Free Crazy by William Peter Blatty Page B

finished off with hooded lids and a barely audible, “Neatness counts.” The girl gave me a pretty odd look at that but then must have decided that she hadn’t really heard it since not only did she give me the badge but a Superman Club decoder ring as well!
    Some Mondays don’t have to be all that bad.
    But by Friday things were rotten: still no Jane.
    “Hey, you seen Jane Bent anywhere?”
    The eighth-grader in the school yard, a truck-sized brute named Leo Zalewski, put down the ruler whose end he had placed against a loose upper molar. He’d been about to bang it hard with the butt of his fist, this being our version of “affordable dentistry.” Leo’s eyes were always moist but now as he looked down at me they seemed on the verge of drowning. “Joey, thanks,” he said. “Thanks a lot.”
    “What for?”
    “I was about to bash out the wrong tooth.”
    “Geez, I’m glad I just happened along.”
    “Some coincidence, huh?”
    I said, “Yeah.”
    I’d decided not to mention the Holy Ghost.
    “So whaddya want?” he asked me.
    “Have you seen Jane Bent?” I repeated.
    “Seen who? ”
    “Jane Bent.”
    “Who’s she?”
    “Who’s she? ”
    My response not having advanced the state of either his knowledge or undoubted deep interest in who should be favored in the Joe Louis–Billy Conn heavyweight boxing match that night, Zalewski looked bored and turned away. “Gotta find myself a mirror,” he mumbled. He’d started walking toward a door to the school and the basement boy’s room that was constantly redolent of urine and chalk, turning briefly to wave and stare at me wetly as he uttered, “I’ll never forget you, pal.”
    I went and collared another eighth-grader that I knew, Billy Burns. “Hey, what’s up?” he said, unwrapping a penny Hooten bar.
    “Listen, Burnsy, have you heard why Jane Bent’s not in school? What’s the story? Is she sick? What’s goin’ on?”
    “Jane who?”
    “Jane Bent.”
    “Never heard of her.”
    “Whaddya mean? ” I said. “Jane! Jane Bent! She’s in your class!”
    “Since when?”
    “Are you nuts? ”
    “Are you? ”
    It could be that I was. I went on to ask other eighth-graders, but every one of them told the same story. I mean, talk about Gaslight ! I’d seen her in the school yard! She’d been here! This was some kind of crazy mistake, I was thinking, like these guys must have misheard her name. And then the bell rang out in the school yard and we all trooped back to our classrooms, me being the only one walking like a zombie. Before the second bell for the start of class, Sister Louise was preoccupied with searching for something in this big black satchel of hers on her desk and I could pretty well guess what it was. Different nuns had different variations on torture. Sister Marguerite’s, for example, was mental and perhaps the most fiendish of all. We would scribble away, writing compositions, which after you had finished it you’d take to her desk and hand it to her and then stand there watching her read it, and when she’d finished she wouldn’t look at you, she’d just turn away with this quiet moan like she was getting warmed up to spend a couple of weeks in the Garden of Gethsemane as she placed your paper atop the stack on her desk and then quietly said to you, her expression inscrutable, “Thank you. You may go back to your seat,” and then you’d hear this pained sigh from behind you. But then sometimes, when one of the brighter kids handed in a paper, she would dredge up a tight little weary smile and say with her thick Irish brogue, “Ah, well, now maybe here’s something sure to brush away the cobwebs from my heart,” and she’d read it and then slowly turn away with that same dead, unreadable expression as she wordlessly placed your composition on top of the others, after which she’d prop her elbows on her desk, lower her face into her hands and then slowly shake her head. Equally effective, though far less