by N. Griffin
“No idea,” Bett answered. “Come on. Let’s go. We have to let the others in.”
Bett quickly checked her sneakers for dirt, but they seemed clean enough, despite her having been chased by a bus in them for the past several days.
Better get a move on.
Hester and Bett stole their way downstairs, hugging the walls until they reached the gym door. Even though they opened it as slowly and carefully as they could, the door let out an enormous creak and Bett almost had a heart attack.
She wasn’t alone. “I almost had a heart attack,” whispered Dan, slipping into the gym.
“Me too!” Hester added.
“An Art Attack heart attack,” Ranger began until they all glared him quiet.
They crept through the first floor. Not a soul. The swimming pool was quiet. The library and most all of the classroom doors were closed. They checked carefully behind each one, but there was nothing. And no one.
“Let’s make sure the upstairs is clear,” Bett suggested, but she pulled on Dan’s arm to hold him back as the others headed up.
“Dan,” she whispered when they were out of earshot. “I think Eddie may be the perp.”
“Are you crazy?” Dan whispered back, looking around nervously. “He’s weird, yeah, but he’s not mental.”
“He is a little bit, I think. And he has the means.” Bett explained about the hatchet.
Dan hesitated. “But why? You were just going on about the psychology five minutes ago. Eddie doesn’t hate the school. So what gives?”
“Well, he is angry as hell all the time,” said Bett. “He’s always about to pop.”
Dan’s brow furrowed. “That’s true.”
“And I know he has, like, trauma from that war.”
Dan frowned. “But the angel was made by a vet. Wouldn’t Eddie want to preserve that, not smash it?”
“Maybe,” said Bett. “Or maybe war just triggers him and he couldn’t stand it, walking through the school. Or maybe he’s just anti-angel.”
“And anti–kid art? It makes him want to ‘gut this place’? Come on.”
“No, you come on. If it is Eddie, we have to get him help.” Bett’s mind was racing again. Could she get him to Hugh Munin so he could help in his sure, dependable way, and then maybe Eddie would be okay? Eddie was a nut, but she didn’t want him in jail, for God’s sake.
“Bett! Dan! Get up here!” Hester whisper-called from above.
They took the stairs two at a time and joined the others on the second-floor landing.
CLANG!
Bett jumped. What the hell was that?
CLANG!
They all looked at each other in alarm.
Was it coming from the outside?
CLANG!
Bett ran toward the window, toward the sound, Hester and Dan right behind her. The others were frozen in place.
CLANG!
Then Bett froze, too, staring out at the entrance to the school.
CLANG!
Staring.
Because someone was by the statue of the soldier on the stone steps of the school, someone with a hatchet, someone bashing the shit out of the man in his coat.
But it wasn’t Eddie.
CLANG!
It was Mutt.
49
Saturday Morning, Autumn, Wee but Terrifying Hours
“WHAT?!” GASPED PAUL. BETT THREW open the window and now they all hung out, horrified, as Mutt—Mutt!!—smashed at the statue of the man. But the bronze must have been tough and the hatchet not enough because they could hear Mutt grunting and weeping with frustration.
Bett was in disbelief. Mutt?! MUTT? But—but—he had been as pissed off as anyone about what was happening! And wasn’t he the one who’d gone on and on about other people destroying stuff that first day at lunch?
“Come on,” said Bett. “We have to stop him.”
Anna held back. “He has a hatchet,” she said, her voice trembling.
“I don’t think it’s us he’s after,” Dan said, and so the six of them pounded down the stairs and flung open the door, and there was Mutt, hatchet midswing.
“What the hell?!” shouted Paul. “What the eff are you doing?”
Mutt froze, startled. Then he looked terrified.
“Mutt, stop! What is wrong with you?!” cried Bett.
Bett was furious, incredulous, petrified all at once.
But then she saw.
Mutt’s face. One eye black and swollen near shut. The other flowing with tears of rage.
“Shut up!” Mutt cried, turning away from them with another swing of the hatchet. “Shut up, you assholes with your perfect lives.” CLANG! “ART ATTACK! Angel heads! Peace and love and all that crap. You don’t know anything!”
Bett’s thoughts skittered crazily. She certainly wasn’t going to get near Mutt and that hatchet, but she knew she had to get him to drop it.
“Mutt,” she said, forcing her voice to be low and steady. Have to stay calm. “Put the hatchet down, put it down, and no one will know it’s you except us. Just stop now and we’ll keep it a secret.”
Behind her, Ranger was gulping.
“I will not stop now!” Mutt’s voice was nearly a shriek. “Dog one night, cup the next! Police at the house every five seconds and that damned social worker, too! What the hell is the point?”
What was he talking about?
Then Bett’s breath caught. That call that had come across her mother’s radio. Mutt’s eye. Oh, his eye, so swollen. His own knuckles bloodied.
Anna came closer. “Mutt,” she began, but she was cut off by the piercing sound of a siren, a siren loud and familiar to Bett, and her stomach dropped. She knew exactly who that siren belonged to, who was coming their way.
Yep.
Soon the flashing blue lights of a cop van were swirling over their faces as Bett’s mother got out of the vehicle. She laser-beamed on Mutt immediately.
“Mutt Igdris! What the hell is wrong with you?” Bett’s mother demanded.
Mutt dropped the hatchet. Immediately.
Bett’s mom carefully picked it up and put it in a plastic bag while Mutt stood panting beside her.
“I’m taking you in. All of you,” she said, her eyes sweeping the group. Then they landed on Bett, went wide, then furious. “WHAT THE HELL IS THE MATTER WITH YOU?” she screamed. “Sneaking out? Vandalism? Damaging town property?”
“I didn’t damage anything!” Bett cried out. “None of us did! Only Mutt!”
“Only Mutt with you all as an audience egging him on,” said a male voice, and there was Mr. McLean, coming out of the other side of the police van. Mr. McLean?
Oh my God, we’re in hell.
“That’s it,” Bett’s mother decided. “All of you. Into the van.” And just like on TV, she read them their rights and cuffed Mutt.
“You can’t arrest us!” cried Anna.
“I can,” said Bett’s mother wearily. “And before we get in that van, I want any and all arms surrendered.”
“Any and all arms surrendered?” Paul’s voice was puzzled.
Oh, God. Doesn’t he get it?
But no. As if she were psychic, it happened just the way Bett thought it would with this group of yahoos. They shoved their arms forward, skin shining in the moonlight and fingers flashing blue in the light of the police car.
Ranger was still stuck behind the bigger kids, desperately trying to shove his way in. “Bett, do you think your mom’ll arrest me because my arms don’t reach?”
“You guys!” Bett cried, exasperated. “She means guns!”
But she stood beside Dan and stuck her arms out alongside the others’ anyway.
50
Still Wee Hours of Saturday
IT WAS COMPLETE CHAOS. BETT, Dan, Ranger, Anna, Paul, Hester, and Mutt were brought down to the station house. Parents were called. Mutt with his blackened eye was still in handcuffs. The rest of them were lined up for questioning, sitting on hard chairs, not daring to move more th
an was necessary, but all of them ready to blow.
“We just wanted to put up some more art!” Paul said for the tenth time, his voice sounding closer and closer to cracking.
“Yeah?” said Bett’s mom. “That’s interesting because it seemed more like you were bashing it down.” And she held out the hatchet in its plastic bag.
“That statue is ruined,” said Mr. McLean. What was he doing here, anyway? Did he get an automatic call for school-related matters? And how did they find out so quickly? Maybe the front door was wired after all. “Do you know what it means to our school? To our community?”
“Yes!” cried Dan.
“We do!” cried Anna.
“My grandfather is on that statue!” Paul yelped.
“So is my uncle!”
“Mutt, your own father is on the statue! You bragged about it yourself! What the fuck, man?” Dan was livid. “And what happened to your eye? Did you hit yourself with the hatchet while you were busy being a prick?”
“What were any of you thinking?” Bett’s mother took a deep breath. “Help me understand. If you cared so much about your relatives, why would you destroy that statue?”
“It wasn’t us!”
“Just Mutt!”
“Destruction of municipal property is a felony in this state. So is breaking and entering. . . . Look, we don’t want to arrest you,” said Bett’s mom. “But you’re making it hard for us not to.”
Bett interrupted. “Please, Mom, just listen! We—not Mutt—the rest of us—we did break into the school. But not to destroy anything. Why would we break in if the statue was outside? We broke in to—”
“Combat the destruction at the school!” Anna finished the sentence for her. Her fists were clenched. She looked around wildly. “Where is the mural? Paul had it—”
“You mean this?” And Bett’s mother held up the folded piece of canvas, also in a plastic bag.
“Yes,” said Paul. “Please! Let us show you. May we . . . Are we allowed to stand?”
Bett’s mother nodded. “Slowly, though.” And she handed Paul the bag.
Anna and Paul stood and unfurled the mural between them. Mr. McLean and Bett’s mom took it in.
“We were going to hang it in the foyer!” Hester explained, her hand rubbing a scrape she’d gotten from her boost up the wall. “We’re innocent!”
Mr. McLean’s nostrils flared. “Not of breaking into the school, young lady. And something was wrecked,” he persisted. “That statue is a huge part of our town history and now it’s severely damaged. I hope not irreparably.”
“It was only Mutt who did that part!” Ranger had been so stoic on the ride to the station, but now he burst into tears. “We were just being a Justice League!”
Bett’s mother gave her head a shake. “A what?”
The room exploded in shouts.
“Mutt’s the one who’s been smashing shit!”
“He did the graffiti—”
“He wrecked the art—”
“And the angel—”
“Shut up!” Mutt begged, his head in his hands.
“You asshole! We trusted you!”
“And leaving those sick drawings in people’s pockets!”
“I didn’t do those!”
“The hell you didn’t!”
In the burst of shouts and questions, parents were entering the police station and finding their various kids and either immediately launching into yelling at them or wrapping their arms around them, depending. It was complete pandemonium. In the midst of it all, Bett’s mom grabbed her by the elbow and steered her into her office, face full of fury and confusion.
“Bett,” she said, “what the hell is really going on?” The office was spare, but full of pictures of Bett: Bett younger on sports teams, Bett’s school pictures, toddler Bett jumping off the back of a sofa, preschool Bett climbing trees as high as she could.
It was all too much.
“What?”
“Don’t get smart with me!”
“I’m not!” cried Bett. “I can’t hear you very well!”
Her mother’s face softened immediately. “I’m so sorry, Bett. Oh, honey. Your ear. The siren.” She spoke directly into Bett’s face, so that Bett could see her lips. Bett turned her good, right ear toward her mother. “Can you talk to me?” her mother asked in a loud, clear voice.
And Bett told her. Everything. The slashing, the tufty-eared mountain lions of justice, Ranger’s Justice League and the new Art League, the break-in, everything. Everything except her false suspicion of Eddie.
“So the kid who did the pictures is that little dude?”
“Yes,” said Bett.
“And the pictures were supposed to be of what again?”
“Tufty-eared mountain lions of . . .”
Bett trailed off. Through the window of her mom’s office, Bett saw the last parent came in. Longish blond hair, too tan. Wide-set eyes. Bruise on his jaw.
Bett recognized him at once.
Oh my God, why hadn’t she seen it before? Mutt’s dad was the guy from Fancy Jim’s all that long time ago. Meredith, Mutt’s little sister, was the perfect little girl who was there that day, the little girl Bett let drive home with an alcohol-stinking man.
Out in the main room Mutt’s swollen face went dead and gray as his dad stood over him and boomed hell at him from above.
51
Saturday Morning, If the Hours Could Be Any Wee-er, This Is Them
BETT WAS SURE THE KIDS on the cross-country team were going to be banned from the meet the next day but, “Oh, no,” her mother told her. “All of you on that team, except Mutt Igdris, will be waking up in two hours and getting on that bus and running that race.”
“Fine,” said Bett. “I’m dying to. You know how much I love cross-country.”
Her mother made a face.
52
Saturday, Nearly Morning, Horribly
WHEN BETT CAME OUT OF her mom’s office, only Mutt was left. His father was talking to the sergeant at the desk. Mutt moved up the row of chairs and sat next to Bett.
What the hell? Is he going to ask me to intervene with my mom?
But no.
“You look like shit,” he said.
“You smell like it,” said Bett back.
Mutt sucked his teeth. “I only meant you look tired.”
Bett looked at the sergeant, then back at Mutt. “Why are you sitting with me?” she asked.
Mutt was quiet. “I don’t know.” He looked down at his handcuffs and let his hands fall, wrists red from the metal and from Mutt’s own rubbing.
“Mutt,” Bett asked gently, though she knew the answer already, “what happened to your eye?”
But Mutt was silent.
Ask an easier question.
“How did you get the hatchet?” she tried.
“I got a key to the bus,” said Mutt, shrugging. “Perk of being the assistant coach.”
Bett hesitated. “But why? Why would you wreck all that art? Why Anna’s? Why did you wreck it all?”
Mutt shook his head and shrugged, and even though he looked away from her, Bett could see he was blinking back tears.
Bett shook her head. Why would Mutt have even come to the Art League meeting, then? But the answer came to her as quickly as the thought. Surveillance. Mutt wanted to know what the rest of them knew. He wanted to track what they were up to. Bett shivered. It was one thing to go to protect Ranger, and another to go to plan his next attack. But why would he bash the statue?
“Mutt,” she said at last, “don’t you know that now you’re a felon?”
“I know,” Mutt said at last. “You don’t think I know? But—and this is the truth—those devil heads weren’t me. And they’re way more psycho, if you ask me.”
Bett ignored that. She and her mother had agreed it would only complicate things to involve Ranger. Besides, the kid was so scared Bett was sure he’d never even so much as look at a crayon again, much less draw anything.
> “Not more psycho than that graffiti you left. What did that even mean?”
Mutt looked at his hands again, full of little cuts from the hatchet. He paused. Then, so quietly Bett could hardly hear him: “You all just make me so mad.”
Bett was silent, thinking, thinking. What had Mutt meant before by “the cup”? What cup? Oh! Mutt meant Meredith’s goblet. His dad must have smashed it.
Then her mind put it all together. Mutt’s eye. His sister. The ears on the stuffed dog. That domestic call, coming over her mother’s radio and Mutt’s dad, Mutt bragging about his service—
What else would Mutt do but this? She understood. And she didn’t know what to say.
Bett thought again about how satisfying it must have been to break that glass over the transom, to smash that angel, and light the art aflame. Punching the river—she didn’t say it out loud, but she should. She should tell Mutt she got it because it could have been her.
53
Autumn, Saturday, Early Morning
ALL OF THEM, SAVE MUTT, exhausted to their back teeth, climbed on Eddie’s bus the next morning at six a.m.
Bett couldn’t believe her mother was really making her go to this meet.
“I can’t hear!”
“Oh, you’re going,” her mother said clearly. “I know you. Staying home in your room would be the treat. Not running that race. You don’t need two ears to run. Besides, I have our friend Mutt’s case to deal with later today, and I don’t want you in my way.”
She was brutal but right. Once again, she had Bett over a barrel two ways and Bett couldn’t find a single argument, not even at all.
It was the weirdest bus ride Bett had ever taken, Mutt missing and all of them potential criminals headed for lockup, or at least community service and ruined chances for college, and there was Eddie. “I heard about your antics and semantics last night,” he said. “What’s wrong with you yahoos? I told you we had a meet!”
“It was Mutt—” Dan started, but Eddie held up a quelling hand.
“Not until that kid gets his fair say,” he said, and really, Bett was enough of her mother’s daughter to agree.