Then Hot Sauce said, “Why a video screen?”
“Well, why do you think a video screen? Why not just stand up there and talk through a loudspeaker?” said the Angel.
Nona, who thought about this kind of thing a great deal, immediately said— “Oh, they don’t want to get shot! They’d probably get shot by someone.”
“Yes. Well done,” said the Angel.
The others were all immediately chuffed for her, and demonstrated it. They slapped her on the back and said, “Good one, Nona,” and “You’re smart, Nona,” until Nona preened, but then a few seconds later she felt a little bit patronised, and she said: “Well, I wonder who it is, who’s going to speak.”
“You’ll find out. Why hurry?” said the Angel. “Look, I’m the only teacher left here—Joli has gone home to make sure her parents are all right. Let’s cancel school for the evening and do something fun, why don’t we? I don’t feel like teaching anything very scientific. I’ll get out the drawing paper and the paints and we can draw for a while. We’ll leave the blackouts up and turn on the lights early.”
Born in the Morning said, “My dads said to come right back or they’d come to pick me up,” and the Angel said— “A quandary, is it? Well, I don’t want to contradict your fathers, but why not let them come and pick you up? I don’t feel great about letting you walk alone through the streets right now. They’ll be jabbing and temperature testing everyone in sight, even if they’ve seen you before, to make sure you’re not House. If you want a needle jabbed in your arse, go ahead.”
It was so funny to hear the Angel say arse that everyone lost it—Nona included—and even Kevin giggled, even though he was normally very serious. Hot Sauce smiled too, but a little distantly, like she was thinking of something else. She was happy enough to go with Nona to get out the big brown sheets of drawing paper, and the nice-smelling boxes of fat wax crayons and chalk. The Angel was at the light box flicking switches and saying, “Draw your favourite animal, go on, I’ve got a book of pictures if you want help,” but as it turned out everyone only wanted to draw Noodle. Noodle was asleep next to the teacher’s desk on one of the abandoned mats, and Beautiful Ruby and Born in the Morning and even Honesty and Kevin squatted there to sketch his outline in chalk. Funny to think of Honesty drawing Noodle, really, when he’d just said no more school.
That had hurt Nona’s feelings a little bit; she didn’t want to think about anyone leaving school. She sat back at one of the tables, feeling her weight as a Teacher’s Aide—doodling a little bit on one of the big brown pieces of paper but not quite joining in—and Hot Sauce perched on the desk next to her, still staring out the window. The Angel went around closing them all, but she shouldn’t have bothered, Nona thought: the outside was weirdly, deadly quiet. You couldn’t even hear honking.
Nona sketched some ideas of animals—what she thought animals should look like, on best principles—and once satisfied with her work, put down her pencil and looked around instead. It almost seemed normal inside the classroom, though not as noisy as it would be any other day. Beautiful Ruby could create enough noise for ten children at least, but everyone was busy, heads-down and content with the chance to do some art. She saw that this troubled the Angel; whenever she looked out over them she seemed to be cheerful, sometimes saying something like “Only six legs, remember, Ruby, he was bred to have a single arboreal pair,” but there was a sorry quirk to the corners of her thin, freckled mouth, like them all being so well-behaved was miserable in a way. Every so often she would stick her thumbs in her suspenders and whistle a note or two, like a back-of-truck seller on the street, and to Nona those notes didn’t sound cheerful at all.
At one point Honesty stretched his arms out and cracked his neck and his knuckles, and he sidled over to the curtains to twitch them open to take a look at the street, and the Angel said so sharply, “Be sensible, Honesty,” that he dropped the curtain like he’d been shot. But it was too late, he’d twitched it; the look Hot Sauce gave him physically staggered him. He went back to his painting so meekly that on any other day Nona would have screamed with laughter, but not right then.
Nona looked up at the clock, gave it her best shot, squinted herself cross-eyed, then gave up.
“Yes, Nona? You don’t have to put up your hand, y’know,” said the Angel. “You do work here.”