19
Alexa had neither office nor classroom in Glendale, a situation attributed to her lack of seniority, although she suspected Barbara Paulson’s resentment of her was the real reason. For all Glendale ’s overcrowding issues, it should have been possible to carve out a space for her things-a desk, a cupboard, a filing cabinet-if not an actual classroom. Instead she was relegated to floater status, ferrying her papers and supplies on a wheeled cart, meeting with students wherever a quiet corner could be found. “My door is always open to you,” Alexa told her students with what she hoped came across as wry acceptance of a bad situation. “That is, my door is always open, assuming you can find it.”
This morning she established a temporary beachhead in the dressing room behind the auditorium to begin gathering her thoughts about the assembly she had volunteered to organize. Had Barbara tricked her into taking on this extra chore? Alexa was no longer sure. All she knew was that she had found herself insisting that she had the necessary background, with her undergraduate work in rhetoric and her postgraduate degrees in psychology and education.
“Oh, I wouldn’t dream of imposing on you,” Barbara had said. “Besides, I really don’t have the authority to assign you extra work-as you often remind me.”
“It wouldn’t be an imposition,” Alexa had said. She was still remembering last year’s assembly in the wake of a car accident that had killed three popular athletes, how the outside grief counselors had mishandled it.
“If you insist.”
Barbara’s bland tone couldn’t quite conceal her smugness. Over the past two years, Alexa had been quick to remind Barbara that the Girl Talk! Empowerment Project had a specific purpose, and that Alexa had to account for her activities to both the state and the nonprofit that underwrote her grant. Yes, it made her sound a little petulant at times, but Barbara would have exploited her otherwise. If Barbara had her way, Alexa would have ended up pulling cafeteria duty and Lord knows what else.
Alexa knew she looked privileged and protected to the rest of the staff, holding what were derisively known as her “hen sessions,” with blocks of time kept open for one-on-one counseling with students. Sometimes she dreamed of placing a sign on her desk-in her fantasies she had a desk-a sign that said IT ONLY LOOKS LIKE I’M NOT WORKING.
She picked up the in-house phone and dialed the office, thinking, as she had frequently over the past three days, about the in-house call that had started everything on Friday. Well, not started, exactly. The shots had been the signal, the clarion call, but even the shots were a reaction to something, something as yet unknown. What had motivated Perri to do such a thing? The school today was rife with rumors, stories so wild that they seemed more like Internet fanfic inspired by one of those prime-time teenage soap operas. Jealousy was the common element in all the stories. Perri must have wanted something that Kat had, or resented her. Her blond good looks? Perri was pretty enough, in her angular way. Her future? But Perri’s admission to North-western’s theater school was as prestigious as Kat’s early acceptance to Stanford.
Could it be a boy? Neither girl had anyone steady as of late. Perri, solo since her on-again, off-again boyfriend graduated the year before, had insisted on taking Dannon as her date to the senior prom, prompting much nasty talk. Kat had attended the dance with a soccer player, a handsome, loose-limbed boy named Bradley, but it appeared to be more a relationship of convenience, like two film stars walking the red carpet at a premiere. Kat and Bradley, both outstanding students, needed suitable partners to navigate the final rites of high school. There hadn’t been a trace of a real romance there.
Besides, Perri truly had no use for jocks like Bradley. While some of the drama-geek girls had chosen that path as a consolation prize, Perri’s indifference to Glendale ’s popular crowd had always seemed sincere. Her friendship with Kat and Josie guaranteed her acceptance by the jocks and the preps, but she had never pursued those kids. Her humor was a bit waspish, and Alexa had encouraged her to curb the more scathing comments, a concept that Perri had embraced this past year with her usual overkill. Once she stopped being so vicious about the high school’s unfortunates, she vented her spleen on those who were simply doing what she had once done-coining cruel nicknames, making devastating critiques of wardrobes and bodies. And where she had once been carefully neutral about the diva crowd, perhaps in deference to Kat’s friends within it, she had become openly disdainful the past year, which had only encouraged their enmity and gossip.
But beneath her lippy bravado, Perri yearned for adult approval. Her exhausting, articulate arguments on every topic under the sun were not meant to challenge the status quo, simply to persuade the grown-ups around her that she was an original thinker. Tightly wound, yes. Almost too empathic, with an easily aroused compassion for anything and everyone. Yet never violent, Alexa thought, although Perri had been increasingly conflicted about the ethical dilemmas posed by those who were. Events in the Middle East had been particularly hard for Perri to synthesize over the past year. Was war ever right? Did violence ever accomplish anything? Alexa had watched Perri struggle with these ideas-her heart yearning to say no, even as her head was insisting that pacifism had a spotty historical track record.
The phone buzzed and buzzed and buzzed, but no one picked up. Anita Whitehead had called in sick this morning, claiming she had a doctor’s note to stay home indefinitely. The events of the past few days had been much too traumatic for her. (As if Anita were the only one who had suffered, as if one needed Anita’s hypersensitive hypochondria to be affected by what had happened.) Where were the other secretaries? Where was Barbara? Probably in the seventy-fifth meeting of the morning. It would be wrong to say that Barbara was enjoying herself, but she had an unusually high color, as if flushed with usefulness in the wake of the tragedy.
There was a knock on the dressing room door, and the unexpected sound made Alexa jump. Everyone was on edge today, naturally. The door was pushed open before she could issue an invitation, and a round-faced man, stocky in a comfortable way, came into the dressing room.
“Ms. Cunningham? I’m Sergeant Lenhardt, Baltimore County Homicide. Mrs. Paulson said I could find you here.”
“You were here on Friday, right?” Alexa was proud of her memory for faces. “Don’t you have a partner?”
He had a slow, lazy smile. “Yeah, ladies always remember Kevin.”
“No, that’s not what I meant at all.” She resented the suggestion that she had been focused on something as trivial as a man’s looks in the midst of a crisis. Besides, the younger cop had been too handsome, the kind of cocky stud that Alexa avoided on principle. “It’s just that I thought you guys always worked in tandem.”
“We do tend to travel in pairs,” the sergeant conceded. “But it happens that the high school is more or less en route for me. I live up near the state line. Detective Infante has to come from the other direction, so he’s going to meet me here for the assembly.”