Boys Life

the hallway, Mrs. Neville said, “Cory Mackenson? Step to my desk, please.”
    I did, under silent protest. Mrs. Neville offered me a smile from a mouth that looked like a red-rimmed string bag. “Now, aren’t you glad you decided to apply yourself to your math?” she asked.
    “Yes ma’am.”
    “If you’d studied as hard all year, you might’ve made the honor roll.”
    “Yes ma’am.” Too bad I hadn’t gotten a drink of Potion Number Ten back in the autumn, I was thinking.
    The classroom was empty. I could hear the echoes fading. I smelled chalk dust, lunchroom chili, and pencil-sharpener shavings; the ghosts were already beginning to gather.
    “You enjoy writing, don’t you?” Mrs. Neville asked me, peering over her bifocals.
    “I guess.”
    “You wrote the best essays in class and you made the highest grade in spelling. I was wondering if you were going to enter the contest this year.”
    “The contest?”
    “The writing contest,” she said. “You know. The Arts Council sponsors it every August.”
    I hadn’t thought about it. The Arts Council, headed by Mr. Grover Dean and Mrs. Evelyn Prathmore, sponsored an essay and story-writing contest. The winners got a plaque and were expected to read their entries during a luncheon at the library. I shrugged. Stories about ghosts, cowboys, detectives, and monsters from outer space didn’t seem much like contest-winning material; it was just something I did for me.
    “You should consider it,” Mrs. Neville continued. “You have a way with words.”
    I shrugged again. Having your teacher talk to you like a regular person is a disconcerting feeling.
    “Have a good summer,” Mrs. Neville said, and I realized suddenly that I was free.
    My heart was a frog leaping out of murky water into clear sunlight. I said, “Thanks!” and I ran for the door. Before I got out, though, I looked back at Mrs. Neville. She sat at a desk with no papers on it that needed grading, no books holding lessons that needed to be taught. The only thing on her desk, besides her blotter and her pencil sharpener that would do no more chewing for a while, was a red apple Paula Erskine had brought her. I saw Mrs. Neville, framed in a spill of sunlight, reach for the apple and pick it up as if in slow motion. Then Mrs. Neville stared out at the room of empty desks, carved with the initials of generations who had passed through this place like a tide rolling into the future. Mrs. Neville suddenly looked awfully old.
    “Have a good summer, Mrs. Neville!” I told her from the doorway.
    “Good-bye,” she said, and she smiled.
    I ran out along the corridor, my arms unencumbered by books, my mind unencumbered by facts and figures, quotations and dates. I ran out into the golden sunlight, and my summer had begun.
    I was still without a bike. It had been almost three weeks since Mom and I had gone to visit the Lady. I kept bugging Mom to call her, but Mom said for me to be patient, that I’d get the new bike when it arrived and not a minute before. Mom and Dad had a long talk about the Lady, as they sat on the porch in the blue twilight, and I guess I wasn’t supposed to be listening but I heard Dad say, “I don’t care what she dreams. I’m not goin’.” Sometimes at night I awakened to hear my father crying out in his sleep, and then I’d hear Mom trying to calm him down. I’d hear him say something like “…in the lake…” or “…down in the dark…” and I knew what had gotten into his mind like a black leech. Dad had started pushing his plate away at dinner when it was still half full, which was in direct violation of his “clean your plate, Cory, because there are youngsters starvin’ in India ” speech. He’d started losing weight, and he’d had to pull the belt in tight on his milkman trousers. His face had begun changing, too; his cheekbones were getting sharper, his eyes sinking back in their sockets. He listened to a lot of baseball on the radio and watched the games on television, and as often as not he went to sleep in his easy chair with his mouth open. In his sleep, his face flinched.
    I was getting scared for him.
    I believe I understand what was gnawing at my father. It was not simply the fact that he’d seen a dead man. It was not the fact that the dead man had been murdered, because there had been murders-though, thank goodness, relatively few-in Zephyr before. I think the meanness of the act, the brutal cold-bloodedness of it, was what had