by Chad Huskins
He pulled out of the parking lot, smashing through the gate and set the iPhone to give him directions in English. “Up…ahead…” she said slowly, in her heavy robot voice, putting emphasis on different words. “Turn…right…at…next…intersection.”
But Spencer was already driving past the road as the bitch in the phone was giving him these instructions.
“You…missed…your…turn,” she said.
“Why…don’t…you…suck…my…cock?” he said. He started laughing, and his arm flared in pain.
11
Principal Manning’s office was familiar to Kaley. She’d been here before, during her first few weeks at CMS, when she’d been tardy or outright skipped class. Before she had ever encountered the Mondo Bitches, there had still been those who would not accept a new girl in school, especially one as “ghetto” as they all whispered she was. It had hurt, feeling their oppressive tribalism, their insecurity with themselves that manifested into a need to berate any newcomer. It was Kaley’s job to conform to their rituals, become haters such as them, and mock others too weak to defend themselves, but she couldn’t. That wasn’t her.
Or is it?
The office was as small as Kaley’s bedroom, perhaps smaller. The desk was a kidney-shaped piece of oak that dominated the room, separating the principal on one side and the admonished-to-be on the other. Behind Manning’s empty chair, there were awards and plaques. IN APPRECIATION FOR 10 YEARS OF QUALITY SERVICE, one said, WE RECOGNIZE STEPHEN MAXWELL MANNING. It was handed out by the PTA, and signed by school superintendent Laura Hilburg.
Her eyes kept slowly moving over the rest of the office.
There was a clock on the wall showing 1:33 PM. Almost time for third period to end. Bookshelves lined the walls on either side of her. Kaley’s eyes moved over a few of them: Teaching Tomorrow’s Leaders Today, Progressive Teaching Techniques, An Administrator’s Guide to Youthful Minds, and The Art of War. That last one intrigued her the most. Why did a principal want a book on his shelf that discussed how to fight wars?
That murky water trickled over every wall, spread across the ceiling in an ever-expanding stain, and even swelled at times, seeming to breathe. Kaley was both aware of this and ignoring it.
On the desk itself, there were three pictures. There was Mr. Manning with his family, a wife and two daughters, both about the same age as Kaley and Shan. She could see the family resemblance all around, especially in their shining smiles. The other two pictures were of Mr. Manning with a large group of students. One of the pictures looked very old, Mr. Manning was very young in it, with a full head of hair and a beard. The kids all looked like fourth- or fifth-graders. Perhaps his first class?
Kaley thought the office felt and smelled mostly sterile. What didn’t feel so sterile, though, was the fear still dripping off these walls, as well as anxiety and rebellion, anger and sadness. How many students and parents had come in here dreading what the principal had to tell them? This wasn’t a place for cozy little meetings, even teachers were brought in here to sit exactly where Kaley was sitting and given evaluations on their jobs. Kaley looked back at the picture of Mr. Manning smiling with his family, and instantly thought of him as a lonely warden, a man who had nothing but love for his prisoners but often had to set that love aside in order to do his job effectively.
Something swam past her leg. She ignored it.
The door opened behind her, and Kaley jumped. The principal walked in and said with an affable smile, “Okay. Kaley. How are we doin’?”
“How is she?” she wanted to know at once. “Is Laquanda okay?”
“She’s fine, Kaley. At least for the moment. The nurses took care of her until the ambulance came, and now she’s off to Kennestone Hospital. I understand she was doing better when they took her away.”
“Better? Better how?”
Mr. Manning sighed and shut the door behind him. “Well, her airway wasn’t blocked anymore, and the swelling came down some.”
“Some?” Panic had leapt back into her mind, and she fought back tears.
“Kaley, how are you?”
She shrugged. “Fine, I guess.”
“You sure?” He stepped around his desk, wading through ankle-deep water without realizing it, and took a seat in the squeaky roll around chair. A pair of glasses hung from his neck, and he put them on to start to thumb through something in his drawer. He pulled out a file and opened it. He looked up when the door opened again. “Mrs. Krenshaw, thanks for coming. I believe you two know each other,” he said brightly.
And she did. Mrs. Krenshaw was the school’s counselor, and Kaley had been introduced to her before anybody else when she started classes at CMS. Mrs. Krenshaw had been fully briefed on everything she and her sister had gone through, and she had taken intense interest. “Hey, Mrs. Krenshaw.”
“Hello, Kaley. How are we?” Underneath the water clinging to the wall, something swam past Mrs. Krenshaw. A great eye looked in on her, and then darted off into the Deep.
“Fine.”
Mrs. Krenshaw took a seat. She was a skinny-up-top-but-fat-bottomed woman, who waddled more than she walked, and she was equal parts kindhearted and clinical. She always had a smile plastered on her face, but that smile never touched her eyes. The smile was for others’ sake, while the eyes were always searching. Mrs. Krenshaw had an ability to see into people—not exactly like Kaley’s charm, but perhaps a distant cousin? She’d suffered trauma somewhere in her own life—Kaley sensed a mistrust of males in general, even of Mr. Manning four feet to her left—and had a need to investigate others. Though she didn’t know it (but Kaley did), in investigating the pain of others, Mrs. Krenshaw was actually attempting to discover her own demons.
Kaley hypothesized that somewhere out there was another Dmitry to Mrs. Krenshaw’s own inner Shannon. She even had a bit of a charm. She doesn’t have a pet psycho, though.
“Kaley,” said Mr. Manning, clicking his pen and priming it for note-taking, “we just want to clear up some things regarding what happened in the cafeteria.”
“Laquanda’s not gonna die, is she?”
Mrs. Krenshaw made a note. Mr. Manning sighed. “I can’t say for sure, Kaley, all I can say is what I’ve already told you. She seemed better when she left.” A pregnant pause filled the office. Mr. Manning glanced over at Mrs. Krenshaw, then back at Kaley. “Tell us what happened if you would, Kaley. What did you see?”
She didn’t know how to respond to that. What happened, she thought. What happened. How could they possibly understand? Her eyes wandered. They touched the pictures on the desk, the plaques on the wall, and finally the books on the shelves. “You have a book called The Art of War,” she said.
Mr. Manning blinked, and looked over at his bookshelf. He smiled. “A gift from an old friend, back at Adairsville Elementary School, where I first started.”
“Why do you have it in here? This office…everything else in here is, like, you know, all school-type stuff.”
The principal shrugged. “There’s some good advice in it.”
“About war?”
He shrugged again, this time more slowly. “Kind of. It’s more about how to approach conflict in any given situation. It was written for war, but its philosophies can be applied to other problems in life.”
“Like what?” To her left, Mrs. Krenshaw was making another note. No doubt something about Kaley avoiding the topic of what happened in the lunchroom, but Kaley really was suddenly curious, particularly because she sensed that Mr. Manning was genuinely fond of the book.
Mr. Manning licked his lips. “Well, my favorite passage is one that says, ‘To know your enemy, you must become your enemy.’ ”
Kaley looked at him. “That sounds…dumb. And dangerous.”
He laughed. “Well, it doesn’t mean you have to literally side with your enemy, it just means…well…”
“You have to, like, empathize with them?”
“Empathize, there you go. Try to see where they’re coming from
, how they became what they became. For instance, I deal with bullies and even parents who behave like bullies. My job isn’t to beat them at bullying, but to, you know, sort of understand why they’re bullying.”
“And that helps?”
“Many times, yes. I’ve found that bullies are mostly insecure, and have a need to be controlling, and when they can’t get that power they act out. We all feel insecure and want power at times,” he went on, “so all I have to do to understand them is to amplify my own such feelings to guess how out of control the bullies’ own emotions are, and that helps me to deal with them, and sometimes talk them down. That’s another of Sun Tzu’s teachings: ‘The supreme art of war is to subdue your enemy without fighting.’ ”
“Sun who?”
Mr. Manning chuckled. “Sun Tzu. He’s the fellow who wrote the book some thousands of years ago.”
“Oh.” Kaley thought on all of that for a moment. “Subdue your enemy without fighting, huh? How does that work? Wouldn’t a person just get beat up?”
“Not if they know their enemy well enough,” said Mr. Manning. In the corner, Mrs. Krenshaw’s pen was working furiously. “Kaley, may we talk about what happened in the lunchroom?”
They sat in silence while she decided. Kaley looked at him. She’d always sensed mostly goodness in Mr. Manning, but now, he had just gone up a few notches on her trust scale. “Laquanda and Nancy were talking about my sister,” she confided. “I told them not to and they kept on.”
Mr. Manning nodded. “That’s Nancy Boyle?” She nodded. “Kaley, did you threaten Nancy and Laquanda?” She said nothing. After a moment, though, she nodded. “What did you tell them?”
She swallowed. “I told them…that I would kill them if they kept talking about Shannon. They kept laughing, and, like, saying Shannon has itchy private spots…because of her vaginitis. And I told them to…” A warm tear trickled down her cheek, and she wiped it away. More note-taking from Mrs. Krenshaw. “I told them to stop, or I’d hurt them.”
“And did you do anything to either one of them?”
Kaley nodded. “Yes.”
“What did you do?”
She had no other recourse but to tell the truth. “I…I…I felt this wave of hate come over me from someplace else. It was familiar to me, like I knew it, like I had met it somewhere before.” Another tear, another wipe, another note taken by Mrs. Krenshaw. “I, uh, I wanted to hurt them, so I, like, willed them to be hurt. I felt…I felt…changes happening. I didn’t have control over them, so I, like…I pushed and prodded those changes. I allowed them to come through.”
Mrs. Krenshaw looked up, and finally spoke. “Are you saying you wished it on Laquanda, and that your wish came true, Kaley?” Mr. Manning and her exchanged a look.
“I guess so,” Kaley whispered. She fought back more tears, and looked down at her hands in her lap. “I was…weak. I had a moment of weakness and I let the hate just…just…wash over me.” She sniffled. “And then I heard my Nan’s voice. That’s my grandmother. She told me…she said, ‘You stupid girl,’ or something like that. ‘You let her go now.’ I forget the rest.” She hadn’t forgotten, she just didn’t want to think on it anymore.
For a moment, the air in the room was bloated with silence. The principal and the counselor exchanged another look. Mrs. Krenshaw spoke, “Kaley, you know that you had nothing to do with what happened to Laquanda, right? That was a bad wish at a bad time. The nurses know that Laquanda suffered an allergic reaction—her file says she’s had some reaction to shellfish in the past—”
“We didn’t have any shellfish for lunch today,” Kaley said. “It was me. I did that to her.”
“I’m sure it feels that way, and it’s understandable that you feel guilty about it, but believe me, you had nothing to do with it.”
Kaley just looked at Mrs. Krenshaw for a moment, then looked away. She imagined what might be going on in Chelyabinsk, what Spencer might have done with the children. Four in the back, one in the trunk. Did he drive the car into a lake to hide it? Were the kids still in it? Her mind went to the one dead girl wearing the One Direction shirt, the one that the Others had gotten a hold of and torn apart. She shut her eyes against the mental image.
Mr. Manning finally sighed, and said, “Regardless of what happened or what you think, Kaley, there does remain the matter of the threat itself.” Kaley nodded. “You’re a smart girl, so I’m sure you know it’s a very serious thing. Threatening to kill or do bodily harm to another student is grounds for suspension…”
As he went on, Kaley felt something licking her heel. She pulled her feet up out of the water, and saw that Mrs. Krenshaw had noticed and was scribbling something in her little book, probably making a note out of the motion.
Kaley stared at Mr. Manning and nodded.
“…and of course Mrs. Krenshaw and I will have to discuss this with Vice Principal Lowe,” the principal went on, “and we will determine the length of that suspension.” On the watery wall behind him, something had begun to manifest. It didn’t know where Mr. Manning was, it only heard him, and moved around in a frantic search.
Kaley stared at Mr. Manning and nodded.
“This will also be taken to the school council and the school superintendent.” Something splashed behind her.
Kaley stared at Mr. Manning and nodded.
“…sure you’ll understand. Like I said, you’re a smart girl, so you’ve heard and read about school shootings, and all sorts of violence that came from kids issuing threats first…”
Something splashed off to her right now, just outside of her periphery. Mr. Manning’s lips kept moving, and most of his words were lost. The strange whispers had returned, but they were too distant for her to make out.
Kaley stared at Mr. Manning and nodded.
“One more thing I want to say. I know that you’ve been through some terrible things, Kaley. I have a sister who suffered through much the same as you did, so I am extremely sympathetic. There were other students sitting around you who have confirmed that they heard Nancy and Laquanda saying those nasty things, and I understand that that must’ve been very hurtful, and believe me, both of them will have to answer to me for it.” A large, dark object swam beneath Kaley’s chair, a giant squid on the hunt.
Kaley stared at Mr. Manning and nodded.
“But that does not excuse what you said, and I cannot dismiss it.” The large squid thing turned back around, started feeling at the legs of Mrs. Krenshaw’s chair.
Kaley stared at Mr. Manning and nodded.
“Now, I’ve called your mother and gotten no response.” Big surprise there, she thought. “So I phoned a next-of-kin, your Aunt Tabitha. She’s coming to pick you up in about an hour. I’m going to give you a letter to give to your mother, asking her for a sit-down with myself and Mrs. Krenshaw, to discuss your behavior…”
Mr. Manning went on and on, but Kaley’s focus was drifting, drifting, drifting. His words went in one ear, out the other, with very few of them resonating. All she could think of was Laquanda Everest, and that somewhere far, far across the Atlantic, a maniac was still on the loose, and likely to kill more innocents.
Behind her, several things flopped lightly in the water. It reminded Kaley of when she and Shan went with Aunt Tabby to her uncle’s lake, when they tossed out some bits of bread for the stocked trout. The trout would quickly shoot to the surface and snatch the bits away. Kaley used to try and snatch them, but Shannon always swatted her hand away. “No!” she would say. “Leave them alone, Kaley! Let them swim around and play!” Sweet Shannon, who couldn’t even allow Kaley to step on a beetle that night when leaving their house, that night when everything had gone wrong, and everything had changed…
“Kaley? Have you been listening?”
“Hm?” She looked up.
Mr. Manning looked at her seriously. “I’ve been talking and you’ve been nodding, but now you’re just smiling. What’s funny about this?” In the corner, Mrs. Krenshaw made another note.
“Nothing, just…sorry…sorry, I was…thinking about Shannon.”
Mr. Manning nodded slowly, unsure how to take that. Behind him, a great eye peeked in from the Deep, coming close enough to the surface for her to see its black sclera, its dark-red streaks like veins throbbing in and around the iris. “You understand the seriousness of this, then? You understand that you can’t just threaten another student, because that’s not conducive to a learning environment.”
“I understand the weak will always be targets,” she said.
The principal blanched. “What?”
The words had leapt out of her mouth unbidden. Kaley had to pause a moment to make sure she had said them. She then looked over to Mrs. Krenshaw, then to Mr. Manning, and for a hot, tense moment, she grew furious by their big, stupid, idiotic, limited adult minds. They didn’t see. Not only did they not see the things stalking them all around, they didn’t see what Laquanda Everest or Nancy Boyle were. “You said that my threat to her wasn’t conducive to creating a learning environment.”
“That’s right, Kaley. You’re going to have to explain—”
“I understand what school is for, Mr. Manning. I learned everything I needed to know about how life works right here in school. It’s, like, what some people call a microcosm?” She nodded, wrapping her mind around her own words. Words are flimsy things, Nan had told her. Mostly useless. People jes use ’em to give a name to somethin’ they don’t understand.
“A microcosm?” said Mr. Manning.
“I’ve learned everything I need to know about the human race between school and life on the streets where I grew up. Group think, envy, posturing, enabling, and how authority figures protect the bullies. And whenever the bullied people fight back, they’re the freaks somehow. You keep people afraid. It’s your job to keep the fear alive in us. That’s what school is for, to let us know where we all stand.” She snorted. “But how to add, subtract, multiply and divide? How to compose a paragraph? The atomic weight of hydrogen? Pffft. Please.” Spencer’s words, every one of them. Or, at least, greatly inspired by her contact with him. Her voice, to be sure, but his attitude, his insane wisdom, was bleeding into them. Kaley was upset with herself for giving in. Damn him. He’s like radiation. You can’t walk away completely unaffected.