“Yeah.” Patricia picked up the pace and tromped back to the back parking lot, so Laurence had to rush to catch up. “But you’d know what you really were. And that’s all that matters.”
When they got back through the parking lot’s gravel slush pit, they found the back door to the school was jammed shut. Locked? Frozen stuck? Patricia and Laurence both tore at the door, since the front entrance was all the way around the building and they would get busted for 100 percent certain. Laurence put one foot on the white-stone wall and pulled with all his Track-and-Field-but-mostly-Field might. Patricia pulled at the edges of the sharp metal handle, which was shaped like a shelf bracket. They both tugged as hard as they could, and then the door swung open. Someone was laughing on the inside of the door. Laurence and Patricia caught a glimpse of not-quite-uniform sneakers and a trio of pudgy hands, before she and Laurence both fell on their asses. Whoever had been holding the door shut from the inside laughed louder, as Laurence and Patricia tried to pick themselves up, and then a blue shape came arcing toward them, and Patricia barely had time to recognize a plastic bucket before a white arm of water sloshed out and they were both soaked. Someone was taking photos.
12
THEODOLPHUS HAD NOT eaten ice cream since the poisoning at the mall, and he didn’t deserve any now. Ice cream was for assassins who finished their targets. Still, he kept imagining how ice cream would taste, how it would melt on his tongue and release layers of flavor. He no longer trusted ice cream, but he needed ice cream.
Well. So be it. Theodolphus went and got in his Nissan Stanza, deflecting his landlady’s usual attempts at flirtation with a wave. He drove for hours, crossing and recrossing state lines, circling and swerving and doubling back, using every trick he could think of. Then he came to a convenience store two states away, where he bought a pint of Ben & Jerry’s, one of the flavors named after a celebrity. He ate it in the driver’s seat with a spork from his glove compartment.
“I don’t deserve this ice cream,” he kept repeating with each bite until he started crying. “I don’t deserve this ice cream.” He sobbed.
A few days later, Theodolphus looked across his desk at an angry blonde girl, Carrie Danning, and realized he had been working as a school guidance counselor for nearly six months, or a dozen times longer than he had ever held a regular job before. This was the first time Theodolphus had ever owned more than two pairs of socks.
The most horrifying thing was, Theodolphus sort of cared about these children and their ludicrous problems. Maybe just because he’d invested so much time, he wanted to see how it all came out. He worried about school politics. He had a gnawing sense that all the debates over whether to allow kids to advance even if they had failed some part of the testing regime were somehow meaningful. He had vivid nightmares about sitting in on parent-teacher conferences.
Carrie Danning was saying that she was over trying to be friends with Macy Firestone, who was a toxic individual, and Theodolphus was nodding without quite listening.
Here’s how it worked if you were a member of the Nameless Order, like Theodolphus — you didn’t see your fellow members that much outside of the five-year gatherings, but you got bulletins in the patterns of dead grass around you, or human bones in one of your shoes — these would let you know if someone had ascended in the rankings, or had made a spectacular brace of kills lately. By now, all of his fellows would be getting little legless creatures in their hats or car glove compartments, signifying that Theodolphus had been having the dry spell to end all dry spells — including whoever had poisoned Theodolphus’s sundae and warned him against directly harming the two children.
Something smooth and red was inside the half-open drawer of Theodolphus’s desk. For a moment he was certain it was a strip of blood-soaked silk from the Order, signifying his fall in status. But instead, he pulled out a cream-colored envelope, lined in red, around a card that informed Theodolphus the District had nominated him for Educator of the Year. He was invited to an award ceremony, at which black tie would be worn and factory-farmed creatures would be eaten. Theodolphus almost wept in front of Carrie Danning. He had to end this somehow. Whatever it took, he had to get his life back.
13
LAURENCE SAW HIS parents coming out of Mr. Rose’s office in the middle of the day. They looked alarmed — literally, as if an alarm had gone off next to their heads and their ears were still ringing. They wouldn’t look at him or acknowledge him at all, as they hustled out of the school and into their car.
Laurence barged into Mr. Rose’s office without knocking. “What did you say to my parents just now?”
“That’s covered by the same confidentiality that all of our conversations in this room enjoy.” Mr. Rose smiled and leaned back in his big chair.
“You’re not a therapist,” said Laurence. “And you shouldn’t pretend to be.”
“Your parents are worried about you,” said Mr. Rose. “You’re one of the most gifted and intelligent students we’ve ever had at this school.”
“What did you say to my parents?” Laurence said. “And what did you say to Patricia, before that? She still won’t tell me what it was, but it messed her up.”
“This is nothing to do with Patricia,” said Mr. Rose. “We’re talking about you.”
“No. We’re talking about you.” Laurence was thinking about how Patricia looked like she’d seen a ghost whenever he mentioned Mr. Rose, and the way Mr. Rose had studied him like an insect before. Things were falling into place. “You said something to freak out my parents, just like you freaked out Patricia before. What did you say?”
“As I was saying, your test scores are off the charts. But your attitude? Threatens to ruin everything.”
“I guess I’m lucky that you already promised that everything I say in here is a secret,” Laurence said. “I can go ahead and tell you that you’re a fake. You’re not the coolest adult at this school, you’re some kind of troll, hiding out in your crappy little pasteboard office and messing with people. My parents are weak-minded and feeble, life has crushed their spirits, and so you think they’re easy marks. But I’m here to tell you that they’re not, and Patricia isn’t, either. I’m going to see that you burn.”
“I see.” Mr. Rose’s hands were twitching. “In that case, what comes next is your own doing. Good day, Mr. Armstead.”
Laurence’s parents weren’t around when he got home, and he was left to scavenge frozen pizza. Around 10:00 PM, he came downstairs and caught his parents looking at brochures, which they hid as soon as they heard his footsteps.
“What were you just looking at?” Laurence asked.
“Just some…,” said his father.
“Just some materials,” said his mother.
The next day, they hauled him out of bed just after dawn and told him he wasn’t going to school today. Instead, they stuck him in the back of their hatchback, and his father drove as if he had a heat-seeking missile on his tail.
“Where are we driving to?” Laurence asked his parents, but they just stared at the road.
They sank into grayest Connecticut, with the interstate hemmed in with rock walls, until they turned onto a series of backwoods humps made of tarmac, then dirt, then gravel. The birch trees jittered and whispered, as if they were trying to tell Laurence something, and then he saw the sign: “COLDWATER: A Military Reform School. Now Reopened Under New Management.” They parked in a rock pile, surrounded by battered Jeeps, and on their left jumped a phalanx of twenty or thirty teenage boys, any one of whom could wipe the floor with Brad Chomner.