by Ray Garton
Erin pushed the list away, not wanting to look at it anymore. She reached for the crumpled pack of cigarettes on the table removed one, and lit up. She'd stopped smoking a little over a year ago but awoke with a craving for a cigarette that morning. She'd found the pack buried in the back of her top nightstand drawer, and the cigarettes tasted as old and stale as she felt.
After J.R. had left the night before, she'd bid Jeff and his friend Lily goodnight and had gone to bed but didn't sleep. She tossed most of the night with an invisible steel band wrapping tighter and tighter around her chest; images of Mallory as a little girl, as a baby, as a lump in her belly went around and around in her head as she tried desperately to figure out where she'd gone wrong.
Erin was thankful for J.R.'s presence last night; it had helped a lot to have someone outside the family show so much concern. It didn't bring Mallory back, though.
Something he had said kept repeating itself over and over in her head: If you keep hiding it from them… if you keep hiding it from them…
She dreaded telling them, but she couldn't keep it from them any longer.
It's nothing to be ashamed of she thought as she sipped her coffee. It's just a job, nothing more; it keeps a roof over their heads, they'll understand that.
But she wasn't so sure Mallory would understand that, especially after what she'd heard Thursday. Mallory and Jeff were very close, and if she wanted to, Mallory could strongly influence Jeff's way of accepting Erin's news….
The steel band returned around her chest, tightening more and more.
The voice on the radio said, smilingly, "Well, kids, Mother Nature isn't being very nice to us, and according to our meteorologist, her mood isn't gonna change very soon, so I guess we're just gonna have to grin and bear it, huh?"
J.R. was made uncomfortable by the sterility of the Laurel Teen Center as he was led down a long corridor with cream-colored walls and fluorescent lighting. Other than a few bulletin boards and fire extinguishers on the walls, there was nothing to break up the monotony, just door after door.
He was led down the corridor by a beefy man with a smirklike smile and a name tag that read luke on the breast pocket of his thin white coat. He'd introduced himself as the supervisor, whatever that meant.
"We're usually careful about allowing visitors," Luke said pleasantly, leading J.R. into a well-furnished room with three shelves of paperback books against one wall and a big-screen television against another. "Mostly we just allow parents and siblings once a week. But we've never gotten a visitation request from a teacher or school counselor before. We'd like to get more. It's a show of concern. Lets us know we're not alone in this. Okay," he said, slapping J.R. on the back twice, "just have a seat right here, and I'll bring him in."
There were four others in the room, obviously patients (or inmates, whatever they called them at such a place): two boys and two girls.
Outside the room and some distance down the corridor shouting broke out. The voices were unintelligible at first, then one rose above the others, clearly crying, "I hate daddies, did you hear me, I said I hate daddiiieees!"
J.R. winced at the voice as he seated himself in a chair.
A few minutes later, Luke ushered Kevin into the room and seated him across a round table from J.R. There was an unfinished jigsaw puzzle spread over the table, and Kevin began toying with some of the pieces, his eyes avoiding J.R.
"There's a group meeting in here in about twenty minutes," Luke said, "so we'll have to clear the room out then." Slapping Kevin on the back, he left.
"We've never actually met, Kevin," J.R. said, "but I'm your counselor at school. My name's J.R. Haskell, but please call me J.R."
Kevin looked bored as he picked at the puzzle, still not looking up. He wore jeans and a plain white T-shirt.
"When I found out you were in here, I… well, I thought you might like to talk."
Kevin shook his head.
"Well, I'd like to talk."
Kevin looked up then, and J.R. realized his face was battered, bruised, one eye swollen. There were stitches in his chin.
"God, what happened to you?" J.R. asked.
"A fight. That's how I got here. A bunch of guys jumped me outside Mickey D.'s, the cops came, everybody ran away but me. My parents… they decided I should be here."
"That's crazy. For a fight?"
He shrugged and turned his attention back to the puzzle.
"Kevin, if you tell me who it was, those guys who did this to you, maybe I can help you. I'll talk to your parents—"
"Won't do any good. That wasn't the only reason…."
"Oh?"
"I hadn't been home for a while. What difference does it make, man?" He suddenly began talking fast, scowling at J.R. "What difference does it make, huh? They've been looking for a reason to put me here for a long time. They searched my room, took my door off—you believe that? They took my fucking bedroom door off! They would've had me in here sooner or later anyway."
"Where have you been?"
"None of your fucking business, man."
"With Mace?"
Kevin looked at him, surprised, and, for a moment, seemed about to smile.
"You know Mace?"
"I know of him, Kevin, and what I know…" He leaned forward, moving closer to Kevin. "Who is Mace? Where is he from?"
Kevin glanced over J.R.'s shoulder at the window, and a hint of a smile crossed his lips.
"I… don't know," he said after a long pause. "But that doesn't matter."
"Why not?"
"Because he… when we met, I was suspicious of him, but not anymore. He offered to help me with my band—I've got this band, y'know—and he gave us a place to practice, music to play, good music—he's taught us a lot. And he's our friend."
"Why were you suspicious at first?"
"Well, I figured maybe he wanted to rip us off—the band, I mean. His offer sounded good, but… too good. Then I went home. My little brother… he started laughing at me because my mom had taken my bedroom door off, like I told you." His eyes darted around J.R., and his voice thickened slightly with emotion. "She'd gone through all my drawers, my closet. She started yelling at me, telling me they were gonna put me away, teach me a lesson, shit like that."
"When was this?"
"Last month. I figured, like, what've I got to lose, y'know? So I went to see Mace, me and the band. And I'm glad we did. We're playing Fantazm Wednesday night."
"But you'll still be in here."
Kevin looked into J.R.'s eyes then and simply smiled.
"Your attendance has been good the last few weeks, Kevin. You didn't meet any of our appointments, but you went to nearly all of your classes. I checked my records before coming over here today, though, and all of a sudden, things stopped last week. You seemed to be trying hard for a while. Now you—what, you don't care? Why?"
He kept smiling.
"Kevin, I don't know if you're aware of this or not, but Mace is scaring a lot of people."
No reply.
"Something is wrong with what he's doing. Do you know Nikki Astin? Did you know a few nights ago he—"
Kevin stood.
"Wait, please, let me—"
He was still smiling, but his smile was cold as he headed for the door.
J.R. stood. "Kevin, please, you don't know what he's—"
Kevin was in the corridor, and J.R. followed him.
"Kevin!" he snapped, reaching for Kevin's arm but missing. J.R. was quickly approached by a round man in white whose name tag read phil.
"Excuse me, but we'd rather you not shout in here," Phil said.
"Look, I have to talk to him, he's—"
"We're very careful about visitation here, sir. Apparently he doesn't want to talk to you anymore."
J.R. watched Kevin walk slowly down the corridor and disappear through one of the many doors….
A few minutes after J.R. was finished with his last appointment of the day, Jeff and Lily came to his office.They bot
h looked tired and scared. They made an attempt at small talk, but Lily and Jeff kept exchanging quick, cryptic glances, and J.R. knew something was up.
"Okay," he said seriously, sitting on the corner of his desk, "what's going on?"
Jeff leaned forward in his chair, elbows on knees, and said, "Remember that thing we told you Nikki was wearing? The weird cross she called a Crucifax?"
J.R. nodded.
"Mallory was wearing one, too. They got them from Mace."
"They're all over campus," Lily said softly.
"What, the crosses?" J.R. asked.
Jeff nodded. "Today I've seen—Jesus, I don't know, maybe twenty-five. More, probably."
"Those are just the ones you can see," Lily added. "Half the girls in my P.E. class were wearing them in the shower today. I went up to Sherry Cavanaugh and touched it, started to ask where she'd gotten it, and she freaked. She pushed my hand away like I'd hit her or something."
J.R. moved off the desk and into his chair, quickly thinking back over the day, trying to remember if he'd seen any students wearing the crosses; he didn't, but he hadn't been looking for them.
"My friend Nick was wearing one," Jeff said. "We usually don't hang around together much during school. Mostly in the summertime. We haven't talked in a while, but I met him today in the caf, and he was… different."
"Different how?" J.R. asked.
"I don't know, really. He's a pretty nice guy, usually quiet. He was moody during the last weeks of summer because his parents were getting a divorce. Now he's… he's still quiet, but he's got this weird smile on his face, like he knows something I don't, and he… he stares a lot. I asked him where he got that thing around his neck, and he said a friend gave it to him. I asked if it was anyone I know, and he didn't say anything for a few seconds, just gave me that creepy smile. Then he said, 'Yeah, you know him' and walked away."
"Everything around here is different," Lily said. There was frustration in her voice, and a frown wrinkled her brow. "Doesn't anyone else notice it? Is it just me?'*
There was a burst of shouting down the hall, and J.R. listened a moment. He recognized Faye Beddoe's voice; she was arguing with a girl. He tried to ignore them.
"Different in what way, Lily?" he asked.
Glancing at Jeff as she spoke, Lily said, "Well, this weather, for one thing, and those damned crosses all over the place…. My friend Nikki, Miss Religion, starts acting like a slut… and I've got this other friend—she's bulimic —her mother's always telling her she's fat, so she throws up every time she eats, and for a while she was just wasting away."
She was one of J.R.'s students; it had been a few weeks since he'd seen her, and he couldn't remember her name, but he remembered that face, long and drawn with hollow cheeks and dark-circled eyes.
"She's gaining weight all of a sudden," Lily went on. "She's eating again, seems happy…." She shrugged as the words trailed off.
J.R. remembered referring her to an eating disorder clinic—how long ago? Three weeks? A month? Longer?— he'd even made an appointment for her himself. He hadn't followed up on it to see if she'd gone, but J.R. could tell by the tone of Lily's voice that she didn't think the change in her friend had come from any clinic or professional counseling.
"Is she wearing a Crucifax?" Jeff asked.
"I don't know. She hasn't been to… school"—her eyes grew slowly with realization as she looked at Jeff—"in a while."
She's with him, J.R. thought. That's what they're thinking, what they're afraid of, that she's with Mace.
He tapped a pencil on his desktop, imagining what would happen if he went to Mr. Booth with everything he knew— which was really very little—and told him something needed to be done about these crosses that were being worn around campus, that they meant something, stood for something that might cause a lot of trouble soon. Booth would chuckle.
Haskell, he might say, we've got kids here who put safety pins in their noses and razor blades in their ears and call them jewelry. You want me to make a fuss about some crosses?
The shouting down the hall worsened; Jeff and Lily looked over their shoulders at the closed door.
"What do you think is happening?" J.R. asked them.
Before either of them could reply, Faye Beddoe screamed.
J.R. shot out of his chair, pulled the door open, and was in the hall in an instant, running toward Faye's office. There were hurried footsteps behind him and a scuffle coming from the office ahead. Faye's door opened, and a girl bolted out and started toward J.R., zigzagging from wall to wall as she ran. When he saw the blood, everything slowed down, way down, because he knew something bad had happened.
He'd seen the girl before: Hispanic, a little chunky, with black hair that used to fall to her waist but was now spiked. She wore a long tan coat that flapped behind her like a cape as she ran, and there was blood spattered on its lapels and on the front of her white sweater. Swinging back and forth over her chest like a pendulum was a cross with flared ends, dark red and heavy-looking, and with each swing it tossed more beads of blood over her coat and sweater, and he held out his arms to stop her, shouting, "Hey, hey, wait!" but she pushed by him, spinning him around and against the wall, and he almost ran after her even though there were others reaching for her, trying to hold her, but he heard Faye's voice rise in an agonized, guttural scream: "Gaawwwd! Gaawwwd!"
J.R. turned again, ran for her office, and pushed through the doorway, and his feet slid over the floor as he skidded to a clumsy halt, his arms flailing to hold his balance.
Faye's desk faced the door, and she was kneeling behind it, her arms sprawled over the desktop, her head lolling. There was a spray of blood on the wall behind her.
She was grinning.
"Faye…" J.R. breathed, moving toward her, feeling as if his feet were plodding through quicksand because something was wrong with her face, with the grin that stretched all the way up her left cheek, then he realized that her black skin was glistening, wet, and he saw teeth, so many teeth….
"Faye?" He was at the desk as she pulled herself up with a horrible gurgling sound, still grinning—
—but she wasn't grinning.
A flap of skin hung loosely from her cheek, jiggling as she tried to pull herself to her feet, dribbling blood over the papers on her desk. A smooth, clean cut swept up from the left corner of Faye's mouth to her mandible. She tried to speak but could only make wet sputtering noises, spraying more blood through the gash in her face. She swept her arms back and forth over the desk, knocking books and pens and papers and the telephone to the floor.
J.R. took her hand as he moved around the desk, saying, "Sit back, Faye, just sit back. Somebody call an ambulance!" he shouted, then: "C'mon, Faye, just sit back, now, c'mon…."
She fell heavily into her chair and leaned her head back; the lower half of her cheek folded over, revealing her writhing tongue.
"Oh, God, dear God," J.R. gasped, moving behind her and pressing a hand over her cheek, holding the flap of skin in place. He could hear shouting and scuffling down the hall but heard no one coming.
"Goddammit!" he shouted, feeling lightheaded and queasy. "Let's get some help down here!"
Faye's blood, sticky and warm, ran between his fingers and over the back of his hand…
Jeff stood in the office doorway as J.R. rushed down the hall.
"What's going on?" Lily asked behind him, her hand on his back.
"I don't—" He stopped when he saw the girl and the blood and the swinging Crucifax, stepped into the hall, muttering, "Jesus," and reached for her as she neared, snapping, "Hold it, hold it!" but she clenched a fist and swung her arm hard, hitting him in the chest and knocking him back into J.R.'s office, bumping him into Lily.
He rushed out the door again, gained on her quickly, and gripped her right arm firmly as she entered the front office. The girl spun around and, with an angry grunt, kicked Jeff hard in the shin. Pain shot up his leg as he loosened his grip on her just enough for her to pull
away and dash across the office.
Mr. Plumley, the oldest and biggest counselor at Valley, was standing by the door that led to the main hall. He stepped in front of the girl, threw his arms around her, and hugged her tightly to his wide, round belly, saying, "Okay, okay, calm down, little lady, just hold the phone, let's—"
"No!" she shouted. "Let me go, let go! I'm going, I'm going away, going away!"
"You're not going anywhere just now, little lady, so let's—ah, Christ!" Plumley cried. "She's biting me!"
The girl had her mouth on his right wrist, and her head was jerking back and forth. Her words were garbled when she spoke: "Away… going… away…"
Plumley let out a high, quavering shriek and pulled his bitten hand protectively to his chest, stumbling backward, shouting, "Jesus Christ, she bit me!"
The girl pushed through the door and ran, her voice fading as she rushed down the hall: "Leave me alone, dammit, I'm going away…. going away…"
Miss Tucker, the receptionist, stood up behind her desk and shouted, "Stop her!" but Jeff was already through the door and running down the hall after her.
"Stop her!" Jeff called to no one in particular. "Help me stop her!"
Heads turned, but no one moved.
She rounded a corner, heading for the building's main entrance, and Jeff picked up his pace. Someone was running behind him, but he didn't take the time to look back.
As Jeff turned the corner, Dwayne Chalmers was wheeling a projection cart through a doorway into the hall, pushing it directly into Jeff's path. Dwayne always wore long-sleeved shirts buttoned to the neck, white socks with brown loafers, and his face was usually sprinkled with pimples. He was not an agile person or else he might have been able to pull the cart out of Jeff's way in time; he tried, but was not fast enough.