After an hour, he was sorry for it all.
By the time Clay got home that night, he flinched whenever his parents asked him a question. He told them repeatedly he’d had a bad day, and he only wanted to go to bed. When they demanded to know why his face was so reddened, he said a ball had hit him at practice. He went to his bedroom as though he was dragging a chain behind him, and Elaine and Brandon were too worried to remember to ask Clay if the coach had mentioned working on the recruiting film for him.
Clay only went to school because he was scared to be at home by himself after his parents had left for their jobs. At school, he jumped when his friends slung their arms around him, punched him in the shoulder, and in general acted like kids on the cusp of becoming men. For the first time in his life, Clay knew what it was like to be weak. To be lesser.
When his best buddy strolled past Hazel Reid’s table in the lunchroom, his fist raised to pound on the table to make Hazel jump (a trick that never grew old with Clay’s friends), Clay caught that fist and said, simply, “No. Not any more.”
“Awww, man,” the friend said, but he’d heard the pronouncement of the most popular boy in school. Not any more.
Clay turned to leave the lunchroom and saw Principal DeWitt standing, straight and lean as an arrow, about two yards away. He was seized by an almost uncontrollable impulse to rush to her and tell her what had happened to him. Everyone said DeWitt was a smart woman and a good principal. She would be able to figure out who’d kidnapped him.
Or maybe not. There were so many candidates.
There were a lot of sins Clay Meacham had never thought twice about committing, sins of which he was now painfully aware. His eyes had been opened last night, even though he’d been blindfolded.
Clay was only seventeen, and he wasn’t clear on how he was supposed to attain perfection, but the guidelines he’d been given last night had been pretty clear.
He saw the principal again that day, when she came to watch the team practice. That wasn’t an uncommon occurrence. While Clay was waiting to come up to bat, he saw Coach Halsey look at Ms. DeWitt. It made Clay shiver. Clay’d been scared he’d pitch poorly that day, but now that he knew there’d be a price to pay if he failed, his focus was amazing.
After practice, Principal DeWitt drifted over to talk to Coach Halsey. After a second, Coach beckoned Clay over. He trotted over to the two adults.
“I hear you need a recruitment film,” Coach Halsey said.
“My parents say I need one to send out next year, yessir,” Clay said.
“I’m willing to help you make it, but I won’t do all the work,” Coach said. “You’ll have to put in some hours helping me do other things, so I’ll have some free time.”
The old Clay would have been sullen about giving up anything to get something that was his due. The new Clay said, “Yessir. Just say when.” He turned and went into the locker room.
“I think he’s been turned around,” Anne said.
“At least for now.” Coach Halsey looked down at her. “Want to get dinner Saturday night?”
“I think so,” she said, after a pause. “There are a few things we might want to talk about.”
“Oh?”
“Sarah Toth’s dad is hitting her.”
“Well,” Holt said. “We can’t have that. She won’t get the high test scores if she’s being beaten at home.”
“If she scores two points higher the next time she takes the SAT, it’ll be a state record.”
He smiled. No one else would have enjoyed that smile but Anne. “Then we’d better get cracking.”
They both laughed, just a little. “By the way,” Holt said. “What happened to the principal before you? You became assistant here the year before she killed herself, right?”
Anne nodded, her expression faintly regretful. “Mrs. Snyder was having sex in her office with a married teacher, Ted Cole. Christy overheard a conversation between them and came to me with it.”
“Then it would have been all over the school in short order.” He smiled. “Good job. Proactive.”
Anne smiled back before she glanced down at her watch. “I have to be at my house to let the handyman in,” she murmured. But she lingered for a moment. “Snyder almost didn’t hire me. She was not a fan, from the first interview until the last. But the school board liked me. And the minute I saw Travis High, I knew it was a place where I could make a difference. Now…” She looked up at him and away, almost shyly. “Now there’s no limit.”
“No limit,” he agreed, and they stood silent in the lowering sun, their long shadows streaking across the practice field.
Sarah Smiles
I didn’t want to follow the pattern of my first Anne DeWitt story, so I cast about for another way of showing Anne doing what she’s best at.
I wondered what Anne’s past had been. She had been a teenager once and what was she like? Even then, she must have been smart and ruthless. How had her foster parents fared with someone like Anne in their house? When did she begin to realize she could manipulate events to make things go the way she wanted them to go?
How far did she go?
So in “Sarah Smiles,” I switched things up a bit so you could all think about that.
Sarah Toth parked her car in the Travis High parking lot just in time to hear the first bell ring. She and her brother James exchanged a long look as they unbuckled their seat belts. “Isn’t there any other way?” he asked her.
As she shook her head, her glossy braid whipped back and forth on her back like an animal’s tail. “We’ve talked about this,” she said, her voice flat. “Come on, bubba. We’ll be late.” James, whose first class was in the south wing, took off in that direction without looking back. More slowly, Sarah went to the main entrance. It was the oldest part of the school, and there were stairs up to the huge front door. She went up them awkwardly, and as she made her way in she could tell that other kids noticed her limp. The door to the left led to the outer room of the principal’s office, where Christy the secretary reigned. The principal herself, Anne DeWitt, had emerged from her inner sanctum to watch the students flow into the building, as she did from time to time. Ms. DeWitt’s face was always calm, always composed, and Sarah found it impossible to tell what the principal was thinking while she scanned the incoming teenagers. When their eyes met, Sarah nodded, because she was a polite and politic girl. She wasn’t surprised when Principal DeWitt nodded back. Everyone on the faculty knew who Sarah was, a source of some pride to the girl. But Principal DeWitt wasn’t the adult she was looking for this morning.
There. Mr. Mathis, the assistant principal, was standing at the T junction of the main hall and the entrance area, his invariable post in the morning. Sarah could feel him watching her as she limped past. She was sure his eyes followed her as she turned left to go to her first period class. World History was taught by Coach Holt Halsey, who was a surprisingly good teacher for a coach. Everyone – everyone in Sarah’s world, that is, the students of Travis High, Colleton County, North Carolina – thought of Halsey, boys’ baseball coach, as a little forbidding. He wouldn’t put up with foolishness, but he was approachable about serious stuff, and he had the reputation of knowing everything about any student who took part in a sport, both boys and girls.