Charlie Anders - All the Birds in the Sky

The smell drove Patricia out of her head, just like everyone else. She imagined this was how being drunk would feel. She kept seeing Mr. Rose observing her through the open door of his office, whenever she was between classes. In the girls’ room, Dorothy Glass and Macy Firestone each grabbed one of Patricia’s arms and shoved her up against the mirror, smeared with unidentifiable effluvia. “Tell us what you did,” they hissed at her. Patricia held her breath until they let go.

At lunch, she couldn’t stand it in the library. She kept thinking about the look Mr. Rose had been giving her, when he thought she wasn’t looking. She was sure: He was responsible for Laurence’s disappearance and this debilitating cloud of foulness. The two things were no coincidence. She was surer than caution.

She stalked down the hallway, lockers vibrating with her strides, and she hardly cared that she was getting a faceful of the death stench, with the exertion.

Just as she reached his doorway, a phrase popped into her head: “The trap that can be ignored is no trap.” She caught her breath — maybe CH@NG3M3 was wiser than it knew — but then she breathed in once again, and the maddening decay got in her nostrils again. She was going to confront this monster, once and for all.

“Miss Delfine.” Mr. Rose looked up from his computer and beckoned her to come sit in the nearest carpety chair facing him. The odor was strongest here in Mr. Rose’s office, but he seemed unbothered. “Always a pleasure to see you.” The door closed behind her.

The smell, it was beyond describing. You might as well have punched Patricia in the nose over and over.

“Uh, hi.” Patricia tried to sit still, but she couldn’t help fidgeting. She was at the epicenter of foulness. “I hope I’m not bothering you at a bad time.”

“I’m always here for you, just as I am for all the students here. What’s on your mind?”

“I’m wondering, umm, about Laurence. I haven’t seen him since Tuesday, and it’s Friday, and it seems weird that nobody’s even mentioned him. I was, umm, wondering if you knew what happened to him.”

Mr. Rose spread out his left palm on the desk. “I know as much as you do.” His right hand was doing something under the table. Patricia realized that “I know as much as you do” could be a loaded sentence, since there was a lot that they both knew. Or he was hinting he knew everything she did. Trap trap trap.

“Okay then.” Patricia raised herself out of the chair with both hands.

Mr. Rose still had one hand under the table. He was trying to be subtle about fiddling with something. “Wait a moment, Miss Delfine,” he rasped. “Now that you mention Mr. Armstead, it does put me in mind of our conversation several weeks ago.” He gestured at the empty chair with his free hand.

“You mean the one that you said we would never talk about again.” Patricia resisted the impulse to obey the summons back to the chair. Instead she backed away.

“Well, if one were to infer that you had decided to ignore the advice I gave you on that occasion, one might well conceive that I decided to take matters into my own hands. Hypothetically speaking.” There was a kind of smile, a mutated species.

“You’re a revolting man.” Patricia had reached the door. The handle was stuck. “I don’t believe you. You’re just a crazy old crazy manipulative crazy person.” She tugged on the doorknob, with everything she had. “If you’ve done anything to hurt Laurence”—she heard her voice rising—“then I promise you I will hunt you down and use all my so-called witch powers to tear you apart.” The door came open with a lurch, just as she was saying the part about her witch powers.

Behind her, she heard a “clump” sound, like something soft and heavy falling. She turned just in time to have an impression of wet fur and teeth bared in agony, on the chair where she’d just been sitting. The day’s terrible stench came stronger than ever when she looked at that bundle of bloody fur in that chair. She could just make out one aquiline cloudy eye, staring at her from under the nearest chair arm.

“My god,” Mr. Rose was saying loud enough to ring through the crowded hallway. “What have you done ?”

Patricia turned, and everywhere she looked people stared. The whole school had just heard her yelling threats of witchcraft and violence at Mr. Rose, and then she’d appeared to throw a smelly dead animal into his chair. This was never going to come right.

She ran. The doorway to the back lot opened with a crunch of the panic bar, and Patricia was sprinting into the cold. Skidding downhill. The stream that had stopped Laurence and her from going to the pew-pew-pew lake was still frosted over even in March, and Patricia hesitated. She heard people shouting. Horrible names. She stepped on the flattest rock and almost spilled into the water. She regained her balance and stepped on the next stone, which dislodged. She toppled forward and somehow turned her falling momentum into forward momentum. She careened onto another rock, then another, and at last she was teetering on the opposite bank. The shouting was louder and more directional. Someone had spotted her school jumper. She ran on, into the trees.

This wasn’t a real forest, not so close to all the roads and buildings. You couldn’t call it a forest unless the treetops occluded the sky and every direction looked the same. But if she could reach the lake and cross the ice without freeze-drowning, she would reach some real density. Nobody would ever find her.

Halfway across the lake, she thought in a vertiginous stumble: I can never go home or see my family again . The ice was caving in. She leapt to a stable patch, kept leaping, landing on her toes each time. The ice groaned and cracks opened everywhere. She hit the opposite bank just as the people searching for her reached the lake, and then she was running deeper into the tree line. Instinct steered her away from the shopping malls and bypass roads and McMansions and golf courses, and she kept widening the radius of tree cover around her.

Low branches and shrubs tore her skirt, making her fall on her hands a few times, and she sweated so hard she froze all the way through. She grew short of breath, and at last she had to stop running and suck in sharp air. She was glad to breathe again after a day of terrible smells, even if she was going to catch pneumonia.

Patricia climbed a tree and made herself as compact as possible inside the cradle of its uppermost branches. She turned off her phone and yanked out the battery.

What if Laurence was really dead? He was the only crummy person she could stand to talk to, pretty much ever. At the thought of Laurence’s death, she felt a sucking anxiety in her core and a nugget of guilt, like she’d killed him herself.

But she hadn’t. And everything Mr. Rose had ever said to her was full of shit.

Okay. So if Laurence was alive, then he was in trouble. She had to help him somehow.

The sun folded. The air froze, and Patricia kept shivering. She had to make a conscious effort not to let her teeth chatter, in case someone was close enough to hear.

Voices grew louder and quieter. A few times, she spotted a flashlight in the darkness. Once, she heard a dog grumbling, keen to avenge its fallen cousin. She was pretty sure that had been a dog in Mr. Rose’s office. The bastard had probably put it in the crawl space the night before, just to give it time to get good and ripe.

Roberta’s voice startled Patricia out of a half dream. “Hey, Trish. I know you can hear me, so stop screwing around. We all want to go home, and you’re being selfish as usual. I had to blow off Grease practice for this. You’re killing Mom and Dad here.”