Charlaine Harris - An Apple for the Creature

It was an odd feeling, one Callie hadn’t encountered in more than a dozen years primarily because it was a sensation uniquely specific to the elementary school experience, something about the amazing cruelness of small children and the amazing ability of adults to look the other way.

“Miss Reaper-Jones?”

The use of her name, out loud and in front of the whole class, made Callie jump. Eyes refocusing, she returned her attention to the problem at hand, pressing the mute button on her (really distracting) internal monologue so she could concentrate.

“I, um, well—” she stammered, feeling the imaginary dunce cap settling farther down the crown of her head.

“Yes, Miss Reaper-Jones? Spit it out.”

The blood rushed to her cheeks in a florid burst.

“I didn’t really, uh, do the reading you assigned.”

Silence from the peanut gallery.

If the proverbial pin had dropped, you would’ve heard the sound of it bouncing on the linoleum, twice, before rolling underneath one of the classroom’s desks where it would’ve stayed, unmolested, until some random day in the faraway future when a janitor came to sweep it away.

Surveying the crowd and trying not to let their hostile stares sting, Callie decided there was actually nothing peanut-y about the assortment of oddities and misfits who had somehow, over the course of their service to Death, Inc., never learned to call up a wormhole and were, thusly, stuck in the same Remedial Wormhole Calling class as Callie.

How to describe her peers?

Angry was a good descriptive word. Annoyed was another. Peeved could also be added to the list. The group fell short of the index-finger-pointing (and elementary school laughter) Callie’s brain had conjured up earlier . . . but just barely.

“I don’t understand your inability to do your homework, Miss Reaper-Jones,” the teacher said, shaking her head.

A tall, shaggy-haired Asian woman with a beaked nose and fleshy jowls that fluttered like gills whenever she spoke, Mrs. Gunwhale—as she’d asked the class to call her—was partial to bruise-colored, diaphanous muumuus that made her bloated appendages appear larger and rounder than they actually were.

“You’re a grown woman—and one in a leadership position, no less,” Mrs. Gunwhale continued, the frown she wore speaking volumes about the hostility she’d engendered toward Callie, a student she’d decidedly labeled “indolent.”

While Mrs. Gunwhale may have been sorely mistaken about most things, she wasn’t wrong about the many leadership responsibilities Callie had to shoulder in order to run Death. Since her dad had been murdered and she’d inherited the presidency of Death, Inc.—who’d have thunk Death would be run like a corporation—Callie’s world had done a one-eighty. There wasn’t time in her rigorous schedule for indolence these days. Overseeing Death, Inc., and being the de facto “Not So Grim Reaper” was running her ragged, keeping her so damn busy she was having a hard time focusing on anything that wasn’t directly work-related.

Like homework.

“Well, that’s why I didn’t do it,” Callie said, aware that the whine in her voice would make her no friends. “There was a Death board meeting and then I had to go to Hell, talk to Cerberus—”

“Everyone here is a commuter student.” Mrs. Gunwhale breathed. “They all hold full-time jobs and, yet, they still find time to do their homework.”

“That’s right,” a girlish falsetto chimed in from the front row.

Callie glared at the owner of the voice, a wispy woman with a halo of bright orange, dandruff-laden hair, and found herself wishing she could use her Death powers to give the woman—the teacher’s pet, of course—a little kick in the direction of an early grave.

Stop that right now, Callie thought as she mentally scolded herself for thinking such horrible thoughts. Bad, bad, bad, bad Death!

Part of the responsibility of possessing special powers—like the power of bestowing life and death—was learning to be judicious about how you applied them. You weren’t supposed to just lay waste to every Tom, Dick, or Harry (or teacher’s pet) that got on your nerves. You were supposed to be wise like King Solomon and split the baby in half—

She paused, realizing she’d gotten the stupid analogy wrong.

“Cutting the baby in half is never the intended outcome—” Callie mumbled to herself.

“Miss Reaper-Jones, stop mumbling. I’m trying to have a pertinent conversation with you!”

“Pertinent?”

“Yes, pertinent,” Mrs. Gunwhale said, enunciating every word. “Pertinent as to whether you continue in my class or not.”

Where there was once silence, now came a snicker from the aforementioned peanut gallery. Callie turned her head, trying to catch the culprit in the act, but only encountered a wall of stony faces, their slack jaws and dead eyes as bland as the faux wood-grain paneling that decorated the four walls of the modular classroom. The class was meeting in a “temporary” trailer that normally housed a second-grade class in a Jamaica, Queens, elementary school (it’d been on-site since 2001, so the “temporary” part was a joke), but at night it was leased out—for an undisclosed sum—to the University of Supernatural Studies Extension Program. Though it was nice to be back in the tri-borough area (it was almost Manhattan!), the gray on gray on brown—ash-colored linoleum-tiled floors, brown fake wood-grain Formica desks two sizes too small for any adult bottom to command, dirty-gray dry-erase boards lining the washed-out, smoky walls—was pretty damn depressing.

And if the decor was not conducive to teaching adults how to call up wormholes, then Callie could only imagine the adverse effect it would have on fidgety second graders attempting to learn fractions. No wonder kids hated to go to school—if Callie had been shunted into a classroom like this one (no matter how nice and kid-friendly the teacher had tried to make the temporary digs), she’d probably have come out of the system totally illiterate.

“Miss Reaper-Jones?” Mrs. Gunwhale bellowed, her aggressive baritone filling Callie’s head like the thundering boom of cannon fire.

As much as she wanted to tell Mrs. Gunwhale where she could shove her Remedial Wormhole Calling class, she knew she needed to master wormhole calling if she wanted to run Death, Inc., and not be laughed at by her employees—including the six numb nuts she was trapped in the modular trailer with for the next four nights’ worth of classes.

Steeling herself for the worst, she took a deep breath and said:

“I would like to stay in your class.”

“And . . . ?”

Mrs. Gunwhale’s dark eyes blatantly telegraphed that she would need to see a little begging from her recalcitrant pupil before she relented and let Callie stay in the class.

Callie sighed, her hands tied. It was imperative that the head of Death, Inc., be self-sufficient and capable of traveling around the Afterlife on her own, without her Executive Assistant calling up wormholes for her like she was some kind of nincompoop. If she didn’t suck it up now and somehow master the art of wormhole calling, she was giving her enemies the advantage, allowing them the opportunity to petition the Death board to recall her from her new job.

“ Please , I would like to stay in your class?” Callie choked out, the obsequiousness of the word making her feel nauseous.

A look of triumph spread across Mrs. Gunwhale’s face. Exultant, she lifted her sausage arms into the sky like airborne blimps—and then the ungainly woman shocked everyone by doing a graceless twirl on the linoleum floor, causing both the gill/jowl flaps around her jaw and the muumuu she had on to flutter with happiness.