Stones and Spark Page 4

  Not home. Not when she's fighting with Jayne. And not Rusty if she has to bike twenty miles.

  So why didn't she come to dinner? I start to wonder if my dad has a good point. If Drew wanted to make Jayne sweat--really twist the knife--she could pretend to run away. Again. And she didn't tell me about her plan because I'm part of it. My search for Drew is supposed to scare Jayne. And Drew won't call my house because of my mom.

  I throw back the covers.

  The Physics lab. Drew stayed after school most days, working on projects and tutoring numbskulls. What if she wheeled her bike into the lab? Hiding out late during the dance until Jayne got so distressed she lost her drunken mind.

  The cold floor stings my raw toes. I suck air through my teeth, slipping out of my pajamas and back into my sweats. When I pick up my shoes, tiptoeing down the servant's stairwell, I can hear the wind whistling over every stair that squeaks.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Thirty minutes before midnight, my neighborhood looks like somebody pulled a plug and drained all the color. Black pavement. Black sky with white stars. One long string of street lights, like pearls pulling me down the road. The only things with any color are the leaves blowing from the trees.

  I run. My feet ache.

  Between the gusts of wind, I hear my breath and the slap-slap-slap of my All Stars. It hurts too much to bend my toes. Of course, the bike would've worked better. But my mom's insomnia is often worse than my own, and my parents' bedroom window looks out over the back patio and alley.

  By the time I get to St. Cat's, sweating and panting, the dance is still going strong. Cars fill the parking lot outside the gym, including a half-dozen limos. Slowing to a walk, I keep my eyes on the two people who guard the gym's double doors.

  Our headmaster, Mr. Ellis.

  And his assistant Mrs. Parsons, otherwise known as Parsnip.

  Ellis speaks first. Naturally.

  "Miss Harmon," he says. “Very nice to see you. But the dance has a dress code.”

  Parsnip giggles.

  "Yes, sir.” I wipe the sleeve of my sweatshirt across my forehead, mopping the sweat and the shame Ellis has thrown my way. "I’m not here for the dance.”

  Parsnip's pinched face, by some miracle of genetics, can pinch even further. “You’re simply out running around town—at this hour?”

  Like Ellis, Parsnip dangles this kind of shame all the time. You're supposed to reflexively feel so bad about yourself you’ll do anything they say. But it doesn’t usually work on me; I feel too bad about myself already.

  "I need to get something inside the school,” I explain.

  “Absolutely not,” Parsnip says.

  "You know the rules, Miss Harmon,” Ellis chimes in.

  “It'll only take a minute."

  "Did you not hear us?" Parsnip says.

  I consider explaining the whole situation. But that’s the nuclear option. After Drew ran away in sixth grade, she sparked a potentially fatal amount of electricity between herself and Ellis. Our headmaster likes to remind us how St. Catherine's prides itself on being the best and oldest girl’s school in Richmond. So great that Lady Astor went here, way back when.

  "Can't you make one exception?" I ask. “It’s an emergency.”

  But Parsnip has shifted her squint toward the parking lot. “Who would dare drive up this late?”

  A white stretch limo has pulled to the curb. The driver jumps out, hustling to the back door and holds it open.

  "I might have guessed," Ellis says.

  MacKenna Fielding stumbles out. She grabs the door, waiting for her date. When he lurches out, she grabs his arm. She giggles. The two of them shamble toward us. MacKenna's crimson gown shimmers like fresh blood.

  "Miss Fielding," Ellis intones. “Arriving rather late, aren’t we?”

  "Engine trouble," MacKenna says.

  Only “engine” sounds like “injun.”

  Parsnip moves from the door, leaning down toward MacKenna. Our assistant headmaster is conveniently shaped like the vegetable we’ve named her after.

  She sniffs the air. "Miss Fielding, really."

  "Yes. Perhaps we need to have a talk with your father."

  I really don't want to see this. And somehow I feel like I'm making this worse. Ellis likes an audience, especially when using someone as an example. So I look away, and that's when I see it.

  The bike rack.

  And a purple bike locked to it.

  “It's here!”

  The words burst from my mouth. Suddenly they’re all looking at me, MacKenna's eyes shiny as glass, and Parsnip’s expression saying she gnaws three times daily on lemons and loves it.

  "Miss Harmon," she says, "would you mind?”

  "I have to get into the school!”

  Ellis looks at Parnsip, "Have we not made ourselves clear?"

  “But I lost something," I say. This statement is true. So of course I push it even farther. "And I won't be able to get my homework done without it."

  That stops them. For a moment.

  "What, pray tell," Parsnip says, "did you lose?”

  “My math." I really wish I'd inherited my dad’s talent for coming up with the right words at the right time. "I lost my math assignment.”

  "Really!" Parsnip snorts. “Your carelessness doesn't absolve you from consequences."

  Ellis looks at MacKenna. "Now, Miss Fielding . . . "

  I glance at the bike. Sitting under the parking lot lights, the purple paint glitters like a freshly cracked geode. I can hear them lecturing MacKenna. It could go on forever. Time for the nuclear option.

  "But Drew’s inside.”

  Parsnip laughs. At least, I think it’s a laugh. It sounds more like Isaac Newton the cat coughing up a fur ball.

  I point at the bike.

  "Wonders never cease,” Parsnip says, recovering. "Miss Levinson rides her bike to a formal dance.”

  “However," Ellis says, "I don't recall seeing her enter. Do you?”

  MacKenna's date glances at her. His eyes are bloodshot but he manages to wink at her.

  "I can state unequivocally," Parsnip says, “Miss Levinson did not darken this entrance tonight."

  “Doubtful she would even attend the dance,” Ellis asks.

  "Right," I say. "Because she's in the school."

  The two of them turn, to refocus on the bike. MacKenna's date maneuvers her behind their turned backs.

  "She's probably in the Physics lab," I say.

  "Impossible." Ellis is still staring at the bike. But he shakes his head. “No students are allowed inside the school after hours."

  “I'll go remind her," I say.

  “Absolutely not," Ellis says.

  “Out of the question!” Parsnip says.

  “We will take care of this matter after the dance," he says.

  “And take care of it we will," Parsnip echoes.

  MacKenna's date grabs the door handle. She covers her mouth, stifling a giggle. I watch them, almost marveling at how they just bypassed these people, like authority didn't matter. And here I am, begging for permission.

  “Miss Levinson needs further instruction," Ellis says. "She's under the mistaken impression that she's in charge."

  "Indeed," Parsnip says. "Lessons need to be learned."

  MacKenna's date flings open the door. A blast of music rushes out. I see that red dress bleeding into the gym, their laughter trailing.

  "Why I never!" Parsnip says.

  Me neither.

  I run for the door, slipping inside just before it closes on Parsnip's voice.

  “Miss Harmon—come back here!”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I hang a fast right inside the gym and sprint past the couples.

  Couples dancing, holding hands. Couples getting their picture taken. And couples gaping as I run past.

  Somebody calls out something, but I can't hear because the band is so loud. I hustle to the far end of the gym, where our P.E. teacher, Mr. Galluci, stands by the sn
ack table. He's cradling a giant bowl of Doritos in one arm.

  “Harmon!” he yells over the music. “What’s with the outfit?”

  I yell back, "I need to get something!" I point to the doors behind him that lead into the main building.

  "Can't let you!"

  “Please?”

  He leans in close, so he doesn't have to yell. “By order from the queen vegetable." He frowns. "Or is she a tuber?”

  Parsnip.

  “But Mr. Galluci, I can’t finish my homework without it.” This is true. Until I find Drew, I can’t possibly think about homework. "I have to get in there."

  But he's not listening to me. Lifting his head, he gazes over the dance floor. The band's lead singer is whispering into the microphone, moving to a slow love song, and every single couple is pulled toward the gym's dark middle. They look like metal shards sucked toward a magnet. Mr. Galluci sets down the bowl of Doritos and falls in with the rest of the chaperones who are circling the lovefest.

  Call me an opportunist, but I pounce. Shoving the door open, I hear Mr. Galluci say, "Hey!"

  But I'm already running down the hall when the door slams behind me. By the first corner I'm flinging my arms wide, sliding around the turn like one of Drew’s beloved baseball players rounding second on a tight play. The floor is the usual Friday mess of cast-off litter. Flyers for basketball tryouts, lunch menus, hyped-up reminders for everyone to have a super time at tonight's dance. I can see one light shining up ahead. English. The Lit classroom. Drew hates English. But she'll do anything to keep her GPA a pristine 4.0. That whole “perfect number thing” obsesses her.

  I pick up speed on the straightaway and slide across the door, grabbing the doorframe for a stop.

  “You are out!” I cry.

  Mr. Sandbag looks up from his desk. “What is the meaning of this?”

  I want to ask the same thing, but it’s his classroom.

  “Sorry. I was looking for Drew.” And, in case he doesn’t remember his most difficult student, I add, “Drew Levinson?”

  “A rather impulsive inquiry.”

  “Assonance,” I sigh. You have to work with this guy. “Have you seen her?”

  “The more refined query is: ‘Does the road wind uphill all the way?’ ”

  Oh, God. Not now.

  I glance around the room. Chairs are twisted away from their desks. White paper spouts from the trashcan, testifying to how much frustration we feel with Mr. Sandberg, a.k.a. Sandbag.

  “Well, does it?” Sandbag demands.

  “’Yes,’” I reply, quoting the Rossetti poem we're supposed to memorize. It's called "Uphill" and right now that's how everything feels. “‘to the very end.’”

  "With feeling, Miss Harmon. Try to recite with feeling."

  If you pull out a dictionary and look up the word tedious, you'll probably find a framed photo of Sandbag. In addition to wearing his glasses on the tip of his nose, he’s one of those teachers who see everything as a “teachable moment.” If you bump into him on the street—God help you—his thin lips will peel back and he'll drop some drippy line. Right there, you’ve got to tell him whether he’s using assonance or alliteration or symbolism, and if you don't, he’ll call you out later in front of class.

  “Drew—have you seen her, anywhere?”

  He gazes at me over the glasses. “And the next line begins? . . .”

  “‘Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?’”

  “‘From morn to night my friend.’”

  “Her bike’s outside.”

  “Miss Levinson, I presume?"

  Who does he think I'm talking about, Christina Rosetti?

  "She did make an appearance this afternoon,” he says.

  “What time?”

  He reaches down, snaps open his briefcase. On the floor near his feet is one small black suitcase. “If memory serves, she was speaking with Miss Teager. Probably attempting to press the parameters of geometry into a cerebellum struggling with its synapses.”

  He gazes over the glasses.

  “Alliteration,” I reply.

  “Ah, but you neglected to note imagery, which could well appear on next week’s parts-of-speech test.”

  “What time did you see Drew?”

  “At what time?"

  He has to correct everything. Like I said, tedious.

  "Yes, sir. At what time?"

  "Two-thirty.” He stands, but almost simultaneously sweeps his leg toward the suitcase, pushing it under his desk. “Or perhaps it was closer to three,” he adds. “The real question is: ‘But is there for the night a resting place?’”

  Quoting the poem again.

  I want to strangle him. And that’s no metaphor.

  “Miss Harmon, the next line?”

  I don’t know it, because I haven’t memorized that far. “Something about a roof. Where was she, when you saw her?”

  “’A roof for when the slow dark hours begin.’” He gives the suitcase another push, sending it deep under the desk. “‘May not the darkness hide —’”

  That's it.

  His words trail behind me like some neglected ghost and don't fade away until I reach our lockers. They're side-by-side, and when I lift Drew's combination lock, I see that little white arrow. It points directly at zero.

  She's compulsive about that, too.

  I spin the dial and click through her five-digit combination. Maybe she's setting up some scavenger hunt. Leaving me clues. Like suddenly having her bike outside. I pop open the tinny metal door and see her textbooks, standing like soldiers in alphabetical order. On the back wall behind them a photo shows the Milky Way, expanding into crystallized eternity; on my right, inside the door, Richard P. Feynman grins.

  I dig behind the books, lift Feynman's photo.

  Nothing.

  I slam the locker shut, spinning the combination dial, but refuse to replace that white arrow at zero. I walk down the hall and kick all the paper across the floor. I've known Drew for three years, and it started at these lockers. We had just moved up to St. Cat's Upper School, the hallowed ground worshipped by the Lower School. Drew was the weird girl who had already explained to our math teacher that space travel was only mathematically possible if the universe was rotating instead of expanding.

  One day she looked over at my open locker and asked, “What is that?”

  It was a photo of a geode, taken right after my dad gave me a rock hammer for my twelfth birthday. In the photo, the quartz crystals radiated like frozen sparks.

  “It's a geode,” I said.

  “Oh." She stared a moment longer. “And I assume the crystals have perfect atomic form because they're growing in a relatively unconfined space.”

  “Uh. Yeah. That’s right.”

  Holy. Cow.

  We slammed our lockers, walked to the cafeteria and spent the next thirty minutes talking about earthquakes, pyroclastic ash—even synclines. And that day, I felt something lift from my shoulders--some invisible weight I never realized was there until it was gone. By the next Friday I was eating dinner at her house, watching Jayne down an entire bottle of wine in one hour while Rusty went upstairs. Drew nuked our frozen cheeseburgers and fries, and when I asked for mayonnaise for the fries, she said, “That’s entirely gross, but I can live with it.” Ever since, we’ve lived with each other’s idiosyncrasies—even celebrating them. For me, it felt like I’d finally found the place where I belonged.

  The lights are out in the Physics lab. I slide my hand along the wall, flicking on the switch.

  Unlike Sandbag's classroom, here the chairs are all aligned behind their desks. The white board gleams clean. Probably Mr. Straithern, our Math and Physics teacher. He is just about as compulsive as Drew.

  Her purple jean jacket hangs on a chair at the back of the room. I walk over and see her notebook with one stiletto-sharp Ticonderoga poking from the pages like a bookmark.

  “Drew?”

  The wall clock ticks to 12:15.

&nbs
p; So, Miss Compulsive was working in Mr. Compulsive’s classroom. Every table wiped clean, the chairs just so, no scraps of paper on the floor. But the purple in her jacket looks as vivid to me as bruises, due to an experiment she came up with when I was playing with acids and alkalis to grow geology crystals. Chemistry was a passing phase—literally—for Drew, but she liked it enough to try soaking her jean jacket in various relative percentages of alum, vinegar, and grape juice. The result looked metamorphic, like the denim boiled inside the earth's molten layer before it was coughed up by some tectonic disaster. But she loves this jacket. And she would only leave it if she were coming back.

  Like the pencil in her notebook, holding her place.

  “Drew, are you hiding in here?”

  I feel stupid waiting for a response.

  I flip open her notebook. Yes, I’m violating her privacy, but too bad. This has gone on long enough.

  Under the heading, “Burgers & Brains,” I see her calculations from two weeks ago when she wanted to test the hypothesis: which will freeze faster, boiling water or cold water? It sounded like a stupid question to me—of course cold water would freeze faster. But she did the experiment at Titus's—and took bets. Everyone picked cold water. Except Titus. Turns out, boiling water freezes faster than cold water. Drew won $18. She told me there’s no rational theory that explains why water behaves like that. But her notes hypothesize: “evaporation affecting mass measurements.”

  “Hey!”

  My voice echoes back.

  The clock ticks.

  So I flip through more pages, feeling a little bad when I see how she’s spared me some baseball stuff. Wooden bats versus aluminum. Something called the “Center of Percussion.” Or COP. My eyes are already glazing over, but she’s drawn stick-man diagrams to show how the bat behaves with the COP. If the batter grips too far away from the center of percussion, he might feel the bat pushing against his finger, “possibly with enough force to lose control of the bat,” she notes. “But, crucially, when the bat connects with a pitch precisely at the COP, the batter will experience zero force in his hands. This is key to understanding the mechanics of powerful hitting.”

  How can someone so interesting be obsessed with something so boring?