* * *
Tess awoke in a sweaty wad of sheets and sat up squinting in the orange light of the rising sun streaming in through the bathroom window. “Odd that the skinny didn't wake me,” she thought. The moment she had mentioned on the steps that she was anxious to try out her trollish make-over at school, Maud encouraged her to go and said that she would let the school know. “I wouldn't expect the skinny to be asking me about my dreams if I hadn't been sitting in front of the sublim board in class, but it would at least wake me if it knew I was going. Maybe Maud forgot to talk to them.” Tess had butterflies in her stomach. She dreaded going, after all. “What's one more day at home?” she said aloud in the midst of a great yawn.
“The difference between success and failure,” said the skinny, suddenly lighting up on the bedside table.
“You mean to tell me that one more day at home will actually flunk me?”
“You tell me. And if you're unable to do that, you certainly need to be there instead of here ignoring your responsibilities.”
Tess pressed her lips into a pucker. She wanted to whack the stupid ball onto the floor. “Maud told me that I had a whole week to adjust,” she said. “Just how is changing my mind about going back on the fourth day ignoring my responsibilities?”
“Society advances when we perform up to our promises and suffers when we lack the integrity to do so,” said the pious mouth in the stone ball. “If you weren't so self- centered, you'd be perfectly willing to return to school today. But I see that you've learnt nothing from your family's relocation. Poor Maud will just have to cope, won't she?”
“Maud? What are you talking about?”
“Children and Family Assistance have ordered Maud to keep you under constant supervision. She'll not be able to visit Mort at the hospital so long as you're at home, regardless of how critical his condition may be.”
Tess knew better than to endanger Maud by saying that she had already been to see Mort with her at home. “I'm a big girl,” she said. “There's no reason she couldn't see Mort with me here.”
“Oh but there is,” said the mouth. “Children and Family has seen that you need to be supervised every minute.” And with that, the ball winked out.
“Just like Children and Family to be so stupid and heavy handed,” Thought Tess, growing uneasy. “Was Maud breaking the rules to leave me here alone yesterday? Or did they change what she's allowed to do because of the roast? Or for my going to Broadstreet?”
Staying home now didn't seem worth the complications. She braced up for a few runs at her cold shower before brushing her Mohawk this way and that and putting on the make-up and clothes Maxi had given her. She wished that she had a full length mirror, but her hand mirror told her that she looked just the way she wanted in her cropped white tee shirt under an unbuttoned black and red flannel shirt, suspenders, denim cut-offs and combat boots.
“Wow, pancakes!” she said as she stepped into the kitchen.
“Without syrup,” said Maud as she took one off the griddle. “You're actually going to school, today? Well I was just giving you encouragement. I'd stay home the rest of the week if it were me. But suit yourself.”
“Do you mind if we eat out on the step again?”
“Not at all, except that we'll both have to use our inhalers with the air as bad as it is today. And take the milk, if y' would. I've got the tea.”
“Syrup,” said Tess, sitting down on the top step with her plate of pancakes. “I guess it does go on pancakes. I remember now. I'd kind of forgotten about it.”
“There was a time everyone had syrup every time they ate pancakes.”
Tess set aside her knife and fork, rolled a pancake into a tube and took a bite.
“My! Home the rest of the week,” she said after a thoughtful chew. “How would you ever get to see Mort?”
“Why, I've got my bicycle up at the north end. The weather looks clear for today, anyway. I just hate the damned bus. I don't want to be on one when it runs over someone...”
“No. I mean: don't I have to be at school for you to be allowed to go see Mort?”
“Where on earth did you get an idea like that?”
“I guess a kid my age doesn't know everything,” said Tess with a shrug as she rolled up another pancake.
Maud threw back her head and laughed a piece of pancake onto her chin.
Tess slopped a spot of milk into her cup. “Drake was right,” she thought with a nod. “Yes he was.”
Tess also hated the busses. Like the metropolitan busses, school busses were also piloted by computers, leaving them under the supervision of older special needs students picked by the district who were often the instigators of the gang rapes which frequently occurred on them. She always walked. In fact, she even made a habit of leaving the school from the side away from where the busses parked to avoid any possibility of being forced onto one. And she preferred walking with her skinny bag slung over her shoulder, since the narrow canvas bag with the stone ball in the bottom made a nice weapon to swing if someone decided to jump her.
She told Maud that she hoped that Mort would be better and set out for school feeling a bit exposed dressed as she was and regretting that she had left her skinny bag hanging in her locker at school so that it would be easier to walk the mile home with the cardboard box of empty jars which the cooks in the kitchen had given her.
Sparrows cheeped, fussing with one another in the hedge along the walkway still wet from the rain in the night. The air stank of burning plastic and trash, but it was the breeze coming in from University Farms that made her unable to breathe without coughing. She stopped for a moment to use her inhaler. At a lewd whistle from a passing truck, she hurried on her way.
Tess's stomach churned the moment she could see the high school down the street. She was already being noticed. “Good job I haven't seen anyone I know,” she said. “Maybe I can make it all the way to class without being figured out.” And long before she was ready, she was up the gritty steps and through the worn glass doors. She stared into the skinny on the stand as she pressed her thumb against the window of the scanner, stepped through the metal detector which never seemed to find the knives the students carried and saw by the clock above the office that she had scarcely five minutes get to her first class.
She avoided faces as she hurried past the gouged and spray-painted lockers opening and slamming the length of the hallway. She certainly was not going to be caught looking at any of the throng of athletes at the end of the hall. One of them standing in the middle of the group looked right at her and pointed to the row of girls' photos taped to the inside of his locker door. “Hey sweet job!” he cried. “I'll let you be here in my fellatio hall of fame!”
Their laughter followed her to the down staircase. And she would have been relieved to be trotting down the steps except that she was going to her locker in the basement which was kept dimly lit by the boys jumping and whacking out the lights. She hurriedly worked her combination lock and grabbed out the skinny bag she had regretted leaving at school.
“Te-ess?” said a honeyed voice right behind her. “Can that be you?”
Tess turned about with a start to the giggles of three varsity cheerleaders mirthfully eyeing her up and down. “My class is all the way up on third,” she said, pushing past them. “So insult me later when I've the time.”
“Hey Tess!” called Honey Voice, just as she reached the stairs. “You look good now, all normal like the rest of us!”
Tess stopped short on the first step. Was this a compliment?
“Yeh!” said one of the others. “Too bad looking normal doesn’t make you normal!”
Tess gave the banister a pull and went up the steps in the echoes of their laughter, knowing that her ears were red. This parting insult came from a girl known as Mindy, whom poor Tess recognized at once as the one in the top photograph on the athlete's locker door, but did not begin to know how to use this tidbit in any sort of well-placed retaliation. Even so, she managed
a sigh of relief as she slid into her seat in World History, just as the bell rang.
Mr. Powers the history teacher was said to have gotten his surname from his breath and armpits, though his disposition earned him other names such as Glowers and Sowers. And here he was, glaring at everyone as he took roll. “Quiet down!” he bellowed. “I want all eyes up here on the sublim board instead of on our updated Miss Greenwood. We've lots to cover today, and we're finding very little of this class turning up in the dreams you discuss with your skinnies, first thing in the morning. That means that we will have a quiz before you leave, so I hope you all brought your tutor balls.”
“I brought both of mine,” said a slouching boy near the back.
“You're Special Needs,” said the young fellow in front of him. “You don't have any.”
Slouching boy gave young fellow's chair a sullen shove with his foot.
The boy behind Tess gave her a poke. “Hey!” he whispered, kicking the leg of her chair.
She turned about and saw him making an okay sign with his hand for her.
“Thanks!” she said, thinking it a compliment.
“This,” he said, brandishing his okay in front of her face, “is you. And this,” he said, holding up the middle finger of his other hand and thrusting it into the loop of his okay, “is what you came to school wanting from me.”
“Take a bath!” she blurted out, turning forward.
“I'm afraid this is not the place!” growled Powers, sending the class into sudden laughter.
“Wow!” came a voice in the midst of it, “Sowers showers!” causing an even louder round of mirth.
“Silence!” roared Powers, quieting the class at once. “Miss Greenwood,” he said.
“Just why were you turned about, bothering Mr. Burgess and disrupting class?”
“Mr. Powers?” said Burgess. “I didn't think she was. She's just had her shots and she was only asking me for a little recreation after school...”
“I was not!” shouted Tess, turning the class into a pandemonium of “Oooh!” and “Go Tess!”
“Quiet!” thundered Powers. “Recreation, I don't care what kind, is just that: recreation, and strictly for after school hours. I want every eye on the sublim board!” And with a click of a remote switch in his hand, the wall behind his desk came alive with the images of grand marching soldiers.
Poor Tess was facing forward, but she was not getting much at all from the bounding images on the wall through her tears of humiliation and anger. She folded her arms and slouched in her seat.
Chapter 6
Maud parked her bicycle in the rack, grabbed her handbag out of the basket, made sure that she had not forgotten her brush and rushed into the hospital past the pair of cops at the front doors. Since she could not imagine Mort being moved out of Critical Care this soon, she hurried straight up to room 301 and found it empty. The nurse's station across the hall also looked empty, so she gave the bell on the counter worktop a frantic swat.
The nurse's aide, who was squatted out of sight fiddling with something behind the counter, shot to her feet with a start. “You're back,” she said, taking on a look of irritation.
“He's still not in there!” said Maud.
“Mr. Bixley? Yes he was...”
“No, Mort!”
“That's right. Mort Bixley...”
“Baxter!”
“What ever,” said the aide. “But he was in there when I came on duty. And he was in real bad shape because he couldn't breathe at all. So I got the night doctor on the skinny the second I saw, and he and the nurses rushed him out somewhere...”
“Where?”
“I'll have to see,” she said, turning to the skinny. “Where do we have Mort Bixley?”
“Baxter, damn it!” said Maud, smacking the worktop. “Mort Baxter!”
“There's a nurse on her way,” said the aide, “but this is still Critical Care and you don't want Security up here.”
“I beg your pardon,” said Maud. “I'll wait for the nurse in 301 then, if you don't mind.” She was much too agitated to sit down when she got there, so she began pacing about only to discover that she was quite light headed. She was just steadying herself against the railing of the bed when the nurse walked in.
“Mrs. Baxter? I'm Gwen Glenys...”
“What happened to Mort? Where'd you take him?”
“Surgery, early this morning...”
“Why wasn't I notified?”
“We tried. You didn't seem to be home.”
“No. I was staying at the barrack of a young client of mine at the far end of the compound.”
“I'm afraid that we found nothing of the kind in his file...”
“Yeh. Because someone here didn't update it when I was in here, yesterday.”
“There's the skinny on the night stand,” said Glenys.
“Please!” said Maud. “I'm worried sick. Please just take me to see Mort.”
“There is no urgency here, Mrs. Baxter. Just tell the skinny who you are and where you're staying and I'll take you to see Dr. Wells.”
Something about the way Glenys said this swept white hot through Maud, making her sit on the bed to keep from tottering as she spoke to the ball. “Haven't we turned the wrong way?” she said the moment they stepped into the hallway. “Isn't the recovery room, I mean, isn't Surgery the other way?”
“I'm taking you to Dr. Wells's office, down a floor.”
Maud nearly fell on the stairs. Wells rose from his desk at the sight of her and offered her a chair. “What's happened to Mort?” she said, ignoring the chair. “The aide said that he was rushed out of his room because he couldn't breathe.”
“Aides just don't have the training to always know what they're seeing,” he said with a great sigh. “We rushed him to surgery immediately. It was his head injury. Dr.
Maldwyn was on duty. He did the surgery. He's the best there is. And in spite everything he tried, Mort died from a massive subdural hematoma...”
“May I see him? May I see my husband?”
“My word! He's already been disposed of...”
“Oh Morty!” wailed Maud, falling to her knees to pummel the rug with her fists in sobs of anguished despair. “No! No! No!”
Dr. Wells nodded at the skinny on his desk. Two nurses stepped in at once and gave Maud a substantial injection of Slumber. She was unconscious almost immediately.
“Barbaric,” he said with a tsk and a shake of his head. “And we still have some of the older ones wanting to commune with the dead.”
* * *
The cafeteria was another part of the high school basement which Tess was not particularly fond of, but today she was relieved to be standing in line with her tray in the warm swirl of voices and the clatter and screech of folding chairs, even with the reek of foul dish water smeared everywhere, mingling with the smell of bleach and overcooked food. In fact, she felt particularly lucky to have gotten a tray that did not stink. She headed for the table at the far wall where the school outcasts ate. Seeing that her favorite spot was taken, she sat at the end of the table by the aisle. She was just studying her wee olive drab peas, mushy carrots and her creamed eggs and reconstituted mashed potatoes as she cleaned the dried filth from between the tines of her fork with her napkin and glass of water, when a pimply girl with a potato nose and a full tray approached from behind.
“Wow!” said the girl, parking her tray beside Tess. “What did you do to yourself? You look amazing!”
“Hey Shanta,” said Tess, looking up with a shrug. “No big deal...”
“I think it is,” said a young fellow with a shaved head and rotten teeth. “You look hot.”
“Oh go on!” said Tess, as if people might overhear.
“Yeh!” he said, leaning across the table. “You look better'n Amy Prentiss, or any of the hot-snot cheerleaders.”
“Nice of you to say, Zip, but we all know better.”
“She doesn’t look in the mirror much,” said Shanta to th
e nearby nodding heads.
“And,” she said, suddenly leaning at Tess. “you'd better look out because here comes trouble and I think it has you singled out.”
Here came Amy the head cheerleader, followed by Mindy, whose photograph was the top one in the athlete's Fellatio Hall of Fame. Tess began eating.
“Hey Tess,” said Amy. “Mindy and I just wanted to ask you a quick question.”
Tess put down her knife and fork. “If it's really quick,” she said, wiping her mouth. “My musty potatoes won't be good cold.”
“Eew!” said Mindy.
“Well,” said Amy with a nod at the table behind her, seated 'round with cheerleaders and athletes, all looking right at them. “We were wondering. I mean, everyone knows your family's not at all well off. No offense. We were just wondering how many trolls you had to do to pay for your make-over.”
“Marvelous!” said Tess, speaking up. “Now everyone knows how you manage to get yours.”
Amy and Mindy dropped wide-eyed agape as the table behind erupted with laughter. “Your make-over's gone to your head!” sputtered Amy. “You really want us for enemies?”
“Wouldn't hurt!” crowed Shanta. “The way the ball team's looking at Tess, you two are better off out of the way.” And with that, both tables were rolling with shouts of laughter and mirth.
“Better watch it, pimple face!” snarled Amy.
“Or what?” shouted Shanta, shooting to her feet. “Ruin my social standing?”
Tess also stood up. “See y',” she said to Shanta with an appreciative look. And with that, she picked up her tray, turned her back on Amy and Mindy and hurried out.
The instant she stepped into the hallway, someone ran right into her, knocking her down.
“Damn!” said Trent, taking her by the hand and helping her up. “I'm really sorry!”
He did not like the amusement of the onlookers. “Who's next?” he barked, scattering every one of them.
“Thanks!” said Tess with as much astonishment as appreciation.
Wham! Page 6