Night School

by Caroline B. Cooney

  Julie said, “What did you and Autumn do in that class, anyway, Mariah?”

  “Nothing,” said Mariah quickly. Much too quickly.

  Julie’s sharp green eyes sharpened.

  She’s creepy, thought Mariah. But who am I to call another person creepy? I who have secret crushes that last for years and years? I who go to Night Class and offer up Scare Choices?

  “Autumn won’t talk about it,” said Julie. “I mean, she won’t even tell me the subject.”

  “There is no subject,” said Mariah.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” snapped Julie. “It’s night school. Of course there’s a subject. You can’t just go there and sit around and pick on each other.”

  The word “pick” penetrated minds as if it were itself a pick: an ice pick, an iron-ore pick.

  Who would Mariah pick? Who would Andrew pick?

  Who would pick Bevin?

  Or had somebody already picked Bevin?

  “What is that Night Class?” said Danielle. “What’s the subject anyhow? Photography? Filming?”

  Andrew went white. “Why do you say that?” he asked.

  “I can’t think of anything else I’d be willing to come back to school for at night,” said Danielle. “I want to go into film, of course. Not acting; actors are pathetic dweebs without lives. I want to be a producer. What was your film about, Andrew?”

  “It was about fear,” said Andrew.

  “Great topic!” said Julie. “Don’t you love scary, scary movies? By the way, here’s something really scary. Autumn is dating Ned.” Julie-Brooke-Danielle burst into hysterical laughter. “Ned!” they repeated.

  Julie, now, would be fun to scare, Autumn realized. Unlike Mr. Phillips, Julie would deserve it. How many people had Julie scorned and loathed publicly over the years? How many people had Julie crushed under her foot, socially speaking? How many people had Julie laughed at?

  Mariah quickly defended Autumn against the terrible charge of dating Ned. “It wasn’t a date. It was just class. We had pizza afterward. Everybody went. You couldn’t call it anything.”

  Too late Mariah saw that Ned had joined them. Of course Ned had joined them, because Ned had thought it was something. Not a date, of course, but his own group.

  Ned, white and hurt, stood very still, trying to be wallpaper, but Julie-Brooke-Danielle noticed him and threw back their heads laughing. “Hi, Neddie,” said Julie. She raised her eyebrows and shook her head, totally entertained. She hooked her finger in Ned’s shirt pocket and moved him forward by his fabric. She regarded his face with her best mixture of contempt and laughter. With her fingernail only, not even touching his skin with her skin, she adjusted the angle of his profile. “Cute choice, Autumn,” she said, meaning, Pathetic choice, Autumn.

  Julie-Brooke-Danielle left laughing.

  Ned was desperate to leave, to be anywhere but there, standing knee-deep in humiliation. He knew from experience not to walk off, because laughter would follow him. It was better just to stand still, until the tormentors abandoned him. He would be forgotten as soon as they faced the other direction and went on with their lives.

  How he had hoped that he would actually have these three as friends! How many times would he fall for it—that soaring giddy hope which led to public pain? It was stupid to have hope.

  The voices of Night Class whispered in the halls. Dark voices, which had stood in dark buildings and considered dark homework.

  “We could film Julie,” said Autumn. “It would be a good film, and Julie would deserve it. She isn’t a nice person.” I’ve been hanging out with her for years, thought Autumn, and yet I never realized that Julie isn’t nice. But I have power now, I am in Night Class. I can do things I couldn’t do a day ago. And I can do some of them to Julie.

  “She’d be a great Scare Choice,” said Mariah, very quietly.

  “I agree,” said Andrew.

  They were on Ned’s side. It had never happened before, that Ned had allies. And his new allies were not merely decorative, either. They were strong and popular and admirable.

  And Julie—she might not be an ETS; but she was certainly an SC. And she would deserve it; nobody need feel guilty. In fact, it would be rather pleasurable to move in on Julie, alone in the dark.

  And that means, thought Mariah, we won’t move in on Bevin, or that poor old lady.

  Mariah smiled at Andrew, and he smiled back. Autumn smiled at Ned and he smiled back. They drew in close, like a pack of animals at a water hole, and they drank together.

  Chapter 9

  ANDREW ARRIVED AT THE HOSPITAL.

  It had a vacant, abandoned look, like the minds of its patients.

  There were weeds in untended gutters. There were patches of peeling paint. There were weather cracks in doors.

  There were no gates, no fences, no grilles in the window. The hospital looked like a place where only the exhausted were kept; only the mental patients who had given up, and about whom nobody worried now.

  Andrew swallowed. He went in by a door whose sign was so small, maybe it didn’t even count. ENTRY, it said sadly.

  “Where is Mr. Phillips?” asked Andrew.

  “He is no longer here,” said the clerk.

  “Oh,” said Andrew, feeling better already. “Did he go home?”

  “No,” said the clerk. The clerk’s eyes never met Andrew’s. The clerk’s eyes stood still, like glass or time. “He was removed.”

  That made Mr. Phillips sound like a corpse, picked up by the mortuary. Andrew said nervously, “Removed by whom?”

  “I couldn’t say,” said the clerk.

  “Removed to where?” asked Andrew. I just want to get out of here, he thought. This place is creepy. What made me think of checking on Mr. Phillips, anyway? He’s a grown-up, he has to take care of his own problems, I’m busy, I’m very busy, I can’t get all involved with some sub’s emotional welfare.

  The clerk pulled a pair of red-rimmed glasses from a shirt pocket and slowly put them on. They were half glasses and his flat eyes stared out from behind the squashed rims. The eyes never moved, and the clerk never once actually looked at, or saw, Andrew.

  “And in what way,” said the clerk, “does this concern you? Are you family?”

  “No,” said Andrew, “I’m one of his students.”

  “You must have another Mr. Phillips in mind,” said the clerk. “This Mr. Phillips was not a teacher.”

  And oh, how true that had been. Andrew said, “If you could just give me his home address …”

  “This Mr. Phillips no longer has a home,” said the clerk.

  “Everybody has a home,” cried Andrew.

  “What an odd idea,” said the clerk.

  Mariah, the future Class Daydreamer, was daydreaming. Mariah’s dreams were so real to her that sometimes her lips moved in pretend dialogue.

  Julie had never poked fun at Mariah for this. She did not know why. There was something incredibly touching about how vulnerable Mariah was when lost in her daydream, as if the slightest stray syllable could knock Mariah down.

  Does anybody in this school like me from afar, the way I like Mariah? wondered Julie.

  But she did not have to wonder, she knew the answer, and the answer was no.

  She felt a longing in her to be nice, the way some girls might long to be beautiful, or to be thin. But being nice seemed so distant, so unlikely. And she was so good at being mean. Could she really give up all that expertise, and turn nice, which was boring?

  Bevin’s new life was acceptable.

  He would go to school as usual, in the car with his sister and mother, and he would get out as usual, lost in the flurry of Mariah calling hello, and dropping things, and saying things, and waving. Somehow, as usual, his mother would never notice that he, Bevin, was not welcomed the way Mariah was. And Mariah, in the way of sisters, would quickly distance herself from her loser brother.

  Bevin didn’t blame her. He would have loved to distance himself from such a loser. Unfortu
nately, he occupied the body.

  Bevin would circle the school. A school on one floor, built for mild weather, it had covered porticoes all the way around, like a Roman villa. Walking purposefully, a technique he hoped would throw off pursuers, he would head for the one place where there was no covered walkway. The nifty little backing-in spot at the nurses’ office door, in case an ambulance ever had to visit the school. Once it had been used for the occasional gym accident, the occasional gang fight, the occasional teacher heart failure.

  Here Bevin would wait until the late bell had rung, and everybody else was in class. Then, quietly, he would walk at an angle into the trees and heavy growth that wrapped the parking lots, invisibly circling the school grounds. Then he would walk back home.

  The school never called his house to ask where Bevin was, in spite of the fact that they had a full-time clerk to do this.

  At first Bevin thought perhaps the clerk might call his parents at work, and that was why he had no calls to intercept at home. Then he realized that nobody had noticed his absence. No teacher had paid any attention to him when he was there, and no teacher was paying any attention to him now that he was not.

  Bevin had thought there was nothing left in him to be broken, nothing left in him that still cared, but he was wrong. Not even bureaucracy cared. Not even paperwork or computers cared.

  Nobody on earth cared whether or not Bevin existed.

  “Hi, Mrs. Deale!” called Andrew’s mother. “How are you today?”

  “Fine, thank you,” said Mrs. Deale. She liked Andrew’s mother. She liked Andrew. She wished she could run over and embrace Mrs. Todd; pour out her loneliness; say “I’m not fine! Please ask me over for dinner! Or at least for tea!” But of course she never said any such thing, and they would all wave politely and then Mrs. Todd or Mr. Todd would drive off swiftly, in the manner of busy people with much to do.

  She knew they never thought of her again.

  She had decided, in her old age, that the worst and most terrible thing was never to be thought of again. At least she had had her youth, when she was beautiful, and boys adored her, and her legs were long and full of dance.

  Her legs now … they were stumps that hardly worked.

  Young Andrew waited patiently for her to cross his driveway. He had a car, too, and was always going someplace. It was wonderful, really, all these people who were never lonely. She smiled at him, and he smiled back, twinkling his fingers as she hobbled on alone, thinking what a nice boy he was, and how once, many many years ago, she had been loved by nice boys like that.

  Mariah studied herself in the mirror.

  She had started doing this, as she recalled, in sixth grade. She wasn’t putting on makeup or fixing her hair. She was studying herself, as if she could learn who this person Mariah was by looking good and hard at that reflection.

  She had learned nothing.

  How extraordinary, she thought. I’ve occupied this body for seventeen years and I don’t know who lives in it. I’m a stranger to me.

  And the part of me I loved most, my secret crush, isn’t inside me anymore.

  Mariah, who loved bed, the cozy sweet familiar comfort of it, that squiggling-down time under the covers, where nothing but Mariah and her crush existed—Mariah could no longer stand going to bed.

  There was no sweet dream of Andrew to hold in her arms like a teddy bear.

  Just when she tried to snuggle down into the dreams, remember the dialogue, feel the face and kiss the lips, Night Class swarmed over her. The choice of homework. The memory of Mr. Phillips, and the film, and the future assignments.

  The crush was there, she still adored Andrew, but the daydreams, the dialogues, the pretend loving and hugging—it evaporated.

  Mariah was left with nothing to think about. Just a steady desperate pulsing in her skull, as if she were just anatomical now, just physiological. Not a person anymore, only a body; the delightful dialogues and histories of her imagination dried up and gone. How empty life was without it. Could she even survive without her secret lives?

  As the days passed, and the second Night Class approached, Mariah felt more and more as if she had truly lost a love. As if she’d been jilted and abandoned.

  Every day she would run into the real Andrew, sometimes several times a day, and she didn’t know him. She tried to tell herself that real life was better, but it wasn’t. In daydreams, everything worked out warm and happy, and even if she threw in some dreadful twist, some terrible event (like Andrew being in a car accident, and she, Mariah, the one to sit by his bed and hold his hand during the coma) it always worked out beautifully, with Andrew fully recovering and deeply indebted to her for her loyalty and strength.

  But in real life, he was just a busy kid with a lot of stuff to do and a lot of friends she hardly knew, and a lot of worries she knew all too well.

  That last night before night school, Mariah made herself very flat on the mattress, like a paper doll. She tried to find her beloved addiction; her sweet entertainment. Andrew wasn’t there.

  And the moment she thought of Night Class, and the instructor, and the homework, she thought of Mr. Phillips, vanished into his own fear. It had eaten him, and he was gone.

  And Bevin … fear was eating him. He, too, was partly gone.

  Bevin was being gentle with her. It terrified Mariah. Was he preparing something … something she didn’t want him to do?

  Why can’t I say it even inside the privacy of my head? Why be fearful of saying out loud, I’m afraid that Bevin might—

  But even in the privacy of her head, Mariah could not express her deepest fear of what Bevin might do to himself.

  It was important not to think too much about Bevin. If she kept having these thoughts that he was—well, that he—well, that—anyway, it might affect Bevin, and move him closer, and anyway, Bevin couldn’t be that bad off. She was daydreaming again.

  Besides, she comforted herself, I am doing things to help Bevin. I’ve given Night Class a different SC in his place. Julie. Julie’s not innocent. Julie’s cruel and deserves what she gets.

  Late in the night, staring out the window at the shadows that might be more than shadows, pulling down the blinds to hide herself from whatever was out there, knowing how pointless that was, because whatever was out there didn’t care how many blinds were lowered … Mariah thought, But Julie won’t be the final assignment. How much does Bevin count? Does he count for two victims? For ten victims? When do I quit handing innocent victims over and let them have Bevin?

  Autumn, too, had trouble in the evenings.

  They were darker than usual, and the shadows hovered close to her face.

  And yet, she was not afraid of the dark. She was afraid of the day. For it was by day that her Night Class was truly evil.

  By day they looked like anybody else. They laughed and talked and dressed like anybody else. You could not tell who was who. You would guess wrong. You would trust the very ones who had chosen you as a victim.

  Her own friend Julie, her longest and best friend Julie, had been named by Autumn herself as SC.

  They carpooled. Ned picked up Mariah and Autumn. It was a drive full of false friendship and faked greetings. Ned had actually done a dry run, timing himself, wanting to get the drive exactly right. There must be no fumbling at driveways, no confusion at intersections.

  But when Ned arrived at Autumn’s house, Ned saw that she knew him to the bone. Knew his fears and flaws and failures as if she’d done a research paper on Ned. Ned waited to be cut.

  But it didn’t happen. Autumn grinned, slid into the front with Ned, said Ned was right on time, said it was good to see Ned.

  Ned began to believe that he had a group of his own at last.

  The parking lot was lit by pools of yellow which did not overlap. Ned parked carefully. He had done it, done everything right, done everything exactly as he had rehearsed, and he was part of the group.

  And then he ruined it, without thinking first, without even know
ing he was going to.

  He got out first and saw little circles of dark, expanding and growing like cancer, taking out the circles of light. The dark chuckled, circling the four teenagers, faster and faster, like hounds going in for the kill.

  “Let’s not do this,” said Ned. “Let’s just go on home. I want to drop out.”

  How slurred and foreign the words felt coming out of his mouth. They were a mud slide, like the mud slide that had taken away the neighbor’s house last year. His voice didn’t sound normal at all.

  Autumn was filled with shame, picking Julie, who might be rotten and nasty, but who trusted her. I must go with Ned, she thought. Ned is the one who knew the right thing, in the end.

  But if I do what Ned says, I’ll be linked with him forever. Think what Julie will say next time! I just can’t have my name fastened with Ned. He may be right, but he’s such a pathetic dweeb. Ned would think I liked him and I don’t. I can’t be in public with Ned unless Andrew and Mariah are there, too; people would laugh. The worst thing, thought Autumn, is to have somebody laugh at you.

  Nobody ever laughed at Autumn, but she had seen it done to others, and she played her life carefully to prevent it ever happening to her.

  “We can’t drop out,” said Autumn. “The instructor said so.”

  I must go with Ned, thought Mariah. To every thing there is a solution. A time to stay and a time to drop out. It’s time to drop out. But … I’m a half loser already because of my brother. And if my secret dreams are revealed, who cares? I don’t have them anymore; they burned up, or flew away, or got sick of me. But if I drop out, they’ll take Bevin. “The class is closed,” she reminded Ned. “And it doesn’t mean nobody else can join. It means none of us can leave.”

  Andrew remembered the hospital, where Mr. Phillips had not been. What if Julie …

  No. Julie was tough as steel. Julie might scream or run or something but she wasn’t going to end up in a mental hospital. She was just going to have a few minutes of knowing what it was like to be picked on, instead of being the pick-owner.