by Jeff Hirsch
“God!” Jackson said when he caught up to me. “She’s always doing stuff like that!”
I had my head down, watching my old boots slap against the asphalt, trying to swallow the thick lump in my throat and shake the warm feeling of Violet’s arms around me.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Moms are like that, I guess.”
Jackson and I fell in with a torrent of kids that pushed us faster toward the turn in the road that led to school. Jackson tried to explain the school day to me as we went, but I only caught bits of it. Six class periods broken up by lunch. Something about math. A buzzing nervousness had come over me. I craned my head toward the safety of the Greens’ house, wondering if I could turn back before it was too late.
“Hey, look, there’s Derrick and Martin!”
Martin looked half asleep. He stared blankly at the road in front of him, glasses slightly askew and shirt untucked, his chopped-up crew cut glistening wet. Derrick, on the other hand, reminded me of corn popping in a skillet. He bounced from toe to toe as though he could barely contain himself.
“Guys!” Derrick shouted. “Compadres! Mis amigos! Como estás?”
“Hey, Derrick,” Jackson said.
“Well, if it isn’t my little friend with the big appetite,” Derrick said to me. “What’s up, my man?”
Head cottony with nerves, I didn’t know what to say. I hitched my shoulders noncommittally.
“Awesome. We all ready for a big day of learning?”
The double doors to the school loomed ahead of us, and the crowd swept us right toward them. Derrick knocked a few little ones out of the way. I took a deep breath, and in we went.
We were herded into a narrow hallway lined with metal lockers and doors to other rooms. I had never seen so many people my own age in one place before. I marveled at their clean clothes and the way they coursed through the hall, full of purpose. As with the houses the day I came to town, I searched for any sign that these people had grown up in the same world I did, but found nothing.
As I studied them, I was being watched too. When I caught them looking, they’d wrinkle their noses before turning away to whisper to their friends. A girl in a gray skirt pointed out my ratty old coat and giggled. I faked like I was cold and pulled it tight around me, hoping to hide the rest of my clothes.
Once we were inside the classroom, Jackson, Martin, and Derrick took desks about halfway back. Jackson pointed to an empty chair in front of him.
“Sit here,” he said.
All around me, kids were writing in their notebooks, desperately trying to finish their homework, I guessed, like Jackson had done that morning. The ones who weren’t working were talking. The roar of it came in waves, building and building until the entire room was shouting at once. It sounded to me like glass grinding against glass. Why does everyone talk so much here? I wondered. What is there to say? I almost put my head down on the desk and covered my ears, but the last thing I needed was to stand out even more. I looked up to my right. Above a set of tall bookshelves I could see the blue sky and the waving branches of the sycamore tree out of the window. “What are you doing here?”
At first I didn’t realize anyone was talking to me, but then someone’s knee bumped roughly into my side. “Hey! Spy! I’m talking to you.”
I looked up. Will Henry. He was wearing a black T-shirt and a pair of jeans that bulged a bit around the thigh where I guessed a bandage was. He was with his three friends, the two sluggy twins and zit-covered mountain of a redhead.
“I said, what are you doing here?” Somehow Will’s eyes glittered but were utterly blank at the same time. My hand fell beneath my coat and closed around the handle of my knife. When I didn’t say anything, Will snatched the notebook out of my hands and held it up to Jackson.
“You give him this, Greeny? You and your folks? How many of these you think we have left? And you give one to some spy?”
Will planted his fists on my desk and leaned over me.
“These things are for us,” he said. “Not you.”
“Leave him alone, Will!”
I turned and was surprised to see that Jackson was up out of his seat. Derrick and Martin rose tentatively to join him.
“What are you going to do?” Will continued, leaning toward him. Even though he was a whole row of desks away, Jackson took one nervous step back, which clearly delighted Will. “You and your folks gonna save this stray too? What? Was the first one not pathetic enough for you?”
Every part of me tensed, desperate to shoot up out of my chair and knock Will into the wall behind him. I struggled to stay calm even as he leaned over me, his face inches from mine.
“How about you, spy? You gonna do something?”
My cheeks burned and the wounds on my hand throbbed as I gripped the rough leather of the knife’s hilt.
The doors at the back of the classroom flew open and slammed against the wall.
“Class, settle down! Settle down, everyone!” the teacher called as he rushed in past us to the front of the room. “Mr. Henry, take your friends and sit.”
“Mr. Tuttle —” Will began, pointing at me.
“No time, Mr. Henry,” Tuttle said, distracted with papers at his desk. “Sit or find yourself in detention.”
Will glanced at Tuttle. “You’re lucky, spy,” he said as he tossed the notebook over his shoulder to one of his friends. “Come on, guys. Kid’s stinking up this side of the room anyway.”
The redhead gave me a vacant, moist-eyed glare while one of the slug twins nudged my desk so my pencils fell to the ground with a clatter. I waited until they were back at their seats before bending to pick them up, but when I did, Jackson was already holding them out to me.
“Here you go.”
“Thanks.” I turned away from him and rearranged my things. It was odd how Jackson and the others had stood up for me the way they had. Getting backed up like that by people who weren’t family didn’t make sense. It felt good, but I couldn’t afford to be careless. Nobody did anything for free.
“Class, I will need your attention … now.”
Tuttle smacked his ruler across the desk and there was a rustle of bodies as everyone dropped into their seats and shot to attention. He surveyed the room, moving from face to face and making little marks on a sheet of paper until his eyes fell on me.
“And who is this?”
“Stephen,” Jackson piped up from behind me. “Stephen, uh …” Jackson tapped my shoulder.
“Quinn,” I said.
“Stephen Quinn. He’s new.”
Tuttle glanced at Jackson. “Yes, I can see that he’s new, Mr. Green. If he wasn’t, I would not have expressed surprise upon seeing him, would I?”
“Um —”
“Rhetorical question, Mr. Green. Now. Quinn. Stephen. I am Mr. Tuttle. Have you been in school before?”
I cleared my throat and tried to sit up straighter. “No sir.”
“Can you read? Do you know your numbers?”
“Yes sir.”
“The Pledge of Allegiance?”
“The pledge of allegiance to what?”
The class laughed all around me. I felt my cheeks go red and hot.
“Well, you’ll have a lot of catching up to do, but I can’t afford to slow down.” Tuttle went back to marking his paper, then nodded toward Jackson and Martin. “Mr. Green and Mr. Stantz will help you.”
“Hey, what about me?”
Tuttle glared at Derrick. “I think Mr. Quinn would do well to pay as little attention to you as possible on educational matters. Don’t you agree, Mr. Waverly?”
“Yes! Absolutely!” Derrick said. “Good call, sir.”
Tuttle gave him a withering look, then stepped back to the blackboard behind him. It was covered by some kind of pull-down screen. The class groaned as he reached for it.
“Yes, class,” Tuttle said. “That’s right. If you were able to better control yourselves, these little tests wouldn’t be necessary. So take out your —”
Before Tuttle could finish, the doors behind us burst open again, smacking against the walls. The class turned as one body toward the sound as Jenny Tan strode barefoot into the classroom. She carried a tattered notebook. A nub of pencil was stuck behind one ear.
“Well, well, well, this is quite an honor,” Tuttle deadpanned. “We haven’t been graced with your presence in weeks. So nice of you to join us today, Miss Green.”
“It’s Tan,” Jenny said as she plopped down into an open seat toward the back of the class and put her bare feet up on the chair in front of her. “And you’re welcome.”
A ripple of laughter went through the classroom. Jackson had his eyes closed tight and his head in his hands. Irritation pulsed off him in waves. Tuttle slapped his ruler down on the corner of his desk.
“I won’t have any more disruptions.”
Jenny raised her hands, palms up, as if to say he wouldn’t get any from her. Tuttle considered her a moment, made a notation on his sheet, then stepped back to pull on the screen in front of the blackboard. It shot up toward the ceiling, revealing a long list of questions written in chalk. Jenny bent over her desk, laying her chin in the palm of one hand while she dug into the wood of her desk with her fingernail.
Jackson handed me a sheet of paper from his notebook as the rest of the class picked up their pencils and began writing. Jenny flicked her hair out of her face, turning just enough to catch me staring at her. It was like being stuck out in the open as lightning flashed all around me. I knew I should look away, and quickly, but I froze.
Jenny raised one eyebrow, and when I still didn’t look away, she jutted her face out at me, bugging her big brown eyes and making a show of staring back. I looked away immediately, up at the test questions, trying to calm the thrill of nerves in my stomach.
I was surprised to find that the test was on Great Expectations, a book I had actually read and more or less remembered. I made a stab at the questions, but it was hard to concentrate. I could feel Jenny across the room. It was like her body had this gravity all its own and it was pulling at me, trying to make me turn. I thought of her drawing spread across that rumpled paper. The riderless horse, motionless but somehow pulsing with movement and life.
Jackson nudged the back of my shoulder. “Ten minutes, Steve,” he whispered. “Come on.”
I shook thoughts of Jenny out of my head and forced myself to focus. The test was a fill-in-the-blank thing and time was ticking down, but I rushed to fill in the last answer just as Tuttle pulled the screen back down in front of the questions.
“Now, class,” Tuttle said as he collected papers. “We will continue our discussion of algebra. Turn to page two twenty-three….”
Jackson nudged me again. When I turned, he was holding a folded piece of paper. He jerked his thumb over toward Jenny, who was bent over her notebook, drawing in the margins. I took the paper and unfolded it.
It was a short note, just two lines long, but when I was done reading, it felt like something had sucked every last wisp of breath out of my lungs.
Across the room, Jenny was smiling in a way that reminded me of a wolf.
The note said, in a jagged scrawl:
I saw what you buried in the woods Friday night.
You are a naughty naughty boy.
FOURTEEN
As soon as Tuttle dismissed us for the day, I jumped out of my seat and ran for the door.
“Hey!” Jackson cried. “Where are you going? We’ve got a game!”
I ignored him. Jenny had started to leave before “Class dismissed” had even left Tuttle’s mouth. I raced down the hallway behind her, but by the time I made it through the school’s front doors and outside she was gone.
The doors behind me opened again and someone rammed into my shoulder, pitching me forward. I turned around just in time to see a golden flash of blond and Will’s grinning face.
“You oughta watch where you stand. I think some people are trying to walk this way.”
Will and his friends laughed.
That’s it.
I grabbed two handfuls of Will’s shirt and spun him around, slamming him into the wall. An icy thrill went through me as his eyes bulged with surprise and fear. I was about to cock my fist when someone grabbed my elbow.
“Stephen, don’t,” a voice said. “Tuttle.”
As soon as he said it, Tuttle appeared behind us like a pillar of black smoke. “Mr. Green, Mr. Quinn, Mr. Henry. What’s going on here?”
“Nothing, sir,” Jackson said quickly. “Right, Stephen?”
Jackson gave me a nudge and I managed to back away from Will and agree through gritted teeth that everything was fine.
“Good,” Tuttle said. “Mr. Henry?”
Will jumped forward with barely disguised glee. “He’s got a knife, sir,” he said, pointing at my waist. “He keeps threatening us with it and it’s making all of us feel really unsafe.”
“That’s not true! I didn’t —”
Before I could say anything else, Tuttle pulled aside my coat and yanked the knife straight out of its sheath.
“I see,” Tuttle said, turning the dark blade over in his hands. “Mr. Henry, you and your friends are dismissed.”
“But —”
“You’re dismissed.”
Will’s glare bloomed into a wide smile. He held up one finger and mouthed the words strike one behind Tuttle’s back before he and his friends glided lazily up the hill and away from the school.
“You three may go as well,” Tuttle said to Jackson, Martin, and Derrick. As they left, I caught Jackson’s eye. He had a strange, worried look on his face but motioned that I should follow them toward the field east of the school when I was done.
“It’s old,” Tuttle said as he turned the leather-wrapped handle of the knife over in his hands. “Older than you. Your father’s?”
I nodded.
“I thought as much,” he said quietly. “He’s hurt, I understand.” I nodded, struggling to swallow something bitter that had risen in my throat.
“I see,” Tuttle said. He ran his finger gently along the knife’s blade. “I will not have chaos in this place, Mr. Quinn. There’s enough of that on the outside. To discourage it, there are a range of punishments I have for my students. Would you like to know what they are?”
I stood my ground, saying nothing.
“There is detention. There is extra homework and cleaning of the schoolhouse. If that doesn’t work, there is brief but vigorous corporal punishment. Now, for someone such as yourself, someone who has no ties to this town, I believe there is another option, the one I hear that Caleb Henry and a few others are already eager to exercise. Expulsion. From school and, if needed, from the town. I believe that would be something you or your father could ill afford, would it not?”
Tuttle waited for an answer. An ember burned down in the pit of my stomach. My fingernails stabbed into my palms. For this man who I didn’t know, had never met, to have that kind of power over me and my dad … it took every ounce of my strength to shake my head.
“I thought not. Luckily for you, there is another option.”
Tuttle turned the knife’s hilt back toward me.
“The stern warning. Take it home and do not bring it to my class again. Do you understand?”
I paused, expecting some sort of trick, then took the knife from him. Tuttle clasped his hands behind his back and stepped down to the concrete sidewalk.
“I’ll be watching you, Mr. Quinn,” he said over his shoulder. Then he was gone.
I fell against the brick wall behind me and clamped my eyes shut, grimacing from the spiky seed of a headache that was sprouting in the back of my skull. What was I thinking? First Jenny sees me burying that stuff in the woods and now this? Will said he’d make sure Dad and I weren’t here long, and now it was pretty clear how he intended to make that happen. In coming to school, I couldn’t have helped him any more if I had tried. I should have seen it. I let my head fall hard onto the brick behind me
, relishing the dull shock of the pain.
“Well, that was kind of awesome.”
I opened my eyes. Derrick was grinning madly and bouncing on the balls of his feet. Martin and Jackson were behind him.
“Just what we all needed before a little baseball game, right? Excitement!”
His voice was like broken glass in my head. I pushed off the brick wall and blew past the three of them without a word.
“Hey! Where you going?” Derrick cried as he jogged alongside me, trailed by the others. “We need you! You can even play second base!”
“Leave me alone, Derrick.”
“But —”
“I don’t want to play some stupid game, okay?”
“Stupid — are you kidding me? Have you ever played baseball before? I mean, what the hell have you been doing all these years?”
“Gee, Derrick, maybe he’s been spending all his time looking for food and shelter and stuff.”
“Valid point, Green!” Derrick said, and darted in closer to me, sticking his face right in mine. “But you don’t have to look for food and shelter right now, do you?”
I glared at him, but he kept going.
“Okay, I get it. Crappy day for you. No question,” Derrick went on. “And I know that most people would back off at this point and let you go and gather your thoughts or whatever, but I can’t. My mom says it’s ‘cause I’ve got, like, this thing in my head that makes it so once I get on something I can’t let it go, and I get kinda hyper about it. She said when she was a kid they’d have doped me to the gills on this stuff called Ritalin, but now — ha! — everyone has to just put up with me!”
“It’s true,” Jackson said. “He won’t stop bothering you until you play or one of you dies.”
“Ha! Nice one, Green. Steve, look, seriously —”
“I said leave me ALONE!” I planted my palms on Derrick’s chest and pushed him so hard he stumbled and fell back into the grass.
Everything went quiet except the sound of blood pounding in my ears.
Derrick looked up at me with huge eyes. Jackson and Martin were motionless, just behind me, waiting.
“Steve,” Jackson said, his voice tremulous. “Hey, come on, we were just trying to —”
