The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories (19 page)

Crouched in the school ventilator system, Ace Freewalter rocks and nods in time to the chant. He is considering his options. With the stuff he’s packing, he could blow every kid in the auditorium to smithereens, but you don’t get the Congressional Medal for nuking a batch of high school kids when your mission is to bring them in under guard with a white flag to seal the surrender. He could use a Smart Bomb to take out the leader and his girlfriend but like any good soldier Ace knows every group like this has its unsuspected secret agent and he’s pretty sure he knows who the city’s agent is. All he needs to do, then, is separate this green-haired girl in the ruggy-looking shift from the boyfriend and give her the grip. He needs to get with this woman agent and figure out the best way to liberate this place. He and the agent will exchange passwords and together they’ll figure out how to save the day and do it without harming the hair on a single kid.

Onstage with Johnny, cute, popular little Trinket is so caught up in the moment that she forgets who she used to be. The crowd roars and that stringy, unhappy, capable person whose dad died in the line of duty which is why she’s such a good cop fades away. She fingers the silver Scrunchy Johnny put on her wrist excitedly because she’s about to get everything she wants! In her life outside
HRH
, Betsy Gallaher went to her high school junior prom alone and her senior prom with a blind date who threw up on her feet, and no matter how smart a woman is, or how accomplished, no matter how smart
you
are, hurts incurred in high school never go away; they just go on hurting. Well, life’s unexpectedly turned around for her. Trinket is going to the Tinsel Prom at
HRH
with the hottest boy in the entire school. It’s soon! Overhead, the Decorations Committee thuds back and forth in a crepe paper and Mylar-fueled frenzy. Only one day left to get ready for the prom.

It is a long night, broken only by the mysterious architectural clanks and thuds characteristic of any building under siege. Unless something else is going on.
In the plaza outside
HRH
the mothers have merged into a solid, slow-moving wedge, pushing into the wall of Marine guards in front of the sealed front door. One has made it to the steps and is hammering angrily, in hopes that she’s front and center on the school’s surveillance cameras which have, incidentally, gone dead. She shouts in a voice big enough to crack stone, “Rafe Michaels, you come the hell out or I’m coming in.”

The mothers won’t know that this is like trying to storm a pyramid and if they did know it wouldn’t stop them; mothers—even very small ones—have been known to occupy entire cities through sheer force of will. In the ranks, some of you are preparing your speeches. Threats: “Come out or
else
.” Expressions of rage: “You’d talk to your
mother
like that?” Invitations to shame: “I’m glad Grandma Jo didn’t live to see this.” Some of you prepare to make promises—cars, trips to Cambodia, you name it—and some of you have come armed with the most powerful weapon of all. “I’ve got brownies, the kind with Heath Bar chunks,” or the simpler, more powerful, “I baked.”

Under orders to protect the perimeter at all costs, the Marines shift and try to close ranks but nobody gets in the way of women once they mobilize and nothing stops mothers on the move. They aren’t as strong as the troops and they’re relatively slow, but together they can move anything. They come down on the regiment with the force of an avalanche. In minutes the first of them are at the razor wire, watching mutely as some of their number move in with blowtorches, working until the wire at the base falls away from the walls, at least as far up as the tallest of them can reach.

Now it is morning. Everybody’s on edge because they were too excited to sleep much. That funny thing where time flies at the same time that it doesn’t move an inch. Kids have started wrangling out of sheer tension. Factions have formed and even more are forming.

It is axiomatic that every revolution spawns a counter-revolution, and Chunk Mackenzie didn’t give up after Johnny’s gang flattened him. If he can crack the captive teachers out, he will be a hero to the woman he loves. Looking for his true love, he found the pocket of holdouts in the principal’s office. Now he’s come back with his gang because he’s convinced his love is inside. Ms. Flan, I mean Beverly, is waiting for him with, like they say in the romance paperbacks he secretly reads, with open arms. His Beverly isn’t in the gym and she didn’t evacuate with the fifty who got away, so she’s gotta be in there. Listen, when Chunk breaks in and rescues her, she’ll forget about him being a dull normal and fall in love with him for true.

It’s either
ESP
or behind the door Beverly really is whispering, “Chunk, watch out!”

Then Principal Wardlaw sends Coach Dykstra out with an offer of amnesty. Armed with Marva Liu’s can of Mace, to keep himself from falling into enemy hands, he holds it up. Chunk leaps for it like a dolphin surfacing in a tank. He knows the handwriting! The principal told her what words to put, but the flowery writing is all Beverly Flan. He recognizes it from his last French paper.
Not quite C work, Charles but for you, this is
merveilleuse
.

He reads aloud:
Let us out and you’ll all walk free. Plus expense-paid shopping sprees at the Brookdale Mall for all.

“Go forth,” Chunk mutters, “and tell the people.” Climbing on a chair he yells, “Let them go and we walk free.” He repeats because nobody seems to care: Chunk, who turns out to be the real idealist. Again, louder. “Let them go and we walk free!”

But a girl named Patsy looked on his paper before he got on the chair and she picks up on the real issue. “Listen,” she shrieks, “It says let ’em go and it’s the mall for all!

Boy, does this bring them running! “The Mall for All.”

Pretty soon the halls of
HRH
(well, the classroom floors, at least) are rattling with colliding slogans. Alerted by the racket, Johnny’s people come down in waves, roaring:

“What the shit,” while Chunk’s buds from the wrestling team try to push them back, yelling,

“
WALK FREE, TURN OUR TEACHERS LOOSE
,”

intercut with the airheads who picked up on the mall part of the message only and are screaming, “The Mall for All.”

While in the library, the forgotten vestiges of the National Honor Society, the chess club and the choir sit among the comatose drinkers, singing so dolefully that you can’t hear them, “Let my people go.”

At the moment, the mall crowd is prevailing. For kids interned in this high-ticket institution packed with everything they thought they wanted, the call to the mall tugs with a powerful force. It isn’t
stuff
they’re interested in, the city baited this place with more stuff than they can use, clothes, computer games, cell phones, Rollerblades, you name it—it’s the chance to walk free—well not free exactly, but in the place where everybody, like, you know, hangs out?

Where they just might accidentally bump into whoever or whatever it is that will end the boredom and do the magic that changes their life.

See, this is the thing. Our lives don’t hang on what happens. Not back then,
not now. It doesn’t matter how many defeats we suffer or how bad it hurts, the thing that keeps us going is: what
might
happen. Here’s what’s important to us. It was important back then when we were in high school and it is important now.

Possibilities.

The skirmish outside Wardlaw’s office is short and ugly. It ends with Dolph, Fred, and the rest of Johnny’s gang on top, and. Wait. What they are on top of? Dolph is standing at the peak of the mound Chunk Mackenzie’s gasping body makes with eight guys bearing down on him—yes, Johnny led the charge, he shoulder-checked Chunk and tipped him. Then Dolph and the others pushed him down. Inside, perhaps aware that this cavalry charge led by her dumbest student was a product of true love, Ms. Flan pats her lavender satin bosom and sighs. “That boy who took the note? I think I
know
that boy.”

The clanking sound traveling up from the ground floor is nothing to worry about, it’s just a pale reflection of the anger and frustration driving Harry Klein. The exhaust tube turned out to be a dead end for him, the sides were too slippery to climb and he was driven back by the fumes. Back at ground level after hours of effort, he used the climber’s pick he boosted from his boss’s mountaineering pack to hack his way out of the tube. Frustrated at every turn, he bashed the hell out of the clogged incinerator chute because the more he needs to find Betsy, the more frustrations the building hands out. Avenue after avenue turned out to be closed to him: faculty elevator shafts imploded, freight elevator disabled for good and all. In the end Harry threaded the maze of generators on the ground floor, intent on locating the emergency staircase he knew had to be in place somewhere. Before he worked on the governor’s first campaign and was rewarded with a staff position, Harry was an architect, and he knows the state board would never approve a building that didn’t come up to code.

Working with only the light from a pencil flash, he walked the walls until he found the secret staircase: the emergency exit, which is his emergency entrance, had been Sheetrocked and painted over. In seconds, he pried off the Sheetrock and then, using safecracking tools that happen to be his own from high school, he opens it. The stairs! By his reckoning, to get to HS1X, he will have to go up almost a hundred flights. What remains of the night before the prom will spin out unbroken for Harry Klein. Gnawing on a Power Bar, Agent Betsy’s partner and, he hopes, upcoming life-partner, takes a deep breath and begins his climb.

All this coming and going
, Doc Glazer thinks crossly, removing the Sheetrock some fool just dropped on the skylight to his place. It might look like a Dumpster to you, but by God it is his home. All this coming and going has turned it into a hellhole.
When am I, a simple hermit, going to get any peace?
When Doc could no longer shave his age and get away with it, hard-hearted Irving Wardlaw let the old English teacher go. The fool hired Bruce Brill, but survival is triumph; witness Doc. As it turns out, younger does not always mean better. Young Brill’s stupidity started this whole riot thing, which serves Irv Wardlaw right.

And Doc is here to tell you that being let go doesn’t mean you have to let go. When Howard Glazer cleaned out his desk after the farewell party last year and took the faculty elevator down for the last time, he contrived to ride down alone, which means that somewhere en route Doc managed to stop the nonstop elevator and climb on top of one of his less important cartons to get himself and the things he cared about out of the ceiling hatch. He pried open the doors on a storage floor and put his stuff through the opening, one box at a time. It took him six weeks to work himself and his stuff down to One which was important because Doc spied for long enough to find out that kids came and went down here, and then he spied long enough to learn where the kids’ secret exit is located, because he likes to go out for an evening walk, although he’s so jealous of his spot on the ground floor that he never leaves the grounds. In the months since, he’s turned this Dumpster into a showplace, raiding the upper floors as needed for supplies.

Now there are so many people milling in the plaza outside that he can’t slip out for his constitutional. He misses the fresh air. Worse, the combination of the mothers’ thumping on the facade and the mayor’s amplified
SURRENDER
message is so loud that he can’t sleep and the mothers rock the building just enough so he can’t rest, either. Worst of all, the ground floor is full of rabble: that pesky custodian, who tramped around all week collecting things instead of setting the incinerator on autostoke, which means the chute is jammed and the whole place is beginning to smell.

Doc can’t be sure but he thinks there’s a mother loose in here somewhere, and now this.

Sighing, he does what any good scholar does when presented with a problem. As he’s alone here, he can’t call a committee meeting about it, so Howard Glazer does the next best thing. He pulls out the books he has on riots and begins. When in doubt, he always says, research.

In the woodworking shop, Jane Brill is damn glad she isn’t really in labor. She used the razor blade Agent Betsy gave her to slit the gallon water bottle by her chair so she could scare the crap out of Dolph and the rest of Johnny’s gang by screeching, “My water broke!” You bet it cleared the room. The seven of them streamed out the door with their funky hair on end, and it won’t matter what this Johnny says to them, no way are they coming back. For the first time, she’s alone in the shop. Working quickly, she uses Agent Betsy’s razor blade to free her other hand and with enormous difficulty, because she’s in the ninth month and rather close to the end, does the necessary contortions so she can saw through the duct tape securing her feet.

Where the hell is Bruce, now that she needs him? What was he thinking when he tried to turn this kid Johnny into a surrogate son? This seventeen-year-old is plenty smart, witness his diatribe when they broke into her house, she particularly admired his choice of the words “assaholic pedant,” and the imitation of Bruce in high mentor mode was dead on. Hell, he’s probably smart enough to run this place, which means the last thing Johnny Slater wants to do is sit down and learn a thousand new words for the SATs, a test about memory tricks and test-taking skills, not smarts. But that isn’t really what pissed him off. What pissed him off was Bruce running at him with the Titania wig and one of his gushy speeches about how in Shakespeare’s day, all the girl parts went to the smartest and best-looking young men. What probably toppled the kid was the smarmy smile Bruce gets whenever he talks about “the bard.” Jane knows kids have an astoundingly low threshold when it comes to sentimental crap.