A story I wrote about a school anthrax scare

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Math class was boring that day.
Charity tried to pay attention, knowing that she would regret not paying attention later, but her mind kept wandering to the makeshift laboratory in her bedroom closet, and the explosives she and her brother were making for a ninth-grader who had ordered them. Charity had never met him before, though he had to go to this school, or else he was homeschooled. This was the only school in Riven, Nebraska. It had its preschool section, its elementary section, its secondary and college and university sections. Charity reasoned that she couldn’t know everyone in the whole school of ten thousand students and two thousand teachers and professors. But she knew just about everyone who was unique or important.
Her best friends were the most eccentric in her year. Fat slob Spencer Freeman, who would have been accepted onto the Dr. Phil show if he had weighed just 200 pounds more than his 450. Filthy-rich, prissy, obsessive-compulsive showoff Cora Peterson. Upper-middle-class, ridiculously overprotected wannabe ghetto child Stephanie Forger. Sidney Walker, the geek who had once risked his life to save his stolen math book. Among others.
Charity knew the prankster gangs, the girl who wore her bathing suit to school every day, the boy who could projectile-vomit halfway across the cafeteria aiming perfectly into the snack-bar window, the kids who were known for being picked on, and everyone else whom she thought could possibly want explosives. The prankster gangs were well-known. All you had to do was ask to join and you’d be accepted, if you were serious. A prankster gang had saved her sister Chastity from her former friends who were pressuring her to smoke, drink and do drugs. Charity trusted the prankster gangs, because they were just that… prankster gangs. They did nothing but pull pranks on people they didn’t like and people they thought needed to lighten up. They didn’t smoke, drink or do drugs, because that might hamper their judgement and success. They didn’t bully people. The people they didn’t like and pulled the pranks on were bullies.
So why did this boy want explosives if he wasn’t in a prankster gang? What did he want to use them for if not to pull a harmless prank on a bully?
He had given his name as Russell. No last name. Or was Russell his last name? She would have to talk to Lars. Maybe he had given his other name to Lars. It was Lars, after all, who had actually written down his more detailed order, after Russell had asked Charity if they made explosives… and she had said "Sure, why not?"
Should she have told the principal? But no; he was the biggest jackass on earth. He was—
"CHANDLER!"
Charity jumped three feet in the air.
"DAYDREAMING IN MY CLASS AGAIN! OUT! ZERO ON THE TEST! OUT!"
Charity knew better than to argue with Mr. Davis. She had had him for math ever since fourth grade. He taught math to all the English-speaking classes in the Albert Einstein School from grade seven onward, and some, like Charity’s class, had been unfortunate enough to have him before that, as he also taught some lower-grade classes.
Charity was out in the hall the next thing she knew, surrounded by her seven friends who had all walked out with her.
"Charity, what’s the matter?" Randal said with uncharacteristic tenderness.
Stephanie had dropped her ghetto-child act and was looking at Charity with genuine concern.
Cora had stopped running her fingers self-consciously through her already-perfect hair. Spencer had stuffed his Aero bar into his pocket and sat back on the bench along the wall. Sidney was looking up from his math book, which he was still reading. (Sidney always read his advanced math books in Mr. Davis’s class. Mr. Davis had gotten bored bullying him for it and moved on to better things.)
"Come on," David said. "Let’s go outside so I can think better."
They went outside and sat at a picnic table out in the middle of the front yard, where almost the whole school could see them. This was their favorite place to skip classes. At least it was honest.
Charity opened her mouth. "There was this guy that I sold explosives to," she blurted out.
Randal in particular took on an ominous expression. When Randal looked ominous about a suspected crime, they all knew it was bad news, because he had the biggest criminal identification (but no criminal record) that she and everyone she knew knew.
"f**k! Why didn’t you tell Bogner?"
"He’s under a lot of str—he’s too busy with Chas and them. He—"
But deep down, Charity knew that she had been hesitant to become a rat. She liked Mr. Bogner. He wasn’t a jackass jackass, or an a**hole a**hole. She had been angry and anxious and harsh with him when she had thought that, and now she felt bad. Now that Randal had said that, she knew she probably should have told Mr. Bogner. Or at least asked her father for his opinion on this.
It was probably lunchtime now. All the kids were swarming out of the doors, laughing and talking, more excited than usual about something. Gossipping. Speculating. They were too far away for Charity to hear them, but she knew by their tone of voice that they were excited about something that had happened. Maybe even something that had happened there, at school.
"Charity! Charity!" Lars was running over to her. "Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!"
The kids he had run out with were gone, except for his friend Biff who was tugging at his sleeve, saying "Let’s go, for Christ’s sake!" Now more kids, more than usual, half the school, were pouring out of that same entranceway, no longer walking. Running. Stumbling. Shouting at each other to move on. Shouting at each other to shut up. Shouting requests to borrow cell phones.
Charity ran. She knew.
"Let’s go that way," Charity said, pointing to where most of the kids were headed down the street, to the nearest corner. The shooters wouldn’t waste their time chasing after them. They probably had some hostages inside. Charity wanted to ask all of them what had happened. Without thinking, she ran to the front of the line. Turned to face the kids rushing down the sidewalk, who had slowed down slightly now that they felt safer. "Let’s all go to my house!" she shouted. People were looking at her weird. It didn’t matter. "We can debrief there!" she said. "You know, talk about what happened. Speculate."


None of them accompanied Charity, Lars, Biff, and Charity’s seven friends to Charity’s house, but Charity had told them they were welcome over there any time if they wanted to talk about the incident. None of them had even said it was a shooting. While each one took their turn on Cora’s cell phone calling their families, the others watched the TV.
"They haven’t got wind of it yet," Sidney said, changing channels frantically and finally settling on channel 12, which was showing Spiderman swooping low over a bank robbery to save the day.
"Let’s go over to my place and watch CNN," Cora said. "I can’t believe so many people don’t have cable." But there was something about the Chandlers’ place that kept them there. Charity figured that when things unravelled she’d know why she felt she should stay there. Heck; they all felt it, even Cora, whose comment had really been only to mourn the fact that they couldn’t get better news quicker here. But there were compensations, as she and the others all knew.
Sofia closed Cora’s phone and handed it back to her, having called her parents for herself and Randal, who was her twin brother. They all stared at the screen, transfixed, until Spiderman abruptly cut off to one of the usual talking-head reporters of the local news station.
"Good day; we’re here with some breaking news."
They had already read the banner at the bottom of the screen before the woman was able to say it. They were gasping by the time she was finally saying it: "An anthrax attack has forced students out of the Albert Einstein Memorial School in Riven, Nebraska."

























Charity had known better than to worry about her other siblings, knowing they didn’t have cell phones and she couldn’t do a thing about it until they either came home or called home. That was why they had used Cora’s cell phone and left the Chandlers’ home phone free for incoming calls. But now, she jumped up and paced back and forth. "My dad’s going to blow a gasket," she said. "And my mom will have a panic attack." She was admittedly not as close to her other siblings as she was to Lars. Lars was her best friend. She was going nuts anyway, but she would really be going nuts if Lars was trapped in the school. But that nervous, nutsy feeling only replaced the feeling of guilt, because now she knew that she was not responsible for this. She had not caused anything by not telling Mr. Bogner that she had sold explosives to a ninth-grader that she didn’t even know.
She looked at Lars. "I didn’t do it," he said. That was enough for her.
Spencer got out his potato chips and started munching loudly.
"Shut up; I can’t hear," Sofia said. Spencer put the bag of chips down and finished his chocolate bar instead.
There were shots of stragglers running out of the school through that same entrance, and so far, nothing much. The reporter told of a hotline to call to find missing family and friends. Charity picked up the phone. Then she heard the raised voices of her parents and the opening and slamming of the kitchen door from the fire escape.
"LARSEN!"
They all looked up, each of them with one eye still focused on the TV screen and the other focused on Charity’s parents.
"Charity, Lars, come here," Mr. David Chandler said. "Now."
"We didn’t do it," they both said at the same time, as their friends half-looked at them with irritation while trying to listen to the news, which was still repeating the same thing.
They relaxed a bit. "I don’t think CNN has anything better anyway," David said.
"Why always the same entrance?" Sofia wondered.
"I can’t watch this," Falon-Marie Chandler said, leaving the room. "Oh God, I just can’t." She knew that if any of her other children were home, they’d have been in there watching the news with Charity, Lars and their friends, though probably not as intensely into it as them.
Charity heard Falon-Marie banging around in the kitchen, making as much noise as she could, on purpose, she suspected. She wanted shout at her to stop so she could just hear the damn news.
Mr. Chandler stayed in the living room and leaned against the wall, watching the news, which suddenly started showing people being rushed out the same door on stretchers. "At least five victims have been reported. Deputy John Walker with details."
Sidney’s cop uncle came into focus on the screen. "We do not know a lot yet—"
"Stop stalling!" Charity yelled at the screen.
"We do know that we have at least nine victims, and the attack took place in the chem lab on the third floor in the north wing."
The phone rang. Charity, Lars, Biff, Sofia and Stephanie, who were sitting nearest to it, all pounced on it. Biff got it first. He said hello and listened as Mr. Chandler crossed the room and held out his hand. He handed it to him, nodding. Mr. Chandler listened… then threw the cordless phone receiver across the room, where it collided with a china figurine of a woman dancing on a shelving unit, creating a domino effect and sending the figurine, framed school headshots of Charity and Lars, a miniature totem pole, a glass ashtray, and a bunch of colored flasks all crashing to the floor. As if this wasn’t enough, he then picked up the other part of the phone, ripping the cord out of the wall, and flung it further through the shelving unit, knocking down and breaking more things. Falon was standing in the doorway by then.
"Let’s go," David Chandler said after a minute.
"Where?"
"To the morgue."




































Charity, Lars and their friends had the whole apartment to themselves. Charity let herself enjoy it. Cora delighted in showing off her wealth by paying for the pizzas that Spencer ordered. But when the deliveryman looked around at all of them, then saw the ripped-out phone and the smashed contents of the shelving unit all over the living room floor, he waved the money away, said "Forget it", and hurried off. People in Riven, Nebraska, were astute when it came to disasters, though they were often slow dunderheads when it came to just about anything else. They could smell a disaster no matter where they went… and usually one was happening. They had been through fires, floods, ice storms, and blizzards that trapped people in their houses. They knew the signs, and that included the signs of people’s involvement in them.
Spencer went into the kitchen and came out with half of it "to go with the pizza": Coca-Cola, Pepsi, freezies, fruit roll-ups, muffins, Halloween cupcakes, Rice Krispies squares, granola bars, strawberry SlimFast milkshakes, a fruitcake, lemon tarts, strawberry sidewalks, lemon danishes, a frozen coconut cream pie, a tub of chocolate ice cream, a 32-pack of little yogurts, an 8-pack of banana pudding. They ate it all. They enjoyed eating together and watching the news. They had done it since seventh grade. Before that they had loved eating together and watching America’s Most Wanted.
Charity pigged out with the rest of them, not caring if she gained weight. She listened to the others speculating and wondered why she wasn’t joining in. What the hell; why isolate herself, even if someone in her family was dead?
"Oh, Charity, I’m so sorry," Stephanie said.
"Who do you think it was, though?" Spencer asked.
"I think it’s a mistake," David said. "It has to be."
"I hope it’s Lawrence," said Randal, joking to make light of the situation. Lawrence was Charity’s older brother who was into his books and bossed his younger siblings and their friends around, exercising what Randal called "chickenshit" authority, trying to put them to work mopping and raking while he crammed for exams that were eight months away.
"Prudence and Patience are so annoying," Stephanie joined in. Prudence and Patience were Charity’s little sisters, twelve and eleven respectively, lecturing Charity and Lars on morals and cleanliness and obedience and duty, basically telling them that having a makeshift lab in their closet and selling things they made in it was wrong and that they were worse people because of it, and blah, blah, blah. The stuff they made in it had usually gone to do things like stick Mr. Davis’s butt to his chair, burn through his pants and stick his skin to the chair. Or burn the first layer of skin off a bully after being dumped on him. It was more pocket cash than they’d ever have made at McDonald’s.
"Adrien is alright though," David said. "I think I like him." Adrien was Charity’s six-year-old brother, who so far was just another six-year-old, playing with his gameboy and game cube and x-box and Nintendo games, trading Pokemon cards and wearing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles t-shirts.
"I miss Amadeus," Randal admitted. "I liked having him around. He was a cool little kid."
Charity’s brother Amadeus, who would have been nine, had been shot dead when he was five years old, in Rome, on a wharf, from a boat, by a criminal involved in a cult, after a very long ordeal involving kidnapping for ransom. They still talked about it sometimes, when they were bored, and it reminded them how lucky they were to be sitting in a school cafeteria doing nothing.
They weren’t shy or traumatized in that sense. They could talk about what had happened to them. Their days of post-traumatic stress were about over. They laughed about Amadeus’s Tourette’s syndrome and how it had saved their lives several times, they laughed about how Sidney had run into a burning building to save their schoolbooks, they laughed about how Charity had pickpocketed the cult leader while he was sleeping. Now they were talking about the experience once again.
"Man, Lars, you set like ten cabins on fire," David said. "Remember that outhouse?"
"I didn’t mean to do that; honest!" Lars was laughing. "I thought it was empty!"
"He just ran out of there, his pants around his ankles, man, and he’s like, his fat is like rolling as he runs, and you can see it all, and it’s bright red." They laughed.