Bridge of Sighs

not
bad
enough—”
    “Uh…I’m going to be late?” he ventured. He wasn’t sure how many more “bad enough’s” there might be, but he guessed quite a few.
    Reluctantly, she handed over the schedule. “I’ve got my eye on you, mister,” she warned him.
    Outside in the hall, Lucy was waiting for him, beaming. “Mr. Berg’s honors?”
    Noonan nodded, feeling guilty that his friend should be so pleased on his behalf. Anybody but Lucy would be suffering a pang of jealousy, or at least vague misgivings, that his girlfriend was pulling strings for another boy. Hadn’t it dawned on the poor bastard why she’d done it? “What do you have for first?” he asked, trying to conceal his elation.
    “Calculus. You?”
    “Geometry. See you in third.”
    “Be prepared,” Lucy said. “He’s pretty weird.”
    Two periods, then, before he’d see Sarah. He thought again of her drawing, the meaning of which had now subtly shifted. Instead of being about to enter Ikey Lubin’s and Lynch World, he now saw himself on the verge of entering Sarah’s affections.
    Two hours later, though, he would conclude that Mrs. Summers had been right. He
wasn’t
one of the brightest kids in the school. Why in the world had he assumed Sarah would be taking her father’s class? Sure, she was smart and industrious, an honors student, but the class was being taught by her
father.
Of course he couldn’t select his own daughter. What had Noonan been thinking? And that wasn’t even the worst part. Sarah, it turned out, was in Mrs. Summers’s class. She’d moved him out of the one class they otherwise would’ve shared. Speaking of clear signals.
             
     
    H IS HOMEROOM TEACHER HAD BEEN right about something else, too. The best and brightest of the senior class seemed to have been purposely excluded from Mr. Berg’s honors seminar on the American Dream, which resembled some weird social experiment whose purpose wouldn’t be revealed until the study was concluded. A case might be made for Lucy, Noonan supposed. He had good grades, and he was a reader, though his taste in books tended toward the juvenile. Worse, his thinking was relentlessly conventional. He had not only been taught by nuns, he’d actually listened to them.
    But what was
Nan Beverly
doing there? Had her old man pulled strings? It was possible. Nan was good-looking, but there was also something a little bit off about her—something green, unseasoned—that Noonan couldn’t quite put his finger on. She had a good body, so that wasn’t it. What, then? She’d dated every eligible boy in town, some two or three times, and not one, if the rumors were true, had gotten anywhere with her. But that, he guessed, might have less to do with her than them. Pretty girls who had rich daddies often inspired cowardice in their social inferiors, which in Nan’s case was pretty much everybody.
    Just as he arrived at this conclusion, she glanced over and met his eye, then looked away with indifference, feigned, he was certain, because her aura told a different story. If she looked at him again before the end of the period, he’d be sure, and he was already sure. She’d make an excellent diversion, he decided, and he was going to need one now that he’d come a cropper with Sarah. Green or not, Nan was the prettiest girl in the school. He wondered if she expected his courage to fail him, as it had her other boyfriends. For her sake, he hoped not, because it wouldn’t.
    But of all the kids in Mr. Berg’s honors class, Perry Kozlowski was the most inexplicable. He wasn’t so much dumb as sullen, a boy who seemed to embrace his reputation as a lout. Noonan supposed his attitude had something to do with the lush garden of acne on his face, in full bloom at the moment, zits on top of zits, crowding each other angrily for space, their tendrils tapping into some deep reservoir of pus. According to Lucy, the experience of nearly killing the Mock kid had briefly chastened him. Public opinion, in the weeks and months that followed, had unexpectedly turned against the Kozlowskis. To get Perry out of town and away from social scrutiny, they’d enrolled him in a Catholic summer camp. Mr. Kozlowski had been against so drastic a measure, unwilling to make a mountain out of the Three Mock molehill, but their buttinsky parish priest had told Mrs. Kozlowski that their son had committed a mortal sin by beating that colored boy into a coma, and damned fool that she was, she’d