Chapter 9
The school board installed metal detectors at Franklin High a couple of years before I left, and they were still in place when I walked in the main entrance a little before noon. Unless I think there’s a real need for it, I usually don’t carry a gun, and since I didn’t feel like testing the effectiveness of the metal detectors, I had opted to arrive that day armed only with my boyish charm, which, strangely enough, seemed lost on the short stocky black woman sitting at the small table just inside the front hall. The name tag on her dark blue school security uniform read T. Watkins, and she asked if she could help me. I told her my name and that I was there to see Mr. DeNunzio. She said a few words into her walkie-talkie, then listened to some garbled speech coming out of it for a minute before turning back to me.
“Mr. DeNunzio said to tell you he’s in the cafeteria. Said you’d know the way.”
“Thanks,” I said. She gave me a visitor’s badge, and as I clipped it on, I asked her, “You still pick up orders from the McDonald’s drive-thru on those things?” There was a Mickey D’s one block from the school.
She smiled and said, “Nah. The board finally broke down and bought us some decent equipment a couple years ago. Actually, I didn’t mind the old handsets that much. Ended up dating the manager of that place for a while. Had me some good times and gained about fifteen pounds.”
“Looks good on you,” I told her.
She grinned and said, “Come back in a few months. I just started Weight Watchers.”
“I’ll make a note,” I said, as I waved and walked away.
* * *
The cafeteria looked and sounded pretty much the same to me. To an outsider, the scene probably resembled chaos, but if you’d been there before, it was more like organized chaos. Before I’d gone twenty feet, I had identified the various groups into which kids sort themselves: the jocks, the cheerleaders, the geeks, the pop queen types, and so on. I know those are gross generalizations, but occasionally there is an underlying truth in generalizations, and my experience has been that as much as teenagers act as though they want to be independent and different, they usually end up hanging out mostly with others who all dress and act and talk alike. Nothing wrong with that. Most adults pretty much do the same thing.
Augie was standing in the middle of the cafeteria, talking to a tall skinny girl with more rings attached to her body than I could count. I caught the end of their conversation as I approached. The girl was clearly upset.
“C’mon, Mr. D, this ain’t fair. How come I get detention and Clarice don’t? Me and her was both late to Ms. Skinner’s class.”
“Rhonda,” said Augie, “we already went over all this in my office this morning, and you know why I assigned you to detention. You want to discuss it some more, we’ll do it after school in the detention room.”
“School sucks,” said Rhonda. “This ain’t fair.”
“You and Jimmy Carter,” said Augie.
“Huh? Who’s Jimmy Carter?”
“Just somebody else who had trouble dealing with a large institution. Don’t be late for your detention.”
As Rhonda stalked away, I walked over to Augie and said, “Still stressing proper grammar in the lunchroom, huh, Aug?”
“Hey,” he said, “last year old Rhonda would’ve mf’d me all over the place for giving her detention. Baby steps, JB, baby steps.”
“Any sign of Anthony?” I asked.
“Yeah, I saw him a few minutes ago. Told him to see me before the end of lunch. You want something to eat?”
Before I had a chance to reply, Augie’s eyes suddenly flicked over my left shoulder and I knew we had trouble. I turned and saw right away that something was wrong in the back of the room. Anyone who hadn’t spent a few years on cafeteria duty probably wouldn’t have noticed anything out of the ordinary, but Augie saw it, and so did I. There’s an ebb and flow to the way kids move in groups, and at the moment, that ebb and flow had been interrupted. Things were a little out of whack back there.
Augie immediately began walking towards the area that didn’t look right, with me right behind. Off to my right, I was aware of a slender black man also moving in that direction. He was wearing a school security uniform and, like Augie and me, he was walking quickly but not running. One of the things you learn in these situations is not to run unless something has already happened. Running just draws attention, and soon you’re trying to push your way through a crowd of fired-up teenagers.
As we approached the far corner of the cafeteria, I saw Augie say a few words into his walkie-talkie and then clip the unit back onto his belt. Directly in front of us, three large black boys had surrounded a fourth boy, also black. When we were still ten feet away, the first three boys suddenly attacked. The attack appeared to be coordinated, and it was vicious. While one of the attackers diverted the victim’s attention by coming at him from the front, the other two both landed hard blows to the boy’s body and head. He went down immediately, and one of his assailants tried to aim a kick to the boy’s head, but as he brought his leg back, the security guard I’d noticed arrived and grabbed the attacker’s arm and jerked him away. The guy might be slender, but he was strong. He’d manhandled the bulky teen with little apparent effort.
By this time, Augie and I were on the scene, along with a couple of hundred teenagers, who were crowding in and shouting. I couldn’t see the kid on the floor, but I saw one of his attackers lean over to
