Small Kingdoms and Other Stories Read online

  “David heard some people were coming after you. You got some enemies.”

  “No one’s tried for three years.”

  “Right before I got to Travis, huh?”

  “Yeah. This guy was waiting in my car after I chaperoned the senior prom.”

  “Garrote?”

  “No, knife. The man this morning, he had a garrote.”

  Their nachos came then, and they ate with some appetite.

  “David actually sent you here?” she asked, when she’d eaten all she could.

  “When they cut me loose with a coach persona, David gave me a call. He thought this might be a good place for me to land.”

  “I’ve never felt like you were watching me. Are you that good?”

  “I didn’t need to watch you too closely. You’re great with your cover. This morning, when you came in I could tell you’d broken your routine because something had happened, and I got a little whiff of blood from your hair.”

  Anne was intensely angry at herself. She should have taken fifteen more minutes to re-wash and re-style her hair.

  “So you figured out . . .”

  “If I assumed someone had gone for you, I knew where I would have dumped him. I figured I might as well check.”

  “You’re cool with this.”

  “Sure,” he said, surprised. “I had a look at him. Chuck Wallis. He was the brother of . . . “

  The name triggered a switch. “Jeremy Wallis. He died in the fifth class. So. Now what?”

  “Now we figure out what to do about that little shit Clay.”

  She smiled. It was not a pleasant smile. It was Twyla Burnside’s smile, not Anne DeWitt’s. She would have to rebury herself in her new character all over again, but it felt so good to let Twyla out. “I think we need to put the fear into him.”

  “The fear of God?”

  “The fear of us. Oh, by the way, let me tell you why the Meachams came to my office this morning. It’ll get you in the mood.”

  The next afternoon Coach Halsey kept Clay after practice. The kid was tired, because the practice had been extra tough, but he didn’t complain. Clay knew that Coach Halsey hated whiners. After he finished the extra exercises the coach had outlined for him, he trudged out to his car. It was dark by now, and he called his mom to let her know he’d be late. He was thoughtful like that, no matter what people said.

  At first, Clay didn’t know what was suddenly poking him in his head. Something hard and small. He felt the presence of someone behind him. “Hey, jerk,” he said angrily, beginning to turn. “What the hell?”

  “What the hell indeed,” said a strange voice, a voice as metallic as the gun that tapped his cheek. “Keep a polite tongue in your mouth. If you want to keep your tongue.”

  Since nothing awful had ever happened to Clay Meacham, he didn’t realize the genuine seriousness of this moment. “Listen, asshole, you don’t know who you’re messing with,” he growled.

  He was instantly slapped by something that felt soft but weighty. It stung. He staggered. “You’re asking for it!” he yelled.

  And then he couldn’t yell anymore, because he was seized by two strong arms and gagged and blindfolded by two deft hands. As Clay’s fear began to swell and explode in his brain, he was bundled into his own car, his keys were extracted from his pocket, and the two hooded figures drove him down county roads and dirt tracks, deep into the woods.

  Once he was on his knees, the metallic voice said, “Clay. We need you to be the best you can be. If you’re going to represent all of us when you’re in college, you need to be bulletproof. If you’re going to be bulletproof, you have to stop molesting women who aren’t able to say yes or no. You have to stop being a taker. Because someday, someone will call you on it. And then you’ll let us down. I can’t tell you how much we don’t want that to happen. So, Clay, you need to tell us now, about what you’ve done before, things you’re not going to do in the future.” Though his first confession had to be coaxed out of him, Clay found himself telling the two invisible presences everything. Everything he’d ever done to people, people smaller and weaker and less handsome than himself. And he’d done a lot.

  After an hour, he was sorry for it all.

  By the time Clay got home that night, he flinched whenever his parents asked him a question. He told them repeatedly he’d had a bad day, and he only wanted to go to bed. When they demanded to know why his face was so reddened, he said a ball had hit him at practice. He went to his bedroom as though he was dragging a chain behind him, and Elaine and Brandon were too worried to remember to ask Clay if the coach had mentioned working on the recruiting film for him.

  Clay only went to school because he was scared to be at home by himself after his parents had left for their jobs. At school, he jumped when his friends slung their arms around him, punched him in the shoulder, and in general acted like kids on the cusp of becoming men. For the first time in his life, Clay knew what it was like to be weak. To be lesser.

  When his best buddy strolled past Hazel Reid’s table in the lunchroom, his fist raised to pound on the table to make Hazel jump (a trick that never grew old with Clay’s friends), Clay caught that fist and said, simply, “No. Not any more.”

  “Awww, man,” the friend said, but he’d heard the pronouncement of the most popular boy in school. Not any more.

  Clay turned to leave the lunchroom and saw Principal DeWitt standing, straight and lean as an arrow, about two yards away. He was seized by an almost uncontrollable impulse to rush to her and tell her what had happened to him. Everyone said DeWitt was a smart woman and a good principal. She would be able to figure out who’d kidnapped him.

  Or maybe not. There were so many candidates.

  There were a lot of sins Clay Meacham had never thought twice about committing, sins of which he was now painfully aware. His eyes had been opened last night, even though he’d been blindfolded.

  Clay was only seventeen, and he wasn’t clear on how he was supposed to attain perfection, but the guidelines he’d been given last night had been pretty clear.

  He saw the principal again that day, when she came to watch the team practice. That wasn’t an uncommon occurrence. While Clay was waiting to come up to bat, he saw Coach Halsey look at Ms. DeWitt. It made Clay shiver. Clay’d been scared he’d pitch poorly that day, but now that he knew there’d be a price to pay if he failed, his focus was amazing.

  After practice, Principal DeWitt drifted over to talk to Coach Halsey. After a second, Coach beckoned Clay over. He trotted over to the two adults.

  “I hear you need a recruitment film,” Coach Halsey said.

  “My parents say I need one to send out next year, yessir,” Clay said.

  “I’m willing to help you make it, but I won’t do all the work,” Coach said. “You’ll have to put in some hours helping me do other things, so I’ll have some free time.”

  The old Clay would have been sullen about giving up anything to get something that was his due. The new Clay said, “Yessir. Just say when.” He turned and went into the locker room.

  “I think he’s been turned around,” Anne said.

  “At least for now.” Coach Halsey looked down at her. “Want to get dinner Saturday night?”

  “I think so,” she said, after a pause. “There are a few things we might want to talk about.”

  “Oh?”

  “Sarah Toth’s dad is hitting her.”

  “Well,” Holt said. “We can’t have that. She won’t get the high test scores if she’s being beaten at home.”

  “If she scores two points higher the next time she takes the SAT, it’ll be a state record.”

  He smiled. No one else would have enjoyed that smile but Anne. “Then we’d better get cracking.”

  They both laughed, just a little. “By the way,” Holt said. “What happened to the principal before you? You became assistant here the year before she killed herself, right?”

  Anne nodded, her expression faintly regretful. “Mrs.
Snyder was having sex in her office with a married teacher, Ted Cole. Christy overheard a conversation between them and came to me with it.”

  “Then it would have been all over the school in short order.” He smiled. “Good job. Proactive.”

  Anne smiled back before she glanced down at her watch. “I have to be at my house to let the handyman in,” she murmured. But she lingered for a moment. “Snyder almost didn’t hire me. She was not a fan, from the first interview until the last. But the school board liked me. And the minute I saw Travis High, I knew it was a place where I could make a difference. Now . . .” She looked up at him and away, almost shyly. “Now there’s no limit.”

  “No limit,” he agreed, and they stood silent in the lowering sun, their long shadows streaking across the practice field.

  Sarah Smiles

  I didn’t want to follow the pattern of my first Anne DeWitt story, so I cast about for another way of showing Anne doing what she’s best at.

  I wondered what Anne’s past had been. She had been a teenager once and what was she like? Even then, she must have been smart and ruthless. How had her foster parents fared with someone like Anne in their house? When did she begin to realize she could manipulate events to make things go the way she wanted them to go?

  How far did she go?

  So in “Sarah Smiles,” I switched things up a bit so you could all think about that.

  Sarah Smiles

  Sarah Toth parked her car in the Travis High parking lot just in time to hear the first bell ring. She and her brother James exchanged a long look as they unbuckled their seat belts. “Isn’t there any other way?” he asked her.

  As she shook her head, her glossy braid whipped back and forth on her back like an animal’s tail. “We’ve talked about this,” she said, her voice flat. “Come on, bubba. We’ll be late.” James, whose first class was in the south wing, took off in that direction without looking back. More slowly, Sarah went to the main entrance. It was the oldest part of the school, and there were stairs up to the huge front door. She went up them awkwardly, and as she made her way in she could tell that other kids noticed her limp. The door to the left led to the outer room of the principal’s office, where Christy the secretary reigned. The principal herself, Anne DeWitt, had emerged from her inner sanctum to watch the students flow into the building, as she did from time to time. Ms. DeWitt’s face was always calm, always composed, and Sarah found it impossible to tell what the principal was thinking while she scanned the incoming teenagers. When their eyes met, Sarah nodded, because she was a polite and politic girl. She wasn’t surprised when Principal DeWitt nodded back. Everyone on the faculty knew who Sarah was, a source of some pride to the girl. But Principal DeWitt wasn’t the adult she was looking for this morning.

  There. Mr. Mathis, the assistant principal, was standing at the T junction of the main hall and the entrance area, his invariable post in the morning. Sarah could feel him watching her as she limped past. She was sure his eyes followed her as she turned left to go to her first period class. World History was taught by Coach Holt Halsey, who was a surprisingly good teacher for a coach. Everyone – everyone in Sarah’s world, that is, the students of Travis High, Colleton County, North Carolina – thought of Halsey, boys’ baseball coach, as a little forbidding. He wouldn’t put up with foolishness, but he was approachable about serious stuff, and he had the reputation of knowing everything about any student who took part in a sport, both boys and girls.

  Sarah was decidedly non-athletic. She was a short, slightly plump, seventeen-year-old senior, with unfashionably waist-length dull brown hair and an unfashionably curvy figure. Sarah wore glasses, though behind them were large blue eyes. She proudly flew the flag for the nerd camp. Sarah was very aware she was possibly the smartest student – maybe the smartest person, teachers included – at Travis High. But that didn’t mean she was happy.

  Sarah’s brain was not on Coach Halsey’s mind as he noted the girl’s slow progress to her desk. While he taught the mostly bored first-period students about the Reign of Terror, he was trying to recall how many times he’d seen Sarah with bruises. When the bell rang at the end of the period, he stopped her as she made her way to the door. “Sarah, hold up,” he said, his voice neither quiet nor loud.

  Sarah paused, her eyes cast down. “Yessir?”

  “Your leg?” the coach asked. He was a man of few words.

  Sarah shrugged, not meeting his eyes. “I fell on the stairs,” she said.

  In the ensuing silence, Sarah’s shoulders stiffened. Finally, her gaze met Coach Halsey’s. He saw that her eyes were filled with rage. He hadn’t expected that. It interested him. He sat down so he wouldn’t be looming over the girl. He thought it might put her at ease. Halsey was well aware he made some people nervous.

  Mostly, he was fine with that.

  “You’re going to take the SAT again in three weeks?” Halsey asked, after a glance at the calendar.

  “Yessir,” she said. “At least, I . . . I plan on doing that.”

  He didn’t ask what might stop her.

  “Just two points away from a school record,” the coach observed. “We’re proud of you. The honor you’re bringing the school.”

  She smiled quite genuinely. “That’s really nice of you, Coach. Thanks. ’Scuse me, I’m late.” And then she scuttled – well, limped as quickly as she could – to her next class. Halsey noticed that Brian Vaughan was waiting to walk with her. Brian was tall, gawky, and had hair like a bird’s nest. He was a good kid. Brian ran track—not with distinction, but with reliability. Halsey, who was excellent at sizing people up, thought Brian would have a pleasant life unless something crazy happened to him. Halsey knew more than anyone at Travis High suspected (anyone except the principal, Anne DeWitt) about the terrible things that could happen to people. He’d had a previous career that would make parents blanch if they discovered it.

  Though he didn’t often spend time in the teachers’ lounge, Halsey got a cup of coffee there at lunchtime. Sarah’s limp was the main topic of discussion that day, though everyone was being carefully oblique. Coach Halsey didn’t join in the talk, but he listened intently.

  “James seems okay,” said the older mathematics teacher, very cautiously. “Moody, sure, but healthy.” Sarah’s brother was younger than her by two years, but he was tall and strong and an athlete.

  Reading between the lines, Halsey interpreted that to mean that James had no appearance of being abused. Though all the faculty members knew that an abusive parent sometimes picked one child to be the punching bag, James’s well-being made it a bit more plausible that Sarah was genuinely accident-prone.

  “James doesn’t seem very happy,” Coach Redding said. James played football for Redding.

  “James is a teenager,” the younger biology teacher said. He was the most cynical person on the faculty. “Teenagers are unhappy by definition.”

  “That’s simply not true,” the calculus teacher said, giving the biology teacher an unfriendly look. She rose to get some more coffee. “They’re as happy as they’re allowed to be.”

  “I asked Sarah about her home life,” said the school nurse, and there was a silence in the lounge. “She came to me because her arm was hurting. She said she’d fallen. But there was a mark on her upper arm, looked a lot like a grip mark.”

  The faculty members present all stared at the nurse, a middle-aged woman with a sweet face and a practical air about her. “And she said?” asked the older math teacher.

  “She said everything was fine at home,” the nurse said, and shrugged. “She said that her father grabbed her to keep her from falling off the front porch. What are you gonna do?”

  There was a moment of silence. If Sarah would not confide in someone as trusted as the nurse, she would not confide in anyone, was the unspoken consensus. And if her brother James wanted to report what was happening to his sister – if anything was – he’d had plenty of opportunity. It was not a clear-cut situation. The previous p
rincipal, the one before Anne DeWitt, had made an accusation of abuse that had proved to be false, and they were all gun-shy as a result.

  After the last bell of the day, Coach Halsey went to the principal’s office. He was glad to see that the secretary had already left, because he wanted to talk to Anne DeWitt without Christy’s sharp ears listening. He knocked on the doorframe of the inner office. Anne looked up from the pile of paperwork on her desk.

  “More to fill out?”

  “The government,” she said tersely. Anne was in her thirties, young for a high school principal. She was lean and muscular and quietly attractive. When she’d been hired as assistant to the previous principal, the school board had been impressed not only with her steady and serious demeanor, but her glowing recommendations. Also, they’d figured that her status as a childless widow meant she would be free to put in long hours. When Principal Delia Snyder had committed suicide (a shocking and tragic loss), Anne had been a shoo-in to fill the post. The school board had no idea what a total package they were getting. Under another name, Anne DeWitt had trained government operatives at a secret camp. She had trained them to survive in extreme conditions. Naturally, a few students had failed her class by dying; Anne had made a few enemies during her service. Her new name, background, and occupation were fabrications she would maintain the rest of her life—a kind of severance package.

  Holt Halsey, who’d graduated from a similar class, waited quietly while Anne took care of a few more forms. When she looked up and stacked the papers neatly, signaling she was ready to talk, Holt said, “We have a problem.”

  “Penny Carson?”

  “No . . . wait, the Spanish teacher? What’s she up to?”

  “I saw her coming out of a liquor store in Candle Springs. Why go to a liquor store in another town unless you’re buying a lot more than you should be consuming?” They both understood that the issue was not Penny Carson’s morals. The issue was the potential scandal and bad publicity for Travis High School if a teacher was discovered to be an alcoholic.