Southern Cross

'I'm busy right now,' Smoke said.

'But you'll be tardy.'

'Oh, I'm scaaaarrrred.' Smoke laughed. 'Get out, re-tardy. '

Weed did. He opened the back door and gathered his cheap knapsack of books, papers and the bologna-and-mustard sandwich he had fixed before Smoke picked him up.

'After school, you get your ass right back here,' Smoke said. 'Right in this exact spot. I'm gonna take you over to the clubhouse so you can get initiated and make your dream come true.'

Weed knew about the clubhouse. Smoke had told him all about it.

'I got band practice,' Weed said as his spirit trembled inside him.

'No you don't.'

'Yeah I do. Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, we got marching practice, Smoke.' Weed's blood lost its heat and his stomach made itself smaller.

'Today you're busy, re-tardy. Your ass better be right here at three.'

Tears welled in Weed's eyes again as Smoke sped off. Weed loved band. He loved going outside on the practice baseball field and marching with his Sabian eighteen-inch bronze cymbals and dreaming of the red-and-white toy-soldier uniform with its black hat and plume that he'd get to wear in the Azalea Parade on Saturday. Mr. Curry said Sabians were the best made, and Weed was responsible for keeping them bright and shiny, the leather straps tied nice and tight in their special flat, braided knots.

Flags were waving in front of the tidy blond-brick school, where nineteen hundred boisterous upper-middle-class students were jostling and shuffling into classrooms. Weed's mood lifted. At least his father lived in the right school district. Weed kept clothes and other belongings in his father's house, pretending he lived there, too. If Weed couldn't go to Godwin, there would be no art or musk in his life.

The 8:35 tardy bell was ringing as Weed slammed shut the door to his bright orange locker and ran through empty corridors of different colored walls, the classrooms he passed filled with chatter and laughter and the thud and flutter of books opening on desktops. Weed had a phobia of being late that preceded this moment by many years.

His mother worked all the time and was rarely home or awake to get Weed up for school. Sometimes he overslept, sending him flying down to the corner bus stop in a panic, without books or lunch, barely dressed. In his mind, missing the bus meant missing life and being left alone in an empty house that echoed with past fights between parents who had split and the loud, full-of-himself sounds of Weed's big brother, Twister, who was dead.

Weed galloped around a corner to the science department just as Mr. Pretty began hall duty from the table outside Mrs. Fan's biology class, where this second Weed was supposed to be getting ready to take a quiz.

'Whoa,' Mr. Pretty called out as Weed ran past and the tardy bell stopped and doors up and down the halls shut.

'I'm going to Mrs. Fan's class,' Weed gasped.

'Do you know where it is?'

'Yes, sir, Mr. Pretty. Right there.' Weed pointed at the red door less than twenty steps away, and wondered what kind of stupid question was that.

'You're late,' Mr. Pretty told him.

'The bell just quit,' Weed said. 'You can almost still hear it.'

'Late is late, Weed.'

'I didn't mean to be.'

'And I don't guess you have a pass,' said Mr. Pretty, who taught ninth-grade Western Civilization.

'I don't got a pass,' Weed said as indignation gathered, 'cause I wasn't planning on being late. But my ride just got here and there wasn't nothing I could do about it and I ran all the way so I wouldn't be late. And now you're making me later, Mr. Pretty.'

Mr. Pretty's compulsion was to pull kids but not ticket them. He was young and nice-looking and had an insatiable need for captive audiences. He was notorious for holding kids in the hall as long as possible while they fidgeted and stared at the rooms where they were supposed to be as classes and quizzes went on without them.

'Don't blame me or your ride for being tardy,' said Mr. Pretty from behind his small table in the empty intersection of shiny, empty hallways.

'I'm not blaming. I'm just saying the way it is.'

'If I were you, I'd watch my mouth, Weed.'

'What you want me to do, walk around with a mirror?' Weed sassed him.

Mr. Pretty might have let Weed go on to class, but Mr. Pretty was pissed and decided to draw things out.

'Let's see, I believe you're in my third period,' he said. 'You remember what we talked about on Friday?'

Weed didn't remember anything about Friday except that he wasn't looking forward to spending the weekend with his father.

'Ah. Maybe this will jog your memory,' Mr. Pretty said curtly. 'What happened in 1556?'

Weed's nerves were tangling and popping. He could hear Mrs. Fan's voice through her shut door. She was passing out the quiz and going over instructions.

'Come on, I know you know it.' Mr. Pretty picked on Weed some more. 'What happened?'

'A war.' Weed threw out the first thing that came to mind.

'A fairly safe guess since there were so many of them. But you're wrong. Fifteen fifty-six was when Akbar became emperor of India.'

'Is it okay if I go in Mrs. Fan's class now?'

'And then what?' Mr. Pretty demanded. 'What happened next?'

'What?'

'I asked you first.'

'About what?' Weed was getting furious.

'About what happened next?' Mr. Pretty asked.

'Depends on what you mean by next,' Weed smarted off.

'Next as in what's next in the chronology of events that I handed out to every person in my class,' Mr. Pretty answered with an edge. 'Of course, you probably never looked at it.'

'I did too. And it says right on it we don't have to memorize nothing unless it's in bold, and the India thing and what happened next ain't in bold.'

'Oh really?' Mr. Pretty got haughty. 'And how can you remember whether something was in bold or not if you don't remember anything in the first place?'

'I remember when something's in bold!' Weed raised his voice, as if he were suddenly talking in bold.

'No you don't!'

'Yes I do!'

Mr. Pretty angrily grabbed a ballpoint pen out of his shirt pocket. He began scribbling words on the Hall Duty passes and no passes sheet.

'All right, smarty pants,' said Mr. Pretty as self-control slipped further out of reach. 'I've written down ten words, some in bold, some not. You get one minute to look them over.'

He handed the list to Weed: for/end, effigy, pogrom, Versailles, mead, Faberge, Fabian, Waterloo, edict, pact. Not one word was familiar. Mr. Pretty snatched back the list.

'Which words were in bold?' Mr. Pretty demanded.

'I can't pronunciate them.'

'Versailles,' Mr. Pretty prodded him.

Weed looked at the list in his head and located the only word that began with a V.

'Fourth one, not in bold,' he said.

'Pogrom!'

'Third, not in bold.'

'Fabian!' Mr. Pretty fired back.

'He's four before last. Not in bold, either.'

'Effigy!' Mr. Pretty blurted out, his attractive face distorted by anger.

'It's in bold,' Weed said. 'Just like five and ten are.'

'Oh really?' Mr. Pretty was beside himself. 'And just what are five and ten since you think you know so much?'

Weed saw mead and pact in his head and pronounced them his own special way. 'Med and paced.'

'What do they mean!'

Mr. Pretty was talking loudly and Mrs. Fan cracked open her door, out of concern, to check on things.

'Shhhhhhhhh!' she said.

'What do they mean, Weed?' Mr. Pretty lowered his scornful voice.

Weed did the best he could.

'Med is what you feel when someone disses you. And paced is what we use in art class,' he guessed.

Officer Fling was guessing, too. He had gone to the next layer control, then hit function 3 for thematic display, and selected remove to get rid of the latest pie, and brought up priority one, two and three calls for fourth precinct, which was not what anyone was interested in at the moment.

Hammer flipped on the overhead lights. The presentation was never supposed to run over an hour and it was well past the limit. She was discouraged and frustrated and determined not to let it show.