“Richter scales.”
Ariana laughed. I nearly had a heart attack, it sounded so beautiful.
Rain had started to fall, heavier by the second. “Come on over to my house,” Ariana said, turning to go. “You can fix your hand up there.”
I looked down and noticed for the first time that the palm of my left hand resembled freshly chopped hamburger.
I ran after her, my blood pounding. All right, an invitation inside for a Band-Aid wasn’t exactly a moonlight skinny-dip on a Mexican beach, but it was a start. I had to take what I could get.
After I was bandaged up, Mr. and Mrs. Maas invited me to stay for dinner, but I felt too nervous. If Smut showed up, he might get the wrong idea, and I didn’t want to end up on the wrong end of a carving knife. So I politely refused.
As Ariana and I passed through the living room to the front door, her mom, dad, and younger sister were staring at the TV.
“… Damage to area homes, as far as we know, was limited to a few broken plates and glasses in private homes,” the announcer was saying. “At 5.1 on the Richter scale, the quake would seem mild to a San Franciscan, but it baffles local experts. It far surpassed the tremor felt in this area in 1950. Is there an active fault below Wetherby? Impossible, says Dr. Paul Bascomb, of the County Meteorological Institute. But don’t try to tell that to the students of Wetherby High School.…”
The camera cut to our school. An ancient maple tree was lying across the front lawn, its top branches embedded in a parked car.
The Maases all gasped. But Ariana smiled and blurted out, “Hey, we’ve got an event!”
“Ssshh,” her sister said.
I must have been giving Ariana a weird look, because she immediately turned to me and explained in a whisper, “I mean, for the yearbook. Every year we have a theme, based on some major event. We try to tie all the aspects of the yearbook together with it. We can have an earthquake theme!”
I thought it was a dumb idea. “Great idea,” I said.
“Only problem is, I have to find another staff member. Sonya Eggert was supposed to work on the theme, but she moved.” Then, for the first time, Ariana looked at me with something like interest. “Do you write, David?”
I’ll give you three guesses what my answer was.
And that is how I joined the Wetherby High School yearbook. As something called Theme Coordinator.
I was in charge of a little one-page introduction to the book, blurbs and funny captions about the earthquake, and appropriate photos.
Me, who had never gotten higher than a “Shows Improvement” on any English paper in my life.
I didn’t care. I was going to spend a large part of the rest of the year with Ariana. Smut or no Smut.
Chapter 5
“SMILING OR SERIOUS?” ASKED Mark “Rosie” Rosenthal, the Voyager photo editor. He peered at me through his Minolta.
It was an April morning, about a week before I found the body. Rosie’s basement felt like the Arctic. “Serious,” I managed to croak before letting out a huge sneeze. My Groucho Marx glasses lurched down my nose. They tugged at my white fright wig, which slipped forward and unseated my hat. The hat clattered to the ground, sending a couple of plastic grapes rolling across the floor.
“You’re losing fruit,” said Rosie.
I scooped up the grapes and reattached them to their stem, right behind the bunch of fake bananas and to the left of an apple and a plum. “Whose idea was this, anyway?”
“Yours,” Rosie replied. “Now, can we take this shot?”
“Go for it,” I said.
I donned my fruit-hat, sat straight in the portrait chair, and looked at Rosie grimly through the fake glasses, nose, and mustache. He managed to get in a few shots before he exploded with laughter. Rosie is a giggler. He’s constantly trying to look at the odd side of things — and he was having no trouble today.
The Bananahead was just one of my many brilliant concepts for the Wetherby Voyager.
You see, after Ariana had popped the fateful question to me that day in February, I had transformed. I was no longer meek and mild David Kallas. I had become Mr. Yearbook.
The Voyager was on a late schedule this year, because the print-shop owner was off in Tibet studying meditation till April. (Don’t ask.) So for two months, I lived and breathed the yearbook. I drove Rosie crazy about getting quake photos. I infiltrated the school newspaper and convinced some of their staffers to write funny captions for us.
And when twenty-three kids didn’t show up for their Voyager photos, and Ariana called them “bananaheads” — voilà — I thought of a way to get even. My plan was to put a photo of the Bananahead above each of the no-shows’ names in the yearbook. Just a joke. Nothing too offensive.
Our faculty advisor, Mr. DeWaart, hated the idea. But the rest of us outvoted him.
Over the weeks, Ariana began looking at me with respect. (I would have preferred lust, or even mild carnal interest, but respect was fine.)
“Okay, I can’t take any more,” Rosie said, still red from laughter.
I pulled off my disguise. “Good. It’s freezing in here. When can you have the prints?”
Rosie shrugged. “This afternoon, I guess.”
“I’ll come by on my way back from the library.”
“The library! It’s Saturday!”
“Hey, I have a date, okay?”
“Fine. Don’t get testy. I just thought you lost your mind. I’m not the first.”
“Nor the last. See you.”
My date was with Edna Klatsch. She was the town librarian.
We had our rendezvous in the lobby of Lyte Memorial Library — but I had to share her with another man.
He was an artist, repairing a mural that had been damaged in the February quake when a tree fell through the glass entrance.
The painting was faded and awful. It showed a bearded white man, dressed in formal clothes, shaking hands with an African slave in front of an open trapdoor in the ground. The slave looked bewildered, and a dozen or so equally dazed-looking slave families stood behind him.
The mural was labeled JONAS LYTE, WETHERBY RESIDENT, HERO OFTHE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD.
Jonas Lyte’s self-satisfied smile had been turned into a white plaster gash by the fallen tree. The artist was trying to recreate it.
“You’re making him into a clown!” Mrs. Klatsch scolded. Then she turned to me and said, “Hello, David. I’m very busy today. Follow me.”
She led me inside, into the locked area that contained the library’s rare and most-likely-to-be-stolen books.
Mrs. Klatsch raised an eyebrow. “You’re looking for — ?”
“Pictures of the 1950 quake, for a ‘then-and-now’ feature for the yearbook,” I replied.
She pointed. “Try the big maroon book. I’ll be back to help you. If you steal anything, I’ll have your head.”
The book was called Our Town: A Wetherby History from 1634 to the Present. I flipped to a section on the ’50 quake. The school actually had caught fire, so I could use some incredibly dramatic shots. But I loved the “candids” the most — stiff, sober-looking kids pointing to fallen trees and broken windows. High school students from 1950 all look about forty years old, I don’t know why.
I kept paging through, stopping to read whatever interested me. Near the beginning, I saw something else I wanted to use. It was a drawing, labeled Witch Hunt, Spuyten Duyvil (Wetherby), 1686. In it, a young and innocent-looking “witch” was being burned at the stake. Next to her the devil was rising out of a crack in the ground, shrouded in mist.
“The burning of Annabelle Spicer,” came a voice from behind me. “Spuyten Duyvil means ‘spitting devil’ in Dutch. That was the name of an area of Wetherby. Shameful … but rather a hilarious engraving, don’t you think?”
I’d known Mrs. Klatsch was approaching before she had said those words. It was the smell of Ben-Gay, mixed with some perfume that only elderly women seem to wear. Eau de Old Lady. Mrs. Klatsch was pr
obably not around at the founding of Wetherby, but she didn’t miss it by much.
I couldn’t help laughing at her comment. The picture was pretty ridiculous. “Which area was it?”
“No one knows for sure.” She took the book and leafed through. “You’ll find a lot of other important things here, you know. Like Wetherby’s role in the Underground Railroad during the Civil War — which will never be looked at the same way after the artist in the lobby is done.…” She sighed and shook her head. “We were a spy post during the Revolution, too. Lord, the Pilgrims set up the first college in the country here — but try telling that to the snobs down at Harvard. You know, we also have some wonderful microfilmed material.…”
Obviously Mrs. Klatsch was proud of her collection. I was impressed, too. I never expected Wetherby to have such a glamorous history.
Mr. DeWaart described my hometown best: “It’s a small town, but ugly.” Wetherby looked like Last Place in a town-design contest of nearsighted architects. Houses were old and drab, office buildings and stores were rundown, and the hottest nighttime hangout on Main Street was the Arby’s (the Methodist church on Sundays being a close second).
But Mrs. Klatsch knew all the town’s secrets, and she let me photocopy everything I needed for free.
I was there for three hours — on a Saturday, voluntarily. I, David Kallas, in the spring of senior year, after class ranks were set and college applications were in, and it didn’t matter if I’d got a D in everything — I was working. It was sick.
Ariana was the cause of my disease. Or the cure. Depending on how you looked at it.
She and I worked well together — except when I wanted to use the picture of the burning of Annabelle Spicer in “Student Activities” as a joke. She thought it was sexist, and also irrelevant to the theme, even though I argued the crack in the ground looked earthquakish.
Sometimes she can be too serious.
Fortunately, that was the only blot on my record. I worked like a dog right up until D-Day.
D-Day was Deadline Day — Monday, April 11. We had to get our “mock-up” to the printer — which meant blocking where every single photo and caption was supposed to go, on cardboard sheets the size of yearbook pages. Getting this done in time was brutal. I don’t think anyone did a homework assignment for weeks (except Smut, who doesn’t sleep, I guess).
We finished just before midnight at Ariana’s house on Sunday, April 10. Mr. DeWaart took the mock-ups and dropped them off at the printer’s before the next morning.
We spent the rest of the week recovering. On Friday the fifteenth, we had a party at Mr. DeWaart’s apartment.
“Abandon hope, all ye who enter!” Mr. DeWaart greeted Ariana, Smut, and me at his door. We had all come up the apartment stairs together. “Welcome to the ship of party fools!”
“Hi, Mr. DeWaart,” I said.
“Say what?” he replied. “It’s Richard to you, my boy.”
“But your name is Joel.”
“Details, details. Come on in.”
Mr. DeWaart was weird. No question. His nickname was Wartface, because of his last name and two large moles on his right cheek and left hand. His image: tweed jackets and wrinkled shirts, a thick salt-and-pepper beard, mismatched socks, and Top-Siders. He hardly ever smiled; sometimes you didn’t know he’d told a joke until about five minutes after you heard it. He’d graduated college four years earlier, which made him about twenty-five, but he looked older. He was both a genius and an awesome athlete. He coached the crew team and organized some of the team members (and other achiever types, including Smut) into a small group called “The Delphic Club,” which sat around after practice and had heavy, top-secret discussions. (No one knew what they were about, or cared.) Between all that, advising the yearbook, teaching history, and working toward his Ph.D. at night, he didn’t have time for much else.
Still, I figured: mid-twenties, unattached, athletic, smart — he must have had a social life. I half-expected some knockout grad student to come jiggling out of the bedroom — or at least a few tell-tale signs of bachelor life, like a rumpled camisole tossed on the floor, or some female-type perfume in the bathroom.
No such luck. He lived in a small, one-bedroom apartment with piles of books and papers in every corner, shabby furniture, and some crummy artwork on the walls — mostly pictures of ancient Greece, philosophers in togas, stuff like that. (Bo-ring.)
But, hey, a party’s a party.
John Christopher, the Voyager sports editor, waved to us as we walked in. He was by a large fruit bowl, along with Rachel Green (our business editor) and Liz Montez (activities editor).
“Wai— her — gluzb — ” John gargled, his jaw working like crazy.
A moment later, he reached into his mouth and pulled out a perfectly knotted cherry stem. With a huge, satisfied grin, he sang, “Ta-da!”
John is large and competitive. If you walk to school with him, he will not let you get there first. If you eat with him, he has to have more than you. Because of that last habit, he’s too … cumbersome for most sports, so he writes about them for the school paper and the yearbook.
“You did that with just your tongue?” Rosie asked.
“That is gross,” Liz said, her smooth, round face puckering in disgust.
John looked disappointed. “It’s supposed to be sexy.”
“Puh-leeze!” groaned Rachel. “Give it up.”
Rachel and John have been going out for years, but you’d never know it. They’re always picking on each other. Rachel’s as petite as John is big. She has huge, dark eyes that can be vulnerable or furious at a moment’s notice.
Of course, all the guys in the group had to try the trick. I managed to choke on my cherry stem, and Rosie chewed his into a limp string. Smut, of course, pulled out a perfect knot.
“Let me try.” Ariana picked a stem and put it in her mouth. Her lips moved up and down rhythmically. Her eyes became half-lidded and mischievous. Her jaw hollowed and thickened. A tiny drop of saliva moistened the left corner of her mouth.
I thought I was going to faint.
When she took out her knotted stem, I was a basket case. I was sitting upright in a chair, but my soul had to be scraped off the floor. Eight weeks of working side by side with her had taken its toll.
“That was great,” Smut said, grinning.
Ariana smiled. “Mmm. I know.”
“Make me puke,” Rachel remarked.
“Eat your heart out,” John said.
“I do,” Rachel retorted. “Every time I realize I’m with you.”
“Who-o-o-oa!” cried Liz, laughing.
Ariana and Smut started giggling about something. Slowly they made their way to the couch in the corner of the living room. It was threadbare and stained, but they didn’t seem to mind. They sat right down, holding hands and whispering.
Smut was lucky. If he’d been in front of an open window, I think I would have pushed him.
Rosie was in charge of the CD player, and he put on some dance tunes. I danced a little with Rachel and Liz. But after awhile I caught a glimpse of Ariana and Smut kissing, and my motor stopped running. Liz asked me if I was okay, and I said yes, I was just tired.
But all I was thinking was: Why didn’t they just go off and park somewhere? Why torment the rest of us, who had to sit and watch?
Well, maybe not the rest of us. Maybe just me. Everyone else seemed to be having a great time.
For the first time in my life I wished I had a vice, like drinking or smoking or writing terrible poetry. But I don’t, so I consoled myself with elaborate murder schemes.
At one point Mr. DeWaart went into his bedroom to answer a phone call. When he came back, he turned off the CD player and announced, “Okay, listen up, guys. Time for a reality check. I just got a call from Mr. Brophy at the print shop. The proofs are ready.”
“All riiight!” Rosie said.
“The bad news is, someone has to go check them.”
A big groan went up
from the room. ‘Tonight?” Liz asked.
“Or first thing tomorrow morning. Mr. Brophy’s projects piled up while he was gone, and he’d have to put them all ahead of us if we waited. The other alternative is to let him do the proofreading, which I don’t recommend — not with some of the last names in our school.”
He was right. Since joining the yearbook, I had learned to my horror that people I’d known on a first-name basis had last names like Xarvoulakis, Wojcechowsky, Orailoglu, and Nwogalanya.
Mr. Brophy was good, but not that good.
Under his breath, to the tune of the Mickey Mouse Club theme song, John Christopher started singing: “X-A-R, V-O-U, L-A-K-I-S …”
“Ah, John, your mnemonic system rivals your glossal coordination,” Mr. DeWaart said drily.
Rachel burst out laughing.
“What’d he say?” John asked.
“Your memory’s as good as your tongue control,” Rachel informed him.
“So I can count on you to go, Mr. Christopher?” Mr. DeWaart went on.
“Uh-uh, not tonight,” John said. “I have to take care of my little bro while my ’rents go out.”
Liz, Rachel, and Rosie all chimed in with excuses.
Finally Mr. DeWaart turned to Ariana. “What do you say, editor in chief?”
Ariana looked as if she wanted to say yes, but I could see Smut squeezing her hand.
“Um, I did have plans,” she said, “but I guess …”
Her voice trailed off. I couldn’t believe everyone was chickening out. And, Smut — he was trying to force Ariana not to do it. I thought they were all selfish, lazy jerks.
“I’ll do it,” I said.
And that was how I became Ariana’s knight in shining armor. And why I was curious about Ariana’s whereabouts after the party. And how I ended up in the Ramble with a human Gumby.
Fast-forward to that night. In the shower, rewinding that party in my mind, wondering why I’d been so curious about Ariana and Smut. Why I couldn’t have walked to the print shop the regular way. Not to mention the yearbook. It was still sitting there, unproofed, because I was off having the worst night of my life.
My skin began shriveling, and I turned the water off.