Part 15 (2/2)

She would call. It would be okay. He could breathe easier then.

He thumbed the Flogger, nearly losing his balance as a laser lash seared across his back.

Settling once more into his nest on the bed, Matthew punched up the sound and dug his eyes deep into the couple with the images crawling across their skin.

His flesh and hers hissed beneath a languid electrocution. But that was d.a.m.ned f.u.c.king okay with Matthew, they were such slimy s.h.i.+ts and good only at the end of their lives (the woman's urine now caught the man full in the face, blinking to avert it) for keeping legions of distraught moms and dads from going insane.

Matthew's fingers scooped up fresh dollops of coconut oil and slathered them on. His penile and lobate tissue responded anew.

Upon the woman's inverted back, a helmeted slitted dome of flesh eased past the thin lips of a blush-lobed lady. Across the man's hairy thigh, twitching beneath a surge, somebody's hand worked a digitally enhanced earlobe deep inside a gaping v.a.g.i.n.a.

Matthew regained the rhythm.

It lived in the pounding of the music, in the agony of voices, in the faint aroma of roast pork that seeped out of his system (a prelude to the char to come), and in the interwoven throbs of incessantly moving flesh.

He caught that rhythm. He rode it, honed by years of viewing, years of coaxing himself, and being coaxed so by caring lovers, toward the twin consummation of lobe and lingam.

On his way.

9. By the Book.

Tweed's chops were just about blown.

The dance band's frantic swing through non-stop chartsa”heavy on the 'bones and light on the restsa”had been more grueling this year than last.

Even the slow numbers felt manic.

Bongo by her side, grabbing at catch-breaths, had been his typical goofball self.

But Dex, Dol, Estlin, and a half-dozen other seniors had acted like square pegs in round holes, hurtling along familiar routes of sound toward two unlucky cla.s.smates' moment of truth.

Tweed had been relieved to see Mr. Versailles filling in as chaperone. It meant he wasn't this year's slasher.

But the bristling boxes of riding crops that appeared beside the stage made Tweed shudder, not because she hadn't delivered and received their bare-backed pleasures a time or two in her young life. No, but because when they were dispersed, it would mean that Princ.i.p.al b.u.t.tweiler's opening remarks were done and that the moment had arrived to go where the envelope directed, waiting there and cowering.

”The prunes are hot for blood,” Bongo cupped into her right ear as she counted.

Glancing into chaperone corner, Tweed saw Mr. and Mrs. Borgstrom edged now on their chairs, in their seventies and shriveled, the adoptive mom and pop of a junior boy whose hair was black and whose ways were sullen and sulky. Their jaws had notches, discolored jags that marked each year they had been married, a practice fallen away in the fifties.

Then the count clicked over in her brain and her horn rose to join in the final verse of ”Lobe Town Blues,” a dirge filled with quirky delights and a chance for each section to show off.

Festus Targer, his cymbal s.h.i.+mmering beneath them, held them back. Festus had it in him, a.s.suming he survived next year's prom, to make it big as a drummer.

Jiminy Jones nodded an okay at the princ.i.p.al, who was chatting, hands in his coat pockets, with Nurse Gaskin among the chaperones. Mr. Jones' pudgy fingers brought the band to a skillful close, his satisfied smile's peculiar clash with her fears reminding Tweed how remote his age made him from the coming sacrifice.

The applause seemed heartfelt. Jiminy bowed, waved a section at a time to its feet, then the full ensemble.

Tweed put the trombone, sectioned, back into its case. She wondered who would next rea.s.semble it. Herself? Or its inheritor?

Dex's hand held the envelope. His features were strained.

d.a.m.n the rules, she thought. It was insanea”her dad more right than she had given him credit fora”that people as whole and good as Dexter Poindexter fell each year under the red blade of the slasher. He had promised her father protection he couldn't possibly deliver, but she vowed that she would fight to save Dex too, if it came to that.

Pa.s.sivity and paralysis were not her style.

Nor his.

Tweed took Dex's hand.

They shared a nervous embrace.

”Ready?” he asked.

”There's gonna be one dead teacher,” said Tweed, ”if he even tries to hurt you.”

Dex smiled. ”We'll waste him.”

Princ.i.p.al b.u.t.tweiler stood off to the left on a floor scattered with s.h.a.gs of sawdust.

His hands were crossed straight-arm below his belt, a slim packet of index cards down-angled in one hand. His nods and smiles were more perfunctory than usual, rotating lights turning his strained face blue, then orange, then a sickly shade of yellow.

The poor man had been dealt a savage blow. But Tweed's sympathy did nothing to dampen the chill she felt as his eyes fell upon her and Dex, deep and unmistakable (or was she just on edge?), the message they shouted: ”You two are the ones. Tonight we're going to see you bleed, mourn you, futter you, use the stoppage of your young hearts to remember this night by.”

Dex drew her along into the light-shade-light of their horded cla.s.smates, come down now, all of them, from the bleachers. They huddled close to the mike where Jiminy Jones had announced each number and where the princ.i.p.al stood, adjusting the mikestand upward.

Nurse Gaskin felt Bix Donner's needy eyes bore into the back of her head. It was hard, wanting to engage this absurd man's spouses in conversation, but knowing that any attempt she made would be interpreted by Bix as encouragement.

When Futzy approached her, Delia had squinted so as to pretend harsh lights were her reason for rotating the axis of their conversation. But in fact it had been to put Mister Pinhead a.s.shole out of eyeshot.

Now Futzy was knuckling the mike head.

The princ.i.p.al wore his humiliation with dignity. Futzy's lobes reminded her of those of his slain daughter Kitty, Delia's lost heartthrob two decades before.

”Is this on?” he said. ”Can everyone hear me?”

The man had cla.s.s. He didn't even look at them as he asked the question, striking a pose for the ages. They were pieces of s.h.i.+ta”he knew it and so did shea”and a deserved flush was about to take place. He would flush 'em all, as would she, if that were possible.

”It's a momentous night, isn't it, boys and girls?” he began. ”In the petting-zoo portion of your time here, we pampered you. While you cut open frogs and pig embryos, we did the same to your brains. We felt along runnels of thought and redirected rivers. And now, poised to leave this slaughterhouse, you, or rather a token couple from those here gathered, shall be sacrificed.”

Delia surveyed the faces, mapped memories of a broken arm, prankish debaggings, sneers, jeers, the flow of a dispensatory river of pills and liquids, the probings of countless needles beneath baby-smooth and zit-infested skina”all of it recalling to mind what this graduating cla.s.s meant to her.

She had been their nurse, seen their health impaired, and healed them.

”You and you. And you.” He pointed to three seniors close to Delia. ”Distribute these riding crops. This is not a new tool, surely, to many of you. It symbolizes the pain I and my staff have taught you to inflict and endure. With care, these crops will last many years. You have found a first love at this schoola”or, in some cases, the school has had to find one for you, pairing you for an eveninga””

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