Free The Wooden Sea by Jonathan Carroll

who ran the place back in our day. Redmond cared a lot about the students, his teachers, and Crane's View. I often bumped into him at the diner across the street from the school at ten at night because he had just left work and was getting a bite to eat before going home.
    Today he looked stricken.

    "Bad news huh, Redmond?"

    "Terrible! Terrible! It's the first time it's ever happened here, Frannie.
    The news is already all over the school. That's all the kids are talking about."

    "I bet."

    "Did you know her?" Bill asked gently as if the dead girl had been the principal's daughter.

    Redmond looked left and right as if about to say dangerous information and didn't want to be overheard. "She was a _nebbish, _Bill! Homework was her middle name. Her essays were always ten pages too long and she was supposedly cataleptic if she didn't make the high honor roll. See my point? That's what I
    don't understand about this. She carried her books against her chest like she was in a fifties TV
    show and was so shy she always looked down when teachers talked to her."

    He turned to me and his face went cynical. In a loud, resentful voice he said, "I've got kids at this school who are devil worshippers, Frannie.
    They've got swastikas tattooed on their necks and their girlfriends last took a bath when they Page 42

    were born. _Them _I could see killing themselves. But not _this _girl, not Antonya."

    What immediately came to mind was an image of Pauline in the bathroom last night wearing only eye makeup and an attitude. Who knows what Antonya Corando did behind her closed doors when everyone diought she was doing calculus homework? Who knows what she dreamed, what she hid, what she pretended to be?
    What on this earth did she hope to gain from sticking a needle full of heroin in her arm while sitting on a toilet?

    "You didn't move her?"

    _"Move her? _Why would I do that, Frannie? She's dead! Where am I going to put her, in my office?"

    I patted his shoulder. "It's okay. Take it easy, Redmond." His eyes had crazy in them by then, but he was a gentle man. Why shouldn't they after what he'd seen that morning?

    We walked down empty, silent halls. In contrast, through small windows in the classroom doors, I could see the bright, buzzing life of school everywhere. Teachers wrote on blackboards, kids in white aprons and plastic goggles worked over Bunsen burners. In a language lab two boys were horsing around until they saw us and disappeared fast. In another room a beautiful tall girl dressed in black stood in front of a class reading aloud from a large red book.
    When she tossed her hair I thought, Oh boy, Frannie from last night would love her. I looked in another room and recognized my old English teacher. The old bastard had once made me memorize a poem by Christina Rossetti, which to this day I couldn't forget: _When I am dead, my dearest,_

    _Sing no sad songs for me--_

    Fitting for what we were about to see. Redmond stopped at a door and took a key out of his pocket. "I didn't know what else I should do, so I locked it."

    "Good idea. Let's have a look."

    Pushing it open, he held it for us to go first. The light, that false, bright, terrible light of a public toilet, made everything grimmer.
    Nothing could hide here--no place for shadows, everything was on display.
    There were six stalls but only one of the doors was open.

    For her last day on earth Antonya Corando wore a gray Skidmore College short-sleeved sweatshirt, a black skirt, and a pair of Doc Martens shoes. That made me wince because they were the brand hip kids wore.
    Pauline said dismissively that anyone who wore Docs was only trying to be cool. Poor square Antonya who always did her homework--buying a pair of those shoes had probably been a very Page 43

    large gesture for her.
    And it must have taken courage for her to wear them when she knew how closely kids check out each other's clothing. Maybe she first put them on in the secrecy of her bedroom and walked around