Authors: David Lubar

B005N8ZFUO EBOK (7 page)

BOOK: B005N8ZFUO EBOK

2.07Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

ads

I
guess every teacher had his own idea of how to teach a class at Edgeview. Mr. Briggs obviously belonged to the crowd that thought a teacher should be a buddy and a pal. Ms. Crenshaw was really into getting the class involved. Mr. Parsons was one of those teachers who experimented with all sorts of methods. Miss Nomad seemed to think a smile and a cheerful attitude would work wonders.

Mr. Langhorn, the geography teacher, had a more traditional approach. Mr. Langhorn depended on discipline from start to finish. Strict discipline. As he stomped into the room, I sensed a change in everyone’s mood. They had that pathetic look that a dog gets when it expects a whack on the snout with a rolled-up newspaper. Mr. Langhorn stood at his desk and glared at us for a moment. He wore his hair in a crew cut and it almost looked like he ironed his suits. I had the feeling he spent a good chunk of each day polishing his shoes.

Even though everyone was reasonably quiet, Mr. Langhorn began class by shouting, “Quiet! No more talking!” His voice was hoarse, like it had suffered from a lifetime of yelling. Little bits of spit sprayed from his mouth. I was happy the seats Cheater had grabbed for us weren’t in the front row. Being close to Mr. Langhorn for a whole class would probably be a lot like taking a warm shower.

For the next hour, he filled us with geography facts. Anytime anybody fidgeted a little or whispered, Mr. Langhorn shouted. I remembered
him yelling, shouting, ranting, raving, and snarling. I remembered him pointing at kids and demanding silence. I remembered him calling us all sorts of names. But I didn’t remember a single fact he told us about geography—not one ocean or river or capital. I knew he talked about geography. When he wasn’t yelling, he was teaching us about some country—I think it was in South America. But as hard as I tried, at the end of the period I couldn’t recall a single fact he’d mentioned.

That wouldn’t have been a big problem, except that as the class was ending, Mr. Langhorn strutted from desk to desk, firing questions at us. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who’d failed to absorb the lesson. Nobody came up with answers. This definitely didn’t please him. By the time he got to me, he was not a happy teacher.

“You,” he snapped, bending over until his face was just inches from mine. He smelled like stale tobacco and sugar-free gum. “Tell me one thing you’ve learned today.”

I looked around the room, hoping for a clue. The walls were lined with travel posters. There were beautiful pictures of exotic places—Portugal, Singapore, New Guinea.

“Are you an idiot?” Mr. Langhorn asked. He grabbed my jaw and yanked my head back toward him. “Don’t look around the room. Look at me when I’m talking to you. Did I just waste my time? Can’t you give me one simple fact?” He let his hand drop from my face.

“Here’s a fact,” I yelled. “You’ve never been to any of these places. You just talk about them.” It was a shot in the dark. I mean, most people don’t get to travel a lot. I’d never been anywhere. For all I knew, maybe Mr. Langhorn had flown all over the world. But it was like Torchie’s picture of Mars. You don’t fill a room with posters of places you’ve been. You fill it with dreams. Still, as the words I’d just shouted echoed in my mind, I figured it wasn’t something that would get me in much trouble.

Wrong again.

Mr. Langhorn got redder. He leaned closer and grabbed the edges of my desk. I expected him to pick up the desk and break it across his
knee. Apparently, I’d hit on the truth, and it didn’t make him happy. He stared at me for another minute. The bell rang. He stood up and backed away. “Class dismissed,” he snarled.

I got up slowly. I still expected him to hit me or twist my head off. But I got out through the doorway in one piece.

“Martin, wait up.”

I turned toward Mr. Briggs, who was jogging down the hallway.

“See you upstairs,” Torchie said. He headed off. Cheater went the other way down the hall. I guess he was going to the library.

“Yeah?” I asked Mr. Briggs when he reached me.

“What you said before. Maybe part of that is true.” He shrugged. “Maybe it’s all true. But what I said was true, too. I am here if you need someone to talk to. Okay?”

“Sure.” I backed up a step. Just because he understood physics and chemistry didn’t mean he had any chance of understanding me. “Is that all?”

“That’s all.”

I made my escape and headed off toward the stairs. One thing at Edgeview was no different from any other school I’d been to—I had homework. Not a lot, but I had some math problems to do and some reading for English. From what I’d seen, at least half the kids didn’t bother doing their homework, but I figured it would help kill some time. I decided to go back to the room and get started on it.

As I reached the top of the stairs, a door down the hall flew open with a bang. Nobody came out of the room. I glanced inside as I passed the open doorway. That kid Trash, the one I’d asked about in the cafeteria, was in the room, sitting at a desk, hunched over with a pencil in his hand.

Just after I turned my eyes away, I heard this fluttering whoosh, followed by a bang that made me duck and cover my head. Something had slammed into the wall right behind me, hitting hard enough to knock out a piece of plaster.

TORCHIE FLICKS AWAY

I
spun and looked down at the math book lying on the floor. Talk about a deadly weapon. I picked it up and stared back into the room. Okay—I’d taken enough crap for one day. More than enough. I walked in. The kid glanced up, watching me with empty eyes.

“You trying to hit me?” I asked. “If you were, you’d better practice. Your aim sucks.” I held out the book, ready to jump back if he took a swing at me. He was about my size—hard to tell for sure, since he was sitting—maybe a couple inches taller and a few pounds heavier, but close enough so I figured I could take him if I had to.

“I wasn’t trying to hit you.” He reached up, took the book from me, and tossed it on the bed. I noticed there was just one bed in the room. Torchie had told me that some of the rooms were so small they didn’t try to cram two people inside.

I relaxed a bit and glanced around the room. Whoa—it looked like the inside of a rock tumbler. The window was boarded over with a sheet of plywood. There were chips of plaster missing from spots on all four walls. Most of the books in the room were piled in one corner. Tangled clothing covered the floor of the closet. The closet door was smashed through in a couple of spots and hanging from one hinge.

“You must be Trash,” I said.

“I must be.”

“I’m Martin,” I said, holding out my hand.

“Nice to meet you.”

We shook hands. His grip was a lot stronger than I expected. I took a step back. “Well, I’ve got homework. Better get to it.”

“Okay.” He turned back to his sketch pad.

I looked over his shoulder. It started out as a quick glance, but what I saw locked me in place. He was drawing this incredible scene of a rocket shooting across an alien landscape. I watched him for a few minutes, but he didn’t look back up, so I went out the door and down the hall to my room.

As I got close to the room, I heard voices from inside. It sounded like Torchie and Lucky. Torchie was saying, “We can trust him.”

“Maybe,” Lucky said. “But I don’t want to take any chances, so let’s not rush.”

“Okay,” Torchie said.

I waited to see if they would say anything else about me, but they didn’t. After a while, I felt funny standing out there listening. So I rattled the knob to make sure they heard me coming, and then went in.

“Hi,” Torchie said a little too quickly.

“Hi.” I sat at my desk and got started on my homework while Torchie and Lucky found another topic of conversation. It was okay if they had a secret. I was new, and it would take a while before they trusted me. I was pretty sure the secret had something to do with Friday nights, because they’d almost let something slip about that already.

A few minutes later, there was a knock on the door. Principal Davis stuck his head in and said to Torchie, “Come with me, please, Philip.”

Torchie sighed as he went past me and muttered, “Didn’t do nuthin’.” He followed the principal out into the hallway.

“What do you think will happen to him?” I asked Lucky.

He shrugged. “No way to guess.” He stared at me. I was afraid he’d start shouting again. Instead, he quietly said, “I look out for my friends. Understand? Torchie—he’s my friend. Same with Cheater and Flinch. They’re my friends. You treat them okay, we’ll get along.”

I nodded. “No problem.”

He stood up. “See you later.”

“Bye.”

About an hour later, Torchie came back. He smelled like smoke. Well, he always smelled like smoke, but right now it was stronger than ever. “What happened?” I asked.

“They made me light fires. Can you believe that? For a whole hour, they just kept making me burn pieces of paper.” He held up his right thumb. “Look. I got a blister from the lighter.”

“They
made
you light fires?”

He nodded. “Guess they figured if they made me do it, I’d get tired of it. But I didn’t do nothin’ in the first place.”

I didn’t say anything. Obviously, he wanted to keep pretending that he didn’t have a problem. As I finished my homework, Lucky came back. I realized that our room was the place where everyone hung out. Maybe it was because we were at the end of the hall. Maybe it was because Torchie had a lot of magazines.

Lucky had brought his portable stereo. “It’s mine,” he said when he caught me looking at it. “I didn’t steal it. I got it last Christmas.”

“Hey, I didn’t say anything,” I told him.

Cheater came next. Flinch dropped by soon after that. It wasn’t like a party or anything—it was just a bunch of us sitting around, talking or reading or just listening to music. Maybe it was a safety thing. Together, we were less likely to be harmed by Bloodbath. Maybe it was a social thing—we had the common bond of being sent to Edgeview. I really didn’t feel like trying to examine it right then.

“Does Trash ever drop in?” I asked Torchie after the other kids had left.

“Him? No way. We tried hanging out with him. All of us did. Especially me. I really tried hard to make friends with him. But he’s not a lot of fun to have around. He’s always throwing stuff. That kind of makes the rest of us nervous.”

“I can see how it might.”

Torchie shook his head. “He even threw a sneaker at Bloodbath once, in the locker room. Can you believe it? He got the crap kicked out of him for that.”

I didn’t want to hear any more about Bloodbath. “Hey, got anything to read besides magazines?”

Torchie pointed to the closet. “I have a ton of books in there. Help yourself.”

“Thanks.” I opened the closet and dug through his collection. There was a lot of good stuff. He had some Jack London and Jules Verne, but I’d already read most of that. My sister had gotten me started on them, along with H. G. Wells, Robert Heinlein, and Roald Dahl. I’d discovered Dean Koontz and Stephen King on my own. I searched around and finally picked up a battered and slightly charred paperback called
Fifty Great Science Fiction Stories
.

Maybe it was the book that gave me my first real hint. The stories I read described all kinds of strange and wonderful things. I guess they gave my mind a shove in a direction I hadn’t planned. At one point, I glanced up from the book and looked at the clock on Torchie’s desk. “A whole day,” I said.

“What?” Torchie asked.

“I’ve been here a whole day.”

“Happy anniversary,” Torchie said.

“Thanks.” I thought about my first day. It couldn’t be called a success—I’d gotten nearly every teacher angry with me. I was used to that sort of reaction, but even I was surprised at how quickly I’d gotten into trouble.

Still, I didn’t think it was fair to compare me with kids who set fires or stole or threw stuff or cheated all the time.
Fair
. Now, there was a fun word. Dad liked to remind me that life wasn’t fair. I’d heard that from him more than once. And then he’d tell me all the things I should be thankful for, and then he’d tell me how easy my life was compared to when he was a kid. And I’d tell myself I couldn’t wait to get away.

Well, here I was. Away. For real. I’d never been away from my parents like this before—not in a place I couldn’t leave. I was on my own.
There were teachers all over the school—Edgeview had no shortage of adults—but that didn’t change the fact that I was on my own. None of the adults here had any reason to care about what happened to me. None of the teachers was going to worry about the fate of one more face in the crowd, no matter what they might say about wanting to help. They especially wouldn’t care after the way things had gone today.

As I heard the dinner bell ring, I put down the book of science fiction stories and got to my feet. “Pretty strange,” I said to Torchie.

“Yeah, it’s got some cool stories,” he said.

I didn’t bother to tell him I hadn’t been talking about the book.