Free Are You in the House Alone? by Richard Peck Page B

how cool I am, Alison. Like you said before, it never happened.” My head throbbed, and I felt a flash of hate for her. Because it wasn’t happening to her. Because she knew. Because she was saying all the wrong things—inadequate words like
fuss.
What did I want her to say? That twisted letter writers like this one are all talk, that they only harm themselves? I wouldn’t have believed her.
    I gagged then and thought I was going to lose my breakfast. But I kept swallowing and swallowing until my eyes burned and my face felt like paper.
    Sonia outdid herself that morning. She was wearing a Spanish shawl that looked like it had come off the top of a piano. It was embroidered in limes and pineapples in living color, with a fringe. She’d circled it around her smooth hair and draped it over one shoulder, pinned with a velvet rose. And under it she wore basic black, something like an evening gown, with beads following the seams on the skirt down to high-heeled suede boots. “She’s really going too far,” Alison said, though she only glanced at Sonia and kept a worried eye on me. Sonia swept past us on a cloud of Evening in Paris cologne.
    It was the monthly Arts Assembly day. I marched through it like a sleepwalker and right into the auditorium for the double period after lunch. We were supposed to sit according to homerooms, but everybody juggled around to be with friends. Steve had staked out a couple of seats for us over on one side in case the performance of the day was the Oldfield String Quartet or Girls’ Junior Glee or something like that. Steve generally liked to sit by a window where he could see to read in case the culture was too home-grown. “Wake me up if it turns out to be Beverly Sills or the Vienna Philharmonic. Otherwise, don’t.” I could think of a way of waking him up. I could reach down in my book bag and hand him the latest note. But I didn’t.
    The teachers started up the side aisles with poles to pull the black-out shades down. “A flick,” Steve muttered out of the side of his mouth. “Hope it’s not the product of a hand-held camera.”
    In the gloom, somebody scurried in and flopped down in the empty seat beside me. Anything like that made me jump out of my skin. But when I turned to see who it was, Valerie Cathcart’s moonface was staring inches from me. She flinched when she recognized me, and even started out of her seat. “No, wait, Val. Listen, I’m sorry I bit your head off the other day down by the station. I was in a funky mood.”
    “Oh, it’s all right,” Valerie said in the tone of one who’s had a lot of forgiving to do in her time. “What’s the movie, do you know? They don’t even know in the office, either that or they’re not telling. If it was about, you know, personal hygiene or something in that area, they wouldn’t be showing it to the guys and
us
, at the same time, would they?”
    “I doubt it, Val. So don’t get your hopes up.”
    “Oh, but I didn’t mean— Oh, it’s starting now. Look that’s Miss Venable on the stage.” It took Valerie to tell me who Miss Venable was. She’d just come that fall to be a guidance counselor. And unless you were Valerie Cathcart or a juvenile offender, you wouldn’t have run into her. Miss Venable had that I’m-fighting-for-control look that new faculty members have until they’re broken in.
    “All right now,” she shouted. “Let’s settle down and have some order here!” The spotlight scanned the stage in front of the screen, trying to find her. She was sidestepping herself, trying to get into the light. “Let’s have less unnecessary conversation, and I mean it!” A lot of the conversation came from people wondering who she was.
    She was definitely fresh out of graduate school—somewhere in inner-city New York probably. No makeup, lank hair, yesterday’s blouse working up out of her belt. She kept running the side of her thumb down her cheek to get the hair out of her face. Unfolding a page, she