Rachel Hawkins: Rebel Belle

The more I thought about it, the more comforting the idea seemed. It was certainly better than thinking there was a sword-wielding maniac on the other side of the door.

It had just been a rogue piece of machinery. A blade or a belt or something had snapped and cut Mr. Hall open, and that had been the rattling at the door. He hadn’t had time to unplug it, and it was probably spinning down the hall right now. I’d get out of here, and I’d go find a teacher and tell him or her, and everything would be fine.

I looked at myself in the mirror. My skin was almost as white as Mr. Hall’s, making the Salmon Fantasy look cheap and too bright.

“It’s going to be fine,” I told my reflection. “Everything is fine .”

I walked to the door, and as I did, I had to step over that weird pillow thing Mr. Hall had strapped to his body.

Oh, right. That.

Why did Mr. Hall have a fake belly? My brain felt like it was in a blender as I tried to think up a plausible explanation, hopefully one that would tie in with my possessed machinery idea.

Okay, Mr. Hall was younger than I’d thought. And cuter. Why would he be wearing a disguise? Was he in the witness protection program? A deadbeat dad hiding out from paying child support?

And there was something else. Something weird about him.

I looked back at his body, bracing myself against throwing up or fainting, but I didn’t feel anything except that tingle in my chest.

It was something about his face, something that had just felt odd when he’d . . . kissed me? Blown on me? Whatever.

I crept back to him, still careful about the blood, then I reached down and touched his beard. My dad and granddad both have beards, and neither of theirs felt like this one.

Sliding my finger around the edge of his beard, just under his left ear, I saw why.

It was a fake. It was a pretty good one, and it was glued on super tight, but it was still a fake.

Then I glanced up at his balding head and saw a fine stubble covering the bare half-moon of his scalp.

So Mr. Hall hadn’t been fat, or bearded, or balding.

“Oh, this is some bullshit ,” I whispered. That’s when I knew I was seriously freaked out. I never curse out loud, not even in private. It’s just not ladylike.

There was no theory I could come up with to explain any of that, no matter how CSI: Pine Grove I was trying to be. No, the best thing to do was to get the heck out of the bathroom and find a teacher, or a cop, or an exorcist. I’d take anyone at this point.

I hurried to the door before realizing I’d left Bee’s lip gloss in the sink. My brain was still scrambled, and despite the dead body at my feet, all I could think was that Bee loved that ugly stuff, and I had to grab it before it was, like, confiscated for evidence or something. So I ran back to the sink.

It’s funny to think about now, because even though that lip gloss had gotten me into this whole mess, that same lip gloss totally saved my life. If I hadn’t gone back for it, I would have been at the door when it exploded into two pieces and slammed into the row of stalls with the force of a small bomb.

And if that hadn’t flattened me like a pancake, I still would have been directly in the path of the man who came running in with a long, curved blade—a scimitar, I was pretty sure I remembered from World History II with Dr. DuPont—held out in front of him.

So thanks to Bee’s lip gloss, I was standing frozen by the sink when the sword-wielding maniac came in and my life stopped making even the littlest bit of sense.

In all the dust from the door flying off, it took the man a minute to realize I was there. He had his back to me as he knelt by Mr. Hall’s body. I watched, still as a statue, as he reached into Mr. Hall’s pockets, but I guess he didn’t find what he was looking for because he stood up really fast and muttered the F-word. I couldn’t hold it against him, though. This did seem like a dire situation.

Then he turned around, and I’m sure the look of total confusion on his face was reflected on mine.

“Harper?”

“ Dr. DuPont? ”

I didn’t get much time to wonder why my history teacher had just killed a janitor, even though I had this whole joke forming about how Dr. DuPont must really hate when his trash cans aren’t emptied—you know, to make him see me as a person and not just a potential shish kabob. I learned that in the self-defense class Mom and I went to at the church last spring.

But that joke dried right up in my mouth, because Dr. DuPont crossed the bathroom in two strides, and put his sword against my neck.

NOW, this is when it really gets weird. I know, I know, dead janitor in disguise, killer history teacher, how much weirder could it get?

Lots. Trust me.

When Dr. DuPont put that sword—well, scimitar—on my neck, I didn’t feel scared, like, at all. Instead, I felt that tingle in my chest again, only this time, it was more like this . . . energy.

I reached out, almost like my hands didn’t belong to me, and grabbed the hilt of the sword, just above Dr. DuPont’s hands on the handle, and yanked, sliding that lethal blade in the space between my arm and my body.

Dr. DuPont was so surprised he didn’t even let go of the sword, which was exactly what I had planned, although where that plan came from, I had no idea. Certainly not from that lame self-defense class, where the only thing I’d learned was how to knee a guy in the groin, and trust me, teenage girls already know how to do that. No, this was a different kind of fighting, one so smooth and powerful that I felt like I was standing outside my body, watching myself pull Dr. DuPont right up to me.

I didn’t knee him in the groin, although I didn’t rule that move out. Instead I . . . ugh, this is so embarrassing.

I head-butted him.

I know, like a soccer hooligan or something. But it worked. He let go of the sword with one hand and reached up to clutch his probably broken nose.

I’d kept my hand on the hilt, and I used it to pull him past me and slam him headfirst into the wall. Now I had a clear shot for the door, but for some reason, I didn’t take it. For one thing, all this ninja-style fighting was . . . well, kind of cool. I had no idea how I was doing it, and I wondered if it was another adrenaline thing, like when I was able to push Mr. Hall off me. But it wasn’t just that I was having fun. It was almost like I couldn’t leave; like I had to finish the fight until one of us was dead.

See? I told you it got weirder.

I stood there, crouched in my pink dress while Dr. DuPont turned around to look at me with an expression I can only call incredulous (that was the word I had beat David Stark with in the fifth -grade spelling bee.)

Blood was caked all around the lower half of his face. Panting, he looked down at Mr. Hall’s body, then back at me.

He laughed, but it was an ugly, wet sound. “So he passed it on to you,” Dr. DuPont wheezed. Then his bloody lips curved in a nasty smirk. “Well, bless your heart ,” he drawled in a not very nice (if kind of accurate) imitation of my accent.

He moved sideways, toward the stalls, the sword still pointed at me. “I really can’t think of a worse choice,” he said, still smiling, “than the bimbo who wrote a paper on the history of shoes for my class.”

Okay, that stung. I’d worked hard on that paper. And it hadn’t been on shoes. It had been about how fashion affected politics. And I may like clothes and makeup and shoes, but I am not a bimbo. Dr. DuPont could totally bite me. I almost said that, but then I changed my mind. As crazy as everything had gone, Dr. DuPont might take that as an opening to actually, you know, bite me .