Night School Read Online Free PDF

whirled. She stared back, but she could not even see the door. She was alone in black, complete dark. The dark here was like a bad night, slick and slippery. When she swallowed, the dark left an ugly taste in her mouth.
    I’m in here with somebody, she thought. Those were prison doors. I’m alone in here with the vicious and the violent.
    Her feet calmly turned and walked her on into the groping, searching dark. It was not Mariah feeling her way; it was the dark feeling her.
    Go home, she said to herself. Trust your senses. If this were a lousy neighborhood downtown, you’d go back to the car.
    But she did not go back. Her feet never paused.
    She passed the library, whose interior wall of glass exposed stack upon stack of books. Usually the library had a warm comforting look, thousands of friendly books cozily ringing the room, and tired old vinyl couches waiting for silly kids to curl up on them.
    Tonight the books seemed to arch and angle, as if they planned an attack. A single light was on. Mr. Phillips, one of the school’s more pitiful subs, was in there working on papers.
    How stranded he looked, one thin pale person among the dark brigades of books. He looked as if he were always alone, and would never be anything but alone.
    Mariah averted her eyes. Mr. Phillips was in the wrong profession. He had no ability to teach, and did not get along well with teenagers, and yet he’d chosen the most difficult of teaching jobs—substituting.
    Everybody knew that subs were fair game.
    She almost rapped on the glass library door to ask if he were all right. But he was too unaware of her presence. He would jump out of his skin if she suddenly appeared. He was that kind of person. All the world startled him.
    Her legs continued on down the corridor, as if they had an assignment of their own, and knew what pace to set.
    She glanced back once, seeing Mr. Phillips from another angle. For a moment he was not Mr. Phillips at all. He was her brother Bevin, grown older into something even weaker. More desperate. Even more alone.
    Mariah shuddered. What fate on earth was worse than being that lonely?
    If I go on substituting dreams for real life, she thought, I will be that lonely one year.
    Mariah’s hands chilled, as if by some northern winter. Her imagination, which she counted on to toast her heart, froze her fingers instead. It’s only Mr. Phillips, she said to herself, it’s nobody. Stop thinking about Bevin.
    Andrew appeared, bending back out of a classroom doorway to signal her. He was a beacon of blond hair and gold tan. One of the wonderful things about California was short sleeves on boys. You had their muscles to admire year-round.
    Andrew was the sun and she was butter. Mariah wanted to melt. But, she warned herself sternly, if you get googly-eyed the minute you get close to him, he’ll sit on the far side of the room forever. Remember that this is real life now. You can’t revise it and do it over again in your mind until it’s just as romantic as you can get it. You actually have to live tonight.
    “Hey, Mariah!” Andrew called, so eagerly he sounded as if Mariah’s presence was going to make his night. His laugh was different. He was bubbly and the smile was a little boy’s. A smile she hadn’t seen on his face since she’d first adored him, when he was eight.
    “Andrew,” she said breathlessly, “what’s going on?”
    He shrugged, but it was a happy, easy, delighted shrug. Somebody who really doesn’t care what’s going on, because life is too good to notice.
    Is it me? she thought. Am I part of the goodness in Andrew’s life?
    So Mariah, too, dreaming and pretending, entered the classroom without seeing the threshold over which she passed.
    Ned slipped nervously into the building, and walked jerkily down the hall, staying very close to the walls, as if the walls were his friend and the open center of the hallway was his enemy. , He had been teased about this ridiculous habit for years, and had