Jeff Hirsch - The Eleventh Plague

“These things are for us,” he said. “Not you.”

“Leave him alone, Will!”

I turned and was surprised to see that Jackson was up out of his seat. Derrick and Martin rose tentatively to join him.

“What are you going to do?” Will continued, leaning toward him. Even though he was a whole row of desks away, Jackson took one nervous step back, which clearly delighted Will. “You and your folks gonna save this stray too? What? Was the first one not pathetic enough for you?”

Every part of me tensed, desperate to shoot up out of my chair and knock Will into the wall behind him. I struggled to stay calm even as he leaned over me, his face inches from mine.

“How about you, spy? You gonna do something?”

My cheeks burned and the wounds on my hand throbbed as I gripped the rough leather of the knife’s hilt.

The doors at the back of the classroom flew open and slammed against the wall.

“Class, settle down! Settle down, everyone!” the teacher called as he rushed in past us to the front of the room. “Mr. Henry, take your friends and sit.”

“Mr. Tuttle —” Will began, pointing at me.

“No time, Mr. Henry,” Tuttle said, distracted with papers at his desk. “Sit or find yourself in detention.”

Will glanced at Tuttle. “You’re lucky, spy,” he said as he tossed the notebook over his shoulder to one of his friends. “Come on, guys. Kid’s stinking up this side of the room anyway.”

The redhead gave me a vacant, moist-eyed glare while one of the slug twins nudged my desk so my pencils fell to the ground with a clatter. I waited until they were back at their seats before bending to pick them up, but when I did, Jackson was already holding them out to me.

“Here you go.”

“Thanks.” I turned away from him and rearranged my things. It was odd how Jackson and the others had stood up for me the way they had. Getting backed up like that by people who weren’t family didn’t make sense. It felt good, but I couldn’t afford to be careless. Nobody did anything for free.

“Class, I will need your attention… now.”

Tuttle smacked his ruler across the desk and there was a rustle of bodies as everyone dropped into their seats and shot to attention. He surveyed the room, moving from face to face and making little marks on a sheet of paper until his eyes fell on me.

“And who is this?”

“Stephen,” Jackson piped up from behind me. “Stephen, uh…” Jackson tapped my shoulder.

“Quinn,” I said.

“Stephen Quinn. He’s new.”

Tuttle glanced at Jackson. “Yes, I can see that he’s new, Mr. Green. If he wasn’t, I would not have expressed surprise upon seeing him, would I?”

“Um—”

“Rhetorical question, Mr. Green. Now. Quinn. Stephen. I am Mr. Tuttle. Have you been in school before?”

I cleared my throat and tried to sit up straighter. “No sir.”

“Can you read? Do you know your numbers?”

“Yes sir.”

“The Pledge of Allegiance?”

“The pledge of allegiance to what?”

The class laughed all around me. I felt my cheeks go red and hot.

“Well, you’ll have a lot of catching up to do, but I can’t afford to slow down.” Tuttle went back to marking his paper, then nodded toward Jackson and Martin. “Mr. Green and Mr. Stantz will help you.”

“Hey, what about me?”

Tuttle glared at Derrick. “I think Mr. Quinn would do well to pay as little attention to you as possible on educational matters. Don’t you agree, Mr. Waverly?”

“Yes! Absolutely!” Derrick said. “Good call, sir.”

Tuttle gave him a withering look, then stepped back to the blackboard behind him. It was covered by some kind of pull-down screen. The class groaned as he reached for it.

“Yes, class,” Tuttle said. “That’s right. If you were able to better control yourselves, these little tests wouldn’t be necessary. So take out your—”

Before Tuttle could finish, the doors behind us burst open again, smacking against the walls. The class turned as one body toward the sound as Jenny Tan strode barefoot into the classroom. She carried a tattered notebook. A nub of pencil was stuck behind one ear.

“Well, well, well, this is quite an honor,” Tuttle deadpanned. “We haven’t been graced with your presence in weeks. So nice of you to join us today, Miss Green.”

“It’s Tan,” Jenny said as she plopped down into an open seat toward the back of the class and put her bare feet up on the chair in front of her. “And you’re welcome.”

A ripple of laughter went through the classroom. Jackson had his eyes closed tight and his head in his hands. Irritation pulsed off him in waves. Tuttle slapped his ruler down on the corner of his desk.

“I won’t have any more disruptions.”

Jenny raised her hands, palms up, as if to say he wouldn’t get any from her. Tuttle considered her a moment, made a notation on his sheet, then stepped back to pull on the screen in front of the blackboard. It shot up toward the ceiling, revealing a long list of questions written in chalk. Jenny bent over her desk, laying her chin in the palm of one hand while she dug into the wood of her desk with her fingernail.

Jackson handed me a sheet of paper from his notebook as the rest of the class picked up their pencils and began writing. Jenny flicked her hair out of her face, turning just enough to catch me staring at her. It was like being stuck out in the open as lightning flashed all around me. I knew I should look away, and quickly, but I froze.

Jenny raised one eyebrow, and when I still didn’t look away, she jutted her face out at me, bugging her big brown eyes and making a show of staring back. I looked away immediately, up at the test questions, trying to calm the thrill of nerves in my stomach.

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 scrawl:

I saw what you buried in the woods Friday night.

You are a naughty naughty boy.

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.