Why They Run the Way They Do (2 page)

“Dr. Dunn,” Louise said thoughtfully, tapping her Blow Pop on her top teeth. “Dr. Dickdunn. Dr. Dunn Dick Dunderhead.”

“Remember last year,” I said, “when he yelled at Melanie Moon when she dropped her Rube Goldberg project in the hallway and spilled all that corn oil?”

She scoffed. “He's such an asshole. We could get him in big trouble, you know. We could turn him in to the school board.”

“Would he get fired?”

“Sure he would. Plus his wife would divorce him and his kids would hate him and he'd lose all his friends. And everywhere he went people would make sucking sounds.”

She slurped obscenely on her Blow Pop and I laughed. On the wall behind her was a torn poster that said “What if they had a war and nobody came?” which I had never understood because if “they” had a war then at the very least “they” would be there, so it wasn't really accurate to say that
nobody
came.

“Hey,” Louise said. “What about blackmail?”

I frowned. “What about it?”

“We could do blackmail on him. Say we'll turn him in unless he pays up.”

“Pays
money
?”

“No, Anne—gum. Of course money. Jeez.” She tossed her Blow Pop stick in a nearby ashtray.

“How much you think we could ask for?” I said.

“We should start small,” she said, her eyes narrowing. “That's how you do it. You get 'em on the hook. You make 'em think it's just one time. Then you start to squeeze a little more, and a little more, and—”

I shook my head. “You're making this up. You don't know bullshit.”

“What's to know?” she asked. “It's easy money.”

It was hard to look at Ms. McDaniel on Monday. Sitting at our art table—once a victim of the school cafeteria, now dying a slow death of scissor scars and clotted paste—Louise and I smirked at each other and in the general direction of the supply closet, but neither of us managed to look up to the front of the room for several minutes. We entirely missed the instructions for the day's project, so when everyone started climbing out of the table and filing out the door, we had no idea why and had to ask around. Turned out we were supposed to go outside and search for nature; this week's project was a spring collage.

Ms. McDaniel oversaw our progress from the front steps of the school, and I found my eyes passing over her again and again. I wondered exactly what it was that Dr. Dunn saw in her that led him down the sinful path to the art room. She was new this year and it showed; she always seemed apprehensive when she talked to us as a group, as if at any moment we might all stand up and start squirting glue at her. She loosened up once we started working, when she could meander around the room murmuring words of encouragement and gentle direction. She wore short skirts and had bobbed hair just under her ears, like she was a tomboy before she became a teacher. She didn't have much in the way of boobs, hardly more than Louise and me, and we weren't even wearing bras yet.

Louise nudged me. “Check that out,” she said. I followed her gaze to the window of the principal's office, which faced the front lawn. Dr. Dunn was standing at the window with his arms crossed over his chest, looking out at us. We could only see him from the waist up, and for a moment I imagined he didn't have any pants on, that his penis was dangling just out of view. I shook the thought from my head.

“He's gross,” Louise said. “He's practically licking his lips.”

“Why do you think he likes her?”

“They always like young ones,” Louise said. “Donna said she could pick any man out of a crowd and he'd have sex with her, whether he was married or a hundred years old.”

“Not any man,” I said, thinking of my father standing among the men in Donna's crowd, my father with his shaggy hair and laugh lines around his mouth. Then I imagined my brothers grown up, tall and bearded but making armpit farts in a frantic attempt to draw Donna's attention.

Louise shrugged. “Check this out,” she said, handing me a piece of notebook paper. In wavy, capital letters was written:

Dear Dr. Dunn,

It has come to our attention that you are having sexual relations with the art teacher Laurie McDaniel. Do not ask how we have the information, we just do. Unless you want everyone to find out your secret, put twenty dollars in an envelope and leave it behind the toilet in the middle stall in the second floor girls bathroom. Do this tomorrow (Tuesday) or face the consequences.

—x and y

“Am I X or Y?” I asked, handing the letter back.

“You're Y,” Louise said.

“How come?”

“Because I'm X.”

“Y is stupid,” I said. “Nobody ever heard of Y. How come we can't both be X?”

“Two X's,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Uh-huh. That would look really cool, Anne, really professional.”

“No, just one X,” I said. “For both of us. Just because we're two people we don't have to be two letters.”

“Girls!” Ms. McDaniel shouted. She was standing at the front door waving us in. Her hair was fluttering in the breeze and I recalled how it had moved in waves under Dr. Dunn's thick fingers.

On our way to math after lunch, two more floppy salmon swept along in the river of students, I shrewdly allowed Louise's letter to fall from my fingers and onto the floor outside the main office. The letter was folded and taped closed and said “DR DUNN” in big block letters we tore from the library copy of
Ranger Rick,
so we assumed the secretary would discover it and simply pass it along to him. I sat in math class imagining him at his giant desk, unfolding the letter, staring at it for a moment, then slowly folding it again. Perhaps after school he'd go down to the art room, wave it in Ms. McDaniel's face.

“They've got us right where they want us,”

he'd say, or:

“The jig's up.”

Maybe she would kiss him, poke her tongue between his lips.

“Darling
,” she would whisper against his teeth.
“What will we do?”

“We'll think of something . . .”

He'd fit his hands over her small breasts, rub them with his thumbs.

“Anne?”

I looked up at Mrs. Payne. She was standing at the blackboard in her hideous orange and white flowered dress, her stomach and breasts an indistinguishable flowery lump. Her grotesque bottom lip trembled slightly, and her words came layered in saliva: “Problem four?”

I didn't know anything about problem four. That was problem one. Problem two was that thinking about Dr. Dunn and Ms. McDaniel together had made me feel like I had a bubble expanding in my stomach, emptying me of everything but its own strained vulnerability, filling me up with the most palpable absence I'd ever known. My face was numb below my cheekbones and I felt sad and happy at the same time.

“Problem four,” Mrs. Payne croaked.

A word about Mrs. Payne. My mother (and countless others) had complained to Dr. Dunn about her on several occasions, for Mrs. Payne was prone to catastrophic mood swings of blinding speed. One minute she'd be the sweetest old lady you'd ever known, a cuddle and a peppermint at the ready, and the next she'd turn on you like a viper, call you lazy, stupid, hopeless, slobber insults on you until you cried or (in the now famous case of Chris Brewster) wet your pants. Other times she'd seem positively adrift; at least once in a day she began a sentence with “When Mr. Payne was alive . . .” and then would launch into a story that might or might not have anything to do with the subject at hand or even with Mr. Payne himself. For instance, we'd be talking about fractions and suddenly Mrs. Payne would say, “When Mr. Payne was alive, you could buy a sporty car for five-hundred dollars. I had such a car myself that I drove all the way from Moline, Illinois, to Boise, Idaho, to visit my dear cousin Edith who was so distraught over a man that the only word she'd spoken for a year was ‘pecan.' ”

She'd pause. To remember? To consider? Why “pecan”? And then she'd move on as if no interruption had occurred.

“Fourteen,” Louise whispered from behind me. In addition to her numerous other afflictions, Mrs. Payne was also half-deaf, so it was pretty easy to cheat on her.

“Fourteen,” I said. My lips were dry and I licked them.

“Fourteen,” Mrs. Payne said, as if mulling over the existence of the number itself. “Fourteen. Four-tee-een. Fourteen is correct.”

“Space case,” Louise said as we gathered our books at the end of class. “Thinking about how to spend the money?”

“Yeah,” I said.

The payoff came as two ten-dollar bills, as perfectly crisp as the ones my grandmother always sent for my birthday. Louise and I hit the bathroom between second and third periods the next morning, when it was packed with primping sixth graders, so that if Dr. Dunn was casing the joint he wouldn't be able to tell who'd actually made the pickup. It was me who went into the middle stall, me who with trembling fingers opened the envelope, certain it would contain a note that said “Anne Foster you are expelled from school for the rest of your life.” But no—there were the two stiff tens, Alexander Hamilton with his sly grin—and I slid the envelope into my backpack and remembered to flush the toilet for cover, even though I hadn't used it, and when I emerged from the stall I gave Louise the sign, which was to brush the side of my nose with my index finger. We had seen this in
The Sting.

“What're you gonna get?” Louise asked. “Think your mom'll take us to the mall this weekend?”

We were in the Hanleys' basement again and I felt like I'd swallowed the twenty dollars—in pennies. My stomach seemed to be sagging to my thighs.

“What's wrong?” Louise asked.

“We're gonna get caught,” I said. “We're gonna get caught and my parents are going to kill me.”

She rolled her eyes. “They're not going to kill you. What's the worst thing they could do to you, legally?”

“They could be very disappointed,” I said. In my mind I could clearly see my parents' Very Disappointed faces, the unique mixture of grief and ire and guilt and pity I was fairly sure the two of them had begun assembling the moment they'd met, so profound and effective it was.

“Tough life,” Louise said. “World's smallest violin, Anne.”

I had known for years that Louise envied what she perceived as my perfect life and family. What she didn't know was that sometimes—like today—I envied hers. Whenever I did something I knew was wrong I wished my parents would die in a tragic car accident ASAP, before the truth of my flawed character could be revealed. It was an extreme solution, but the only one I could conceive of. Lucky Louise . . . the news of her own flawed character would cause little disruption in the Hanley house. Her mother probably wouldn't even look up from the paper.

“We could get two records each,” Louise said. “Or we could save it to spend at Six Flags this summer.”