When he lurches away again, the young teacher wanders to the lounge for coffee and relates the story to a colleague. The other woman chuckles.
“Oh, those two. He’s in some kind of remedial program for jocks at the university. I’ve heard there’s very little chance he’ll ever actually play and not much more he’ll be able to complete a degree. Gauthier transferred up here to be with him.”
“Oh. Well, they certainly are—flamboyant.”
“You weren’t here last year,” the other one reminds herself, “I forgot. Well, anyway, he was a big high school star and so was she.” The woman shudders. “She came out of an abusive home. Stepfather killed her mother. There was quite a dustup at the time about the fact she was living with her boyfriend and she was just a sophomore. I wasn’t surprised. I used to run into it fairly often when I taught on the coast. These girls move in with their boyfriends just to get out of the house. Just kids. Could I see that card? My daughter’s Datsun’s been out of commission for a week and she’s driving my car and I’ve got to do something!”
“What happens to them?” the young woman asks.
The older teacher shrugs. “Sometimes they grow up together quite successfully,” she says. “You never can tell.”
AFTERWORD
If I may beg just a few more minutes of your time, I’d like to make amends to the championship basketball teams whose titles I borrowed in telling this particular yarn. Not fictional Greenspark Academy but the Old Town High School Indians won the 1991 Class A Schoolboy Basketball Championship of the State of Maine. In the years preceding, titles I attributed to the Greenspark Indians were actually won by Lawrence in 1990, and Morse in both 1989 and ‘88. The real Class A Schoolgirl Basketball Champion of the State of Maine in 1991 was Lawrence. The players on Greenspark’s teams are entirely fictional and not based on any real present or past Maine basketball players or any real or present basketball players anywhere. However, none of the Greenspark players’ athletic feats are unique to fiction.
Castle Rock and Derry, of course, were first mapped fictionally by another novelist who was kind enough to allow me to add to their histories. For those of you who are familiar with Castle Rock, the basketball season related in this particular yarn occurs in the spring before Mr. Leland Gaunt opened his curio shop in the Rock.
June 1, 1991,
Bangor, Maine
