The Fire (16 page)

She opened her eyes and snagged Jonah on them.

“Sit down, Jonah,” breathed Katy. “Or things will happen to you.”

Mrs. Shevvington’s little yellow corn teeth showed. “Katy, Katy. Such imagination. What a shame you are not able to demonstrate it in your homework. Jonah is welcome to check on Christina, of course. But that would be skipping school. He would not be able to attend the picnic either.”

“Then Christina and I will have a separate picnic,” said Jonah.

Mrs. Shevvington laughed. “Christina is in love with Benjamin, who is sixteen. And also in love with Blake, who is eighteen. Do you think she will even notice a little boy like you attempting to ‘save’ her?” Her laugh rattled around like pebbles thrown into a tin bucket.

Jonah flushed.

Vicki and Gretch giggled. “At least you have a brain, Jonah,” said Vicki. “Benjamin doesn’t. You could offer Chrissie your brain.”

“She likes muscles,” said Gretch, “and Jonah doesn’t have any of those.”

“Run along, Jonah,” said Mrs. Shevvington. “You may certainly come back to school and report what you find. We’ll all be so interested.”

Behind Jonah, between the snickering girls, Robbie stood up. He was even scrawnier than Jonah and much shorter, not having started his growth at all. He looked about nine. He said, “I’m going with you Jonah.”

Vicki and Gretch burst into gales of laughter. “What a team!” snickered Gretch. “Gosh, I hope when I’m in trouble, I get rescued by men like these.”

Mrs. Shevvington’s birdseed teeth vanished, as if she had swallowed them herself. “Let’s not tease, girls. It’s painful to be an adolescent boy with nothing to offer. Let’s not make it worse.”

The door to the English room creaked.

Slowly, as if the hinges had grown together, it began opening.

The door cried out, rustily, as if it hurt.

The children froze, staring.

Mrs. Shevvington seemed to swell and bloat.

Slowly the door ate its way into the classroom. Gently it tapped the far wall. It shivered against the plaster.

A ray of sun walked across the classroom from the window to the door, like a golden ghost.

Standing in the shaft of light was a tangle of silver and gold: the tri-colored hair of Christina Romney.

She looked at the class. She looked at Robbie and at Jonah, standing up for her. She looked at Vicki and Gretch, laughing at them all. She looked at Mrs. Shevvington. Without a sound … slowly, as if wound up … she entered the room. She raised her small chin and pointed her small nose forward. “I came to get you, Mrs. Shevvington,” said Christina Romney. In her hand she held a sheaf of grayish-white papers: Xeroxed copies. She tapped them against her open palm.

Gretch and Vicki tittered.

Jonah and Robbie sank back into their seats.

Mrs. Shevvington looked like a dead fish on the sand, filled with her own poisons. “You’re late, Christina,” she whispered, hissing.

“But not too late,” said Christina Romney.

“Go to the office. Mr. Shevvington will take care of you.”

Christina’s soft eyebrows rose like Roman arches, carved on stone. Her chin lifted higher, like a goddess of the sea. “No.”

The class gasped. Nobody said “No” to Mrs. Shevvington.

“I beg your pardon?” said Mrs. Shevvington.

“No,” repeated Christina softly. “I have to look at you first. You destroyed so many of us, and you nearly destroyed me. I need to look at you first and know that you are just an ordinary person.”

“Go to the office!” said Mrs. Shevvington. Her voice was thick.

The sun glittered on Christina’s hair. It divided into separate, living creatures, like silver snakes, or sable ribbons. “Val heard you laughing in the night,” said Christina. “You shouldn’t have laughed. It woke her up.”

Mrs. Shevvington’s slick tongue wet her mean little lips. She laughed again, but this time it was queer and bubbly, like froth rising on a milk shake.

“Val remembered, long long ago, when you first befriended her, when you first started eating away at her like acid, that you kept a file on her. She remembered that you had copies. And she found them. In the cellar. Damp and moldy, Mrs. Shevvington, but they have the truth in them. The truth about Emily and Wendy, Margaret and Jessica. And all your other victims. Their photographs, your notes, what happened to them, how you did it.”

“Who are Jessica and Emily and all?” said Gretch.

“Shells,” said Christina.

“My sister?” cried Robbie. “Christina, is Val all right?”

“No,” said Christina, “but she’s better. She came for me. She woke me. She dressed me. She was the only one who knew how, because she had been there. She had swung in the same hammock.”

“Hammock?” said Vicki and Gretch together. “Christina, do you have any idea how weird you sound?”

“Come, Christina,” said Mrs. Shevvington. “You and I will go down to the office. You need sedation. Mr. Shevvington and I will help you.”

“I will go to the office with you,” said Christina. “But I am using the phone there. To end all the terrible things you have been doing.”

“Excuse me?” said Mrs. Shevvington, pasting a smile on her oatmeal face.

“No,” said Christina, slowly shaking her head back and forth. The silver locks slid over the gold and tangled with the brown. “I will not excuse you. The law will not excuse you. Parents will not excuse you.”

“She
has
flipped out,” whispered Vicki. “You were right, Mrs. Shevvington. Christina is gone-zo.” Vicki and Gretch snickered.

The froth on Mrs. Shevvington’s lips spilled over.

“Being crazy is rather pleasant,” said Christina, “once they soften it with drugs or sleep. Like a hammock. You just swing quietly in the shade of your mind.”

Mrs. Shevvington seemed to rock back and forth, like a swing.

“And Val,” said Robbie, “is Val still in the shade?”

“No,” said Christina. “She is back.”

Mrs. Shevvington licked the froth from her mouth. “Come, my child of the Isle,” she said. “We will go read your silly little papers together. And if you call the police, that is fine with me. It’s about time they put a stop to your fire-setting and your match-collecting.”

They entered the hallway of the middle school together.

Jonah and Robbie tried to follow.

“I think not,” said Mrs. Shevvington, closing the door of the seventh-grade English room behind her. She and Christina walked down the long, wide corridors, where no teacher stood, no student passed, no janitor cleaned. Alone, they walked.

“You made a fatal error, Christina,” said Mrs. Shevvington. Her smile widened, as if the smile planned to slit her face, as if it were a parasite turning on its own body. “You wanted to gloat. I sympathize. I enjoy gloating.” The smile ate like acid into the oatmeal complexion, until Mrs. Shevvington’s face vanished and nothing was there but a yellow slit of triumph. “
Val is not safe
,” said Mrs. Shevvington. Laughing, she whispered, “And neither, my fair island girl, are you.”

T
HEY WERE TOO FAR
from the seventh-grade class for her to scream for Robbie or Jonah. Too far from the high school halls to scream for Michael or Benjamin Jaye. They were in the front lobby, by the school offices, where only parents and teachers went willingly.

Mrs. Shevvington stumped on. It was like the evening they went for ice cream, and she struggled in Michael’s grip like a kitten dragged to the vet.

Jonah knew this would happen, thought Christina. He told me I was getting cocky. But I had to show off. I had to sashay in there, so the seventh grade would know. I was playing games. But this isn’t a game. Don’t
I
know that best? But even so, I kept playing games, thinking I would win.

The grown-ups always win.

In lock-step Mrs. Shevvington and Christina entered the outer office. Filing cabinet drawers were half open while secretaries pretended to look things up. A gym coach without a class lounged on the counter and a big kid getting suspended slouched against the wall.

The staff glanced up. “Oh! Mrs. Shevvington!” they said, ignoring Christina. “Mr. Shevvington just left! Poor little Val showed up after all this time!”

Christina cried out.

“Mr. Shevvington was so sweet to her,” put in the file clerk, not answering her ringing phone. “Val was so strange. You would not have believed the accusations she made. The poor child. A clinical case of paranoia if I ever saw one. Just like on soap operas. And she comes from such a nice family, too.”

“She was supposed to stay at the Inne,” mumbled Christina. “Where she’d be safe.”

The gym coach slapped the counter with his huge flat hand. “You’re the one who was hiding Val?” he demanded. “You’re one of those island girls, aren’t you? The one who plays with matches and tried to set a storm cottage on fire. I heard about you. Kids like you shouldn’t be allowed in the school system with regular kids.”

Christina ripped loose from Mrs. Shevvington and tried to bolt. The gym coach caught Christina’s elbows and pinned her to the wall. “This has been some year!” he said to Mrs. Shevvington. “I bet you guys are sorry you ever transferred to Maine. We’ve handed you more crazies than the rest of the country has in a generation!”

Mrs. Shevvington smiled. There was a puffiness to her now: a contentment. “So true,” said Mrs. Shevvington. “You might call the ambulance for Christina. She must be sedated.”

Christina remembered the quiet of the guest room, the painted isles, and the foggy mind. I’ll be back there in a minute, she thought. Or in the Institute. And I won’t know, or care. I’ll be a shell again. What made Val come here? What made either of us come here? Did the Shevvingtons pull us in with their evil or did something in us want to be defeated?

Christina felt herself fading like a sheet in the storm cottage, drifting into mists of mindlessness. Perhaps you had to participate in your own ending. You had to allow it to happen.

“Mr. Shevvington was going to call Val’s parents from Schooner Inne,” said the file clerk, “for privacy. He always puts the child first, you know. No matter how undeserving. He drove Val back there.”

“Did my husband have his briefcase?” asked Mrs. Shevvington.

“Why, yes,” said the typist, “I believe he went back into the office to get it. He had Val in one hand and the briefcase in the other.”

The coach released Christina’s arms. Defeat was so complete that she went limp and sagged to the floor. He knelt beside her. “I’d better get her a glass of water.”

The typist said, “I’ll call the nurse.”

“No need,” said Mrs. Shevvington, retrieving the pile of papers that had slipped out of Christina’s hands.

“She might be ill,” protested the coach. “Sometimes when my students act weird out on the field, it turns out to be heatstroke or something.”

“The ambulance is coming. Some things are better left to trained paramedics.”

Christina was not ill. She was faking. She leaped to her feet, shoving Mrs. Shevvington against the door. She raced out of the office, skidding on waxy floors toward the front doors. “Stop her!” cried Mrs. Shevvington. “She’s dangerous.”

Gym coach, secretary, and teacher lurched after Christina.

The big kid getting suspended yawned, stretched, and stuck his feet out. “Oh, sorry,” he said pleasantly, when they tripped over him and knocked into each other, bottling up their own exit.

Through the lobby, out the doors, down the wide granite steps, Christina tried to soak granite through her shoes; she would need it all. She heard them coming after her, but the women were wearing narrow skirts and high heels; the coach made kids exercise but rarely exercised himself; Christina was too fleet of foot for them.

Across the wide green expanse of campus she ran. The coach tried to catch her, but Mrs. Shevvington didn’t bother. She headed for her car. Christina swerved through the trees, cutting through the opening in the fence. Mrs. Shevvington started her engine. Christina burst out onto the sidewalk, ran down School Street, heading for town. Mrs. Shevvington, driving in the most ordinary way, without unseemly haste, could go forty miles an hour. The woman turned onto the School Street and accelerated.

Christina, sobbing for breath, ran up a side street, crossed two backyards, ducked down a driveway, and came out behind the laundromat. Through the laundromat, between the clattering washers and the steamy dryers, she went. Anya had worked here. Mindlessly folding other people’s underwear. Don’t let them catch me! prayed Christina.

She crossed Seaside Avenue, and jumped up onto the sidewalk just as Mrs. Shevvington drove across Seaside. She’s not trying to catch me, thought Christina. She’s going straight to Schooner Inne.

Christina came out at the bottom of Breakneck Hill. Mrs. Shevvington came out at the top and parked in front of Schooner Inne. She unlocked the huge green door, let herself in, and shut it behind her.

I have to get Val, thought Christina. I did this. This is my fault. How did it happen?

Christina stepped over the cliff. She had come up these rocks, but never gone down. Tide was out. The mudflats were slimy and pockmarked. She climbed carefully down the treacherous crags and outcroppings. She had to drop down into the mud. It sucked her in almost to the knees. She tugged her right foot free, and it came out black with slime. Slogging across the flats, mud sucking at her feet, Christina stayed next to the cliffs. No windows in Schooner Inne could see a person at the bottom of the cliff. In some places the mud had dried and she walked on top. In some places there was water a foot deep, or even two feet, and she waded, or fell in.

She made her way around a jutting stone with sharp edges, and there, hidden in a cleft, was the entrance to the cellar passage the old sea captain had used for smuggling. They would not be expecting her to arrive this way. They would look for her by road, by door, but not by cellar. Tearing her hands, ripping her clothes, she finally got up to the opening. The opening she and Dolly had found so tantalizing — had fallen out of, and nearly been swallowed by the tide while the Shevvingtons’ insane son laughed joyfully above.

Christina tiptoed up the splintery wooden cellar steps. How many horrible sounds had she heard in this black hole? How many times had she been cornered here? But today it was her secret entry. Creeping up from the cellar — as the Shevvingtons’ son had done in his time — she would slip unnoticed into the house, as Mr. and Mrs. Shevvington watched for her from the doors and windows, and silently she and Val would go back to the sea. Just as she had done with Dolly! They would sail back to the Isle and be safe. Somehow Christina would make all the parents believe her.