Prom Read Free Page B

“connect with us” and focused on math, I liked her better. Nat fell in love with her the minute she announced she was the new prom advisor, “because prom is such a magical moment.” Nat had a thing for magical moments.
    Crane was having a crappy day, I could see that right off. Her hair was flat on her head like a “before” shot in an ad for volumizer spray. She wasn’t wearing any foundation, and you could see day-old green eyeliner in the crusty corner of her left eye. She forgot to put on lipstick and she was wearing khakis—khakis!—stretched one size too tight over her thighs, along with a faded red polo shirt.
    “What’s up with her?” I whispered to Dalinda, sitting in front of me.
    Dalinda blew a bubble. “Ashanti Williams has her for homeroom and said she was crying in her cell phone first thing. Maybe she got dumped.”
    People were sleeping, eating chicken nuggets, listening to music, talking, and doing homework (not math). Big Mike Whelan was chewing a toothbrush. Nat was in the back of the room, nose in another prom magazine.
    Crane stood up. Her eyes did not look one hundred percent focused. Maybe she finally snapped under the pressure of teaching us. Or she was buzzed. Nah, not her . She had been cranky ever since we came back from spring break. She must have snapped. I was kinda bummed. As far as teachers went, Crane wasn’t the worst.
    She picked up a textbook. “All right, people, that’s enough!” Bam! She slammed the book on her desk. “Get out a sheet of paper and a pencil. We’re having a quiz. No, not a quiz. Quizzes are for babies, and you’re always telling me how grown-up you are. A test. Forty percent of your grade, in fact.”
    The class moaned. Nat whined that this was not fair. She was always wanting things to be fair, although they never were.
    Crane screamed louder. “Shut! Up! The next person who speaks will automatically get an F and be sent to Mr. Gilroy.”
    The only sound was paper being ripped out of notebooks.
    Our mouths weren’t moving, but our eyes were, blinking and flashing like billboards. Some people were saying, “Bitch is wack,” and some people were saying, “Forty percent?” and some people were saying, “She’s high.” Nat looked at me, and her gray Russian eyes said, “Something’s really wrong.” I said back to her, kind of desperate, “I need a pencil.” She dug one out of her purse and tossed it to me.
    A couple guys in the back of the room didn’t get the hint and started talking the old-fashioned way again. Crane handed them passes to Gilroy and pointed to the door. After they left, she scribbled some problems on the board.
    “You’d better get started,” she said.
    The problems were hard. Way hard. I wasn’t your A+ kind of student, but I swear she never showed us half of what she was testing us on.
    And then it happened.
    The second miracle. Two of them in one day—the kind of thing that made you wonder if maybe the priests were telling the truth after all.
    A knock on the door.
    Everybody stopped writing, because if we were lucky it was going to be Gilroy wanting to conference with her in the hall about the students she sent to him, and if they were con ferencing in the hall you better believe we were going to conference in the classroom, so we all lifted our pencils from our papers and held our breath.
    It was Mr. Banks, the principal. He stuck his head in the door and asked Miss Crane if she would come out and talk to him.
    Even better.
    Except that she didn’t go. She didn’t answer him or look his way. She slumped in her chair with her eyes on the paper in front of her.
    We all put our pencils down. Mr. Banks stepped into the room.
    “I’m sorry to disturb your class,” he said. “But I need to see you, Miss Crane. Now.”
    Alex Mullins was sitting closest to the door. He stretched his neck to see what was in the hall, then spun around to look at us, his eyes bugging out. Something or somebody was out there.
    Crane