Abandon - Meg Cabot [58]
How else was I going to get out of there without actually having to do — well, that — with him?
I couldn’t let that happen. I had to stay in control.
Mr. Mueller kept saying we should give each other neck massages. He knew how tense I had to be from all my problems at home, he said, with my mom and dad’s divorce (which had been all over the tristate news because of the amount of money involved and who my dad was). Mr. Mueller said he imagined I had to feel as stressed as he was. But that was all right. We were both adults. We might as well admit we were attracted to each other.
I knew then that I wasn’t going to be able to go through with it. Not only was the camera probably not even recording anything due to the lack of adequate lighting, so the whole thing was for nothing — because of course I had to have what the Changs didn’t have: evidence — but now that I was alone with him, the idea of Mr. Mueller touching any part of me, even just my neck, made me want to vomit.
The worst part of it all was that no one was going to believe me. Why would they?
I guess that’s what got me so mad. So mad that a red tinge began to appear at the periphery of my vision.
Oh, no.
When you play back the recording of what happened that day in Mr. Mueller’s classroom, you can’t see anything much at all because of the lighting issue, except for my white school uniform blouse, and the dark blob of Mr. Mueller’s arm coming towards me.
On the tape, you can hear his voice assuring me that everything’s going to be all right. I just need to relax, he says.
I hate it when people tell me I just need to relax.
Had he told Hannah she just needed to relax? I bet he had.
That’s when my vision turned magenta.
“There’s no accountability anymore, Pierce,” Dad always liked to complain during our fancy lunches. “No one holds anyone accountable for what they do. It’s always someone else’s fault. Usually people just blame the victim.”
Slut. Liar. Skank.
Well, I was holding Mr. Mueller accountable for what had happened to Hannah.
It was as Mr. Mueller was telling me to relax, and reaching his hand towards me — I thought to massage my neck, but I soon found out it was for a different reason — that it happened. You can watch it happen on the tape. There’s me, leaning up against the edge of his desk, telling myself I could handle the situation if it got out of hand (once, when we were waiting for Dad to come out of a board meeting, his driver, an ex-cop, taught me how to hit someone in self-defense, should the need ever arise), and there Mr. Mueller is, standing in front of me, lifting his arm. His hand is coming towards my face.
The next second, Mr. Mueller is gone.
I don’t mean literally gone. I just mean, on the tape, a black shadow appears, blocking the entire lens for a second or two. It’s as if a third person had entered the room. Although no one — no matter how much of an expert in digital film analysis, or how much Dad promised to pay them for their testimony — can say for certain, to me this shadow definitely looks like the figure of a man…a very tall man with longish dark hair, maybe eighteen or nineteen years old.
For a few seconds, you can’t see anything on the tape. The screen is black. You can just hear sounds. There’s a brief scuffle, then a sickening crunching sound, some muffled conversation.
A second later, the shadow is gone.
On the film, I’m exactly where I always was, leaning against the desk. Only now, instead of standing in front of me with his hand out, Mr. Mueller is cowering against the chalkboard, cradling his arm against his chest.
And he’s screaming.
That’s because every bone in his hand has just been broken.
But especially the bones in the finger that he used to press the cookie crumb into the bare skin of my knee. Those, in particular, were pulverized.
The Westport police say “it’s unlikely…though not impossible” a girl as small as I am could have inflicted that much damage to a full-grown man.
Unfortunately, Mr. Marzjak, the custodian, swears he saw no one else come in