Making Angels Laugh Read online

  After dressing, she headed toward the large conference room for the staff dinner meeting.

  Memories that she had kept locked away for many years, largely because they had been too painful to deal with, nearly overwhelmed her as she walked down the hall. And yet, no matter how hard she tried to dismiss those memories, the painful scenes from the past would not remain silent but instead played themselves out in her mind; unwelcome, unbidden, and unstoppable.

  It was the first day of her freshman year of high school. She walked into her assigned homeroom.

  “Kid,” the football player who had challenged her on the first of the testing days said, “you are in the wrong building.”

  “I don’t believe so,” Margarita replied. “This is American Literature?”

  Miss Jones, the young teacher, looked at her. “You are Margaret, then?”

  “My name is Margarita,” Margarita replied.

  “You do not want to be called Peggy, as I understand,” Miss Jones stated.

  “Not Peggy. She’s Piggy! Just look at the fat pig!” Peter Allen Quinn said loudly enough to be heard by everyone. “Sooey Pig!” Two boys seated one each side of him both made pig sounds, “oink”.

  “That’s enough, Peter. And it’s enough from the other two of you, Greg and Tim. No more of that,” the teacher corrected. “Margarita, take your seat.”

  The only open desk was immediately in front of the boy called Peter. She took a seat at that desk.

  “Oink, Piggy, oink!” Peter said, in a voice designed to carry no further than her own ears.

  “Piggy, piggy, oink, oink,” Peter Allen Quinn taunted her lowly as he walked up to her locker on the third floor of the high school two weeks after school began that year. His locker was just across the hall from hers. She had just shelved her books and was retrieving her flute in order to go to band practice. The final bell of the regular day rang a couple of minutes before Peter began to harass her. Most everyone was eager to get out of the building, everyone except band members and athletes who would be on the grounds for some time yet.

  Margarita just ignored the jock. Or rather she tried to ignore him.

  Peter Allen Quinn was trouble with a capital T. Everyone was afraid of him. His father was the county sheriff. His uncle was the State’s Attorney. And his grandfather was the circuit judge. No one wanted any of those men as enemies.

  Another of the trio, Greg Wilson, his family owned the coal mine at which many of the l0cal people worked. So, no one wanted to make an enemy of the Wilson family either.

  Then there was the fact that Peter, even though he was only a freshman, was the quarterback of the football team, the darling of some of the football obsessed teachers in whose eyes he could do no wrong. So, Peter got away with murder.

  The problem was Margarita wasn’t so sure “getting away with murder” was, or would always remain, a metaphor where Peter, or his friends, was concerned. He and the other two he ran with were trouble. Vicious, nasty, dangerous, trouble.

  Because the three of them had taken her into obvious dislike, most of the other people in the school shunned her, only speaking to her when they needed homework help. She couldn’t really say she blamed her classmates for avoiding coming under the censure of the bullies. Being on the receiving end of the attention of this trio of was far from pleasant. She wouldn’t have wished their bullying upon anyone.

  At least, she only had one class, first hour, homeroom, American Literature, with the trio during her freshman year. But she had all three of them in that class. Their presence made for a miserable start to each school day. And because their lockers were in this hall, that made for a miserable end of each day as well.

  She closed her locker and turned around to see them standing there, the three boys who had gone out of their way to make her life difficult since the beginning of the year. Peter, Greg Wilson, and Tim Riggs, the terrible trio, all were standing there smiling quite unpleasantly at her.

  “What do you want from me?” she demanded, keeping her voice cool and remote.

  “Ruskie pig!” Tim said. “You think you’re so much better than everyone else.”

  “You will excuse me. I must be in band class in a very few minutes.”

  “You will never have any class, Butter Butt,” Greg dismissed. “Fat freak of nature that you are.”

  Jack Greer, holding his coronet case, walked up to them. “Rita, can I walk you to band?”

  “That would be nice, Jack. Thank you.”

  “You will excuse us?” Jack said pointedly to the other boys.

  “There’s no excuse for either of you, Large Marge and the Vet’s Freak son,” Tim snarled. “The pair of you are quite a disgusting team. Beanpole, bespeckled, freak and a fat, four-eyed, geek. Nothing normal about either of you. I ought to pound both of you into bloody freakburger. It wouldn’t be hard at all.”

  “Don’t be so sure of that,” Jack replied, his voice unafraid.

  “Freak!” Tim charged. But then he, and the other boys, stepped back.

  Greg said, “We have to get to football practice. See you later, Piggy. We’re going to be watching you.”

  “Watch away. I have nothing to hide,” she replied.

  “No. Nothing anyone would want. Fat body, smart mouth. One of these days, your smart assed attitude will get you into major trouble,” Peter said. “I can hardly wait.”

  “Speaking of waiting, I’m sure Coach is waiting for you, on the field,” Jack said, firmly. “You should not keep him waiting unless you wish to run an extra mile or two as punishment for being late. You know how he is.”

  Margarita watched the boys turn and go away.

  With a heavy sigh, she leaned into her locker. Those three frightened her more than just about anything else had ever done. The hatred in their eyes was all too real.

  “Did they hurt you?” Jack asked in clear concern.

  “No. This was intimidation, or an attempt at intimidation, on their part anyway,” she replied, lightly, dismissing the fear she always felt around them. “Thank you for coming to my rescue. It really wasn’t necessary. You just made yourself a target for them.”

  Jack smiled. “They’ve picked on me and my cousins ever since we were grade school. They’re just plain mean. One of these days, they’ll get their comeuppance… Doctor Fisher’s waiting for us in the band room.”

  “Did you get your Calculus homework finished?” she asked as they walked down the hall with Jack. She’d been tutoring him and his cousins in math, as they were taking their math at the community college instead of at the high school, and they needed some help now and again.

  “Except for the last problem. Do you have any idea how to attack this?” he asked as he fished his book out of his backpack and opened it up to the exercise giving him difficulty.

  She looked at it. “Problem thirty?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’m baffled.”

  “It isn’t that difficult,” she began as they walked down the stairs. “Start by reducing the equation…”

  “Doctor Zornova,” Max Plecker, the chief pharmacist of the clinic called to her as she walked down the hall, past the pharmacy, breaking into her memories with his words.

  She turned to face him, “Yes, Max. How can I help you?”

  “Do you have a moment, Doctor?”

  Still that conversation about a patient’s medications took more than a moment.

  After she finished with the pharmacist and walked away, the memories once more, like sewage carried from a waste water treatment plant by the relentless flow of a sudden flood, nearly drowned her in the stench and filth.

  The trees wore their fall colors. The leaves on the tree just outside the window of the third floor homeroom danced in the early morning wind, bright against the overcast and stormy sky.

  She’d caught the shared, all too gleeful, all too expectant, looks on the face of the trio of her tormentors. Those looks set her nerves on edge. They had something unpleasant planned for her, or
for someone else. Probably for her. Likely, this was going to be yet another unwanted and unpleasant “gift” in her desk.

  She placed her essay on The Scarlet Letter in the “in” box on Miss Jones’ desk.

  Sighing, she walked to her desk. All the desks in this classroom were the old hinged top models; a well worn and heavily scared oak writing surface hinged onto a closed metal box on metal legs. At one time, there had been a metal shelf for pencils built into the side of the desk nearest the pupil’s chair. But that had broken off, leaving a jagged edge of sharp metal right where the wood top met the metal box. She’d cut herself on it, the first day of school. Soon after that, she had taken masking tape and covered the sharp edges to prevent being cut again.

  She stood beside her desk. She looked at Peter’s face. The anticipation displayed there was almost too much to bear. This was going to be bad, really bad. Much worse than anything they’d done all year.

  Several Monday mornings, in the five weeks since the term had begun, there had been some “gift” in her desk. First, it had been a pair of gray field mice scampering in her desk. That really hadn’t been all that horrible. Mice, she could deal with. They weren’t anything except an easily dealt with annoyance. She’d simply scooped them up and carried them outdoors between class periods and set them free. The next Monday, it had been a still born piglet. As that had been fairly fresh, she’d taken it to the biology department for them to use for dissection, telling the teacher that she had found it in her desk. Then, the gift on the following Monday morning had been a large female specimen of a Rose Hair Tarantula. That didn’t scare her either. She had, during the time between first and second periods, carried that arachnid to the biology classrooms to donate it as she had the pig. That specimen crawling up her arm had engendered some talk as she had walked through the halls with it. Margarita had refused to even acknowledge in the boys’ presence that they had done anything. She had refused to give them the satisfaction.

  Still, given the current high level of anticipation and malicious glee on the boys’ faces, this was going to be far more dramatic, far more dangerous, than the spider.

  A sound came from within her desk, like the sound of dry peas being shaken in a cup. Possibilities ran through her mind. None of them pleasant. Some of them quite deadly.

  Deciding not to sit down, she took her three ring binder and used it to lift the top of her desk from the side, just enough to glimpse the contents. Inside, there was a mass of writhing coils. She hated snakes, particularly hated venomous snakes. She dropped the top with a loud thud.

  Miss Jones looked up, clearly annoyed. “What is the problem?”

  Margarita was not going to give them the satisfaction of knowing they had scared her. If they ever knew that they’d scared her, then they would have a weapon to use against her. She’d be damned and boiled in oil before she would give any of those boys any weapon to use against her.

  “Yes, Miss Jones. There is a problem. There seems to be a live rattlesnake in my desk,” she said, keeping her voice as calm as she could, while moving quickly to the front of the room.

  Several other girls screamed.

  “You want to say that again? I don’t believe I heard you,” Miss Jones asked, clearly not understanding.

  “There is a live snake in my desk, Miss. I believe it may be a rattlesnake, but I barely glanced it. We need to get out of here and send someone in to deal with the animal.”

  “You’re serious?” Miss Jones demanded, rising to her feet.

  She forced her voice to remain calm, “I assure you, Miss, I would not joke about such as this. Someone put a venomous reptile in my desk!”

  And that was the last calm thing that had happened that morning.

  The biology teacher, James Edwards, had sent for, and asked to deal with the snake. Herpetology, after all, was his major interest. A call was also put in to the Sheriff’s office. But, of course, although noises were made about getting to the bottom of this, no one was ever charged.

  The American Literature class, and all other classes scheduled for the room, met that day in the auditorium as every desk and drawer in the room was examined for further snakes. But none had been found. Thank God.

  While the first hour class was in the auditorium, Donna Petit, the dour high school secretary, walked down the auditorium central aisle and spoke in hushed tones to Miss Jones.

  Miss Jones said, “Miss Melnikova, you are dismissed. Please accompany Mrs. Petit.”

  “Someone’s in trouble,” Peter Quinn sang, in a low, gleeful, voice. Then he and the other two boys snorted like pigs. Then they chanted, not quite in unison, “Piggy’s in trouble.”

  “That’s enough, boys!” Miss Jones replied sharply. “Be quiet or get an F on your daily grade. Do you understand me? Be quiet or fail.”

  The trio glared at Margarita as she walked out of the auditorium in the company of the school secretary.

  Donna Petit said nothing to her until they were out of the auditorium. Then when they were in the hall, she said in a low volume and harsh tone, “I knew you were going to be trouble, from the first moment I heard about you, Ruskie brat. Principal Fisher wants to see you. And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you were expelled over today’s misadventure. What in the hell were you thinking, bringing a poisonous snake to school?”

  “I did no such thing. Someone put that in my desk.”

  “And I suppose you didn’t walk down the hall with a poisonous spider on your arm, either?” Donna Petit dismissed.

  “That was also left in my desk for me to find.”

  “Right. I knew that you were going to be trouble, you dirty Communist brat.”

  “I assure you, Madam, had my family been Communist, we would still be in the USSR,” Margarita answered.

  “Don’t talk back to adults, Ruskie. You might be as smart as people say you are. Personally, I doubt it. You have everyone else fooled. But I’m not so easily convinced. Just remember, you can be deported. That would probably be the best thing for the United States, to get rid of you and your whole nest of filthy communist infiltrators. Send you all, the whole lot of you, back to Mother Russia. I understand they know how to treat failures there. Siberia, I believe. That would not be too harsh of a punishment for a troublemaker like you. You need to die in the most terrible way possible.”

  Stunned by the venom of the school secretary, and knowing that nothing she would say now would make any difference, Margarita was silent for the rest of the walk to the office.

  Mrs. Fisher was in the Principal’s office as well, when Margarita arrived there.

  Donna Petit said, “The Melnikov girl, Sir, as you asked.”

  Principal Fisher nodded. “Very good, Donna. Leave and close the door behind you.”

  Donna Petit was clearly displeased at that command. Yet, she complied, closing the door firmly behind herself.

  Mrs. Fisher offered a chair and a box of tissues. “Sit down, Rita. Have a tissue. You look like you could use one or more.”

  “Margarita Aleksandrova, are you well?” Principal Fisher asked, his voice both kind and genuinely concerned.

  At the kindness shown to her, her tears which she had not dared to shed began falling. “No. I am not well. I am terrified, horrified beyond words. Those boys have been harassing me from the first day of school. Now, they tried to kill me!”

  “Which boys?” the Principal demanded.

  “The terrible trio; Peter Quinn, Greg Wilson, and Tim Riggs.”

  “Suppose you tell me the story from the beginning?” he demanded, his voice kind but firm.

  “There have been animals left in my homeroom desk on Monday mornings since school began.”

  “The pig and the tarantula,” Principal Fisher offered. “Mr. Edwards said you were quite calm when you walked into his room with those and offered them to him.”

  She shrugged. “I don’t mind spiders as a rule, and that one is really generally not a problem to people. I recognized the species as it
comes from South America. I wore a blouse with long sleeves of a fairly thick fabric and was wearing my glasses, so I was in little actual danger from the spider. Mornings aren’t their most active time, anyway. And the mice left in my desk the week before that weren’t a real problem, either. I just carried them outside and let them go. But this? This is a problem,” Margarita said through her tears. “I hate snakes. And poisonous snakes are really loathsome to me, particularly when they’re close enough to be a clear and present danger.”

  “No one blames you for hating snakes,” Mrs. Fisher said. “I would still be shaking if this happened to me.”

  Margarita held up her trembling hand. “You think I’m not shaking? I just couldn’t afford to let the boys see how this has affected me. They’d get too much of a thrill from knowing that they frightened me. I won’t give them that degree of satisfaction. It would only embolden them further to know that anything they’ve done has had any impact on me, at all.”

  “Can I get you something to drink? Water, soda, a cup of tea?” Mrs. Fisher asked.

  “No. Thank you. I would likely be violently nauseous if I ate or drank anything just now…” She wiped her eyes with a tissue. “I have really tried to ignore them, to just go about my business. But this is too much.”

  Principal Fisher sighed. “Margarita Aleksandrova, what do you need from me?”

  “I try not to show them any reaction. Not to give them any pleasure of knowing that they’ve scared me. But this time, they’ve gone way too far.”

  “Are you sure they are the ones who did this?” Mrs. Fisher asked.

  Margarita sighed. “I cannot prove it. But I know they did it. They were all too watchful, too gleefully expectant, looking at me when I came into the classroom this morning. They were waiting in delighted anticipation for me to be bitten by that deadly thing.”

  “We can move you to a different homeroom,” Principal Fisher offered.