A Hole in Juan

by Gillian Roberts

  The question shredded under the impact of a sound so all-enveloping my brain rattled and I felt the detonation in my fillings.

  Screams filled every bit of airspace the boom had left. Everyone pushed at once, trying to move to wherever they were not, shoving us all near to riot, to trampling and stampeding.

  “Don’t panic!” I shouted to them—and myself. Enough people near me heard and a small center calmed.

  What had happened? My mind refused to comprehend it, but my mouth apparently knew what to do. “Move quietly toward the stairs,” I shouted, pushing through the mass of bodies, dividing them up. “Front and back. This part to the back. You”—I waved—“the front.”

  They had to get away—anywhere away—for fear it, whatever it had been, would happen again.

  “Did the furnace explode?” The terrified-looking questioner was Moira deLong, the Romance languages teacher, her voice piercingly high and trembling.

  But she at least remembered language. Explode. That was the word for that sound.

  “I don’t think so—I think—in there—” I pointed at the closed chemistry lab. I turned to the two students nearest to me. “Find Ms. Moffatt. She has keys to all the rooms.” I turned to a third student. “Go to the office and tell them there’s been an explosion in the chemistry lab, and Mr. Reyes is in there.”

  “I’ll call nine one one. I’ve got a cell,” the student said, and only then did I remember that so did I.

  I reached for it, but the screams that had died down resumed and then stopped, as if all breath had been inhaled as the chemistry room door opened, and Juan Angel Reyes stood there, one hand on the knob, so much blood pouring from his face I couldn’t tell what was injured. He put his other hand up to his chest, looked as if he might speak, then his eyes rolled up and slowly, slowly, mouth still open in a silent plea, he fell, knees crumpling, the rest of him toppling straight forward to the floor.

  * * *

  Eight

  * * *

  * * *

  Bedlam. Sobs. Girls in tears, boys backing up, away, silently expressing horror.

  And blind, rote action, clearing away the wave of students who pushed toward the lab, stemming the tide so that it came no closer to Juan Reyes, the room, and possibly more explosions, and away from each other to clear a path for the paramedics.

  All around me, sobbing, and when I took a swift look, I was surprised to see Allie, Susan, and Nita among the distraught.

  The paramedics scooped Reyes up, did a quick scan of the lab, while the accompanying police asked if anyone knew anything.

  “Chemistry labs,” one said wearily. “Every single year one goes up. But it’s not usually the teacher who gets hurt.” They asked more questions and, one by one, the students shook their heads. Nobody knew much beyond what we’d all felt, heard, and seen.

  “He just got there,” one young man said. I didn’t know him, but he looked ashen and close to being sick. “He just walked in. I know because I was leaning on his door. He asked me to move. I could have . . . if I hadn’t moved . . . I could have . . .” He put his hand over his mouth and rushed off.

  “The door was closed and locked,” I said when it was my turn. “People out here couldn’t see anything.”

  “Cigarette filter in the sink. He smoke?” the officer asked me.

  I nodded, remembering those morning whiffs.

  “Well,” the officer said, shaking his head. “My chemistry teacher would have flunked him. Stupid to light up in a lab.”

  But only if something gaseous was in the air, I thought. And wouldn’t we have smelled it? Wouldn’t there be a big fire?

  The police officer made note of my questions, and then agreed that we both wished we’d been more attentive chemistry students.

  Only after they had removed Reyes, taken photographs, and tried to find out whatever they could, which was almost nothing, and only when the gurney was leaving the building, did Maurice Havermeyer emerge.

  “What is it?” he asked, as if any of us had an answer. He looked irritated, his morning routine disrupted. Hardly an appropriate response.

  He knew as much as any of us did. He’d spoken to the paramedics and police officers. Why question us? “Why aren’t these students in class?” he demanded.

  I could only gape. “There was a . . . The explosion! Mr. Reyes was seriously hurt—his face—the paramedics—you saw—”

  “Students are supposed to be in the auditorium or lunchroom before class on rainy days.”

  “I know, but they weren’t.”

  “Students need consistency, order, and routine.” Havermeyer clapped his hands twice. “Students,” he said in a fake sing-song nobody could hear. “Students!”

  “Maybe we could ring the bell?”

  “It has already rung,” he said, frowning.

  I hadn’t heard it over the decibel level. “Again, then?”

  He frowned and pursed his lips. “It’s on an automatic . . .” He looked around, squinted. “What happened, precisely?”

  “Something exploded. In there.” I nodded toward the open chemistry lab which now seemed peaceful enough. If there had been a fire, it had been put out.

  All around us, students who’d been mute with the police were now free with supposed information.

  “Accident.”

  “I heard he smoked.”

  “He did! I saw—one day right after school, in there.”

  “Probably lit a cigarette and boom!”

  “Probably experimenting with gunpowder. Or a bomb!”

  “The door was locked,” I told the headmaster, “so nobody could get in quickly right after it—”

  “Locked?” he shouted. “At this hour?”

  Trust him to fixate on the least significant aspect. Judging by Havermeyer’s expression, there was a rule that said you were not to lock yourself in your classroom prior to having something explode on you.

  I continued. “Then Mr. Reyes opened the door, covered in blood, and collapsed.”

  The voices around us continued telling more than I hoped Havermeyer was hearing.

  “I heard Mr. Reyes and that girl from art upstairs . . .”

  “His head was blown off, did you see?”

  “I heard they—like three times a week in the morning—did she say the door was locked?”

  “I heard it was a suicide pact, like Romeo and Juliet.”

  “Romeo and Juliet took poison!”

  “Not both!”

  “Okay, but they didn’t blow each other up!”

  “That was then. This is now. He’s secretly married and she—”

  “Besides, where is she? You made that up!”

  Words reached me in idea fragments and layers, speculation, gossip, and illogical “facts” about what had just happened. But “where is she” registered clearly.

  The students were still standing back from the door, so the headmaster and I seemed to be on a small island, surrounded by agitated natives.

  “Did the police say what caused the explosion?” he asked me.

  Why hadn’t he asked them? “They didn’t say to me. One did say it seemed accidental, which I’d assume, too.” I shrugged. “Horrible, but these things happen in chemistry labs.”

  “Not in my school,” he said emphatically. I remembered at least two other explosions, though nobody had been hurt in them.

  “Is he going to die?” a sobbing tenth grader asked the headmaster.

  Havermeyer had no choice but to actually interact with a student. He turned his back to me, and blustered about probabilities and possibilities and waiting and seeing, and I was no longer the center of his attention.

  I didn’t know if the paramedics or police searched the room, or the back room, the place Reyes thought nobody entered without his permission. They weren’t looking for a second person, after all, unless it was another casualty, who would be near to the explosion site. How thoroughly had they searched?

  My mind leapfrogged across a dozen horr
ifying scenarios about what might be behind the half-open door.

  “Students,” Havermeyer said, “we can but pray for Mr. Reyes’s welfare, but in the interim, it’s time to return to your—”

  Feeling guilty although I couldn’t see what rules I was breaking—there was no crime scene tape, no warnings, no posted signs—I ducked into the lab, glass crunching under my shoes. I stepped to the side, and twisted my ankle on what turned out to be Juan Reyes’s briefcase. It, too, was sprinkled with glass, as if he’d inadvertently flung it away when the explosion startled him. I lifted it up and shook it to clean it off.

  The abandoned, scuffed briefcase, its leather cut where I pulled out a particularly large shard, its insides scarred by yesterday’s acid attack, brought me close to tears. It was so unlike that fastidious man’s painstaking care of his possessions and appearance that it underlined the severity of what had happened.

  Shards and fragments seemed everywhere; under my feet, and beside me, on the white counter next to a sink. I couldn’t see what had exploded or where it had been. I also saw dark stains I did not want to think about, and when I turned, I saw Tisha Banks, the student teacher. She huddled in the corner, her face down on her knees, trying to become invisible, and now she looked up with fear and shock on her tear-stained face.

  “We weren’t doing anything,” she wailed as soon as she saw me. “And then boom! His head—his face! Blood all—” She seemed on the brink of losing all control. “I can’t . . . I don’t . . . I didn’t do anything!”

  I knelt beside her. Her raincoat, buttoned up to her neck, was bloodstained. She had socks on, no shoes, and I noticed flecks of blood on their white surfaces. “Nobody thinks you did. Nobody even knows you’re in here. I was worried about you, about whether you were hurt.”

  “If nobody knows I’m here, how did you?” she whispered.

  Honesty seemed the only relief for the awkwardness of the situation. “Tisha, some people are apparently aware of your romantic involvement with Mr. Reyes.”

  She whimpered, wiped her nose on her raincoat sleeve. “I wasn’t—we didn’t—it wasn’t like everybody thinks. It wasn’t wrong! We were in love.”

  “You don’t have to use the past tense.”

  She looked at me blankly. I must have sounded as if I were correcting her grammar. “He isn’t dead.” I hoped that was still true. “You don’t have to talk about him in the past.”

  She shook her head. “I saw his face—his eyes—I heard him scream—”

  “He’s in bad shape, yes. He’s been hurt, but he’s unconscious, not dead. And nobody blames you for anything.”

  “He smoked. A lot. Whenever he could. I didn’t think it was right, especially in the lab, but he said he knew precisely where everything was, and that nothing was dangerous if you knew what you were doing and took precautions, and he was angry that there wasn’t a single place in this school to smoke. He thought the faculty, at least, should have a place. He said a lot of high schools even had places like that for the students. He said—”

  I held her hand and listened, trying to hear more than she seemed able to say.

  “—besides, he put it out—he put out his cigarette and that’s when—he shouted ‘Oh, no!’ and all of a sudden, flames and glass and blood and—”

  “He shouted before the explosion?”

  She started sobbing again, hiccupping out words. “I think so, but—I don’t know—It was so fast—loud—”

  “Shhh. What shattered?” I thought about those flying shards and couldn’t help but think of St. Cassian of Imola and death by a thousand cuts.

  “I don’t know! Nothing was out, like beakers or bottles, I swear. No gas was on—I would have smelled it. And I didn’t touch a thing!”

  I made shushing noises and spoke softly, asking if she was all right, if she had been hurt anywhere. She calmed down, and then words erupted out of her again. “We were—we are in love and we’re both adults.”

  “Nobody said anything was wrong.” Of course, I didn’t know what anybody had said. I gave Pip still more points for knowing that teachers didn’t have a clue about what was really going on. I didn’t even know what was going on with other teachers, let alone the students.

  “I think,” I said softly and slowly, “you need to go someplace where you can rest. Home, probably. Take the day off. You are quite understandably shaken and upset. You probably should make a statement.”

  “About what? To whom?”

  Indeed. Who was there? Surely not Maurice Havermeyer. I could hear him still booming orders to move on, move on, and report to your assigned homerooms. He was maintaining his longtime record of being completely ineffective.

  “Never mind,” I said. “I didn’t think that through. This isn’t a crime scene and there’s no evidence of foul play. I hope you don’t mind if I ask you a question, however. Where were you when they checked out the lab? They obviously didn’t see you.”

  She wailed again.

  “Tisha? It doesn’t matter. You weren’t hurt and you were frightened. I can understand why you’d hide; I just can’t imagine where.”

  “In the prep room in back. That’s where we—it’s private there. Pretty cramped, though. I hid behind his desk in there. They only looked around for a second. I think they were looking for bodies. Out-in-the-open bodies. Or more fire or something. They came near, but they didn’t pull out the chair and look underneath. Everything was peaceful, so they went away.”

  “Had you been waiting for him in the prep room?”

  “At first, yes. I wanted to surprise him. Usually, we don’t—I don’t get in this early on Wednesday, so we can’t . . . But my dad had an early appointment in Delaware today, and he said he’d drop me off on the way.”

  “Did you see any students when you came in here?”

  “A few, and I didn’t want them noticing me, so I came in fast.” She looked down at her feet. “I have a key,” she whispered.

  I let that pass. “You know who the students you saw were?” She shook her head.

  “Did you wait a long time?”

  She shrugged. “Not that long.” She tilted her head and reconsidered. “Maybe a little long.”

  “And he had no way of knowing you were here, am I correct?”

  “Well . . . I left the door unlocked, kind of as a warning. But otherwise, right. I was in back and I swear I didn’t touch any chemicals. I never, ever do. I’m scared to death of them!”

  “How long do you think you waited for Mr. Reyes?” It felt ludicrous using his surname with his lover, but the man had such a wall of propriety around him that it felt overly intimate on my part to call him Juan.

  “Don’t know.” She was probably a visual whiz, but she left a lot to be desired verbally. “A while. Just . . . a while. Is this going to . . . am I going to flunk now? Not get my degree?” Her nose reddened dangerously again.

  “I doubt it. Nobody’s going to know, anyway. Let’s get you out of here, all right?”

  She looked at me appraisingly before she whispered, “I need my clothes.”

  I looked down at her buttoned-up raincoat.

  She swallowed hard. I nodded, and she stood up and tiptoed carefully. The telltale red marks on her socks meant she’d already had enough contact with the broken glass.

  While she put her jeans and sweater back on, I crunched around. The room was dim. The police or paramedics must have turned the switch back off. I wondered if turning the switch had set off the explosion. I tried to remember Reyes as he staggered out of the room. He’d still been in his raincoat.

  I couldn’t have said what I was looking for, but I found only glass and stains. Blood, I thought, and something else. On the floor, on the counter, in the sink where the skeletal remains of Reyes’s umbrella also rested.

  Tisha re-entered the lab as Havermeyer poked his head in. “What is going on here?”

  “Ms. Banks and I realized that Mr. Reyes’s briefcase was still in the room.” I raised my arm, sho
wing it to him. “She’s taking it to him. We’re sure it will be a comfort to him to know it’s safe.”

  Tisha timidly nodded at the headmaster.

  He peered at the lab, his bottom lip jutting out in perturbation. “What are we going to do about the classes scheduled—”

  “Ms. Moffat and her crew can have it back to normal in a jiffy,” I said. “It’s only glass and . . . whatever. Then we need a substitute teacher.”

  “I’m aware of that. I meant . . .” I don’t know what he meant. He inhaled, seemed about to present an oration, but instead looked at the pocket watch he wore on a fob right next to his faux Phi Beta Kappa key. “I believe your homeroom is already in session, Miss Pepper,” he said sternly, and then he turned and lumbered off toward the staircase.

  Tisha watched his retreat, then looked at me. “Thanks,” she said. “I don’t think he knew who I was.”

  “He wouldn’t.”

  “But I’ve met him three times and—”

  “Trust me. It’s nothing personal.”

  “I don’t think he realized I was in there and—”

  “He didn’t. You’re safe. And I’m sure Miss Jouilliat—” I rushed through the art teacher’s name because nobody I knew of was sure of its pronunciation. I, for one, was willing to swear that she herself pronounced it differently each time, as a sort of performance art of her own. “Want me to go upstairs with you to talk with her?” I was hoping she’d say yes. Getting to the light and air of the third floor art room—which was half glass and always reminded me of a Parisian studio, or Hollywood’s version of the same—would be a relief.

  She considered, then shook her head. “Thanks, but she’ll know what happened. Do you really want me to take his briefcase to the hospital?”

  “If you change your clothing first. I don’t think the sight of his blood all over your coat will make for an easy visit or help him. Besides”—I glanced out the window—“you don’t need it. Looks like it’s clearing.”

  She was a few steps away when I realized I still had questions. “One second more, please,” I called out.