South Central Noir

The corridor outside the dorm was dark. Shadows were always moving from the roving headlights of traffic along Crenshaw. Light kept sweeping over our faces, and I caught a secret glance between Josie and Maggie with smiles meant only for the dark, and didn’t attribute it to anything other than our mutual eagerness.

I liked roving the empty corridors at night, seeing the closed doors on the sleeping classrooms. The quiet. I imagined the nuns settling down in little nests, like black-and-white-feathered chickens, clucking softly to one another, plotting their evil for the day to come.

First place we headed was the basement, because that was where Mr. Washington had all his tools, his shelves filled with cans of paint beside stiff brushes, coils of wire, buckets, electrical tape, coffee cans of nuts, bolts, screws, nails.

He wasn’t there so we poked about, looking into the cans of oily-smelling nails, brown with grease. We pried opened paint cans and sniffed their pungent fumes.

It was Josie who got the idea.

She took a bucket and filled it with the smelliest white paint. We got a rickety old stepping stool, and placed it on the landing so we could position the bucket over the door, pulling it ajar. We had to figure out how to get out of the room and set it up, and we finally did. Then we scrambled around the corner in the dark to watch what happened.

It took a long time. We were getting bored waiting, and had to keep reminding each other it would only be really good if we saw it happen. But it seemed like hours. It might have been.

Finally Mr. Washington came around the corner, the squeaky wheel of his dented metal mop bucket echoing down the corridor. He pushed it forward, leaning heavily on it, like he had the whole world on his shoulders. He looked tired. For a second, a short one, I thought of stopping him... but then the idea of white paint all over that black face was starting to make me laugh, and I threw my hand over my mouth, stifling the sound.

He scuffed to the basement door and stopped. His eyes traveled up and down that doorway. I guess he wondered why it was ajar, but he didn’t think long about it before he pushed it open. The bucket came down on him, dumping a sheet of white on his head. It looked like a cloak, covering the roundness of his head and then his shoulders, before the bucket hit the floor with a loud clatter, and then bumped down each step. He swore some bad words that I wasn’t quite sure the meaning of, and slipped down a few of the stairs, yelling some more. He fell on his back and just lay there, swearing and crying.

We jumped up from our hiding place and tore through the corridors back to our dorm, slippered feet slapping the linoleum. When we got back inside the dorm, with whispered warnings to be quiet that only made more of a ruckus, one of the girls sat up in bed and scolded us, saying that they’d all get in trouble because of our shenanigans.

And all night I sort of regretted doing it. Though it had been funny at first, he was crying real tears because it had hurt when he fell, and maybe it wasn’t all that funny, and then I got mad at Josie and Maggie. And I knew we’d get in trouble bad in the morning.

But nothing was ever said about it. And when our guilt faded away, we plotted again.

7

Mr. Washington had a shed where he kept the lawn mower and other garden tools and bags of manure. He did a lot of work in there, sharpening shears and clippers. I hung around, eating peanuts in the shell that he always had.

And he’d always tell me, “You shouldn’t be in here, miss. You’re gonna get dirty with all them tools and grease.”

I hung out there sometimes because I wanted to get away from my friends. One day I asked him, “Where do you live, Mr. Washington? Do you live here at the school?”

“No, little miss. I live not too far from here in a house.”

“You work late. Why don’t you live here?”

“It ain’t right for me to live here. And I got a house.”

I wanted to ask more personal questions, but I didn’t know how to.

I don’t know why we played pranks on him. I liked him. But I liked doing things with my friends. Even though... even though they played them on me sometimes.

I have found dead frogs in my bed. I have found my toothbrush floating in the toilet. Once, they hid all my clothes.

I never got back at them. I don’t know why.

8

The corridors were quiet and dark. I liked to glide through them. Sometimes I’d come across the nuns in the hallways and I’d swirl around their silent figures. I whispered something nasty in the ear of Sister Sixtus once. Her face drained of color, then she babbled a prayer and ran to the chapel.

I began whispering to all the nuns, but only a few of them heard me.

Not one saw me.

9

Josie and Maggie stopped doing things together once I was dead. They never sat near each other in class, never passed the ball to each other in phys ed. Their voices sounded hollow and muffled to me. It seemed... they were hollow and muffled to everyone else. They didn’t seem to have any other friends.