And if that hadn’t flattened me like a pancake, I still would have been directly in the path of the man who came running in with a long, curved blade—a scimitar, I was pretty sure I remembered from World History II with Dr. DuPont—held out in front of him.
So thanks to Bee’s lip gloss, I was standing frozen by the sink when the sword-wielding maniac came in and my life stopped making even the littlest bit of sense.
In all the dust from the door flying off, it took the man a minute to realize I was there. He had his back to me as he knelt by Mr. Hall’s body. I watched, still as a statue, as he reached into Mr. Hall’s pockets, but I guess he didn’t find what he was looking for because he stood up really fast and muttered the F-word. I couldn’t hold it against him, though. This did seem like a dire situation.
Then he turned around, and I’m sure the look of total confusion on his face was reflected on mine.
“Harper?”
“Dr. DuPont?”
I didn’t get much time to wonder why my history teacher had just killed a janitor, even though I had this whole joke forming about how Dr. DuPont must really hate when his trash cans aren’t emptied—you know, to make him see me as a person and not just a potential shish kabob. I learned that in the self-defense class Mom and I went to at the church last spring.
But that joke dried right up in my mouth, because Dr. DuPont crossed the bathroom in two strides, and put his sword against my neck.
Chapter 3
Now, this is when it really gets weird. I know, I know, dead janitor in disguise, killer history teacher, how much weirder could it get?
Lots. Trust me.
When Dr. DuPont put that sword—well, scimitar—on my neck, I didn’t feel scared, like, at all. Instead, I felt that tingle in my chest again, only this time, it was more like this . . . energy.
I reached out, almost like my hands didn’t belong to me, and grabbed the hilt of the sword, just above Dr. DuPont’s hands on the handle, and yanked, sliding that lethal blade in the space between my arm and my body.
Dr. DuPont was so surprised he didn’t even let go of the sword, which was exactly what I had planned, although where that plan came from, I had no idea. Certainly not from that lame self-defense class, where the only thing I’d learned was how to knee a guy in the groin, and trust me, teenage girls already know how to do that. No, this was a different kind of fighting, one so smooth and powerful that I felt like I was standing outside my body, watching myself pull Dr. DuPont right up to me.
I didn’t knee him in the groin, although I didn’t rule that move out. Instead I . . . ugh, this is so embarrassing.
I head-butted him.
I know, like a soccer hooligan or something. But it worked. He let go of the sword with one hand and reached up to clutch his probably broken nose.
I’d kept my hand on the hilt, and I used it to pull him past me and slam him headfirst into the wall. Now I had a clear shot for the door, but for some reason, I didn’t take it. For one thing, all this ninja-style fighting was . . . well, kind of cool. I had no idea how I was doing it, and I wondered if it was another adrenaline thing, like when I was able to push Mr. Hall off me. But it wasn’t just that I was having fun. It was almost like I couldn’t leave; like I had to finish the fight until one of us was dead.
See? I told you it got weirder.
I stood there, crouched in my pink dress while Dr. DuPont turned around to look at me with an expression I can only call incredulous (that was the word I had beat David Stark with in the fifth-grade spelling bee.)
Blood was caked all around the lower half of his face. Panting, he looked down at Mr. Hall’s body, then back at me.
He laughed, but it was an ugly, wet sound. “So he passed it on to you,” Dr. DuPont wheezed. Then his bloody lips curved in a nasty smirk. “Well, bless your heart,” he drawled in a not very nice (if kind of accurate) imitation of my accent.
He moved sideways, toward the stalls, the sword still pointed at me. “I really can’t think of a worse choice,” he said, still smiling, “than the bimbo who wrote a paper on the history of shoes for my class.”
Okay, that stung. I’d worked hard on that paper. And it hadn’t been on shoes. It had been about how fashion affected politics. And I may like clothes and makeup and shoes, but I am not a bimbo. Dr. DuPont could totally bite me. I almost said that, but then I changed my mind. As crazy as everything had gone, Dr. DuPont might take that as an opening to actually, you know, bite me.
“Tell me, Harper, are you going to use your new superpowers to strong-arm some boy into taking you to prom? Or maybe become head cheerleader?” Something in his expression hardened. “Not that you’re going to live that long.”
Then he lunged again, sword high, but I was ready for him. I spun around so my back was to him, then dropped so the sword passed right over my head. With my hands on the floor, I kicked out my left heel. “I already am head cheerleader,” I said through clenched teeth as my foot connected with his jaw.
Before Dr. DuPont recovered from my kick, I spun in my crouch and used that same leg to knock his legs out from under him.
He cracked his head against the sink as he went down, and I figured that was the end of it.
I stood up and looked down. There was a ragged tear from the hem of my skirt all the way up to the middle of my thigh. “Oh, shoot,” I muttered, giving Dr. DuPont’s limp body a dark glare.
Then it occurred to me that I should definitely get out of here and find a non-homicidal teacher. Something in me still didn’t want to leave, but I shoved that down. Dr. DuPont had said superpowers, and talked about Mr. Hall “passing something on” to me. That must have been what that weird blowing in my mouth thing had been. But I could figure out exactly what had happened to me later. Right now I needed to get out of here before Dr. DuPont came to.
My arms and legs were starting to ache. I’d be black and blue tomorrow, I thought, as I scooted around Dr. DuPont, and I’d probably missed the crowning, thanks to all this craziness. I swear, if—
I didn’t get to finish the thought. Instead, there was a sharp pain at the back of my head that brought tears to my eyes and ripped a short scream from my throat. Dr. DuPont had grabbed a big handful of my thick hair. Yanking so hard that I was surprised I wasn’t snatched bald, he used my hair to pull me back and sling me into the sinks.
My right elbow hit the edge of the counter and a wave of nausea spilled over me.
I was still blinking back stars when Dr. DuPont swung a powerful kick to my stomach.
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.”
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.