by David Klass
“Nothing,” Charley the Fish said. “But you have to admit, he’s not in school. And the police are.”
The news that the police were on campus, questioning students, created a weird energy at Lawndale High. Our school is a pretty tough place, but it’s tough in very predictable ways. Students get bullied, and now and then they get beaten up, but rarely does something happen that’s bad enough to bring the cops. And now Deputy Police Chief Coyle himself was here, in Vice Principal Tobias’s office. Everybody was talking about it—wondering what had happened on the golf course, and why the police had come, and who was in serious trouble.
Since I had been on the golf course, maybe I should have been worried. But I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong, and I had other things on my mind. Kris and I often meet on the way to school, but I had missed her or she had missed me that morning. And we usually run into each other in the hallway before homeroom, but I had been busy with the Phenom and Charley the Fish. So as fifth-period advanced biology approached, my anxiety level kept rising. I wanted to see her, and, at the same time, I was kind of dreading it.
Kris is a stellar student and takes almost exclusively advanced-placement classes like calculus and world history, so we have never had too many classes together. But I’ve always been good in biology, and the head of the Science Department, Mr. Desoto, surprised me by suggesting I take his advanced class this year. It was fun being in the same class with Kris. We sat side by side and laughed and joked our way through the fifty minutes. We studied for tests together, and when a project called for lab partners, we paired off. We had already bred fruit flies and raised bean plants. Today we were supposed to dissect a frog together.
I walked through the bio lab door, and there Kris was, already suited up in a white dissecting smock, goggles, and rubber gloves. Beneath the ridiculous costume, she looked beautiful, as always. Her sandy brown hair was tied back in a ponytail, and her hazel eyes sparkled behind the thick goggles. She didn’t seem embarrassed to see me, or guilty for having been out with the Phenom. Nor did the prospect of dissecting a frog appear to be making her upset or the least bit squeamish—if anything, she was raring to go. “So, Monsieur Brickman,” she said when I walked in, “I believe the specialty du jour is frogs’ legs.”
I couldn’t think of anything light or clever to say back. I guess I just wasn’t in the mood. “We’re not gonna eat it, we’re just gonna cut it up,” I muttered.
She dropped the French chef accent and switched to a backwoods drawl. “Okay, then, pardner, get out your buzz saw and let’s slice and dice.”
I pulled on a dissecting smock and goggles. This lab was optional—Mr. Desoto had told us that in his opinion there was no way to really learn the anatomy and physiology of an animal unless you literally took one apart. That’s why medical students dissect dogs, and eventually human cadavers. But he also said he understood that some of us might have personal objections to dissecting a dead frog, so anybody who wanted to could opt out and spend the period in the library, doing some extra reading. Of course, nobody opted for the library. Not that we had a class of frog haters, but there was something about the word “dissection”—about goggles and scalpels and anatomy drawings with directions for incisions—that made us feel like doctors or mad scientists.
“You look like Dr. Frankenstein,” Kris said with a giggle when she saw me with my goggles on.
Normally I would have returned the compliment, but I just said, “Where’s our frog?”
“What’s the rush?” Kris wanted to know. “It’s not like he’s going to hop away or anything.” And then, when I didn’t laugh, or even smile, she asked, “Joe, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I said, and went to the front of the room to get our frog. Now, I am not squeamish. A frog—living or dead—is no big thing to me. I’ve caught dozens if not hundreds of frogs in my life. I’ve snuck up on them in ponds and marshes, tiptoeing in from behind, and grabbing them around their fat bellies before they could hop away. In fact, once in fourth grade I believe I caught a particularly slimy specimen in Sylvan Park and brought it back and dropped it down Kris’s shirt.
But when I went to the front of the room and Mr. Desoto handed me the dead frog that Kris and I were to dissect, I didn’t feel so good. It was lying there stiffly in its bag, more like a piece of rubber than a frog that had once been hopping around chasing flies. And it stank of formaldehyde. For some reason, and I know this sounds crazy, I kind of identified with it. I felt like I was in a transparent bag, about to have all my nerves laid bare. “You and me, pal,” I whispered to the frog as I carried it at arm’s length.
I brought it back to our lab desk and handed it to Kris. “Here you go. Slice and dice.”
She opened the bag and the smell of formaldehyde got even stronger. But, surprisingly, there was a sweet edge to this awful smell. Then I realized that Kris was wearing perfume. This may not seem like such a big revelation, but there are girls in our school who battle each other in the designer clothes and expensive scents competition on a daily basis. Kris wasn’t one of them. But on this day, I noticed, she was wearing enough perfume for me to smell it over the formaldehyde. And earrings! Kris never wore earrings. But she was wearing hoop earrings today.
She felt me staring at her. “So, J, you wanna tell me what’s wrong?” she asked again.
“Nothing, K,” I said, responding in kind. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Why should anything be wrong with me?”
“I dunno,” I said, and I couldn’t quite keep the anger from my voice. “Why don’t you tell me.”
“There’s nothing to tell,” she said. “Everything’s cool.”
“Great,” I said. “Terrific. Me too. Cool. Never better.” I dumped our frog out on the plastic dissecting board, turned it belly up, and began pinning its legs.
Kris watched me skewer the poor frog’s limbs so that it was soon spread-eagled to the yellow plastic and I knew she could tell I was real mad about something. “So,” Kris asked, “want to change gears and talk about something positive and happy for a while?”
I stuck a pin through the remaining leg. “Fire away.”
“I hear your team has got itself a star player,” she said with a big smile. “Congratulations.”
I kept my eyes on the dead frog. “No we don’t.”
“Antonio.” I didn’t like hearing her say his name. She pronounced it like it was some exotic foreign dish she was ordering in a restaurant. A dish she had tried, and was eager to order again. “That guy from Brazil—”
“I know who Antonio is.”
“He told me he wanted to join your team. And he’s great. I mean, he’s gonna turn your whole season around. If you win the rest of your games, you can still make the county tournament, and with Antonio I’m sure …”
That was when I lost it a little. I looked up at her—right into those pretty eyes. She saw my look and she knew enough to shut up. My words came fast and hard. “Kris, you go where you want, with who you want, do what you want, it’s none of my business. But leave my soccer team alone.”
Seconds ticked off silently, as Kris looked back at me and the dead frog looked up at both of us. “What the heck are you talking about?” she finally demanded. “For starters, what do you mean, go where I want, with who I want? What are you talking about—”
She was pissed off, but I matched her anger for anger. “If either of us is owed an explanation—”
And then we both shut up because the door to our bio lab opened and Mrs. Eckes, Vice Principal Tobias’s dreaded aide and henchwoman, entered. She was a tall woman with a flint-hard face topped by a shock of hair dyed an ominous shade of flame orange. She was a feared figure in our school because she appeared in classrooms only to summon students to her boss for severe discipline. She spoke some quick words to Mr. Desoto, and they both looked at me.
“This is a one-of-a-kind lab that he won’t be able to make up if he misses,” Mr. Desoto told her. “I’ll send him
over as soon as we’re done … ?”
“No. Now,” she said. “They want him right away.”
Mr. Desoto shrugged. “Joe, you’d better go …”
Everyone in the room fell silent. A summons to the vice principal’s office is bad enough, but they all knew I was on my way to face a police interrogation.
Some of the anger drained from Kris’s face and she even looked a little worried for me.
I looked back at her and said softly, “See ya, K. Good luck with the frog. Nice earrings.”
And then I followed Mrs. Eckes out of the room, down the long and empty corridor, toward the vice principal’s office.
10
Vice Principal Tobias was a big man with a big office. Facing west from the second floor, it looked out over athletic fields and tennis courts to a row of weeping willows that fringed the waters of Overpeck Creek. The office had been large to start with, and then he had knocked down a wall and taken over what used to be an accounting room. Since old Landisman, the principal, was doddering and missing from school for weeks at a time, Tobias had been running things day to day. From the ever-expanding size of his office, it was pretty clear he expected to be taking over completely in the near future.
The Vice Principal himself was more than six feet tall and must have tipped the scales at well over three hundred pounds. Not much of it was muscle—he was built like an enormous pillow, and every year the stuffing of the pillow seemed to sift downward a little bit, following the pull of gravity. He had a great bald head and enormous hands, and even though he always wore dark suits with the middle buttons done up, you could tell that his stomach jiggled like a tub of Jell-O when he walked.
When I entered his office, Vice Principal Tobias was sitting back in his big leather armchair, sipping coffee and talking to Deputy Police Chief Coyle and a young policewoman who I didn’t recognize, about the fish mounted on his office wall. He didn’t stop talking when I came through the door, so I stood there uncomfortably, waiting for them to acknowledge me, as Tobias finished describing how he had caught this trophy largemouth bass. “So then I said to Martha, ‘To hell with eating it, this one belongs on my wall ’cause it’s more than a meal, it’s a damn work of art,’” Tobias finished.
“Well, you got that right,” Deputy Police Chief Coyle said, studying the mounted fish as if making a calculation. “How much they charge you to stuff it?”
“Twenty-five bucks.”
“You got ripped off,” Coyle said. “I got a nephew who would’ve done it for fifteen. But it’s a fine fish anyway.”
The policewoman didn’t say anything about the fish. She was young—maybe twenty-five, with short black hair and a pretty face that she kept pointed at the screen of a laptop computer on the desk in front of her. I didn’t blame her for keeping quiet—if I were a pretty young woman alone with Tobias and Coyle, I would keep my mouth shut, too. I guessed Deputy Police Chief Coyle had brought her along to take notes and make himself seem more important. I figured he was probably also hitting on her every chance he got.
You can probably tell that I didn’t have a very high opinion of Deputy Police Chief Coyle. My father washes all police cars for free. Before he became the deputy chief, Coyle used to be a regular patrolman and he would pull his cruiser into our car wash twice a week, even if it was perfectly clean. Now, police cruisers are more work and they take longer to dry than just about any other type of car, because of the overhead flashers. Coyle used to walk slowly around his car when I was done, inspecting it from the hubcaps to the flashers. As often as not, he’d call me back with a loud “Hey, Car Wash Boy. Sloppy work today. Come on over here and get your rag out again.”
I didn’t relish being called Car Wash Boy. Especially when we were washing his car for free. And I didn’t appreciate being tipped a quarter for a police cruiser, when most people tip a dollar for a regular car. Each time I vacuumed the inside of his cruiser, I saw the Penthouse and other magazines that Coyle kept under the dash. He had a pretty extensive collection. I figure what a person reads is his own private business, but at the same time I like to think that police, on duty, aren’t reading flesh mags.
So when Coyle looked down from the fish on the wall to me, and stared at me hard for a moment as if he was calculating how much it might cost to have me stuffed, I looked right back at him, meeting his gaze head-on. We didn’t like each other, and we both knew it. But whatever I thought about him, he wore the badge, and I knew I had to be real careful.
“Sam, Lisa, this here is Joe Brickman,” Vice Principal Tobias said. “Good kid. Wrestling star. Captain of the soccer team, too. Not a discipline problem either, least up till now.”
“Joe and I know each other,” Coyle said. “We’re old buddies. Right, Joe?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Joe used to wash my car,” Coyle said, with a little grin for the benefit of the policewoman. “Did a pretty good job, too. Pretty handy with that rag.”
I felt her glance at me, as if trying to imagine me holding a rag. I just stood there with my arms dangling, and didn’t say a word.
“How’s your father, Joe?” Coyle asked, not that he could have cared less.
“He’s okay. Thanks for asking.”
And then, quickly, “You play golf, Joe?”
The unexpected question caught me off guard. “Not really,” I said. “I mean, I play all sports a little.”
“Lot of wrestling,” Coyle said. “Soccer captain.” The knuckle of his index finger ran back and forth over his thin, rust-colored mustache. “Why not a little golf? You own your own clubs, Joe?”
“Old ones.”
“So you like to hang out on golf courses?”
Now I knew where he was going with this. “Not particularly. Like I said, I only play a little.”
“What about Saturday night? The town course, about 11 p.m.?”
I stood there awkwardly, looking back at him, and knew that he knew perfectly well that I couldn’t answer what he was asking. It’s not that I don’t respect cops. My father brought me up to trust police, and to tell them the truth, so even though I didn’t have much personal liking for Deputy Police Chief Coyle, I would have liked to answer his questions. All I had done on the golf course on Saturday night was to intervene to stop violence, and to rescue a friend. But of course there was no way I could tell them that. Because once I admitted I had been there, I would have to provide details, and name names.
There’s a code of silence in our high school that you just don’t break. Never. Ever. Kids don’t rat on other kids to adults. Lawndale kids don’t rat on Banksiders. Soccer team players don’t rat on hard guys. It was simply out of the question. On the other hand, I had to say something. And I didn’t want to tell an outright lie. “Wish I could get in to play. The town course is locked at night,” I said. “And fenced off. Barbed wire at the top.”
Coyle scratched his nose. “So, if someone said they saw you running away from the golf course on Saturday night, they’d be lying?”
“Did someone say that?” I asked.
Suddenly he was leaning forward and his tone was hard. “Answer my question.”
“Sure I was running near the golf course,” I admitted. “I always run at night, to stay in shape for soccer. I run in the winter, too, for wrestling.”
“The golf course is three miles from Laurel Street,” Coyle pointed out, letting me know he considered this serious enough to have taken the time to find out where I live. “Pretty far for a late night jog.”
“Sometimes I run five, six, seven miles,” I told him. “Once I get going I don’t notice the distance.”
“So on Saturday night, when you were running near the golf course, who else did you see? I’m collecting names, Joe. Someone gave me yours. If you help me add to the collection, I can let you out of here.”
“Sorry. I was concentrating on running.”
Coyle looked back at me. “So that’s the way it’s going to be,” he said. There was a long, uncom
fortable silence during which they all looked at me and I didn’t make a sound. “Lisa,” he finally said, “tell Joe about Red Flag.”
The young policewoman looked up from her computer screen. “Red Flag is a new system,” she said, and it sounded like she was quoting from a public relations brochure she had memorized. “It was developed at the state level as an interface between school and law enforcement. Crimes involving teens, and reports of violence involving teenagers, and certain other types of incidents and information get flagged automatically onto our system. And when we start to see patterns and increases that we think might be warning signs, we come to the school and get involved.”
“Sounds like a good idea,” I said.
“It is a good idea,” Vice Principal Tobias said. “But it requires the cooperation of students. What happened on the golf course on Saturday night, Joe?”
For a minute I looked right back at this big man who would soon be taking over our high school, and I thought to myself, almost angrily, that he was no fool. He was not old and naive like Principal Landisman. He had gone to school here himself, years ago. He knew all about the bullying. He knew about the fights—he could see them on the athletic fields from his window. He knew about the feuds between Lawndale and Bankside that went on day to day, week to week. And he sat there in his big leather swivel chair looking at his stuffed fish, and he did nothing. So what did he want from me?
“I wish I could help more, sir,” I said. “I was really just out for a run.”
11
One of the things I love most about sports is how, when things are going from lousy to awful, or are getting so confusing you’re not sure why you bothered to get out of bed that morning, you can completely lose yourself in sprinting around a grassy field till your lungs burn and your legs ache. There’s nothing quite as effective at clearing a troubled mind as a hard sliding tackle or a SLAMMING, BAMMING chest-to-chest collision.
That afternoon, as I sprinted toward the practice field, I tried to forget all about Kris and the Mouse and golf course brawls and police interrogations, and just enjoy racing down the gravel path and then out along the grass of the practice fields as an autumn breeze blew off Overpeck Creek, straight into my face. It was a whistling breeze that sometimes swelled to a howling roar as it thrashed willow branches and smacked waves against the bank.
