So there was that much, anyway.
But instead of going straight to the school office as he’d meant to, Brendan found himself heading for homeroom, like any other day. He even got to his seat before the bell finished ringing—only to realize that (duh) if he was there, he’d have to at least pretend to be doing this dumb “dreams” assignment. Which meant he’d need to borrow a piece of paper, since everything related to school was on his bedroom floor.
Writing his dreams? What was the fucking point? He sure wasn’t going to be finishing the thing.
But if he wasn’t going to the main office yet, he might as well scribble words on the page while he worked himself up to do what he (and Jock!) were now committed to.
Sure, like I’m going to write down dreams on this piece of paper for everyone to see. Dreams are just a mix of crap from the back of the brain. People who think dreams mean something are like those religious nuts who see Jesus on a tortilla.
Smith & Wesson Bodyguard 380, now there’s a dream for you.
I read somewhere that dreams are how the subconsious tries to make things right, by redoing them, over and over. If that’s true, all I can say is, I have a really sick subconsious. Why can’t I dream about Mina S some hot actress or something?
And anyway by the time this essay is due I don’t think it’ll be the first thing on people’s minds for me.
I’m only sitting here because I’m working up the nerve to hunt down Ms. McDonald. Get things moving, like I told Jock. Career Day? Who gives a crap?
Your wasting time, Brendan. Stand up and just walk out. Take your backpack to the office. Give it to the principal like you planned.
Your such a coward.
Okay, soon as the bell rings.
8:03
Linda
Linda leaned back in her chair, blowing a puff of air up toward her unruly bangs. A little more than an hour before the guest speakers started to arrive, with a speech to finalize, a stack of pink call slips, and a queue of emails demanding attention. Most of all, the call to Tom Atcheson—she’d Googled his name twice, to see if the DA had announced his investigation, but so far there was nothing.
By tonight, she was going to feel like an old dishrag.
She and Gordon should take off for a few days over Easter vacation. Or what about a nice long trip, over the summer? They’d never had an actual holiday together. And she’d been working 70-hour weeks since May. Could she talk him into going somewhere? Fiji, Tahiti…
Maybe someplace without international borders. Maui? Two weeks there, doing nothing but sweating, swimming, and reading a suitcase full of trashy novels.
For the next forty seconds, Linda McDonald was on a beach, listening to waves and the clatter of wind through palm trees—until a raised voice from the adjoining office reminded her of life, and her eyes came to focus on the little red circle informing her of 42 unopened emails.
Day-dreams over. She picked up the phone and called Atcheson Enterprises, to ask that the man get in touch with her as soon as he came in.
8:03
Tío
A janitor’s dreams were not those of a schoolmaster, Tío had found. To say nothing of the extent the world had changed since he last stood in front of a class.
Sometimes he would pause, outside a classroom or near a group of students, to perform some task that allowed him to listen unnoticed.
Guadalupe was an alien world from the one where he grew up. It was not merely the modern inventions—this change from chalkboards to video screens, from shared textbooks to electronic tablets was a matter of surface technology. It was the shift in attitudes that made him ponder.
A school had always been a place to incubate hopes and dreams, in a village like Tío’s or in the biggest of cities. But for many of the children here, parental hopes had turned to adult expectations, and the warmth of the incubator felt more like the focused burn of a magnifying glass in the sun. He had first noticed it in the ball games—baseball and what they called soccer here. Mothers and fathers screamed at their players, not in appreciation but in command, even condemnation. Did no one still believe that childhood was a time for joy? That soccer was a game, not a test of the child’s moral strength?
He finished his tidying of the school entrance and slipped the handle of the broom into its slot, turning back toward the cafeteria. Entering the breezeway, he saw a man standing outside of the library, head tipped in attention.
This man interested Tío. The husband of Principal McDonald was one of the rare individuals who looked at a uniform and saw the person underneath. In another (Sergeant Olivia Mendez, for one) this might have made Tío uncomfortable, but from their first encounter, he had felt that he and Gordon Kendrick spoke the same language. That this man, too, had a face he did not show the world.
Once or twice a month, they would have a conversation. About nothing much, and yet, about everything.
Tío gave his cart a little jiggle, causing a rattle that made the tall man turn, startled. Immediately, his face relaxed into the open expression that (Tío thought) went far to explain how the unsentimental Principal McDonald had allowed this man under her guard.
They exchanged greetings in each other’s languages, and Tío asked what it was the Englishman had heard.
“I was listening to the silence.”
“Ah.” Tío nodded. “The sound of the children at work.”
“According to the schedule, they’re spending this hour writing their dreams.”
“An hour seems very little time for dreaming.”
“Hard reality and job planning come at nine o’clock.”
“A pity.”
The two men smiled, both of them aware of, but neither looking at, the uniformed woman approaching from the far end of the quad. “In Australia, the aboriginals talk about Dreamtime, a place of eternal potential—entiende ‘potential’?”
“Potentia is Latin, Señor.”
“Of course, sorry. Dreamtime is where the lives and the knowledge of all our ancestors exist, and where all the acts of our descendants wait, at once.”
“A potent assignment, indeed, for one fifty-minute class.”
Gordon laughed. “I don’t think I ever asked—do you have children?”
“I did.” Tío’s voice was calm. “A son. He was killed.”
“Oh, Jaime. I’m sorry.”
“Many years ago. Some joys are…temporary.”
“And yet pain seems to last forever.”
“And speaking of pain.” The two men moved apart to watch Olivia Mendez, coming at them down the length of B Quad.
8:03
Olivia
When the eight o’clock bell rang, Olivia had been turning the last corner of the fence-line, in a world so quiet, she could hear a trickle of water in the stream behind her. It might have been a Sunday morning—until a girl popped out of a B Wing classroom, crossing the quad to the bathrooms at the end of the gym. And a teacher, head bent over a cellphone, strolled down A Quad toward the office. Someone had come out of the library to stand, in an attitude of listening—and although Olivia’s even pace did not change, her interest sharpened.
Gordon Kendrick.
Mendez, she scolded herself, you’re like that kid who just has to pull apart a clock to see how it works. Some people wanted privacy for no other reason than they were private people. She should be glad for the chance to meet someone like Linda’s quirky husband.
But she couldn’t shake the feeling there was something about him she ought to know.
As she watched-without-watching, he turned sharply at a sound behind him, then relaxed, his posture declaring how pleased he was to see whoever was coming down the breezeway. And that was exactly it: wasn’t the reaction just a bit more…edgy than you’d expect from an amiable British guy? Was it mere chance that he now had his back to the wall? Or was Olivia Mendez about to reduce another lovely piece of machinery to a silent heap of gears?
The janitor’s cart came into view, along
with the janitor. The two men shook hands like old friends, then stood talking. She was tempted—briefly—to veer aside and sprint down A Quad, so she could listen in on what the unlikely pair was saying, but she squelched the impulse. Instead, she continued her steady approach, across the outdoor basketball courts and through the picnic tables of B Quad.
Gordon appeared to notice her, although she suspected that he’d been watching her all along. Tío, too, looked around, then finished whatever he had been saying to his boss’s tall husband. The men stood apart as she came into earshot.
“Morning.” Her voice was all cop: friendly authority.
When they had returned her greeting, Tío nodded toward the far end of the quad she had just come down. “Does all look well in the school grounds?”
“I didn’t see any problems.”
“Good. It is troubling, what people will throw over the fences to save paying fees at the dump. Today I found this.” He pulled a white plastic shopping bag from the cart. Olivia accepted it gingerly, but when it neither dripped nor squelched, she pulled open the top: a can of spray paint and an orange cap. “It was lying at the entrance to the school. The cap was off, but it looks unused. I have found no paint on the walls.”
“Like someone was about to use it, and got interrupted?”
“There is a light in the entrance that goes on with motion, but it has developed a few seconds of delay. I reported it to the District. They have not yet fixed it.”
“Okay. Um, has anyone touched this but you?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Well, thanks. I’ll hang on to it, in case we…well, just in case.”
He nodded, and pushed his cart down the quad to the cafeteria.
Gordon turned his gaze on the plastic bag. “You could leave that in Linda’s office, if you don’t want to carry it around.”
“Oh, I’ll just stick it in my cruiser. How are things going up here?”
Somehow, she found that they were moving in the direction of the parking lot, Gordon slowing his pace to her shorter legs as he considered his reply. “The children seem…excited.”
“That’s understandable. Unless it’s something more?” When he did not answer, she glanced up sharply. “Trouble?” God, she thought, I take a ten-minute walk around the fields and something happens?
But he was shaking his head. “Not necessarily. More as if…have you ever stepped into a surprise party? Where guests are hiding behind the sofas?”
She stopped walking, openly astonished at the picture: this man, with friends in silly hats waiting to pounce? “You think the kids have something planned?”
“Not all of them. And not even a plan.” He gave her a rueful smile. “I honestly don’t know what I mean. It’s probably just their reaction to the day’s excitements. And speaking of excitements,” he went on before she could decide whether or not she agreed, “Linda tells me I’m to ask about your Fool.”
8:10
Gordon
Innocence was not a word most people associated with the students of a California middle school, Gordon reflected as he walked beside a woman with handcuffs on her belt. These were children who had long outgrown childish naiveté: raised with televised violence, playing games of graphic death, taught by their parents to mistrust any political, economic, or even religious authority. Eleven-year-old girls with braces on their teeth and sparkly unicorns on their notebooks breathed out the cynicism of a nihilist.
And yet, even the oldest, most sneering of these adolescents harbored secret pockets of hope, a hidden belief that the world might still hold out an outstretched hand in place of a fist.
This story of the Fool and the killer, for example. The goodness of three children in the face of murder, their willingness to share danger, made him want to weep—although he took care not to show that to Sergeant Olivia Mendez.
Gordon Hugh-Kendrick had no business walking among these children. His very presence was a threat—to their persons, and to that tiny flicker of hope in each and every breast. He should go before the demons of his past turned an Arctic breeze on the school’s small candle—to say nothing of Linda’s.
God only knew what kind of creative vengeance a company of international mercenaries might come up with.
And yet, he couldn’t quite stay away. Just as he couldn’t resist this game of conversation with Sergeant Olivia Mendez. While he listened to her story about San Felipe’s visitation from the Fool, his tongue was playing with words as it might with a chipped tooth. It would not take much of a slip: Sergeant Mendez might look like a small-town cop, but her mind was sharp, and curious, and very probably inexorable.
Instead, he listened, and made the expected responses in an open and appreciative manner, with no jarring note, no oddness that could not be explained by his accent. The very model of a principal’s English husband.
8:19
Chaco
What’s the point in writing about some pinche dream job? The men he knew took whatever work there was. Holding out for something you really wanted to do was just a ticket to Disappointment. Like, someone was going to hire Chaco Cabrera for a job in a fine suit? Oh, sure. Might as well dream about being Spider-Man or the Arrow.
No: what a man hoped for was a life that was sufficient. (And maybe one that was long enough to worry about jobs…) Like university professor would be nuts but schoolteacher might not be way out of reach. Video game designer? (Yeah, sure: more like selling videos at Best Buy.)
Still, the teacher might be right about one thing: “Think about what’s easy for you, or what you really love to do.” Not that Chaco was gonna blab aloud about that second part, but “easy”?
Math had always been weirdly simple. Other subjects were slippery, but math was so effortless he had to work sometimes to hide it, giving wrong answers so the teacher didn’t make comments in front of the class. But what kinds of things used math? (Other than whatever it was Tío had in mind. What was that about, anyway?) Maybe math teacher, if he wanted it bad enough, and if he got lucky along the way. Or work in a bank? He’d heard his aunt complaining about the tellers (funny word—what did they tell?) who didn’t speak enough Spanish to get through a simple thing like depositing a check.
There, Chaco had two skills: math, and Spanish.
’Course, he also had Mamá and the littles and Angel in his life. So he wasn’t about to write anything too honest about dreams. Lying was a skill, too.
Dreams are what keep you from sleeping at night. Dreams get in the way of standing on your feet. Dreams are for mothers, who don’t really know what’s going on in their son’s life.
I used to dream. One of my dreams was walking into the house and finding my Dad, only he wasn’t my Dad he was someone all healthy and cheerful who looked like him. Or I sometimes had dreams that my Mom was laughing. My father was never happy or healthy, not when I knew him, but Mom used to laugh a lot when I was young.
If I was going to dream some kind of Career, it would be something that would make my Mom laugh like that again. Something that would mean she doesn’t have to work so much, and stops worrying about paying the rent, and can take my sister to the doctor when she needs to. Buy herself clothes she likes, not just what she needs.
But it would also have to be something that would keep my cous other people happy, too. Cause there are people with expectations who if I let down, would make things even harder on my Mom.
So will this Career Day give me some kind of job that lets my Mom laugh again, but also keeps my family happy? Cause right now I don’t see that happening.
But anyway, that’s my dream.
8:23
Nick
“Write your dreams,” the teacher said. “Due Friday.”
As far as Nick was concerned, this whole year had been a dream. And at other times, it was the most real thing that had ever happened to him.
Bee was gone: that was real.
A month ago, he’d been so sure he knew what happened to her, even thou
gh he’d seen how careful all the adults were around the subject, like they were afraid to point out how really unlikely it was, in case he broke into a thousand pieces.
He knew it was unlikely. Did they think he believed in Harry Potter or something?
Then the really strange thing happened.
He’d started #speakforbee because he was mad. And sad, sure, but mostly really pissed off, that he couldn’t seem to do anything for Bee. He could even remember when it started: with that ad in the paper showing Mr. Cuomo grinning like the salesman he was.
What right did he have to look like that when his daughter was gone?
Nick had grabbed a felt pen to add horns and fangs to the ad. Then he put little red lines in the guy’s eyes and blood dripping down his chin.
But instead of bursting into tears (like he was doing at pretty much everything else right then) Nick cut the ad out and kept it.
The next day he hunted down the ad online and printed off a bunch of copies. It made him feel good to turn the smile into something evil. Nearly as good as hurting Mr. Cuomo himself. It was childish, but so what?
Nick couldn’t afford Photoshop, but in one of his schools he’d learned how to edit a photo, so he downloaded a free program and added Dracula fangs onto Cuomo’s grin. It looked almost real.
He sent it to AJ as a laugh—well, not a laugh, really. It was too angry for that. But AJ had been Bee’s friend, too.
AJ sent it to the Tim twins, and they sent it to some other friends of Bee’s, and then somebody—Nick never did find out who—posted it online. Along with the hashtag #speakforbee.
In a couple of days there were four images, only two of them Nick’s. In no time at all it went viral. It became a game to see who could make the best image of Evil Cuomo—the one of Cuomo’s face mixed with Hannibal Lechter was totally creepy, since the two faces looked a little bit alike.