What she was looking for would be either on the desk or near a bedside phone. It didn’t take more than ninety seconds for Jordan to spot it.
Students were not supposed to have access to this blue-jacketed binder emblazoned with the school’s name and logo beneath the words “Confidential Faculty/Staff Directory.” If they-or their invariably upset parents -wanted to contact someone in the administration or on the faculty, the school’s website listed e-mail addresses and official phone numbers. But the directory that Jordan had seized from beneath a stack of student papers had information not so readily available.
She flipped it open to the section entitled “Dean’s Office.”
There, next to “Administrative Secretary,” was a name, along with office and home phone numbers and an address, and even more conveniently, in parentheses, a man’s name. The secretary’s husband.
Her hand quivered as she read the name. Are you the Wolf? For a moment, her head spun dizzily. Jordan breathed in deeply, settling her racing pulse and clenched stomach. Then she copied everything from the directory entry onto the back of her hand in black ink. She didn’t trust herself not to lose a scrap of paper. She wanted this information tattooed to her skin.
She could feel a rush of fears and confidences all clashing together within her. She fought off every sensation, telling herself to remain calm, remain focused, to return the directory to the exact same position it had occupied when she found it. She reminded herself to make sure that she had disturbed nothing and left no trace of herself in the faculty member’s apartment, not even the scent of her fear. The air in the apartment seemed harsh, like bitter smoke. She urged herself to use stealth, make sure that she exited the room with as much quiet and secrecy as she had used when she arrived.
Don’t let anyone see you, Jordan, she admonished herself. Be invisible.
For an instant, she thought it was funny. She had broken in and acted like a burglar, violating a school rule that would get her dismissed instantly, but she had not stolen anything except a small piece of information that might be larger than anything she had ever before held in her hands. It was like stealing something that could be either priceless or worthless.
She moved across the room quietly and put her ear to the door. She could hear no one outside. She inhaled rapidly, like a diver readying herself to plunge beneath black waters, and slowly turned the handle to let herself out. She wished in that second that she’d brought her filleting knife with her. She decided that from that point on, she would keep it close at hand.
Now the band was covering the Rolling Stones’ “She’s So Cold,” doing a passable imitation of Mick, Keith, and the lads, right down to the lead vocalist’s plaintive pleas encapsulated in the lyrics. The local group was wedged into a corner of the art gallery’s main room. Usually, the gallery sported student, faculty, and alumni works, but the open space was easily converted into a dance floor. Someone had replaced some of the overhead lights with a huge silver ball that reflected flashes of light onto the packed dancers.
The music reverberated off the walls; the students gyrated or collected in knots, closely pressed together, shouting above the band’s sounds. It was hot and loud. There was a refreshment table to the side, where a pair of the younger faculty dispensed plastic cups filled with watered-down red punch. A couple of other teachers hung by the sides, eyeing the students, trying to make sure than none of them snuck off hand in hand for some illicit contact. This was an impossible task. Jordan knew that the heat in the room would translate into connecting. Someone will lose his or her virginity tonight, she told herself.
Three times, she had elbowed her way through the dense, twisting pack of dancing students, moving diagonally across the floor each time, pausing once or twice to twist her body in circles, so that she might be mistaken for one of the party-goers. Her eyes, however, were fixed on the exits and on the faculty trying to prevent the inevitable sneaking off to quiet, dark places.
Jordan had been to enough of these dances to know what would happen. The teachers would spot a couple trying to exit together. Or, they’d be smart enough to realize that the sophomore leaving from the right intended to meet the senior exiting on the left, and both would be halted.
She waited, biding her time. When she saw a couple trying to leave, she slid behind them. She knew what would happen.
“Where do you think you two are going?” came the demand from the teacher. He confronted the couple, who at least had the sense to stop holding hands, and who were replying sheepishly and nervously that they meant no harm and didn’t mean anything and weren’t doing anything and had no possible idea what the faculty member thought they might conceivably be up to.
And, in that moment of confrontation, Jordan slipped through the door.
She made her way rapidly down a corridor. With each step, the music faded a bit more. At the end of the hall, she stopped. To her right were stairs, to her left another hall that led to the bathrooms. There would be faculty watching each bathroom. It was too obvious a place for a quick grope between couples or a fast swallow of an ecstasy pill or snort of cocaine. The kids who wanted to use the dance to cover a marijuana smoke invariably were wise enough to head outside, so that the telltale scent of the drug couldn’t be detected by the houndlike capabilities of the faculty noses.
The stairs to the right went down to a second flight, where there were drawing and sculpture studios. The studios would all be watched by a teacher making rounds every fifteen minutes or so, because they were a favorite making-out location. She intended to bypass these obvious spots, head out a ground-floor door, and, sticking to the shadows, make her way into the science and physics building next door. It was a little like being an escaping prisoner of war, dodging light towers and guards.
There was an advantage to being a four-year senior. By the time graduation would arrive, one knew all the little quirks and idiosyncrasies of the school-such as which doors weren’t locked.
Ignoring the classrooms just inside the entrance, Jordan headed down another flight of stairs. The labs were below and their windows didn’t look out on the main walkways and quadrangles of the school, but faced toward the playing fields. It was dark-the only light was reflected from the art building where the dance was being held, which was well illuminated. It was quiet; Jordan’s sneakers slapping against the floor and her breathing were the only noises close by-everything else was rhythm and blues and rock and roll coming from the band a building away.
At the third lab door, Jordan stopped and turned the handle. The room was black and gray. She could make out the shadows of lab equipment spread out across wide tables, where students did experiments.
She whispered, “Karen? Sarah?”
From a corner shadow, they responded, “We’re here.”
38
The room itself seemed conspiratorial. Dark shadows seeping into corners, the wan light from the nearby art building, the odd shapes of scientific equipment spread throughout the long, wide space-everything made it seem like the sort of spot where bad ideas and wild schemes were hatched. It had been years since Karen had been in a school laboratory. Sarah’s scientific sensibilities were defined by elementary classroom studies of ducks and frogs and barnyard animals. Jordan, however, loved the room, not because of the science that was contained there, but because it seemed to her to be the place where odd chemicals and strange substances could be combined into smelly failures or explosive successes, and that paralleled the position she imagined the three of them were in. She was encouraged as well by the idea that it was a place of well-defined formulas and eminent reason, so that the order and understanding that science tried to impose on the world might help them as they designed what their next steps were to be.