by Kit Reed
In a barren, freshly scoured apartment in the projects, one woman in particular hears. “You better not lay a hand on my kid!” Rolling up her sleeves, she looks around her tiny apartment for weapons. She’s a decent woman. Except for a steak knife and sewing shears, there is nothing at hand. Never mind. She picks up her mobile phone and grabs her late husband’s safari jacket. Unarmed, Marybeth Slater will take on anybody and everything that threatens her son. “I’m getting Johnny out. If I have to, I’ll kill.”
The studio switchboard lights up like a fireworks finale. The women get an open mike. “Patton you bastard. Murderer!”
“Ladies and gentlemen, I’m sorry for any confusion. When I say blow them up it isn’t an exact meaning.” Caught in the act, Mayor Patton is getting shrill. “It’s just a matter of speaking.” His press officer mutters into his ear: too late. He screeches, “It’s a metaphor!”
Agent Betsy looks up from the locket Johnny just gave her. “I guess you’re not having school in here any more.”
“Not so’s you’d notice.”
“What, um.” She has to make it sound like kid conversation instead of a leading question. “What do you guys want?”
“What do you mean what do we want?”
“I mean, do you have, um, like, demands?”
The answer is too complicated for Johnny Slater to come up with, at least right now. “Everything not sucking, that’s all.”
“Everything always sucks, it’s no big,” Trinket says. Come on, Johnny, give me something I can work with. Entrance and escape routes, weak spots, ways to get him to back down, Agent Betsy is thinking, but she is also thinking, he really is cute. Trinket rubs against him, but only a little bit, “I mean, do you guys want to get out of this stupid place or what?”
He explodes. “I just want them to leave us alone, that’s all.”
“It looks to me like that, you got.”
“This isn’t alone, this is …” He lifts Bruce Brill’s stupid Titania wig that started the whole thing. It looks like a microwaved rat. Words pop out of him like exploding shells. “This asshole Teach tried to put me in a play.”
“And you snatched his wife for that?”
“Nobody makes a pussy out of J. Slater.” He gestures at the crates that line the room where they are standing. “Look what I got.”
What has he got? What doesn’t he have. Cases of assault weapons, gravity knives, and mounded six-packs of MACE, a crate filled with Gulf War era grenades. Anthrax pellets, for all she knows. Agent Betsy gulps. “What’s the plan?”
He picks up a grenade. “What makes you think there’s a plan?”
She knows enough to shrug. “Beats the shit out of me.”
He drops it into the crate. It lands with a clank. “You’re the new kid and you think I’m gonna tell you the plan? I love ya baby, but sheesh!”
This isn’t a job for psychology, she realizes, looking into the open crate. Shit she knew that. Shit this kid is dangerous. The mayor has given her until Saturday to get results; it’ll take that long to worm her way into Johnny Slater’s head.
“Yo Trinket,” he says, and the look he gives her slides between love and hate. Worse. He sees the break in concentration as the agent glances over her shoulder to see who he’s talking to, the second it takes her to find and replace Betsy with her new name. In a flash he clenches his elbow around her neck. “Come with me.”
How did our children get this way? When did they start to fight us over every little thing, and what makes them so judgmental? What turned them mean? They started out little and cute and now they scare the shit out of us.
When something like this comes up everybody has excuses, and with or without one, we scramble for an explanation. Better that than admitting there are things about us that nobody can explain.
Bad parenting, you say, some of you, and the finger you are pointing is never at yourself.
You say, You didn’t listen to them, you always gave them what they wanted/always said no.
You say, You neglected/overprotected them.
Another theory? You gave them everything they wanted but you couldn’t give them love or, You gave them what they wanted when discipline is what they need. Or: You gave them too much/you didn’t give them enough.
Television, you say. It’s what you get when kids watch too much TV.
Poverty, you say, That’s the root cause. They’re angry because they grew up poor, except you know as well as we do that these aren’t only ghetto kids rampaging, they are people like us. They come out of upmarket apartments, lots of them, some from posh brownstones and more from shiny tract houses or treelined neighborhoods in the ’burbs, so what’s going on here isn’t only a function of poverty, although which of us is to say what makes a family poor?
It is, however, a function of rage. Why else would they do everything and hurt everybody and trash the place?
Bad companions, you say, bad influence. H/she never would have gotten into this all by h/erself, it’s all this hanging out with the wrong kind of kids—you think this, every one of you, even though, hey, somebody’s kid’s gotta be wrong or they’d all be perfect, right? You think, if only we save our nice, nice children from all that bad company and talk sense to them!
Do any of you remember what it’s like to be sixteen?
Race, you say, or religious discrimination, but if you look at the mix in HRH you will find it is a perfect mix, kids seething like roaches in the same melting pot.
Oh, oh! If only I hadn’t refused her the car/made fun of the crush/made rules/made him wear that purple shirt!
When kids go bad, it’s never what you think.
What did she do wrong? What changed? Grimly, Johnny frog-marches Agent Betsy to the elevator and with his arm still locked around her neck, drags her inside. They shoot up, up, and up into the ruined school. When she can speak she asks, “Where are we going?”
“I’m done showing you around.” The door opens on HRH1 and he forces her into the hall.
“You didn’t show me shit.” She wants to try, Why don’t you show me that you like me but she is strangling as he drags her along. “Where are we really going?”
“Check on things.”
“So. What. Are we going to the prom together or not?”
Johnny laughs and tightens his grip. “You’re my number one woman, right?”
“Then. Agh.” She chokes out the words. “Why are you hurting me?”
Johnny unlocks his arm and turns. He lifts her off her feet by the tightly braided green ponytail, sets her down, and gives her a kiss. “It’s just the way I am.”
In Wardlaw’s office, Beverly Flan whimpers, “We’re running out of food.”
Coach Dykstra says, “The situation is desperate. We have to get a message out.”
Wardlaw pounds on his dead Totalphone and skates his muted cell phone across his desk and into the trash. “How?”
“I have an idea.” Patting her gray satin front, Beverly Flan smiles brightly. Wardlaw hates Beverly Flan. “We can open a window and drop a note!”
Wardlaw says through his teeth, “You know as well as I do that these windows can’t open. At this altitude the wind would create a vacuum and suck us all to hell.”
Huddled in his corner, Edward McShy is shaken by a coughing fit. Remember that note he attached to a rock that almost brained a rubbernecker? MY STRADIVARIUS. What window did he open that he shouldn’t have opened, to drop it out, and if that window is still open, what will happen if some kid crashes his way into the music closet, which has formed its own airlock, breaking the seal?
And in the governor’s office, with nothing on TV but reruns of the Bruce Brill interview and the mayor’s speech, Harry Klein paces and frets. On the surveillance monitor, the silhouette of High Rise High looms, huge in the encroaching dawn. The woman he thinks he loves is undercover somewhere in there, and he’s afraid she is in danger. Is she OK? She promised to let him know. The city’s phones are dead and the police scanner
gives back only background racket, nightmare static from beyond the pale. Betsy has to get in touch, but how? She swore she’d find a way to let Harry know she was all right. He saw her go in, all right, but nothing has come out.
Amazing what happens when systems break down, Trinket thinks as her new boyfriend rushes her along. Order in institutions is always delicately balanced, a masterpiece of tension. Amazing, how long so few could control so many particles. A thousand kids kept at bay for all these months by a hundred teachers at most, few of them particularly physically strong and even fewer armed. Teachers plus the custodian who, the folder they gave her at the briefing told her, had been a Green Beret. Everything running smoothly until …
Brill, she thinks. That idiot Bruce Brill.
Now the adults are absent or neutralized in a holding pen, and order has gone out the window. The place is falling apart. The school isn’t exactly a charnel house but by this time it’s pretty much a mess. Instead of going back to their dorms after the riot, the kids seem to want to hang together. It’s either a gut fear of being alone or herd instinct or maybe it’s a victory thing. Nerved up and chattering, they’ve holed up in various classrooms to extend the experience, jittering teenagers on a perpetual roll. Maybe they think if they go home to bed, the adults will swarm them and take over while they sleep. They’ve dragged mattresses into the school precincts and set up little camps in labs and classrooms—bikers here, ravers there, the tightly knit Geeks and Monsters here in the computer lab on HRH2, wrapped up in a multi-level chess game in which the National Honor Society kids have just checkmated the Science Club in six dimensions, happy and peaceable because they’ve played for two days straight undisturbed by the need to change classes or leave here to go to Study Hall. Kids, Betsy wants to yell, although she’s strangling and can’t yell anything, put your eggheads together and come up with a plan to save the school.
Johnny drags her along past kid fundamentalists ranting in the nondenominational chapel and hard-core druggies zoning in the cafeteria on HRH3 and there is, of course, the Rifle Club holding the hostages at their encampment in the gym on 4. Agent Betsy notes that the HRH gangs have divided according to every possible line a group could draw between itself and another group: racial lines, gender lines, politics; they have divided according to everything from sexual orientation to religion: Muslim Alliance, Baptist Youth, Murray Atheists, Holy Rollers, Bayit, Rosicrucians, to say nothing of the Republican Youth, Young Democrats, Conservative Fucks; you name it, a splinter group is here. Oh yes, and the school chapter of A.A., which is meeting over coffee in the abandoned teachers’ lounge. Meanwhile the real drinkers have taken over the school library; as Johnny steers her past, kid drunks reel out to high five him, giggling and happily plotzed.
“These are my people,” he says into her ear.
She does not say, You’d be better off at MIT.
“And this is my place.”
What Agent Betsy doesn’t know, rolling down the hall with the school’s number one tough guy, is that if Johnny Slater tried to raise an army now, it wouldn’t necessarily be his army. The kids of HRH would tear each other to pieces trying to decide who should be in charge.
Outside the gym, the silence is impressive. Inside, the hostages—half the faculty—are bedded down on exercise mats while the Rifle Club patrols with M20s and with fatigues tucked into tightly laced boots. There’s blood on the floor in a couple of places—that’ll teach you to argue with us. Solid as a truck, fat, blue-eyed Chunk MacKenzie goes from mat to mat with a flashlight, turning over huddled teachers with a heavily shod toe. He is looking for the light of his life. She’s a tad too old for him but he is meant to be with the only woman whose heft matches his—big as a tub but beautifully dressed with pretty blonde permanent hair and what a pretty face—his love, the one and only French teacher, Ms. Beverly Flan. His heart is breaking. Where is she? Around him, other guys and girls in the Rifle Club are getting off their rocks getting even with the teachers who humiliated them in math or told them to shut up or just plain gave them a D, but Chunk’s head is on a different track. Enough hitting and kicking for him, enough pushing teachers to their knees and making them beg. His heart is in the high place. We can be together when this is over, he tells himself, unless he is trying to tell Beverly.
Everybody has a dream, and this is Chunk’s. I’ll save her and she’ll forget I’m too young and start talking to me in French. I’ll save her and she’ll thank me, you’ll see.
As they reach the end of the fourth floor hall Johnny relaxes his grip slightly, letting Trinket slide down a bit; they’re going along like sweethearts now, cute couple walking close. “We took this place down in fifteen minutes,” he says. “The school is ours.”
Words fail her. “Kewl.”
Overhead there is ominous thudding and rumbling: the Decorations Committee hanging pink balloons and Mylar streamers from the rafters under the skylight, decorating the Olympic-sized indoor track with Styrofoam snowmen and silver Kmart Christmas trees for the Tinsel Prom.
They reach the machine shop. Johnny’s guys have given up on the table saw and instead are flipping cigarette butts at the Teach’s gravely pregnant wife, who turns her head with a cold glare. Even though her eyes are swollen from hours of crying so quietly that nobody will know, when Mrs. Brill sees Johnny coming in with Agent Betsy, she understands. Kids are only kids, but women know. They exchange looks. Agent Betsy’s hair is crazy green and she’s dressed like a kid; she carries herself like a kid, but women know what’s up before men have a clue. Jane Brill’s eyes kindle at the sight of her, but Johnny’s watching so the pregnant woman quenches them fast. A lesser person would beg for her life but Jane is a lot smarter than her husband the bright-eyed Teach. “Oh,” she says with absolutely no inflection. Not surprised. Not scared. Not anything, just observing, the way you’d say, It’s raining. “You’re back.”
“Look what I got,” Johnny says, putting Agent Betsy in front of him like a prize he won at the carnival. God, is he trying to impress her? The woman is tied to a chair! “This my girlfriend Trinket, Mrs. Teach. In case you thought …”
It seems wise to act impressed. Agent Betsy says, “Is that your hostage?”
“Hell no. Better. This is my ticket to ride.”
Quick as that—maybe too quickly for a guy’s girlfriend, Trinket asks, “Ride where?”
When you’re seventeen sometimes your body takes you places your mind isn’t ready to be. Johnny gives her a look of naked doubt, but covers quickly. “Like I’d tell you.”
In the chair, Jane Brill sits without moving. Agent Betsy notes that her ankles have begun to swell. Sometimes women can communicate without words. Trinket lowers her voice. “Has this lady, like, been to the bathroom?”
“Who gives a shit?”
“She’s no good to you if she croaks.” She hisses like something out of a scary movie. “Did you ever hear of toxemia?”
“Oh,” Johnny says. Smart, remember; in his time this kid has read everything.
“See how her ankles are puffing up?”
“Oh, shit.”
“You better let her go before she pops.”
Seven louts in black spandex and Army surplus boots converge, all cartridge belts and jangling chains. “Did we win yet?” “What took you?” “What did we get from them?” “You were going to bring pizza.” The biggest, the one with Sidekick written all over him, gives Johnny a bearish nudge. “Where’s the beer?”
“Fuck off, Dolph,” he says. “I’m bringing Trinket for the girls to take care of while I’m busy. He means: surveill. He knows the word but he knows not to say it. “But first. Trinket, these are the guys. Guys, Trinket.”
The gratifying rumble tells Trinket she is looking good.
“So, the Slaterettes are holed up … where?”
“Music room, what’s left of it. Susie’s putting up a tent.”
Dolph mutters, “You’re taking your chick to the girls?”
Johnny g
rins. “You got a problem with that?”
“You know how they are with new kids,” Dolph says.
Trinket gives him a sharp look. “I can take care of myself.”
He bends over Trinket with an amiable leer. “Just watch the fuck out for Mad Maggie.”
Then Johnny says something that absolutely terrifies her. “Fuck that shit, she’s mine. Mag knows I saw her first.”
Think fast, Trinket. “Like, you don’t want me to take Mrs. Teach here to the bathroom? If she pops on you, you’re screwed.”
Jane Brill says, “Especially if I pop right here.”
Trinket bores in. “You want dead baby all over the place?”
“Shut up.”
Jane’s voice is shaking but she says, “Think of the mess.”
Ever the cop, Trinket clinches it. “By me, that makes it Murder One.”
Jane says, “And they still fry killers in America.”
“I said, shut up.” Johnny plasters duct tape over Jane Brill’s mouth. Then he takes out his knife. Cool as she is, the teacher’s wife shrinks as the point touches her front. In a swift gesture, he cuts the tape that keeps her in her chair. “Go with them, Dolph.”
Dolph does. About the conversation between these women: there will be no conversation. Dolph lounges while Betsy helps the teacher’s wife stagger to the bathroom; he props the stall door open as she sits and without Trinket there to drop one strap of her tank top, creating a distraction, Johnny’s sidekick would have watched the pregnant lady peeing like a customer ogling a pole dancer in a topless bar. What he won’t see, no matter how carefully he watches, is the look of complicity, or that Trinket has slipped a razor blade into Jane Brill’s palm.
Deep in the bowels of the school’s heating system, Ace Freewalter has belted on the necessary equipment and snaked into a ventilating duct. Juvenile perps and Saddam wannabes, watch out. The Ace is on the move.