FIVE
***
Lenore stood beside the line of students wending its way through the cafeteria lunch line and concentrated on thinking about something other than her missing student or the almost equally disconcerting visit by Sheriff Meeks.
The air in the line was somber: even the ninth through twelfth graders were quieter than usual, with less shoving for place in line than usual.
The school knew that it had lost one of its own.
Then a small disturbance erupted nearby. Lenore turned to see Albert Gomberg stumbling away from a group of cheerleaders. She sighed: Albert was in eleventh grade, and was a target for bullies as young as ten. He was the quintessential audio-video kid: the kind of boy who volunteered to be the A-V department assistant over the summer...and brought his own video equipment because what the school had wasn't up to his standards. He was the kind of quiet, smart, shy kid that others loved to pick on. It made Lenore sad, because she knew that if something didn't change - and quickly - Albert would likely be doomed to live the same kind of life that she herself did: a life where the only alternatives were to hide or be attacked.
She walked over to the students, and as she came closer she saw that Albert was desperately trying to hide a small camcorder in his hands from the senior cheerleaders who were even now trying to viciously pull it from his grasp.
"Hey!" said Lenore, but was ignored. The cheerleaders kept pulling at him, trying to separate the boy from one of his beloved recording items. One of the girls, Sarah West, was particularly vicious, yanking at his arm as Albert, almost reduced to tears by the episode, struggled vainly to protect himself and his property.
"Hand it over, freak," said Sarah, and for a moment Lenore actually thought that the cheerleader was going to bite the younger boy. Sarah looked almost rabid, almost angry enough to do it.
"Leave me alone," cried Albert.
Lenore finally got close enough to the girls that some of them noticed her and stopped harassing Albert. Lenore was not the most imposing woman in the world - far from it - but even so, she was cloaked in that invisible yet potent aura of "teacherness" that would stop most students from acting out.
Most students.
Not Sarah West.
"What is going on here?" demanded Lenore.
"This pervert," said Sarah, and yanked again at Albert's encumbered hand, "was filming my ass."
Lenore could see Albert's ears instantly redden at the accusation; could see just as clearly that he had been engaged in no such activity.
"I wasn't, I really wasn-" he began.
"Ass-shooter," retorted Sarah.
"Sarah, that's enough," said Lenore in a voice that was as close to loud as hers ever came.
"Enough?" Sarah swiveled to focus her ire on Lenore now. "This creepazoid conspiracy-theory freakshow geek goes around filming my ass all the time and-"
"Enough!"
Lenore said the word far louder than she meant to. All activity in the cafeteria ground to a halt as everyone looked around to see what the altercation was, as though the possibility of a fight in the cafeteria were the highest form of excitement the students could conceive of.
Maybe it is, thought Lenore, and the thought saddened her immensely. So many of the students were either predator or prey, in actuality or in training, and so whenever a fight broke out they had to see it, as though watching fights would provide them with clues about how to act in their respective roles.
Sarah was also looking closely. But not at Albert anymore; Sarah was now focused intently on Lenore. The cheerleader's face was curled in a derisive, malicious smile, as though she knew all about Lenore and knew that a confrontation with this particular teacher could actually be won by a student.
"Enough or what?" asked Sarah with a snort.
Lenore blushed. Sarah might be right: Lenore was the type of teacher that even a student could get away with bullying sometimes.
Sometimes. But not today. Not when the target of the bullying was someone as obviously harmless and good-natured as Albert. Besides...Lenore had a bit of a talisman - a silver bullet of sorts - in the case of the rude young woman who now looked down her nose at her.
Lenore leaned in close and whispered her secret to the cheerleader: "You leave this boy alone right now, or I'll tell everyone why you never cheer at the swim meets."
The sentence had the desired effect: Sarah's mouth opened, then shut again. The girl's perfectly tanned face turned a shade lighter as the blood drained from it. Then she mumbled, "I'm not very hungry now," and left the line, pulling her cronies from the cheerleading team along with her.
Lenore turned to tell Albert he could go to the front of the line. It would be paltry repayment for the constant humiliation he had to stand at the hands of people like Susan, but it was what Lenore had power to do.
Albert, however, was gone. She cast her eyes around, looking to find him, and saw one of the nearby doors - the opposite side of the cafeteria from the one that Sarah had gone through, thank goodness - swinging shut as Albert went through it and disappeared.
Lenore hurried out after him, managing to catch up to him in the school's "quad" - the common area that was directly behind the cafeteria and in which the students tended to congregate after eating their lunches.
"Hey," she called. Albert didn't so much as pause. If anything, he sped up, as though afraid that Lenore would be the one to bring the next round of bullying into his life. She had to physically grab his arm to arrest his movement.
"You okay?" she asked.
Albert tried to look sullen and tough, but all he could manage was a visage of half-veiled fear. "They're all out to get me," he said.
"Sarah's just a teenage girl," Lenore said, even though the "just" was a stretch. Sarah was the most stereotypically nasty teenage girl she had ever had the misfortune to encounter. "Teenage girls can be difficult sometimes," she continued.
"It's not just them," responded Albert. "It's everyone." He blinked back tears, clearly trying vainly to hold onto whatever perceived dignity he might be retaining.
"Come on," said Lenore. "I'm sure it's not everyone."
"It is," insisted the student. "It's everyone."
Lenore touched Albert's arm. She smiled, trying to make a connection with this sad, lonely boy. "Not everyone," she said. "Not me."
Albert looked at her, and Lenore was heartened to see what looked like a smile trying to break through his expression of dismay.
"Why won't she cheer for the swim meets?" he asked suddenly.
For a moment, Lenore's gentle smile faltered. She didn't know if she should tell what she knew. She had found out the information when in the school office one day: one of the school's two counselors had left a file open on one of the tables, and Lenore had happened to see a notation inside it, so she didn't know if it would be any kind of a breach of confidentiality to talk about what she had seen.
But then she decided: she had made no promise to keep the contents of the file secret. It had been an accident that she had found out. Besides, if revealing the information would keep Albert safe from future attacks, then it would be worth it.
"She's afraid of water," said Lenore. "Like, really afraid. She won't even get near a pool."
The smile that Lenore had seen fighting to emerge from Albert's expression was just millimeters away from seeing daylight now as he practically inhaled this wonderful bit of information as to his nemesis' Achilles heel.
But then, in the instant before the smile could emerge fully formed, like a butterfly from its chrysalis, Lenore's own expression changed from reassurance to horror, and she screamed as Albert's eyes started to bleed.
Only no, it wasn't blood. Instead it was some kind of viscous black fluid that was dripping now from his eyes, his nose, and had begun spurting from the boy's ears.
Lenore screamed again, backpedaling wildly, tripping over several nearby students and bringing all of them down in a heap.
Silence reigned in the quad as she regained her feet.
She slowly looked back at Albert, prepared to rush him to the school nurse, or perhaps even just to get him in her car and bundle him off to the small hospital in the next town.
What she saw stopped her heart.
She saw nothing. Albert was fine. No blood. No black ooze dribbling in spurts from ears and nose and eyes. Just a sad-faced boy with concern writ large in his eyes.
And then the worst thing Lenore could think of happened: Sarah West, bitch-cheerleader extraordinaire, had apparently come out onto the quad during the momentary fracas. She seized the moment: "Geez, Freakshow, you even frighten the teachers," she shouted.
The students all laughed, obviously scrambling to grab onto any excuse to break the uncomfortable silence.
Albert looked around at the laughing faces and pointing fingers, and Lenore could practically see the thoughts in his mind: his worst fears being realized as all his peers pointed and laughed at him. They were all against him.
He ran out of the quad, eyes awash in tears.
And Lenore, stunned at the fact that she had just seen a student hemorrhaging what looked like old motor oil and then just as suddenly return to normal, didn't do anything. She just watched him leave.
What's going on? she asked herself.
She didn't know the answer. But she thought of Sean Rand disappearing, and then of Albert's horrifying visage as he had...bled...and for the second time that day she pulled her sweater tightly around her shoulders even though the weather was warm.
What's going on in Rising?
***