Different Seasons(66)

“You shoot them.”

“No, we give them gas. It’s very humane. They don’t feel a thing.”

“No,” Mr. Denker said. “I am sure they don’t.”

Todd’s seat in Beginning Algebra was four desks down in the second row. He sat there, trying to keep his face expressionless, as Mr. Storrman passed back the exams. But his ragged fingernails were digging into his palms again, and his entire body seemed to be running with a slow and caustic sweat.

Don’t get your hopes up. Don’t be such a goddam chump. There’s no way you could have passed. You know you didn’t pass.

Nevertheless, he could not completely squash the foolish hope. It had been the first algebra exam in weeks that looked as if it had been written in something other than Greek. He was sure that in his nervousness (nervousness? no, call it what it had really been: outright terror) he had not done that well, but maybe . . . well, if it had been anyone else but Storrman, who had a Yale padlock for a heart . . .

STOP IT! he commanded himself, and for a moment, a coldly horrible moment, he was positive he had screamed those two words aloud in the classroom. You flunked, you know you did, not a thing in the world is going to change it.

Storrman handed him his paper expressionlessly and moved on. Todd laid it face down on his initial-scarred desk. For a moment he didn’t think he possessed sufficient will to even turn it over and know. At last he flipped it with such convulsive suddenness that the exam sheet tore. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth as he stared at it. His heart seemed to stop for a moment.

The number 83 was written in a circle at the top of the sheet. Below it was a letter-grade: C+. Below the letter-grade was a brief notation: Good improvement! I think I’m twice as relieved as you should be. Check errors carefully At least three of them are arithmetical rather than conceptual.

His heartbeat began again, at triple-time. Relief washed over him, but it was not cool—it was hot and complicated and strange. He closed his eyes, not hearing the class as it buzzed over the exam and began the pre-ordained fight for an extra point here or there. Todd saw redness behind his eyes. It pulsed like flowing blood with the rhythm of his heartbeat. In that instant he hated Dussander more than he ever had before. His hands snapped shut into fists and he only wished, wished, wished, that Dussander’s scrawny chicken neck could have been between them.

Dick and Monica Bowden had twin beds, separated by a nightstand with a pretty imitation Tiffany lamp standing on it. Their room was done in genuine redwood, and the walls were comfortably lined with books. Across the room, nestled between two ivory bookends (bull elephants on their hind legs) was a round Sony TV. Dick was watching Johnny Carson with the earplug in while Monica read the new Michael Crichton that had come from the book club that day.

“Dick?” She put a bookmark (THIS IS WHERE I FELL ASLEEP, it said) into the Crichton and closed it.

On the TV, Buddy Hackett had just broken everyone up. Dick smiled.

“Dick?” she said more loudly.

He pulled the earplug out. “What?”

“Do you think Todd’s all right?”

He looked at her for a moment, frowning, then shook his head a little. “Je ne comprends pas, chérie.” His limping French was a joke between them. His father had sent him an extra two hundred dollars to hire a tutor when he was flunking French. He had gotten Monica Darrow, picking her name at random from the cards tacked up on the Union bulletin board. By Christmas she had been wearing his pin . . . and he had managed a C in French.

“Well . . . he’s lost weight.”

“He looks a little scrawny, sure,” Dick said. He put the TV earplug in his lap, where it emitted tiny squawking sounds.

“He’s growing up, Monica.”

“So soon?” she asked uneasily.

He laughed. “So soon. I shot up seven inches as a teenager—from a five-foot-six shrimp at twelve to the beautiful six-foot-one mass of muscle you see before you today. My mother said that when I was fourteen you could hear me growing in the night ”

“Good thing not all of you grew that much.”

“It’s all in how you use it.”

“Want to use it tonight?”

“The wench grows bold,” Dick Bowden said, and threw the earplug across the room.

After, as he was drifting off to sleep:

“Dick, he’s having bad dreams, too.”

“Nightmares?” he muttered.

“Nightmares. I’ve heard him moaning in his sleep two or three times when I’ve gone down to use the bathroom in the night. I didn’t want to wake him up. It’s silly, but my grandmother used to say you could drive a person insane if you woke them up in the middle of a bad dream.”

“She was the Polack, wasn’t she?”

“The Polack, yeah, the Polack. Nice talk!”

“You know what I mean. Why don’t you just use the upstairs john?” He had put it in himself two years ago.

“You know the flush always wakes you up,” she said.

“So don’t flush it.”

“Dick, that’s nasty.”

He sighed.

“Sometimes when I go in, he’s sweating. And the sheets are damp.”

He grinned in the dark. “I bet.”

“What’s that . . . oh.” She slapped him lightly. “That’s nasty, too. Besides, he’s only thirteen.”