Somebody Else's Music(45)

Today, it had started out to be all right, except that she was jumpy about the meeting they’d had the night before at Chris’s, and still angry with Peggy Smith. She had spent the morning in her office doing the kind of paperwork that she could not avoid, but that required no mental effort whatsoever. A badly made android could have done just as well. Once or twice, she’d tried to call Chris at home, without luck. Chris was probably on the golf course, taking her aggressions out on little white balls. Once, she’d walked down to Peggy Smith’s classroom and looked through the big window at the top of the door. Every once in a while, she hatched plans to get Peggy off the faculty, permanently, but they always ran aground on the fact that Peggy ran an excellent classroom. Nancy went back to her office and got her lunch out of the little refrigerator she had had installed her first week as principal. She was working herself into a positively bad mood, complete with tantrum. By the time Lisa buzzed her to tell her the assistant principal wanted to have a word, Nancy nearly had smoke coming out of her ears, and she had begun to tear paper into confetti.

The vice principal was a man named Harvey Grey, who hated her. It was Harvey’s opinion that he was the one who should have been made principal of Hollman High the last two times the job had become open, and it was further his opinion that the only reason he hadn’t been was that the board had decided they had to give the job to a woman. That he had a master’s degree instead of a doctorate in education, and that he’d gotten it at UP-Johnstown instead of Penn State, did not seem relevant to him, any more than it seemed relevant to him that he was a little worm of a man with a high-pitched squeal instead of a voice and the personality of a sex-obsessed, hypochondriacal old maid. He collected resentments the way other people collected stamps.

He came into the office and sat down in the chair in front of her desk, without being asked. Harvey never asked. “It’s Diane Asch again,” he said. “There was an incident at lunch.”

“An incident?’

Harvey looked at the floor, and the ceiling, and his hands. “She’s having hysterics in the east wing second-floor girls’ room. I’m not sure what started it.”

“Has anybody tried to talk to her?”

“Peggy went in and tried for a while. Peggy was lunch monitor today.”

“So?”

“Whatever it was started at lunch. She’s saying she’ll never go back to the cafeteria as long as she lives. Diane Asch is saying it.”

“Why?”

“She says they said something to her,” Harvey said. “You know. DeeDee Craft and Lynn Mackay and Sharon Peterson. They said something to her.”

“What?”

“How am I supposed to know? I couldn’t go into the girls’ bathroom. Not in this day and age. I’d get arrested. If you ask me, you don’t take this situation seriously. Think of Columbine. Think of that place in Kentucky. This is how school shootings get started.”

“You think Diane Asch is going to commit a school shooting?”

“Think of Carrie,” Harvey said darkly.

Nancy stood up. Something at the back of her mind told her that she should not do this. At the very least, she ought to talk herself down from her anger enough so that all her muscles weren’t jumping. She ran her right hand through her hair. Her nails were long and sharp enough to serve as a crude kind of comb.

“Did you say the east wing second-floor girls’ room?”

“We had a very interesting presentation about situations like this at the last in-service,” Harvey said. “It’s regrettable you were too busy to attend. There was an educational psychologist down from the University of Pennsylvania—”

Nancy was past him, out her office door, into the anteroom. “Take messages,” she told Lisa as she passed. “I’ll only be a minute.”

She went out into the foyer and down the hall. She got to the stairwell and almost ran up the stairs. Sometimes physical exercise calmed her down. This was not one of those times.

When she reached the east wing second-floor girls’ room, there were students in the hall. She pushed past them and went inside.

“Everybody out,” Peggy’s voice nearly screamed at her.

The only other sound in the room was of wracking, shuddering breathing.

“It’s me,” Nancy told Peggy.

Peggy was leaning against a locked lavatory stall. Nancy pushed her away.

“Diane?” Nancy said.

The breathing stopped, momentarily. Diane did not reply.

“Diane,” Nancy said, “listen to me. Come out of there now. Now. If you don’t come out of there now, I’ll break that door down and drag you out.”