DEAR FELLOW GRADUATES

by Michael David Lukas

Indian Rock

First of all, I think it's only appropriate for me to extend a hearty congratulations to my fellow graduates (and to all you proud family members)! I've been there with you these past four years and I understand how you all must feel, sitting up there on that stage.

But as much as I would love to recount all the ups and downs of the past four years, as much as I would enjoy reminiscing about Spirit Weeks past and shedding a tear over the last days of our youth, a higher duty calls me to task. What I present before you, in this, my last column as editor of the Berkeley High Jacket, is a tale that needs to be told, burns to be told, even if some people out there (Mrs. Eliason!) won't be happy I'm telling it.

By now, some of you (especially all you proud family members) might be wondering: Who the heck is this guy? What is he talking about? I thought this was the graduation edition of the Berkeley High Jacket.

I can assure you that this is indeed the graduation edition of the Berkeley High Jacket. In the rest of these pages you will find the traditional fare for such an issuance. On pages 6–9, you can see where your dear child and their friends are going to college (as if you didn't already know!). On pages 12–15, you can read a variety of melancholy farewells to our fair school. And so on and so forth.

If you would rather not read this story, you are obviously free to turn the page. But I can assure you that you will be glad to have read it.

The events in question began late one Wednesday night a few months ago (actually, technically, it was early Thursday morning). As the editor of this fair paper, it was my responsibility to drive the finished proofs down to our printer in Fremont once every other week. It's a long drive, and on my way home, I would often stop at a little park near my dad's house.

You may be familiar with Indian Rock, around the corner. You may also know Grotto Rock, a few blocks up the hill. Chances are, though, you've never heard of Mortar Rock, which is why I like it. There's almost never anyone there.

On the night in question, I was coming home particularly late. The moon was high and white and the streets were empty. I parked across the street from the rock and climbed to the top, which is when I noticed the two men in a beat-up white Volvo.

There are any number of reasons why two men might be sitting in a beat-up white Volvo across the street from a park at two thirty in the morning. But these two seemed a little shady. They were both uncommonly large, with Nordic features and a slightly dented appearance that seemed out of place in the neighborhood. Was I stereotyping? Yes, my fellow graduates, I was. And, like any good Berkeley High student, I felt bad for succumbing to my biases. But as we will see, my biases, in this case at least, were spot on.

After sitting quietly on top of the rock for five or ten minutes (not smoking a joint or anything like that), I realized that there was someone else in the park with me: a tall, gangly man bent over a trash can. It took me a moment to process that this man, digging frantically through the trash in a public park at two thirty in the morning, was none other than my English teacher, Mr. Balz.

As most of my fellow graduates know, Mr. Balz is not your typical teacher. He can recite Beowulf by heart in Old English. He often delivers Shakespearean monologues from atop his desk. And once he dedicated an entire period of my Bible As Literature class to the poetry of Liz Phair. I can't say I'm the biggest fan of Mr. Balz. (My own personal feeling is that he's kind of a poser.) But I also don't have any particular ill will toward him. And I've always thought that the jokes about his name are a little cheap.

So there we were. Me and Mr. Balz, staring at each other across Mortar Rock.

"Michael Lukas," he said in the same voice he used to call my name off the roll sheet. "AP British Literature."

There was a short silence, then a car door slammed and Mr. Balz took off running.

Those Scandinavians were big but they were fast. Half a block down the hill, the dark-haired one caught up with Mr. Balz and grabbed his shirt while the blond one tackled him to the ground. There were some grunts and a crunching sound as bone hit asphalt. Before Mr. Balz could shout for help, the Scandinavians duct-taped his mouth, bound his wrists, and carried him to the trunk of the Volvo. You could have been sleeping in your bed a few dozen yards away (perhaps some of you were) and not heard a thing.

If I were a less reliable narrator, I would tell you that I leaped into action right then and there. I would say that I put my dislike for Mr. Balz aside, hopped in my dad's Subaru, and sped after the Scandinavians on a wild chase through Tilden Park. But the truth is, after watching all this transpire, after seeing my AP British Literature teacher tackled, stuffed into a trunk, and driven to who knows where, I did nothing.

I drove home and spent the rest of the night with my covers pulled up over my head, praying the Scandinavians hadn't seen me or heard my name. Sometime in the dark hours of the morning, I decided that the most prudent course of action was no action at all. I would keep this whole thing to myself, wipe what I had seen from my mind, then finish up the school year and head off to college.

But, as Mr. Balz often said, the truth will out. That next morning, when I saw Sarah Meyers at the bus stop, I couldn't help but tell her.

"Wait, what?"

"They put him in the trunk and drove away."

Sarah stared at me, squinting, like she wasn't sure I was even real. "What?"

Most of my fellow graduates probably know Sarah Meyers. For those who don't, I would describe her thusly: She has bright red hair. She does not suffer fools, gladly or otherwise. And she always keeps a box of Froot Loops in her backpack. She's two parts Joan Didion, one part Simone de Beauvior, and one part Courtney Love. Some people say she took the SATs on acid, which may or may not be true. What I know for sure is that she aced them, and that she's going to Columbia next fall on a full scholarship.

"Did you call the police?"

"I—"

"Did you tell your parents? Did you tell anyone?"

"I told you."

"And what am I supposed to do?"

"I don't know."

"Clearly."

She swung her backpack around and dug into the Fruit Loops. "Okay," she said midchew, "here's what we're going to do. First, we're going to go over to his house and check things out."

"Now?" I had a calculus test second period, we both did. More importantly, I didn't want to run into those Scandinavians again.

"Yeah, now," she said, already walking down the hill. "OR, do you not consider this an urgent situation?"

Mr. Balz's house was on one of those tiny streets off Indian Rock Road, a three-story brown shingle with a front yard so overgrown you could barely see the house itself. The bottom-floor windows were all covered with sun-faded tapestries and the mailbox was stuffed full of junk.

"It was his grandparents' house," Sarah said, standing in the driveway. "I think his grandpa was a judge or some kind of politician?"

"Very interesting," I said. "Now, how are we going to get in?"

Sarah gave a little smile and hoisted herself up over the fence. "I just might know where he keeps the hide-a-key."

Most of my fellow graduates will probably have heard some of the rumors about Sarah and Mr. Balz. You might have heard that they went camping together last summer, took mushrooms, and stayed up late into the night reading passages of A Midsummer Night's Dream. You might have heard Cindy Lee say she saw Sarah coming out of Mr. Balz's house. I don't know if any of these rumors are true. They probably aren't. What I do know is that their relationship goes beyond what most people would think is appropriate. Sarah once told me she considered Mr. Balz "more of a friend than a teacher" and I know that he wrote her a recommendation letter that used the phrase beautiful mind at least three times.

"Is this how his house usually looks?" I asked once we were both inside.

There was mail scattered around the entryway. Half-filled mugs lined the stairs. And a huge oak dining table blocked the way to the kitchen.

Sarah turned and looked me dead in the eye. "How much of a slut do you think I am?"

"I don't," I said. "But I mean, you've been here before, right? You knew where the hide-a-key was."

"I've been here twice. Once for a study group, and once to feed his cats when he was out of town. And yes, it does usually look like this."

I followed Sarah up to the third floor and into a bedroom that seemed to be inhabited almost entirely by cats. There were litter boxes everywhere, little felt mice, and nests of old fabric. Two black cats stalked the edges of the room while an orange one stared down at me from the top of an eight-foot-high scratching post. I turned to say something to Sarah, but she was already crouched down in front of a small safe at the back of the closet.

"You're going to try to guess the combination?"

She looked back over her shoulder, still spinning the knob. "I'm guessing it's the same as it was when I was house-sitting," she said. As she fiddled with the knobs, one of the black cats doubled back and rubbed its flank against her knee. "Two, two, seventy-four." The safe popped open and she smiled to herself. "But at the length truth will out." When I didn't catch her reference, she explained: "Mr. Balz's favorite line in all of Shakespeare. The Merchant of Venice. Act two, scene two, line seventy-four." She took out a sheaf of papers and leafed through them. After a few moments, she held up a manila folder. "Bingo."

In the top right-hand corner was one word, written in Mr. Balz's distinctive block letters: Evidence.

At this point we probably should have gone straight to the police. At the very least, we should have been more careful with the evidence. Instead, Sarah and I sat down in the middle of the floor and began going through the folder, piece by piece.

"This is what he was talking about," she said under her breath. "He was always saying how shady Mrs. Eliason is."

She laid out two pieces of paper (schoolwide test results, both reproduced here for your benefit) and was beginning to explain what they meant, how they might have been manipulated, and so on, when there was a crash downstairs.

"One of the cats?"

Sarah shook her head. "Come on." She motioned for me to follow her upstairs to the attic, a dusty open room filled with banker's boxes and old surfing equipment. Downstairs, there were the muffled sounds of conversation, then another crash.

"Did you take the files?"

I looked down at my hands. "I have these," I said, still holding the two pieces of paper we'd been looking at.

"Great," she said, jiggling one of the windows at the other side of the room.

"I thought you had it."

"Nope."

When the window wouldn't open, Sarah wrapped an old wetsuit around her hand.

"What are you doing?"

"Come on," she said as she punched through the window and stepped out onto the roof. "Don't be such a baby."

For those of you who have never been on top of a roof, I will tell you this: two stories is a heck of a lot higher than you think. From where we were standing, Mr. Balz's backyard looked like it was about fifty feet down. Maybe that's an exaggeration. It probably is. In any case, it was not a jumpable distance, not by any stretch of the imagination. But don't tell that to Sarah Meyers.

I can't say exactly what happened next except that one moment she was peering through the sunlight in the middle of the roof. The next she was jumping into an overgrown hedge. There was a crash and a long silence. Then she crawled out from under the hedge. Her face was pretty scratched up and there was a massive gash on her hand. Still, she was smiling.

"It's not as far as you think," she called up.

"I don't know. It looks pretty far."

Just then, the attic door shook. There was a quick shout, a grunt, and the doorframe splintered. Another few seconds and there would be no more door.

My fellow graduates, I would like to tell you that I reacted to this situation with cool detachment. But the truth is, I fell. In the grips of fear and indecision, I lost my footing and slid to the edge of the roof, whereupon I somehow caught my arm on the gutter and dropped the fifty or twenty or fifteen feet to the ground.

I blinked. I was still alive, but my leg was on fire. No, it was fire. Molten pain.

"I think I broke my leg," I said as Sarah helped me up.

"If you broke your leg you wouldn't be able to walk," she replied. "And anyways, we're not walking anywhere. We're getting the fuck out of here."

She dumped me into the backseat of Mr. Balz's old Audi, and seven harrowing minutes later we arrived, mostly intact, at our destination: the Berkeley Police Department parking lot.

The woman at the front desk seemed to recognize Sarah. "Detective James?" she asked, and without waiting for Sarah to respond, she buzzed us back.

"Detective James helped me out when I was getting that restraining order against Tom Kantor," Sarah explained.

"Oh," I said, not sure how else to respond. I hadn't heard about any restraining order. I just thought they had a bad breakup.

"He's a sweetie," Sarah said. "Not Tom—he's a dick—the detective. A little rough around the edges, but very avuncular."

When we walked into his office, the very avuncular Detective James was having a little nap, leaning back in his chair, his chin tucked into the soft pillow of his chest.

"What?" he barked awake, softening when he saw Sarah. "Meyers. That little pervert still bothering you?"

"No sir," Sarah said. She was sitting up straight. Her eyes were open in a kind of vulnerable and hopeful tilt. "It's something else, something about our English teacher."

"Okay."

She turned to me.

"So," I started, "I guess it was, sir, I suppose it all began—"

"Son," Detective James interrupted me, "take a deep breath. This isn't story time. And you aren't being interrogated. Just tell me what happened. Plain-like. Start to finish."

"All right." I took a deep breath. Then I told him everything: the Scandinavians at Mortar Rock, Mr. Balz's house, the documents.

"And you gained entry to the house with a key?"

"Yes sir," Sarah said.

"The location of which Mr. Balz informed you of previously?"

"Yes sir."

"And the safe?"

"It was open," Sarah lied without blinking an eye.

"The safe was open?"

"Yes sir."

Detective James leaned back in his chair and held the documents in question up to the light. He thought for a few rattling breaths, then wrote a couple things on a yellow legal pad.

While he was writing, Sarah glanced down at her phone. Something she saw made her jaw loosen slightly. She drummed her fingers on the desk, as if trying to make out a difficult equation, then slipped the phone back in her bag.

"Here's my number," Detective James told me. He pointed to a yellowed stack of business cards on the corner of his desk and I took one. "Call me if you see those Scandinavians again."

Sarah stood up and swung her bag around her shoulder.

"Wait," I said, "don't you need us to, I don't know, help out?"

"Help out?" Detective James chortled a little. "No, son. We'll take it from here."

"But how—"

"Like I said, we'll take it from here. The case is in good hands."

* * *

"So that's it?" I asked, standing in the parking lot with Sarah.

She didn't say anything for a few moments. When we got to the sidewalk, she took out her phone and scrolled to the text she had gotten while we were in Detective James's office.

Safeway. Tice Valley Road. WC. We have Balz. No Police.

"Who's that from?"

"I don't know," she said. "But I know where that Safeway is. My grandma used to live in the old folks' home across the street."

Back in the car, Sarah opened the glove compartment, found a Dead Kennedys tape, and popped it into the stereo. I wanted to ask what the plan was, whether we should call for some help, like maybe the police. I wanted to tell her to slow down, or at least to signal when she was changing lanes. But the music was too loud to think. All I could do was hold onto the armrest, watch the green hills of Orinda flash past, and let the lyrics drill into my skull.

 

It's time to taste what you most fear

Right Guard will not help you here

Brace yourself, my dear

Brace yourself, my dear . . .

 

"So what's the plan?" Sarah asked as we pulled into the parking lot.

"Ride the wave," I said, a lame attempt at sarcasm.

"Yes," she said, patting my knee. "Now you're getting it."

She put the car in park and scanned the lot. "Over there." She pointed at a woman standing next to a pile of watermelons by the front entrance. Then she jumped out of the car and walked straight toward her, paying no regard to cars or shopping carts.

"Mrs. Eliason!" she called out.

And there she was, my old biology teacher, the new principal of our school. Mrs. Eliason was just about the last person I was expecting to see in that parking lot. But neither she nor Sarah seemed very surprised.

"So nice to see you here," Mrs. Eliason said, scanning the parking lot behind us. "You kids wouldn't mind helping me with these bags, would you?" She pointed to the shopping cart next to her.

"Sure," I said.

We each took a bag and followed her to her car.

"I hear you two have had quite the morning."

Before we could respond, Mrs. Eliason opened up her new BMW. Sitting in the passenger seat was none other than Mr. Balz.

"Hey, guys," he said with a weak little wave.

He seemed good, as good as anyone could be after being thrown in the trunk of a car and whatever else he had endured.

"If you don't mind," Mrs. Eliason said, motioning to the backseat, "I think we've had a little misunderstanding."

I glanced at Sarah and she looked at Mr. Balz, who nodded.

"All right," Sarah said, "this ought to be good."

While Mrs. Eliason loaded her groceries into the trunk, Sarah pressed a few buttons on her phone. I thought she might be calling the police. In fact, she was turning on her phone's voice recorder.

You can find a transcript of the whole conversation on page 4. For those who don't want to read the whole thing, I'll give you the overview.

It was all a big misunderstanding, Mrs. Eliason told us. What I had seen the night before was just a prank, a little thing that teachers do for fun. And the guys at Mr. Balz's house, they were just trying to find his toothbrush. Mr. Balz nodded, but you could tell that he was just trying to make Mrs. Eliason happy. When we asked about the documents in Mr. Balz's safe, Mrs. Eliason's tone changed. She told us that no one would believe us, that she knew Detective James personally and that it would be easy to convince him that nothing untoward had happened, except for our false accusations and the documents we had faked. And, of course, something like that would most certainly reflect poorly on our academic standing, which would obviously put our college admissions in jeopardy.

She could ruin our futures with a few keystrokes. Or, she said, we could call Detective James right now and make it all go away.

"You have a choice," she said. "Either you're part of the solution or you're part of the problem."

Well, Mrs. Eliason, we've made our choice.

My fellow graduates, esteemed family members, after reading this article I hope you will be somewhat closer to the truth and can decide for yourself what you think.

Thank you for your time and congratulations again. This is your day. Enjoy it!