by Amy Lane
Kirby grunted—a sound much like Aaron’s, whenever their morning conversation got too personal. “Tell my father I am not a brain-dead skank like my older sister, and I recognize that he’s been a superlative parent and an all-around good guy, so I would appreciate he not give me the third degree every time he walks into the house. I’m trying to study!”
“I just run with the guy,” Larx protested. “I’m not his family counselor. Do we have any other questions?”
“Yeah. Do you think we’re going to win tonight?” Kirby’s brown eyes were narrowed as though he knew exactly what tonight’s game was going to be like if the Colton Tigers didn’t win.
“I got no idea. I hope everybody has a good time.” And on that, Larx turned to his next table—and two of his favorite students.
“Isaiah, Kellan, tell me you’re ready for tonight!”
Isaiah Campbell—six feet three inches of still-growing boy—smiled quietly at Larx with limpid brown eyes through a thick fringe of lashes. “I’m ready, sir,” he said, ducking his head shyly. Isaiah was not the stereotypical football player. An honor-roll student, a member of the drama club, and an all-around sweet kid, Isaiah was one of those superstudents that happened maybe once every two or three years. Larx had been teaching for twenty-four years, and the thrill of having a kid like this—kind, smart, talented in a thousand areas—still hadn’t faded. There were very few jobs that let you actually launch superlative human beings into what would hopefully be an extraordinary life.
“I thought so,” Larx said warmly. He turned to Isaiah’s shadow—five feet eight inches of bouncy, out-of-control energy that flinched like prey while wearing the body of a football-throwing predator. Kellan Corker, family whipping boy and lost soul, was the quarterback. From what Andy Jones, the head football coach, said, the only thing that kept a bundle of ADHD like Kellan focused on the field was Isaiah. Apparently when they were freshmen, Kellan had almost washed out of the game—which would have been too bad, because the coach was good at making football a sanctuary for the kids who needed it most. Isaiah had actually been more interested in drama club, but Jones had seen Kellan’s almost slavish devotion to his friend and had decided to use that. He’d made Isaiah a receiver, and now, when the two of them were on the field, they were unstoppable.
“How ’bout you, Kell—you take your Adderall this morning?”
Kellan cackled. “Oh yeah—got permission to take another dose tonight. I’ll be up until oh-dark-thirty, but I can get ’er done!”
“That’s not good for you,” Isaiah said, poking Kellan with a gentle elbow.
“I’m totally all over it.” Kellan nodded, his black, cowlicked hair flopping everywhere. If Larx had ever had a son, he would have looked a lot like Kellan Corker—black hair, green eyes, a spazzy little ball of too much energy and too many ideas. Larx adored Isaiah, but Kellan was the kid he could do the most for.
“Well, remember it’s just a football game,” he said, winking at Isaiah. “Don’t fry your brains out for one game—what would your buddy do without you?”
Kellan’s expression went sulky. “He’s got a girlfriend. He won’t even notice I’m a drooling zombie.”
“She asked me!” Isaiah protested. “It’s the homecoming dance next week. You can get a date too!”
“Yeah, because girls love it when I forget what they’re saying in the middle of a sentence. I was gonna go stag, and so were you, but that girl—”
“Which girl?” Larx asked, wondering who could possibly come between the dangerous duo.
“Julia Olson,” Kellan blurted.
Larx couldn’t help it—his eyes got big and he breathed sharply through his nose. “Oh… oh… Isaiah.”
Isaiah grimaced. “Yeah. She… I guess she’s had a crush for a while, and she, like, blindsided me. And it was in the middle of lunch and everyone was watching and… if I said no, it would be like, totally….” He bit his lip.
“You didn’t want to embarrass her,” Larx said, but he had a bad feeling about this. Julia Olson—great-granddaughter of the man who had donated his property for the school and had a road named after him—was a scary, scary kid.
Her grandfather had made a fortune by selling another batch of land to developers who created an entire tourist village in the north end of town. On the one hand, it allowed a small colony of artisans and craftsmen to run businesses in Colton, because the four-month flux of tourists between May and August sustained them for the entire rest of the year. A lot of those people came back before Christmas and brought friends, which meant campers and people renting cabins in that area also helped keep the town alive.
But that made the Olsons very rich, and very powerful. Julia’s father had been a spoiled, arrogant little fuck, by all accounts, and he spent a lot of his time abroad, leaving Julia home with her former beauty queen of a mother.
Julia’s mother had poured her heart and soul into living her life through her daughter.
Beauty pageants as a child, acting and elocution lessons as an adolescent—Julia was a perfectly turned-out doll of a girl who had been told her entire life that her pretty face and family connections trumped what any other adult told her. Without her family, the town wouldn’t have a goddamned school, thank you very much!
Crossing Julia because he wanted to spend time with Kellan did not bode well for a shy football player who would rather run around backstage during the spring play than catch a football in front of the entire town.
“She’s lonely,” Isaiah said, shrugging. “It makes her mean. I… I didn’t want to make that worse, but….” He bit his lip. “I’m… I mean, it’s just a dance, right?”
“Yeah,” Larx said. “Sure.” Back in Sacramento, he’d watched a kid like Julia almost destroy a teacher’s career. When the kid led a witch hunt to get Dana to change the girl’s grade, the administration had caved, which had pissed Larx off. When the Colton board of education made him principal, he’d vowed he’d never let a kid like that, with powerful parents, fuck with anyone else’s life.
“Just….” God. How did he explain the foreboding here? “Isaiah, just be careful. Every time she talks to you, asks you to do something you don’t want to, send an email to Kellan, okay? Document it. If she makes you uncomfortable, or threatens to spread rumors, document it. I know you were trying to be a nice guy, but—”
“She’s not nice,” Kellan muttered. “She’s crazy. I mean… crazy. You know she’s the one who dumped perfume on Mrs. Pavelle’s snake, right?”
“Bruce?” Larx felt an unexpected pang. Nancy Pavelle, the biology teacher, had kept a pet garter snake for three years. They’d fed that snake every Friday afternoon, watching carefully to make sure poor Bruce could eat the mouse put in his cage. Bruce hadn’t been that bright, but he’d been affectionate and gentle—and dead, after someone had dumped perfume all over him. He and Nancy had spent hours trying to wash the substance off Bruce’s skin, but in the end it hadn’t worked. The perfume was toxic, the snake had absorbed too much, and he’d died. “She killed Bruce?”
“Mrs. Pavelle gave her a shitty grade, remember?”
Yeah. Larx remembered. Nancy was a chubby little woman with cookie-dough cheeks and a habit of rescuing God’s least-loved creatures. Snakes, lizards, a butt-ugly fish that had it out for anything that ventured near its tank—Nancy took them in. She’d been surprisingly firm standing up to old Nobili—and unlike poor Dana back in Sacramento, Nancy had the documentation to back her up. They’d thought the perfume was an accident—a kid playing around who didn’t want to fess up. But to find out it was deliberate?
“Why didn’t you tell anybody?” he asked, appalled—and mourning Bruce the snake all over again.
“Because she’s crazy!” Kellan sputtered. “Because she could screw us up with a nasty rumor, and nobody in the school is going to say shit against her. The only reason Mr. Albrecht passed her is because she threatened to tell her parents he grabbed her ass!”
Larx stared in hor
ror. Goddammit, Nobili couldn’t have waited until Julia had graduated to bail, could he? “Did he?”
“No!” Isaiah almost laughed. “Are you kidding? Mr. Albrecht can hardly look girls in the eye when they’re wearing tight T-shirts. If he accidentally touched a girl, he’d probably wet himself and faint.”
Oh thank God. “I sort of hoped that was the case,” he muttered. “Okay, so, Isaiah, you’re going to the dance with a really… frightening girl. You need to take Kellan with you. Kellan, you need to take a girl you like and trust, agreed?”
Kellan grimaced. “Yeah. Okay. Just as friends.”
And later, Larx would feel stupid, because nothing pinged until just that moment. He thought he should have seen it—should have figured it out right then.
But he didn’t, and he’d feel crappy about that for a long time.
He looked at the two boys again, both of them leaning on their science tables with a sort of earnestness he treasured in kids. Most of them were just like most people. Good. With good intentions and hopes. These were two of the best.
He opened his mouth to say something—anything—and then two students with an actual problem called him, and he rapped sharply on the desk in front of Kellan.
“Keep me posted,” he said, and moved on.
But after the class, and on into his day as principal, he would think about those two kids and worry.
Something about them—about the way Kellan looked at Isaiah like he couldn’t see past the boy’s brown eyes, and the way Isaiah followed Kellan into whatever he was doing just to keep him grounded….
Something.
It reminded him of a sheriff’s deputy jogging next to him on the red-dirt track of Olson Road in waffle stompers, asking him nicely not to get hurt.
“LARX? LARX! Larx!”
Larx shook himself and focused on Yoshi, which was hard because for a moment his face was just a big beige blur against the oppressive paneling of the principal’s office. He finally got a bead on Yoshi—whose bird’s-nest hair and chia beard did not make him look any older, like he hoped—and tried to remember what they were talking about before he’d wandered off. He could almost remember… homecoming floats… business and open-topped cars… he almost had it….
And then he yawned. “Sorry, Yosh. Getting used to running in the morning instead of the afternoons.”
“How’s that going? You and George getting along okay?”
Larx had to smile. Running with Aaron was actually sort of a kick. In full running kit, Aaron wasn’t nearly as slow as he’d claimed, and Larx had fun pushing him, just a little faster, just a little harder. When he’d had enough, Aaron would smack him on the head with his baseball hat and Larx would pull back, and then, often, they’d begin to talk.
Kids, at first. Because they had them in common. Larx missed Olivia something fierce now that she’d gone away, and Aaron sounded like he had his hands full with his oldest.
“Do you text her?” he’d asked. “You know, when she’s at school?”
“Text her with what?” Aaron asked breathlessly. “I think someone’s poaching fish and I have to call Fish and Game?”
“Send her cute kitten stuff,” Larx told him, their footfalls and panted breaths falling with comfortable evenness in the gray light of dawn. “Works like a charm.”
He’d turned in time to see Aaron smile like a little kid learning about lizards for the first time ever, and his chest… it still hadn’t recovered.
“We’re getting on fine,” Larx said, shaking himself awake over his desk. “Coffee—I need more coffee.”
“Like I need my mother telling me to marry. Have a fruit juice, dammit!”
Larx scowled at him. Yoshi was gay, and closeted to everybody but Larx and the shy artist he lived with. Tane Pavelle was Nancy’s younger brother—after high school he’d escaped the small town that had served as his prison, but after a series of misadventures he never spoke about, he’d returned to town to run one of the small tourist galleries that kept Colton going.
Yoshi had interviewed for an open teaching position the fall after Tane returned. Larx—trusted by both Nancy and Yoshi after the first year—was one of the few people who knew. And in return, Yoshi knew almost every detail of Larx’s divorce from his wife—and it hadn’t been pretty.
Yoshi was probably the one person Larx could tell about Kellan and Isaiah. Or the stupid way his whole body lit up as Larx jogged toward Aaron’s little two-story house on the forestry track.
Larx didn’t feel like talking about that second thing yet, though.
“Yosh, what do you know about Julia Olson?”
Yoshi sucked wind in through his teeth. “I can’t think of a name bad enough. And I speak three languages.” French, Spanish, and English.
“Kellan told me she’s the one who killed Bruce the snake.”
Yoshi’s broad, boyish face contorted in grief. “Bruce? She killed Bruce? I need to ask my grandmother if she knows anything in Japanese, because I’m telling you—”
“Yeah. Bad. She’s got a crush on Isaiah Campbell—asked him to homecoming next week. You know….”
Yoshi grimaced. “He’s too smart for that shit.”
“Right? But I’ve got a bad feeling—he said yes because he didn’t want to embarrass her, but—”
“Yeah. I get it. Don’t feed the trolls.”
“She’s a Grade A troll.”
Yoshi shuddered. “Let’s hope she doesn’t crap all over the woods. And you dodged the question about Deputy George. What’s he like?”
“You’ve met him. Solid, friendly. Nice eyes.” Crap.
“I knew it!” Yoshi crowed.
“What? I was kidding. I mean, he’s got nice eyes”—blue, clear, laugh lines at the corners—“but I was just mentioning them. Like, comic relief. It was nothing. I’m innocent. Stop looking at me like that!”
Yoshi broke up over his egg salad sandwich. “You like him.”
“We’re running buddies! I know you resist all physical exercise—”
“I do Pilates,” he returned mildly.
“Whatever. You don’t flirt when you run. It’s a rule.” The sound of their feet in what was almost a dead sprint, and the whoosh of Aaron’s hat as he tried to tag Larx to make him slow down. Larx pulling back just a smidge, just enough to let the hat brush his arm on the next pass. So they could run side by side again. So they could talk.
“This is a really shitty office,” Yoshi said, seemingly out of nowhere, but Larx knew better.
Larx looked around at the oppressive sixties-style paneling, the green carpet, the terminally uncomfortable visitor chairs. “I didn’t choose the décor,” he said.
“I was just wondering.” Yoshi took another bite of his sandwich and chewed steadily, then swallowed. “What was the principal’s office like when you went to school?”
“Those beige thumbtack walls,” Larx said promptly. “A cheap Formica desk. Stacks of files everywhere.”
“Bet you practically lived there.” Yoshi licked his fingers after the last bite of sandwich.
“I had a cot. Why are we talking about this?”
“I’m just saying, you are such an incredibly crappy liar I can’t imagine you got away with shit in high school. Forget a cot—you probably had a washroom and a closet and a plaque.”
Larx glared at him, although Yoshi wasn’t far off regarding Larx’s impromptu camp in the principal’s office. However, toward the end of his senior year, mostly he hung out there from a sense of nostalgia. He and Johnny Erikson had become buddies by then, because Erikson had talked him off the spazzy boy’s adolescent ledge of hating the world before it hated him back. Larx had learned to love the dedication that had gone into saving him from himself.
He’d lived to give back.
“What, exactly, am I lying about?” he asked Yoshi now.
Yoshi shrugged and opened a bag of barbecue potato chips, offering Larx one. Larx took it automatically and then cursed himself because he sud
denly craved the whole bag.
“You said he has nice eyes. He does. He has very nice eyes. But you weren’t kidding—you meant it. You like him—admit it.”
“He’s becoming a friend.” That was no more than the truth.
“You ever stop to think about, you know. Why now? You guys have been running into each other at football games, parent-teacher meetings, back-to-school nights—why would he suddenly ask you to go running now?”
Larx shrugged. “Because I just started running on the side of the road?” And like Johnny Erikson, who hadn’t wanted to see Larx get lost in his own stubbornness, Aaron had stepped in.
“Or maybe because you both have just a little ways to go before your kids are out of the house, and suddenly, you can live for yourselves again.”
Larx wrinkled his nose and automatically checked his phone. Olivia texted him like seven times a day—sometimes wanting his attention right that moment in spite of the fact that they both had “adulting” (her word) to do.
“You, my friend, have a highly romanticized idea of what children leaving the nest is really like,” Larx told him grimly. Seven times a day was a few texts down from the maybe twenty frantic, needy texts he’d gotten per day when Olivia had first gone to San Diego in August.
“And you, my friend, need a sex life. Or a love life. Or any life that doesn’t involve this school and your kids.”
“Are you high?” Larx asked without heat. “I mean, that looked like egg salad, but you never know. Has Tane been mixing paint again?” He smiled conspiratorially. “Did you get lead with your egg salad, Yoshi? Because I could have sworn you just told me to make a pass at a probably straight man—a sheriff’s deputy—in this teeny tiny redneck little town. As the school principal. I may be bi—”
“Bi?” Yoshi asked grumpily. “Really, Larx? Bi?”
“I like women,” Larx responded mildly. Because he did. Just not quite as much as men. A thing he bitterly regretted telling his ex-wife—not because of how much she hated him, but because she had taken it out on their children. Family-court drama—blessedly kept confidential—but Larx had been more than happy to take his kids and move the hell away from Sacramento and the judgmental administration that would rather fry its teachers than support them.
