right, and although I was sick of doing the right thing and having it boomerang, I reopened my briefcase and extracted their article. They waited as I skimmed over it. I had a memory of what was in it and hoped against hope that my memory was failing me.

  But there it was on the second page: names. Students’ names, schools’ names, the Philly Prep ringleader’s name. And not on the page—yet—but as a postscript to what was already written, I also saw expulsions, nongraduations, possible revoking of college admissions, involvement of other schools.

  You’ll never work in this town again, Amanda.

  But the right thing to do. Morally correct. Ethically proper.

  And on the other side of the scales of justice, what did I have to offer up as an objection and counterweight?

  My convenience.

  My comfort level.

  My butt.

  “Also the police?”

  For once, I hoped Jill meant that question mark, that she didn’t know if the police needed instant notification.

  “Because it’s a crime, an actual illegal thing, her uncle Josh says.”

  “They’ll need to investigate? Uncle Josh says just because we wrote this thing doesn’t make it true legally for a case? That, like, the kids could sue for libel or something? So there has to be an investigation, like with detectives and everything? Uncle Josh thought maybe me and Nancy—”

  “Nancy and I,” I said, working by remote control.

  “Nancy and I could write the story for the big newspapers, too? Maybe? Maybe the Inquirer?”

  “Maybe,” I murmured. My pulse was going triple-time. The little idea that grew. Any higher profile, I’d have to be on Mount Rushmore.

  TOWARD THE END OF THE DAY, MY SENIORS WERE IN THEIR circle, working on their movie projects. Adam’s absence was no longer physically visible—his chair removed, the circle made whole again, although Troy Bloester came up to my desk to whisper, “Adam’s okay. Thought you’d want to know.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He’s been around.”

  “Around where? What do you mean?”

  “Around here. This junior saw him early this morning. His mom—the junior’s mom—was dropping him off, and they both saw Adam and another guy in the alley behind the school.”

  That didn’t sound so okay to me. Adam was either unaware of being the subject of a manhunt or unaware of everything.

  “The mom called the cops, too, but Adam was gone way before they got there. Thought you’d want to know. I was glad he got away, and so was the kid whose mom was going to turn him in. Nobody wants Adam in bigger trouble than he already is. The guy’s a weird dude, but …”

  I waited.

  “He’s our weird dude.”

  I found that a rather elegant and suitable philosophy, and thanked Troy for the update.

  Sarah Adams, the tiny girl who’d missed the ruckus at the library, had seemed positively infected with her project since that day. Now, having gone back to the library each succeeding day that it was open, she was creating an involved story about a frontier woman whose adventures served as the basis of the books she both wrote and illustrated. Sarah hummed to herself as she drew. Every time I saw her and was again amazed by the transformation of an otherwise lackadaisical pupil, I smiled. With enough time, with enough breathing room to think about the students and to plan, I could … I squelched the joyous expansion of my heart—that touchdown feeling that always followed a teaching success, minor though it might be. The optimistic hopes for still more successes.

  I had to wean myself of those feelings. They had no future.

  A messenger entered with a note. I knew what it was going to say almost before I opened it, and I knew why the ancients used to kill the messenger. I tried not to glare at the hapless kid as I read: Miss Pepper, stop in the office before leaving school. Dr. Havermeyer needs to talk with you. Signed by the Office Witch herself, who’d carefully omitted any social pleasantries such as please or thank you. “I’ll be there,” I told the messenger, who seemed to feel the tension field surrounding the note, and who wheeled around and was immediately gone.

  Too soon after, I stood in front of a red-faced Havermeyer, a man so overwhelmed by impossible emotions that he could barely form an unintelligible sentence. “First and foremost,” he said, “I regret the necessity of immediately, as of this moment, suspending publication of the InkWire.”

  “The school paper? You aren’t going to let the kids print their last issue of the year?” I’m not sure why I found it necessary to ask questions to which I knew the answers, but I did. Just to hear the facts sounded in the land of freedom of the press.

  “Miss Pepper, you should have prevented a story of this magnitude—do you even begin to understand the ramifications of what those girls—have you any idea of the negative—I thought I communicated with you to the effect I wanted nothing more than to preserve the integrity of the school’s reputation— just when our scores and admissions were …” He obviously realized why we were suddenly doing so well, and clamped his mouth shut, but his skin tone could have been made into a crayon color called Stroke Victim.

  “They investigated on their own,” I said. “They aren’t doing this for personal gain. Do you want a crime like this to go unpunished? Do you want me to censor honest inquiry? What they’ve done is what we hope our students will do. What participants in a democracy would all do.”

  “No InkWire,” he said. “Publication indefinitely suspended.”

  “Why indefinite? We have only one more issue before the year ends. Those editors will move on.”

  “Then not indefinite. For the duration of this term,” he said. “And next term we will have to have a prior agreement on what constitutes responsible reporting—what is permissible in a school newspaper. This isn’t The New York Times. There was no need—”

  I was thoroughly incensed. Forget my job. Forget the stupid and petty politics of this wretched school. The baseline was that two tenth-grade girls had shown amazing gumption, done a bang-up job of reporting and putting together a story, and it was now considered an offense, something I should have squelched.

  “I think you’re making a mistake,” I said. “The police—”

  “We are delaying informing the police, pending our own investigation,” he said. “This school will undertake an inquiry on its own before we involve the entire city and the wider press. The girls’ parents and
I have come to an agreement that will spare their daughters unnecessary and undesirable exposure and involvement in a criminal proceeding. Until such time as it may prove necessary, of course.”

  “Who? How?”

  “You may put your mind at rest and stop being bothered by that question, because it is no longer a concern of yours,” he said. “I have relieved you of that concern by virtue of suspending publication of the paper.” He turned his back to me and looked out the window at the street and the square beyond it.

  “They tried to do the right thing,” I said. “That’s all they did.”

  Outside, our students made their start-and-stop way across the square. I could see them around the silhouetted figure of my headmaster at the window. “I requested a low profile,” he said, his back still to me, “and this is anything but. Everything but. I do not feel that ours is a harmonious working relationship, and this insubordination and refusal to honor a modest request on my part, a protective desire for our school—all this leads me to believe that you might definitely find a more compatible working relationship and be happier elsewhere. I hope that such is the case, because I feel obliged to terminate your employment.”

  “Now? Today?” On a Tuesday in late April? It seemed ridiculous.

  “A leave of absence until the end of the year.” He finally turned and faced me. “Please leave your substitute your lesson plans and any finals you’ve prepared, of course. A brief sabbatical. Shall we call it that, then?”

  And that was it. The accumulated frustrations of this worst of all weeks—what felt like effort after effort to behave responsibly, to be a good citizen, a good teacher, a good adult— all of it misfiring and winding up here, with nobody trying to do the right thing by me—all of that exploded. Besides, I had absolutely nothing to lose.

  “I don’t think I’d call it a sabbatical,” I said. “I don’t think that’s the right word at all. I think we should call it being fired for allowing students to enjoy their constitutional right of freedom of speech. I think in fact what you’re doing is illegal and deserves a news story of its own. You’re not even giving me a chance to say goodbye to my students, are you? I think they deserve to know what’s going on.”