The Lottery (25 page)

“Dayna Mascarenhas is good at that kind of thing,” said Judy.

“So is Bill Artem,” added Rolf.

“You know who else is good at it?” Linda spoke so casually, Sal almost missed the stalking quality in her voice. “Our old friend Diane Kruisselbrink is a maniac for calligraphy. She does most of the lettering for the Posters Committee.”

“She’s already been targeted once,” said Judy, frowning slightly.

“But picture it,” Linda grinned. “Diane Kruisselbrink
on a stepladder in the auditorium, sweating over the lettering for ecstasy.”

A breathy laugh ran around the group.

“We’ve got to get it on film,” muttered Marvin.

“It’d mean getting her in at night,” mused Willis. “You think she’s worth the risk?”

“She’s got no friends,” said Linda. “Who’s she going to tell?”

“Those are the kids you’ve got to watch the most,” said Willis. “The ones with nothing to lose.”

“Vote,” snapped Linda. “Everyone in favor of Diane Kruisselbrink, raise your hand.”

Seven hands rose into the air, Willis and Judy abstaining.

“Carried,” said Linda. “Rolf, write up the duty.”

“I won’t deliver it.” The words left Sal’s mouth before she knew she was thinking them. Sailing across the room, they smacked Linda Paboni right on the kisser. As Shadow’s vice president turned toward her, a look of utter astonishment on her face, Sal’s stomach went off like a field mine. “Not Diane Kruisselbrink,” she stammered, bent double and rocking around her gut. “Please don’t pick on Diane Kruisselbrink.”

“You do as you’re told,” snarled Linda, leaning forward in her chair.

“Not Diane Kruisselbrink.” Sal’s mind had blanked, it was all she could think to say. “Just not Diane Kruisselbrink,” she repeated desperately.

“Why not Diane?” asked Rolf, chewing his pen. The room was suddenly so intent, Sal could feel the bricks listening in the walls.

“Because she’s a walking wound,” she mumbled. “That’s
what you want to turn everyone into, isn’t it? Well she’s already there, so go after someone else.”

“You know how many demerits you’ve just earned, victim?” Linda asked. “Looks like you’ve landed the duty of repainting the school motto.”

Hunched on the footstool, Sal dug her fist into the acid scream of her stomach. For a long moment, no one moved. Then Willis cleared his throat.

“This was supposed to be a short meeting — pick up posters, in and out. Our next full-member session is next Monday at noon. We’ll discuss this then. Everyone dismissed.”

“I think Exec and the victim should hang around,” Linda demurred.

“Can’t,” said Willis. “I’m already late for a Student Council Exec meeting. Everyone’s officially dismissed, including the victim. Now.”

Riding the emphasis of his last word, Sal clutched her stomach and bolted for the door.

For once she was early, in her place and warming up before most of the Concert Band members arrived for Tuesday morning practice. It hadn’t been intentional — one of her mother’s pointed comments delivered through the bedroom door had set Sal off pell-mell to beat her parent out the kitchen door, and the rush had carried her, pedaling furiously, all the way to school. Now, seated alone in the music room’s first row of chairs, she felt odd, as if she’d stepped into another, unfamiliar part of her brain where everything was reversed. One by one, students rushed through the doorway with their instruments, and she watched them as they must have watched her so many times. It was like looking in a mirror — she could predict
their every movement as they dumped their coats and books in the heap by the door and turned to scan the room, looking for someone to connect with. Then their gaze met hers, and she could almost hear the door slamming in their brain as their eyes went blank, turning inward or away. When Willis entered, he glanced immediately toward her seat, even though he must have expected to find it empty, and something leapt between them — wordless, full of fear. His face blanked and he mounted the risers to the back row, taking his place as lead trumpeter.

Brydan’s eyes also fixed immediately on her, and a flush began crawling up his neck. They’d met again yesterday, followed the after-school crowd to the nearest 7-Eleven and defiantly slurped their Slurpees just outside the store door. No one entering or exiting had spoken to them. As the crowd of students that usually packed the parking lot had drifted away, Sal’s Slurpee had settled into a cold defeated mound in her stomach. “Want to come play video games at my place?” Brydan had asked, but she’d made excuses, wanting only to crawl into bed, curl around the nuclear fusion of her stomach, and sink into an intense sleep drool. Now, as Brydan wheeled through the music room doorway toward her, she felt the pain in her gut flare briefly before settling into its regular slow burn.

Fetching his clarinet from the wall cabinet, Brydan backed into place with quick precise movements and began setting up. “So, how’s the Javex?”

“How’s the Drano?” she countered.

“Pardon?” asked the oboist to Brydan’s right, turning toward him.

“I was talking to Sal.” Keeping his head down, Brydan slid his clarinet joints together with unusual concentration.

“You were?” The oboist’s eyes slid quickly toward Sal, then back to Brydan. Shifting in her seat, she carefully angled herself toward the flutist on her other side. Brydan’s face flickered with astonishment, then narrowed into thought.

“I guess I was that tight-assed last week, wasn’t I?” he said ruefully, glancing at Sal.

“Time passes,” Sal shrugged. “Things change.”

“Hey,” said Brydan. “Ape became man. That was one self-improvement course.”

As soon as Pavvie released them, Sal ducked out of the music room, knowing from experience that she needed to get to her locker as soon as possible in case there were deliveries to make. As she’d expected, someone from Shadow Council stepped out to meet her, three fingers raised, extending a handful of envelopes. No words were exchanged. She accepted the envelopes, scanned the paper-clipped names, and headed off to the indicated homerooms. The deliveries progressed with the usual minor setbacks — she had to use the Sign of the Inside twice — but the procedure was complicated by the presence of Willis’s notebook burning a hole in her back pocket and pushing her thoughts to a feverish pitch. She hadn’t told Brydan of her plans for this morning, not wanting to face him with failure if she lost the courage to carry them out. Now she wove her way through the crowded halls, plucking her thoughts like daisy petals as she debated the enormous choice looming over her.

Should I, or shouldn’t I? Will Willis love me, or will he hate me forever? When Shadow finds out, will they kill me, or will they kill me? If I deliver every one of these goddam envelopes first, will they go easier on me for good behavior?

It was an idiot’s bargain, but her brain was a collection of bare wires, white hot and fused into hyper-drive. All she knew was that she had to do this or something inside her, some fine rare specimen of hope, would go extinct. This was the DNA of choices, the decision that could bring her back to her truest self. At the same time it was the act of a lunatic, and the envelopes she’d been given to deliver were the only barrier standing between herself and all hell breaking loose. Each one passed from her hand like a farewell to sanity. Handing the final envelope to a Megadeth fan in classroom N8, she stood in the buzzing corridor, her brain stripped to one last daisy-petal thought.

Everyone should commit acts of random intelligence.

Her watch stood at 8:53, leaving her seven minutes before the bell. Sliding Willis’s notebook from her pocket, Sal scanned the busy hallway ahead of her and swallowed a surge of bile. Never had her body felt so heavy, a dead weight. Slowly, she tore the first page from the notebook.

“Message from Shadow,” she said, pressing it into the hand of a nearby student.

“What?” asked the girl, glancing at her.

“Read it,” said Sal, moving on down the hall. Tearing out another page, she tapped a guy on the shoulder. She felt trapped deep underwater, her words slurred like a depth sounding. “Message from Shadow,” she repeated and handed him the page. Noticing a teacher, she ducked her head and hurried on, then tore out another page and pushed it into the hand of the next student. On and on she went — the notebook was full of coded phrases, most of them never used, but relevant nonetheless. “Message from Shadow, message from Shadow,” she kept repeating,
handing out page after page until the notebook had been reduced to its front and back covers.

“What is this?” a guy demanded, turning and coming after her with a page in his hand.

“It’s the way Shadow thinks and talks about you.” She could barely get the sentence out, the words jumbled and oversized in her mouth. What was the matter with her? Why couldn’t she speak like a normal human being?

“Get real,” he said. “Really?”

“Really.”

“No kidding.” He wandered back to his friends, his lips moving as he scrutinized the list of codes. Watching him, Sal wondered if the wall was finally starting to crack, if the words he was reading would do anything except destroy what was left of her life.

The rest of the day progressed as usual. No one spoke to her, though she kept getting glances — eyes full of questions that darted away, too frightened to stick around for the answers. Twice that afternoon, she glanced up to see someone from Shadow Council headed grimly toward her, but she ducked each encounter, skipping her locker after school and taking off on her bike without waiting for Brydan.

The streets flew by, a blurred electric field. She kept expecting to see Shadow Council step out from behind hydro poles or rise out of the ground. How had she managed to escape their clutches for an entire day? But maybe it wasn’t all that surprising. Even Shadow needed time to organize after something unexpected — they weren’t supernatural, and they wouldn’t have seen this coming. Except for her refusal to deliver Diane Kruisselbrink’s second duty, she’d been docile and cooperative, handing herself to them like a lamb going to the slaughter.

The house was empty, her pillow waiting. Sal crawled in among crumpled packages of Doritos and Oreos and shattered into tears as the familiar smells of laundry soap and sleep rose to engulf her.

Sometime later she woke, ascending sharply into a chorus of phones. Stumbling downstairs and through the darkened house, she glanced out a window into more darkness. What day was it? Tuesday, Tuesday evening. No one home again, just her and her lonesomeness. Dusty was probably studying at the U — well, hopefully — and her mother working late at the office. No, Sal thought angrily. Her mother was an alien, zooming in from another planet to check on her offspring only when the guilt became intolerable. If things went according to schedule, that guilt would start hitting Ms. Hanson in approximately one hour. The clock on the kitchen stove stood at 7:23. It had been ten and a half hours, Sal realized with surprise, since Willis’s notebook had been distributed to the masses.

Again the phones rang, yanking her out of her thoughts. Picking up the livingroom maple leaf, Sal mumbled, “Hello?”

“You bitch!” screamed a voice at the other end. “You did this to him. If he dies, it’ll be your fault.”

“Who is this?” Bewildered, Sal sank onto the couch.

“Kimmie Busatto. Don’t you remember your old friends now you’ve turned so evil?”

“Of course I remember you.” Sal struggled with the inside of her head, still dense with sleep. “Why are you talking to me?”

“You know why.” The phone spat static. “How many envelopes have you delivered in the past two days? How could you do this to my brother? You know how upset he gets.”

“Chris? But that was last week,” Sal faltered. “He refused his duty and I had to do it for him.”

“Not the past two days,” Kimmie yelled. “Kids have been kicking and shoving him, ransacking his locker. Today a couple of guys picked him up and turned him upside down into a garbage pail in the cafeteria. He left school after lunch, came home and cut his arms. Wrist to elbow, Sal — the way you do it if you really want to die.”

The living room dissolved into a vast roar. “No,” Sal whimpered, lost in the whirlpool. “No.”

“He’s in the hospital now.” Kimmie was no longer yelling, but the words still came at Sal like bricks. “The psych ward, and you did it to him. This is your fault, Sal Hanson. I thought after this year maybe we could be friends again, but not after this. No one’ll want to be your friend after I tell them what you did to my brother.”

“But I didn’t know,” Sal wailed desperately into the phone. “I didn’t know those envelopes were about Chris. All I do is deliver them, Kimmie. That’s all I do.”

The only sound that came back to her was the dial tone.

The stairwell raced by, a panicky blur. Flicking on the overhead light, Sal headed straight for the stereo. After Kimmie’s phone call, the headphones wouldn’t be enough; she needed Dusty’s floor-to-ceiling speakers reverberating from every corner of the room. Quickly she flipped through the stack of CDs on the shelf. Where was it, where was it? Here, at the bottom, it’d been a while since she’d listened to The Wall Live. Skip the first track, pump it up, pump it up. Yes, there was her favorite guitar line,
blasting from the speakers, vibrating the carpet so each orange fiber stood on end. This was what she needed, this great booming force field convulsing her body into mad savage shapes — something huge, like a god, blasting her to smithereens. Yeah, when she was in the middle of this sonic boom, this fusion of sound and mind, nothing could touch her, nothing was real. Problems shattered the way a brick wall collapses — you just had to put your mind to it, and all the walls came down.

A blurred form brushed past her. Shutting off the stereo, Dusty turned toward her and shouted, “What, are you crazy? Now we’re supposed to take you in for bionic eardrum replacements?”

“You like loud music,” Sal yelled back, floating on the supersonic ringing in her ears. “Why can’t I?”

“I like music,” said Dusty. “That was like listening to the air show.”

“I was just getting something out of my system.” Sal fidgeted, frightened at the quiet in the room, the stillness of her own body. She had to keep moving, keep moving, or it would catch up with her and blow her wide open again. “Dusty!” she cried, faking a glittery smile. “I’ve got a good idea. Take me driving. I haven’t had a lesson in weeks.”