“You dick.”
Mr. Hand cocked his head. He appeared poised on the edge of incredible violence. There was a sudden silence while the class wondered exactly what he might do to the surfer. Deck him? Throw him out of Ridgemont? Shoot him at sunrise?
But Mr. Hand simply turned away from Jeff Spicoli as if the kid had just ceased to exist. Small potatoes. Hand simply continued with his first-day lecture.
“I’ve taken the trouble,” he said, “to print up a complete schedule of class quizzes and the chapters they cover. Please pass them to all the desks behind you.”
Spicoli remained at the front of the class, his face flushed, still trying to sort out what had happened. Hand coolly counted out stacks of his purple mimeographed assignment sheets. After a time, Spicoli fished a few bits of his red add card out of the wastebasket and huffed out of the room.
Hand had made his entrance, just as Brad said he would. But the strange saga of Mr. Hand wasn’t the only item Brad Hamilton handed down to his sister. He had also passed her a fairly complete set of Mr. Hand’s weekly quizzes. Hand did not change them from year to year, a well-known fact that rendered him harmlessly entertaining.
“So,” said Hand just before the last bell, “let’s recap. First test on Friday. Be there. Aloha.”
Linda Barrett
Stacy Hamilton’s second-period class was Beginning Journalism/School Newspaper, the only class she would share this year with her friend Linda Barrett. Ridgemont High prided itself in a strong and sophisticated school newspaper. The Ridgemont Reader covered world and school news alike, all in six pages. It was infrequent that an underclassman like Stacy was allowed to join the staff, but Linda Barrett had arranged that, too.
The teacher was a young woman in her early thirties, a slightly frazzled-looking brunette who wore her hair in a short ponytail. Her name was Mrs. Sheehan, but most of her returning students called her Rita. On the first day of class, Mrs. Sheehan was seated at one of the beige plastic desks arranged in a semicircle around her classroom. At the front of the room, sitting on Mrs. Sheehan’s desk and kicking her legs rhythmically against the front panel, was Angie Parisi, the student editor of the Ridgemont Reader. She wore a tight Black Sabbath t-shirt.
“Okay,” said Angie, “does everybody have their assignments for the first issue?”
A beefy kid in a red-and-yellow letterman’s jacket spoke louder than the others. “When do I have to have my column in?”
Angie cast a wicked sidelong glance at the rest of the class. “How about Friday afternoon? Like everybody else, William.”
“But football is this Friday, and I want to include some observations about the first football game. You know?”
Groans.
“Be grateful you have the column at all, William.”
The remark seemed to roll right off William. You got the feeling he was used to it.
“Okay,” continued Angie, “where is Alan Davidson?”
“Here.” He was short, and wore an oversized blue down vest, winter and summer.
“Alan, how is that piece coming on angel dust smokers out on Luna Street?”
“They don’t talk much. I ask them questions and they just kind of look at me . . .”
The class was disrupted by the arrival of Linda Barrett. Late, as always, she bustled through the door of journalism class carrying an armload of books. She headed straight for the empty seat beside Stacy Hamilton, and plopped her cargo on the desk. Everything stopped in journalism class—Linda was wearing tight jeans and a filmy blue blouse with three buttons undone.
“Well,” she said in a sparkling voice, “do you want to hear my excuse now or later, Rita?”
Mrs. Sheehan watched her with tired eyes, even on this first day. This was her third year with Linda Barrett.
“Please try and be on time, Linda.”
“But my locker broke, Mrs. Sheehan!”
“Just try and be on time, Linda.”
“I’m sorry, Rita.”
The class resumed.
Linda leaned over and punched Stacy’s arm. They had not seen each other yet this morning, and they hadn’t talked since the phone call at 3 A.M.
“God, you look so good,” she whispered. “Where did it happen?”
Stacy smiled.
“Where?”
“The baseball field.”
“The baseball field?”
“Well, not really the baseball field. The dugout.”
“The dugout?”
“Well, where else do you go?”
Linda punched Stacy’s arm again. “I don’t believe you. Is this serious?”
“Come on,” Stacy cracked. “It’s just sex.”
They both laughed, and Linda feigned great shock at her younger friend’s use of one of Linda’s favorite lines.
Somehow all roads at Ridgemont High led to Linda Barrett. Everyone knew her. She left an indelible mark on most students who came in contact with her. She was chronically exuberant, usually in a relentlessly good mood. She knew how to dress, and she knew how to walk.
Even as far back as grade school, other girls came to Linda Barrett for counseling. Her mother was a nurse at University Hospital, and somehow Linda knew all the facts of life before any other kid her age in Ridgemont.
Linda’s view of sex was, basically, that everyone had blown it way out of proportion. “A lot of girls use sex,” she had told Stacy Hamilton long ago. “They use sex to get a guy closer. To really nail him down or something. To say ‘I had sex with you, you owe me something.’ Well, that’s terrible. They’re not having sex to have sex. They’re having sex to use it as something. I’d hate myself if I did that.”
No question about it. Linda Barrett was an authority. While the other girls were just abandoning their tricycles, Linda was underlining and memorizing all the sex scenes from Shōgun. Some had Seventeen magazine in their lockers; she had The Hite Report.
Linda and Stacy had been sitting at a bus stop the winter before, when Stacy turned to Linda. “Linda,” she asked, “will you help me get birth control pills?”
Linda, then sixteen, turned all pro. “We’ll go down to the clinic and get them tomorrow.”
“You just go down there?”
“Yeah. They give them to you free. But you’ve got to need them first.”
“Linda,” Stacy had said with determination, “I’m getting ready to need them.”
The next day they ditched third period and took a bus to the downtown free clinic. They were too late for the noon session, so they walked around downtown for an hour. The two girls looked so young, not even the sailors bothered them.
“When you get in there,” Linda had advised, “you tell them that you have sex twice a week.”
Stacy nodded.
“If you tell them the truth, they won’t give you the right pills. They’ll try to talk you into a diaphragm or something, and that might really hurt. You’ve got to hold out for the pills.”
It took forever. The free clinic, Stacy thought at the time, was like anything else—they made you wait a long time for what you really wanted. First, three nurses led the group of girls into a high-ceilinged “rap room,” public service jargon for a room with bean bags instead of chairs, and proceeded with a half-hour presentation of Responsibilities of Sex. They used the same diagrams Stacy had seen in eighth- and ninth-grade sex-education classes. Then, finally, each girl waited for a private examination and prescription from one of the free clinic doctors.