“She’d keel over from the kickback from a water pistol.”
“—but you must see what I’m getting at. I wish you’d sit down and try to come up with some approach to this problem that didn’t make all of us look bad. We really can’t go to the press or the school board or the Home News saying that Diane Asch is some kind of paranoid psychotic, not unless you can prove she is a paranoid psychotic, which I don’t think you can—”
“No,” Nancy said. “She’s not a paranoid psychotic. She’s a fat, unattractive, whining, sniveling mass of insecurity complexes and it’s no damned surprise to anybody who’s paying attention that she has virtually no friends. We can’t just cave in to this kind of thing. What are we supposed to do next? Cancel the prom? Abolish the cheerleaders? Chuck the whole student council? What Diane Asch needs is a good swift kick in the pants. What her father needs is some reality therapy.”
“Yes,” Carol said. “Well. I just thought I’d better warn you. He may be calling you later. The man from the New York Times. You might want to decide what you’re going to say.”
“Yes. All right. I will. Maybe I just won’t take the call.”
“I don’t think that would be advisable. He’d put it in his story, that you refused to talk to him. That wouldn’t look good.”
“Fine, then. I’ll talk to him.”
“It’s really too bad things like this have to get blown so out of proportion,” Carol said. “Still, it’s better to be safe. You must admit that. It’s better to be safe.”
“It’s better to be safe,” Nancy repeated—and then she hung up. She didn’t say good-bye. She didn’t wish Carol a good day. She didn’t make any of the soothing noises that had come to be standard practice on ending a telephone call. She just hung up.
A second later, she realized she was frozen in her chair. Her muscles would not move. Her head felt screwed into her neck. All she could think about was the afternoon Emma and Belinda had held Betsy Toliver down on the floor of the girls’ room in the junior high wing of the old building and put lipstick all over her face, on her cheeks, on her eyelids, on her ears. They’d done it because they couldn’t stand the fact that Betsy never wore any of the stuff, but now that Nancy thought of it she could see how right it had been, how just it had been. None of the teachers then would have dreamed of interfering with what they were doing.
Crap, Nancy thought.
Then she got up and started throwing the things she needed for home into her attache’ case.
3
Peggy Smith Kennedy had no idea why they had brought her to the hospital. It would have made more sense if they had sent her home to Stu. She was having a lot of difficulty holding on to time. She’d been sitting against the wall with that thing in her hand, and Emma had been spurting. Emma had been like a fountain of blood, spritzing thick red goo everywhere. The stain had spread along the front of her dress like the stain that spread across the front of the screen in that old Vincent Price movie.
The light changed in the room, and she shifted a little on her chair to get back into the center of it. She had been thinking that it would be nice to own a chair like this for her own living room. Stu always wrecked new furniture. She would like a new chair, and she would like flower boxes outside the windows at the front of the house, where she could plant pansies in the spring. When she was growing up and writing Stu’s name all over her notebooks at school, she had had distinct fantasies about window boxes and pansies and big evergreen wreaths for the door at Christmas. It was odd. You never really thought about the important things. You never imagined paying the bills, or buying a car, or cleaning vomit up off the carpet in the bedroom hallway because Stu hadn’t made it all the way to the bathroom before he’d started to throw up. You never thought about lying on your face on the linoleum in the kitchen with your right arm broken and your teeth aching where he had kicked them. You never thought about what it really meant to say you were in love.
The light in the room changed again, and Peggy shifted again, and then she realized that there was someone standing in the doorway.
The woman in the door seemed to lean forward. She was standing in shadow, and Peggy could not make out her features.
“Do you want something?” she called out to the form in the doorway. “Are you looking for somebody?”
“I’m sorry,” Betsy Toliver said. “I didn’t mean to disturb you. I was just wondering how you were.”
It was not, Peggy thought, Betsy Toliver’s voice as she remembered it. It was Betsy’s voice from television, with its tinge of Britishness that probably came from living all those years in London. Peggy stabbed at her hair.