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“That’s the thing, right? It should be funny,” Sam says. “It’s funny now. But right then it was so awful that all we could do was sit there in shock. I was so embarrassed for him! And he just lectured the class on Hamlet like nothing was happening. I mean, he’s quoting Shakespeare while we’re all just trying not to look down.”
“Didn’t anyone say anything?” Daneca asks. “All those jokers?”
“Finally,” says Sam, “Kim Hwangbo raises her hand.”
I shake my head. Kim is quiet, nice, and will probably go to a better college than anyone else at Wallingford.
Even Daneca is laughing now. “What did she say?”
“?‘Mr. Knight, your pants are unzipped!’?” says Sam. He laughs. “So Mr. Knight looks down, barely has a reaction, says ‘Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown,’ tucks himself in, and zips up. The end!”
“Are you going to tell anyone?” Daneca asks.
Sam shakes his head as he opens his milk. “No, and don’t you, either. Mr. Knight is harmless—it’s not like he did it on purpose—and he’d get in a lot of trouble if Northcutt found out. Or parents.”
“They’re going to find out,” I say. I wonder how long it will take before bets start flooding in about him getting fired. “No one can hide anything for long around here.”
Daneca frowns in my direction. “Oh, I don’t know about that.”
“What do you mean?” Lila asks, not entirely friendly.
Daneca ignores her question. “We’re going to the movies this weekend,” she says instead. “Do you guys want to come? We could double-date.”
A flush creeps up Sam’s neck.
Lila turns to me uncertainly. I smile.
“Sure,” she says. “If you want to, Cassel?”
“What’s the movie?” I ask. With Daneca, we could wind up going to some kind of documentary on the evils of baby seal clubbing.
“We’re going to see The Giant Spider Invasion,” Sam says. “They’re playing it at the Friday Rewind. It’s a classic Bill Rebane film—the special effects crew created the giant spider by covering a Volkswagen Beetle in fake fur and using the taillights as its red glowing eyes.”
“What’s better than that?” I ask.
No one can think of a thing.
* * *
That night I dream I’m in a room of corpses, all of them wearing dresses and lipstick, sitting stiffly on couches. It takes me a moment to realize they’re all my ex-girlfriends, their dead eyes glittering, their mouths barely moving as they whisper a list of my flaws.
He kisses like a fish, says my kindergarten girlfriend, Michiko Ishii. We’d meet behind a fat oak tree on the playground, until we got caught by another girl who ratted us out. Her corpse is that of a very little girl; glassy eyes make her look like a doll.
He flirted with my friend, says the girl who ratted us out, Sofia Spiegel, who was technically also my girlfriend at the time.
He’s a liar, says a girl from Atlantic City. The one in the silver dress.
Such a liar, says my eighth-grade girlfriend. I didn’t tell her that I was going to Wallingford until after I left. I don’t blame her for still being mad.
After the party he pretended not to know me, says Emily Rogers, who, to be fair, pretended just as hard that I didn’t exist after we’d spent the night rolling around on a pile of coats at Harvey Silverman’s freshman-year house party.
He borrowed my car and totaled it, says Stephanie Douglas, a worker girl I met in Carney over the summer after I was sure I’d killed Lila. She was two years older than me and could knot the stem of a cherry with her tongue.
He never really loved me, says Audrey. He doesn’t even know what love is.
I wake up while it’s still dark outside. Rather than go back to sleep, I start on some homework. I’m tired of the dead ganging up on me. There’s got to be a problem somewhere that wants solving.
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