I couldn’t let this go on forever.
When you’re a kid, you don’t think in terms of “my childhood is being stolen.” But I was getting tired of Mr. Martin ruining my life. It was November 1st. We were almost at the end of the decade (pedantic cries of “the end of the decade is technically December 31st, 1980” notwithstanding) and I wasn’t going to start the 1980’s living in fear of that asshole. I was going to finish this. Somehow.
The mood was grim at home. We didn’t know Dominick very well, but still, when an eleven-year-old dies in your area, in a city not really known for its shocking tragedies, it carries a lot of weight.
I was too exhausted to have another sleepless night. I still woke up a couple of times, unable to shake the weird feeling that somebody was in the house, but when I crept around to investigate, I saw nothing unusual. Maybe it was Dominick’s ghost.
The next day was Friday, which was normally cause for celebration except that I had three different tests, none of which had received the level of studying that they required. (If I’d been a teacher, I would’ve shown my students mercy and not scheduled tests on Halloween week, but I was not consulted on the matter.)
Second period was Pre-Algebra. I stared at the test. The formulas on the page looked as foreign as…well, algebra. This was going to be ugly.
Somebody knocked on the classroom door.
Mrs. Van Lauren glanced over from her desk and scowled. She believed that algebra was the engine that drove all of humanity, so if somebody was interrupting her test, it had better be extremely important. She pushed back her chair, but the door opened before she finished getting up.
Principal Taylor walked into the classroom. He seemed to suddenly realize that he was interrupting a test, so he quietly walked over to Mrs. Van Lauren and whispered something to her. Both of them looked over at me.
It became very difficult to breathe.
I’m not sure why my mind immediately went to Oh, shit, I’m in trouble. Maybe Mr. Martin had finally been arrested and they needed my statement. This could be good.
Principal Taylor didn’t look like this was good.
He walked over to my desk. “Curtis, I’ll need you to come with me.”
I nodded. “Okay.”
“Bring your things.”
I picked up my backpack and stood up. We walked toward the door.
“Eyes on your work,” Mrs. Van Lauren announced, but of course every eye was on me.
Maybe I wasn’t in trouble. Maybe something horrible had happened.
Maybe Tina was dead. Maybe Mom and Dad were dead.
I should never have gone over there.
We walked out into the hallway. “What’s wrong?” I asked. Principal Taylor didn’t answer. He was walking so quickly that I had to jog a little to keep up.
When we went around the corner, I saw a state trooper standing by my locker.
If they just wanted to question me, or deliver bad news, why would he be standing by my locker?
At least nobody was dead.
We walked over there. “Here he is,” said Principal Taylor, as if the trooper might not have noticed that he had a student with him.
The trooper gave me a stern nod. “Hello, Curtis. I’m going to need you to open your locker.”
There was absolutely nothing in my locker that I’d want to hide from the principal or the authorities. At least, there hadn’t been before. I suddenly had a very good idea of where this might be headed.
My mind went blank and I couldn’t remember my locker combination. I closed my eyes and spent a moment trying to focus.
“Do it,” said Principal Taylor, mistaking my erased memory for reluctance.
I turned the dial, hoping the combination would come back to me when my fingers started moving. It did. I unlocked it, then pulled open the door. As it swung open, I half-expected to see a severed head dangling in there, but the inside of my locker looked the same as it had this morning. Messy as hell.
“Please move away,” the trooper told me.
I stepped out of the way. The trooper began to methodically search through my locker.
“What are you looking for?” I asked. Principal Taylor shushed me.
It took at least ten excruciating minutes for the trooper to finish going through my stuff. Finally he reached for my backpack. “Hand it over, please.”
I gave him my backpack.
Everything was going to be fine. I’d had my backpack with me all day. Nobody would have had a chance to slip anything in there without me noticing.
Unless I hadn’t imagined that somebody was in the house last night.
Oh, God.
Mr. Martin wouldn’t do anything like this, would he? What would he gain? Why would he do something that would force me to tell the authorities what I knew? This all had to be a huge misunderstanding. The state trooper would go through my backpack, apologize, and then I’d return to class so Mrs. Van Lauren and I could figure out what we were going to do about the pre-algebra test that I’d abandoned.
The trooper unzipped my backpack and began taking things out and setting them on the floor. Books. Pencils. A notebook. An empty can of root beer that I’d meant to throw away a couple of weeks ago. Some empty potato chip bags. When I got out of this mess, I’d have to start cleaning out my backpack on a regular basis.
“Oops,” said the trooper. “Yep, here we go.”
He took out a large baggie filled with what I immediately knew—without ever having seen any in real life—was marijuana.
“That’s not mine,” I insisted.
“Of course it’s not.”
“Somebody put that in there.”
“Of course they did.” The trooper, instead of looking gleeful at his discovery, seemed genuinely disappointed in me. “Do I need to use handcuffs, or are you going to come with me without any fuss?”
I informed him that I wouldn’t cause any
