Creepy Teacher: A Psychological Thriller (9 page)

Bailey’s decision overcame her in a rush.

Screw Carla Cummings!

She was taking zero shit from Carla Cummings tonight!

Not tonight, and probably never again!

Because it wasn’t right, treating people like dirt.

Bailey imagined what Jany would do. She imagined what Jany would say. Use your assets, Jany would have told Bailey. Play your aces.

But what were her assets?

What were her aces?

She had but one ace, she realized suddenly, and tonight one ace was all she needed.

Eric.

Yes.

It was his party, and he had chosen
her
, Bailey Howard.

So she walked over confidently in her blue jeans, blue shirt, and blue shoes, and with her chin held high, but not arrogantly so, she linked her elbow with Eric’s and said to Carla, “Eric asked me here to protect him, because scary movies make him jumpy. So I’ll keep him safe.”

Then she squeezed his arm and looked up into his eyes fawningly. She kept looking at him, ignoring Carla, until his face broke with a smile he refused to hold off.

“That’s true,” Eric said. “I do get jumpy.”

Carla scoffed and said, “Well, te smell of chicken makes
me
sick. Yuck.”

Without glancing from Eric’s eyes to Carla, Bailey said, “This is an unnecessary question, Eric, but do you like chicken?”

“I do,” he said. “I love chicken, in fact.”

“That’s what I thought,” Bailey said.

From there, it took only a smile from Bailey to Carla for Carla to walk away.

B
y 7:45 p.m.,
Bailey estimated there were more than fifty students in the barn, most of them jocks and clingers from Freemont High, most of them people she rarely spoke to. A couple of faces, she had never seen before, but she eventually figured out they were students from Clayton High, and they had come with Jackson the Sackston.

Tony Avery and Kylie Westin had been lingering next to Eric, and consequently beside Bailey, and Bailey thought Kylie was being especially nice.

Casey Crawford brought Eric a wireless microphone, so Eric could address everyone with a few basic party rules from atop a front row hay bale, which raised him even taller than he already was.

But first he said, “Where did Nancy Spielman go?” And when Nancy stood up on a bale, he said, “Come here, Nancy.”

She walked across the second row of hay bales, then hopped down and up again onto the first row where Eric was standing.

“What?” she said into the microphone.

Eric leaned over toward her ear and whispered into the microphone, “I’m your boyfriend now, Nancy.” Then he made his tongue long and waggled it close to her ear.

Everyone laughed.

Nancy shied away at first, then blushed, then stood there.

Someone shouted, “Let’s see
your
tongue, Nancy!”

She showed it quickly before jumping off the bale.

It didn’t seem to Bailey that anyone really understood the reference Eric was making, until he explained it.

“That was one of Freddy Krueger’s most frequently quoted movie lines from the 1980’s,” he said. “For those who have never heard of Freddy Krueger, tonight you’ll experience the kind of horror flicks our parents grew up on.”

He raised a box set of movies for everyone to see.

Someone shouted, “Go Freddy!”

“That’s right, go Freddy!” Eric said into the mike. “I have all seven of the original movies here, and we’ll start with
A Nightmare on Elm Street
at eight o’clock. We’ll then cue up
Freddy’s Revenge
at ten o’clock, and then
Dream Warriors
at midnight, and so on, until the last person leaves. If we get through number four, I’ll be shocked.”

“All seven!” someone shouted.

From where Bailey stood, with Kylie Westin and Tony Avery on her left, and Eric Cady standing high on the bale to her right, she couldn’t see the shouters.

“It’s almost eight,” Eric continued. “Let’s all thank Casey Crawford for the audio setup, and Brad Townsend for the projector and gigantic screen.”

He motioned to the speakers and screen.

Cheers went up for Casey and Brad.

Bailey just beamed. She was already having fun. The party seemed almost like a pep rally, but thanks to the bales of hay and the wooden barn walls and the heavy timbers supporting the roof, this gathering lacked the ringing echo of a gymnasium.

Casey had a wireless microphone, too, and he added what he felt was an important note, saying, “Please keep all beverages away from the equipment. Thank you.”

“Other rules,” Eric said, “are as follows…”

“No rules!” someone shouted.

Bailey found it interesting that only the guys were rowdy enough, at this point, to be shouting. Most, it seemed to her, were trying extra hard to be cool. Certainly,
she
didn’t feel a compulsion to blurt out some random, useless thing.

“Number one,” Eric continued, “don’t toss the empties all over the barn. I’m not cleaning up your mess. There’s a recycle bin over there.” He pointed to the far left side of the large, open room that they were gathered in. “Number two, if you brought alcohol, don’t leave the property drunk. I’ll kill you myself.”

“Or Freddy will!” someone shouted.

“Exactly,” Eric said. “If the cops show up, you damn sure better tell them I didn’t know you brought it. I’m personally drinking peach-mango lemonade tonight, and providing the same.”

“Bullshit!” someone shouted.

Eric ignored that and continued on, saying, “No smoking in the barn. No drunks in the loft.” He pointed to the left side of the barn. “Over there, we have the
Psychedelic Crash Pit
, complete with sound-activated party lights and a strobe, for those who aren’t drinking and find Freddy Krueger too scary or too boring to watch. Please be careful swinging on the rope. That’s it. It’s now eight-oh-five. We’re late. Find a hay bale to sit on. Start the movie, Brad.”

*     *     *

“This is fun,”
Bailey whispered. “I’m glad I came.”

“So am I,” Eric said.

“Me, too,” Tony added.

Eric elbowed him. “Shut it, Bony.”

Kylie told her boyfriend to watch the movie and leave them alone. That was nice, Bailey thought. She had firmly decided that Kylie Westin was a decent person. Certainly, she was beautiful on the outside. That went without saying. Time would tell if she was equally beautiful on the inside.

“I can’t believe Johnny Depp is in this,” Bailey whispered to Eric. “And look how young he is.”

“I’m pretty sure this was his first movie,” Eric said. “He comes last in the credits, as
introducing Johnny Depp
.”

“So far, that’s the most interesting part,” Bailey said.

She liked scary movies, but this one, like most of the horror films from the tail-end of the twentieth century, focused almost entirely on psychotic killers who slashed any nameless, random victim that came within his reach. Only the method of killing changed. In this case, a leather glove retrofitted with five razor-sharp knives.

Come on!

Where’s the motivation? Bailey wanted to know.

What happened to character development?

Mostly—and tonight illustrated this—the goose bumps rose because of the music. The low-end rumblings of Freddy’s furnace room, the eerie, chalkboard-scraping sound of Freddy’s knives on a handrail, the guttural chuffing and ripping open noises of wet torso cavities…all those sounds of music gave these genre flicks their horror.

Compared to books like
Great Expectations
, the storylines were weak, and it was difficult to care if someone lived or died when their best line in the movie was, “Hello…? Hello…? Is somebody out there…?”

Still, they were fun. And more importantly,
A Nightmare on Elm Street
, Johnny Depp’s first movie, in which he played a teenager named Glen, was going down in Bailey’s personal history book as the one that excused her for nestling closely on a hay bale in the dark in a barn with Eric Cady, a
real
teenager, a heart-throb who actually knew she existed, and liked her.

And Bailey could tell now, sitting together with Eric in anticipation of another Freddy killing, that he was about to make some move. She could sense him fidgeting. Peripherally, she could see the change in his breathing rhythm, could see him swallow a lump of anxiety, and not because of the movie.

His fingers opened and closed slowly, scratching the dark blue cotton of his jeans.

Her ears were perked and strangely sensitive to any sound he made. She could feel his body heat against her shoulder. She could smell the cologne he wore, and she liked it. She wondered if he could smell hers.
Of course, he can smell it
, she thought.
The only other fragrance floating in the air is the smell of hay, and fresh lilacs sitting atop a bale of hay would probably smell pretty good to a man.
She certainly hoped so. Besides, if she could smell him, then she knew he could likewise smell her.

It was ironic to admit she was smelling him, she decided. But how could she help it?

And he was fidgeting more distractedly than before, she realized, especially those left fingers scratching the cotton of his jeans.

Johnny Depp was being dragged into his mattress now.

Who cared!

Her palms were damp with perspiration.

She clandestinely wiped her right hand on her jeans.

Then she reached forward just enough to take his hand in hers. Their fingers laced immediately.

He glanced at her sheepishly in the darkness, the flicker of movie light shining off his face as he smiled. At first, his smile seemed one of complete embarrassment, rather than complete relief, but then it changed to complete relief, and he exhaled deeply and with satisfaction.

And the whole time she watched his face.

Until he turned his head and smiled now with full brightness of perfect teeth, and he leaned over toward her and whispered, his breath peach-mango, into the bubble of her glowing happiness, “You’ve got guts, Bailey.”

And she said, “Yes, I know.”

And she truly believed it.

She truly believed now that she was courageous and brave…for doing that, if for nothing else.

S
tuart Renly reveled
in his ability to adapt. Perhaps his years of surveillance training—via the spider hole—had laid a solid foundation of skill on which to build upward and beyond. Sure, that could be part of it. Genius, he knew, was often only a product of rigorous study and application of knowledge. In simpleton terms, practice makes perfect. He had adapted easily from the spider hole in the NE wing lavatory at Freemont High, to a full-blown surveyor out in the field.

Flexibility, he realized now, thinking about it, was vital to maintain as one aged.

He was not so much crouched, as stretched like a bridge—in the famous yoga position called Downward Facing Dog—along the stone foundation of the barn, peeking around the corner and keeping his head low to the ground.

Carla Cummings was performing fellatio on Jackson Saxton. She was giving her chicken neck a workout, while Jackson’s was tipped at a forty-five degree angle against the barn, eyes wide to the stars.