Top of the Class (7 page)

“Miss Rogers? Um, because she is? She’s basically the most unstable person at the school. I mean, she has amazing hair and an amazing yoga body, sure, but she also has amazing mood swings. While I haven’t had the pleasure of her company recently, I did have her last year, when she cried in the middle of class because someone gave away the ending to
Toy Story 2
. Also, last December, she dressed like an elf
every single day
. Oh, and how could I forget the time she asked everyone what their spirit animal was—and then imitated the sound that animal makes! No wonder she can’t find someone her own age, so she dates a teenager instead. I’m sorry. You’re great, but…” She drifted off and laughed softly to herself, wiping her eyes. “And incidentally, I’ve been in Jamaica with my sister since last Wednesday. I just got back.” She held out her unusually tan arm, which was covered in peeling, flaky skin. “See?”

“Antonia, I’m sorry that I ever suspected you. And for whatever I said or didn’t say. I know I can, um, yell sometimes when I get excited.”

Antonia smiled. “Eric, you’ve never yelled in your entire life. You’re very loving.”

“Well then, for all the rest of it. For ending things. I don’t know why I…”

But Antonia had already started to cry again. “It doesn’t matter.”

It doesn’t matter
,
whispered a woman’s voice in my head.

Well, it matters to me! I don’t trust cheese that comes from a box
, called another voice. A familiar voice that I somehow identified as my own, even though I technically had no idea what my real voice sounded like.

I flashed on a woman with dark hair to her shoulders, bangs, and freckles, with a beautiful face—not young anymore, but not old. A mother, aging gracefully.

You’re a food snot!
she said, laughing. She was waving a box of Kraft macaroni and cheese in my face, trying to shove the box in my mouth.
Eat it!
she laughed.
The big, bad cheese packet is going to get you!

I could hear myself collapsing into laughter, waving my hands maniacally in front of my face, trying to shoo her away.

Mom!
I was screaming.

Then the memory dissolved into nothing.

I heard Antonia calling Eric’s name, followed by a pounding at the door. People were trying to get in and Antonia was telling them to go away. But I couldn’t think of anything else except what Will had said. I would be awarded memories when I had accomplished something. But I hadn’t accomplished anything since I’d arrived. I’d chased after phantoms and run down dead ends. I’d even ended up locked in the girls’ bathroom.

I brushed past Antonia, threw open the lock and rushed down the hallway, wracking my brain for a solution. If it wasn’t Richard, and it wasn’t Antonia, who was it? I knew it had to be a member of the faculty, and the only other member of the faculty I knew about was…Miss Rogers.

Had Miss Rogers taken Eric’s keyboard and switched it with the one in the principal’s office? Was this her way of being romantic, of making Eric have to leave the school so the two of them could be together out in the open?

Didn’t she know that Eric would be headed to jail instead? That wasn’t very romantic at all. Unless Miss Rogers was like one of those lonely women from the Midwest who marries convicted felons over the Internet.

Just how unstable was she?

There was only one way to find out.

Chapter
10

Friday, 12:37 PM

I
flipped the light on in Miss Rogers’ office, then thought better of it and switched it off, lest anyone should walk by.

I turned on her computer and the monitor hummed to life. A yoga pose appeared as her desktop image. I did a file search for “Eric,” thinking maybe she’d typed up the steps of her bizarre plan in a Word document, but the only file that popped up was a smoldering picture of the Nordic actor who plays Eric on
True Blood
.

I pulled up Firefox, and, to my delight, her e-mail account was still open. I searched for my name and a series of e-mails between Miss Rogers and Principal Schecter popped up. Miss Rogers had written:

Subject: Re: Eric McCormack/Student Council

In my experience, Eric deals with faculty members quite well. He has always been thoughtful, courteous—generous, even—and I see no grounds to remove him.

Remove him? I scrolled down to see the e-mail that she was responding to.

Subject: Eric McCormack/Student Council

Hello, Davida. I hope you’re well. I am writing to suggest that Eric McCormack be removed as head of the Student Council. During an impromptu meeting last week, which I cordially agreed to last minute, he took a tone with me that was completely inappropriate. His behavior in the past weeks has been generally erratic and arguably belligerent. He should be dismissed for the improper way he deals with faculty members.

I remembered what Schecter had said: “Last week, when you came to my office to discuss budgeting minutiae, you yelled at me.” But Antonia had told me that I never yelled.

Lost in thought, I accidentally knocked a pile of folders on Miss Rogers’ desk to the floor with my elbow. I bent to collect the files and picked up the one labeled “Budget.”

I left the others on the ground and leafed through the budget folder. The pages were numbered one through thirty-four, but the fourth and fifth pages were missing.

Budget minutiae. Yelling. Missing pages. What was going on? Where are the missing pages?

I remembered that, the morning before, I’d noticed two sheets of paper floating in what was otherwise Eric’s highly organized backpack. Could those be the missing sheets? Why did I have the missing budget sheets? I rifled through my backpack and found the two papers—they were labeled four and five. Bingo.

I scanned the pages and noticed a circle in red pen around the total of a column of numbers, with a question mark next to it. The word “discrepancy” was scrawled in red letters, and another number was written next to the printed total, one that was thousands of dollars more than the printed total. I ran through the numbers again, noticing a pattern. This wasn’t accidental. Someone was skimming a consistent percentage of the funds from the budget.

It must have been what Eric had gone to Schecter to discuss. He had discovered that someone had been stealing from the school. But why would that make calm and collected Eric lose his temper with the principal?

Unless it was Schecter who was doing the stealing.

Could the principal have framed Eric to protect himself from an impending accusation? It would have been easy to perpetrate. It had been Schecter’s computer, after all, that got hacked. All the principal had to do was go into the system and change Eric’s grades, then pop over to Miss Salat’s classroom and switch his keyboard for one covered in Eric’s fingerprints.

There was a knock at the door. Richard stepped into the office. “Haven’t you violated Miss Rogers’ personal space enough this week?”

“I figured it out,” I said. “It was Principal Schecter who framed me. Cause I accused him of embezzling from the school.”

“Nice try,” Richard said, shaking his head. “But the break-in occurred at 8:13. Schecter was at the PTA meeting Wednesday night, from 7:30 to 9:30. It couldn’t have been him.”

I sighed with disappointment. But all the pieces fit!

“Wait a minute,” I said, remembering how I had given the police a true alibi—I was at home all night—without telling them what I had
actually
been doing. Couldn’t the principal have employed a similar technique to establish his alibi?

“I have an idea,” I said, dragging Richard down the hallway by the sleeve of his blazer. “Where is the AV room?”

Chapter
11

Friday, 1:12 PM

I
followed Richard down a hallway that was just slightly darker and slightly narrower than all of the others in the school.

“Why are we going to the AV room?” he asked, struggling to keep up.

“They keep a tape of all the PTA meetings. My mom wanted me to watch the tape from Wednesday of her giving her presentation about lunch.”

“And you’re choosing to do it
now
?”

“Yes,” I answered. “The threat of a jail sentence always makes me feel very daughterly.”

Richard stopped short. “Daughterly?”

Oops.

“I mean, son-ly. Freudian slip…My mom always wanted a daughter. It’s a heavy family conversation.”

Richard seemed to buy it. We kept moving until we reached a dark closet labeled “AV Room.”

I threw the door open and a girl with straight black hair that ended abruptly at her chin and huge bifocal lenses jumped from her seat and screamed. “What? What do you want?”

She was wearing corduroy pants and a paisley turtleneck, with a nametag that read “Audio/Visual Technician.”

“Hi, Bernice Wu,” Richard said.

“You promised you wouldn’t say Wu every time you said my name, Richard,” she whined softly.

“I had my fingers crossed while I was promising, Bernice Wu,” Richard said.

“I don’t really have time for you two to flirt right now,” I said, which made their cheeks turn the color of cranberry cocktail. “I need to see the tape from Wednesday night’s PTA meeting, Bernice.”

“Oh, God,” she huffed. “Why? No one ever wants to see those things. I toss them into this box in the back.”

Bernice stepped over cardboard boxes filled with old CDs and DVDs, almost knocking over a tripod and camcorder. “Darn it,” she said. “I was having such a good day. I was in the middle of my fifth
Hoarders
episode in a row. Will Augustine let them take her dining room table that’s been corroded by rat urine? I’ll never know, thanks to you.”

Bernice reached to the top of a shelf and pulled down a plastic bin overflowing with mini-DV tapes. “Here, Richard Gilati,” she said, shoving the box into his outstretched arms.

Together, Richard and I rifled through the box, covering the ground with mini cassettes like we were preparing to start a one-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle. “You have no system, Bernice Wu,” said Richard. “You’re system-less. Look at this place. You’re like a hoarder yourself. Why do you have all these tapes? You need to be loading everything onto media cards and dumping it onto external hard-drives. You could fit everything on two, maybe three one-terabyte drives and this whole closet could be empty except for you and your TV. You’re a silly woman, Bernice Wu.”

“I would, of course, dump onto externals if I had a
budget
,
Richard
!” Bernice fired back. “Do you know how much they give me to tape and catalogue every single noteworthy event that goes on in this place?
Pittance. Nada
. I’m using equipment from
2006
up in here. Let me just pull out the
stylus
from my
Palm Pilot
and make a note to buy a few more hard-drives and another media card for my frigging
standard definition camcorder
!”

“Can you both shut up?” I said. “You can have tech-argument-sex all you want after I leave, but I am going to be trapped in this body forever if I don’t figure this out and I’m not even a boy and I’m going to jail for something I didn’t do and Eric didn’t do either, so please, shut up!”

Richard and Bernice both shifted their gaze uncomfortably between one another and the floor. I knew I’d said things I shouldn’t have, things that made Eric seem both delusional and gender dysphoric, but that’s exactly how I was feeling in that particular moment.

I continued to root around the box of tapes in strained silence until I found a tape with Wednesday’s date, labeled “Linda McCormack Lunch Presentation.” Bernice popped the tape into her camcorder and pressed play.

Richard, Bernice, and I huddled around the monitor and watched as Linda took her place at the podium in the school’s auditorium. “Okay,” she said, clearing her throat. She was wearing a black skirt suit and looked like a friendly CEO. “I hope you like my suit. My son Eric told me I looked like I was on my way to a funeral, but I haven’t actually worn a suit in a long time and this is the only one I’ve got. So…dearly beloved, we are gathered here today—”

She stopped herself and smiled as the crowd erupted in laughter.

Wow. She reminds me of my mom
, I thought.

“I’m kidding,” Linda went on. “I want to talk about the lunch our kids eat every day. Obesity is a full-blown epidemic in this country, and it’s not surprising at all, given the content and the sizes of our meals.”

“The big bad cheese packet is going to get you!”
I heard my mother shouting, waving the box in front of my face.
“Mom! Come on, give me a break!”
I heard myself shouting back.

Linda went on, smiling good-naturedly. “Farm policy in this country has shaped our diet by making empty calories the cheapest and nutrient-rich calories the most expensive. Imagine if a hamburger were ten dollars and a salad was a buck fifty, instead of the other way around? I think we’d all be in much better shape.”

“Ugh, you kill me,”
I heard my mother say, smiling wide.
“Come here.”
I felt her pull me close and kiss my face over and over until there was a dent in my cheek. She smelled like musk.
“This is my musk. I have to try very hard to be sexy, nowadays
,
”
she’d say, laughing at herself as she dotted her neck with the tiny bottle.

I felt a tear running down my cheek. The memories flooded my brain and were overwhelming me.

“Abby,”
I heard my mother say. I saw her face, her kind green eyes, her lovely nose. I saw how much she loved me.
“My girl,”
she said.

That, I knew, was my reward—that tiny memory. The knowledge that someone out there loved me, that I was someone’s girl. That I belonged somewhere, with real people.