It was the Annual All-School Safety Assembly. The police officer looked short and lonely in the middle of the stage as he rattled off the possible threats: flashers in raincoats; razor blades in apples; strangers in cars.
Ms. Hempel wanted to raise her hand. Wasn’t he forgetting something? He hadn’t even mentioned the predators she dreaded most. And wasn’t it all supposed to sound more cautionary, more scary?
The grisly details that the officer omitted, Ms. Hempel’s imagination generously supplied. The black and shining van, the malevolent clowns, their wigs in sherbet colors. The dim interior, the stains on the carpet. Doors that shut with a rattling slam.
Ms. Hempel clenched her muscles. Terror flowered darkly inside her.
In the very back row of the auditorium, the eighth grade sat and squirmed. Zander, upon completing a drum solo, crashed an invisible cymbal. Elias drew a picture of a small, slouching boy on the back of Julianne’s binder. Jonathan, with the toe of his sneaker, battered the chair of the seventh-grader sitting in front of him. Here they were, arrayed before her: restless, oblivious, vulnerable, all of them.
“Come on, guys.” Mr. Peele, microphone in hand, glowered at the eighth grade. “This is serious.”
An assertion that prompted the entire back row to explode into laughter. The eighth-graders were banished to their homerooms. As they exited the auditorium, banging into everything they touched, Mr. Peele, his palm clamped over the microphone, instructed the homeroom teachers to finish off the job. “And don’t forget to remind them about Safe Haven,” he said, but the homeroom teachers were already walking out the door, rolling their eyes at each other. They had inherited yet another mess, like the teaching of sex education, the chaperoning of Trip Days, the organizing of canned food drives and danceathons.
Ms. Hempel’s class, jostling their way back into the homeroom, looked decidedly pleased with themselves. “We’re missing French!” Sasha announced. Victoriously, they slammed their backpacks down onto the desk-chairs. “How many more periods until lunch?” Geoffrey asked.
They had no idea of the danger. “Don’t you realize,” Ms. Hempel cried, shutting the door behind her, “all the terrible things that could happen to you?”
The class regarded her coolly. The whole assembly, they explained, was not for their benefit. They weren’t small or cute enough anymore. They were too wised-up. “Want some candy, little girl?” Elias said in a cooing voice. Who would fall for such a stupid trick? Probably even the fifth- and sixth-graders knew better.
“I mean,” Sasha said, “we’re not exactly the ones to worry about.”
“I know!” A chorus of agreement. And then, the cherished complaint: no one seemed to have noticed the fact that they were, virtually, in high school and thus fully capable of handling their own affairs.
“Haven’t you heard,” persisted Ms. Hempel, “about the clowns? Who kidnap you? Who drive around in vans!”
“Oh, Ms. Hempel,” Julianne sighed. “We’re fine. Really.”
“Can you imagine,” Sasha asked, “a clown taking off with Jonathan Hamish?”
The class turned and looked at Jonathan, who had peeled the sole off his sneaker and was now trying to insert it down the back of Toby’s shirt. The logic went: in the unlikely chance that Jonathan could be swayed by the promise of bottle rockets and lured into the back of a dark and fusty van, he would exhaust the clowns before anything creepy might happen. The kids chuckled at the thought: the clowns slumped over, wigs askew, wearing the same dazed, disbelieving expression they sometimes saw on the faces of Jonathan’s teachers.
Meanwhile, Toby wriggled valorously.
Ms. Hempel confiscated the sole.
“What is Jonathan, or any of you, going to do when the clowns sneak up behind you and clobber you over the head with a tire iron?” she asked. “Or stuff a chloroform-soaked towel underneath your nose, and you pass out? Dead to the world? What are you going to do then?”
“They do that?” Geoffrey asked.
“For real?” Julianne asked.
“Yes!” Ms. Hempel said. “I read it in the newspaper.”
The eighth grade looked appalled. Ms. Hempel felt appalled, at the enormity of her lie.