A Hole in Juan

by Gillian Roberts

  I’d spent too much of the week looking for the villain of the piece, becoming convinced it was Seth, but I’d been duped. Juan Reyes had been duped.

  Nothing rankled more than the idea that one—or several—of my students had set me up, except the idea that it had worked.

  “Wait till Mackenzie gets here. You can go there together, later. Meanwhile, eat something. Have another glass of wine, and then you can go. Maybe it’d be best if you let the kids work it out together. Whatever it is, in the end, they’ve got to handle it themselves.”

  She stood there like a stone wall, a blind alley. I sighed and nodded, and she looked relieved.

  “I’ll get us more wine,” she said and retreated into the kitchen. Luckily, the condo she’d inherited as a by-product of one of her parents’ many marriages and divorces was rambling and large, so that she was out of sight—and then, so was I.

  We’d work it out later.

  I had to do this. The worst scenario would be that I was completely wrong and I’d be humiliated. I’d already been there, so that prospect didn’t even rankle. But I had created a situation that I was now sure would be bad and I couldn’t shrug and ignore it, sit back and allow Seth’s, and possibly his antagonist’s future, turn dark.

  There were indeed other teachers there, but poor sniffly Carol had no inkling of what had been going on, and neither did Havermeyer—if he actually stayed in hearing distance—and Edie Friedman would be guarding her gym or looking for a parent to date. The hapless parents who were chaperoning would be oblivious as well. And even if I could send a warning, what would I say? I didn’t know what would happen, only that something would.

  I walked double—triple time in the damp dark chill, wishing as always that Benjamin Franklin, who’d first thought of the good idea of daylight savings time, had thought it was good enough to be in effect all year long. Wasn’t winter dark enough without making it worse with the clock change? Wasn’t daylight always worth saving? I grumbled my way toward school which, luckily, was only a matter of a few blocks’ walk. It was so much easier to be angry with Franklin and the daylight wasting lobby, whoever they were, than with the mess at school. Still, it would help, would always help if everything had to be done in broad daylight. For starters, there would be no Mischief Night.

  I passed one knocked-over city trash can, one soaped-up dry cleaner’s window, and what looked to be a new splat of red paint on the side of a corner deli, but I didn’t see any mischief makers. Still, I upped my pace even more, wished for better streetlights, and was relieved to turn the corner toward the school.

  The Square was dark across from me, and silent, though I could see the ghostly outline of a tree that had been toilet-papered.

  I also could hear music from the school. The sound system worked and the party was apparently in full swing. I was only steps away. I took a deep breath, squared my shoulders against what, I didn’t know—and heard footsteps, loud and fast, and garbled words, “It’s her!” from behind me.

  I whirled around, expecting to see kids running from toilet-papering another tree but the masks were the first clue I was wrong. Unless they were headed for the school dance dressed as burglars, there was no reason for the black Zorro masks the trio of lummoxes wore. Halloween was tomorrow.

  Before I could do or say anything, they grabbed me, each arm held in a vise grip, one of the attackers behind my back, hands on my shoulders.

  I screamed as loudly as I could.

  A hand was clapped over my mouth. “Chill!” a gravelly voice said from behind me. “We’re friends of Mitty’s!”

  His words were slurred and he sounded drunk. I didn’t chill, and I couldn’t speak with that huge hand over my mouth, couldn’t say I didn’t know Mitty, wasn’t Mitty, didn’t care about Mitty—and what kind of friends grab women in the street?

  They laughed—all three. Different laughs, drunken but vastly amused laughs.

  I struck out with my only free appendage—my leg—trying to kick sideways at one of them. Sideways kicks are rather pitiable.

  “Whoa, whoa,” another equally drunk sounding voice said, and then he laughed. “Fierce, isn’t she?”

  “C’mon, calm down. It’s Mischief Night and we’re the Mitt’s buds!”

  Whoever they were, they were strong. I tried to move my lips, to get some distance from the hammy paw over my mouth to bite it, but I couldn’t, and nibbling his fingers wouldn’t help much.

  “You don’t want him to think he’s in love with a bitch, do you?” one said as I struck out with my other leg which, alas, also didn’t have much room to move. “He never stops talkin’ about you, Madeleine—thinks the world of you! We know you’re still seein’ Drake, but you’re making a big mistake and we’re here to prove it.”

  “ ’Cause it’s Mischief Night—and we’re makin’ mischief—the good kind.”

  They found that observation hysterical. If they weren’t still clamped on to me, they’d have doubled up and rolled around on the ground from the sound of it. As it was, I could feel their bodies shaking with laughter. I thought I might get drunk myself on the alcoholic fumes their laughter produced.

  “Hey! Mitty and Maddy! It even sounds good together!”

  I shook my head as much as I could. I wasn’t Madeleine. I didn’t know a Mitty, was not dating Drake, and Ham Hand had to get his paw off my face.

  “Don’t be scared—come on. You’ll see, it’ll be fun. Mitty’s home—you’re our Mischief Night surprise.”

  I realized that they were stupid and drunk but probably not malicious. Still—who cared what their intent was? They’d terrified me and they were keeping me against my will.

  Where were other pranksters or passersby or homeless people when I needed them? Nobody was on the street. Nobody would hear me even if I could free myself and scream. Nobody would save me. I had to save myself.

  I moved and squirmed as much as I could, pulling sideways and rolling my head, shaking it in a futile no-no-no! and rolling my eyes up toward the skyline with a momentary fantasy that Superman had relocated from Metropolis to Philadelphia and if I screamed Help! Help! he’d rescue me.

  If I could scream, of course.

  Surely they could look at me and realize I was not the girl they had in mind. If they had minds.

  They weren’t vicious. They didn’t react by increasing pressure. They were stupid. They laughed more. I didn’t know that was much better.

  Then my eyes and head rolled back and up toward the rooftop, and I had one of those times when what the eye sees and the brain is willing to receive don’t mesh. What I saw was impossible. Therefore, I took too long to see it.

  Superman wasn’t on the roof, but six Screams were.

  Robes darker than the sky against which they were silhouetted, bone-white distorted skull heads with frozen screaming mouths gleamed in the light of a sliver of moon. If I hadn’t had a hand across my mouth, I would have joined in their screams, been the voice for all of them.

  The rooftop. What was there? The art studio. The music room. The tennis court.

  But those were enclosed, and these figures were outside, on the off-limits part of the roof where, in the warm months, a small garden was planted, and botany experiments attempted. The spindly tree struggling to grow in a large pot up there was also silhouetted.

  Why there? And was that another figure, one in street clothes? Without the costume, the grotesque mask, he looked so much less substantial than they did.

  This was it: the worse thing that was going to happen. The Friday thing.

  I’d thought they had humiliation, at worst a fistfight in mind. What was more useful than using the crowd downstairs to thoroughly embarrass someone? Leaving the audience behind made no sense.

  In their black robes, they looked like the nightmare jury of six that they in fact were, a jury of his peers who had found him guilty a long time ago. This, I feared, was the sentencing.

  The group shifted, but whatever they were doing—debating, accu
sing, taunting—they weren’t touching him.

  All this probably took up no more time than an eyeblink, but it felt centuries, geological epochs, and it meant I had to get up on that roof before time ran out altogether, drunken louts or not.

  The trio was well beyond sensitivity or nuance. Time was running out. I had to resort to primitive means.

  I went limp and thought about Cupcake, the dog I’d had in elementary school, the sweetest dog ever, who’d broken away from me while I walked her, and had been run over by a truck. And as always, the guilt and loss and the sweet memories of that dog filled my eyes with tears.

  The ham-handed one pulled his paw off my mouth. “She’s crying!” he said. “Don’t cry, don’t cry! We thought it was funny and Mitty—”

  “I’m not Madeleine!” I sobbed.

  “What?” One of them came close and blinked as he looked at me. “Sure you are.”

  “No. You could check my ID, but there’s no time.”

  “But this is where he said you—”

  “And he was almost right. I know where she is. She’s here on this street. Follow me—”

  They weren’t ready to spring to action. “You’re not the right girl?” one of them said. “You sure?”

  “She’s at that party up there—see? Quick—before she goes off with”—What was his name?—“Drake!”

  They listened. In their stupid dazed way, they half understood and nodded and followed me as I ran them around to the back entry. I did not want to be detained by Havermeyer at this moment. Then up the stairs, up and up until we were on the third floor, inside the school.

  “Is she gone then? I don’t see her!” the third stooge said, looking around.

  “Nobody’s here. You lied!” his comrade brilliantly observed.

  “You’re probably Madeleine!”

  “They’re outside. Remember—you saw her from down on the street because she was outside.”

  “Oh, yeah. Right.”

  I led my band of jokers to the door that led outside. “Shhh,” I said. “Let’s surprise her.”

  “Wait,” one of them said. He sounded as if he might be sobering up. “Wait. This isn’t such a good idea.” His features scrunched together as he looked out the glass pane. “I don’t see her, anyway.”

  “She’s probably in disguise,” I said. “She is, in fact. She’s disguised as a famous painting.”

  “A painting? That’s nuts. Is she in a frame, is she—”

  “Shhh! Don’t scare her.” I hoped that the entry of three large and unfamiliar males and one teacher who could name names would at least stop events for a while.

  “Shhh,” I said again as I quietly opened the door, which had a narrow wedge keeping it from locking. I wondered when in the week the seniors had taken care of that. “Shhh. Don’t say anything till I give the sign, okay? I’ll point to where she is.”

  They nodded, but the one who was sobering up looked as if he was trying to think of an objection. Happily for me, his thought processes were not yet, if ever, swift. Before he could think it through, we were outside, creeping onto the dark terrace, the rough shadows of dead and dried-up flower beds next to us. “Now?” one whispered, but I shook my head. We crouched at the back near the wall in dark shadow.

  “Jump!” a female voice said. I hadn’t noticed her from below, but Allie stood to the side, arms folded across her chest. The sight of her in that position made me shudder. She was orchestrating it—whatever it was. Disguised as her or not, she was Lady Macbeth. “Just jump and end everybody’s misery. It’s either you or all of us, so guess which it’s going to be?”

  “Her?” the nearly-sober one said. “She’s not Madeleine. She’s a blonde and Madeleine’s—”

  “Shhh—I told you, she’s in disguise. One of those people in the cape and mask,” I whispered.

  Seth was encircled, but nobody was touching him. He’d backed right to the edge and was pressed against the wall, which was low, too low. All it would take was minimal hoisting . . .

  “No—don’t jump,” a low voice said. His back was to me, but I thought it was Wilson. His voice was strained, his tone urgent. “Don’t. Come on, man. Just agree to keep your mouth shut. Don’t tell. You tell and we’re all screwed for the rest of our lives, starting with not getting into college. Nobody’d believe you, anyway. They think you did it. All of it.”

  “Because you framed me,” Seth said. “You were my friends and you—”

  “How can you be friends with somebody you don’t even know? Who will never give in or compromise? Who doesn’t care about anybody else? Who thinks he’s the best person on earth—maybe the only one?” Allie’s voice was low, flat, and cold.

  “You didn’t make it easy, man.” Whoever said that sounded sad about it. “We asked you not to, just to stay cool, but you had to push. You started it all.”

  “The party could have been perfect if you hadn’t insisted on your so-called Rights.” Allie’s voice sounded like a snarl.

  Seth was quiet. I had missed the beginning of this, but even coming into it now, I could feel we were in a lull, a held breath, after which things could go either way, and one of the ways was too frightening and insane to contemplate.

  “Go!” I said to my trio. “She’s one of them.” And then I used my only attack weapon, The Teacher Voice. “Stop right now!” I shouted in the ultra classroom decibel. “You! Wilson! Erik! Jimmy!!!”

  The various Screams froze in place, making it even easier for Curly, Moe, and Larry to reach them, and though the drunks were outnumbered, they had the element of surprise, bulk, and alcoholic bravado on their side.

  “What are you—”

  One of my would-be kidnappers was working on pulling off a mask. “My head!” a male voice shouted, pulling off the mask himself. It was Wilson, his bruises from the fistfight still visible.

  “You aren’t Madeleine!” the drunk said. “Hell—you’re not a girl!” He turned to me. “What’s going on?” He turned back. “Madeleine? Where are you? Which one are you?”

  By then, I’d reached them. “How could you do this? Are you crazy? On drugs? Drunk? What on earth—you wanted him to die? I can’t believe you’re murderers! I—I—” I ran out of words, of ideas, of anything that could encompass what had been going on.

  “It was up to him,” Allie said in that new frozen voice. “He threatened us.”

  I’d heard them ask him to promise not to tell, and they surely didn’t mean about tonight’s fracas.

  “He threatened all of you by saying he’d tell about what happened to Mr. Reyes,” I said as if I knew it to be true. “About the jar of sodium.”

  “Nobody meant that to happen,” Erik said. “Honestly, Miss Pepper. Nobody. Just for him to find it there and get mad again, like with the other things. We left other things in the sink, too, ’cause you couldn’t see them there at first, so it was a bigger surprise. We didn’t mean . . .”

  “We only wanted him to leave—to quit! To stop giving us such bad marks and ruining everything for us. He kept acting like he was going to—threatening us. We thought we’d speed it up, give us a chance.”

  “So what’s the point of Seth telling what happened? The cops think it was an accident–and it was!”

  They looked at me, their masks in their hands or dropped on the roof, their anonymity gone, their expressions bewildered, as if I’d startled them awake, and in fact, I thought I had.

  They looked pitiable. Barely grown young men, vulnerable and human without their disguises.

  Bad company, indeed. “This started because you wanted better grades for college,” I said, punching out every word. “Better grades! And look where it took you—to trying to murder someone! What happened to all of you? How did you get from there to here?”

  The red-haired drunk poked his finger into my shoulder and spoke with the air of revelation. “Madeleine’s not here.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “My mistake.”

  “This is boring,” the heavyset
one said. “These are kids. High schoolers.” And the three of them turned and walked back into the school. I didn’t try to stop them, though I knew I should—they didn’t belong in the building. I hoped they’d find their way out, that Havermeyer wouldn’t find them first, that if he did, he wouldn’t find out how they’d gotten into the building in the first place, and that en route they would do no damage.

  They were now in the hands of fate. I had my hands and attention sufficiently full up here.

  Allie looked like a broken toy. Her hands hung at her sides and her eyes focused somewhere internally.

  “How could you?” I asked her, and the question wasn’t rhetorical. “To try to goad somebody into—” I had to stop. I was controlling the urge to cry because it hurt too much to believe this could be true. I cleared my throat. “This morning you were crusading for civil rights, marching and talking to the TV reporter and now, now you wanted a friend to die. Why Seth? Why pick on him? Is it because you don’t approve of his emotions? Of his right to be who he is?”

  She snapped into attention and defensiveness. “That’s not it! I’m not a bigot—none of us are. Nobody . . . we were all cool with it when he came out. But that was enough, and then he pushed it too far. He was bringing a guy to the party, and that was too much. It made everybody uncomfortable, and we tried to reason with him. Nothing would have happened if he’d just . . . given in.”

  “You have rules for Seth that don’t apply to you? Does he vet your dates? Were special exclusions for some people what you were marching for today?”

  “That’s not the same! We would have all looked . . . Nobody ever did that at a Philly Prep party before, why did he have to say he was going to do it at ours?” She shook her head and sounded as if she was running out of steam, and when she continued, her voice was lower, less sure of itself. “We all said we wouldn’t go with dates, but he—it was this thing with him. He needed a lesson—that was all—that’s all we wanted—just for him to stop being so . . . stop thinking he was better than everybody. That’s why we—we were already doing things to Mr. Reyes, but that’s why we made it look like . . . like he was doing those things. Two birds with one stone.” She looked surprised by her own words.