Friday, October twenty-sixth.
Jonquil Brindisi, her long legs crossed, sat in Claude's generous futon chair, sipping a banana daiquiri as she listened to Futzy Buttweiler and Delia Gaskin hold forth from the couch.
Futzy had called them all together, the major players who had survived the prom. They needed some sort of closure, he said, and he was right.
A lot of changes had come down.
Claude had divorced his wives and swiftly remarried. His new mates? The couple Jonquil herself had lusted after until the state of their earlobes had cooled her passions.
The three of them sat now in clunky dining room chairs, listening and nodding.
Lovey-dovey motherfuckers.
Futzy had replaced his pair of hellions with Adora Phipps. While they insisted a third would surely come along any day now, Jonquil doubted they were looking in any serious way.
And no secret to anyone and not a scandal to the unbigoted, Delia Gaskin, while maintaining the fiction of a separate residence, was deep in lust with Bix Donner's widows, Trilby and Brest, their threesome a virtual marriage.
Trilby's little whistleblower knelt alone on the living room carpet. Pill busied herself with a deck of cards, some weird sorting exercise whose rules only an eight-year-old could divine.
Near Pill sat Tweed and her kid sister Jenna, crosslegged on pillows. They bookended a chipper Dexter Poindexter, who had replaced a slaughtered bank clerk at First National soon after the prom.
"Now that the media brouhaha has died down," continued Futzy, Adora's loving eyes on him, "I thought a nice quiet evening of putting the pieces together would benefit us all."
Claude nodded and spoke. "A final look at things, one last breath and benediction before we move on with our lives. Is that what you mean?"
Jonquil, bemused, said nothing.
What a load of crap this was. Were they a bunch of fucking wimps? She could take on such a night again easily. Truth be told, she missed it already. The terror, the hunt, the futtering of the crazy janitor whose bones she had wanted to leap but had ended up breaking instead.
Might it somehow happen again?
She thrilled at the thought.
"Yes," said Nurse Gaskin. "Victims of major traumas tend to obsess about them. We should look on this retelling as a ritual signpost, a mark of punctuation on the way to healing."
"Back to normal after tonight, eh?" said Jonquil. The looks Bray and Winnie gave her reinforced her doubt.
"By no means." Nurse Gaskin's eyes flared with hatred.
Then she smoothed it over.
Delia Gaskin, in Jonquil's opinion, needed to be taken down a few notches. The upstart bitch in whites had far too lofty an opinion of herself.
"The horror of that night," the nurse said, "will haunt us for the rest of our lives. But going over the ground again may make it in some sense manageable."
With that, she and Futzy launched into a retelling of the events of prom night.
Like obedient little androids, the others, everyone but Jonquil, chimed in with one part of the story or another.
Jonquil clinked and sipped, remarking what odd ducks she had fallen in with. Between bouts of savage fucking in the supply closet, she liked to regale Benji Rubblerum, the new head janitor, with stories about her colleagues and how very odd they were.
Then the weird thing happened.
Futzy and the school nurse, caught up in their tale, came to the killing of Pesky and Flense in the faculty lounge.
Jonquil saw seeds of worry sprout in Trilby Donner's eyes.
Her little girl looked up from her playing cards, listening and staring.
Jonquil might have jumped in to deflect the telling. But she loved to witness the fruits of violence, especially violence inflicted in all innocence.
"Then," said the nurse, who wore a stylish denim dress, long-sleeved, with embroidery that suggested cowboy motifs, "it's my guess that old Gerber took a pellet of dry ice in his gloved fist and forced the poor girl to swallow it."
Her hands illustrated as she spoke.
"Miss Gaskin!" said Trilby, ever the mom.
Then Pill's eyes bugged out. Her eyelids fluttered and she keeled over. No one was near enough to break her fall.
But the girl, on her knees already, did not fall far. In a glancing blow, her scalp knocked against the futon frame. The cards she cupped in her hands fanned out over the carpet, a sprawl of red and black and white.
Jonquil observed it all coolly.
She clinked her ice.
It looked as if the poor girl was choking on her tongue.
She would die if no one helped.
But the nurse barreled in to clear the girl's passageway, hovering like a benevolent angel. She rubbed Pill's hands vigorously, feeling for pulse and heartbeat, moving deft fingers everywhere on her body. "She'll be all right, I think. Claude, do you have maybe a day bed Pill can lie down on?"
"There's the guest room upstairs, with the coats. Just shove them aside."
"Trilby, why don't you stay with her, out of earshot of the rest of this?" Delia said.
Upstart bitch.
Granted, Little Miss Nursiepoo was caught up in a minicrisis. But that gave her no excuse for addressing Claude as Claude, for calling Trilby Trilby. It ought to have been Mr. Versailles and Ms. Donner, even outside working hours.
In the privacy of her threesome, the bitch could use first names all she liked. But in mixed company, it was unseemly, an affront to all decent Americans.
The two women took Pill upstairs.
Delia Gaskin returned and the tale continued. But no one was into it much any more.
Jonquil, when she wasn't mulling how best to puncture the nurse's inflated ego, saw that Pill's fainting spell had brought back the terror of that night in everyone here.
Jenna Megrim, a sweet senior whose prom would occur six months from now, who had lost her father and almost her sister as well, seemed most upset.
But the pall lay upon them all.
Delicious.
When they stood up to disperse, Brest checked with Trilby and Pill upstairs.
Then she left with Delia Gaskin.
It saved time, lots of time, Jonquil later realized, that the rest of them were still mixing and milling when Pill, holding her mother's hand, appeared on the stairs and began to tell them why she had fainted.
When Pill awoke, she didn't know at first where she was. Mommy was holding her hand and feeling her forehead, and Mommy's new secret sort-of-wife Delia was standing over her, saying, "I think she's coming out of it."
A huge turned-away snoozing bear lay beside Pill on the bed.
Coats.
A lamp with a frilly green shade cast a soft glow from the nightstand. The overhead light had been switched off.
Then Pill remembered.
But she managed not to show it, not even when Delia stared right into her eyes.
"You okay, Pill?" Mommy asked.
"Uh huh."
Delia said, "You gave us a scare."
"I'm sorry, Delia," she said.
Mommy bent and laughed and kissed Pill on the cheek and told her not to worry, that she was just delighted to have her back among the living.
Delia examined her, holding her wrist tight with a concentrated frown, and then moving Pill's head in strange ways by the neck and jaw.
Pill didn't much like Delia. She hadn't much liked her since Daddy died, or even before. But her two mommies seemed to like her a whole bunch, especially Brest.
So Pill only shared the way she really felt with Gigi the goat. In whispers, late at night, under the covers.
But now, she especially didn't like Delia.
Luckily Delia left and Mommy stayed behind.
"Mommy?" Pill said.
"Yes, dear?"
"I need to tell you something."
The telling was hard. At one point, Mommy began to cry and Pill almost wished she hadn't told her anything at all.
But in spite of her crying, Mommy was a tough lady. Pill knew that already, from the rough love her mommy sometimes shared with Daddy and Brest. She knew it from her limps and winces and from the way moonlight lit her bruises when she came in late at night to kiss Pill on the cheek, and Pill pretended to be sleeping.
Mommy cried and sighed and blew her nose.
But when Brest came up and said she and Delia would be off and asked was Pill okay, Mommy said, "She's fine."
Then her face got all dark. She added, "Make some excuse. Drop Delia off at her place and come back without her."
"I don't understand," Pill's second mommy said. "Is there-"
"I'll explain when you come back."
Pill was proud of her mother.
"Don't let on that anything's out of the ordinary, okay?"
Brest said she wouldn't. She found her coat in the pile on the bed, Delia's too, and left the room.
Mommy held Pill. She told her she was her sweet pumpkin. "We'll give them five minutes," she said. "Then we'll go downstairs."
But Mommy kept looking at her watch and Pill knew that nowhere near five minutes had passed when Mommy told her it was time, hustle her buns, chop-chop.
It felt strange, like being in a fishbowl, to leave the bedroom holding Mommy's hand and see all the grown-ups standing in clumps downstairs.
They stopped when Mommy said something. They all looked up.
Then Pill told them.
Just like she told Mommy.
It was really hard this time. It felt as if she were back in that closet again, but this time Mommy was with her.
It was okay to see the hand moving again, Delia's hand in that same gesture, the dry ice pellet in her glove.
And it was okay to hear Miss Gaskin!.
Pill worried at first that she wouldn't be able to tell it the way it happened, so the grown-ups would get a clear picture. But she saw from their faces that they did.
They got it clear all right, Mr. Buttweiler, the principal, most of all. Pill could see that in the blush of his blotchy skin.
And in what came next.
Futzy looked at little Pill on the landing, listening as she drew the correct conclusion from that terrible night. She was an angel, and this was her annunciation.
If he tried, he could hear her voice deepen into his slain daughter's voice. He could see her sprout a foot taller, her breasts plump out, her first lobebag being slipped over her lovelobe when she came of age. She was Kitty all over again.
Kitty had come back, his beloved girl, to set things right.
Adora had enriched his homelife.
Now his daughter had returned to fix the rest of it.
When Pill finished, she gazed up at her mom.
"Oh wow," said Jenna Megrim.
Heads turned.
"What is it, Jenna?" Futzy asked.
"I was parking cars that night. I remember, after it was all over, wondering why the janitor's car was parked in the faculty and staff lot. But then I figured he knew the combination into the backways and didn't need to drive into the so-called, not-really-secret garage everybody knows about and use the underground elevator.
"What I didn't see, until Pill was talking just now, was that-and I've gone over this a hundred times in my head-the nurse's blue clunker was never in the parking lot, at least not up to the moment the school was padlocked shut."
"She was inside long before then," Jonquil said coolly.
Futzy recalled how quickly Delia had left that night, not through the front door like floods of relieved seniors did. Ten minutes later, when Jonquil, Adora, Winnie, and Bray joined him in exploring the backways, Matthew Megrim had been discovered. Soon after, they found the hapless history teacher's car by the elevator. Hints of gas fumes suggested that the motor had recently been on, though that made no sense.
It hadn't been his fumes at all.
It had been Delia's.
So Futzy told the gathering of survivors.
"Something else," Winnie said from the couch, holding Claude's hand and Bray's. "The coroner's report repeatedly mentioned right-handed stabs to the bodies. Now I remember the janitor at the light bank lifting a hand to adjust the lights just before the music started. Did anyone else see that?"
Tweed spoke up. "We were on the bandstand. Me and Dex." She looked up to recapture it. "The janitor was raising his left hand, kinda drifting it hazily over the switches, struggling to recall which ones he was supposed to throw."
Futzy brought back other scenes. Gerber Waddell screwing in lightbulbs, triangulating an American flag, weeding flower beds in front of the school. He saw Gerber's left hand moving, ever moving, his right hand idle or thumb-tucked into his belt.
Futzy looked at Trilby Donner's little girl. "Pill," he said, "which hand did you see holding that dry ice pellet? Can you remember?"
"I think so," the little girl said.
Gripping the oak railing, she brought the scene back with a squinch and a twist to her face. The narrow crack through which she had seen the killer's arm.
Her hands let go, shaping a slow fog before her. First the left rose, then stopped, falling back into place. Then with increasing certainty, the other, the right, lifted, finding its fixed place in the air, holding the invisible pellet, the arm, the hand, a gesture of strength mixed with delicacy.
The movement of Pill's hand matched precisely Delia's gesture on the couch, right before the little girl had fainted.
Trilby Donner, once more in shock and torn umpteen ways, listened as the questions confirmed what all this had been leading to.
Delia Gaskin, Brest's hush-hush lover and her own, had, by dint of damning evidence, just been convicted of multiple deaths: Zane Fronemeyer and his wives, Sheriff Blackburn, Jiminy Jones, a slew of seniors in the midst of a night of terror, and then, to redirect the finger of accusation, poor innocent Gerber Waddell, a feeb falsely futtered, his reputation forever besmirched.
Trilby felt shame.
And violation.
How could a person seem so decent, mouth all the words of love one could ever hope to hear, yet beneath that facade be monstrous?
She and Brest were still deep in grief over Bix's death.
Now, their relationship had once again been ripped raw. A betrayer had wrapped herself about their ailing hearts, a snake whose hooded guile had penetrated deep to the soul.
Trilby's hand went to her mouth.
Her eyes teared up.
Keep it together, keep it together.
Focus on Pill.
Focus on her beautiful innocent girl, nodding to this or that question from the gathered adults, her words pure and carefully chosen.
Pill was not the easiest child to raise. She tested for boundaries. She gave guff. She pushed back.
But always, Trilby sensed her child's secret delight in being reined in, in knowing where the limits were.
Trilby had feared, coming off the prom, a shattering. She had seen Pill move this way and that in new psychic space, struggling to keep her balance in a world rearranged, a world from which her father had been violently ripped.
But now, here in Claude Versailles' living room (how she wished Brest could witness it), Pill was taking confident steps onto solid ground. In this precious eight-year-old girl, her childlike honesty in full display, Trilby had her first glimpse of the proud woman her daughter would become.
This vision anchored her.
These were her friends and colleagues, their eyes afire with appalled awe at the deception and temerity of Delia Gaskin. But primarily their eyes brimmed with wonder at the emergence of Pill, her Pill, her lovely daughter, getting near to being gangly of limb, a slim barely-there little girl in bib overalls and close-skulled brown hair.
Her friends could not save Trilby from the madness of the moment, but Pill could. For all her quiet frailty, Pill would pull her mother through; Trilby sensed it deep in her heart.
So too would it be with Brest.
Somehow they would survive this time, keeping a dread secret from the monster in their lives, as would Pill (her innocence wily enough not to tell Delia a thing), until this close-knit community took its proper revenge upon her.
That revenge would not be long in coming.
Already, as the final questions to Pill were asked and answered, Trilby saw wheels turning.
In Futzy Buttweiler.
In Jonquil Brindisi.
In Claude Versailles.
Retribution would be swift and sure.
She and Brest, newly wounded and raw, would be seen after.
More important, Pill would see her father's murderer dealt with. She would forgive her mommies for their bad choice, rectified at once and explained when she was much older. And she would find firm footing in this marvelous society in the greatest country on the face of the planet.
From the midst of torment, a new seed of hope and solidarity would sprout.
Trilby had never loved her daughter more than she did at this moment. That's what her tears, freely flowing now, announced to all who cared to observe them.
Hope was justified, she thought, even when life seemed most hopeless.
Robert Devereaux
Slaughterhouse High
25. Piecing Together What Was Torn Asunder
Bray looked up at the sound of Claude's front door opening. In walked Brest Donner from having dropped Delia Gaskin home.
Brest was a hard woman, he thought. Beauty edged with greed, an inturned nature. Before too many years had passed, her great-eagle sweep and flare would droop into something vulturish.
Bray considered the abomination this woman had instigated: a female threesome.
He couldn't help but be judgmental about such a perverted combination of partners. Despite his years as an outcast and the prejudicial treatment he had suffered, there were certain personal choices that struck him as simply wrong. Three women in a sexual entanglement was one of them. Didn't the Bible have a few prohibitions against that sort of thing? He believed it did.
"Okay, what's up?" said Brest. "A surprise party?"
Everyone spoke at once. While the confusion was sorting itself out, Bray whispered to Winnie, "They'll slap us in jail."
She goggled at him. "Jeepers, Bray, now what's your problem?"
"We were heroes, weren't we? You and me, the two social pariahs, especially. We did the media circuit and the world changed, a tiny bit anyway."
"So?"
"So now the story will turn way the fuck around: We made a mistake, we got fooled, we fucked up. They'll take everything back, they'll try us for Gerber's murder, they'll demonize us, it'll be Notorious for sure."
Claude leaned to Winnie. "Is our handsome yummy-nums lapsing into Bray-mode again?"
"He sure is," Winnie said.
"Be not dismayed, hubby ours," Claude said. "Everyone in this room, without exception, was Delia's dupe."
That was true. Claude had a way of cutting to the heart. He was also a mean flogger when the mood struck him.
" All of us made a mistake," continued Claude, "which we simply must, with all deliberate speed, rectify. If we visit right retribution upon our wayward school nurse, they'll make us heroes all over again. The public loves seeing justice meted out. Calm down, Bray, sweetie. Let come what may."
Claude sat back, not waiting to see if Bray followed his advice. Claude knew he would. His confidence, Bray thought, was irritating, but it wasn't misplaced. Claude knew him.
Claude knew them both.
Had sexy Jonquil Brindisi not been so deeply bigoted, it would have been sweet and savory for them to have tripled up with her. But Claude, the more he and Winnie got to know him, was a pretty decent companion. He treated them well, he was fun to listen to, and he cooked a mean omelette.
"I just don't like it," Bray muttered, but only for form's sake.
Winnie's look said, I love you, you doofus, despite your fretting and moaning.
Meanwhile, Brest had clearly been struggling to make sense of the babble. As everyone spoke up, fitting in this or that piece of the puzzle for her, Trilby held her hand.
Pill leaned against her mother and listened, looking tired but otherwise like any other eight-year-old up past her bedtime.
Bray twiddled his fingers at her, a spastic butterfly caught chest high. Pill gave a wisp of a smile and twiddled back.
The plan for dealing with Delia Gaskin came in part from Futzy Buttweiler and in part-indeed the killer part-from Jenna Megrim.
Bray listened in fascination as their plan gathered shape and momentum. Carrying it out, he sensed, would provide the healing for which they had come together. As one part of the plan meshed with another, their conspiratorial circle took on centripetal force. Heads angled in like sharpened stakes in a concealed pit.
Only Jonquil held back, sipping her drink.
Bray gave her a brief look of wistful lust, to which Jonquil dutifully shot back an intolerant glare full of fire and fuck-you.
Still, her compact, killer, curvaceous legs, crossed just so, boggled Bray's brain. He longed to uncross them, to shred those dark stockings, to dip down into the warm moist fire of her loins and tongue up the juices that sizzled there.
Right, he thought. Not in this lifetime.
Winnie elbowed him. Listen up, Bray, her look commanded him.
Bray listened.
Dex sat on the floor against an overstuffed armchair, intent on the grown-ups' conversation.
Tweed sat huggably close on his right, her sister Jenna's head on his left thigh.
Despite Dex's graduation the previous spring and his coming-up-on six months at First National, clerking away as if he'd done it forever, he still felt very much a kid.
The terrors of the prom had indeed aged him. And this evening's revelations went even further toward drawing his youth to a close. But maturity wasn't something you snapped on like a toolbelt.
It was strange being a boy.
Boys were expected to show strength. Not to cry, or only on special occasions.
But really the girls were in charge.
With decent boys anyway.
He had heard of the rougher sort of guys, who threw their rage around and made things nasty for the women in their lives. They were just wacked-out dudes, far as he was concerned.
But among normal people, the women held sway and everybody knew it.
There were even jokes about it.
Now he had learned that it wasn't sick-guy Gerber Waddell, but sick-girl Delia Gaskin, who had been the prom killer.
Poor Gerber, a kind retard with a nasty past and a brain pruned back to cut out his nastiness, they had futtered by mistake.
And Miss Gaskin walked about, bold as brass, wearing a mask of innocence, even trysting on the sly with the widows of the same Bix Donner whose life she herself had ended.
She had to be insane.
To think that he had visited the nurse's office, what, at least half a dozen times during his four-year stint at Corundum High. She could have sliced him up, fed him poison pills, or God knows what -all.
She could have done that to anyone.
Maybe she had.
No doubt there would be an investigation. Odd incidents at the school. Rumors of excess pain, of prolonged illnesses, the examination of pill bottles in medicine chests.
Dex didn't think anyone had died, but maybe he was wrong. Probably though, what with all the ribbing the nurse took, she had simply snapped.
On his left, Jenna stirred.
Tweed cuddled against him, almost hiding her head beneath his arm. Perhaps she was reliving those awful moments at the prom, and the death of her father. Dex would have to soothe her tonight, to assure her that she was safe in his arms and adored to the max.
But Tweed's kid sister squirmed in a most delightful fashion at his thigh. As he watched her take in each speaker in the room, Dex could feel the tension in her body.
Jenna was a pert thing, a little more compact than Tweed but otherwise a knock-off of her.
And a knock-out.
Dex mused.
Sister-wives were not unheard of.
Jenna was currently nursing a crush on the sprightly Pish Balthasar and on Bo Meacham, a hot-shot quarterback with nothing but brawn and looks to recommend him.
Maybe after her prom, she would wise up and gaze upon her brother-in-law in a new way.
Dex hoped so.
But he thought it best to let that unfold on its own. It was inconceivable to bring it up with her. Maybe he could plant a seed in Tweed's ear, letting sisterly magic weave its gossamer web.
Shame on him!
With all the upset and outrage sweeping through Mr. Versailles' living room, here he was firmly focused on lust.
Maybe Tweed would chastise him tonight.
He loved their Private Flogger.
And he was glad it made such a racket, the buzz-build, the thwap!
Jenna, down the hall from their bedroom, was most likely listening, lying there stroking her lovelobe. Most likely, she had Pish and Bo on her mind as she stroked, but maybe not, maybe not.
He could dream, couldn't he?
Tweed clung to Dex.
She missed her father's melodious voice.
At first, her house had seemed empty without him. But Dex's love for her had so filled it, and so filled her heart, that the ache of her father's death had lost its edge in recent months.
Jenna's presence helped too.
Their sisterly rivalry, always minor, had vanished completely in the sudden maturity prom night had brought on.
Jenna had recently taken up with Bo Meacham, whose outsized nose and dorkish grins were more than offset by his dropdead looks and a stellar career this year as lead quarterback. She had dropped hints to Tweed, snickering over popcorn while Dex was off hitting the bars with his work buddies, that noselength, at least in Bo's case, did indeed nicely correspond to genlength.
But more important to Tweed was her sister's near-certain crowning as prom queen. Next spring, the designated slasher's victim would come as usual from the pool of the non-exempt, a pool which would not include Jenna.
Proper protocol would be observed at Corundum High. Mr. Buttweiler would see to it. No doubt, the entire Demented States of America would tune in that night to witness the restoration of order in Corundum, Kansas.
Pillowed on Dex's thigh on the floor, Jenna was following intensely the how-shall-we-kill-her debate which filled the living room.
Tweed watched a lightbulb struggle to go on in her sister's head. Later, she swore she heard the tinny tinsel clink of the pullchain as Jenna's eyes lit up.
"Wait! I've got it!" she said, interrupting a savage suggestion from Jonquil Brindisi. Jenna had always been bold with adults. "We mustn't rip her apart. Not quickly. Not slowly. Not with drops of acid steaming pain into her wounds. Not with starved, rabid rats dangling within a jaw's bite of her flesh. Nope! We've got to keep her skin intact!"
A razor stropped in Miss Brindisi's voice. "The woman deserves slow dismemberment." End of argument.
Had Jenna already taken her course in the greater vices? Yes. Tweed remembered the B+ on her sister's report card the winter before. No reprisals were possible from that quarter.
"Jonquil," said Mr. Buttweiler, "let's hear what Jenna has to say, shall we?"
"She's a real pistol," whispered Tweed to Dex, who nodded and squeezed her hand.
Jenna's prodigious zest, her zeal when she latched onto the meat of an idea, was a favorite topic of conversation between them. That, even more than Jenna's beauty, explained her popularity.
" Here's how we'll kill her!"
Tweed observed the others as Jenna talked.
Trilby and Brest, torn by warring emotions, nodded with enthusiasm as her plan unfolded. Miss Phipps' eyes saucered behind her gold wire rims. Futzy Buttweiler's eyebrows looked like a couple of fat caterpillars working overtime at pushups. Claude Versailles and his formerly homeless lovers were utterly enthralled by Jenna's words.
Even Jonquil Brindisi's defiance softened to neutrality there in that armchair. Her sips grew more deliberate, her body shifting in what Tweed suspected was growing arousal.
"Once she's dead," said Jenna, "we'll have her fluxidermed. Her body will be on display just inside Corundum High's front door. Kids'll get to paint her. Or scrawl graffiti on her. Or maybe do some other stuff the prom committee thinks up or approves. But nobody's allowed to steal her. And no one can, like, remove her arms or legs or anything, because everyone will understand what her role at the prom will be and just be dying of anticipation all year."
Jonquil Brindisi's long legs dandled against one another as she leaned forward.
"Her role at the prom?" she asked.
Ms. Brindisi's friendship lobe blushed with bloodlust, her lovelobe's gray-paisley bag seeming to throb with a stung-thumb swelling.
Tweed's pride in Jenna flowered as her plan spilled out with renewed energy. The living room, once solemn, was now abuzz with fresh dreams of collective revenge. Jenna's stunning imagination pictured the gym, months in the future.
She showed them, all of them, how it would be on that terror-filled night.
Where precisely the slaughtered couple would pillow their heads.
And how the climax of the evening would at last put the community's anguish-and the anguish of an entire nation-to rest.