Читать книгу Devilish - Maureen Johnson - Страница 15

Here, for your edification, is Jane’s first law of lateness. Given that

a. you don’t fall asleep until 3 a.m. because you sit up all night writing e-mails to your ex-boyfriend that you are never going to send,

b. your power goes out somewhere around four in the morning because of freak wind and rainstorm,

c. your obnoxiously loud green alarm clock doesn’t go off because you haven’t changed the backup battery since you got it (Christmas, age twelve), and

d. you wake up with a sudden start and a horrible feeling in your stomach because you haven’t been blasted halfway across the room by the screaming antics of Boston’s most annoying morning DJ (station chosen expressly for this purpose),…

the time will be exactly (and I do mean exactly) four minutes before you have to leave for school.

Why four? Partially because five minutes is an accepted unit of time. Four minutes is just short of an accepted unit of time. But because you technically have some time because you aren’t late yet, you think you can use that time and do all the things you normally do… just a little more quickly, with the fine points ignored. But the truth is, you just make yourself later in the process.

Joan was in the shower, so I made a pathetic attempt at washing myself up with peach-scented dish soap at the kitchen sink. I evaded any questions from my father, who was standing at the counter slicing a pile of grapefruit. I was still ten minutes late in leaving. I forgot my keys in the process.

The weather was foul. It was pouring down rain. The trolleys were a mess, so I tried to walk. The wind blew my umbrella upside down halfway to school, and I couldn’t really get it to turn the right way again. And as a final gesture, I was so busy running up the school driveway that I didn’t even try to avoid the countless holes that I couldn’t see because they had filled with water. I went right into one, soaking one foot completely and banging up both my knees. Sister Rose Marie passed me a demerit in the lobby for ‘throwing open the door with excessive force.’

I checked in at the front office with Sister Mary Bernadette, the principal’s secretary. Everyone loved Sister Bernie. She was a tiny slip of a woman, probably ninety years old, with a high, cheerful voice. One of the few blessings in the school was that if you were late, you checked in with Sister Bernie, who had endless sympathy for any story and believed that everyone told the truth. I once tested this famously boundless faith sophomore year, when I overslept. I came in and told Sister Bernie that a pack of dogs got loose from a dog walker and pinned me in between some Dumpsters for half an hour. Sister nodded sadly and patted my hand and said, ‘Poor dear. Dogs can be so unpredictable. Mother Mary was with you, though, and kept you safe. No demerits. And stop down in the cafeteria and have something to eat to calm your nerves.’

Needless to say, I felt like such an evil heel after that, I brought Sister a bag of assorted chocolates on Christmas and her feast day every year from that point on. And I still couldn’t look her in the eye.

Today I just told her the truth. She gave me some tissues to help me dry off and let me go with no more demerits. There is mercy in this world.

I walked down the hall as silently as I could, considering that my school shoes were squeaking. It always gave me a very bad feeling walking around between classes. When the halls weren’t filled with other people and movement and noise, that’s when I noticed all the statues. I think we had more statues than the Louvre. But they weren’t statues you would want to find peeking out at you from a dark corner. They were all either clumsy ceramic renderings that managed to make saints look like rejected characters from Star Wars, or they were highly detailed, highly accurate images of saints in intense pain, like the one at the end of the hallway I was in — the one that showed you, in graphic detail, St. Sebastian as he was struck by a dozen arrows at once.

I rounded the corner and found myself facing an entire wall of flyers. These flyers weren’t on the bulletin boards, which in itself was a shock. We were only allowed to use bulletin boards for flyers, and then only for official school club announcements. Someone had actually had the guts to plaster an actual wall with their own flyers. And they were all exactly the same, containing only one sentence. They read: WILL YOU BE ASKED?

I followed the line of flyers with amazement. There was no way that anyone would have been able to do this without being noticed. I instinctively sped up. I didn’t want to be seen anywhere near these flyers, not with my recent warnings. They wouldn’t have even liked it if I was tacking up signs that said: SEX SUX! GIRLS’ SCHOOL RULES!

The door to English was closed, of course. The period had started fifteen minutes before, which was well beyond the point of recovery. Our school hated lateness in general, but Sister Charles hated it in a very particular sort of way, like we were deliberately stealing time from her life and she planned on extracting it back from us somehow.

As I opened the door, I heard her saying, ‘The overall poor quality of the last batch of essays you turned in makes me wonder if any of you know how to read, much less write…’

She trailed off as she noticed me. I waited for the blow, but she switched her focus and continued as if I wasn’t even there.

‘So,’ she went on. ‘We will return to basics, as you do with children. An essay takes a stand. It presents an opinion. I may be assuming too much, but I think you all have opinions.’

I sidestepped as gingerly as I could between desks and made it to my own. I had never noticed before how loud this was — the deafening rip of my zipper, the unbearable scratching sound of pages being turned. The fact that Sister chose to ignore me was about ten times worse than getting chewed out. It seemed to suggest that she was waiting to unleash something truly unholy on me at any moment.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw that there was a strange girl at Allison’s desk. My brain played a bit of a trick on me because though I could see the girl was in a St. Teresa’s uniform, I first assumed she was a visiting student, sitting in on a class. Over the next few seconds, my brain re-scanned the image and told me something stranger.

That girl was Allison. In a wig.

At least, my brain said, that’s what it had to be because whatever was on her head was not the Ally fro I knew and loved. Instead of her somewhat washy red blond, her hair was a blitz of cascading deep red, with a blond streak coming right out of the front. Plus, most of it was gone. It had been chopped into a pert little bob, right at the point where her hair usually bent and started to look awkward. Now it looked like a little red helmet.

It was adorable. It even made her forehead look perfectly proportioned.

‘Miss Jarvis,’ Sister said, ‘as you’ve developed a very becoming slack jaw, perhaps you’d like to tell us about the kinds of rhetorical appeals that we may utilize in composition?’

I searched around in my head for an answer, but a tiny red-helmeted cartoon figure of Allison was running around, scrambling the normally well-ordered facts.

‘There are three basic kinds of appeals,’ I said. ‘There’s…’

All I could think about was that shiny red bob.

‘… logos. That’s the appeal to…’

The shiny redness of it. That was my best friend’s head. The head of the girl who had had the exact same hairstyle since the sixth grade. A kind of… lumpy thing.

‘…reason. There’s also…’

Nothing. White noise. I looked at Sister, but her image was hazy to me. My face fell soft and dumb and blank.

‘I see,’ she said. ‘The great Miss Jarvis does not know. Are you too warm, Miss Jarvis?’

I didn’t reply. Sister shifted her gaze to Allison.

‘Miss Concord,’ she said. ‘I see you have recovered. And it looks like you’ve spent the evening at the hairdresser. I think you might have spent it better sitting at home and reading your book. But perhaps you can contribute something to this conversation?’

The voice that came from the redheaded girl was calm and clear, not the dry stuttering that was so soothing and familiar.

‘There’s also pathos,’ it said. ‘The appeal to emotion, and ethos, which is when you try to convince the audience that they should listen to you because you have a good character and you are knowledgeable.’

Sister stood very still and took a good look at Allison. It seemed like she was seeing her for the first time.

‘Oh?’ she said. ‘This is certainly interesting. Can you elaborate?’

‘Well, Sister,’ Allison said, ‘Cicero, maybe the most famous of Roman orators, said the last method, ethos, is really kind of conceited, but it works. He used it a lot himself. He felt that it should only be used in the exordium, the introduction.’

This was enough of an unusual occurrence to get the attention of everyone in the room. They were all looking at Allison now.

‘Could it be,’ Sister said, ‘that a St. Teresa’s girl had actually read her book and taken note of its contents? My prayers have not gone unanswered.’

I didn’t have to turn and look to know that the redheaded girl smiled. I could feel it in my spine.

I cornered Ally the second the bell rang.

‘Your hair,’ I said. ‘What did you do to it?’

She reached up and touched her head gently, as if she was petting a baby bunny I had just informed her was squatting there.

‘I just decided I needed a change,’ she said. ‘So I went out last night and got my hair done. Do you like it?’

‘It’s nice,’ I said uncertainly. ‘I’m just getting used to it. I wish you had told me.’

‘I don’t actually need permission from you to get my hair done,’ she snapped.

Ally had never snapped at me before.

‘I didn’t say that,’ I said. ‘I was just worried.’

‘I think you’re pissed off that I knew something you didn’t,’ she said. ‘Feeling stupid sucks, huh?’

And with that, she walked away.

I’d never argued with Allison before. Allison was my best friend. A fight between us was so unfamiliar and unexpected — something unthinkable, like someone in their first earthquake, unable to accept the fact that the earth is wiggling like jelly under their feet. Literally. I felt a little unsteady as I went down the hall.

That’s when I noticed that all of those flyers were gone. Not even a piece of tape remained to show where they had been.