Slaughterhouse High

"Mommy?" Pill said.

"Yes, dear?"

"I need to tell you something."

The telling was hard. At one point, Mommy began to cry and Pill almost wished she hadn't told her anything at all.

But in spite of her crying, Mommy was a tough lady. Pill knew that already, from the rough love her mommy sometimes shared with Daddy and Brest. She knew it from her limps and winces and from the way moonlight lit her bruises when she came in late at night to kiss Pill on the cheek, and Pill pretended to be sleeping.

Mommy cried and sighed and blew her nose.

But when Brest came up and said she and Delia would be off and asked was Pill okay, Mommy said, "She's fine."

Then her face got all dark. She added, "Make some excuse. Drop Delia off at her place and come back without her."

"I don't understand," Pill's second mommy said. "Is there-"

"I'll explain when you come back."

Pill was proud of her mother.

"Don't let on that anything's out of the ordinary, okay?"

Brest said she wouldn't. She found her coat in the pile on the bed, Delia's too, and left the room.

Mommy held Pill. She told her she was her sweet pumpkin. "We'll give them five minutes," she said. "Then we'll go downstairs."

But Mommy kept looking at her watch and Pill knew that nowhere near five minutes had passed when Mommy told her it was time, hustle her buns, chop-chop.

It felt strange, like being in a fishbowl, to leave the bedroom holding Mommy's hand and see all the grown-ups standing in clumps downstairs.

They stopped when Mommy said something. They all looked up.

Then Pill told them.

Just like she told Mommy.

It was really hard this time. It felt as if she were back in that closet again, but this time Mommy was with her.

It was okay to see the hand moving again, Delia's hand in that same gesture, the dry ice pellet in her glove.

And it was okay to hear Miss Gaskin!.

Pill worried at first that she wouldn't be able to tell it the way it happened, so the grown-ups would get a clear picture. But she saw from their faces that they did.

They got it clear all right, Mr. Buttweiler, the principal, most of all. Pill could see that in the blush of his blotchy skin.

And in what came next.

*****

Futzy looked at little Pill on the landing, listening as she drew the correct conclusion from that terrible night. She was an angel, and this was her annunciation.

If he tried, he could hear her voice deepen into his slain daughter's voice. He could see her sprout a foot taller, her breasts plump out, her first lobebag being slipped over her lovelobe when she came of age. She was Kitty all over again.

Kitty had come back, his beloved girl, to set things right.

Adora had enriched his homelife.

Now his daughter had returned to fix the rest of it.

When Pill finished, she gazed up at her mom.

"Oh wow," said Jenna Megrim.

Heads turned.

"What is it, Jenna?" Futzy asked.

"I was parking cars that night. I remember, after it was all over, wondering why the janitor's car was parked in the faculty and staff lot. But then I figured he knew the combination into the backways and didn't need to drive into the so-called, not-really-secret garage everybody knows about and use the underground elevator.

"What I didn't see, until Pill was talking just now, was that-and I've gone over this a hundred times in my head-the nurse's blue clunker was never in the parking lot, at least not up to the moment the school was padlocked shut."

"She was inside long before then," Jonquil said coolly.

Futzy recalled how quickly Delia had left that night, not through the front door like floods of relieved seniors did. Ten minutes later, when Jonquil, Adora, Winnie, and Bray joined him in exploring the backways, Matthew Megrim had been discovered. Soon after, they found the hapless history teacher's car by the elevator. Hints of gas fumes suggested that the motor had recently been on, though that made no sense.

It hadn't been his fumes at all.

It had been Delia's.

So Futzy told the gathering of survivors.

"Something else," Winnie said from the couch, holding Claude's hand and Bray's. "The coroner's report repeatedly mentioned right-handed stabs to the bodies. Now I remember the janitor at the light bank lifting a hand to adjust the lights just before the music started. Did anyone else see that?"

Tweed spoke up. "We were on the bandstand. Me and Dex." She looked up to recapture it. "The janitor was raising his left hand, kinda drifting it hazily over the switches, struggling to recall which ones he was supposed to throw."

Futzy brought back other scenes. Gerber Waddell screwing in lightbulbs, triangulating an American flag, weeding flower beds in front of the school. He saw Gerber's left hand moving, ever moving, his right hand idle or thumb-tucked into his belt.

Futzy looked at Trilby Donner's little girl. "Pill," he said, "which hand did you see holding that dry ice pellet? Can you remember?"

"I think so," the little girl said.