The Story Until Now: A Great Big Book of Stories Read online

  Days pass faster than they should. The prom is almost here! Adults in the city outside are in a righteous frenzy. No school has ever capped its prom with a human sacrifice, but there’s always a first.

  The time whips by like nothing for the waiting city because we are more excited than we are scared—what a show!—and even faster for the excited kids, who are definitely on a roll, trying on outfits and dragging a lifetime supply of glits and Mylar and phosphorescent tubes up to the fifth floor, burning their favorites on CDs for the prom DJ and rehearsing some live music of their own; Johnny has the idea that they should dress Principal Wardlaw up as a Christmas tree and make him sing the kickoff number at the Tinsel Prom.

  For the adults trapped inside High Rise High, chomping on graham crackers and Pepperidge Farms goldfish in Irving Wardlaw’s office or tossing on filthy wrestling mats in the gym while they wait to be rescued, however, the days and nights seem interminable.

  Whereas Trinket is like a cat jittering on a fence. Time is whipping by too fast, in terms of Agent Betsy’s mission. In the last four days she’s tried a lot of things and accomplished zip. She had hoped to undermine the revolution or at the very least open the main doors downstairs for the swat team by this time, but when you’re in a building this size everything takes longer than you think. Plus she’s heavily surveilled. For Agent Betsy, the clock is ticking and time is running out.

  And Trinket? This is taking forever. She can hardly wait for the prom! When he isn’t with her, Johnny turns her over to the Slaterettes. She was worried about it going in, like this Mad Mag kid would mess her up, but it’s cool. This Mad Maggie everybody’s so afraid of turned out to be a fat, soft bully with a big voice. When Mag came down on this kid Evie for no reason, Trinket used her police training to deck the two-hundred-pound bitch and all the other Slaterettes clapped. Now she and Evie are best friends. Agent Betsy’s expertise has made Trinket something of a hero. To say nothing of her wardrobe sense. With Evie riding post, Trinket and the Slaterettes have raided closets on the dormitory floors for everything from dental mirrors to wing nuts and jewelry and hubcaps to pin onto costumes from the aborted Shakespeare thing. With Trinket as personal shopper, the Slaterettes scored big. Now they’re in the music room working on their Look.

  “Don’t have much time,” Trinket says, suddenly confused. She looks up from the black gauze shift she is decorating, surprised. “It’s tomorrow night.”

  Oh, man. Remember the mayor’s secret ultimatum? Agent Betsy has forgotten a lot of the things she had in mind but she hasn’t forgotten the threat the mayor made right before he patted her on the butt and sent her in. If she can’t bring the revolution down by the time they crown the prom queen, he’s going to send a plane in to nuke the place.

  But tonight is the pep rally, and for a kid in high school, first things come first. It’s cool. After all, it’s a big world in here, and she still has twenty-four hours.

  They like me, Trinket thinks, doing makeup for the pep rally. Makeup: after her drab girlhood as a police officer’s orphan child, after rigorous police training to make up for it, hanging out with kids doing makeup is a trip.

  And Johnny, she thinks, even though she should not be thinking it, not with Harry Klein parting the razor wire down below and running his laser knife around a sealed opening that you don’t know about, not with Harry letting himself into the bottom of the exhaust shaft where he labors upward in spite of fumes and grit-filled smoke. She definitely should not be thinking, and Johnny, not with Harry tightening the crampons to climb a hundred stories straight up if he has to, just to get to her, but Agent Betsy is giddy with success and for a dead cop’s daughter who’s having her first real girlhood, this is distracting. If Trinket had a diary, her kid life in HRH has left her in such a state that she’d write, Dear Diary, she thinks, because she never had a diary, but instead of writing it down or speaking aloud, she burns the words into the air: They really like me. And Johnny. Johnny likes me.

  In the streets of the city in crisis, mothers are on the march. They don’t know the mayor set the clock ticking, but they do know he has made threats. They think as one: Not my kid.

  Imagine being in a mothers’ march. Someone like you! Time’s gone by but you are still a mother and it twists in your gut like a knife. My baby, my kid!

  Your kids got too big for the nest, you thought, when they went off to school it was a relief. Then why do you find yourselves wandering into their empty rooms on bright autumn afternoons, remembering how cute they were when they were little and (yes, Marie!) satisfied with a little toy and now they are at risk so never mind what they do to you for breaking into their special place, you are out to bring them back. You don’t want them at home, really, but you do want them at home sort of, they used to be so cute, and you are determined to get them out of that school because no matter what he did to you, you love him, and you love her no matter what she said during the fight because whether or not you intended it, once you have become a mother you are a mother all your life; you have, etched into your consciousness, the legend of the mother’s heart. One more time: the thief cuts out his mother’s heart for a profit, he’s running to the highest bidder to collect the cash when he trips and falls in the dirt and drops the heart and the heart cries out, are you hurt?

  Mothers, do not hope to get into the building. Do not expect to change the outcome, you are only a mother and mothers can’t. Just go to the place and do what you always do. Coursing through the streets, you are joined by others occupying the same head, house cleaners and brain surgeons alike: intent not so much on their occupations or accomplishments or dreams or even maternal duties as on their job description, which is both name and self-fulfilling prophecy. There are thousands of you now.

  In the refurbished auditorium. Johnny and Trinket are onstage for the pep rally, him in a red shirt with gazillion safety pins and slashes, her looking cool in a shift she made out of a rug she found.

  “This is it, guys,” Johnny says but even he must notice that nobody’s listening. They are distracted by the threats in the sky outside—warnings from the mayor etched in the clouds in phosphorescent pink smoke. GIVE UP. The ultimatum hinted at. TOMORROW BY MIDNIGHT. The antique plane doing the writing has just put the final flourish on: OR ELSE.

  There is, furthermore, the mysterious clanking coming from somewhere deep in the building, as though somebody’s running a forklift into the trash chute which, incidentally, is pretty much jammed right now since this Ace Freewalter guy, you know, the supe, disappeared without starting the incinerator and kids are throwing things in at such a rate that the stink is piling up. Still, these are his people and Johnny Slater is on a roll.

  By this time he’s forgotten how this thing got started; he’s forgotten the promises he made to get his people going and he’s almost forgotten the Teach’s pregnant wife who is by this time sitting in her chair in the shop with a pool of water at her feet—don’t ask. What he’s thinking about now as he looks out over the assembly is that this is going to be the bitchinest prom ever, he’s here with an extremely sweet new woman, even though she still hasn’t let him fuck her it’s close, and nobody is never, ever gonna make him put on a stupid wig. He raises his hand for silence, which, forget it.

  “Guys.”

  Wait. No great moment gets launched without a slogan, but the uprising at High Rise High was spontaneous, no big moment he can point to, no main reason, just a thousand kids exploding all at once. Now Johnny’s people are milling and jabbering and he has to come up with some slogan or he’ll blow this deal. “Guys,” he says, but it’s getting so loud in here that nobody hears.

  In the back of the auditorium kids have started throwing ninja blades at the velvet curtains onstage and one of them zips close, maybe too close to Johnny’s head. “Guys.”

  Funny, it’s Mayor Patton that gets their attention. Amazing, his geeks have patched a remote into the school’s PA system and his voice is booming from every speaker. GIVE UP OR WE NU
KE YOU TO SAVE THE INSTALLATION. They think it’s a bluff so only Agent Betsy knows it is true. The Mayor booms on, silencing the rally. HAVE YOU CHILDREN EVER HEARD OF NERVE GAS?

  All it takes to move mountains is a really good threat. Kids start bumming right and left. Five minutes of this and they’ll be storming the secret staircase, swarming out like rats.

  “Babe,” Johnny whispers into Trinket’s Day-Glo hair. “It’s you and me to the end.”

  It’s odd, what happens to Agent Betsy then. He loves me. Johnny loves me.

  On the other hand, you can find ways to turn a really good threat, to make people mobilize. At Johnny Slater’s side, his girl Trinket starts shaking like a rocket at liftoff. Her thought balloon has a light bulb in it. She pulls a stick of something out of her front and with a wild grin, she lights it off. Johnny flinches but it isn’t dynamite Trinket holds overhead like the Statue of Liberty’s torch; it’s a flare. “That’s just shit!” she cries, and in the front row Dolph mutters to the guys, “What did she just say?” and Fred yells, “I think she said what the shit!” This rocks so strong that every kid in the place takes it up, and as it passes through the room Agent Betsy’s angry outcry morphs into the kickass slogan to end all slogans. Pretty soon the place is rocking with it: “What the shit. What the shit!”

  Crouched in the school ventilator system, Ace Freewalter rocks and nods in time to the chant. He is considering his options. With the stuff he’s packing, he could blow every kid in the auditorium to smithereens, but you don’t get the Congressional Medal for nuking a batch of high school kids when your mission is to bring them in under guard with a white flag to seal the surrender. He could use a Smart Bomb to take out the leader and his girlfriend but like any good soldier Ace knows every group like this has its unsuspected secret agent and he’s pretty sure he knows who the city’s agent is. All he needs to do, then, is separate this green-haired girl in the ruggy-looking shift from the boyfriend and give her the grip. He needs to get with this woman agent and figure out the best way to liberate this place. He and the agent will exchange passwords and together they’ll figure out how to save the day and do it without harming the hair on a single kid.

  Onstage with Johnny, cute, popular little Trinket is so caught up in the moment that she forgets who she used to be. The crowd roars and that stringy, unhappy, capable person whose dad died in the line of duty which is why she’s such a good cop fades away. She fingers the silver Scrunchy Johnny put on her wrist excitedly because she’s about to get everything she wants! In her life outside HRH, Betsy Gallaher went to her high school junior prom alone and her senior prom with a blind date who threw up on her feet, and no matter how smart a woman is, or how accomplished, no matter how smart you are, hurts incurred in high school never go away; they just go on hurting. Well, life’s unexpectedly turned around for her. Trinket is going to the Tinsel Prom at HRH with the hottest boy in the entire school. It’s soon! Overhead, the Decorations Committee thuds back and forth in a crepe paper and Mylar-fueled frenzy. Only one day left to get ready for the prom.

  It is a long night, broken only by the mysterious architectural clanks and thuds characteristic of any building under siege. Unless something else is going on. In the plaza outside HRH the mothers have merged into a solid, slow-moving wedge, pushing into the wall of Marine guards in front of the sealed front door. One has made it to the steps and is hammering angrily, in hopes that she’s front and center on the school’s surveillance cameras which have, incidentally, gone dead. She shouts in a voice big enough to crack stone, “Rafe Michaels, you come the hell out or I’m coming in.”

  The mothers won’t know that this is like trying to storm a pyramid and if they did know it wouldn’t stop them; mothers—even very small ones—have been known to occupy entire cities through sheer force of will. In the ranks, some of you are preparing your speeches. Threats: “Come out or else.” Expressions of rage: “You’d talk to your mother like that?” Invitations to shame: “I’m glad Grandma Jo didn’t live to see this.” Some of you prepare to make promises—cars, trips to Cambodia, you name it—and some of you have come armed with the most powerful weapon of all. “I’ve got brownies, the kind with Heath Bar chunks,” or the simpler, more powerful, “I baked.”

  Under orders to protect the perimeter at all costs, the Marines shift and try to close ranks but nobody gets in the way of women once they mobilize and nothing stops mothers on the move. They aren’t as strong as the troops and they’re relatively slow, but together they can move anything. They come down on the regiment with the force of an avalanche. In minutes the first of them are at the razor wire, watching mutely as some of their number move in with blowtorches, working until the wire at the base falls away from the walls, at least as far up as the tallest of them can reach.

  Now it is morning. Everybody’s on edge because they were too excited to sleep much. That funny thing where time flies at the same time that it doesn’t move an inch. Kids have started wrangling out of sheer tension. Factions have formed and even more are forming.

  It is axiomatic that every revolution spawns a counter-revolution, and Chunk Mackenzie didn’t give up after Johnny’s gang flattened him. If he can crack the captive teachers out, he will be a hero to the woman he loves. Looking for his true love, he found the pocket of holdouts in the principal’s office. Now he’s come back with his gang because he’s convinced his love is inside. Ms. Flan, I mean Beverly, is waiting for him with, like they say in the romance paperbacks he secretly reads, with open arms. His Beverly isn’t in the gym and she didn’t evacuate with the fifty who got away, so she’s gotta be in there. Listen, when Chunk breaks in and rescues her, she’ll forget about him being a dull normal and fall in love with him for true.

  It’s either ESP or behind the door Beverly really is whispering, “Chunk, watch out!”

  Then Principal Wardlaw sends Coach Dykstra out with an offer of amnesty. Armed with Marva Liu’s can of Mace, to keep himself from falling into enemy hands, he holds it up. Chunk leaps for it like a dolphin surfacing in a tank. He knows the handwriting! The principal told her what words to put, but the flowery writing is all Beverly Flan. He recognizes it from his last French paper. Not quite C work, Charles but for you, this is merveilleuse.

  He reads aloud: Let us out and you’ll all walk free. Plus expense-paid shopping sprees at the Brookdale Mall for all.

  “Go forth,” Chunk mutters, “and tell the people.” Climbing on a chair he yells, “Let them go and we walk free.” He repeats because nobody seems to care: Chunk, who turns out to be the real idealist. Again, louder. “Let them go and we walk free!”

  But a girl named Patsy looked on his paper before he got on the chair and she picks up on the real issue. “Listen,” she shrieks, “It says let ’em go and it’s the mall for all!

  Boy, does this bring them running! “The Mall for All.”

  Pretty soon the halls of HRH (well, the classroom floors, at least) are rattling with colliding slogans. Alerted by the racket, Johnny’s people come down in waves, roaring:

  “What the shit,” while Chunk’s buds from the wrestling team try to push them back, yelling,

  “WALK FREE, TURN OUR TEACHERS LOOSE,”

  intercut with the airheads who picked up on the mall part of the message only and are screaming, “The Mall for All.”

  While in the library, the forgotten vestiges of the National Honor Society, the chess club and the choir sit among the comatose drinkers, singing so dolefully that you can’t hear them, “Let my people go.”

  At the moment, the mall crowd is prevailing. For kids interned in this high-ticket institution packed with everything they thought they wanted, the call to the mall tugs with a powerful force. It isn’t stuff they’re interested in, the city baited this place with more stuff than they can use, clothes, computer games, cell phones, Rollerblades, you name it—it’s the chance to walk free—well not free exactly, but in the place where everybody, like, you know, hangs out?

  Wher
e they just might accidentally bump into whoever or whatever it is that will end the boredom and do the magic that changes their life.

  See, this is the thing. Our lives don’t hang on what happens. Not back then, not now. It doesn’t matter how many defeats we suffer or how bad it hurts, the thing that keeps us going is: what might happen. Here’s what’s important to us. It was important back then when we were in high school and it is important now.

  Possibilities.

  The skirmish outside Wardlaw’s office is short and ugly. It ends with Dolph, Fred, and the rest of Johnny’s gang on top, and. Wait. What they are on top of? Dolph is standing at the peak of the mound Chunk Mackenzie’s gasping body makes with eight guys bearing down on him—yes, Johnny led the charge, he shoulder-checked Chunk and tipped him. Then Dolph and the others pushed him down. Inside, perhaps aware that this cavalry charge led by her dumbest student was a product of true love, Ms. Flan pats her lavender satin bosom and sighs. “That boy who took the note? I think I know that boy.”

  The clanking sound traveling up from the ground floor is nothing to worry about, it’s just a pale reflection of the anger and frustration driving Harry Klein. The exhaust tube turned out to be a dead end for him, the sides were too slippery to climb and he was driven back by the fumes. Back at ground level after hours of effort, he used the climber’s pick he boosted from his boss’s mountaineering pack to hack his way out of the tube. Frustrated at every turn, he bashed the hell out of the clogged incinerator chute because the more he needs to find Betsy, the more frustrations the building hands out. Avenue after avenue turned out to be closed to him: faculty elevator shafts imploded, freight elevator disabled for good and all. In the end Harry threaded the maze of generators on the ground floor, intent on locating the emergency staircase he knew had to be in place somewhere. Before he worked on the governor’s first campaign and was rewarded with a staff position, Harry was an architect, and he knows the state board would never approve a building that didn’t come up to code.