The Idealists: Part IX

The Idealists – Part IX

Jenny

The phone rings at five a.m., exactly. Derick answers, eyes still closed as he nods at Ruthie’s form watching from the bed.

“There’s an emergency meeting at 6,” he says, hanging up. “There’s been some kind of tragedy,” he said. Derick stumbles to the bathroom.

“It’s Georgia,” Ruthie says, still in bed. “She’s drunk herself to death.”

“Well, I’m not covering her French class,” Derick calls.

As they walk into the faculty room, they’re greeted with reddened eyes and silence. Georgia isn’t there.

“Where’s Dan?” Ruthie asks. “Was he on duty last night?”

Derick nods. “Sally’s gone too.”

They sit. Someone closes the door. There is a knock and Sally, Dan, and Georgia come in, white faced. The head of the school stands to speak.

“Jenny,” he says and begins to cry.

The ones who were a part of it don’t give any details. Everyone else pieces together what they can. The security guard, one of half a dozen off-duty cops who take turns watching the campus overnight, found her in the gym. That’s as specific as it gets, but everyone is thinking about the basketball goals on either end.

“We couldn’t find her at lights out,” Georgia says, later, in the dining hall. “I never suspected… she didn’t seem depressed at all.”

“No one suspected,” Ruthie says.

“Uh, guys,” Carly, a science teacher, pipes up, “we’re not supposed to be…”

“Right, I know,” Georgia says. She pokes at her Caribbean beans and rice. All week dinner has been comfort food: mac and cheese, beans and rice, turkey melts.

Derick tries to eat as well, but he and Ruthie both are thinking about those last few days, and how Jenny would show up, smelly, unkempt, to play with the fancy rats.

“Do you think?” Ruthie asks that night. It’s the closest to discussing it they’ve come. Derick turns terrified eyes on her.

“No,” he finally says. “It wasn’t your fault.”

Half the students go home, the rest wander the campus in a daze. Classes virtually stop. Homework is assigned but never taken up. Students regularly skip, arrive 20 or 30 minutes late. Faculty members break down in the middle of math lectures and are consoled by students.

At morning meeting, the head of the school urges everyone not to speak about Jenny’s death. “Her family doesn’t want this publicized, and I think we owe it to them to respect their wishes.”

In Morning Advisory, one of the younger girls asks Derick:

“Did you know her, Mr. Stone; I mean, really?”

Derick answers slowly. “She used to hang around our apartment. I mean, there are always kids there.”

“But you didn’t really know her.”

“She used to like our pets. She used to come visit them.”

The girl stares at him as he struggles to answer.

The bell rings, and the kids don’t move. Instead, they watch him without speaking as he stares at something far away.

A couple months later, things have settled into a sort of dazed rhythm. Derick drops by Ruthie’s office to find her crying over her grade-book. He puts his hand on her shoulder.

“I just got off the phone with Doctor Buttkuss,” she says. “I’m late.”

Derick glances at his watch, then lowers his arm slowly, realizing the inadvertent joke he’s made. Ruthie locks eyes with him.

“I feel so guilty for being happy,” she says.

For the rest of the day, Derick can’t help smiling. His students look at him like he’s insane.

C.L. Bledsoe

Posted over on Troubadour 21