Red 1-2-3

24

Oddly, it was Red Two who fielded the phone call of silence and reacted calmly. Sarah surprised herself. Every other contact with the Big Bad Wolf threw her into a frantic, gun-waving, panicky response, and yet this time, as ominous and threatening as the quiet on the other end of the line had been, it moved her into a place far different. She had felt cold, but not the chill of fear as much as the ice of a decision being thrust upon her. She suddenly knew exactly what she had to do. This made her feel almost warm and comfortable.

Red One, on the other hand, had burst into tears.

The silence seemed to shout incompetence to her. Her entire life had been devoted to figuring out the answers to complicated questions, and now, no matter what she did, the answer eluded her. Scream obscenities? Scream defiance? Scream some phony show of strength? So as soon as the Big Bad Wolf disappeared from the black opposite end of the line, she set her phone down on the desk in front of her and allowed herself the release of tears. They streamed down her cheeks accompanied by gasps and sobs and even a low moan of despair. Karen gave in to the unbridled, unstoppable flood of emotion, rocking back and forth in her seat, her arms clenched tightly around her, chest heaving in agony. She was unsure how long she tied herself into knots. But like a small child crying over a missing puppy, eventually she choked back her tears and was able to fight her way to normal breathing, even if she had absolutely no idea what to do next. Her only desire was to speak with the other two Reds because, as different as they were from her, they were the only people on the entire earth who could understand what she was going through. Except, she realized, perhaps the Big Bad Wolf.

Red Three had been overwhelmed by rage.

Sleep eluded her after the call, and she spent much of the night unsuccessfully reexamining the Big Bad Wolf’s YouTube video, trying to find some hidden clue that would help her fight back. At 3 a.m. she finally crawled into her bed and pulled the covers up over her head like a child half her age, afraid of the dark. But underneath the blankets she sweated, teeth clenched. Eventually she threw off all the covers and lay rigid, like a corpse, staring up at the ceiling. When her alarm sounded, she arose feeling filthy, a sensation that hot water and shower suds failed to remove. As she walked to class that morning, she stumbled and nearly fell when she passed the spot where she had been standing the night before when the phone call of silence came. It was as if she’d been tripped by short-term memory, and she kicked at a spot in the pathway as though it was to blame for her near-tumble.

Her first class that morning was advanced Spanish. Mrs. Garcia, the teacher, had grown up in Barcelona, so reversing her skills to teach U.S. high schoolers wasn’t much of a challenge. She was a thickset, dark-haired woman, with a cackling laugh and unabashed enthusiasm for anything that was even vaguely connected to her native country. She showed films like Pan’s Labyrinth or The Secret in Their Eyes and assigned books from Cervantes to Gabriel García Márquez, even when she doubted the students understood very much. If someone mentioned art in the class, she almost invariably launched into a rhapsodic description of Madrid’s Prado and its famous Goya and Hieronymus Bosch paintings. Jordan was just scraping by in the class, but still, Jordan liked Mrs. Garcia immensely, because she was neither parent nor administrator and didn’t try to act like she had all the answers to Jordan’s problems.

This morning Jordan took her usual seat near the back, adjacent to a window, so she could look outside and watch blackbirds roost in a nearby tree. She remained completely distracted, playing over in her memory every aspect of the silent phone call. If there had been words or even guttural noises, heavy breathing, whistling, or the slapping sounds of some man playing with himself, she could have interpreted these and formed some sort of picture in her mind. But the absence of noise left her staring at a blank canvas.

She clenched her hands into fists, placed them just beneath her breasts, and pushed them together, as if fighting with herself.

“Jordan?”

Her knuckles grew white. She wanted to strike something.

“Senorita Jordan?”

Anger covered her face like a mask.

“Senorita Jordan, que pasa?”

It was the tittering of other students that brought her back to the classroom. She looked around wildly, facing the grins and low, mocking laughter. She had no idea what was happening, until she looked to the front and saw Mrs. Garcia in front of the blackboard staring directly at her. Jordan realized instantly that she’d been asked a question and hadn’t responded.

“I’m sorry…” she stammered.

“En español, por favor, Jordan.”

“I don’t know…”

“No estabas escuchando?”

“Yes, I was listening, I just…” She stopped mid-lie.

“Te pasa algo?”

“No, Mrs. Garcia. Nothing’s wrong.” This was another lie, and she knew both the teacher and the other students knew it.

“Bueno. En español, por favor, Jordan,” Mrs. Garcia repeated. “Cuál es el problema?”

“There’s no problem. I was not…” She stopped, seeing that she was about to contradict herself. She understood she was supposed to reply in Spanish, but the words were just slightly out of reach. Phrases, sentences, snippets of passages from books, dialogue from movies, all in melodic Spanish, flooded into Jordan’s head. She searched desperately for the right combination with which to answer her teacher’s questions.

Mrs. Garcia hesitated. This pause allowed a couple of the other teenage girls in the class to whisper something to each other. Jordan could not quite hear what they said, but she knew it was something cutting.

She could not help herself. Standing up, she spun toward the other girls. She could see half-taunting grins in their faces. To the girl closest to her she snarled, “Pinche puta idiota!”

The girl recoiled. Jordan wondered whether anyone had ever called her a fucking idiot bitch in any language.

“Jordan!” Mrs. Garcia broke in.

But this made no difference to Jordan, who felt days of fury released within her. “Besa mi culo, puta!” she insulted another girl. Kiss my ass, bitch.

One of the boys in the class half-rose, as if to come to the defense of the insulted girl, but Jordan pulled out the most common of all Spanish insults and one that she was sure the boy would know. In fact, they would all know it, she told herself.

“Chinga tu madre!” Jordan blurted out, pointing at the boy’s chest.

“Jordan, that’s enough!” Mrs. Garcia had slipped into furious English. She rarely did this.

Jordan could feel every eye in the room on her. She threw her head back, defiant, and was about to direct another insult at the class. She remembered an old insult from one of the books they had read earlier in the semester: El burro sabe más que tu… The donkey knows more than you. She was about to shout this one out, but hesitated.

“You can either leave or stay-your choice, Jordan,” Mrs. Garcia said in a slow, furious tone. “But either way, you will immediately cease what you are doing.”

The command demanded silence in the class. Whispers, undercover laughter, muffled obscenities all stopped.

Jordan reached down and started to collect her things. She had this vision of giving the finger to all the kids in the class, walking out, and finding some isolated, bucolic spot where she could be alone and patiently wait for her killer to find her and put an end to everything. But partway through this dramatic exit, she stopped. She looked up at Mrs. Garcia, whose red face had dimmed, and who now looked merely sad.

Jordan took a deep breath. “No,” she said suddenly. “Ésta es mi clase favorita.” She sat down abruptly.

Another silence riveted the classroom. After a long pause, Mrs. Garcia cleared her throat, looked sadly again at Jordan, and muttered, “Bueno,” before continuing with the day’s lesson.

Jordan sat back down in her seat and resumed staring out the window. She didn’t want to make eye contact with any of her fellow students. Instead she thought:

Big-that was grande.

Bad-that was malo.

Wolf-that was lobo.

She put them together in her head. Grande malo lobo. It had a nice rhythm to it. Spanish was like that, she thought. Every phrase sounded like it belonged in a song. Jordan sighed and stiffened, still refusing to turn and have any contact with her classmates. She felt like a piece of radioactive waste. She was glowing, dangerous, and no one could touch her.

When the class ended, Jordan waited for the others to leave. Mrs. Garcia had taken a seat behind her desk at the front. She gestured for Jordan to approach.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. G,” Jordan said.

The woman nodded. “I know you’re having a tough time, Jordan. Is there any way I can help?”

Do you have a gun? Can you shoot straight? “No. But thank you.”

The teacher looked disappointed, but managed a small smile. “You will let me know if you think I can. Even if it’s just to talk things over. Any time. Any day. Any reason. Okay?”

Are you a killer or just a Spanish teacher? Can you kill a man who wants to kill me? “Okay, Mrs. G. Thanks.”

Jordan slung her backpack over her shoulder and left the classroom. She hadn’t gone far when she heard a buzzing noise, which she recognized as the throwaway phone that Red One had given her. She ducked into a women’s toilet and found an empty stall before removing the phone and staring at the screen.

It was a text from Red Two.

Meet tonite. Talk. Important.

She was about to reply to this, when a second text came in, from Red One.

Pickup pizza place 7.

She texted both back: OK.

She wanted to add If we’re still alive at 7 tonight. She didn’t.

Then Jordan headed off to English class. The assignment that day was Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-lighted Place.” She had read the story through twice, but decided that if her teacher asked her about it, she would pretend she hadn’t even looked at it.

What she had liked most was the Spanish waiter in the story. The older one who was willing to keep the bar open for the lonely ancient man, not the young one in a hurry to get home to his wife.

Nada y pues nada y pues nada.

She knew exactly what the waiter meant with every word, and it didn’t need any translation.