Chapter 1

 

     I only caught a glimpse of him that first time, so I can’t say for sure whether I recognized him right off, or whether it dawned on me later that he looked like somebody I once knew.  He was standing at the corner of the east wing hall, just down from my office, with his foot propped up against a locker like he owned the place. It’s unusual to see that kind of posture in a new student. Usually they have that scared, disoriented look, always wondering where to go next, even in a school as small as Brownville High.

     But not this kid.

     He didn’t care where he went next, and he wasn’t in a hurry to get there.

     I was just getting in from a miserable spring testing workshop at the district office, and as luck would have it, my arrival coincided with the beginning of first lunch. That meant I nearly got trampled by the herd of ninth grade buffaloes that stampeded out of Miss Quaid’s Algebra I class (having been spooked by the 11:30 bell) so they could huddle in the lunch line before the seniors started cutting in.

     But even in the chaos of changing classes, I spotted the new kid right off. Since Columbine, the universal school rule has been to never let a stranger in the hall go unquestioned.  Besides, as guidance counselor, I was responsible for registering and orienting new students, so I started over to introduce myself. But before I got as far as the water cooler, Shelly Brice shoved a transcript request in my hand, and when I looked up, the new kid was gone.

 

     “How was your meeting?” asked Sandra Burnsides, the school secretary. She was a pixyish brunette who looked like she had just graduated from secretarial college. The male students still flirted with her, and Larry Ringer claimed the reason he got sent out of Mrs. Brehmer’s class twice a week was so he’d have an excuse to look at her on the way to Mr. Jacob’s office. It was only after you saw the efficient way she operated that you realized she had almost a dozen years’ experience.

     “Don’t ask,” I replied.

     “That bad, huh?”

     I took the mail out of my cubbyhole and thumbed through it. “Let’s just say it started out so-so and went downhill.”

     She laughed.

     I tore open an envelope. “Anything interesting happen while I was gone?”

     She turned from her computer. “Let’s see. Bennie Norris was suspended.”

     “Again? What did he do this time?”

     “He got in a shoving match with Ted Kass. When Mrs. Wilson tried to break it up, he hit her. Broke her glasses.”

     I shook my head. “I just had a long talk with Bennie yesterday. It’s nice to know everything I said went in one ear and out the other.”

     “I doubt it even went in one ear.”

     “Probably not.”

     “Mr. Jacobs is going to take Bennie before the board for expulsion. I’m typing up the papers now.”

     “I guess we’ve done all we could,” I muttered, hoping that was true. I paused on my way out. “By the way, Sandra, who’s the new student?”

     “What new student?”

     “Well, I assumed he was a new student. I saw this kid standing in the hall. I don’t believe I’ve seen him around before.”

     “What did he look like?”

     “Medium height. Dark shaggy hair. Sharp nose. I believe he wore jeans and a fatigue shirt.”

     “I don’t know who he could have been.”

     “Maybe he wasn’t a student.”

     “Or maybe Mr. Jacobs enrolled him while I was gone to the bank.”

     “I’ll ask him.”

 

     Before the school board’s consolidation vote in med-February, Mr. Jacobs was a hard man to find. He had an uncanny way of knowing when trouble was about to come his way, and he could make himself scarce just before it hit. It was remarkable how quickly he could disappear in a school as small as Brownville High.

     But lately you could always find him in his office with his feet up on his desk, working the daily crossword puzzle or just doodling in his notepad. He no longer seemed to care whether trouble found him or not. He was what is known in political circles as a lame duck. The local L. B. Brown textile mill, Brownville’s only source of employment, had closed its doors for good in January after eighty years of operation, thanks to cheap textile imports and management’s failure to modernize. Without the mill, Brownville High’s projected enrollment would not be sufficient to keep its doors open. The school board had faced the situation with uncharacteristic decisiveness in early March by voting to close down Brownville High at the end of the current school year, making the class of 2010 the school’s last graduating class. The student body would be consolidated with the 2000-student high school in the county seat seventeen miles down the road.  The town of Brownville had fought stubbornly to keep its school open, and Principal Stanley Jacobs, a 1979 graduate of Brownville High, had led the bitter but unsuccessful fight.

     Now Jacobs whiled away his last days as principal like a defeated Confederate general waiting in the shade for Reconstruction. He was depressed and irritable when I found him.

     He didn’t bother to remove his feet from his desk when I entered his office. He cut me a sharp look, the kind he reserved for students sent out of Mrs. Brehmer’s class for shooting spitballs.

     “What-choo need, Fellars?”

     “I saw a new kid in the hall today. I was wondering if you enrolled anybody while I was gone.”

     He rubbed his bald scalp like he still had enough hair there to push out of his eyes. “No. What’d he look like?”

     “Dark complexion. Sharp nose. Shaggy hair. You know, now that I think about it, he looked a lot like Randy Galphin.”

     “Randy Galphin? Hot dang, Bill. You need a vacation worse than I do.”

 

     I was going over the testing schedule I had picked up at the district office, trying to figure out how I was going to come up with enough monitors for eight classrooms, when the new kid sauntered into the guidance office.

     I gave him a hard stare and saw right off that he wasn’t a new kid after all.

     “Randy?  Randy Galphin?”

     He gave me a grin I hadn’t seen in a long time. He walked over and sat on the ledge of my window like he always did, propping his foot on the radiator.

     “Hello, Mr. Fellars. You busy?”
     I don’t think I even answered him.

     He turned and looked out the window at the faculty parking lot. He was watching two girls walk from the band house to the girl’s restroom, which was right under my office. He cracked the window a few inches, and I thought he was going to yell at them. I made ready to scold him if he did. That’s one of my pet peeves, kids yelling out my window.

     But he didn’t. He closed the window and turned back to face me.

     I was still staring at him.

     “Randy, I thought you were dead.”

     “I am,” he said.