His voice kept getting quieter and quieter. Ms. Hempel peered down at him anxiously. “Are you all right in there?” she asked. “Jonathan, do you want them to stop?”
Finally, in a very small voice, he said, “Enough.”
The boys were proud of what they had done. “Picture!” Roderick yelled. “We have to take a picture!” None of the boys had brought a camera. Only the girls had thought to do that. So off they went, thundering down the beach. “Don’t move!” they shouted back at Jonathan.
“Okay,” he whispered.
Ms. Hempel knelt down beside him. “Jonathan,” she said. “Are you really okay?”
“I’m okay,” he whispered. His mouth had turned a funny dark color, as if he had just finished eating a grape popsicle.
“Promise me.”
“I’m just resting,” he said, and closed his eyes.
“Jonathan?” she asked. “Do you want me to get you anything? Do you want some water?”
“No,” he sighed, his eyes still closed.
Then he asked, “Do you see them?”
“They’ll be back any minute now,” she said. “It’s not very far.”
“This sand is heavy,” he whispered.
“Do you want to get up?” she asked. “Jonathan?”
“I’m okay. It’s just a little hard to breathe.”
“Oh, sweetheart,” she said. “That doesn’t sound good.”
“It’s okay,” he whispered. “Are they back yet?”
But only Ms. DeWitt appeared on the horizon: teacher of advanced math, coach of girls’ basketball. When she called out, Ms. Hempel waved back at her and smiled.
“Everything’s fine!” she shouted, despairingly.
Another teacher would have intervened, she knew, would have brought it all to a halt. Stand up, she imagined Ms. DeWitt barking. Right now. This is dangerous.
Words that Ms. Hempel should have said from the very beginning.
“Can you see them?” Jonathan whispered.
“Yes,” she told him, though it wasn’t true. “They’re running straight at us.”
THE BOYS RETURNED, EVENTUALLY, and the picture was taken. Jonathan had become quite blue by that point. He wasn’t able to burst forth from the sand as the others had. It was much more of a struggle for him, and when he pulled himself to his feet, he was shivering violently. The other boys draped him in their towels. “Let’s go back to the bus,” Ms. Hempel said. “We can ask the bus driver to turn on the heater.”
Together they climbed up the beach toward the parking lot. The boys ran ahead and tripped each other and kicked sand, but Jonathan walked behind them, still trembling, a towel thrown over his head like a hood. Ms. Hempel made him stop.
“Come here,” she said, and she held him.
Creep
AS CHILDREN, BEATRICE AND her brother lived on the very top floor of their house, in rooms that had been inhabited by servants nearly one hundred years before. Attached to the wall at the top of the stairs was a beautiful wooden box, with one side made of glass, and painted upon the glass, in tiny gold letters, were the names of rooms: master bedroom; butler’s pantry; dining room; conservatory; loggia. Through the glass you could see a complicated system of hammers and bells and cogs, strung together with bright copper wiring that disappeared through a hole in the bottom corner of the box and burrowed into the house’s thick walls, only to emerge on the floors below, inside each of the gold-lettered rooms, in the form of a button. The finger most often pressing the button was Beatrice’s, for when you pressed it, an electric current would course up the copper wiring to the top floor of the house, and a little bell inside the wooden box would ring, not a tinkling ring, but a sort of low-pitched vibration, similar to the sound people make when they’re cold: Brrrrrrrrrrr.
Beatrice never got tired of hearing this sound. She liked it so much, she invented a game called Servant: she would waft into a room, drape herself across a chair, and then, in a gesture both impatient and languid, poke the little button embedded in the wall. She would hear, very faintly, that low and lovely hum, and then the muffled drumbeat of her brother hurrying down the four flights of stairs. “How may I be of service, madam?” he had to ask, according to the rules. She would tell him, “I’m dying for a glass of water. On a tray,” or “Would you mind terribly, opening the curtains?” and depending upon how well he performed the tasks, a new round would begin, with Calvin climbing back up the stairs to wait beside the box and Beatrice deciding which room she would waft into next. But this was only one of many games she had invented, and maybe not as good as Teacher, or Dead, or Blackout.
Living, as they did, at the top of the house, Beatrice and her brother were surrounded by trees. In the summer, their rooms filled with a green light. In the winter, the fir boughs grew heavy with snow and brushed against their windowpanes. Because they lived in rooms meant only for servants, their windows were small and perfectly square, not long and grand like those in the rest of the house. But they preferred it this way: they liked living in their tiny rooms, aloft in the trees; they liked the green light falling in squares at their feet. Their rooms were almost the same, but not quite: Calvin had a fireplace in his, and Beatrice had a wall of bookshelves built into hers.
Beatrice didn’t read books anymore. All she did was listen to the radio. She listened late at night, to the pirate stations found at the bottom of the dial. In the place where books should have been, she kept her tremendous radio. It had once belonged to her mother, in the days when she still wore her hair long and wrote essays.
The pirate radio stations broadcast many different shows: they had names such as the Flophouse, and Nocturnal Emissions, and the Curious Sofa. Beatrice’s favorite was a pro-gram called the Rock Hotel. It came on every night at eleven o’clock and played music of the sort that Beatrice had never heard before, music that sounded at once grinding and frenzied, like a train car screeching backward down a mountain, and all the passengers inside howling. A velvety static blanketed everything, like snow falling on the scene of the disaster. Before discovering the Rock Hotel, Beatrice had believed that music was supposed to make things more beautiful and orderly.
That’s when I reach for my revolver, she sang in the bathroom. That’s when it all just slips away.
Calvin stood outside the door. “What are you doing?” he asked.
She threw the door open and lunged forward, her hand convulsing. “I’m practicing electric guitar,” she said.
Calvin tucked his chin against his shoulder and cocked his wrist in the air; he drew an invisible bow across invisible strings. “I will accompany you.”
Beatrice let her hands drop. For a moment she felt poisoned. But it was no use explaining that violins and guitars don’t go together. She knew what he would say, serenely: “It’s an electric violin.”
She wheeled to face the mirror hanging over the sink. “Give me a sword,” she said.
“Viking, Roman, or Greek?” Calvin asked.
“Viking!” Beatrice said. Her brother returned with the sword. Wielding it over her head, she studied herself in the mirror. Her arms, raised this way, looked thinner than they did when just hanging at her sides. She wondered what other reasons she might find to assume this position. “Tremble!” she said, to no one in particular.
Calvin wedged himself between her and the sink, so that he could brush his teeth. He brushed his teeth many times a day because he was concerned about plaque. On his birthday their mother had given him a kit containing a special yellow solution and a special handheld light. You sloshed the solution inside your mouth, made the bathroom completely dark, flicked on the special light, and saw, in beautiful and arctic blue, all the plaque that was slowly encrusting your teeth.