Prom Dates from Hell (9 page)

I had figured out this much about my dreams: If I wake with a sense of clarity, it was just random neuron firings, or my subconscious working out my fears or something. But if I wake with the dream still clinging to me, like I’d walked through a spiderweb and my brain was covered by sticky threads of night memory, it was more than that.

I had been dreading sleep, but when I couldn’t resist my bed any longer, all I’d dreamed of was talking horses. Nightmare free was a wonderful feeling. I turned on the radio while I showered and dressed. I may have even danced around a little. When the rising sun warmed the gaps between my curtains, I flung them open to welcome the day.

The filthiness of my bedroom window startled me. The morning light had to struggle through the murky glass. It was depressing and simply
wrong
somehow. True, I wasn’t the neatest person in the world, but the grime coating the window was just gross.

I opened the study curtains, and had to squint against the light. Slowly I turned back to the bedroom and realized with a sinking feeling that one window was much dirtier than the other.

Not dirty. Sooty.

Leaden feet carried me to the window. With shaking hands I flipped open the latches and raised the sash, then ran my index finger through the greasy, powdery film that coated the outside glass, leaving a streak of sunshine in the grimy shadow.

I drew my hand in and closed the window. Locked it. Then I got the little blacklight out of my backpack, went into the bathroom and closed the door.

My fingertip glowed a bright, spectral blue.

12

i
arrived at school early for the third morning in a row. I had searched the online city paper archives for any news from the high school. Except for budget cuts, there wasn’t much of suspicious malevolence. But there were sixty yearbooks in the school library, and a couple of decades of school newspapers archived as well. After my visitor last night, I was extremely motivated to get to the bottom of this.

Was that why I hadn’t dreamed last night? Had the smoke specter decided to get a look at me in person?

Balancing an armload of textbooks and a venti vanilla latte, extra shot, extra foam, I climbed the front steps, wondering why Brian Baywatch was nowhere around when I could actually use a hand. Then, as if the thought itself had conjured him, I saw him standing just inside the glass doors.

He broke off from his friends and opened the door for me, an act of necessity rather than chivalry; my hands were completely full. The Jocks were not the only ones loitering around the foyer. There was a mixed bag of cheerleaders, band geeks, and drama nerds. “What’s going on?”

“I don’t know.” Brian glanced toward his buddies, who were staring at him with a kind of astonished contempt. “Jessica called Brandon and told us to get over here.”

The auditorium entrance was closed. I saw no sign of any of the Jessicas—I assumed Brian meant Prime—but I caught a glimpse of the prompter from backstage and beckoned him over. “Is something happening in there?”

“I don’t know, man. I heard some dude over there say they may be canceling the play.”

“Why would they do that?”

The guy shrugged his slumped shoulders. “I don’t know. Sure would suck, though, after all that work.” He slouched off with one last “Dude” and a shake of his shaggy head.

Visions of
Phantom of the Opera
filled my head as I left Brian and elbowed my way through the crowd. I had reached the front when the doors opened and the Three Original Jessicas emerged. Thespica was crying great inconsolable tears, supported by her friends, Jessicas Prime and Minor—their feud apparently forgotten in the crisis. They bore her limp and sobbing form toward the office.

Brian caught my eye. I shrugged, as clueless as he was. Then his pack leader beckoned and they trailed after the girls. Brandon, the alpha dog, gave me one last, long stare. It was almost territorial, which, gladiatorial subtext aside, seemed to say he thought I was a threat to his pack.

With a Nancy Drew determination to satisfy my curiosity, I ignored the closed doors and went into the auditorium.

I expected scenic carnage. Maybe not a smashed chandelier, but the state of artistic chaos seemed the same as ever. The director’s hair was standing on end, as if he’d been trying to pull it out, but I think that was status quo.

“Mr. Thomas?”

He stared blankly for a moment before recognition dawned. “How did you get in here?”

“Through the door. Look, everyone outside is saying you’re going to cancel the show tonight. I just wanted to get the real story.”

A huge sigh rattled his chest. “I hope we won’t. The female lead, Jessica Jordan”—Thespica, obviously—“has come down with laryngitis. She can’t make a sound.”

My brows shot up. “Really.”

“Yes. No amount of tea and honey is going to fix that by tonight.”

“What are you going to do?” I didn’t have to fake my concern. I’d been making fun of the drama nerds, but I knew how much work they’d put into the project, how important it was to them. Even if I wasn’t sympathetic to Thespica (and I wasn’t, really), I felt bad for the rest of them.

Then someone called from the stage. “She’s here, Mr. Thomas.” The choir teacher stood alongside a vaguely familiar, very nervous-looking, brown-haired girl.

Mr. Thomas excused himself. “That’s the understudy. If she’s up to it, then we’ll open as planned.”

He scurried down the aisle. I watched him talk earnestly to the girl, then gesture to the choir teacher, who went to the piano. Understudy Girl started to sing the chicks and ducks song, and though she lacked a fraction of Thespica’s confidence (and by that I mean rampant egotism), she had a pretty voice with nice inflection. It sounded like the day was saved, and the show would go on.

All praise the Greek god Thespis.

“It’s just like
Phantom
, isn’t it?” Emily Farber gushed, turned around in her desk to chatter at Lisa and me. It was English class and we were—big surprise—working on our papers.

The understudy’s name was Suzie Miller. She was in the afternoon AP English class, as well as AP Calculus with Karen and Stanley. Her ascension to stardom was seen as a score for the smart kids, and a much more interesting topic than grammar and subtext.

“Where the phantom sabotages the prima donna so that Christine could have a chance at the limelight…” Emily sighed. “That is
so
romantic.”

“I don’t get that movie.” Lisa slumped in her chair. “What’s so hot about a homicidal psychopath?”

“Well, those eyes, that voice, that face—the part not all melty and gross, I mean.” Emily looked prepared to go on at length.

“Those shoulders,” I added.

“Girls!” snapped Ms. Vincent. She really ought to set up a subroutine for that. “You’re supposed to be working on your themes. They are due in a week.”

Lisa groaned and slithered lower in her seat. “Wake me up when the term is over.”

She had a theory that term papers were a sort of “get out of teaching free” card. From the start of the assignment to its end, anytime the teacher wanted to dodge lecturing, she could give us class time to work on our papers and expect us to be grateful.

Personally, I was grateful for any day I didn’t have to listen to Ms. Vincent regurgitate the textbook analysis of literature and expect us to parrot it back without alteration.

“Hey, Lisa.” I doodled on my paper to make it look like I was working. “Have you ever heard of a student dying, maybe here on campus?”

She opened an eye and gave me a monocular glare. “You’re not referring to that thing we were talking about last night that we are not going to talk about at school ever, are you?”

“No. Well, not really.”

She sighed, then thought about it. “I think there was some kid who killed himself about twenty years ago.”

“In the gym?”

“In the band hall.”

That was not particularly helpful. Then I remembered that geography didn’t seem to be a real issue here.

“Are you going to the play tonight?” I asked, changing the subject.

She laid her head on her folded arms. “I wasn’t. But if there’s a chance Gerard Butler might show up in a tux and a half-mask, I’m there.”

“Dude. Me too.”

Naturally, since I’d lost the research time that morning, my second opportunity—journalism class—was taken up by a lecture. In lab I discovered that while our high school might have four decades of archived newspapers, the index only went back one and a half.

“Curses!” I half-slammed the drawer closed. “Foiled again.”

“What’s the problem?” asked Mr. Allison.

I blushed slightly, having been caught in a temper tantrum. “What happened to the index before the nineties?”

“It was lost when they moved the journalism lab up here. They started again with the current year, and no one has ever had the time to replace the old one. There’s not that much call for old football scores and homecoming courts.”

“I guess not.” I drummed my fingers on the metal cabinet.

Mr. Allison came around his desk. “Something I can help you with?”

“Maybe. I’m looking for record of any student who may have died here on campus.”

“That’s grim.”

“It’s for a research paper.” I was getting too good at lying. “Someone mentioned there was a kid who killed himself, maybe in the Band Hall?”

“Oh yes. That was a shame.” He shook his head sadly. “I was in school here at the time.” He opened a file drawer and came out with a microfiche spool marked 1981–85. “Look through the spring of 1984.”

“Thanks.” I went over to the projector. I wondered if someday, when all the archives in the world were stored on computer, microfilm projectors would be extinct. Even now, it’s a dying art. Like calligraphy and Morse code, and about that efficient, too.

“Only one week until prom!” I’d barely set foot in the courtyard when a neon green paper fluttered before my face. “Have you voted for your Royal…Oh. It’s you.” My friend from Student Council snatched back the ballot. “I don’t have enough of these for you to wad up and throw on the floor.”

“We’re outside,” I said, very reasonably, considering the neon green was hammering spikes into my eyes, which were aching from an hour reading little bitty backlit type. “There is no floor.”

“Whatever. You can’t have a ballot.” She tucked the stack protectively against her chest.

“Are you taking away my constitutional right to vote for a King and Queen?” I raised my voice in outrage.

“Well…” She wavered as people around us turned to stare.

“I demand the right to choose my own representation of all that is wrong with adolescent social hierarchy.”

“Right on!” said a voice near me.

“You cannot deny me a voice in the senseless aggrandizement of those already entitled by wealth and privilege!” Encouraged by cheers and laughter, I leapt up on a bench and orated with a fervor worthy of Patrick Henry. “No! I tell you, popular is not enough! They must be royalty.”

A roar went up from the crowd. I grabbed a painfully green ballot and raised it in my fist.

“For we hold these truths to be self-evident! That there is no greater embodiment of the American Way than the choosing of a leader based on their physical beauty and mediocre intelligence.”

Cheers and whistles filled the courtyard. The Spanish Club shouted “¡Olé! Viva mediocridad!” from the breezeway. A Biff-like voice called out “Freak,” and then, over it all, the stentorian shout of the assistant principal.

“Margaret Quinn! In my office, right now!”

And that was how I ended up in detention for inciting a riot. I hoped that Syracuse wouldn’t revoke my acceptance without giving me a chance to explain.

I didn’t mind spending lunch in detention, but I wish Halloran had seen fit to extend it through P.E. I would much rather have been studying chemistry than enduring the last day of swimming.