I Will Ruin You

Seven

My second class back was the same group of kids I’d been with when I saw Mark LeDrew crossing the school parking lot. I knew it was unlikely we’d pick up where we left off, talking about The Road.

When I walked in, they were all standing beside their desks and saluting, big grins on their faces. Not all were in attendance, however. Some parents had not sent their kids back yet. I was guessing some never would, that they’d send their kids to different schools, maybe private ones. But you had to wonder whether any school—or mall or church or nightclub or grocery store—was immune when there were so many nutcases out there.

I’d spent so much time telling the police what had happened when I confronted LeDrew that I’d heard very little about what transpired in my classroom after I had run down the hall in a bid to block his entry. I should point out there’d been some whispering that I’d abandoned my kids at the worst possible time, and maybe there was something to that, but in the moment I did what I’d hoped would be in the interests of everyone. We’d never know how things might have played out if I’d stayed put.

Emma Katzenback, the girl with a phone welded to her palm, had done as I’d instructed and immediately called 911. Told the dispatcher a shooter was coming into the school, even though that had been an assumption on her part. An easy one to make, given that I had said “armed intruder.” The dispatcher kept her on the line, asking for more details, but not only did Emma not have any, she could barely hear because the other kids had started shoving desks toward the door to barricade it.

The shades had been drawn by Eldon and another student, and then everyone huddled below the window in case there was a shooter and bullets started coming through the glass.

Then they waited. Waited to hear shots. Waited to hear people screaming in the halls. Waited to hear sirens. Most of them started texting or phoning their parents at work or home. Emma hung up on the 911 dispatcher so that she could call her mother.

Finally, there was the sound of Mark LeDrew’s bomb going off.

Everyone in the class had screamed. They’d been steeling themselves to hear gunfire, a single shot at least. But the explosion came as a surprise. A bomb? A fucking bomb? Was the entire school going to blow up? Should they clear the door and make a run for it? Pull back the shades, break glass, and escape through the windows?

But within a minute or two of the blast, Trent went on the PA system and told everyone to stay where they were. The situation, he said, appeared to have reached a resolution, but the lockdown would continue until they got an “all-clear” from the police.

“That was the worst time,” Eldon said. “Wondering if there was gonna be more bombs, or shooting, or what. The weird thing was, we were all kind of freaking out at first but we were all calm at the same time, you know?”

I nodded.

They had plenty of questions for me, some of them about the most grisly details, but I dodged most of them. “You know the basics,” I said. “It’s not easy for me to talk about. I hope you get that.”

They did.

Eldon said, “They fired Mr. Grant.”

The caretaker.

“He’s not fired,” Emma said. “He’s on some kind of suspension. That’s what my mom said. He kept meaning to fix the latch on that door but never got around to it. I think he should be fired. If we’d have been killed it would have been all his fault.”

I didn’t want to get into it. I made one vain attempt to talk about our current reading project, but the bell was going to ring in two minutes so I don’t know why I bothered. I assigned no homework and wished everyone a good weekend. On Monday, I warned them, we were going to get back to work. Tests and essays, I told them. Lots and lots of them. The most homework in the history of homework. No one looked particularly worried.

I noticed there was one student who hadn’t said a word the entire period. As he was exiting the class, head down, I called to him.

“Andrew,” I said.

Andrew Kanin stopped and turned. “Yes, Mr. B.?” he said.

“Got a second?”

“You want me to close the door?” he asked.

“No, leave it open. You were pretty quiet. You okay?”

“I guess,” he said, taking a few steps toward my desk. “This is my first day back, too.”

I nodded. “There’s quite a few kids still haven’t returned.”

“My parents didn’t want me to come back but neither of them could get off work today and they didn’t want me to stay home alone.”

At fifteen?

“I promised them I’d text them every hour.”

“Okay,” I said. “It’s going to take a while for everything to feel back to normal.”

“When are we going to be reading a different book?”

“You don’t like The Road?”

He thought for a moment. “I’ll finish it, but are there any happy books?”

A wave of guilt washed over me. Maybe, given the current state of things, there were better choices than the apocalypse.

I thought a moment. “How about happy and funny?”

“Sure.”

I didn’t want to overwhelm him with a list. “Go to the library and find Carl Hiaasen.” I spelled the last name for him. “He writes for grown-ups and young adults. See if they have Hoot.”

Andrew said he would.

I was at my desk, trying to focus on lesson planning for the coming week, when there was a soft rapping at my open door. I looked up and saw Sally Berwick.

“Got a minute?” she asked.

I nodded and waved her in. I got up and the two of us sat sideways in student desks, across from each other, almost knee to knee.

“I just wanted to be sure about something,” she said. “He really said my name? You heard him say he was coming for me?”

I wasn’t going to tell her LeDrew had referred to her as “Fat Sally,” although I had told that to the police. But she was the only Sally on staff, and she tended to fit the description.

“Yes,” I said.

She nodded solemnly, as if this confirmation was what she was waiting to hear. “I’m quitting,” she said, just like that.

“Maybe that’s not something you should decide right now. Give it some time.”

“I can’t do this anymore. I’m clearly not good at what I do. I thought I was helping that boy.”

“You are good at what you do. I bet you did everything you could for him.”

“No, no, I didn’t. I believed what I’d been told by others. That he had intellectual limitations. But I should have judged him on my own, found out what made him tick. I had a sense things at home were not good, that he wasn’t close to his father, who was distant, critical. Maybe I could have steered him toward something that would have suited him, but still presented a challenge, instead of underestimating him the way others had. Then maybe he wouldn’t have become so... so angry about how we failed him. How I failed him.”

Sally dug her fingernails into her palms. “It’s not that I’m scared some other student is going to come in here and hunt us all down. I don’t think lightning will strike twice like that. But I don’t want to fail any more kids.”

I took her hand in mine, pried open her fingers to get a better grip. “I don’t know anyone in this school who cares about kids more than you do.”

She smiled sadly at me. “They need someone in the billing department where my husband works. I don’t have a lot of experience but they said I’ll get the hang of it really fast and the job’s there if I want it. I’ve put in enough years that I’ll get a good chunk of my teachers’ pension.”

“If you think that’s what’s best.”

“Every day now feels like a gift. We have a bit of money set aside, so we think we’ll do some traveling, too. I’ve always wanted to go to London. Have you been to London?”

I nodded. “You’ll love it.” I let go of her hand.

“I want to see Buckingham Palace.” She grinned. “Maybe the king will invite us in for tea.”

“I’ll call ahead, set something up.”

She gave me another smile. “What about you? You staying?”

I shrugged. “I guess. I’m otherwise unemployable.”

“Has it... changed you?”

I considered the question. “I don’t think I know yet. But I’ll tell you this. I’m ready for my life to get back to normal.” I thought of something I wanted to ask her.

“Did Mark ever mention anything about a lawnmower man?”

Sally pushed her lips out, thinking. “Wasn’t that a horror movie? I remember our son watching something like that.”

“Yeah. But did he ever refer to an actual person that way?”

“Maybe it was something he wanted to be, like getting a job with a landscaping company.”

I held her hand again and gave it a brief squeeze. “Enjoy your new life.”