The Eleventh Plague

THIRTEEN

“So what do they do down there?”

I was lingering by the window over Dad’s bed a few days later, full from a breakfast of eggs and bacon and bread that Marcus had cooked and insisted I join them for. The sun was spread across the asphalt where it dipped into the woods a few houses down. Soon that road would be stocked with kids jostling and laughing on their way down to the school.

“Usual stuff. Math. English. Why? You want to —”

“No,” I said quickly. “I was curious. I’ll help you and Sam in the fields again.”

“I bet we could do without you for a day or two.”

Violet had changed Dad into a pair of Marcus’s old pajamas that had white and blue stripes and a neat little collar. His face and beard were clean. There were shadows all along the white sheet that covered him. Dips and peaks. It was like he was buried under a drift of snow.

“What are you two talking about?” Violet appeared in the doorway behind us, drying her hands after doing the dishes in a wash bucket out on the porch.

“Stephen going to school this morning.”

Violet glanced down at Dad and then fixed me with a no-nonsense gaze, her hands on her hips. “There’s nothing you can do for your dad that I can’t. I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is. I’m sure he would want you to go to school if you could. Don’t you think?”

“I —”

“Jackson,” she called back into the kitchen. “You have some notebooks and things to give Stephen if he wanted to come to school with you?”

“On my desk!”

“Upstairs to the left,” Violet said to me, turning back toward the kitchen. “Better get moving. Don’t want you two to be late.”

I was about to argue, to insist that I would stay behind with Dad, but there was something about the swift sureness of Violet’s command that had me falling into place behind her and following her through the kitchen. Besides, I had to admit I was curious.

The kitchen was wide and open with tall windows all along the back looking out onto a porch. Jackson was sitting at the end of the long table with a big book that said AMERICAN HISTORY on the spine. He peeked over it as I came in, then away again as soon as I caught him.

“Next to the bed,” he said. “Take a couple pencils too.”

I nodded and looked up the length of the dark staircase that sat behind him. I took the rail and climbed slowly, feeling a strange leg-shaking vertigo. Once I reached the landing at the top of the stairs I saw his open door, went through, and was instantly struck dumb. To my left there was a bed, an actual bed, neatly situated under a curtained window with a little nightstand next to it. The bed was crisply made with a bright red blanket and two pillows.

Standing there, I felt the same eerie sense as when I saw the pictures of their long-gone families. Everything they had was left over from the last inhabitants of the town. After they had died, the Greens and the others swept in, tidied up, and took their places. Slept in their beds. Cooked in their kitchens. Started their lives all over again.

I stepped farther in. Next to the bed was a shelf that, incredibly, held at least thirty paperback and hardcover books. I stepped closer and ran my finger along each book’s cracked spine. The same hunger I felt when Marcus laid down that first plate of eggs and bacon that morning twisted inside of me. I felt a stab of jealousy again — How could they have so much? — so I made myself look away. That’s when I noticed that there was a second room across the hall. From where I stood, I could just see the corner of a bed and a bureau with its drawers hanging open. Clothes, bits of paper, and nubs of pencils littered the floor.

Jenny’s room?

I scooped up a notebook and a couple pencils from Jackson’s desk and crossed the hall, lingering at Jenny’s door and listening. Glass clinked together as Violet put the dishes away. Jackson talked low to Marcus downstairs. I slipped inside.

Light flooded in from the one bare window, harsh and glaring on the bone-white walls. Where Jackson’s was clean and orderly and spare, hers was a junkyard. There was a bed stripped of its blanket with a couple coverless pillows and a balled-up sheet. Old clothes lay among dishes that were covered in congealed candle wax. A big hardback book was spread-eagled on the floor. It said CHEMISTRY in black letters.

Her mattress was small with thin blue pinstripes. I could imagine Jenny lying there, her hair spread out like a thick black cloud, staring up at the ceiling and waiting (like me?) for sleep that wouldn’t come.

I remembered Jenny’s body stretching in the sun, her heavy scar glowing white like a vein in marble, a sketch of a smile on her lips.

Violet’s voice drifted up the stairs. “Stephen?”

As I pulled myself out of the room, I caught sight of a spot to one side of the door where the wall had been crushed inward. I stepped up for a closer look. The hole was in the shape of a small fist. Smeared traces of blood lay where knuckles would have bit into the plaster. I opened my own hand and looked at it.

In the center of my palm were the four half-moon slashes I had made the morning after Dad’s accident. I reached my hand out, laid it over the hole in the wall, and closed my eyes.

“Stephen? You okay?”

It sounded like Violet was at the foot of the stairs now. Any second she’d come up to check on me.

“Coming!” I called, feeling strangely drained as I ran down the stairs to where Violet was waiting with two metal pails. I scrambled for an explanation for what I had been doing, but she handed one pail to Jackson and one to me. Puzzled, I peered inside and found a few big lumps wrapped in cloth.

“Your lunch,” she said helpfully.

“Oh,” I said and stood there awkwardly for a moment. Just over her shoulder I could almost see the edge of her big medicine cabinet. “Well … thanks.”

Violet pulled at my collar, fussing with my clothes to get them straight. “If I had known you were going, I would have heated up enough water for a bath. Marcus, I don’t know….”

“He’ll be fine.”

Jackson was hovering by the door, impatient.

“I’ll be fine,” I said. As I started to go, Violet turned me around and pulled me into a warm hug. Close up, she smelled like baked bread and dried flowers.

She said nothing, just held on, her breath rising and falling, matching the swell of my own. The feeling was familiar, nice at first, but as it lingered it was like being embraced by a ghost and I had to push myself away.

“We better … we should go. Right, Jackson?” I blew past him, not waiting for a response, and threw myself into the front door, relieved to feel the blast of fresh air that hit me as soon as I was outside.

“God!” Jackson said when he caught up to me. “She’s always doing stuff like that!”

I had my head down, watching my old boots slap against the asphalt, trying to swallow the thick lump in my throat and shake the warm feeling of Violet’s arms around me.

“It’s okay,” I said. “Moms are like that, I guess.”

Jackson and I fell in with a torrent of kids that pushed us faster toward the turn in the road that led to school. Jackson tried to explain the school day to me as we went, but I only caught bits of it. Six class periods broken up by lunch. Something about math. A buzzing nervousness had come over me. I craned my head toward the safety of the Greens’ house, wondering if I could turn back before it was too late.

“Hey, look, there’s Derrick and Martin!”

Martin looked half asleep. He stared blankly at the road in front of him, glasses slightly askew and shirt untucked, his chopped-up crew cut glistening wet. Derrick, on the other hand, reminded me of corn popping in a skillet. He bounced from toe to toe as though he could barely contain himself.

“Guys!” Derrick shouted. “Compadres! Mis amigos! Como estás?”

“Hey, Derrick,” Jackson said.

“Well, if it isn’t my little friend with the big appetite,” Derrick said to me. “What’s up, my man?”

Head cottony with nerves, I didn’t know what to say. I hitched my shoulders noncommittally.

“Awesome. We all ready for a big day of learning?”

The double doors to the school loomed ahead of us, and the crowd swept us right toward them. Derrick knocked a few little ones out of the way. I took a deep breath, and in we went.

We were herded into a narrow hallway lined with metal lockers and doors to other rooms. I had never seen so many people my own age in one place before. I marveled at their clean clothes and the way they coursed through the hall, full of purpose. As with the houses the day I came to town, I searched for any sign that these people had grown up in the same world I did, but found nothing.

As I studied them, I was being watched too. When I caught them looking, they’d wrinkle their noses before turning away to whisper to their friends. A girl in a gray skirt pointed out my ratty old coat and giggled. I faked like I was cold and pulled it tight around me, hoping to hide the rest of my clothes.

Once we were inside the classroom, Jackson, Martin, and Derrick took desks about halfway back. Jackson pointed to an empty chair in front of him.

“Sit here,” he said.

All around me, kids were writing in their notebooks, desperately trying to finish their homework, I guessed, like Jackson had done that morning. The ones who weren’t working were talking. The roar of it came in waves, building and building until the entire room was shouting at once. It sounded to me like glass grinding against glass. Why does everyone talk so much here? I wondered. What is there to say? I almost put my head down on the desk and covered my ears, but the last thing I needed was to stand out even more. I looked up to my right. Above a set of tall bookshelves I could see the blue sky and the waving branches of the sycamore tree out of the window. “What are you doing here?”

At first I didn’t realize anyone was talking to me, but then someone’s knee bumped roughly into my side. “Hey! Spy! I’m talking to you.”

I looked up. Will Henry. He was wearing a black T-shirt and a pair of jeans that bulged a bit around the thigh where I guessed a bandage was. He was with his three friends, the two sluggy twins and zit-covered mountain of a redhead.

“I said, what are you doing here?” Somehow Will’s eyes glittered but were utterly blank at the same time. My hand fell beneath my coat and closed around the handle of my knife. When I didn’t say anything, Will snatched the notebook out of my hands and held it up to Jackson.

“You give him this, Greeny? You and your folks? How many of these you think we have left? And you give one to some spy?”

Will planted his fists on my desk and leaned over me.

“These things are for us,” he said. “Not you.”

“Leave him alone, Will!”

I turned and was surprised to see that Jackson was up out of his seat. Derrick and Martin rose tentatively to join him.

“What are you going to do?” Will continued, leaning toward him. Even though he was a whole row of desks away, Jackson took one nervous step back, which clearly delighted Will. “You and your folks gonna save this stray too? What? Was the first one not pathetic enough for you?”

Every part of me tensed, desperate to shoot up out of my chair and knock Will into the wall behind him. I struggled to stay calm even as he leaned over me, his face inches from mine.

“How about you, spy? You gonna do something?”

My cheeks burned and the wounds on my hand throbbed as I gripped the rough leather of the knife’s hilt.

The doors at the back of the classroom flew open and slammed against the wall.

“Class, settle down! Settle down, everyone!” the teacher called as he rushed in past us to the front of the room. “Mr. Henry, take your friends and sit.”

“Mr. Tuttle —” Will began, pointing at me.

“No time, Mr. Henry,” Tuttle said, distracted with papers at his desk. “Sit or find yourself in detention.”

Will glanced at Tuttle. “You’re lucky, spy,” he said as he tossed the notebook over his shoulder to one of his friends. “Come on, guys. Kid’s stinking up this side of the room anyway.”

The redhead gave me a vacant, moist-eyed glare while one of the slug twins nudged my desk so my pencils fell to the ground with a clatter. I waited until they were back at their seats before bending to pick them up, but when I did, Jackson was already holding them out to me.

“Here you go.”

“Thanks.” I turned away from him and rearranged my things. It was odd how Jackson and the others had stood up for me the way they had. Getting backed up like that by people who weren’t family didn’t make sense. It felt good, but I couldn’t afford to be careless. Nobody did anything for free.

“Class, I will need your attention … now.”

Tuttle smacked his ruler across the desk and there was a rustle of bodies as everyone dropped into their seats and shot to attention. He surveyed the room, moving from face to face and making little marks on a sheet of paper until his eyes fell on me.

“And who is this?”

“Stephen,” Jackson piped up from behind me. “Stephen, uh …” Jackson tapped my shoulder.

“Quinn,” I said.

“Stephen Quinn. He’s new.”

Tuttle glanced at Jackson. “Yes, I can see that he’s new, Mr. Green. If he wasn’t, I would not have expressed surprise upon seeing him, would I?”

“Um —”

“Rhetorical question, Mr. Green. Now. Quinn. Stephen. I am Mr. Tuttle. Have you been in school before?”

I cleared my throat and tried to sit up straighter. “No sir.”

“Can you read? Do you know your numbers?”

“Yes sir.”

“The Pledge of Allegiance?”

“The pledge of allegiance to what?”

The class laughed all around me. I felt my cheeks go red and hot.

“Well, you’ll have a lot of catching up to do, but I can’t afford to slow down.” Tuttle went back to marking his paper, then nodded toward Jackson and Martin. “Mr. Green and Mr. Stantz will help you.”

“Hey, what about me?”

Tuttle glared at Derrick. “I think Mr. Quinn would do well to pay as little attention to you as possible on educational matters. Don’t you agree, Mr. Waverly?”

“Yes! Absolutely!” Derrick said. “Good call, sir.”

Tuttle gave him a withering look, then stepped back to the blackboard behind him. It was covered by some kind of pull-down screen. The class groaned as he reached for it.

“Yes, class,” Tuttle said. “That’s right. If you were able to better control yourselves, these little tests wouldn’t be necessary. So take out your —”

Before Tuttle could finish, the doors behind us burst open again, smacking against the walls. The class turned as one body toward the sound as Jenny Tan strode barefoot into the classroom. She carried a tattered notebook. A nub of pencil was stuck behind one ear.

“Well, well, well, this is quite an honor,” Tuttle deadpanned. “We haven’t been graced with your presence in weeks. So nice of you to join us today, Miss Green.”

“It’s Tan,” Jenny said as she plopped down into an open seat toward the back of the class and put her bare feet up on the chair in front of her. “And you’re welcome.”

A ripple of laughter went through the classroom. Jackson had his eyes closed tight and his head in his hands. Irritation pulsed off him in waves. Tuttle slapped his ruler down on the corner of his desk.

“I won’t have any more disruptions.”

Jenny raised her hands, palms up, as if to say he wouldn’t get any from her. Tuttle considered her a moment, made a notation on his sheet, then stepped back to pull on the screen in front of the blackboard. It shot up toward the ceiling, revealing a long list of questions written in chalk. Jenny bent over her desk, laying her chin in the palm of one hand while she dug into the wood of her desk with her fingernail.

Jackson handed me a sheet of paper from his notebook as the rest of the class picked up their pencils and began writing. Jenny flicked her hair out of her face, turning just enough to catch me staring at her. It was like being stuck out in the open as lightning flashed all around me. I knew I should look away, and quickly, but I froze.

Jenny raised one eyebrow, and when I still didn’t look away, she jutted her face out at me, bugging her big brown eyes and making a show of staring back. I looked away immediately, up at the test questions, trying to calm the thrill of nerves in my stomach.

I was surprised to find that the test was on Great Expectations, a book I had actually read and more or less remembered. I made a stab at the questions, but it was hard to concentrate. I could feel Jenny across the room. It was like her body had this gravity all its own and it was pulling at me, trying to make me turn. I thought of her drawing spread across that rumpled paper. The riderless horse, motionless but somehow pulsing with movement and life.

Jackson nudged the back of my shoulder. “Ten minutes, Steve,” he whispered. “Come on.”

I shook thoughts of Jenny out of my head and forced myself to focus. The test was a fill-in-the-blank thing and time was ticking down, but I rushed to fill in the last answer just as Tuttle pulled the screen back down in front of the questions.

“Now, class,” Tuttle said as he collected papers. “We will continue our discussion of algebra. Turn to page two twenty-three….”

Jackson nudged me again. When I turned, he was holding a folded piece of paper. He jerked his thumb over toward Jenny, who was bent over her notebook, drawing in the margins. I took the paper and unfolded it.

It was a short note, just two lines long, but when I was done reading, it felt like something had sucked every last wisp of breath out of my lungs.

Across the room, Jenny was smiling in a way that reminded me of a wolf.

The note said, in a jagged scrawl:

I saw what you buried in the woods Friday night.

You are a naughty naughty boy.