Game Change: A Nina Bannister Mystery (The Nina Bannister Mysteries Book 3) (26 page)

Oh, it probably didn’t matter. One state patrolman, another state patrolman…

…pretty much all the same thing, when one thought about it.

“Coach, you need to come with us.”

“But but but but…”

“Now.”

“Oh, come on!”

The players were circled around, staring open-mouthed.

She looked at them and said:

“Game change.”

Then she left the court.

She spent the second half in the dressing room, being consoled by this parent or that who came down to tell her she was doing a wonderful job and that they had no right to treat her this way.

Finally, with perhaps a minute left in the game, Jackson Bennett appeared.

It was of course the women’s dressing room, but nobody was going to throw Jackson Bennett out of it.

He stood massively in the doorway.

Then he took two steps toward her and said:

“I’ve never seen anything like that in my life.”

She tried to answer but could think of nothing to say.

He continued:

“I’m so proud of you. And Frank would have been, too.”

Then they embraced.

Then he told her the final score: Bay St. Lucy sixty eight, Logansport forty-one.

Then they embraced again.

CHAPTER 16: MOCKMACE!

“...how false the most profound book turns out to be when applied to life.”

––
William Faulkner
,
Light in August

“The displacement of water is equal to the something of something.”

––
William Faulkner

The following Friday, Bay St. Lucy High School took the MOCK MACE.

This did not happen quite as expected, though.

The tests—in English, math, social studies, and Spanish—were to be administered at precisely ten AM, taken with Number 2 pencils, and finished by 11:50.

Except that at 9:35 AM, a fight broke out.

This was not one of the after school fights that took place ever so often, and that Nina had broken up on her first day back.

This was a fight in school.

“Ms. Bannister?”

“Yes,” Nina answered, taking her nose out of the English literature MOCKMACE she was reading over and hoping that the students would remember that
Huckleberry Finn
was not written by Nathanial Hawthorne. “What is it?”

“There’s something going on down the hall!”

“What? What’s going on?”

“I don’t know; there’s just a lot of yelling!”

She got to her feet, left the office, took off down the hall, and glanced around for state troopers.

None in sight.

Well, that was something, anyway.

The shouting was coming from Max Lirpa’s room.

Room 102.

Chairs, she could hear, were being thrown around.

“NO! NO! DAMMIT, NO!”

She approached the door, which was closed, and put her hand on the handle.

Several people who worked in the office had clustered behind her.

She opened the door.

All of the students were standing, but two in particular had faced off in the middle of the room; the others had formed a kind of semi-circle around them.

The two who’d been shouting, and who now stood glaring at each other, were football players.

She’d spent so much time recently with the women’s basketball team that she’d forgotten what male football players looked like.

They were very big.

On one side of an imaginary ‘x’ that one could visualize in the floor’s middle, stood LaMarcus Johnson, an ‘athletic’ defensive tackle. (
Athletic
, in the school’s sensitivity and ethnical propriety code, meant that he was an African American.) Facing him, red faced, was linebacker Thomas Swinson, who was a ‘disciplined’ defender.
 
(
Disciplined
meant that he was white.)

LaMarcus, at six feet five, was somewhat the bigger of the two; but Thomas was no stripling, and the potential clash between them promised broken furniture at the least, and perhaps a shattered wall of windows.

“All he had to do,” LaMarcus bellowed, “was get out of the damned road!”

“He
couldn’t!”

“Why the hell couldn’t he?”

Nina took two steps forward into the room. The small entourage behind her followed.

“The way he was brought up, man!”

“What are you talking about? What does that have to do with anything?”

Max Lirpa was nowhere to be seen.

Probably off drinking, Nina surmised, with Tom Broussard.

One of the girls from the back of the room—Susan Alexander, to be exact, five foot four and short brown haired, so that she seemed a perfect imitation of Nina herself years and years and even decades ago—made her way into the combatants’ circle, and, with a show of great bravery, piped up:

“He was a prince! He was raised to be a prince!”

But LaMarcus was having none of it, and continued to roar at the half of the room that was facing him:

“Don’t mean nothing! The Dude has got to…move, man!”

“But he can’t!”

“What you tellin’ me that for?”

“What is going on here?” said Nina.

No one heard her.

No one even seemed aware that the door had opened.

A slender boy with black-rimmed glasses—clearly not a football player but probably quite proficient with computers and deeply involved in social networking—shouted:

“It’s self defense!”

Then everyone seemed to want to talk at once:

“It’s
not
self defense!”

“What was he gonna do? They attacked him, man! And they was four of them.”

“But it’s not like they came looking for him. They just told him to move!”

“Would
you
have moved?”

“For a damned king? You better...know it!”

“He didn’t know that was a king!”

“Don’t matter who it was, common sense be tellin’ you to move!”

“But they didn’t see it that way in those days!”

“Those days, these days, it’s all the same thing, man!”

“If you’re walking along the sidewalk and some dude comes up and pushes you off it, what are you gonna do?”

“I’m gonna whip his ass, man.”

“See?”

“But that’s
me!
I ain’t
him!”

The room was bathed in the half light of a winter Mississippi mid-afternoon, For some reason, Nina allowed her eyes to rest upon a monstrous and grotesque piñata, which was used when Spanish was taught in the room, but which, proving far too great a distraction for other students in other classes, had been bolted tight to the ceiling.

The walls were covered with posters announcing various Shakespearian plays, for Max Lirpa was a lover of theater and was constantly in the habit of switching from one character’s voice to another as he taught.

How boring, he said constantly, to be trapped in the body and mind of one being.

The students loved it.

There! There in the back of the room was power forward—how strange that she now saw certain students only in terms of their position on the court—Amanda Billingsley.

She was waving her hand.

Don’t worry about getting called on, Amanda
, Nina told herself, and, at least mentally, Amanda.
Just jump right in there; nobody’s here to call on you anyway
.

Where was Max Lirpa?

“It’s not a question of self defense or not self defense.”

“What is it a question of, then?”

“Fate.”

“What?”

“It’s a play about fate. The gods told him he was going to have to do this; he had no choice.”

“That’s not right! We all have choices! It’s not like God
makes
us do stuff!”

This from the boy with the black-rimmed glasses.

Do not do not do not label him a nerd, Nina.

He’s a young individual with multiple tastes and strengths, and he should not be labeled as a geek or a nerd.

Amanda responded:

“But these are different gods! This was like two thousand years ago!”

“It doesn’t matter,” the nerd responded. “Gods are gods! It’s a question of free will versus determinism!”

LaMarcus was not to be moved away from his original point;

“He still had no business blocking the damned road!”

Amanda:

“But that was his decision!”

Somebody else she didn’t know:

“Listen, you guys!”

None of the ‘guys’ seemed particularly ready to listen, but the new speaker, a chunky girl with a red ponytail, was loud:

“He’s supposed to be wise, right? But he doesn’t
act
wise! You’re told by the gods that you’re going to marry your mother. So what do you
not
do? You do
not
marry somebody old enough to be your mother! Like, how smart is that?”

“But he had to marry her! He was the new king and she was queen! He had no choice!”

“But what about Tiresias?”

“Who?”

“The blind guy! Oedipus is going to have him executed! For nothing!”

“Yeah but if Creon…”

At this point, Max Lirpa stepped out from behind a movie screen in the corner of the room, and yelled:

“All right! Enough!”

Everyone looked at him.

“You have to go!” he repeated. “The bell’s ready to ring!”

Everybody looked up at the clock.

Someone said:

“It’s time already?”

Twenty three students, Nina found herself thinking, do not realize that fifty minutes have passed. Unbelievable.

And they weren’t even talking about phallic imagery.

Amanda tried to make herself heard above the din of people getting backpacks together.

“Mr. Lirpa?”

“Yes, Amanda dear?”

“What do we do for tomorrow?”

“We vote! The jury votes! Oedipus: guilty or not guilty!”

Responses came like popcorn from a sea of exiting bodies:

“Guilty!”

“Not guilty!”

“The Dude is toast!”

“Guilty but not of murder!”

Max Lirpa shook his head:

“Get out of here get out of here get out of here YOU’RE LATE FOR THIRD PERIOD! Now be off with you, you rabble!”

He finally saw Nina.

“Headmistress! You’ve come! So good of you!”

“Max…”

Both of them approached the desk in the front of the room.

“Max, what were they yelling about?”

“Oedipus.”

“You’re teaching Sophocles?”

He shook his head, while raffling through an impossible mixture of multi-colored papers and dog-shaggy paperback books.