Bad Seeds: Evil Progeny Page 16

  The girls love George. He has replaced Aidan completely in their eyes. His foreignness adds to his cachet. He sashays about the class in corduroy pants and linen shirts—clothing not quite familiar but not quite foreign—exuding pure confidence.

  The confidence is because George is the heir to a glue fortune. Rubber cement, paste, epoxy, you name it. If it’s sticky, George’s family makes it. It’s rumored, via Lindsay, the exchange student coordinator and my ex-girlfriend, that George’s family produces enough glue each year to fill the Great Lakes, and that he’s worth over a billion dollars. This potential for bequeathment is no small thing at this school.

  Without the other boys, George takes on a more alpha role. Things begin to change. Eliza returns to her Lunchables. The others go about their business, napping, snacking, teasing one another, as best they know how. Before long, it’s almost as if nothing has changed. They’re aware of their counterparts’ disappearance, but they seem to accept it as inevitable.

  Though I am skeptical of his motives, I’m thankful for this change in the collective mood and George knows it. He begins to take small liberties in the classroom—taking extra cookies during snack time, and always making sure he’s first in line for recess (we usually line up alphabetically).

  I’m lenient, for now.

  Then comes the Pinky fiasco. Pinky is our hamster and mascot. He’s also an emotional barometer for the class. One day, Eliza goes to feed Pinky and finds him cowering in the corner of his cage. This isn’t abnormal behavior for Pinky so I shrug it off. But Pinky refuses to eat. Soon he’s pressing his little hamster nose between the bars of the cage with such force that he draws blood. At the risk of anthropomorphizing, it seems that Pinky’s lost it. One day, Pinky bites Jenna. I forbid all interactions with him. The children are frightened and uncertain, but Jenna takes it well. She thinks it was an isolated incident. I’m unsure. Plus, as a teacher, I have to think about lawsuits. I take precautions. A lock goes on the cage and I’ve got the only key.

  Soon, Pinky is dead. His bloody face and matted fur are too much for second graders to handle, so I put him in a shoebox and tell the kids I’m taking him to a pet cemetery. I toss him into a dumpster on the way home from work.

  In the wake of Pinky’s demise, the class is thrown into turmoil again, but this time it’s worse. My popularity plummets. Ashley eats all of the blue crayons, Libby wets herself and Alexandra decides that she’s a monkey. Eliza returns to her hunger strike with renewed vigor.

  “Pinky,” says Jenna as I apply more Neosporin to her wound, “wasn’t just a hamster.”

  I’m not sure she understands the full weight of her words, but I can’t disagree. She means, I think, that Pinky was also her friend, but I can’t help but think Pinky was more than a friend. He was a symbol. Of what, I’m not sure.

  George is unfazed. While the girls wail in mourning, George sits quietly with a book. Who does he think he is? Is he unaffected by this carnage? The girls look to George for support. He is their rock. I worry that their rock will turn out to be not so rock-like at all.

  Then I realize that on the day Pinky got sick, it was George’s turn to feed him. Coincidence? Probably. I think back to when I moved Pinky from his cage to his final resting place. His fur was bloody and matted, yes, but wasn’t there also a slight stickiness? A gluey stickiness on his undercarriage? At first I chalked it up to moist blood but now, in retrospect, I wonder.

  One day, a letter. This one is different from the others. It is alone, and addressed only to me. I find it in my cubbyhole covered in foreign-looking stamps with strange foreign curly-cued writing. I ask George to translate, but he claims he can’t. I doubt it but I’m tired of arguing.

  I don dishwashing gloves and shake the letter to check for anthrax spores. The address is also written sloppily in upper-case letters. The writer clearly doesn’t speak English as a first language and that’s a bad sign. I decide to open it anyway.

  It’s from Aidan.

  The bad handwriting is a second grader’s, it turns out, and that reflects poorly on me. I leave George and the girls to fend for themselves and rush into the teachers-only bathroom where I can be alone.

  Aidan, it turns out, is doing just fine. His handwriting is poor, his diction and syntax worse, but the message is clear: he’s happy with his decision to enlist. He’s optimistic. He’s proud. He doesn’t miss any of the things he used to love: the Legos, the read aloud time, and least of all, the show and tell. In fact, he says (I’m paraphrasing) that war is kind of like show and tell on a grand scale. They show you an M16, and then they tell you how to use it. The only difference is, you then get to take your M16 back to your tent. When Eliza brought in her bunny, guess who took that home.

  I’m cleaning out the fridge one day when I find Eliza’s Lunchables. I stuck them in the fridge weeks ago but they’re ageless. They look perfect in their packaging—uniform, clean, correct—and evoke some sort of pop culture ethos, like an edible Koons. I consider eating them but stop just before tearing off the cover. I return the Lunchables, untouched, to the fridge. Those Lunchables, I think, will outlive us all.

  George is dealing glue. At least I think he is. One day, Rachel ducks into the coatroom just before naptime and emerges, minutes later, groggy and confused. Then Michelle does the same thing. George is nowhere to be found.

  The hooks in the kids’ coatroom are only about three feet off the ground. It would be impractical for someone my height to hang my coat on one of them so I’ve got no reason to investigate. I could pull rank but that would only exacerbate their distrust. But here’s what I imagine:

  George, white linen shirt rakishly unbuttoned, hair tousled just so, sprawled out like a Persian king on a pile of down jackets in the back of the coatroom like it’s Medellin in ’81 and he’s Ochoa. I wouldn’t be surprised if he were smoking a Cohiba or snorting coke off of Ashley’s nonexistent breasts. He hands a paper bag filled with glue to his next customer. She’s unsure what to do with it, but kids have a natural affinity for paste. He pushes her head into the bag and tells her to start huffing. After a few deep breaths, she pulls away, grinning stupidly. As she stumbles back into the classroom, our eyes meet, but there’s not even a flicker of recognition. She pushes by me, and I retreat.

  That’s what I imagine. I give George an indefinite Time Out.

  That afternoon I’m sitting at my desk long after the children are gone, wondering if I can be arrested for allowing a drug dealer to operate on school grounds. I’m pondering these options when I see my own jar of glue, sitting untouched on my desk. I think of Aidan in a ditch in the desert and I pick up the jar and inhale. I don’t know what comes over me but I decide to put the jar into a paper bag and hyperventilate like it’s a panic attack. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I huff into the bag, but I don’t know if it’s to myself or Aidan or someone else. But my troubles, George, Pinky, Aidan, they all get rolled up into a crinkled ball of blue construction paper and tossed away. There’s a fuzzy throbbing in my head and ears but it feels warm and good, like being underwater as a tanker goes by a mile out to sea.

  I take the finger paint from the cupboard. I take the red and mix in just a little bit of black. A drop of blue. Then I dip in my finger.

  I know about Pinky, I write on a piece of wax paper.

  Then I stick it into George’s desk with a protractor and drive home with the windows down, eyes half closed, ears buzzing.

  The next morning I come in late with a terrible hangover. It’s not your run-of-the-mill alcohol hangover, it’s worse. I can barely see/breathe/feel.

  I walk to my classroom and see, through the little window in the door, that the principal is inside, speaking to George. The principal is gesticulating wildly and I can imagine what he’s saying.

  “Time out? Time out? What is this, the erstwhile Gitmo? There will be no time outs at this school as long as I’m principal, especially for someone of your, well, stature, George.”

  I turn away, head
straight to my cubbyhole. It’s quiet; everyone’s in class. I peer into the dark and squint my eyes into focus. At first, I think it’s empty but then I see something mashed up against the back wall. It’s a letter from Aidan. I sit down right there next to the cubbyholes and tear it open.

  I’m jealous of Aidan. He did what he wanted to do and is making a difference too. They say that youth is wasted on the young but I disagree. Aidan knows what he’s doing better than I do.

  Aidan’s not happy, though. He doesn’t know the words, but what he describes is manic depression. He’s just plodding ahead, full steam, and then he’s up and then he’s down. The way he describes it, he’s always on the precipice of something and always in a state of agitation. There’s no middle ground. He wants middle ground. He doesn’t come clean and say it, but what he wants is second grade.

  What’s he fighting for? he asks.

  I want to take him in my arms and whisper, shh, shh, shh, I ask myself that everyday. But the next time I see Aidan, it will be at his funeral. I can feel it.

  Ashley is coming up the hall so I rush into the boys’ bathroom. I try to throw up but nothing comes. I can’t stop shaking. I can taste iron. I tear up the note and go home sick.

  The glue is addictive. I wander through the days looking out from behind a veil of lentil soup. As far as I can tell, the students aren’t any better. But frankly, I’m not paying much attention. We go through the motions, a super slow-mo second grade, and for once it feels right. It feels drugged, but right. Or maybe I can’t tell the difference.

  There’s no more turmoil among the students. Eliza hasn’t gone back to her hunger strikes. In fact, she’s put on weight. She eats constantly throughout the day—food, but also paste, crayons, etc. I allow it. They’re all non-toxic, I’m pretty sure. I’m 50/50 sure. The students nap for three, sometimes four or five hours a day, without any prodding. Perhaps it’s even more. It’s hard to tell because usually I nap right along with them.

  George is more industrious than ever. He cleans out the fish tank and buys a small shark that, he tells me, will grow to three feet long if fed properly. I ask what is proper and he says Christian babies. Maybe he said mice. He replaces Pinky with a chinchilla named Aristu. George says that Aristu is the softest thing in the world, softer than a cloud, but we are forbidden to hold him. He’s delicate, says George. I write left-handed now, so George can’t trace my handwriting back to the note I left on his desk. The snack fridge is full of foreign treats. Eliza’s Lunchables have long since disappeared. I eat small semi-dried fruits all day. They look like little turds but they’re delicious. I’m more regular than ever.

  One day George says we should take a group picture and send it to the boys, in case they miss us. So we all stand behind the new shark tank with George in front, cupping Aristu in one hand and stroking him with the other. So soft, so soft, he mutters, and presses the animal to his lips. I set the digital camera on a ten-second timer and tell the students to say cheese. Some do, some don’t. Flash.

  I look at the photo. By a head count I know that we are all there, but we look fewer.

  We’re blurry. I delete it.

  Respects

  Ramsey Campbell

  By the time Dorothy finished hobbling downstairs, somebody had rung three times and knocked several more. Charmaine Bullough and some of her children were blocking the short garden path under a nondescript November sky. “What did you see?” Charmaine demanded at once.

  “Why, nothing to bother about.” Dorothy had glimpsed six-year-old Brad kicking the door, but tried to believe he’d simply wanted to help his mother. “Shouldn’t you be at school?” she asked him.

  Brad jerked a thumb at eight-year-old J-Bu. “She’s not,” he shouted.

  Perhaps his absent siblings were, but not barely teenage Angelina, who was brandishing a bunch of flowers. “Are those for me?” Dorothy suggested out of pleasantness rather than because it seemed remotely likely, then saw the extent of her mistake. “Sorry,” she murmured.

  Half a dozen bouquets and as many wreaths were tied to the lamp-standard on the corner of the main road, beyond her gate. Charmaine’s scowl seemed to tug the roots of her black hair paler. “What do you mean, it’s not worth bothering about?”

  “I didn’t realise you meant last week,” Dorothy said with the kind of patience she’d had to use on children and parents too when she was teaching.

  “You saw the police drive our Keanu off the road, didn’t you?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t say I did.”

  At once, despite their assortment of fathers, the children resembled their mother more than ever. Their aggressive defensiveness turned resentful in a moment, accentuating their features, which were already as sharp as smashed glass. “Can’t or won’t?” Charmaine said.

  “I only heard the crash.”

  Dorothy had heard the cause as well—the wild screech of tyres as the fifteen-year-old had attempted to swerve the stolen Punto into her road apparently at eighty miles an hour, only to ram a van parked opposite her house—but she didn’t want to upset the children, although Brad’s attention seemed to have lapsed. “Wanna wee,” he announced and made to push past her, the soles of his trainers lighting up at every step.

  As Dorothy raised a hand to detain him, J-Bu shook a fist that set bracelets clacking on her thin arm. “Don’t you touch my brother. We can get you put in prison.”

  “You shouldn’t just walk into someone else’s house,” Dorothy said and did her best to smile. “You don’t want to end up—”

  “Like who?” Angelina interrupted, her eyes and the studs in her nose glinting. “Like Keanu? You saying he was in your house?”

  Dorothy might have. The day before the crash she’d come home to find him gazing out of her front room. He hadn’t moved until she managed to fumble her key into the lock, at which point he’d let himself out of the back door. Apart from her peace of mind he’d stolen only an old handbag that contained an empty purse, and so she hadn’t hurried to report him to the overworked police. If she had, might they have given him no chance to steal the car? As Dorothy refrained from saying any of this, Charmaine dragged Brad back. “Come out of there. We don’t want anyone else making trouble for us.”

  “I’m sorry not to be more help,” Dorothy felt bound to say. “I do know how you feel.”

  Angelina peered so closely at her that Dorothy smelled some kind of smoke on the girl’s breath. “How?”

  “I lost my husband just about a year ago.”

  “Was he as old as you?” J-Bu said.

  “Even older,” said Dorothy, managing to laugh.

  “Then it’s not the same,” Angelina objected. “It was time he went.”

  “Old people take the money we could have,” said J-Bu.

  “It’s ours for all the things we need,” Brad said.

  “Never mind that now,” said Charmaine and fixed Dorothy with her scowl. “So you’re not going to be a witness.”

  “To what, forgive me?”

  “To how they killed my son. I’ll be taking them to court. The social worker says I’m entitled.”

  “They’ll have to pay for Keanu,” said Brad.

  Dorothy took time over drawing a breath. “I don’t think I’ve anything to offer except sympathy.”

  “That won’t put shoes on their feet. Come on, all of you. Let’s see Keanu has some fresh flowers. He deserves the best,” Charmaine added louder still.

  Brad ran to the streetlamp and snatched off a bouquet. About to throw them over Dorothy’s wall, he saw her watching and flung them in the road. As Angelina substituted her flowers, Dorothy seemed to hear a noise closer to the house. She might have thought a rose was scratching at the window, but the flower was inches distant. In any case, the noise had sounded muffled by the glass. She picked up a beer can and a hamburger’s polystyrene shell from her garden and carried them into the house.

  When she and Harry had moved in she’d been able to run through it without
pausing for breath. She could easily outdistance him to the bedroom, which had been part of their fun. Now she tried not to breathe, since the flimsy shell harboured the chewed remains of its contents. She hadn’t reached the kitchen when she had to gasp, but any unwelcome smell was blotted out by the scents of flowers in vases in every downstairs room.

  She dumped the rubbish in the backyard bin and locked the back door. The putty was still soft around the pane Mr. Thorpe had replaced. Though he’d assured her it was safe, she was testing the glass with her knuckles when something sprawled into the hall. It was the free weekly newspaper, and Keanu’s death occupied the front page. LOCAL TEENAGER DIES IN POLICE CHASE.

  She still had to decide whether to remember Harry in the paper. She took it into the dining-room, where a vaseful of chrysanthemums held up their dense yellow heads towards the false sun of a Chinese paper globe, and spread the obituary pages across the table. Keanu was in them too. Which of the remembrances were meant to be witty or even intended as a joke? “Kee brought excitement into everyone’s life”? “He was a rogue like children are supposed to be”? “There wasn’t a day he didn’t come up with some new trick”? “He raced through life like he knew he had to take it while he could”? “Even us that was his family couldn’t keep up with his speed”? Quite a few of them took it, Dorothy suspected, along with other drugs. “When he was little his feet lit up when he walked, now they do because he’s God’s new angel.” She dabbed at her eyes, which had grown so blurred that the shadows of stalks drooping out of the vase appeared to grope at the newsprint. She could do with a walk herself.

  She buttoned up her winter overcoat, which felt heavier than last year, and collected her library books from the front room. Trying to read herself to sleep only reminded her that she was alone in bed, but even downstairs she hadn’t finished any of them—the deaths in the detective stories seemed insultingly trivial, and the comic novels left her cold now that she couldn’t share the jokes. She lingered for a sniff at the multicoloured polyanthuses in the vase on her mother’s old sideboard before loading her scruffiest handbag with the books. The sadder a bag looked, the less likely it was to be snatched.