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I was still blinking back stars when Dr. DuPont swung a powerful kick to my stomach.Advertisement

All the air left my lungs, and I crumpled to the ground, gasping and gagging at the same time. My chest was burning again, this time from lack of oxygen.

I lay there, staring at Dr. DuPont’s shiny black loafers as he walked over to the corner and picked up the scimitar he’d dropped.

I’m going to die here , I thought dimly. I’m going to be stabbed to death by my history teacher with some freaky sword, and no one will ever know what happened to me. And my parents will have two daughters who died at school dances, and my mom’s eyes will get sadder, and Dad’s face will get thinner, and our house will feel even grayer and emptier.

Now the pain in my stomach had nothing to do with Dr. DuPont’s kick. I closed my eyes as tears burned. Dr. DuPont was talking, but I couldn’t really hear him. He said something about the wrong place and the wrong time, and then he said this weird word that started with “pal.”

Paladin. What was that? He might as well have been speaking Greek. All I could focus on was the burn in my chest and the aching of my midsection.

He was right in front of me now. I opened my eyes and saw the sword hanging at his side. The end glittered in the ugly fluorescent light of the bathroom.

I turned my head a little so I didn’t have to see him raise the blade.

Something pink caught my eye. It was one of my shoes. I remembered taking them off to help Mr. Hall. Apparently, they’d gotten kicked under the sink.

Dr. DuPont was still talking, but I was focused on that shiny pink shoe that now looked so silly in the midst of all this death and destruction. I reached out and pulled the shoe to me. Dr. DuPont laughed. “Afraid of dying without the right accessories, Miss Price? Nice to see you’re still a silly bitch, right to the end.”

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But I didn’t want the shoe because it was pretty, or because it was pink. I rolled onto my back, slowly drawing my knees up. It wasn’t the most ladylike of positions, but I was going to need leverage. I held the shoe against my chest. I ran my thumb over its heel, remembering my desire to stomp on David Stark’s foot in these shoes. It would’ve hurt.

I fought to keep a smile off my face as Dr. DuPont raised the sword.

In fact, if I had stomped on David’s foot hard enough, the heel would’ve gone right through. It was awfully sharp.

If Dr. DuPont hadn’t been a total drama queen and raised the sword with both hands, he might have actually killed me. He certainly wouldn’t have ended up giving me the opening he did.

Because while his arms were high over his head, about to bring the sword down, I pushed myself off the floor and into a spin, the high heel clutched in my hands, sharp point out.

The sword was still poised in the air when I came to an abrupt stop and sunk the heel into his throat, right under his jaw. I’d learned about the carotid artery in Anatomy and Physiology, which was turning out to be a much more useful class than I’d originally thought, and while I’d definitely been aiming for it, I was still kind of shocked that I managed to hit it.

I guess Dr. DuPont was, too, because his eyes got really wide, and the sword clattered to the floor. He stared at me, his lips opening and closing like a fish, my pink shoe stuck in his neck. I guess it would’ve been kind of funny if it hadn’t been, you know, completely gross and horrifying.

Dr. DuPont reached up and pulled the heel out of his neck. Blood poured from the hole, pulsing out with his heartbeat.

He looked at the shoe for a long time, like he couldn’t figure out what it was. Then he muttered, “Pink.” The shoe fell from his fingers and he dropped back on the floor, his eyes wide and staring.

The only sound in the bathroom was my breathing and the steady plink-plink of the dripping sink.

Reality took a minute to set in, but when it did, it was bad.

I had just killed a teacher. With my shoe.

I ran over and picked up that shoe, wincing at the streaks of red on the heel. I grabbed a handful of paper towels and wiped it off, and my breathing got faster and faster.

“It’s okay,” I murmured to myself. “It was self-defense. He had a sword.”

I scrubbed at the heel, feeling like Lady Macbeth. Self-defense or not, I’d just killed someone. That was bad. That was really bad. I looked in the mirror, and saw that other than flushed cheeks and bright eyes, I looked pretty much the same as I had when I came in the bathroom. Well, except for the line of Salmon Fantasy scrawled across my face. I grabbed a paper towel and began scrubbing at my mouth.

Even my hair wasn’t that messed up. I should tell Ms. Brenda that the next time I go in, I thought automatically. Then it occurred to me that there was no way to tell my hairdresser that her ’dos hold up even when you’re kicking the crap out of sword-wielding teachers.

After I was done getting the blood off of my shoe and ugly lipstick off of my face, I tossed the paper towel in the trash and looked around. Mr. Hall’s body was against the stalls, and Dr. DuPont was lying about three feet away. There were big cracks in the tile from where I’d slammed Dr. DuPont’s head into the wall, and the bathroom door lay in pieces on the floor, surrounded by a fine layer of grit and more broken tiles.

Without really thinking, I slid my shoe back on and hobbled over to the trashcan, where the second high heel lay on its side.

I guess this is the part where I should have started screaming and/or vomiting, but I just felt . . . numb. Certainly not as horrified as someone who just watched two men die (and one by her own hand. Well, her own shoe) should feel.

That weird feeling, like adrenaline times a thousand, was still flowing over me. That was probably what was keeping the nervous breakdown at bay. As I stepped over the fallen door and out of the bathroom, I wondered why no one had come looking for me yet. I mean, I must have been in there for at least half an hour. Then I glanced at my watch and saw that only eleven minutes had passed since I’d bumped into David Stark.

I walked down the English hall, and the further I got from the bathroom, the shakier my legs felt. I was almost to the gym lobby, close enough to could hear the band’s lead singer say, “Okay, in just a few, we’ll be announcing Homecoming Queen, so come on up here, ladies.”

That’s when I felt something in my stomach shift dangerously, and I turned and ran back down the English hall.

As my heels clattered down the hallway—

Oh God, oh God, don’t think about your heels, don’t think about your shoe sticking out of his neck!

I realized I should have run down the history hall because there was no way I could go back in the bathroom with Mr. Hall and Dr. DuPont.

But it was too late now.

Then I remembered that—hello?—there are two bathrooms in the English hall, so I ran into the boys’ room across the hall from the girls’.

As I barreled through the door, I heard a startled male voice squawk, “What the hell?” but I didn’t even glance at the figure standing by the sink. I ran straight into one of the stalls, actually thankful it didn’t have a door.

I had barely hit my knees before everything that was in my stomach came up.

“Holy crap,” I heard Sink Guy say, and then he was there in the stall with me, lifting the heavy mass of hair away from my face and neck. It felt so good, and it was such a nice thing to do that I wasn’t even embarrassed that some random guy was watching me, Harper Jane Price, SGA president, head cheerleader, Future Business Leader of America, and soon-to-be Homecoming Queen, puking my guts out in the boys’ bathroom.

I felt shaky and hollowed out when I was done, but better. Lots better.

“Here,” Sink Guy said, handing me a bunch of damp, cool paper towels. I took them gratefully and pressed them against my sweaty face. At the same time, the mystery guy laid a few more of the paper towels against the back of my neck. He was still holding my hair back.

My face buried in the paper towels, I reached up and flushed the toilet.

“Thank you,” I murmured into the wad of wet towels. “No worries. So are you knocked up?”

I looked up and found myself glaring into David Stark’s blue eyes.

Of course.

“No,” I said, trying to get to my feet in the narrow stall without flashing my panties at him. He reached down and took my elbow to help me. “I was joking,” he said. “If there’s ever been anyone less likely to be on Teen Mom than you, I’ve never met her.” He sounded sincere, but I still shook him off.

I walked out of the stall and over to the sink, where I rinsed my mouth out about twenty times. When I was done, David reached into that stupid messenger bag of his and pulled out a tin of Altoids, wordlessly handing me a few.

“Thanks,” I said again, hating that I’d had to say “thank you” to David Stark two times in as many minutes.

He just shrugged, but he was looking at me in that weird, almost predatory way he has. With any other guy, that look would mean he was trying to get in my pants, but I doubt David even thinks about those kinds of things. He only gets that look about the stupid school paper, and I knew he was trying to sniff out a story about why “Pres” was tossing her cookies in the boys’ room the night of the Homecoming Dance.

“I know you weren’t drinking,” he said, “Not after . . . ,” he broke off awkwardly before clearing his throat. “So, food poisoning?”

“No,” I said again, “It’s just that they’re about to announce Homecoming Queen, and I’m nervous. Stage fright.”

I thought it was pretty good as far as excuses go, but David just laughed. “Yeah, right. Pres, you’d make out with a spotlight if you could figure out how. It’s gotta be something else.”

That hungry look was back in his eyes, and it suddenly occurred to me that the reason I’d thrown up was literally across the hall. My stomach and knees turned to jelly. It was a miracle that David hadn’t noticed the broken door to the girls’ room when he’d come in here. There was no way he was going to miss it when he left. And David was the smartest person I knew; he was the only thing currently standing between me and valedictorian. David had seen me going toward the girls’ room, and when he saw the two dead bodies in there, he’d put two and two together. pqdm.com