Stones and Spark (6 page)

But he's not listening to me. Lifting his head, he gazes over the dance floor. The band's lead singer is whispering into the microphone, moving to a slow love song, and every single couple is pulled toward the gym's dark middle. They look like metal shards sucked toward a magnet. Mr. Galluci sets down the bowl of Doritos and falls in with the rest of the chaperones who are circling the lovefest.

Call me an opportunist, but I pounce. Shoving the door open, I hear Mr. Galluci say, "Hey!"

But I'm already running down the hall when the door slams behind me. By the first corner I'm flinging my arms wide, sliding around the turn like one of Drew’s beloved baseball players rounding second on a tight play. The floor is the usual Friday mess of cast-off litter. Flyers for basketball tryouts, lunch menus, hyped-up reminders for everyone to have a super time at tonight's dance. I can see one light shining up ahead. English. The Lit classroom. Drew hates English. But she'll do anything to keep her GPA a pristine 4.0. That whole “perfect number thing” obsesses her.

I pick up speed on the straightaway and slide across the door, grabbing the doorframe for a stop.

“You are out!” I cry.

Mr. Sandbag looks up from his desk. “What is the meaning of this?”

I want to ask the same thing, but it’s his classroom.

“Sorry. I was looking for Drew.” And, in case he doesn’t remember his most difficult student, I add, “Drew Levinson?”

“A rather impulsive inquiry.”

“Assonance,” I sigh. You have to work with this guy. “Have you seen her?”

“The more refined query is: ‘Does the road wind uphill all the way?’ ”

Oh, God. Not now.

I glance around the room. Chairs are twisted away from their desks. White paper spouts from the trashcan, testifying to how much frustration we feel with Mr. Sandberg, a.k.a. Sandbag.

“Well, does it?” Sandbag demands.

“’Yes,’” I reply, quoting the Rossetti poem we're supposed to memorize. It's called "Uphill" and right now that's how everything feels. “‘to the very end.’”

"With feeling, Miss Harmon. Try to recite with feeling."

If you pull out a dictionary and look up the word
tedious
, you'll probably find a framed photo of Sandbag. In addition to wearing his glasses on the tip of his nose, he’s one of those teachers who see everything as a “teachable moment.” If you bump into him on the street—God help you—his thin lips will peel back and he'll drop some drippy line. Right there, you’ve got to tell him whether he’s using assonance or alliteration or symbolism, and if you don't, he’ll call you out later in front of class.

“Drew—have you seen her, anywhere?”

He gazes at me over the glasses. “And the next line begins? . . .”

“‘Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?’”

“‘From morn to night my friend.’”

“Her bike’s outside.”

“Miss Levinson, I presume?"

Who does he think I'm talking about,
Christina Rosetti?

"She did make an appearance this afternoon,” he says.

“What time?”

He reaches down, snaps open his briefcase. On the floor near his feet is one small black suitcase. “If memory serves, she was speaking with Miss Teager. Probably attempting to press the parameters of geometry into a cerebellum struggling with its synapses.”

He gazes over the glasses.

“Alliteration,” I reply.

“Ah, but you neglected to note imagery, which could well appear on next week’s parts-of-speech test.”

“What time did you see Drew?”

“
At
what time?"

He has to correct everything. Like I said, tedious.

"Yes, sir. At what time?"

"Two-thirty.” He stands, but almost simultaneously sweeps his leg toward the suitcase, pushing it under his desk. “Or perhaps it was closer to three,” he adds. “The real question is: ‘But is there for the night a resting place?’”

Quoting the poem again.

I want to strangle him. And that’s no metaphor.

“Miss Harmon, the next line?”

I don’t know it, because I haven’t memorized that far. “Something about a roof. Where was she, when you saw her?”

“’A roof for when the slow dark hours begin.’” He gives the suitcase another push, sending it deep under the desk. “‘May not the darkness hide —’”

That's it.

His words trail behind me like some neglected ghost and don't fade away until I reach our lockers. They're side-by-side, and when I lift Drew's combination lock, I see that little white arrow. It points directly at zero.

She's compulsive about that, too.

I spin the dial and click through her five-digit combination. Maybe she's setting up some scavenger hunt. Leaving me clues. Like suddenly having her bike outside. I pop open the tinny metal door and see her textbooks, standing like soldiers in alphabetical order. On the back wall behind them a photo shows the Milky Way, expanding into crystallized eternity; on my right, inside the door, Richard P. Feynman grins.

I dig behind the books, lift Feynman's photo.

Nothing.

I slam the locker shut, spinning the combination dial, but refuse to replace that white arrow at zero. I walk down the hall and kick all the paper across the floor. I've known Drew for three years, and it started at these lockers. We had just moved up to St. Cat's Upper School, the hallowed ground worshipped by the Lower School. Drew was the weird girl who had already explained to our math teacher that space travel was only mathematically possible if the universe was rotating instead of expanding.

One day she looked over at my open locker and asked, “What is that?”

It was a photo of a geode, taken right after my dad gave me a rock hammer for my twelfth birthday. In the photo, the quartz crystals radiated like frozen sparks.

“It's a geode,” I said.

“Oh." She stared a moment longer. “And I assume the crystals have perfect atomic form because they're growing in a relatively unconfined space.”

“Uh. Yeah. That’s right.”

Holy. Cow.

We slammed our lockers, walked to the cafeteria and spent the next thirty minutes talking about earthquakes, pyroclastic ash—even synclines. And that day, I felt something lift from my shoulders--some invisible weight I never realized was there until it was gone. By the next Friday I was eating dinner at her house, watching Jayne down an entire bottle of wine in one hour while Rusty went upstairs. Drew nuked our frozen cheeseburgers and fries, and when I asked for mayonnaise for the fries, she said, “That’s entirely gross, but I can live with it.” Ever since, we’ve lived with each other’s idiosyncrasies—even celebrating them. For me, it felt like I’d finally found the place where I belonged.

The lights are out in the Physics lab. I slide my hand along the wall, flicking on the switch.

Unlike Sandbag's classroom, here the chairs are all aligned behind their desks. The white board gleams clean. Probably Mr. Straithern, our Math and Physics teacher. He is just about as compulsive as Drew.

Her purple jean jacket hangs on a chair at the back of the room. I walk over and see her notebook with one stiletto-sharp Ticonderoga poking from the pages like a bookmark.

“Drew?”

The wall clock ticks to 12:15.

So, Miss Compulsive was working in Mr. Compulsive’s classroom. Every table wiped clean, the chairs just so, no scraps of paper on the floor. But the purple in her jacket looks as vivid to me as bruises, due to an experiment she came up with when I was playing with acids and alkalis to grow geology crystals. Chemistry was a passing phase—literally—for Drew, but she liked it enough to try soaking her jean jacket in various relative percentages of alum, vinegar, and grape juice. The result looked metamorphic, like the denim boiled inside the earth's molten layer before it was coughed up by some tectonic disaster. But she loves this jacket. And she would only leave it if she were coming back.

Like the pencil in her notebook, holding her place.

“Drew, are you hiding in here?”

I feel stupid waiting for a response.

I flip open her notebook. Yes, I’m violating her privacy, but too bad. This has gone on long enough.

Under the heading, “Burgers & Brains,” I see her calculations from two weeks ago when she wanted to test the hypothesis: which will freeze faster, boiling water or cold water? It sounded like a stupid question to me—of course cold water would freeze faster. But she did the experiment at Titus's—and took bets. Everyone picked cold water. Except Titus. Turns out, boiling water freezes faster than cold water. Drew won $18. She told me there’s no rational theory that explains why water behaves like that. But her notes hypothesize: “evaporation affecting mass measurements.”

“Hey!”

My voice echoes back.

The clock ticks.

So I flip through more pages, feeling a little bad when I see how she’s spared me some baseball stuff. Wooden bats versus aluminum. Something called the “Center of Percussion.” Or COP. My eyes are already glazing over, but she’s drawn stick-man diagrams to show how the bat behaves with the COP. If the batter grips too far away from the center of percussion, he might feel the bat pushing against his finger, “possibly with enough force to lose control of the bat,” she notes. “But, crucially, when the bat connects with a pitch precisely at the COP, the batter will experience zero force in his hands. This is key to understanding the mechanics of powerful hitting.”

How can someone so interesting be obsessed with something so boring?

I flip all the way back to the front cover. She’s handwritten that Feynman quote, the same one she highlighted in that book stacked in the sunroom.

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts."

I replace her pencil. Give the room one more glance and see a shadow falling between the closet's double doors. The neat freak Mr. Straithern only allows one student to use his supplies. That rat.

She must’ve heard me coming down the hall and jumped into the closet.

That skinny rat.

And now I feel the need for revenge. Tiptoeing over, holding my breath, I yank open the door.

“Gotcha!”

Dull, black magnets. Iron levers. Dowel rods swinging in the breeze I've just created.

“Drew.” My throat feels hoarse. “This is so not funny.”

But the only reply is the clock, ticking away the silence.

***

When I step into the hall, there's an unmistakable sound. Like a horse whinnying.

“Oh, Herb, stop!”

Parsnip.

I am immobile with shock. Herb is Sandbag’s first name.

“Will you please be patient!” she whinnies.

I sneak down the hall in the opposite direction, skirting the litter, until I reach the girls’ bathroom. It’s as dark as the Physics lab. When I flick on the light, I see three stall doors are closed.

“If you're hiding in here, I'm going to kill you.”

No response.

I have to crawl under the doors because you can’t really see under them. And because Drew never gives up. But what I find are toilets clogged with stuff that triggers my gag reflex. I’m coming out of the third stall when the bathroom door opens. I have a moment of hope versus panic—is it Drew, or Parsnip?

Neither.

The janitor gapes at me. “What in blue blazes?!”

“Hi.”

“What’re you doing?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?” He keeps the door propped open, with one hand on the rolling cart that holds his cleaning supplies. “You're not supposed to be in here.”

“I know, I was . . . ”

But I don’t know what to say.

“Who let you in?” he demands.

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

I don’t want to get Mr. Galluci in trouble. But I can’t keep eye contact. I have nothing but lies, and this is John, the janitor. Not Ellis or Parsnip, but a guy who’s been nice to Drew and me. To everyone. And to make me feel even guiltier, every time I look away from him, I catch my guilty reflection in the mirror. Somebody’s left a giant lipstick kiss, and it sits right above my head, like a bad joke about kissing my decency goodbye.

“I was looking for something,” I manage to say.

“In the bathroom?"

His voice has some kind of northern accent, New York or New Jersey or someplace where they say exactly what's on their mind in a tone of voice that says you’re an idiot. He’s still holding the door open, expecting me to leave. But then something dawns on him.

“Oh. Okay. I got it. Come out when you’re done.”

He starts to leave.

“Wait!” I call out.

He turns around. He’s bald and the skin on his scalp is all wrinkled up with baffled questions.

“I mean, hang on a second. You know Drew, right?” I make a motion with my hand, indicating her wild brown hair. “Drew Levinson?”