“Mr. Styles, will you tell us, please, what Huck Finn means by ‘you can’t pray a lie.’”
Sam draws in his feet and straightens up, starting to sweat, slipping back to that agonizing moment when Paul Romney had called upon him to read aloud in that first freshman lit class. He scrubs his face with his huge hands and for a moment it is a blank as he searches for a response.
“You can’t bullsh—con—God.”
Romney mops at his brow mockingly.
“Thank you, Sam. Succinct as always.”
As the teacher moves on, searching his class for signs of brain activity above the flatline, Sam takes a deep breath. His armpits are greasy with the stress and his stomach churns but he has survived another challenge. He glances around at his classmates, all kids with whom he has been in school since seventh grade. One or two grin at him.
Paul Romney ignores the interplay. That first day three years ago, as Sam stuttered and then fell catatonically silent, the other kids were hot-eyed with fury at the teacher. One of them, Todd Gramolini, lingered after class to tell Romney bluntly to quit picking on Sam.
“He can’t help the stutter,” Todd insisted. “Everybody leaves him alone.”
Paul Romney went directly to Sam’s records and found what he’d suspected. Since coming from the Nodd’s Ridge grammar school into the Greenspark system at the junior high level, the boy had taken only low-track courses that required little more than a warm body to answer the roll call to pass. With the exception of straight A’s in shop classes, his grades were suspiciously at the exact minimal level required for athletic eligibility. This kid evidently got the flu every time somebody handed him a test folder and a #2 pencil, for his state assessment tests were all marked incomplete. No makeup tests had been recorded. Speech therapy for the stutter supposedly completed in the fourth grade. No discipline problems, a good school citizen—but one teacher more honest than the rest had noted: Rarely have I seen so much effort expended to so little result.
The educational mill had simply passed the kid on, year after year, filling in the minimum marks to keep him playing ball and get him to the next grade level. Hardly unique, Romney knew, but it had infuriated him anyway. He yanked Sam from a study hall, sat him down in his office and tested him informally. The boy wasn’t able to flog his way through a confiscated X-Men comic book. When Romney let him try the Harley-Davidson owner’s manual from the teacher’s own bike, it was clear Sam was faking it, using practical knowledge to cover the fact he couldn’t read anything more than a handful of words strongly associated with specific objects—stop, yield, Texaco, gas, McDonald’s—and a smattering of obscenities that only added to his confusion with the variant spellings to be found on restroom walls.
Further testing confirmed Romney’s guess that Sam was dyslexic. Romney became Sam’s tutor and over the intervening years, the boy achieved grade level. It was Sam who chose summer school with Romney over invitations to basketball camps. Thinking of how far Sam has come—he almost never stutters anymore when he is called on in class—Romney experiences a brief flicker of satisfaction. Then he humbles himself, recalling how many failures he can count against this one particular success—Sam’s older sister Karen among them. Karen—primarily a disciplinary problem rather than an academic one—Karen had defeated Romney.
Romney worked as hard as he did with Sam as much to compensate for Karen as for the points he would make with the administration for keeping the school’s basketball star unchallengeably eligible. Of course Sam was relieved to have his secret exposed and eager to make up the deficiency. It had been a pleasure to watch the boy discover he could bring the same concentration to bear in his studies that served him so well in his sports.
The teacher stops to squeeze the bridge of his nose. He is amused to realize he is having as much trouble concentrating today as his students are. Something in the air. A virus you contract from the lags who run the system, or the kids themselves, he thinks tiredly. Who gives a shit. Nobody.
“I want you all to consider the contrast between Huck Finn’s and Tom Sawyer’s ideas of right and wrong, particularly as regards the issue of slavery. Be thinking in terms of Friday’s exam, which will be, I remind you, a choice of essay questions.”
Another day of Sam Styles’s senior year gurgles away. Changing for practice, Sam is grateful for the few moments in the locker room. Lately, it seems like he can’t turn around without tripping over some babe—or into a whole gaggle of them—a giggle of girls, he amends, because that is what they do, in sulfurous soprano geysers, just as he realizes that once again he has just committed some oafish act—elbowed some babe’s boobs or trod upon her toes. It seems as if he spends most of his time backing red-faced away from females laughing at him.
During practice, of course, the girls’ team and the cheerleaders and assorted other loiterers will be in the bleachers but that’s different. Once he’s playing ball, he’s focused. The wenches could be wallpaper then. Almost.
Slamming into the locker room, Kevin Bither calls out, “Hoss!”
Sam resists the urge to strangle Bither on the spot. Any hint how much he loathes being called Hoss and Bither will never let up. It is bad enough to be known as Samson and Slammer in the sports columns of the school newspaper and the local rag. If Hoss and Bigger and some of the other stuff they call him in the locker room ever gets out—someone will have to die, that’s all. He gathers his hair at the nape of his neck and twists an elastic around it.
“Hey Hoss,” Bither
