Chapter 35
'Let me guess, you took it on,' Susan said.
'Yep.'
She smiled at me like a mother at an unusual child. 'You never thought about speaking to the school principal?' she said.
'Oh, God, no,' I said.
'Not done?' Susan said.
'Not by fourteen-year-old boys,' I said. 'Wouldn't have done any good anyway.'
Susan nodded.
'Schools are notoriously ineffective,' she said, 'at the prevention of bullying.'
'And most other things,' I said.
'You've never been a fan of the school system,' Susan said.
'True,' I said. 'And this was a kind of systematic racial bullying. They would have had an assembly and the principal would have told everybody not to do it.'
'And all the bigots and bullies would have said, a??Oh, gee, okay,'' Susan said.
'And beat the hell out of Aurelio Lopez,' I said, 'as soon as class got out.'
'Probably,' Susan said. 'How about the police?'
'Tell you the truth, I never thought of it,' I said.
'No,' Susan said. 'Of course not. I can remember how hermetically sealed adolescence was.'
'Even for well-mannered Jewish girls growing up in Swampscott?' I said.
'Even for them. Life was you and the other kids,' she said. 'Adults were remote.'
'That's right,' I said.
'So you decided to protect him,' she said.
'I did.'
'Fourteen years old,' she said.
'Almost fifteen,' I said.
She smiled.
'Oh, well, that makes it different,' she said. 'Were you reading
'No,' I said. 'But they read it to me when I was about twelvea??the Thomas Malory one, as I recall. Not Tennyson.'
'And you swallowed it all,' Susan said.
'Yep.'
'And you still do,' she said.
'Yep.'
'Knight-errant,' she said.
