'You've still got twenty-seven. Bill Stearns got killed the Tuesday after Christmas. Car accident. Hit-and- run.’
'Billy?’
The picture formed in his mind in black and white, like a senior photograph.
William Stearns, Key Club 1, Football 1,2, Pen & Lance, 2. He had been one of the few good ones in Living with Lit. Quiet, consistent A's and B's on his exams. Didn't volunteer often, but usually summoned the correct answers (laced with a pleasing dry wit) when called on. Dead? Fifteen years old. His own mortality suddenly whispered through his bones like a cold draught under a door.
'Christ, that's awful. Do they know what happened?’
'Cops are checking into it. He was downtown exchanging a Christmas present.
Started across Rampart Street and an old Ford sedan hit him. No one got the licence number, but the words 'Snake Eyes' were written on the side door. the way a kid would do it.’
'Christ,' Jim said again.
'There's the bell,' Simmons said.
He hurried away, pausing to break up a crowd of kids around a drinking fountain.
Jim went towards his class, feeling empty.
During his free period he flipped open Robert Lawson's folder. The first page was a green sheet from Milford High, which Jim had never heard of. The second was a student personality profile. Adjusted IQ of 78. Some manual skills, not many. Antisocial answers to the Barnett-Hudson personality test. Poor aptitude scores. Jim thought sourly that he was a Living with Lit kid all the way.
The next page was a disciplinary history, the yellow sheet. The Milford sheet was white with a black border, and it was depressingly well filled. Lawson had been in a hundred kinds of trouble.
He turned the next page, glanced down at a school photo of Robert Lawson, then looked again. Terror suddenly crept into the pit of his belly and coiled there, warm and hissing.
Lawson was staring antagonistically into the camera, as if posing for a police mug shot rather than a school photographer. There was a small strawberry birthmark on his chin.
By period seven, he had brought all the civilized rationalizations into play. He told himself there must be thousands of kids with red birthmarks on their chins.
He told himself that the hood who had stabbed his brother that day sixteen long dead years ago would now be at least thirty-two.
But, climbing to the third floor, the apprehension remained. And another fear to go with it: This is how you felt when you were cracking up. He tasted the bright steel of panic in his mouth.
The usual group of kids was horsing around the door of Room 33, and some of them went in when they saw Jim coming. A few hung around, talking in undertones and grinning. He saw the new boy standing beside Chip Osway. Robert Lawson was wearing blue jeans and heavy yellow tractor boots - all the rage this year.
'Chip, go on in.
'That an order?' He smiled vacuously over Jim's head.
'Sure.’
'You flunk me on that test?’
'Sure.’
'Yeah, that's . . .' The rest was an under-the-breath mumble.
Jim turned to Robert Lawson. 'You're new,' he said. 'I just wanted to tell you how we run things around here.’
'Sure, Mr Norman.' His right eyebrow was split with a small scar, a scar Jim knew. There could be no mistake. It was crazy, it was lunacy, but it was also a fact. Sixteen years ago, this kid had driven a knife into his brother.
Numbly, as if from a great distance, he heard himself beginning to outline the class rules and regulations. Robert Lawson hooked his thumbs into his garrison belt, listened, smiled, and began to nod, as if they were old friends.
'Jim?’
'Hmmm?’
'Is something wrong?’
'No.’
'Those Living with Lit boys still giving you a hard time?’
No answer.
'Jim?’
'No.’
'Why don't you go to bed early tonight?' But he didn't.
The dream was very bad that night. When the kid with the strawberry birthmark stabbed his brother with his knife, he called after Jim: 'You next, kid. Right through the bag.’
He woke up screaming.
