It was about half past when I finished with Dad and Mr. Steiner, already fifteen minutes into the second period. According to the schedule in my binder, I was supposed to be in English class in Room 214 with Mrs. Turnbull. I couldn’t remember where 214 was and barely remembered her. First I had to find my locker and dump my crap off. I rooted out my binder and found my locker and combination taped to the front inside cover. High security, you bet!
I wandered around the halls getting familiarized to an extent and found my locker. Boy, that was like looking into a time capsule! I would need to sort through that at some point. I tossed my bag and jacket in there and went off in search of 214. Finding it, I looked through the window in the door and saw Mrs. Turnbull standing near a blackboard at one end of the room. I moved on to the other door and slid in through the back.
There was no hope of doing this secretively. Mrs. Turnbull stopped and stared at me as everyone in the room turned in their chairs and looked at me, goggle eyed and slack jawed. A memory came back and I realized that the empty chair in the fourth row on the right was mine. I made my way over and slid into it.
“Welcome back, Mr. Buckman. I had heard you were no longer with us,” said Mrs. Turnbull. She was a nondescript but witty and sharp woman in her forties.
“The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated,” I replied.
She smiled. “So I gather, Mr. Twain, so I gather. Might I assume you will continue to grace us with your presence in the foreseeable future?”
“And a most gracious presence it will be!” Mrs. Turnbull had enjoyed witty repartee back in the day. She didn’t mind a student arguing or disagreeing with her, just so long as they used good English, proper phrasing, and refused to swear or insult.
She nodded at me. “We’ll see about that.” She went back towards the board and resumed her lecture.
As soon as Turnbull’s back was turned, when she began to write something on the blackboard, Katie Lowenthal, who sat next to me turned and whispered, “What happened! I saw you go to jail!”
Without turning, Mrs. Turnbull loudly said, “Miss Lowenthal, questions such as that are best answered after school. Would you like a detention later on to allow you time to make a list?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Then spare the discussion until after class.”
Katie gave me a dirty look, but I just shrugged my shoulders. Katie was one of my best friends in school, and she was a girl, but she was never a girlfriend. We had known each other since our days at Hampton Elementary. She was another college prep kid, scary smart, and we could talk about anything. She was rather roly-poly throughout our time in school. We totally lost track of each other after graduation, when I moved hundreds of miles away and stayed away, but ran across each other at our twenty year reunion. She had become a doctor, was doing research in oncology, and was living in Southern California. She had slimmed down, gotten an amazing tan, and looked very foxy. I got the impression she might have been interested in a little reunion get-together on our own later, but I was with Marilyn and just smiled away the tentative approach.
Anyway, that was all years in the future, or the past, or something. We muddled through the remainder of the class, and I could feel the occasional stares as people wondered what I was doing here. The fight on the bus, the expulsion, and the three boys in the hospital would have been amazing in themselves, but add that I was arrested and hauled off in handcuffs and you just knew that I was the talk of the last couple of days. Now I show back up like nothing has happened.
As soon as I got out of the class to the hallway Katie was in my face, with some other friends around us. “What are you doing here!? You’re supposed to be in jail!”
“Yeah, you escape or something?” asked somebody behind her.
I just gave a laugh. “It’s nothing like that. I was never arrested. It was all a misunderstanding.”
“No it wasn’t! I saw the police put the cuffs on you!” she protested.
I just leaned against a wall of lockers. “Yeah, but that was because the bus driver screwed up. That’s why the police were here later that morning. Did they talk to you then?” I asked.
She nodded. “Yeah, me and Betty and Ray. They wanted to know what happened. It was kind of cool. Ray said he asked if you were going to jail but the police officer wouldn’t say. Mr. Warner stayed with us the entire time and the police officer kept telling him to let us talk. He kept trying to tell what happened, like he was there or something.”
“Figures. Anyway, as soon as they knew what really happened I went home. It’s no big deal.”
“It is too a big deal! They had you in handcuffs like on TV. Did they fingerprint you? Take your picture?” Ray Shorn had come up next to Katie and was hitting me with all sorts of questions. He was one of the normal kids, but was a good guy anyway. He lived three houses up and across the street, and when we were little we had made a tree fort in the woods behind his house.
“Nope. None of that. They just asked me some questions and sent me home.”
“What about the Strutters and Tewkesie? What happened to them?” asked Katie.
“Don’t know. Haven’t seen them? They haven’t been to school?” I asked innocently.
She stared at me. “They all went off in a couple of ambulances. There was so much blood that Marcie fainted and little Billy Smith puked up breakfast all over his brother.”
Ray laughed. “Yeah, it was so cool!”
So much for being innocent. That was pretty funny, in a black comedy sort of way. I had to smile at that and shrug. “Hey, they started it, not me.”
“Where did you learn to fight like that?” asked Tommy Toner, another guy from the college prep crew. “What, you some kind of karate guy or something?” It was years before Kung Fu ever made it to television, so at least I didn’t have to put up with that.
“I just got lucky, I guess.”
The bell rang and we had to split up and move along. Next class was Algebra 1. I wondered just how bad it was going to be. It turned out to be just about as bad as I thought it would. It had been pretty easy and straightforward the first time around, and it sure hadn’t gotten any harder since then. I was going to have to do something about this. I decided to think some more about it and speak to the teacher tomorrow.
The rest of the day was pretty much the same. I was a celebrity, in a dark and creepy sort of way, and I spent the day rehashing the entire event between classes, and the time in class rehashing ancient lessons. It got funny, though, when it was time to go home. I followed Katie out to the buses, not trusting my memory as to where in the lineup it would be. The driver refused to let me on. That led to an argument between him and Mr. Warner, who oversaw us getting on the buses, which got very interesting. It ended when Warner threatened to have the driver yanked off the bus and have Joe Jenkins, the head maintenance guy, drive us home. I was allowed on the bus, but ordered to sit in the first row with the little kids, so he could keep an eye on me. I just smiled and sat where he pointed. When one of the little kids asked why I was being punished, I just answered, “I guess he likes me!” which got me an order to shut up or he was throwing me off.
The ride home was quiet, since none of the seventh graders I was riding with knew who I was, other than ‘the guy in the back who got in the fight and went to jail.’ My buddies, who would all have been bugging me, and any friends of the three ex-students were all behind us. The bus driver told me he was going to see about having me removed, no matter what Warner said, but I just shrugged and ignored him.
The next morning I went running again, same route as before, same crick in my side as before. It would have to get better sooner or later. Daisy ran with me the first lap, but then I let her into the house and continued on. I suspected she was smarter than I was. The bus driver was different however, a woman this time. Katie asked her what happened to our old driver and she said that he was on a different route. She didn’t say anything about any assigned seating to me, so I just moved on down to my normal seat. One of the ninth graders, a buddy of Tewkesie, gave me a dirty look, but I just looked him straight in the eye and he continued on down the aisle. After he passed, I slowly turned and saw him sitting down. He looked at me again, silently daring me to do something, but I just stared him down and after about ten seconds he looked away.