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 scrawclass="underline"
I saw what you buried in the woods Friday night.
You are a naughty naughty boy.
FOURTEEN
As soon as Tuttle dismissed us for the day, I jumped out of my seat and ran for the door.
“Hey!” Jackson cried. “Where are you going? We’ve got a game!”
I ignored him. Jenny had started to leave before “Class dismissed” had even left Tuttle’s mouth. I raced down the hallway behind her, but by the time I made it through the school’s front doors and outside she was gone.
The doors behind me opened again and someone rammed into my shoulder, pitching me forward. I turned around just in time to see a golden flash of blond and Will’s grinning face.
“You oughta watch where you stand. I think some people are trying to walk this way.”
Will and his friends laughed.
That’s it.
I grabbed two handfuls of Will’s shirt and spun him around, slamming him into the wall. An icy thrill went through me as his eyes bulged with surprise and fear. I was about to cock my fist when someone grabbed my elbow.
“Stephen, don’t,” a voice said. “Tuttle.”
As soon as he said it, Tuttle appeared behind us like a pillar of black smoke. “Mr. Green, Mr. Quinn, Mr. Henry. What’s going on here?”
“Nothing, sir,” Jackson said quickly. “Right, Stephen?”
Jackson gave me a nudge and I managed to back away from Will and agree through gritted teeth that everything was fine.
“Good,” Tuttle said. “Mr. Henry?”
Will jumped forward with barely disguised glee. “He’s got a knife, sir,” he said, pointing at my waist. “He keeps threatening us with it and it’s making all of us feel really unsafe.”
“That’s not true! I didn’t—”
Before I could say anything else, Tuttle pulled aside my coat and yanked the knife straight out of its sheath.
“I see,” Tuttle said, turning the dark blade over in his hands. “Mr. Henry, you and your friends are dismissed.”
“But—”
“You’re dismissed.”
Will’s glare bloomed into a wide smile. He held up one finger and mouthed the words strike one behind Tuttle’s back before he and his friends glided lazily up the hill and away from the school.
“You three may go as well,” Tuttle said to Jackson, Martin, and Derrick. As they left, I caught Jackson’s eye. He had a strange, worried look on his face but motioned that I should follow them toward the field east of the school when I was done.
“It’s old,” Tuttle said as he turned the leather-wrapped handle of the knife over in his hands. “Older than you. Your father’s?”
I nodded.
“I thought as much,” he said quietly. “He’s hurt, I understand.” I nodded, struggling to swallow something bitter that had risen in my throat.
“I see,” Tuttle said. He ran his finger gently along the knife’s blade. “I will not have chaos in this place, Mr. Quinn. There’s enough of that on the outside. To discourage it, there are a range of punishments I have for my students. Would you like to know what they are?”
I stood my ground, saying nothing.
“There is detention. There is extra homework and cleaning of the schoolhouse. If that doesn’t work, there is brief but vigorous corporal punishment. Now, for someone such as yourself, someone who has no ties to this town, I believe there is another option, the one I hear that Caleb Henry and a few others are already eager to exercise. Expulsion. From school and, if needed, from the town. I believe that would be something you or your father could ill afford, would it not?”
Tuttle waited for an answer. An ember burned down in the pit of my stomach. My fingernails stabbed into my palms. For this man who I didn’t know, had never met, to have that kind of power over me and my dad… it took every ounce of my strength to shake my head.
“I thought not. Luckily for you, there is another option.”
Tuttle turned the knife’s hilt back toward me.
“The stern warning. Take it home and do not bring it to my class again. Do you understand?”
I paused, expecting some sort of trick, then took the knife from him. Tuttle clasped his hands behind his back and stepped down to the concrete sidewalk.
“I’ll be watching you, Mr. Quinn,” he said over his shoulder. Then he was gone.
I fell against the brick wall behind me and clamped my eyes shut, grimacing from the spiky seed of a headache that was sprouting in the back of my skull. What was I thinking? First Jenny sees me burying that stuff in the woods and now this? Will said he’d make sure Dad and I weren’t here long, and now it was pretty clear how he intended to make that happen. In coming to school, I couldn’t have helped him any more if I had tried. I should have seen it. I let my head fall hard onto the brick behind me, relishing the dull shock of the pain.
“Well, that was kind of awesome.”
I opened my eyes. Derrick was grinning madly and bouncing on the balls of his feet. Martin and Jackson were behind him.
“Just what we all needed before a little baseball game, right? Excitement!”
His voice was like broken glass in my head. I pushed off the brick wall and blew past the three of them without a word.
“Hey! Where you going?” Derrick cried as he jogged alongside me, trailed by the others. “We need you! You can even play second base!”
“Leave me alone, Derrick.”
“But—”
“I don’t want to play some stupid game, okay?”
“Stupid — are you kidding me? Have you ever played baseball before? I mean, what the hell have you been doing all these years?”
“Gee, Derrick, maybe he’s been spending all his time looking for food and shelter and stuff.”
“Valid point, Green!” Derrick said, and darted in closer to me, sticking his face right in mine. “But you don’t have to look for food and shelter right now, do you?”
I glared at him, but he kept going.
“Okay, I get it. Crappy day for you. No question,” Derrick went on. “And I know that most people would back off at this point and let you go and gather your thoughts or whatever, but I can’t. My mom says it’s ‘cause I’ve got, like, this thing in my head that makes it so once I get on something I can’t let it go, and I get kinda hyper about it. She said when she was a kid they’d have doped me to the gills on this stuff called Ritalin, but now — ha! — everyone has to just put up with me!”