Читать книгу Angela 2 - David A. Bedford - Страница 7

Benjie turned to Angela with his eyebrows raised and Fiona frowned, looking thoughtful. With a sinking feeling in her stomach, Angela picked up her things and headed toward the door. Fiona patted her on the arm as she went by and Angela returned a small, worried smile.

Feeling as though she had tuned in to the same bad movie for the fourth or fifth time, Angela entered the school office. The secretary told her that Ms. Petty was waiting for her and to go on in. She stepped timidly into the principal’s personal territory. Something was odd about the light. Behind the desk, Petty was in shadows. Angela looked up and saw that the light fixture was wrapped in something black. The lamp on the desk was draped over as well. Petty spoke:

“What do you have to say for yourself, miss Angela Poltergeist?”

“Excuse me?”

“I guess you thought it was funny, but you are going to pay! Doesn’t look very funny now, does it?”

Angela decided that the best approach was to be quiet, as anything she said would be pounced on and she had no idea what she was alleged to have done. The silence extended uncomfortably, but Angela looked the principal in the eyes and waited.

“Well, answer me!” said Petty at last.

Angela took a deep breath, let it out slowly and, making a monumental effort to control her feelings, said:

“Ms. Petty, if you are accusing me of something, please tell me what it is.”

“You know what you’ve done!”

Angela felt like screaming in frustration. Instead, she waited.

Petty exploded. “What is the meaning of all this?!” she exclaimed, indicating the lamp and the light fixture.

“Ms. Petty, I really don’t know.”

“You don’t know,” echoed the principal, oozing sarcasm. “These are your dance clothes!” She lifted up a pair of undies from where they had been laid on the telephone. They had blended into the shadows and Angela had not seen them.

“My dance stuff is in my locker.”

“Very well,” challenged the principal. “Let’s go look.”

Angela followed the imperious Petty into the hallway. She would have found the principal comical, strutting importantly but bursting all over with inadequacy, if it were not that she knew that Petty really had it in for her since the previous year. They reached her locker, which was firmly closed, nothing looking amiss. Angela felt her heart beating fast and strong, fearing that there would be some surprise. She worked the combination, opened the locker, and saw that her duffel bag lay open. She remembered that she had left it zipped. She pulled out the bag. The dance clothes were not there.

Confused and shaking, she looked up at the principal, whose face was contorted into an ugly triumphal smile.

“Follow me,” ordered Petty. They filed back to the office. The principal showed Angela a chair with a wave of her hand. Looking as though she were savoring the moment intensely, Petty pulled a camera out of her desk and took pictures of the offending clothes wrapped around the lights and phone. She also shot the dance shoes, which Angela now saw were perched coyly on the file cabinet. The principal put the camera away, pulled the clothes off the lights and phone, grabbed the shoes, and set them in a neat pile on her desk. Examining the bands on the tights and other items, she read off: “Angela Fournier” for each one. She sat down behind her desk with what appeared to Angela to be glee, even giddiness.

“I’ve been thinking over what to do about you,” said Petty.

“Ms. Petty, I did not do this. Somebody took…”

“Silence! What do you take me for? Now, in spite of your repeated maliciousness and your cavalier attitude” – Cava-what? – “I am inclined to be generous as it is early in the school year and maybe I can get you to come around, though I doubt it. You will have detention in the front office every day for a week at lunch time and during dance.”

Angela felt a sick, sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. She felt herself turning red. She opened her mouth and then thought better of saying anything, deciding to accept the injustice, at least for the moment. She left the principal’s office with a rising sense of anger at whoever had opened her locker and used her own things, her dance things, against her, and at Ms. Petty, always ready to think the worst of her. Why was it that schools never punish bullies but only their victims?

Between classes, Angela told Fiona and Benjie what happened. After their indignation, voiced in loud protestations by Benjie, subsided, Angela put to them her question about bullies always going scot free.

“Because they’re sneaky and well connected,” offered Benjie.

“Yeah,” agreed Fiona, “and because people like the powerful and look down on the weak. They see the bullies as powerful and their victims as weak.”

“But that’s cynical and wrong!” protested Angela.

“Maybe so,” Fiona went on, “but the school is a power structure and the principal is the most powerful person. Power always protects power. I got that from Michael Crighton. Really!” she insisted, when Angela made a doubtful expression. “The principal always rules for the teachers over the students and the school board always supports the principal in any conflict with the teachers. It’s human nature!”

Angela felt dissatisfied and she thought Benjie looked like he did, too, but she couldn’t think of any examples to the contrary.

“Wait a minute!” said Benjie. “What about last year when Angela won at the board?”

Angela frowned.

“She had the teachers supporting her,” reasoned Fiona, “and the Petty wasn’t even there!”

“It makes sense,” commented Angela, feeling defeated, “but it’s so wrong, unfair, for people to be that way.”

She took her friends’ silence as agreement and support.

***

Lunchtime was drab and the food, which was brought to her from the cafeteria by the secretary, tasted like cardboard. Without her friends, Angela felt devoid of purpose. When time for dance class came, she stopped by on her way to the office to let her teacher know about the detention. Ms. Amberg, however, was not in a mood to accept losing Angela for a week without putting up a fight.

“Come with me,” she said. “Jo! Put the ladies – and guys too, sorry, guys – through the usual warm-up stretches. I’ll be right back.”

Jo smiled, looking pleased and in her element and started the exercises as Angela and Ms. Amberg left for the office.

“Come in!” said Petty when Ms. Amberg called at the door, but she frowned when she saw Angela. “You’re in detention, young lady. Go sit in the front office and start on your homework.”

“Just a minute, Mara,” pleaded Ms. Amberg in her most reasonable voice. “What is this? A week without dance! She’s the kindest and one of the best behaved and most respectful students in our school.”

“I’ll decide that, Tanya, and the detention is not negotiable. Apparently Little Miss Perfect has you fooled. Angela is rebellious and conniving and needs to be taught a lesson.”

“Mara, that’s absurd! Besides, a lunch detention I can understand, but you cannot pull students out of classes for detention, only for suspension.”

“Academic classes, you’re right,” countered Petty. “But dance is not an essential.”

The two women stood looking at each other, Petty smug and Ms. Amberg struggling to control herself.

“Very well, as I cannot do anything about it. But I do want you to understand that I disagree and I am not happy about this. Come on, Angela,” the dance teacher added, leading her into the front office. “Let’s just move forward. I’ll make sure you don’t get behind. Do the exercise routine at home every day and I will e-mail you the choreography we’re working on. Ok?”

“Thanks, Ms. Amberg,” said Angela as she sat down and placed her things on a desk. She watched her teacher disappear into the hall, feeling calmer and much less angry knowing she had Ms. Amberg’s support. I’ve got to stop being angry, she thought, it really does bad things to me.

***

On the way home, Angela told her mother about being called into the office, about her dance things wrapped provocatively around Petty’s belongings, and about her detention. Susan thought about it a minute and then said:

“I think you’re wise not to challenge your detention and I’m glad you kept control. That’s good. It seems to me that the important thing here is to find out who did it. Taking things from your locker is not a prank, it’s a serious offence! Petty larceny or some such.”

“That’s funny, Mom!”

“What is?”

“Petty larceny.”

“Oh!” exclaimed Susan, laughing when she realized what she had said. “Anyway, it can’t be tolerated at a school. If we need to later, we can hold that over Ms. Petty with the school board and it will help that you’re doing your detention without complaint. But what is the motivation of whoever did it? And what may they do next? That’s what bothers me.”

They prepared tea when they got home. Angela asked for chamomile. She sat sipping the tea in silence. The day’s events and her mom’s reaction had given her a lot to think about.

The next day during lunch detention, Fiona and Benjie walked in. Angela smiled happily, but before she could say anything, Petty materialized perversely and ran them off.

“Sit there and eat. Alone,” she instructed Angela. “If you’re done eating before the next period, start on your homework.” She turned and reentered her office. Angela stabbed furiously at the oven-roasted potatoes, which she loved but which at the moment lacked any detectable flavor. Determined to eat slowly so as to make the food last the entire lunch period, she chewed morosely with tears in her eyes. She was disappointed with herself for getting so angry. Why did injustice always seem to win out? Right then she saw the newspaper at the corner of the administrative assistant’s desk. “Plans for Sargasso Beach Pipeline Go Forward” proclaimed the headline. See? There’s another example. It’s everywhere! she told herself. She leaned over and picked up the paper, not sure if it was allowed. As she scanned down the column, a familiar word caught her eye:

“Is putting the pipeline through the nature preserve the best route? Surely there are better alternatives. Won’t the wildlife be endangered?” the Caller—Times asked Grovell Construction public relations associate, Irene Snow. “Grovell is proud to be associated with Hermes Oil on this joint venture. Both companies are committed to protecting the environment and the investors,” said Snow. “We have chosen the most cost-effective route. Some want all of Padre Island protected, which causes difficulties for business, drives up prices, and has a bad effect on employment. To the north we would face a forest of regulations in Corpus Christi and to the south we have Texas’ only federally protected coastline area. We are fortunate to have the enlightened, pro-business community of Sargasso Beach at the point of most direct access. They have assured us we will only need to work out a minor zoning change. The city stands to benefit from the significantly higher tax earnings and the many jobs that will be created. It is a win-win for everyone.”

Angela put the newspaper back where she had found it. Her thoughts drifted to large mechanical cranes rising out of Oso Bay, backhoes clouding the water, birds shunning the area because the fish had left, oil spills spreading over the surface of the inlet, and on the horizon inland, the black nightmarish outline of a refinery with its towers, pipes, and floodlights, flushing pollutants into the water. People need the fuel and natural gas, thought Angela. Yes, but we also need protected natural areas where the Earth can breathe and life can grow, she countered herself.

After P.E., Angela brought up the subject with Fiona and Benjie and told them about the news story.

“They’re never satisfied,” said Benjie. “All they care about is making more money. But don’t we all pretty much want the same? We demand the right to keep on driving forever, and we reject anyone telling us we can’t have a big car with a bigger engine if want to!”

Angela recognized that what he said was true, but it was no help in this case, on the contrary… Fiona was twisting her mouth, which meant she was thinking hard. At that moment Michaela walked up.

Fiona said, “land values went up six or seven times where the refinery is going, just before the project was announced.”

“How do you know all this stuff?” asked Benjie.

“I read the newspaper. You see what will happen: people will no longer want the land around there. People who have land where the refinery will go will make a fortune. Those who live outside the refinery perimeter will want to move, but they won’t get buyers for their houses. So it makes money for some people, but it’s a disaster for others. Irene Snow won’t tell you that.”

Angela felt overwhelmed. There was so much she did not know. A determination to do something to protect the nature preserve began to well up in her.

“What I think,” contributed Michaela, talking for the first time, “is that people who care about money and not about beauty are very unhappy. I feel sorry for them!”

When dance period arrived, Angela headed for detention with a sense of purpose which helped fill the emptiness she felt. First, she completed the written work that was due the next day and then asked to use the computer that was sitting on the table, the screen displaying a beautiful coral reef from under water, surrounded by gliding fish with garish colors. She went online and looked up “pipeline” and “wetlands”. Among a list of links appearing on the monitor was an article in the National Geographic. She clicked it and began reading, becoming so absorbed that she did not hear or see Petty come out of the office and stand behind her.

“Just what are you doing?” barked Petty.

Angela jumped. “Oh, hello Ms. Petty! I’ve finished my homework for tomorrow and I’m starting to research for my honors paper.”

Petty stared at her, nostrils twitching and eyes narrowed. Angela felt her own eyes getting bigger, but she did not back down.

“Ok, then,” Petty conceded. “Apparently detention is doing you some good. Just don’t let me catch you e-mailing anyone, doing games, or listening to music. Work and that’s all! Got it?”

“Yes, Ms. Petty.”

“All right, well…” Petty trailed off and then continued her way into the hall. Angela felt confused and guilty. She had told Petty two half-truths: she had not said that she had a lot of reading to do for the next day nor that an honors paper was not the real reason she had started researching pipelines and wetlands. On the other hand, Petty believed Angela only if it was something she couldn’t be punished for, otherwise the principal closed her ears and gave her detentions for lying. So, what’s the use? Angela knew she was right in her intentions, and that she was being punished for something she had not done, but still felt dissatisfied with herself. She turned again to the computer screen, opened a notebook, and began to take down information.