The Fourth Stall Part II

Chris Rylander

The Fourth Stall
PART II

Dedication

For Amanda, always

Contents

 

 

I
knew she would be trouble from the moment I saw her.

Perhaps because she was soaking wet from the rain even though an umbrella stuck out from her backpack or maybe simply because she was a girl—an especially dangerous-looking girl at that. In grade school they say girls are more dangerous than shotguns.

I'd helped out plenty of girls with problems before. That's what I do. If there's a kid in this school who needs help, they come to see me in my office in the fourth stall from the high window in the East Wing boys' bathroom. And plenty of those kids over the years had been girls.

But this girl was different than most girls. She was only an eighth grader, but she seemed even older. There was something almost predatory about her, like a rattlesnake sat across from me and not a girl. And I felt like a small white mouse or whatever it is that rattlesnakes eat.

I cleared my throat as she sat there staring at me. Her eyes were bright green and glowed like the neon signs you see in pawnshop windows. Her hair was dark, not quite black but dark enough to remind me what my teacher had said once about how objects that are black absorb all frequencies of light so that none can be seen, as if they want to keep all color to themselves. The girl's hair hung past her shoulders in intentional tangles that looked like they could eat a kid alive. She was dressed as if she cared just enough to make it look like she didn't care, and I kind of liked that about her.

“So what can I do for you?” I asked.

She shook her wet hair and little droplets of cold water splashed across my desk and on my face. She stopped and looked at me, her thin, dark eyebrows forming two perfect, high arches.

I wiped off my face with my sleeve.

“Oh, uh, right,” I said. “Hey, Vince, can we get a towel or something in here?”

After an uncomfortable silence during which the dark-haired girl kept staring at me, Vince, my right-hand man, financial manager, best friend, and overall good guy, came into the stall with a bunch of brown paper towels clutched in his hand.

“Will these do, Mac?”

I looked at the paper towels. They were the same cheap stuff found in every school from here to Canada and back. They're stiff and dry, and you're more likely to rub your skin raw right down to the bone than you are to dry yourself.

“That's all we got?”

Vince shrugged.

“They'll be fine,” the dark-haired girl said as she snatched the towels from Vince.

Vince stood there looking like a sheep about to get sheared naked.

“Okay, we're good,” I said to him.

He snapped out of it and left the stall to take up his post just inside the bathroom door.

I watched the dark-haired girl try to dry her hair with the mass of brown paper towels. More water fell onto her shoulders and my desk than was actually soaked up by the brown stuff.

“I'm Mac, by the way,” I said.

“I know.”

“Oh, right. Okay, what's your name?”

“Are you trying to help me or ask me out?” she asked.

I felt my face grow hot, and I was sure it was glowing red right then, despite the fact that I always asked my customers for their names. It's for bookkeeping—I run a pretty tight ship. Normally I operate much more smoothly than this. It's my office, my business; I run the show. But this girl was making me feel like it was my first day of kindergarten.

Then she laughed. But it sounded even worse than the icy silence of a few moments before. It sounded like the blurring rattle of an about-to-strike rattlesnake.

“I'm just messing with you, Mac.”

I tried to laugh back.

“Anyways, the reason I'm here is because I heard you might be able to help me.”

I nodded.

“Okay, well, the problem is this jerk Bryce who goes to Oaks Crossing private school over in Riverdale. I went out with him for a while and then he . . . ugh. Well, he's just a whiny loser!” The dark-haired girl slammed her fist on my desk. My pen rattled and dropped to the floor.

I leaned over to pick it up, more than a little frightened at how quickly she'd gone from wet and angry to laughing and scary to angry and, well, angry.

“Okay, so Bryce is like your boyfriend or something, then?” I said as I faced her again.

“No, weren't you listening? Why would I date a jerk like him?” she said.

“Oh yeah, well, I thought you said . . .”

“What
is
it with boys? Seriously? Do you all have, like, mental defects that prevent you from understanding simple sentences?”

I opened my mouth, but all I could do was shrug and shake my head.

“I
said
dat-
ed
, as in past tense. I broke up with the loser weeks ago.”

“Oh,” I said.

She looked at me, her mouth open. Her neon eyes glared, and I almost had to shield my face. If there had still been a toilet in the fourth stall from the high window, I'd have been trying desperately to flush myself down it right then.

“Are you
slow
?” she asked. She said it calmly. Sincerely. As if she already knew the answer was yes and was now just afraid she was going to hurt my feelings.

“No, of course not. So you, what, need me to get back at Bryce for you or something?”

She sighed.

“Why would I need that?
I
broke up with
him.
Remember?”

It felt like this girl was twisting my brain into a pretzel. I remembered that she'd said that, but I'd just spaced out. She had me so mixed up I could barely remember my own name.

“Oh yeah—yes. What do you need help with, then? Do you need protection from him?” I asked as professionally as I could. But I sure hoped that wasn't the case. The last kid that had come in here looking for protection had ended up almost destroying my whole business. But that's another story.

“What? From that moron? No. He's too stupid to pose any kind of threat to anybody but himself. It's his dad who's the real problem.”

I almost asked her why she hadn't just said that to begin with, but I thought better of it. After all, if you come across a rattlesnake in a field, the dumbest thing to do would be to poke it with a stick. So I just nodded instead.

“I think his dad is out to get me,” she said.

As she spoke, she fiddled with the corner of my Books, which I use to track my customers and their different problems. I watched as she folded the corner of a sheet back and forth, creasing it. I wanted to stop her because I like to keep nice, neat Books, but then I realized that I was afraid to say something. Even after everything I'd faced over the years, I was afraid of an unarmed girl. That is if you could ever really call
any
girl “unarmed” . . . unless of course she was a girl who really didn't have any arms, in which case you'd probably feel too bad for her to be afraid anyway.

Meanwhile she just kept on folding, back and forth, back and forth. The page tore a little and I winced as if she'd broken my pinkie.

“Are you even listening to me?” she asked.

I realized that I'd been staring vacantly at her pale fingers as they desecrated my Books, and I wasn't really paying attention to what she'd been saying. I opened my mouth and closed it a few times.

“You know what? Forget it.” She started to gather her things and get up.

I really should have just let her go. She scared me. She made my head feel like a nut clamped firmly inside a squirrel's jaw. But my business doesn't work like that. If you have a problem,
I am going to solve it
. So I stopped her.

“Wait,” I said. “I'm sorry. I can help you, I promise.”

She sat back down and closed her left eye. She examined me closely with her one open eye. After a moment she was looking at me with two again.

“Okay, what I was saying is that Bryce's dad has been a real jerk to me in class. I think that Bryce went bawling to his daddy after I dumped him like the loser that he is, and now his dad is out to fail me and make sure that I don't ever get to high school. Or maybe worse . . . maybe he's trying to get me expelled. He yells at me in class a lot, he erases my correct answers on tests and writes in wrong ones so I fail, and he always gives me detention for nothing at all.”

I hadn't heard the part about Bryce's dad working at our school, but I wasn't going to ask her to clarify again, because if I did, I was sure she'd dig her venom-filled fangs into me and that'd be it.

“Which teacher is his dad?”

“Mr. Kjelson.”

“Mr. Kjelson, the new guy?”

“Do you know another Mr. Kjelson?”

“Right. Sorry.”

Now I was more confused than ever. Mr. Kjelson had just started working at our school a few months ago after one of the older seventh-grade science teachers, Mrs. Beck, mysteriously vanished one day. Well, I'm sure
somebody
knew what had happened to her, but nobody I knew did. She was there one day and the next she was gone. I heard from a few kids in her classes that she hadn't even come back to get the stuff on her desk, like pictures of her family and all of that.

Anyways, at first I didn't pay much attention to Mr. K. (that's what all the kids call him since his name is like a phonics test of bravery, complete with a man-eating, double-consonant-breathing dragon right at the start). But then I found out he was going to be the new middle school baseball coach this year. And, well, that definitely caught my interest since Vince and I had always been planning to try out for the middle school team as sixth graders ever since we were kindergartners.

It was pretty tough to make the team as a sixth grader, but if anybody could do it, it'd be Vince. He is, without question, the best pitcher I've ever caught. Well, okay, so he's also the only pitcher I've ever caught, but last summer in pony baseball, which is organized through the local recreation center, he'd struck out thirteen batters in six innings in the only game our idiotic coach, Colton, let him start. Colton was this high school kid who only pretended to like sports to impress girls and who the rec center assigned to our team. And he had a little brother named Chase who he let pitch every game despite the fact that Chase was like the Joe Blanton of summer little league: good on paper but horrible in an actual game. That was part of why we were so eager to make the school team this year rather than play in the rec league: to get away from idiot teenage coaches like Colton.

In fact, the first day of tryouts for pitchers and catchers was after school that day in the gymnasium, since it was still too cold to have practice outside. I'd heard some good things about Mr. Kjelson, both as a coach and teacher. Supposedly some kid who played against the team he'd coached last year said that Mr. Kjelson loved small ball, and anybody who loves small ball clearly knows baseball. Also, even after just part of a year as a teacher, the rumor already was that he was the best science teacher the school had ever had. Supposedly when he taught class, he explained things by comparing all the boring science stuff to funny, weird, and cool stuff like using Mr. T's haircut when explaining how a disease worked, turning the periodic table into a rap song, and using Harry Potter characters to explain our internal organs.

So long story short, what this girl was telling me right now didn't really add up.

“Mr. Kjelson does all of that? Are you sure?”

She gave me a look that could have melted gold. “You think I don't even know who my own teachers are? Yeah, of course I'm sure!”

“Oh, right, sorry. I just, it's just that that's not really matching up with what I've heard about the guy, that's all,” I said.

“Well, do you always believe everything you hear around here? Because if so, then I'm probably wasting my time,” she said, starting to get up again.

“No, wait,” I said. “I mean, I actually do have pretty good sources. But I suppose they have been wrong before.”

She looked at me and didn't say anything else. I looked back, getting the bad feeling that she was waiting for me to say more. But for whatever reason I didn't know what to do next, which was a first for me—like I said, I run a pretty tight business.

When I didn't say anything after a few more seconds, she rolled her eyes.

“So can you help me or not?” the dark-haired girl demanded.

I nodded and folded my hands in front of me. “You just want me to get Kjelson off your back? Yeah, I think we can work something out, provided he's as corrupt as you say he is.”

She started giggling, going from anger to laughter faster than I could have thought possible. She rocked back in her chair and slapped the desk with her open palm. “You. Are. So. Cute.”

My face burned even though I figured my brain might explode at any moment because I was so confused. I couldn't figure why she was laughing at me. Was it because I was trying to be professional? This is a respectable business, and I treat it like one; everybody knows that. What was it with this girl?

“I'm sorry, I'm sorry,” she said as she managed to stifle the last of her giggles.

“So, uh, can I get your name for my Books?” I asked, picking up my pen.

She snorted one final guffaw. “Trixie Von Parkway.”

Just to be clear, I didn't believe that for a second. But that was okay; I'd had plenty of kids give me false names over the years. I could get her real name if I really needed it. It's not difficult to get information when you've got guys like Tyrell Alishouse on your payroll. He's about the best spy that ever existed. He could probably find Jimmy Hoffa in under an hour if I put him on the case.

“Is that it, then? You'll just take care of it?” she asked.

“Yeah, well, um, there's also the matter of, uh, payment,” I said, coughing at the end of the sentence like I'd seen my dad do once while he negotiated the purchase of a new car. He talked them down to the sticker price, which he said was a steal. I'd never been so afraid to go over my payment terms before. I didn't like what this girl was doing to me; I had a reputation to uphold.