Grime and Punishment

the opportunity came. She had to sit quite still, getting her nerves under control, before she could enter the building. In Jane’s opinion, junior high schools were possibly the worst idea educators had ever come up with. At the age children most needed to have older teens to look up to and younger children to set examples for, the system pulled them out and isolated them to flounder around without guidance. No, not without guidance; they had nearly as many counselors as teachers assigned to the school, but those supposedly trained adults hadn’t a fraction of the influence the mere presence of exalted high school kids would have had.
    Drawing a deep breath, Jane entered the school. Unfortunately, at that moment, the bell rang for the last class change and she found herself engulfed in a tide of children. A good third of the boys towered over her and half of them tripped over her. She was jostled unmercifully as she struggled to make her way to the art room, where the meeting was to be held. Some of the kids ran into her deliberately, some because they weren’t paying attention, and a few because the poor things simply didn’t know where all the parts of their rapidly developing bodies were at any given moment. Twice, as she clawed her way forward, a timid voice greeted her by name. She couldn’t discern the source either time.
    She thought she glimpsed Katie, but made no attempt to get her attention. That would have been asking for a snub. She knew that junior high schoolers always tried to maintain the fiction that they had no parents. They might, if pressed, grudgingly admit to a father for the sake of filling out forms, but not to a mother. And never in public.
    She all but fell into the art room when she finally reached it. There were about twenty women present, most of them more or less familiar. Grade-school PTAs consisted of a beleaguered cross section of parents. By junior high, however, only the truly devoted club women were involved. These were the folks they should have called on to bail out Chrysler; they’d have staged international bake sales to boggle the mind. Small knots of conversation were breaking up, and the women were moving (with obscene eagerness, it seemed to Jane) toward desks so the meeting could commence.
    “It positively reeks of hormones in this building,“ one of them was muttering to her friend.
    “It isn’t all hormones. It’s dirty gym socks and chalk dust too. And cheap perfume,“ the friend replied.
    Before Jane could contribute her opinion, Shelley appeared and dragged her to the back of the room, where she’d staked out two desks for them. “Thank God!“ Jane exclaimed. “I thought you’d gotten me here and not shown up yourself. What is it?“
    “Remember when Paul’s mother died a year ago?“ Shelley was talking fast, anxious to convey as much as possible before the group was called to order.
    “Huh? Yes, but what on earth—?“
    “Well, she left him—not me, mind you, but him—a strand of pearls that belonged to her mother. They’re missing.“
    “Forgive me, but what in the world are you talking about? A strand of real pearls? But I thought—“
    “—that Paul’s people were dirt poor. Right. I don’t know if the pearls are genuine or not. See, his mother emigrated from Poland just after World War I with her parents. The pearls were supposed to have been given to her folks during the war by some Russian soldier they helped escape a firing squad or some such thing. They were probably trash, but they might have been the result of some high-class looting. For all I know he might have ripped them off Anastasia’s neck.“
    “You never told me.“
    “I never took the story seriously. They looked pretty ratty to me. Kinda discolored and lumpy. It crossed my mind that they were just tightly rolled dough lumps with a little varnish. Anyhow, Paul thought they were the family treasure, and said he was going to take them to New York sometime and have them appraised and cleaned and restrung. In the meantime, he told me to put them in the safe-deposit box.“
    “Ladies! let me have your attention...“ a woman at the front of the room said, clapping her hands in a very school-teacherish way. She was an angular, hard-featured woman with a belligerent manner. The kid who tried to jostle her in the halls probably came away with serious bruises.
    Jane lowered her voice. “Am I to assume you didn’t bother to lock them up?“
    “Exactly. I just forgot.