“Miss Pearl,” he said, before being seized by a mucusy cough. “Ladies first.”
He stepped aside and opened the driver’s-side door, then looked at me expectantly.
Oh, hell. His outdated chivalry meant it was my turn to drive.
* * *
—
Mr. Dekalb sat shotgun, and the three guys crammed into the back. Their knees butted up against the front seat, and they made lots of gay jokes about accidentally touching each other’s legs. Since Mr. Dekalb couldn’t hear anything quieter than a honking horn, he had no idea what they were saying, and I tried to ignore them as I adjusted my mirrors and buckled my seat belt.
The gay jokes progressed, or regressed, to dick jokes, and I cleared my throat loudly, but none of them paid me any attention. Mr. Dekalb scribbled something on his clipboard; then he told me to start the car. I turned the key, and the Corolla whined to life just as there was a sound like splitting fabric from the back seat.
The bros dissolved into giggles that quickly turned to gags.
One of them had just ripped a massive fart.
We were hot-boxed by a flatulent cloud of eggs, kimchi, and old burritos. My eyes were watering, and I gagged, grabbing the steering wheel and leaning forward as if I could somehow get away from it. Next to me, Mr. Dekalb still hadn’t heard a thing, but boy, could he smell it.
“Maybe some fresh air?” he said, beginning to press a button on his door, trying to roll his window down, but it wouldn’t budge. In the back seat, the boys were punching each other and pretending to vomit. We were all mashing at the window buttons, but none of them opened so much as a crack.
“The child lock, Esme,” Mr. Dekalb said. “The child lock…” He was holding his hand over his nose.
I had no idea what the child lock was. I pressed something on my armrest, but it just locked the doors. The guys in the back seat were now yelling at me to open the doors or roll down the windows. I kept pressing buttons, on the door, on the steering wheel, on the console, and the windshield wipers flipped on, then the AM radio. Nothing happened, and I was starting to panic.
I dropped my hands from the wheel and sat back to catch my breath, except breathing was the last thing I wanted to do.
That was when it happened.
With a jerk, we were zooming backward. Only, I wasn’t touching anything! My stomach lurched as the gas pedal pressed to the floor. The steering wheel was rocking back and forth like it was being controlled by an invisible toddler, and the Corolla cut a wild squiggle through the parking lot, then jumped the curb and stopped only when it plowed right into a baby birch tree that had been planted with much ceremony by the graduating seniors of last year’s environmental club.
For a split second, we all sat there in shocked silence, no one saying anything, nothing but the fuzz of static coming from the radio. I blinked back tears brought on half by noxious butt fumes, half by impending humiliation. What had happened?
I saw a different button. I pressed it. Everyone gasped for breath as the windows rolled down.
That was when the airbags deployed.
* * *
—
No one else ended up behind the wheel in driver’s ed that day. Everyone knew that something was up when we were back in the classroom within fifteen minutes of leaving. The three bros couldn’t keep their mouth shut for a second, and were barely in the door before they were recounting the tale like they were war heroes just back from the trenches.
I was slinking back to my chair when Mr. Dekalb cleared his throat. “Esme, please come with me,” he said, and motioned for me to follow him out the door. Normally those are the last words you want to hear coming out of a teacher’s mouth, but in that moment I would have taken any excuse to GTFO of that classroom, where half the eyes were on me, who was hating it, and the other half on my passengers, who were loving it. Every second of it.
Mr. Dekalb didn’t say anything as we headed down the hall to the office. He pushed open the swinging door and let me go first. I stood in the middle of the room, not sure what to do next. He walked past me to the counter.
“I need an accident report, Donna,” he said to the school secretary, who was reptilian in features and had hair like a crash helmet.
“Oh jeez, Gary, again?” she said. “Was this one texting too?”
Mr. Dekalb ran his hand through his hair, dislodging a few flakes of dandruff that drifted down to settle with the others on the shoulder of his sweater. “Nope,” he said, shaking his head. “Just can’t drive worth a hoot.” I was about to clear my throat, thinking that maybe he was so old and senile that he’d forgotten that I was standing right there, when he picked up a phone and turned toward me.
“Esme, what’s your mother’s number?”
“My mom, uh…” I stumbled on my words.
“Ah, yes,” he said, nodding, because even freakin’ Mr. Dekalb knew about Mom. “Your father’s, then?”
I recited it, and he dialed as I held my breath. I could hear the phone ringing through the receiver, and he was just about to hang up when Dad answered.
“Hello, Mr. Pearl?” he said. “This is Gary Dekalb, your daughter’s driver’s ed teacher. I am, unfortunately, calling because there’s been an accident.” He paused for a second. “No, she’s fine, but there has been significant vehicle damage, and property damage as well.” I tuned out right after I heard him say, “You see, she ran over a tree. A baby tree.”
The next thing I knew, he was holding the phone out to me. I would have preferred to have this conversation never, but no such luck. I took the phone from Mr. Dekalb and held it up to my ear, keeping it an inch away from my skin since I had no idea where this phone had been. Today was shaping up badly enough without a case of ear herpes.
“Hello?” I said.
Dad answered with a sigh. A looong sigh, like a slowly deflating air mattress. Just when I thought he couldn’t possibly have any air left in his lungs, he took a breath and sighed again.
“Esme, I’m not mad,” he said, finally. “I’m just glad no one was hurt.”
“Okay,” I responded, because I wasn’t sure what he wanted me to say.
“And I take half the blame,” he continued.
“Okay.”
“We should have been practicing. If my seventeen-year-old daughter doesn’t know the difference between the brake and the gas pedal, I can’t blame anyone but myself.”
A flame of anger flickered in my chest. Did he really think I was that dumb? But just as quickly, I extinguished it. Because I didn’t have an excuse. I didn’t even really know what had happened. I swear I hadn’t touched anything, but I couldn’t say that, because it would just sound like I was trying to say it wasn’t my fault.
Besides, it sounded nuts, and I knew all about that.
“We’ll have to put the money we were saving to buy you a car toward the damages,” Dad continued. “And you’ll probably have to contribute some of your babysitting money as well. I hate to do this, but you’ve got to take responsibility for your actions, and the sooner you learn that, the better.”
I told him “Okay” again, we exchanged a few more words, and then he hung up and I handed the phone back. Mr. Dekalb, who displayed a sense of intuition that was totally surprising, wrote me a bathroom pass and excused me from the remainder of class.
I gratefully took it and headed to the girls’ bathroom, where I sat on the toilet fully clothed, my knees tucked up under my chin, and tried to steel myself for my next port of call on this humiliation cruise. It awaited me right after the next bell.
Gym. I hate it. I despise it, I abhor it. If it were a person, I would speed up if I saw it crossing the street. If it were a building, I would set it on fire. But it’s a class, so I take it. Because I have to.
I thought I was so smart, getting out of gym freshman and sophomore yea
r. Freshman year was the year everyone was supposed to take it. Unless you were in band. So a crappy piccolo player I became. I could barely blow my way through “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” without spit pooling and dribbling out of the end of my petite wand. Gross it most definitely was, and after a full year of placing paper towels around my chair, I had to admit—and the band teacher readily agreed—that perhaps music was not for me.
At the beginning of sophomore year, I was lucky enough to get mono. That came with a doctor’s note that got me out of gym for the whole first semester, and a computer glitch meant that gym didn’t show up on my schedule for the second semester either.
So of course it came around to bite me in the butt junior year, when it was me and a bunch of freshmen who were all still bigger and stronger and better at sports than me. And fellow junior Stacey Wasser, who took gym because she liked it.
I couldn’t even wrap my head around that—it was like liking the norovirus, or the longest, slowest line at the checkout counter. She was the biggest bully the school had ever had. Even the teachers ducked when they saw her coming. Also, she’d hated me ever since we’d had art class together freshman year. I made a turtle flute out of clay, and it pissed her off because I guess she’d had a bad experience with a turtle when she was little. IDK, and I didn’t really care either. All I knew was that my turtle came out of the kiln with a fist print right in the middle of it, and that really made her laugh. I gave all gym activities about an 8 percent effort, but I did burn a lot of calories trying to stay as far away from Stacey Wasser as I possibly could.
The only thing worse than actual gym class were the few minutes leading up to it, in the locker room. The locker room was a steamy armpit. Walking into it felt like heading into the bathroom right after someone else had taken a too-long shower that had used up all the hot water and left filmy puddles on the floor.
And the hair—oh God, the hair. Long brown hairs, long blond hairs, long red hairs, long black hairs…curly, short hairs that did not come from someone’s head, if you know what I mean. Rodent-sized clumps of hair that had been pulled from hairbrushes and tossed into corners, only to escape and attach themselves to the butt of your shorts as soon as you made the mistake of sitting on a bench, or stuck between your toes if you ever chanced to touch a bare foot to the ground.
And don’t even get me started on the gym uniforms.
They looked like they’d been designed by the fashion team at Depends. The front and the back of the shorts were indistinguishable, and they were the highest of high-waisted. You could pull them up to your armpits and look like a grandpa out for his regular mall walk, or you could roll them down until you had a good three inches of thick fabric orbiting your belly button. Some of the curvier girls had managed to make them look awkward-sexy in that seventies way, but I didn’t even try. I was just a stick figure in incontinence pants.
I changed out of Sylvia Plath and into my diaper wear as quickly I could and kept my tank on under my T-shirt. Any time you can do a thing to avoid getting naked at school, you should definitely do that thing.
I looked up long enough to notice the new girl, Cassandra Heaven, standing at the end of a row of lockers, her gym uniform crumpled in her hand and a look of total dismay on her face. In any other environment, I would have said hello, made a joke, done something to try to make her feel like the hellhole she was in wasn’t going to be so hellish.
But this was gym. It was every girl for herself.
I shut my locker, locked it, and walked out to the gymnasium, where I leaned up against the wall, wishing I could just blend in with the tile. I jumped when I heard an adult male voice say my name, and then groaned silently to myself.
“Hi, Brian. Er, I mean Coach Davis,” I said, forcing a smile. Coach Davis was in his early forties and wore a nylon tracksuit every day. He wore a gold chain tucked into his T-shirt, and in all the years that I’d known him, I’d never managed to figure out what was on it. He was the head of the school’s athletic department, the football coach, and also my dad’s best friend. In fact, he was basically Dad’s only friend, and it was a friendship that had always puzzled me. I mean, my dad was a dork. Like, he was a legit Tom Cruise fan, and his favorite musician was Dave Matthews. And Coach Davis was kinda cool. Like, not cool in an I’d-want-to-hang-out-with-him way but in a top-of-the-Spring-River-food-chain kinda way. There was something about him that made people pay attention—I’d once seen a grown woman lose her mind in a 7-Eleven because she mistook Brian for Ludacris. Like any celebrity had ever set foot in Spring River.
I didn’t even really know how he and Dad knew each other—I thought it dated back to being on the same team, somewhere, doing something that involved a ball—but Brian had been around for as long as I could remember, and, truth be told, I always got the vibe from him that it was more obligation than fun times. Obligation to what, though, I had no clue, but it did lead to plenty of awkward interactions for me. Like this one.
“How’s it going?” I asked, forcing myself to stand up straight and not look miserable.
“Good, Esme,” he said. “Glad to see you out here getting some physical activity.”
“Well, it is physical education, right? Haha. Gotta kick some balls, you know?” Oh my God. Could this small talk be any worse? Thankfully, I was saved by the whistle, and Coach Davis flashed me a thumbs-up and walked away. I breathed a sigh of relief, and then immediately felt guilty about it. He was really nice—to me, and especially to Dad. But still, there was just something about Brian that I couldn’t quite put my finger on, like he was always about to say something serious and then decided not to. It always made me feel weird. I didn’t want to have a heart-to-heart with any adult, but especially not a male gym teacher.
The door swung shut behind him, and I turned my attention back to the whistle blower, who was my bad perm of a gym teacher and the cheerleading sponsor. Three more short tweets, and then she announced that we were going to have fun today and play dodgeball.
I actually LOL’d.
Surely there were United Nations accords against dodgeball by now, right? No one had played dodgeball IRL since the eighties. It was like smoking—people had finally realized it was bad for you.
Right?
Right?
Wrong.
Coach Perm was busy emptying out a big bag of red rubber balls, and they poured, bouncing, onto the floor. “All right. Count off into teams!” Tweet, tweet. “One!” she yelled, pointing at a gangly freshman, who shuffled off to one side of the room. Tweet, tweet. “Two!” yelled a redhead, bounding off to the other.
“One!”
“Two!” The counting-off continued, with people yelling out their numbers like they were super stoked (sadists, probably) or mumbling them like they were heading off to the executioner’s chamber. Before I knew it, it was my turn. “Two,” I groaned. As I walked over to join my teammates/fellow denizens of hell, I surveyed our opponents, wondering which one of them was likely to hurl a ball straight at my face in an attempt to break my glasses.
I didn’t have to wonder for too long, because guess whose team I was not on? Yep, Stacey Wasser’s, and there was no doubt she had it in for me. She was already eyeing me with a look that I usually saw on the faces of kids who were busy picking the wings off butterflies.
I shuffled to the middle of the gym with everyone else, planning to do what I always did: get myself eliminated as soon as possible and go back to standing on the sidelines. Coach blew her whistle yet again to signal the start of the game, and everyone ran for the balls except me. Stacey Wasser elbowed two of her own teammates out of the way to get one. As soon as it was in her paws, she stood up, looked at me, and used all of her strength to launch it straight at my face.
Oh my God, I thought, this is going to hurt.
Instead of ducking, though, I froze, staring at the ball…and then I watched in shock as
it changed directions midflight and zoomed right back the way it had come. The thing that finally stopped it was Stacey Wasser’s nose, and when it made contact, all I could hear was the thwack, like rubber on a watermelon. I couldn’t move. Stacey Wasser was as shocked and confused as I was. She held a hand up to her face to feel where the ball had hit her, and she looked like a hippo about to charge. I was staring death in the eyes.
“You’re out!” Coach yelled, pointing at Stacey Wasser and giving her no choice but to leave the floor.
All around me, the game kept going. Balls flying through the air, the squeak of rubber soles on wood, grunts and whistles as people got hit. It was chaos, but as she made her way to the side of the gym, Stacey Wasser never stopped staring at me. What was going on? It was like I’d sent her ball flying right back at her. And from the look on her face, I could tell she thought so too, because her bovine eyes were drilling into me, as hard as onyx.
I had a sudden overwhelming urge to run up to her and beg her forgiveness, to swear that I hadn’t meant to do it. Except, what the hell did that mean? How could I have not meant to do something if I hadn’t done anything?
I felt dizzy, like the room was turning around me. It was all I could do to keep standing up. When a ball smacked me in the ass and Coach Watson tweeted her whistle again, I was out. Normally I was grateful to be out of any game, but this out just brought me one step closer to Stacey, who was standing on the sidelines, frothing to get back in.
Gulp. The only thing stopping me from crawling into the trash can to hide was the knowledge that all the guys spit in it. Though at this point, globs of phlegm might be preferable to spending one more minute with my nemesis’s side-eye.
After what felt like three lifetimes and a school assembly, the game ended and everyone was supposed to divide into new teams. This was my chance, so I was going to take it. I walked backward until I was standing right in front of the gym door. Then, as soon as Coach was distracted by two freshmen who didn’t seem to get the “one-two” concept of counting off, I pushed through it and ran down the hall to get back into the locker room. I grabbed my clothes and changed in a bathroom stall, then shoved my gym uniform into my backpack and left. The whole thing probably took me thirty seconds. I’d never moved so fast in my life. On the way out the door, I smashed into Cassandra Heaven and practically knocked her over. I mumbled some very sincere apologies and looked back to see her staring me down with a look straight out of a mug shot. In one gym class, I’d managed to rack up two enemies. Go, me.
The Babysitters Coven Page 3