CHAPTER 38

It’s a School

Brown-Sparrow seemed different after visiting the Gibbs Brothers Circus winter quarters with Al Crane. For one thing, I was more aware of the way Al was treated by the other cadets. Everybody was polite to everybody, and I can’t say they were mean to him—but it was clear that he didn’t count as much as some of the other kids, the ones whose fathers were famous movie stars, or big men in the movie studios, or just very rich. They didn’t ask Al’s opinion about things, or listen when he talked. It was subtle—the way they stood when he was around, sort of not making a space for him in the group. If I had asked anybody, they would have said he was a good kid, and they liked him, but I knew they didn’t think he was very important.

It didn’t seem to bother Al—but why would it? He rode elephants, and knew lion tamers, and worked in the circus. To him, the other cadets must have seemed fairly silly. Of course, neither Seamus nor I ever said a word about the circus, and keeping that secret made us separate from the other cadets, and being separate made us look at them slightly differently.

Then there was the military thing. The every-body-looking-alike thing. This went beyond looking sharp on the parade ground. There was a feeling you were supposed to be a certain kind of person.

I was all right, of course, because I was friends with Finn and his father was a big actor. But if it weren’t for that, I thought, I would probably have been treated the same as Crane.

One of the kids in my class, Stover, said to me, “You know, they watch people like you.” I didn’t ask him what he meant—it just gave me an icky feeling. Stover was a corporal—the highest rank of anybody in our class. He was always kissing up to teachers, older cadets, higher ranks. I knew if he ever saw me breaking a rule he would turn me in. He was the one watching me. He knew that I could be a rule breaker.

I still liked the school. Miss Magistra was a good teacher, and class was always fun. I liked the marching and the military stuff too, especially the band. Seamus was in the junior band, not the one that played on the parade ground—and he really wanted to get good enough to be promoted. The school had a great hobby shop in the basement, with all the tools anyone would want, and balsa wood, and glue, and plastic, and paint, all free of charge. Seamus and Al and I often spent time there after school, working on our model airplanes. There was even a hobby shop teacher, Mr. Resnek, the mechanical drawing teacher, a nice guy who was there from two to five every day and would help cadets with their projects.

Brown-Sparrow had a lot of good points. What I was realizing was that it just wasn’t a warm and cuddly sort of place—but maybe that’s how a military school is supposed to be.

The only other person, besides Seamus and Al, who seemed to understand my mixed feelings about the place was Sergeant Caleb, who I was pretty sure was really Melvin the shaman—only, how could he have been? Sometimes he would say things to me when I walked past his post at the gate, sort of as if he were breaking into my thoughts. “There are idiots wherever you go, Wentworthstein,” he might say, out of a clear sky. Other times, he would say things like “Put your hat on straight, Wentworthstein” or “Don’t slouch, Wentworthstein—you’re walking like an armadillo.”