“Open your eyes, Caroline!” Miss Wurtz shrieked.
“If the hot, moist breath is at your throat, that’s another matter,” Caroline French went on.
“The what at my throat?” Miss Wurtz asked, her hands on her neck.
Jack’s feelings for Miss Wurtz were deeply conflicted. He was embarrassed for her that she had no mastery of stage presence in a real-life crisis, but he believed she was beautiful. He secretly loved her. “She means a vampire bat,” Jack tried to explain to Miss Wurtz, although Caroline French detested being interrupted. (Her brother interrupted her frequently.)
“You’ll just frighten Miss Wurtz, Jack,” Caroline said crossly. “Miss Wurtz—if the hot, moist breathing is at your throat, go nuts. Just swat it away.”
“Swat what away?” Miss Wurtz wailed.
“But if you feel the breaths on your belly button, remain calm,” Gordon French said, in seeming contradiction of his hostile twin sister.
“Just don’t move,” Jack added.
“Nothing’s breathing on my belly button!” Miss Wurtz screamed.
“You see, Jack?” Caroline French said. “You’ve made it worse, haven’t you?”
“Don’t panic,” the voice on the loudspeaker repeated. “The power will be restored in no time.”
“I forget why we have to crawl inside the bat cave,” Jimmy Bacon said. (None of them could remember that part of Emma Oastler’s story.)
“Nobody’s crawling inside the bat cave!” Miss Wurtz raved. “All of you open your eyes!” Jack thought of telling her that the ultraviolet lights would blind them somehow, but she seemed too upset for more bad news.
“I feel a fruit bat,” Jack whispered, without moving, but it was Maureen Yap; she had dropped to her knees and was hyperventilating in close proximity to his navel.
“Stop that!” Miss Wurtz shouted. Jimmy Bacon was moaning while he rubbed his head against her hip. Miss Wurtz may not have meant to grab Jimmy by the throat, but Jimmy reacted in the vampire-bat fashion; he went nuts, screaming and swatting away. Miss Caroline Wurtz screamed, too. (And to think she believed so adamantly in “measured restraint” onstage!)
That was Jack’s first school trip at St. Hilda’s. Like much of his junior-school experience, it would have seemed slight without the necessary preparations for the journey ahead, which had been provided for him in kindergarten by Emma Oastler—the nap-time storyteller who had appointed herself his personal girl guide.
Oh, what a lucky boy Jack was! Safe among the girls, without a doubt.
9. Not Old Enough
When Jack started grade one, Emma Oastler and her companions had moved on to the middle school—they were in grade seven. Less fearsome girls became the grade-six guides of the junior school; Jack wouldn’t remember them. Sometimes a whole school day, but rarely two in a row, would pass without his seeing Emma, who fiercely promised him that she would always keep in touch. And Jack’s occasional sightings of Wendy Holton and Charlotte Barford were usually from a safe distance. (Fists-of-Stone Holton, as he still thought of Wendy. Breasts-with-Bones-in-Them Barford, as he would forever remember Charlotte and her melon-size knees.)
Miss Wong, Jack’s grade-one teacher, had been born in the Bahamas during a hurricane. Nothing noticeably like a tropical storm had remained alive in her, although her habit of apologizing for everything might have begun with the hurricane. She would never acknowledge by name the particular storm she had been born in, which might have led the grade-one children to suspect that the hurricane still flickered somewhere in her subconscious. No trace of a storm animated her listless body or gave the slightest urgency to her voice. “I am sorry to inform you, children, that the foremost difference between kindergarten and grade one is that we don’t nap,” Miss Wong announced on opening day.
Naturally, her apology was greeted by collective sighs of relief, and some spontaneous expressions of gratitude—heel-thumping from the French twins, identical blanket-sucking sounds from the Booth girls, heartfelt moaning from Jimmy Bacon. That the grade-one response to her no-nap announcement did not inspire a storm of curiosity from “Miss Bahamas,” as the children called Miss Wong behind her back, was further indication of the lifelessness of their new teacher.
During junior-school chapel service, which was held once a week in lieu of the daily assembly in the Great Hall, Maureen Yap whispered to Jack: “Don’t you kind of miss Emma Oastler and her sleepy-time stories?” There was an instant lump in Jack’s throat; he could neither sing nor make conversation with The Yap, as the kids called Maureen. “I know how you feel,” The Yap went on. “But what was the worst of it? What do you miss most?”
“All of it,” Jack managed to reply.
“We all miss it, Jack,” Caroline French said.
“We all miss all of it,” her irritating twin, Gordon, corrected her.
“Shove it, Gordon,” Caroline said.
“I kind of miss the moaning,” Jimmy Bacon admitted. The Booth girls, though blanketless, made their identical blanket-sucking sounds.
Did the grade-one children crave stories of divorced dads, passed out from too much sex? Did they long to be defenseless, yet again, in the bat-cave exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum? Did they miss the single-mom stories, or the overlarge and oversexed boyfriends and girlfriends? Or was it Emma Oastler they missed? Emma and her friends on the verge of puberty, or in puberty’s throes—Wendy Fists-of-Stone Holton and Charlotte Breasts-with-Bones-in-Them Barford.
There was a new girl in grade one, Lucinda Fleming. She was afflicted with what Miss Wong called “silent rage,” which took the form of the girl physically hurting herself. When Miss Wong introduced Lucinda’s affliction to the class, she spoke of her as if she weren’t there.
“We must keep an eye on Lucinda,” Miss Wong told the class. Lucinda calmly received their stares. “If you see her with a sharp or dangerous-looking object, you should not hesitate to speak to me. If she looks as if she is trying to go off by herself somewhere—well, that could be dangerous for her, too. Forgive me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that what we should do, Lucinda?” Miss Wong asked the silent girl.
“It’s okay with me,” Lucinda said, smiling serenely. She was tall and thin with pale-blue eyes and a habit of rubbing a strand of her ghostly, white-blond hair against her teeth—as if her hair were dental floss. She wore it in a massive ponytail.
Caroline French inquired if this habit was harmful to Lucinda’s hair or teeth. Caroline’s point was that teeth-and-hair rubbing was probably an early indication of the silent rage, a precursor to more troubling behavior.
“I’m sorry to disagree, but I don’t think so, Caroline,” Miss Wong replied. “You’re not trying to hurt yourself with your hair or your teeth, are you, Lucinda?” Miss Wong asked.
“Not now,” Lucinda mumbled. She had a strand of hair in her mouth when she spoke.
“It doesn’t look dangerous to me,” Maureen Yap said. (The Yap occasionally sucked her hair.)
“Yeah, but it’s gross,” said Heather Booth.
Patsy, Heather’s identical twin, said, “Yeah.”
Jack thought it was probably a good thing that Lucinda Fleming was a new girl and had not attended kindergarten at St. Hilda’s. Who knows how Emma Oastler might have affected Lucinda’s proclivity to silent rage? Between mouthfuls of hair, Lucinda told Jack that her mother had been impregnated by an alien; she said her father was from outer space. Although he was only six, Jack surmised that Lucinda’s mom was divorced. Emma Oastler’s saga of the squeezed child, no matter which ending, would have given Lucinda Fleming a rage to top all her rages.