by Sean Oliver
There could be an escape hatch to what was coming at P.S. 21, couldn’t there? What if he was just gone, if he was teaching computer science in Elizabeth? Wouldn’t he be free and clear of any obligations at 21? He wouldn’t look back. Deanna could leave, too, and after Trisha’s disappearance she’d probably be much less resistant to the idea. She might even go now.
But he needed out. He’d interviewed well. He had a great rapport with the principal in Elizabeth who’d come from a technology background as well. He seemed to like Jared’s ideas, liked his energy. That alone seemed miraculous because Jared was a wreck. How any of that hadn’t seeped through his pores was miraculous.
He’d gotten the usual questions from the guy—Anderson? Andrews? His head was too rattled to have even heard it correctly in that office. The principal had all the questions Jared had expected.
“You’re tenured, aren’t you?” he asked, cocking his head.
“I am.” He knew what was coming, and it was a damn good question. Why would he throw away the security of a protected city job and start the clock anew in another school district? It would take him four more years to get tenured in Elizabeth, or anywhere he went.
What desperate situation would cause one to do that?
“The district,” he said. “They’re cutting again.” That’s it. The Big Hand, swatting from above.
“Computers?” the man asked.
Jared nodded. “I love what I teach.”
Well done. Anderson-Andrews looked down at Jared’s application. Next would be the money.
“You’re on step seven on the salary guide for Carson. We wouldn’t bump you down to step one, but you know you’re not starting at seven, right?”
“Would’ve done something else if I wanted to get rich.” Jared stayed stone-faced and let the Anderson guy continue reading the application and resume. Jared was confident about that part of the process.
“First place in the NJ Statewide LEGO Competition?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve been waiting to meet you, I think.” Anderson pointed over his shoulder at a shelf displaying a handful of trophies. Right in the center was the one with a gold leaf LEGO sitting on top. A little placard on the base read New Jersey Elementary School LEGO Exposition - 2nd Place.
“Oh,” Jared said with an awkward smile. “Sorry.”
Andrews waved a hand. “You shouldn’t be.”
“Okay, good. I’m actually not.” He smiled and Andrews looked up from the resume and returned it.
They talked informal stuff for the rest of the meeting and Jared left feeling like Anderson or Andrews was a good guy. He’d made Jared comfortable and he instinctively felt something good in the environment. He stood and shook hands with the principal, then took one of his business cards off the desk. He left that building excited to be anywhere other than Carson.
Even if Elizabeth didn’t work out, there were hundreds of schools within a thirty-minute drive in dense northeast New Jersey. He could take the Praxis test in New York and get a teaching certificate there. And Pennsylvania after that.
His foot was heavy on the gas and he was flying—weaving between cars. His little sedan was roaring forward.
He would go. He would get out.
His car slowed for traffic at Exit 15E on the Turnpike, and his mind followed suit.
Would he really be able to just leave? It couldn’t be that easy. His heart picked up pace again as he sat in the standstill traffic. For the past fifteen minutes, his life had been his own. But that was now gone. He’d be back in school in a few minutes, with people that expected him to be right there beside them. He’d see his lovely fiancée, and he’d continue planning a wedding that he knew was never to be.
Jared pulled into a parking spot on the street near the school. He grabbed the business card from that principal—what the hell was the name, anyway?
Martin Andrews, Principal
He shoved it in his pocket with his keys, was out of the car and on school steps just before 11:00 a.m. He checked for texts from Deanna. He’d messaged her before leaving the parking lot in Elizabeth.
What’s the word on Trisha? he wrote. Anything?
Nothing. Something’s not right. How was ur checkup?
I’m fine. Ready for UFC.
He used a key card from Willie he was not supposed to have, keyed himself into the lobby, and flashed his ID badge to Mr. Moore, still filling in at the security desk. Jared kept on toward the office and caught his reflection in the glass of the trophy case beside security.
The tie. He was still wearing the sure-fire, dead giveaway in schools that you were going on a job interview that day. A suit? Forget it. That was deliberately flying a flag in the faces of building administration—I want out.
He stopped short of the office and reached up to undo the tie and yank it over his head. Willie strolled up beside him. He was carrying three contractor-size garbage bags and stopped when he saw Jared. He dropped the bags at his feet and caught his breath.
“You need help tying that thing, man?” Willie asked. Jared shook his head and stuffed the tie in his pocket, which was already full with a folded piece of paper, a business card from Principal Andrews, and a set of keys. He pulled all of it out to make room for the tie.
“I need this note anyway,” he said, unfolding a sheet. In doing so he dropped everything on the floor. “Shit.”
Willie leaned down and picked up the items for him. “I got it, my man.” He held them and unfolded the piece of paper. “Doctor who? What the hell—”
“Shhh,” Jared said. “Just gimme.” He snatched the fake doctor’s note out of Willie’s hands, who began to chuckle.
“Man, that shit is the worst looking one I ever seen.”
“Doesn’t matter. They just need a note. No one ever said anything about Photoshop.”
“Man, you gangster. Here.” He handed Jared his keys and he started for the office door. “You got time for a late morning refreshment downstairs?”
“Nah. Let me get signed in. I told them eleven.” Willie flashed him a thumbs up and bent down to grab his garbage bags again.
TWENTY-FIVE
DORIS CALHOUN SPENT the better part of the morning arranging the chairs in the library. Each time she thought they were absolutely perfect, she’d look across the room to one that seemed just a touch askew. She was using a line of tile in the floor as her guide, and she was realizing that it was the rows of tile, not the chairs, that were likely not perfectly centered in the room.
Today’s session with Elias Albrecht would be the first one with food. Calhoun had draped plastic tablecloths across all the long reading desks and there were plastic plates and utensils on each. Covered catering trays sat on a table against the wall beside the SMART board. Everything looked ready, except the darn chairs.
Snippy teachers, annoyed by Calhoun, had jokingly played the OCD card when firing back at her after being corrected for the manner in which they’d pushed in a chair. Putting books back on a shelf was walking a field riddled with landmines. Those who knew better made sure the book was flush with the shelf’s outermost edge. Those that didn’t, well, Doris Calhoun was watching.
If you at least tried to line it up, then you were spared any comment. Calhoun was rolling her eyes behind your back, to be sure. After you left, she would have to go over there and slide that book the remaining quarter inch. But if she saw you taking care to slowly and methodically push each book in by its spine, easing up when you got close to lining it up with the shelf, then you got out of there with a “Good day,” and that was it.
Within the confines of that large room sat her world. To violate it would be personal.
Doris had long ago decided she was not marrying. A host of catastrophes on the man-front had assured her that there was no room for both a lover and the endless list of minutiae demanding her attention. There were processes and protocol, in her and in society, that needed addressing. She was in determined servitude to these and no one with whom she might
share her life would understand. She’d kept pets and did it well, paying staunch attention to their needs.
She actually didn’t have a pet anymore. She forgot that sometimes.
This new school year had brought with it yet another voice to which she found herself in service. It was external and really more a feeling than a voice. The Smoke started in her back and rolled up to her shoulders, across her arms and up her neck, into her head. Anything it demanded she found herself doing without pause or judgment, whether it be meticulously aligning chairs, preparing the perfect environment for Mr. Albrecht’s professional developments, or poisoning Gert.
“Looks about ready,” said a voice behind Calhoun. She turned to see Albrecht entering the room with a raincoat draped over his arm and his leather satchel in his hand. He put his belongings down on the back of a chair and surveyed the room. “How special.”
“I think so,” Calhoun said. “Teachers will be down in about a half hour.”
“Great.” He walked toward the SMART board and connected his laptop to it. He powered on the computer and set up his notes on a computer cart. “Anything troubling you, Miss Calhoun?” He didn’t look up, just kept setting up his station.
“Well, I hope you don’t think the tablecloths are too cheap. They’re the plastic kind—it’s what I had in the closet.” He held up a hand. She might’ve gone on all day if he hadn’t.
“Miss Calhoun, it all looks fine. Really. You do a great job setting all of this up for us. Couldn’t ask for a better facilitator.” That made her smile and freeze, getting more awkward than usual.
“Should be nice. The food smells good. Got it from a place I like down on West Side Avenue.”
“It’ll be great,” he said. “First time we’re all breaking bread together here. It’s important for us. Sense of community.”
“Yes, yes.” She stood at her desk, looking around the room. Scanning it for a cockeyed fork, a fallen napkin. If he weren’t in the room she’d go over and tinker with something, force herself to make adjustments. But he was in here, and she gave the room to him. He was just standing at the computer cart at the front of the room, but she stayed behind her desk anyway.
“What about that sense of community, Miss Calhoun? Do you feel we have a good community?”
“Not a perfect one.” She watched him work. He nodded at her estimation.
“Certainly not.” He kept on typing, eventually his slideshow appeared on the screen.
“We are close, though,” Calhoun said. He stopped and looked to her for a moment, before standing and walking in her direction.
“Miss Calhoun, my sessions will eventually become very specific and not for everyone’s ears.”
He stopped at her desk and searched her face for understanding. She was with him.
“Miss Calhoun, it is in the nature of people to fight what they do not understand. Society adopts a small selection of rights and wrongs, based on the smallest sliver of data—that which they understand. From this incomplete input, people erect their rigid guidelines for living.”
“Mr. Albrecht, I’ve never much cared what people thought of the things I do.”
“I know. You’re a great facilitator for my professional developments sessions for that very reason. Some might say you were born to do this. All of this.” He gestured to the room and its state of order. She didn’t need to look around. She knew what it all looked like.
“We do have one outstanding issue that should be dealt with,” he said, bringing his attention back to her eyes. “Must be dealt with.”
Doris felt that urgency. The tingle in her shoulders retuned. She could see something; she was thinking about someone. Just kind of popped into her head.
She was thinking about Deanna Anastas.
TWENTY-SIX
“I CALL HER every day, too, Mrs. McAllister,” Deanna said into her phone as she paced her living room. “I feel so stupid but I keep thinking maybe she’ll pick up.” Her voice quivered. “Please let me know if you hear anything. Okay. I love you, too.”
Jared sat staring at a weather report on the TV in the living room as Deanna crossed in front of him for the twentieth time, and hung up her call. She tossed her phone across the room onto the couch and remained standing.
“Nothing,” she said. She ran her hands through her hair.
“God,” Jared said. “How many days now?”
“Five? Six? They haven’t told her mother anything. I’m freaking out.”
“Why don’t you sit—”
“I can’t. I haven’t been able to keep my mind on anything since they…” She couldn’t finish the sentence. Instead she choked back her tears. She folded her arms and stopped walking.
“Dee, you really think someone at school is responsible?” Jared asked.
“You’re damn right.”
“But why? Who?”
“The people we work with have been so shady to her since she came there. Someone took her laptop.”
“Or she lost it.”
“Jared, someone took her laptop. She had no enemy in the world before she came to this school. You know that. She has us, and her family. That’s it.”
That gave Jared pause.
“What can we do?”
Deanna forfeited, shrugged.
“It doesn’t feel right,” she said. “That entire school has felt so bizarre since we came back, Jared. You see it, don’t you?”
“People may be nervous, about testing and all.”
“No. No, no, no. People are sketchy. Even before the laptop, someone went into her room and pulled apart all these booklets she made. I saw it.”
“You saw them do it?”
“No. The papers, the mess,” she said. He nodded.
“And then they kidnapped her?” He outstretched his hands. Is there more? She didn’t answer. They sat and accepted the helplessness these experiences bring. They stared at the remainder of the weather report on the nightly news before them. “Who do you think did it?” he asked.
“Who could?”
“Forcibly take her, you mean? Bodily?” He waited for her response. She paced again.
“The girls on the first floor are weird,” she began, “and I saw her grade partner acting like a freak in the teacher’s room. The cousins walk around like they’re Siamese twins now, giving everyone the eye.”
“They never gave me the eye. Wish someone would.”
She had no time for his levity.
“I told you about Mary Edison doing the Statue of Liberty up on the window ledge.”
“Where’s the kidnapping, Dee?”
She stopped pacing and spun to look at him. “I’m getting there. No one else seems to be doing shit so you better get on board with finding out about Trisha.” He nodded.
She walked to the window and sat on the sill. The sky was cloudless and black. New York bounced in all its glory across the waterfront, but Deanna was looking to the sky.
“In everything I just mentioned, the only person I ever saw being hostile toward her, outright rude, was that security guard. The new guy.”
“The old man?” Jared asked.
“Yeah. He was treating her like an idiot when she reported the laptop missing. Basically accused her of lying.”
Jared was nodding, but had that confused face on, and it was annoying her. He rolled his hand at her—keep going, keep going.
“But he was like…mad at her,” Deanna said. “It was strange.”
“So he’s a suspect?”
“Who is he?” she asked. “Where did he come from?”
“Did you ask your father?”
“He won’t talk to me about this.”
They both stared at the TV until Jared got up and walked to the foyer. He gabbed his school bag and came back to the couch. He pulled out his laptop and laid it on the coffee table.
“What are you doing? It’s eleven at night.”
“Oh, you were going to sleep?” Jared said.
Deanna shook her head
and went to the couch and sat beside him. She looked over at the laptop as the home screen came up, and Jared typed his password.
“It’s WOZNIAK1 if you need to use it,” he said.
“I have my own laptop.”
Jared pulled out a flash drive and slipped it into the USB port. He browsed to a file named “Glitchy.exe” and double-clicked it. A basic interface opened—it was a rectangle segmented into four parts, with a cursor blinking in a field in the center.
“Well, if you do need to use this, don’t use this application.”
“What is Glitchy?”
“Amir named it. He wrote it.” He began typing in the cursor field.
“Is it a virus?”
“Nah.”
“Hack?”
“Closer.”
“Well, what the hell is it? Some game your student made?”
“It’s a data miner.” He typed the URL for the Carson Public School District website in the field. When he did, information began to populate in the four windows that sat in the user interface.
“What are we mining?”
He pointed to the lower left box. It showed a long list of district email addresses, each with a six-digit number beside the address.
“Passwords,” he said. “Sorted by most recent login, these are all the usernames and passwords that logged into the district’s Intranet portion of the website.”
“What’s in the Intranet section again?”
“Everything, depending on who is logging in. You, as a teacher, would only see certain things.” He began scrolling down through the email addresses and passwords. He stopped at the email address and password for d.tavares@carsonpublicschools. “But if you’re the head of Human Resources, like Dmitri Tavares…”
He copied the six-digit password beside Dmitri’s email, launched the Internet browser, and went to the Carson Public School Board site. He clicked Staff Intranet, and logged in as d.tavares.
“…then you can see everything about every employee.” The Intranet site displayed a massive list of district employee names. It ran for several pages. “What’s that guard’s name?”