Underdead (23 page)

I did a double take on one of the photos. It looked like Roger, only younger and with more hair, and it was. Sure enough, Roger had been listed as Bayshore’s faculty adviser for a four-year stint before he had passed it off to Bob. Roger had even won an award for training the kids, and for two years in a row, his students had won the big kahuna of the Olympiad, the Rube Goldberg experiment, where as far as I understood it, kids had to create an absurd machine that would get a ping-pong ball from one end of a room to the other in the most indirect way possible. If you can remember Dick Van Dyke’s breakfast making contraption in
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
, you’ve got the general idea. Kendra, thankfully, was taking on that one this year.

I admit I was relieved to see that Bayshore had never placed better than fifth in the paper airplane toss or the egg drop, the two semi-plum categories on my list. Low expectations were good.

I spent several more hours poking around the various sites, until a particularly vicious growl from my stomach reminded me how late it was. I grabbed my printouts to read at home over dinner. The sun had long since gone down. Prompted by an unnerving combination of Gavin’s dire warnings and my own heightened fear since my recent run-in with Will, I pulled out my car keys as I walked to the exit and listened and looked both ways before leaving the building. In a welcome piece of luck, I spied Fred out doing his rounds, and called out to him in greeting. He seemed happy to have a bit a company and offered to walk me to my car.

I slowed my pace to match his stiffer gait. “You shouldn’t stay so late,” he scolded, rubbing his knuckles against a grizzled cheek. “It’s not healthy.”

“I know. I had to get some stuff done.”

“You should take a lesson from the older teachers. You don’t see them here. They know better than to be here all the time. You get burned out easy, doing this job.” His watery blue eyes searched mine to make sure the warning had sunk in, and I assured him I didn’t plan to make a habit of it. Especially as I had several hours of grading and prep work waiting for me at home.

As I got in my car, Fred ambled back over to the guard box to open the gate for me. When I pulled up to the gate, he held up a hand for me to stop.

“That lady ever find you tonight?” he asked. “I have a note here from Carter that a Mrs. Beckworth was here to see you.”

I froze. That was the name Natasha had used on parent night. “Um, no.”

“She a blonde lady? Stylish?”

Stylish
was a reasonable Fred substitute for
young, hot, and scantily clad
. I nodded.

“She came by last night, too, oh, ‘round eight o’clock. Said she hated to make an appointment, as her schedule was unpredictable and she would like as not have to cancel last minute-like. Said she’d keep trying, and would catch you one of these nights. Oh well, serves her right for not making an appointment. Now you go straight home, have something to eat, and get an early night, you hear? Yer looking a little peaked.”

Peaked was not the word for how I felt. “Thanks, Fred, I will.”

As I drove home, curiosity slowly encroached upon the fear that had frozen my brain. Why had Natasha been looking for me? It was one thing for her to have harassed me when I practically fell into her lap at the amusement park, but another for her to
come looking
for me. Hadn’t Will told her to leave me alone at work?

Had I misunderstood? Perhaps even deliberately, preferring to believe Will had a chivalrous streak when it came to me? No, I didn’t think I
had
misunderstood, and that left me with one of two disturbing conclusions—either Will had changed his mind and it was now open season on turning me, in which case I should expect more vampires coming my way, or Natasha had decided to follow through with her threat of getting rid of me the old-fashioned way.

“Miss Gartner, may we have a party in your classroom?”

It was lunchtime. Becky was sitting across from me out of the girls’ view and rolled her eyes in a way that said as clearly as if she had spoken out loud,
Middle schoolers and their cupcake parties!

I finished my mouthful of the cafeteria offering for Cheeseburger Wednesday and politely took a sip of my drink, pretending I was considering their request.

“No.”

“Please?” they begged in unison.

“I’m sorry, girls, but it’s out of the question. We can’t spend class time having parties.”

Becky blew her drink back through her straw with what sounded suspiciously like a snort.

The girls weren’t giving up that easily. “It doesn’t have to be during class.”

This gave me pause. The whole point of a party at school was to get out of doing schoolwork.

“We can do it after school. Whenever’s convenient for you.”

I thought I caught a slight inflection on the word
you
. “What’s the party for?”

They exchanged glances. “It’s a surprise.”

“You’re going to have to give me more than that. I can’t just blindly authorize an activity in my classroom.”

“Why don’t you tell me,” Becky offered unexpectedly in a sweet voice.

I gave her a narrow look. She seemed to be enjoying this a little too much.

The girls hesitated, but ultimately decided it was easier to confide in her.

Becky’s eyebrows shot up and she flicked a glance at me. “That’s very sweet of you girls, but it’s not true.” She spoke sternly, without a trace of softness to mitigate the impact. “None of it. Someone made it up. You girls should know better than to listen to gossip, or to repeat it.”

Both girls turned red with embarrassment. They were young and innocent enough for her censure to weigh heavily on them. As they turned to leave, the quieter one mustered up the courage to say softly to me, “Mr. Bob seemed pretty nice. I’m sorry for your loss.”

I watched her go with open mouth.

“Oh my God,” I said.

Becky was trying her damnedest not to laugh but lost the battle once the girls had gone round a corner. She burst out laughing, wheezing for air. When she could breathe again, she wiped a tear from her eye and said, “You might have to switch schools,” before losing it again.

Alan and Kendra put their trays down on the table and joined us.

“What’s so funny?” asked Alan.

Becky pulled herself together with an effort and told them an abridged version of the story.

“You poor thing,” Alan said, chuckling.

“The whole thing’s ridiculous,” Kendra said.

“Of course it is,” Alan said, “but some rumors are just too juicy to be squelched. No offense, Jo.”

“None taken,” I replied truthfully. It was so obvious that no one at the table thought the rumor the least bit credible that I just couldn’t get worked up about it anymore. And really, it
was
funny.

I took up my cheeseburger again and regarded it unenthusiastically. It had gone from tolerably lukewarm to stone-cold, and the yellow square of cheese, never a high point for me even before I’d gone All Meat All the Time, had turned to rubber.

Becky examined my lunch disapprovingly over a forkful of salad. “What is it with you and hamburgers these days? Are you sure you’re not pregnant without your knowledge? You’d better find out—you’re going to need to eat a more balanced diet if you want your secret love child to come out healthy.”

“Oh, shut up, Becky. You’re just jealous because Bob secretly loved me more than he secretly loved you,” I said, scraping off the offending cheese and taking a bite of my now naked burger.

“
You’re
just jealous because he secretly, secretly loved me,” she retorted.

“That doesn’t even make sense,” I said.

“Shut up, both of you,” Kendra said.

“What she said,” Alan said. “I’m trying to eat here. You know biology makes me nauseous.”

“Is that why you went into physics? I always thought it was because you were too geeky for any of the other sciences,” Becky said.

“That’s interesting,” he said. “I always thought
you
were too geeky for a secret, secret love affair.”

“Man, don’t you guys ever shut up?” Kendra slammed her plate onto her tray and went to sit a few tables away with Roger.

Becky and I looked chagrined.

“What’s with her?” Alan asked, folding a fry into his mouth.

I rolled my eyes in disgust. At least
we
had the good grace to feel remorse after joking tastelessly about Bob in front of his best friend at Bayshore. “Men!” I said.

“Yeah,” Becky said. “Can’t live with them, can’t have a secret love child without them.”

I pushed my tray away, put my head down on my arms, and laughed so hard I wet my shirt sleeves.

The first Science Olympiad meeting was a little crazy. We had forty kids packed into my classroom and a good half dozen more who told me they were interested but couldn’t attend the first meeting. Kendra did a double take when she came in.

“What the hell?” She dropped a short stack of handouts on my desk and unslung a heavy bag full of notes and handouts from her shoulder. “Do these kids know they’re here for the
Science
Olympiad?” She eyed a rather chatty group of girls whose uniform skirts, rolled at the waist to make them into minis so short their trendy boxer shorts peeked out from underneath, identified them as popular. Kendra rolled her eyes and turned to address the group.

They quieted down for her depressingly fast, and for a moment I reconsidered my decision not to use my vampire-esque powers on the kids. I chastised myself for my own weakness in trying to find the easy way out, and forced myself to pay attention.

Kendra spent the next several minutes explaining the activities in this year’s Olympiad and then invited the kids to sign up for as many events as interested them, cautioning that we would hold some sort of competition later on to determine who would go on to represent Bayshore in the county event. To keep them entertained while the sign-up sheet was being passed around, she organized an impromptu paper airplane flying contest. I helped out several of the kids with some of the tips I picked up in my web research, and we had a pretty good time.

After the meeting was over, Kendra rushed off to coach soccer practice and I sat down with Chucky Farryll, who had stayed after for his private tutoring. Having had Kendra there was a cruel reminder that he wasn’t allowed to play on the varsity team and he was even more antsy and unfocused than usual. After a futile half-hour trying to drill some science into his head, I let him go.

I could have left after that, but my room was a mess, even for me. The Olympiad kids had tidied a little before they left, but that wasn’t saying a lot. There were still dozens of unclaimed paper airplanes littering the room (some of them, admittedly, my own) and I sorely needed to reorganize the mineral trays lest my first period think quartz was a boxy, silver-colored mineral and pyrite was a six-sided hunk of hard brown dullness. By the time I finished organizing everything, it was well after six again. I really needed to stop these twelve-hour days, not so much because I still had to prep for tomorrow’s classes and thin the ever-growing stack of papers to grade, but because the idea of being on campus at night with Natasha out there looking for me gave me the shakes.

After a quick peek outside, I left the second floor of the science building and headed downstairs, car keys at the ready, knees bent for immediate flight. After I passed Maxine plugging away in her office and ran into Roger in the mailroom, I made myself stop edging around corners as if I expected the boogie man to grab me and headed out into the parking lot.

As I reached my car, I heard a single soft
click
somewhere behind me. I turned around. The parking lot was empty, except for me. I chided myself for jumping at every last noise, but as I bent to fit my key to the lock, my hands were shaking so much I dropped the keys. They ricocheted off my heavy canvas book bag and landed somewhere under my car. Typical. With a heartfelt curse, I stretched out on the ground and fished them out from behind the wheel.

As I clambered back to my feet, I heard a gunshot and something whistled by me and slammed into the car door. I yelped and dropped to the ground, banging my chin painfully on the asphalt.

I lay there waiting for the next shot, my hands laced uselessly over my head like they teach you in an earthquake drill. Seconds, maybe minutes, ticked by in absolute silence. I had almost convinced myself the shooter had gone when I heard someone moving at the other end of the parking lot, by the doors to the administration wing.

The footsteps echoed eerily in the half empty lot and then stopped, as if someone was listening, searching. They headed in my direction. I rolled under the SUV parked next to me and forgot to breathe.

The footsteps stopped short as someone came running from the gym. “Hey,” they called, “is everyone okay over there?”
Kendra.

A voice replied from where I’d last heard the footsteps. “I don’t know. Did you see anything?”
Maxine.
It was just Maxine and Kendra
. Relief flooded me. The shooter was long gone and rescue had arrived.

Kendra slowed to a walk as she joined Maxine by the administration building. “I was just putting the soccer balls away when I heard the noise. It sounded like a gunshot. I thought maybe it was just someone’s car backfiring, but then I thought I heard someone scream, and I ran over in case someone needed help.” She took a few steps out into the parking lot. “Is anyone here?”

“Don’t!” Maxine said. “Wait here with me. I called 9-1-1, they should be here any second.”

“But what if someone’s hurt?”

“Someone has a gun. It’s not safe.”

The sound of sirens prevented me from hearing Kendra’s reply. A police car, followed by an ambulance and a second police car, pulled into the parking lot at high speed. The officers got out of their cars and crouched behind the open doors. One of them called for anyone in the parking lot to show themselves immediately.

I stayed where I was. If I suddenly popped out from under the SUV, I was afraid they might take a shot at me, and I wasn’t counting on two misses in the same evening. Besides, it seemed I was stuck.