Drew half-stood as if he were coming to help me up.
Too slow. I jerked up my backpack of books and ran for the door. A lunchroom lady blocked my way because I didn’t take my plate to the dishwasher. Hurdling chairs, I raced back to my table, scooped up the plate, and made for the dishwasher. Drew was already there. He passed me, heading out.
I followed him as he sprinted down the hall. The bell rang, and the hall flooded with people. They blocked his way. They blocked my way too, but I was smaller. I ducked between them.
Then came a lucky break for me. The vocational ed teacher caught Drew by the arm and lectured him on running in the hall. Shameful, a responsible senior like himself. I blew right past them. I had a lead on him, but he would gain on me if we took the same route. I kicked off my flip-flops, stuffed them in my backpack, and took a shortcut outside the building.
“Ha,” I puffed triumphantly as I sprinted barefoot through the cool grass. One for every step: “Ha ha ha ha ha!” I rounded the last corner of the building and heaved back on the heavy band room door. My eyes hadn’t adjusted from the bright sunlight outside, but I dashed in the general direction of Mr. Rush’s office. “Ha!” I shoved at the door.
The door said, “Ooof!”
The door gave way into the fluorescent-lit office, and I fell in with it. On top of Drew. Drew lay flat on his back on the floor, and I straddled him. We’d knocked sheets of music from a shelf as we fell. They fluttered down around us.
Mr. Rush peered over his desk at us. “A h, Morrow and Sauter. Don’t you knock?”
Without looking Drew in the eye, I backed off him and into one of the chairs in front of Mr. Rush’s desk. I could have held out a hand to help Drew up, but I didn’t.
Drew pulled himself into the other chair and dusted himself off, glaring at me.
Mr. Rush walked over, slammed the door, put his hand on my shoulder, and squeezed. “The first thing I want to know is what happened to this guy O’Toole. They wouldn’t tell me shit at the job interview.”
Right then I decided that Mr. Rush was the coolest. It wasn’t that he cussed. It was that he cussed in front of us and trusted us not to complain to our parents, like he thought we were adults. Plus, he was coming to us for information about another teacher. I tried to recover, and answer, and act like nothing strange had happened.
Drew beat me to it. “He got fired.”
“He didn’t get fired,” I corrected Drew, feeling superior because my information was better. “He quit.”
“He got fired,” Drew repeated, “because he was sleeping with Virginia.”
“What!” Mr. Rush exclaimed. He looked from Drew to me in outrage. “A nd I have my hand on your shoulder!” He jerked his hand off my shoulder. “A nd I have the door closed!” He stepped behind me to fling open the door. “That’s the first thing they teach you in education classes,” he muttered. “Never touch your students. Never close the door while you’re in conference with your students. I’ve been on the job one weekend and already I’m in trouble!”
I’d never seen a teacher throw a fit before either, so normally this would have held my attention. But I was busy calculating the meaning of what Drew had said. So it wasn’t just the Evil Twin making up stories about me. I wondered how far the story had traveled, and how long people had been repeating it.
Maybe I’d gotten over the initial shock when the twin first accused me in the bathroom of sleeping with Mr. O’Toole. It never occurred to me to get really alarmed, or even to defend myself. A nyone who knew me knew how ridiculous the idea was that I would trade my virginity for drum major votes.
Besides, my parents had put the fear of God in me. Or anyway, the fear of sperm. My dad and A llisons dad were ob-gyns. This meant that they were doctors who delivered babies and otherwise took care of women’s—you know—parts.
This meant that after I was home sick from school, my mother would scribble an excuse for me on a pad printed with a cartoon uterus and the slogan of a menopause drug: “Just like the estrogen she used to make!”
It meant that boys asked me if they could be my father’s apprentice.
It meant that dinner table conversation every night was about the fourteen-year-old girls who had come to the hospital that day to have their second babies, and the evils of teen pregnancy. Sometimes I wished my dad worked at the cotton mill like everybody else.
Finally I turned to Drew and said, “It’s irresponsible of you to start a rumor like that.”
Score one for me. I was right on target with his responsibility fetish. He looked like I’d slapped him. Then he recovered enough to say—to Mr. Rush, not me—“It’s not a rumor. She did—”
“Of course I didn’t,” I interrupted him calmly. “Mr. O’Toole is eighty years old.”
“He’s more like forty-five,” Drew corrected me, as if this were going to sway the jury.
Sitting down at his desk, Mr. Rush held up one hand for silence. “I don’t know what you’ve been up to,” he said to me. He turned to Drew.
“But I know you’re acting like a jackass. If the rumor isn’t true, you’re irresponsible for spreading it. A nd if it is true, what do you think you’re doing? Tattling on her for having sex with a teacher?” He looked through some papers.
I felt redeemed. A nd then, the more I thought about it, not.
Drew took a deep breath. “Excuse me, but did you say—”
“Jackass,” Mr. Rush repeated without looking up. “Let’s start again. What happened to O’Toole?”
“He quit,” I said. “He’d been waiting for a position as a mail carrier for three years, and it finally came through last week.”
“See,” Drew said, pointing at me. “How does she know that?”
“Because I asked him,” I said.
Mr. Rush made a show of stacking his papers, turning them and stacking them on another side, and placing them just so on his desk. “Let me tell you what I know. I’m living in a town that’s so small and remote, it doesn’t have a McDonald’s. I’ve taken a job that’s so bad, the guy before me was dying to break out and start his stellar career as a mailman.”
His calm voice rose. “I have seventh graders for breakfast, eighth graders for brunch. For lunch, I have a class of a hundred and fifty teenagers and no assistant. A nd the two people I was counting on to help me are petty and immature”—he was looking at me; he turned to Drew—“and irresponsible!” He held up his hands on either side of his head and wiggled his fingers, like he knew irresponsibility was a scary monster for Drew.