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Girl Gone Missing. Marcie Rendon
Читать онлайн.Название Girl Gone Missing
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781947627123
Автор произведения Marcie Rendon
Жанр Ужасы и Мистика
Издательство Ingram
She needed to sleep. She planned to go ask the chair of science about testing out of biology and, if she was lucky, Professor LeRoy from the English Department would let her take that test tomorrow. She started counting backwards from ten. Ten-nine-eight and on to one. Then she started counting forward. She almost always fell back asleep before she reached fifty and tonight was no different.
She woke again at seven when the alarm went off. She brushed her hair, quickly braided it into one braid down the center of her back, washed her face while her coffee was brewing. She rinsed out her Thermos before filling it with hot coffee, made a fried egg sandwich, grabbed her book and notebooks off the kitchen table and headed to school.
The first place she stopped was LeRoy’s office.
“Oh,” he said, leaning back in his chair as she entered. “I looked up your grades. Not bad. You did all right in high school too, I see.”
Cash stood waiting.
“So…you still want to test out?”
“Yes.”
“Alright… if you’re sure. Come back here, not here, but to Room 103 in this building at two. Can you come at two?”
Cash nodded her head yes.
“Alright. Come back at two, Room 103, and we’ll see how you do. Bring a couple of pencils, sharpened, to write with. Most of it is multiple choice, but you’ll also have to write an essay.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Is an essay going to be too hard?”
Cash shook her head and turned to leave.
“It’s early enough in the quarter, if you pass, you could register for the next level English,” LeRoy said to her back.
Cash hadn’t thought about that. Wasn’t ready to think about that. “I’ll think about that,” she said as she left. She pulled the heavy door shut behind her.
Maybe she could do this school thing without taking any classes, she thought as she walked through the English building, her footsteps along with the voices of other students echoing off the hardwood floor.
After she sat through what she hoped was her last boring English 101 class, she stepped out into the fall air and fought the urge to keep walking right to her Ranchero, to drive north along the river…or go to the Casbah…or go eat. To do anything but go to science class and take that stupid test. Instead, she walked across the Commons and entered the science building, trudged up the stairs to the second floor.
Sharon was already there, sitting front and center, wearing a different miniskirt than she had worn the day before. This one had fake fringe leather on the hem. Sharon leered at Mr. Danielson’s back as he wrote notes on the blackboard.
Cash took her usual spot at the back of the room. She was done with the test way before most of the other students. Mr. Danielson had said they could leave once they were finished. But, rather than call attention to herself by being the first one up, Cash pretended to keep working while looking around the room at the other students. Her mind drifted to her dream of the blonde screaming for help, the blonde who just a week ago sat at the front of the room where Sharon now sat. Thinking about the dream raised the hair on the back of her neck.
Cash caught Mr. Danielson staring at her. She ducked her head and pretended to write more on the test. Finally two guys got up and turned their tests in. Thank god. A few seconds later, Cash gathered her books and papers from under the desk, dropped her test on Danielson’s desk and walked out of the room, down the stairs into the fresh air. She shivered, and not from the cold. Danielson gave her the creeps.
She remembered she was going to ask Chairman Olsen of the Science Department about testing out too. She went back in the building, found his door and walked through the same conversation she’d had earlier with the chair of the English Department. The Science chair was less verbal. He looked at her through horn-rimmed glasses. He had a pencil stuck behind his left ear. He mumbled, “Sure, come in on Friday at noon.”
Cash nodded and got the heck out of his room. It reeked of formaldehyde.
She was halfway across the Commons on her way to the rec room when Sharon caught up with her. She babbled on for the next hour, over the sound of pool balls dropping, about how groovy Mr. Danielson was. After forty minutes, Cash cleared the table one last time, and told Sharon to “get over it.”
At the end of the hour she went to her psych class. The information in this class was new to her. She found the reading and homework easy, but she didn’t think it would make sense to try to test out of it.
After psych, she went to judo in the school gym. She threw and got thrown for an hour. At the end, she was breathing hard, exhausted. She was going to have to start exercising like she used to in high school. Without working in the fields full time, she could tell she was losing muscle.
Right at two, Cash returned to Room 103 in the English building. The class was in progress, but when LeRoy saw her looking in the door window, he motioned for her to come in. He handed her some standardized test pages and a few pages of lined blank paper. “Your essay should be a comparative essay on Shakespeare and a twentieth-century poet or writer. There’s a desk at the back you can sit at. Just bring it all up here when you’re finished.”
Cash was done with the multiple-choice test a few minutes shy of fifteen. She sat and stared out the classroom window for another ten. There was a maple tree, its leaves brilliant fall red. A small bird, a wren, hopped from branch to branch. Cash thought about the line from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar—“Et tu, Brute?”—and how many times she had been betrayed, or felt betrayed, by families who swore to the social workers’ faces, faces that were either lined with worry or a churchy cheerfulness, that they would care for her. She thought about Langston Hughes’ poem, Dream Variations. Before she gave up hope, she had dreamed of a day when she could whirl and dance in the sun. She was startled out of her reverie by LeRoy blocking out the window.
“You going to be able to finish?”
“Of course,” answered Cash. She grabbed up her pencil. For the next twenty-five minutes, she wrote without stopping. When the bell rang, she put a period on the last sentence and wrote her name at the top of each page. She handed them to LeRoy and walked out of the room, making a beeline for the door. Outside she gulped fresh air and looked to the red maple where the wren continued its hopping.
Mission accomplished.
Cash drove through the town of Moorhead. Lawns were turning brown. Orange and yellow leaves were falling from the trees. It wasn’t winter cold yet, but the fall chill was in the air. She stopped at the red light on Main and lit up a Marlboro waiting for the light to change. Station wagons passed by, driven by farm wives in town for doctor’s appointments or grocery shopping. Ford pickup trucks pulling broken farm equipment dropped chunks of field dirt on the pavement on their way to the implement shop. On the radio, Merle Haggard turned twenty-one in prison while his mama cried. For a fleeting second, Cash wondered about her own mom, but she quickly shut that door in her mind. She took another drag of her cigarette and turned up the volume on the radio.
Back at her apartment, she put the tuna sandwich she had gotten at the Silver Cup in her lunch box with a full Thermos of coffee. She changed into work clothes and headed north along the river.
As she neared Perley, she could see Wheaton’s cruiser sitting in the graveled parking lot of the town’s grain elevators. As she got closer, Wheaton flashed his headlights at her. She pulled in alongside his car, driver window to driver window.
“How’s school?”
“Okay.”
“Passing?”
“Of