The Queen's Gambit by Walter Tevis Read Free Book Online Page B

dime, in for a dollar.”
    She took the jar over to the table and poured the contents of the Dixie cups back into it, stepped back and checked. It would be simple to lean over from the outside and lift the jar out. She knew, too, where she could hide it, on the shelf of a disused janitors’ closet in the girls’ room. There was an old galvanized bucket up there that was never used; the jar would fit into it. There was also a short ladder in the closet, and she could use it safely because a person could lock the door on the girls’ room from the inside. Then, if there was a search for the missing pills, even if they found them, they couldn’t be traced to her. She would take only a few at a time and wouldn’t tell anyone—not even Jolene.
    The pills she had gulped down a few minutes before were beginning to reach her mind. All of her nervousness had vanished. With clear purposefulness, she climbed up on Mr. Fergussen’s white table, put her head out the window and looked around her at the still-empty room. The jar of pills was a few inches from her left knee. She wriggled her way through the window and onto the stool. Standing up high there, she felt calm, powerful, in charge of her life.
    She leaned forward dreamily and took the jar by its rim in both hands. A fine relaxation had spread through her body. She let herself go limp, staring down into the depths of green pills. Stately music came from the movie in the Library. Her toes were still on the stool and her body was loosely jackknifed over the window ledge; she no longer felt the sharp edge. She was like a limp rag doll. As her eyes lost focus, the green became a bright luminous blur.
    “
Elizabeth!
” The voice seemed to come from a place inside her head. “
Elizabeth!
” She blinked. It was a woman’s voice, harsh, like Mother’s. She did not look around. Her fingers and thumbs on the side of the jar had gone loose. She squeezed them together and picked up the jar. She felt herself moving in slow motion, like slow motion in a movie where someone falls from a horse at a rodeo and you see him float gently to the ground as though it could not hurt at all. She lifted the jar with both hands and turned, and the bottom of the jar hit the window ledge with a dull ringing sound and her wrists twisted and the jar came loose from her hands and exploded on the edge of the stool at her feet. The fragments, mixed with hundreds of green pellets, cascaded to the linoleum floor. Bits of glass caught light like rhinestones and lay in place shivering while the green pills rolled outward like a bright waterfall toward Mrs. Deardorff. Mrs. Deardorff was standing a few feet away from her, saying, “Elizabeth!” over and over again. After what seemed a long time, the pills stopped moving.
    Behind Mrs. Deardorff was Mr. Fergussen in his white pants and T-shirt. Next to him stood Mr. Schell, and just behind them, crowding to see what had happened, were the other children, some of them still blinking from the movie that had just ended. Every person in the room was staring at her, high on the miniature stage of her stool with her hands a foot apart as though she were still holding the glass jar.
    Fergussen rode with her in the brown staff car and carried her into the hospital to the little room where the lights were bright and they made her swallow a gray rubber tube. It was easy. Nothing mattered. She could still see the green mound of pills in the jar. There were strange things happening inside her, but it didn’t matter. She fell asleep and woke only for a moment when someone pushed a hypodermic needle in her arm. She did not know how long she was there, but she did not spend the night. Fergussen drove her back the same evening. She sat in the front seat now, awake and unworried. The hospital was on the campus, where Fergussen was a graduate student; he pointed out the Psychology Building as they drove past it. “That’s where I go to school,” he said.
    She merely nodded.