“I just hope she wasn’t kidnapped.”
“Around here? I doubt that,” the other chaperone said.
“I’m betting she’ll turn up safe and sound in a dorm room,” Rowan told them. The conversation unfolded well beyond earshot of her students, but Rowan wasn’t about to confide that she herself had gone missing overnight back in her own high school days.
She’d climbed out a window and taken a joyride to a concert in Hartford with a -couple of older friends. Prince—-Purple Rain. That was the concert. She remembers the set list began with “Let’s Go Crazy” and the first encore was “I Would Die 4 U,” remembers that she sprayed her long permed hair purple, ratted it, and used a pair of violet tights as a headband, remembers everything except . . .
What the hell was I thinking?
She wasn’t thinking. After the concert, no one was in any condition to drive home. They wound up at a party at some cabin, fell asleep at dawn, and arrived home the next evening to find search teams with dogs combing the woods surrounding Mundy’s Landing.
She was grounded an entire summer for that stunt. That was the plan, anyway. Her mother died before she could see Rowan through the punishment, and although her father was too caught up in his grief to keep tabs on her, she didn’t have the heart to resume her previous antics.
As certain as she is that today’s missing girl will be found, and most likely grounded for life, she’s not taking any chances with her students.
“. . . twenty--three, twenty--four.” Satisfied, she nods and holds up her arm, the signal for silence.
The excited chatter subsides, though not entirely. The kids are just too keyed up that it’s finally their turn to embark on this local rite of passage, many of them having heard about it from older siblings and looked forward to it since kindergarten. Rowan gets that; she was once in their shoes.
Bari Hicks is on her cell phone, telling someone that she spent the “whole trip on the verge of vomiting . . . yes . . . yes, I’m serious! I know! But the teacher is giving me a dirty look so I have to run. I’ll call you back in a few minutes.”
Rowan sighs inwardly before she addresses the group. It’s going to be a long morning.
“Okay, listen up, -people. Before we go inside, I just want to remind you what we talked about. Use your manners, pay attention, hands to yourselves, and if I see any of you with a cell phone or an iPod or anything that has a screen, what happens?”
“You confiscate it,” Amanda Hicks says.
“Confiscate!” Bari beams. “What a nice big word!”
Rather than pause to congratulate Amanda’s literary skills, Rowan goes on talking, reminding the class of Miss Abrams’s strict no--electronics policy in order to preserve an authentic atmosphere. She demonstrates that she’s turning off her own phone, instructs everyone to follow suit, and knows that half of them, including a certain chaperone, will ignore the rule.
“Okay, let’s go, guys. Just be on your best behavior. Got it?”
“Got it,” most of them say in unison. The few who don’t haven’t got it and never will.
She marches the line up the wide steps of the stone building, with the three chaperones walking alongside them. Bari is, not surprisingly, only interested in interacting with her own daughter. The two of them are dressed identically in khakis and black North Face jackets, with ridiculously tiny matching purses slung from shoulder to opposite hip and clutched protectively close, in case someone tries to mug them between the bus and the steps.
Ora Abrams is framed in the doorway. She seemed elderly even back when Rowan was a girl, but always spry and lovely, with her snow white updo piled high above a pastel satin headband, making her look like a geriatric Cinderella.