7

The new school was right across the football field from where the old one had blown up. The old school had been a craggy, castlelike building, ugly but impressive, as though a high school might be attacked by something supernatural, a dragon or a giant.

The new Wilson School was a series of low buildings with flat roofs, gray and off-gray. You saw the backboards of the basketball court and the big yellow loop of the track around the football field before you saw the buildings. If these walls collapsed they wouldn’t hurt anyone. You’d shake them off like so much bulletin board material that had just happened to fall down.

Some people liked sitting in the buildings, but everyone with lungs and blood in their bodies stayed out on the football stands. There was always something to watch. There were fights, and you could watch the drug corner across the street—even on the days when the cops staked it out, expensive cars cruised by.

Before school I sat exactly as I always did, smoking with Jared. Jared stubbed his cigarettes out on the heads of the bolts that held the bleachers together. That way the yellow paint didn’t get charred.

“The same house,” he said, standing up.

“With the green shutters,” I said, as though in agreement.

“Tonight.” He smiled.

“Not tonight,” I began. A half-dozen excuses crowded me. “Maybe this weekend,” I offered feebly.

“You’ll just get more and more nervous. It’s best to get it over with.”

He put a forefinger on the knuckle of my hand, just a touch, as though to push a switch to activate my brain. I shrugged, the way he often did, as though it made no difference to me at all. This was what I wanted, I told myself. The game was life. And this—this was hardly life to me, the sound of the bell barely leaking all the way to the muddy football field, the scraps of old daily bulletins plastered against the chain-link fence.

But the thought had given my mouth a sour taste.

Not tonight. Not the same house. It was crazy.

Mr. Milliken decided to spend the entire period lecturing on the steam engine. He was a round, red-haired man, with white curls of hair on his freckled arms. “They would blow up,” he exclaimed, “scalding hundreds!”

He stalked the room like a giant zombie. “Painful, howling deaths! Steamboats blowing up on the Mississippi! Locomotives blowing up in the station! These were dangerous machines. Even when they didn’t explode, they rained hot cinders. Blinding ashes! Stanley!” he exclaimed.

He did this to make sure we were listening. “We the People, in order to Stanley,” he might say, just to make sure I was listening, and I always was, but years of living with my mother have accustomed me to listen without looking.

I looked at him and waved, a little sarcastically. He gave a frowning smile in return. He taught history as a series of lurid headlines. As a result, we were way behind schedule. I could hardly wait for the Civil War.

Sky Tagaloa was in this class. Her long dark hair was held together with a little blue elastic like a minature bungee cord.

As we were tumbling out of class Mr. Milliken put a big freckled hand on my shoulder. “You look a little sleepy there, North.”

I didn’t respond, so he said, “Wake up or stay home.”

I shrugged, and did my gimme-a-break smirk. I was happy to slip away from him, and trudge just behind Sky past the slamming lockers.

I said hello to her as she found her locker and, spun the dial. “Hello, Stanley,” she said. She had a deep voice, and always spoke slowly.

Hello, Stanley. She had said as much before. She had been friendly enough. Hello. She had repeated my greeting back to me. And she hadn’t said “Stan.” She had used my whole name, both syllables. I liked that—I hated to be called Stan.

But my plan was not going well. We had always been on speaking terms. This was not an improvement. This morning was turning out to be just another dead day. A dead day in a school with air conditioning that sucked the oxygen out of the rooms.

And the day chugged forward, dead, flat, dull.

Until lunch. Then everything changed.