He tossed the grapefruit in the wastebasket and turned back to the blackboard.
He opened the morning paper, sipping his coffee, and saw the headline about halfway down. 'God!' he said, splitting his wife's easy flow of morning chatter. His belly felt suddenly filled with splinters -'Teen-Age Girl Falls to Her Death: Katherine Slavin, a seventeen-year-old junior at Harold Davis High School, either fell or was pushed from the roof of her downtown apartment house early yesterday evening. The girl, who kept a pigeon coop on the roof, had gone up with a sack of feed, according to her mother.
'Police said an unidentified woman in a neighbouring development had seen three boys running across the roof at 6.45 p.m., just minutes after the girl's body (continued page 3)-'
'Jim, was she one of yours?' But he could only look at her mutely.
Two weeks later, Simmons met him in the hall after the lunch bell with a folder in his hand, and Jim felt a terrible sinking in his belly.
'New student,' he said flatly to Simmons. 'Living with Lit.'
Sim's eyebrows went up. 'How did you know that?'
Jim shrugged and held his hand out for the folder.
'Got to run,' Simmons said. 'Department heads are meeting on course evaluations. You look a little run-down. Feeling okay?'
That's right, a little run-down. Like Billy Stearns.
'Sure,' he said.
'That's the stuff,' Simmons said, and clapped him on the back.
When he was gone, Jim opened the folder to the picture, wincing in advance, like man about to be hit.
But the face wasn't instantly familiar. Just a kid's face. Maybe he'd seen it before, maybe not. The kid, David Garcia, was a hulking, dark-haired boy with rather negroid lips and dark, slumbering eyes. The yellow sheet said he was also from Milford High and that he had spent two years in Granville Reformatory. Car theft.
Jim closed the folder with hands that trembled slightly.
'Sally?'
She looked up from her ironing. He had been staring at a TV basketball game without really seeing it.
'Nothing,' he said. 'Forgot what I was going to say.'
'Must have been a lie.'
He smiled mechanically and looked at the TV again. It had been on the tip of his tongue to spill everything. But how could he? It was worse than crazy. Where would you start? The dream? The breakdown? The appearance of Robert Lawson?
No. With Wayne - your brother.
But he had never told anyone about that, not even in analysis. His thoughts turned to David Garcia, and the dreamy terror that had washed over him when they had looked at each other in the hall. Of course, he had only looked vaguely familiar in the picture. Pictures don't move or twitch.
Garcia had been standing with Lawson and Chip Osway, and when he looked up and saw Jim Norman, he smiled and
his eyelid began to jitter up and down and voices spoke in Jim's mind with unearthly clarity:
Come on, kid, how much you got? F-four cents.
You f**kin' liar - look, Vinnie, he wet himself'
'Jim? Did you say something?'
'No.' But he wasn't sure if he had or not. He was getting very scared.
One day after school in early February there was a knock on the teachers'-room door, and when Jim opened it, Chip Osway stood there. He looked frightened. Jim was alone; it was ten after four and the last of the teachers had gone home an hour before. He was correcting a batch of American Lit themes.
'Chip?' he said evenly.
Chip shuffled his feet. 'Can I talk to you for a minute, Mr Norman?'
'Sure. But if it's about that test, you're wasting your -'
'It's not about that. Uh, can I smoke in here?'
'Go ahead.'
He lit his cigarette with a hand that trembled slightly. He didn't speak for perhaps as long as a minute. It seemed that he couldn't. His lips twitched, his hands came together, and his eyes slitted, as if some inner self was struggling to find expression.
He suddenly burst out: 'If they do it, I want you to know I wasn't in on it! I don't like those guys! They're creeps!'
'What guys, Chip?'
'Lawson and that Garcia creep.'
'Are they planning to get me?' The old dreamy terror was on him, and he knew the answer.
'I liked them at first,' Chip said. 'We went out and had a few beers. I started bitchin' about you and that test. About how I was gonna get you. But that was just talk! I swear it!'
'What happened?'
'They took me right up on it. Asked what time you left school, what kind of car you drove, all that stuff. I said what have you got against him and Garcia said they knew you a long time ago. . . hey, are you all right?'
'The cigarette,' he said thickly. 'Haven't ever got used to the smoke.'
Chip ground it out. 'I asked them when they knew you and Bob Lawson said I was still pissin' my didies then. But they're seventeen, the same as me.'
'Then what?'